Jacob had never felt more tired. He had endured weeks with hardly any sleep, even though he was lying horizontally, manacled to a hard wooden table. Every time he tried to close his eyes, freezing cold water was hurled over his face, and when even that wasn’t enough to stop the fitless bursts of sleep which overcame him, he was wired up to a cart-like machine with a sulphurous-smelling battery lodged on its platform, burning his skin every time he nodded off. Jacob lost all track of time. Days, weeks, maybe months of such treatment, until he started seeing visions. His dead wife Mary standing in the corner, crying, and she wouldn’t stop however much he begged her. Weeping for … Carter’s two beautiful brothers sprawled across the cell’s straw, every bit as pale and trembling as when the fever had claimed them in their final hours. Constable Wiggins came to him too, the old lawman laconic and scathing of how easily Jacob had let him die at Nix’s hands.
All of my ghosts
. No, not all of them. Not even a fraction of the true tally. All the soldiers he had put in the dirt in the Burn. There were countless phantoms, far too many to fit in a punishment cell under the palace. King Marcus was right. It didn’t matter what name he took.
Jake Silver, Jacob Carnehan
. Both were butchers. The only thing he regretted was that there weren’t more corpses to add to his reckoning when he finally went before the saints.
King Marcus, Tom Purdell, Benner Landor, Sergeant Nix
, he whispered the names to stop himself going insane. Clinging to his hatred like a cork raft in a raging sea.
By the time the man in the white surgeon’s apron appeared, Jacob was so tired and ragged he needed every iota of his will just to focus on what the visitor was saying.
‘Yes, yes, I’m real enough,’ said the surgeon. ‘What things you must have seen over the last few weeks. The mind is so predictable when stressed. My name is Keall Merrisor; I am a doctor of the College of the Snake and Purple, an imperial surgeon. Do you understand what an honour this is? We normally only minister to the emperor, his family, and any allies whose lives the emperor wishes to preserve.’
‘Vandia’s found a real snake in our palace,’ growled Jacob. ‘I wouldn’t count on King Marcus’s loyalty, though. It’s for sale to the highest bidder.’
‘Now then, my friend. I’m not terribly fond of my posting here either. A year in your dreary, foul-stinking barbarian backwater. This city has only recently introduced electricity. Do you know how hard it is to read by oil-lamp at my age? I pray every day to my ancestors for my tedious service here to be done.’
‘Keep talking, torturer,’ said Jacob. ‘Please. You’re sending me to sleep.’
Keall placed a black bag on the platform where Jacob lay bound. ‘I am no imperial torturer, my friend. They’re a separate college. I demand the truth. Their disciples demand an example, a slow excruciating spectacle. The two matters are mutually exclusive. But your presence here
has
done me something of a favour. This element of my work has been sadly neglected of late. Your chieftain has only drawn on my healing skills – primarily for the pox he catches from his predilection for sexual congress without prophylactics. Almost as dull as the host of illusory diseases he imagines himself struck by … every sniffle a fever and every rash the onset of a plague.’
‘I should be so lucky. Let him die. You’ll get home faster.’
‘And wouldn’t my enemies in Vandia love that,’ said the surgeon. ‘The same resentful bastards in the college that encouraged my posting here. But I will show them how ingenuity may prosper, even in adversity.’
‘I know what you’ve been doing,’ said Jacob. ‘Tenderizing me like a piece of steak. And now you’re here to fry me. I’ve had people interrogated, Doctor. Maybe it’s only fitting that I should get a taste of my own medicine.’ The Vandian just chuckled and made no comment; and when Jacob’s vision started to fade, his own screams woke him. The machine he was wired to had detected his slumber and burned into his flesh like a vat of acid.
‘No dropping off, please. Duty, duty,’ said Keall, removing a glass hypodermic from his case. He found a small vial and carefully began to charge the needle. ‘Duty is what we must remember. Now, I’d like to know where exactly in the Rodalian Mountains the Lady Cassandra Skar is being held hostage. An expeditionary force will shortly be arriving from Vandia and after I play my part in rescuing the emperor’s granddaughter, I hope to be recognized as a champion of the imperium. The great houses will vie with each other to have me select a high position among their ranks.’
‘You don’t need to fill me with that poison,’ said Jacob. ‘Just let me rest. Your royal brat’s being taken to Rodal’s capital, Hadra-Hareer.’
