A storm came in the night, raging against the canvas. Tents are boasters, telling exaggerated tales of the weather they save you from. The sound was of a deluge fit to drown the kingdom and a wind that could scour the rocks from mountain slopes. Under a weather blanket, curled below a hedge, it might not have woken me, but beneath the great drum of the pavilion roof I lay staring into darkness.
Sometimes it’s good to hear the rain, but not be wet, to know that the wind is howling but to feel no breath of it. I waited in that timeless comfortable dark and at last the scent of white musk rose, her arms folded about my chest, and she drew me down into dreams. There seemed an urgency to it tonight.
‘Aunt Katherine.’ No doubt my lips twitched toward the words while I slept.
In the beginning Katherine sent me only nightmares, as if she counted herself my conscience and needed to torment me with my crimes. Time and again baby Degran died in my hands and I woke screaming, sweat-soaked, a danger to any who shared my bed. I spent nights roasting over the slow fire of Sareth’s grief, shown from every angle by the arts her sister taught herself while married to the Prince of Arrow. Miana could not keep to my chambers and set herself a bed in the east tower.
Dream-sworn, I told myself. She’s a dream-witch. Sageous’s ilk. But it didn’t stop me wanting her. I painted Katherine’s image across the dark storm of my imagination. She never showed herself and so I brought forth my first sight of her, that time-locked memory when we collided in the corridors of the Tall Castle.
Katherine showed me her loved ones – those I had killed. Sir Galen championing her through the bright days of her youth in Scorron, and her maid Hanna at a time when she looked less sour and offered a child-princess comfort in a loveless court. In dreaming, Katherine made me care about her cares, about her people, twisting me with the strange logic of the sleeping mind such that they seemed important, real, as real as the memories from before the thorns. And all of this in the too-bright light of the Gelleth sun, the flesh-stripping glare of that Builder Sun, always behind me, throwing my shadow like a black finger into the midst of their lives.
I let her arms draw me down through midnight. I had never fought her, though I felt I could, and I think perhaps she wanted me to. Even more than she wanted to show me the wrongs I had wrought, even more than she needed to make me feel it as she felt it, I think she needed me to fight her, to struggle against her spell, to close my dreaming eyes and try to escape. But I didn’t. I told myself that I chose to face what I feared. That her torments would burn me clean of sentiment. But truly – I liked her arms around me, the feel of her close at hand, touching yet untouchable.
Whispers of light reached me through the starless night. Of late the dreams she drew me to were more confused, unfocused, as if she dreamed also. I would see her, or touch her, but never both. We would walk the Tall Castle, or the Palace of Arrow, her dresses flowing, silence binding us, the walls aging and crumbling as we passed. Or I would smell her, hold her, but be blind, or see only the graves of Perechaise.
Tonight though, the dream came cold and clear. Broken stone crunched beneath my shoes, the rain lashed me. I climbed a slope, bent against the gale. My fingers moved blind across natural rock, a wall rising before me. I knew every sensation but held no control as if I were a puppet and another kept the strings.
‘What lesson is this, Katherine?’
She never spoke to me. Just as I never fought her – she never spoke. At first the dreams she wrought on me were all anger and revenge. Still they often carried that edge but I thought also that she experimented, trained her talent – as a swordsman crafts his technique and adds new strokes to his repertoire. These had been Sageous’s skills and now that my aunt kept once more beneath Father’s roof it might be she filled the heathen’s role, though whether like him she spread a subtle web of influence and with touches turned the Hundred along Olidan Ancrath’s paths, or indeed her own, I didn’t know.
The storm fell away without warning and the wind died, though I heard it moaning behind me. A cave of some sort. I had passed through the narrow mouth of a cave. I crouched and swung the pack from my shoulder. Sure fingers found a flint and tinder. Within moments I lit the lantern fished from a pocket within the bag. I would have been proud of my work, but the hands that carried it out, the hands I held the flint in and struck flame with, were not mine. The lantern showed them to be pale, like flesh too long under water, and long-fingered. I have long fingers, but these were white spiders, crawling in the lantern’s shadows.
