“You’d see better if you took that thing off.” Darin rapped his knuckles on Barras’s great helm. Any further joking died on his lips as he too caught the sound of the death-cry.
“The lichkin is coming back.” The roar, faint but still laden with enough threat to core a man, approached from the west. The dead below us had tripled in number since it departed, more crowding in by the minute. They had some rudimentary fear of fire, enough to make them press away from it, though with so little room to spare some of those closest to the burning buildings had started to smoulder. I saw one young woman in a blue dress—a merchant’s daughter perhaps—with no marks of violence visible upon her, go up like a torch beside a burning tavern. I’d taken ale there once upon a time, though I couldn’t remember the place’s name. Her hair ignited in a fiery halo and she started to clamber over the backs of other corpses to escape the heat.
Getting a count of the numbers arrayed against us had proved difficult, what with the smoke, and the density of the buildings sheltering many of the streets from view, but no one who stood there with me argued that there were less than ten thousand dead before the gates of Vermillion. The noise came nearer, the speed of its approach terrifying.
“Here it comes! To arms! Your city stands behind you!” I shouted the words above the rising howl as somewhere out in the dark, amid the growing inferno, the lichkin raced toward us.
The lichkin swept through those thousands as fast as a horse galloping, veering toward the gates. I leaned out as far as I dared to track its progress but it raced out of view beneath the gatehouse into the space immediately before the doors of Vermillion.
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 ironshod 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.