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‘Open the door.’
‘The EM-bolts failed over six hundred years ago. The door is not locked.’
I drove my sword into the panel. The glass shattered and a brilliant flash lit the compartment. I pushed on, through a softness yielding like flesh, and things that crunched and gave like the bones of birds. Something hit me in the chest and I staggered back, caught by Makin. When I’d shaken the after-images from my eyes I could see my sword standing from the rear wall, smoking and blackened.
‘Open the damn door!’ I shook Makin off.
‘But—’ Burlow started. I cut through his objection.
‘It’s not locked. Gorgoth, Rike, give it a decent pull. Burlow, get in there and make that lard work for us for once.’
They did as I said, setting their bulk to the task, well over a thousand pounds of dumb muscle between them. For a moment nothing happened. Another moment, and then, without the slightest whisper from the hinges, the massive door stole into motion.
The road may go ever on, but we don’t: we wear out, we break. Age makes different things of different men. It will harden some, sharpen them, to a point. Brother Elban has that toughness, like old leather. But in the end the weakness comes and the rot. Perhaps that’s the fear behind his eyes. Like the salmon, he’s been swimming upstream all his life, and he knows there’s no shallows waiting for him, no still waters. Sometimes I think it would be kindness to make a swift end for Elban, before the fear eats up the man he was.
34
‘What is this place?’ Makin stood at the entrance with me.
The vault stretched beyond sight. On the ceiling ghost lights flickered into life, some obedient to the opening of the door, others struggling into wakefulness, tardy children late for the day’s lesson. I could see little of the floor past the crush of treasures. No Hollander grain-master owns a warehouse so well packed. To describe it fully would require all the vocabulary of shape and solid so kindly furnished by Euclid and by Plato. Cylinders longer and wider than a man, and cubes a yard on each side, lay stacked to scrape the Builder-stone above, and against the wall-cones and spheres in wire cradles, all skinned with dust. Row upon row, stack upon stack, marching beyond sight.
‘It’s an armoury,’ I said.
‘Where are the weapons?’ Rike came to join us from his struggles with the door. He wiped the sweat from his brow, and spat into the dust.
‘Inside the boxes.’ Makin rolled his eyes.
‘Let’s get ’em open then!’ Burlow said. He pulled a small crowbar from his belt. It never took much encouragement to set the brothers to looting.
‘Surely.’ I waved him in. ‘But open one at the back please. They’re all filled with poison.’
Burlow took a few steps into the vault before that sunk in. ‘Poison?’ He turned round slow-like.
‘The best the Builders could make. Enough to poison the whole world,’ I said.
‘And this will help us how?’ Makin asked. ‘We sneak into the Castle Red’s kitchens and slip some in their soup? That’s a plan for children’s games, Jorg.’
I let that slide. It was a fair question, and I didn’t feel like falling out with Makin.
‘These poisons can kill by a touch. They can kill through the air,’ I said.
Makin put a hand to his face and drew it down in a slow motion, pulling at his cheeks and lips. ‘How do you know this, Jorg? I looked at that old book of yours, there was nothing about this in there.’
I stabbed a finger toward the piled weapons. ‘These are the poisons of the Builders.’ I pulled the Builders’ book from my belt. ‘This is the map. And that,’ I pointed to Gorgoth, ‘is the evidence of their potency. Him and the Blushers of the Castle Red.’
I crossed to where Gorgoth leaned against the silvery mass of the door.
‘If you were to search the depths of this vault, and I don’t advise that you do, you’ll find fissures where underground waters have found their way in and out. And where do these waters run?’
For a moment I expected an answer, then I remembered who my audience were. ‘Where does any water run?’ Still dumb looks and silence. ‘Down!’
I put a hand to the deformed rib-bones that reached out of Gorgoth’s chest. He made a growl that would put a grizzly bear to shame, and the vibration of his ribs undercut it.
‘Down to the valley where, in the tiniest of doses, it makes monsters of men. And where did the water run from?’ I asked.
‘Up?’ Makin at least was game to try.
‘Up,’ I said. ‘So our poison wafts up, and what hint escapes into the Castle Red paints the folk that live there, the Blushers, an attractive lobster red. Which, my brothers, is what it says the stuff does in this here book handed down through some thousand years to your own sweet Jorgy.’
