“See?” I said, when there was a gap. “I’m not proud of how I learned to do that-but there it is, the devil makes work for idle hands-I can kill parts of your spinal cord and leave you in that much pain for the years before you die. I can paralyse you and take away your speech so no one will know how you suffer and you will not be able to seek or beg for an end.”
The Prince’s soldiers came on at a run, but they had a lot of mountainside to cover.
“What do you want?” he asked.
I had already killed the link between his mind and his muscles so he knew I wasn’t lying. I was only lying when I implied I might be able to restore it. “Let’s be friends,” I said. “I know I might not be able to trust you even if you called me brother…but do it anyway.”
“What?” Egan said.
“Jorg! We need to run!” Uncle Robert put a hand on my shoulder.
I ignored him and let more pain flood through Egan. “Call me brother.”
“Brother! BROTHER! You’re my brother,” he cried, then screamed, then gasped.
“Father Gomst, did you hear that?” I asked.
The old man nodded.
“Let’s make it official,” I said. “Adopt me into your family, Brother.”
I hurt him again.
“Jorg!” Makin pointed at the thousands coming our way, as if I hadn’t noticed.
“I…You’re adopted. You’re my brother,” Egan gasped.
“Excellent.” I let him fall. I stood and wiped his blood from my hands onto Makin’s cloak.
“We need to run!” Makin took a few quick steps toward the Haunt to encourage me.
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “We’d never make it.”
“What’s your plan?” Makin asked.
“I’d hoped they would just give up. I mean it’s not as if they like this pile of dung.” I kicked Egan in the head, but not too hard: I might yet need that foot for running. “I’ve killed more than half of the bastards. Both their princes are gone. You’d think they’d just go home!” I shouted this last part at their ranks, close enough to see faces now.
“That’s it?” Uncle Robert asked. “You just hoped?”
I grinned and faced him. “I’ve lived the last ten years on hunches, bets, hope, and luck.”
The fire danced behind him as timbers fell from the trebuchet. The flames held that same strangeness as those in the castle, a flat brittle look. Crimson striations flushed through them, a stippled effect…
“I am going to watch you die.” Sageous stood to my left, naked but for a loincloth despite the cold, every inch of him written upon.
He had surprised me but I tried not to let it show. I stepped toward him.
“I’m not here. Will you never learn, Jorg of Ancrath?” I could see he hated me. That in itself made a small victory, putting some emotion in those mild cow-eyes of his.
“Are you not?” I asked.
He looked at Egan, limp and bleeding in his rainbow armour. “I could have done great things with that one. Do you know how long it took to find a man so powerful and yet so malleable? I couldn’t work with Orrin. He had less give in him than your father, and that’s saying a lot.”
“You set him to kill Orrin?” I asked.
“It wasn’t hard. It needed the slightest push in the right direction. Sweet Katherine proved too tempting and poor Orrin was just in the way. Men like Egan have only one answer to things being in their way.”
“So many little pushes, dream-witch,” I said.
“You probably don’t even remember the dream that made you beg to visit Norwood that day, do you, Jorg?”
“What?” Images bubbled at the back of my mind. The fair at Norwood. The bunting. I had wanted to go. I’d pestered my mother. I’d almost dragged them into that carriage. “It was you?”
“Yes.” He showed me a tight vicious smile. “Your sins cried out for it.” He mimicked me.
“I was a child…”
Sageous looked down at Egan. “They cry out for it now.”
A cold fire rose through me. “I’ll tell you what my sins cry out for, heathen. They cry out for more. They call for company.” And I stepped toward him.
“I am not here, Jorg,” he said.
“But I think you are.”
I felt him try to weave my vision, try to walk away in dream. And then I saw her. A ghost of her. Katherine white with anger and the more beautiful with it. A ghost of her at his shoulder, waiting in the place he sought to run to, like a mirage on hot sand, her lips moving without sound, chanting something. I could see her sitting on horseback, with the same knights around her that she brought with her from Arrow’s palace. Somewhere back in the mass of that army Katherine rode her horse blind, her eyes bound by visions as she cast spells of her own. And with each silent word from the tight line of her mouth Sageous grew more solid, more there.
I reached for him. “I met a man who wasn’t there…” My hands almost found the heathen, the stuff of him slipping away as my fingers closed. What had Fexler said? It’s all about will. Put aside the skulls, the smokes, the wording of spells, and at the bottom of it all is desire. “He wasn’t there again today.” Wanting makes it so. “Oh, how I wish he’d always stay.” And my grasping hands found him. Whatever may be said about the aftertaste, in the moment revenge tastes sweeter than blood, my brothers.
I seized his head and tore it from his shoulders as though I were a troll and he only human, for he had walked too long in dream and his flesh was rotten with it, tearing like the scribbled parchment it resembled. He made his own silent screams then and tried to die. But I held him there. I let the necromancy bind him into his skull.
“There is not sufficient hurt in this world for you.” And the fire that burned in my bones, that echoed in my blood, lit about my hands and he burned with it also, trapped, living, and consumed.
I threw his head toward the oncoming troops. It bounced flaming on the rocks, flesh bubbling, lips writhing.
Burning was too good for him.
I walked toward the flaming wreck of the trebuchet, the fire running up my arms now.
“Jorg?” Makin asked, his voice quiet as if at least half of him was hoping not to be noticed.
“Better run,” I said.
“We can’t outrun them,” Rike growled.
“From me,” I said.
The fire leapt as I approached it. It looked like glass, like a window. Behind me Makin and the others ran. I laughed. The joy of it, the roaring joy of destruction. That’s why the flames dance. For joy.
“There’s only one fire,” I said, and I knew Gog watched me from it.
I reached into the blaze and found him, flame-made, his white-hot hand in mine, the fragments of his lost body still in my flesh, preserving me. In the core of me this new fire magic-call it magic, or understanding, or empathy-made war on the necromancy that still infected my blood.
The Prince’s troops passed Rigden Rock, a spear flew by my head.
“Come to me,” I said, “Brother Gog.”
“Truly?” he asked. “There will be no end to this-like the sun beneath the mountain.”
A million images tumbled through me. Faces, moments, places, brothers of every kind. The weariness of the world. And the fire consumed it. I knew then how Ferrakind felt.
“Let it all burn.”
And Gog flowed into me. A river of fire, eating the death-magic and making something new, a darker fire that ran like poison, coiling about my limbs.
The first of Egan’s army reached me and the fire lifted from my hands. The men shredded, their flesh lifting from them as sea foam before a wind, their bones igniting as they fell. The dark-fire ran, jumping from man to man as the soldiers tried to flee, tried to turn and run, only to find their comrades not yet understanding, surging forward.
I walked amongst them and death walked with me.
Death and fire. Ferrakind howled at me from the place where fire lives, a song of destruction, stripping away
