this from?’
‘Kara. I wasn’t going to spend months travelling to death’s door with a völva and not ask her any questions about what to expect!’
I let that one lie. It’s what I did, but then I never had any intention of ending up here.
We slog up a low ridge and beyond it the land falls away. There below us is the river, a gleaming silver ribbon in a valley that weaves away into grey distances, the only thing in all that awful place with any hint of life in it. I start forward but immediately the ground drops in a crumbling cliff a little taller than me and at its base a broad sprawl of hook-briar, black and twisted, as you’ll see in a wood after the first frosts.
‘We’ll have to go a—’ I break off. There’s movement on the edge of the briar. I shift to get a better view. It’s the boy from the milestone, lunging in among the thorns, leaving them glistening. ‘Hey!’
‘Leave him, Jal. It is the way it is. It has been like this for an age before we came and will be like it after we leave.’
If we leave!
‘But…’
Snorri sets off to find an easier route down. I can’t leave, though. Almost as if the briar has me hooked too. ‘Hey! Wait! Keep still and I can get you out.’ I cast about for a way down the cliff that won’t pitch me in among the thorns.
‘I’m not trying to get out.’ The boy pauses his lunging and looks up at me. Even from this distance his face is a nightmare, flayed by the briar, his flesh ripped, studded with broken thorns bedded bone-deep.
‘What…’ I step back as the ground crumbles beneath my foot and sandy soil cataracts over the drop. ‘What the hell are you doing then?’
‘Looking for my brother.’ Blood spills from torn lips. ‘He’s in there somewhere.’
He throws himself back at the thorns. The spikes are as long as his fingers and set with a small hook behind each point to lodge in the flesh.
‘Stop! For Christ’s sake!’
I try to climb down where the cliff dips but it breaks away and I scamper back.
‘He wouldn’t stop if it were me.’ The words sound ragged as if his cheeks are torn. I can hardly see him in the mass of the briar now.
‘Stop—’ Snorri’s hand grabs my shoulder and he pulls me away mid-protest.
‘You can’t get caught up in this. Everything here is a snare.’ He walks me away.
‘Me? Hasn’t this place had its hooks in you ever since you first held that key?’ They’re just words though, without heat. I’m not thinking about Snorri. I’m thinking about my sister, dead before she was ever born. I’m thinking about the boy and his brother and what I might do to save my own sibling. Less than that, I say to myself. Less than that.
I woke, still drunk, and with so many devils hammering on the inside of my head that it took me an age to understand I was in a prison cell. I lay there in the heat, eyes tight against the pain and the blinding light lancing in through a small high window, too miserable to call out or demand release. Omar found me there at last. I don’t know how much later. Long enough to pass the contents of a jug of water through me and leave the place stinking slightly worse than I found it.
‘Come on, old friend.’ He helped me up, wrinkling his nose, still grinning. The guards watched disapprovingly behind him. ‘Why do you northerners do this to yourselves? Even if God did not forbid it drinking is a poor bet.’
I staggered out along the corridor to the guards’ room, wincing, and watching the world through slitted eyes. ‘I’m never doing it again, so let’s not talk about it any more. OK?’
‘Do you even remember what happened to you last night?’ Omar caught me as I stumbled into the street and with a grunt of effort kept me on my feet.
‘Something about a camel?’ I recalled some sort of argument with a camel in the small hours of the morning. Had it looked at me wrong? Certainly I’d decided it was responsible for the footprint on my backside and all other indignities I’d ever suffered from the species. ‘Jorg!’ I remembered. ‘Jorg fucking Ancrath! He was up there, Omar! On that roof. You’ve got to warn the caliph!’
I knew there was bad blood between the Horse Coast kingdoms and Liba, raids across the sea and such, and that the Ancraths had alliances with the Morrow, which made Liba their foe. What I thought one man could do to the Caliph of Liba, especially if his head was like mine this morning, I wasn’t sure. This was, however, Jorg Ancrath who had destroyed Duke Gellethar along with his army, castle and the mountain they all sat upon. We had returned through Gelleth months after the explosion and the sky was still— ‘Christ! The explosion. In the desert! It was him, wasn’t it?’
‘It was.’ Omar signed for Allah’s protection. ‘He has met with my father and they are now friends.’
I stopped in the street and thought about that for a moment. ‘Starting his empire building young, isn’t he?’ I was impressed though. My grandmother had alliances in Liba – she’d reached out far and wide in the hope of good marriages – but her goal had been finding blood that mixed with her sons’ would produce a worthy heir, someone to fill in the gaps in the Silent Sister’s visions of the future … my sister. Jorg of Ancrath had other plans and I wondered how long it would be before they took him to Vyene to present his case to Congression and demand the Empire throne. ‘How far will it take him, I wonder…’
‘What do you make of him?’ Omar had come back for me, a caliph’s son waiting for me in the dusty street. He seemed strangely interested in my answer. It struck me then that I’d never seen him as clearly as I did there that morning, burdened by my self-inflicted pain. Soft, pudgy, Omar, the bad gambler, too rich, too amiable for his own good. But as he watched me with an intensity he saved for the roulette wheel I understood that the Mathema saw a different man – a man who would not only insert my answer into an equation of unearthly complexity, but one who might also solve it. ‘Can he match his ambition?’
‘What?’ I clutched my head. I didn’t have to fake it. ‘Jorg? Don’t know. Don’t care. I just want to go home.’
Omar and Yusuf came to the outskirts of Hamada to see me off, Omar in the black robes of a student, Yusuf in the fractal patterned grey-on-white of a master, his smile black and gleaming. They’d calculated me safe passage to the coast with a salt caravan. Travel with Sheik Malik, they told me, would not end well, though whether my downfall would have been at the sheik’s instigation, or by djinn or dead man, or perhaps through indecency with his lovely daughters, they didn’t say.
‘A gift, my friend!’ Omar jerked his head back at the three camels his man was leading behind them.
‘Oh you bastard.’
‘You’ll warm to them, Jalan! Think of the heads you’ll turn in Vermillion riding in on camelback!’
I rolled my eyes and waved the man forward to add my trio to the laden herd browsing karran grass a short way behind me. Soon all four score of them
