“A dark spirit.” I stared at the woman. “Aslaug?”
“She became trapped in the mythology of the humans who repopulated the northern regions, yes. The belief of many untrained minds proved stronger than her will.”
I thought of Aslaug, Loki’s daughter, lie-born, her spider-shadow and the monstrous form of her that day when she came through the wrongmages’ door in Osheim. “I’m sorry.”
The Builder-ghost shrugged. “It’s not a unique fate. How many of us are trapped in the stories told about us, or by us?” She gave me a hard and quizzical stare that reminded me still more strongly of Aslaug.
I didn’t much like the implication and started to bluster. “Well I’m not—”
“There’s a story about a charming prince trying to snare you even now, Jalan. There’s another story you tell yourself that might pull you along a very different path.”
“You’re very talkative for a library entry.” I moved again to shut the box.
“I never liked to play by the rules, Jalan.” She gave that dark smile I knew so well.
A pounding on the great doors of the throne room drowned out any reply I had and the head of the palace guard pushed through without waiting for a reply.
“Steward, Marshal, the city is under attack! The dead are in the river!”
TWELVE
The attack came along both shores of the Seleen, heralded by the arrival of a raft of corpses floating with the current. The bodies, more than a hundred of them, looked by the remnants of their colours to be war-dead from the Orlanth advance into Rhone. When the boat crews had gone out to intercept it, it quickly became apparent that mire-ghouls had insinuated themselves among the mass, hanging onto the edges, just their dark heads above the water, or lying flat on top of the tangled bodies, blowpipes held close and ready.
“Have the Iron Hoof join us at the Morano Bridge!” I shouted orders as I rode toward the Horse Gate to depart the palace. After being made marshal I’d secured a fine charger named Murder, a huge beast and fiery with it. Damned hard to control, though, and on the point of breaking into a gallop at every moment. “Tell Prince Martus to keep the Seventh at the palace gates until we know the situ—Whoa!” I wrenched Murder’s head around and leaned forward as he tried to rear. “Tell him to send runners to all the wall towers.”
“Yes, Marshal!” The palace guard captain had followed me from the throne room with five of his men, receiving, and hopefully remembering, the orders I reeled off as I collected Murder from the stables. Now, with Captain Renprow and ten message riders from the regular palace guard around me, I waved for the gates to be opened. We would make for the Morano Bridge, the best viewpoint from which to see a great length of the Seleen’s banks, both east and west, upstream and down. The reports I had were already half an hour old: where the fighting might be now and what situation would greet us I couldn’t say. The Iron Hoof was nothing more than a drinking club for the richest sons of the aristocracy these days, but they had all been officers in the cavalry before Grandmother disbanded it, and whilst lancers would be of little use in the city, they would at least be able to get where they were going in a hurry.
I spotted one of the house-guards, Double, heading off on some errand and sent him back to Roma Hall with orders to secure the place. He was the youngest of Father’s house-guards and probably the only one still fit enough to give account of himself in a fight. “Don’t let anyone you don’t know in, dead or alive! Especially dead. Even if you do know them!”
Double set off back to the hall at a run and I took a last glance around. The shadows of Milano House stretched toward the Inner Palace, as if Hertet were reaching for his mother’s throne. The sun burned low on the walls, without heat. The day was dying on me. “Let’s go!”
Within moments we were clattering beneath the gate arch and racing off along Kings Way, our hooves striking sparks from the cobbles. For the next several minutes the business of riding at speed along roads variously packed, narrow, winding, or all three at once, occupied our attention. Flattening a peasant or two is all well and good, but if you’re in a hurry to get somewhere it can slow you down. Also, in Vermillion peasants are thin on the ground and you’re likely to have the injured party’s father or guild or whatever camped outside the palace gates the next day seeking compensation. Or worse, justice.
I led the way as we galloped along the west bank toward the Morano Bridge. I didn’t want to lead but everyone else deferred to me as marshal and Murder proved disinclined to let any other horse go ahead even when I tried to slow him. The lane along the west bank is broad in places, even paved in some stretches, but toward the bridge a strip of hard-trodden ground served, threading between stands of bulrushes leading to the water and a tangle of briar rising to the walls of the riverside merchants’ houses. I saw figures ahead and shouted at them to clear the way.
“Marshal!” Captain Renprow hollering behind me. There was more to it lost in the thunder of hooves.
The people ahead proved too slow, and given the option of pulling up, veering left into swampy riverbank, right into briar patch, or simply mowing down muddy peasants, I opted for the princely solution and rode on. My disregard for public safety proved prudent as the figures turned out to be bloated and slime-covered river corpses that wanted to pull me from the saddle.
A dozen men of the Iron Hoof caught up with us as we turned onto the bridge, having taken an alternate route. Half of them looked as if they’d come straight from lunch. Lord Nester’s son still had a napkin tucked into his collar, though Young Sorren had thought to strap on a breastplate.
“Iron Hoof, ho!” I led the charge up onto to the Morano Bridge, a boyhood ambition, and we clattered to the middle of the span.
“The enemy don’t appear to need bridges.” Darin rode up beside me, having somehow joined our party unnoticed as we left the palace. “They’re happy enough getting wet.”
“It’s me that needs the bridge.” I stood in the stirrups, hoping that for once Murder would hold still. I never paid that much attention in our strategy and tactics classes but the one lesson that did seem to have been hammered in sufficiently deep to stick was that a commander needed to see his battlefield. When your battlefield was an entire city, in which seeing from one end of a road to the other could be difficult, that lesson came to haunt you pretty quickly. All I had to go on were brief reports now nearly an hour old. Any new intelligence not delivered by my own eyes would have to follow an increasingly long chain of directions to reach me.
I stared out across the city of Vermillion. Innumerable rooftops, spires here and there, mansions on the rises overlooking the river, starlings wheeling on high, the great blue sky above, dashed with cloud, the air crisp with that feel it gets when the leaves are colouring as they gather their courage for the fall. Somewhere amid all that the enemy was already at work. River-dead might be easily discovered at the end of a series of wet footprints, but necromancers were harder to find. Some Drowned Isles death-worker might have taken a room at a riverside tavern and be watching us even now through his shutters.
“Over there!” Darin, his steed perilously close to the bridge balustrade, pointed downstream toward the east bank.
“What?”
“It’s still autumn and there’s hardly a chill in the air,” he said. “So?” I hated him sometimes.
“People seem to be lighting their fires early . . .”
It was true. What I’d taken for smoke rising from a number of chimneys now looked more sinister.