‘So easy?’ Keall held the needle up to the light as he tapped it. ‘Shall I trust you? I think not. You’re one of the leaders of the slave revolt. A barbarian who helped crush a legion in the shadow of the great stratovolcano. And you simply give me her ladyship’s location like that? Why?’
‘Lean closer, I’ll tell you.’
Keall frowned, checking Jacob’s manacles were fully secure before he bent down. ‘Why, then, my friend?’
‘Because one legion’s not nearly enough.’ Jacob found the purchase to whip his skull forward, striking Keall’s nose. The imperial surgeon stumbled back indignantly, raising a hand to staunch the blood fountaining across his chin.
‘Healing that should make a change from curing Marcus’s mangy trouser sword, Doctor.’
‘Filthy savage!’ Keall leaned over and struck the cart’s control panel, sending Jacob’s back arching up in agony as current lashed his body. The surgeon’s blood-stained fingers settled around Jacob’s arm and with the other hand, he drove the needle into the pastor’s flesh. ‘I’ll have the truth from you now.’
Keall paced up and down the cell for a couple of minutes, angrily staunching his own bleeding, waiting for his drugs to work their way through the pastor’s body. Jacob found himself drifting, losing all sense of weight and place. He had been remade as a barrage balloon floating over the battlements of Northhaven.
‘Where is Lady Cassandra Skar?’
‘The capital of Rodal,’ moaned Jacob. It was as though he was watching someone else speak. Not his lips moving at all. ‘In the custody of the skyguard and Sheplar Lesh.’
‘That was the truth after all, then?’ said Keall shocked. ‘Why?’
‘Because one legion isn’t enough.’
Keall shrugged, sadly. ‘You are nothing but a dirty savage … an ignorant fool. They’ll drag you back to Vandis for abducting the emperor’s granddaughter and record your punishment. In countless centuries’ time, imperial torturers will still be watching your pain during their apprenticeships as a demonstration of how one man can be made to suffer so much and for so long. But first our legions will arrive in your barbarian land and you will be witness to a kind of hell that you have never seen before.’
The surgeon faded from sight, replaced by darkness, then burning agony as Jacob rode a series of shocks back to consciousness.
‘What was that you were mumbling?’ demanded Keall.
‘You’re wrong,’ said Jacob. ‘I have seen it before. The hell was mine.’
‘Too high a dose,’ said Keall, annoyed. ‘I must have given you too much. You’re babbling. Focus, now. I have more questions for you. There was an outlaw who fought alongside you when you led the slave revolt. An outlaw carrying many names … Sariel Teller. Sariel Player. Sariel Skel-Bane. Where is the devil now?’
‘Here,’ groaned Jacob.
‘Yes, he’s hiding here, but where in Weyland? What city, what region?’
‘
Here
.’
‘Very well. I shall wait until the dose weakens,’ sighed Keall.
‘I won’t,’ a weighted staff came crashing down onto the surgeon’s skull. Keall crumpled to the floor, striking Jacob’s restraining table on the way down.
Sariel leant against his staff, satisfied, wearing his brown leather coat etched with hundreds of intricate pictures as though they were tattoos in leather. The sorcerous vagabond had changed little since he’d vanished from Northhaven. His ancient face even more sunburnt by travel and lined with age, the same raggedy bleached white beard. Sariel wiped a tear of sweat from Jacob’s forehead and licked his finger, before his bright, devilish eyes flashed. ‘Aha. Severe neural hyperpolarization through sodium thiopental, a highly potent truth serum. The quack has injected you with far too much serum, though. Enough to make a bull-shark sing the truth, and sharks are renowned as the greatest liars in the ocean. It’s a wonder the fool’s allowed to practise.’ The old sorcerer reached out to seize Jacob’s hand and the pastor’s skin prickled as Sariel’s golden skin glowed like a swarm of fireflies. The warmth swelled, comfortable at first, then rising higher and higher through Jacob’s flesh, a raging heat that left him moaning and trembling. Jacob plummeted landward from the giddy clouds where he had just been drifting, but his mind was clear again.
‘A blood heat to purge the poison from your system.’ Sariel lifted the fallen syringe from the cell’s floor and his hand flared with light again, the liquid inside the glass bubbling as it changed colour. ‘There … a small transfiguration. Far more useful, now. A dose of armodafinil, mother maiden’s little helper.’ The sorcerer jabbed the needle in Jacob’s arm, drawing blood as the potion entered his flesh. ‘You’ll stay awake for another day and a night, now. But when you next sleep, it will be for the best part of a week.’
