PRINCE OF FOOLS
Book One of The Red Queen’s War
Mark Lawrence

Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2014

Copyright © Mark Lawrence 2014

Jacket layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014

Jacket illustration © Jason Chan

Map © Andrew Ashton

Mark Lawrence asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007531530

Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007531554

Version: 2017-05-31

Dedication

Dedicated to my daughter, Heather.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Map

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Mark Lawrence

About the Publisher

1

I’m a liar and a cheat and a coward, but I will never, ever, let a friend down. Unless of course not letting them down requires honesty, fair play, or bravery.

I’ve always found hitting a man from behind to be the best way to go about things. This can sometimes be accomplished by dint of a simple ruse. Classics such as, ‘What’s that over there?’ work surprisingly often, but for truly optimal results it’s best if the person doesn’t ever know you were there.

‘Ow! Jesu! What the hell did you do that for?’ Alain DeVeer turned, clamping his hand to the back of his head and bringing it away bloody.

When the person you hit doesn’t have the grace to fall over it’s generally best to have a back-up plan. I dropped what remained of the vase, turned and ran. In my mind he’d folded up with a pleasing ‘oofff’ and left me free to leave the mansion unobserved, stepping over his prone and senseless form on the way. Instead his senseless form was now chasing me down the hall bellowing for blood.

I crashed back through Lisa’s door and slammed it behind me, bracing myself for the impact.

‘What the hell?’ Lisa sat in the bed, silken sheets flowing off her nakedness like water.

‘Uh.’ Alain hammered into the door, jolting the air from my lungs and scraping my heels over the tiles. The trick is to never rush for the bolt. You’ll be fumbling for it and get a face full of opening door. Brace for the impact, when that’s done slam the bolt home while the other party is picking himself off the floor. Alain proved worryingly fast in getting back on his feet and I nearly got the doorhandle for breakfast despite my precautions.

‘Jal!’ Lisa was out of bed now, wearing nothing but the light and shade through the shutters. Stripes suited her. Sweeter than her elder sister, sharper than her younger sister. Even then I wanted her, even with her murderous brother held back by just an inch of oak and with my chances for escape evaporating by the moment.

I ran to the largest window and tore the shutters open. ‘Say sorry to your brother for me.’ I swung a leg over the casement. ‘Mistaken identity or something …’ The door started to shudder as Alain pounded the far side.

‘Alain?’ Lisa managed to look both furious with me and terrified at the same time.

I didn’t stop to reply but vaulted down into the bushes, which were thankfully the fragrant rather than thorny variety. Dropping into a thorn bush can lead to no end of grief.

Landing is always important. I do a lot of falling and it’s not how you start that matters so much as how you finish. In this instance, I finished concertinaed, heels to arse, chin to knees, half an azalea bush up my nose and all the air driven from my lungs, but with no bones broken. I fought my way out and limped toward the garden wall, gasping for breath and hoping the staff were too busy with pre-dawn chores to be poised and ready to hunt me down.

I took off, across the formal lawns, through the herb garden, cutting a straight path through all the little diamonds of sage, and triangles of thyme and whatnot. Somewhere back at the house a hound bayed, and that put the fear in me. I’m a good runner any day of the week. Scared shitless I’m world class. Two years ago, in the ‘border incident’ with Scorron, I ran from a patrol of Teutons, five of them on big old destriers. The men I had charge of stayed put, lacking any orders. I find the important thing in running away is not how fast you run but simply that you run faster than the next man. Unfortunately my lads did a piss-poor job of slowing the Scorrons down and that left poor Jal running for his life with hardly twenty years under his belt and a great long list of things still to do – with the DeVeer sisters near the top and dying on a Scorron lance not even making the first page. In any event, the borderlands aren’t the place to stretch a warhorse’s legs and I kept a gap between us by running through a boulderfield at breakneck speed. Without warning I found myself charging into the back of a pitched battle between a much larger force of Scorron irregulars and the band of Red March skirmishers I’d been scouting on behalf of in the first place. I rocketed into the midst of it all, flailed around with my sword in blind terror trying to escape, and when the dust settled and the blood stopped squirting, I discovered myself the hero of the day, breaking the enemy with a courageous attack that showed complete disregard for my own safety.

So here’s the thing: bravery may be observed when a person tramples one fear whilst in secret flight from a greater terror. And those whose greatest terror is being thought a coward are always brave. I, on the other hand, am a coward. But with a little luck, a dashing smile, and the ability to lie from the hip, I’ve done a surprisingly good job of seeming a hero and of fooling most of the people most of the time.

The DeVeers’s wall was a high and forbidding one but it and I were old friends: I knew its curves and foibles as well as any contour Lisa, Sharal, or Micha might possess. Escape routes have always been an obsession of mine.

Most barriers are there to keep the unwashed out, not the washed in. I vaulted a rain barrel, onto the roof of a gardener’s outbuilding, and jumped for the wall. Teeth snapped at my heels as I hauled myself over. I clung by my fingers and dropped. A shiver of relief ran through me as the hound found its voice and scrabbled against the far side of the wall in frustration. The beast had run silent and almost caught me. The silent ones are apt to kill you. The more sound and fury there is, the less murderous the animal. True of men too. I’m nine parts bluster and one part greed and so far not an ounce of murder.

I landed in the street, less heavily this time, free and clear, and if not smelling of roses then at least of azalea and mixed herbs. Alain would be a problem for another day. He could take his place in the queue. It was a long one and at its head stood Maeres Allus clutching a dozen promissory notes, IOUs, and intents to pay drunkenly scrawled on whores’ silken lingerie. I stood, stretched, and listened to the hound complain behind the wall. I’d need a taller wall than that to keep Maeres’ bullies at bay.

Kings Way stretched before me, strewn with shadows. On Kings Way the townhouses of noble families vie with the ostentation of merchant-princes’ mansions, new money trying to gleam brighter than the old. The city of Vermillion has few streets as fine.

‘Take him to the gate! He’s got the scent.’ Voices back in the garden.

‘Here, Pluto! Here!’

That didn’t sound good. I set off sprinting in the direction of the palace, sending rats fleeing and scattering dungmen on their rounds, the dawn chasing after me, throwing red spears at my back.

2

The palace at Vermillion is a sprawling affair of walled compounds, exquisite gardens, satellite mansions for extended family, and finally the Inner Palace, the great stone confection that has for generations housed the kings of Red March. The whole thing is garnished with marble statuary teased into startlingly lifelike forms by the artistry of Milano masons, and a dedicated man could probably scrape enough gold leaf off the walls to make himself slightly richer than Croesus. My grandmother hates it with a passion. She’d be happier behind granite barricades a hundred feet thick and spiked with the heads of her enemies.

Even the most decadent of palaces can’t be entered without some protocol, though. I slipped in via the Surgeons’ Gate, flipping a silver crown to the guard.

‘Got you out early again, Melchar.’ I make a point of knowing the guards’ names. They still think of me as the hero of Aral Pass and it’s helpful to have the gatekeepers on side when your life dangles from as large a web of lies as mine does.

‘Aye, Prince Jal. Them’s as works best works hardest they do say.’

‘So true.’ I had no idea what he’d said but my fake laugh is even better than my real one, and nine-tenths of being popular is the ability to jolly the menials along. ‘I’d get one of those lazy bastards to take a turn.’ I nodded toward the lantern glow bleeding past the crack of the guardhouse door, and strolled on through the gates as Melchar drew them open.

Once inside, I made a straight line for the Roma Hall. As the queen’s third son, Father got invested in the Roma Hall, a palatial Vatican edifice constructed by the pope’s own craftsmen for Cardinal Paracheck way back whenever. Grandmother has little enough time for Jesu and his cross though she’ll say the words at celebrations and look to mean them. She has far less time for Roma, and none at all for the pope that sits there now – the Holy Cow, she calls her.

As Father’s third son I get bugger all. A chamber in Roma Hall, an unwanted commission in the Army of the North, one that didn’t even swing me a cavalry rank since the northern borders are too damn hilly for horse. Scorron deploy cavalry on the borders but Grandmother declared their pigheadedness a failing the Red March should exploit rather than a foolishness we should continue to follow. Women and war don’t mix. I’ve said it before. I should have been breaking hearts on a white charger, armoured for tourney. But no, that old witch had me crawling around the peaks trying not to get murdered by Scorron peasants.

I entered the Hall – really a collection of halls, staterooms, a ballroom, kitchens, stables, and a second floor with endless bedchambers – by the west port, a service door meant for scullions and such. Fat Ned sat at guard, his halberd against the wall.

‘Ned!’

‘Master Jal!’ He woke with a start and came perilously close to tipping the chair over backwards.

‘As you were.’ I gave him a wink and went by. Fat Ned kept a tight lip and my excursions were safe with him. He’d known me since I was a little monster bullying the smaller princes and princesses and toadying to the ones big enough to clout me. He’d been fat back in those days. The flesh hung off him now as the reaper closed in for the final swing, but the name stuck. There’s power in a name. ‘Prince’ has served me very well – something to hide behind when trouble comes, and ‘Jalan’ carries echoes of King Jalan of the Red March, Fist of the Emperor back when we had one. A title and a name like Jalan carry an aura with them, enough to give me the benefit of the doubt – and there was never a doubt I needed that.

I nearly made it back to my room.

‘Jalan Kendeth!’

I stopped two steps from the balcony that led to my chambers, toe poised for the next step, boots in my hand. I said nothing. Sometimes the bishop would just bellow my name when he discovered random mischief. In fairness I was normally the root cause. This time however he was looking directly at me.

‘I see you right there, Jalan Kendeth, footsteps black with sin as you creep back to your lair. Get down here!’

I turned with an apologetic grin. Churchmen like you to be sorry and often it doesn’t matter what you’re sorry about. In this case I was sorry for being caught.

‘And the best of mornings to you, your excellency.’ I put the boots behind my back and swaggered down toward him as if it had been my plan all along.

‘His eminence directs me to present your brothers and yourself at the throne room by second bell.’ Bishop James scowled at me, cheeks grey with stubble as if he too had been turfed out of bed at an unreasonable hour, though perhaps not by Lisa DeVeer’s shapely foot.

‘Father directed that?’ He’d said nothing at table the previous night and the cardinal was not one to rise before noon whatever the good book had to say about sloth. They call it a deadly sin but in my experience lust will get you into more trouble and sloth’s only a sin when you’re being chased.

‘The message came from the queen.’ The bishop’s scowl deepened. He liked to attribute all commands to Father as the church’s highest, albeit least enthusiastic, representative in Red March. Grandmother once said she’d been tempted to set the cardinal’s hat on the nearest donkey but Father had been closer and promised to be more easily led. ‘Martus and Darin have already left.’

I shrugged. ‘They arrived before me too.’ I’d yet to forgive my elder brothers that slight. I stopped, out of arms’ reach as the bishop loved nothing better than to slap the sin out of a wayward prince, and turned to go upstairs. ‘I’ll get dressed.’

‘You’ll go now! It’s almost second bell and your preening never takes less than an hour.’

As much as I would have liked to dispute the old fool he happened to be right and I knew better than to be late for the Red Queen. I suppressed a sneer and hurried past him. I had on what I’d worn for my midnight escapades and whilst it was stylish enough, the slashed velvets hadn’t fared too well during my escape. Still, it would have to serve. Grandmother would rather see her spawn battle armoured and dripping blood in any event, so a touch of mud here and there might earn me some approval.

3

I came late to the throne room with the second bell’s echoes dying before I reached the bronze doors, huge out-of-place things stolen from some still-grander palace by one of my distant and bloody-handed relatives. The guards eyed me as if I might be bird crap that had sailed uninvited through a high window to splat before them.

‘Prince Jalan.’ I rolled my hands to chivvy them along. ‘You may have heard of me? I am invited.’

Without commentary the largest of them, a giant in fire-bronze mail and crimson plumed helm, hauled the left door wide enough to admit me. My campaign to befriend every guard in the palace had never penetrated as far as Grandmother’s picked men: they thought too much of themselves for that. Also they were too well paid to be impressed by my largesse, and perhaps forewarned against me in any case.

I crept in unannounced and hurried across the echoing expanse of marble. I’ve never liked the throne room. Not for the arching grandness of it, or the history set in grim-faced stone and staring at us from every wall, but because the place has no escape routes. Guards, guards, and more guards, along with the scrutiny of that awful old woman who claims to be my grandmother.

I made my way toward my nine siblings and cousins. It seemed this was to be an audience exclusively for the royal grandchildren: the nine junior princes and singular princess of Red March. By rights I should have been tenth in line to the throne after my two uncles, their sons, my father and elder brothers, but the old witch who’d kept that particular seat warm these past forty years had different ideas about succession. Cousin Serah, still a month shy of her eighteenth birthday, and containing not an ounce of whatever it is that makes a princess, was the apple of the Red Queen’s eye. I won’t lie, Serah had more than several ounces of whatever it is that lets a woman steal the sense from a man and accordingly I would gladly have ignored the common views on what cousins should and shouldn’t get up to. Indeed I’d tried to ignore them several times, but Serah had a vicious right hook and a knack for kicking the tenderest of spots that a man owns. She’d come today wearing some kind of riding suit in fawn and suede that looked better suited to the hunt than to court. But, damn, she looked good.

I brushed past her and elbowed my way in between my brothers near the front of the group. I’m a decent sized fellow, tall enough to give men pause, but I don’t normally care to stand by Martus and Darin. They make me look small and, with nothing to set us apart, all with the same dark-gold hair and hazel eyes, I get referred to as ‘the little one’. That I don’t like. On this occasion, though, I was prepared to be overlooked. It wasn’t just being in the throne room that made me nervous. Nor even because of Grandmother’s pointed disapproval. It was the blind-eye woman. She scares the hell out of me.

I first saw her when they brought me before the throne on my fifth birthday, my name day, flanked by Martus and Darin in their church finest, Father in his cardinal’s hat, sober despite the sun having passed its zenith, my mother in silks and pearls, a clutch of churchmen and court ladies forming the periphery. The Red Queen sat forward in her great chair booming out something about her grandfather’s grandfather, Jalan, the Fist of the Emperor, but it passed me by – I’d seen her. An ancient woman, so old it turned my stomach to look at her. She crouched in the shadow of the throne, hunched up so she’d be hidden away if you looked from the other side. She had a face like paper that had been soaked then left to dry, her lips a greyish line, cheekbones sharp. Clad in rags and tatters, she had no place in that throne room, at odds with the finery, the fire-bronzed guards and the glittering retinue come to see my name set in place upon me. There was no motion in the crone: she could almost have been a trick of the light, a discarded cloak, an illusion of lines and shade.

‘… Jalan?’ The Red Queen stopped her litany with a question.

I had answered with silence, tearing my gaze from the creature at her side.

‘Well?’ Grandmother narrowed her regard to a sharp point that held me.

Still I had nothing. Martus had elbowed me hard enough to make my ribs creak. It hadn’t helped. I wanted to look back at the old woman. Was she still there? Had she moved the moment my eyes left her? I imagined how she’d move. Quick like a spider. My stomach made a tight knot of itself.

‘Do you accept the charge I have laid upon you, child?’ Grandmother asked, attempting kindness.

My glance flickered back to the hag. Still there, exactly the same, her face half-turned from me, fixed on Grandmother. I hadn’t noticed her eye at first, but now it drew me. One of the cats at the Hall had an eye like that. Milky. Pearly almost. Blind, my nurse called it. But to me it seemed to see more than the other eye.

‘What’s wrong with the boy? Is he simple?’ Grandmother’s displeasure had rippled through the court, silencing their murmurs.

I couldn’t look away. I stood there sweating. Barely able to keep from wetting myself. Too scared to speak, too scared even to lie. Too scared to do anything but sweat and keep my eyes on that old woman.

When she moved, I nearly screamed and ran. Instead just a squeak escaped me. ‘Don-don’t you see her?’

She stole into motion. So slow at first you had to measure her against the background to be sure it wasn’t imagination. Then speeding up, smooth and sure. She turned that awful face toward me, one eye dark, the other milk and pearl. It had felt hot, suddenly, as if all the great hearths had roared into life with one scorching voice, sparked into fury on a fine summer’s day, the flames leaping from iron grates as if they wanted nothing more than to be amongst us.

