“Good.” I drank again. “I was starting to think we were the same person.”
The boy came back, refilling my cup from his jug and moving the lanterns closer to us to light our conversation. The man said something to him in the desert tongue but I couldn’t follow it. Too drunk. Also, I don’t know more than the five words I learned in my year living in the city.
With the lamplight showing me the fellow’s face I had a sudden sense of déjà vu. I’d seen him before—possibly recently—or someone who reminded me strongly of him. Pieces of the puzzle started to settle out of my drunken haze. “Prince you say?” Every other rich man in Liba seemed to be a prince, but in the north, where we both clearly came from, “prince” was a richer currency. “Where from again?” I remembered but hoped I was wrong.
“Renar.”
“Not . . . Ancrath?”
“Maybe . . . once.”
“By Christ! You’re him!”
“I’m certainly someone.” He lifted his flask high, draining it.
“Jorg Ancrath.” I knew him though I’d seen him just the one time, over a year ago in that tavern in Crath City, and he hadn’t sported such a burn then.
“I’d say ‘at your service’, but I’m not. And you’re a prince of Red March, eh? Which would make you one of the Red Queen’s brood?” He made to put his flask down and missed the ground, drunker than he had seemed.
“I have that honour,” I said, my lips numb and framing the words roughly. “I am one of her many breeding experiments—not one that has best pleased her though.”
“We’re all a disappointment to someone.” He swigged again, sinking further back into his cushions. “Best to disappoint your enemies though.”
“These damnable mathmagicians have put us together, you know.” I knew Yusuf had let me go too easily.
Jorg gave no sign of having heard me. I wondered if he’d passed out. A long pause turned into midnight, as it often does when you’re very drunk. The distant hour bell jolted him into speech. “I’ve made plenty of seers eat their predictions.”
“Got their sums wrong this time though—I’m no use to you. It should have been my sister. She was to have been the sorceress. To stand at your side. Bring you to the throne.” I found my face wet. I’d not wanted to think about any of this.
Jorg mumbled something, but all I caught was a name. Katherine.
“Perhaps . . . she never had a name. She never saw this world.” I stopped, my throat choked with the foolishness too much drink will put in a man. I drained my cup. There’s a scribe who lives behind our eyes scribbling down an account of events for our later perusal. If you keep drinking then at some point he rolls up his scroll, wraps up his quills, and takes the night off. What remained in my cup proved sufficient to give him his marching orders. I’m sure we continued to mutter drunkenly at each other, King Jorg of Renar and I. I expect we made a few loud and passionate declarations before we passed out. We probably banged our cups on the roof and declared all men our brothers or our foe, depending on the kind of drunks we were, but I have no record of it.
I do remember that I confided my problems with Maeres Allus to the good king, and he kindly offered me his sage advice. I recall that the solution was both elegant and clever and that I swore to adopt it. Sadly not a single word of that counsel remained with me the following day.
My last memory is an image. Jorg lying sprawled, dead to the world, looking far younger in sleep than I had ever imagined him. Me pulling a rug up across him to keep off the cold of the desert night, then staggering dangerously toward the stairs. I wonder how many lives might have been saved if I had just rolled him off the roof’s edge . . .
Many men drink to forget. Alcohol will wash away the tail end of a night, erasing helpful advice, and the occasional embarrassing incident, whilst trying to weave a path home. Unfortunately if you’ve developed a talent for suppressing older memories, accumulated while depressingly sober, then alcohol will often erode those barriers. When that happens, rather than sleep in the blessed oblivion of the deeply inebriated you will in fact suffer the nightmare of reliving the worst times you’ve ever known. A river of whisky carried me back into memories of Hell.
“Jesus Christ! What was that thing?” I gasp it between deep breaths, bent double, hands on my thighs. Looking back I see the raised dust that marks our hasty escape from the small boy and his ridiculously vast dog.
“You did want to see monsters, Jal.” Snorri, leaning back against another of the towering stones that punctuate the plain.
“A hell-hound . . .” I straighten up and shake my head. “Well I’ve seen enough now. Where’s this fucking river?”
“Come on.” Snorri leads off, his axe over his shoulder, the blades finding something bloody in the deadlight and offering it back to Hell.
We trek another mile, or ten, in the dust. I’m starting to see figures in the distance, souls toiling across the plain or clustered in groups, or just standing there.
“We’re getting closer.” Snorri waves his axe toward the shade of a man a few hundred yards off, staked out among the rocks. “It takes courage to cross the Slidr. It gives many pause.”
“Looks like more than a lack of courage holding that one back!” The stakes go through the soul’s hands and feet.
Snorri shakes his head, walking on. “The mind makes its own bonds here.”
“So all these people are doomed to wander here forever? They won’t ever cross over?”
“Men leave echoes of themselves . . .” He pauses as if trying to recall the words. “Echoes scattered across the geometry of death. These are shed skins. The dead have to leave anything they can’t carry across the river.”
“Where are you getting this from?”
“Kara. I wasn’t going to spend months travelling to death’s door with a v?lva and not ask her any questions about what to expect!”
I let that one lie. It’s what I did, but then I never had any intention of ending up here.
We slog up a low ridge and beyond it the land falls away. There below us is the river, a gleaming silver ribbon in a valley that weaves away into grey distances, the only thing in all that awful place with any hint of life in it. I start forward but immediately the ground drops in a crumbling cliff a little taller than me and at its base a broad sprawl of hook-briar, black and twisted, as you’ll see in a wood after the first frosts.
“We’ll have to go a—” I break off. There’s movement on the edge of the briar. I shift to get a better view. It’s the boy from the milestone, lunging in among the thorns, leaving them glistening. “Hey!”
“Leave him, Jal. It is the way it is. It has been like this for an age before we came and will be like it after we leave.”
If we leave!
“But . . .”
Snorri sets off to find an easier route down. I can’t leave, though. Almost as if the briar has me hooked too. “Hey! Wait! Keep still and I can get you out.” I cast about for a way down the cliff that won’t pitch me in among the thorns.
“I’m not trying to get out.” The boy pauses his lunging and looks up at me. Even from this distance his face is a nightmare, flayed by the briar, his flesh ripped, studded with broken thorns bedded bone-deep.
“What . . .” I step back as the ground crumbles beneath my foot and sandy soil cataracts over the drop. “What the hell are you doing then?”
“Looking for my brother.” Blood spills from torn lips. “He’s in there somewhere.”
He throws himself back at the thorns. The spikes are as long as his fingers and set with a small hook behind each point to lodge in the flesh.
“Stop! For Christ’s sake!”
I try to climb down where the cliff dips but it breaks away and I scamper back.
“He wouldn’t stop if it were me.” The words sound ragged as if his cheeks are torn. I can hardly see him in the mass of the briar now.
“Stop—” Snorri’s hand grabs my shoulder and he pulls me away midprotest.