When it struck the gates the dead there went berserk, hammering and howling at the timbers. I imagined fists striking the wood so hard their bones shattered. The pounding subsided and the nerve-splitting screaming intensified as the great mass of corpses behind them pressed forward, a slow but steady mounting of pressure. The gates began to creak, at first like a house settling at night, then louder, a series of high retorts as the timbers fought their battles against each other, and beneath that a deep groan as the locking bars took up the strain, three great iron-shod cores from the heart of thousand-year oaks. A sharp ping as somewhere a rivet shot out of its socket.
‘Get men down there! Push back.’ My utter faith in the gates’ strength lasted less than a minute. ‘Quick, dammit! I want three hundred men down there now!’ I wanted to be down there myself, putting my shoulder to those doors, but I had to see.
I leaned out over the battlements to look down at the top of the gatehouse a short way below us. The soldiers there had two great cauldrons of oil set above a bed of glowing coals to boil.
Barras elbowed alongside me. ‘You think dead men are even going to notice boiling oil?’ A mixture of pessimism and hope in his voice. I knew it well from long nights at the dice table, where he lost a fortune, and at the card table, where he won one back … mostly from me.
‘It might inconvenience them … a bit.’ I shrugged. ‘The main thing is that the men have something to do.’ At times like these it’s better to have something to do rather than let fear sink its claws into you.
‘Burning oil now – that would be something!’ Barras said. ‘They’d notice that!’
‘Only an idiot starts a fire at the foot of his gates, Barras.’ Darin, joining us.
It’s rare I’ll support a brother above a friend but he had it right. ‘The oil won’t burn, it’s a mineral oil from Attar. You can put a bonfire out with that. Costs the earth but better pour money on your enemy than something they can fire your gates with!’
Darin raised an eyebrow. ‘You know your stuff, little br—’
‘I’m the fucking marshal, Darin.’
‘You know your stuff, Little Marshal.’ He grinned.
‘I’m a good study when it comes to keeping safe.’ Darin had never bought into the whole hero of Aral Pass story and I didn’t feel the need to pretend for his benefit.
The men by the cauldrons were looking up at me now, seeing they had an audience.
‘Pour it!’ I shouted. I’d seen no sign of necromancers but there was always a chance they were mingled among the dead, hiding in plain sight. Edris Dean had taught me that they weren’t common men, but even so, a shower of boiling oil would certainly spoil their day.
At my order the men started to uncover the murder-holes and ready the supports that would tip the cauldrons.
The oil hissed down the murder-holes with a satisfying sizzle, but damned if I heard even a change in the tone of the screaming from down below.
‘Damn.’ Somewhat deflated, I went back to watch from the front of the tower.
For ten minutes the howling dead threw their weight against the Appan Gate, each crack and groan of the timbers taking my guts in a cold fist and twisting them. The lichkin moved back and forth, in and out of the gatehouse, sending waves of surging fury against the doors. I heard splintering and bit my lip to keep from adding my own note of despair to the mix.
‘The fire’s really taking hold.’ Darin choked on the smoke as if to prove his point. I’d had my gaze fixed on the backs of the dead men pressing in, but now looking back out at the outer city I saw Darin had it right. The upper halves of several houses closest to the walls had collapsed, sending vast columns of flames roaring up higher than the walls, pluming sparks and embers into the air. All across the outer city fire leapt from roof to roof, chasing along fences, licking at doorways. Everywhere the dead stood scorched and blistered, some with their hair and clothing burned away. I could see the remains of others, coiled amid the spreading blaze. For a moment I thought of Father on his pyre.
I coughed and pressed the heels of my hands to stinging eyes. ‘They’re moving!’
The lichkin flowed out through the corpse-ranks, abandoning the assault on the gates. The fire had removed the luxury of time from our enemy. A general might have retreated to the surrounding farms and waited in the olive groves before returning a day later, but I guessed that dead men and spirits were more elemental than strategic. What I knew of the Dead King himself, and it was precious little, painted him not as a planner but as a force of destruction unwittingly steered by the Lady Blue’s machinations.
The dead did not withdraw and the lichkin didn’t try to escape from the flames – instead it tracked away from us, around the walls, as if seeking a weakness.
Two hundred yards to the east the dead who had formerly been standing vigil before the walls now quickened and began to tear at the base of a tower standing so close that a man atop it might throw a spear at the watchmen with a good chance of hitting one.
I’d visited that same structure days before – a water tower to service the well-appointed homes of several merchants who could have afforded to live within the city bounds, albeit in considerably less grand mansions. The tower also supplied water to a prosperous smithy servicing the needs of various wheelwrights, cartwrights, and provisioners with outlets on the Appan Way just as it left the gates.
I had marvelled that Grandmother allowed the tower so close to her walls despite her oft-repeated threats to level the suburbs at even the hint of war. It turned out that licence had been granted on the basis that the structure was designed to fall. Sturdy wooden buttresses supported the tower wall and without them the thing would collapse. Rather than providing a platform from which archers might clear our walls, the tower was a death-trap. Targeting the buttresses with iron bolts fired from a scorpion would topple the tower, killing any enemy in it and hopefully no few of those close by.
‘What the hell—’ The tower came down before I could finish. A score and more of the dead shattered by the deluge of masonry and timber.
More quickened dead closed on the rubble, shrouded in dust now as well as smoke. Within moments they were on the move, hauling the broken stones to the wall, dead men hefting thick and splintered beams, dead children dragging smaller pieces. Others came rushing from nearby streets pushing carts, wagons, doors ripped from houses, all of it thrown in an untidy heap before the walls.
‘They’re building a ramp!’ Darin gripped the battlements. ‘We’ve got to get over there.’
The parapet at that section, like all the others, was well-manned, albeit by the old men of the wall guard, and more were converging on the spot from both sides. ‘We need to stop them is what we need to do, not stand there waiting for them to do it.’ I started toward the tower steps, but turned instead to the battlements overlooking the gates. The empty cauldrons stood beside the murder-holes, smoking gently.
‘Fill those with fire-oil!’ I gestured to the men on the scorpion that had been manoeuvred to the front of our tower. ‘Take it down to them.’ They had small barrels of the stuff, and tubs of tar, all used for the firing of the suburbs. ‘You! All of you.’ I pointed to the wall guard at the back. ‘Run to the other towers, fetch their fire-oil and tar.’
‘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 shift
ing 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.
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 s
pear. 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.