I moved on, or rather the man whose skin I shared moved on and bore me with him. The lantern’s glow reached out and found little to return it. My vision stayed where directed by the owner of the eyes I watched through – on the floor for the most part, natural rock smoothed by the passage of many feet. An occasional glance to the left and right showed waterfalls of frozen stone and unearthly galleries where stalagmites reached up to stalactites. And I knew where I walked. The Haunt’s eastern sally port. The pale man had climbed the Runyard in the dark of the storm and entered the sally port through the concealed slot high on the Runyard’s flank.
The man moved with confidence. Although many twists and turns led off to dark unknowns it took no special skill to find the way, polished as it was by countless predecessors. The dream seemed accurate, drawing on my memories to make substance. A shiver ran through me, though not through the pale man. If Katherine strove for accuracy then soon a black hand would close around the intruder, reaching from the shadow, and pull him with inexorable strength and merciful speed into the gaping maw of a troll. I hoped not to feel those black teeth close in my flesh, but it seemed likely. Already their stink hung in my nose and his collar chafed my neck.
He walked his path and no hand came reaching. If I had been able to hold a breath I would have let it sigh through my teeth. For a while the dream had convinced me I was there, but no; Gorgoth’s trolls guarded the subterranean paths to the Haunt and many more secret routes besides.
We came now through hand-hewn tunnels, gouged into the rock to join the Haunt to the natural caves. The man stopped, not far from the lowest of the Haunt’s cellars. Ahead a clot of darkness swallowed the lantern light and gave nothing back. For long moments he held still, no motion in him, almost inhuman in his lack of twitch or tremor. When he advanced he moved on swift feet, the hilt of a knife cool in his grip though I couldn’t see the blade. A single troll lay across the rough stone, sprawled out with its long limbs reaching. The beast’s face nestled, hidden against the black knob of its shoulder. It might have been dead, but with careful observation the pale man and I saw the slow rise and fall of its back as breath came and went.
Without haste the man stepped around the sleeping troll, ducking where the tunnel’s roof curved low, picking his way over black legs.
‘A poor dream, Katherine.’ I spoke without needing his lips. ‘Trolls are made for war. It’s written through them. This man’s scent would have woken a dozen by now and set their mouths running with hunger.’
My escort found the wooden door that gives onto the Haunt’s wine cellars. He worked the lock with heavy picks suited to such an old and solid mechanism. A drop of oil to take any squeak from the hinges and he pushed it open, stepping through without hesitation. I caught sight of his knife then, an assassin’s tool, long and thin, its handle of turned white bone.
He emerged from the false front of the huge barrel that disguised the exit. Propped against a real barrel, opposite the false one and of nearly equal size, a guardsman in my colours sat, helm to one side, legs stretched in front of him, head forward in slumber. I crouched before him. I felt my haunches settle on my heels, I felt the strain in the muscles of my thighs, the coarseness of the guard’s dirty blond hair as I pulled his head back. I knew him. The name fluttered behind my thoughts. Rodrick, a little fellow, younger than me, I once found him hiding in my tower when Arrow besieged the castle. My knife lay cold against his throat now, and still he didn’t stir. I’d half a mind to open his neck just for being such a useless guard. Even so it came as a shock when my hand slipped lower and drove the blade into his heart. That woke him! Rodrick watched me with hurt eyes, mouth twisting but silent, and he died. I waited. All trace of motion left the boy but still I waited. And then I pulled the knife free. Very little blood flowed. I wiped my blade clean on his tunic.
The pale man had black sleeves. I noticed that much before his gaze found the stairs and he went to them. He left his lantern beside Rodrick and his shadow led the way.
The man walked through the Haunt’s corridors and halls as if he belonged there. The castle lay in darkness with only the occasional lamp set to light a corner or doorway. Shutters rattled, shaken by the wind, rainwater pooled below, driven past lintels and running over stone floors. It seemed my people huddled in their beds while the storm howled, for none of them wandered, no servant tending lamps, no dun-man for the night-soil, not a nursemaid or guardsman’s harlot slipping from the barracks … not a guardsman come to that.
