“Christ.” Someone had put up a fight here—probably Grandmother’s elite. Dismembered bodies littered a floor awash with blood, a dozen or more mire-ghouls in the mix, many of the dead bloated and still smeared with stinking river mud.
“What country are we in?” Snorri at my shoulder.
“This is the palace in Vermillion. My uncle had a go at playing king. It didn’t work out very well.”
The front doors of Milano House lay in fragments, the wood grey with dry rot, corrupted by the lichkin’s touch. We went down the steps, Snorri holding up a shield he’d lifted from a fallen guard.
“Not your style?” I looked back, raising a brow.
“Ghoul darts are even less my style.” He followed me out onto the steps.
Enough torches had kept burning when dropped to surround the house in a loose halo of faint illumination. The story here ran similar to that inside. Broken corpses, scattered gore, half a dozen dead men in sight, wandering aimlessly, at least until the first of them spotted us.
“Run!” I shouted and took to my heels.
I stopped about ten yards later, realizing that Snorri wasn’t following me and that it was dark where I was going. I turned back toward him. “Run?”
Snorri gave me that grin that shows all those white teeth in the blackness of his beard. “I haven’t been walking all this time in Hel—” he paused to behead the first dead man to reach him, a savage and perfectly timed swing, “—to run from these sorry remains.” He didn’t so much decapitate the next man as swing his axe through the fellow’s head. Then two were on him together. I hadn’t time to see how he dealt with those because a serving woman in a torn dress had singled me out. She came on at an awkward, urgent lumbering, her grey hair fanned out in disarray, purple bruises around her neck where dead hands had choked the life out of her. I stuck my sword through her mouth and out the back of her head. A grisly business. I was still wrestling my blade out when Snorri strode past me. Even with her head a ruin she still clutched at me blindly. I had to dodge back and leave her flailing on the ground.
“Come on then,” he called over his shoulder. He held a pair of burnedlow reed torches in one hand, at arm’s length to light his way, the flames guttering over the last of the pitch.
I led the way, expecting some or other horror to leap at us from the night—the further we went without assault the worse the feeling of anticipation—but at last we stood before Roma Hall, unchallenged by anyone, living or dead.
“Who’s inside?” Snorri asked. “Just Lisa?”
“I don’t know for sure, Lisa, her sister Micha, my baby niece.” As marshal of the city I should be gathering men and making for the walls. Lisa would be as dead as the rest of us if the main force outside gained the city. Whatever the logic, I had to know she was all right, that they all were. Or at least to see their end and know that nothing now could save them.
The front doors stood ajar, the hall behind them dark. As I led the way up the steps I saw blood, just a smear, where perhaps someone had fallen and hit their head.
I opened the door on the left using the point of my blade. The light of Snorri’s dying torch hinted at the long hall beyond, Father’s Indus statuettes and vases in their niches at measured intervals. Fat Ned’s head lay a few yards in, staring up at the ceiling with an expression of mild surprise, perhaps at having died on guard duty and meeting a quick and violent end after such a slow battle against whatever was eating him inside. Proof that none of us really knows what to expect. I glanced about for his bony carcass but saw no sign of it.
At this point I remembered the small cone of orichalcum buried in the depths of my deepest pocket. I considered digging for it. Snorri loomed behind me raising his torch, and when I stepped aside, he walked on through. Not carrying any source of illumination proved such a good excuse for sending the Northman in ahead that I left the orichalcum firmly where it was.
“Lisa!” Snorri boomed. “Lisa!”
“Shhhh!” I motioned frantically down with my hand.
“What?”
“They’ll know we’re here!”
“That’s the idea. LISA!”
I supposed it was the idea, but the notion of calling out the enemy ran opposite to a great many deeply ingrained instincts and half of me still wanted to slap my hand over Snorri’s mouth.
Snorri led the way down the entrance hall. The place didn’t smell like home, it held a sour odour, the stink of death, old rather than fresh. There should be men at the door but I’d seen Alphons back outside Milano House, conscripted to Hertet’s guard, and Double could have been drafted too.
“Lisa!” Another booming announcement. Snorri glanced back at me. “It’s big!”
“It’s not like I haven’t been telling you I’m a prince all this time.” I waved him on. “Turn left past the next doors. And try not to kill any servants.” If we met Ballessa while carrying a smoky torch it might be Snorri who was in danger. Dirtying up the cardinal’s ceiling was not allowed. I remembered then that we’d made smoke of my father that morning and an unexpected sadness settled on me—something all my own rather than a lichkin’s gift.
It’s an odd thing to be sad about someone in death that you never really cared for in life and a thing that chooses its own moment to sneak up on you—usually a damn inconvenient one—but there it is . . . perhaps we hurt for the lost opportunities, for the conversation that would have released all the unspoken words, for the way it should have been.
“Where now?”
I paused. It was a big place. “Upstairs. We’ll check Darin’s old rooms.”
As we climbed the staircase I caught the distant sound of banging, something pounding on a door? The place seemed silent apart from that hammering, though silent is the way of corpses and necromancy—right up to the moment they leap out at you from the dark.
“Left at the top.”
Snorri’s torch guttered and the shadows danced, the untouched darkness crawling with horror. “Trouble.” He used a small word to understate a large disaster. Blood had congealed in sticky waterfalls down the top four or five steps. The landing was scattered with body parts, dark smears of blood reaching further up the walls than seemed reasonable.
“Palace guardsmen.” A few chunks bore large enough pieces of uniform to identify them. The men must have been killed then reanimated and finally hacked apart.
At the margins of the torch’s illumination a dark figure crouched on an armoured one. Snorri pressed the torch into my hand. Moving slowly, he let his axe slide until he gripped it just below the head and did the absolute last thing I would have recommended. He set it down.
“What?” I could see the black figure pause in whatever had occupied it and look our way, a tension in it as if poised either to attack or run.
Snorri ignored me, instead gripping the rim of his round shield and easing his other arm from the straps. Two things happened at once. The figure in the shadows sprang away and Snorri hurled his shield like a discus, the iron rim catching the creature in the back of the head and felling it.
We rushed forward, Snorri grabbing his axe. A mire-ghoul lay sprawled beside a gory torso in very shiny armour. I couldn’t say who it was—the face had been eaten away. Snorri turned the ghoul over with his foot. A dark and bristly moustache was stuck in the thing’s teeth, along with several unpleasant gobbets of flesh.
“Sir Wodger,” I said, understanding at last who had inhabited the gleaming armour. “My cousin sent him and these men to recover the DeVeer sisters.”
The ghoul opened an eye. Snorri sank his axe into its chest.