The Wheel of Osheim (The Red Queen's War 3)

“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.

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.