Broken Empire by Mark Lawrence

Author:Mark Lawrence
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi

More than in muscle heaped on bone, Brother Rike’s strength springs from the ability to hate the inanimate.

39

Four years earlier

“She’s gone, yes?” Makin shaded his eyes against the sunrise and squinted back across the marsh. We stood on rolling scrubland now with yellow rock breaking through in sandy patches here and there.

“I hope so,” I said. Part of me wanted Chella to find destruction at my hands, the personal touch, but perhaps she ended there in the marsh amongst the burning dead. I hadn’t felt it. No sense of satisfaction, but my uncle’s death had taught me that revenge is far less sweet than it promises to be. An empty meal, however long you take over it.

We took to horse for the first time in what seemed an age. Rike on Row’s roan since his own plough-horse proved too heavy for its own good in the bogs. Kent and Makin on their horses. Grumlow riding double with me since he and I were the lightest of the Brothers and Brath the strongest of the nags.

The sour stink of the marshes followed us for miles. Black mud caking on our clothes, drying grey and flaking away. More persistent than stink or mud, the image of Chella as the flames rose around her, and the echo of her last words. The Dead King sails.

In three days we came by moorland and scrub, then by forgotten roads, and finally by country tracks, to the free port of Barlona. Rike made ceaseless complaint about his sunburn until I convinced him to smear pig-shit over the worst affected areas. For some reason it seemed to help though I hadn’t intended it to. Suggestion can be a powerful thing.

The ancient walls shimmered in the summer heat as we approached. They must have been impressive a thousand years ago. Now only the base of the walls remained, twenty foot high and just as thick, spilling black stone in great heaps for the peasants to raid to make huts and boundary walls for their fields.

I liked the city from the moment we rode in. The air held exotic scents, spices and cooking smoke that made my stomach growl. The people thronged, loud in voice and clothing, bright silks, garish jewellery made of glass and base metals, flesh of all colours on display in wide swathes. Men and women as light as me, as dark as the Nuban, and all shades in between. None as pale as Sindri and Duke Alaric though. Those, I think the sun would melt.

Music came from almost every corner in as many shades as the people. It seemed that the citizens walked in time to the beat and pulse of a thousand drums, horns, voices. I’d not heard such sounds before, so many strange melodies, some reminding me of the marching beats the Nuban used to slap against his thigh as we walked and which he elaborated on around the campfire. Others held remembrances of the curious atonal humming Tutor Lundist lapsed into in empty moments.

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