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The Wheel of Osheim
Mark Lawrence


From the critically-acclaimed author of PRINCE OF FOOLS comes the third volume of the brilliant new epic fantasy series, THE RED QUEEN’S WAR.All the horrors of Hell stand between Snorri Ver Snagason and the rescue of his family, if indeed the dead can be rescued.For Jalan Kendeth getting back out alive and with Loki’s Key is all that matters. Loki’s creation can open any lock, any door, and it may also be the key to Jal’s fortune back in the living world.Jal plans to return to the three Ws that have been the core of his idle and debauched life: wine, women, and wagering. Fate however has other, larger, plans…The Wheel of Osheim is turning ever faster and it will crack the world unless it’s stopped. When the end of all things looms, and there’s nowhere to run, even the worst coward must find new answers.Jal and Snorri face many dangers – from the corpse-hordes of the Dead King to the many mirrors of the Lady Blue; but in the end, fast or slow, the Wheel of Osheim will exert its power.In the end it’s win or die.























Copyright (#u5e59e188-e654-55b1-b7af-f199ebb21e75)







HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

Published by HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2017

Copyright © Mark Lawrence 2016

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016

Cover Illustration © Jason Chan

Map © Andrew Ashton

Mark Lawrence asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780007531639

Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780008171001

Version: 2017-10-27




Praise for The Wheel of Osheim (#u5e59e188-e654-55b1-b7af-f199ebb21e75)


‘A triumphant conclusion … Jalan’s wry narration enhances Lawrence’s heady, enjoyable mix of court intrigue, dirty family politics, and ancient magic. Both new readers and series fans will enjoy this dark and lively epic fantasy’

Publishers Weekly

‘The Wheel of Osheim presents everything our followers could want in a fantasy book, which is no less than one would expect from Mark Lawrence’

Grimdark Magazine

‘Lawrence’s writing makes every page a pleasure to read … The Wheel of Osheim his most outstanding contribution to the genre … so far’

Fantasy-Faction.com

‘The best book I’ve read this year, maybe the best book I’ve read for a few years … I cannot recommend this trilogy highly enough’

FantasyBookReview.co.uk




Praise for The Liar’s Key (#u5e59e188-e654-55b1-b7af-f199ebb21e75)


‘Lawrence improves with every book he writes and if he keeps on like this, we may have to turn the ratings system up to eleven. Magnificent, and highly recommended’

Starburst Magazine

‘The dialogue is a humorous, frightening lullaby that flawlessly depicts this dark, disturbing universe and its meticulously constructed characters, both friends and fiends’

RT Book Reviews

‘Mark gives us a perfect second book that, just like Jalan, is far more faceted that most. I’m already looking forward to starting it again’

Fantasy-Faction.com

‘Mark Lawrence should be commended on another excellent book of The Red Queen’s War trilogy’

Impulse Gamer




Praise for Prince of Fools (#u5e59e188-e654-55b1-b7af-f199ebb21e75)


‘Mark Lawrence’s growing army of fans will relish this rollicking new adventure and look forward to the next one’

Daily Mail

‘A bit like The Wizard of Oz but with whores and gore’

Sun

‘Keeps us turning pages with a careful balance of quips and gory incident’

SFX

‘There are special rewards in store here for readers of The Broken Empire series. Highly recommended’

ROBIN HOBB, author of the internationally bestselling Realm of the Elderlings series

‘Mark Lawrence is the best thing to happen to fantasy in recent years’

PETER V. BRETT, internationally bestselling author of The Demon Cycle

‘A savage voice which is telling you a good jest while trying to drown you in story’

ROBERT LOW, author of The Kingdom Series and The Oathsworn Series

‘Really excellent, gritty fantasy – I’m trying to avoid comparison with A Game of Thrones, but I’m afraid it’s right there. But funnier. Very funny indeed’

ANTHONY MCGOWAN, author of The Knife That Killed Me




Praise for The Broken Empire trilogy (#ulink_5eb2812d-00f7-523e-b403-db9cfa1f3eea)


‘Excellent – on a par with George R.R. Martin’

CONN IGGULDEN

‘Like … Stephen Donaldson, Mark Lawrence gets the reader firmly behind the flawed saviour that he has created. Soaring fantasy’

Sun

‘Dark, disturbing and horribly gripping … [Prince of Thorns] is a dystopian thriller that strong-stomached readers … who love the TV series Game of Thrones will find right up their street’

The Times

‘[A] morbidly gripping, gritty fantasy tale’

Publishers Weekly

‘In recent years, a cohort of writers including Joe Abercrombie, Mark Lawrence and Brent Weeks has resurrected heroic fantasy and placed it firmly back in the bestseller lists’

Guardian

‘Dark and relentless, Prince of Thorns will pull you under and drown you in story. A two-in-the-morning page turner. Absolutely stunning … jaw-dropping’

ROBIN HOBB

‘A hard-edged tale of survival and conquest in a brutal medieval world, well told and very compelling’

TERRY BROOKS, internationally bestselling author of the Shannara books

‘Marks an unbroken and steady ascent to the top of my favourite-fantasy pile. Lawrence gets better with each book he writes’

MYKE COLE, author of the Shadow Ops series

‘Emperor of Thorns … is a mighty achievement that grew richer as it developed, and a brilliant twist at the very end brings this trilogy to a worthy and quite astounding conclusion’

Daily Mail




Dedication (#ulink_6bb1bd30-d260-57d5-9ea7-e68ed02bf379)


Dedicated to my father, Patrick.


Table of Contents

Cover (#u266b9791-b581-54a1-8670-a7c1bce88cd6)

Title Page (#u32ee0a2c-fce4-5b63-b54e-284340a61a5d)

Copyright (#u58ea2bea-0345-506c-8c9c-361661b65035)

Praise for The Wheel of Osheim (#u0c6c42ef-4f7b-5762-8509-afd44f5b88d4)

Praise for The Liar’s Key (#u242accb8-9523-566d-911a-444cde13c06b)

Praise for Prince of Fools (#uc5ebd4e1-ea20-5248-bf19-2d20026cb92c)



Praise for The Broken Empire Trilogy (#uac0866cc-25bd-54cd-86c6-682ec027f571)



Dedication (#u6856915a-dea5-5fc8-b31c-35d7fe4744df)

Map (#u70be9e01-6d4b-5dbf-a989-b442355271cd)



Author’s Note (#uac96a976-d222-594b-8b9a-f7fb8e9e0ed7)



Prologue (#ub5d16c31-d3ba-56b3-afff-0bbaca57f908)



Chapter 1 (#ua75d09c4-e2c8-59b5-9686-6fb0da52f725)



Chapter 2 (#u058b1d32-b6d6-5d9e-9f53-e3badb3a159c)



Chapter 3 (#ueb77d89c-1616-5cf0-8c08-bfa012187adf)



Chapter 4 (#ub80182bd-674c-5f0e-847b-95136f9494f6)



Chapter 5 (#u7285cc7c-b6c1-5546-a9b9-5ccad5486858)



Chapter 6 (#ub9fd2c5d-a762-54f7-8e4a-1b33146f9180)



Chapter 7 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)



Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)



Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading … (#litres_trial_promo)



About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)



Also by Mark Lawrence (#litres_trial_promo)



About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)










Author’s Note (#ulink_8c87d8e6-cea6-5138-8524-088d66817dfc)


For those of you who have had to wait a year for this book I provide brief catch-up notes to Book 3, so that your memories may be refreshed and I can avoid the awkwardness of having to have characters tell each other things they already know for your benefit.

Here I carry forward only what is of importance to the tale that follows.



1. Jalan Kendeth, grandson to the Red Queen, has few ambitions. He wants to be back in his grandmother’s capital, rich, and out of danger. He’d also love to lord it over his older brothers Martus and Darin.

2. Life has become a little more complicated of late. Jalan still lusts after his former love, Lisa DeVeer, but she’s now married to his best friend. Additionally he’s still in massive debt to the murderous crime lord Maeres Allus, and wanted for fraud by the great banks of Florence. Plus, he’s vowed revenge on Edris Dean, the man who killed his mother and his sister. His sister was still in his mother’s womb and the necromantic sword Edris used (that Jalan now carries) trapped her in Hell, ready to return as an unborn to serve the Dead King. Jalan’s sister had the potential to be a powerful sorceress and will make a very dangerous unborn – such potent unborn require the death of a close family member to return to the living world.

3. Jalan has travelled from the frozen north to the burning hills of Florence. He began his trip with Norsemen Snorri and Tuttugu of the Undoreth, picking up a Norse witch named Kara, and Hennan, a young boy from Osheim, on the way.

4. Jalan and Snorri were bound to spirits of darkness and light respectively: Aslaug and Baraqel. During their journey those bonds were broken.

5. Jalan has Loki’s key, an artefact that can open any door. Many people want this – not least the Dead King who could use it to emerge from Hell.

6. In this book I use both Hell and Hel to describe the part of the afterlife into which our heroes venture. Hel is what the Norse call it. Hell is what it’s called in Christendom.

7. Tuttugu died in an Umbertide jail, tortured and killed by Edris Dean.

8. We last saw Jalan, Snorri, Kara and Hennan in the depths of the salt-mine where the door-mage, Kelem, dwelt.

9. Kelem was hauled off into the dark-world by Aslaug.

10. Snorri went through the door into Hel to save his family. Jalan said he would go with him, and gave Loki’s key to Kara so it wouldn’t fall into the Dead King’s hands. Jalan’s nerve failed him and he didn’t follow Snorri. He pickpocketed the key back off Kara and a moment later someone pushed the door open from the Hel side and hauled him through.

11. More generally: Jalan’s grandmother, Alica Kendeth, the Red Queen, has been fighting a hidden war with the Lady Blue and her allies for many years. The Lady Blue is the guiding hand behind the Dead King, and the necromancer Edris Dean is one of her agents.

12. Aiding the Red Queen are her twin older siblings, the Silent Sister – who sees the future but never speaks – and her disabled brother Garyus, who runs a commercial empire of his own.

13. The Red Queen’s War is about the change the Builders made in reality a thousand years previously – the change that introduced magic into the world shortly before the previous society (us in about fifty years) was destroyed in a nuclear war.

14. The change the Builders made has been accelerating as people use magic more – in turn allowing more magic to be used – a vicious cycle that is breaking down reality and leading to the end of all things.

15. The Red Queen believes the disaster can be averted – or that she should at least try. The Lady Blue wants to accelerate to the end, believing that she and a select few can survive to become gods in whatever will follow.

16. Dr Taproot appeared to be a circus master going about his business, but Jalan saw him in his grandmother’s memories of sixty years ago, acting as head of her grandfather’s security and much the same age as he is now…

17. The Wheel of Osheim is a region to the north where reality breaks down and every horror from a man’s imagination is given form. Kara’s studies indicate that at the heart of it was a great machine, a work of the Builders, mysterious engines hidden in a circular underground tunnel many miles across. Quite what role it plays in the disaster to come is unclear…





Prologue (#ulink_4eca3a54-74ef-5f9d-a913-cf4ae536faca)


In the deepness of the desert, amid dunes taller than any prayer tower, men are made tiny, less than ants. The sun burns there, the wind whispers, all is in motion, too slow for the eye but more certain than sight. The prophet said sand is neither kind nor cruel, but in the oven of the Sahar it is hard to think that it does not hate you.

Tahnoon’s back ached, his tongue scraped dry across the roof of his mouth. He rode, hunched, swaying with the gait of his camel, eyes squinting against the glare even behind the thin material of his shesh. He pushed the discomfort aside. His spine, his thirst, the soreness of the saddle, none of it mattered. The caravan behind him relied on Tahnoon’s eyes, only that. If Allah, thrice-blessed his name, would grant that he saw clearly then his purpose was served.

So Tahnoon rode, and he watched, and he beheld the multitude of sand and the vast emptiness of it, mile upon baking mile. Behind him, the caravan, snaking amid the depths of the dunes where the first shadows would gather come evening. Around its length his fellow Ha’tari rode the slopes, their vigilance turned outward, guarding the soft al’Effem with their tarnished faith. Only the Ha’tari kept to the commandments in spirit as well as word. In the desert such rigid observance was all that kept a man alive. Others might pass through and survive, but only Tahnoon’s people lived in the Sahar, never more than a dry well from death. Treading the fine line in all things. Pure. Allah’s chosen.

Tahnoon angled his camel up the slope. The al’Effem sometimes named their beasts. Another weakness of the tribes not born in the desert. In addition, they scrimped on the second and fourth prayers of each day, denying Allah his full due.

The wind picked up, hot and dry, making the sand hiss as it stripped it from the sculpted crest of the dune. Reaching the top of the slope, Tahnoon gazed down into yet another empty sun-hammered valley. He shook his head, thoughts returning along his trail to the caravan. He glanced back toward the curving shoulder of the next dune, behind which his charges laboured along the path he had set them. These particular al’Effem had been in his care for twenty days now. Two more and he would deliver them to the city. Two more days to endure until the sheikh and his family would grate upon him no longer with their decadent and godless ways. The daughters were the worst. Walking behind their father’s camels, they wore not the twelve-yard thobe of the Ha’tari but a nine-yard abomination that wrapped so tight its folds barely concealed the woman beneath.

The curve of the dune drew his eye and for a second he imagined a female hip. He shook the vision from his head and would have spat were his mouth not so dry.

‘God forgive me for my sin.’

Two more days. Two long days.

The wind shifted from complaint to howl without warning, almost taking Tahnoon from his saddle. His camel moaned her disapproval, trying to turn her head from the sting of the sand. Tahnoon did not turn his head. Just twenty yards before him and six foot above the dune the air shimmered as if in mirage, but like none Tahnoon had seen in forty dry years. The empty space rippled as if it were liquid silver, then tore, offering glimpses of some place beyond, some stone temple lit by a dead orange light that woke every ache the Ha’tari had been ignoring and turned each into a throbbing misery. Tahnoon’s lips drew back as if a sour taste had filled his mouth. He fought to control his steed, the animal sharing his fear.

‘What?’ A whisper to himself, lost beneath the camel’s complaints.

Revealed in ragged strips through rents in the fabric of the world Tahnoon saw a naked woman, her body sculpted from every desire a man could own, each curve underwritten with shadow and caressed by that same dead light. The woman’s fullness held Tahnoon’s eye for ten long heartbeats before his gaze finally wandered up to her face and the shock tumbled him from his perch. Even as he hit the ground he had his saif in hand. The demon had fixed its eyes upon him, red as blood, mouth gaping, baring fangs like those of a dozen giant cobras.

Tahnoon scrambled back to the top of the dune. His terrified steed was gone, the thud of her feet diminishing behind him as she fled. He gained the crest in time to see the slashed veil between him and the temple ripped wide, as if a raider had cut their way through the side of a tent. The succubus stood fully displayed and before her, now tumbling out of that place through the torn air, a man, half-naked. The man hit the sand hard, leapt up in an instant, and reached overhead to where the succubus made to pursue him, feeling her way into the rip that he’d dived through headfirst. As she reached for him, needle-like claws springing from her fingertips, the man jabbed upward, something black clutched in his fist, and with an audible click it was all gone. The hole torn into another world – gone. The demon with her scarlet eyes and perfect breasts – gone. The ancient temple vanished, the dead light of that awful place sealed away again behind whatever thinness keeps us from nightmare.

‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’ The man started to hop from one bare foot to the other. ‘Hot! Hot! Hot!’ An infidel, tall, very white, with the golden hair of the distant north across the sea. ‘Fuck. Hot. Fuck. Hot.’ Pulling on a boot that must have spilled out with him, he fell, searing his bare back on the scalding sand and leaping to his feet again. ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!’ The man managed to drag on his other boot before toppling once more and vanishing head over heels down the far side of the dune screaming obscenities.

Tahnoon stood slowly, sliding his saif back into its curved scabbard. The man’s curses diminished into the distance. Man? Or demon? It had escaped from hell, so demon. But its words had been in the tongue of the old empire, thick with the coarse accent of northmen, putting uncomfortable angles on every syllable.

The Ha’tari blinked and there, written in green on red across the back of his eyelids, the succubus stretched toward him. Blinked again, once, twice, three times. Her image remained, enticing and deadly. With a sigh Tahnoon started to trudge down after the yelping infidel, vowing to himself never to worry about the scandalous nine-yard thobes of the al’Effem again.




1 (#ulink_d6f37888-0ac6-5c85-9615-df44f26f7b03)


All I had to do was walk the length of the temple and not be seduced from the path. It would have taken two hundred paces, no more, and I could have left Hell by the judges’ gate and found myself wherever I damn well pleased. And it would have been the palace in Vermillion that I pleased to go to.

‘Shit.’ I levered myself up from the burning sand. The stuff coated my lips, filled my eyes with a thousand gritty little grains, even seemed to trickle out of my ears when I tilted my head. I squatted, spitting, squinting into the brilliance of the day. The sun scorched down with such unreasonable fierceness that I could almost feel my skin withering beneath it. ‘Crap.’

She had been gorgeous though. The part of my mind that had known it was a trap only now struggled out from under the more lustful nine tenths and began shouting ‘I told you so!’

‘Bollocks.’ I stood up. An enormous sand dune curved steeply up before me, taller than seemed reasonable and blazing hot. ‘A fucking desert. Great, just great.’

Actually, after the deadlands even a desert didn’t feel too bad. Certainly it was far too hot, eager to burn any flesh that touched sand, and likely to kill me within an hour if I didn’t find water, but all that aside, it was alive. Yes, there wasn’t any hint of life here, but the very fabric of the place wasn’t woven from malice and despair, the very ground didn’t suck life and joy and hope from you as blotting paper takes up ink.

I looked up at the incredible blueness of the sky. In truth a faded blue that looked to have been left out in the sun too long but after the unchanging dead-sky with its flat orange light all colours looked good to my eye: alive, vibrant, intense. I stretched out my arms. ‘Damn, but it’s good to be alive!’

‘Demon.’ A voice behind me.

I made a slow turn, keeping my arms wide, hands empty and open, the key thrust into the undone belt struggling to keep my trews up.

A black-robed tribesman stood there, curved sword levelled at me, the record of his passage down the dune written across the slope behind him. I couldn’t see his face behind those veils they wear but he didn’t seem pleased to see me.

‘As-salamu alaykum,’ I told him. That’s about all the heathen I picked up during my year in the desert city of Hamada. It’s the local version of ‘hello’.

‘You.’ He gestured sharply upward with his blade. ‘From sky!’

I turned my palms up and shrugged. What could I tell him? Besides any good lie would probably be wasted on the man if he understood the Empire tongue as poorly as he spoke it.

He eyed the length of me, his veil somehow not a barrier to the depth of his disapproval.

‘Ha’tari?’ I asked. In Hamada the locals relied on desert-born mercenaries to see them across the wastes. I was pretty sure they were called Ha’tari.

The man said nothing, only watched me, blade ready. Eventually he waved the sword up the slope he’d come down. ‘Go.’

I nodded and started trudging back along his tracks, grateful that he’d decided not to stick me then and there and leave me to bleed. The truth was of course he didn’t need his sword to kill me. Just leaving me behind would be a death sentence.

Sand dunes are far harder to climb than any hill twice the size. They suck your feet down, stealing the energy from each stride so you’re panting before you’ve climbed your own height. After ten steps I was thirsty, by halfway parched and dizzy. I kept my head down and laboured up the slope, trying not to think about the havoc the sun must be wreaking on my back.

I’d escaped the succubus by luck rather than judgment. I’d had to bury my judgment pretty deep to allow myself to be led off by her in any event. True, she’d been the first thing I’d seen in all the deadlands that looked alive – more than that, she’d been a dream in flesh, shaped to promise all a man could desire. Lisa DeVeer. A dirty trick. Even so, I could hardly have claimed not to have been warned, and when she pulled me down into her embrace and her smile split into something wider than a hyena’s grin and full of fangs I was only half-surprised.

Somehow I’d wriggled free, losing my shirt in the process, but she’d have been on me quick enough if I hadn’t seen the walls ripple and known that the veils were thin there, very thin indeed. The key had torn them open for me and I’d leapt through. I hadn’t known what would be waiting for me, nothing good to be sure, but likely it had fewer teeth than my new lady friend.

Snorri had told me the veils grew thinnest where the most people were dying. Wars, plagues, mass executions … anywhere that souls were being separated from flesh in great numbers and needed to pass into the deadlands. So finding myself in an empty desert where nobody was likely to die apart from me had been a bit of a surprise.

Each part of the world corresponds to some part of the deadlands – wherever disaster strikes, the barrier between the two places fades. They say that on the Day of a Thousand Suns so many died in so many places at the same time that the veil between life and death tore apart and has never properly repaired itself. Necromancers have exploited that weakness ever since.

‘There!’ The tribesman’s voice brought me back to myself and I found we’d reached the top of the dune. Following the line of his blade I saw down in the valley, between our crest and the next, the first dozen camels of what I hoped would be a large caravan.

‘Allah be praised!’ I gave the heathen my widest smile. After all, when in Rome…

More Ha’tari converged on us before we reached the caravan, all black-robed, one leading a lost camel. My captor, or saviour, mounted the beast as one of his fellows tossed him the reins. I got to slip and slide down the dune on foot.

By the time we reached the caravan the whole of its length had come into view, a hundred camels at least, most laden with goods, bales wrapped in cloth stacked high around the animals’ humps, large storage jars hanging two to each side, their conical bases reaching almost to the sand. A score or so of the camels bore riders, robed variously in white, pale blue or dark checks, and a dozen more heathens followed on foot, swaddled beneath mounds of black cloth, and presumably sweltering. A handful of scrawny sheep trailed at the rear, an extravagance given what it must have cost to keep them watered.

