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

The lichkin flowed out through the corpse-ranks, abandoning the assault on the gates. The fire had removed the luxury of time from our enemy. A general might have retreated to the surrounding farms and waited in the olive groves before returning a day later, but I guessed that dead men and spirits were more elemental than strategic. What I knew of the Dead King himself, and it was precious little, painted him not as a planner but as a force of destruction unwittingly steered by the Lady Blue’s machinations.

The dead did not withdraw and the lichkin didn’t try to escape from the flames—instead it tracked away from us, around the walls, as if seeking a weakness.

Two hundred yards to the east the dead who had formerly been standing vigil before the walls now quickened and began to tear at the base of a tower standing so close that a man atop it might throw a spear at the watchmen with a good chance of hitting one.

I’d visited that same structure days before—a water tower to service the well-appointed homes of several merchants who could have afforded to live within the city bounds, albeit in considerably less grand mansions. The tower also supplied water to a prosperous smithy servicing the needs of various wheelwrights, cartwrights, and provisioners with outlets on the Appan Way just as it left the gates.

I had marvelled that Grandmother allowed the tower so close to her walls despite her oft-repeated threats to level the suburbs at even the hint of war. It turned out that licence had been granted on the basis that the structure was designed to fall. Sturdy wooden buttresses supported the tower wall and without them the thing would collapse. Rather than providing a platform from which archers might clear our walls, the tower was a death-trap. Targeting the buttresses with iron bolts fired from a scorpion would topple the tower, killing any enemy in it and hopefully no few of those close by.

“What the hell—” The tower came down before I could finish. A score and more of the dead shattered by the deluge of masonry and timber.

More quickened dead closed on the rubble, shrouded in dust now as well as smoke. Within moments they were on the move, hauling the broken stones to the wall, dead men hefting thick and splintered beams, dead children dragging smaller pieces. Others came rushing from nearby streets pushing carts, wagons, doors ripped from houses, all of it thrown in an untidy heap before the walls.

“They’re building a ramp!” Darin gripped the battlements. “We’ve got to get over there.”

The parapet at that section, like all the others, was well-manned, albeit by the old men of the wall guard, and more were converging on the spot from both sides. “We need to stop them is what we need to do, not stand there waiting for them to do it.” I started toward the tower steps, but turned instead to the battlements overlooking the gates. The empty cauldrons stood beside the murder-holes, smoking gently.

“Fill those with fire-oil!” I gestured to the men on the scorpion that had been manoeuvred to the front of our tower. “Take it down to them.” They had small barrels of the stuff, and tubs of tar, all used for the firing of the suburbs. “You! All of you.” I pointed to the wall guard at the back. “Run to the other towers, fetch their fire-oil and tar.”

“They’re dropping rocks on them, Jal!” Barras hollered from the other side of the tower, looking back at me, visor raised, face flushed. “That should do it!”

I raced across to see. The guard were hefting stones over the top of the wall, some as big as a man’s head, most much larger. Men with wheeled barrows hurried up with more ammunition from stockpiles along the parapet. Down below carnage reigned, dead men’s heads shattering wetly as plummeting rocks hit them. Others, bent in the act of placing their own chunks of masonry on the heap, fell broken as stones hammered into their backs.

“It’s working!” Captain Renprow beside me.

“Yes, but not for us,” I said, narrowing my eyes at the heap, trying to pierce the shifting shroud of dust and smoke. None of the men around me understood the dead or their king the way I did. I turned to Renprow. “Stop them! Fast as you can. They’re just helping to build the ramp for them.” Their rain of stones, and the crushed bodies it created, were mounding up at the base of the wall. New dead just replaced the old, unloading their cargo of masonry and timber atop the twitching remains beneath their feet. “We need to reinforce that area. Get Martus’s soldiers there.” I didn’t say it out loud but I didn’t have much faith in the wall guard. Age may make a man a little wiser but it makes his sword arm a lot slower. It had never seemed likely that Vermillion would be attacked, certainly not without considerable warning. Having the wall guard as a retirement plan for old soldiers had seemed a sensible idea. Now it seemed less so.