The Wheel of Osheim

THIRTEEN

“I hope to God Grandmother named you marshal for a good reason.” Darin joined me atop the leftmost of the two towers flanking the Appan Gate, his voice awestruck. “Most of our cousins thought it was a joke.”

“Most?”

“The rest thought it was a punishment.”

We looked out across Vermillion’s overspill, the extended city reaching half a mile from the walls, still further where it followed the Appan Way, as if desperate to wring a few more coins out of any traveller so foolish as to leave. Dead people crowded the space before the gates- men, women, children-the grey and flaking dead in the filthy remains of their grave-clothes; the fresh dead, still scarlet with their murder, a silent throng stretching out around the walls, back along the main road, pressed tight in the alleys between houses.

Even sixty feet up with a light breeze the stench proved invasive, tearing at the back of my throat, stinging my eyes. More than a few meals had been splattered down the wall. The sight and smell of your first walking dead is apt to do that to you.

“I gave standing orders for no archery.” This to Renprow, the gore drying on him now after our hurried ride from the bridge. A good number of the dead closest to the Appan Gate sported two, three, sometimes five arrows, jutting from arms and chests-an elderly woman had one in her eye. “It’s a waste.”

“I’ll send out the order again, Marshal. It’s hard for the men not to shoot when the enemy advances on their positions.”

I waved Renprow away. Soldiers of the wall guard packed the tower-top, men of middling years in the main, many thick-waisted and gone to grey, thinking to pace away their remaining years peacefully on the walls of the capital. The primary duty of a Vermillion wall guard is spotting fires. Apart from that they’re basically a mobile reserve to the city guard and the only excitement they ever see is when they are called upon to descend into the city to back up their thinly stretched brothers in city red.

“Move!” Behind me Martus elbowed his way through the guard, blaring at any who didn’t shift quick enough. “Get out of my way! I’m a bloody prince. I’ll-Dear God . . .” Martus faltered in mid-bluster, squinting out across the dead horde against the setting sun. “Dear God.” He grew pale. “I’ve never seen anything like . . . that.”

“I have.” I leaned out, hands on the battlements to support me. “I’ve seen worse.” And in that moment I realized that while fear ran through me from head to toe, it wasn’t the debilitating terror I’d known on so many other occasions. I thought then that maybe I knew why Grandmother had chosen me. “I’ve seen Hell.” I raised my voice. “I’ve seen Hell and this isn’t it. We’re the Red Queen’s men and we’ve all of Vermillion at our backs. A bunch of shuffling corpses isn’t going to take it from us!”

A cheer went up at that, taking me by surprise. To be fair, Renprow did lead it, but the fact is the men around me had lost their courage and a few bold words from a frightened man had given them back some measure of it.

“How in God’s name did . . .” Martus gazed across the multitude again, “. . . an army of three thousand dead reach our walls without any alarm?”

Darin rubbed at the stubble on his chin. “It’s not as if you can’t smell them a mile off! Didn’t you send any scouts, Jal?”

I looked between my brothers. Some called them the twins, though Martus had a heavier build and Darin sharper features. No one ever called us the triplets, though in truth if I were two inches taller we might pass as such in a poor light. As much as I might profess to dislike them it actually felt good to have some family at my back-to have some people with me on the tower who genuinely didn’t expect me to solve their problems or get it right.

“I have over a hundred men on wide patrol and no army could make its way through Red March without the word going out from towns and villages. That . . .” I pointed back at our enemy, “. . . was made here. Most of them probably killed in their homes within the last few hours while we were chasing ghouls around the river.” I wondered how many necromancers might be out among those alleyways, or working in leafy squares, moving along rows of my people, fresh-killed and laid out on the cobbles side by side, one family at a time.

“What are we going to do?” Darin asked. The Darin I knew of old would have been telling me what we should do, laying it all out with a debonair swagger. I narrowed my eyes at him, wondering what ailed the man, before remembering the seven pounds of new pink flesh so recently arrived. Misha had put the baby in my hands when she and Darin had finally trapped me in the Roma Hall a few nights back. A tiny thing.

“We’ve called her Nia,” Misha had said. I’d looked down at the child, named for my mother, and found my eyes stinging.

