The Wheel of Osheim

FIFTEEN

For half an hour it looked as if we might hold the Dead King’s forces on the wall, and perhaps even beat them back once the soldiers of the Seventh reached the fray to relieve the old men of the guard. On the narrow parapet the dead could come at the wall guard only two or three abreast. They threw themselves forward with alarming speed, accepting the thrust of sword or spear to close on their opponents and lock hands around a man’s throat.

“It’s always strangling with these dead men. What’s the point of it?” I couldn’t see it was a very efficient way to kill anyone, especially in the midst of a pitched battle.

“What other options do they have?” Darin asked.

“Thumbs in eyeballs? Head smashed against the wall?” I’d spent entirely too much time with Snorri.

“And there’s that too!” Barras pointed to another pair struggling, the attacker a young woman, seared with fire-oil and still smouldering, now with a spear through her guts. She grappled the guardsman who speared her and both pitched off the walkway, a twenty-five foot drop headlong onto the cobbles below.

We watched from the tower as the fighting progressed. Given the narrowness of the battlefront there wasn’t much else to do. In those first moments the breach had seemed a complete disaster but ten minutes later the dead had pushed the wall guard back maybe twenty yards on each side for the loss of scores of their own number.

“They throttle them because an undamaged corpse is easier to stand up again,” Darin said. On cue back along the parapet two gauntleted hands reached up over the wall and a guardsman stood up, his neck livid and the dead-scream bursting from his lungs.

“They’ve no intelligence though,” Barras said. “Look. Half of them just fall straight off the other side as soon as they scramble over the wall. It must be a bloody mess down there.”

I watched for a moment. He was right. The stream of corpses, on climbing their blackened and smoking scaffold of dead, lunged over the wall as if expecting immediately to find someone to grapple with. At least half of them failed to arrest themselves on the oily stonework before reaching the edge of the parapet and plunging to their doom.

“Shit!” My blood ran cold. “Follow me!” It would have taken too long to explain or issue orders. I snatched one of the oil-rush torches by the scorpion and hurried down the spiral stair that led through the tower. “Follow, damn you!”

Hundreds of citizens watched from the streets behind the gates, fifty yards back or so, huddled in nervous crowds. Young men mostly, carrying spears, butcher knives, the occasional sword, whatever they could arm themselves with, but there were older men too, and boys, even young women and grey-haired mothers, all drawn by the thought of spectacle. They say people are dying to be entertained and here stood an audience who seemed ready to do just that. Hawkers walked among them, bearing lanterns to display their wares, pastries and sausage, sweet candy and sour apples. I doubt they had much business, what with the stench of death, the wafting smoke, and the stomach-turning death howl. The fact the crowds were still here stood testimony to their faith in our walls but if any of them truly understood what waited on the other side they would have been running for their homes screaming for God’s mercy.

“What?” Darin caught up with me at the base of the tower.

I looked back to check we weren’t alone. Renprow, Barras, and now a steady stream of guardsmen emerged behind us, two more bearing torches. “All those dead men falling . . .” I said. “Do you hear them landing?” I led the way into the utter darkness along the base of the wall, then slowed so that guardsmen overtook us. I’d no intention of being in the front rank. “Renprow! Get more men down here. And send for Martus’s reinforcements.” I felt sure I’d already ordered them forward to the wall. “And where are the palace guard, damn it?”

“But why are we down here?” Darin repeated.

“The dead from the wall. Can you hear them hitting the ground?” I asked, eyes roaming the darkness, wishing I had Aslaug here to help me.

“Can’t hear anything but you shouting,” Barras said, clanking along in his fine tourney mail.

It was there though, beneath the din of men fighting and dying, beneath the death-howl, a dull thudding, with no rhythm to it, like the first heavy raindrops presaging a downpour.

“What’s got you spooked?” Darin held his long blade before him, catching the torchlight. “It’s nearly a thirty-foot drop onto hard ground. That’s more than broken ankles, its broken shins, knees, hips, the lot. I don’t care if they don’t die-they won’t be chasing anyone.” He stepped slowly, despite his words, as if he didn’t trust the flagstones not to bite.

“It was thirty foot onto hard ground for the first dozen. We’ve seen more than a hundred go over. By now they’re landing on a nice soft pile of broken bodies.”

We could hear it clearly now, a rapid and irregular beat, flesh thudding into flesh, an erratic heartbeat in the dark behind the wall.

