‘Hertet?’ I asked. ‘Has he been found?’ He would be among the dead. The slaughter at Milano House had been thorough.
‘Not yet.’ Garyus touched the swelling around his eye. ‘There were fires at the house, and part of the rear wall collapsed. It may be that even counting the dead proves beyond us. But I’ve had no word that he escaped.’ He shook his head, the sorrow seemingly genuine. ‘Foolish boy.’ Perhaps he remembered the child and not the man that replaced him.
‘I should take what men we have and get back to the Appan Gate.’ The sentence didn’t sound like something I would say, but then again, if the dead broke through in numbers none of us would see the next sunset.
‘I’ve a more important task for you two,’ Garyus said.
I raised a brow at that and wondered if Hertet’s fist had scrambled his uncle’s wits. ‘What could be more important? Christ! They were over the wall hours ago. For all I know they’ve taken the gate by now. We need—’
Garyus raised a hand. ‘I have more recent reports. Marshal Serah is—’
‘Marshal Serah? How many marshals is this city to have in one night? And Serah’s a child for godsake!’ Though if I were honest she had been doing an efficient job of organizing the defence when I left.
Garyus waited, pursing his lips to see if I had any more complaints. I held my tongue. ‘The breakthrough is reported to have been contained. The dead remaining outside the walls grew less … vital … and proved unable to follow the others over the ramp and scaffold. Reinforcements arrived: a mercenary force in my employ together with armed citizenry, including a number who formerly made their living in the Blood Holes and other illegal fighting dens…’ Here his eye wandered in Snorri’s direction, letting me know the story of the Northman and the bear had reached his ears. ‘And these reinforcements ensured the destruction of the dead that made it into the city.’
‘They’ll strike somewhere else! The walls by Tannery Square are hardly standing as it is. I—’
‘The firing of the outer city cremated a large number of the corpses raised against us and has severely curtailed the ability of those remaining to move around the walls. My reports indicate that the dead host lacks leadership or direction.’
‘But there were necromancers … I saw Edris Dean myself! They must be planning something… The sewers!’
‘You saw to that weakness yourself, Jalan, and there are no indications of attack. It seems that the Dead King has lost interest in this assault.’
‘But … why? Because we sent his lichkin back to Hell?’ It didn’t make sense. He almost had us. Why give up?
‘A merchant would ask what profit our opponent sought to make.’ Garyus eased himself back, wincing. ‘Why did he spend his strength here, against this city?’
‘Because the Red Queen left us. What better time to attack Vermillion?’
‘You’re thinking about what we value, Jalan, not what the Dead King values. What does he care for Vermillion? Or all of Red March? There are many cities, many places where the living can be converted into the dead far more easily than in the heart of Red March, wherever the Red Queen might be.’
‘All this for the key? All this?’ It didn’t seem possible, though as I said it Loki’s key turned to ice against my chest.
‘What other thing would profit him more?’
‘But.’ I clapped my hand over the key. ‘He doesn’t have it. Why give up now?’
‘I don’t know, Jalan. But I do know his power is not limitless and the prospect for a victory of the sort he would need in order to claim the key became slim when the lichkin fled and our defences proved more formidable than perhaps he anticipated.’
‘Or he found some other treasure,’ Snorri rumbled at my shoulder.
‘Indeed.’ Garyus showed no irritation at a barbarian interrupting. ‘I have considered the possibility. But what other compensation might have satisfied?’
A horrible thought unrolled itself and try as I might to pack it back into a small neat dot of possibility it wouldn’t go. ‘Why did they come here in the first place?’
‘Who?’ Garyus shifted his gaze from Snorri to me.
‘The unborn.’ So many miles had passed beneath my feet and still I found myself back at the start of it all. Me and Snorri together in the Red Queen’s throne room again, talking about the dead once more. And on the evening of that same day I had bumped shoulders with the Unborn Prince, at the opera, a place where no good thing ever happened. ‘Why did the unborn come here in the first place?’
‘They came to bring another unborn into the world. A powerful one.’ Garyus watched me with peculiar intensity. ‘It must have been powerful to risk the Dead King’s two greatest servants within Vermillion’s walls with the Red Queen in the city.’