I stood, scorching beneath the sun, while two of the Ha’tari intercepted the trio of riders coming from the caravan. Another of their number disarmed me, taking both knife and sword. After a minute or two of gesticulating and death threats, or possibly reasoned discourse – the two tend to sound the same in the desert tongue – all five returned, a white-robe in the middle, a checked robe to each side, the Ha’tari flanking.

The three newcomers were bare-faced, baked dark by the sun, hook-nosed, eyes like black stones, related I guessed, perhaps a father and his sons.

‘Tahnoon tells me you’re a demon and that we should kill you in the old way to avert disaster.’ The father spoke, lips thin and cruel within a short white beard.

‘Prince Jalan Kendeth of Red March at your service!’ I bowed from the waist. Courtesy costs nothing, which makes it the ideal gift when you’re as cheap as I am. ‘And actually I’m an angel of salvation. You should take me with you.’ I tried my smile on him. It hadn’t been working recently but it was pretty much all I had.

‘A prince?’ The man smiled back. ‘Marvellous.’ Somehow one twist of his lips transformed him. The black stones of his eyes twinkled and became almost kindly. Even the boys to either side of him stopped scowling. ‘Come, you will dine with us!’ He clapped his hands and barked something at the elder son, his voice so vicious that I could believe he’d just ordered him to disembowel himself. The son rode off at speed. ‘I am Sheik Malik al’Hameed. My boys Jahmeen.’ He nodded to the son beside him. ‘And Mahood.’ He gestured after the departing man.

‘Delighted.’ I bowed again. ‘My father is…’

‘Tahnoon says you fell from the sky, pursued by a demon-whore!’ The sheik grinned at his son. ‘When a Ha’tari falls off his camel there’s always a demon or djinn at the bottom of it – a proud people. Very proud.’

I laughed with him, mostly in relief: I’d been about to declare myself the son of a cardinal. Perhaps I had sunstroke already.

Mahood returned with a camel for me. I can’t say I’m fond of the beasts but riding is perhaps my only real talent and I’d spent enough time lurching about on camelback to have mastered the basics. I stepped up into the saddle easy enough and nudged the creature after Sheik Malik as he led off. I took the words he muttered to his boys to be approval.

‘We’ll make camp.’ The sheik lifted up his arm as we joined the head of the column. He drew breath to shout the order.

‘Christ no!’ Panic made the words come out louder than intended. I pressed on, hoping the ‘Christ’ would slip past unnoticed. The key to changing a man’s mind is to do it before he’s announced his plan. ‘My lord al’Hameed, we need to ride hard. Something terrible is going to happen here, very soon!’ If the veils hadn’t thinned because of some ongoing slaughter it could only mean one thing. Something far worse was going to happen and the walls that divide life from death were coming down in anticipation…

The sheik swivelled toward me, eyes stone once more, his sons tensing as if I’d offered grave insult by interrupting.

‘My lord, your man Tahnoon had his story half right. I’m no demon, but I did fall from the sky. Something terrible will happen here very soon and we need to get as far away as we can. I swear by my honour this is true. Perhaps I was sent here to save you and you were sent here to save me. Certainly without each other neither of us would have survived.’

Sheik Malik narrowed his eyes at me, deep crows’ feet appearing, the sun leaving no place for age to hide. ‘The Ha’tari are a simple people, Prince Jalan, superstitious. My kingdom lies north and reaches the coast. I have studied at the Mathema and owe allegiance to no one in all of Liba save the caliph. Do not take me for a fool.’

The fear that had me by the balls tightened its grip. I’d seen death in all its horrific shades and escaped at great cost to get here. I didn’t want to find myself back in the deadlands within the hour, this time just another soul detached from its flesh and defenceless against the terrors that dwelt there. ‘Look at me, Lord al’Hameed.’ I spread my hands and glanced down across my reddening stomach. ‘We’re in the deep desert. I’ve spent less than a quarter of an hour here and my skin is burning. In another hour it will be blistered and peeling off. I have no robes, no camel, no water. How could I have got here? I swear to you, my lord, on the honour of my house, if we do not leave, right now, as fast as is possible, we will all die.’

The sheik looked at me as if taking me in for the first time. A long minute of silence passed, broken only by the faint hiss of sand and the snorting of camels. The men around us watched on, tensed for action. ‘Get the prince some robes, Mahood.’ He raised his arm again and barked an order. ‘We ride!’

The promised fleeing proved far more leisurely than I would have liked. The sheik discussed matters with the Ha’tari headman and we ambled up the slope of a dune, apparently on a course at right angles to their original one. The highlight of the first hour was my drink of water. An indescribable pleasure. Water is life and in the drylands of the dead I had started to feel more than half dead myself. Pouring that wonderful, wet, life into my mouth was a rebirth, probably as noisy and as much of a struggle as the first one given how many men it took to get the water-urn back off me.

Another hour passed. It took all the self-restraint I could muster not to dig my heels in and charge off into the distance. I had taken part in camel races during my time in Hamada. I wasn’t the best rider but I got good odds, being a foreigner. Being on a galloping camel bears several resemblances to energetic sex with an enormously strong and very ugly woman. Right now it was pretty much all I wanted, but the desert is about the marathon not the sprint. The heavily laden camels would be exhausted in half a mile, less if they had to carry the walkers, and whilst the sheik had been prodded into action by my story he clearly thought the chance I was a madman outweighed any advantage to be gained by leaving his goods behind for the dunes to claim.

‘Where are you heading, Lord al’Hameed?’ I rode beside him near the front of the column, preceded by his elder two sons. Three more of his heirs rode further back.

‘We were bound for Hamada and we will still get there, though this is not the direct path. I had intended to spend this evening at the Oasis of Palms and Angels. The tribes are gathering there, a meeting of sheiks before our delegations present themselves to the caliph. We reach agreement in the desert before entering the city. Ibn Fayed receives his vassals once a year and it is better to speak to the throne with one voice so that our requests may be heard more clearly.’

‘And are we still aiming for the oasis?’

The sheik snorted phlegm, a custom the locals seem to have learned from the camels. ‘Sometimes Allah sends us messages. Sometimes they’re written in the sand and you have to be quick to read them. Sometimes it’s in the flight of birds or the scatter of a lamb’s blood and you have to be clever to understand them. Sometimes an infidel drops on you in the desert and you’d have to be a fool not to listen to them.’ He glanced my way, lips pressed into a bitter line. ‘The oasis lies three miles west of the spot we found you. Hamada lies two days south.’

Many men would have chosen to take my warning to the oasis. I felt a moment of great relief that Malik al’Hameed was not one of them, or right now instead of riding directly away from whatever was coming I would be three miles from it, trying to convince a dozen sheiks to abandon their oasis.

‘And if they all die?’

‘Ibn Fayed will still hear a single voice.’ The sheik nudged his camel on. ‘Mine.’

A mile further on it occurred to me that although Hamada lay two days south, we were in fact heading east. I pulled up alongside the sheik again, displacing a son.

‘We’re no longer going to Hamada?’

‘Tahnoon tells me there is a river to the east that will carry us to safety.’

I turned in my saddle and gave the sheik a hard stare. ‘A river?’

He shrugged. ‘A place where time flows differently. The world is cracked, my friend.’ He held a hand up toward the sun. ‘Men fall from the sky. The dead are unquiet. And in the desert there are fractures where time runs away from you, or with you.’ A shrug. ‘The gap between us and whatever this danger of yours is will grow more quickly if we crawl this way than if we run in any other direction.’

I had heard of such things before, though never seen them. On the Bremmer Slopes in the Ost Reich there are bubbles of slo-time that can trap a man, releasing him after a week, a year, or a century, to a world grown older while he merely blinked. Elsewhere there are places where a man might grow ancient and find that in the rest of Christendom just a day has passed.

We rode on and perhaps we found this so-called river of time, but there was little to show for it. Our feet did not race, our strides didn’t devour seven yards at a time. All I can say is that evening arrived much more swiftly than expected and night fell like a stone.

I must have turned in my saddle a hundred times. If I had been Lot’s wife the pillar of salt would have stood on Sodom’s doorstep. I didn’t know what I was looking for, demons boiling black across the dunes, a plague of flesh-scarabs … I remembered the Red Vikings chasing us into Osheim what seemed a lifetime ago and half-expected them to crest a dune, axes raised. But, whatever fear painted there, the horizon remained stubbornly empty of threat. All I saw was the Ha’tari rear-guard, strengthened at the sheik’s request.

The sheik kept us moving deep into the night until at last the snorting of his beasts convinced him to call a halt. I sat back, sipping from a water skin, while the sheik’s people set up camp with practised economy. Great tents were unfolded from camelback, lines tethered to flat stakes long enough to find purchase in the sand, fires built from camel dung gathered and hoarded along the journey. Lamps were lit and set beneath the awnings of the tents’ porches, silver lamps for the sheik’s tent, burning rock-oil. Cauldrons were unpacked, storage jars opened, even a small iron oven set above its own oil burners. Spice scents filled the air, somehow more foreign even than the dunes and the strange stars above us.

‘They’re slaughtering the sheep.’ Mahood had come up behind me, making me jump. ‘Father brought them all this way to impress Sheik Kahleed and the others at the meet. Send ahead, I told him, get them brought out from Hamada. But no, he wanted to feast Kahleed on Hameed mutton, said he would know any deception. Desert-seasoned mutton is stringy, tough stuff, but it does have a flavour all its own.’ He watched the Ha’tari as he spoke. They patrolled on foot now, out on the moon-washed sands, calling to each other once in a while with soft melodic cries. ‘Father will want to ask you questions about where you came from and who gave you this message of doom, but that is a conversation for after the meal, you understand?’

‘I do.’ That at least gave me some time to concoct suitable lies. If I told the truth about where I had been and the things I had seen … well, it would turn their stomachs and they’d wish they hadn’t eaten.

Mahood and another of the sons sat down beside me and started to smoke, sharing a single long pipe, beautifully wrought in meerschaum, in which they appeared to be burning garbage, judging by the reek. I waved the thing away when they offered it to me. After half an hour I relaxed and lay back, listening to the distant Ha’tari and looking up at the dazzle of the stars. It doesn’t take long in Hell before your definition of ‘good company’ reduces to ‘not dead’. For the first time in an age I felt comfortable.

In time the crowd around the cooking pots thinned and a line of bearers carried the products of all that labour into the largest tent. A gong sounded and the brothers stood up around me. ‘Tomorrow we’ll see Hamada. Tonight we feast.’ Mahood, lean and morose, tapped his pipe out on the sand. ‘I missed many old friends at the oasis meet tonight, Prince Jalan. My brother Jahmeen was to meet his betrothed this evening. Though I feel he is rather pleased to delay that encounter, at least for a day or two. Let us hope for you that your warning proves to have substance, or my father will have lost face. Let us hope for our brothers on the sand that you are mistaken.’ With that he walked off and I trailed him to the glowing tent.

I pushed the flaps back as they swished closed behind Mahood, and stood, still half-bowed and momentarily blinded by the light of a score of cowled lanterns. A broad and sumptuous carpet of woven silks, brilliantly patterned in reds and greens, covered the sand, set with smaller rugs where one might expect the table and chairs to stand. Sheik al’Hameed’s family and retainers sat around a central rug crowded with silver platters, each heaped with food: aromatic rice in heaps of yellow, white, and green; dates and olives in bowls; marinated, dried, sweet strips of camel meat, dry roasted over open flame and dusted with the pollen of the desert rose; a dozen other dishes boasting culinary mysteries.

‘Sit, prince, sit!’ The sheik gestured to my spot.

I started as I registered for the first time that half of the company seated around the feast were women. Young beautiful women at that, clad in immodest amounts of silk. Impressive weights of gold crowded elegant wrists in glimmering bangles, and elaborate earrings descended in multi-petalled cascades to drape bare shoulders or collect in the hollows behind collarbones.

‘Sheik … I didn’t know you had…’ Daughters? Wives? I clamped my mouth shut on my ignorance and sat cross-legged where he indicated, trying not to rub elbows with the dark-haired visions to either side of me, each as tempting as the succubus and each potentially as lethal a trap.

‘You didn’t see my sisters walking behind us?’ One of the younger brothers whose name hadn’t stuck – clearly amused.

I opened my mouth. Those were women? They could have had four arms and horns under all that folded cloth and I’d have been no wiser. Sensibly I let no words escape my slack jaw.

‘We cover ourselves and walk to keep the Ha’tari satisfied,’ said the girl to my left, tall, lean, elegant, and perhaps no more than eighteen. ‘They are easily shocked, these desert men. If they came to the coast they might go blind for not knowing where to rest their eyes … poor things. Even Hamada would be too much for them.’

‘Fearless fighters, though,’ said the woman to my left, perhaps my age. ‘Without them, crossing the barrens would be a great ordeal. Even in the desert there are dangers.’

Across from us the other two sisters shared an observation, glancing my way. The older of the pair laughed, full-throated. I stared desperately at her kohl-darkened eyes, struggling to keep my gaze from dipping to the jiggle of full breasts beneath silk gauze strewn with sequins. I knew by reputation that Liban royalty, be it the ubiquitous princes, the rarer sheiks, or the singular caliph, all guarded their womenfolk with legendary zeal and would pursue vendettas across the centuries over as little as a covetous glance. What they might do over a despoiled maiden they left to the horrors of imagination.

I wondered if the sheik saw me as a marriage opportunity, having seated me amid his daughters. ‘I’m very grateful that the Ha’tari found me,’ I said, keeping my eyes firmly on the meal.

‘My daughters Lila, Mina, Tarelle, and Danelle.’ The sheik smiled indulgently as he pointed to each in turn.

‘Delightful.’ I imagined ways in which they might be delightful.

As if reading my mind the sheik raised his goblet. ‘We are not so strict in our faith as the Ha’tari but the laws we do keep are iron. You are a welcome guest, prince. But, unless you become betrothed to one of my daughters, lay no finger on them that you would rather keep.’

I reddened and started to bluster. ‘Sir! A prince of Red March would never—’

‘Lay more than a finger upon her and I will make her a gift of your testicles, gold-plated, to be worn as earrings.’ He smiled as if we’d been discussing the weather. ‘Time to eat!’

Food! At least there was the food. I would gorge to the point I was too full for even the smallest of lustful thoughts. And I’d enjoy it too. In the deadlands you starved. From the first moment you stepped into that deadlight until the moment you left it, you starved.

The sheik led us in their heathen prayers, spoken in the desert tongue. It took a damnable long time, my belly rumbling the while, mouth watering at the display set out before me. At last the lot of them joined in with a line or two and we were done. All heads turned to the tent flaps, expectant.

Two elderly male servants walked in with the main course on silver plates, square in the Araby style. Sitting on the floor I could just see a mound of food rising above the dishes, roast mutton no doubt, given the slaughtering earlier. God yes! My stomach growled like a lion, attracting nods of approval from Sheik Malik and his eldest son.

The server set my plate before me and moved on. A skinned sheep’s head stared at me, steaming gently, boiled eyes regarding me with an amused expression, or perhaps that was just the grin on its lipless mouth. A dark tongue coiled beneath a row of surprisingly even teeth.

‘Ah.’ I closed my own mouth with a click and looked to Tarelle on my left who had just received her own severed head.

She favoured me with a sweet smile. ‘Marvellous, is it not, Prince Jalan? A feast like this in the desert. A taste of home after so many hard miles.’

I’d heard that the Libans could get almost as stabby if you didn’t touch their food as they would if you did touch their women. I returned my gaze to the steaming head, its juices pooling around it, and considered how far I was from Hamada and how few yards I would get without water.

I reached for the nearest rice and started to heap my plate. Perhaps I could give the poor creature a decent burial and nobody would notice. Sadly I was the curiosity at this family feast and most eyes were turned my way. Even the dozen sheep seemed interested.

‘You’re hungry, my prince!’ Danelle to my right, her knee brushing mine each time she reached forward to add a date or olive to her plate.

‘Very,’ I said, grimly shovelling rice onto the monstrosity on my own. The thing had so little flesh that it was practically a grinning skull. The presence of a distinctly scooped spoon amid the flatware arranged by my plate suggested that a goodly amount of delving was expected. I wondered whether it was etiquette to use the same spoon for eyeballs as for brain…

‘Father says the Ha’tari think you fell from the sky.’ Lila from across the feast.

‘With a devil-woman giving chase!’ Mina giggled. The youngest of them, silenced by a sharp look from elder brother Mahood.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I—’

Something moved beneath my rice heap.

‘Yes?’ Tarelle by my side, knee touching mine, naked beneath thin silks.

‘I certainly—’

Goddamn! There it was again, something writhing like a serpent beneath mud. ‘I … the sheik said your man fell from his camel.’

Mina was a slight thing, but unreasonably beautiful, perhaps not yet sixteen. ‘The Ha’tari are not ours. We are theirs now they have Father’s coin. Theirs until we are discharged into Hamada.’

‘But it’s true,’ Danelle, her voice seductively husky at my ear. ‘The Ha’tari would rather say the moon swung too low and knocked them from their steed than admit they fell.’

General laughter. The sheep’s purple tongue broke through my burial, coiling amid the fragrant yellow rice. I stabbed it with my fork, pinning it to the plate.

The sudden movement drew attention. ‘The tongue is my favourite,’ Mina said.

‘The brain is divine,’ Sheik al’Hameed declared from the head of the feast. ‘My girls puree it with dates, parsley and pepper then return it to the skull.’ He kissed his fingertips.

Whilst he held his children’s attention I quickly severed the tongue and with some frantic sawing reduced it to six or more sections.

‘Fine cooking skills are a great bonus in a wife, are they not, Prince Jalan? Even if she never has to cook it is well that she knows enough to instruct her staff.’ The sheik turned the focus back onto me.

‘Yes.’ I stirred the tongue pieces into the rice and heaped more atop them. ‘Absolutely.’

The sheik seemed pleased at that. ‘Let the poor man eat! The desert has given him an appetite.’

For a few minutes we ate in near silence, each traveller dedicated to their meal after weeks of poor fare. I worked at the rice around the edge of my burial, unwilling to put tainted mutton anywhere near my mouth. Beside me the delicious Tarelle inverted her own sheep’s head and started scooping out brains into her suddenly far less desirable mouth. The spoon made unpleasant scraping sounds along the inside of the skull.

I knew what had happened. Whilst in the deadlands Loki’s key had been invisible to the Dead King. Perhaps a jest of Loki’s, to have the thing become apparent only when out of reach. Whatever the reason, we had been able to travel the deadlands with less danger from the Dead King than we’d had during the previous year in the living world. Of course we had far more danger from every other damned thing, but that was a different matter. Now that the key was back among the living any dead thing could hunt it for the Dead King.

I was pretty sure Tarelle and Danelle’s sheep had turned their puffy eyeballs my way and I didn’t dare scrape away the rice from my own for fear of finding the thing staring back at me. I managed, by dint of continuously sampling from the dishes in the centre, to eat a vast amount of food whilst continuing to increase the mound on my own plate. After months in the deadlands it would take more than a severed head on my plate to kill my appetite. I drank at least a gallon from my goblet, constantly refilling it from a nearby ewer, only water sadly, but the deadlands had given me a thirst that required a small river to quench and the desert had only added to it.

‘This danger that you claim to have come to warn us of.’ Mahood pushed back his plate. ‘What is it?’ He rested both hands on his stomach. As lean as his father, he was taller, sharp featured, pockmarked, as quick to shift from friendly to sinister with just the slightest movement of his face.

‘Bad.’ I took the opportunity to push back my own plate. To be unable to clear your plate is a compliment to a Liban host’s largesse. Mine simply constituted a bigger compliment than usual, I hoped. ‘I don’t know what form it will take. I only pray that we are far enough away to be safe.’

‘And God sent an infidel to deliver this warning?’

‘A divine message is holy whatever it may be written upon.’ I had Bishop James to thank for that gem. He beat the words, if not the sentiment, into me after I decorated the privy wall with that bible passage about who was cleaving to whom. ‘And of course the messenger is never to be blamed! That one’s older than civilization.’ I breathed a sigh of relief as my plate was removed without comment.

‘And now dessert!’ The sheik clapped his hands. ‘A true desert dessert!’

I looked up expectantly as the servers returned with smaller square platters stacked along their arms, half expecting to be presented with a plate of sand. I would have preferred a plate of sand.

‘It’s a scorpion,’ I said.

‘A keen eye you have, Prince Jalan.’ Mahood favoured me with a dark stare over the top of his water goblet.

‘Crystallized scorpion, Prince Jalan! Can you have spent time in Liba and not yet tried one?’ The sheik looked confounded.

‘It’s a great delicacy.’ Tarelle’s knee bumped mine.

‘I’m sure I’ll love it.’ I forced the words past gritted teeth. Teeth that had no intention of parting to admit the thing. I stared at the scorpion, a monster fully nine inches long from the curve of the tail arching over its back to the oversized twin claws. The arachnid had a slightly translucent hue to it, its carapace orange and glistening with some kind of sugary glaze. Any larger and it could be mistaken for a lobster.

