The Wheel of Osheim (The Red Queen's War, #3)

by Mark Lawrence

The prophet said sand is neither kind nor cruel, but in the oven of the Sahar it is hard to think that it does not hate you.

Being on a galloping camel bears several resemblances to energetic sex with an enormously strong and very ugly woman.

“Ibn Fayed will still hear a single voice.” The sheik nudged his camel on. “Mine.”

On the Bremmer Slopes in the Ost Reich there are bubbles of slo-time that can trap a man, releasing him after a week, a year, or a century, to a world grown older while he merely blinked. Elsewhere there are places where a man might grow ancient and find that in the rest of Christendom just a day has passed.

A crack of thunder broke ridiculously close and suddenly Prince Jal was the filling in a four-girl sandwich.

There’s a saying in Liba: The last yard of the thobe is the best. . . . or if there isn’t, there should be!

“Get up, Jal!” I’m on the ground, dust rising all around me. Snorri is kneeling over me, hair dark around his face. I’m losing him. Sinking. The dust rising, thicker by the moment. I’m Martell Harris. The sword went into me like ice but I’m all right, I just need to get back into the battle. Martell moves my arms, struggles to rise. Jalan is gone, sinking into the dust. “Stay with me, Jal!” I can feel Snorri’s grip on me. Nothing else, just that iron grip. “Don’t let him drive you out. You’re Jalan. Prince Jalan Kendeth.” The fact of Snorri actually saying my name right—title and all—jolts me out of the dust’s soft embrace. “Jalan Kendeth!” The grip tightens. It really hurts. “Say it! SAY IT!” “Jalan Kendeth!” The words tore from me in a great shout.

I lay, sprawled across its hump for twenty yards, hanging on desperately, but it’s hard enough to stay on a galloping camel if you’re in the right place and sadly sometimes desperation isn’t a sufficient adhesive.

“I can make you see fear in a handful of dust.” The words escape me with a breath. Snorri smiles at that.

“Fear can be a useful friend—but it’s never a good master.”

Perhaps the joke had been that the man leading that soldier in was himself a dead man wrapped around the altered frame of a Mechanists’ creation.

For a place that had nothing but sand and water to its name Hamada had accumulated an awful lot of gold over the centuries.

“Kelem’s hold on the clans is broken.” Yusuf’s hands moved on the table top, fingers twitching as if he were struggling not to write down the terms and balance the equations with new information. “Calculations indicate that he has lost his material form.” “What does that mean?” I asked. “You don’t know?” Yusuf’s left eyebrow suggested it didn’t believe me.

Most houses in this quarter had a screen of beads to dissuade the flies and relied on the threat of being publicly impaled to dissuade any thief. Though what horror “publicly” adds to “impaled” I’ve never been clear on.

“That sibling I mentioned, killed when I saw my mother killed . . .” He looked up at me, again just the one eye glittering above his burn scar, the other hidden. “Yes?” “Well she’s not properly dead. She’s in Hell plotting her return and planning revenge.” “On who?” “Me, you.” I shrugged. “The living. Mostly me, I think.” “Ah.” He leaned back into the cushions. “Well there you’ve got me beat.” “Good.” I drank again. “I was starting to think we were the same person.”

“These damnable mathmagicians have put us together, you know.” I knew Yusuf had let me go too easily. Jorg gave no sign of having heard me. I wondered if he’d passed out. A long pause turned into midnight, as it often does when you’re very drunk. The distant hour bell jolted him into speech. “I’ve made plenty of seers eat their predictions.” “Got their sums wrong this time though—I’m no use to you. It should have been my sister. She was to have been the

sorceress. To stand at your side. Bring you to the throne.” I found my face wet. I’d not wanted to think about any of this. Jorg mumbled something, but all I caught was a name. Katherine. “Perhaps . . . she never had a name. She never saw this world.” I stopped, my throat choked with the foolishness too much drink will put in a man. I drained my cup. There’s a scribe who lives behind our eyes scribbling down an account of events for our later perusal. If you keep drinking then at some point he rolls up his scroll, wraps up his quills, and takes the night off. What remained in my cup proved sufficient to give him his marching orders. I’m sure we continued to mutter drunkenly at each other, King Jorg of Renar and I. I expect we made a few loud and passionate declarations before we passed out. We probably banged our cups on the roof and declared all men our brothers or our foe, depending on the kind of drunks we were, but I have no record of it. I do remember that I confided my problems with Maeres Allus to the good king, and he kindly offered me his sage advice. I recall that the solution was both elegant and clever and that I swore to adopt it. Sadly not a single word of that counsel remained with me the following day. My last memory is an image. Jorg lying sprawled, dead to the world, looking far younger in sleep than I had ever imagined him. Me pulling a rug up across him to keep off the cold of the desert night, then staggering dangerously toward the stairs. I wonder how...