She was tall. I saw that now, hunched but tall. And thin, like a bone.

‘Don’t you see her?’ My words rising to a shriek, I pointed and she stepped toward me, a white hand reaching.

‘Who?’ Darin beside me, nine years under his belt and too old for such foolishness.

I had no voice to answer him. The blind-eye woman had laid her hand of paper and bones over mine. She smiled at me, an ugly twisting of her face, like worms writhing over each other. She smiled, and I fell.

I fell into a hot, blind place. They tell me I had a fit, convulsions. A ‘lepsy’, the chirurgeon said to Father the next day, a chronic condition, but I’ve never had it again, not in nearly twenty years. All I know is that I fell, and I don’t think I’ve stopped falling since.

Grandmother had lost patience and set my name upon me as I jerked and twitched on the floor. ‘Bring him back when his voice breaks,’ she said.

And that was it for eight years. I came back to the throne room aged thirteen, to be presented to Grandmother before the Saturnalia feast in the hard winter of 89. On that occasion, and all others since, I’ve followed everyone else’s example and pretended not to see the blind-eye woman. Perhaps they really don’t see her because Martus and Darin are too dumb to act and poor liars at that, and yet their eyes never so much as flicker when they look her way. Maybe I’m the only one to see her when she taps her fingers on the Red Queen’s shoulder. It’s hard not to look when you know you shouldn’t. Like a woman’s cleavage, breasts squeezed together and lifted for inspection, and yet a prince is supposed not to notice, not to drop his gaze. I try harder with the blind-eye woman and for the most part I manage it – though Grandmother’s given me an odd look from time to time.

In any event, on this particular morning, sweating in the clothes I wore the night before and with half the DeVeers’ garden to decorate them, I didn’t mind in the least being wedged between my hulking brothers and being ‘the little one’, easy to overlook. Frankly, the attention of either the Red Queen or her silent sister were things I could do without.

We stood for another ten minutes, unspeaking in the main, some princes yawning, others shifting weight from one foot to the other, or casting sour glances my way. I do try to keep my misadventures from polluting the calm waters of the palace. It’s ill advised to shit where you eat, and besides, it’s hard to hide behind one’s rank when the offended party is also a prince. Even so, over the course of the years, I’d given my cousins few reasons to love me.

At last the Red Queen came in, without fanfare but flanked by guards. The relief was momentary – the blind-eye woman followed in her wake, and although I turned away quicker than quick, she saw me looking. The queen settled herself into her royal seat and the guardsmen arrayed themselves around the walls. A single chamberlain – Mantal Drews, I think – stood ill at ease between the royal progeny and our sovereign, and once more the hall returned to silence.

I watched Grandmother and, with some effort, kept my gaze from sliding toward the white and shrivelled hand resting behind her head on the throne’s shoulder. Over the years I’d heard many rumours about Grandmother’s secret counsellor, an old and half-mad woman kept hidden away – the Silent Sister they called her. It seemed though that I stood alone in knowing that she waited at the Red Queen’s side each day. Other people’s eyes seemed to avoid her just as I always wished mine would.

The Red Queen cleared her throat. In taverns across Vermillion they tell it that my grandmother was once a handsome woman, though monstrous tall with it. A heartbreaker who attracted suit from all corners of the Broken Empire and even beyond. To my eye she had a brutal face, raw-boned, her skin tight as if scorched, but still showing wrinkles as crumpled parchment will. She had to have seventy years on her but no one would have called her more than fifty. Her hair dark and without a hint of grey, still showing deepest red where the light caught it. Handsome or not, though, her eyes would turn any man’s bowels to water. Flinty chips of dispassion. And no crown for the warrior queen, oh no. She sat near-swallowed by a robe of blacks and scarlets, just the thinnest circlet of gold to keep her locks in place, scraped back across her head.

‘My children’s children.’ Grandmother’s words came so thick with disappointment that you felt it reach out and try to throttle you. She shook her head, as if we were all of us an experiment in horse-breeding gone tragically astray. ‘And some of you whelping new princes and princesses of your own I hear.’

‘Yes w—’

‘Idle, numerous, and breeding sedition in your numbers.’ Grandmother rolled over Cousin Roland’s announcement before he could puff himself up. His smile died in that stupid beard of his, the one he grew to allow people at least the suspicion that he might have a chin. ‘Dark times are coming and this nation must be a fortress. The time for being children has passed. My blood runs in each of you, thin though it’s grown. And you will be soldiers in this coming war.’

Martus snorted at that, though quiet enough that it would be missed. Martus had been commissioned into the heavy horse, destined for knight-general, commander of Red March’s elite. The Red Queen in a fit of madness five years earlier had all but eliminated the force. Centuries of tradition, honour, and excellence ploughed under at the whim of an old woman. Now we were all to be soldiers running to battle on foot, digging ditches, endlessly practising mechanical tactics that any peasant could master and which set a prince no higher than a pot boy.

‘… greater foe. Time to put aside thoughts of empty conquest and draw in …’

I looked up from my disgust to find Grandmother still droning on about war. It’s not that I care overmuch about honour. All that chivalry nonsense loads a man down and any sensible fellow will ditch it the moment he needs to run – but it’s the look of the thing, the form of it. To be in one of the three horse corps, to earn your spurs and keep a trio of chargers at the city barracks … it had been the birthright of young nobles since time immemorial. Damnit, I wanted my commission. I wanted in at the officers’ mews, wanted to swap tall tales around the smoky tables at the Conarrf and ride along the Kings Way flying the colours of the Red Lance or Iron Hoof, with the long hair and bristling moustache of a cavalry man and a stallion between my legs. Tenth in line to a throne will get you into a not-insignificant number of bedchambers, but if a man dons the scarlet cloak of the Red March riders and wraps his legs around a destrier there are few ladies of quality who won’t open theirs when he flashes a smile at them.

At the corner of my vision the blind-eye woman moved, spoiling my daydream and putting all thoughts of riding, of either kind, from my head.

‘… burning all dead. Cremation is to be mandatory, for noble and commoner alike, and damn any dissent from Roma …’

That again. The old bird had been banging on about death rites for over a year now. As if men my age gave a fig for such things! She’d become obsessed with sailors’ tales, ghost stories from the Drowned Isles, the ramblings of muddy drunkards from the Ken Marshes. Already men went chained into the ground – good iron wasted against superstition – and now chains weren’t enough? Bodies must be burned? Well the church wouldn’t like it. It would put a crimp in their plans for Judgment Day and us all rising from the grave for a big grimy hug. But who cared? Really? I watched the early light slide across the walls high above me and tried to picture Lisa as I’d left her that morning, clad in brightness and shadow and nothing more.

The crash of the chamberlain’s staff on flagstones jerked my head back up. In fairness I’d had very little sleep the night before and a trying morning. If I hadn’t been caught a yard from my bedchamber door I would have been safely ensconced therein until well past noon, dreaming better versions of the daydream Grandmother kept interrupting.

‘Bring in the witnesses!’ The chamberlain had a voice that could make a death sentence boring.

Four guardsmen entered, flanking a Nuban warrior, scar-marked and tall, manacled wrist and ankle, the chains all threaded through an iron ring belted around his waist. That perked my interest. I misspent much of my youth gambling at the pit-fights in the Latin Quarter, and I intended to misspend much of what life remained to me there too. I’ve always enjoyed a good fight and a healthy dose of bloodshed, as long as it’s not me being pummelled or my blood getting spilled. Gordo’s pits, or the Blood Holes down by Mercants, got you close enough to wipe the occasional splatter from the toe of your boot, and offered endless opportunity for betting. Of late I’d even entered men on my own ticket. Likely lads bought off the slave boats out of Maroc. None had lasted more than two bouts yet, but even losing can pay if you know where to place your wagers. In any event, the Nuban looked like a solid bet. Perhaps he might even be the ticket that could get Maeres Allus off my back and silence his tiresome demands for payment for brandy already consumed and for whores already fucked.

A weedy half-caste with a decorative arrangement of missing teeth followed the Nuban to translate his mumbo jumbo. The chamberlain posed a question or two and the man answered with the usual nonsense about dead men rising from the Afrique sands, elaborating the tales this time to make it small legions of them. No doubt he hoped for freedom if his story proved sufficiently entertaining. He did a fine job of it, throwing in a djinn or two for good measure, though not the normal jolly fellows in satin pantaloons offering wishes. I felt tempted to applaud at the end, but Grandmother’s face suggested that might not be a wise idea.

Two more reprobates followed, each similarly chained, each with a more outrageous fable than the last. The corsair, a swarthy fellow with torn ears where the gold had been ripped from him, spun a yarn about dead ships rising, crewed by drowned men. And the Slav spoke of bone men from the barrows out in the grass sea. Ancient dead clad in pale gold and grave goods from before the Builders’ time. Neither man had much potential for the pits. The corsair looked wiry and was no doubt used to fighting in close quarters, but he’d lost fingers from both hands and age was against him. The Slav was a big fellow, but slow. Some men have a special kind of clumsiness that announces itself in every move they make. I started to dream about Lisa again. Then Lisa and Micha together. Then Lisa, Micha and Sharal. It got quite complicated. But when more guards marched in with the fourth and last of these ‘witnesses’ Grandmother suddenly had all my attention. You only had to look at the man to tell the Blood Holes wouldn’t know what had hit them. I’d found my new fighter!

The prisoner strode into the throne room with head held high. He dwarfed the four guards around him. I’ve seen taller men, though not often. I’ve seen men more heavily muscled, but seldom. I’ve even on rare occasions seen men larger in both dimensions, but this Norseman carried himself like a true warrior. I may not be much of a one for fighting, but I’ve a great eye for a fighter. He walked in like murder, and when they jerked him to a halt before the chamberlain he snarled. Snarled. I could almost count the gold crowns spilling into my hands when I got this one to the pits!

‘Snorri ver Snagason, purchased off the slave-ship Heddod.’ The chamberlain took a step back despite himself and kept his staff between them as he read from his notes. ‘Sold in trade exchange off the Hardanger Fjord.’ He traced a finger down the scroll, frowning. ‘Describe the events you recounted to our agent.’

I had no idea where the place might be, but clearly they bred men tough up in Hardanger. The slavers had hacked off most of the man’s hair, but the thick shock remaining was so black as to almost be blue. I’d thought Norsemen fair. The deep burn across his neck and shoulders showed he didn’t take well to the sun, though. Innumerable lash marks intersected the sunburn – that had to sting a bit! Still, the fight-pits were always in shadow so he’d appreciate that part of my plans for him at least.

‘Speak up, man.’ Grandmother addressed the giant directly. He’d made an impression even on her.

Snorri turned his gaze on the Red Queen and gave her the type of look that’s apt to lose men eyeballs. He had blue eyes, pale. That at least was in keeping with his heritage. That and the remnants of his furs and sealskins, and the Norse runes picked out in black ink and blue around his upper arms. Writing too, some sort of heathen script by the look of it but with the hammer and the axe in there as well.

Grandmother opened her mouth to speak again but the Norseman pre-empted her, stealing the tension for his own words.

‘I left the North from Hardanger but it is not my home. Hardanger is quiet waters, green slopes, goats and cherry orchards. The people there are not the true folk of the North.’

He spoke with a deep voice and a shallow accent, sharpening the blunt edges of each word just enough so you knew he was raised in another tongue. He addressed the whole room, though he kept his eyes on the queen. He told his story with an orator’s skill. I’ve heard tell that the winter in the North is a night that lasts three months. Such nights breed storytellers.

‘My home was in Uuliskind, at the far reach of the Bitter Ice. I tell you my story because that place and time are over and live only in memory. I would put these things into your minds, not to give them meaning or life, but to make them real to you, to let you walk among the Undoreth, the Children of the Hammer, and to have you hear of their last struggle.’

I don’t know how he did it but when he wrapped his voice around the words Snorri wove a kind of magic. It set the hairs pricking on the backs of my arms, and damned if I didn’t want to be a Viking too, swinging my axe on a longboat sailing up the Uulisk Fjord, with the spring ice crunching beneath its hull.

Every time he paused for breath the foolishness left me and I counted myself very lucky to be warm and safe in Red March, but while he spoke a Viking heart beat in every listener’s chest, even mine.

‘North of Uuliskind, past the Jarlson Uplands, the ice begins in earnest. The highest summer will drive it back a mile or three but before long you find yourself raised above the land on a blanket of ice that never melts, folded, fissured, and ancient. The Undoreth venture there only to trade with Inowen, the men who live in snow and hunt for seal on the sea-ice. The Inowen are not as other men, sewn into their sealskins and eating the fat of whales. They are … a different kind.

‘Inowen offer walrus tusks, oils sweated from blubber, the teeth of great sharks, pelts of the white bear and skins. Also ivories carved into combs and picks and into the shapes of the true spirits of the ice.’

When my grandmother interjected into the story’s flow she sounded like a screeching crow trying to overwrite a melody. Still, credit to her for finding the will to speak – I’d forgotten even that I stood in the throne room, sore-footed and yawning for my bed. Instead I was with Snorri trading shaped iron and salt for seals carved from the bones of whales.

‘Speak of the dead, Snagason. Put some fear into these idle princes,’ Grandmother told him.

I saw it then. The quickest flicker of his glance toward the blind-eye woman. I’d come to understand it was common knowledge that the Red Queen consulted with the Silent Sister. But like most such ‘common knowledge’ the recipients would be hard pressed to tell you how they came by their information, though willing to insist upon its veracity with considerable vigour. It was common knowledge, for example, that the Duke of Grast took young boys to his bed. I put that one about after he slapped me for making an improper suggestion to his sister – a buxom wench with plenty of improper suggestions of her own. The vicious slander stuck and I’ve taken great delight in defending his honour ever since against heated opposition who ‘had it from a trusted source’! It was common knowledge that the Duke of Grast sodomized small boys in the privacy of his castle, common knowledge that the Red Queen practised forbidden sorceries in her highest tower, common knowledge that the Silent Sister, a parlous witch whose hand lay behind much of the empire’s ills, was either in the Red Queen’s palm or vice versa. But until this brutish Norseman glanced her way I’d never encountered any other person who truly saw the blind-eye woman at my grandmother’s side.

Whether convinced by the Silent Sister’s pearl-eyed stare or the Red Queen’s command Snorri ver Snagason bowed his head and spoke of the dead.

‘In the Jarlson Uplands the frozen dead wander. Corpse tribes, black with frost, stagger in columns, lost in the swirl of the frostral. They say mammoth walk with them, dead beasts freed from the ice cliffs that held them far to the north from times before Odin first gave men the curse of speech. Their numbers are unknown but they are many.

‘When the gates of Niflheim open to release the winter, and the frost giants’ breath rolls out across the North, the dead come with it, taking whoever they can find to join their ranks. Sometimes lone traders, or fishermen washed up on strange shores. Sometimes they cross a fjord by ice bridges and take whole villages.’

Grandmother rose from her throne and a score of gauntleted hands moved to cover sword hilts. She cast a sour glance toward her offspring. ‘And how do you come to stand before me in chains, Snorri ver Snagason?’

‘We thought the threat came from the north: from the Uplands and the Bitter Ice.’ He shook his head. ‘When ships came up the Uulisk in depths of night, black-sailed and silent, we slept, our sentries watching north for the frozen dead. Raiders had crossed the Quiet Sea and come against the Undoreth. Men of the Drowned Isles broke amongst us. Some living, others corpses preserved from rot, and other creatures still – half-men from the Brettan swamps, corpse-eaters, ghouls with venomed darts that steal a man’s strength and leave him helpless as a newborn.

‘Sven Broke-Oar guided their ships. Sven and others of the Hardassa. Without their treachery the Islanders would never have been able to navigate the Uulisk by night. Even by day they would have lost ships.’ Snorri’s hands closed into huge fists and muscle heaped across his shoulders, twitching for violence. ‘The Broke-Oar took twenty warriors in chains as part of his payment. He sold us in Hardanger Fjord. The trader, a merchant of the Port Kingdoms, meant to have us sold again in Afrique after we’d rowed his cargo south. Your agent bought me in Kordoba, in the port of Albus.’

Grandmother must have been hunting far and wide for these tales – Red March had no tradition of slavery and I knew she didn’t approve of the trade.

‘And the rest?’ Grandmother asked, stepping past him, beyond arms’ reach, seemingly angled toward me. ‘Those not taken by your countryman?’