‘My sister.’
‘You don’t have a sister, Jalan…’
‘Edris Dean killed her in Mother’s womb the night he came to the palace. I saw Mother test her belly with your orichalcum just before the attack. The light … it was as if the sun had come to Earth…’ Snorri’s hand gripped my shoulder in a moment’s sympathy, then fell away. ‘My sister chased me out of Hell. If she had caught me I would have been her gate into the world. I think she tried to come through Father when he died. And again, when Darin fell at the walls. Something tried to come through him.’
‘But it didn’t succeed?’ Garyus frowned. ‘So why did the Dead King withdraw his strength…’
‘Martus!’ A cold certainty tightened in my chest. ‘Send for word of my brother!’
Garyus lowered his head. With effort he lifted a hand and motioned, two fingers extended. A bloodied soldier stepped out from beside one of the royal guards, the smaller man hidden by the larger until now. He stopped five yards from the throne. The tattered uniform announced him an officer of the Seventh. Numerous thin cuts on his hands and face suggested a recent encounter with a rag-a-maul.
‘Captain Davio was to report once our business had concluded,’ Garyus said. ‘Speak what you know, Captain.’ Garyus motioned for the man to step closer.
‘General Martus…’ The captain choked, and grabbed his jaw as if to wring the emotion from his voice. ‘Prince Martus, your highness … he…’ Davio pulled his hand away, leaving both cheeks blood-stained. ‘He led the charge. There wasn’t any fear in him. Ran straight into that unholy windstorm. I saw him cut two ghosts in half as the wind tore at him. We were battling the possessed, but General Martus just made straight for the centre of it. I lost sight of him … and then it was over. The wind died. Rags and glass and stones falling out of the sky … and the possessed running wild, no organization to them any more.’
‘And my brother?’ I knew the answer.
‘We found him in the middle of it, sir, your highness. Cut and torn. I looked for a pulse but I could see he was gone, sir. I called for men to carry him to the palace, and I saw his sword close by. It happened while I was picking the blade off the ground.’ He fell silent, staring at some memory, and I thought Garyus would have to ask, but just as we reached the point at which one of us must speak, the captain jerked his head toward Garyus and continued. ‘His eyes opened. General Martus’s eyes opened and I thought he would rise like the others we’d lost, crazed and dead and needing to be cut down. The lads all raised their swords and axes … we’d set aside our spears and found whatever we could that would cut. Them without swords had woodsmen’s axes, butcher knives, whatever we could find… Nobody wanted to be the first to strike him. Not with him being a prince, and our general.
‘But he didn’t leap up. His body … moved … but it was like something was eating him from the inside. His bones … we heard them snap and it looked like he was full of serpents, writhing. All his flesh sunk in … only his eyes didn’t change.’ Davio choked back a sob. ‘They kept watching us. And then … and then…’
‘Just tell us the facts, Captain,’ Garyus said, not unkindly. ‘They’ll leave fewer scars the quicker you speak them.’
??
?Yes, Steward, sir.’ He drew a breath. ‘And then the thing escaped him. A red bloody mess it was, like a skinned dog, only with his eyes, with General Martus’s eyes. It ripped out of him like he was a sack they’d put it in to drown, and it ran, quick as quick. Batran Deens tried to stop it. Fast hands, that man. He threw himself at it as it passed. Got both arms round it. But the thing slipped through and left him screaming. Everywhere he’d touched it the flesh was melted off him, gone … I saw bones in his arms.’ The captain dropped his head, staring at the floor.
‘There’s the Dead King’s compensation,’ I said. My sister was in the world at long last. I felt nothing – only hollow.
We stood in silence for a moment, contemplating the depth of the shit we stood in. I’d burned my father, burned half the city I lived in, lost two brothers, and gained a homicidal unborn sister all in the same day. I doubted it was possible to fit more misfortune between two sunrises.
Garyus spoke first. ‘You need to take the key north.’