“Better take the little beast back before she wets my shirt,” I’d said and thrust my niece back at her mother, but it had been too late. The old magic that babies weave so well had got in under my skin, contaminating me faster than piss or vomit or any of the other bodily fluids that newborns are so keen to share. Even a lifetime of evading all duties put upon me was insufficient practice to let this one slide off me like the others. How much worse to be the father?

Darin had taken Nia and lifted her up. “If my girl wants to soil her uncle’s peacock feathers it’s just testimony to her good taste.” But he took no offence. He’d seen something come over me in the moment I held her, despite my trying to hide it, and had given me a knowing and very irritating smile.

“What are your orders, Marshal?” Captain Renprow asked, bringing me back to the horror of the tower-top and the Dead King’s army.

“My orders?” I looked down at the dead again. “They don’t seem to be much of a threat to the main city. No siege engines, no ropes, no bows. Are they planning to bore us to death?” It didn’t make a lot of sense. I could hear faint screams, carried on the breeze from the outer city.

“My wife’s out there.” A man in the charcoal grey of the wall guard, a common ranksman. He pointed to a slight rise topped by a church, houses ringed around it like ripples. A muscle twitched in his jaw. “My sons and their children are down Pendrast way. He swung his arm to indicate another region, smoke rising above shingled roofs. “And over-”

“Hold your tongue, soldier!” A hefty sergeant, red-faced. “Twenty-three thousand living beyond the city walls at the last census, Marshal,” Renprow reported the number in a penetrating voice.

“I hope they’re running.” I hoped it for their sakes and for ours. If the dead horde were swelled by over twenty thousand new recruits they might ring the city so effectively that we would stand besieged.

“Can’t we . . .” Darin didn’t finish the sentence, he knew the answer was no. We couldn’t go out there.

“We haven’t the numbers.”

Behind us a team of men struggled to position the scorpion, a hefty device of iron and timber and ropes, capable of hurling a heavy spear four hundred yards. At close range it could launch that spear through the front door of a house, put a hole through three men behind it, and punch its way out through the back door.

“We can’t stand here staring at them all day,” I said. “We’ve got dead in the streets, and mire-ghouls. They need to be stamped on, and hard.”

Three of the four captains of the city watch had joined us on the overcrowded tower-top and now approached as I beckoned. Their commander, Lord Ollenson, would be overseeing the operation at the river- that or attending his own public beheading on the morrow-but the wall alarm had brought captains Danaka, Folerni and Fredrico to my side.

“Danaka, I want you with three squads at the north watch.” Two towers overlooked the Seleen where it entered the city, each of them standing with its feet in the water, terminating the wall. “Fredrico, three squads to the south watch.” The fortifications overlooking the river’s exit were less formidable. Any boats attempting to enter Vermillion that way would have to contend with the current, making them slow and cumbersome.

I turned to Folerni, a wiry goat of a man, his left eye milky, the brow above and cheek below divided by a scar. The look of him reminded me of the Silent Sister and I paused. Before I could find my words a dreadful howling overwrote whatever I might have said. The kind of sound that would set statues running the other way. I made a slow rotation toward the walls, though the sound unmanned me and no part of me wanted to look.

My eyes fixed on a disturbance past the dead crowding the Appan Gate. A few hundred yards back along the main road a change had come over the corpses shambling toward the walls. It almost seemed to be a wave, moving through their ranks. Their heads snapped up, they became horribly alert, and their mouths gaped wide to utter that terrible cry. Perhaps only the fresh-killed could scream but it sounded as though the noise came from corrupt lungs long past use, the voice of the grave, death itself speaking, and not softly. The undulating howl came full of threat, promising the worst kind of pain.

Every place where the change came the dead moved faster, with wild energy, scrambling up buildings to tear at the roofs, seeking any that might be left inside, hammering on doors, or rushing toward us with an enthusiasm that suddenly made the city walls small comfort. I heard bows creak beside me.

“Do not fire.”

The wave of “awakenings” moved steadily toward the gates, a tightpacked knot of the quickened dead surging ahead. But I noticed something. Before my time in Hell my eye would have been too fascinated by the horror of the spectacle to pick up on details, but my time there had changed me. At the back of the surge I saw the dead return to their stumbling, once more closer to sleepwalkers than to wolverines.

“They’re turning!” Martus, shouting beneath the death-call.