Snorri stared into the empty throne, then directly at the blind-eye woman. He spoke past gritted teeth. ‘Many were killed. I lay poisoned and saw ghouls swarm my wife. I saw Drowned men chase my children and couldn’t turn my head to watch their flight. The Islanders returned to their ships with red swords. Prisoners were taken.’ He paused, frowned, shook his head. ‘Sven Broke-Oar told me … tales. The truth would twist the Broke-Oar’s tongue … but he said the Islanders planned to take prisoners to excavate the Bitter Ice. Olaaf Rikeson’s army is out there. The Broke-Oar told it that the Islanders had been sent to free them.’

‘An army?’ Grandmother stood almost close enough to touch now. A monster of a woman, taller than me – and I overtop six foot – and probably strong enough to break me across her knee. ‘Who is this Rikeson?’

The Norseman raised an eyebrow at that, as if every monarch should know the tawdry history of his frozen wastes. ‘Olaaf Rikeson marched north in the first summer of the reign of Emperor Orrin III. The sagas have it that he planned to drive the giants from Jotenheim and bore with him the key to their gates. More sober histories say perhaps his goal was just to bring the Inowen into the empire. Whatever the truth, the records agree he took a thousand and more with him, perhaps ten thousand.’ Snorri shrugged and turned from the Silent Sister to face Grandmother. Braver than me – though that’s not saying much – I’d not turn my back on that creature. ‘Rikeson thought he marched with Odin’s blessing but the giants’ breath rolled down even so, and one summer’s day every warrior in his army froze where he stood and the snows drowned them.

‘The Broke-Oar has it that those taken from Uuliskind are excavating the dead. Freeing them from the ice.’

Grandmother paced along the front line of our number. Martus, little me, Darin, Cousin Roland with his stupid beard, Rotus, lean and sour, unmarried at thirty, duller than ditchwater, obsessed with reading – and histories at that! She paused by Rotus, another of her favourites and third in line by right – though still it seemed she would give her throne to Cousin Serah before him. ‘And why, Snagason? Who has sent these forces on such an errand?’ She met Rotus’s gaze as if he of all of us would appreciate the answer.

The giant paused. It’s hard for a Norseman to pale but I swear he did. ‘The Dead King, lady.’

A guard made to strike him down, though whether for the improper address or for making mock with foolish tales I couldn’t say. Grandmother stayed the man with a lifted finger. ‘The Dead King.’ She made a slow repetition of the words as if they somehow sealed her opinion. Perhaps she’d mentioned him before when I wasn’t listening.

I’d heard tales of course. Children had started to tell them to scare each other on Hallows Night. The Dead King will come for you! Woo, woo, woo. It took a child to be scared. Anyone with a proper idea of how far away the Drowned Isles were and of how many kingdoms lay between us would have a hard time caring. Even if the stories held a core of truth I couldn’t see any serious-minded gentleman getting overly excited about a bunch of heathen necromancers playing with old corpses on whatever wet hillocks remained to the Lords of the Isles. So what if they actually did raise a hundred dead men twitching from their coffins and dropping corpse-flesh with every step? Ten heavy horse would ride down any such in half an hour without loss and damn their rotting eyes.

I felt tired and out of sorts, grumpy that I’d had to stand half the morning and more listening to this parade of nonsense. If I’d been drunk too I might have given voice to my thoughts. It’s probably a good job I wasn’t, though – the Red Queen could scare me sober with a look.

Grandmother turned and pointed at the Norseman. ‘Well told, Snorri ver Snagason. Let your axe guide you.’ I blinked at that. Some sort of northern saying, I guessed. ‘Take him away,’ she said, and her guards led him off, chains clanking.

My fellow princes fell to muttering, and me to yawning. I watched the huge Norseman leave and hoped we’d be released soon. Despite the call of my bed I had important plans for Snorri ver Snagason and needed to get hold of him quickly.

Grandmother returned to her throne and held her peace until the doors had closed behind the last prisoner to exit.

‘Did you know there is a door into death?’ The Red Queen didn’t raise her voice and yet it cut through the princes’ chatter. ‘An actual door. One you can set your hand against. And behind it, all the lands of death.’ Her gaze swept across us. ‘There’s an important question you should ask me now.’

No one spoke – I hadn’t a clue but was tempted to answer anyway just to hurry things along. I decided against it and the silence stretched until Rotus cleared his throat at last and asked, ‘Where?’

‘Wrong.’ Grandmother cocked her head. ‘The question was “why?” Why is there a door into death? The answer is as important as anything you’ve heard today.’ Her stare fell upon me and I quickly turned my attention to the state of my fingernails. ‘There is a door into death because we live in an age of myth. Our ancestors lived in a world of immutable laws. Times have changed. There is a door because there are tales of that door, because myths and legends have grown about it over centuries, because it is set in holy books, and because the stories of that door are told and retold. There is a door because in some way we wanted it, or expected it, or both. This is why. And this is why you must believe the tales that have been told today. The world is changing, moving beneath our feet. We are in a war, children of the Red March, though you may not see it yet, may not feel it. We are in a war against everything you can imagine and armed only with our desire to oppose it.’

Nonsense of course. Red March’s only recent war was against Scorron and even that had fallen into an uneasy truce this past year … Grandmother must have sensed she was losing even the most gullible of her audience and switched tactics.

‘Rotus asked “where”, but I know where the door is. And I know that it cannot be opened.’ She stood from her throne again. ‘And what does a door demand?’

‘A key?’ Serah, ever eager to please.

‘Yes. A key.’ A smile for her protégée. ‘Such a key would be sought by many. A dangerous thing, but better we should own it than our enemies. I will have tasks for you all soon, quests for some, questions for others, new lessons for others still. Be sure to commit yourselves to these labours as to nothing before. In this you will serve me, you will serve yourselves, and most importantly – you will serve the empire.’

Exchanged glances, muttering, ‘Where was Red March in all that?’ Martus perhaps.

‘Enough!’ Grandmother clapped her hands, releasing us. ‘Go. Scurry back to your empty luxuries and enjoy them while you can. Or – if my blood runs hot in you – consider these words and act on them. These are the end days. All our lives draw in toward a single point and time, not too many miles or years from this room. A point in history when the emperor will either save us or damn us. All we can do is buy him the time he needs – and the price must be paid in blood.’

At last! I hurried out among the others, catching up with Serah. ‘Well that settles it! The old bat’s cracked. The emperor!’ I laughed and flashed her my cavalry grin. ‘Even Grandmother isn’t old enough to have seen the last emperor?’

Serah fixed me with a look of disgust. ‘Did you listen to anything she said?’ And off she strode, leaving me standing there, jostled by Martus and Darin as they passed by.

4

From the throne room I sprinted down the grand corridor, turning left where all my family turned right. Armour, statuary, portraits, displays of fanned-out swords, all of them flashed past. My day boots pounded a hundred yards of staggeringly expensive woven rug, luxuriant silks patterned in the Indus style. I turned the corner at the far end, teetering on the edge of control, dodged two maids, and ran flat out along the central corridor of the guest range where scores of rooms were laid ready against the possibility of visiting nobility.

‘Out the fucking way!’ Some old retainer doddered from a doorway into my path. One of my father’s – Robbin, a grey old cripple always limping about the place getting underfoot. I swerved past him, Lord knows why we keep such hangers-on, and accelerated down the hallway.

Twice guardsmen startled from their alcoves, one even calling a challenge before deciding I was more ass than assassin. Two doors short of the corridor’s end I stopped and made an entrance to the Green Room, gambling that it would be unoccupied. The room, chambered in rustic style with a four-poster bed carved like spreading oaks, lay empty and shrouded in white linens. I passed the bed, wherein I’d once spent several pleasant nights in the company of a dusky contessa from the southernmost reaches of Roma, and threw back the shutters. Through the window, onto the balcony, vault the balustrade and drop to the peaked roof of the royal stables, an edifice that would put to shame any mansion on the Kings Way.

Now, I know how to fall, but the drop from the stables roof would kill a Chinee acrobat and so the speed with which I ran along the stone gutter was a careful balance between my desire not to fall to my death and my desire to not be stabbed to my death by Maeres Allus or one of his enforcers. The giant Norseman could bludgeon me a way out of debt altogether if I managed to secure his services and make the right wagers. Hell, if people saw what I saw in the man and wouldn’t give me good odds then I could just slip him some bonewort and bet against him.

At the far end of the stables hall two Corinthian pillars supported ancient vines, or vice versa. Either way a good, or desperate, climber could make his way to ground there. I slid the last ten foot, bruised my heel, bit my tongue, and ran off toward the Battle Gate spitting blood.

I arrived there winded and had to bend double, palms on thighs, heaving in great lungfuls of air before I could assess the situation.

Two guards watched me with undisguised curiosity. An old soak commonly known as Double, and a youngster I didn’t recognize.

‘Double!’ I straightened up and raised a hand in greeting. ‘What dungeon are the queen’s prisoners being taken to?’ It would be the war cells up in the Marsail keep. They might be slaves but you wouldn’t put the Norseman in with common stock. I asked anyway. It’s always good to open with an easy question to put your man at ease.

‘Ain’t no cells for them lot.’ Double made to spit then thought better of it and swallowed noisily.

‘Wh—?’ She couldn’t be having them killed! It would be a criminal waste.

‘They’s going free. Tha’s what I heard.’ Double shook his head at the badness of the business, jowls wobbling. ‘Contaph’s coming up to process them.’ He nodded out across the plaza and sure enough there was Contaph, layered in his official robes and beetling toward us with the sort of self-importance that only minor functionaries can muster. From the high latticed windows above the Battle Gate I could hear the distant clank of chains, drawing nearer.

‘Damn it.’ I glanced from door to sub-chamberlain and back again. ‘Hold them here, Double,’ I told him. ‘Don’t tell them anything. Not a thing. I’ll see you right. Your friend too.’ And with that I hurried off to intercept Ameral Contaph of House Mecer.

We met in the middle of the plaza where an ancient sundial spelled out the time with morning shadows. Already the flagstones were beginning to heat up and the day’s promise simmered above the rooftops. ‘Ameral!’ I threw my hands wide as though he were an old friend.

‘Prince Jalan.’ He ducked his head as if seeking to take me from his sight. I could forgive him his suspicions, as a child I used to hide scorpions in his pockets.

‘Those slaves that put on this morning’s entertainment in the throne room … what’s to become of them, Ameral?’ I moved to intercept him while he tried to circumnavigate me, his order-scroll clutched tight in one pudgy fist.

‘I’m to set them on a caravan for Port Ismuth with papers dissolving any indenture.’ He stopped trying to get past me and sighed. ‘What is it that you want, Prince Jalan?’

‘Only the Norseman.’ I gave him a smile and a wink. ‘He’s too dangerous to just set free. That should have been obvious to everyone. In any event Grandmother sent me to take charge of him.’

Contaph looked up at me, eyes narrow with distrust. ‘I’ve had no such instructions.’

I have, I must confess, a very honest face. Bluff and courageous it’s been called. I’m easy to mistake for a hero and with a little effort I can convince even the most cynical stranger of my sincerity. With people who know me that trick becomes more difficult. Much more difficult.

‘Walk with me.’ I set a hand to his shoulder and steered him toward the Battle Gate. It’s good to steer a man in the direction they intended to go. It blurs the line between what he wants and what you want.

‘In truth the Red Queen gave me a scroll with the order. A hasty scrawl on a scrap of parchment really. And to my shame I’ve let it drop in my rush to get here.’ I took my hand from his shoulder and unfastened the gold chain from around my wrist, a thing of heavy links set with a small ruby on both clasps. ‘It would be deeply embarrassing for me to have to return and admit the loss to my grandmother. A friend would understand such things.’ I took to steering him again as if my only desire were for him to reach his destination safely. The chain I dangled before him. ‘You are my friend aren’t you, Ameral?’ Rather than drop the chain into a pocket of his robe and risk reminding him of scorpions I pressed it into the midst of his sweaty palm and risked him realizing it was red glass and gold plated over lead, and thinly at that. Anything of true value I’d long since pawned against the interest on my debts.

‘You’ll retrace your steps and find this document?’ Contaph asked, pausing to stare at the chain in his hand. ‘And bring it for filing before sunset.’

‘Assuredly.’ I oozed sincerity. Any more and it would be dripping from me.

‘He is dangerous, this Norseman.’ Contaph nodded as if persuading himself. ‘A heathen with false gods. I was surprised, I must admit, to see freedom set against his name.’

‘An oversight.’ I nodded. ‘Now corrected.’ Ahead of us Double appeared to be engaged in heated conversation through the view grille set into the Battle Gate’s sub-door. ‘You may allow the prisoners out,’ I called to him. ‘We’re ready for them now!’

‘You’re looking uncommonly pleased with yourself.’ Darin strolled into the High Hall, a dining gallery named for its elevation rather than the height of its ceiling. I like to eat there for the view it offers, both out across the palace compound and, via slit windows, into the great entrance hall of my father’s house.

‘Pheasant, pickled trout, hen’s eggs.’ I gestured at the silver plates set before me on the long trestle. ‘What’s not to be pleased about? Help yourself.’ Darin is self-righteous and overly curious about my doings, but not the royal pain in the arse that Martus is, so by dint of not being Martus he carries the title of ‘favourite brother’.

‘The domo reports dishes keep going missing from the kitchens of late.’ Darin took an egg and sat at the far end of the table with it.

‘Curious.’ That would be Jula, our sharp-eyed head cook, telling tales to the house domo, though how such whispers came to Darin’s ear … ‘I’d have a few of the scullions beaten. Soon put a stop to it.’

‘On what evidence?’ He salted the egg and bit deep.

‘Evidence be damned! Bloody up a few of the menials, put the fear into the lot of them. That’ll put an end to it. That’s what Grandmother would do. Light fingers get broken, she’d say.’ I went for honest outrage, using my own discomfort to colour my reactions. No more selling off the family silver for Jal then … that line of credit had come to an end. Still, I had the Norseman safely stowed away in the Marsail keep. I could see the keep from where I sat, a slouching edifice of stone more ancient than any part of the palace, scarred and disfigured but stubbornly resisting the plans of a dozen former kings to tear it down. A ring of tiny windows, heavily barred, ran around its girth like a belt. Snorri ver Snagason would be looking up at one of those from the floor of his cell. I’d told them to give him red meat, rare and bloody. Fighters thrive on blood.

For the longest time I stared out the window, watching the keep and the vast landscape of the heavens behind it, a sky of white and blue, all in motion so that the keep seemed to move and the clouds stay still, making a ship of all that stone, ploughing on through white waves.

‘What did you think of all that rubbish this morning?’ I asked the question without expecting an answer, sure that Darin had taken his leave.

‘I think if Grandmother is worried we should be too,’ Darin said.

‘A door into death? Corpses? Necromancy?’ I sucked and the flesh came easily off a pheasant’s bone. ‘Am I to fear this?’ I tapped the bone to the table, looked away from the window and grinned at him. ‘Is it going to pursue me for vengeance?’ I made it walk.

‘You heard those men—’

‘Have you ever seen a dead man walk? Forget distant deserts and ice wastes. Here in Red March has anyone ever seen such?’

Darin shrugged. ‘Grandmother says at least one unborn has entered the city. That’s something to be taken seriously.’

‘A what?’

‘Jesu! Did you really not listen to a word she said? She is the queen you know. You’d do well to pay attention from time to time.’

‘An unborn?’ The term rang no bells. It didn’t even approach the belfry.

‘Something born into death rather than life, remember?’ Darin shook his head at my blank look. ‘Forget it! Just listen now. Father expects you at this opera of his tonight. No showing up late, or drunk, or both. No pretending nobody told you.’

‘Opera? Dear God why?’ That was the last thing I needed. A bunch of fat and painted idiots wailing at me from a stage for several hours.

‘Just be there. A cardinal is expected to finance such projects from time to time. And when he does his family had better put in an appearance or the chattering classes will want to know why.’

