the Builders may be done with herding and guiding…’
I didn’t want to know what came after that so I took a gulp of my whisky.
‘…it may be time for the slaughtering,’ Omar said.
‘Why for God’s sake?’ What I really meant was, why me? Do it in a hundred years and I wouldn’t give a damn.
‘The magic is breaking the world. The more it’s used the easier it is to use and the wider the cracks grow. Kill us and the problem might go away.’ He watched me, eyes dark and solemn.
‘But destroying Hamada is hardly going to … oh.’
Omar nodded. ‘Everyone. Everywhere. They can do it too.’
Footsteps on the stairs, a dark shape hurrying to Omar’s side, a hasty whispered exchange. I watched, trying to focus, tipping my cup and discovering it empty. ‘Who’s your friend?’
Omar got to his feet and I stood too, his steadiness making me realize quite how much I was swaying. ‘You’re not off?’ The racing finished hours ago.
‘Father has called us all to the palace. This explosion of yours has changed things – perhaps turned theory into fact. We all saw it, then felt it. I was knocked off my feet. Perhaps Father will share with us how and why we were spared. Hopefully he will have a plan to stop it happening again!’ Omar followed the caliph’s messenger toward the stairs, waving. ‘So good to see you alive, my friend.’
I half-sat half-collapsed back into the cushions. Even though he never used it against me I always held the fact that Omar’s father was the caliph of Liba, where mine was only a cardinal, to be a black mark against his name. Even a seventh son looks like a good deal to a man who is tenth in line. Still, when the caliph calls, you come. I couldn’t hold that against Omar, though he had left me to drown my sorrows by myself. Not to mention added to those troubles with his talk of long-dead Builders lurking in ancient machines and wishing us ill. Even drunk I wasn’t about to believe that nonsense, but there was definitely something bad happening.
I stared up at the stars through a gap in the awning. ‘What time is it anyway?’
‘Lacking an hour to midnight.’
I lifted my head and looked around. It had been a rhetorical question. I had thought myself alone up here.
‘Who said that?’ I couldn’t make out any human figures, just low hillocks of cushions. ‘Show yourself. Don’t make me drink alone!’
A black shape detached itself from the most distant corner, close to the roof’s edge and the fifty-foot drop into the street below. For a moment my heart lurched as I thought of Aslaug, but it had been a man’s voice. A lean but well-muscled figure resolved itself, tall but not quite my height, face shrouded in shadow and long dark hair. He walked with the exaggerated care of the quite drunk, clutching an earthenware flask in one hand, and flomped bonelessly into the cushions vacated by Omar.
Moonlight revealed him in a rippling slice, falling through the gap between one awning and the next. The silver light painted him, from a grisly burn that covered his left cheek, down a plain white shirt to the hilt of a sword. A dark eye regarded me, glittering amid the burn, the other lost behind a veil of hair. He raised his flask toward me, then swigged from it. ‘Now you’re not drinking alone.’
‘Well that’s good.’ I took a gulp from my own pewter cup. ‘Does a man no good to drink by himself. Especially not after what I’ve been through.’ I felt very maudlin, as a man in his cups is wont to do without lively music and good company.
‘I’m a very long way from home,’ I said, suddenly as miserable and homesick as I had ever been.
‘Me too.’
‘Red March is a thousand miles south of us.’
‘The Renar Highlands are further.’
For some reason known only to drunkards that angered me. ‘I’ve had a hard time.’
‘These are hard days.’
‘Not just today.’ I drank again. ‘I’m a prince you know.’ Quite how that would get me sympathy I wasn’t sure.
‘Liba is straining at the seams with princes. I was born a prince too.’
‘Not that I’ll ever be king…’ I kept to my own thread.
‘Ah,’ the stranger said. ‘My path to inheritance is also unclear.’
‘My father…’ Somehow my train of thought slipped away from me. ‘He never loved me. A cold man.’
‘My own has that reputation too. Our disagreements have been … sharp.’ The man drank from his flask. The light caught him again and I could see he was young. Even younger than me.
Perhaps it was relief at being safe and drunk and not being chased by monsters that did it, but somehow all the grief and injustice of my situation that there hadn’t been time for until now bubbled up out of me.
‘I was just a boy … I saw him do it … killed them both. My mother, and my…’ I choked and couldn’t speak.
‘A sibling?’ he asked.
I nodded and drank.
‘I saw my mother and brother killed,’ he said. ‘I was young too.’
I couldn’t tell if he were mocking me, topping each of my declarations with his own variant.
‘I still have the scars of that day!’ I raised my shirt to show the pale line where Edris Dean’s sword had pierced my chest.
‘Me too.’ He pushed back his sleeves and moved his arms so the moonlight caught on innumerable silvery seams criss-crossing his skin.
‘Jesus!’
‘He wasn’t there.’ The stranger pulled back into the shadow. ‘Just the hook-briar. And that was enough.’
I winced. Hook-briar is nasty stuff. My new friend seemed to have dived in headfirst. I raised my cup. ‘Drink to forget.’
‘I have better ways.’ He opened his left hand, revealing a small copper box, moonlight gleaming on a thorn pattern running around its lip. He might have better ways than alcohol but he drank from his flask, and deeply.
I watched the box, my eye fascinated by the familiarity of it – but, familiar or not, no part of me wanted to touch it. It held something bad.
Like my new friend I drank too, though I also had better ways of burying a memory. I let the raw whisky run down my throat, hardly tasting it now, hardly feeling the burn.
‘Drink to dull the pain, my brother!’ I’m an amiable drunk. Given enough time I always reach the point where every man is my brother. A few more cups and I declare my undying love for all and sundry. ‘I’m not sure there’s a bit of me that isn’t bruised.’ I lifted my shirt again, trying to see the bruising across my ribs. In the dark it looked less impressive than I remembered. ‘I could show you a camel footprint but…’ I waved the idea away.
