“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 spear. 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.
Where my arrow fell I have no idea. I very much doubt I emulated my grandmother’s feat at Ameroth, but she was aiming at her sister and we Kendeths seem to do rather better under such circumstances. Of the dozen or more shafts launched at Edris two hit him and a few more sprouted from corpses walking by, scarcely causing them to break stride. One of the two to strike him took him in the shoulder, the other, and I’m claiming it no matter what the odds, jutted from his chest. Having seen Edris Dean escape Frauds’ Tower in Umbertide despite being cut so deep that only his neckbones prevented decapitation, rather than punch the air I started to order a second volley. Before I finished shouting out the command Edris shattered—as if he were a reflection on a pane of glass. The pieces of him fell from view, lost in the tide of walking corpses.
“Hell.” I thrust the bow I’d stolen back at its owner.
“What . . . was that?” Barras asked.
“A necromancer,” I said.
“Did we kill him?” Darin used the royal we: he hadn’t a bow, but he probably would have got nearer the mark than me if he’d had a try.
“I wouldn’t bet on it.” I’d seen too much mirror-magic to think him destroyed. I wondered instead how many other reflections he might have scattered among our foe and how I might avoid meeting any of them. The Dead King’s hand might be behind this army of our fallen and he may have bound the necromancers to his cause, but one at least had a blue hand on his shoulder. The Dead King spent his power here hunting Loki’s key to let him out into the world, but the Blue Lady no doubt had still more pressing aims—with Grandmother and her Silent Sister bound for the Blue Lady’s stronghold in Slov, perhaps she sought to turn Alica Kendeth from her path with a direct strike at the heart of her kingdom. If that was the case then she clearly didn’t know my grandmother very well. The Red Queen would sacrifice us all to win this war of hers and go to her bed that night to an untroubled sleep.
“Load faster! Load faster!” Captain Renprow’s panicky commands brought me out of my own panicky thoughts. He directed the scorpion toward the base of the ramp, invisible now beneath the weight of dead citizens swarming over it.