Mark Lawrence - The Wheel of Osheim

“Nia.” I thought for a moment he was speaking of Mother-just for a moment, then I remembered his new daughter, small and soft in Micha’s arms. She would never know him.

“I’ll protect her. I swear it.”

Darin’s head lolled to the side and my heart seemed to stop inside me though I’d never claimed any love for my brothers, not even my favourite one. But he raised his brows and I followed the line of his gaze to his fingers, glistening with some clear liquid.

“Oil,” Darin said.

It was true, we were crouched in the stuff, thankfully cool now: it must have leaked under the gate after being poured through the murderholes. Darin brushed slippery fingers across the back of my hand.

“Stopped . . . them.”

I puzzled on that for a second. The oil hadn’t stopped them. I set my fingers to it and slid them over the cobbles. “It did!” I understood, passing from confusion to clarity in one instant. The dead beneath the gatehouse hadn’t been able to push, they had no traction on the ground. All they could be was a plug of flesh to transmit the shove from outside. The doors had only just held. The oil saved them. A moment of triumph lit me. “I knew if I-” But Darin had gone.

The chirurgeon kept his fingers on Darin’s neck a moment longer, feeling for that beat. He shook his head. And, blinded by tears that had never been from the smoke, I drew my sword.

Something moved beneath my brother’s skin. Large enough that even with my eyes misted I could see it. Like a small hand sliding up his neck. His body jerked as if a blow had been struck from inside his chest.

“What in God’s name?” The chirurgeon jumped back aghast, clearly not fully acquainted with the nature of our foe.

Darin’s lips writhed. With a curse I slid my sword up through my brother’s sternum into his heart, and without a sound he relaxed into a true death.

“It’s not enough.” Serah behind me. “You need to bind him-”

“With this sword it’s enough.” I pulled the blade clear, red with my brother’s blood, and stood to face my cousins.

“That wasn’t the same as the others-what happened to him . . .” Rotus leaned in, peering.

“No.” The dead had always woken in an instant, hunger in their eyes, ready to do murder. Darin had been different. As if . . . as if something were trying to break out of him. Or through him. “I-” Then I noticed it. “The dead howl . . . it’s gone.” It struck me that since I’d come to my senses after that insane charge the dead had fallen silent. The shouts and screams I could hear now came from living throats, some full of rage, others terror, or pain, but the chilling and unending scream of the attacking dead had . . . ended.

“The dead have slowed,” Renprow reported, eyeing me as if worried I might collapse again, or throw myself back into the fray. “But we’re barely holding them and they keep coming-they must have a usable ramp to the top of the wall now.”

“Get back on the tower, Captain. We need eyes on this.” Beyond the walls the roar of the fire sounded like a river in full tumult.

Cousin Serah stepped closer, raising her hand to my upper arm. A light touch. “I’m sorry about Darin, Jalan. He was a good man.”

I’d put him out of my head. Just like that, my own brother, lying dead on the floor behind me, bleeding from the wound I gave him. Suddenly I needed to fill myself with something else. Right then I was even grateful for the attack. I stepped past Serah. “These can’t be all the Seventh! Where’s Martus?” Barely a hundred men in the chain surcoats of the Seventh stood around us and the battle-line held against the dead lay just twenty yards away. The citizens who came for the show had fled long ago, hopefully spreading necessary panic throughout the city. “Where in hell are the palace guard? We might hold them with all our forces here.”

Serah set herself before me once again. “I came from the Victory Gate. We saw the fires starting and brought these men to help.” She glanced over her shoulder at the battle, pale but with her mouth set in a grim line of determination.

“I came from the palace,” Rotus said, looming over his little sister. “Uncle Hertet has commanded Martus to keep the Seventh close to the walls-”

“Why isn’t he fucking here then?”

“The palace walls,” Serah said. She looked as young as her seventeen years.

“He has ordered the palace guard to remain at station and defend him at all costs,” Rotus said.

“Oh. That. Bastard.” I sheathed my sword, still red with my brother’s blood. “What the hell is Garyus doing letting Hertet give orders? I’m going back. You’ll have to hold here. I’ll get the reinforcements.”

“We’ll hold.” I expected Rotus to make the pledge, but it was Serah who spoke. She held my gaze for a moment and I saw something familiar. Something I last saw in her grandmother’s eyes on the walls of Ameroth.

“I know you will.” And I began pushing my way through the troops, aiming for the main street from the Appan Gate, lit only by a scatter of dropped lanterns.

“Marshal!” Renprow at my shoulder. “You can’t go alone!”

“We need every man here.” I really didn’t want to go alone, but we really did need every man at the breakthrough.

“I’ll come too. Just let me gather a squad.” He caught hold of my arm. “A squad who can ride? And have horses?” My stallion and the mounts of the men who had ridden from the Morano Bridge had been stabled at a tavern a hundred yards along the Appan Street. It would take an age to gather those riders together, if they still lived, and many of the horses weren’t the sort to take kindly to a new rider.

“I’ll come.” He reached out and took two soldiers by the shoulder. “And these men can ride with us. There are messenger horses in the stables.”

“You know more about this city’s defences than anyone else, Captain.

You’re needed here. These two I’ll take.”

Coming to the edge of the press of soldiers and wall guards I found myself suddenly reluctant to leave. Stepping beyond the crowded bodies, out into the dark, seemed like a very bad idea indeed. The men huddled together as sheep will in the pen, so tight I’d had to force a path through them. Fear bound us close, herd animals before the predator, though it appeared that only I had truly appreciated the nature of the threat haunting this night. The dead had fallen silent. That meant the lichkin had left. I would have liked to think it had retreated back over the wall to some devilry outside amid the firestorm. But looking at the dark I knew.

The lichkin was in my city now. Out there in the streets. Loose among the innocent, and believe me when I say that before the ancient malice of the lichkin we are all innocent.

Leaving the shelter of the men took all my meagre reserves of courage. Once out in the open, with the pair of guards following, pride kept me moving. Pride has always been my most lethal character flaw. Worse even than being cursed through my grandmother’s blood with the tendency to infrequent berserker rages when pushed to the edge. Pride lets a man be skewered on the point of other people’s expectations. How often had I walked into the proverbial, and sometimes literal, fire with Snorri watching on, my justifiable instinct to run in the opposite direction crushed under the weight of his confidence in me?

I collected a lantern hanging from a pastry stall abandoned when the crowd panicked and led the way across toward the stables, the light jittering in my grasp. I hurried across Appan Street in the dark with the two soldiers at my back.

Appan Street lay eerily quiet, no sounds but the distant cries from the fighting at the wall. Tell-tale cracks of light at upper windows and the occasional shadow moving behind closed shutters were all that betrayed the fact the city hadn’t been abandoned.