‘You broke the blade,’ Mara observed.
‘He’ll be angry,’ Petal added.
‘I’ll buy him a new one,’ Skinner answered, his voice a croak, and he threw it down and started awkwardly pulling off the gauntlets. Mara quickly rose to help. Petal sat watching them. His lips drew tight and he threw more broken branches on to the fire.
The next morning Mara awoke after dawn as the light found her face. Smoke from the smouldering fire trailed almost straight up into a clear sky still painted pink and orange. Mist cloaked the jungle verge. She sat up to find Petal sitting still where he’d been when she’d fallen asleep. Skinner lay in his armour curled close to the fire.
‘You stood watch?’ she asked, surprised.
He nodded. ‘The fire may have drawn others.’
‘They are quite dispirited, I should think.’
He stood, suddenly, alarming Mara who turned, her Warren snapping high. A single bedraggled figure came clambering among the fallen tree trunks and scattered stone blocks. He moved in a curious hopping and twitching manner that she knew all too well. ‘Gods, no. Not him.’
‘It would seem impossible to escape the fellow,’ Petal observed as if fascinated.
‘King in Chains indeed!’ the priest called as he neared, cackling. He rubbed his hands together, laughing anew. He still wore only his dirty loincloth. His hair was a rat’s nest, only now patchy as if it were falling out in tufts.
Good gods. The man has mange! And gods know what else …
He came to the fire and warmed himself, twitching and flinching in an odd dance. It might have been a trick of the firelight, but Mara thought she saw things writhing and snaking beneath his flesh. ‘Another shard will soon be vulnerable,’ he announced. ‘We must be ready to move.’
‘Where?’ Petal asked.
‘Far off. On another continent. But no matter. Our lord will send us.’
No, your lord, Mara silently corrected.
‘You said King in Chains,’ Petal observed from where he sat. ‘Surely you mean King of Chains?’
‘Not at all,’ the little man said in his taut, nervous delivery. ‘Not by any measure.’ He gestured to Skinner where he lay insensate with exhaustion. ‘When he accepted the role he doubled his chains though he knows it not.’
‘Doubled them?’ Mara asked, alarmed.
The man now peered about, frowning. ‘Where are your soldiers? We will need soldiers. There will be much fighting this time.’ He turned on Petal, demanded, ‘Where are they?’
The mage pointed aside with the stick he was using to poke the ground. ‘Headed east.’
‘East!’ the priest squawked. He hopped from bare filthy foot to foot. ‘This is not good. We must go. Catch them. Be ready for our lord’s call.’
Petal lumbered to his feet, stretched his back. Peering down, he regarded the prone form of Skinner for a time. ‘You can wake him,’ he told the priest.
* * *
It was becoming ever more difficult for Pon-lor to walk. He had selected a stick that he leaned upon with each step. Everything was now blurry to his vision. Sweat dripped from his nose, coursed down his chest and back beneath his filthy shirt. He knew he’d been missing some sort of nutrients, or had been systematically poisoning himself with what he ate. As to progress … he had no idea where he was headed.
He raised a hand to his eyes: the flesh held a yellowed hue; the hand shook, palsied. Fever and infection. Twin illnesses his training could not address. So, the Himatan shall claim me after all. I shall be taken in by the soil and drawn up to add to the sum total mass of trees and plants.
Yet he laboured on, for he was Thaumaturg, master of this house of bones and the muscle and sinew that moved it to his will. He blinked now at his surroundings: he seemed to have stumbled into some sort of concourse, road or processional way. The great stone heads that dotted the jungle lined it. Some had sunk to their stern glaring eyes. Others had been entirely overgrown by moss and tangles of roots and vines until only the corner of one disapproving carved mouth was visible.
He continued on and it struck him that the ground was very flat here, the heads widely dispersed, and he wondered whether he had found the site of an ancient settlement or ceremonial centre. Why should these peoples have built tall towers or walls if they had no use for them? It struck him that it was an innate bias of those who valued such architecture to impose these expectations upon others. Why should extensive architectural achievements be the guiding measure of a culture’s or society’s greatness? Surely there must be other such measures — an infinity of them.
Pon-lor paused to wipe a soaked sleeve across his slick face. The questions one might ask of these mute stone witnesses were more a measure of one’s own preoccupations and values than those of the interrogated.
A flight of tall white birds burst skyward from nearby. Their shadows rippled over him and he paused, peering up. The ground shook. He tottered, nearly falling, braced himself against one of the cyclopean stone heads.
Then a great grinding and scraping of rock over rock echoed from all about. Trees atop a nearby head groaned, tilting, to fall with ground-shuddering crashes. The statue beneath his hand moved in a juddering grinding of granite. He backed away, stunned, peering up.
As he watched, the carved eyelids rose, revealing the carved orbs of eyes complete with pupil and iris.
I am mad with fever.
Then the stone lips parted, scraping, and a voice boomed forth making him clap his hands to his ears in agony.
‘He is returned,’ the voice announced. ‘Praise to his name. The High King returneth.’
Pon-lor spun as if to see the man behind him. The jungle blurred, whirling, and he nearly fell.
‘All hail Kallor, High King. May his rule endure the ages.’
The stone mouth stilled. The sightless eyes ground closed.
Pon-lor wiped a hand down his face. Had he imagined that? Yet that name — that forbidden name! Kallor. Ancient ruler, so some sources hinted, of all these lands of which Ardata’s demesnes had been but a mere distant corner. Over the intervening centuries the jungle appeared to have engulfed everything.
Wood snapped explosively overhead and he glanced up, flinching, to catch a glimpse of a tree looming directly over him. Then came a blow, and darkness.
He awakened to tears dropping onto his face. It was night, pitch black, and the tears were warm rain. Something was crushing down upon him — the limbs of some giant held him like a smothering blanket. He wiggled free.
Something was wrong with his body. He was having trouble standing and seeing. Everything seemed jagged and misaligned in his vision. He raised a hand and gently probed his head. Sizzling agony erupted as his hand encountered wetness and a hard edge of bone like the sharp rim of a cracked pot.
My head is a broken jar. Is all that I am spilling out?
He made an effort to straighten. He tried to run his hands down his sodden robes but found that he could not raise his right arm. Yet am I not Thaumaturg? Am I not trained to set aside the demands of the body and carry on? Starving, diseased, or broken … it matters not. The flesh obeys the will. Thus it has always been.
He urged his foot forward in a shuffling, dragging step. Then the other.
She was right. The witch had it right all along. He was coming and they would be driven to panic. Only one thing could forestall him. That one thing they had tried in their utter desperation to rid themselves of him more than an age ago.
He raised his face to the driving fat drops of rain, saw there behind passing cloud cover the lurking emerald banner that was the Stranger.