Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

“They’re dropping rocks on them, Jal!” Barras hollered from the other side of the tower, looking back at me, visor raised, face flushed. “That should do it!”

I raced across to see. The guard were hefting stones over the top of the wall, some as big as a man’s head, most much larger. Men with wheeled barrows hurried up with more ammunition from stockpiles along the parapet. Down below carnage reigned, dead men’s heads shattering wetly as plummeting rocks hit them. Others, bent in the act of placing their own chunks of masonry on the heap, fell broken as stones hammered into their backs.

“It’s working!” Captain Renprow beside me.

“Yes, but not for us,” I said, narrowing my eyes at the heap, trying to pierce the shifting shroud of dust and smoke. None of the men around me understood the dead or their king the way I did. I turned to Renprow. “Stop them! Fast as you can. They’re just helping to build the ramp for them.” Their rain of stones, and the crushed bodies it created, were mounding up at the base of the wall. New dead just replaced the old, unloading their cargo of masonry and timber atop the twitching remains beneath their feet. “We need to reinforce that area. Get Martus’s soldiers there.” I didn’t say it out loud but I didn’t have much faith in the wall guard. Age may make a man a little wiser but it makes his sword arm a lot slower. It had never seemed likely that Vermillion would be attacked, certainly not without considerable warning. Having the wall guard as a retirement plan for old soldiers had seemed a sensible idea. Now it seemed less so.

The messages took forever to go out. The first load of fire-oil wasn’t tipped into the first cauldron for several minutes. With the dead howling and their ramp building it seemed like a lifetime. Just to get the wall guard to stop raining rocks on the attackers took minutes when seconds felt too long.

“They’ll never make it to the top,” Darin said. He had a point. The walls seemed short from the elevation of a sixty foot tower, but they stood a good thirty feet above the outer city and the dead men’s ramp was scarcely more than ten foot high, maybe twice that in width. The thing about a heap is that as it gets taller it grows more slowly, it spreads and requires ten times the labour and materials to double in height. “Never.” Even so Darin’s affirmation sounded more like a prayer.

For ten minutes we watched them build, while the fires beyond the ramp grew until the flames’ roar became louder than even the rage of the dead. Perhaps necromancers watched us from the night, somehow enduring the inferno, but I saw nothing save corpse upon corpse, all driven toward the wall and their mound of broken rock and broken bodies. I glimpsed the lichkin from time to time, and regretted even looking for it. Once it turned the narrow, eyeless wedge of its head toward our tower and the cold horror of its regard settled upon me like a great weight of ice. I backed rapidly, then half-crouched, half-collapsed, and dropped out of sight below the level of the tower wall.

“Marshal?” Renprow followed, reaching down for me.

“Here you go, Jal.” Barras grabbing my arm to haul me to my feet. “Can’t have our glorious leader fainting. Bad for moral.”

“I dropped something.” I pretended to shove some item hidden in my fist into a pocket beneath the chainmail I’d donned. There’d been no time to get my armour from the palace so instead the Marshal of Vermillion stood in an ill-fitting chainshirt from the gatehouse stores. “Where’s that damn oil? Aren’t the cauldrons full yet?”

“Something coming!” An archer at the front of the tower.

“Something big!” The man beside him, clutching his spear as if it were the only thing keeping him on his feet.

Renprow let go of my arm and elbowed his way forward to see.

“Lots of them!” A large, bearded man, backing away from the wall in what looked suspiciously like retreat.

“Marshal!” Renprow beckoning me.

Dread nearly pushed me back on the floor but I walked forward to join him, squinting into the stinging smoke. The approaching shapes, dark against the blaze to either side of the Appan Way, were the kind to give you nightmares. They had something of the spider about them, but also something of the hand, or perhaps a mutilated dog, hollowed out and walking on the stumps of its legs. I could make out the figures of men behind them, and realized in that moment that each of the half dozen monsters was larger than two carthorses strapped together.

“Get that scorpion forward again!” I turned back. “Do it fucking now! And signal the other towers to open fire. Archers on the men behind! Every man with a bow.” I prayed that these at last were the necromancers and that filling them full of arrows would put them down. “And, for the love of God, get those cauldrons over to the ramp. I don’t care how full they are!”

The men around me started to volley arrows into the sky. Whether they were hitting or not I couldn’t tell until at last one of the men toward the rear of the column fell, clutching his face.

“Target the men! Target the men! They’re necromancers!”

The initial scorpion shot went wide. It impaled three dead men shuffling along just in front of the foremost monstrosity, passing through and skimming off the road behind them. The three turned like lazy tops turning once, twice, and falling. All of them had regained their feet before the next shot sounded. The things advanced and the smoke blew aside for a moment to let the fire’s glare reveal them. Each of them crafted along similar designs, shaped like a hand missing the two middle fingers, walking on three legs, the limbs made from the thighbones of half a dozen men, glistening with the remnants of muscle and bound together with yards of sinew. Several arrow shafts jutted from the first one’s limbs and back, causing it no obvious inconvenience. Red flesh wrapped the construct like thick ivy vines and a glutinous white mass of fat obscured the vertex where the three limbs met.

“Jesus.” Barras still had his sword out for some reason but now let his arm drop limply to his side.

I’d known necromancers for raiders of the grave, practitioners of arts that would stand the dead back up, full of violence and hunger. This was a fresh horror. Here they had become flesh-mongers, sculpting corpses into new and grotesque forms. It reminded me of the unborn, shaping themselves nightmarish forms from whatever carrion might lie within reach. The only small comfort lay in the fact that where the unborn creations possessed deadly speed and coordination, the things that the necromancers had built moved slowly and without grace. So awkward in fact that it was hard to see how they might be a threat. The first of them looked as though it might be hacked apart by three men with greatswords before it managed to mount an attack. I turned away. “Shoot them down.”

Archers bent their bows and lofted more shafts. Four men laboured at the scorpion’s winding wheel, drawing the great crossbow arm back, another waited with the spear, ready to load it. The howling at the ramp reached new heights now and the dead threw themselves forward in frenzy, locking arms, sinking their teeth into each other, holding tight while new corpses clambered over them. I’d seen something like it before when ants bridge a tiny stream, building the span out of their own bodies, hundreds of them locked tight while others run across.

“Where’s that fire-oil?” Darin hollered, looking out over the back of the tower.

I rushed to join him, rediscovering in the act just how hard it was to rush anywhere in chainmail. Two teams of men had reached the steps to the wall, each team carrying a cauldron between them, hanging from a sturdy wooden pole. “Hurry up!” I shouted, though it was doubtful they could hear anything but the howling dead and the voice of the fire.