I spun away from Gorgoth, caught up in my display, and mindful of his fists. ‘And these poisons, in their interesting boxes, can do all this when what we have is an ancient spill, washed over for a thousand years. So all in all, Brother Burlow, it would be best not to open one with your crowbar, just yet.’
‘So what will we do with them, Jorth?’ Elban came to lisp at my elbow. ‘Sounds like dirty work, no?’
‘The dirtiest, old man.’ I clapped a hand to his shoulder. ‘We’re going to build a slow fire, bank it well, and run for our lives. The heat will crack open these marvellous toys, and the smoke will make a charnel house of the Castle Red.’
‘Will it stop there?’ Makin shot me a sharp glance.
‘Maybe.’ I looked around at the brothers. ‘Liar, Row, and Burlow, see to finding some fuel for our fire. Bones and tar if you must.’
‘Jorg, you said “enough to poison the world”,’ Makin said.
‘The world is already poisoned, Sir Makin,’ I said.
Makin pursed his lips. ‘But this could spread. It could spill out over Gelleth.’
Burlow and the others stopped by the door and turned to watch us.
‘My father asked for Gelleth,’ I said. ‘He did not specify the nature of its delivery. If I hand him a smoking ruin he will thank me for it, by God he will. Do you think there is a crime he would not countenance to secure his borders? Even one crime? Any single sin?’
Makin frowned. ‘And if the fumes roll into Ancrath?’
‘That,’ I said, ‘is a risk that I am prepared to accept.’
Makin turned from me, his hand on his sword hilt.
‘What?’ I questioned his back, and my voice echoed in the Builders’ dusty vault. I spread my arms. ‘What? And don’t you dare speak to me of innocents. It is late in the day for Sir Makin of Trent to champion maids and babes in arms.’ My anger sprang from more than Makin’s doubt. ‘There are no innocents. There is success, and there is failure. Who are you to tell me what can be risked? We weren’t dealt a hand to win with in this game, but I will win though it beggar heaven!’
The tirade left me breathless.
‘But it’d be so many, Jorth,’ Elban said.
You’d think seeing me knife Brother Gemt not so many weeks earlier, over a far smaller dispute, would have taught them sense, but no.
‘One life, or ten thousand, I can’t see the difference. It’s a currency I don’t understand.’ I set my sword to Elban’s neck, drawing too quick for him to react. ‘If I take your head once, is that less bad than taking it again, and then again?’
But I had no appetite for it. Somehow losing the Nuban had made what brothers I had left seem more worth keeping, scum though they were.
I put the blade away. ‘Brothers,’ I said. ‘You know it’s not like me to lose my temper. I’m out of sorts. Too long without sight of the sun perhaps, or maybe something I ate …’ Rike smirked at the reference to the necromancer’s heart. ‘You’re right, Makin, to destroy more than the Castle Red would be … wasteful.’
Makin turned to face me, hands together now. ‘As you say, Prince Jorg.’
‘Little Rikey, get you just one of those wonderful toys. That one, like a giant’s gonad, if you please.’ I pointed out the closest of the spheres. ‘Don’t drop it mind, and have Gorgoth help out if it’s as heavy as it looks. We’ll take it up a little higher and set it cooking for the castle’s breakfast. One should be enough.’
And we did.
With hindsight, if all the detail were known, Makin’s stand there in the Builders’ vault should be sufficient to wash the blood from his hands, to erase all his crimes, the cathedral at Wexten notwithstanding, and make of him a hero fit to stand beside any that may be found in legend. Given the swathe of death downwind of the Castle Red, it’s clear that the drastic scaling-down of my original plan saved the world from a rather unpleasant death. Or at least delayed it.
35
‘We should have seen something by now,’ Makin said.
I looked back over my shoulder. The ugly bulk of Mount Honas made a black fist against the sky, the Castle Red cradled in its grip. Behind us the brothers straggled, a line of vagabonds labouring down the slope.
‘This death walks softly, Makin,’ I said. ‘An invisible hand with fatal fingers.’ I gave him a grin.
‘Finding every baby in its crib?’ Distaste thinned Makin’s thick lips.
‘Would you rather it were Rike that found them, or Row?’ I asked. I set a hand to his shoulder, gauntlet to breastplate, both smeared with the grey mud from our escape tunnel. He had it in his hair too, drying on black curls.
