So you did have help? A flicker of annoyance in the voice, though Hakons face revealed no emotion. It was a subtle thing, detected only after analysis. A manipulation at sub-instrumental levels. Sleep psionics of advanced degree
I found the door and tugged at it. Hakon took three quick steps and I set both hands to the vial, making to twist the top. Do it and Ill open Pandoras Box here and well see what ills emerge.
If you leave I am finished, Kalla said, flexing Hakons hands.
Not at all. I hooked the door open with my bare foot and retreated through it. If I break this, youre finished. If I leave you still have a chance. Use Hakon, steal another subject. Some chance is better than no chance.
You dont seem to accept that logic yourself. Kalla kept pace with me as I backed down the long corridor.
I smelled fresh air but didnt risk a glance back as I retreated. Im not afraid to die, ghost. I spoke the truth. Youve spent a thousand years cheating death. That kind of dedication is built on fear. Ive spent much of sixteen years hunting it. Were very different, you and I.
I passed a great and twisted door, propped against the corridor wall. The remains of needle-bugs told me Id reached the point where they first took me. A breeze played against my neck, back, thighs, reminding me of my nakedness. My hand hurt, almost as much as when I first ripped it free the feeling in it perhaps woken by the scent of the green world outside.
I saw my sword, still lying there in the dust by the broken door, as if it held no value. Id no time to pick it up and little good it would do me in my left hand. Even so it pained me to leave it as I carried on down the corridor.
Hakon held back, allowing the yard between us to grow into two, three. Take a look, Jorg.
I glanced over my shoulder. The cavern opened out behind me onto a sea of tangled green, deeper than a man is tall. Small red flowers peppered the curls and hoops of the briar.
You know thorns, Jorg: that much was written on you when you came. Perhaps it was this variety that marked you so? The hook-briar?
I looked down at my chest, arms Gone? The scars had vanished. Id borne them so long but it took until now to notice they had gone. I felt more naked than ever. The scars had been an armour of sorts. An account of my personal history set down in blood and permanence. The scars were to be with me forever taken to the grave. The loss unsettled me more than eyeballs in frozen jelly or the reanimated corpse of a friend. Those Id seen before. How?
This is a medical facility, Jorg. Look in the skin-flask.
The what?
Its on your back. Depress the third, seventh, and sixth button.
I took the cylinder from my shoulder and set it down before me by its strap. I knelt and pressed the numbered bumps as directed, glancing down only briefly, expecting to be rushed. I leapt back as the lid began to unscrew along a previously unseen seam. The top fell away with a hiss and I leaned forward to peer at the contents.
Pink slime. For some reason my stomach rumbled, reminding me I hadnt eaten in well, a very long time. Does it taste as bad as it looks?
Nu-skin. Touch it to your hand. Hakon turned his head, the ugly array of rods emerging from his eyes now pointing at my injury.
I didnt trust Kalla but knowledge can be power and my half-flayed hand hurt badly enough to stop me concentrating. With my good hand I dipped a fingertip into the muck and felt it writhe, the sensation similar to holding a slug. I touched the slightest smear of it to the raw flesh of my other hand, still tight around the plague vial. The effect came within seconds, the livid pinkness of the slime flowing into something more skin-coloured, spreading, thinning, the feeling of insects crawling and finally, a patch of new skin little wider than a fingerprint.
If you help me you can walk away with many such treasures. Wonders of the old world. I could explain them to you. A man with that kind of magic on his side could rule
I already have a kingdom, ghost. I sealed the cylinder and set it over my shoulder again.
Is it enough? she asked, Hakon immobile, her voice rising from his chest. The sweet smell of rot hung about him. A fly buzzed about his head, settling by the corner of an eye.
Nothing is ever enough. Habit led my fingers to the old burns across the left side of my face, still rough and puckered. You didnt want me pretty? Or doesnt your gloop heal burns?