‘That’s madness. The Dead King will catch us and take it!’ I didn’t feel safe behind Vermillion’s walls any more but I felt a damn sight safer than I would outside them.
‘The Dead King didn’t catch you all the time you spent travelling from Trond to Umbertide. You were months on that journey.’ Garyus looked to Snorri as if seeking confirmation. ‘It’s when the key is still that he finds it. While it is here the whole city is at risk.’
‘Where would we take it? You want us to just keep running until we fall off the edge of the world?’
‘The dead outside our walls are not the greatest threat we face, Jalan.’ Garyus studied his palm. The Red Queen had the same mannerism when thinking.
‘There is a greater threat?’ I felt rather than saw Snorri turn to watch me. His question seemed to burn unspoken on the back of my neck.
I raised my hands. ‘I will concede that the imminent end of the world is a bigger problem. And…’ I swivelled sharply to stare up at Snorri. ‘I don’t want to hear a damn thing about Ragnarok. It’s not like that at all. It’s that stupid wheel of yours, it’s going to crack the world open. Or rather it’s allowing us to do so. Or rather it’s allowing people like the Lady Blue and Kelem and the Dead King to do so. So yes, we’re all going to die. And we may not even get a chance to destroy the world because the machines the Builders left behind are probably going to ignite a whole bunch more suns and burn us off the face of the Earth to stop that happening… Either way, it’s not good.’
Snorri stared back at me with an intensity he usually reserved for men he was about to swing his axe at. ‘We will go to Osheim and stop the Wheel’s turning.’
‘That’s just Viking talk.’ I turned back to Garyus. ‘What should we do really?’
‘You need to take the key to the Wheel of Osheim,’ Garyus said.
‘Take—’ I had doubted it was possible to fit more misfortune between two sunrises. I had been wrong. ‘What? Why?’ I’d been intending to just say no but when I opened my mouth questions came out instead.
‘The key has to be taken to the centre. Nobody has ever escaped from that place. It’s one of the few locations that should be secure. If the Dead King, his servants, or anyone else goes hunting it, they won’t return.’
I cleared my throat. ‘I think you’re missing an important point here. Nobody has ever escaped from that place.’
‘That is the point, Jalan. I didn’t miss it.’
‘I—’ I had dug myself into Hell by not having the bravery to admit my cowardice. I resolved not to get into a similar situation again. ‘Look. I’m just going to say it. I’m not in favour of any plan that doesn’t see me coming back again, and that’s that. I’m sure there are far more capable volunteers ready to do … this thing.’
‘I will do it,’ Snorri said. We both ignored him.
Garyus kept his gaze on me. ‘The rest of the point is that you’re not just going there to put the key in a safe place – you’re going there to use it. The Wheel is the source of our problems and the key is the one thing that might stop it. You’re going there to turn the Wheel back. If you fail then the key will be in a place that is dangerous to reach and impossible to escape from, but if you succeed then the world won’t split open, you’ll be able to return, and we will all live whatever lives were laid out for us.’
I breathed a sigh of relief. The old man was mad. Someone would need to replace him as steward and then we could all sit tight until the Red Queen came back to save us. If she was still alive.
‘Yes.’ Snorri didn’t sound like he needed any convincing. ‘We should leave today.’ We both ignored him.
‘Great-uncle.’ I tried for a sympathetic voice. ‘The Wheel of Osheim … it’s not an actual wheel, you know? It’s a tunnel deep underground that runs in a circle miles wide. It can’t be “turned”.’
‘It’s a machine. That’s what Kara told me,’ Snorri said. ‘It’s a machine that changed the world a thousand years ago and is still changing it. It was started – so it can be stopped.’
‘Interesting,’ I said, by which I meant ‘shut the fuck up’. Why the hell Snorri was so keen to rush off to Osheim I had no idea. I stroked my chin as if contemplating his words and tried not to sound too tetchy. ‘Tunnel, machine, whatever, it’s huge and we can’t turn it back.’
‘You could turn it off though,’ Garyus said. ‘If you had the right key.’
22
And so I found myself down at the river docks about to flee Vermillion by boat with a Viking once again. Same Viking, different boat.
