The hammering sounded louder, close at hand. Snorri put his boot on the ghoul’s neck, wrenched his weapon free with a wet sound.
“Lisa?” I pushed past, sword before me, torch to the side. A priest stood before the door to Darin’s suite, fists raw from banging against the wood. He turned to face me. Bishop James, I thought . . . the choked purple of his face made it hard to tell. Stout, ageing, and stern, Bishop James had spent many futile hours trying to teach me the error of my ways as a child, with either the rod or the bible, both wielded as a weapon. I never liked him but I wouldn’t have wished this end on him.
Bishop James ran at me with the recklessness of dead men. I knew enough not to let him impale himself and trap my blade, and swung instead, taking off one of his reaching hands somewhere between wrist and elbow. I ducked at the last, shoulder down, and let him tumble over me. A wet crunch from behind indicated an ungentle meeting with Snorri’s axe.
“Lisa?” I rapped on the door. “Micha?”
“Barras? Is that you?” A woman, voice muffled.
“Darin? Thank God!” A second woman.
“It’s Jal,” I said.
A moment of silence. “How many men have you got with you?”
“Enough.” I felt mildly insulted. “Open the door. We need to leave, quickly.”
“We’ve barricaded it. It will take a while to move all this stuff.” Lisa’s voice, rather faint.
“Leave it shut.” Snorri came up to stand beside me. “We need to clear the place first.”
“Leave the barricade!” I called out more loudly, trying to make the idea sound like my own. “We’re going to make sure it’s safe first.”
“It’s Double, Jal!” Micha called from behind the door. I heard a cry of complaint from little Nia.
“What?” I shouted back. Either I’d misheard or she wasn’t making sense.
“Double!”
I turned to look up at Snorri and shrugged. “Double?”
“She means me.” The voice came from behind us on the landing.
Turning, I saw a thing built of body parts. Not a man like the augmented giant who had chased me across the rooftops, but something closer to the monstrosities that had bound together to form the scaffold by which the dead had overtopped the city wall. To my eye it was a gory spider made from the severed limbs of the men Sir Roger had led to their deaths. Arms and legs fused one to the next to make crude and gangly spider-limbs, with the dripping upper half of a torso at the apex where six or seven of these limbs converged.
“Hasty work and crude, I apologize.” I focused on the man behind it, holding a lantern aloft.
“Double?” He wore the household uniform though the arms of it were thick with gore past the elbows.
“Not really my name of course, but you’ve been using it for the past year so why not let’s keep it that way for the last night of your life.”
“But . . . you’re . . .” When I thought about it Double seemed an unlikely name. I’d met him for the first time escorting Snorri to the Marsail keep the day Grandmother set him to be freed after telling his story in the throne room.
“I would stay to chat but I’ve things to do in the church. I just came in to see what the noise was.” Double lifted his lantern a little higher. “And you brought the Northman back, I see. Where has he been? I see death all over him.”
“Yours,” Snorri said and moved toward the flesh-spider, a grimace on his face as if the distasteful shape of it worried him more than the actual combat.
Double reached his hand toward Snorri, extending his fingers around the rounded black object he was holding. Snorri stopped, distaste turning to surprise.
“What?” Snorri tried to move but it seemed as if his body had frozen into one solid piece. Even forcing the question past his lips took effort.
“This really is quite remarkable.” Double showed a smile wholly at odds with my memories of his bland and friendly face. “You’re clearly alive and yet death has seeped into you almost bone deep. We really will have to have a discussion before I kill you.”
And that left just me guarding Lisa’s door against a treacherous necromancer and his pet horror.
“It was you who searched my room when I came back from the North!” The main thing about not fighting someone is to not let the fight start. In some circles this is known as stalling.
“There’s no point trying to stall me, Prince Jalan.” Double focused on his creation and it scuttled forward a yard or so. “But yes. Me. If you’d had the decency to leave Loki’s key with your other possessions then all this unpleasantness might have been delayed.” He returned his attention to the flesh-spider and it jittered forward another yard, the head in the middle of it all watching me with the same avid attention the hawk reserves for the mouse.
“What is that thing?” I pointed at the object in the hand Double had extended toward Snorri.
“Oh please.” Double advanced his creature a few more steps.
“No, really, it looks familiar.” At first I’d thought his hand wrapped about some kind of necromantic blackness—but it was something solid and real and I’d seen it somewhere before.
“This?” Double inverted his palm so the object rested on his palm. “A young woman threw it at me while I was organizing things in the church.”
“A holy stone!” Father’s holy stone, to be precise.
“Yes. One of the DeVeer sisters threw it. I’ll return it to her soon.” Again that stranger’s smile. “I suppose she thought one of the cardinal’s symbols might hold some power over me? What is it they say? Let she that is without sin cast the first stone? But the DeVeer sisters are hardly innocents now, are they? And your father never was very much of a cardinal . . .”
“Why don’t you give it to me instead?” I needed Father’s seal to defend me against my sister if she broke through—when she broke through. Darin’s death had nearly given her the doorway she needed and with so much dying in the city it could only be getting easier for her. I needed a cardinal’s seal Marco had said, but the other symbols of his office were almost as holy—they might be enough.
“This?” Double set his lantern on one of the support posts for the railings that ran alongside the landing. He passed the holy stone from hand to hand, like the lichkin enjoying his moment of power. I guess it had grated on him serving my father’s house in such a lowly capacity while all the time hiding such talents. “You think I don’t know why you want it?” He held it by the dark metal handle that followed the curve of the stone’s black iron body. “Sister,” he said. “Sister . . .” drawing out the word into a taunt. “Your father’s seal would serve you better against her, but Archbishop Larrin made off with that. The one that got away. If I’d caught him I would have had the whole set from choirboy to archbishop.”
In the corner of my eye Snorri struggled against the bonds holding him. He’d been too long in Hell, steeped in the dryness of the deadlands, and necromancy would have a hold on him until the living world fully accepted him back. Double’s monstrosity began to advance again.
“Wait!” I shouted. You’d be surprised how often that works.
The flesh-spider paused and Double raised his eyebrows, inviting me to elaborate.
“If you could put down my father’s holy stone. I don’t want to damage it when I kill you.” I lifted my sword. Bravado is as good a delaying tactic as begging. I just needed to buy a few minutes for Snorri to shake off the necromancer’s spell.
“I might take my time with you, Prince Jalan.” Double examined the holy stone. “You’ve no idea how dull it is waiting on your family. How difficult it is to nod and bow before such a collection of pompous morons puffed up on their own misplaced sense of self-importance . . .” He banged the stone against the banister, hard, examined it with a scowl, then waved his creation on to finish me.