Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

“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.