Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3)

‘The road is flooded – we’re fording.’ Kai, head back against the rests, eyes closed. ‘There’s a pyre of sorts in the town square. No bones.’


Kai had told her his wind-sight grew hand in hand with his dead-sight. She hated him the more for it. His eyeballs twitched beneath his eyelids, looking ahead of them, seeing what she could not. Still, she allowed herself a smile. There were things ahead that Kai would not see coming, however far his vision rode the wind. The Dead King’s cunning had set them on this path. Two necromancers sent to Congression. The necromancy necessary to his purpose, and just as necessary the fact that they stood close enough to life to pass as untainted, Kai too new to his calling to raise alarm, and she too distant from her old power to seem a threat.

Dark waters seeped around the door join as they went, the carriage half-floating now. Then, as it seemed they would sink, the wheels found the road once more and they jolted back onto dry land. Chella caught the stink of roast meat.

‘It’s a funeral pyre.’

‘There are no bones,’ Kai said. ‘And the festival flags are out. A celebration maybe?’

Chella knew death. She shook her head.

Stepping from the carriage she jumped to the ground before it came to a halt.

‘What is it?’ Kai dropped down behind her.

Chella raised a hand to silence him, not that she listened with her ears, but it felt good to shut him up.

‘Screaming …’ she said. Horrible agony. Her skin burned with it. A hand rose before her face and for a moment she didn’t recognize it as hers, hanging on invisible thread, one long finger, bony in the knuckle, pointing. The questing hand settled, indicating the open waters between the town and a nearby copse. ‘There.’

‘I can barely sense it,’ Kai said.

‘It’s hiding.’ Chella brought her hands together before her, shaping her will. She might have only an echo of her power but she wielded what she held with lifetimes of experience. ‘Help me bring it out.’

Drawing forth dead things from behind the veil always put Chella in mind of the cesspit back in Jonholt. A hot summer and the stink rose between the boards, acrid, strong enough to make her eyes water that day, the day she dropped Nan Robtin’s brooch. Dropped was the wrong word. She had pinned it carefully to her smock, piercing coarse wool with the steel pin. And even so it fell, turning in the air, sparkling, making diamond fractures of the light, though it was only glass and mirror. She missed the brooch twice in the air, fingers brushing it, then fumbled it, sending it skittering across the boards and down the dung hole.

For the longest time Chella had stood and stared at the hole. The image of the sparkling brooch falling into darkness played across her vision. She hadn’t asked to take it. Nan would have said no. It’s borrowing if you bring it back, she had told herself.

‘Stealing if you don’t,’ she whispered, there by the cesspit behind the scrub lilacs.

She had lain flat upon the boards, nose wrinkled, breath held against the physical force of the stench. Cheek to the wood, arm reaching down, the stained boards scraping her bicep through her smock. Fingers found the filth, the coldness surprising, a crawling sensation of revulsion as she dipped in, stomach heaving, her hand enveloped now, wanting to make a fist and yet stretching out, questing.

The need to draw breath built in her chest, a hammering demand. Eyes screwed tight. Toes curled, legs drumming, hand questing. YOU WILL BREATHE. And in the end the body’s wants prove stronger than the mind’s and you always take the breath.

Chella had lain gagging, a thin spill of acid spew drooling from her panting mouth, and still her fingers hunted in a cold world, half-solid, half-liquid.

And after all that – the sudden bite of the brooch pin made her scream and whip her hand out, empty, splattering filth.

‘The trick,’ she muttered to Kai, ‘is to let it bite.’

When the bite came Kai fell shrieking, and Chella endured with grim satisfaction, hauling to bring out what was lost and hidden. Weak as she was, Chella used the life that filled her to tempt and anchor her prey. At the last, when her bones threatened to tear through flesh and skin if she did not release her hold, Chella pulled harder still and a mist began to coil about the surface of the flood. Frost patterns spread beneath the mist, racing in wild, angular profusion over dark water.

It rose in a splintering of ice, something both more white than the frost, blacker than the waters, a creature of bone-pale limbs cast with midnight shadow, blade-thin, hands dividing root-like into three fingers. And somehow, despite the lack of defining features, undeniably female. Mouthless, her pain scaled a different register, resonating in an ache deep in the sockets of Chella’s teeth. Men of the guard staggered around her, choking, tearing at their eyes.

‘Keres!’ Chella named the lichkin, sealing it back into the world.