The Wheel of Osheim

TEN

The uniform turned out to be a baton of office and an ageing sash of yellow silk with a number of worryingly bloodlike stains on it. Over the course of the next few days I came to appreciate the cruelty of Grandmother’s revenge. After the initial joy of informing Martus that he was now my subordinate came an endless round of official duties. I had to inspect the wall guard, deal with engineers and their tiresome opinions about what needed repairing or knocking down, and officiate over disputes between the resident city guard and my brother’s newly arrived infantry.

I would have told them all to go hang, but my assistant, Captain Renprow, proved annoyingly persistent, an example of the “raised on merit” class of energetic low-born types that the system needs in order to function but who have to be watched closely. Additionally, continued reports of rag-a-maul and ghouls in the poor quarter acted as an added incentive. If there’s one thing that will get me to do half an honest day’s work it’s the conviction that doing so will make me safer.

“What are rag-a-maul, Renprow?” I leaned back in my chair, my feet in their shiny boots on my shiny marshal’s desk.

Renprow, a short dark man with short dark hair, frowned, favouring me with a stare that put me uncomfortably in mind of Snorri. “You don’t know? I’ve passed you a dozen reports . . . you attended that strategy meeting yesterday, and-”

“Of course I know. I just wanted your opinion on the subject, Renprow. Humour me.”

“Well.” He pursed his lips. “Some kind of malicious ghost. People describe them as miniature whirlwinds raising rags and dust. Whirlwinds so full of sharp edges they can flay a man, and when the wind drops the victim is possessed and runs around on a murderous rampage until they’re put down.” He puffed out his cheek and tapped two fingers to it. “That about covers it.”

“And these incidents are peculiar to Vermillion?”

“We’ve had reports far and wide, but we do seem to have a higher incidence in the city. Perhaps just because the population is so much larger.” He paused. “My father’s people know them too. But they call them wind-stick devils, and they’re very rare.” Renprow had a heritage that began far south of Liba, giving him command of many odd facts.

“Well.” I swung my boots off the desk and glanced around the room. The marshal’s manse was a spacious building but had been unoccupied for so long that most of the furniture had wandered off. “If that concludes our business for the day?” The sun had passed its zenith and I had a flamehaired beauty to visit, a sweet girl named Lola, or Lulu, or something.

Renprow’s mouth twitched into a shortlived smile as if I’d been attempting a joke. “Your next appointment is with the menonites in the Appan suburb. They’re proving resistant to the idea of disinterring their cemeteries. After that-”

“We still have dead in the ground?” I stood up fast enough to knock the chair over. “Have the guard do it for them!” I’d seen what happened when the dead come clambering back from where they’ve been put. “Better still, have Martus’s soldiers do it. I want every corpse burned. Immediately! And if they have to make more corpses to do it . . . that’s fine. As long as they burn those too.” I shivered at memories I’d been trying to bury-like the Vermillion dead they weren’t buried deep enough.

Renprow picked up a weighty ledger from the shelf by the door and held it across his chest like a shield. “The menonites are unruly at the best of times and numerous. Their sect venerates ancestors to the ninth generation. It would be better if we could negotiate.”

And there went my afternoon, just like the three before it. Smiling and performing for peasant stock, a bunch of ingrates who should be falling over themselves to obey my commands. I sighed and stood. Better to cajole the live ones than have to contend with the dead ones later on. The live ones may smell bad and have irritating opinions but the dead ones smell even worse and hold the opinion that we’re food. “All right. But if they don’t listen I’m sending the soldiers in.” I found myself still shivering despite the heat of the day, visions of the dead crowding in, patient, silent, waiting . . . until the Dead King woke their hunger.

“Jalan!” The door burst open without a knock and Darin stood there, pale and serious.

“My dear brother. And how have you decided to brighten my day? Perhaps some overflowing sewers need my attention?”

“Father is dead.”

“Oh, you liar.” Father wasn’t dead. He didn’t do that sort of thing. I took my cloak from its hook. The day outside looked grey and uninspiring.

“Jalan.” Darin stepped toward me, a hand reaching my shoulder.

“Nonsense.” I brushed his arm aside. “I’ve got menonites to see.” A coldness sat in my stomach and my eyes stung. It made no sense. Firstly he wasn’t dead, and secondly I didn’t even like him. I walked past Darin, aiming for the doorway.

“He’s dead, Jalan.” My brother’s hand settled on my shoulder as I passed him and I stopped, almost at the door, my back to him. For a moment visions of a different time replaced the square outside and rooftops beyond. I saw my father young, standing beside Mother, bending down, a smile on his face, arms open to receive me as I raced toward them.

