Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3)

The provost took a scroll and dipped her quill. ‘These Perros will face justice soon enough.’ She shot me a cold look. ‘These road-brothers. This order will send enough of the city guard to hang them all.’


‘They’re all dead, I believe. Perhaps one or two escaped.’ I remembered flinging the hatchet, the man’s arms thrown up as he fell, the second runner vanishing over the rise. ‘One.’ I wanted to go back and hunt him down myself. With effort I unclenched my jaw and met the provost’s gaze.

‘We know of the Perros Viciosos in Albaseat, King Jorg. Tales are brought through our gates, many tales.’

‘Well, let them add that to Lesha’s own story. At the last she brought an end to the Bad Dogs and saved many others from their predations. And I was the end she brought them.’ I thought perhaps Lesha might have approved of that.

The provost shook her head, just a fraction, telling me her disbelief without words. ‘It can’t be that there are less than scores in that band, not with the trouble they have caused, the atrocities …’

‘Two dozen, a few more perhaps.’ I shrugged. ‘It doesn’t take many hands or much imagination to build a reputation on blood and horror.’

‘Two dozen – and yet you killed all but one?’ The provost arched a brow and set her quill down again as if unwilling to record a falsehood.

‘Dear lady, I killed them from youngest child to oldest woman, and when I was done I blunted three axes dismembering their corpses. I am Jorg of Ancrath – I burned ten thousand in Gelleth and didn’t think it too many.’

I gave her my bow and turned to leave. The men at the door, wide and gleaming in the black scales of their armour, stepped aside sharply.





28


Five years earlier

I turned fifteen on the voyage to Afrique. I had always imagined such a journey as an endurance at sea, like the storm-tossed odysseys of legend that end clinging to a raft of wreckage, hidden from the sun by a square of tarpaulin, on the point of drinking your own urine as the faint haze of land rises over the horizon.

The truth is that from Albaseat you can travel by good roads through the kingdoms of Kadiz and Kordoba and come to the Kordoban coast where a promontory ends in a vast rock miles wide – Tariq’s Mountain. Look south from the watchtowers on the heights of this wave-lapped mountain, across two dozen miles of ocean, and the shores of Afrique may be seen, bare peaks rising in challenge above a morning sea mist. Look west, across Tariq Bay and you’ll see Port Albus where many ships wait to carry a man with gold in his pocket to whatever corner of the Earth he desires.

It isn’t that Afrique is so far away that gives her mystery. From the realms of the Horse Coast you can almost reach out to touch her, but as I’ve learned with Katherine, touching is not knowing. The fringes of Maroc may be seen from the watchtowers of the Rock, but the vastness of Afrique sprawls south so far that at its extreme are regions more distant from the Horse Coast than the frozen north of the Jarls, as far as Utter in the east, as far even as the Great Lands of the West across the ocean.

In short then I was at sea for only a day, and on that day, midway between two continents, out of sight of all land – thanks to the persistence of the coastal mists – the hour of my birth came and went and I entered my fifteenth year.

I had arrived at Port Albus burned dark by the Kordoban sun, which in truth is much the same as the sun of Kadiz and of Wennith and of Morrow, though the Kordobans like to claim it as their own. I negotiated passage across the straits on quays thronged with as many Moors, Nubans, and men of Araby as with men of the Horse Coast or Port Kingdoms. Captain Akham of the Keshaf agreed to carry me that morning. I waited while thick-muscled Nubans, black as trolls, brought ashore the last of his cargo. They stacked up white salt-blocks thick as a hand span and a foot square, carried from the unknown across great deserts on camel trains. And beside them, baskets of fruit from the groves of Maroc. Lemons larger than any I’d held, and objects picked from no tree I had seen before. I had a stevedore name them for me, pineapple, star fruit, hairy lychee. I bought one of each for two copper stallions, both a little crimped, and went aboard an hour later with sticky hands, sticky face, sticky dagger, and a mouth wanting to taste more of foreign shores.

While I waited and ate my fruit a man joined me at the barrel-stack, just opposite the gangway. A man stranger than any on the quay, though by no means the furthest flung.

‘Sir Jorg of Conaught.’ I sketched him a bow. ‘And you’ll be a Florentine?’

He nodded, a curt motion beneath the tall cylinder of his hat. No part of his flesh showed, save his face, a plump and pasty white beneath the two-inch brim of that hat. How it didn’t burn scarlet I don’t know.