The torchlight showed figures up ahead. Lots of figures, standing there in the blind dark, unspeaking. A few steps closer and the shadows yielded still more. They looked up as one, eyes catching the flames and returning them. Then they charged. And the screaming started.

Close up, the ferocity of the quickened dead was a shocking thing. Their utter fury and lack of regard for sharp edges made defence feel a futile business, a momentary delaying of the inevitable. The first rank of guardsmen went down in moments, borne to the floor, dead hands closing around their necks. The second rank fell apart in short order, with more dead streaming around the flanks of my band of some thirty men, which left me surrounded and being leapt upon by a fat man in rags who looked to have spent a couple of weeks in the grave before being roused to join today’s festivities. I didn’t have time to complain that his burial was in direct contravention of the Red Queen’s orders, not to mention mine as marshal. I barely had time to scream.

The thing about dead men who won’t die again, and who need to be dismembered if you’re to stop them, is that it’s all very well telling yourself this information, but when one of the bastards jumps on you screaming unholy rage . . . you run them through. It’s instinct. They should have put that on my tombstone. “Killed by instinct.”

In defiance of reason however, the hunger fled the corpse-man’s eyes in the moment my sword hilt met his chest above his corrupt, unbeating heart. The weight of him threw me back into the guardsmen behind me but with their help I kept my feet, and managed to haul my blade clear as my enemy-now a simple corpse of the type that lies still and waits to be a skeleton-fell to the side. The next dead thing came at me in the same instant. Repeating my mistake, I slashed at its neck, and repeating the miracle it fell clutching at the cold blood welling from the ruin of its throat. Edris Dean’s blade seemed to vibrate in my hand as if alive. I risked a glance at the blade as I stuck it through the howling mouth of the dead woman next in line to kill me, a slightly-built young thing who might have been pretty under all that soot and blood and murderous hunger. Along the length of my sword dead men’s blood clung to the script that had been etched into the steel. A necromancer’s weapon-the tool of his trade- seemingly as adept at cutting the strings that animate a corpse as at cutting those that lead a living man through the dance of his days.

“Watch out!”

I didn’t have time to contemplate my discovery. A man who’d died in the athletic prime of his life threw himself at me, pinning my blade, and took me to the ground. I’ve not been savaged by a hound but I imagine the experience is similarly terrifying. The sound of the thing’s roaring filled my world. Its strength wholly over-matched mine and without the chainmail surcoat it would have been tearing the flesh from my bones. Other hands seized me and I felt myself dragged across the flagstones, though I’d lost my bearings and couldn’t say in which direction. I almost hoped it might be into the mass of the dead where I could at least expect a quick death.

In the next moment I discovered what it might be like to be on the butcher’s block. Swords rose and fell above me. I heard and felt the thudding of blades in flesh. I struggled as the cold blood washed over me, and after what seemed a lifetime, strong hands hauled me to my feet.

“Marshal!” Renprow, seizing my head, inspecting me for wounds while my now-limbless assailant twitched on the ground before us. The sounds of the battle raged close by, not the clash of steel on steel or the thrum of bowstrings, just the screaming, of both the living and the dead, and the dull chopping of meat. “Marshal? Can you hear me?”

“What?” I looked around. Men of the guard packed in close on every side, reserves brought in by the long circular road that the wall parapet constituted. Up above us the war of attrition was still being waged, the dead pushing slowly out from the point where they overtopped the wall, but the real battle lay before me. More dead continued to spill over the wall in a steady rain, landing on the mound of those too injured by the fall to move on. The drop would probably still kill a man, but it didn’t break enough bones to slow the Dead King’s army, and now guardsmen recently throttled were facing their old comrades. “Where are our reserves? Damn it! We need the Seventh! We need the palace guard!”

I let Renprow lead me back through the ranks. Our presence had drawn the dead but we didn’t have the numbers to contain them. A necromancer’s orders could see them scatter out into the city. Perhaps only their masters’ desire to see the officers and commanders of Vermillion’s defence dead kept them here.

“Darin? Where’s Darin?” I shook Renprow off. “Where’s Barras?”

Renprow looked up to meet my gaze, jostled as more guardsmen hurried past to join the fray. He held me with the dark intensity of his gaze. “Marshal, all that stands between this city and disaster is your command. You need to concentrate on the bigger picture-”

I had him by the throat in a moment. “Where is my brother?” I shouted it into his face.

“Prince Darin fell.” The captain choked the words out. “While he was helping to drag you clear.”

