King of Thorns

I made to step forward but something caught my foot. Looking down I saw teeth, a dog’s skull half-buried, half-emerged, gripping my foot. Another ghost, but it pinned me even so.

I looked out across the dead horde, scanning the packed crowds of ghosts behind them. Chella couldn’t know about my dog, Justice. She couldn’t have gathered all the dead of Gelleth or learned their stories. Somehow this came from me. Somehow Chella was pulling the ghosts of my past out through whatever hole it was I made in the world. And not even the ghosts I knew of but the ghosts of those whose end I caused. I felt the corner of an idea, not the whole shape of it, but a corner.

The skull brought my gaze back to the ground at my feet. “You shouldn’t have done that,” I said. I tore free. I felt him rip me but Justice’s teeth left no marks upon my boot. It was just pain, no blood. It was just my mind that trapped me. The ghosts couldn’t harm us or we would have died in Ruth’s house, we would have burned with them when the Builders’ Sun lit. Chella brought them only to torment me.

“Let’s get married, dear-heart,” Chella said. “The congregation is assembled. I’m sure we can find a cleric to perform the ceremony.”

And pushing from the other ghosts came Friar Glen, a shade wavering in the daylight, less clear than the other spirits, as if something tried to keep him back. At my hip the box of memories grew heavy. I hadn’t known Friar Glen to be dead, but perhaps I knew it once and chose to forget. He came with a slow step, hobbling, though I could see no wound upon him, and he didn’t look well pleased. In one hand he held a knife, a familiar knife, red with blood. When a dead man shambled into his path the friar stabbed him in the neck. The creature toppled with the knife still in him. Ghosts couldn’t hurt the living, but apparently they could hurt the dead plenty. Friar Glen hobbled on until he stood at Chella’s side.

I wondered how the friar’s ghost came to be here, watching me with such hatred. I could feel it from fifty yards. But more than that—more than I wondered about Friar Glen—I circled around the words Chella spoke before she called him.

The congregation is assembled.

The quick-dead moved closer though I heard no instruction. They took slow steps, their hands ready to grab and twist and tear. Against so many we would last moments.

“It’s no kind of wedding if my family can’t attend.” I sheathed my sword.

“Some ghosts I can’t summon. The royal dead are buried in consecrated tombs and lie with old magics. If I could have made your mother dance for you I would have done so long ago,” Chella said. The whisper reached me through the crowd, writhing on the lips of the quick-dead as they stepped ever closer.

The congregation is assembled, but some ghosts she can’t summon.

The remaining horses nickered behind me, nervous, even the grey.

“I was thinking of my Brothers,” I said. I opened a hand to the left and right to indicate Makin, Kent, Grumlow, and Rike.

“They can attend,” Chella said. “I will leave them their eyes.”

“Will we have no music? No poets to declaim? No flowers?” I asked. I was stalling.

“You’re stalling,” she said.

The congregation is assembled. Aside from those she can’t summon. And those she does not wish to.

“There’s a poet I’m thinking of, Chella. A poem. A fitting one. ‘To his coy mistress.’”

“Am I coy?” She walked closer now, swaying through the dead.

The wisdom of poets has outlived that of the Builders.

“The poem is about time, at least in part. About how the poet can’t stop time. And in the end he says, ‘For Thus, though we cannot make our sun; Stand still, yet we will make him run.’”

Ghosts can’t hurt men. They can drive them mad. They can torment them to the point at which they take their own lives, but they cannot wound them. I felt this to be true. My stolen necromancy told me it was so. But they can hurt the dead, it seems. I had seen it with my own eyes. The corpses that Chella set to walking could be felled by spirits because they stood closer to their world, close enough to the gates of death for a ghost to reach out and throttle them.

“Very sweet,” Chella said. “But it won’t stop me.”