“No.” For reasons wholly beyond explanation the word stuck in my throat, my mouth trembled and tears filled my eyes.

“Yes.” Darin turned me around and folded his arms about me. Just for a moment, but long enough for me to press the foolishness back where it came from. He released me and with an arm around my shoulders he steered me out into the day.

The cardinal died in his bedroom, alone. He looked small in the wideness of that bed, sunken, old before his time. If he’d been drinking then the maids had removed the evidence and tidied him up.

He’d gone into a decline following his trip to Roma. The pope’s scolding was a thing to behold by all accounts, and accompanying Reymond Kendeth back to Vermillion, along with a heavy burden of shame, came the pope’s own man, Archbishop Larrin, whose only job appeared to be making my father do his. Some men thrive on old age, others feel the world narrow around them and see no point in the path before them. A man’s first taste of the poppy gives him something glorious and wonderful, something that he strives to recapture with each return to the resin, but in the end he needs to smoke it just to feel human. Life is the same for many of us-a few scant years of golden youth when everything tastes sweet, every experience new and sharp with meaning. Then a long slow grind to the grave, trying and failing to recapture that feeling you had when you were seventeen and the world rolled out before you.

The funeral took place three days later, Father’s corpse under guard until then while the most pious of the faith filed past to honour the office if not the man. We gathered in the Black Courtyard, a sizeable rectangle between the Poor Palace and the Marsail keep, generally used for exercising horses but traditionally reserved for gathering with the coffin before the slow walk to the cemetery, or the church, depending on the deceased’s station in life. Today, under a sullen and blustery sky, there was to be a cremation. Split logs of rosewood and magnolia, selected for fragrance, had been stacked into a pyre taller than a mounted man. Father’s coffin lay perched atop the wooden mountain, polished, gleaming, chased with silver, a heavy silver cross placed upon the lid.

The entire palace turned out. This was the Red Queen’s youngest son, the highest cleric in the land. In the tiered seating for the royals Garyus’s palanquin sat highest, with Martus, Darin and me in the row beneath, our cousins arrayed before us one row lower. Father’s elder brother, Uncle Parrus, remained in his holdings in the east. The message hadn’t had time to reach him, let alone allowed time for him to return, and in any event with Grandmother’s thrust into Slov it would hardly be the time for the grandest lord in the east to abandon his castle on the border.

I had reports demanding my attention-disturbances in the outer city that morning-but I couldn’t begrudge Father his due. Somehow, after Mother’s death we never had anything to say to each other. I should have fixed that. You always think there’s going to be time. Put things off. And then suddenly there’s no time left at all.

“Here he comes.” Darin to my left, nodding down at the courtyard. A crowd of the aristocracy emerged from the Adam Arch, chattering brightly despite their sombre blacks and greys.

“Grandmother’s only been gone ten days and he thinks he owns the place.” Martus on Darin’s far side.

I could make out my father’s eldest brother, my Uncle Hertet, at the centre of the crowd, not because of his height-which was modest-but by virtue of the shirt of brilliant yellow-and-green silk showing through the wide gap in his mourning robe, all of it stretched to contain an ample belly. His entourage swept before him, the phoney court he maintained as practice for when the throne would supposedly be his. To watch him you might imagine that he considered his mother gone for good-not merely on campaign but to her grave.

Hertet’s sons, Johnath and Roland, peeled off to the lowest row to sit beside our other cousins along with the lords and barons. Their father, sweating in his finery despite the cool breeze, lumbered up the timber steps to the highest tier where he wedged himself alongside Garyus’s palanquin. The heir-apparently-not gave no hint of a bow nor acknowledged his uncle’s presence in any way other than that forced on him by having to squeeze in beside the curtained box.

“Hurry it along.” Hertet raised his voice behind us. I turned to see him brushing a hand up through the damp straggles of his grey hair, plastering them back over his forehead. With sagging jowls and bloodshot eyes he looked a far more likely candidate for the reaper’s scythe than my father ever had. “Reymond kept me waiting long enough in life with those damned masses of his. Let’s not have him waste any more of our time.”

Seeing Hertet’s waving arm the archbishop down in the square began to read aloud from the huge bible held open for him by two choirboys.

“Damned nonsense all this pyre business.” Hertet continued to grumble behind me. “Got better things to do with my morning than sit and smell Reymond cook. Should put him in the crypt with the rest of the Kendeths.”

Since our family name passed down through the monarch we were all Kendeths despite Grandmother’s three sons having three different fathers. I’d always taken pride in the name before, though sharing it with Hertet soured that pride somewhat there on the tiers. I hoped his opinions on cremating the dead didn’t escape the palace. It was proving hard enough convincing Vermillion to exhume and burn her dead as it was, without Hertet Kendeth declaring it foolishness.

