Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

“I won’t keep you long.” Luntar stood before us, we two his only witnesses. He slipped from the memory of every other person even as they saw him. An invisibility of a kind. Whether there was something in the Kendeth blood that resisted the trick, or whether he simply chose to allow us to remember him, he didn’t say, though even in the minute reporting to the steward with my back to Luntar I had forgotten that he was there.

“If you would all be so kind as to afford my great-nephew and me a little privacy.” Garyus raised his voice to carry. The remnants of his court began to move toward the doors. “Even you, Mary.” This to the most senior of his nurses, a solid matron who seemed to think herself indispensable. “And gentlemen-if you will.” He nodded to the guardsmen flanking him. “All my guards.”

The captain approached, boots heavy on the polished floor. “Steward, it’s our place to protect you.”

“If I die in your absence Prince Jalan is to be demoted to peasant. There, I should be safe enough now?”

The guard captain frowned, the word “but” struggling to get off his lips.

“And really, I insist,” Garyus said.

Five minutes later, after the guard had double-checked each dark corner, we were alone.

“I had hoped to find the Red Queen here,” Luntar said. “Now it seems I must follow her to Slov.”

I resisted the obvious jibe that he should have foreseen this circumstance. No doubt he had interfered with Grandmother’s fate in the past and denied himself further visions of her future. That or the Silent Sister guarded her from such foretelling.

“When must you leave?” The day before he arrived would have suited me. I still found Luntar deeply unsettling, the rawness of his burned flesh demanded a reaction and if it couldn’t get one from him it certainly created something very close to pain in me. The Silent Sister had looked so far into our bright future that it had blinded her in one eye. Luntar had looked beyond even that and been burned head to toe by what he saw. To hear Garyus speak of it, somewhere not too far ahead of us the impossible brilliance of a thousand Builders’ Suns consumed our all our futures.

“I will leave immediately we conclude our discussion here,” Luntar said. “It’s a long walk, and no horse will bear me.”

“Tell me . . .” I glanced at Garyus, but he waved for me to continue. “Tell me, the future that burned you, that you say is coming, is this the end the Red Queen fears? The doom the Builders set upon us when they worked their science and changed the world?” I tried not to make it sound like an accusation-but it was. Luntar and his kind had been cracking reality for generations, driving us to the edge as they pulled more and more magic through the fabric of the world.

Beside me Garyus nodded his heavy head. His gaze rested upon the cube of white plasteek in his lap-the box of ghosts that Luntar had given him.

“There’s nothing we can do?” I asked. Just somewhere safe to run to would be good.

Luntar set both hands to his face and slid them wetly toward his brow as if pushing away some weariness. “In some futures it’s the cracking of the world that ends us, darkness and light, the elements taking on monstrous forms, the very substance of which we are made unravelling . . . In other futures it’s the light of the Builders’ weapons that scorches us from the earth.”

“Shit.” I had seen that light. I tried to take the whine from my voice and sound more like Snorri would. “Twice now in the space of a year Builders’ Suns have lit. I heard of one in Gelleth on my trip north, and then in Liba I saw one with my own eyes, burning the desert. Who’s using these dead men’s weapons against us, and why?”

“Death isn’t what it was.” Luntar extended his skinless arm and studied it.

“The Builders are dead. They went to dust a thousand years ago.” But as I said it I recalled Kara’s words. The völva had told me on her boat that Baraqel and Aslaug were once human, Builders who had escaped into spirit when the world burned. She had claimed that others copied themselves into their machines before the end. Whatever that meant. “It can’t be the Builders? Even if they weren’t dead why would they wish us harm?”

“Do you recall how the Builders brought magic into the world in the first place, Prince Jalan?”

“Turned a wheel . . . I think that’s how Grandmother described it. They made it so a man’s will could change what’s real. But the Day of a Thousand Suns came and the wheel kept turning with nobody to stop it-the magic getting stronger.”

“That’s more or less it,” Luntar said. “But this wheel isn’t just a figure of speech. It’s not just words to paint a picture we can understand. There is a wheel. In-”

“Osheim.” The word escaped my lips despite strict instructions not to emerge.

“Yes.”

“These explosions in Gelleth and Liba though-”

“Ask the ghosts,” Luntar said. “It’s their work.” And then he was no longer there.

“How?” I stepped forward, waving an arm through the space the burned man had so recently occupied.

“The same way any other man leaves,” Garyus said. “He just made us forget it.”

“Well damn that! Why couldn’t he just stay and answer my bloody question? Why the hell be so mysterious about everything?”

With effort Garyus raised his head and smiled up at me. “I always felt those stories your Nanna Willow told you boys would have been a lot shorter if there had been some plain speaking in them. But perhaps you know the answer.”

“Bloody future-sworn!” I almost spat on the floor but Grandmother’s presence still haunted the throne room too strongly for that. Luntar saw a future that might be better than those that had burned him but if he steered us toward it, it would start to retreat, and if he answered our questions the whole possibility might evaporate like a morning mist. Even giving us the box would have blinded him to our paths now, making his vision less clear. Do nothing and see everything that will be with perfect and impotent clarity-or reach out to change things and like a hand touching water destroy the reflection of tomorrow. The frustration of it would drive me mad.

“Open the box?” Garyus placed the box in question on the small table I’d carried over. I placed a lantern beside it: afternoon had shaded toward evening and the shadows multiplied in every corner. “Open the box . . .” He tapped his fingers on the polished surface.

“That’s been known to go wrong in the past,” I said.

Garyus raised an eyebrow at that. “Pandora?”

“All the ills of the world.” I nodded. “Besides, he said it’s full of ghosts. That’s the case made for burying it right there.”

“He also said we should ask them our questions.”

I looked at the box and found my curiosity had dried right up.

“Are you scared, Jalan?” Garyus looked up at me, the light and shadow conspiring to make a monster of him. His deformity had that character- innocent one moment, pitiable even, the next sinister, malign. At those times I had no doubt he was twin to the Silent Sister.

“Scared doesn’t cover it.” The plasteek looked more like bone in the lantern light. Visions of Hell bubbled at the back of my mind and I wondered just how much of that place the art of the Builders might fit into one small box. “Petrified.”

“Makes you feel alive, doesn’t it?” And Garyus opened the box.

“Empty!” A laugh burst from me, somehow small and hollow in the loneliness of the hall.

“It does seem to-” Garyus drew his hand back with an oath. One red fingerprint remained where he had touched the lid.

“Blood?” I asked, tilting my head to study the mark.