‘Eating the scorpion is a delicate art, Prince Jalan,’ the sheik said, demanding our attention. ‘First, do not be tempted to eat the sting. For the rest customs vary, but in my homeland we begin with the lower section of the pincer, like so.’ He took hold of the upper part and set his knife between the two halves. ‘A slight twist will crack—’

Out of the corner of my eye I saw the scorpion on my plate jitter toward me on stiff legs, six glazed feet scrabbling for purchase on the silver. I slammed my goblet down on the thing crushing its back, legs shattering, pieces flying in all directions, cloudy syrup leaking from its broken body.

All nine al’Hameeds stared at me in open-mouthed astonishment.

‘Ah … that’s…’ I groped for some kind of explanation. ‘That’s how we do it where I come from!’

A silence stretched, rapidly extending through awkward into uncomfortable, until with a deep belly-laugh Sheik Malik slammed his goblet down on his own scorpion. ‘Unsubtle, but effective. I like it!’ Two of his daughters and one son followed suit. Mahood and Jahmeen watched me with narrowed eyes as they started to dismember their dessert piece by piece in strict accordance with tradition.

I looked down at the syrupy mess of fragments in my own plate. Only the claws and stinger had survived. I still didn’t want to eat any of it. Opposite me, Mina popped a sticky chunk of broken scorpion into her pretty mouth, smiling all the while.

I picked up a piece, sharp-edged and dripping with ichor, hoping for some distraction so that I could palm the thing away. It was a pity the heathens took against dogs so. A hound at a feast is always handy for disposing of unwanted food. With a sigh I moved the fragment toward my lips…

When the distraction came I was almost too distracted to use the opportunity. One moment we sat illuminated by the fluttering light of a dozen oil lamps, the next the world outside lit up brighter than a desert noon, dazzling even through the tent walls. I could see the shadows of guy ropes stark against the material, the outline of a passing servant. The intensity of it grew from unbelievable to impossible, and outside the screaming started. A wave of heat reached me as if I had passed from shadow to sun. I barely had time to stand before the glow departed, as quickly as it came. The tent seemed suddenly dim. I stumbled over Tarelle, unable to make out my surroundings.

We exited in disordered confusion, to stare at the vast column of fire rising in the distance. A column of fire so huge it rose into the heavens before flattening against the roof of the sky and turning down upon itself in a roiling mushroom-shaped cloud of flame.

For the longest time we watched in silence, ignoring the screams of the servants clutching their faces, the panic of the animals, and the fried smell rising from the tents, which seemed to have been on the point of bursting into flame.

Even in the chaos I had time to reflect that things seemed to be turning out rather well. Not only had I escaped the deadlands and returned to life, I had now very clearly saved the life of a rich man and his beautiful daughters. Who knew how large my reward might be, or how pretty!

A distant rumbling underwrote the screams of men and animals.

‘Allah!’ Sheik Malik stood beside me, reaching only my shoulder. He had seemed taller on his camel.

That old Jalan luck was kicking in. Everything turning up roses.

‘It’s where we found him,’ Mahood said.

The rumbling became a roar. I had to raise my voice, nodding, and trying to look grim. ‘You were wise to listen to me, Sheik Mal—’

Jahmeen cut across me. ‘It can’t be. That was twenty miles back. No fire could be seen at such—’

The dunes before us exploded, the most distant first, then the next, the next, the next, quick as a man can beat a drum. Then the world rose around us and everything was flying tents and sand and darkness.




2 (#ulink_04eb197e-cb05-59c4-b22d-227415f29d9c)


I could have lost consciousness only for a moment for I gained my senses in time to see a dozen or more camels charging right at me, maddened by terror, eyes rolling. I lurched to my feet, spitting sand, and dived to one side. If I’d had a split second to think about my move I would have gone the other way. As it was, almost immediately I slammed into someone still staggering about while the rumbles of the explosion died away. Both of us followed my planned arc but fell short of the point I would have reached unimpeded. I did my level best to haul my screaming companion out from underneath me to use as a shield but just ended up with two handfuls of gauze and a camel’s foot stamping on my arse as it thundered by.

Groaning and clutching my rear, I rolled to the side, discovering that I appeared to have stripped and possibly killed one of the sheik’s daughters. The moonlight hid few details but with her hair in disarray I couldn’t tell which of the four it was. Figures closed on me from both sides, the sand settling out of the night as they came. Somewhere someone kept shrieking but the sound came muffled as if the loudness of detonation had reduced all other noise to insignificance.

The sheik’s elder sons pulled me to my feet, keeping an iron grip on my arms even after I’d stood up. A grey-haired retainer, bleeding from the nose and with the left side of his face blistered, covered the dead daughter with his tunic, leaving himself naked from the waist up, hollow-chested and wattled with the hanging skin old men wear. The sons were shouting questions or accusations at me but none of them quite penetrated the ringing in my ears.

The sand cleared from the air within a minute or so and the moon washed across the ruin of our camp. I stood, half-dazed, with Jahmeen’s knife to my throat, while Mahood shouted accusations at me, mostly about his sister, as if the destruction of the camp were as nothing compared to the baring of two breasts. However fine. Oddly I didn’t feel scared. The blast had left me somehow separated, as if I floated outside myself, an unconcerned observer, watching the surroundings as much as I watched Mahood’s raging or Jahmeen’s hand around the hilt of the blade at my neck.

It looked as if a hurricane had blown through leaving no tent standing. Those of us who had been inside when the night lit up were largely unharmed. Those who had been outside showed burns on any exposed flesh facing the direction of the explosion. The Ha’tari on patrol had fared better, though one looked to be blind. But the tribesmen who had been sitting around their prayer pole, unveiled in the darkness, had been burned as badly as the servants.

The camels had taken off but many of the caravaneers had gathered around the base of the nearest dune where the wounded were being treated, leaving me with the two brothers and three retainers out on more exposed sands. It was damnable cold in the desert night and I found myself shivering. The brothers might have thought it from fear, and Jahmeen grinned nastily at me, but some cataclysms are so terrifying that my habitual terror just ups and runs, and right now my fear was still lost somewhere out there in the night.

It wasn’t until Sheik Malik approached from the dunes with two Ha’tari, leading half a dozen camels, that I suddenly settled back into myself and started to panic, recalling his light-hearted talk of gold-plating the balls of any man who laid hands on his daughters.

‘I never touched her! I swear it!’

‘Touched who?’ The sheik left the camels to the Ha’tari and strode into the middle of the small gathering around me.

Jahmeen lowered the knife and the two brothers hauled me around to face their father. Behind him the column of fire continued to boil up into the night, yellow, orange, mottled with darkness, spreading out across the sky, huge despite the fact it would take a whole day to walk back to where it stood.

‘This was a Builders’ Sun.’ The sheik waved at the fire behind him.

My mind hadn’t even wandered into why or what yet but as the sheik said it I knew that he was right. The night had lit brighter than day. Had we been a few miles closer the tents would have burst into flame, the people outside turned into burning pillars. Who but the ancients had such power? I tried to imagine the Day of a Thousand Suns when the Builders scorched the world and broke death.

‘The infidel has despoiled Tarelle!’ Mahood shouted pointing at the figure sprawled beneath the robes.

‘And killed her!’ Jahmeen, waving his knife as if to make up for the fact that this was an afterthought.

The sheik’s face turned wooden. He dropped to the girl’s side and drew back the robe to expose her head. Tarelle chose that moment to sneeze and opened her eyes to fix her father with an unfocused stare.

‘My child!’ Sheik Malik drew his daughter to him, exposing enough neck and shoulder to give a Ha’tari apoplexy. He fixed me with cold eyes.

‘The camels!’ Tarelle pulled at her father’s arm. ‘They … he saved me, Father! Prince Jalan … he jumped into their path as they charged and carried me clear.’

‘It’s true!’ I lied. ‘I covered her with my body to save her from being crushed.’ I shook off the brothers’ hands with a snarl. ‘I got stepped on by the camel that would have trampled your daughter.’ In full bluster mode now I straightened out my robes, wishing they were a cavalry shirt and jacket. ‘And I don’t appreciate having a damned knife held to my throat by the brothers of the woman I protected at great personal risk. Brothers, it must be said, who would currently be on fire at the Oasis of Palms and Angels if I hadn’t been sent to save all your lives!’

‘Unhand him!’ The sheik shot dark looks at both sons, neither of which actually had hands on me any more, and waved them further back. ‘Go with Tahnoon and recover our animals! And you!’ He rounded on the three retainers, ignoring their injuries. ‘Get this camp back into order!’

Returning his attention to me, the sheik bowed at the waist. ‘A thousand pardons, Prince Jalan. If you would do me the honour of guarding my daughters while I salvage our trade goods I would stand in your debt!’

‘The honour is all mine, Sheik Malik.’ And I returned the bow, allowing my own to hide the grin I couldn’t keep from my face.

An hour later I found myself outside the sheik’s second best tent guarding all four of his daughters who huddled inside, wrapped once more in the ridiculous acreage of their thobes. The girls had three ageing maidservants to attend their needs and guard their virtue, but the trio hadn’t fared too well when the Builders’ Sun lit the night. Two had burns and the third looked to have broken a leg when the blast threw us all around. They were being tended a short distance off, outside the tent sheltering the injured men.

The important thing about the injured was that none of them looked mortally injured. The sands are staggeringly empty: the Dead King might have turned his eyes my way, but without corpses to work with he posed little threat.

I heard my name mentioned more than once as the sisters discussed the calamity in low voices behind me, Tarelle sharing the story of my bravery in the face of stampeding camels, and Lila reminding her sisters that my warning had saved them all. If I hadn’t been stuck outside in tribesman robes that stank of camel and itched my sunburn into a misery I might have felt quite pleased with myself.

The sheik, together with his sons and guards, had gone out amid the dunes to hunt down his precious cargo and the beasts it was tied onto. I couldn’t imagine how they could track the camels in the night, or how they hoped to find their way back to us either with or without them, but that seemed to be firmly the sheik’s problem and not mine.

I stood, leaning into the wind, eyes slitted against the fine grit it bore. During the whole day’s journey a light breeze had blown in across us from the west, but now the wind had turned toward the explosion, as if answering a summons, and strengthened into something that might easily become a sandstorm. The fire in the south had gone, leaving only darkness and questions.

After half an hour I gave up standing guard and started to sit guard instead, hollowing the sand to make it more comfortable for my bruised arse. I watched the sheik’s more able-bodied retainers salvaging additional tents and putting them back up as best they could. And I listened to the daughters, occasionally twirling a length of broken tent pole I’d picked up in lieu of a sword. I even started humming: it takes more than a Builders’ Sun exploding to take the gloss off a man’s first night in the living world after what seemed an eternity in Hell. I’d made it through the first two verses of The Charge of the Iron Lance when an unexplained stillness made me sit up straight and look around. Straining through the gloom I could make out the nearest of the men, standing motionless around a half-erected tent. I wondered why they’d stopped work. The real question struck me a few moments later. Why could I barely see them? It had become darker – much darker – and all within the space of a few minutes. I looked up. No stars. No moon. Which had to mean cloud. And that simply didn’t happen in the Sahar. Certainly not during the year I’d spent in Hamada.

The first drop of rain hit me square between the eyes. The second hit me in the right eye. The third hit the back of my throat as I made to complain. Within the space of ten heartbeats three drops had grown into a deluge that had me backing into the tent awning for shelter. Slim hands reached out for my shoulders and drew me in through the flaps.

‘Rain!’ Tarelle, her face in shadow, the light of a single lamp hinting at the curve of her cheekbone, her brow, the line of her nose.

‘How can it be raining?’ Mina, fearful yet excited.

‘I…’ I didn’t know. ‘The Builders’ Sun must have done it.’ Could a fire make it rain? A fire that big might change the weather … certainly the flames reached high enough to lick the very roof of the sky.

‘I heard that after the Day of a Thousand Suns there was a hundred years of winter. The winter of the north where water turns to stone and falls from the sky in flakes,’ Danelle said, her face at my shoulder, voice rich and commanding thrills down my spine.

‘I’m scared.’ Lila pressed closer as the rain began to hammer on the tent roof above us. I doubted we’d be dry for long – tents in Liba are intended to keep out the sun and the wind: they rarely have to contend with the wet.

A crack of thunder broke ridiculously close and suddenly Prince Jal was the filling in a four-girl sandwich. The boom paralysed me with terror for a moment and left my ears ringing, so it took me a short while to appreciate my position. Not even thirty-six yards of thobe could entirely disguise the sisters’ charms at this proximity. Moments later, though, a new fear surfaced to chase off any thoughts of taking advantage.

‘Your father made some very specific threats, ladies, concerning your virtue and I really—’

‘Oh, you don’t want to worry about that.’ A husky voice close enough to my ear to make me shiver.

‘Father says all manner of things.’ Softly spoken by a girl with her head against my chest. ‘And nobody will move until the rain stops.’

‘I can’t remember a time when we weren’t being watched over by Father, or our brothers, or his men.’ Another pressed soft against my shoulder.

‘And we do so need protecting…’ Behind me. Mina? Danelle? Whoever it was her hands were moving over my hips in a most unvirtuous way.

‘But the sheik—’

‘Gold plating?’ A tinkling laugh as the fourth sister started to push me down. ‘Did you really believe that?’

At least two of the girls were busy unwinding their thobes with swift and practised hands. Amid the shadows thrown by so many bodies I could see very little, but what I could see I liked. A lot.

All four of them pushed me down now, a tangled mass of smooth limbs and long hair, hands roaming.

‘Gold’s so expensive.’ Tarelle, climbing atop me, still half-wrapped.

‘That would be silly.’ Danelle, pressed to my side, deliciously soft, her tongue doing wonderful things to my ear. ‘He always uses silver…’

I tried to get up at that point, but there were too many of them, and things had got out of hand – except for the things that were now in hands … and, dammit, I’d been in Hell long enough, it was time for a spot of paradise.

There’s a saying in Liba: The last yard of the thobe is the best.

…or if there isn’t, there should be!

‘Arrrrgh!’

I’ve found that there are few things more effective at making a man’s ardour grow softer than cold water. When the tent roof, weakened by earlier traumas, gave without warning and released several gallons of icy rainwater over my back I jumped up sharply, scattering al’Hameed women and no doubt teaching them a whole new set of foreign curse words.

One thing that became clear as the water dripped off me was that very little more was dripping in to replace it.

‘Sshhh!’ I raised my voice over the last of their shrieking – they’d enjoyed the soaking no more than I had. ‘It’s stopped raining!’

‘عشيقة، هل أنت خخير؟’ A man just outside the tent, jabbering away in the heathen tongue, others joining him. They must have heard the screams. How much longer the fear of what the sheik would do to them if they burst in on his daughters would outweigh the fear of what the sheik would do to them if they failed to protect his daughters, I couldn’t say.

‘Cover yourselves!’ I shouted, moving to defend the entrance.

I heard smirking behind me, but they moved, presumably not expecting to emerge unscathed if reports of ‘frolicking’ reached their father.

Outside someone took hold of the tent flap. I’d not even laced it! With a yelp I flung myself down to grab the bottom of it. ‘Hurry for Christ’s sake! And blow out the lamp!’

That set them giggling again. I grabbed the lamp and pre-empted any attempt at entry by bursting out, setting the foremost of the sheik’s retainers on his backside in the wet sand.

‘They’re all fine!’ I straightened up and waved an arm back toward the tent. ‘The roof gave way under the rain … water everywhere.’ I did my best to mime the last part in case none of them had the Empire tongue. I don’t think the idiots got it because they stood there staring at me as if I’d asked a riddle. I strode purposefully away from the tent, beckoning the three men with me. ‘Look! It’ll all be clearer over here.’ I sincerely hoped those thobes went back on as quickly as they came off. Two of the sheik’s men were bringing over one of the sisters’ maids, urging her on despite her injuries.

‘What’s that over there?’ I said it mainly to distract everyone. As I looked in the direction I was pointing though … there was something. ‘Over there!’ I gesticulated more fiercely. Moonlight had started to pierce the shredding clouds overhead and something seemed to be emerging from the dune that I’d selected at random. Not cresting it, or stepping from its shadow, but struggling through the damp crust of sand.

Others started to see it now, their voices rising in confusion. From the broken sand something rose, a figure, impossibly slim, bone-pale.

‘Damn it all…’ I’d escaped from Hell and now Hell seemed to be following me. The dune had disgorged a skeleton, the bones connected by nothing but memory of their previous association. Another skeleton seemed to be fighting its way from the damp sand beside the first, constructing itself from assorted pieces as it came.

All around me people started to cry out in alarm, cursing, calling on Allah, or just plain screaming. They began to fall back. I retreated with them. Not long ago the sight would have had me sprinting in the direction that best carried me away from the two horrors before us, but I’d seen my share of dead, both in and out of Hell, and I kept the panic to just below boiling point.

‘Where did they come from? What are the odds we camped right where a couple of travellers died?’ It hardly seemed fair.

‘More than a couple.’ A timid voice behind me. I spun around to see four bethobed figures outside the women’s tent. ‘Over there!’ The speaker, the shortest so probably Mina, the youngest, pointed to my left. The sand in the lee of the dune had begun to heave and bony hands had emerged like a nightmare crop of weeds.

‘There was a city here once.’ The tallest … Danelle? ‘The desert ate it two hundred years ago. The desert has covered many such.’ She sounded calm: probably in shock.

The sheik’s retainers began to back in a new direction, retreating from both threats. The original two skeletons now seemed to sight us with their empty sockets and came on at a flat run, silent, their pace deadly, slowed only by the softness of the sand. That brought my panic to the boil. Before I could take to my heels though, a lone Ha’tari sprinted past me, having come through the camp. The sheik must have left one to patrol out among the dunes.

‘No sword!’ I held my empty hands up in excuse and let my retreat bring me among the four daughters. We stood together and watched the Ha’tari intercept the first of the skeletons. He hacked at its neck with his curved blade. Hearteningly, bone shattered beneath the blow, the skull flew clear and the rest of the skeleton collided with him, bouncing off to fall in a disarticulated heap on the sand.

The second skeleton rushed the warrior and he ran it through.

‘Idiot!’ I shouted, perhaps unreasonably because he’d acted on instinct and his reflexes were well honed.

Unfortunately sticking your blade through the chest of a skeleton is less of an inconvenience to the thing than it would have been back in the days when its bones were covered in flesh and guarded a lung. The skeleton ran into the thrust and clawed at the warrior’s face with bone fingers. The man fell back yelling, leaving his sword trapped between its ribs.

I saw now, as the last tatters of cloud departed and the moon washed across the scene, that the skeleton was not as unconnected as I had thought. The silver light illuminated a grey misty substance that wrapped each bone and linked it, albeit insubstantially, to the next, as if the phantom of their previous owner still hung about the bones and sought to keep them united. Where the first attacker had collapsed and scattered, the mist, or smoke, had stained the ground, and as the stain sank away the desert floor writhed, nightmare faces appearing in the sand, mouths opening in silent screams before they lost form and collapsed in turn.

The Ha’tari warrior continued to back away, bent double, both hands clutching his face. The skeleton rotated its skull toward us and started to run again, the sword trapped in its ribcage clattering as it came on.

‘This way!’ I turned to do some running of my own, only to see that skeletons were closing on the camp from all directions, gleaming white in the moonlight. ‘Hell!’

The sheik’s men had nothing better than daggers to defend themselves with, and I hadn’t even filched a knife from the evening meal.

‘There!’ Danelle caught my shoulder and pointed at the closest of several lamp stands that had been set between the tents, each a shaft of mahogany a good six foot tall and standing on a splayed base, the brass lamp cradled at the top.

‘That’s no damn use!’ I grabbed it anyway, letting the lamp fall and hefting the stand up with a grunt.

With nowhere to run I waited for the first of our attackers and timed my swing to its arrival. The lamp stand smashed through the skeleton’s ribcage, shattering it like matchwood and breaking its spinal column into a shower of loose vertebrae. The dead thing fell into a hundred pieces, and the phantom that had wrapped them sank slowly toward the fragments, a grey mist descending.

The momentum of my swing turned me right around and the daughters had to be quick on their feet to avoid being hit. I found myself with my back to my original foe and facing two more with no time to swing again. I jabbed the stand’s base into the breastbone of the foremost skeleton. Lacking flesh, the thing had little weight and the impact halted its charge, breaking bones and lifting it from its feet. The next skeleton reached me a moment later but I was able to smash the shaft of the stand into its neck like a quarterstaff then carry it down to the sand where my weight parted its skull from its body before its bony claws could reach me.

This left me on all fours amid the ruin of my last enemy but with half a dozen more racing my way, the closest just a few yards off. Still more were tearing into the sheik’s people, both the injured and the healthy.

I got to my knees, empty handed, and found myself facing a skeleton just about to dive onto me. The scream hadn’t managed to leave my mouth when a curved sword flashed above my head, shattering the skull about to hit my face. The rest of the horror bounced off me, falling into pieces, leaving a cold grey mist hanging in the air. I stepped up sharpish, shaking my hands as the phantom tried to leach into me through my skin.

‘Here!’ Tarelle had swung the sword and now pressed it into my grip. The Ha’tari’s blade – she must have recovered it from the remains of the first skeleton I put down.

‘Shit!’ I sidestepped the next attacker and took the head off the one behind.

Five or six more were charging in a tight knot. I briefly weighed surrender in the balance against digging a hole. Neither offered much hope. Before I had time to consider any other options a huge shape barrelled through the undead, bones shattering with brittle retorts. A Ha’tari on camelback brushed past me, swinging his saif, more following in his wake.

Within moments the sheik and his sons were dismounting around us, shouting orders and waving swords.

