“I will find the heathen and kill him,” I had promised Fexler.
“Sageous is nothing but a savage, straining truth through superstition to dabble in dreams.” Fexler shook his head.
“Still, he’s hard to catch a hold of,” I had said.
“Oh, how I wish he’d go away,” Fexler had replied, his voice half song.
“What?”
“An old rhyme. An ancient rhyme I suppose. Sageous puts me in mind of it. As I was going up the stair I met a man who wasn’t there; he wasn’t there again today; oh, how I wish he’d go away. That’s Sageous for you; the man who wasn’t there. The thing to do of course is to change it around. Oh, how I wish he’d always stay.”
“What?” I wondered if ghosts could grow senile.
Fexler had come in close then and set his ghost-light hand to the box. “But none of this is any use to you until the puzzle of this box is done, this Gordian knot unravelled. I’ll put it in the box.”
“No!” I shouted it. I wouldn’t let him take this memory from me.
“No what?” Fexler had asked.
“I…forget,” I had said.
“No?” Makin asked at my side, back in the corridors of the Haunt, the Prince of Arrow waiting outside with his sword and thousands more behind.
I shook my head. My hand held the empty box, crushed now in my grip, blood on it from old thorn-scars bleeding once more. The box fell from me, and I kicked it to the wall.
“No,” I said. “Just no.”
Father Gomst waited for us in the courtyard. A path had been cleared through the dead. They lay heaped to either side as if it were the road into hell. And the smell of it, Brothers! It made my stomach rumble. And worse, as I walked that path between the corpses, stacked and charred, they twitched. Hands red in ruin flexed at my passing, burned skin sloughing from fingers. Heads lolled, dead eyes found me. The men with me, focused in their purpose, didn’t see it, but I saw, I felt them all, uneasy in their new slumbers as the Dead King watched me through them.
Never open the box.
Death and fire had their hooks in me. Deeper than deep. And each had started to pull.
“I should be tending the dying,” Father Gomst said, almost shouting to be heard over the screaming from the circle gallery where they had been taken.
“Let the dying tend to themselves,” I said. I knew that Father Gomst would have been no comfort to me when I lay groaning in the Heimrift. I saw Grumlow at the keep doors, hanging back in the shadows. I waved him forward. “Show the dying a little mercy, Grumlow,” I said. He nodded and departed.
I knew I would have appreciated Grumlow’s quick sharp mercy back in the Heimrift rather than a slow exit accompanied by Father Gomst’s moralizing.
We walked along the pathway, cleared of the dead, but not the grease of burned flesh, the pieces of skin, the charred outlines of men. No one spoke; even Rike looked grim. It was appropriate though. My uncle, the Duke of Renar, had been a burner. He had spread his own terror that way. And I had come to take the place from him with Gog at my side, filling the courtyard with cremations. The Prince of Arrow had it right when he called the Ancraths the darkest branch of the Steward tree. I had long wondered if I would stand against Orrin of Arrow when he came a-calling. He was perhaps the brightest fruit from the branches of the emperor’s line. In the four years since I claimed the Highlands I had walked the empire, returning at last to suppress cousin Jarco’s uprising in the west, then battled less tangible foes, sickness in my people and in the economy. In the same span the Prince of Arrow had built his strength and taken five thrones. It was perhaps only the repeated whispering of the wise, telling me I must cede him the empire throne, that made me think of opposing his march to the Gilden Gate. I do not like to be told.
Now though, with the copper box torn open and my memories and sins returned to me, I felt that more had been restored, as if I had been a shadow of myself, almost me, but with something vital stolen away, something so bonded to my crimes that Luntar had been forced to set it also into his box of memories. I might not live to see the sun set on this day of blood, but if I did, four years would not pass again and find me no closer to my goals.
We walked out through the ruins of the sprawl-town where burning chunks of the Haunt’s outer walls had left only wreckage in their path. No trace of Jerring’s stables where Makin had once rolled in dung to be ready for the road.
Even now I could end this. The Prince would accept a peace: his progress was too important to him not to. And who would say that he would make a worse emperor than I? I could match the very worst of his crimes with my own then trump them with darker deeds.
There had been times aplenty, in the clarity of high places among the peaks, when I had thought to leave Orrin of Arrow a clear path. But things change. A different Jorg approached the duelling ground, a different Prince of Arrow. This wedding day had seen Jorg Ancrath remade in an older mould. I had