I let Renprow fall and bent forward, doubled up by a blow to the stomach-though nothing had hit me but the truth. “No.”

There’s a red rage that runs deep in me, so deep you wouldn’t catch even a hint though you kept my company month after month. Even so, it is there. Edris Dean ignited it the day he ran his sword through my mother’s belly. He took that young boy’s bravery, his anger, his despair, and with one blow he set it apart from me, bound tight into something new, something darker, more bitter, and more deadly. And in the years of my life I’ve lived on a surface below which this crimson outrage ran unknown and unsuspected, stolen from me, leaving a different man.

“No!” That old rage rose then, surfaced from its depths, and I welcomed it. As I ran back through the ranks of my men I roared a welcome to it that Snorri himself would have been proud of-greeting an old friend.

Edris Dean’s sword, the same blade that shaped my life, sent dead men back to the grave as easily as it set live ones on their first visit. There was a crucial difference though-the dead had no fear of men with swords. It made them easy for me to kill. I ran among them, swinging with every ounce of skill that my old swordmasters had beaten into me at Grandmother’s insistence, and every lesson that unwanted experience had taught me since. The men of Vermillion followed in a wedge behind me, and at every slash and slice I bellowed my brother’s name. I kicked corpse-men from their victims, chopped away the arms fastened on men’s throats, hacked and slew until my blade began to weigh like lead and my traitor limbs betrayed me, the strength running from them.

A corpse-woman grappled me about the legs, another grabbed my left arm, trying to sink its teeth into the inside of my elbow. The chainmail foiled the bite, and a spearman drove his shaft through the dead woman’s head, though she didn’t loosen her grip. Strong arms wrapped me from behind and pulled me back among my men. Unable to fight them, I collapsed into the embrace. For a moment the world went darker, the light of torch and lantern dimming as the thunder of my heart filled my ears.

“Darin?” I gasped the question between great lungfuls of air drawn through a raw throat. “Barras?”

I blinked and cleared my vision. The men around me were of the Seventh. Renprow stood looking down at me, making me realize I lay on my back. I’d passed out but had no idea how long I’d been unconscious. I blinked again. Cousin Serah stood beside Captain Renprow, her face soot-streaked and framed by a close-fitting chainmail hood, her eldest brother Rotus loomed behind her, his lean frame armoured, his customary sour expression in place.

“Where is my brother?” I demanded, sitting up, gasping at the pain from bruised ribs.

The captain tilted his head, face torn in three parallel furrows across his cheek. I followed the gesture and saw Darin, propped in a sitting position against the Appan Gate, more pale than I’d ever seen him.

“Barras?” I asked as I got up.

“Who?” Serah reaching down to help me I shook her off.

“Barras Jon, the Vyene ambassador’s son. Married to Lisa DeVeer,” Rotus supplied, always full of facts-even in the midst of battle.

“My sword!” I shouted, before finding it in my scabbard. “And where’s Barras, damn it?”

Captain Renprow shook his head. “I’ve not seen him.”

I reached my brother’s side and knelt down opposite the chirurgeon examining him.

“How-” My voice stuck, so I coughed and tried again. “How are you, brother?”

Darin raised a hand, as though it were the heaviest thing, and set it to his neck, torn by the nails of dead men, the crushed flesh livid with blood both above and below the skin. “Been . . . better.” A pained whisper.

I looked to the chirurgeon, a grey-headed battlefield practitioner in studded leather armour bearing the crossed spears of the Seventh. He shook his head.

“What do you mean, ‘no’?” I stared at him in outrage. “Fix him! He’s a bloody prince. His elder brother’s in charge of your whole army . . . and I’m the fucking marshal!”

The man ignored me, as used to battlefield hysteria as to battlefield wounds, and tapped at Darin’s chest, above his ribs. “Ruptured a vessel in his windpipe. His lungs are filling with blood.” He set his fingers to my brother’s neck to count his pulse.

“Damn that!” I made to grab the so-called healer. “Why don’t you-” Darin’s hand on my wrist stopped me mid-flow, even though there was no strength in the grip.

“You . . . came back . . . for me.” So faint I had to lean in to hear it. I heard the bubbling then, of blood in lungs.

“I wish I hadn’t now!” I shouted at him, the smoke stinging my eyes so I could hardly see. “If you’re just planning to lie there and die on me.” Something caught in my throat, more smoke perhaps, and I choked on it. When I spoke again it was quiet, meant only for him. “Get up, Darin, get up.” More than a hint of a child’s whine in my voice.