I had opened my mouth to protest when it occurred to me that the DeVeer sisters would be among those chattering classes. Phenella Maitus too, the newly arrived and allegedly stunning daughter of Ortus Maitus whose pockets ran so deep it might even be worth a marriage contract to reach into them. And of course if I could have Snorri make his debut in the pits before the show started then I would likely find no end of aristocratic and mercantile purses opening in the opera intermissions to wager on this exciting new blood. If there’s one good thing to be said about opera it’s that it makes a man appreciate all other forms of entertainment so much more. I closed my mouth and nodded. Darin left, still munching his egg.

The appetite had left me. I pushed the plate away. Idle fingers discovered my old locket beneath the folds of my cloak and I fished it out, tapping it against the table. A cheap enough thing of plate and glass, it clicked open to reveal Mother’s portrait. I snapped it shut again. She last saw me when I was seven: a flux took her. They call it a flux. It’s just the shits really. You weaken, fever takes you, you die stinking. Not the way a princess is supposed to die, or a mother. I slipped the locket away unopened. Best she remember me as seven and not see me now.

Before leaving the palace I picked up my escort, the two elderly guardsmen allotted to the task of preserving my royal hide by my father’s generosity. With the pair in tow I swung by the Red Hall and collected a handful of my usual cronies. Roust and Lon Greyjar, cousins of the Prince of Arrow, sent to ‘further relations’, which seemed to entail eating all our best vittles and chasing chamber maids. Also Omar, seventh son of the Caliph of Liba and a fine fellow for gambling. I’d met him during my brief and inglorious spell at the Mathema and he’d persuaded the caliph to send him to the continent to broaden his education! With Omar and the Greyjars I headed up to the guest range, that wing of the Inner Palace where more important dignitaries were housed and where Barras Jon’s father, the Vyene ambassador to court, kept a suite of rooms. We had a servant fetch out Barras and he came sharp enough, with Rollas his companion-come-bodyguard trailing behind.

‘What a perfect night to get drunk on!’ Barras saluted me as he came down the steps. He always said it was a perfect night to get drunk.

‘For that we’d need wine!’ I spread my hands.

Barras stepped aside to reveal Rollas behind him carrying a large flask. ‘Big goings-on in court today.’

‘A meeting of the clan,’ I said. Barras never stopped fishing for court news. I had a hunch half of his allowance depended on feeding gossip to his father.

‘The Lady Blue playing her games again?’ He flung an arm around my shoulders and steered me toward the Common Gate. With Barras everything was a plot of nation against nation or worse, a conspiracy to undermine what peace remained in the Broken Empire.

‘Damned if I know.’ Now he mentioned it there had been talk of the Lady Blue. Barras always insisted that my grandmother and this purported sorceress were fighting their own private war and had been for decades – if true then to my mind it was a piss-poor excuse for one as I’d seen precious little sign of it. Tales about the Lady Blue seemed as doubtful as those about the handful of so-called magicians who seemed to haunt the western courts. Kelem, Corion, half a dozen others: charlatans the lot of them. Only the existence of Grandmother’s Silent Sister lent any credence at all to the rumours … ‘Last I heard our friend in blue was flitting from one Teuton court to the next. Probably been hung for a witch by now.’

Barras grunted. ‘Let’s hope so. Let’s hope she’s not back in Scorron stirring up that little war again.’

I could agree with him there. Barras’s father negotiated the peace and treated it like his second son. I’d rather a close relative came to harm than that particular peace deal. Nothing would induce me back into the mountains to fight the Scorrons.

We left the palace by the Victory Gate in fine spirits, passing our flask of Wennith red between us while I explained the virtues of wooing sisters.

As we entered Heroes’ Plaza the wine turned to vinegar in my mouth. I half-choked and dropped the flask.

‘There! Do you see her?’ Coughing, wiping tears from my eyes, I forgot my own rule and pointed at the blind-eye woman. She stood at the base of a great statue, The Last Steward, sombre on his petty throne.

‘Steady on!’ Roust thumped me between the shoulders.

‘See who?’ Omar asked, staring where I pointed. Dressed in tatters, she might in another glance be nothing more than rags hanging on a dead bush. Perhaps that’s what Omar saw.

‘Nearly lost this!’ Barras retrieved the flask, safe in its reed casing. ‘Come to papa! I’ll be looking after you from now on, little one!’ And he cradled it like a baby.

None of them saw her. She watched a moment longer, the blind-eye burning across me, then turned and walked away through the crowds flowing toward Trent Market. Jostled into action by the others I walked on too, haunted by old fears.

We approached the Blood Holes in the early afternoon, me sweating and nervous, and not just because of the unseasonal heat or the fact that my financial future was about to ride on two very broad shoulders. The Silent Sister always unsettled me and I’d seen entirely too much of her today. I kept glancing about, half-expecting to spot her again along the crowded streets.

‘Let’s see this monster of yours!’ Lon Greyjar slapped a hand to my shoulder, shaking me out of my rememberings and alerting me to the fact we’d arrived at the Blood Holes. I made a smile for him and promised myself I’d fleece the little fucker down to his last crown. He had an annoying way about him did Lon, too chummy, too keen to lay hands on you, and always snipping away at anything you said as if he doubted everything, even the boots you were standing in. Fair enough, I lie a lot, but that doesn’t mean cousins of some minor princeling can take liberties.

I paused before approaching the doors and stepped back, casting my gaze along the outer walls. The place had been a slaughterhouse once, though a grand one, as if the king back in those days had wanted even his cattle murdered in buildings that would shame the homes of his copper-crown rivals.

On the only other occasion I’d seen the blind-eye woman outside the throne room she had been on the Street of Nails up close to one of the larger manses toward the western end. I’d come out of some ambassador’s ballroom with an enticing young woman, got my face slapped for my efforts, and was cooling off, watching the street before going back in. I had been wiggling one of my teeth to check the damned girl hadn’t knocked it loose when I saw the Silent Sister across the broadness of the street. She stood there, bolder than brass, a bucket in one white hand and a horsehair brush in the other, painting symbols on the walls of the manse. Not the garden walls facing the street but the walls of the building itself, seemingly unnoticed by guard or dog. I watched her, growing colder by the moment as if a crack had run through the night letting all the heat spill out of it. She showed no sign of hurry, painting one symbol, moving on to the next. In the moonlight it looked like blood she was painting with, broad dark strokes, each running with countless dribbles, and coming together to make sigils that seemed to twist the night around them. She was encircling the building, throwing a painted noose about it, patient, slow, relentless. I ran back in then, far more scared of that old woman and her bucket of blood than of the young Countess Loren, her over-quick hand, and whatever brothers she might set upon me to defend her honour. The joy of the night was gone though and I left for home quick enough.

A day later I heard report of a terrible fire on the Street of Nails. A house burned to ash with not a single survivor. Even today the site lies vacant, with nobody willing to build there again.

The walls of the Blood Holes were blessedly free of any decoration save perhaps the scratched names of temporary lovers here and there where a buttress provided shelter for such work. I cursed myself for a fool and led on through the doors.

The Terrif brothers who ran the Blood Holes had sent a wagon to collect Snorri from the Marsail keep earlier in the day. I’d been particular in the message I dispatched, warning them to take considerable care with the man and demanding assurances of a thousand in crown gold if they failed to ensure his attendance in the Crimson Pit for the first bout.

Flanked by my entourage I strode into the Blood Holes, enveloped immediately in the sweat and smoke and stink and din of the place. Damn but I loved it there. Silk-clad nobles strolled around the fight floor, each an island of colour and sophistication, close pressed by companions, then a ragged halo of hangers on, hawkers, beer-men, poppy-men and brazens, and at the periphery, urchins ready to scurry between one gentleman and the next bearing messages by mouth or hand. The bet-takers, each sanctioned and approved by the Terrifs, stood at their stalls around the edge of the hall, odds listed in chalk, boys ready to collect or deliver at the run.

The four main pits lay at the vertices of a great diamond, red-tiled into the floor. Scarlet, Umber, Ochre, and Crimson. All of a likeness, twenty-foot deep, twenty-foot across, but with Crimson first among equals. The nobility wound their way between these and the lesser pits, peering down, discussing the fighters on display, the odds on offer. A sturdy wooden rail surrounded each pit, set into a timber apron that overlapped the stonework, reaching a yard down into the depression. I led the way to Crimson and leaned over, the rail hard against my midriff. Snorri ver Snagason glowered up at me.

‘Fresh meat here!’ I raised my hand, still staring down at my meal ticket. ‘Who’ll take a cut!’

Two small olive hands slid out over the rail beside me. ‘I believe I will. I feel you owe me a cut, or two, Prince Jalan.’

Aw hell. ‘Maeres, how good to see you.’ To my credit I kept the blind terror from my reply and didn’t soil myself. Maeres Allus had the calm and reasonable voice that a scribe or tutor should have. The fact that he liked to watch when his collectors cut the lips off a man turned that reasonable tone from a comfort to a horror.

‘He’s a big fellow,’ Maeres said.

‘Yes.’ I glanced around wildly for my friends. All of them, even the two old veterans picked specially by my father to guard me, had slunk off toward Umber without a word and let Maeres Allus slide up beside me unannounced. Only Omar had the grace to look guilty.

‘How would he fare against Lord Gren’s man, Norras, do you think?’ Maeres asked.

Norras was a skilled pugilist but I thought Snorri would pound the man flat. I could see Gren’s fighter now, standing behind the barred gate opposite the one that Snorri had come through.

‘Shouldn’t we call the fight? Get the odds set?’ I shot Barras Jon a look and called out to him, ‘Norras against my fresh meat? What numbers there?’

Maeres set a soft hand to my arm. ‘Time enough for wagering when the man’s been tested, no?’

‘B-but he might come to harm,’ I flustered. ‘I plan to make good coin here, Maeres, pay you back with interest.’ My finger ached. The one Maeres had broken when I came up short two months back.

‘Indulge me,’ he said. ‘That will be my interest. I’ll cover any losses. A man like that … he might be worth three hundred crowns.’

I saw his game then. Three hundred was just half what I owed him. The bastard meant to see Snorri die and keep a royal prince on his leash. There didn’t seem to be a way past it though. You don’t argue with Maeres Allus, certainly not in his cousins’ fight hall and owing him the best part of a thousand in gold. Maeres knew how far he could push me, minor princeling or not. He’d seen past my bluster to what lies beneath. You don’t get to head an organization like Maeres’s without being a good judge of men.

‘Three hundred if he’s not fit to fight wagered bouts tonight?’ I could slip back after Father’s ridiculous opera and buy into the serious fights. This afternoon’s exercise had only ever been intended to whet appetites and stir up interest.

Maeres didn’t answer, only clapped his soft hands and had the pit-guards raise the opposite gate. At the sound of iron grating on stone and chains ratcheting through their housings the crowds came to the rail, drawn by the pull of the pit.

‘He’s huge!’

‘Handsome fella!’

‘Norras will ugly him up.’

‘Knows his stuff does Norras.’

The beefy Teuton came out of the archway, rolling his bald head on a thick neck.

‘Fists only, Norseman,’ Maeres called down. ‘The only way out of that pit for you is to follow the rules.’

Norras raised both hands and balled them into fists as if to instruct the heathen. He closed the distance between them, swift on his feet, jerking his head in sharp stutters designed to fool the eye and tempt an ill-advised swing. He looked rather like a chicken to me, bobbing his head like that, fists at his face, elbows out like little wings. A big muscular hen.

Snorri clearly had the reach so Norras came in fast. He ducks his head, does Norras – takes punches on his skull. That’s what I was going to say. I’d seen men hurt their hands on the Teuton’s thick and bony head before. I didn’t have time to get the words out. Norras jabbed and Snorri caught the man’s fist in the flat of his palm, closing his fingers to trap it. He yanked Norras forward, punching with his other arm, brushing aside the wild swing of the Teuton’s left with his elbow. The Norseman’s huge fist hammered into Norras’s face, knuckles impacting from chin to nose. The man flew back a yard or more, hitting the floor with a boneless thump, blood spattered his upturned face, mixed with teeth and muck from his flattened snout.

A moment of silence then a roar went up that hurt my ears. Half delight, half outrage. Betting parchments flew, coins changed hands, all informal wagers made in the moment.

‘An impressive specimen,’ Maeres said without passion. He watched while two pitmen dragged Norras away through the double-chambered exit valve. Snorri let them do their work. I could see he’d calculated his chances of escape and found them to be zero. The second iron gate could be raised only from the outside and then only when the first had been lowered.

‘Send in Ootana.’ Maeres never raised his voice but was always heard amid the din. He offered me a thin smile.

‘No!’ I strangled back the outrage, remembering that I had seen lipless men even in the palace. Maeres Allus had a long arm. ‘Maeres, my friend, you can’t be serious?’ Ootana was a specialist with countless knife-bouts notched onto his belt. He’d sliced open half a dozen good knifemen this year already. ‘At least let my fighter train with the hook-knife for a few weeks! He’s from the ice. If it’s not an axe they don’t understand it.’ I tried for humour but Ootana already waited behind the gate, a loose-limbed devil from the farthest shores of Afrique.

‘Fight.’ Maeres raised his hand.

‘But—’ Snorri hadn’t even been given his weapon. It was murder, pure and simple. A public lesson to put a prince firmly in his place. The public didn’t have to like it though! Boos rang out when Ootana stepped into the pit, his hooked blade held carelessly to the side. The nobles hooted as if we were watching mummers in the square. They might hoot again tonight with equal passion if Father’s opera contained a suitably villainous party.

Snorri glanced up at us. I swear he was grinning. ‘No rules now?’

Ootana began a slow advance, passing his knife from hand to hand. Snorri spread his arms, not fully but enough to make a wide man wider still in that confined space, and with a roar that drowned out the many voices above, he charged. Ootana jigged to one side, intending to slash and dodge clear, but the Norseman came too fast, swerved to compensate, and reached with arms every bit as long as the Afriqan’s. At the last Ootana could do no more than attempt the killing blow, nothing else would save him from Snorri’s grapple. The exchange was lost in the collision. Snorri pounded into his man, driving him back a yard and slamming him into the pit wall. He held there for a heartbeat, perhaps a word passed between them, then stepped away. Ootana slid to a crumpled heap at the base of the wall, white fragments of bone showing through dark skin at the back of his head.

Snorri turned to us, shot an unreadable glance my way, then looked down to inspect the hook-knife driven through his hand, hilt hard against his palm. The sacrifice he’d made to keep the blade from his throat.

‘The bear.’ Maeres said it more quietly than ever into the noise of the erupting crowd. I’d never seen him angry, few men had, but I could see it now in the thinness of his lips and the paling of his skin.

‘Bear?’ Why not just shoot him with crossbows from the rail and be done! I’d seen a Blood Holes’ bear once before, a black beast from the western forests. They set it against a Conaught man with spear and net. It wasn’t any bigger than him but the spear just made it angry and when it got in close it was all over. It doesn’t matter how much muscle a man may carry, a bear’s strength is a different thing and makes any warrior seem weak as a child.

It took them a while to produce the bear. This clearly hadn’t been part of the plan that involved Norras and Ootana. Snorri simply stood where he was, holding his injured hand high above his head and gripping the wrist with his other hand. He left the hook-knife where it was, embedded in his palm.

The fury the crowd had shown at Ootana’s entrance flared to new heights when the bear approached the gate, but Snorri’s booming laugh silenced them.

‘Call that a bear?’ He lowered his arms and thumped his chest. ‘I am of the Undoreth, The Children of the Hammer. The blood of Odin runs in our veins. Storm-born we!’ He pointed up at Maeres with his transfixed hand, dripping crimson, knowing his tormentor. ‘I am Snorri, Son of the Axe. I have fought trolls! You have a bigger bear. I saw it back in the cells. Send that one.’

‘Bigger bear!’ Roust Greyjar shouted out behind me, and his fool brother took up the chant. ‘Bigger bear!’ Within moments they were all baying it and the old slaughterhouse pulsed with the demand.

Maeres said nothing, only nodded.

‘Bigger bear!’ The crowd roared it time and again until at last the bigger bear arrived and awed them to silence.

Where Maeres had procured the beast I couldn’t say but it must have cost him a fortune. The creature was simply the biggest thing I’d ever seen. Dwarfing the black bears of the Teuton forests, overtopping even the grizzled bears from beyond the Slav lands. Even slouched behind the gate in its off-white pelt it stood nine foot and more, and heavy with muscle beneath fur and fat. The crowd drew breath and howled its delight and its horror, ecstatic at the prospect of death and gore, outraged at the unfairness of the killing to come.

