The Wheel of Osheim

TWENTY

“Lisa!” I broke away from Snorri, nearly tripping over one of the butchered corpses littering Hertet’s great hall. “Lisa!”

“The girl you wanted to marry?” Snorri stepped back, taking in his surroundings for the first time.

“We have to go!” I started toward the main doors. “I have family in trouble.”

Snorri shouldered his axe and followed, stepping over scattered pieces of armour and the occasional twitching corpse.

The great doors to Hertet’s throne room crossed each other at drunken angles, each clinging to the frame by a single hinge. I kicked the left one and sent it swinging back. The antechamber was a well-dressed charnel house.

“Christ.” Someone had put up a fight here-probably Grandmother’s elite. Dismembered bodies littered a floor awash with blood, a dozen or more mire-ghouls in the mix, many of the dead bloated and still smeared with stinking river mud.

“What country are we in?” Snorri at my shoulder.

“This is the palace in Vermillion. My uncle had a go at playing king. It didn’t work out very well.”

The front doors of Milano House lay in fragments, the wood grey with dry rot, corrupted by the lichkin’s touch. We went down the steps, Snorri holding up a shield he’d lifted from a fallen guard.

“Not your style?” I looked back, raising a brow.

“Ghoul darts are even less my style.” He followed me out onto the steps.

Enough torches had kept burning when dropped to surround the house in a loose halo of faint illumination. The story here ran similar to that inside. Broken corpses, scattered gore, half a dozen dead men in sight, wandering aimlessly, at least until the first of them spotted us.

“Run!” I shouted and took to my heels.

I stopped about ten yards later, realizing that Snorri wasn’t following me and that it was dark where I was going. I turned back toward him. “Run?”

Snorri gave me that grin that shows all those white teeth in the blackness of his beard. “I haven’t been walking all this time in Hel-” he paused to behead the first dead man to reach him, a savage and perfectly timed swing, “-to run from these sorry remains.” He didn’t so much decapitate the next man as swing his axe through the fellow’s head. Then two were on him together. I hadn’t time to see how he dealt with those because a serving woman in a torn dress had singled me out. She came on at an awkward, urgent lumbering, her grey hair fanned out in disarray, purple bruises around her neck where dead hands had choked the life out of her. I stuck my sword through her mouth and out the back of her head. A grisly business. I was still wrestling my blade out when Snorri strode past me. Even with her head a ruin she still clutched at me blindly. I had to dodge back and leave her flailing on the ground.

“Come on then,” he called over his shoulder. He held a pair of burnedlow reed torches in one hand, at arm’s length to light his way, the flames guttering over the last of the pitch.

I led the way, expecting some or other horror to leap at us from the night-the further we went without assault the worse the feeling of anticipation-but at last we stood before Roma Hall, unchallenged by anyone, living or dead.

“Who’s inside?” Snorri asked. “Just Lisa?”

“I don’t know for sure, Lisa, her sister Micha, my baby niece.” As marshal of the city I should be gathering men and making for the walls. Lisa would be as dead as the rest of us if the main force outside gained the city. Whatever the logic, I had to know she was all right, that they all were. Or at least to see their end and know that nothing now could save them.

The front doors stood ajar, the hall behind them dark. As I led the way up the steps I saw blood, just a smear, where perhaps someone had fallen and hit their head.

I opened the door on the left using the point of my blade. The light of Snorri’s dying torch hinted at the long hall beyond, Father’s Indus statuettes and vases in their niches at measured intervals. Fat Ned’s head lay a few yards in, staring up at the ceiling with an expression of mild surprise, perhaps at having died on guard duty and meeting a quick and violent end after such a slow battle against whatever was eating him inside. Proof that none of us really knows what to expect. I glanced about for his bony carcass but saw no sign of it.

At this point I remembered the small cone of orichalcum buried in the depths of my deepest pocket. I considered digging for it. Snorri loomed behind me raising his torch, and when I stepped aside, he walked on through. Not carrying any source of illumination proved such a good excuse for sending the Northman in ahead that I left the orichalcum firmly where it was.

“Lisa!” Snorri boomed. “Lisa!”