At last, as the assassin reached the internal door to the east tower, we found a guard who hadn’t abandoned his post. Sir Graeham, knight of my table, asleep on his feet, held upright by a combination of plate armour, a halberd, and the wall. Pale hands positioned the long knife at the gap between gorget and shoulderplate. The assassin set the heel of his palm over his knife’s bone hilt, positioned so a sharp blow would puncture both leather and chainmail, and find the jugular beneath. He paused, perhaps sharing my thought that the knight might create quite a clatter if he fell. We held, close enough that I could draw Sir Graeham’s ripe stink in with each breath. The wind howled and I drove the knife home. Its hilt stung the hand that wasn’t mine, the business end stung Sir Graeham worse, and he fell, twitching. His weight pulled him from the knife.
Again the assassin cleaned his blade. This time on the knight’s red cloak, smearing it with a brighter shade. Fastidious, this one.
He found the key on Graeham’s belt and unlocked the oak door, iron-bound and polished by the touch of hands. Old as the door was, the archway held more years. My uncle’s scrolls spoke of a time when the Haunt was nothing but the east tower, a single watchtower set on the mountain’s shoulder with a military camp about its base. And even those men, who fought the tribes of Or and forged a stronghold in the Highlands, did not build the tower. There is writing on that arch, but time has forgotten even the name of the script. Its meaning has passed beyond knowing.
The assassin stepped beneath the archway and beneath the runes deep-set upon the keystone. Pain shot through me, thorns found my flesh, hooking through skin and blood in a manner that promised no easy release, like the barbed arrow that must be dug free, or the lock-hound that needs killing before the muscles and tendons along its jaw can be sliced and its teeth pried from the bone. It hurt, but I found my freedom, torn from the body that had held me. He walked on without pause and I staggered in his wake, following as he mounted the stair. Across the back of his black cloak a cross had been sewn in white silk. A holy cross.
I ran at him, but passed through as if I were the ghost, though in truth it was me that shivered at the contact. Lamp light offered me his face as I turned, just for a moment before he walked through me and left me standing on the steps. The man held no colour, his face the same pale, drowned hue as his hands, hair oiled to the scalp, the iris of his eyes matching the ivory of the whites. He bore a cross embroidered in white silk across the front of his tunic to echo the one on his back. A papal assassin then. Only the Vatican sends assassins out into the world bearing a return address. The rest of us would rather not be caught using such agents. The papal assassin however is merely an extension of the Pope’s infallibility – how can there be shame in executing the word of God? Why would such men cloak themselves in anonymity?
Sprawled in an alcove off the stairwell, Brother Emmer lay dead to the world. The assassin knelt and applied his knife to make sure it was a permanent state of affairs. Emmer had shown little interest in women on the road and had seemed a good choice to watch over my queen. I watched the Pope’s man climb the stairs until the turn of the tower took him from view. Emmer’s blood washed down, step by step, in crimson falls.
I never fought Katherine, never tried to escape her illusions, but that didn’t mean I had to cooperate. Somehow I had broken free of the assassin and I had no reason to watch what else he might do. Murder my queen, no doubt. Miana would be sleeping in the chamber at the top of the stairs if Katherine kept to the castle plan she had mined from my memories. Should I follow like a fool and watch Miana’s throat slit? See her thrash in her blood with my child dying inside her?
I stood in the darkness with just the echoes of lamplight from beyond the winding of the stair above and below.
‘Truly? You think you can show me anything that would hurt me?’ I spoke to the air. ‘You’ve walked my rememberings.’ I let her wander where she pleased when she came with her nightmares. I thought perhaps that daring the long corridors of my memory was more torment to her than her punishments were to me. Even with the key to each of my doors in her hand I knew there were places in me she didn’t go. Who in their right mind would?
‘Let’s play this game, Princess, all the way through. Let’s discover if you find the end too bitter.’
I ran up the stairs, the contacts between foot and stone were light and without effort, as if only in the assassin’s flesh could I properly touch this dream. I caught him within moments, passed him and won the race to the top.
Marten waited there, crouched before the queen’s door, his sword and shield on the floor, his eyes bloodshot and wild. Sweat held dark hair to his brow and ran down the straining tendons of his neck. In one fist a dagger, making constant jabs into his open palm. His breath came in short gasps and blood brimmed crimson from the cup of his hand.