It looked at first as if he were right, but they weren’t turning, the effect was turning. The area where the dead quickened veered off to the left a hundred yards from the gates. Those who had been howling for our blood fell silent and sullen once more and other dead men, and their wives, and their children, suddenly took up the cry in the streets to the left of the Appan Way.

“It’s as if . . .” I spoke the words only for myself. It was as if they felt some awful heat that made them fierce, and the thing from which that heat radiated . . . was on the move. I tried to see where the focus of the effect lay . . . and saw it, a shifting point where it almost looked as if the world had folded around itself to obscure something the eye shouldn’t see. “There!” I raised my voice, pointing now. “There! Do you see it?”

“See what?” Martus pushed to the wall beside me.

“There’s . . . something.” Darin on my other side, squinting. “Something . . . wrong.”

“I can’t see a damn thing! Where?” Martus shielding his eyes against the dying rays of the sun.

I stared, tracking the point, losing it behind houses, picking it up again. A space where the light seemed folded. A dead spot on the eye. And then, for just a moment, I did see. Perhaps it was the setting sun lending me a hint of the old dark-sight Aslaug used to bring, or maybe Hell had trained my eye to see what the men were not supposed to see. A flicker of motion, an impossibly thin body, nerve-white, clad in a shifting shroud of grey: soul-stuff perhaps, the ghosts of men haunting the lichkin’s flesh like a garment.

“Shit.”

“What? What is it?” Darin, still staring.

“A lichkin,” I said. A lichkin, one of the parasites that Edris and his kind set riding the unborn children they slew. Such a thing held my sister and wanted nothing more than to wear her flesh into the living world. But here we had a naked one, broken into the world through God knows what crack, and scarcely less dangerous than an unborn from what I’d seen in Hell.

“Where’s it going?” Martus asked. The sound of howling grew more distant as the lichkin moved away.

“Hunting,” I said, and I felt Grandmother’s gaze upon me as surely as if I stood before her throne, those eyes of hers, harder than hard, without any shred of comprom-ise. I remembered finally opening that scroll-case Garyus had given me, seeing the Red Queen’s seal, breaking it open to see the words in her own hand. Marshal of Vermillion. And a note: “You say you saw the defence of Ameroth. Pray that you learned its lesson and pray harder that you will never have to show that you learned it.”

A hundred men stood at my back, a city behind them, mine to wield, mine to protect. In all my adventures across the face of the Broken Empire I’d never want to be somewhere else quite as much as I did in that moment. I looked out across the rooftops, all in shadow now, the sky aflame, boiling red above the departed sun. “Burn it all.”

The howling had passed almost beyond hearing, the dead below us stood silent. Nobody spoke. I heard the flutter of the flags, the wind’s whisper, and far off behind the walls the cry of a street vendor singing out his wares.

I turned and walked toward the scorpion. The men parted before me. “Burn it all.” I slapped a hand to the heavy spear loaded into the machine. “Rags and oil. Shoot for the rooftops. Send word to all the towers.”

Martus wrenched me around. “That’s madness! What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“We can’t defend the outer city. By morning they’ll all be dead and added to the army at our gates.”

“It’s not sane! It’s not right.” Martus shook me, raising his voice, mutters from all sides adding to his protest.

“Would you lead the Seventh out there?” I cocked my head toward the darkening streets of the outer city. We could hear distant screaming, another house broken into.

“Well . . . I . . .” Martus screwed his face up, presaging one of his furious blusters. “It would be madness.”

“I wouldn’t let you.” I shook him off and sought the guardsman who had pointed to his home out by the church on the hill. “You. Your name.”

“Daccio, your highness.” He had a subdued look to him, his anger gone, though it showed now on the faces of his comrades.

“Daccio. I’m sorry but your wife is dead, your sons too. Or they’re hiding in their homes waiting to be saved.” I looked about at the wall guard, grey in their ranks. “Are you going to save them? Will the wall guard descend these walls this last time and sally forth where the Seventh Army fear to tread? Or will the lichkin find them out? If we do nothing the dawn will show us your family standing bloody before our gates.” I took a rag from the base of the scorpion, an oily thing used on the bow arms to keep them from rust. “Fire is clean. Better to burn than let those creatures have you. And what better chance will our people have to run than in the smoke and confusion of a great conflagration?” I slapped the rag into Daccio’s hand. “Do it.”

And he did.