“Shhhh!” I motioned frantically down with my hand.

“What?”

“They’ll know we’re here!”

“That’s the idea. LISA!”

I supposed it was the idea, but the notion of calling out the enemy ran opposite to a great many deeply ingrained instincts and half of me still wanted to slap my hand over Snorri’s mouth.

Snorri led the way down the entrance hall. The place didn’t smell like home, it held a sour odour, the stink of death, old rather than fresh. There should be men at the door but I’d seen Alphons back outside Milano House, conscripted to Hertet’s guard, and Double could have been drafted too.

“Lisa!” Another booming announcement. Snorri glanced back at me. “It’s big!”

“It’s not like I haven’t been telling you I’m a prince all this time.” I waved him on. “Turn left past the next doors. And try not to kill any servants.” If we met Ballessa while carrying a smoky torch it might be Snorri who was in danger. Dirtying up the cardinal’s ceiling was not allowed. I remembered then that we’d made smoke of my father that morning and an unexpected sadness settled on me-something all my own rather than a lichkin’s gift.

It’s an odd thing to be sad about someone in death that you never really cared for in life and a thing that chooses its own moment to sneak up on you-usually a damn inconvenient one-but there it is . . . perhaps we hurt for the lost opportunities, for the conversation that would have released all the unspoken words, for the way it should have been.

“Where now?”

I paused. It was a big place. “Upstairs. We’ll check Darin’s old rooms.”

As we climbed the staircase I caught the distant sound of banging, something pounding on a door? The place seemed silent apart from that hammering, though silent is the way of corpses and necromancy-right up to the moment they leap out at you from the dark.

“Left at the top.”

Snorri’s torch guttered and the shadows danced, the untouched darkness crawling with horror. “Trouble.” He used a small word to understate a large disaster. Blood had congealed in sticky waterfalls down the top four or five steps. The landing was scattered with body parts, dark smears of blood reaching further up the walls than seemed reasonable.

“Palace guardsmen.” A few chunks bore large enough pieces of uniform to identify them. The men must have been killed then reanimated and finally hacked apart.

At the margins of the torch’s illumination a dark figure crouched on an armoured one. Snorri pressed the torch into my hand. Moving slowly, he let his axe slide until he gripped it just below the head and did the absolute last thing I would have recommended. He set it down.

“What?” I could see the black figure pause in whatever had occupied it and look our way, a tension in it as if poised either to attack or run.

Snorri ignored me, instead gripping the rim of his round shield and easing his other arm from the straps. Two things happened at once. The figure in the shadows sprang away and Snorri hurled his shield like a discus, the iron rim catching the creature in the back of the head and felling it.

We rushed forward, Snorri grabbing his axe. A mire-ghoul lay sprawled beside a gory torso in very shiny armour. I couldn’t say who it was-the face had been eaten away. Snorri turned the ghoul over with his foot. A dark and bristly moustache was stuck in the thing’s teeth, along with several unpleasant gobbets of flesh.

“Sir Wodger,” I said, understanding at last who had inhabited the gleaming armour. “My cousin sent him and these men to recover the DeVeer sisters.”

The ghoul opened an eye. Snorri sank his axe into its chest.

The hammering sounded louder, close at hand. Snorri put his boot on the ghoul’s neck, wrenched his weapon free with a wet sound.

“Lisa?” I pushed past, sword before me, torch to the side. A priest stood before the door to Darin’s suite, fists raw from banging against the wood. He turned to face me. Bishop James, I thought . . . the choked purple of his face made it hard to tell. Stout, ageing, and stern, Bishop James had spent many futile hours trying to teach me the error of my ways as a child, with either the rod or the bible, both wielded as a weapon. I never liked him but I wouldn’t have wished this end on him.

Bishop James ran at me with the recklessness of dead men. I knew enough not to let him impale himself and trap my blade, and swung instead, taking off one of his reaching hands somewhere between wrist and elbow. I ducked at the last, shoulder down, and let him tumble over me. A wet crunch from behind indicated an ungentle meeting with Snorri’s axe.

“Lisa?” I rapped on the door. “Micha?”

“Barras? Is that you?” A woman, voice muffled.

