Mark Lawrence - Prince of Fools

“Jalan!” Snorri’s voice.

I stuck my head out through the flaps into the starlight, far from pleased. Snorri stood with one thick arm gripping the wagon bed, arresting its motion. “Come.”

I hadn’t the breath to tell him that was what I was trying to do. Instead I slipped out, lacing up what needed to be laced. “Yes?” Not keeping the temper from my voice.

“Come.” He led off between the nearest wagons. I could hear weeping now. Wailing.

Snorri followed the field’s gradient, letting it lead us a little way out from the wagons and carts encircling Taproot’s tent. Here several dozen of the circus folk huddled before a bright fire.

“A child died.” Snorri set a hand to my shoulder as if offering comfort. “Unborn.”

“The pregnant woman?” A foolish thing to say-it had to be a pregnant woman. Daisy. I remembered her name.

“The babe’s buried.” He nodded to a low mound in the dirt out past the fire, snug between two old grave markers. “We should show our respects.”

I sighed. No more fun for Jal tonight. I felt sorry for the woman, of course, but the troubles of people I don’t know never reached that far into me. My father, in one of his rare moments of coherence, declared it to be a symptom of youth. My youth, at least. He called on God to visit compassion upon me as a burden to be carried in later life. I was just impressed that he’d noticed me or my ways this once, and of course it’s always nice for a cardinal to remember to call on God every now and then.

We sat a little apart from the main group, though close enough to feel the fire’s heat.

“How’s the hand?” I asked.

“Hurts more, feels better.” He held out the appendage in question and flexed it slightly, wincing. “She removed a lot of the poison.”

Thankfully Snorri omitted greater detail. Some folk will seek to entertain you with the gory details of their ailments. My brother Martus would have painted each glistening drop of pus for me in one of his woe-is-me monologues for which the only remedy is a swift exit.

The night held enough warmth, combined with the fire and my recent exercise, to leave me pleasantly sleepy. I lay back on the ground, without complaint for the hardness of it or the dust in my hair. For a moment or three I watched the stars and listened to the soft weeping. I yawned once and sleep took me.

Strange dreams hunted me that night. I wandered an empty circus haunted by the memory of the eyes behind that porcelain mask but finding only the dancers, each sobbing in her bed, and breaking into bright fragments as I reached to touch them. Cherri was there, Lula too, and they broke together, speaking a single word. Quarry. The night fractured, cracks running through tents, wheels, barrels; an elephant bellowed unseen in the darkness. My head filled with light until at last I opened my eyes to keep from being blinded.

Nothing! Just Snorri’s bulk, seated beside me, knees drawn up. The fire had fallen to red embers. The circus folk had gone to their beds, taking their sorrow with them. No sound but for the whirr and chirp of insects. My heart’s pounding slowed. My head continued to ache as if it were cracked through, but the blame for that lay with a quart of wine gulped down in the heat of the day.

“It’s a thing to make the world weep, the loss of a baby.” Snorri’s rumble was almost too deep to make sense of. “In Asgard Odin sees it and his unblinking eye blinks.”

I thought it best not to mention that technically a one-eyed god can only wink. “All deaths are sad.” It seemed like a good thing to say.

“Most of what a man is has been written by the time his beard starts to prickle. A babe is made of maybes. There are few crimes worse than the ending of something before its time.”

Once more I bit my tongue and made no complaint that this was exactly what he had accomplished at the dancers’ wagon earlier. It wasn’t tact that held me silent so much as the desire not to get my nose broken yet again. “I suppose some sorrows can only truly touch a parent.” I’d heard that somewhere. I think perhaps Cousin Serah had said it at her little brother’s funeral. I recall all the grey heads nodding and exchanging words about her. She probably fished it from a book. Even at fourteen she was scheming for Grandmother’s approval. And her throne.

“When you become a father, it changes you.” Snorri spoke towards the fire’s glow. “You see the world in new ways. Those who are not changed were not properly men to begin with.”

I wondered if he was drunk. That’s when I tend to speak profundities to the night. Then I remembered that Snorri was a father. I couldn’t picture it. Wee ones bouncing on his knee. Tiny hands tugging at his battle braids. Even so, I understood his mood better now I could guess what he might see amongst the embers. Not this unborn child, but his own children, fleeing horrors in the snows. The thing that drew him north against all sense.

“Why are you still here?” I asked him.

“Why are you?”

“I passed out.” Mild exasperation coloured my voice. “I’m not sitting vigil! In fact, now that I’m awake I’ll find a better place to sleep.” Perhaps one with more interesting contours and a snub nose. I stood, aching along my side, and stamped to get some life back into my legs.

“Can’t you feel it?” he said as I turned to go.

“No.” But I could. Something wrong. A sense of brokenness. “No, I can’t.” Even so, I didn’t step away.

With one breath the insects ceased their chorus. A deep noise reached me, rumbling up through the soles of my feet, still bare. “Ah hell.” My hands trembled, with the customary terror of the unknown, but also with something new, as if they were full of fractured light.

“Hel’s about right.” Snorri stood too. He had his stolen sword in hand. Had he held it all the time or gone to fetch it while I slept? He pointed the blade towards the baby’s grave. The noise had come from there. A burrowing, a scratching, the sound of roots pushing blind paths through soil. The headstone to the left tilted as the ground sank beneath it. The one to the right toppled forwards, coming to rest with a dull thud. All around the child’s mound the soil cracked and heaved.

“We should run,” I said, having not the least idea why I was not already doing so. The word quarry repeated over and again behind my eyes. “What’s happening down there?” Perhaps a sick fascination kept me there, or the immobility of the rabbit beneath hawk’s claws.

“Something is being built,” Snorri said. “When the unborn return, they take what they need.”

“Return?” I sometimes ask even when I really don’t want to hear the answer. Bad habit.

“It’s hard for the unborn to return. They are not like fallen that rise from the deaths of men.” Snorri began to swing his sword left-handed, blurring it around him in fire-glow glimmers, making the air sigh. “They are uncommon things. The world must be cracked open to admit them, and their strength is surpassing. The Dead King must want us very badly indeed.”

I found my feet at that and ran. As the ground heaved and some dark thing rose, shedding dry clods of earth and shrugging off gravestones, I raced five full steps before tripping on an abandoned wine jug-possibly one I’d brought with me-and sprawling face first.

I rolled and saw, edged by the radiance of stars and the faint light of embers, a horror still knee-deep in the earth and yet towering above the Norseman, a thin thing of old bones, tattered cloth, encompassing arms with talons built from too many finger bones to count. And about these dry and creaking remains, something wet and glistening, some vital freshness running along a golem built of long-dead grave litter, knitting this to that, bleeding quickness into the construct.