As the gate lifted, and the bear snarled and went to all fours behind it, Snorri took hold of the hook-knife and pulled it free, making that curious turn of the blade at the last moment necessary to prevent the wound from becoming larger still. He bunched the injured hand into a scarlet fist and took the blade in an overhand grip in the other.

The bear, clearly some arctic breed, came in unhurriedly on all fours, swinging its head from side to side in great sweeps, drawing in the stink of men and blood. Snorri charged, stamping his great feet, arms wide, roaring that deafening challenge of his. He drew up short but it was enough to make the bear rear, returning the challenge with a snarl that nearly unloosed my waters even behind the safety of the rail. The bear stood ten foot, forelegs lifted, its black claws longer than fingers. Snorri’s knife, crimson with his own blood, looked a sorry little thing. It would hardly penetrate the bear’s fat. It would take a longsword to reach its vitals.

The Norseman shouted out some curse in his heathen tongue and flung out his wounded hand, holding it wide, splattering blood across the bear’s chest, a pattern of red on white. ‘Madness!’ Even I knew not to let a wild thing see that you’re wounded.

The bear, more curious than enraged, bent down, folding up to sniff and lick at its bloody fur. And at that instant Snorri charged. For a moment I wondered if he could actually kill the thing. If by some miracle of war he could drive his blade just so into its spine while its head was down. All of us drew a single breath. Snorri leapt. He set his injured hand flat to the top of the bear’s head and like some court tumbler vaulted onto its shoulders, crouching. Roaring outrage, the bear snapped erect, reaching for the annoyance, powering up to its full height as if Snorri were a child and it the father carrying him aback. As the bear straightened Snorri straightened too, leaping upwards with their combined thrust and reaching high with his knife-hand. He drove the blade into the wooden skirts of the rail some twenty feet above the floor of the pit. He pulled, reached, swung, and in a broken second he was amongst us.

Snorri ver Snagason surged through the highborn crowd, trampling full-grown men underfoot. Somewhere in those first few steps he found a new knife. He left a trail of flattened and bleeding citizens, using his blade only three times when members of the Terrif pit team made more earnest efforts to stop him. Those he left gutted, one with his head nearly taken off. He was out into the street before half the crowd even knew what had happened.

I leaned over the rail. The hall was in chaos, everywhere men were finding their courage and starting to give chase now that their quarry was long gone. The bear had returned to sniffing the pit floor, licking blood from the flagstones, the red print of Snorri’s hand stark across the back of its head.

Maeres had vanished. He had a way for coming and going, that one. I shrugged. The Norseman was clearly too dangerous to keep. He would have been the death of me, one way or another. At least this way I’d put a three hundred crown dent in my debt to Maeres Allus. It would keep him off my back for a good three months, maybe six. And a lot can happen in six months. Six months is an eternity.

5

Opera! There’s nothing like it. Except wild boars rutting.

The only good thing about Father’s interminable opera was the venue, a fine domed building in Vermillion’s eastern quarter where a preponderance of Florentine bankers and Milano merchants gave the city a very different flavour. For the first hour I gazed up at the nymphs cavorting nude across the dome, somehow painted so that the curved surface presented them without distortion. As much as I admired the artist’s eye for detail I found the scene frequently interrupted by flashes of imagery from the Blood Holes. Snorri felling Norras with what must have been a fatal punch. Ootana falling forward from the pit wall, the back of his head broken open. That leap. That spectacular, impossible, insane leap! On stage a soprano soared through an aria as I replayed the Norseman launching himself to freedom.

In the intermission I searched for familiar faces. I had come late to the showing and had shuffled my way noisily to a seat blocking everyone’s view. In the dim light and separated from my more punctual companions I had to settle for sitting among strangers. Now under the lanterns of the intermisso hall and plucking glasses of wine from every passing tray, I found that despite my brother Darin’s dire warnings the opening night was surprisingly poorly attended. It seemed that Father himself had failed to arrive. Taken to his bed, the gossip had it. He was never a music lover but the Vatican’s coffers had financed this tripe of angels and devils wailing one against the other, fat men sweltering under wings of wax and feathers whilst belting out the chorus. The least their most senior local representative could do was attend and suffer with the rest of us. Damn it all, I couldn’t even spot Martus, or fucking Darin.

I jostled past a man in a white enamel mask, as though he were attending a masquerade rather than an opera. Or at least I attempted to jostle past, failed, and bounced off him as if he were cast from iron. I turned, rubbing my shoulder. Something in the eyes watching from those slits swept away in a cold wash of fear any inclination I had to complain. I let the press of people separate us. Had it even been a man? The eyes haunted me. The irises white, the whites grey. My shoulder ached as though infection ate at the bone … Unborn. Darin had said something about an unborn in the city …

‘Prince Jalan!’ Ameral Contaph hailed me with irritating familiarity, puffed up in ridiculous finery no doubt purchased for just this occasion. They must have been desperate to fill the seats if toadies of Contaph’s water were invited to the premiere. ‘Prince Jalan!’ The flow of the crowd somehow pulled us further apart and I affected not to see him. The fellow was probably just pursuing me for the fictional paperwork regarding Snorri. Worse still, he might have already heard the Norseman was running amok in Vermillion’s streets … Or perhaps he’d scratched off the gold plate from my gift. Either way, none of the reasons he might want to talk to me seemed to be reasons I might want to talk to him! I turned sharply away and found myself face to face with Alain DeVeer, sporting an unbecoming bandage around his head and flanked by two large and ugly men in ill-fitting opera cloaks.

‘Jalan!’ Alain reached for me, finding only a handful of my own exquisitely tailored cape. I shrugged the garment off and let him keep it while I sprinted for the stairs, weaving a dangerous path around dowagers sporting diamonds in their hair and gruff old lords knocking back the wine with the grim determination of men wishing to dull their senses.

I have quick feet but it’s probably my total disregard for other people’s safety that allowed me to open a considerable lead so swiftly.

There are communal privies at the rear of the opera house. For the men, a dozen open seats above water flowing in channels that pour out into the alley behind. The water runs from a large tank on the roof. A small band of urchins spend all day filling it with buckets – an activity I had occasion to note when using one of the cast changing rooms for an assignation with Duchess Sansera a season previously. I was banging away dutifully as a chap does with a woman of declining years and increasing fortune when hoping to cadge a loan, but every time I seemed to be getting anywhere a small boy would wander past the door, heavy buckets sloshing. Quite put me off my stride. And the old cow didn’t loan me so much as a silver penny.

That afternoon with Duchess Money-Buckets wasn’t a complete waste though. After I’d let her usher me out of there with a wet kiss and a goosing of my buttocks, I chased down as many of those ratty little children as I could and kicked some arse. It’s true that my foe outnumbered me but I am the hero of Aral Pass, after all, and sometimes when Prince Jalan Kendeth is roused to anger it’s best to flee, whatever your number. If you’re eight.

I had found three of the little bastards cowering in the tiny utility room where the buckets are stored along with assorted brooms and mops. And that was the pay-off – another hiding place to add to my list.

Racing along the same corridor now, with Alain and friends a corner or two behind me, I stopped dead, hauled the closet door open and dived in. The thing with closing doors behind you is to do it quickly but quietly. That proved a challenge whilst trying to disentangle myself from various broom handles in the dark without the teetering bucket towers crashing down around me. Seconds later when Alain and his heavies clattered down the corridor, the hero of Aral Pass was crouched among the mops, hands clamped to mouth to stifle a sneeze.

I managed to hold the sneeze back almost long enough, but no man can be in complete control of his body, and there’s no stopping such things sometimes – as I told the Duchess Sansera when she expressed her disappointment.

‘Achoo!’

The footsteps, fading at the edge of hearing, stopped.

‘What was that?’ Alain’s voice, distant but not distant enough.

Cowards divide into two broad groups. Those paralysed by their fear, and those galvanized by it. Fortunately I belong to the latter group and burst out of that closet like a … well, like a lecherous prince hoping to escape a beating.

I’ve always made a close study of windows, and the most accessible windows in the opera house were in the aforementioned communal privies, which needed them for obvious reasons. I pounded down the corridor, swerved, banked, and crashed through into the fetid gloom of the men’s privy. One old gent had settled himself there with a flagon of wine, clearly feeling that breathing in the sewer stink was preferable to a seat closer to the stage. I ran straight past, climbed onto the rear throne and tried to jam my head between the shutters. Normally they were propped ajar to offer sufficient ventilation to prevent the place exploding if one more over-fed lordling passed wind. Today, like everything else since I got up, they seemed to be against me and stood firmly closed. I shook them hard. They weren’t latched and it made no sense that they wouldn’t give. Fear lent strength to my arm and when the damn things wouldn’t open I ripped out the slats before thrusting my head through.

For a half second I just stood with that cool, slightly less fetid, air on my face. Salvation! There’s something almost orgasmic about getting out from under a heap of trouble, winning free and thumbing your nose at it. Tomorrow maybe that same trouble will be waiting around a corner for you, but today, right now, it’s beaten, left in the dust. Cowards, over burdened with imagination as we are, spend most of our attention on the future, worrying what’s coming next, so when that rare opportunity to live in the moment arrives I seize it with as many hands as I’ve got spare.

In the next half second I realized that we were on the second floor and the drop to the street below seemed likely to injure me more grievously than Alain and his friends would dare to. I should perhaps puff myself up, brazen it out, and remind Alain whose damned father’s opera this was and whose grandmother happened to be warming the throne. No part of me wanted to bank on Alain’s commonsense outweighing his anger, but an ankle-breaking drop into the alley where they flushed the shit … that didn’t appeal either.

And then I saw her. A tattered figure in the alley, bent over some burden. A bucket? For one ridiculous moment I thought it was another of those little boys lugging water for the tank. A pale hand lifted a brush, moonlight glimmered on what dripped from it.

‘Jalan Kendeth, hiding in the privies. How appropriate.’ Alain DeVeer banging open the door behind me. I didn’t turn my head even a fraction. If I hadn’t taken care of business at the start of the intermission I would have rapidly filled the privy I was standing on by way of both trouser legs. The figure in the alley looked up and one eye caught the moonbeams, glowing pearly in the darkness. My shoulder ached with a sudden memory of the masked figure I’d barged into. Conviction seized me by the throat. That had not been a man. There had been nothing human in that stare. Outside the blind-eye woman painted her fatal runes, and inside, among the lords and ladies, hell walked with us.

I would have run head first into a dozen Alain DeVeers to get away from the Silent Sister. Hell, I’d have flattened Maeres Allus to put some space between me and that old witch. I’d have put my foot in his groin and told him to add it to the debt. I would have charged right at Alain and his two friends but for the memory of a fire on The Street of Nails. The walls themselves had burned. There had been nothing left but fine ash. Nobody got out. Not one person. And there had been four other fires like that across the city. Four in five years.

‘Oh, Jalan!’ Alain drew the ‘a’ out, making it a sing-song taunt, ‘Jaaaalaan.’ He really hadn’t taken having that vase broken over his head very well.

I jammed myself further through the broken shutter, wedging both shoulders into the gap and splintering more slats. Some kind of webbing stretched across my face. Because right now I needed a big spider on my head? Once more the gods of fate were crapping on me from a height. I looked to the left. Black symbols covered the wall, each like some horrifying and twisted insect caught in its death throes. To the right, more of them, reaching up from where the blind-eye woman had returned to her work. They seemed to have grown along the sides of the building, like vines … or crawled up. There was no way she could reach so high. She planted her hideous seeds as she circled the building, painting a noose of symbols, and from each one more grew, and more, rising until the noose became a net.

‘Hey!’ Alain, his gloating turning to irritation at being ignored.

‘We’ve got to get out of here.’ I pulled free and glanced back at the three of them in the doorway, the old man clutching his wine looking on bemused. ‘There’s no time—’

‘Get him down from there.’ Alain shook his head in disgust.

The drop to the street had been knocked off the top of the list of today’s most terrifying things, where it had nestled just above Alain and friends. The writing on the wall immediately outside swept all that other stuff right off the list and into the privies. I stuck both arms through the hole I’d made and launched myself out. I made it a couple of feet, and came to a splintering halt with my chest wedged into the shutter frame. Something dark and very cold stretched across my face again, feeling for all the world like a web spun by the world’s toughest spider. The strands of it closed my left eye for me and resisted any further advance.

‘Quick!’

‘Grab him!’

Pounding feet as Alain led the charge. When it comes to wriggling out of things I’m pretty good, but my current situation offered little purchase. I seized the windowsill with both hands and tried to propel myself forward, managing an advance of a few inches, jacket ripping. The black stuff over my face pulled even harder, pressing my head back and threatening to throw me back into the room if I lessened my grip even a little.

Now, nature may have gifted me a pretty decent physique but I do try to avoid any strenuous activity, at least whilst clothed, and I’ll lay no claims to any great strength. Raw terror does, however, have a startling effect on me and I’ve been known to toss extraordinarily heavy items aside if they stood between me and a swift escape.

Anticipating the arrival of Alain DeVeer’s hand on my flailing shin occasioned just the right level of terror. It wasn’t the thought of being dragged back in and given a good kicking that worried me – although it normally would … a lot. It was the idea that whilst they were kicking me, and whilst poor old Jalan was rolling about manfully taking his lumps and screaming for mercy, the Silent Sister would complete her noose, the fire would ignite, and we’d each and every one of us burn.

Whatever had stretched across my face had stopped stretching and was instead keeping me from getting any further forward, all its elasticity used up. It felt more like a length of wire now, cutting across my forehead and face. With my feet finding nothing to push against, I hung, one-third out, two-thirds in, thrashing helplessly and roaring all manner of threats and promises. I rather suspect Alain and his friends might have paused to have a laugh at my expense because it took longer than I expected before someone laid a hand on me.

They should have taken the matter more seriously. Flailing legs are a dangerous proposition. Fuelled by desperation I struck out and made a solid connection, booted heel to something that crunched like a nose. Someone made a noise very similar to the one Alain had made that morning when I broke the vase over his head.

The added thrust proved sufficient. The wire-like obstruction bit deeper, like a cold knife carving through me, then something gave. It felt more as though it were me that gave rather than the obstruction, as if I cracked and it ran through me, but either way I won free and tumbled out in one piece rather than two.

As victories go it proved fairly Pyrrhic, my prize being the liberty to pitch out face-first with a two-storey drop between me and the flagstones. When you run out of screaming during a fall you know that you’ve dropped way too far. Too far and too fast in general for there to be any reasonable prospect of you ever getting up again. Something tugged at me though, slowing my descent a fraction, an awful ripping sound over-riding my scream as I fell. Even so, I hammered into the ground with more than enough force to kill me but for the large mound of semi-solid dung accumulated beneath the privy outlet. I hit with a splat.

I staggered up, spitting out mouthfuls of filth, roared an oath, slipped and plunged immediately back in. Derisive laughter from on high confirmed I had an audience. My second attempt left me on my back, scraping dung from my eyes. Looking up I saw the whole side of the opera house clothed in interlocking symbols, with one exception. The window from which I tumbled lay bare, a man’s face peering from the hole I’d left. Elsewhere the black limbs of the Silent Sister’s calligraphy bound the shutters closed, but across the broken privy shutter, not even a trace. And leading down from it, a crack, running deep into the masonry, following the path of my descent. A peculiar golden light bled from the crack, flickering with shadows all along its length, illuminating both alley and building.

With more speed and less haste I found my feet and cast around for the Silent Sister. She’d rounded the corner, quite possibly before I fell. How far she had to go until completing her noose I couldn’t see. I backed to the middle of the alley, out of the dung heap, wiping the muck from my clothes to little avail. Something snagged at my fingers and I found myself holding what looked like black ribbon but felt more like the writhing leg of some nightmare insect. With a cry I tore it from me, and found the whole of one of the witch’s symbols hanging from my hand, nearly reaching to the ground and twisting in a breeze that just wasn’t there – as if it were somehow trying to wrap itself back around me. I flung it down in revulsion, sensing it was more filthy than anything else that coated me.