‘You seem troubled of late, old friend,’ I said. ‘The past sins weigh so heavy that you’re afraid to add more?’
I noticed that we stood nearly of a height, though Makin was a tall man. Another year’s growth and he’d be tilting his head to meet my gaze.
‘Sometimes you almost fool me, you’re that good, Jorg.’ He sounded weary. I could see the web of fine lines around the corners of his eyes. ‘We’re not old friends. A little over three years ago you were ten. Ten! Maybe we’re friends, I can’t tell, but “old”? No.’
‘And what is it that I’m so good at?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘Playing a role. Filling in for lost years with that intuition of yours. Replacing experience with genius.’
‘You think I have to be old to think with an old head?’ I asked.
‘I think you need to have lived more to truly know a man’s heart. You need to have made more transactions in life to know the worth of the coin you spend so freely.’ Makin turned to watch the column close on us.
Rike came into view at the rear of the line, cresting a ridge, black against a dawn-pale sky. Behind him the clouds ran out in ribbons, the dirty purple of a fresh bruise, reaching for the west. Bandages on his upper arm, and around his brow, flapped in the breeze.
Something tickled at me, the ghosts of whispers, colder than the wind.
Makin turned to go.
‘Wait—’
Screams now. The terror of those already dead.
No sound came, but Mount Honas lifted, like a giant drawing breath. A light woke beneath the rock, bleeding incandescence through spreading fissures. In one moment, the mountain vanished, thrown at heaven in a spiralling inferno. And, somewhere within that gyre, every stone of the Castle Red, from deepest vault to tower high.
A brilliance took all glory from the morning, making a pale wash of the land. Rike became a flicker of shadow against the blinding sky. I felt the hot kiss of that distant fury, like sunburn on my cheeks.
What burns so bright cannot endure. The light failed, leaving us in shadow, the kind of darkness that precedes a squall. I saw the storm’s outriders, newborn ghosts, driven before the rage. I watched them sweep out across the land, like the ripple from a pond-thrown stone, a grey ring where rock became dust, racing fast as thought. The sky rippled too, the ribbon-cloud now whips for the cracking.
‘Dear Jesu.’ Makin left his mouth open, though he had no more words.
‘Run!’ Burlow’s shout sounded oddly mute.
‘Why?’ I spread my arms to welcome the destruction. We had nowhere to run.
I watched the brothers fall. Time ran slow and the blood pulsed cold in my veins. Between two beats of my heart, the blast cut them all down, Rike first, lost beneath the grey maelstrom, a child before an ocean breaker. The hot wind took my feet. I felt the dead flow through me, and tasted the bitter gall of necromancer blood once more.
For a time I floated, like smoke above the slaughter.
I lay in nothing. I knew nothing. A peace deeper than sleep, until …
‘Oh! Bravo!’ The voice cut into me, too close, and somehow familiar. ‘Now is the winter of our Hundred War made fearsome summer by this prodigal son.’ His words flowed like rhyme, and carried strange accents.
‘You maul Shakespeare worse than you abuse his mother tongue, Saracen.’ This a woman, velvet and rich.
Just run.
‘He has woken a Builders’ Sun, and you make jokes?’ A child spoke, a girl.
‘You’re not dead yet, child? With the mountain levelled into the valley?’ The woman sounded disappointed.
‘Forget the girl, Chella. Tell me who stands behind this boy. Has Corion grown weary of Count Renar and taken a new piece to the board? Or has the Silent Sister shown her hand at last?’
Sageous! I knew him.
‘She thinks to win the game with this half-grown child?’ The woman laughed.
And I knew her too. The necromancer.
‘I sent you to Hell, with the Nuban’s bolt through your heart, bitch,’ I said.
‘What in Kali’s n—’
‘He hears us?’ She cut across him, Chella, I knew her voice, the only corpse ever to make me rise.
I hunted for them, there in the smoke.
‘No, it’s not possible,’ Sageous said. ‘Who stands behind you, boy?’
I could find nothing in the swirl of blindness enfolding me.
‘Jorg?’ A whisper at my ear. The girl again. The monsters’ glowing child.
‘Jane?’ I whispered back, or thought I did, I couldn’t feel my lips or any other part of me.
‘The ether doesn’t hide us,’ she said. ‘We are the ether.’
I thought on that for a moment. ‘Let me see you.’
