Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3)

The heat, the immediate quiet, and the faint sounds that distance made familiar – smoothed of their alien edges – all conspired to lull me to sleep. A buzzing brought me to my senses, reaching for the knife at my hip. Something on my chest? I slapped a hand to the hot metal of my breastplate. The buzz again, as if a huge fly had crawled beneath the armour and become trapped.

Cramped fingers found the buzzing thing between iron, cloth, and sweating flesh. I fished it out. The Builders’ view-ring! I took the thong that held it from around my neck and let the ring make slow revolutions. It buzzed once more, tiny vibrations seen only as a blurring of the surface. I held it to my eye and at once the whole of the wall between my room and Marco’s became over-written with pulsing red light.

‘Curious.’

I moved to the wall and set my ear to it. The sounds of a conversation reached me, too indistinct to make out the words or even the language. Outside my window the balcony overlooking the lemon trees served all the rooms. I slipped out and edged to Marco’s window. He had the shutters closed.

Any in the courtyard below who chose to look up, or any guest on their balcony, would see me. However, the banking clan seemed less popular than genital warts in Kutta so I thought it unlikely that anyone would complain about my spying. In fact the lack of attention I was getting made me sure that they were all busy spying on me.

I set an eye to the shutter slats. I shouldn’t have been able to see much, looking from the brightness of the day into the gloom of a shuttered room. The Builder ghost glowed with its own light though, described in whites from bone to magnolia, and so I had no trouble seeing it, or in seeing Marco, cast into pasty relief by the pale illumination.

Spying is well and good, but in general I don’t have the patience for it, and what patience I do have is soon lost when it gets hot. I dug my fingers between the slats and wrenched the shutters open. The catch came free and skittered across the floor, fetching up against the polished leather of Marco’s shoe. I stepped in and closed the shutter behind me.

‘So sorry.’ I sketched the faintest of bows. ‘But I really wanted to see what you were up to.’

The modern staggered back, his face twisted halfway between murder and terror.

The trunk lay open at the centre of the room, the bed set on end and leaning against the door to make space. Inside, the sharkskin exterior gave over to metal, plasteek, and muted patterns of light beneath glass that reminded me of the hidden panel at the weapon vaults beneath Mount Honas.

‘Ah, the aberration.’ This Builder ghost spoke with none of Fexler’s warmth, dropping each word stillborn. He looked younger, maybe thirty, maybe forty, hard to tell in a picture drawn from shades of pale. His clothes too were different, many layers, close-tailored, buttons along the front, a breast pocket.

‘Aberration? I like that. I’ve been called many things, but you’re the first to use “aberration”. And what should I call you, ghost?’

‘Kill him!’ Marco hissed, his hat held to his chest like a talisman.

‘Well that’s no way to treat a friend.’ I gave Marco my smile, the one with edges, then looked to the data ghost. ‘Instead of that why don’t you tell me how it is that you need Marco here to drag you halfway across Maroc when you should be able to look out of a thousand hidden eyes, step out of all manner of hidden doors in scores of nations? And what do you want with Ibn Fayed?’

‘You may call me Michael.’ The ghost grinned, a smile selected from one of thousands stolen from the Michael made of flesh, a man now centuries old dust. A real smile but somehow wrong, as if sewn into position on a dead man’s face. ‘And I need to be carried because Ibn Fayed has a new faith – one that bids him seek out any trace of the Builders and erase it. Which of course answers your question about my business with him, Jorg.’

‘Well and good then. I too have business with the man. It’s just the getting there that is proving problematic. Perhaps you have some wonder of the ancients that will fly us all there like birds?’

Marco snorted, managing contempt. But the Builders had flown. I knew it from my father’s library.

‘Well?’ I asked. If this turn of events lay within the mathmagicians’ calculations then I may as well have admitted defeat – but given that I didn’t think it did fall within their plotting, I found renewed interest in crossing the desert to the court of Ibn Fayed with my two new friends.

‘I can do better than that, Jorg of Ancrath,’ Michael said. ‘We can go by ship.’





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