King of Thorns (The Broken Empire 2)

The congregation is assembled.

The quick-dead moved closer though I heard no instruction. They took slow steps, their hands ready to grab and twist and tear. Against so many we would last moments.

“It’s no kind of wedding if my family can’t attend.” I sheathed my sword.

“Some ghosts I can’t summon. The royal dead are buried in consecrated tombs and lie with old magics. If I could have made your mother dance for you I would have done so long ago,” Chella said. The whisper reached me through the crowd, writhing on the lips of the quick-dead as they stepped ever closer.

The congregation is assembled, but some ghosts she can’t summon.

The remaining horses nickered behind me, nervous, even the grey.

“I was thinking of my Brothers,” I said. I opened a hand to the left and right to indicate Makin, Kent, Grumlow, and Rike.

“They can attend,” Chella said. “I will leave them their eyes.”

“Will we have no music? No poets to declaim? No flowers?” I asked. I was stalling.

“You’re stalling,” she said.

The congregation is assembled. Aside from those she can’t summon. And those she does not wish to.

“There’s a poet I’m thinking of, Chella. A poem. A fitting one. ‘To his coy mistress.’”

“Am I coy?” She walked closer now, swaying through the dead.

The wisdom of poets has outlived that of the Builders.

“The poem is about time, at least in part. About how the poet can’t stop time. And in the end he says, ‘For Thus, though we cannot make our sun; Stand still, yet we will make him run.’”

Ghosts can’t hurt men. They can drive them mad. They can torment them to the point at which they take their own lives, but they cannot wound them. I felt this to be true. My stolen necromancy told me it was so. But they can hurt the dead, it seems. I had seen it with my own eyes. The corpses that Chella set to walking could be felled by spirits because they stood closer to their world, close enough to the gates of death for a ghost to reach out and throttle them.

“Very sweet,” Chella said. “But it won’t stop me.”

“So I’ll make you run.” And with every fragment of my will I summoned my ghosts. I pulled them through the gates that Chella had opened. With arms spread wide I returned each shade and phantom, each haunt and spirit that had trailed me these long years. I bled them through my chest, let them pulse through me with each beat of my heart. I couldn’t stop Chella drawing forth those she wanted but I could make damn sure they all came, each and every one. At a run.

And they came. The congregation Chella had chosen not to invite. The burning dead of Gelleth, those that the Builders’ Sun took first, not victims from the outskirts of the explosion like Ruth and her Ma, but those who burned in the Castle Red at the heart of the inferno. They poured from me in an endless torrent. Ten of them to every child of Gelleth that Chella had brought forth. And my dead, the burning dead, brought with them a fire like no other. They burned as candles in the hearth, flesh running, flames leaping, each man or woman screaming and racing or staggering and clutching. And behind them, with measured pace, a new kind of ghost, each glowing with a terrible light that made their flesh a pink haze and shadows of their bones.

I saw nothing but fire without heat, heard only screams, and after forever we stood alone on our mound with no sign of Chella or her army save for blackened bones smouldering on damp reeds.

“Wedding’s off,” I said, and taking my bearing from the sunset I led the Brothers away to the south.

Brother Makin has high ideals. If he kept to them, we would be enemies. If he nursed his failure, we would not be friends.

35

Wedding day

“A spade?” Hobbs said.

If there was ever a man to call a spade a spade, Watch-master Hobbs was that man. I was just impressed a man of his age had any breath left at this point, for stating the obvious or otherwise.

I kicked about in the snow. Spades lay everywhere, covered by a recent fall.

“Get Stodd and Keppen’s squads shooting down the slope. Harold’s men I want using these spades to dig,” I said.

“Stodd’s dead.” Hobbs spat and watched the snowfield. The gap between the Watch and our pursuit had vanished. Here and there men stopped running. Few managed to draw a blade, let alone swing, before they were cut down.

Blood on snow is very pretty. In the deep powder it melts its way down and there’s not much to see, but where the snow has an icy crust, that dazzling white shines through the scarlet and makes the blood look somehow richer and more vital than ever it did in your veins.

“Get men shooting down the slope. I don’t much care what they hit. Legs are good. Put more bodies in the way. Slow them down.”

An injured man is more of an obstacle than a dead one. Put a big wound in a man and he often gets clingy, as though he thinks you can save him and all he has to do is hold on so you won’t leave. The fresh-wounded like company. Give them a while and they’d rather be alone with their pain. For a moment I saw Coddin, odd chinks of light offering the lines of him, curled in his tomb. Some folk bury their dead like that, curled up, forehead to knee. Makin said it makes for easier digging of a grave, but to my eye it’s more of a return. We lay coiled in the womb.

“Shoot the bastards down!” I yelled. I waved my hands toward the men that I wanted using their bows. “Don’t pick targets.”

Makin staggered up and I slapped a spade across his chest. Captain Harold and I started to collar other men and set them digging. None of them asked why. Except for Makin, and truthfully I think he just wanted the chance to rest.

“We came here once,” he said.

“Yes.” I threw another load of snow behind me. It felt odd having climbed for what seemed like forever, to now be desperately digging back down with the last of my strength.

“We were on our way to some village…Cutting?”

“Gutting,” I said. Another load of snow. The cries and clash of blades on the slopes closer now.

“This is insane!” Makin dropped his spade and drew his sword. “I remember now. There are caves here. But they don’t lead anywhere. We searched them. The men we have here—they’d barely fit in.”

My spade bit into nothing and slipped from numb fingers into the void below. “I’m through! Dig here!”

The melee reached to within fifty yards of our position, a bloody, rolling fight, men slipping in the snow, a pink mush now, screaming, severed limbs, dripping blades. And beyond the carnage, like an arrowhead pointing directly at me, more and more and more soldiers, the line of them broadening to a mass several hundred men wide as they crossed the snowline far below.

“I may have left it too late,” I said. I knew I’d left it too late. I spent too long with Coddin. And Arrow’s men had been faster than I thought they would be.

“Too late?” Makin shouted. He waved his sword at the army converging on us. “We’re dead. We could have done this back down there! At least I would have had the strength to fight then.”

He looked strong enough to me. Anger always opens a new reserve, a little something you’d forgotten about.