‘Fight it,’ I told him. Despite my resolve I found myself drawn in by his struggle to stay awake and guard Miana.
The assassin came into view, my view, not Marten’s. He stopped, sniffed the air without sound, and cocked his head to catch the faint gasp of Marten’s pain. Whilst he paused I dived into him, determined to settle around his bones, clinging to anything tangible. A moment of blind agony and I stared once more out of his eyes. I tasted blood. He had shared the hurt of reunion with me and although he hadn’t cried out, a sharp intake of breath had passed his lips. Perhaps it would be enough to warn Marten.
The Pope’s man reached into his robe, replacing the long bone-handled blade and drawing forth two short and heavy daggers, cruciform and weighted for throwing. He moved very fast, diving into Marten’s line of sight whilst at the same time releasing the first of his knives, just a flick of the wrist but imparting lethal force.
Marten launched himself almost in the instant we faced him, slowed for a heartbeat perhaps by the weight of sleep he denied. The assassin’s dagger hit somewhere between neck and belly – I heard chain links snap. He passed us with a roar and the assassin’s foot lashed out, catching Marten’s chin, propelling him into the curved wall. Momentum carried him feet over head over feet, clattering down the stairs. We hesitated, as if unsure whether to pursue and check if any bones remained unbroken. The hot wetness below our knee convinced the assassin otherwise. Somehow Marten had sliced the assassin as he passed. The Pope’s man hobbled on toward the door, hissing at the pain now spreading from the cut Marten had left on us. He paused to tie a bandage, a silk sash from an inner pocket, pulled it tight, then advanced up the steps.
Any key had clattered down the stairs with Marten and the Pope’s man took out his picks once more to work the lock. It took longer than before, the queen’s door boasted a tricky mechanism perhaps as old as the tower. Before it yielded to our patient work the flagstones were pooled with the assassin’s blood, red as any man’s despite the pallor of his skin.
We stood, and I felt his weakness – blood loss and something else – he strained some muscle I didn’t share, but I knew the effort wearied him. Perhaps the all-encompassing sleep had cost him dear.
The door opened without sound. He took the lamp from its hook where Marten had crouched and stepped in. The strength of his imaginings began to reach me as at last his excitement mounted. I saw the pictures rising in his mind. All of a sudden, dream or no dream, I wanted him to fail. I didn’t want him to slice Miana open. I had no wish to see the red ruin of my unborn child drawn from her. The fear surprised me, raw and basic, and I knew it to be my own, not some sharing with Katherine. I wondered if it might be an echo of what Coddin warned I would feel for my son or daughter when I first saw them, held them. If that were true then I had my first inkling of how dangerous the bond might be.
On the dresser by the bed a glimmer from the silver chain I gave Miana on her name day. Under the covers a mounded form caught in shadows, wife and child, soft in sleep.
‘Wake up.’ As if saying it would make it happen. ‘Wake up.’ All my will and not even a tremble of it on his lips.
Cold certainty gripped me by the throat. This was real. This was now. I slept in my bed in a tent, Miana slept in hers miles from me, and a pale death approached her.
‘Katherine!’ I shouted her name inside his head. ‘Don’t do this!’
He stepped toward the bed, the second of his throwing knives raised and ready. Perhaps only the size of the lump beneath the covers prevented him from flinging the blade at it immediately. Miana could not be said to be a large woman, even with a baby straining to get out of her. It looked as though she had company in there. I might even have thought it, but for Marten at the door.
Another step, his injured leg numb and cold now, his lips muttering some spell in silence, as if his magics mirrored his unsteady gait and needed support. I had no warning, my arm – his arm – drew back to throw. In that moment the covers fluttered, I heard a muted ‘choom’ and a fist hit my side, hard enough to throw me back, spinning twice before slamming into the wall. I slid to the floor, legs stretched before me and looked down. Both pale hands covered my side, blood spurting between my fingers, pieces of flesh hanging.
The covers lifted and Miana faced me, crouched around the black mass of the Nuban’s crossbow, eyes wide and fierce above it.
