The Complete Broken Empire Trilogy: Prince of Thorns, King of Thorns, Emperor of Thorns

‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ I said.

Gorgoth paused to scowl at me, then led the way, holding a pitch-torch the size of a small tree.

Our path angled up now, the tunnel thick with dust that tasted of bitter almonds. We walked for less than a thousand yards before the way broadened into a wide gallery crossed by stone trenches of obscure purpose, yards across, and as deep as a man is tall. At the mouth of the gallery a wooden pen hugged the wall, the stays bound with rope. Two children huddled together in the middle of the bare cage. Two leucrota. Gorgoth hauled the door open.

‘Out.’

They were neither of them past seven summers, if summers were a proper count for the dark halls of the leucrota. They came out naked, two skinny boys, brothers to look at them, the younger one perhaps five. Of all the leucrota I’d seen they looked the least monstrous. A black-and-red stippling marked their skin, colouring them like the tigers of Indus. Dark barbs of horn jutted from their elbows, mirrored in the talons on their fingers. The elder of the two shot me a glance, his eyes utterly black, no white, iris, or pupil.

‘We don’t want your children,’ Makin said. He reached into his pocket and tossed a twist of dry-meat to the brothers. ‘Put them back.’

The meat twist skittered to a halt at the elder child’s feet. He kept his eyes on Gorgoth. The littlest watched the dry-meat intently, but made no move. Their skin stretched so tight over the bone I could count every rib.

‘These are for the necromancers, don’t waste your food on them.’ Gorgoth’s rumble came so low it hurt to hear it.

‘A sacrifice?’ the Nuban asked.

‘They’re dead already,’ Gorgoth said. ‘The strength of the leucrota isn’t in them.’

‘They look hearty enough to me,’ I said. ‘With a meal or two in ’em. Sure you’re not just jealous because they’re not as ugly as the rest of you?’ I didn’t much care what Gorgoth did with the runts, but I took a pleasure in taunting him.

Gorgoth flexed his hands and six giant knuckles popped like logs on the fire.

‘Eat.’

The two boys fell on Makin’s food, snarling like dogs.

‘The leucrota are pure-born, we gain our gifts as we grow. It is a slow change.’ He gestured to the boys licking the last fragments of dry-meat from the stone. ‘These two have the changes of a leucrota twice their age. The gifts will come faster now, faster and stronger. None can bear such changes. I have seen it before. Such gifts will turn a man inside out.’ Something in those cat’s eyes of his told me he meant it, told me he’d seen it. ‘Better they serve us as payment to keep the necromancers from our caves. Better the dead-ones take these than search for victims who could have lived. They will find a quick death and a long peace.’

‘If you say it, then it is so.’ I shrugged. ‘Let’s be moving on. I’m keen to meet these necromancers of yours.’

We followed Gorgoth through the gallery. The brothers scampered around us, and I saw the Nuban slip them dried apricots from the woollen depths of his tunic.

‘So what’s your plan?’ Makin sidled close to me, voice low.

‘Hmmm?’ I watched the younger child skip away from Liar’s well-aimed boot.

‘These necromancers – what’s your plan?’ Makin kept to a hiss.

I didn’t have a plan, but that was just one more obstacle to overcome. ‘There was a time when the dead stayed dead,’ I said. ‘I’ve read it in Father’s library. For the longest time the dead only walked in stories. Even Plato had the dead comfortably far away, over the river Styx.’

‘That’s what you get for all that reading,’ Makin said. ‘I remember the marsh road. Those ghosts hadn’t read your books.’

‘Nuban!’ I called him over. ‘Nuban, come tell Sir Makin why the dead don’t rest easy any more.’

He joined us, crossbow over one shoulder, oil of cloves in the air around him. ‘The wise-men of Nuba tell it that the door stands ajar.’ He paused and ran a very pink tongue over very white teeth. ‘There’s a door to death, a veil between the worlds, and we push through when we die. But on the Day of a Thousand Suns so many people had to push through at once, they broke the door. The veils are thin now. It just takes a whisper and the right promise, and you can call the dead back.’

‘There you have it, Makin,’ I said.

Makin furrowed his brow at that, then rubbed his lips. ‘And the plan?’

‘Ah,’ I said.

‘The plan?’ He could be annoyingly persistent could Makin.

‘Same as normal. We just keep killing them until they stay down.’

Brother Row you could trust to make a long shot with a short bow. You could trust him to come out of a knife fight with somebody else’s blood on his shirt. You could trust him to lie, to cheat, to steal, and to watch your back. You couldn’t trust his eyes though. He had kind eyes, and you couldn’t trust them.

29

The Builders had an aversion to stairs it seems. Gorgoth led us up through the mountain by treacherous paths cut into the walls of endless vertical shafts. Perhaps the Builders grew wings, or like the far-seers of Indus they could levitate through force of will. In any case, the picks of later men had chewed a stair into the poured stone of the shaft walls, narrow and crudely hewn. We climbed with care, our arms tight before us, keeping narrow for fear of pitching ourselves into a fall with an inadvertent shrug of the shoulders. If the depths had been lit I don’t doubt but some of the brothers would have needed the point of a sword to help them up, but darkness hides all sins, and we could fool ourselves a floor lay unseen twenty feet below.

Strange how the deeper a hole the stronger it draws a man. The fascination that lives on the keenest edge, and sparkles on the sharpest point, also gathers in depths of a fall. I felt the pull of it every moment of that climb.

Gorgoth seemed least well crafted for such an ascent, but he made it look easy. The two leucrota children danced in front of me, skipping up the steps with a disregard that made me want to shove them into space.

‘Why don’t they run off?’ I called ahead to Gorgoth. He didn’t answer. I guessed the boys’ disdain for the fall had to be set against the fate that awaited them if they made it safely to the top.

‘You’re taking them to die. Why do they follow you?’ I called the words at the broad expanse of his back.

‘Ask them.’ Gorgoth’s voice rumbled like distant thunder in the shaft.

I caught the elder brother by the neck and held him out over the fall. There was almost no weight to him and I needed a rest. I could feel the tally of all those steps fuelling a fire in my leg muscles.

‘What’s your name, little monster?’ I asked him.

He looked at me with eyes that seemed darker and wider than the drop to my right.

‘Name? No name,’ he said, high and sweet.

‘That’s no good. I’ll give you a name,’ I said. ‘I’m a prince, I’m allowed to do things like that. You’ll be Gog, and your brother can be Magog.’

I glanced around at Red Kent who stood behind me, puffing, not the slightest flicker of comprehension on his peasant face.

‘Gog, Magog … Jesu, where’s a priest when I need someone to get a biblical joke!’ I said. ‘I never thought to miss Father Gomst!’

I turned back to young Gog. ‘What’re you so happy about? Old Gorgy-goth up there, he’s taking you to be eaten by the dead.’

‘Can fight ’em,’ Gog said, quiet-like. ‘Law says so.’ If he felt uncomfortable being held up by the neck, he didn’t show it.

‘What about little Magog?’ I nodded to his brother squatting on the step above us. ‘He going to fight too?’ I grinned at the notion of these two doing battle with death mages.

‘I’ll protect him,’ Gog said, and he started to twist in my hand, so hard and fast that I had to set him down, or else pitch over the edge with him.

He scampered to his brother’s side and set striped hand to striped shoulder. They watched me with those black eyes, quieter than mice.

‘May be some sport in this,’ Kent said behind me.