Prince of Thorns

“We should have seen something by now,” Makin said.

I looked back over my shoulder. The ugly bulk of Mount Honas made a black fist against the sky, the Castle Red cradled in its grip. Behind us the brothers straggled, a line of vagabonds labouring down the slope.

“This death walks softly, Makin,” I said. “An invisible hand with fatal fingers.” I gave him a grin.

“Finding every baby in its crib?” Distaste thinned Makin’s thick lips.

“Would you rather it were Rike that found them, or Row?” I asked. I set a hand to his shoulder, gauntlet to breastplate, both smeared with the grey mud from our escape tunnel. He had it in his hair too, drying on black curls.

“You seem troubled of late, old friend,” I said. “The past sins weigh so heavy that you’re afraid to add more?”

I noticed that we stood nearly of a height, though Makin was a tall man. Another year’s growth and he’d be tilting his head to meet my gaze.

“Sometimes you almost fool me, you’re that good, Jorg.” He sounded weary. I could see the web of fine lines around the corners of his eyes. “We’re not old friends. A little over three years ago you were ten. Ten! Maybe we’re friends, I can’t tell, but ‘old’? No.”

“And what is it that I’m so good at?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Playing a role. Filling in for lost years with that intuition of yours. Replacing experience with genius.”

“You think I have to be old to think with an old head?” I asked.

“I think you need to have lived more to truly know a man’s heart. You need to have made more transactions in life to know the worth of the coin you spend so freely.” Makin turned to watch the column close on us.

Rike came into view at the rear of the line, cresting a ridge, black against a dawn-pale sky. Behind him the clouds ran out in ribbons, the dirty purple of a fresh bruise, reaching for the west. Bandages on his upper arm, and around his brow, flapped in the breeze.

Something tickled at me, the ghosts of whispers, colder than the wind.

Makin turned to go.

“Wait—”

Screams now. The terror of those already dead.

No sound came, but Mount Honas lifted, like a giant drawing breath. A light woke beneath the rock, bleeding incandescence through spreading fissures. In one moment, the mountain vanished, thrown at heaven in a spiralling inferno. And, somewhere within that gyre, every stone of the Castle Red, from deepest vault to tower high.

A brilliance took all glory from the morning, making a pale wash of the land. Rike became a flicker of shadow against the blinding sky. I felt the hot kiss of that distant fury, like sunburn on my cheeks.

What burns so bright cannot endure. The light failed, leaving us in shadow, the kind of darkness that precedes a squall. I saw the storm’s outriders, newborn ghosts, driven before the rage. I watched them sweep out across the land, like the ripple from a pond-thrown stone, a grey ring where rock became dust, racing fast as thought. The sky rippled too, the ribbon-cloud now whips for the cracking.

“Dear Jesu.” Makin left his mouth open, though he had no more words.

“Run!” Burlow’s shout sounded oddly mute.

“Why?” I spread my arms to welcome the destruction. We had nowhere to run.

I watched the brothers fall. Time ran slow and the blood pulsed cold in my veins. Between two beats of my heart, the blast cut them all down, Rike first, lost beneath the grey maelstrom, a child before an ocean breaker. The hot wind took my feet. I felt the dead flow through me, and tasted the bitter gall of necromancer blood once more.

For a time I floated, like smoke above the slaughter.

I lay in nothing. I knew nothing. A peace deeper than sleep, until . . .

“Oh! Bravo!” The voice cut into me, too close, and somehow familiar. “Now is the winter of our Hundred War made fearsome summer by this prodigal son.” His words flowed like rhyme, and carried strange accents.

“You maul Shakespeare worse than you abuse his mother tongue, Saracen.” This a woman, velvet and rich.

Just run.

“He has woken a Builders’ Sun, and you make jokes?” A child spoke, a girl.

“You’re not dead yet, child? With the mountain levelled into the valley?” The woman sounded disappointed.

“Forget the girl, Chella. Tell me who stands behind this boy. Has Corion grown weary of Count Renar and taken a new piece to the board? Or has the Silent Sister shown her hand at last?”

Sageous! I knew him.

“She thinks to win the game with this half-grown child?” The woman laughed.

And I knew her too. The necromancer.

“I sent you to Hell, with the Nuban’s bolt through your heart, bitch,” I said.

“What in Kali’s n—”

“He hears us?” She cut across him, Chella, I knew her voice, the only corpse ever to make me rise.

I hunted for them, there in the smoke.

“No, it’s not possible,” Sageous said. “Who stands behind you, boy?”

I could find nothing in the swirl of blindness enfolding me.