“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.

“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.”

Giving a man three camels after he’s been locked up for assaulting one is mean-spirited, and not at all amusing.

For the first time Jalan the berserker has met everyday Jalan and we’ve come to some sort of agreement. I’m not sure exactly what it is yet . . . but something has changed.

“You promised! On your honour, Prince Jalan. Your honour.” “Oh.” I turn away again. “That.” And start to walk. “If you find it, let me know.”

I remembered his eyes, that first night I saw him in Crath City. As if even then he looked past the world and saw all this coming his way. And didn’t give a damn.

“Pah. All history has taught us is we don’t learn from history.”

You always think there’s going to be time. Put things off. And then suddenly there’s no time left at all.

I saw nothing until I stepped to the side and let the moonlight flood in after me. A small and empty antechamber. The dark steps spiralling down to the foyer below. The door to the Silent Sister’s room stood closed, one tall-backed chair beside it. A second chair, twin to the first, had been moved to the middle of the antechamber, halfway between the door and the arch to the staircase. On it rested a goblet, moon-washed and silver, a strip of linen, and a boot. “What the hell?” I staggered forward, my left leg hurting unaccountably and my right foot cold against the stone floor. I looked down. The giant hadn’t released his grip on me—the sole of my boot had torn off in his hand. Blood ran freely down my left leg from a gash above the knee—one of the gargoyle’s horns must have torn me as it came free. I took the linen and bound my leg. The boot looked suspiciously like a new version of the one I was wearing. Ridding myself of the remnants of the old boot I slipped the new one on. A perfect fit. The goblet stood three-quarters full of water. Some must have evaporated in the two weeks since my great-aunt placed it there. A black fly floated in it. “I’m not that thirsty!” A hoarse dry whisper. I took the goblet and flicked the fly corpse clear. I wasn’t even fooling myself, and I’m good at that. I drained the cup and wiped my mouth, wondering if the old witch had weakened the joint that held the gargoyle to the wall. I felt weak and dizzy, sweaty with exertion and fear. How mu...

“I am at peace,” Snorri said, and walked over to clap me in a warrior’s embrace.

We stood in silence for a moment, contemplating the depth of the shit we stood in. I’d burned my father, burned half the city I lived in, lost two brothers, and gained a homicidal unborn sister all in the same day. I doubted it was possible to fit more misfortune between two sunrises.

Same Viking, different boat.

“So.” I turned back to Kara and Hennan. “Did you miss me?”

“We’re Kendeths, Jalan!” She loomed over me. “We fight. We fight when hope is gone. We fight while there’s blood left in us.”

“But we knew each other in the biblical sense, yes.” “Aren’t your cardinals . . . old people?” Hennan asked. “How long ago was this?” Kara asked. I nudged Murder to a faster pace, trying to shake off the curious Norse pressing me on all sides. “A long time ago.” “How long?” Snorri caught up. “Not long ago you were twelve. You weren’t twelve were you?” “Of course not. Much older than that.” “He’s lying.” Kara, back on my left. “A little older.” I could hear Snorri sniggering above the rain. “If you must know, Gertrude was my first. She was very gentle—” Laughter from both sides cut me off. “Damn you, heathens!” I spurred Murder into a canter. “I’ll be back with the seal by morning. And if the guards catch you hanging around I’ll recommend you’re burned as witches.”

“Come!” Snorri snatched up my sword and, limping, ran into the fray. “Come? You just took my bloody sword. What am I supposed to use? Bad language?”

“Do you see them?” Snorri asked. “No.” I had been hoping they were figments of my imagination. “What are they?” “Figments of your imagination,” Kara said behind me, struggling to keep her nag from panic. “Oh good.”

don’t care!” Loki boomed across me, haggard now, and ill. “Only know that you don’t need the truth. The truth didn’t set you free. It was a lie. You didn’t see your mother die. You weren’t in the room. You weren’t even in Roma Hall that day.” “What?” “I lied to you.” “What . . .” “Hate, courage, fear . . . all lies. Don’t look for reasons. Do what you feel. Not what you feel to be right—just what you feel.” “I have the scar . . .” My free hand moved toward my chest where Edris’s sword had caught me that day. “You did that climbing a fence.” “You lying bast—” “Yes, I know. Now hurry up could you? I’m falling apart here.” I looked back past the false god, a thing made real by the dreams of men, and saw, standing at the blood-smeared window to the other room, the hulking figure of my friend, only his eyes clearly visible where a hand had wiped the glass clean. I turned the key.