Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

“I’m paying the price for your failings!” The Red Queen thrust me before her and I staggered back as she advanced. “Your duty is to the throne! Your debts are not my concern.” A roar now, her anger loose.

My own anger leapt from my throat before I could cage it. “I was paying your debts, Grandmother!” I halted my retreat. “I gave the key to Garyus. You took his throne. And you .” I pointed without looking to the place where the Silent Sister stood. I could sense her now, like a needle in my flesh. “And you took his strength. I have given him something neither of you can take. You can ask and he may allow because he loves this land and its peoples, but you can’t take. When you put a cripple in a high tower the message is clear enough. A hundred and seven steps are hardly an invitation to the man to join the world! I have put him at the centre of it.” I exhaled and my shoulders went down, the anger gone from me, quicker than it came.

The Red Queen towered before me, sucking in her breath to roar again. But the roar never came. Something in her expression softened, just the smallest bit. “Go,” she said. “We will speak of this another time.” She dismissed me with a wave of her hand, and I turned for the door, willing myself not to run.

I saw the Silent Sister, standing where I had pointed. Rags and skin and glinting eyes. What she thought of the matter I couldn’t tell. She remained as unreadable as algebra.

I returned to Roma Hall to find my brother Martus in a foul mood, waiting to pounce. “There you are. Where the hell did you vanish off to?” He strode out of an antechamber off the entrance hall.

“I had business with-”

“Well it doesn’t matter. Glad to see you’ve cleaned up. You’re lucky you weren’t shot as a ghoul.”

“A ghoul?”

“Yes, a damn ghoul. You don’t know what’s going on? Where the hell have you been? Under a rock?”

“Well yes, for some of the time. But more recently, Marsail, the Corsair Isles, the Liban desert, and Hell. So what is going on?”

“Trouble! That’s what. Grandmother’s marching the Army of the South off to Slov on some ill-conceived campaign. She doesn’t even care about Slov-it’s some damn witch she’s after. Claims the Slov dukes are harbouring the woman. A whole army! For one woman . . . And the worst of it is my command’s being left here.”

“Yes, that is the worst of it.” I made to walk by. I had an empty stomach and a sudden desire to fill it with something delicious.

“That damn Gregori DeVeer.” Martus stuck a hand out and caught my shoulder, arresting my escape. “His army of foot-sloggers are forming up as the vanguard. He’ll come back a blasted hero. I know it. He’ll be acting this campaign out around the dining table at the officers’ mess for years, lining the grapes up: ‘The Slov line held the ridge’, pushing the cherries in: ‘Our Red March infantry column attacked from the west . . .’. God damn it. And that old woman’s leaving me here to babysit the city.”

“Well. It would be nice if you could keep it in one piece.” I scratched my belly. “But does it really take . . . how many are you?”

“Two thousand men.”

“Two thousand men!” I shrugged his hand off my shoulder. “What are you supposed to be protecting us from? This is Vermillion! Nobody is going to attack us.”

“I just told you what, idiot!”

“You didn’t say-Wait, ghouls?”

“Ghouls, rag-a-maul, corpse-men. We’ve seen them all in the city over the past couple of months. Nothing the guard can’t handle, but it’s made people jumpy. They’re scared enough even with the Army of the South crowding the streets.”

“Well . . . better safe than sorry, I guess. I shall sleep better in someone else’s bed knowing that you’re patrolling the walls, brother.” And with that I turned and set off sharp enough to escape any restraining hand that might come my way.

Much as I wanted to leave matters of state to those who matter I found myself unable to shake off Martus’s complaints. Not that I cared about his lost chances for glory-but I was worried by the idea that Grandmother was leading the army off into what seemed a fairly arbitrary war just as Vermillion was starting to see actual evidence of the kinds of dangers she’d been warning us about for years. The unanswered questions led me back up Garyus’s stairs. I doubted the Red Queen would be particularly forthcoming, especially after our last meeting, and frankly I didn’t know anyone else in Red March who might have both the information I was after and the inclination to share it with me.

The old man was where I left him, hunched over a book. “Books!” I breezed in. “Nobody ever put anything good in a book.”

“Grand-nephew.” Garyus set the offending item to one side. “Explain the Slov thing to me.” There didn’t seem to be any point beating about the bush. I wanted my mind set at ease so I could go and get drunk in good company. “She’s starting a war . . . for what? Why now?” Garyus smiled, a crooked thing. “I’m not my sister’s keeper.”

“But you know.”

He shrugged. “Some of it.”

“There are ghouls in the city. Other . . . things, too. The Dead King has turned his eyes this way. Why would she rush off to fight foreigners hundreds of miles away?”

“What turned the Dead King’s eyes this way?” Garyus asked.

Not wanting to say that I had done it I said nothing. Though to be fair Martus’s report indicated that the dead had been stirring within our walls for some while and I had only just returned.

“The Lady Blue steers the Dead King,” Garyus answered for me.

“And why-”

“Alica says our time is running out, and fast. She says that the troubles in Vermillion are to distract her, to keep her here. The true danger lies in not stopping the Lady Blue. The Wheel of Osheim is still turning . . . how long remains to us is unclear, but if the Lady Blue is left unchecked to keep pushing it then the last of our days will run through our fingers so quickly that even ancients like me will have to worry.”

“So it truly is a whole army, a whole war, just to kill one woman?”

“Sometimes that’s what it takes . . .”

I came to my father’s chambers also without knowing why. To learn more about his mother’s war was the excuse that had led me there, but the Red Queen would rather share her plans with her court jester-if she had one-than Reymond Kendeth.

I knocked at his bedchamber and a maid opened the door. I didn’t note which maid. The figure in the bed held my gaze, hunched in upon himself in the gloom, his form picked out only here and there where the daylight found a slit in his blinds.

The maid closed the door behind her as she left.

I stood, feeling like a child again, lost for words. The place smelled of sour wine, musty neglect, sickness, and sorrow. “Father.”

He raised his head. He looked old. Balding, greying, flesh sunken about his bones, an unhealthy glitter in his eyes. “My son.”

The cardinal called everyone “my son.” A hundred dusty sermons crowded in on me-all the times when I’d wanted a father not a cleric, all those times since Mother died when I’d wanted the man she’d seen in him-for arranged or not she wasn’t one to have given herself to a man she felt no respect or appreciation for.

“My son?” he repeated, a thickness in his voice. Drunk again.

The reason I’d come escaped me and I turned to go.

“Jalan.”

I turned back. “So you recognize me.”

He smiled-a weak thing, part grimace. “I do. But you’ve changed, boy. Grown. I thought at first you were your brother . . . but I couldn’t tell which. You’ve both of them in you.”