At length we were done with the Latin and the lies. Archbishop Larrin closed the huge bible with a thump that echoed around the Black Courtyard, and the finality of it sent a chill through me. Father’s seal hung around the man’s neck, catching the light. A minor cleric handed Larrin a burning brand and he duly tossed it into the kindling heaped at the pyre’s base. The flames took hold, grew, crackled, found their roar and started to devour the logs above them. Thankfully the breeze blew from the south and carried the smoke away from us, drifting in grey clouds across the Marsail keep, over the palace walls, and out across the city.

“Ballessa said an odd thing.” Darin kept his eyes on the flames and I could imagine he hadn’t spoken. “She said she passed by Father’s chambers the afternoon he died and heard him shouting something about the devil . . . and his daughter.”

“Father doesn’t have a daughter,” Martus said, with the kind of firmness that indicated if some bastard child were discovered she should be forgotten again pretty damn quick.

“Daughter?” I watched the flames too. Ballessa wasn’t given to flights of fancy. You would have to look far and wide to find a woman more firmly grounded than the major-domo of Roma Hall. “He was just drunk and shouting nonsense. He was in his cups when I saw him a few days back.” Darin looked at me with a frown. “Father hadn’t drunk for weeks, brother, not since he came back from Roma. The maids told me it was true. You can’t hide anything from the people who clean up after you.”

“I-” I didn’t have anything to say to that. Father had said it for me. He wished that he had done a better job of being a father. Now I wished that I had been a better son.

“Jula was with him at the end,” Darin said.

“He died alone! That’s what I was told!” I looked at my brother but he kept his eyes forward.

“A cardinal shouldn’t die alone with a cook, Jal.” Martus gave a snort. “She was there, even so,” Darin said. “She brought him his broth personally. She’s been his cook longer than any of us have been his sons.”

“And Jula said?”

“That he faded quietly and she thought he’d fallen asleep. Then, seeing how pale and still he was she thought him dead. But he surprised her. At the end he was violent, struggling to rise-mouthing words but making no sound.” Darin looked away from the burning pyre, up, past the smoke, into the blue heavens. “She said he seemed possessed. Like a different person. She said his eyes met hers and in that moment he reached for his seal beside the bed, and on touching it collapsed back to his pillows. Dead.”

Neither Martus nor I had an answer for that. We stood in silence, listening to the crackle of the flames. The breeze rippled through the smoke and for a moment I saw shapes there, one moving into the next, almost a grasping hand, almost a face, almost a skull . . . all of them disturbing.

It took half an hour before the coffin fell in with a dull crash, a scattering of blazing logs and a maelstrom of sparks lofted toward the heavens. The heat reached us even on the upper tiers, red upon our faces. The archbishop signalled and the palace flag was lowered to indicate the start of mourning and that we could leave.

“Well, it’s done.” And Hertet levered himself up then stomped off down to the courtyard. Others took their cue and followed. Some lingered. My cousin Serah turned to offer my brothers and me her condolences for Uncle Reymond, Rotus shook our hands. Micha DeVeer waited for her Darin at the margins of the courtyard in her black dress, a milk-nurse beside her with my niece, pink and pudgy in her mourning cloth. Barras and Lisa said their words, kind ones, but they rolled off me. And finally it was just three brothers, and the possibly empty box on the tier behind us.

“I’m going to get drunk tonight.” Darin stood. “We never saw the best of that man. Maybe our sons will never see the best of us. I’ll say a prayer for him, then drink a drink.”

“I’ll join you.” Martus got to his feet. “I’ll drink to Uncle Hertet taking the forever nap before the Red Queen quits the throne. Christ, I’d see Cousin Serah take the crown before that old bastard.” He slapped his hands to his upper arms. “You’ll join us, Jalan. You’re good at drinking at least.” And with that he set off down the steps.

“Steward.” Darin bowed to the palanquin, put a hand to my shoulder, then followed Martus.

“How stand our defences?” Garyus’s voice emerged from behind the curtains.

“The west wall is crumbling. Sections need to be underpinned. The suburbs need to be burned and razed. Martus’s men are bored and picking fights with the guard. We’re short a hundred crossbows and half our scorpions are in want of maintenance if they’re to fire more than twice before breaking. Grain reserves are a third of what they should be. Apart from that we’re fine. Why?”

“You’ve looked at the figures?”

“Some of them, certainly.”

