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

“It’s as if . . .” I spoke the words only for myself. It was as if they felt some awful heat that made them fierce, and the thing from which that heat radiated . . . was on the move. I tried to see where the focus of the effect lay . . . and saw it, a shifting point where it almost looked as if the world had folded around itself to obscure something the eye shouldn’t see. “There!” I raised my voice, pointing now. “There! Do you see it?”

“See what?” Martus pushed to the wall beside me.

“There’s . . . something.” Darin on my other side, squinting. “Something . . . wrong.”

“I can’t see a damn thing! Where?” Martus shielding his eyes against the dying rays of the sun.

I stared, tracking the point, losing it behind houses, picking it up again. A space where the light seemed folded. A dead spot on the eye. And then, for just a moment, I did see. Perhaps it was the setting sun lending me a hint of the old dark-sight Aslaug used to bring, or maybe Hell had trained my eye to see what the men were not supposed to see. A flicker of motion, an impossibly thin body, nerve-white, clad in a shifting shroud of grey: soul-stuff perhaps, the ghosts of men haunting the lichkin’s flesh like a garment.

“Shit.”

“What? What is it?” Darin, still staring.

“A lichkin,” I said. A lichkin, one of the parasites that Edris and his kind set riding the unborn children they slew. Such a thing held my sister and wanted nothing more than to wear her flesh into the living world. But here we had a naked one, broken into the world through God knows what crack, and scarcely less dangerous than an unborn from what I’d seen in Hell.

“Where’s it going?” Martus asked. The sound of howling grew more distant as the lichkin moved away.

“Hunting,” I said, and I felt Grandmother’s gaze upon me as surely as if I stood before her throne, those eyes of hers, harder than hard, without any shred of comprom-ise. I remembered finally opening that scroll-case Garyus had given me, seeing the Red Queen’s seal, breaking it open to see the words in her own hand. Marshal of Vermillion. And a note: “You say you saw the defence of Ameroth. Pray that you learned its lesson and pray harder that you will never have to show that you learned it.”

A hundred men stood at my back, a city behind them, mine to wield, mine to protect. In all my adventures across the face of the Broken Empire I’d never want to be somewhere else quite as much as I did in that moment. I looked out across the rooftops, all in shadow now, the sky aflame, boiling red above the departed sun. “Burn it all.”

The howling had passed almost beyond hearing, the dead below us stood silent. Nobody spoke. I heard the flutter of the flags, the wind’s whisper, and far off behind the walls the cry of a street vendor singing out his wares.

I turned and walked toward the scorpion. The men parted before me. “Burn it all.” I slapped a hand to the heavy spear loaded into the machine. “Rags and oil. Shoot for the rooftops. Send word to all the towers.”

Martus wrenched me around. “That’s madness! What the hell’s wrong with you?”

“We can’t defend the outer city. By morning they’ll all be dead and added to the army at our gates.”

“It’s not sane! It’s not right.” Martus shook me, raising his voice, mutters from all sides adding to his protest.

“Would you lead the Seventh out there?” I cocked my head toward the darkening streets of the outer city. We could hear distant screaming, another house broken into.

“Well . . . I . . .” Martus screwed his face up, presaging one of his furious blusters. “It would be madness.”

“I wouldn’t let you.” I shook him off and sought the guardsman who had pointed to his home out by the church on the hill. “You. Your name.”

“Daccio, your highness.” He had a subdued look to him, his anger gone, though it showed now on the faces of his comrades.

“Daccio. I’m sorry but your wife is dead, your sons too. Or they’re hiding in their homes waiting to be saved.” I looked about at the wall guard, grey in their ranks. “Are you going to save them? Will the wall guard descend these walls this last time and sally forth where the Seventh Army fear to tread? Or will the lichkin find them out? If we do nothing the dawn will show us your family standing bloody before our gates.” I took a rag from the base of the scorpion, an oily thing used on the bow arms to keep them from rust. “Fire is clean. Better to burn than let those creatures have you. And what better chance will our people have to run than in the smoke and confusion of a great conflagration?” I slapped the rag into Daccio’s hand. “Do it.”