Close up, the ferocity of the quickened dead was a shocking thing. Their utter fury and lack of regard for sharp edges made defence feel a futile business, a momentary delaying of the inevitable. The first rank of guardsmen went down in moments, borne to the floor, dead hands closing around their necks. The second rank fell apart in short order, with more dead streaming around the flanks of my band of some thirty men, which left me surrounded and being leapt upon by a fat man in rags who looked to have spent a couple of weeks in the grave before being roused to join today’s festivities. I didn’t have time to complain that his burial was in direct contravention of the Red Queen’s orders, not to mention mine as marshal. I barely had time to scream.
The thing about dead men who won’t die again, and who need to be dismembered if you’re to stop them, is that it’s all very well telling yourself this information, but when one of the bastards jumps on you screaming unholy rage . . . you run them through. It’s instinct. They should have put that on my tombstone. “Killed by instinct.”
In defiance of reason however, the hunger fled the corpse-man’s eyes in the moment my sword hilt met his chest above his corrupt, unbeating heart. The weight of him threw me back into the guardsmen behind me but with their help I kept my feet, and managed to haul my blade clear as my enemy—now a simple corpse of the type that lies still and waits to be a skeleton—fell to the side. The next dead thing came at me in the same instant. Repeating my mistake, I slashed at its neck, and repeating the miracle it fell clutching at the cold blood welling from the ruin of its throat. Edris Dean’s blade seemed to vibrate in my hand as if alive. I risked a glance at the blade as I stuck it through the howling mouth of the dead woman next in line to kill me, a slightly-built young thing who might have been pretty under all that soot and blood and murderous hunger. Along the length of my sword dead men’s blood clung to the script that had been etched into the steel. A necromancer’s weapon—the tool of his trade— seemingly as adept at cutting the strings that animate a corpse as at cutting those that lead a living man through the dance of his days.
“Watch out!”
I didn’t have time to contemplate my discovery. A man who’d died in the athletic prime of his life threw himself at me, pinning my blade, and took me to the ground. I’ve not been savaged by a hound but I imagine the experience is similarly terrifying. The sound of the thing’s roaring filled my world. Its strength wholly over-matched mine and without the chainmail surcoat it would have been tearing the flesh from my bones. Other hands seized me and I felt myself dragged across the flagstones, though I’d lost my bearings and couldn’t say in which direction. I almost hoped it might be into the mass of the dead where I could at least expect a quick death.
In the next moment I discovered what it might be like to be on the butcher’s block. Swords rose and fell above me. I heard and felt the thudding of blades in flesh. I struggled as the cold blood washed over me, and after what seemed a lifetime, strong hands hauled me to my feet.
“Marshal!” Renprow, seizing my head, inspecting me for wounds while my now-limbless assailant twitched on the ground before us. The sounds of the battle raged close by, not the clash of steel on steel or the thrum of bowstrings, just the screaming, of both the living and the dead, and the dull chopping of meat. “Marshal? Can you hear me?”
“What?” I looked around. Men of the guard packed in close on every side, reserves brought in by the long circular road that the wall parapet constituted. Up above us the war of attrition was still being waged, the dead pushing slowly out from the point where they overtopped the wall, but the real battle lay before me. More dead continued to spill over the wall in a steady rain, landing on the mound of those too injured by the fall to move on. The drop would probably still kill a man, but it didn’t break enough bones to slow the Dead King’s army, and now guardsmen recently throttled were facing their old comrades. “Where are our reserves? Damn it! We need the Seventh! We need the palace guard!”
I let Renprow lead me back through the ranks. Our presence had drawn the dead but we didn’t have the numbers to contain them. A necromancer’s orders could see them scatter out into the city. Perhaps only their masters’ desire to see the officers and commanders of Vermillion’s defence dead kept them here.
“Darin? Where’s Darin?” I shook Renprow off. “Where’s Barras?”
Renprow looked up to meet my gaze, jostled as more guardsmen hurried past to join the fray. He held me with the dark intensity of his gaze. “Marshal, all that stands between this city and disaster is your command. You need to concentrate on the bigger picture—”
I had him by the throat in a moment. “Where is my brother?” I shouted it into his face.
“Prince Darin fell.” The captain choked the words out. “While he was helping to drag you clear.”
I let Renprow fall and bent forward, doubled up by a blow to the stomach—though nothing had hit me but the truth. “No.”
There’s a red rage that runs deep in me, so deep you wouldn’t catch even a hint though you kept my company month after month. Even so, it is there. Edris Dean ignited it the day he ran his sword through my mother’s belly. He took that young boy’s bravery, his anger, his despair, and with one blow he set it apart from me, bound tight into something new, something darker, more bitter, and more deadly. And in the years of my life I’ve lived on a surface below which this crimson outrage ran unknown and unsuspected, stolen from me, leaving a different man.
“No!” That old rage rose then, surfaced from its depths, and I welcomed it. As I ran back through the ranks of my men I roared a welcome to it that Snorri himself would have been proud of—greeting an old friend.
Edris Dean’s sword, the same blade that shaped my life, sent dead men back to the grave as easily as it set live ones on their first visit. There was a crucial difference though—the dead had no fear of men with swords. It made them easy for me to kill. I ran among them, swinging with every ounce of skill that my old swordmasters had beaten into me at Grandmother’s insistence, and every lesson that unwanted experience had taught me since. The men of Vermillion followed in a wedge behind me, and at every slash and slice I bellowed my brother’s name. I kicked corpse-men from their victims, chopped away the arms fastened on men’s throats, hacked and slew until my blade began to weigh like lead and my traitor limbs betrayed me, the strength running from them.
A corpse-woman grappled me about the legs, another grabbed my left arm, trying to sink its teeth into the inside of my elbow. The chainmail foiled the bite, and a spearman drove his shaft through the dead woman’s head, though she didn’t loosen her grip. Strong arms wrapped me from behind and pulled me back among my men. Unable to fight them, I collapsed into the embrace. For a moment the world went darker, the light of torch and lantern dimming as the thunder of my heart filled my ears.
“Darin?” I gasped the question between great lungfuls of air drawn through a raw throat. “Barras?”
I blinked and cleared my vision. The men around me were of the Seventh. Renprow stood looking down at me, making me realize I lay on my back. I’d passed out but had no idea how long I’d been unconscious. I blinked again. Cousin Serah stood beside Captain Renprow, her face soot-streaked and framed by a close-fitting chainmail hood, her eldest brother Rotus loomed behind her, his lean frame armoured, his customary sour expression in place.
“Where is my brother?” I demanded, sitting up, gasping at the pain from bruised ribs.
The captain tilted his head, face torn in three parallel furrows across his cheek. I followed the gesture and saw Darin, propped in a sitting position against the Appan Gate, more pale than I’d ever seen him.
“Barras?” I asked as I got up.
“Who?” Serah reaching down to help me I shook her off.
“Barras Jon, the Vyene ambassador’s son. Married to Lisa DeVeer,” Rotus supplied, always full of facts—even in the midst of battle.
“My sword!” I shouted, before finding it in my scabbard. “And where’s Barras, damn it?”
Captain Renprow shook his head. “I’ve not seen him.”
I reached my brother’s side and knelt down opposite the chirurgeon examining him.