King of Thorns

“So this would be the land of…” I ignored the boy and watched Ruth’s muddy eyes.

“Gelleth of course.” She opened the shutters. “Mount Honas is west of us. On a clear night you can sometimes see the lights.”

Makin may have been the man for maps, but I knew we were five hundred miles and more from Gelleth and the dust I had made of its duke. You would need the eyes of the god of eagles to see Mount Honas from any window in the Cantanlona…and yet Ruth believed what she said.

She turned from the window, the right half of her as scarlet as if she’d been dipped in boiling water.





31





Four years earlier


I stood up sharp enough, beating Makin out of his rocker. “Ladies, my thanks but we have to leave.”

“We?” the mother asked from the kitchen doorway, half-scarlet like her daughter but on the left rather than the right, as if together they might make an untouched woman and a wholly scalded one.

“There’s only you, Jorg,” Ruth said, the side of her face starting to blister and weep. “There’s only ever been you for us.” She spat two teeth—incisors, one upper, one lower—making a slot in her smile.

Makin slipped past me, out into the mist. I backed after him, sword held ready to ward the women off. Ruth’s smile held my gaze and I forgot her child. He clamped himself to my leg, the skin falling off him like wet paper. “Who’re you? Who’re you, mister?”

“Only you, Jorg,” said the mother, her head bald now but for random white tufts. “Since the sun came.” She lifted her hand to the window.

The mist lit with a yellow glow then shrivelled back, drawn across the marsh as if it were a tablecloth whipped away fast enough to leave everything in place.

Out across the marsh it seemed that a second sun rose, too terrible and too bright to look at, too awful to look away from. A Builders’ Sun.

In horrible unison both women started to scream. Ruth’s hair burst into flame. Her mother’s scalp smouldered. I shook Jamie from my leg and he crashed against the wall, pieces of his skin left adhering to my leggings. I backed away from the house. I recognized the screams. I had made the same sounds when Gog burned me. Justice made those screams when Father lit him up.

Once upon a time perhaps I might have thought two women running around on fire was a free show. Rike would laugh that laugh of his even now. Row would bet on which one would fall first. But of late my old tastes had gone sour. I had grown to understand this kind of pain. And whatever enchantments might have staged this show for me, these people had felt real. They had felt kind. A truth ran through this lie and I didn’t like it.

Outside the sun shone, watching us from a midmorning angle, and the screams sounded fainter, farther off.

“The hell?” Red Kent swung his head. “Where’d the mist go?”

“Ain’t that a thing.” Row spat.

The buildings dripped with mud. They looked rotted. The roofs were gone.

“What did you see in there, Makin?” I asked, watching the doorway. No fire. No smoke. It looked dark. As if the sun wasn’t reaching in even though the roof had gone.

He shook his head.

“They’re sinking,” Rike said.

I could see it. Inch by inch each of the houses sunk into the foulness of the marsh. The sound of it put me in mind of sex though nothing had been more distant from my thoughts.

“They’re going back,” Sim said. He kept his distance from the walls.

He had it right. If we were seeing true now the mist had gone, then those buildings sunk long ago and something had made the marsh vomit them up again just for us.

“What happened?” Makin asked, although his face said he’d rather not know.

“They were ghosts,” I said. “Summoned for my benefit.” Some tortured re-enactment of the suffering at Gelleth. People who died because of me. “They can’t hurt us.”

Within minutes the buildings were swallowed and no trace remained above the mud. I scanned the horizon. Nothing but stagnant pools for mile after mile. The retreating mist had cleared more than my sight though. A second veil had been drawn away. A more subtle kind of mist that had been with us since we first scented the marsh. The necromancy tingled in me. We stood on the surface of an ocean and the dead swam below. Something had been overwriting my power, blinding me. Something or someone.

“Show yourself, Chella!” I shouted.