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

“Hell.” I thrust the bow I’d stolen back at its owner.

“What . . . was that?” Barras asked.

“A necromancer,” I said.

“Did we kill him?” Darin used the royal we: he hadn’t a bow, but he probably would have got nearer the mark than me if he’d had a try.

“I wouldn’t bet on it.” I’d seen too much mirror-magic to think him destroyed. I wondered instead how many other reflections he might have scattered among our foe and how I might avoid meeting any of them. The Dead King’s hand might be behind this army of our fallen and he may have bound the necromancers to his cause, but one at least had a blue hand on his shoulder. The Dead King spent his power here hunting Loki’s key to let him out into the world, but the Blue Lady no doubt had still more pressing aims—with Grandmother and her Silent Sister bound for the Blue Lady’s stronghold in Slov, perhaps she sought to turn Alica Kendeth from her path with a direct strike at the heart of her kingdom. If that was the case then she clearly didn’t know my grandmother very well. The Red Queen would sacrifice us all to win this war of hers and go to her bed that night to an untroubled sleep.

“Load faster! Load faster!” Captain Renprow’s panicky commands brought me out of my own panicky thoughts. He directed the scorpion toward the base of the ramp, invisible now beneath the weight of dead citizens swarming over it.

I could see terror on the faces of the men at the wall above as they struggled to get the two heavy cauldrons in place. No single man would be able to lift either, and with dozens of gallons of fire-oil and tar inside the four men who could fit around each were hard-pressed to position them.

Just below the guards battling the cauldrons’ weight a sea of dead men surged, howling, washing up around the ramp of broken stone, broken timber, broken bodies. The scaffold of human corpses reached to within a yard of the wall top, hundreds in the construction, dozens more clambering up, screaming their awful hunger. And out beyond that scaffold, stepping through the dead horde, crushing some, knocking others aside, came the monsters, the tripods, raw, bloody, scuttling like spiders. And yet the wall guard held their ground. Those old men I’d doubted, they kept their place, bound by their oath and by their duty, where I would have run.

“Yes!” Darin, Barras, in fact every man around me calling out, as two torches were set to the mouths of the cauldrons and each began to tip.

Twin streams of fire started to splash down onto the pyramid of dead, flattened against the wall. A cheer went up from all the guards. And yet the dead men below held tight even as they burned, their skin withering before the heat, hair and clothes burned away, flesh sizzling.

The first of the great three-legged monstrosities began its climb, anchoring its legs into the burning corpse-tower and scuttling up toward the wall. A wave of blazing oil broke across it but still the thing came on, new dead men ascending in its wake. The tower scorpions could no longer target the thing, so close to the guards, and with a last lunge it hooked two of its legs over the lip of the wall. Burning dead men scrambled over its back, howling, and threw themselves at the cauldron crews, who fell back in panic. The remains of the fire-oil spilled from the dropped cauldrons, setting the parapet afire.

“Get more men down there! Now!” I waved my sword unnecessarily. “Sound the breach!”

Trumpets blared, an alarm that no one alive in Vermillion had ever heard except in wall-drills. The city had been breached.

FIFTEEN

For half an hour it looked as if we might hold the Dead King’s forces on the wall, and perhaps even beat them back once the soldiers of the Seventh reached the fray to relieve the old men of the guard. On the narrow parapet the dead could come at the wall guard only two or three abreast. They threw themselves forward with alarming speed, accepting the thrust of sword or spear to close on their opponents and lock hands around a man’s throat.

“It’s always strangling with these dead men. What’s the point of it?” I couldn’t see it was a very efficient way to kill anyone, especially in the midst of a pitched battle.

“What other options do they have?” Darin asked.

“Thumbs in eyeballs? Head smashed against the wall?” I’d spent entirely too much time with Snorri.

“And there’s that too!” Barras pointed to another pair struggling, the attacker a young woman, seared with fire-oil and still smouldering, now with a spear through her guts. She grappled the guardsman who speared her and both pitched off the walkway, a twenty-five foot drop headlong onto the cobbles below.