‘Leave the tents!’ Sheik Malik yelled. ‘This way!’ And he pointed up along the valley snaking between the dune crests that bracketed us.

Before long a column of men and women were limping their way behind the mounted sheik, flanked by his sons and his own armed tribesmen while the Ha’tari fought a rear-guard action against the bone hordes still being vomited forth from the damp sand.

A half mile on and we joined the rest of the sheik’s riders, standing guard around the laden camels they’d recovered from the surrounding desert.

‘We’ll press on through the night.’ The sheik stood in his stirrups atop his ghost-white camel to address us. ‘No stopping. Any who fall behind will be left.’

I looked over at Jahmeen, watching his father with strained intensity.

‘The Ha’tari will deal with the dead, won’t they?’ I couldn’t see mounted warriors being in too much danger from damp skeletons.

Jahmeen glanced my way. ‘When the bones rest uneasy it means the djinn are coming – from the empty places.’

‘Djinn?’ Stories of magic lamps, jolly fellows in silk pantaloons, and the granting of three wishes sprung to mind. ‘Are they really as bad as the dead trying to eat us?’

‘Worse.’ Jahmeen looked away, seeming less an angry young man and more a scared boy. ‘Much, much worse.’




3 (#ulink_5ee22b2b-4675-5e59-b339-509cba9aa64d)


‘So, about these djinn…’ We’d travelled no more than two miles and somehow it was daytime among the dunes, scorching hot, blinding, miserable as always. As we left the time-river rather than hasten into the next day we seemed to slip back into the one we’d escaped. The sun actually rose in the west in a reversal of the sunset we’d witnessed many hours before. The feeling was decidedly unsettling, and given my recent experiences ‘unsettling’ is no gentle word! ‘Tell me more.’ I didn’t really want to know any more about the djinn, but if the Dead King was sending more servants after the key I should at least know what I was running away from.

‘Creatures of invisible scorching fire,’ Mahood said on my right.

‘They will be drawn to the Builders’ Sun.’ Jahmeen on my left. They had bracketed me the whole journey, presumably to stop me talking to their sisters.

‘God made three creatures with the power of thought,’ Sheik Malik called back to us. ‘The angels, men, and djinn. The greatest of all the djinn, Shaytan, defied Allah and was cast down.’ The sheik slowed his mount to draw closer. ‘There are many djinn that dance in the desert but these are the lesser kind. In this part of the Sahar there is just one grand djinn. Him we should fear.’

‘You’re telling me Satan is coming for us?’ I scanned the dune tops.

‘No.’ Sheik Malik flashed a white line of teeth. ‘He lives in the deep Sahar where men cannot abide.’

I slumped in my saddle at that.

‘This is just a cousin of his.’ And with that the sheik urged his camel on toward the Ha’tari riding point.

The ragged caravan continued on, winding its way through the dunes, limited to the pace of the walking wounded, variously burned by the light of the Builders’ Sun, broken by the blast that reached us minutes later, and torn by the bones of men long dead, emerging from the sands.

I hunched over my malodorous steed, swaying with the motion, sweating in my robes and willing away the miles between us and the safety of Hamada’s walls. Somehow I knew we wouldn’t make it. Perhaps just speaking about the djinn had sealed our fate. Speak of the devil, as it were.

The Builders’ Suns left invisible fire – everyone knew that. There were places even in Red March still tainted with the shadow of the Thousand Suns. Places where a man might walk and find his flesh blistering for no reason, leaving him to die horribly over the next few days. They called them the Promised Lands. One day they would be ours again, but not soon.

I half-expected the djinn to come like that, like the light of the Builders’ Sun, but unseen, turning first one man then the next into columns of flame, molten fats running. I’d seen bad things in Hell and my imagination had plenty to work with.

In fact, djinn burn men from the inside.

It began with writing in the sand. As we snaked between the dunes their blindingly white flanks became scarred with the curving script of the heathens. At first, seen only where the sun grazed a slope at an angle shallow enough for the raised letters to throw a shadow.

None of us knew how long before Tarelle noticed the markings we had been riding between slopes overwritten with descriptions of our fate.

‘What does it say?’ I didn’t really want to know but it’s one of those questions that asks itself.

‘You don’t want to know.’ Mahood looked nauseous, as if he’d eaten one too many sheep’s eyeballs.

Either the entire caravan was literate or the anxiety infectious because within minutes of Tarelle’s discovery each traveller seemed to walk or ride within their own bubble of despair. Prayers were said in quavering voices, the Ha’tari rode closer in, and the whole desert pressed in against us, vast and empty.

Mahood was right, I didn’t want to know what the writing said, but even so part of me ached to be told. The lines of the words, raised against the smoothness of the dunes, drew my eye, maddening and terrifying at the same time. I wanted to ride out and scuff away the messages but fear held me back amid the others. The main thing when trouble strikes is to keep a low profile. Don’t draw attention to yourself – don’t be the lightning rod.

‘How much farther is it?’ I’d asked that question a few times, first in irritation, then desperation. We were close. Ten miles, maybe fifteen, and the dunes would part to reveal Hamada, another city waiting its turn to drown beneath the desert. ‘How much farther?’ I asked it as if repetition would wear away the miles more effectively than camel strides.

Finding myself ignored by Mahood, I turned to Jahmeen, and discovered that I was already the centre of his attention. Something in the stiffness of him, the awkwardness with which he rode his camel, gave me pause and my question stuck in my throat.

I met his eyes. He held me with the same implacable stare his father used – but then I saw it, a flicker of flame, glimpsed through the pupil of each eye.

‘What … what’s written in the sand?’ A new question stuttered out.

Jahmeen parted his lips and I thought he would speak but instead his mouth opened so wide that his jaw creaked, and all that came forth was a hiss, like the sand being stripped from the dunes. He leaned forward, hand clasping around my wrist, and beneath his palm a fire ignited, trying to eat into me, trying to invade. My world became that burning touch – nothing else, not sight, or sound, or drawing breath, just the pain. Pain and memories … the worst memories of all … memories of Hell. And while I suffered and lost myself in them how long would it be before the djinn escaped Jahmeen and hollowed out my flesh, driving my own undernourished soul into Hell for good? I saw Snorri, standing there in my memory, standing there at the start of a tale I had no wish to follow, with that grin of his, that reckless, stupid, brave, infectious grin… All I had to do was hang onto the now. I had to stay here, in the now, with my body, and the pain. I just had to—

Snorri’s hand is clamped about my wrist, the other on my shoulder, preventing me from falling. I’m looking up and he’s framed against a dead sky from which a flat orange light bleeds. Every part of me hurts.

‘The door got away from you, hey?’ He stands me up. ‘Couldn’t hold it myself – had to pull you through quick before it shut again.’

I swallow the scream of raw terror before it chokes me in its bid for freedom. ‘Ah.’

The door is right in front of me, a faint silver rectangle scratched into the dull grey flank of an enormous boulder. It’s fading as I look at it. All life, all my future, everything I know lies on the other side of that door. Kara and Hennan are standing there, just two yards away, probably still staring at it in confusion.

‘Give Kara a minute to lock it. Then we’ll go.’ Snorri looms beside me.

Pretty soon Kara’s confusion will turn into anger as she realizes I’ve picked Loki’s key from her pocket. The thing just seemed to leap into my hand and stick to my fingers, as if it wanted to be stolen.

I cast a quick glance around me. The afterlife looks remarkably dull. They tell in children’s tales that the Builders made ships that flew and some would soar above the clouds and out into the blackness between stars. They say the richest of kings once taxed all his nobles into the poorhouse and built a ship so vast and swift, hung beneath a thousand-acre sail, that it bore men all the way to Mars that, like the Moon, is a world unto itself. They went all those untold thousands of miles and returned with images of a place of dull red rocks and dull red dust and a dry wind that blew forever … and men never again bothered to go there. The deadlands look pretty much like that … only slightly less red.

The dryness prickles against my skin as if the air itself is thirsty, and each part of me is sore like a bruise. In the half-light the shadows across Snorri’s face have a sinister cast, as though his flesh is itself a shadow over the bone beneath and any moment might find it gone, leaving a bare skull to regard me.

‘What the hell is that?’ I point an accusing finger over his shoulder. I tried this once when we first met and earned not so much as a flinch. Now he turns, bound by trust. Quickly I pull Loki’s key from my pocket and jab it toward the fading door. A keyhole appears, the key sinks home, I turn it, turn it back, pull it clear. Quicker than a trice. Locked.

‘I don’t see it.’ Snorri’s still peering at the jumbled rocks when I turn back. Useful stuff, trust. I pocket the key. It was worth sixty-four thousand in crown gold to Kelem. To me it’s worth a brief stay in the deadlands. I’ll open the door again when I’m sure Kara won’t be waiting on the other side of it. Then I’ll go home.

‘Might have been a shadow.’ I scan the horizon. It’s not inspiring. Low hills, scoured with deep gullies, march off into a gloomy haze. The huge boulder we’re next to is one of many scattering a broad plain of fractured rock, dark and jagged pieces of basalt bedded in a dull reddish dust. ‘I’m thirsty.’

‘Let’s go.’ Snorri rests the haft of his axe on his shoulder and sets off, stepping from one sharp rock to the next.

‘Where?’ I follow him, concentrating on my footing, feeling the uncomfortable angles through the soles of my boots.

‘The river.’

‘And you know it’s in this direction … how?’ I struggle to keep up. It’s not hot or cold, just dry. There’s a wind, not enough to pick up the dust, but it blows through me, not around, but through, like an ache deep in the bones.

‘These are the deadlands, Jal. Everyone’s lost. Any direction will take you where you’re going. You just have to hope that’s where you want to be.’

I don’t comment. Barbarians are immune to logic. Instead I glance back at the rock where the door lay, trying to fix it in my memory. It’s crooked over to the right, almost like the letter ‘r’. I should be able to open a door out anywhere I choose, but I don’t much want to put that to the test. It took a mage like Kelem to show us a door in and the chances are he’s in the deadlands now. I’d rather not have to ask him to show me the exit.

We press on, stepping from rock to rock on sore feet, trudging through the dust where the rocks grow sparse. There’s no sound but us. Nothing grows. Just a dry and endless wilderness. I had expected screaming, torn bodies, torture and demons.

‘Is this what you expected?’ I lengthen my stride and catch up with Snorri again.

‘Yes.’

‘I’d always thought Hell would be more … lively. Pitchforks, wailing souls, lakes of fire.’

‘The völvas say the goddess makes a Hel for each man.’

‘Goddess?’ I stub my toe on a rock hidden in the dust and stumble on, cursing.

‘You spent a winter in Trond, Jal! Didn’t you learn anything?’

‘Fuckit.’ I hobble on. The pain from my foot almost unmans me. It’s as if I’ve stepped in acid and it’s eating its way up my leg. If just banging my toe hurts this much in the deadlands I’m terrified of being on the wrong end of any significant injury. ‘I learned plenty.’ Just not about their damned sagas. Most of them seemed to be about Thor hitting things with his hammer. More interesting than the stories Roma tries to feed us, true, but not much of a code to live by.

Snorri stops and I hobble two paces past him before realizing. He spreads his arms as I turn. ‘Hel rules here. She watches the dead—’

‘No, wait. I do remember this one.’ Kara had told me. Hel, ice-hearted, split nose to crotch by a line dividing a left side of pure jet from a right side of alabaster. ‘She watches the souls of men, her bright eye sees the good in them, her dark eye sees the evil, and she cares not for either … did I get it right?’ I hop on one leg, massaging my toe.

Snorri shrugs. ‘Close enough. She sees the courage in men. Ragnarok is coming. Not the Thousand Suns of the Builders, but a true end when the world cracks and burns and the giants rise. Courage is all that will matter then.’

I look around at the rocks, the dust, the barren hills. ‘So where’s mine? If this is your hell where’s mine?’ I don’t want to see mine. At all. But even so, to be wandering around in a barbarian’s hell seems … wrong. Or perhaps a key ingredient in my personal hell is that nobody recognizes the precedence of nobility over commoners.

‘You don’t believe in it,’ Snorri says. ‘Why would Hel build it for you if you don’t believe in it?’

‘I do!’ Protesting my faithfulness in all things is a reflex with me.

‘Your father is a priest, yes?’

‘A cardinal! He’s a cardinal, not some damn village priest.’

Snorri shrugs as if these are just words. ‘Priests’ children seldom believe. No man is a prophet in his own land.’

‘That sort of pagan nonsense might—’

‘It’s from the bible.’ Snorri stops again.

‘Oh.’ I stop too. He’s right, I guess. I’ve never had much use for religion, except when it comes to swearing or begging for mercy. ‘Why have we stopped?’

Snorri says nothing, so I look where he’s looking. Ahead of us the air is splintering and through the fractures I see glimpses of a sky that already looks impossibly blue, too full of the vital stuff of life to have any place in the drylands of death. The tears grow larger – I see the arc of a sword – a spray of crimson, and a man tumbles out of nowhere, the fractures sealing themselves behind him. I say a man, but really it’s a memory of him, sketched in pale lines, occupying the space where he should be. He stands, not disturbing so much as a mote of dust, and I see the bloodless wound that killed him, a gash across his forehead that skips down to his broken collarbone and through it into the meat of him.

As the man stands, the process is repeating to his left and right, and again twenty yards behind them. More men drop through from whatever battlefield they’re dying on. They ignore us, standing with heads bowed, a few with scraps of armour, all weaponless. I’m about to call out to the first when he turns and walks away, his path close to our own heading but veering a little to the left.

‘Souls.’ I mean to say out loud but only a whisper escapes.

Snorri shrugged. ‘Dead men.’ He starts walking too. ‘We’ll follow them.’

I start forward but the air breaks before me. I see the world, I can smell it, feel the breeze, taste the air. And suddenly I understand the hunger in dead men’s eyes. I’ve been in the drylands less than an hour and already the need that just this glimpse of life gives me is consuming. There’s a battle raging that makes Aral Pass look like a skirmish: men hack at each other with bright steel and wild cries, the roar of massed troops, the screams of the wounded, the groans of the dying. Even so I’m lunging forward, so desperate for the living world that even a few moments there before someone spears me seem worth it.

It’s the soul that stops me. The one that punched this hole into death. I meet him head on, emerging, being born into death. There’s nothing to him, just the faint lines that remember him – that and the howling rage and fear and pain of his last seconds. It’s enough to stop me though. He runs over my skin like a scald, sinks through it, and I fall back, shrieking, overwritten by his memories, drowning in his sorrow. Martell he’s called. Martell Harris. It seems more important than my own name. I try to speak my name, whatever it is, and find my lips have forgotten the shape of it.

‘Get up, Jal!’

I’m on the ground, dust rising all around me. Snorri is kneeling over me, hair dark around his face. I’m losing him. Sinking. The dust rising, thicker by the moment. I’m Martell Harris. The sword went into me like ice but I’m all right, I just need to get back into the battle. Martell moves my arms, struggles to rise. Jalan is gone, sinking into the dust.

‘Stay with me, Jal!’ I can feel Snorri’s grip on me. Nothing else, just that iron grip. ‘Don’t let him drive you out. You’re Jalan. Prince Jalan Kendeth.’

The fact of Snorri actually saying my name right – title and all – jolts me out of the dust’s soft embrace.

‘Jalan Kendeth!’ The grip tightens. It really hurts. ‘Say it! SAY IT!’

‘Jalan Kendeth!’ The words tore from me in a great shout.

I found myself face to face with the thing that used to be Sheik Malik’s son, Jahmeen, before the djinn burned him hollow. Somehow the memory of that Hell-bound soul pushing into me, stealing my flesh had brought me back to the moment, back to fighting the djinn for control using whatever tricks I’d learned in the drylands.

The grip on my wrist is iron, anchoring me. And the pain! With my senses returned to me I found my whole arm on fire with white agony. Desperate to escape before the djinn could slip from Jahmeen and possess me in his stead I headbutted him full in the face and wrenched my arm clear. A heartbeat later I drove both heels viciously into my camel’s sides. With a lurch and a bugle of protest the beast took to the gallop, me bouncing about atop, hanging on with every limb at my disposal.

I didn’t look back. Damsels in distress be damned. Before I’d broken that grip I’d felt a familiar feeling. As the djinn had tried to move in, I in turn had been moving out. I knew exactly what Hell felt like and that was exactly where the djinn was trying to put the bits of me it didn’t need.

About a mile on, still following the channel between the two great dunes that had hemmed us in, my camel stopped. Where horses will frequently run past the limit of their endurance given enough encouragement, camels are beasts of a very different temperament. Mine just decided it had had enough and came to a dead halt, using the sand to arrest its progress. An experienced rider can usually pick up on the warning signs and prepare himself. An inexperienced rider, scared witless, has to rely on the sand to slow them down too. This is achieved by allowing the rider’s momentum to launch him or her over the head of his or her camel. The rest takes care of itself.

I got up quick enough, spitting out the desert. Put enough fear or embarrassment into a man and he’s immune to all but the very worst pain. Back along the winding route I’d ridden between dune crests a sandstorm had risen. Four main things worried me about it. Firstly, unlike dust, sand takes a hell of a wind to rise up into the air. Secondly, rather than the traditional advancing storm-wall, this storm appeared to be localized to the valley between two dunes, no more than two hundred yards apart. Thirdly, the wind was hardly blowing. And finally, what wind there was blowing toward the sandstorm and yet it seemed to be advancing on me at quite a rate!

‘Shit. Shit. Shit.’ I leapt toward my camel and scrambled up his side. Somehow my panic panicked the camel and the damn thing took off with me halfway into the saddle. I lay, sprawled across its hump for twenty yards, hanging on desperately, but it’s hard enough to stay on a galloping camel if you’re in the right place and sadly sometimes desperation isn’t a sufficient adhesive. My camel and I parted company, leaving me with a handful of camel hair, an ill-smelling blanket, and a seven-foot drop to the ground.

The outer edges of the sandstorm were on me before I’d managed to get back any of the air that the impact sent rushing from my lungs. I could feel the djinn in there, more diffuse than it had been when confined inside Jahmeen, but there none the less, scraping sandy fingers across my face, burning around every grain the wind carried.

This time the invasion came indirectly. The djinn had tried to overwhelm me and kick my soul into Hell, but for whatever reason, perhaps because I’d just come from there, or perhaps due to the magic that runs in Kendeth veins, I’d resisted. Now it took away my vision and my hearing, and as I hunched there trying to snatch a breath that wouldn’t burn my lungs, hoping not to be buried alive, the djinn prickled at the back of my mind, seeking a way in. Again my memories of the Hell-trip surged forward, Snorri grabbing me, trying to help me drive that stranger’s soul out, trying to help me keep my body.

‘No way.’ The words came through gritted teeth and narrowed lips. The djinn wouldn’t fool me twice. ‘I’m Jalan Kendeth and I’m wise to your tri—’

But the sand is dust now, choking dust, and I’m being hauled through it by a big hand, fingers knotted in my shirt.

‘I’m Jalan Kendeth!’ I shout it then fall to coughing. The dust mixed with my saliva looks like blood on my hands – exactly like blood. ‘—alan’ cough ‘Kendeth!’

‘Good man!’ Snorri sets me on my feet, slapping the worst of the dust off me. ‘One of the dead ran into you – almost took your body right off you!’

I feel I was somewhere else, somewhere sandy, doing something important. There was something I had to remember, something vital … but quite what it was escapes me even as I search for it.

‘Take my body? They … they can do that?’ More spluttering. My chest aches. I wipe my hands on my trousers. They’ve seen better days. ‘The dead can take your body?’

Snorri shrugs. ‘Best not get in their way.’ He waits for me to recover, impatient to follow the souls we saw.

‘Dust and rocks.’ I’m not ready yet. I rasp a breath in. ‘Is that as scary as Norse storytellers can make the afterlife?’

Again the shrug. ‘We’re not like you followers of the White Christ, Jal. There’s no paradise foretold, no roaming in green pastures for the blessed, no everlasting torment for the wicked. There’s only Ragnarok. The last battle. No promise of salvation or a happy ending, only that everything will end in blood and war, and men will have one last chance to raise their axes and shout their defiance at the end of time. The priests tell us that death is just a place to wait.’

‘Marvellous.’ I straighten. Holding out a hand as he tries to move off. ‘If it’s a place to wait why be in such a hurry?’

Snorri ignores that. Instead he holds out a fist, opening it to reveal a heaped palm. ‘Besides, it’s not dust. It’s dried blood. The blood of everyone who ever lived.’

‘I can make you see fear in a handful of dust.’ The words escape me with a breath.

Snorri smiles at that.

‘Elliot John,’ I say. I once spent a day memorizing quotes from classical literature to impress a woman of considerable learning – also a considerable fortune and a figure like an hourglass full of sex. I can’t remember the quotes now, but occasionally one of them will surface at random. ‘A great bard from the Builders’ time. He also wrote some of those songs you Vikings are always butchering in your ale halls!’ I start to brush myself down. ‘It’s just pretty words though. Dust is dust. I don’t care where it came from.’

Snorri lets the dust sift through his fingers, drifting on the wind. For a moment it’s just dust. Then I see it. The fear. As if the dust becomes a living thing, twisting while it falls, hinting at a face, a baby’s, a child’s, too indistinct to recognize, it could be anyone … me … suddenly it’s me … it ages, haggard, hollow, a skull, gone. All that’s left is the terror, as if I saw my life played out in an instant, dust on the wind, as swiftly taken, just as meaningless.

‘Let’s go.’ I need to be off, moving, not thinking.