“Ghoul sightings inside the city walls in the past four days?” He’d picked one I actually noticed when Renprow pushed it across my desk. “Uh, three, then seven, twelve yesterday, another dozen or so came in this morning before I left after lunch.”

“They’re scouting us,” Garyus said.

“What?” I leaned forward and pulled his curtain aside. He looked like a monster in his shadowed den, an unwell monster, pale and beaded with sweat. “They’re scavengers, half-dead corpse-eaters following the riverbanks. There have been dead floating downstream for weeks-some army of Orlanth laying waste in Rhone.” I wondered if Grandmother would be clogging rivers with dead Slovs before the month was out.

“Have you mapped out the captures and the sightings?” Garyus asked.

“Well, no, but there’s no pattern to it. Except more by the river than anywhere else. But they’re everywhere.” I tried to see it in my mind. Something about the picture I came up with worried me.

“All over. Never the same area twice?” Garyus looked grim.

“Well, occasionally. But not often, no. Once the guard see them off they don’t come back. That’s a good thing . . . isn’t it?”

“It’s what scouts do. Checking for weakness, gathering information to plan with.”

“I should go,” I said. “Had reports of corpse attacks in the outer city.” It was the ones within the protection of the city walls that worried me most, but the recent messages spoke of a rash of attacks coming quite suddenly.

I made to turn away but something glinting on the palanquin’s floor caught my eye. “What’s that?” I leaned forward and answered my own question. “Pieces of mirror.”

Garyus inclined his head. “The Lady is trying to open new eyes in Vermillion. She knows my sisters are coming for her-perhaps she’s desperate. I hope so. In any event, I advise against using any mirrors. A handsome fellow like you shouldn’t need to check his reflection-that’s a pastime for us ugly people in case we forget our appearance and get to thinking that the world will look well upon us.”

“I gave up mirrors a while back.” A shudder ran through me: too many glimpses of movement that shouldn’t be there, too many flickers that might have been blue. “Your sisters have left us to find the damn woman but what’s to stop her stepping out of someone’s looking-glass and murdering the lot of us while they’re gone? Not to mention that the ghoulproblem hasn’t gone away. Grandmother said that was a distraction to keep her here. Well she’s gone now . . . but we’re still finding bodies missing-dead ones and live ones. I don’t like it. Any of it.”

Garyus pursed his lips. “I don’t like it either, Marshal, but it’s what we have. I’m sure my twin has left enchantments in place to close this city to the Lady Blue-at least from physical intrusion. She learned that lesson at a very young age. The rest of it is for us to take care of.”

I sighed. I would have rather heard a comforting lie than the frightening truth. “Duty calls.” I glanced down at the Black Courtyard, preparing to go. The yard stood clear now of all but a few mourners, the clerics set to watch the pyre burn down, and of course Garyus’s guard. The air above the embers rippled, reminding me of how Hell rippled when too many died at once and their souls came flooding through. I stared at the hot orange mound and through the heat shimmer I caught sight of a figure approaching. I watched, uncertain of what it was until it rounded the fire and I saw clear.

“Dear God! Guards! Guards!” I pointed a shaking hand at the thing walking calmly toward the stands. “It’s a . . . a . . .” I had no idea.

The six men at the base of the seating tiers looked up at me and, following the direction of my finger, they seemed to see the flayed man for the first time. They recoiled in horror, but only for a moment, trained men these, hard men, Grandmother’s elite. As one they reached for their swords . . . then, as one, they let their arms fall, looked away. A moment later they were standing as they had been before, as if for all the world there wasn’t a hairless, skinless man in a black cloak walking calmly toward them.

“What?” I glanced back at Garyus in his palanquin. “What the hell? Garyus! Tell them! It’s possessed! A rag-a-maul’s had him!”

Two of the guards looked up at me, frowning as if offended by my tone of voice.

“Leave it be, Jalan. Luntar is a friend.”

I moved quickly to the side of Garyus’s box and drew my sword. I would have hidden behind the thing but it had been pushed back against the wall of the building that the stand rested against. “That thing is a friend? It’s been fucking skinned!” I looked down at the palace guard who were scanning the courtyard, wary for any threat to the steward. “And what the hell is wrong with your bodyguard?”

“Burned. Not skinned.” The black-cloaked man smiled up at me as he climbed the last few steps, his footprints wet behind him. “And the guards have merely forgotten what they saw. Memory is the key to any man. It’s all we are.”

I kept my sword up as he closed the last couple of yards. I’d seen burned men before and dearly wished I hadn’t. Our visitor looked rather as if Father might have if he decided to clamber out of his coffin after the flames had taken hold good and hard.

