Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

Returning to the tower front I saw that the men driving the monsters had vanished, though another body lay in the road, trampled by more oncoming dead. The constructs themselves had veered toward the ramp and were moving with greater speed, jolting and swaying as they came.

The dead on the ramp now reached to within six foot of the top of the wall and the guard there had resumed pelting them with rocks. Almost nothing held them to the wall-here and there dead fingers jammed into gaps between the stones where the mortar had fallen out, shattered away by a hard frost one winter and not maintained. There were parts of the wall in worse repair where it would be easier to swarm over the walls, but the dead had collected here for their attempt on the gate and with the outer city alight any reorganization of the attack would probably cook half of their number. I’d had men working on the sections of wall around us only the week before. If they’d done a better job the attempt to scale the walls would be going rather more slowly. On the other hand, if I’d not assigned them to the task at all then we’d be overrun by now.

“We won’t last!” Barras pointed to where yet more corpses clambered up the tower of bodies. One wall guard leaned out to thrust down at them with his spear. He lunged for his target, an old woman in a soot-streaked smock, her hair white and wild, left arm flame-seared. The spear took her in the neck and she seized it, falling back. The guardsman fell with her, too surprised to release his weapon.

“It’s a race,” Darin breathed beside me. The men with the cauldrons had gained the parapet and needed to navigate fifty yards of crowded wall top. The monsters were closing on the ramp with maybe twice that distance to go, moving faster and with more surety now they approached the lichkin’s orbit and they too were quickened by its presence.

Several scorpions spoke in quick succession. The leading monster, already pierced by one spear, now sprung two more, one tearing through a leg, shattering bones. It fell, scrabbling, sending dead men flying with wild kicks of its raw legs, and, unable to get up, began to inch toward the ramp. Another of the monsters lost balance when hit by a scorpion bolt and veered out of control into a blazing stable block, collapsing the weakened structure around it.

I scanned the scene, trying to force some meaning from the chaos. Something caught my eye. Not monster nor lichkin nor the flames roaring up between rafters. A single figure among the thousands. Sometimes it’s not the way a man moves that gives him away: rather it’s the way he’s still. The only thing that drew my eye was the current of the crowded dead as they flowed around the point where he stood. Other than that, nothing marked him. Smoke and ash stained him as it stained so many others, colouring his tunic and trews a dirty grey. Old blood covered half his face and ran down his neck in dark trickles. Both his hands were crimson to the elbows. He held his neck at an odd angle and a dark scar ran across it. At first I thought the scar must have been from the blow that killed him, and that the dark streak across the crown of his grey hair was just ash from some burnt timber. Then he glanced up at the tower, at me, and I knew him.

“Edris Dean!” I shouted, though none around me would know his name. “Shoot him! Shoot that bastard, right there!” I pointed, and seizing a bow from the man behind me demanded an arrow so that I could follow my own order. “Necromancer!” I yelled-and that got them going.

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!”