Mark Lawrence - The Complete Broken Empire Trilogy - Prince of Thorns, King of Thorns, Emperor of Thorns

‘Pray I never dig you out,’ I said.

I looked to Jane. ‘So you’re buried too?’

For a moment her glow flickered, and I saw another Jane in her place, this one a broken thing. A rag-doll held between shards of rock in some dark place where she alone gave light. Bones stood from her hip and shoulder, very white, traced with blood, black in the faint illumination. She turned her head a fraction, and those silver eyes met mine. She flickered again, whole once more, standing before me, free and unharmed.

‘I don’t understand.’ But I did.

‘Poor sweet Jane.’ Chella circled the girl, never coming too close.

‘She’ll die clean,’ I said. ‘She’s not afraid to go. She’ll take that path you fear so much. Cling to carrion flesh and rot in the bowels of the earth if that’s where cowardice keeps you.’

Chella hissed, venom on her face, the wet flap of decay in her lungs. The smoke began to take her again, writhing around her in serpent coils.

‘Kill this one slow, Saracen.’ She threw Sageous a hard look. And she was gone.

I felt Jane at my side. The light had left her. Her skin held the colour of fine ash when the fire has taken all there is to give. She spoke in a whisper. ‘Look after Gog for me, and Gorgoth. They’re the last of the leucrota.’

The thought of Gorgoth needing a guardian brought sharp words to the tip of my tongue, but I swallowed them. ‘I will.’ Maybe I even meant it.

She took my hand. ‘You can win the victories you seek, Jorg. But only if you find better reasons to want them.’ I felt a tingle of her power through my fingers. ‘Look to the lost years, Jorg. Look to the hand upon your shoulder. The strings that lead you …’

Her grip fell away, and smoke coiled where she had been.

‘Don’t come home again, Prince Jorg.’ Sageous made his threat sound like fatherly advice.

‘If you start running now,’ I said. ‘I might not catch you.’

‘Corion?’ He looked into the coiling ether behind me. ‘Don’t send this boy against me. It would go ill.’

I reached for my sword, but he’d gone before I cleared scabbard. The smoke became bitter, catching at my throat, and I found myself coughing.

‘He’s coming round.’ I heard Makin’s voice as if from a great distance.

‘Give him more water.’ I recognized Elban’s lisp.

I struggled up, choking and spitting water. ‘God’s whore!’

A vast cloud, like the anvil of a thunderhead, stood where Mount Honas had been.

I blinked and let Makin haul me to my feet. ‘You’re not the only one to take a hard knock.’ He nodded across to where Gorgoth crouched a few yards off, with his back to us.

I stumbled over, stopping when I noticed the heat – the heat and a glow that made a silhouette of Gorgoth despite the daylight, as if he were huddled over a fierce campfire. I edged around and to the side. Gog lay coiled like a babe in the womb, every inch of him white hot, as if the light of the Builders’ Sun were bleeding through him. Even Gorgoth had to shuffle back.

As I watched, the boy’s skin shaded down through colours seen in iron in the forge, hot orange, then the duller reds. I took a step toward him and he opened his eyes, white holes into the centre of a sun. He gasped, the inside of his mouth molten, then curled more tightly. At times fire danced across his back, running along his arms, then guttering out. It took ten minutes for Gog to cool so that his old colours returned and a man could stand beside him.

At last he lifted his head and grinned. ‘More!’

‘You’ve had enough, lad,’ I said. I didn’t know what the Builders’ Sun had woken as it echoed through him, but from what I’d seen, better it went back to sleep.

I looked back at the cloud still rising above Mount Honas and the countryside burning for miles around.

‘I think it’s time to go home, lads.’

It can’t be done,’ said the Nuban.

‘Few things worth having can be got easily’, I said.

‘It can’t be done,’ he said. ‘Not by anyone who expects to live five minutes past the act.’

‘If a suicidal assassin were all it took, then the Hundred would be the Dozen by now.’ My own father had survived several attempts in which the would-be killer had no interest in escape. ‘No one with a claim to the empire throne is that easy to bring to an end.’

The Nuban turned in the saddle to frown at me. He’d given up asking how a child knew such things. I wondered how long before he gave up telling me it couldn’t be done.

I nudged my horse on. The towers of the Count’s castle hadn’t seemed to get any closer over the last half hour.

‘We need to find the Count’s strongest defence,’ I said. ‘The protection that he most relies upon. The one upon which his faith rests.’

The Nuban frowned again. ‘Seek out your enemy’s weakness,’ he said. ‘Then take your shot.’ He patted the heavy crossbow strapped across his saddlebags.

‘But you’ve already told me it can’t be done,’ I said. ‘Repeatedly.’ I pulled my cloak tight against the evening wind. The man I had taken it from had been a tall one, and it hung loose about me. ‘So you’re just planning the most sensible way to lose.’

The Nuban shrugged. He never argued for the sake of being right. I liked that in him.

‘The weakest spot in a good defence is designed to fail. It falls, but in falling it summons the next defence and so on. It’s all about layers. At the end of it all you’ll find yourself facing the thing you sought to avoid all along, only now you’re weaker, and it’s forewarned.’

The Nuban said nothing, the blackness of his face impenetrable in the dying light.

‘Surprise is our only real weapon here. We sidestep that process of escalation. We cut straight to the heart of the matter.’

And the heart is what we want to cut.

We rode on, and at length the towers grew closer, and taller, and loomed until the castle gates yawned before us. A sprawl of buildings pooled before them like vomit – taverns and tanneries, hovels and whorehouses.

‘Renar’s shield is a man named Corion.’ The Nuban twitched his nose at the stench as the horses threaded a path to the gates. ‘A magician from the Horse Coast, they say. Certainly a good councillor. He has the Count guarded by mercenaries from his homeland. Men with no families to threaten, and an honour code that keeps them true.’

‘So, what could get us an invitation to see this Corion, I wonder?’

The queue at the gates moved in fits and starts, but never above a snail’s pace. Ten yards ahead of us a peasant with an ox in tow argued with a guard in the Count’s livery.

‘Is he really a magician, do you think?’ I watched the Nuban for his answer.

‘The Horse Coast is the place for them.’

The peasant seemed to have won his case, and moved on with his ox, into the outer yard where the market stalls would still be set out.

By the time we reached the gate a light rain had started to fall. The guard’s plume drooped somewhat in the drizzle, but there was nothing tired about the look he gave us.

‘What’s your business in the castle?’

‘Supplies.’ The Nuban patted his saddlebags.

‘Out there.’ The guard nodded to the sprawl before the gates. ‘You’ll find all you want out there.’

The Nuban pursed his lips. The castle market would have the best goods, but that line wasn’t going to carry us far. We’d need a better reason before the Count’s man was going to let a road-worn Nuban mercenary across his master’s threshold.

‘Give me your bow,’ I said to the Nuban.

He frowned. ‘You’re going to shoot him?’