King of Thorns

From the Printers’ Door it is left then right along a short corridor to reach the chapel. The chapel door is never locked. I look in. Only two candles still burn, both little more than stubs and making scant light. The place is empty. I move on.

Friar Glen’s quarters are close to the chapel. His door is latched but I carry a short strip of steel thin enough and flexible enough to fit between door and frame, strong enough to lift the latch.

His room is very dark but it has a high window that opens onto the courtyard where Makin used to school the squires in the arts of combat. A borrowed light filters in and I let my eyes learn its ways. The place stinks like cheese left too long in the sun. I stand and listen to the friar’s snore whilst my eyes hunt him.

He lies hunched in his bed, an inchworm frozen in midcrawl. I can see little of the room, just a cross on the wall with the saviour absent as if he’d taken a break rather than watch this night’s business. I step forward. I remember how Friar Glen dug in my flesh for those hooks the briar left in me. How he hunted them. What pleasure he took in it, with his man, Inch, holding me down. I pull my knife from its sheath.

Crouched beside his bed, my head level with his, the snores are loud. So loud you would think he should wake himself. I can’t see his face so I remember it instead; flat I would call it, too blunt for deep emotion but well suited to the sneer. At service with Father Gomst holding forth from the pulpit, Friar Glen would watch from the chair by the chapel door, hair like wet straw around a tonsure that needed little shaving, his eyes too small for the broadness of the forehead above.

I should slit his throat and be gone. Anything else would make too much noise.

You raped Katherine. You raped her and let her think I had done it. You made her pregnant and made her hate me so much she poisoned the child from her womb. Made her hate me enough to stab me.

Katherine’s blow was for Friar Glen, not me.

My eyes have learned the darkness and the room lies revealed in night shades. I trim a long strip from the edge of his sheet. I make only a whisper below the roar of his snoring but he stirs and complains even so. I cut a second strip, a third, a fourth. I bundle the last strip into a tight ball. A candle stand and small table are set near the bed. I move them farther back so they will not fall and make a racket. I count his snores and get their rhythm. When he breathes in I stuff the wadded cloth into his mouth. I tie another strip around his head to hold it in place. Friar Glen is slow to wake but surprisingly strong. I snatch the remains of the sheet from him and hammer my elbow down into his solar plexus. The air hisses from him past his gag. I see the gleam of his eyes. He coils, foetal, and I bind his ankles tight with the third strip. The fourth is for his wrists. I have to punch his throat before I can manage to secure them.

I’ve lost my taste for the work by the time he is properly trussed. He is an ugly naked man whimpering in the dark and I only want to be gone from here. I take my knife from the table that I moved aside.

“I have something for you,” I say. “Something that was very nearly misdelivered.”

I drive my knife in low, at the base of his scrotum. I leave it there. I don’t want it back. Also, if I pull it free he will bleed to death quickly. I think he should linger.

Also, I have a spare.

I am almost at the door, with Friar Glen wheezing and hissing behind me. He makes a loud thump as he falls from the bed, but it isn’t that which stops me.

Sageous appears. He doesn’t step through the doorway, he doesn’t rise from behind a chest, he is just there. His skin glows with its own light, not bright enough to illuminate even the floor at his feet, but enough to make silhouettes of the endless script tattooed across every inch of him. His eyes and mouth are dark holes in the glow.

“I see you are making a habit out of the clergy. Are you working your way down the list? First a bishop, now a friar. What next? An altar boy?”

“You’re a heathen,” I say. “You should applaud me. Besides, his sins cried out for it.”

“Oh well, in that case…” His smile makes a black crescent in the light of his face. “And what do your sins cry out for, Jorg?”

I have no answer.

Sageous only smiles wider. “And what were the friar’s sins? I would ask him but you appear to have gagged him. I do hope the dreams I gave young Katherine have not caused trouble? Women are such complex creatures, no?”

“Dreams?” I say. My hand searches in my pack, hunting my second knife.

“She dreamed she was with child,” Sageous says. “Somehow the dream even fooled her body. I think they call it a phantom pregnancy.” The writing on his face seemed to move, words pulsing as if spoken. “Such complex creatures.”

“There was a child. She killed it.” My mouth is dry.

“There was blood and muck. Saraem Wic’s poisons will do that. But there was no child. I doubt there ever will be now. That old witch’s poisons are not gentle. They scrape a womb bare.”