A sharp retort returned my gaze to the building. As I watched, the crack spread, darting down another five yards, almost reaching the ground. The shriek that burst from me was more girlish than I would have hoped for. Without hesitation, I turned and fled. More laughter from above. I paused at the alley’s end, hoping for something clever to shout back at Alain. But any witticism which might have materialized vanished as all along the wall beside me the symbols started to light up. Each cracked open, glowing, as if they had become fissures into some world of fire waiting for us all just beneath the surface of the stone. I realized in that instant that the Silent Sister had completed her work and that Alain, his friends, the old man with his wine, and every other person inside was about to burn. I swear, in that moment I even felt sorry for the opera singers.

‘Jump, you idiots!’ I shouted it over my shoulder, already running.

I rounded the corner at speed and slipped, shoes still slick with muck. Sprawling across cobbles, I saw back along the alleyway, now lit in blinding incandescence shot through with pulsing shadow. Each symbol blazed. At the far end, one particular shadow stayed constant: the Silent Sister, ragged and immobile, still little more than a stain on the eye despite the glare from the wall beside her.

I gained my feet to the sound of awful screaming. The old hall rang to notes that had never before issued from any mouth within it down the long years of its history. I ran then, feet sliding and skittering beneath me – and out of the brilliance of that alleyway something gave chase. A bright and jagged line zigzagged along my trail as if the broken pattern sought to reclaim me, to catch me and light me up so that I too might share the fate I’d fought so hard to escape.

You would think it best to save your breath for running, but I often find screaming helps. The street I had turned into from the alley ran past the back of the opera house and was well-trodden even at this hour of the night, though nowhere near as crowded as Paint Street that runs past the grand entrance and delivers patrons to the doors. My … manly bellowing … served to clear my path somewhat, and where town-folk proved too slow to move I variously sidestepped or, if they were sufficiently small or frail, flattened them. The crack emerged into the street behind me, advancing in rapid stuttering steps, each accompanied by a sound like something expensive shattering.

Turning sideways to slot between two town-laws on patrol, I managed a glance back and saw the crack jag left, veering down the street, away from the opera house and in the direction I’d taken. The people in the road hardly noticed, transfixed as they were by the glow of the building beyond, its walls now wreathed in pale violet flame. The crack itself seemed more than it first appeared, being in truth two cracks running close together, crossing and re-crossing, one bleeding a hot golden light and the other revealing a consuming darkness that seemed to swallow what illumination fell its way. At each point where they crossed golden sparks boiled in darkness and the flagstones shattered.

I barged between the town-laws, the impact spinning me round, hopping on one foot to keep my balance. The crack ran under an old fellow I’d felled in my escape. More than that, it ran through him, and where the dark crossed the light something broke. Smaller fissures spread from each crossing point, encompassing the man for a heartbeat before he literally exploded. Red chunks of him were thrown skyward, burning as they flew, consumed with such ferocity that few made it to the ground.

Whatever anyone may say about running, the main thing is to pick your feet up as quickly as possible – as if the ground has developed a great desire to hurt you. Which it kind of had. I took off at a pace that would have left my dog-fleeing self of only that morning stopping to check if his legs were still moving. More people exploded in my wake as the crack ran through them. I vaulted a cart, which immediately detonated behind me, pieces of burning wood peppering the wall as I dived through an open window.

I rolled to my feet inside what looked to be, and certainly smelled like, a brothel of such low class I hadn’t even been aware of its existence. Shapes writhed in the gloom to one side as I pelted across the chamber, knocking over a lamp, a wicker table, a dresser, and a small man with a toupee, before pulverizing the shutters on the rear window on my way out.

The room lit behind me. I crashed across the alleyway into which I’d spilled, let the opposite wall arrest my momentum, and charged off. The window I came through cracked, sill and lintel, the whole building splitting. The twin fissures, light and dark, wove their path after me, picking up still more speed. I jumped a poppy-head slumped in the alley and raced on. From the sound of it the fissure cured his addiction permanently a heartbeat later.

Eyes forward is the second rule of running, right after the one about picking up your feet. Sometimes though you can’t follow all the rules. Something about the crack demanded my attention, and I shot another glance back at it.

Slam! At first I thought I’d run into a wall. Drawing breath for more screaming and more running I pulled away, only to discover the wall was holding me. Two huge fists, one bandaged and bloody, bunched in the jacket over my chest. I looked up, then up some more, and found myself staring into Snorri Snagason’s pale eyes.

‘What—’ He hadn’t time for more words. The crack ran through us. I saw a black fracture race through the Norseman, jagged lines across his face, bleeding darkness. In the same moment something hot and unbearably brilliant cut through me, filling me with light and stealing the world away.

My vision cleared just in time to see Snorri’s forehead descending. I heard a crack of an entirely different kind. My nose breaking. And the world went away again.

6

First check where my money pouch is, and pat for my locket. It’s a habit I’ve developed. When you wake up in the kinds of places I wake up in, and in the company I often pay to keep … well, it pays to keep your coin close. The bed was harder and more bumpy than I tend to like. As hard and bumpy as cobbles, in fact. And it smelled like shit. The glorious safe moment between being asleep and being awake was over. I rolled onto my side, clutching my nose. Either I’d not been unconscious very long, or the stink had kept even the beggars off. That and the excitement down the road, the trail of exploded citizens, the burning opera house, the blazing crack. The crack! I staggered to my feet at that, expecting to see the jagged path leading down the alley and pointing straight at me. Nothing. At least nothing to see by starlight and a quarter moon.

‘Shit.’ My nose hurt more than seemed reasonable. I remembered fierce eyes beneath heavy brows … and then those heavy brows smacking into my face. ‘Snorri …’

The Norseman was long gone. Why small charred chunks of us both weren’t decorating the walls I couldn’t say. I remembered the way those two fissures had run side by side, crossing and re-crossing, and at every junction, a detonation. The dark fracture-line had run through Snorri – I had seen it across his face. The light—

I patted myself down, sudden frantic hands searching for injury. The light one had run through me. Pulling up my trouser legs revealed grubby shins with no sign of golden light shining from any cracks. But the street showed no sign of the fissure either. Nothing remained but the damage it had wrought.

I shook thoughts of that blinding golden light from my mind. I’d survived! The screams from the opera house returned to me. How many had died? How many of my friends? My relatives? Had Alain’s sisters been there? Pray God Maeres Allus had been. Let it be one of those nights he pretended to be a merchant and used his money to buy him into social circles far above his station. For now though I needed to put more distance between me and the site of the fire. But where to go? The Silent Sister’s magic had pursued me. Would she be waiting at the palace to finish the job?

When in doubt, run.

I took off again, along dark streets, lost but knowing in time that I would hit the river and gain my bearings anew. Running blind is apt to get you a broken nose, and since I had one of those already and wasn’t keen to find out what came next I kept my pace on the sensible side of break-neck. I normally find that showing trouble my heels and putting a few miles behind me makes things a whole lot better. As I ran though, breathing through my mouth and catching my side where a muscle kept cramping, I felt worse and worse. A general unease grew minute by minute and hardened into a general crippling anxiety. I wondered whether this was what conscience felt like. Not that any of it had been my fault. I couldn’t have saved anyone even if I’d tried.

I paused and leaned against a wall, catching my breath and trying to shake off whatever it was that plagued me. My heart kept fluttering behind my ribs as if I’d started to sprint rather than come to a halt. Each part of me seemed, fragile, somehow brittle. My hands looked wrong, too white, too light. I started to run again, accelerating, any fatigue left behind. Spare energy boiled off my skin, rattled through me, set my teeth buzzing in their sockets, my hair seeming to float up around my head. Something was wrong with me, broken, I couldn’t slow down if I wanted to.

Ahead the street forked, starlight offering just the lines of the building that divided the way. I veered from one side of the street to the other, unsure which path to follow. Moving to the left made me worse, my speed increasing, sprinting, my hands almost glowing as they pumped, head aching, ready to split, bright light fracturing across my vision. Veering right restored a touch of normality. I took the right fork. Suddenly I knew the direction. Something had been tugging at me since I picked myself up off the cobbles. Now, as if a lamp had been lit, I knew the direction of its pull. If I turned from it then whatever malady afflicted me grew worse. Head toward it and the symptoms eased. I had a direction.

What the destination might be I couldn’t say.

It seemed to be my day for charging headlong down the streets of Vermillion. My path now followed the gentle gradient toward the Seleen where she eased her slow passage through the city. I started to pass the markets and cargo bays behind the great warehouses that fronted the river docks. Even at this hour men moved back and forth, hauling crates from mule-drawn trolleys, loading wagons, labouring by the mean light of lanterns to push the stuff of commerce through Vermillion’s narrow veins.

My path took me across a deserted marketplace smelling of fish and fetched me up against a wide expanse of wall, one of the city’s most ancient buildings, now co-opted into service as a docks warehouse. The thing stretched a hundred yards and more both left and right, and I had no interest in either direction. Forward. My route lay straight ahead. That’s where the pull came from. A broad-planked door cracked open a few yards off and without thought I was there, yanking it wide, slipping past the bewildered menial with his hand still trying to push. A corridor ran ahead, going my way, and I gave chase. Shouts from behind as men startled into action and tried to catch me. Builder globes burned here, shedding the cold white light of the ancients. I hadn’t realized quite how old the structure was. I charged on regardless, flashing past archway after archway each opening on to Builder-lit galleries, all packed with green-laden benches and walled with shelf upon shelf of many-leaved plants. When, about halfway through the width of the warehouse, a plank-built door opened, slamming out into my path, all I had time to think before blacking out was that hitting Snorri Snagason had hurt more.

I came back to consciousness lying horizontal once again, and hurting in so many places that I missed out the blissful ignorance stage and went directly into the asking of stupid questions.

‘Where am I?’ Nasal and hesitant.

The bright but flickering light and the faint unnatural whine helped me to remember. Somewhere with Builder-globes. I made to sit up and found myself tied to a table. ‘Help!’ A little louder. Panicked, I tested my strength against the ropes and found no give in them. “Help!”

‘Best save your breath!’ The voice came from the shadows by the door. I squinted. A thickset ruffian leaned against the wall, looking back at me.

‘I’m Prince Jalan! I’ll have your fucking head for this! Untie these ropes.’

‘Yeah, that’s not going to happen.’ He leaned forward, chewing something, the flickering light gleaming on his baldness.

‘I’m Prince Jalan! Don’t you recognize me?’

‘Like I know what the princes look like. I don’t even know the princes’ names! Far as I’m concerned you’re some toff who got juiced up and went swimming in a sewer. Just your bad luck to end up here. Horace though, he did seem to know you from somewhere. Told me to keep you here and off he went. “Keep an eye on that one, Daveet,” he said. “Keep a good watch.” You must be some kind of important or you’d be floating down the river by now with your throat cut.’

‘Kill me and my grandmother will raze this quarter to the ground.’ A blatant lie but, spoken with conviction, it made me feel better. ‘I’m a rich man. Let me go and I’ll see you’re fixed up for life.’ I’ll admit I have a gift for lying. I sound least convincing when I tell the truth.

‘Money’s nice an’ all,’ the man said. He took a step away from the wall and let the flickers illuminate the brutality of his face. ‘But if I let you go without Horace’s say-so then I wouldn’t have no fingers to count it all with. And if it turned out you really were a prince and we let you go without the boss’s say-so, well me and Horace would think having our fingers taken was the easy part.’ He bared his teeth at me, more gaps than teeth, truth be told, and settled back into the shadow.

I lay back, moaning from time to time, and asking questions that he ignored. At least the strange compulsion that had me running headlong into this mess in the first place had now faded. I still had that sense of direction, but the need to pursue it had lessened and I felt more my old self. Which in this instance meant terrified. Even in my terror though I noticed that the direction that nagged at me was changing, swinging round, the urge to pursue it growing more faint by the minute.

I drew a deep breath and took stock of my surroundings. A smallish room, not one of those long galleries. They’d been growing plants there? That made no sense. No plants in here though. The broken light probably meant it wasn’t suitable. Just a table and me tied to it.

‘Why—’ The door juddered open and cut through my nineteenth question.

‘Good lord it stinks in here!’ A calm and depressingly familiar voice. ‘Stand our guest up, why don’t you, and let’s see if you can’t sluice some of that filth off him.’

Men loomed to either side, strong hands grasped the table and the world turned through a right-angle, leaving the table standing on end, and me standing too, still bound to it. A bucket of cold water took my breath and vision before I had a chance to look around. Another followed in quick succession. I stood gasping, trying to get a breath – no mean task with your nose clogged with blood and water everywhere – whilst a fragrant brown pool began to spread around my feet.

‘Well bless me. There seems to be a prince hidden under all this unpleasantness. A diamond in the muck as they say. Albeit a very low-carat one.’

I shook the wet hair from my eyes, and there he stood, Maeres Allus, dressed in his finest as if bound for high company … and an opera perhaps?

‘Ah, Maeres! I was hoping to see you. Had a little something to hand over toward our arrangement.’ I never called it my debt. Our arrangement sounded better. A little more as if it was both our problems, not just mine.

‘You were?’ Just the slightest smile mocking at the corners of his mouth. He’d worn that same smile when one of his heavies snapped my index finger. The ache of it still ran through me on cold mornings when I reached for the flagon of small beer they put by my bed. It ran through that same finger now, secured at my side.

‘Yes.’ I didn’t even stutter. ‘Had it with me at the opera.’ By my reckoning the business with Snorri had bought me in the region of six months’ grace but it never hurts to sound willing. Besides, the main thing when tied to tables by criminals is to remind them how much more valuable you are to them when not tied to a table. ‘The gold was right in my pocket. I think I must have lost it in the panic.’

‘Tragic.’ Maeres lifted a hand, cupped his fingers and a man came from the shadows to stand at his shoulder. A dry rustling accompanied his advance, and stopped when he did. I didn’t like this one at all. He looked too pleased to see me. ‘Another fire with no survivors.’

‘Well …’ I didn’t want to contradict Maeres. My eyes slid to the man beside him. Maeres is a slight fellow, unremarkable, the kind of little man you might find bent over the ledgers at some merchant’s office. Neat brown hair, eyes that are neither kind nor cruel. In fact remarkably similar to my father in age and appearance. Maeres’ companion though, he looked like the sort of man who would drown kittens recreationally. His face reminded me of the skulls in the palace catacombs. Stretch skin over one and press in some pale staring eyes, and you’d have this man, his smile too wide, teeth too long and white.

Maeres clicked his fingers, snapping my attention back to him. ‘This is Cutter John. I was telling him as we came in just how unfortunate it is that you’ve seen my operation here.’

‘O-o-operation?’ I stuttered the question out. Victory could be measured now by a lack of soiling myself. Cutter John was a name everyone knew, but not many claimed to have seen him. Cutter John came into play when Maeres wanted to hurt people more creatively. When a broken finger, amputated toe, or good beating wouldn’t suffice, when Maeres wanted to stamp his authority, set his trademark upon some poor soul, Cutter John would be the man to do the work. Some called it artistry.

‘The poppies.’

‘I didn’t see any poppies.’ Row upon row of green things growing, here under Builder-lights. My Uncle Hertert – the heir-apparently-not, as Father liked to call him – had made countless initiatives to cut the opium supply. He’d had town-law out on boats patrolling God knows how many miles of the Seleen, convinced it came upriver from the port of Marsail. But Maeres grew his own. Right here. Under Hertert’s nose and ready to go up everyone else’s. ‘I didn’t see a thing, Maeres. I ran into a door for godsakes. Blind drunk.’

‘You sobered up remarkably well.’ He lifted a golden vinaigrette to his nose, as if the stink of me offended him. Which it probably did. ‘In any event it’s a risk I can’t run, and if we have to part company we may as well make it a memorable event, no?’ He tilted his head at Cutter John.

That was enough to let my bladder go. It wasn’t as if anyone would notice, soaked and reeking as I was. ‘C-come now, Maeres, you’re joking? I owe you money. Who’ll pay if I … if I don’t pay?’ He needed me.

‘Well Jalan, the thing is, I don’t think you can pay. If a man owes me a thousand crowns he’s in trouble. If he owes me a hundred thousand, then I’m in trouble. And you, Jalan, owe me eight hundred and six crowns, less some small amount for your amusing Norseman. All of which makes you a small fish that can neither swallow me nor feed me.’

‘But … I can pay. I’m the Red Queen’s grandson. I’m good for the debt!’

‘One of many, Jalan. Too much of any denomination waters down the currency. I’d call “prince” an over-valued commodity in Red March these days.’

