Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3)

‘You are visiting a relative in Maroc?’ he asked. ‘Getting married?’


‘You think your ladies would like me?’ I turned my burns toward him.

Yusuf shrugged. ‘Daughters marry who their fathers tell them to.’

‘And are you getting married?’ I lifted my gaze from the slim and curving sword at his hip to the dark mass of his hair, an expanding confusion of tight curls, imprisoned with bone combs.

He threw his head back and laughed. ‘Questions for questions. You’re a man who’s spent time at court.’ He let the swell lean him back into the rail and shot me a shrewd look. ‘I’m too old for more wives, Sir Jorg, and you perhaps think yourself too young for the first?’ Dark lips framed his smile, darker than the caramel of his skin. I guessed he might be thirty, certainly no older.

I shrugged. ‘Surely too young for any more. And to satisfy your curiosity, Lord Yusuf, I am merely travelling to see what the world has to offer.’

A wave slapped the hull sending up an unexpected spray over both of us.

The Marocan wiped his face. ‘Salty! Let’s hope the world has better to offer than that, no?’ Again the grin, teeth long, even, and curiously grey.

I grinned back. An odyssey would have been all right with me, barring the drifting wreckage and the consumption of urine. One day at sea was too few. Besides, entering a new world deserves a journey of consequence, not just a hop across a thirty-mile channel.

‘You will come and stay with me, Sir Jorg. I have a beautiful home. Come with me when we disembark. Let it not be said Maroc offers a poor welcome. I insist. And you can tell us what you hope to find in Afrique.’

‘You honour me,’ I said.

We stood without speaking for a time, watching the gulls again and the white flecked waves, until at last the distant mist and haze offered up the mountains once more, the jagged coast of a new world. I wondered what I would tell my hosts when they asked at table what brought me there. I could give away my rank and speak of Congression, of how the provost of Albaseat put into my mind that in Vyene the empire throne might be won in a different kind of game, with less bloodshed and more lying. And that to play in this new game I needed to know more about the key figures in the Hundred, more than they chose to show before the Gilden Gates. I could perhaps speak of the Prince of Arrow. Of how, more than the wind in the Keshaf ’s sails, his derision drove me to see the borders of empire for myself, to know what I would own, to give me better reasons for wanting it. And at the last, if foolishness took hold, I might speak of Ibn Fayed and of a mathmagician named Qalasadi. I had spent years in pursuit of revenge against an uncle who killed my mother and brother, and here was a man who would have slain all my mother’s kin in one night and left me holding the blame. Surely he deserved no better than Uncle Renar got?

The port of Kutta sprawled across a long and dusty arc of coastline, hemmed between the sea and mountains that launched skyward, browns and dark clumps of greenery soon giving way to bare rock. We stepped ashore onto a long and rickety quay crammed with so many people it seemed that at any given moment a dozen of them threatened to fall into the water. I let Yusuf forge a path. The balance between the force that may be exerted in such endeavours and the nature of the response when offence is taken varies with geography. Rather than pitch headlong into a pointless fight mere yards into what I planned to be a long journey through Afrique, I let myself be led, and kept close and watchful.

There seemed no reason for the crowd, all of them but the half-naked Nubans swathed head to foot in robes, either white or black, most turbaned in the Maroc way, the shesh covering head and face, leaving just eyes to contend with. The noise also! A wall of sound, a harsh jabber, half-threat, half-joke. Maybe the peace of the voyage made it seem so, or it’s that a throng is more raucous when the language is unknown to you, or perhaps just the heat and press of bodies amplified the clamour. Struggling behind Yusuf in that mass of humanity I knew that for the first time I had stepped into somewhere truly foreign. A place where they spoke a different tongue, where minds ran different paths. Maroc had been part of empire for centuries, its lords attended Congression still, but for the first time I had entered a realm that bordered kingdoms not ever part of empire. A place where ‘empire’ would not suffice but needed to be qualified with ‘holy’ for they knew of other empires. In Utter they call us ‘Christendom’ but in Maroc we are the Holy Empire, more fitting since nineteen in every twenty of Maroc’s people answer the adhan call when the muezzin sing from their minarets.