I had argued long and hard that I should at least take a crack squad of troops, by which I meant a small army … or, if it were up to me, a large one. Garyus pointed out that any infantry would slow me down and were needed at the walls. The horde of dead men wandering the embers of the outer city still posed a substantial threat and there was no certain knowing that the Dead King would not return his attention to them or send another lichkin or unborn to focus their efforts.
‘A fast horse will serve you better than two hundred men, and the queen took what little cavalry remains to us to Slov with her. Any riders we have left in Vermillion are needed as swift reserves to react to possible incursions.’
Garyus had directed that we should begin our journey by following the line of Grandmother’s advance into Slov. The trail of destruction should allow for relatively unhindered passage. He had had no word of his sister and reports of her death appeared to be wishful thinking on Uncle Hertet’s part. With any luck Grandmother would already have levelled the Lady Blue’s stronghold and killed the witch with her bare hands.
This of course led me to suggest that I then deliver the key into the Red Queen’s hands and let her see to its future, whether that lay in the Wheel of Osheim or around her neck. If it were to be the Wheel she would surely do a better job of it than me.
Garyus had contradicted me again. ‘You have qualities she lacks, Jalan. Necessary ones. You will run away. You will lie and cheat. My sister is more likely to fight and die. The only sure way this key is getting to Osheim is in the hands of someone as flexible and resourceful as you.’
Garyus’s talk of his sister had returned my thoughts to my own. In Hell Marco had revealed that the holiest of items might separate an unborn into the child’s soul and the lichkin that rode it. But Father’s seal was gone, his holy stone too, and a search of the Inner Palace had turned up nothing more holy than a gold cross blessed by the cardinal. I took it anyway. It was made of gold! But truth be told I suspected that being blessed by my father would probably have rendered it less holy rather than more.
All of which left me standing on a cold and misty riverbank thinking that if I really were flexible and resourceful I would have found a way out of this. It also left me clutching the side of my face.
‘I think she loosened one of my teeth.’ I probed with my tongue.
‘You look fine to me,’ Snorri said, his gaze on the water.
I’d had a guard
bring Micha to me in one of the palace’s waiting rooms. She had come with Nia bawling in her arms, wearing the worn-through look of a new parent overlayered with the long horror of the night.
‘Jalan?’ She had been surprised to see me.
‘Sit down, Micha.’ I nodded to the couch opposite, an overstuffed confection from some Florentine master.
‘What is it? It’s Darin! Tell me!’ She stood, rooted to her mark, even Nia’s howls fading away to underscore the moment.
The words dried up in my mouth and I desperately wanted to be able to play deaf again. ‘He was very brave,’ I said. I had plenty more I planned to say. I knew how I was going to declaim it, words regarding my brother’s heroism, words of comfort, words of encouragement for the future. But when it came to saying them to her – all I had were those four.
She had crumpled then, folded and gone to the floor, Nia still safe and silent in her arms. I had expected rage, questions, denials, but her grief just reached up and took her voice.
I had Alphons, from my father’s guard, lead her away to the ballroom where a number of soldiers watched over a growing collection of survivors from around the palace. Next I sent for Lisa. She walked in white-faced, cold-eyed, proud, as if I were the invader and she my captive.
I tried to deflect her toward the couch but she kept on coming until we stood almost nose to nose. My instinct has always been to deliver bad news at a distance and be ready to run.
‘Two teeth, I think.’
‘What?’
I took the fingers out of my mouth and repeated myself more clearly. ‘Two teeth, I think.’ I should have stuck with my instincts. Being honest and compassionate just gets you slapped so hard your teeth rattle. I didn’t even say Barras was dead, just that I’d lost sight of him in the battle and it didn’t look good…
‘There’s the boat.’ Snorri pointed to a darker patch of mist.
The blur resolved itself as it drew closer to the shore. A flat-bellied riverboat of the sort used to ferry livestock and goods across the Seleen or a short way up or downstream. Currently it held my stallion, Murder, and three other horses chosen for their endurance, the pair not immediately intended for riding laden with provisions and a tent.