Snorri leads the way, following the direction the souls took, though there’s no sign of them now.

We walk forever. There are no days or nights. I’m hungry and thirsty, hungrier and thirstier than I have ever been, but it gets no worse and I don’t die. Perhaps eating, drinking, and dying are not things that happen here, only waiting and hurting. It starts to hollow you out, this place. I’m too dry for complaining. There’s just the dust, the rocks, the distant hills that never draw any closer, and Snorri’s back, always moving on.

‘I wonder what Aslaug would have made of this place.’ Perhaps it would have scared her too, no darkness, a dead light that gives no warmth and casts no shadows.

‘Baraqel would have been the best ally to bring here,’ Snorri says.

I wrinkle my lip. ‘That fussy old maid? He’d certainly find plenty of subject matter for his lectures on morality.’

‘He was a warrior of the light. I liked him,’ Snorri says.

‘We’re talking about the same irritating angel, yes?’

‘Maybe not.’ Snorri shrugged. ‘We gave him his voice. He built himself from our imaginations. Perhaps for you he was different. But we both saw him at the wrong-mages’ door. That Baraqel we could use.’

I had to nod at that. Yards tall, golden winged with a silver sword. Baraqel might have been a pain but his heart was in the right place. Right now I’d be happy to have him in my head telling me what a sinner I was if it meant he would spring into being when trouble approached. ‘I suppose I might have misjudged—’

‘What?’ Snorri stops, his arm out to stop me too.

Just ahead of us is a milestone, old, grey, and weathered. It bears the roman runes for six and fresh blood glistens along one side. I look around. There’s nothing else, just this milestone in the dust. In the distance, far behind us, I can just make out, among the shapes of the vast boulders that scatter the plain, one that looks crooked over to the right, almost like the letter ‘r’.

Snorri kneels down to study the blood. ‘Fresh.’

‘You shouldn’t be here.’ There’s blood running in rivulets down the face of the boy who’s speaking, a young child not much taller than the milestone. He wasn’t there a moment ago. He can’t be more than six or seven. His skull has been caved in, his blonde hair is scarlet along one side. Blood trickles in parallel lines down the left side of his face, filling his eye, dividing him like Hel herself.

‘We’re passing through,’ Snorri says.

There is a growl behind us. I turn, slowly, to see a wolfhound approaching. I’ve seen a Fenris wolf, so I’ve seen bigger, but this is a huge dog, its head level with my ribs. It has the sort of eyes that tell you how much it will enjoy eating you.

‘We don’t want any trouble.’ I reach for my sword. Edris Dean’s sword. Snorri’s hand covers mine before I draw it.

‘Don’t be afraid, Justice won’t hurt you, he just comes to protect me,’ the boy says.

I turn so I have a side facing each of them. ‘I wasn’t afraid,’ I lie.

‘Fear can be a useful friend – but it’s never a good master.’ The boy looks at me, blood dripping into the dust. He doesn’t sound like a boy. I wonder if he memorized that from the same book I used.

‘Why are you out here?’ Snorri asks him, kneeling to be on a level, though keeping his distance. ‘The dead need to cross the river.’

The hound circles around to stand beside the milestone, and the boy reaches up to pat his back. ‘I left myself here. Once you cross the river you need to be strong. I only took what I needed.’ He smiles at us. He’s a nice-looking kid … apart from all the blood.

‘Look,’ I say. I step toward him, past Snorri. ‘You shouldn’t be out here by y—’

Suddenly the hound is bigger than any Fenris wolf ever was, and on fire. Flames clothe the beast, head to claw, kindling in its eyes. Its maw is a foot from my face, and when it opens its mouth to howl, an inferno erupts past its teeth.

‘No!’ I screamed and found myself face to face with the djinn, at the heart of the sandstorm. Somehow I’d resisted its attempts to drive me out of my body again. Perhaps that child’s hell-hound had scared it out. It certainly scared a whole other mess right out of me, double quick!

I saw the djinn only because each wind-borne grain of sand passing through its invisible body became heated to the point of incandescence, revealing the spirit shaped by the glow, trailing burning sand on the lee side where the wind tore through it. Here before me was a demon as I had always imagined them, stolen from the lurid imaginations of churchmen, horns and fangs and white-hot eyes.

‘Fuck.’ My next discovery was that being chest-deep in sand made running away difficult. And the discovery after that was worse. Through the storm I could make out a body, lying sprawled on the dune behind the djinn. A momentary lull allowed a better view … and somehow it was me lying there, slack-jawed and sightless. Which made me the one doing the watching … an ejected soul being sucked down into Hell!

The djinn held position, just before me, illustrated by the glowing sand tearing through its form. It just stood there, between me and my body, close enough to touch. It didn’t even have to push me, the dune seemed eager to suck me down. Scared witless, I dug my arms down and tried to draw my sword but the sand defeated me and my questing hand came up empty. I grabbed the key off my chest, unsure of how it was going to help … or if it even was the key, since there had appeared to be an identical one hanging about my body’s neck when I glimpsed myself during the lull. I clenched the key hard as I could. ‘Come on! Give me something I can work with here!’

In the instant of my complaint the sand about me fell away revealing a trapdoor incongruously set into the dune, with me two-thirds of the way through. And as the sand fell through it, I fell too. I managed to get both arms out and hold myself there, dangling over a familiar barren plain lit by that same deadlight. ‘Oh, come on!’

Finding little purchase on the dune, and still slipping into the hole by inches, I grabbed the only other thing there. Part of me expected my hands to burn, but despite its effect on the sand I’d felt no heat from the djinn, only the blast of its wordless rage and hatred.

Beneath my soul’s fingers the djinn felt blisteringly hot, but not so hot that I was ready to let go and fall into Hell, leaving my body as its plaything. ‘Bastard!’ I hauled myself up the djinn, grabbing horns, spurs, rolls of fat, whatever came to hand. With a strength born of fear I was two-thirds out of the trapdoor before the djinn even seemed to realize what had happened. Surprise had unbalanced the thing and though my soul might not weigh as much in the scales as some, it proved enough to drag the djinn forward and down whilst I climbed up.

Within moments the two of us were locked together, each trying to wrestle the other down through the trapdoor, both of us part in, part out. My main problems were that the djinn was stronger than me, heavier than me – which seemed deeply unfair given how the wind blew through him – and blessed with the aforementioned horns and barbs, together with a set of triangular teeth that looked capable of shearing through bones.

It turns out that when it’s your soul doing the wrestling the sharp spikes and keen edges are less important than how much you want to win – or in my case, win clear. Panic may not be much help in most situations, but well-focused terror can be a godsend. I jammed Loki’s key into the djinn’s eye, grabbed both his dangling earlobes, and pulled myself over him, setting a booted foot to the back of his neck and pitching him further into the trapdoor … where his bulk wedged him fast. It took me jumping up and down on him several times, both heels mashing into his shoulders before, like a cork escaping an amphora, he shot through. I very nearly followed him down, but by means of a lunge, a scramble, and a good measure of panic, I found myself lying on the dune, the winds dying and the sand settling all about me.

Quickly I pulled the trapdoor closed and locked it with Loki’s key, finding in that instant that it vanished leaving me poking the key into the sand. I shrugged and went over cautiously to inspect my body. Re-inhabiting your own flesh turns out to be remarkably easy, which is good because I had visions of the sheik and his men turning up and finding me lying there and soul-me having to trek along behind while they slung me over a camel and subjected me to heathen indignities. Or worse still, they might have passed me by unseen beneath my sandy shroud and left me to watch my body parch, the dry flesh flaking in the wind until I sat alone and watched the desert drown my bones… So it was fortunate that as soon as I laid a soul-finger on myself I was sucked back in and woke up coughing.

I sat up and immediately reached for the key around my neck. How much of what I’d seen had been real and how much just my mind’s way of interpreting my struggle with the djinn’s evil I had no idea. I even harboured a suspicion that the key itself had drawn those scenes for me, calling on Loki’s own twisted sense of humour.

The caravan outriders found me about half an hour later, crouched on the blazing dune, head covered with the ill-smelling blanket I snatched from my camel. The Ha’tari escorted me back to Sheik Malik, prodding me along before them like an escaped prisoner.

The sheik urged his camel out toward us as we approached, two of his own guards moving to flank him as he came. Behind him at the front of the caravan I could see Jahmeen, slumped across his saddle, kept in place by his two younger brothers riding to either side. I guessed the sheik would not be in the best of moods.

‘My friend!’ I raised a hand and offered a broad smile. ‘It’s good to see there were no more djinn. I was worried the one I drew off might not be the only attacker!’

‘Drew off?’ Confusion broke the hardness around the sheik’s eyes.

‘I saw the beast had taken hold of Jahmeen so I pushed it out of the boy and then set off at once, knowing it would chase me for revenge. If I’d stayed it would have sought an easier target to inhabit and use against me.’ I nodded sagely. It’s always good to have someone agreeing with you in such a discussion, even if it’s only yourself.

‘You pushed the djinn out—’

‘How is Jahmeen?’ I think I managed to make the concern sound genuine. ‘I hope he recovers soon – it must have been a terrible ordeal.’

‘Well.’ The sheik glanced back at his son, motionless on the halted camel. ‘Let us pray it will be soon.’

I very much doubted it. From what I’d seen and felt I guessed Jahmeen had been burned hollow, his flesh warm but as good as dead, his soul in the deadlands enjoying whatever his faith had told him was in store for a man of his quality. Or perhaps suffering it.

‘Within a few days, I hope!’ I kept smiling. Within half a day we would be in Hamada and I would be rid of the sheik and his camels and his sons forever. Sadly I would be rid of his daughters too, but that was a price I was willing to pay.




4 (#ulink_4009227c-d453-534f-8e35-9421dfb3b9e7)


Hamada is a grand city that beggars most others in the Broken Empire, though we don’t like to talk about that back in Christendom. You can only approach it from the desert so it is always welcome to the eye. It has no great walls – sand would only heap against them, providing any enemy a ramp. Instead it rises slowly from ground where hidden water has bound the dunes with karran grass. First it’s mud domes, made startlingly white with lime-wash, half-buried, their dark interiors unfathomable to the sun-blind eye. The buildings grow in stature and the ground dips toward that promised water, revealing towers and minarets and palatial edifices of white marble and pale sandstone.

Seeing the city grow before us out of the desert had silenced everyone, even stopping the talk of the Builders’ Sun, the endless whys, the circular discussions of what it all meant. There’s something magical about seeing Hamada after an age in the Sahar – and believe me, two days is an age in such a place. I was doubly grateful for the distraction since I’d been foolish enough to mention that much of Gelleth had been devastated by one of the Builders’ weapons and that I’d seen the margins of the destruction. The sheik – who obviously paid far more attention to his history lessons than I had – noted that no Builders’ Sun had ignited in over eight hundred years, which made the odds against a man being witness to two such events extremely long indeed. Only the sight of Hamada had stopped him from carrying that observation toward a conclusion in which I was somehow involved in the explosions.

‘I will be glad to get off this camel.’ I broke the silence. I wore the sword I had taken from Edris Dean, and the dagger I’d brought out of Hell with me, both returned on my request after the incident with the djinn. In Hamada I would swap my robes for something more fitting. With a horse under me I’d start feeling like my old self in no time!

There is a gate to the west of Hamada, flanked on each side by fifty yards of isolated wall, an archway tall enough for elephants with high, plumed howdahs on their backs. The Gate of Peace they call it and sheiks always enter the city through it, and so, with civilization tantalizingly close, our caravan turned and tracked the city’s perimeter that we might keep with tradition.

I rode near the head of the column, keeping a wary distance from Jahmeen, not wholly trusting the djinn not to find some way back into him and escape the deadlands. The only good thing about that final mile of the journey was that the last of our water was shared about, a veritable abundance of the stuff. The Ha’tari poured it down their throats, over their hands, down their chests. Me, I just drank it until my belly swelled and would take no more. Even then the thirst the deadlands had put in me was still there, parching my mouth as I swallowed the last gulp.

‘What will you do, Prince Jalan?’ The sheik had never once asked how I came to be in the desert, perhaps trusting it to be God’s will, proven by the truth of my prophecy and beyond understanding. He seemed interested in my future though, if not my past. ‘Will you stay in Liba? Come to the coast with me and I will show you my gardens. We grow more than sand in the north! Perhaps you might stay?’

‘Ah. Perhaps. First though I mean to present myself at the Mathema and look up an old friend.’ All I wanted to do was get home, with the key, in one piece. I doubted that the three double florins and scatter of smaller coins in my pocket would get me there. If I could ride Sheik Malik’s goodwill all the way to the coast that would be well and good – but I wondered if his approval would last the journey. In my experience it’s never that long before any ill fortune gets pinned to the outsider. How many weeks into the desert would it be before his son’s failure to recover soured the sheik and he started to look at events in a different light? How long before my role as the one who warned him of the danger twisted into painting me as the one who brought the danger?

‘My business will keep me in Hamada for a month—’ The sheik broke off as we approached the Gate of Peace. A twisted corpse had been tied above the archway – the strangest corpse I had seen in a while. Scraps of black cloth fluttered around the body: beneath them the victim’s skin lay whiter than a Viking’s, save for the many places where it was torn and dark with old blood. The true shock came where the limbs hung broken and the flesh, opened by sword blows, should have revealed the bone. Instead metal gleamed amid the seething mass of flies. A carrion crow set them buzzing and through the black cloud I saw silver steel, articulated at the joints.

‘That’s Mechanist work,’ I said, shielding my eyes for a better view as we drew nearer. ‘The man almost looks like a modern, from Umbertide but inside he’s…’

‘Clockwork.’ Sheik Malik halted just shy of passing beneath the arch. The column behind us began to bunch.

‘I’d swear that’s a banker.’ I thought of dear old Marco Onstantos Evenaline of the House Gold, Mercantile Derivatives South. The man had taught me to trade in prospects. For a time I had enjoyed taking part in the mad speculation governing the flow of gold through the dozen largest Florentine banks. Banks that seemed sometimes to rule the world. I wondered if this could be him – if so, he hadn’t governed his own prospects too well. ‘It might even be one I’ve met.’

‘That, would be hard to tell.’ Sheik Malik prompted his camel forward.

‘True.’ A dozen or more crossbow bolts appeared to have passed through the banker’s head, leaving little of his face and making a ruin of the silver-steel skull behind it. Even so, I thought of Marco, whom I’d seen last with the necromancer Edris Dean. Marco with his inhuman stillness and his projects on marrying dead flesh to clockwork. When his superior, Davario, had first called him in I had thought it had been to show me the dead hand attached to a clockwork soldier. Perhaps the joke had been that the man leading that soldier in was himself a dead man wrapped around the altered frame of a Mechanists’ creation.

The Ha’tari remained at the gate, singing their prayers for our souls, or for our righteous damnation, while the sheik’s entourage passed through. We left the ragged crowd of urchins that had followed us from the outskirts there too, only to have it replaced within yards by a throng of Hamadians of all stations, from street merchant to silk-clad prince, all clamouring for news. The sheik began to address them in the desert tongue, a rapid knife-edged language. I could see from their faces they knew that it wouldn’t be good news, but few of them would understand yet quite how bad it would be. Nobody from the gathering at the Oasis of Palms and Angels would ever pass through this gate again.

I took the opportunity to slip from my camel and weave a path through the crowd. No one saw me go, bound as they were by Sheik Malik’s report.

The city seemed almost empty. It always does. No one wishes to linger in the oven of the streets when there are cooler interiors offering shade. I passed the grand buildings, built by the wealth of caliphs past for the people of Hamada. For a place that had nothing but sand and water to its name Hamada had accumulated an awful lot of gold over the centuries.

Walking over the sand-scattered flagstones with my shadow puddled dark around my feet I could imagine it a city of ghosts, djinn-haunted and waiting for the dune-tide to drown it.

The sudden dip that reveals the lake is always a surprise. There before me lay a wide stretch of water taking the sky’s tired blue and making something azure and supple of it. The caliph’s palace sat across the lake from me, a vast central dome surrounded by minarets and a sprawl of interlinked buildings, dazzling white, galleried and cool.

I skirted the lake, passing by the steps and pillars of an ancient amphitheatre built by the men of Roma back in the days before Christ found them. The Mathema Tower stood back from the water but with an uninterrupted view, reaching for the heavens and dwarfing all other towers in Hamada, even the caliph’s own. Advancing on it gave me uncomfortable recollections of the Frauds’ Tower in Umbertide, though the Mathema stands half as broad and three times as tall.

‘Welcome.’ One of the black-robed students resting in the tower’s shadow stood to intercept me. The others, maybe a dozen in all, scarcely looked up from their slates, busy scratching down their calculations.

‘Wa-alaykum salaam,’ I returned the greeting. You’d think after all the sand I’d swallowed I would have more of the desert tongue, but no.

The exchange seemed to have exhausted both his words of Empire and mine of Araby and an awkward silence stretched between us. ‘This is new.’ I waved at the open entrance. There had been a black crystal door there, to be opened by solving some puzzle of shifting patterns, different each time. As a student it had never taken me less than two hours to open it, and on one occasion, two days. Having no door at all now made a pleasant if unexpected change, though I had rather been looking forward to poking Loki’s key at the bastard and seeing it swing open for me immediately.

The student, a narrow-featured youngster from far-Araby, his black hair slick to his skull, frowned as if remembering some calamity. ‘Jorg.’

‘I’m sure.’ I nodded, pretending to understand. ‘Now, I’m going up to see Qalasadi.’ I pushed past and followed the short corridor beyond to the stair that winds up just inside the outer wall. The sight of equations set into the wall and spiralling up with the stairs for hundreds of feet, just reminded me what a torture my year in Hamada had been. Not quite walking-the-deadlands level of torture, but mathematics can come pretty close on a hot day when you’re hung over. The equations followed me up as I climbed. A master mathmagician can calculate the future, seeing as much amid the scratched summations and complex integrations on their slates as the Silent Sister sees with her blind eye or the völvas extrapolate from the dropping of their runestones. Men are just variables to the mathmagicians of Liba, and just how far the mathmagicians see and what their aims might be are secrets known only to their order.

I got about halfway up to Omega level at the top of the tower before, sweating freely, I paused to catch my breath. The four grandmasters of the order preside in turn throughout the year and I was hoping that the current incumbent would remember me, along with my connections to the Red March throne. Qalasadi was my best bet since he arranged my tuition during my stay. With any luck the mathmagicians would organize my safe passage home, perhaps even calculating me a risk-free path.

‘Jalan Kendeth.’ Not a question.

I turned and Yusuf Malendra filled the staircase behind me, white robes swirling, a grin gleaming black against the mocha of his face. I’d seen him last in Umbertide waiting in the foyer of House Gold.

‘They say there are no coincidences with mathmagicians,’ I said, wiping my forehead. ‘Did you calculate the place and moment of our meeting? Or was it just the end of your business in Florence that brought you back here?’

‘The latter, my prince.’ He looked genuinely pleased to see me. ‘We do of course have coincidences and this is a most happy one.’ Behind him a student came puffing up the stairs.

A sudden thought struck me, the image of a white body, black clad, broken and left hanging on the Gate of Peace in the desert sun. ‘Marco … that was Marco wasn’t it?’

‘I—’

‘Jalan? Jalan Kendeth? I don’t believe it!’ A head poked around Yusuf’s shoulder, broad, dark, a grin so wide it seemed to hang between his ears.

‘Omar!’ As soon as I laid eyes on the grinning face of Omar Fayed, seventh son of the caliph, I knew my ordeal was over. Omar had been among the most faithful of my companions back in Vermillion, always up for hitting the town. Not a great drinker perhaps but with a love of gambling that eclipsed even my own, and pockets deeper than any young man I ever knew. ‘Now tell me that this was coincidence!’ I challenged Yusuf.

The mathmagician spread his hands. ‘You didn’t know Prince Omar had returned to Hamada and his studies at the Mathema?’

‘Well…’ I had to concede that I had known.

‘They said you were dead!’ Omar squeezed past Yusuf and set a hand on my shoulder. Being short, he had to reach up, which made a change after all my time standing in Snorri’s shadow. ‘That fire … I never believed them. I’ve been trying to do the sums to prove it, but, well, they’re tricky.’

‘I’m glad to have saved you the effort.’ I found myself answering his grin. It felt good to be back with people who knew me. A friend who cared enough to try to find out what had happened to me. After … however long it had been, trekking in Hell, it all felt suddenly a bit overwhelming.

‘Come.’ Yusuf saved me the embarrassment of blubbing on the stairs in front of them by leading the way down half a dozen steps to the door onto the Lambda level and taking us into a small room off the main corridor.

We sat down around a polished table, the room crowding around us, lined as it was with scrolls and fat tomes bound with leather. Yusuf poured three tiny cups of very strong java from a silver jug standing in the window slit.

‘I need to get home,’ I said, wincing as I knocked back the java. No point in beating around any bushes.

‘Where have you been?’ Omar, a smile still splitting his face. ‘You came south after escaping the fire? Why south? Why pretend to be dead?’

‘I went north as it happens, in a hurry, but the point is that I’ve been … incommunicado … for a few … um. When is it?’

‘Sorry?’ Omar frowned, puzzled.

‘It’s the 98th year of Interregnum, the tenth month,’ Yusuf said, watching me closely.

‘For … uh…’ I’ll admit to a little shame, struggling with subtraction in front of a master mathmagician of the Mathema. ‘About, well, damn it! Months, nearly half a year!’ It hadn’t been half a year, had it? On the one hand it had felt about two lifetimes, but on the other, if I considered the things that actually happened it seemed you could easily fit them into a week.