‘But—’ I’d always known Maeres Allus for a businessman, a cruel and implacable one of a certainty, but sane. Now it seemed that madness might be spiralling behind those dark little eyes. Too much blood in the water for the shark in him to lie quiet any longer. ‘But … what good would killing me do?’ He couldn’t ever tell anyone. My death wouldn’t serve him.

‘You died in the fire, Prince Jalan. Everyone knows that. None of my doing. And if a hint of a rumour floated behind Vermillion’s conversations. A whisper that you might have died elsewhere, in even less pleasant circumstances, over a matter of debt … well then, what new heights might my clients reach in their efforts not to disappoint me in future? Might there be ladies of ill-repute who would recognize Cutter’s latest bracelet and spread the word as they spread their legs?’ He glanced toward Cutter John who raised his right arm. Dry bands of pale gristle encircled the limb, rustling against each other, dozens of them, starting at his wrist and reaching past his elbow.

‘Wh-what?’ I didn’t understand what I was seeing, or perhaps some part of my brain was sensibly stopping me from understanding.

Cutter John circled his own lips with one finger. The trophies along his arm whispered together as he did so. ‘Open wide.’ His voice slithered as though he were something not human.

‘You shouldn’t have come here, Jalan.’ Maeres spoke into the silence of my horror. ‘It’s unfortunate that you can’t un-see my poppies, but the world is full of misfortunes.’ He stepped back to stand by Daveet at the door – the lights flickering across his face providing the only animation, a shadow smile there and gone, there and gone.

‘No!’ For the first time ever I wanted Maeres Allus not to leave. Anything was better than being abandoned to Cutter John. ‘No! I won’t talk! I won’t. Not ever.’ I put some anger into it – who would believe a sobbing promise of strength? ‘I’m saying nothing!’ I strained at my ropes, rocking the table back against its legs. ‘Pull my nails. I won’t talk. Hot pincers won’t drag it from me.’

‘How about cold ones?’ Cutter John raised the short handled iron pincers he’d been holding all this time in his other hand.

I roared at them then, thrashing, useless in the ropes. If one of Maeres’s men hadn’t been standing on the table legs it would have tipped forward and I’d have gone face first into the flagstones, which bad as it sounds would have been far less painful than what Cutter John had in mind for me. I was still roaring and screaming, working my way rapidly toward sobbing and pleading, when a hot wet something splattered across my face. It was enough to make me unscrew my eyes and pause my bellowing. Although I’d stopped yelling the din was no less deafening, only now it wasn’t me screaming. I’d drowned out the crash of the door bursting open, too far gone in my terror to notice it. Only Daveet stood there now, framed in the doorway. He turned as I watched, slit from collarbone to hip, spilling coils of his guts to the floor. To the left a large figure moved at the edge of my vision. As I turned my head the action shifted behind the table, another scream and a pale arm wrapped in bracelets made from men’s lips landed on the flagstones about a foot from where Daveet’s head hit the stone when he tripped on his intestines. And in one moment there was silence. Not a sound save for men shouting far down the corridor outside, echoey in the distance. Daveet appeared to have knocked himself out or died from sudden blood loss. If Cutter John missed his arm he wasn’t complaining. I could see one more of Maeres’s men lying dead. The others might be dead behind me or taking a leaf from my book and sprinting for the hills. If I hadn’t been tied to the damn table I would have been overtaking them on the way to the aforementioned hills myself.

Snorri Snagason stepped into view. ‘You!’ he said.

The hooded robe he’d been wearing when I ran into him was half-torn from his shoulders, blood splattered his chest and arms, and dripped from the scarlet sword in his fist. More of the stuff ran down his face from a shallow cut on his forehead. It wouldn’t be hard to mistake him for a demon risen from hell. In fact in the flickering light, blood clad and with battle in his eyes, it was quite hard not to.

‘You?’ The eloquence Snorri had demonstrated in Grandmother’s throne room had wholly abandoned him.

He reached for me, and I shrank back, but not far because that fucking table was in the way. As that big hand came close I felt a tingle on my cheekbones, my lips, forehead, like pins and needles, a kind of pressure building. He felt it too – I saw his eyes widen. The direction that had led me, the destination that had drawn me on … it was him. The same force had led Snorri here, and set him among Maeres’ men. We both recognized it now.

The Norseman slowed his hand, fingers an inch or two from my neck. The skin there buzzed, almost crackling with … something. He stopped, not wanting to find out what would happen if he touched me skin to skin. The hand withdrew, returned full of knife, and before I could squeal he set to cutting my bonds.

‘You’re coming with me. We can sort this out somewhere else.’

Abandoning me amongst loops of sliced rope, Snorri returned to the doorway, pausing only to stamp on someone’s neck. Not Maeres’s unfortunately. He ducked his head through, pulling back immediately, a quick bobbing motion. Something hissed past the entrance, several somethings.

‘Crossbows.’ Snorri spat on Daveet’s corpse. ‘I hate bowmen.’ A glance back at me. ‘Grab a sword.’

‘A sword?’ The man clearly thought he was still in the wilds among the overly hairy folk of the North. I cast my eye across the carnage, looking behind the table. Cutter John lay sprawled, the stump of his arm barely pulsing, an ugly wound on his forehead. No sign of Maeres. I couldn’t imagine how he’d escaped.

None of them had any weapon more offensive than a six-inch knife, carrying anything larger within the city walls just wasn’t worth the trouble from town-laws. I took the dagger and kicked Cutter John in the head a few times. It really hurt my toes, but I felt it a price worth paying.

I hobbled back round the table holding my new weapon and earned a withering look from the Norseman. He picked up the door. ‘Catch.’ I didn’t quite manage it. Whilst I hopped on my good foot, clutching my face and swearing nasally, Snorri quickly hacked the legs from the table and bearing it like a huge shield, advanced toward the corridor. ‘Get my back!’

The fear of being left behind, and finding myself in Maeres Allus’s clutches again, spurred me into action. With some effort I picked up the door and together we propelled our shields into the corridor before stepping between them. Crossbow bolts thudded into both immediately, iron heads splintering partway through.

‘Which direc—’ Snorri was already too far away to hear me even if he hadn’t been shouting his battle cry. He’d stormed off down the corridor behind me. I followed as best I could, trying to hold the door across my back while I stumbled after him, keeping my head down, reaching over my shoulders to hold the door in place. Shouts and screams ahead indicated that Snorri had got to grips with his hated bowmen but by the time I got there it was all blood and pieces. The main difficulty lay in not slipping over in the gore. Several more bolts hit the boards across my back with powerful thuds, and another skipped between my ankles, letting me know that I’d left a gap. Fortunately I had just ten yards to reach the exit. With the door scraping the floor behind me, and just the tips of my fingers exposed, I broke out into the night air. My traditional moment of triumph at escaping yet again was curtailed by a muscular arm that reached from the darkness and yanked me to one side.

‘I’ve got a boat,’ Snorri growled. Normally when you say someone growled something it’s just a turn of phrase, but Snorri really put something feral into his words.

‘What?’ I shook my arm free, or he let it go, a mutual thing, neither of us liking the burning needling sensation where his fingers gripped me.

‘I’ve got a boat.’

‘Of course you do, you’re a Viking.’ Everything seemed rather surreal. Perhaps I’d been hit in the face one too many times since Alain made a grab for me in the opera house only an hour or two earlier.

Snorri shook his head. ‘Follow. Quick!’

He took off into the night. The sounds of men approaching down the warehouse corridor convinced me to give chase. We crossed a wide space stacked with barrels and crates, passed dozens of hanging nets, the sails of riverboats poking up above the river wall beside us. By moonlight we crossed a quay and descended stone steps to the water where a rowing boat lay tied to one of the great iron rings set into the wall.

‘You’ve got a boat,’ I said.

‘I was a mile downstream, free and clear.’ Snorri tossed his sword in, stepped in after it, and picked up an oar. ‘Something happened to me.’ He paused staring for a moment into his hand though it held only darkness. ‘Something … I was getting sick.’ He sat and took both oars. ‘I knew I had to come back – knew the direction. And then I found you.’

I stood on the step. The Silent Sister’s magic had done this. I knew it. The crack had run through us, the light through me, the dark through him, and as Snorri and I separated some arcane force tried to rejoin those two lines, the dark and the light. We had drawn away from each other, the river carrying Snorri west, and those hidden fissures started to open again, started to tear us both apart just so they could be free to run together once more. I remembered what happened when they joined. It wasn’t pretty.

‘Don’t stand there like an idiot. Loose the rope and get in.’

‘I …’ The rowing boat moved as the current tried to wrest it from its mooring. ‘It doesn’t look very stable.’ I’ve always viewed boats as a thin plank between me and drowning. As a sensible fellow I’d never entrusted my safety to one before, and close up they looked even more dangerous. The dark river slurped at the oars as if hungry.

Snorri nodded up at the steps, up toward the gap in the river wall they led to. ‘In a moment a man with a crossbow will stand there and convince you that waiting was a mistake.’

I hopped in sharp enough at that, Snorri deploying his weight to stop me turning the boat over before I managed to sit down.

‘The rope?’ he asked. Shouts rang out above us, drawing closer.

I pulled my knife, slashed the rope, nearly lost the knife in the river, tried again, and finally sawed at the strands until at last they gave and we were off. The current took us and the wall vanished into the gloom along with all sight of land.

7

‘Are you going to be sick again?’

‘Has the river stopped flowing?’ I asked.

Snorri snorted.

‘Then yes.’ I demonstrated, adding another streak of colour into the dark waters of the Seleen. ‘If God had intended men to go on water he would have given them …’ I felt too ill for wit and hung limp over the side of the boat, scowling at the grey dawn coming up behind us. ‘… given them whatever it is you need for that kind of thing.’

‘A messiah who walked on water to show you all it was exactly where God intended men to go?’ Snorri shook that big chiselled head of his. ‘My people have older learning than the White Christ brought. Aegir owns the sea and he doesn’t intend that we go onto it. But we do even so.’ He rumbled through a bar of song, ‘Undoreth, we. Battle-born. Raise hammer, raise axe, at our war-shout gods tremble.’ He rowed on, humming his tuneless tunes.

My nose hurt like buggery, I felt cold, most of me ached, and when I did manage to sniff through my twice-broken snout I could tell that I still smelled only slightly less bad than that dung heap which saved my life.

‘My—’ I fell silent. My pronunciation sounded comical, ‘my nose’ would have come out ‘by dose’. And although I had every right to complain, it might rile the Norseman, and it doesn’t pay to rile the kind of man who can jump on a bear to escape a fight-pit. Especially if it was you who put him in that pit in the first place. As my father would say, ‘To err is human, to forgive is divine … but I’m only a cardinal and cardinals are human, so rather than forgiving you I’m going to err toward beating you with this stick.’ Snorri didn’t look the forgiving kind either. I settled for another groan.

‘What?’ He looked up from his rowing. I remembered the remarkable number of bodies he left in his wake coming in and out of Maeres’s poppy-farm to get me. All with his weapon hand badly injured.

‘Nothing.’

We rowed on through the garden lands of Red March. Well Snorri rowed on, and I lay moaning. In truth he mostly steered us and the Seleen did the rest. Where his right hand clutched the oar he left it bloodstained.

Scenery passed, green and monotonous, and I slumped over the side, muttering complaints and vomiting sporadically. I also wondered about how I’d moved from waking beside the naked delights of Lisa DeVeer to sharing a shitty rowing boat with a huge Norse maniac all in the space between two dawns.

‘Will we have trouble?’

‘Huh?’ I looked up from my misery.

Snorri tilted his head downstream to where several rickety wooden quays reached out into the river, a number of fishing boats tied up at them. Men moved here and there along the shore checking fish traps, mending nets.

‘Why should—’ I remembered that Snorri was very far from home in lands he had probably only glimpsed from the back of a slave wagon. ‘No,’ I said.

He grunted and set an oar to angle us into deeper water where the current ran fastest. Perhaps in the fjords of the frozen North any passing stranger was game and you became a stranger ten yards from your doorstep. Red March enjoyed ways a touch more civilized. Due in no small part to the fact that my grandmother would have anyone who broke the bigger laws nailed to a tree.

We carried on past various nameless hamlets and small towns that probably had names but held too few distractions ever to make me care what those names were. Occasionally a field hand would rest fingers on hoe, chin on knuckles, and watch us pass with the same vacancy that the cows used. Urchins chased us from time to time, following along the banks for a hundred yards, some throwing stones, others baring their grimy arses in mock-threat. Washerwomen splatting husbands’ second smocks against flat stones would raise their heads and hoot appreciatively at the Norseman as he flexed his arms against the oars. And finally on a lonely stretch of river where the Seleen explored her floodplain, with the sun hot and high, Snorri deflected us beneath the broad fringe of a great willow. The tree leaned out across lazy waters at the extreme of a long meander and encompassed us beneath its canopy.

‘So,’ he said, and the prow bumped up against the willow trunk. The hilt of his sword slipped from the bench and clunked on the planks, blade dark with dried blood.

‘Look … about the fight-pits … I—’ Much of the morning my maiden voyage had been spent planning the smooth denials that now refused to stutter from my tongue. In between the vomiting and the complaining I’d been rehearsing my lies, but under the focused gaze of a man who appeared to be more than ready to slaughter his way through any situation, I ran out of the spit required for falsehoods. For a moment I saw him staring up at Maeres from the pit floor. ‘Bring a bigger bear?’ I remembered the smile he had on him. A snort of laughter broke out of me and, fuck, yes it hurt. ‘Who even says that kind of thing?’

Snorri grinned. ‘The first one was too small.’

‘And the last one was just right?’ I shook my head, trying not to laugh again. ‘You beat Goldilocks to the punchline by one bear.’

He frowned at that. ‘Goldilocks?’

‘Never mind. Never mind. And Cutter John!’ I sucked in a huge breath and surrendered to the joy of the memory, of escaping that goggle-eyed demon and his knives. The mirth bubbled out of me. I doubled up, gasping with hysterical laughter, beating the side of the boat to stop myself. ‘Ah, Jesu! You took the bastard’s arm off.’

Snorri shrugged, holding back another grin. ‘Must have got in my way. Once your Red Queen changed her mind about letting me go she put her city at war with me.’

‘The Red Qu—’ I caught myself. I’d said it was the queen’s order that he be sent to the pits. He had no reason not to believe me. Remembering the anchor points of any web of lies is part of the basics when practising to deceive. Normally I’m world class at it. I blamed my failure on extenuating circumstances. I had, after all, escaped from Alain DeVeer’s frying pan into the fire of the opera only to plunge from that into something even worse. ‘Yes. That was … harsh of her. But my grandmother is known as somewhat of a tyrant.’

‘Your grandmother?’ Snorri raised his eyebrows.

‘Um.’ Shit. He hadn’t even noticed me in the throne room and now he knew me for a prince, a prize hostage. ‘I’m a very distant grandson. Hardly related at all really.’ I raised a hand to my nose. All that laughing had left it pulsing with hurt.

‘Take a breath.’ Snorri leaned forward.

‘What?’

He snaked out an arm, catching my head from behind, fingers like iron rods. For a second I thought he was just going to crush my skull, but then his other hand blocked my view and the world exploded in white agony. Pinching the bridge of my nose with finger and thumb he pulled and twisted. Something grated and if I’d had anything left to vomit I’d have filled the boat with it.

‘There.’ He released me. ‘Fixed.’

I hollered out the pain and surprise in one burst, trailing into coherence at the end of it, ‘… Jesu fuck me with a cross!’ The words came out clear, the nasal twang gone. I couldn’t bring myself to say thank you though, so I said, ‘Ouch.’

Snorri leaned back, arms resting on the sides of the boat. ‘You were in the throne room then? You must have heard the tale we prisoners were brought in to tell.’

‘Well, yes …’ Certainly bits of it.

‘So you’ll know where I’m headed then,’ Snorri said.

‘South?’ I ventured.

He looked puzzled at that. ‘I’d be more at ease going by sea but that may be hard to arrange. It might be I need to trek north through Rhone and Renar and Ancrath and Conaught.’