My right hand found the bone handle of the longer knife. Spitting blood I crawled to my feet, the world rotating around me. I could see that no bolts remained in the crossbow. Inside the assassin I strained with every piece of my being to still his legs, to lay down the weapon. I think he felt it this time. He moved slowly, but keeping between Miana and her door. His eyes fell to her belly, taut beneath her nightgown.
‘Stop!’ I held to his arm with all my will, but still it crept forward.
Miana looked angry rather than scared. Ready to do bloody murder.
My hand started forward, lunging with the knife, aimed low, below the swing of Miana’s bow. I couldn’t stop it. The gleaming blade would pierce her womb, and slice, and in a welter of gore she would die. Our child with her.
The assassin thrust, and a hand span from finding flesh our arm shuddered off course, all its power cut clean away by a blow that sheared through my shoulder. I twisted as I collapsed, the ironwork of the crossbow smashing into my face. Marten stood behind me, a devil clothed in blood, his snarl veiled in scarlet. My head hit the carpet, vision turning black. Their voices sounded far away.
‘My queen!’
‘I’m not hurt, Marten.’
‘I’m so sorry – I failed you – he passed me.’
‘I’m not hurt, Marten … A woman woke me in my dreams.’
3
‘You’re quiet this morning, Jorg.’
I crunched my bread: from the Haunt, a day old and slightly stale.
‘Still brooding over the chess?’ The smell of clove-spice as he came close. ‘I told you I’ve played since I was six.’
The bread snapped and scattered crust as I broke it open. ‘Get Riccard in here will you?’
Makin stood, downing his java, a cold and stinking brew the guards favour. He left without question: Makin could read people.
Riccard followed him back in moments later, tramping mud over the floor hides, crumbs of his own breakfast in his yellow moustache.
‘Sire?’ He offered a bow, probably warned by Makin.
‘I want you to ride to the Haunt. Take an hour there. Speak to Chancellor Coddin and the queen. Catch us up as soon as you can with any report. If that report makes mention of a white-skinned man, bring the black coffer from my treasury, the one whose lid is inlaid with a silver eagle, and ten men to guard it. Coddin will arrange it.’
Makin raised an eyebrow but came no closer to a question.
I pulled the chessboard near and took an apple from the table. The apple sprayed when bitten and droplets of juice shone on the black and white squares. The pieces stood ready in their lines. I set a finger to the white queen, making a slow circle so she rolled around her base. Either it had been a false dream, Katherine designing better torments than of old, and Miana was fine, or it had been a true dream and Miana was fine.
‘Another game, Jorg?’ Makin asked. All around, from outside, the sounds of camp being struck.
‘No.’ The queen fell, toppling two pawns. ‘I’m past games.’
4
Five years earlier
I took the Haunt and the Highland’s crown in my fourteenth year and bore its weight three months before I went once more to the road. I ranged north to the Heimrift and south to the Horse Coast, and approached fifteen in the Castle Morrow under the protection of Earl Hansa, my grandfather. And though it was his heavy horse that had drawn me there, and the promise of a strong ally in the Southlands, it was the secrets which lay beneath the castle that kept me. In a forgotten cellar one small corner of a lost world broke through into ours.
‘Come out come out wherever you are.’ I knocked the hilt of my dagger against the machine. In the cramped cellar it rang loud enough to hurt my ears.
Still nothing. Just the flicker and buzz of the three still-working glow-bulbs overhead.
‘Come on, Grouch. You pop out to badger every visitor. You’re famed for it. And yet you hide from me?’
I tapped metal to metal. A thoughtful tempo. Why would Fexler Brews hide from me?
‘I thought I was your favourite?’ I turned the Builders’ view-ring over in my hand. He hadn’t made me work very hard for it and I counted it a gift above any my father had ever given me.
‘It’s some kind of test?’ I asked. ‘You want something from me?’
What would a Builder ghost want from me? What couldn’t he take, or make? Or ask for? If he wanted something, wouldn’t he ask?
‘You want something.’
One of the glow-bulbs flickered, flared, and died.
He needs something from me but can’t ask.
I held the view-ring to my eye, and once again I saw the world – the whole world as viewed from outside, a jewel of blue and white hung in the blackness that holds the stars.
He wanted me to see something.
‘Where are you, Fexler? Where are you hiding?’