It was made for burns. Burns are its speciality. But that injury is curiously resistant. Theres an exotic energy signature If our physics laboratory were operational then
I backed toward the mouth of the cave and the green riot of hook-briar. The drone of bees reached me now, the call of birds. High summer outside, the seasons had turned whilst I slept.
Theres no escape that way, Jorg. Kalla followed. Hook-briar was one of our works.
Yours?
Well, not mine. But from this facility. This was a big place once. Three hundred people worked here. Chamber upon chamber, waiting now for a man with enough vision to excavate them. Hook-briar a cheaper, self-renewing razor wire. Highly effective engineering. For warmer climes than this of course if you want all-year protection. They never did get a strain that wouldnt die back in the winter.
And your projector is out there? I tilted my head toward the midst of the thorns. Youre not worried I might call on you in person? I gave her my dangerous smile. I hadnt felt like smiling since I woke but now the edge of an idea sliced through the fading fog of Kallas drugs.
Hakon nodded. Its safe enough from you even if you wore armour and carried shears. Naked and without weapons you pose no threat. I tell you this to show you how hopeless your situation is. Work with me and power beyond your dreams could be
Ive dreamed enough, ghost, I said. Time to die. Goodbye, Brother Hakon.
His lips twitched, a snarl of effort, and words stuttered out. B-b-beauty. S-s-sacrifice. His own voice, free of Kallas control. The mutterings of a broken mind. Or perhaps his memory of our joking in Vyene about the price wed pay to see our enemies burn.
I set my strength to untwisting the top of the vial.
No! Hakon started forward, Kalla shouting from his chest unit.
The lid came free and I flung the container over his head, back along the corridor. Kalla had said it held death, a plague that might scour mankind from the world. Id called it Pandoras Box. I turned and ran, shrugging Hakons reaching fingers from my shoulder. I built up speed, barefoot across the stony cavern floor.
Id released Pandoras ills and back along the corridor a klaxon sounded, wailing like a thousand banshees. Angling toward the extreme left of the cave mouth, I reached the impenetrable wall of thorns, and leapt, high as I might, diving forward.
Purging. Repeat level 0 viral breach. Repeat. Full Purge!
Pandoras Box held all the worlds troubles but at the bottom of it, last to emerge, trapped among nightmares, lay Hope.
The hook-briar gave before my weight, thorns snagging at my skin, slipping in, tearing, slicing deeper, holding, until at last they arrested my advance and I hung among them. Trapped as Id been trapped years before, pierced by the same sharp and sudden pain, but this time by my own volition.
I heard rather than saw the hot white tongue of fire that roared from the cave mouth, a spear of incendiary rage surrounded by billowing flame that spilled to either side, spreading, engulfing.
The klaxon felt silent, leaving only the roar of flames, the crackle of burning, and my screaming as the margins of the inferno reached me, naked amongst the thorns.
Unconsciousness is a blessing in such times, but horrifically late in coming. I felt my skin crisp, saw my hair shrivel and burn as the hot breath of the fire blew around me. I saw the skin melting from my hands before the heat took my sight.
Unconsciousness is a blessing, but only a temporary one.
I found myself amid a forest of blackened coils, thorn-toothed, stark against the blueness of the sky.
Rolling my bald and weeping head, I saw with blurred eyes a corridor cut through the midst of the hook-briar where only fine white ash remained. The silver-steel of the cylinder lay beneath me, scorched but unharmed. I jabbed at the buttons with sticky fingers, some welded together with molten skin, clumsy in a pain that admits no description.
Three times I tried the numbers. I would have wept but Id gone past tears. At last, infinitely slow, the lid rotated off and I dipped my hands into the nu-skin. I daubed the slime across each finger. As the stuff writhed across them I held each digit wide, despite the pain. I smeared slime across my face, into my mouth, into each eye, down across my body as far as the remaining thorns would let me.