“Nia.” I thought for a moment he was speaking of Mother-just for a moment, then I remembered his new daughter, small and soft in Micha’s arms. She would never know him.

“I’ll protect her. I swear it.”

Darin’s head lolled to the side and my heart seemed to stop inside me though I’d never claimed any love for my brothers, not even my favourite one. But he raised his brows and I followed the line of his gaze to his fingers, glistening with some clear liquid.

“Oil,” Darin said.

It was true, we were crouched in the stuff, thankfully cool now: it must have leaked under the gate after being poured through the murderholes. Darin brushed slippery fingers across the back of my hand.

“Stopped . . . them.”

I puzzled on that for a second. The oil hadn’t stopped them. I set my fingers to it and slid them over the cobbles. “It did!” I understood, passing from confusion to clarity in one instant. The dead beneath the gatehouse hadn’t been able to push, they had no traction on the ground. All they could be was a plug of flesh to transmit the shove from outside. The doors had only just held. The oil saved them. A moment of triumph lit me. “I knew if I-” But Darin had gone.

The chirurgeon kept his fingers on Darin’s neck a moment longer, feeling for that beat. He shook his head. And, blinded by tears that had never been from the smoke, I drew my sword.

Something moved beneath my brother’s skin. Large enough that even with my eyes misted I could see it. Like a small hand sliding up his neck. His body jerked as if a blow had been struck from inside his chest.

“What in God’s name?” The chirurgeon jumped back aghast, clearly not fully acquainted with the nature of our foe.

Darin’s lips writhed. With a curse I slid my sword up through my brother’s sternum into his heart, and without a sound he relaxed into a true death.

“It’s not enough.” Serah behind me. “You need to bind him-”

“With this sword it’s enough.” I pulled the blade clear, red with my brother’s blood, and stood to face my cousins.

“That wasn’t the same as the others-what happened to him . . .” Rotus leaned in, peering.

“No.” The dead had always woken in an instant, hunger in their eyes, ready to do murder. Darin had been different. As if . . . as if something were trying to break out of him. Or through him. “I-” Then I noticed it. “The dead howl . . . it’s gone.” It struck me that since I’d come to my senses after that insane charge the dead had fallen silent. The shouts and screams I could hear now came from living throats, some full of rage, others terror, or pain, but the chilling and unending scream of the attacking dead had . . . ended.

“The dead have slowed,” Renprow reported, eyeing me as if worried I might collapse again, or throw myself back into the fray. “But we’re barely holding them and they keep coming-they must have a usable ramp to the top of the wall now.”

“Get back on the tower, Captain. We need eyes on this.” Beyond the walls the roar of the fire sounded like a river in full tumult.

Cousin Serah stepped closer, raising her hand to my upper arm. A light touch. “I’m sorry about Darin, Jalan. He was a good man.”

I’d put him out of my head. Just like that, my own brother, lying dead on the floor behind me, bleeding from the wound I gave him. Suddenly I needed to fill myself with something else. Right then I was even grateful for the attack. I stepped past Serah. “These can’t be all the Seventh! Where’s Martus?” Barely a hundred men in the chain surcoats of the Seventh stood around us and the battle-line held against the dead lay just twenty yards away. The citizens who came for the show had fled long ago, hopefully spreading necessary panic throughout the city. “Where in hell are the palace guard? We might hold them with all our forces here.”

Serah set herself before me once again. “I came from the Victory Gate. We saw the fires starting and brought these men to help.” She glanced over her shoulder at the battle, pale but with her mouth set in a grim line of determination.

“I came from the palace,” Rotus said, looming over his little sister. “Uncle Hertet has commanded Martus to keep the Seventh close to the walls-”

“Why isn’t he fucking here then?”

“The palace walls,” Serah said. She looked as young as her seventeen years.

“He has ordered the palace guard to remain at station and defend him at all costs,” Rotus said.

“Oh. That. Bastard.” I sheathed my sword, still red with my brother’s blood. “What the hell is Garyus doing letting Hertet give orders? I’m going back. You’ll have to hold here. I’ll get the reinforcements.”

“We’ll hold.” I expected Rotus to make the pledge, but it was Serah who spoke. She held my gaze for a moment and I saw something familiar. Something I last saw in her grandmother’s eyes on the walls of Ameroth.

“I know you will.” And I began pushing my way through the troops, aiming for the main street from the Appan Gate, lit only by a scatter of dropped lanterns.