King of Thorns

“I’m told they call it a watch,” I said. “And you can see why.”


In truth, I’d been watching it a lot myself. It had a face on it behind crystal, with twelve hours marked and sixty minutes, and two black arms that moved, one slow, one slower still, to point out the time. Entranced, I had opened it up at the back with the point of my knife and gazed into the guts of the thing. The hatch popped back on a minute hinge as if the Builders had known I would want to see inside. Wheels within wheels, tiny, toothed, and turning. How they made such things so small and so precise I cannot guess but to me it is a wonder past any man-made sun or glow-light.

“What else you got, Jorg?” Rike asked.

“This.” I took it from the deep pocket on my hip and set it down on the flagstones. A battered metal clown with traces of paint clinging to his jerkin, hair and nose.

Kent took a step back. “It looks evil.”

I knelt and released a catch behind the clown’s head. With a jerk and a whir he started to stamp his metal feet and bring his metal hands together, clashing the cymbals he held. He jittered in a loose circle, stamping and clashing, going nowhere.

Rike started to laugh. Not that “hur, hur, hur” of his that sounds like another kind of anger, but a real laugh, from the belly. “It’s like…It’s like…” He couldn’t get the words out.

The others couldn’t hold back. Sim and Maical cracked first. Grumlow snorting through the drowned-rat moustache he’d been working on. Then Red Kent and at last even Row, laughing like children. Gog looked on, astonished. Even Gorgoth couldn’t help but grin, showing back-teeth like tombstones.

The clown fell over and kept on stamping the air. Rike collapsed with it, thumping the ground with his fist, gasping for breath.

The clown slowed, then stopped. There’s a blue-steel spring inside that you wind tight with a key. And when it’s finished stamping and crashing, the spring is loose again.

“Burlow…Burlow should have seen this.” Rike wiped the tears from his eyes. The first time I’d heard him mention any of the fallen.

“Yes, Brother Rike,” I said. “Yes, he should.” I imagined Brother Burlow laughing with us, his belly shaking.

We made our moment then, one of those waypoints by which a life is remembered, the Brotherhood remade and bound for the road. We made our moment—the last good one. “Time to go,” I said.

Sometimes I wonder if we all don’t have a blue-steel spring inside us, like that dena of Gorgoth’s coiled tight at the core. I wonder if we don’t all go stamping and crashing, crashing and stamping in our own little circles going nowhere. And I wonder who it is that laughs at us.





6





Four years earlier


Three months previously I had entered the Haunt alone, covered in blood that was not my own and swinging a stolen sword. My Brothers followed me in. Now I left the castle in the hands of another. I had wanted my uncle’s blood. His crown I took because other men said I could not have it.


If the Haunt reminds you of a skull, and it does me, then the scraps of town around the gates might be considered the dried vomit of its last heave. A tannery here, abattoir there, all the necessary but stinking evils of modern life, set out beyond the walls where the wind will scour them. We were barely clear of the last hovel before Makin caught us.

“Missing me already?”

“The Forest Watch tell me we have company coming,” Makin said, catching his breath.

“We really should rename the Watch,” I said. The best the Highlands could offer by way of forest was the occasional clump of trees huddled miserably in a deep valley, all twisted and hunched against the wind.

“Fifty knights,” Makin said. “Carrying the banner of Arrow.”

“Arrow?” I frowned. “They’ve come a ways.” The province lay on the edge of the map we had so recently rolled up.

“They look fresh enough by all accounts.”

“I think I’ll meet them on the road,” I said. “We might get a more interesting story out of them as a band of road-brothers.” The truth was I didn’t want to change back into silks and ermine and go through the formalities. They would be heading for the castle. You don’t send fifty men in plate armour for a stealth mission.

“I’ll come with you,” Makin said. He wasn’t going to take “no” this time.

“You won’t pass as a road-brother,” I said. “You look like an actor who’s raided the props chest for all the best knight-gear.”

“Roll him in some shit,” Rike said. “He’ll pass then.”

We happened to be right by Jerring’s stables and a heap of manure lay close at hand. I pointed to it.

“Not so different from life in court.” Makin grimaced and threw his robe into the head-cart. Maical had hitched it to the grey out of habit.