Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3)

The Bad Dogs’ camp held few signs of its former masters. A split bone here and there, the weapons, tatters of cloth, scraps of armour, all filmed over with dust. I stayed long enough to take one of Toltech’s bitter pills and fill my water-skins.

I took a look through the view-ring before I left. Part of me wanted to see Fexler there, to tell him how much his freedom had cost, to see if he cared. The ring showed nothing, just the world through a hoop of silver-steel. As I took it away the view flicked to the one seen from the lower slopes of paradise, nations laid out in browns and greens, without regard for the boundaries on men’s maps, the oceans swirled about in deepest blue. And there, on the coast to the south, on the thin arm of sea that divides our lands from Afrique … a red dot, burning.

‘I’m not your toy, Fexler. You can’t set me chasing across empire to join your little dots.’

Balky snorted, as if wondering whether I’d gone mad in the heat. I put the ring away. ‘Dammit.’ I’d been planning a journey to that exact spot.

‘King Honorous Jorg Ancrath.’ The flunky with little rod for rapping doors afforded me the introduction he omitted on my first visit.

The provost sat in her ebony chair as if she had remained there since I left, seated the whole time with her ledgers and tallies, amid the geometric splendour of her Moorish halls. The writing desk beside her lay empty, the scribe perhaps dismissed while the provost checked his work. She watched me cross the floor with sufficient interest to pause her quill-scratching.

‘Sanity prevailed, King Jorg?’ she asked. ‘You turned back before the Hills? When I sent Lesha to guide you I had hope that it would be her scars that showed you the way – back through the city gates.’

‘Your granddaughter was both a caution and an inspiration, Provost.’ I came to the step of her dais and offered a deeper bow than she merited. I carried bad news after all. ‘She was an explorer. Our world needs more like her.’

‘Was?’ The old woman didn’t miss much. I felt rather than heard the tensing of the two men at the door.

‘Outlaws attacked our camp while we slept. Perros Viciosos.’

‘Oh.’ That made her old, those two words. Years that had only toughened now for a moment hung their weight upon her head. ‘Better to have found the fire a second time.’

‘Lesha died in the struggle before we were taken, Provost. My man, Greyson, was not so lucky. His was a hard death.’

And yet you survived. She didn’t say it. The Hundred and their spawn have an instinct for survival and it never pays to ask the cost.

The provost sat back in her chair and set her quill on the armrest. A moment later she let her papers fall. ‘I have sixteen grandchildren you know, Jorg?’

I nodded. It didn’t seem the time to say ‘fifteen’.

‘All bright and wonderful children who ran through these halls at one time or other, shrieking, laughing, full of life. A trickle of them at first, then a tide. And their mothers would put them on my lap, always the mothers, and we’d sit and goggle, young to old, a mystery to each other. Then life would sweep them on their way, and now I could more quickly tell you the names of the sixteen district water marshals than of those children. Many I wouldn’t recognize in the street unless you told me to watch out for one.

‘Lesha was a bold girl. Not pretty, but clever and fierce. She could have done my job maybe, but she was never meant for city life. I’m sorry now that I didn’t get to know her better. More sorry for her father, who knew her even less well perhaps but will weep for her where all I have are excuses.’

‘I liked her. The same force pushed us both. I liked Greyson too,’ I said.

It struck me that finding someone I might call a friend had been a rare thing in my life. And in the space of three short months I’d discovered and lost two.

‘I hope whatever you found proves worth the sacrifice.’

The gun hung heavy at my hip, wrapped in leather. Almost as heavy as the copper box on the hip opposite. The provost took up her quill again. No talk now of receptions, feasts with merchants, mass with the cardinal. Perhaps she first wanted to tell her son that his daughter was dead.

‘A man who can’t make sacrifices has lost before he starts, Provost. There was a time when I could spend the lives of those around me without care. Now, sometimes, I care. Sometimes it hurts.’ I thought for a moment of the Nuban falling away after I shot him. ‘But that doesn’t mean that I can’t and won’t sacrifice absolutely anything rather than allow it to be used to rule me, rather than have it be made into a way to lose.’

‘Well now, there’s an attitude that will serve you well at Congression, King Jorg.’ The provost offered me a grim smile, tight in the creases of her face.

‘Your granddaughter though was not something I gave up to advance my cause. I did my best to save her from pain.’