‘I’ll sleep when I’m dead, you old dog,’ groaned Jacob. ‘Where the hell have you been?’
‘Chasing my memories,’ said Sariel. The old man found the key for the manacles on the surgeon and released Jacob. The pastor pulled himself to his feet, suddenly dizzy, his flesh creaking and weak after the saints knew how long being held here. All desire for sleep had fled, though.
‘The same memories your son carried to me in the sky mines,’ added Sariel. ‘I have been learning which of them are true and which of them are false and which of them merely echoes of the great might-have-been.’
‘You
might-have-been
with us a little earlier,’ said Jacob. ‘That would have been just dandy. There’s a war breaking out in Weyland now.’
‘You’re quite welcome, your excellency,’ said Sariel, his voice dripping with sarcasm. ‘I only live to release you from capture by your enemies. This land is but a small corner of a much wider war. One that has been going on for far longer than Weyland’s current troubles.’
‘The rest of Pellas isn’t my home. Shit on them.’
‘That’s fine then,’ said Sariel, picking up his traveller’s staff. ‘All those countless baronies and kingdoms and states out there, everyone with its share of envious fools who believe they’re stronger, cleverer, more popular, wiser, better looking and more entitled for the job of ruler than the incumbent. We’ll forget about them, shall we?’
‘No,’ said Jacob. ‘I won’t even think about them to start with.’
‘What a fine representative of your people you are,’ said Sariel. ‘I should send a portrait of you to every librarian’s hold in the world and ask them to record it under the entry,
Man; common pattern
.’
‘Ask the guild to record it under “regicides”,’ said Jacob. ‘Because I’ve a king to kill.’
‘First you must choose which monarch to slay.’
Jacob bent down and checked the imperial surgeon. ‘This leech’s master will do.’ Keall still possessed a pulse. ‘Excellent. Their pox doctor is going to live.’
‘Still a remnant of a priest’s compassion then,’ said Sariel. ‘Even for a Vandian.’
Jacob shrugged.
He’d better live. I’d hate the empire to get lost when it comes hunting for me
.
Sariel took his staff and scratched a symbol on the wall; two circles joined together, a
lemniscate
. ‘There, every artist should sign his work.’
‘You want them to know you broke me out?’
‘Oh yes,’ Sariel smiled, although there was only coldness in the old man’s eyes. ‘The Vandian secret police, the hoodsmen, they would grow idle if I did not poke them every now and then. It’s a game we have been playing for a long time. We are all used to our traditions, and I wouldn’t wish to disappoint them.’
Jacob couldn’t help but wonder how long.
Longer than I could accurately guess, I suspect
. They exited the cell. Jacob found himself in a wide corridor with metal doors, ancient and rusting. No sign of the royal guardsmen acting as warders, but he could hear people talking somewhere in the distance, echoes drifting to his ears. ‘How did you know to come for me here?’
‘My friends the sparrows told me to visit your son, the Lord Carnehan, much suffering over the loss of his beloved. The son informed me of the father’s predicament and so here I am.’
‘Carter, thank the saints! Where is he?’
‘Thank Prince Owen Hawkins’ forces, instead, for he is with them.’ Sariel explored a side corridor and passed into a largely empty storeroom. He placed his hand against a wall, as though feeling for something. Then he found it. There was a sharp crack and a line of bricks swung inward on a sliding wall. ‘These hidden passages were put in by King Theron. He had similar appetites to King Marcus, but was married to a queen who was far less forgiving of his philandering ways. Queen Henrietta’s suspicious vigilance necessitated that he sneak out unseen by his own servants, who were, wisely, far more afraid of
her
than of
him
.’
‘My son is safe?’ asked Jacob, already impatient with the old man’s tall tales. The passage beyond was narrow, little more than a gap between the walls, lit by tiny arrows of light reflected by mirror-lined channels that emerged somewhere on the palace roof.
‘And where would you consider safe, now, your grace? Your son lives. Does that sit well enough with you? The northern members of the People’s Assembly have declared for the pretender and retreated to the city of Midsburg. That is where Lord Carnehan waits. The southern assemblymen and the majority of the prefecture support the usurper and advance towards your people’s positions. It isn’t just
your
revenge that is worked out here. There is no conflict bloodier than a civil war. Brother against brother. Friend against friend. Gaiaist against Mechanicalist. Reformer against traditionalist. Party against party. Guild against guild. Families torn apart. Old feuds settled and every festering spleeny hag-born jealousy given its vent through violence.’