‘Kelem!’ I blurted the name out before deciding if that were a wise thing to do or not. ‘Tell me about Kelem, and the banking clans.’

‘Kelem’s hold on the clans is broken.’ Yusuf’s hands moved on the table top, fingers twitching as if he were struggling not to write down the terms and balance the equations with new information. ‘Calculations indicate that he has lost his material form.’

‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

‘You don’t know?’ Yusuf’s left eyebrow suggested it didn’t believe me.

I thought of Aslaug and Baraqel, remembering how Loki’s daughter raged against Kelem when I set her free, and the look of hurt in her black eyes as I let Kara drive her back into the darkness. ‘The Builders went into the spirit world…’

‘Some of them did,’ Yusuf said. ‘A small number. They used the changes they wrought in the world when they turned the Wheel. They escaped into other forms when their flesh betrayed them. Others were copied into the Builders’ machines and exist there now as echoes of men and women long since dead. The Builders who left their flesh were as gods for a while, but when men returned to the lands of the west their expectations became a subtle trap. The Builder spirits found themselves ensnared by myth, each tale growing around the spirits, reinforced by them, weaving them into a fabric of belief that both shaped and trapped them until they could scarcely remember a time when they were anything other than what men believed them to be.’

‘And Kelem?’ He was the one that worried me. ‘Can he come back? Will he remember … uh, what happened?’

‘It will take him time to gather himself. Kelem was rock-sworn. If he has not died properly then in time he will go into the earth. And yes, he will remember. It will be a long while before he’s snared into story. Perhaps never since he is aware of the danger.’

I stared at the stone walls around us. ‘I need to—’

Yusuf raised a hand. ‘The rock-sworn are slow to act. It will take time before Kelem shows his face to the world again, and time is what he doesn’t have, what none of us have. The world is cracking, Prince Jalan. The Wheel the Builders turned to change the world did not stop turning and as it runs free those changes will increase in size and speed until nothing that we know is left. We are a generation of blind men, walking toward a cliff. Kelem is not your worry.’

‘The Lady Blue … the Dead King.’ I didn’t want to say their names. I’d done a good job of keeping both out of my thoughts ever since escaping Hell. In fact if that damned djinn hadn’t sparked my memories then I might have managed never to think about the whole journey and poor Snorri ever again. ‘Those are the two I need to worry about?’

‘Even so.’ Yusuf nodded.

Omar just looked more confused and mouthed ‘who?’ at me from across the table.

‘Well.’ I leaned back in my chair. ‘That’s all beyond me. All I want to do is get home.’

‘It’s a war your grandmother cares about.’ Yusuf spoke the words softly but they carried an uncomfortable weight.

‘The Red Queen has her war and she can keep it,’ I said. ‘It’s not the kind of thing men like me can change one way or the other. I don’t want any part of it. I just want to go home and … relax.’

‘You say this, and yet you have been changing things at an astonishing rate, Prince Jalan. Defeating unborn in the northern wastes, dethroning Kelem in his mines, chasing the Dead King into Hell … and you hold the key, do you not?’

I gave Yusuf an angry stare. He knew entirely too much. ‘I have a key, yes. And you’re not having it. It’s mine.’ I’d be hanging on to Loki’s key with everything I had until I got home. Then I’d hand it over to the old woman in a heartbeat and wait to be showered with praise, gold, and titles.

Yusuf smiled at me and shrugged. ‘If you want no part of shaping the future, so be it. I will arrange passage back to Red March for you. It will take a few days. Relax here. Enjoy the city. I’m sure you know your way around.’

When someone lets you off too easily there’s always that suspicion that they know something you do not. It’s an irritating thing, like sunburn, but I know a sure-fire way to ease it.

‘Let’s get a drink!’

‘Let’s go win some gold.’ Omar jerked his head toward the grand library: a quarter of a mile past it the largest of Hamada’s racetracks would be packed to bursting with Libans screaming at camels.

‘A drink first,’ I said.

Omar was always willing to compromise, even though he kept to his faith’s prohibition on alcohol. ‘A little one.’ He patted his well-rounded form and beneath his robes coins clinked reassuringly against each other. ‘I’m buying.’

‘A little one,’ I lied. Never drink small if it’s at someone else’s expense. And besides, I had no intention of going to the races. In the past two days I’d seen more than enough of camels.

The city of Hamada is officially dry, which is ironic since it’s the only place to be found with any water in hundreds of square miles of arid dunes. One may not purchase or drink alcohol in any form anywhere within the kingdom of Liba. A crying shame given how damnable hot the place is. However, the Mathema attracts rich students from across the Broken Empire and from the deepest interior of the continent of Afrique and they bring with them a thirst for more than just water or knowledge. And so there exist in Hamada, for those who know where to look, watering holes of a different kind, to which the imams and city guard turn a blind eye.

‘Mathema.’ Omar hissed it through the grille of iron strips defending the tiny window. The heavy door containing the window was set into the whitewashed wall of a narrow alley on the east side of the city. The wooden door was a giveaway in itself, wood being expensive in the desert. Most houses in this quarter had a screen of beads to dissuade the flies and relied on the threat of being publicly impaled to dissuade any thief. Though what horror ‘publicly’ adds to ‘impaled’ I’ve never been clear on.

We followed the door-keeper, a skinny, ebony-hued man of uncertain years clad only in a loincloth, along a dark and sweltering corridor past the entrance to the cellar where a still bubbled dangerously to itself, cooking up grain alcohol of the roughest sort, and up three flights of stairs to the roof. Here a canopy of printed cloth, floating between a score of supports, covered the entire roof space, offering blessed shade.

‘Two whiskies,’ I told the man as Omar and I collapsed onto mounds of cushions.

‘Not for me.’ Omar wagged a finger. ‘Coconut water, with nutmeg.’

‘Two whiskies and what he said.’ I waved the man off and sank deeper into the cushions, not caring what it was that had stained them. ‘Christ, I need a drink.’

‘What happened at the opera?’ Omar asked.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t say a thing or move a muscle until five minutes had passed and a young boy in a white shirt had brought our drinks. I picked up my first ‘whisky’. Drained it. Made the gasping noise and reached for the next. ‘That. Is. Good.’ I took the second in two gulps. ‘Three more whiskies!’ I hollered toward the stairs – the boy wouldn’t have reached the bottom yet. Then I rolled back. Then I told my story.

‘And that’s that.’ The sun had set and the boy had returned to light half a dozen lamps before my race through the highlights of my journey had reached all the way from the ill-fated opera house to the Gate of Peace in Hamada. ‘And he lived happily ever after.’ I tried to get up and found myself on all fours, considerably more drunk than I had imagined myself to be.

‘Incredible!’ Omar leaning forward, both fists beneath his chin. He could have been talking about my method for finally finding my feet, but I think it was my tale that had impressed him. Even without mention of anything that happened to me in Hell and with talk of the unborn and the Dead King cut to a minimum it really was an incredible tale. I might think another man was humouring me, but Omar had always taken me at my word on everything – which was foolish and a terrible trait in a chronic gambler, but there it was.

For a long and pleasantly silent moment I sat back and savoured my drink. An unpleasant memory jerked me out of my reverie. I set my whisky down, hard.

‘What the hell happened in the desert then?’ As much as I like talking about myself I realized that in my eagerness to escape becoming part of Yusuf’s world-saving calculations I’d forgotten to ask why, apparently for only the second time in eight centuries, a Builders’ Sun had ignited, and why close enough to Hamada to shake the sand out of their beards?

‘My father has closed the Builders’ eyes in Hamada. I think perhaps they don’t like that.’ Omar put his palm across the mouth of his cup and rolled it about its rim.

‘What?’ I hadn’t felt drunk until I tried to make sense of what he said. ‘The Builders are dust.’

‘Master Yusuf just told you that they still echo in their machines. Copies of men, or at least they were copies long ago… They watch us. Father thinks they herd us, guide us like goats and sheep. So he has sought out their eyes and put them out.’

‘It took a thousand years for someone to do that?’ I reached for my cup, nearly knocking it over.

‘It took a long time for the Mathema to discover all the Builders’ eyes.’ Omar shrugged. ‘And longer still to decide the time was right to share that information with a caliph.’

‘Why now?’

‘Because our equations indicate the Builders may be done with herding and guiding…’

I didn’t want to know what came after that so I took a gulp of my whisky.

‘…it may be time for the slaughtering,’ Omar said.

‘Why for God’s sake?’ What I really meant was, why me? Do it in a hundred years and I wouldn’t give a damn.

‘The magic is breaking the world. The more it’s used the easier it is to use and the wider the cracks grow. Kill us and the problem might go away.’ He watched me, eyes dark and solemn.

‘But destroying Hamada is hardly going to … oh.’

Omar nodded. ‘Everyone. Everywhere. They can do it too.’

Footsteps on the stairs, a dark shape hurrying to Omar’s side, a hasty whispered exchange. I watched, trying to focus, tipping my cup and discovering it empty. ‘Who’s your friend?’

Omar got to his feet and I stood too, his steadiness making me realize quite how much I was swaying. ‘You’re not off?’ The racing finished hours ago.

‘Father has called us all to the palace. This explosion of yours has changed things – perhaps turned theory into fact. We all saw it, then felt it. I was knocked off my feet. Perhaps Father will share with us how and why we were spared. Hopefully he will have a plan to stop it happening again!’ Omar followed the caliph’s messenger toward the stairs, waving. ‘So good to see you alive, my friend.’

I half-sat half-collapsed back into the cushions. Even though he never used it against me I always held the fact that Omar’s father was the caliph of Liba, where mine was only a cardinal, to be a black mark against his name. Even a seventh son looks like a good deal to a man who is tenth in line. Still, when the caliph calls, you come. I couldn’t hold that against Omar, though he had left me to drown my sorrows by myself. Not to mention added to those troubles with his talk of long-dead Builders lurking in ancient machines and wishing us ill. Even drunk I wasn’t about to believe that nonsense, but there was definitely something bad happening.

I stared up at the stars through a gap in the awning. ‘What time is it anyway?’

‘Lacking an hour to midnight.’

I lifted my head and looked around. It had been a rhetorical question. I had thought myself alone up here.

‘Who said that?’ I couldn’t make out any human figures, just low hillocks of cushions. ‘Show yourself. Don’t make me drink alone!’

A black shape detached itself from the most distant corner, close to the roof’s edge and the fifty-foot drop into the street below. For a moment my heart lurched as I thought of Aslaug, but it had been a man’s voice. A lean but well-muscled figure resolved itself, tall but not quite my height, face shrouded in shadow and long dark hair. He walked with the exaggerated care of the quite drunk, clutching an earthenware flask in one hand, and flomped bonelessly into the cushions vacated by Omar.

Moonlight revealed him in a rippling slice, falling through the gap between one awning and the next. The silver light painted him, from a grisly burn that covered his left cheek, down a plain white shirt to the hilt of a sword. A dark eye regarded me, glittering amid the burn, the other lost behind a veil of hair. He raised his flask toward me, then swigged from it. ‘Now you’re not drinking alone.’

‘Well that’s good.’ I took a gulp from my own pewter cup. ‘Does a man no good to drink by himself. Especially not after what I’ve been through.’ I felt very maudlin, as a man in his cups is wont to do without lively music and good company.

‘I’m a very long way from home,’ I said, suddenly as miserable and homesick as I had ever been.

‘Me too.’

‘Red March is a thousand miles south of us.’

‘The Renar Highlands are further.’

For some reason known only to drunkards that angered me. ‘I’ve had a hard time.’

‘These are hard days.’

‘Not just today.’ I drank again. ‘I’m a prince you know.’ Quite how that would get me sympathy I wasn’t sure.

‘Liba is straining at the seams with princes. I was born a prince too.’

‘Not that I’ll ever be king…’ I kept to my own thread.

‘Ah,’ the stranger said. ‘My path to inheritance is also unclear.’

‘My father…’ Somehow my train of thought slipped away from me. ‘He never loved me. A cold man.’

‘My own has that reputation too. Our disagreements have been … sharp.’ The man drank from his flask. The light caught him again and I could see he was young. Even younger than me.

Perhaps it was relief at being safe and drunk and not being chased by monsters that did it, but somehow all the grief and injustice of my situation that there hadn’t been time for until now bubbled up out of me.

‘I was just a boy … I saw him do it … killed them both. My mother, and my…’ I choked and couldn’t speak.

‘A sibling?’ he asked.

I nodded and drank.

‘I saw my mother and brother killed,’ he said. ‘I was young too.’

I couldn’t tell if he were mocking me, topping each of my declarations with his own variant.

‘I still have the scars of that day!’ I raised my shirt to show the pale line where Edris Dean’s sword had pierced my chest.

‘Me too.’ He pushed back his sleeves and moved his arms so the moonlight caught on innumerable silvery seams criss-crossing his skin.

‘Jesus!’

‘He wasn’t there.’ The stranger pulled back into the shadow. ‘Just the hook-briar. And that was enough.’

I winced. Hook-briar is nasty stuff. My new friend seemed to have dived in headfirst. I raised my cup. ‘Drink to forget.’

‘I have better ways.’ He opened his left hand, revealing a small copper box, moonlight gleaming on a thorn pattern running around its lip. He might have better ways than alcohol but he drank from his flask, and deeply.

I watched the box, my eye fascinated by the familiarity of it – but, familiar or not, no part of me wanted to touch it. It held something bad.

Like my new friend I drank too, though I also had better ways of burying a memory. I let the raw whisky run down my throat, hardly tasting it now, hardly feeling the burn.

‘Drink to dull the pain, my brother!’ I’m an amiable drunk. Given enough time I always reach the point where every man is my brother. A few more cups and I declare my undying love for all and sundry. ‘I’m not sure there’s a bit of me that isn’t bruised.’ I lifted my shirt again, trying to see the bruising across my ribs. In the dark it looked less impressive than I remembered. ‘I could show you a camel footprint but…’ I waved the idea away.

‘I’ve a few bruises myself.’ He lifted his own shirt and the moonlight caught the hard muscles of his stomach. The thorn scars patterned him there too, but it was his chest that caught my eye. In exactly the spot where I have a thin line of scar recording the entry of Edris Dean’s sword my drinking companion sported his own record of a blade’s passage into his flesh, though the scar was black, and from it dark tendrils of scar spread root-like across his bare chest. These were old injuries though, long healed. He had fresher hurts – better light would show them angry and red, the bite of a blade in his side, above the kidney, other slices, puncture wounds, a tapestry of harm.

‘Shit. What the hell—’

‘Dogs.’

‘Pretty damn vicious dogs!’

‘Very.’

I swallowed the word ‘bastard’ and cast about instead for some claim or tale that the bastard wouldn’t instantly top.

‘That sibling I mentioned, killed when I saw my mother killed…’

He looked up at me, again just the one eye glittering above his burn scar, the other hidden. ‘Yes?’

‘Well she’s not properly dead. She’s in Hell plotting her return and planning revenge.’

‘On who?’

‘Me, you.’ I shrugged. ‘The living. Mostly me I think.’

‘Ah.’ He leaned back into the cushions. ‘Well there you’ve got me beat.’

‘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 völva 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 mid-protest.

‘You can’t get caught up in this. Everything here is a snare.’ He walks me away.

‘Me? Hasn’t this place had its hooks in you ever since you first held that key?’ They’re just words though, without heat. I’m not thinking about Snorri. I’m thinking about my sister, dead before she was ever born. I’m thinking about the boy and his brother and what I might do to save my own sibling. Less than that, I say to myself. Less than that.

I woke, still drunk, and with so many devils hammering on the inside of my head that it took me an age to understand I was in a prison cell. I lay there in the heat, eyes tight against the pain and the blinding light lancing in through a small high window, too miserable to call out or demand release. Omar found me there at last. I don’t know how much later. Long enough to pass the contents of a jug of water through me and leave the place stinking slightly worse than I found it.

‘Come on, old friend.’ He helped me up, wrinkling his nose, still grinning. The guards watched disapprovingly behind him. ‘Why do you northerners do this to yourselves? Even if God did not forbid it drinking is a poor bet.’

I staggered out along the corridor to the guards’ room, wincing, and watching the world through slitted eyes. ‘I’m never doing it again, so let’s not talk about it any more. OK?’

‘Do you even remember what happened to you last night?’ Omar caught me as I stumbled into the street and with a grunt of effort kept me on my feet.

‘Something about a camel?’ I recalled some sort of argument with a camel in the small hours of the morning. Had it looked at me wrong? Certainly I’d decided it was responsible for the footprint on my backside and all other indignities I’d ever suffered from the species. ‘Jorg!’ I remembered. ‘Jorg fucking Ancrath! He was up there, Omar! On that roof. You’ve got to warn the caliph!’

I knew there was bad blood between the Horse Coast kingdoms and Liba, raids across the sea and such, and that the Ancraths had alliances with the Morrow, which made Liba their foe. What I thought one man could do to the Caliph of Liba, especially if his head was like mine this morning, I wasn’t sure. This was, however, Jorg Ancrath who had destroyed Duke Gellethar along with his army, castle and the mountain they all sat upon. We had returned through Gelleth months after the explosion and the sky was still— ‘Christ! The explosion. In the desert! It was him, wasn’t it?’

‘It was.’ Omar signed for Allah’s protection. ‘He has met with my father and they are now friends.’

I stopped in the street and thought about that for a moment. ‘Starting his empire building young, isn’t he?’ I was impressed though. My grandmother had alliances in Liba – she’d reached out far and wide in the hope of good marriages – but her goal had been finding blood that mixed with her sons’ would produce a worthy heir, someone to fill in the gaps in the Silent Sister’s visions of the future … my sister. Jorg of Ancrath had other plans and I wondered how long it would be before they took him to Vyene to present his case to Congression and demand the Empire throne. ‘How far will it take him, I wonder…’

‘What do you make of him?’ Omar had come back for me, a caliph’s son waiting for me in the dusty street. He seemed strangely interested in my answer. It struck me then that I’d never seen him as clearly as I did there that morning, burdened by my self-inflicted pain. Soft, pudgy, Omar, the bad gambler, too rich, too amiable for his own good. But as he watched me with an intensity he saved for the roulette wheel I understood that the Mathema saw a different man – a man who would not only insert my answer into an equation of unearthly complexity, but one who might also solve it. ‘Can he match his ambition?’

‘What?’ I clutched my head. I didn’t have to fake it. ‘Jorg? Don’t know. Don’t care. I just want to go home.’




5 (#ulink_9cf9050b-9ac0-5674-9e39-cab30eec33a1)


Omar and Yusuf came to the outskirts of Hamada to see me off, Omar in the black robes of a student, Yusuf in the fractal patterned grey-on-white of a master, his smile black and gleaming. They’d calculated me safe passage to the coast with a salt caravan. Travel with Sheik Malik, they told me, would not end well, though whether my downfall would have been at the sheik’s instigation, or by djinn or dead man, or perhaps through indecency with his lovely daughters, they didn’t say.

‘A gift, my friend!’ Omar jerked his head back at the three camels his man was leading behind them.

‘Oh you bastard.’

‘You’ll warm to them, Jalan! Think of the heads you’ll turn in Vermillion riding in on camelback!’

I rolled my eyes and waved the man forward to add my trio to the laden herd browsing karran grass a short way behind me. Soon all four score of them would be trekking the dunes with just me and twelve salt merchants to keep order.

‘And give the Red Queen my father’s regards,’ Omar said. ‘And my mother’s.’

Omar’s mother I liked. The second eldest of the caliph’s six wives, a tall Nuban woman from the interior, dark as ebony and mouth-wateringly attractive. Funny too. I guessed Omar’s sense of humour came from his father. Giving a man three camels after he’s been locked up for assaulting one is mean-spirited, and not at all amusing.

I turned to Yusuf. ‘So, master Yusuf, perhaps you have a prediction for me, something I can use.’ Tradition has it that nobody of consequence leaves Hamada without some numerology to guide their way. Most come from failed students who ply their trade in whatever way they can, be it as accountants, bookmakers, or mystics selling predictions on the street. A prince, however, might hope for an audit of his possibilities and probabilities to be issued by the Mathema itself. And, since I knew Yusuf from my days in Umbertide, there seemed no harm in trying to coax one from a master.

Yusuf’s smile stiffened for a moment. ‘Of course, my prince. I’m afraid our halls of calculation are occupied with … notables. But I can do a quick evaluation.’

I stood there, trying not to let my offence show, while Yusuf scratched away with startling speed on a slate taken from inside his robe. ‘One, two, thirteen.’ He looked up.

I pursed my lips. ‘Which means?’

‘Ah.’ Yusuf glanced down at the slate again as if seeking inspiration. ‘First stop, second sister, thirteenth … something.’

‘Why can’t these ever be like, on the third day of spring give the fifth man you see four coppers to avoid disaster? See, that’s simple and useful. Yours could mean anything. First stop … on my way home? An oasis? A port? And second sister? My sister, the Silent Sister? Help me out here!’

‘The calculation is done on the basis that you are told what I told you – if I wanted to tell you more I would have to do the calculation again and it would be a different answer, a different purpose. If I told you more now then it would disrupt the outcome and the numbers would no longer be true. Besides, I don’t know the answers, that’s where the magic comes in and it’s hard to pin down. You understand?’

‘So, do it again. It only took you a moment.’

