“Dear God! Guards! Guards!” I pointed a shaking hand at the thing walking calmly toward the stands. “It’s a . . . a . . .” I had no idea.
The six men at the base of the seating tiers looked up at me and, following the direction of my finger, they seemed to see the flayed man for the first time. They recoiled in horror, but only for a moment, trained men these, hard men, Grandmother’s elite. As one they reached for their swords . . . then, as one, they let their arms fall, looked away. A moment later they were standing as they had been before, as if for all the world there wasn’t a hairless, skinless man in a black cloak walking calmly toward them.
“What?” I glanced back at Garyus in his palanquin. “What the hell? Garyus! Tell them! It’s possessed! A rag-a-maul’s had him!”
Two of the guards looked up at me, frowning as if offended by my tone of voice.
“Leave it be, Jalan. Luntar is a friend.”
I moved quickly to the side of Garyus’s box and drew my sword. I would have hidden behind the thing but it had been pushed back against the wall of the building that the stand rested against. “That thing is a friend? It’s been fucking skinned!” I looked down at the palace guard who were scanning the courtyard, wary for any threat to the steward. “And what the hell is wrong with your bodyguard?”
“Burned. Not skinned.” The black-cloaked man smiled up at me as he climbed the last few steps, his footprints wet behind him. “And the guards have merely forgotten what they saw. Memory is the key to any man. It’s all we are.”
I kept my sword up as he closed the last couple of yards. I’d seen burned men before and dearly wished I hadn’t. Our visitor looked rather as if Father might have if he decided to clamber out of his coffin after the flames had taken hold good and hard.
“Luntar,” Garyus twitched a hand up in greeting. “Good to see you, old friend.”
“Well met, Gholloth. And this would be your great-nephew, Jalan. A rare man.”
I lowered my sword further than I wanted to and less than decorum demanded. “You know me?”
Luntar smiled again. For a man who should be screaming in horrible agony he seemed remarkably cheerful. Burned skin cracked and wept as he spoke. “I know far less of you than I know of almost any man. Which makes you a rarity. Your future is too twisted with that of Edris Dean to be seen clearly.”
I frowned. The future-sworn don’t see me—that’s what Edris Dean had said about himself. The fact he loomed in my future as well as my past did not make me feel any better. I might want him dead but I didn’t want to be the one tasked with the job.
“My condolences for the loss of your father, Prince Jalan.” Luntar spoke into the silence where my reply should have been. “I met him once. A good man. The loss of your mother changed him.”
“I . . .” I swallowed and coughed. “My thanks.”
“To what do we owe the honour, Luntar?” Garyus asked.
“You know me, Gholloth. Always chasing probabilities and possibilities. Or chased by them.”
Luntar looked out across the rooftops at the pale sky. The seared flesh glistened across his skull and I took a step back, or would have if I hadn’t fetched up against the wall, banging my head. “Trouble is coming.” Spoken to the heavens.
“Don’t need a future-sworn to see that.” I rubbed the back of my head. “Trouble’s always coming.”
“There’s to be an attack? Here?” Garyus asked.
“Yes.” Luntar faced us again. “But it runs far deeper than that. Your sisters have gone to stop Mora Shival, but it will not be enough. The world is broken, not just this empire, not just these lands, but the world itself, from mountain root to sky and out beyond. The armies of the dead are just the start of it.”
I puzzled over “Mora Shival” then remembered that in Grandmother’s memories it had been Lady Shival with the sapphire headdress that had come to kill the elder Gholloth. Somewhere after that she had become the Blue Lady.
“How long do we have?” Garyus again.
“Months.”
“Months?” I asked. “Until the attack?” Grandmother would be back by then and it could be her problem.
“The attack will be very soon. Perhaps it has already started. It will be months until the end.”
“Of?” I spread my palms in query.
Luntar echoed my gesture then spread his arms to encompass the palace and the sky. “Everything.”
I laughed.
He stared at me.
I tried to laugh again. Grandmother had said her war with the Lady Blue was about the end of the world. I hadn’t taken her literally. Or rather, I had understood the words but not absorbed them. Yes the Builders had cracked the world when they turned their wheel, yes mages like Kelem, Sageous and the rest cracked it wider each time they worked their magics . . . but the end? I knew the Lady Blue’s ambitions lay in whatever followed the ruin of everything we held, but that had always been years away, a problem for later. Even with Grandmother’s departure for Slov I hadn’t really thought everything was at stake. Not the whole world. Red March maybe or the lands around Osheim. But I’d always imagined that there would be somewhere to run to, somewhere to hide.
At least I understood now the urgency . . . or desperation . . . that had taken the Red Queen from her throne, leaving her beloved city in peril, to war in a distant land at an age when many grandmothers sit grey and wrinkled, knitting quietly in a corner and counting away the last of their days.
“Months!” I said the word again to see if it tasted any better. It didn’t. I may have once said that six months was forever but right now it felt distinctly less than enough. For some reason Darin’s baby popped into my mind, even though all I’d seen of her were plump pink legs waving and plump pink arms reaching for Micha’s milk-heavy breasts. And frankly I hadn’t been looking at the baby. Six months wouldn’t take her very far.
“For you, less than a week if your walls don’t hold.” Luntar reached into his cloak and my sword came up between us. “Months for the world.”
“A week!” I yelped. “Less than a week?” How far could I get on a fast horse in less than a week? “This isn’t right! An attack here? Is an army coming? Is it the Dead King? Someone needs to do something! We need—”
“A gift, Gholloth.” Luntar ignored my panic and drew out a white box, a cube six inches deep. “You once gave me a copper box in your possession and it proved very useful. Now I return the favour.” Apart from the pale pink smears, where his burns had smeared the surface, the box was without design or ornament, a cube with rounded corners, made of white bone. Ivory perhaps . . . or . . .
“It’s plasteek?” I asked. “A Builder thing?” I tried to keep my voice steady but the words “less than a week” kept running through my mind, along with images of my new horse, Murder, waiting for me in the stables.
“It is plasteek, yes.” Luntar placed the box beside Garyus.
“What’s inside?” I asked before my great-uncle could get the words past the twist of his mouth.
“Ghosts.”
ELEVEN
We hurried into the throne room to interrogate Luntar within the protection of the Red Queen’s strongest wards. All the way there I had to keep stopping to chivvy Garyus’s bearers along as they negotiated the palanquin through the palace. I managed, at least when not looking at Luntar, to convince myself that I shouldn’t take the predictions of some random soothsayer too seriously. Looking at the skinless horror of him it was hard to imagine him some charlatan. Even so, as a drowning man will clutch at floating straws, I still clutched at the idea he might be wrong, or at least lying.