King of Thorns

The sea breeze carried a low moaning with it. I tried not to worry about that.

We pressed on, unwilling to rest after the last time. Four horses followed us, Row’s having taken a broken ankle after putting its leg down a mud-hole. I made Kent cut its legs off once Row had slit its throat. “I’m not having Chella stand him up again and have her dead men ride after us.”

The sea kept looking bigger by the minute. We’d soon be in the salt marsh.

“Jesus please us.” Row stopped dead ahead of me. Of all the Brothers he was the one least likely to call on divine aid.

I came to his shoulder. The tufted marshland we’d been crossing ended without warning and a long stretch of mudflats reached out before us, eventually giving over to reed-beds after two hundred yards or so. The heads were what stopped Row, not the mud.

Every five yards, like cabbages in a field, a head stuck up from the flats. The closest ones stopped moaning and swivelled their eyes to watch us.

The one by Row’s feet, a woman of middle years, slightly jowly, strained to see our faces. “God save me,” she said. “Save me.”

“You’re alive?” I knelt beside her on one knee, the mud firm beneath me, like wet clay.

“Save me!” A shriek now.

“They’re underneath.” A man to our left, Makin’s age maybe, black-bearded, the mud only in the lower parts of his beard as if rain had washed him clean.

I reached out with the necromancy lurking in my fingertips. I could sense no more death in this mud than in any other part of the bog. Except around the people themselves. I could feel the life leaching out of them—being replaced by something less vital, but more durable.

“They’re tearing my skin off!” The man’s voice rose to a howl.

To our right, a younger woman, black hair flowing down into the mud. She raised her face to us, the skin mottled with dark veins like those on my chest. She snarled. A deep throaty sound, full of hunger. And behind her another woman who might have been her sister. “They come at night. Dead children. They give us sour water and feed us awful things. Awful things.” She hung her head again.

“Kill me.” A man farther out on the mudflats.

“And me.” Another.

“How long…” I said.

“How long have you been here?” Makin asked.

“Three days.”

“Two weeks.”

“Nine days.”

“Forever!” The moaning and the snarling grew in volume.

I stood, cold in my limbs and sick in my stomach. “Why?” I asked Makin. He shrugged.

“I know,” Rike said.

“You don’t know anything, Rike,” I told him.

But he did. “The quick and the dead,” he said. “She’s making them here. Letting them stew. She’s turning them slowly and they’ll be fast. Heard of this kind before.”

Out on the flats another head watched us with new hunger and screeched. Several more took up the call.

“Give them what they want, Kent,” I said.

“No! Please mercy.” The woman at Row’s feet begged. “I have children.”

“Or if they don’t want it, give them what they need,” I said.

Kent set to cropping the field. Red work and hard on the back. The others pitched in, Rike with rare enthusiasm.

We moved on at a trot, eager to be quit of the place.

“That won’t be the only field,” Makin said. He’d lost his other boot along the way and ran barefoot now.

I wasn’t so much worried about what else Chella had growing. Rather I worried about what she had already grown.

We moved through a green sea to reach a grey one. The reeds came chest high and higher, dark mud around them that took you calf-deep before your next step. Broad swathes of open mud divided the reed banks, each with a tiny stream trickling at its middle. I started to hear the distant waves as we broke out onto yet another of these divisions.

“No.” Grumlow put a hand on my shoulder before I stepped onto the mud.

Out toward the middle, where the stream made a bright ribbon, the mud heaved.

Row took out his bow. I wound the Nuban’s crossbow.

The mud flexed again, mounded, and began to flow in reluctant waves as something black emerged.

“It’s a fucking boat,” Rike said.

Clearly it was Rike’s day for being right. A fishing boat of black and rotting timber emerged as if surging from beneath a rogue wave, its crew lifting themselves from the deck, shedding mud and clumps of decayed flesh as they rose. I thought of the fat captain on his barge crossing the Rhyme. Perhaps he’d made the wise choice to stick to the route he knew after all.

“Back!” And I led them into the reed-beds again.

We ran, carving our path through reeds that overtopped me, reed-heads beating at my face.

“Something’s coming,” Rike shouted. He could still see above the green.

“From the boat?” I called.

“No. The other side.”

We veered away and ran harder.

I could hear them. Gaining on us, beating a path through the stems.

“What is it?” I shouted.