Yusuf showed me his black smile. ‘Ah, my friend, you have found me out. I have been processing your variables since we first met in that Florentine bank. I may have misled you when I implied that you were not important to the shape of things to come. I thought perhaps it would have been easier for you if you didn’t know.’

‘Well … uh, that’s better.’ I wasn’t sure it was. I’d been happier being outraged about not being important enough to factor than I was knowing that my actions mattered. ‘I, uh, should be going. Allah be upon you, and all that…’ I raised my hand in farewell but Omar was too fast for me and launched himself forward into a hug that, truth be told, was pretty much a cuddle.

‘Good luck, my friend.’

‘I don’t need luck, Omar! And I have the figures to prove it … one, two, three—’

‘Thirteen.’

‘One, two, thirteen. That should see me safe. You come visit us in Red March when you’re bored with balancing equations.’

‘I will,’ he said, but I know from experience it takes practice to lie when cuddling someone, and Omar had not practised.

I disentangled myself and set off toward the front of the caravan.

‘Don’t forget your camels, Jalan!’

‘Right.’ And with reluctance I angled my way toward the rear of the group being lined up, already tensing to dodge the first barrage of camel-spit.

The desert is hot and boring. I’m sorry, but that’s pretty much all there is to it. It’s also sandy, but rocks are essentially dull things and breaking them up into really small pieces doesn’t improve matters. Some people will tell you how the desert changes character day by day, how the wind sculpts it endlessly in vast and empty spaces not meant for man. They’ll wax lyrical about the grain and shade of the sand, the majesty of bare rock rising mountainous, carved by the sand-laden breeze into exotic shapes that speak of water and flow … but for me sandy, hot, and boring covers it all.

The most important factor, once water and salt are covered, is the boredom. Some men thrive on it, but me, I try to avoid being left alone with my own imagination. The key if one wishes to avoid dwelling on unpleasant memories or inconvenient truths is to keep yourself occupied. That fact alone explains much of my youth. In any event, in the desert silence, with nobody but camels and heathens to speak to, none of them with much mastery of Empire tongue, a man is left defenceless, prey to dark thoughts.

I held out until we hit the coast, but that last trek along the narrow strip of sand between the wideness of the sea and the vast march of dunes broke me. One chill night we camped beside the skeleton of some great ocean-going ship that had floundered close enough to port for the irony to be more bitter than the seawater. I walked among its bare and salt-rimed spars rising from the beach, and setting a hand to one ancient timber I could swear I heard the screams of drowning sailors.

That night sleep proved impossible to find. Instead, beneath the bright and cold scatter of the stars, my ghosts came visiting and dragged me back to Hell.

‘Isn’t there supposed to be a bridge?’ I ask, staring out across the fast-flowing waters of the River Slidr. It’s the first water I’ve seen in Hell. The river lies at least thirty yards wide, the opposite shore is a beach of black sand sloping up to a set of crumbling black cliffs. The cliffs vault toward the dead-lit sky in a series of steps, and above them clouds gather, dark as smoke.

‘It’s the River Gjöll that has a bridge, not the Slidr. Gjallarbrú they call the bridge. Be thankful we don’t need to cross it, Módgud stands guard.’

‘Módgud?’ I don’t really want to know.

‘A giantess. The far shore of that river is corpse upon corpse. They build the Nagelfar there, the nail ship that Loki will steer to Ragnarok. And behind that bridge stand the gates of Hel, guarded by the chained hound, Garm.’

‘But don’t we need to—’

‘We’re already past the gates, Jal. The key, the door, all that took us into Hel.’

‘Just the wrong bit of it?’

‘We need to cross the river.’

Thirst rather than a lack of caution draws me on, hurrying me down those last few yards of the shore.

I advance to the shallows. ‘Yeah. That’s not going to happen.’ The riverbed shelves away rapidly and although the swift-flowing water lies unnaturally clear it soon becomes lost in darkness. Crossing a river like this would be a serious problem under any circumstances but as I kneel to drink I spot the real show-stopper. In defiance of all reason there are daggers, spears, and even swords, being borne along in the current, all silvery clean, and sparkling with sharpness. Some are pointed resolutely in the direction the current takes them, others swirl as they go, scything the waters all around.

Snorri arrives at my shoulder. ‘It’s called the River of Swords. I wouldn’t drink it.’

I stand. Further out the blades look like fish shoaling. Long, sharp, steel fish.

‘So, what do we do?’ I stare upriver, then down. Nothing but miles of eroded banks stepping up to the badlands on either side.

‘Swim.’ Snorri walks past me.

‘Wait!’ I reach forward to get an arm in his way. ‘What?’

‘They’re just swords, Jal.’

‘Yessssss. That was my point too.’ I look up at him. ‘You’re going to dive in among a whole bunch of swords?’

‘Isn’t that what we do in battle?’ Snorri steps into the water. ‘Ah, cold!’

‘Fuck cold, it’s sharp I’m worried about.’ I make no move to follow him.

‘Crossing the Slidr isn’t about bridges or tricks. It’s a battle. Fight the river. Courage and heart will see you across – and if it doesn’t then Valhalla will have you for you will have fallen in combat.’

‘Courage?’ I know I’m sunk before I start then. Unless simply wading in constitutes courage … rather than just stupidity.

‘It’s that or stay here forever.’ Snorri takes another step and suddenly he’s swimming, the water churning white behind him, his great arms rising and falling.

‘Crap on it.’ I stick a foot in the water. The chill of it reaches through my boot as if it isn’t there and shoots up the bones of my leg. ‘Jesus.’ I take the foot out again, sharpish. ‘Snorri!’ But he’s gone, a third of the way across, battling the waters.

I take the opportunity to put the key back around my neck on its thong. I find it hot in my grasp, reflecting nothing, not even the sky. I wonder if I call on Loki will the true God see and drown me for my betrayal? I hedge my bets by calling on any deity that might be listening.

‘Help!’

The way I see it is that God must be pretty busy with people appealing to him all the time, so he probably appreciates it when prayers cut to the chase.

I pause to consider the injustice of a Hell that contains no lakes that drown heroes and let cowards float, but instead holds test upon test over which someone with nothing to recommend them save a strong arm may triumph. Then, without further consideration I run three steps and dive in.

Swimming has never been my forte. Swimming with a sword at my hip has always resulted in swifter progress, but sadly only toward the bottom of whatever body of water I’m drowning in. The Slidr however, proves unusually buoyant when it comes to sharp-edged steel and Edris Dean’s blade rather than dragging me down, holds me up.

I thrash madly, my lungs too paralysed by the cold even to begin pulling back the breath that escaped me when I hit the river. The iciness of the water is invasive, seeping through blood and bone, filling my head. I lose contact with my limbs but it’s not drowning that concerns me – it’s keeping warm. Deep in my head, in the dark spaces where we go to hide, I’m crouched, waiting to die, waiting for the ice to reach me, and all I have to burn are memories.

I reach for the hottest memory I have. It isn’t the blind heat of the Sahar, or the crackling embrace of Gowfaugh Forest engulfed in flame. The Aral Pass unfolds, dragging me back into that blood-soaked gorge packed with men at war, men screaming, men at cut and thrust, men fallen about their wounds, time running red from their veins, men dying, whispering beneath the cacophony, speaking to their loved and lost, calling for their mothers, last words twitching on blue lips, bargains with the Devil, promises to God. I see another man slide back from my sword, leaving it black with gore. By now it’s too dull to slice, but a yard of steel is still deadly whatever edge it carries.

The Aral Pass carries me a third of the way across the Slidr. I find my focus and realize the river’s sharp load has not yet cut me open but there’s still too far to go and the opposite shore is slipping by too fast. In the distance I hear a roar, a low, steady, wet-mouthed roar. A long silver spear passes beneath me, too close. I start to swim again, pounding artlessly at the water, and this time it is the bloodshed at the Black Fort that drives me on. I remember the sick sound as my sword point pierces an eye, crunching through the bony orbit and into the Viking’s brain. In an instant the fire is gone from him, a meat puppet with his strings all snipped. An axe cleaves the air in front of my face as I sway back. A high table catches me in the back and I topple onto it, twisting, throwing my legs into the spin. A broadsword hammers into the planks where my head was and I’m over the table, on both feet, swinging, shearing through the arm that held that sword.

The battle madness of the Black Fort releases me at last, panting amid tumbled corpses. I’m two-thirds of the way across the Slidr, still in the choppy, swift-moving clarity of the river. Downstream, in the distance, the valley is choked with mist. That roar has grown louder, filling the world, trembling in the depth of my bones.

I strike out for shore, desperate now. Something bad waits for me in that mist but I’m running out of fight and time. The coldness takes me and all I have to burn is my duel with Count Isen, the high, sharp crash of blade on blade as he tries to kill me and I weave my defence from desperation. It’s not enough. I’m still ten yards from shore and going under. There’s a sharp agony in my leg that reaches me even though the limb is frozen and numb. I’ve been hit. The waters close over me. I surface once more and see that before reaching the rising mist the whole Slidr vanishes as if itself cut by a massive sword. The thunder is louder than thought. I’m being dragged to the falls. I go under again and none of that matters: a shoal of knives is bearing down on me and I’ve no air to scream with.

Somehow, against all sense, my sword is in my hand. A fine way to drown. But then I remember it’s not my sword and the heat that was in my blood in the moment I took it fills me once more. Edris Dean wielded this sword against me, seeking my life as he had sought that of my mother, and of my sister, warm in the womb. I battled him before Tuttugu’s corpse. The corpse of my friend, a coward who died a hero’s death. I remember how it felt to drive my sword between Edris Dean’s ribs, to sink it into the meat of him, to feel it bedded in his flesh and to rip it out again, grating across bone. I open my mouth and roar, careless of the river, and there I stand, dripping in the shallows, sword in hand, and above me the mist from an endless waterfall rises in clouds that dare the sky. The Slidr plunges over a rocky lip just ten yards on. Swords leap from its clear waters as gravity takes the river and hauls it swiftly away.

I step forward on trembling legs, weak in every limb, three more steps, two more, and I’m on the wet sand. I’ve no injuries that I can see.

A figure is running toward me, Snorri, slowing as he draws near, panting. ‘I—’ He raises a hand, draws in a huge breath, ‘thought I’d lost you there.’

I look at the sword in my hand, the script etched into its blade, the water still dripping from it, diamonds turned rust red in the deadlight. ‘No. Not yet. Not today.’

We climb up the riverbank in silence, both of us wrapped in memories. As the Slidr dries from me I feel that somehow its waters have left me more … connected. I remember my battle at the Aral Pass. I remember the fight within the Black Fort. For the first time Jalan the berserker has met everyday Jalan and we’ve come to some sort of agreement. I’m not sure exactly what it is yet … but something has changed.

Hell on the far side of the Slidr proves steeper than before. Hills of black rock replace the dust, hills in which everything is sharp and that offer a traveller no chance for rest. Everywhere the stone looks as if it were soup on the boil, frozen in the instant, bubbles bursting from it, leaving a myriad edges, all razored. Just touching the ground leaves my fingers bloody. How long the leather soles of my boots will last, and what will become of my feet after that, I can’t say.

We see more souls here, grey clusters of them, flowing like dirty water along the dry valleys, men and women and children, heads down, unspeaking, drawn onward by some call I can’t hear.

We follow, twisting and turning through the black hills, the valleys becoming deeper, broader, more thick with souls. The Slidr is less than a memory now, Hell has parched me again. I feel my skin dying, desiccating, flaking away.

‘Wait.’ For no reason a gorge on to our left catches my eye, high above us, emptying out of the valley side.

‘This is the way.’ Snorri gestures after the departing souls ahead of us, more drifting by. His eyes are red with burst veins, like a man who has forgotten how to sleep. I feel worse than he looks.

‘Up there.’ I point at it. ‘There’s something up there.’

‘This is the way.’ Snorri repeats, starting off after the souls, head down once more.

‘No.’ And I’m climbing over boulders, a dozen paper-thin cuts on my palm where I reach out to steady myself. ‘It’s up here.’

‘I don’t sense it.’ Snorri turns toward me, exhausted, the souls dwarfed as they flow around him.

‘It’s here.’ I keep climbing, drawing my sword to balance myself, to give myself some support that doesn’t require touching the rocks.

It’s a scramble to reach the gorge and my hand stings as if vinegar has been poured into each cut. I advance along the narrow path that leads up between the gorge’s clifflike walls, Snorri a short way behind me, cursing.

It’s silent here out of the wind, at least it is once Snorri stops complaining. A pervasive quiet, ancient and deep. Our footfalls sound like sacrilege. If it were water that carved these valleys it has been gone since before man walked here. In a hell built from loneliness this seems the most desolate and most lost place that the damned might ever walk.

‘There’s nothing here, Jal, I tol—’

The narrow walls draw back just ahead of us. There’s a dell, perhaps a plunge pool where some long-dead river once fell. A single tree stands there, black, gnarled, the bare fingers of its branches stark against the dead-lit sky. Its trunk is mottled, a sickly white against the black, rising from the broad base toward the heights where the first branches divide.

Advancing, I see that the tree is both further away and more huge than I had imagined. ‘Help me up.’ There’s a step in the gorge, taller than I am. Snorri boosts me to the top. I cut my leg through my trousers. More acid slices from the bubble-fractured rock. I reach for Snorri and help him join me.

Drawing closer we see that the tree, though leafless, is laden with strange fruit. Closer still and the diseased trunk reveals its secret. Bodies are nailed to it. Hundreds of them.

If this tree were the size trees are supposed to be then we would be ants. It must be some offspring of Yggdrasil, the world-tree that stands in the heart of all things and from which worlds depend. The branches which bear fruit droop like those of the willow, dangling almost to the ground. Some reach so low I could stretch up and touch them, but I’ve no wish to. The fruit are dark and shrivelled, some a couple of feet across, some no bigger than a man’s head, all grotesque, unsettling in a way I can’t define.

The low groaning of the tree’s victims reaches us now. Men and women are pinned to its trunk, young and old, so crowded their limbs overlap, their splayed forms fitted together like interlaced fingers or the pieces of a puzzle.

We come amid the thick and sprawling tangle of the tree’s roots to its trunk, as wide as the Mathema Tower and taller still. One patch of whiteness draws my eye, paler than the others and low to the ground.

‘Hello Marco.’ I step closer, sheathing my sword, looking up at him. There he is, nailed among the hundreds, hands and feet pinned by black spikes of iron. Scores of heads turn my way, slowly, as if it takes great effort, but only Marco speaks.

‘Prince Jalan Kendeth.’ His gaze lifts. ‘And the barbarian.’

‘I’m glad you remember me.’

‘There are few curses worse than having your name spoken in Hell,’ he says.

That takes the wind from my sails. ‘W-well.’ I swallow and try to speak without stammering. ‘I’d rather have my name spoken in Hell than be nailed to a tree in Hell for all eternity.’

Marco hasn’t an answer to that.

‘I remember you,’ Snorri says. ‘The man with the papers. You had Tuttugu tortured. Why are you on this tree?’

‘Maybe this is where torturers go,’ I say.

‘It would take a forest to house them,’ Snorri says. ‘This tree would not suffice.’

‘So some more specific crime…’ I frown. This place scares me. All of Hell scares me, but this place is worse.

‘A worse crime.’ Snorri’s gaze wanders across the bodies, all naked, all pierced by nails, hanging on gravity’s rack.

‘Get me down and I’ll tell you,’ Marco says, always the banker. I can see the desperation in his eyes, though.

‘You put yourself there.’ Snorri turns to study the closest of the hanging fruit. He reaches up to touch it. ‘Ah!’ And snatches his hand back as if stung. A flush of colour spreads across the wizened husk, a fleshy pink. We watch, Snorri still rubbing his fingers. The fruit swells, like a chest inflated with a deep breath. The thing’s true shape resolves. We see limbs, coiled in tight, flesh tones mottling the previous lifeless black. The transformation lasts as long as the breath that Snorri drew in, and with his exhalation the ‘fruit’ shrivels back to its dark dry husk.

‘It … it was…’

‘It looked like a baby,’ I whisper. Only too small, head too big, limbs too tiny, fingers webbed.

‘An unborn.’ Snorri turns back to Marco. ‘That’s the fruit of this tree? Your crimes?’

I’m not listening: my eyes have found another of the tree’s fruit. Just one among hundreds, maybe thousands, but it draws me. I can’t look away. Every other thing blurs, and I’m walking toward it.

‘Jal?’ Snorri calls me from somewhere distant.

I reach up with both hands and clasp the desiccated husk. The pain isn’t in my fingers, it’s in my veins, in the marrow of each bone as something is drawn from me. Thick arms wrestle me away and I’m on the ground looking up at the unborn, pink and tiny … wet and dripping with life.

‘What are you doing?’ Snorri hauls me to my feet. ‘Have you gone mad?’

‘I…’ I look at the pink thing, this almost-child. I draw Edris Dean’s sword and the script along the blade has run crimson as if the symbols themselves are bleeding. ‘This is my sister.’

Though some magic has drawn me to her our connection ends there. I’ve never met her – she has never grown – and I have had two brothers teach me that there’s nothing holy in blood bonds. Given my elder brother, Martus, and a random stranger both dangling over a precipice and only time to save one of them, it would be my day to make a new friend. Especially if the stranger were young and female. All I have to link me to this … creature … is the memory of watching Mother die. Only sorrow binds us, and now she’s been corrupted. This nameless child has been wrought into some terror, a terror that needs to kill me to escape into the living world and keep its place there…

I hold my bleeding sword and watch the thing before me, pink, ugly, wet and raw. Snorri stands beside me and says nothing. A cry escapes me, a harsh noise, as short and sharp as the arc of my blade. Steel slices. The unborn drops, and where she hits the ground there is only dust and small dry bones.

‘Jal.’ Snorri reaches for my shoulder. I shake him off.

Above the dust something intangible is rising, ghost-pale, changing, growing, shifting swiftly through many forms. All of them her. My sister. A sleeping baby, a tiny child staggering as they do when taking first steps, a young girl, long-haired, pretty, a tall woman, slender and beautiful with Mother’s looks, dark locks coiled about her shoulders. The images change more swiftly – a mother holding tiny hands, a woman, stern-faced, a power behind her eyes, an old woman on a tall throne. Gone.

I’m left standing there, tingles up and down my arms, across my cheeks, breath sharp and shallow, a pain in my chest. Why does this hurt me? Might-have-beens are lost every second of every day. Might-have-beens, plans that come to naught, pipe-dreams, they pour into nothing, swifter than the Slidr plunging over its cliff. I stand looking down at the tiny bones as they blacken and go to dust. Not might-have-beens: should-have-beens.

Marco laughs at me. An ugly sound, tight and full of pain, but laughter none the less, and from a man I never once saw smile in the living world. ‘It’s not finished, prince. Not over.’ He groans, struggling to move but pinned by his extremities. ‘The tree bears what the lichkin leave behind.’

‘Lichkin?’ I’ve heard of them, monsters from the deadlands, things the Dead King brought into the world to serve his purpose.

‘What do you think rides the children taken from the womb? What moulds their potential and uses that power? It is fair exchange.’ He watches me dead-eyed. He could be talking of bargains made on the floors of Umbertide’s exchanges for all the emotion he shows. ‘Where is the crime? The child that would not have lived gets to live, and the lichkin that has never lived gets to quicken and walk in the world of men where it may feed its hunger.’

I look up into the distance above us, at the flesh-mottled trunk, tented by innumerable willow-like branches, each dangling its stolen life. Is Marco the worst man pinned there? It seems unlikely. I should hate him more fiercely. I should rush at him and hack him down. But this place burns emotion from you. In place of rage I feel hollow, sad. I turn and walk away.

‘Wait! Get me down!’

‘Get you down?’ I turn back, the flame of anger guttering somewhere deep within. ‘Why?’

‘I told you. I gave you information. You owe me.’ Marco heaves each word out over a chest being compressed by his own weight.

‘This tree will not stand long enough for me to owe you, banker. Not if it stands ten thousand years and you save my life every day.’

He coughs, black blood on his lips. ‘They’ll hunt you now – the lichkin and what parts of your sister it has taken. A brother’s death would open a door for them and let them emerge together, unborn, a new evil in the world. Your death would seal them into the lands above.’

The thought of being tracked through Hell by some monster bound about my sister’s soul scares me silly but I’m damned if I’ll let Marco see it. ‘If this … thing … seeks me out I shall just have to end it. With cold steel!’ I draw my sword for good measure – the thing has, after all, been enchanted to end dead creatures as effectively as live ones.

‘I can tell you how to save her.’ He holds my gaze, eyes dark and glittering.

‘My sister?’ Saving her hadn’t been on my list – that’s Snorri’s forte. I want to walk away but something won’t let me. ‘How?’

‘It can be done now that you’ve freed her futures from the tree.’ His pain is clear in his face for once, his desperation. ‘You’ll get me down? You promise.’

‘By my honour.’

‘When you meet them in the living world, your sister and whichever lichkin wears her skin, any sufficiently holy thing will part them.’

‘And my sister will … live?’

Marco makes that ugly sound again, his laughter. ‘She’ll die. But properly. Cleanly.’

‘Sufficiently holy?’ Snorri, rumbles the words beside me.

‘Something of importance. It’s the faith of all those believers that will make it work. A focus. Not some church cross. Not holy water from a cathedral font. Some true symbol, some—’

‘A cardinal’s seal?’ I ask.

Marco nods, face lined with the pain and the effort of it. ‘Yes. Probably.’

I turn to go again.