“Darin? Thank God!” A second woman.

“It’s Jal,” I said.

A moment of silence. “How many men have you got with you?”

“Enough.” I felt mildly insulted. “Open the door. We need to leave, quickly.”

“We’ve barricaded it. It will take a while to move all this stuff.” Lisa’s voice, rather faint.

“Leave it shut.” Snorri came up to stand beside me. “We need to clear the place first.”

“Leave the barricade!” I called out more loudly, trying to make the idea sound like my own. “We’re going to make sure it’s safe first.”

“It’s Double, Jal!” Micha called from behind the door. I heard a cry of complaint from little Nia.

“What?” I shouted back. Either I’d misheard or she wasn’t making sense.

“Double!”

I turned to look up at Snorri and shrugged. “Double?”

“She means me.” The voice came from behind us on the landing.

Turning, I saw a thing built of body parts. Not a man like the augmented giant who had chased me across the rooftops, but something closer to the monstrosities that had bound together to form the scaffold by which the dead had overtopped the city wall. To my eye it was a gory spider made from the severed limbs of the men Sir Roger had led to their deaths. Arms and legs fused one to the next to make crude and gangly spider-limbs, with the dripping upper half of a torso at the apex where six or seven of these limbs converged.

“Hasty work and crude, I apologize.” I focused on the man behind it, holding a lantern aloft.

“Double?” He wore the household uniform though the arms of it were thick with gore past the elbows.

“Not really my name of course, but you’ve been using it for the past year so why not let’s keep it that way for the last night of your life.”

“But . . . you’re . . .” When I thought about it Double seemed an unlikely name. I’d met him for the first time escorting Snorri to the Marsail keep the day Grandmother set him to be freed after telling his story in the throne room.

“I would stay to chat but I’ve things to do in the church. I just came in to see what the noise was.” Double lifted his lantern a little higher. “And you brought the Northman back, I see. Where has he been? I see death all over him.”

“Yours,” Snorri said and moved toward the flesh-spider, a grimace on his face as if the distasteful shape of it worried him more than the actual combat.

Double reached his hand toward Snorri, extending his fingers around the rounded black object he was holding. Snorri stopped, distaste turning to surprise.

“What?” Snorri tried to move but it seemed as if his body had frozen into one solid piece. Even forcing the question past his lips took effort.

“This really is quite remarkable.” Double showed a smile wholly at odds with my memories of his bland and friendly face. “You’re clearly alive and yet death has seeped into you almost bone deep. We really will have to have a discussion before I kill you.”

And that left just me guarding Lisa’s door against a treacherous necromancer and his pet horror.

“It was you who searched my room when I came back from the North!” The main thing about not fighting someone is to not let the fight start. In some circles this is known as stalling.

“There’s no point trying to stall me, Prince Jalan.” Double focused on his creation and it scuttled forward a yard or so. “But yes. Me. If you’d had the decency to leave Loki’s key with your other possessions then all this unpleasantness might have been delayed.” He returned his attention to the flesh-spider and it jittered forward another yard, the head in the middle of it all watching me with the same avid attention the hawk reserves for the mouse.

“What is that thing?” I pointed at the object in the hand Double had extended toward Snorri.

“Oh please.” Double advanced his creature a few more steps.

“No, really, it looks familiar.” At first I’d thought his hand wrapped about some kind of necromantic blackness-but it was something solid and real and I’d seen it somewhere before.

“This?” Double inverted his palm so the object rested on his palm. “A young woman threw it at me while I was organizing things in the church.”

“A holy stone!” Father’s holy stone, to be precise.

“Yes. One of the DeVeer sisters threw it. I’ll return it to her soon.” Again that stranger’s smile. “I suppose she thought one of the cardinal’s symbols might hold some power over me? What is it they say? Let she that is without sin cast the first stone? But the DeVeer sisters are hardly innocents now, are they? And your father never was very much of a cardinal . . .”

“Why don’t you give it to me instead?” I needed Father’s seal to defend me against my sister if she broke through-when she broke through. Darin’s death had nearly given her the doorway she needed and with so much dying in the city it could only be getting easier for her. I needed a cardinal’s seal Marco had said, but the other symbols of his office were almost as holy-they might be enough.