‘Well, of course …’ I had no idea what he was talking about. If there had been a word of truth in his story he wouldn’t want to go back. And his itinerary sounded like the trek from hell. Rhone, our uncouth neighbour to the north, was always a place best avoided. I’d yet to meet a Rhonish man I’d piss on if he were on fire. Renar I’d never heard of. Ancrath was a murky kingdom on the edge of a swamp and full of murderous inbreds, and Conaught lay so far away there was bound to be something wrong with it. ‘I wish you luck of the journey, Snagason, wherever you’re bound.’ I held my hand out for a manly clasping, a prelude to a parting of our ways.

‘I’m going north. Home to rescue my wife, my family …’ He paused for a moment, pressing his lips tight, then shook off the emotion. ‘And it went poorly the first time I left you behind,’ Snorri said. He eyed my outstretched hand with a measure of suspicion and extended his own cautiously. ‘You didn’t feel that just now?’ He touched his own nose with his other hand.

‘Course I bloody felt it!’ It was quite possibly the most painful thing I’d ever experienced, and that from someone who learned the hard way not to jump into the saddle from a bedroom window.

He brought his hand closer to mine and a pressure built against my skin, all pins and needles and fire. Closer still, and more slow, and my hand started to pale, almost to glow from within, while his darkened. With an inch between our extended palms it seemed that a cold fire ran through my veins, my hand brighter than the day, his looking as if it had been dipped in dark waters, stained with blackest ink that collected in every crease and filled each pore. His veins ran black while mine burned, darkness bled from his skin like mist, a wisp of pale flame ghosted across my knuckles. Snorri met my gaze, his teeth gritted against a pain that mirrored mine. Eyes which had been blue were now holes into some inner night.

I gave one of those yelps that I always hope will go unnoticed and whipped my hand away. ‘Damnation!’ I shook it, trying to shake the pain out, and watched as it shaded back to normality. ‘That bloody witch! Point taken. We won’t shake on it.’ I gestured to a gravel beach on the outer edge of the meander. ‘You can drop me off there. I’ll find my own way back.’

Snorri shook his head, eyes returning to blue. ‘It was worse when we got too far apart. Didn’t you notice?’

‘I was rather distracted,’ I said. ‘But, yes, I do recall some problems.’

‘What witch?’

‘What?’

‘You said “bloody witch”. What witch?’

‘Oh nothing, I—’ I remembered the fight-pits. Lying to the man on this point would probably be a mistake. I was lying out of habit in any case. Better to tell him. It might be that his heathen ways could lead to some kind of solution. ‘You met her. Well, you saw her in the Red Queen’s throne room.’

‘The old völva?’ Snorri asked.

‘The old what?’

‘That crone at the Red Queen’s side. She’s the witch you’re talking about?’

‘Yes. The Silent Sister everyone calls her. Most don’t see her though.’

Snorri spat into the water. The current took it away in a series of lazy swirls. ‘I know this name, the Silent Sister. The völvas of the North speak it, but not loudly.’

‘Well now you’ve seen her.’ I still wondered at that. Perhaps the fact that we could both see her had something to do with her magic failing to destroy us. ‘She set a spell that was to kill everyone at the opera I went to last night.’

‘Opera?’ he asked.

‘Better not to know. In any event, I escaped the spell, but when I forced my way through, something broke, a crack ran after me. Two cracks, inter-woven, one dark, one light. When you grabbed hold of me the crack caught up and ran through both of us. And somehow stopped.’

‘And when we separate?’

‘The dark fissure ran through you, the light through me. When we pull them apart it seems the cracks try to tear free, to rejoin.’

‘And when they join?’ Snorri asked.

I shrugged. ‘It’s bad. Worse than opera.’ However nonchalant my words might be though, and despite the heat of the day, my blood ran colder than the river.

Snorri set his jaw in that way I’d come to recognize as consideration. His hands quietly strangled the oars. ‘So your grandmother sentences me to the fight-pit and then you bring down her witch’s curse on me?’

‘I didn’t seek you out!’ The nonchalance I’d been striving for wouldn’t come from a dry mouth. ‘You stopped me dead in the street, remember?’ I regretted using the word ‘dead’ immediately.

‘You’re a man of honour,’ he said to no one in particular. I looked for the smirk and found nothing but sincerity. If he was acting then I needed lessons from the same place he’d got his. I concluded that he was reminding himself of his duties, which seemed odd in a Viking whose duties traditionally extended to remembering to pillage before raping, or the other way around. ‘You’re a man of honour.’ Louder this time, looking right at me. Where the hell he got that idea I had no notion.

‘Yes,’ I lied.

‘We should settle this like men.’ Absolutely the last words I wanted to hear.

‘Here’s the thing, Snorri.’ I eyed the various escape options open to me. I could jump overboard. Unfortunately I’d always viewed boats as a thin plank between me and drowning, and swimming as the same again but without the plank. The tree offered the next best option, but willow fronds aren’t climbing material unless you happen to be a squirrel. I selected the last option. ‘What’s that over there?’ I pointed to a spot on the riverbank behind the Norseman. He didn’t so much as turn his head. Shit. ‘Ah, my mistake.’ And that was me out of options. ‘As I was saying. The thing is. The thing. Well, honestly.’ The thing had to be something. ‘Um. I’m afraid that when I kill you the crack will run out of you just the same as it would if we got too far apart. And then – boom – a split second later I’d be too far apart. So tempting as it is to pit my princely fighting skills against those of a … what is your rank? I never found out.’

‘Hauldr. I own my land, ten acres from Uulisk shore to the ridge top.’

‘So as much as it tempts me to break with societal rules and pit the arm of a prince of Red March against a … a hauldr, I’m concerned that I wouldn’t survive your death.’ From his frown I could see that it might be a risk he was willing to take if no better alternative were on offer, so to forestall him I added, ‘But as it happens I’ve always had a hankering to visit the North myself and see firsthand just how reaving is done. And besides, my grandmother worries so about these dead ghost-men of yours. It would put her heart at ease to have the business sorted out. So I’d best come with you.’

‘I mean to travel fast.’ Snorri’s frown deepened. ‘I’ve left it too long already and the distance is great. And be warned: it will be a bloody business when I get there. Slow me down and … but you were moving pretty quick when you crashed into me.’ His brow smoothed, thunderclouds clearing, and that smile lit him up, half-wild, half-friendly, and all dangerous. ‘Besides, you’ll know more about the terrain than me. Tell me about the men of Rhone.’

And just like that we were travelling companions. I’d bound myself to his quest for rescue and vengeance in some distant land. Hopefully it wouldn’t take too long. Snorri could save his family then slaughter his enemies to the last man, necromancer and corpse monster, and that would be that. I’m good at self-deception but I couldn’t manage to make the plan sound like anything other than a suicidal nightmare. Still, the icy North was a long way off – plenty of opportunity to break the spell that bound us together and run away home.

Snorri took up the oars again, paused, then, ‘Stand a moment.’

‘Really?’

He nodded. I’ve good balance on a horse and none at all on water. Even so, not wanting to fall out with the man within moments of our new understanding, I got to my feet, arms out to steady myself. He tipped the boat, a sharp deliberate move, and I pitched into the river, grasping desperately at willow twigs as a man about to drown will clutch at straws.

Above the splashing I could hear Snorri having a good old laugh to himself. He was saying something too, ‘… clean … together …’ But I could only catch the odd word since drowning is a noisy business. Eventually, when I’d given up trying to save myself by swallowing all the water and had slipped below the surface for the third and final time, he snagged my waistcoat and hauled me back in with distressing ease. I lay in the bottom flopping about like a fish and retching up enough of the river almost to swamp the boat.

‘Bastard!’ My first coherent word before I remembered quite how big and murderous he was.

‘I couldn’t have you come to the North smelling like that!’ Snorri laughed and steered back out into the current, the willow trailing its fingers over us in regret. ‘And how can a man not know how to swim? Madness!’

8

The river took us to the sea. A journey of two days. We slept by the banks, far enough back to escape the worst of the mosquitoes. Snorri laughed at my complaints. ‘In the northern summer the biters are so thick in the air they cast a shadow.’

‘Probably why you’re all so pale,’ I said. ‘No tan and blood loss.’

I found sleep elusive. The hard ground didn’t help, nor did the itchiness of anything I used to soften it. The whole business reminded me of the misery that had been the Scorron Campaign two summers earlier. It’s true I wasn’t there more than three weeks before returning to be feted as the hero of the Aral Pass and to nurse my bad leg, strained in combat, or at least in inadvertently sprinting away from one combat into another. In any event, I lay on the too-hard and too-scratchy ground looking at the stars, with the river whispering in the dark and the bushes alive with things that chirruped and rustled and creaked. I thought then of Lisa DeVeer and suspected that few nights would pass between now and my return to the palace when I wouldn’t find occasion to ask myself how I ended up in such straits. And in the smallest hours of the night, feeling deeply sorry for myself, I even found time to wonder again if Lisa and her sisters might have survived the opera. Perhaps Alain had convinced his father to keep them home as punishment for the company they’d been keeping.

‘Why don’t you sleep, Red March?’ Snorri spoke from the darkness.

‘We’re in Red March, Norseman. It only makes sense to call someone by their place of origin when you’re a long way from it. We’ve been through this.’

‘And the sleeping?’

‘Women on my mind.’

‘Ah.’ Enough silence that I thought he’d dropped off, then, ‘One in particular?’

‘Mostly all of them, and their absence from this riverbank.’

‘Better to think of one,’ he said.

For the longest time I watched the stars. People say they spin, but I couldn’t see it. ‘Why are you awake?’

‘My hand pains me.’

‘A scratch like that? And you a great big Viking?’

‘We’re made of meat just like other men. This needs cleaning, stitching. Done right and I’ll keep the arm. We’ll leave the boat when the river widens, then skirt the coast. I’ll find someone in Rhone.’

He knew there would be a port at the mouth of the river, but if the Red Queen had marked him for death then it would be madness to go there seeking treatment. The fact that Grandmother had ordered his release and that the port of Marsail was a renowned centre of medicine, with a school that had produced the region’s finest doctors for close on three hundred years, I kept to myself. Telling him would unravel my lies and paint me as the architect of his fate. I didn’t feel good about it, but better than I would if he decided to trim me with his sword.

I returned to my imaginings of Lisa and her sisters, but in the deepest part of the night it was that fire which lit my dreams, colouring them violet, and I saw through the flames, not the agonies of the dying but two inhuman eyes in the dark slit of a mask. Somehow I’d broken the Silent Sister’s spell, escaped the inferno, and borne away part of the magic … but what else might have escaped and where might it be now? Suddenly each noise in the dark was the slow step of that monster, sniffing me out in the blind night, and despite the heat my sweat lay cold upon me.

Morning struck with the promise of a blazing summer’s day. More of a threat than a promise. When you watch from a shaded veranda, sipping iced wine as the Red March summer paints lemons onto garden boughs – that’s promise. When you have to toil a whole day in the dust to cover a thumb’s distance on the map – that’s threat. Snorri scowled at the east, breaking his fast on the last stale remains of the bread he’d stolen in the city. He said little and ate left-handed, his right swelling and red, the skin blistering like that on his shoulders but not burned by the sun.

The river held a brackish air, its banks parting company and surrendering to mud flats. We stood by our boat, the water now fifty yards off, sucked back by tidal flow.

‘Marsail.’ I pointed to a haze on the horizon, a smear of darkness against the wrinkled blue where the distant sea crowded beneath the sky.

‘Big.’ Snorri shook his head. He went to the rowing boat and made a slight bow, muttering. Some damn heathen prayer no doubt, as if the thing needed thanking for not drowning us. Finished at last, he turned and gestured for me to lead the way. ‘Rhone. And by swift roads.’

‘They’d be swifter if we had horses.’

Snorri snorted as if offended by the idea. And waited. And waited some more.

‘Oh,’ I said, and led off, though in truth my expertise ended with the knowledge that Rhone lay north and a little west. I hadn’t the least clue about local roads. In fact past Marsail I would struggle to name any of the region’s major towns. No doubt Cousin Serah could reel them off pat, her breasts defying gravity all the while, and Cousin Rotus could probably bore a librarian to death with the populace, produce and politics of each settlement down to the last hamlet. My attentions, however, had always been focused closer to home and on less worthy pursuits.

We left the broad strip of cultivated floodplain and climbed by a series of ridges into drier country. Snorri ran with sweat by the time the land levelled out. He seemed to be struggling: perhaps a fever from his wound had its hooks in him. It didn’t take long for the sun to become a burden. After a mile or three of trekking through stony valleys and rough scrub, and with my feet already sore, my boots already too tight, I returned to the subject of horses.

‘You know what would be good? Horses. That’s what.’

‘Norsemen sail. We don’t ride.’ Snorri looked embarrassed or perhaps it was the sunburn.

‘Don’t or can’t?’

He shrugged. ‘How hard can it be? You hold the reins and go forward. If you find us horses we’ll ride.’ His expression darkened. ‘I need to be back there. I’ll sleep in the saddle if a horse will get me north before Sven Broke-Oar finishes his work in the Bitter Ice.’

It occurred to me then that the Norseman truly hoped his family might yet survive. He thought this a rescue mission rather than just some matter of revenge. That made it even worse. Revenge is a business of calculation, best served cold. Rescue holds more of sacrifice, suicidal danger, and all manner of other madness that should have me running in the opposite direction. It made breaking whatever spell bound us an even higher priority. By the look of his hand, which seemed worse from one hour to the next, with the infection’s spread now marked by a darkening of the veins, any spell-breaking would need to be done soon. Otherwise he might die on me and then my dire predictions concerning the consequence for one of us if the other expired might soon be put to the test. I’d made the claim as a lie, but it had felt true when I spoke it.

We trudged on through the heat of the day, forcing a path through a dry and airless conifer forest. Hours later the trees released us, scratched, and sticky with both sap and sweat. As luck would have it we spilled from the forest’s margins directly onto a broad track punctuated with remnants of ancient paving.

‘Good.’ Snorri nodded, clearing the side ditch with one stride. ‘I’d thought you lost back there.’

‘Lost?’ I feigned hurt. ‘Every prince should know his realm like the back of … of …’ A glimpsed memory of Lisa DeVeer’s back came to me, the pattern of freckles, the knobs of her spine casting shadows in lamplight as she bent to some sweet task. ‘Of something familiar.’

The road wound up to a plateau where innumerable springs chuckled from the eastern hills along stony beds and the land returned to cultivation. Olive groves, tobacco, cornfields. Here and there a lone farmhouse or collection of stone huts, slate-roofed and huddled together for protection.

Our first encounter was an elderly man driving a still more venerable donkey ahead of him with flicks of his switch. Two huge panniers of what looked to be sticks almost engulfed the beast.

‘Horse?’ Snorri muttered the suggestion as we approached.

‘Please.’

‘It’s got four legs. That’s better than two.’

‘We’ll find something more sturdy. And not some plough-horse either. Something fitting.’

‘And fast,’ said Snorri The donkey ignored us, and the old fellow paid scarcely more attention, as if he encountered giant Vikings and ragged princes every day. ‘Ayuh.’ And he was past.

Snorri pursed his blistered lips and walked on, until a hundred yards further down the road something stopped him in his tracks. ‘That,’ he said, looking down, ‘is the biggest pile of dung I’ve seen in my life.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve seen bigger.’ In fact I’d fallen in bigger, but as this appeared to have dropped from the behind of a single beast I had to agree that it was pretty damned impressive. You could have heaped a score of dinner plates with it if one were so inclined. ‘It’s big, but I have seen the like before. In fact it’s quite possible that we’ll soon have something in common.’

‘Yes?’

‘It’s quite possible, my friend, that we’ll both have had our lives saved by a big pile of shit.’ I turned toward the retreating old man. ‘Hey!’ Hollered down the road at his back. ‘Where’s the circus?’

The ancient didn’t pause but simply extended a bony arm toward an olive-studded ridge to the south.

‘Circus?’ Snorri asked, still transfixed by the dung pile.

‘You’re about to see an elephant, my friend!’

‘And this effelant will cure my poisoned hand?’ He held the offending article up for inspection, wincing as he did so.

‘Best place to get wounds seen to outside a battle-hospital! These people juggle axes and burning brands. They swing from trapezes and walk on ropes. There’s not a circus in the Broken Empire that doesn’t have half a dozen people who can stitch wounds and with luck a herbman for other ailments.’

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