‘Wait!’ I hear Marco gasp as he tries to reach for me.

‘What?’ I glance back.

‘Release me! We made a bargain.’

‘Do you have the paperwork, Marco Onstantos Evenaline of the House Gold? The correct forms? Are they signed? Witnessed? Do they bear the proper marks?’

‘You promised! On your honour, Prince Jalan. Your honour.’

‘Oh.’ I turn away again. ‘That.’ And start to walk. ‘If you find it, let me know.’




6 (#ulink_a5009d0d-e879-5767-8a67-e3b97a35cefc)


In the Liban port of Al-Aran I took ship on a cog named Santa Maria, the same vessel that took most of the salt my companions had spent the best part of the previous month hauling north from Hamada. They also found room for my three camels in the hold, and I’ll admit to a certain satisfaction at the beasts’ distress, having spent so long enduring my own distress on a camel hump.

‘I warn you, captain, God crafted these creatures for three things only. Passing wind from the rear end, passing wind from the front end, and spitting. They spit stomach acid so tell your men, and don’t let anyone venture into the hold with a naked flame or you may find yourself the master of a marvellous collection of floating splinters. Also we’ll all drown.’

Captain Malturk snorted into the bushiness of his moustaches and waved me off, turning toward the masts and rigging to shout nautical nonsense at his men.

Travel by sea is a miserable business best not spoken about in polite company and nothing of any account happened for the first four days. Oh, there were waves, the wind blew, meals were eaten, but until the coast of Cag Liar appeared on the horizon it was generally distinguishable from all my other sea voyages only by the temperature, the language in which the sailors swore, and the taste of the food coming back up.

Also, never take a camel to sea. Just don’t. Especially not three of the bastards.

Port French on Cag Liar, the southern-most of the Corsair Isles, is the first stop of many ships leaving the coast of Afrique. There are two ways to sail the Middle Sea and survive the experience. Firstly armed to the teeth, secondly armed with a right-of-passage purchased from the pirate-lords. Such things can be obtained from factors in many ports, but it bodes well for a ship to put in at Port French or one of the other main centres on the Corsairs. The code flags are changed regularly and it doesn’t do to be sailing on out-of-date flags. Plus, for a merchant, once the painful business of ‘taxes’ is concluded, there are few places in the world that offer as wide a range of goods and services as the corsair ports. They trade in flesh there too, the bought-and-sold type as well as the hired type. Slaves run mainly west to east and a trickle north to south. The Broken Empire never had a big demand for slaves. We have peasants. Much the same thing, and they think they’re free so they never run off.

Coming into port it felt good to at last see the world I knew best, the headlands thick with pine and beech and oak in place of the scattered palm trees of northern Liba. And seasons too! The forest stood rust-speckled with the first crisp touch of autumn, though on a blazing day like this it felt hard to imagine the summer in terminal decline. In place of Liba’s flat roofs the houses on the slopes above the harbour boasted terracotta tiles, sloped in a tacit admission that rain actually happens.

‘Two days! Two days!’ Malturk’s first mate, a barrel of a man named Bartoli, who seemed incapable of wearing a shirt. ‘Two days!’ A booming baritone.

‘How many?’

‘Two d—’

‘I got it, thank you.’ I wiggled a finger into my half-deafened ear and proceeded down the gangplank.

The quays of Port French are like none I’ve seen. It’s as though the contents of every brothel, opium den, gambling hall, and blood-pit have been vomited up onto the sun-soaked harbour, pushing out among the quays so that the dockhands have to weave their path among this bright and varied crowd just to tie off a hawser.

I immediately found myself swamped by maidens in all shades from jet through dusky to sun-burned, along with men trying to steer me to establishments where any vice might be indulged so long as it parts you from your coin. The most direct of all, and perhaps the most honest, were the small boys dodging in and out among the adults’ legs and attempting to lift my purse before I’d gone ten paces.

‘Two days!’ Bartoli, on the rail, watching his crew and passengers disperse. The Santa Maria would sail with or without us once its business had concluded and the code flags were hung.

After Hell, the desert, and then the sea, Port French seemed as close to heaven as makes no difference. I wandered through the crowd in a state of bliss, paying no specific attention to any of the people trying to lure me this way or that, no matter how persistent. At one point I paused to boot a particularly annoying little cutpurse into the sea, and then at last I was off the quay and climbing into the maze of streets leading up to the ridge where all the finest buildings seemed to cluster.

Nothing paralyses a man so well as choice. Offered such a banquet after so long in the wilderness the decision stumped me. I settled at a table outside a tavern on a steep and cobbled street halfway to the ridge. I ordered wine and it came in an amphora cradled in a raffia jacket to keep it whole. I sat watching the world go by, sipping from my clay cup.

They call them the Corsair Isles and it’s true that pirating defines them, but there are millions of hot dry acres in the interior where the sea can’t even be spotted from a hill, and in those valleys they grow damned fine grapes. However cheap its container, the wine was good.

My travel-stained robes and Sahar tan made me more of an Arab than a man of Red March, only the sun-bleached gold in my hair told the lie. Certainly nobody would mistake me for a prince, which has its advantages in a town packed with robbers, thieves, pirates and pimps. Anonymous in my desert attire I took a moment to relax. Hell, I took several moments, then two hours, then three more, and enjoyed the passing hustle and bustle of close-packed living while the sun slipped across the sky.

I considered my return to Vermillion, my fortunes, my future, but most of all I considered Yusuf Malendra and his calculations. Not just Yusuf though, not just the Mathema where a hundred mathmagicians scratched away at their algebras, but all of those who saw or told or lied about the future. The völvas of the north, the magicians of Afrique, the Silent Sister with her blind eye, the Lady Blue amid her mirrors looking for reflections of tomorrow. Spiders, all of them, laying their webs. And what did that make men like me and Jorg Ancrath? Flies, bound tight and ready to have our vital juices sucked away to feed their appetite for knowing?

Jorg had it worse than me of course. That boy prince with his thorn scars. He’d escaped that tangle of briars but did he know that he hung in a larger one now, its hooks long enough to eviscerate a man? Did he know my grandmother whispered his name to the Silent Sister? That so many conspired to either make or break him? Emperor or fool – which he would be remembered as I couldn’t say, but he was one of those in the making, no doubt about it. Perhaps both. I remembered his eyes, that first night I saw him in Crath City. As if even then he looked past the world and saw all this coming his way. And didn’t give a damn.

I knocked back my cup and tried to pour another. The amphora dribbled and ran dry. ‘I’m well out of that business.’ I had covered the Ancrath boy with a blanket and left him on that roof in Hamada. I should have done him the kindness of pushing him off. Still, I had escaped, and that, as always, was the important thing. A prophecy has to get up very early in the morning indeed if it wants to snare old Jalan!

‘Rollas?’ Looking up from my close inspection of the amphora’s interior, in search of hidden wine, I saw a man turn from the main street into a side alley. Something about the square cut of his shoulders below the blunt and bristly back of his head, put me in mind of my friend Barras Jon’s man, Rollas. I stood, swaying somewhat, steadying myself with a hand to the shoulder of a man seated by the next table. ‘Your pardon.’ The words slurred over numb lips. ‘Just getting my land legs.’ And I stumbled out across the street. It hadn’t just reminded me of Barras’s man. It had been him. I’d followed the back of that head home to the palace after enough drunken Vermillion nights to know it anywhere. It was habit more than anything that made me set off after it this time.

I walked carefully, not wanting to step in anything unpleasant, and had to negotiate passage around an ill-smelling beggar even more drunk than myself. I emerged from the alley into another street leading from the docks to the heights, sure that I must have lost my quarry, but found myself just in time to see him enter a whorehouse. You can always tell the places: better presented than the drinking holes, more conspicuous than gambling dens, and if business is slow then girls will be leaning out of the upstairs windows. Besides, this one had ‘Hore House’ painted in big red letters on a sign running the length of the eaves.

I crossed over and let the street-hook snare me.

‘A fine-looking man like you shouldn’t be alone on a nice afternoon like this now.’ The hook, a striking, dark-haired woman in her forties took my arm, steering me toward the brothel door.

‘And you’d like to keep me company would you?’ I leered politely.

She smiled, professional enough not to wince at my wine-sour breath. ‘Well, I’m a little old for a young man like you, but there are some beautiful girls inside just dying to meet you. Samantha has the b—’

‘Do you know the man who went in just before me?’ I held back against the tug of her arm, just shy of the doorway and the door-guard hulking in the shadows of its porch.

She released me and looked up, smile erased. ‘We’re a very discreet establishment. We don’t tell tales.’

I held up a Liban bar between finger and thumb and let the rectangular coin catch the afternoon light. I’d borrowed ten bars from Omar the night before I left, each made of a touch more gold than an Empire ducat.

‘I haven’t seen him before. I would remember. Handsome fellow.’

‘What did he want?’

She rolled her eyes at that. ‘A whore.’

‘He came straight here. He wasn’t wandering. He didn’t hesitate … did he come to see a particular girl?’

‘That’s a pretty coin. Does it weigh much?’ She held her hand out, palm up.

‘Yes.’ I pressed it into her hand. It seemed a lot to spend on what was probably mistaken identity – and I didn’t quite know why I hadn’t just shouted out to Rollas. I considered walking away but Barras was my friend, albeit a treacherous, backstabbing one who had married the girl I’d been mooning over in the frozen north … at least when there weren’t any other girls to keep me warm. And if it was Rollas I’d seen then something was very wrong. I couldn’t think of any good reason that the man the Great Jon hired to protect his son would be hurrying into a Port French brothel. ‘I’m spending any change inside, so the better the story the less work this Samantha of yours has to do.’

The woman bit her lip, considering the odds. She’d make a terrible poker player. She glanced at the doorman, at me, eyes finally coming to rest on the Liban bar in her hand. ‘Said he wanted to look the girls over. Wanted to know if we only used free workers, or if we bought chained skin. Asking after any new girls. White girls. My height, dark hair. Told him no, but he wanted to look anyway.’

‘Did he mention a name?’

‘It doesn’t do to ask questions like his on the Isles. It’s an easy way to get a cut throat.’

I took her meaning. Even drunk I knew it wasn’t idle talk. Even so. ‘Did he mention a name?’

‘Lisa?’

‘DeVeer?’

‘New girls only get one name. Do a good job and you might get another in a couple of years. DeVeer, though? That’s not going to bring them in. DeLicious, maybe. Mine was FourWays. Serra FourWays.’

Lisa? A corsair captive? I needed to think it through. I stepped away, almost crashing into a man laden beneath sacks. ‘Your pardon.’ Somehow I’d been reduced to apologizing to common labourers. ‘I…’ I turned and started down the street.

‘You don’t want to use your credit?’ Serra called after me.

‘Maybe later…’ I’d stopped turning but my head kept spinning, and it wasn’t all too much afternoon wine. Lisa DeVeer a slave in Port French? How?

‘You’re still wondering what the fourth way is, aren’t you?’ She called the words at my back.

I didn’t answer, but truth be told, even with thoughts of Lisa swirling in my head … I was.

The sun was setting as I walked back up the gangplank onto the Santa Maria. The quays were quieter, though far from quiet. There’s a hush that settles as the sea turns crimson and the shadows reach. The shadow-masts stretch out from ships at rest, venturing farther and farther, across the docks, up the warehouse walls, meshing, merging until only the highest ridge is lit, the sun’s last rays burning on the mansions where pirate lords and pirate ladies play at nobility.

‘You back to water those fucking beasts of yours?’ Bartoli loomed behind me as I stood at the rail looking out across the sea. Time was when a man took a risk interrupting me at sunset, but Aslaug no longer even whispered.

‘They’re camels, for Christsake. Camels don’t drink. Everyone knows that.’ I held a hand in front of his face to forestall any reply. ‘Corsairs trade in flesh – but they don’t raid for it … do they?’ Asking questions in Port French might well get Rollas his throat cut. Me, I’d ask my questions on the Santa Maria. Much safer.

‘You looking to buy? You can’t even look after camels!’

‘Where do they get their slaves from?’ I stuck to my question.

‘Slavers bring them in, obviously.’ Bartoli rubbed at the blackness of his beard and spat noisily over the rail. ‘Corsairs will sell on prisoners off a ship, but they don’t snatch from ports or raid inland. Even pirates need friends. Don’t shit where you eat. That’s a lesson for everyone … except your fucking camels, apparently.’

‘So … where would someone buy a slave?’

‘At a slave market.’ Bartoli gave me the same look he’d been giving me for days, the ‘you’re an idiot’ look.

‘And where—’

‘Take your pick. Must be a dozen of ’em. First one is just over there, general market, behind the Crooked Jacks warehouse, big one with the shingle roof, tobacco and such. Second one is a kids market, just past the King’s Heart tavern at the bottom of Main.’

‘A dozen?’ It seemed like a lot to check out just on a hunch and the back of a man’s head.

Bartoli furrowed his brow and stared at his fingers. ‘Thirteen.’

I felt the ripple run through me as the planets aligned. ‘Thirteen?’

‘Thirteen.’

First stop, second sister, thirteen … ‘Where’s the thirteenth?’

‘Way up, past the lords’ houses, back in the hills.’ He waved a thick arm at the town. ‘They actually call it Thirteen. S’how I figured there’s thirteen. Not so much selling goes on there. More of a … how’d you call it? School? Training up quality females. Not for the likes of us though. Sell ’em on to rich men in Maroc and the interior.’

And so it was that on the following morning a hunch, the back of a man’s head, the memory of Lisa DeVeer’s many charms, and two devious mathmagicians, had me toiling up through the streets of Port French nursing a hangover. I found myself drenched in sweat despite the cloud wrack burgeoning over the hills of Cag Liar. Storm coming. I didn’t need to be a sailor or a farmer to know that.

Yusuf had set me up for this. I knew it. From plotting out my route home to handing over those three little numbers that he must have known I would ask for. I resolved to settle my scores with Omar and his master in due course. For now I kept on walking, manfully resisting the various taverns opening onto the street, the rattle of gaming wheels from low garrets, and the calls of commercially-minded young women from arched windows.

I’d slept on the Santa Maria the previous night. My afternoon’s drinking had caught up with me and I’d settled on a big coil of rope by the forecastle steps just to rest my eyes. The next thing I knew seagulls were crapping on me and an unreasonably bright morning was in progress, with sailors shouting too loudly and the keenest salesmen already setting out their quayside stalls.

After forcing down a hearty breakfast I decided to do the honourable thing and see if I could find Lisa. I considered searching Rollas out – if it was Rollas – but at least I knew Lisa wouldn’t be wandering about. And besides, the chances were that Rollas had already asked enough questions to get himself knifed and dumped in the docks. Or knowing Rollas, to have knifed his attackers first and then had to flee.

Port French peters out into a scattering of merchants’ estates and vineyards as you climb up into the hills that step their way into the countryside. It’s pretty in its way, but I’d rather see it from the saddle. Or not at all. Especially not on foot, battered by a squally wind that couldn’t decide on a direction in which to blow. I narrowed my eyes against the grit and dust and followed the conflicting directions of several locals, plotting the average path. Soon I found myself lost, pursuing dry tracks that snaked their way between drier ridges. I passed one slack-jawed yokel who gave me another bunch of lies concerning the route to Thirteen, his dialect so thick as to be barely distinguishable from the grunting of his hogs. After that I met only goats, and once, a surprised donkey.

‘Bollocks.’

I couldn’t see the sea any more, nor the town, just rolling brown hills, studded with thorn bushes and rocks. Apart from the goats, the odd lizard sunning itself, and a buzzard circling overhead, possibly waiting for me to die, I appeared to be utterly alone.

Then it began to rain.

An hour later, sodden, muddy from several falls, and having already abandoned my quest – my goal now being to find Port French again – I scrambled over a ridge and there, on the crest of the next rise, lay Thirteen.

The place had the look of an old fortress to it, a high-walled compound with observation towers at each corner, facing out over a slate-grey sea. From my elevation I could make out a range of buildings within the compound: barracks, stables, officers’ quarters – the only part of the edifice that looked vaguely hospitable – a well and three separate exercise yards. Formidable gates of iron-banded timber stood closed to the outside world. Guards manned the towers, alongside bell-bars waiting to be given their voice in case of alarm. Other guards ambled around the walls, some resting on the parapet to enjoy a pipe or watch the clouds. It seemed unreasonably well defended until you realized that the concern was not the slaves escaping but that they might be stolen. They were, after all, a valuable commodity and this was an island ruled by criminals.

I could see small groups of women in sackcloth being marched from one building to another. At this range I couldn’t make out the doors on the slave blocks, but no doubt they would be sturdy and well locked.

‘Hmmm.’ I wiped the wet hair from my eyes and contemplated the place. The rain had slackened off and lighter skies promised in the east.

I’ve never claimed to be a hero, but I knew that a woman I had briefly intended to marry could well be incarcerated, destined for a life of slavery, most likely as a concubine in some harem far to the south. I drew Loki’s key out from beneath my muddy robes. It glistened in the grey light. I could almost feel the thing laughing at me as I held it in my hand.

My gaze shifted from the consuming blackness of the key to the dark mass of the fortress they called Thirteen, glowering at me from the next ridge. Once before I’d stormed a stronghold to rescue a friend. The key twisted in my grip as if already imagining the locks that would surrender to it.

I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to get back on the Santa Maria and ride her all the way home. But I was a prince of Red March, and this was Lisa, Lisa DeVeer, my Lisa, damn it. I knew what I had to do.

‘You bastard!’

‘What?’ I stepped back sharply out of the reach of her fists.

‘Camels?’ Lisa shouted, and shuffled toward me, hampered by the rope still hobbling her legs. ‘You traded me for three camels? Three?’

‘Well…’ I hadn’t imagined this reaction when I took her slave-hood off. We were only a hundred yards from Thirteen’s doors. The men on the towers were watching and probably having a good laugh at my expense. ‘They were good camels, Lisa!’

‘Three!’ She swung at me again and I jumped back. Overbalanced, she toppled, cursing, into the mud.

No probably about it. I could hear the tower guards laughing.

‘Lisa! Angel! I rescued you!’ I thought it politic not to mention that it was actually just two camels. I traded the other one for five pieces of crown silver and a rather stylish leather jerkin with iron plates stitched to the chest and sides, nicely engraved. The factor had admitted after the deal that Lisa had been proving a pain to train in the duties of a harem girl and would likely have had to be whipped beyond the point of physical acceptability in the role. ‘I saved you!’

‘My husband should have done that!’ Her shriek managed to make my ears ring.

‘I’m sure Barras is…’ I bit the sentence off and decided not to make excuses for the treacherous bastard. ‘Well, he didn’t, did he? So you’re lucky I found you.’ I drew my knife. ‘Now, if you’ll stop trying to hit me I’ll cut your legs free.’

Lisa dropped her arms and let me kneel to slice the rope.

The moment the last fibres parted, she was off. Charging straight back at the doors, screaming bloody threats and dire promises, both hands raised in obscene gestures. Fortunately the circulation hadn’t fully returned to her legs and I caught her before she got a third of the way back, wrapping my arms about her from behind and spinning her around bodily.

‘Christsakes, woman! They’ll take you right back off me and tear up the bill of sale. These are not nice men. Your mouth’s going to get your nose cut off and find you doing tricks in a dark-house just to eat!’ I was as worried for me as for her. We were a long way from town, and these were the Corsair Isles: they could do pretty much anything and get away with it.

I started to drag her away. It was actually slightly easier than dragging my three camels all the way up from the quayside. I got her back to where we started before she got her arm free and slapped me.

‘Ow! Jesus!’ I clutched my face. ‘What was that for?’

‘They said you died!’ Angry, as if it were my fault.

‘They said you got married!’ My turn to feel angry, and for more than being slapped, though I wasn’t sure why. The ingratitude of it probably. I’d liked those camels. I grabbed her arm and pulled her on. ‘We’ve got to get out of here. If they see I know you they’ll either want more money or just kill me so this never comes back to them.’ I set off, Lisa stumbling and jerking behind me. ‘How long before one of the men on the wall reports all this to someone important down below? I should have kept the hood on you till we were out of sight of the—’

I broke off as Lisa started sobbing, heaving in great lungfuls of air and shuddering them out as she walked. In other circumstances I might have said or at least thought something patronizing about the ‘weaker sex’, but frankly I knew exactly the feeling – there had been too many escapes of mine where I would have been sobbing with relief too if I hadn’t had a front to maintain before the company I was in.

I kept glancing back at Lisa as I led her down through those hills. Her sackcloth dress had got almost as muddy as my robes when I wrestled her to the ground, her hair stuck out at odd angles or hung in dirty straggles – slave-hood hair you could call it – and her eyes were red from too many tears.

Back at Thirteen I’d said I was after the least expensive beauty they had, and Lisa was in the line of eight they’d brought out from the discipline hut. None of them had been made presentable and some you had to look at pretty hard to see much beauty beneath the grime and bruises. Lisa though, took my breath. Something in her eyes, or the shape of her mouth, or … I can’t tell you. Maybe just because that mouth, those eyes, the curve of her neck, meant something to me, each part of her so overlaid with memories that it became hard to see what stood in front of me without our history crowding in. I didn’t like the sensation at all – most uncomfortable – I put it down to the shock of my Hell-trek and having been so long in heathen climes. It gave me additional reasons to be grateful for the desert veil I’d put in place. I’d worn it of course to stop her recognizing me and giving away the fact I was there for her. At best that would have simply increased her price ten-fold. At worst it would have got me killed.




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