Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

Trumpets blared, an alarm that no one alive in Vermillion had ever heard except in wall-drills. The city had been breached.

For half an hour it looked as if we might hold the Dead King’s forces on the wall, and perhaps even beat them back once the soldiers of the Seventh reached the fray to relieve the old men of the guard. On the narrow parapet the dead could come at the wall guard only two or three abreast. They threw themselves forward with alarming speed, accepting the thrust of sword or spear to close on their opponents and lock hands around a man’s throat.

“It’s always strangling with these dead men. What’s the point of it?” I couldn’t see it was a very efficient way to kill anyone, especially in the midst of a pitched battle.

“What other options do they have?” Darin asked.

“Thumbs in eyeballs? Head smashed against the wall?” I’d spent entirely too much time with Snorri.

“And there’s that too!” Barras pointed to another pair struggling, the attacker a young woman, seared with fire-oil and still smouldering, now with a spear through her guts. She grappled the guardsman who speared her and both pitched off the walkway, a twenty-five foot drop headlong onto the cobbles below.

We watched from the tower as the fighting progressed. Given the narrowness of the battlefront there wasn’t much else to do. In those first moments the breach had seemed a complete disaster but ten minutes later the dead had pushed the wall guard back maybe twenty yards on each side for the loss of scores of their own number.

“They throttle them because an undamaged corpse is easier to stand up again,” Darin said. On cue back along the parapet two gauntleted hands reached up over the wall and a guardsman stood up, his neck livid and the dead-scream bursting from his lungs.

“They’ve no intelligence though,” Barras said. “Look. Half of them just fall straight off the other side as soon as they scramble over the wall. It must be a bloody mess down there.”

I watched for a moment. He was right. The stream of corpses, on climbing their blackened and smoking scaffold of dead, lunged over the wall as if expecting immediately to find someone to grapple with. At least half of them failed to arrest themselves on the oily stonework before reaching the edge of the parapet and plunging to their doom.

“Shit!” My blood ran cold. “Follow me!” It would have taken too long to explain or issue orders. I snatched one of the oil-rush torches by the scorpion and hurried down the spiral stair that led through the tower. “Follow, damn you!”

Hundreds of citizens watched from the streets behind the gates, fifty yards back or so, huddled in nervous crowds. Young men mostly, carrying spears, butcher knives, the occasional sword, whatever they could arm themselves with, but there were older men too, and boys, even young women and grey-haired mothers, all drawn by the thought of spectacle. They say people are dying to be entertained and here stood an audience who seemed ready to do just that. Hawkers walked among them, bearing lanterns to display their wares, pastries and sausage, sweet candy and sour apples. I doubt they had much business, what with the stench of death, the wafting smoke, and the stomach-turning death howl. The fact the crowds were still here stood testimony to their faith in our walls but if any of them truly understood what waited on the other side they would have been running for their homes screaming for God’s mercy.

“What?” Darin caught up with me at the base of the tower.

I looked back to check we weren’t alone. Renprow, Barras, and now a steady stream of guardsmen emerged behind us, two more bearing torches. “All those dead men falling . . .” I said. “Do you hear them landing?” I led the way into the utter darkness along the base of the wall, then slowed so that guardsmen overtook us. I’d no intention of being in the front rank. “Renprow! Get more men down here. And send for Martus’s reinforcements.” I felt sure I’d already ordered them forward to the wall. “And where are the palace guard, damn it?”

“But why are we down here?” Darin repeated.

“The dead from the wall. Can you hear them hitting the ground?” I asked, eyes roaming the darkness, wishing I had Aslaug here to help me.

“Can’t hear anything but you shouting,” Barras said, clanking along in his fine tourney mail.

It was there though, beneath the din of men fighting and dying, beneath the death-howl, a dull thudding, with no rhythm to it, like the first heavy raindrops presaging a downpour.

“What’s got you spooked?” Darin held his long blade before him, catching the torchlight. “It’s nearly a thirty-foot drop onto hard ground. That’s more than broken ankles, its broken shins, knees, hips, the lot. I don’t care if they don’t die-they won’t be chasing anyone.” He stepped slowly, despite his words, as if he didn’t trust the flagstones not to bite.

“It was thirty foot onto hard ground for the first dozen. We’ve seen more than a hundred go over. By now they’re landing on a nice soft pile of broken bodies.”

We could hear it clearly now, a rapid and irregular beat, flesh thudding into flesh, an erratic heartbeat in the dark behind the wall.

The torchlight showed figures up ahead. Lots of figures, standing there in the blind dark, unspeaking. A few steps closer and the shadows yielded still more. They looked up as one, eyes catching the flames and returning them. Then they charged. And the screaming started.

Close up, the ferocity of the quickened dead was a shocking thing. Their utter fury and lack of regard for sharp edges made defence feel a futile business, a momentary delaying of the inevitable. The first rank of guardsmen went down in moments, borne to the floor, dead hands closing around their necks. The second rank fell apart in short order, with more dead streaming around the flanks of my band of some thirty men, which left me surrounded and being leapt upon by a fat man in rags who looked to have spent a couple of weeks in the grave before being roused to join today’s festivities. I didn’t have time to complain that his burial was in direct contravention of the Red Queen’s orders, not to mention mine as marshal. I barely had time to scream.

The thing about dead men who won’t die again, and who need to be dismembered if you’re to stop them, is that it’s all very well telling yourself this information, but when one of the bastards jumps on you screaming unholy rage . . . you run them through. It’s instinct. They should have put that on my tombstone. “Killed by instinct.”

In defiance of reason however, the hunger fled the corpse-man’s eyes in the moment my sword hilt met his chest above his corrupt, unbeating heart. The weight of him threw me back into the guardsmen behind me but with their help I kept my feet, and managed to haul my blade clear as my enemy-now a simple corpse of the type that lies still and waits to be a skeleton-fell to the side. The next dead thing came at me in the same instant. Repeating my mistake, I slashed at its neck, and repeating the miracle it fell clutching at the cold blood welling from the ruin of its throat. Edris Dean’s blade seemed to vibrate in my hand as if alive. I risked a glance at the blade as I stuck it through the howling mouth of the dead woman next in line to kill me, a slightly-built young thing who might have been pretty under all that soot and blood and murderous hunger. Along the length of my sword dead men’s blood clung to the script that had been etched into the steel. A necromancer’s weapon-the tool of his trade- seemingly as adept at cutting the strings that animate a corpse as at cutting those that lead a living man through the dance of his days.