“This?” Double set his lantern on one of the support posts for the railings that ran alongside the landing. He passed the holy stone from hand to hand, like the lichkin enjoying his moment of power. I guess it had grated on him serving my father’s house in such a lowly capacity while all the time hiding such talents. “You think I don’t know why you want it?” He held it by the dark metal handle that followed the curve of the stone’s black iron body. “Sister,” he said. “Sister . . .” drawing out the word into a taunt. “Your father’s seal would serve you better against her, but Archbishop Larrin made off with that. The one that got away. If I’d caught him I would have had the whole set from choirboy to archbishop.”

In the corner of my eye Snorri struggled against the bonds holding him. He’d been too long in Hell, steeped in the dryness of the deadlands, and necromancy would have a hold on him until the living world fully accepted him back. Double’s monstrosity began to advance again.

“Wait!” I shouted. You’d be surprised how often that works.

The flesh-spider paused and Double raised his eyebrows, inviting me to elaborate.

“If you could put down my father’s holy stone. I don’t want to damage it when I kill you.” I lifted my sword. Bravado is as good a delaying tactic as begging. I just needed to buy a few minutes for Snorri to shake off the necromancer’s spell.

“I might take my time with you, Prince Jalan.” Double examined the holy stone. “You’ve no idea how dull it is waiting on your family. How difficult it is to nod and bow before such a collection of pompous morons puffed up on their own misplaced sense of self-importance . . .” He banged the stone against the banister, hard, examined it with a scowl, then waved his creation on to finish me.

“On second thoughts, keep the stone. I don’t think you can damage it.” Although I wanted the thing myself I would rather spend the next minute watching him smashing it against the banisters than spend it with me going man to men against his ugly monster.

Double rose to the bait. I didn’t expect him to. Still, I played along, shouting out an agonized “no!” as he beat the thing against the wall. Bullies are to be avoided but often their cruel streak does allow them to be manipulated. “No!” I cried, as if he were swinging my child against the doorposts. When he finally did manage to pull some minor piece free, a metal pin of some kind, nobody was more surprised than me to see the whole side clasp come away in his hand. I’d always thought of the holy stone as an iron pineapple, impervious to any harm.

“There!” He grinned. “I doubt that’s holy any more. It’s not even whole. What do you think of that, Prince Jalan?”

I don’t recall making any reply. In fact the next thing I recall is finding myself horizontal, on a bed, in a room with an oak panelled ceiling.

“What?” I’ve never been very creative with opening lines when recovering consciousness.

Lisa DeVeer’s face swam into focus above me. I jerked into a sitting position, narrowly missing breaking her nose with my forehead. Micha stood at the foot of the bed, clutching Nia to her breast. Snorri occupied the doorway, his back to us.

“Double!” I patted my hip, hoping to find the hilt of my sword. “Where’s Double?”

Lisa pointed to the left and slightly up, Micha to the right and down. Both of them seemed to be speaking at once but I couldn’t make out the words through the ringing in my ears. I lurched off the bed, found my sword on the dresser close by, and pushed Snorri aside.

An acrid smoke hung over the landing outside. Ten yards of the banister had vanished, splintered stumps of the railings punctuating the gap. The flesh-spider appeared to have been returned to a scattered collection of ill-matched limbs, and I could see that the sisters had technically both been correct about the location of Double. Some pieces of him were sticking to the wall on both sides of the doorway.

Snorri said something but the only word I caught was “exploded.”

“Holy hell!” I turned back into the room. “Let’s get out of here!”

“Where to?” I could see that Snorri was shouting though I had to struggle to make out his words.

“The Inner Palace. That’s the safest place. Garyus might be there too.” I could hardly hear my own voice through the ringing in my ears. I took one of the lanterns from the mantelpiece and ushered Lisa and Micha out of their sanctuary. “Quickly. Quietly.” And I led the way out of a place I couldn’t ever imagine would feel like home again. We walked through the scattered remains, a red lesson in how the church rewards an abundance of curiosity in its clerics. Clearly dismantling your holy stone against strict orders results in it reducing you to several hundred small and bloody lumps.