“Luntar,” Garyus twitched a hand up in greeting. “Good to see you, old friend.”

“Well met, Gholloth. And this would be your great-nephew, Jalan. A rare man.”

I lowered my sword further than I wanted to and less than decorum demanded. “You know me?”

Luntar smiled again. For a man who should be screaming in horrible agony he seemed remarkably cheerful. Burned skin cracked and wept as he spoke. “I know far less of you than I know of almost any man. Which makes you a rarity. Your future is too twisted with that of Edris Dean to be seen clearly.”

I frowned. The future-sworn don’t see me-that’s what Edris Dean had said about himself. The fact he loomed in my future as well as my past did not make me feel any better. I might want him dead but I didn’t want to be the one tasked with the job.

“My condolences for the loss of your father, Prince Jalan.” Luntar spoke into the silence where my reply should have been. “I met him once. A good man. The loss of your mother changed him.”

“I . . .” I swallowed and coughed. “My thanks.”

“To what do we owe the honour, Luntar?” Garyus asked.

“You know me, Gholloth. Always chasing probabilities and possibilities. Or chased by them.”

Luntar looked out across the rooftops at the pale sky. The seared flesh glistened across his skull and I took a step back, or would have if I hadn’t fetched up against the wall, banging my head. “Trouble is coming.” Spoken to the heavens.

“Don’t need a future-sworn to see that.” I rubbed the back of my head. “Trouble’s always coming.”

“There’s to be an attack? Here?” Garyus asked.

“Yes.” Luntar faced us again. “But it runs far deeper than that. Your sisters have gone to stop Mora Shival, but it will not be enough. The world is broken, not just this empire, not just these lands, but the world itself, from mountain root to sky and out beyond. The armies of the dead are just the start of it.”

I puzzled over “Mora Shival” then remembered that in Grandmother’s memories it had been Lady Shival with the sapphire headdress that had come to kill the elder Gholloth. Somewhere after that she had become the Blue Lady.

“How long do we have?” Garyus again.

“Months.”

“Months?” I asked. “Until the attack?” Grandmother would be back by then and it could be her problem.

“The attack will be very soon. Perhaps it has already started. It will be months until the end.”

“Of?” I spread my palms in query.

Luntar echoed my gesture then spread his arms to encompass the palace and the sky. “Everything.”

I laughed.

He stared at me.

I tried to laugh again. Grandmother had said her war with the Lady Blue was about the end of the world. I hadn’t taken her literally. Or rather, I had understood the words but not absorbed them. Yes the Builders had cracked the world when they turned their wheel, yes mages like Kelem, Sageous and the rest cracked it wider each time they worked their magics . . . but the end? I knew the Lady Blue’s ambitions lay in whatever followed the ruin of everything we held, but that had always been years away, a problem for later. Even with Grandmother’s departure for Slov I hadn’t really thought everything was at stake. Not the whole world. Red March maybe or the lands around Osheim. But I’d always imagined that there would be somewhere to run to, somewhere to hide.

At least I understood now the urgency . . . or desperation . . . that had taken the Red Queen from her throne, leaving her beloved city in peril, to war in a distant land at an age when many grandmothers sit grey and wrinkled, knitting quietly in a corner and counting away the last of their days.

“Months!” I said the word again to see if it tasted any better. It didn’t. I may have once said that six months was forever but right now it felt distinctly less than enough. For some reason Darin’s baby popped into my mind, even though all I’d seen of her were plump pink legs waving and plump pink arms reaching for Micha’s milk-heavy breasts. And frankly I hadn’t been looking at the baby. Six months wouldn’t take her very far.

“For you, less than a week if your walls don’t hold.” Luntar reached into his cloak and my sword came up between us. “Months for the world.”

“A week!” I yelped. “Less than a week?” How far could I get on a fast horse in less than a week? “This isn’t right! An attack here? Is an army coming? Is it the Dead King? Someone needs to do something! We need-”

“A gift, Gholloth.” Luntar ignored my panic and drew out a white box, a cube six inches deep. “You once gave me a copper box in your possession and it proved very useful. Now I return the favour.” Apart from the pale pink smears, where his burns had smeared the surface, the box was without design or ornament, a cube with rounded corners, made of white bone. Ivory perhaps . . . or . . .

“It’s plasteek?” I asked. “A Builder thing?” I tried to keep my voice steady but the words “less than a week” kept running through my mind, along with images of my new horse, Murder, waiting for me in the stables.

“It is plasteek, yes.” Luntar placed the box beside Garyus.

“What’s inside?” I asked before my great-uncle could get the words past the twist of his mouth.

“Ghosts.”