Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

“Hunting,” I said, and I felt Grandmother’s gaze upon me as surely as if I stood before her throne, those eyes of hers, harder than hard, without any shred of comprom-ise. I remembered finally opening that scroll-case Garyus had given me, seeing the Red Queen’s seal, breaking it open to see the words in her own hand. Marshal of Vermillion . And a note: “ You say you saw the defence of Ameroth. Pray that you learned its lesson and pray harder that you will never have to show that you learned it. ”

A hundred men stood at my back, a city behind them, mine to wield, mine to protect. In all my adventures across the face of the Broken Empire I’d never want to be somewhere else quite as much as I did in that moment. I looked out across the rooftops, all in shadow now, the sky aflame, boiling red above the departed sun. “Burn it all.”

The howling had passed almost beyond hearing, the dead below us stood silent. Nobody spoke. I heard the flutter of the flags, the wind’s whisper, and far off behind the walls the cry of a street vendor singing out his wares.

I turned and walked toward the scorpion. The men parted before me. “Burn it all.” I slapped a hand to the heavy spear loaded into the machine. “Rags and oil. Shoot for the rooftops. Send word to all the towers.”

Martus wrenched me around. “That’s madness! What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“We can’t defend the outer city. By morning they’ll all be dead and added to the army at our gates.”

“It’s not sane! It’s not right.” Martus shook me, raising his voice, mutters from all sides adding to his protest.

“Would you lead the Seventh out there?” I cocked my head toward the darkening streets of the outer city. We could hear distant screaming, another house broken into.

“Well . . . I . . .” Martus screwed his face up, presaging one of his furious blusters. “It would be madness.”

“I wouldn’t let you.” I shook him off and sought the guardsman who had pointed to his home out by the church on the hill. “You. Your name.”

“Daccio, your highness.” He had a subdued look to him, his anger gone, though it showed now on the faces of his comrades.

“Daccio. I’m sorry but your wife is dead, your sons too. Or they’re hiding in their homes waiting to be saved.” I looked about at the wall guard, grey in their ranks. “Are you going to save them? Will the wall guard descend these walls this last time and sally forth where the Seventh Army fear to tread? Or will the lichkin find them out? If we do nothing the dawn will show us your family standing bloody before our gates.” I took a rag from the base of the scorpion, an oily thing used on the bow arms to keep them from rust. “Fire is clean. Better to burn than let those creatures have you. And what better chance will our people have to run than in the smoke and confusion of a great conflagration?” I slapped the rag into Daccio’s hand. “Do it.”

And he did.

The lichkin returned before the flames took full hold. I kept to the tower, needing to see though not wanting to. Darin remained at my side. Martus departed to direct the Seventh, dispatching them to the most vulnerable sections of the wall in hundreds, each squad led by a captain. At my direction five hundred men of the Seventh would stay with Martus in reserve at the palace. I told Martus to insist that the palace guard-some four hundred men, veterans in the main, be sent to join my command.

The dead had first mustered at the Appan Gate and the throng there grew steadily even as my order went out and the deep twangs of scorpions began to sound all along the walls. The fire took hold: a rooftop here, a covered wagon there, orange tongues licking up, hungry for new flavours, and a loose pall of smoke drifted over the dead.

“We’re never going to be forgiven for this.” Darin looked out over the fires with disbelieving eyes.

“It’s me they won’t forgive,” I said. “And without this there will be no one left to do the forgiving.”

“Never thought you had it in you, Jal.” Barras Jon had sought me out, determined to do his bit for the defence. He looked ready for the tourney lists in his Vyenese armour, following the latest lamellar fashion, each iron plate embossed with the rose sigil of his house. “It looks like Hell down there.”

“It’s getting closer to it.”

The night lay dark and moonless but the fires we’d started lit the scene in undeniably hellish tones. Barras wiped at his face, smearing an ash flake across his pale cheek. It seemed insane, the two of us here, staring out over an army of the dead lit by the growing inferno that had been Vermillion. I expected to see his face over a goblet of wine, or lit by the excitement of the races, not framed by an iron helm, eyes wide with fright. He lowered his perforated visor, becoming still more the stranger.

Through the smoke and flames we saw some of my prediction coming true, people moved by fear of the conflagration bursting out of the security of their homes and running for the open country. They stood a much better chance in this involuntary mass exodus than they did waiting for the dead to break in. When the lichkin came close the quickened dead would rip apart their doors and there would be no escape. Now at least although they faced hordes of walking corpses at least they were the shambling kind rather than the sprinting kind.

Additionally the sheer number of fleeing citizens, along with the leaping fire and thick smoke, confused the scene so much that many of Grandmother’s subjects looked as though they might actually win free and get to watch the night’s events from the comfort of some lonely cornfield or distant patch of woodland. Even so, as I saw them run I knew there would be others too paralysed by the horrors outside their walls to leave, even when the smoke crept beneath their doors and the flames started to peel back their roofs. If I had eaten more recently I might have added my own contribution to the vomit-stained walls.

“I just don’t see how they can harm us,” Darin said at my side, as if wanting affirmation. “They’ve got no weapons. They can’t punch through walls or push open the gates. They can’t climb . . . these ones are just shambling and even when they get angry they’re not going to be scaling sheer walls. They’ve no ropes, no ladders, nothing . . .”

I hadn’t an answer for him. Even so, the not knowing made me feel scared rather than confident.

“Christ, what’s that?” Barras Jon spun around, clanking, nearly impaling a watchman on his sword.

“You’d see better if you took that thing off.” Darin rapped his knuckles on Barras’s great helm. Any further joking died on his lips as he too caught the sound of the death-cry.

“The lichkin is coming back.” The roar, faint but still laden with enough threat to core a man, approached from the west. The dead below us had tripled in number since it departed, more crowding in by the minute. They had some rudimentary fear of fire, enough to make them press away from it, though with so little room to spare some of those closest to the burning buildings had started to smoulder. I saw one young woman in a blue dress-a merchant’s daughter perhaps-with no marks of violence visible upon her, go up like a torch beside a burning tavern. I’d taken ale there once upon a time, though I couldn’t remember the place’s name. Her hair ignited in a fiery halo and she started to clamber over the backs of other corpses to escape the heat.

Getting a count of the numbers arrayed against us had proved difficult, what with the smoke, and the density of the buildings sheltering many of the streets from view, but no one who stood there with me argued that there were less than ten thousand dead before the gates of Vermillion. The noise came nearer, the speed of its approach terrifying.