Where my arrow fell I have no idea. I very much doubt I emulated my grandmother’s feat at Ameroth, but she was aiming at her sister and we Kendeths seem to do rather better under such circumstances. Of the dozen or more shafts launched at Edris two hit him and a few more sprouted from corpses walking by, scarcely causing them to break stride. One of the two to strike him took him in the shoulder, the other, and I’m claiming it no matter what the odds, jutted from his chest. Having seen Edris Dean escape Frauds’ Tower in Umbertide despite being cut so deep that only his neckbones prevented decapitation, rather than punch the air I started to order a second volley. Before I finished shouting out the command Edris shattered – as if he were a reflection on a pane of glass. The pieces of him fell from view, lost in the tide of walking corpses.
‘Hell.’ I thrust the bow I’d stolen back at its owner.
‘What … was that?’ Barras asked.
‘A necromancer,’ I said.
‘Did we kill him?’ Darin used the royal we: he hadn’t a bow, but he probably would have got nearer the mark than me if he’d had a try.
‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’ I’d seen too much mirror-magic to think him destroyed. I wondered instead how many other reflections he might have scattered among our foe and how I might avoid meeting any of them. The Dead King’s hand might be behind this army of our fallen and he may have bound the necromancers to his cause, but one at least had a blue hand on his shoulder. The Dead King spent his power here hunting Loki’s key to let him out into the world, but the Blue Lady no doubt had still more pressing aims – with Grandmother and her Silent Sister bound for the Blue Lady’s stronghold in Slov, perhaps she sought to turn Alica Kendeth from her path with a direct strike at the heart of her kingdom. If that was the case then she clearly didn’t know my grandmother very well. The Red Queen would sacrifice us all to win this war of hers and go to her bed that night to an untroubled sleep.
‘Load faster! Load faster!’ Captain Renprow’s panicky commands brought me out of my own panicky thoughts. He directed the scorpion toward the base of the ramp, invisible now beneath the weight of dead citizens swarming over it.
I could see terror on the faces of the men at the wall above as they struggled to get the two heavy cauldrons in place. No single man would be able to lift either, and with dozens of gallons of fire-oil and tar inside the four men who could fit around each were hard-pressed to position them.
Just below the guards battling the cauldrons’ weight a sea of dead men surged, howling, washing up around the ramp of broken stone, broken timber, broken bodies. The scaffold of human corpses reached to within a yard of the wall top, hundreds in the construction, dozens more clambering up, screaming their awful hunger. And out beyond that scaffold, stepping through the dead horde, crushing some, knocking others aside, came the monsters, the tripods, raw, bloody, scuttling like spiders. And yet the wall guard held their ground. Those old men I’d doubted, they kept their place, bound by their oath and by their duty, where I would have run.
‘Yes!’ Darin, Barras, in fact every man around me calling out, as two torches were set to the mouths of the cauldrons and each began to tip.
Twin streams of fire started to splash down onto the pyramid of dead, flattened against the wall. A cheer went up from all the guards. And yet the dead men below held tight even as they burned, their skin withering before the heat, hair and clothes burned away, flesh sizzling.
The first of the great three-legged monstrosities began its climb, anchoring its legs into the burning corpse-tower and scuttling up toward the wall. A wave of blazing oil broke across it but still the thing came on, new dead men ascending in its wake. The tower scorpions could no longer target the thing, so close to the guards, and with a last lunge it hooked two of its legs over the lip of the wall. Burning dead men scrambled over its back, howling, and threw themselves at the cauldron crews, who fell back in panic. The remains of the fire-oil spilled from the dropped cauldrons, setting the parapet afire.
‘Get more men down there! Now!’ I waved my sword unnecessarily. ‘Sound the breach!’
Trumpets blared, an alarm that no one alive in Vermillion had ever heard except in wall-drills. The city had been breached.
15
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.