King of Thorns

The imaged blurred with speed for a heartbeat, two, three, and then snapped into focus. However vast the telescope that must hang above us, it could offer no closer view than this, an image miles across in which the Haunt’s outline could be seen but the details lay hidden. The mass of the Prince’s army made a darker smear on the mountainside. I could see the shape of the larger siege engines, and the men around them like specks of dust. I moved my fingertip again and the image went black. By flickers I counted as it jumped through four voids where whatever eyes the Builders once had were now blind, and then, with my finger on the last of the ridges, a new scene. I could see the army and the smoking wreckage of my walls as if I stood on a nearby mountaintop. Stroking the metal side to side and moving my fingertip forward by hundredths of an inch I drove the view in closer, zeroing upon the ground by Rigden Rock.

In most places the Builders’ ring can see no closer than the miles-high bird’s-eye perspective I described, but in maybe one place in five there are other eyes it can use. By exploration and extrapolation I found the location of an eye that I now exploited. It sits on a high ridge in the Matteracks, entirely hidden from view when not in use. When I call upon it, a gleaming steel shaft rises from behind black doors set into the natural rock and lifts a black crystal dome into the air. I have stood below this dome and listened to the faint hum and whir as I change the ring’s view. Some mechanical eye must sit within and answer my needs. I left it as I found it. These eyes, in the vaults of heaven and down amongst us, burrowed into the living rock, are a work of genius. Even so, I wonder at a people who felt the need to be watched in every moment and at every place. Perhaps it was what drove them mad. I would not be spied upon so. I would blind such eyes.

Fexler Brews went mad. Fourteen years after his echo was captured and held in that machine, he took a gun and shot himself. A Colt four-and-five they called that gun, though it looks no more like a horse than the Horse Coast does. I found Fexler, but it wasn’t easy. I found him on my long and wandering return to the Renar Highlands and it cost me pain and lives. Lives I valued. A rare commodity. Fexler had put a bullet through his brain but even then the machines wouldn’t let him go. They held him trapped between fractions of a second. I pushed away the thought, the image of the weapon in his time-frozen hand, rubies of blood motionless in the air about the exit wound. I forgot about the stasis chamber…before Sageous saw my remembering.

They say God watches us in every moment. But I think, in some moments, when some deeds are done, he turns his face away.

“What do you see, Jorg?” Miana at my side now.

“That the killing ground is clear.” I took the ring from my eye.

“Can you win, Jorg?” she asked. “Against this prince? They say he is very good.”

I felt Sageous. I smelled him, picking at the edges of my thoughts, trying to filch my secrets.

“He is very good. And I…I am very bad. Let’s see what comes of that, shall we?” I made a wall of my imagination and kept my mind from wandering forward to what would happen. My hands knew what to do—I did not need to think of it.

There is a strong-box built into the base of my throne at the Haunt. Before they set my helm in place, I knelt in front of the throne and set the heavy key into the lock-plate. I lowered the side and reached in with my right hand, slipping it into the straps of the small iron buckler within, then drawing it out. I closed my fingers around the curious grip of the object that the buckler hid, and smiled. Imagine Fexler Brews thinking I would take “no” as an answer. I left the box open and stood, stepping off the dais so that the pageboys could reach to strap my helmet on.

“Move my sword belt round, Keven,” I said.

The boy frowned and blinked. He looked like a child. I supposed he was, no older than Miana. “Sire?”

I just nodded and still frowning he unbuckled the belt and refastened it with the hilt sitting on the steel above my left hip.

Some men name their swords. I’ve always found that a strange affectation. If I had to call it something I would call it “Sharp,” but I’m no more inclined to christen it than I would my fork at dinner or the helm upon my head.

I walked from the throne-room, taking slow steps, with all eyes on me.

“Red Jorg,” Kent said in a whisper as I passed.

“Red would be good, Kent. But I fear I am darker than that.”

When I opened that box I got more back than memory.

The flames on the torches by the doorway flared as I passed, infecting me with strange passion. I felt watched by more than my court, by more than Sageous and the players who seek to move the Hundred across their board. Gog watched me. From the fire.

I looked back one time, to see Miana beside the throne.

Lord Robert fell in behind me. Captain Keppen and Rike joined us outside.

“Time to jump the falls, old man,” I told Keppen as he stepped beside me. He grinned at that, as if he knew the hour was upon us and shared my hunger for it.