Whatever science or enchantment the nu-skin held it proved to be powerful. The unguent worked different wonders depending on where it found itself, repairing my sight, flowing down my windpipe and healing my lungs to the point where I could scream once more, building new skin across my arms while the dead stuff sloughed away.
I tore free of the thorns, only to snare myself on new ones, but allowing the application of my dwindling stock of slime to new areas, groin, legs, back. The skins work drew on my own strength, an exhaustion rising through me that dragged me into a torpor despite the crawling agony of it all.
At last a light rain woke me. I stood, caught amid the skeletal remains of the briar, impaled on black thorns, smeared with ash, but unburned, clad in a new hide.
Even burned and brittle the hook-briar took its toll on me as I struggled through. By the time I reached the corridor of ash I ran with blood from a hundred wounds, the last of the nu-skin exhausted early in the escape. The rain came heavy now, but warm, sluicing down across my body in a crimson wash. I stood in the mud and ash and let it clean me.
I returned to the cave, finding it still hot, the stone ticking as it cooled, no trace of Hakon save a stain around the blackened drug stand. Wincing at the heat beneath my bare and bleeding feet I made my way along the dark corridor and found my sword. And thus dressed I left the bunker.
At last, before my strength failed once more, I picked my way around ancient remnants of razor wire and came to where the top of a sunken pillar of Builder-stone emerged from the mud. The stone had been cracked by the fires heat and a little less than a foot of it lay exposed. Despite the weathering and corrosion it took more effort than I thought remained in me to slide the top to one side. The hollow interior stretched down beyond sight, the inner surface crowded with myriad crystalline growths, all interconnected with a forest of silver wires, some thick, some finer than spider silk. Many of the crystals lay dark, but here and there one glowed with a faint light, visible only in the shadow.
Found you.
Dont. Kallas voice, weak and pulsing from the interior.
I pried a rock from the muck about me. A heavy chunk of what might once have been poured stone. Grunting with effort I lifted it to the lip of the column. It would fit down the inside with an inch or two to spare.
I cant end. Not like
A thousand years is too long to live. And I let the rock fall. It dropped with a prolonged and continuous sound of shattering, ricocheting from one wall to the other, tearing away the guts that had let Kalla echo for so long within the last works of the Builders.
I looked at my hands, torn and empty. A great weariness washed through me, a desire to lie myself down in the mud and let sleep claim me. All that stopped me was the memory of a kiss, the hint of her scent.
No. Ive slept long enough.
A kiss had woken me and Id found, as we so often do, that the world had moved on without me. And thats the riddle of existence for you. When to move and when to stay. Dwell too long and we become the prisoner of our dreams, or someone elses. Move too fast, live without pause, and youll miss it all, your whole life a blur of doing. Good lives are built of moments of times when we step back and truly see. The dream and the dreamer. Theres the rub. Does the dream ever let go? Arent we all only sleepwalking into old age, just waiting, waiting, waiting for that kiss?
Bleeding, smeared with muck and ash, I staggered down the hill, all that survived the purge of Bunker 17. I might be counted one more ill to be visited upon the world, for I could hardly be called its hope. But, hope or horror, I had endured. I had been delivered from the thorns in fire and pain and set free.
I ran a hand across the baldness of my scalp and felt my mouth twist in its old smile, a bitter one to be sure but not only bitter.
Sleeping beauty, woken by the princesss kiss, I said.
And so I set off to find her.
Footnote
This was the first Broken Empire short story I wrote, prompted by a reader daring me to do a Jorg/fairy-tale mash-up. Its framed around Sleeping Beauty but has a nod to Goldilocks and even Rapunzel! Chronologically it takes place between the two threads in Emperor of Thorns, before the Wedding Day thread in King of Thorns, on Jorgs return to Ancrath from his first visit to Vyene. Hakon is a character seen in The Red Queens War trilogy.
Did Katherine wake Jorg using her dream-magic, or was it just a failure of the ageing machinery? Thats for the reader to decide.