Prince of Fools

“What did you see?” Tuttugu, white-faced.

“Nothing.” I gasped it out and drew a breath.

“What?” Three blank looks.

“Nothing,” I said. “Just the Hardanger men’s lanterns.”

Another moment of incomprehension.

“There’s no fire on the wall.” I pointed in the rough direction of Snorri’s great pyre.

“It can’t have gone out,” Ein said. “It’ll still be hot this time tomorrow.”

“Yes.” I nodded. When I came down to report the visitors from the Bitter Ice, the bone-fire had been ten yards of orange embers with flames licking over them when the wind gusted.

“I’ll go check.” Ein took up a lantern from the mantelpiece and went to the heavy door that connected back to the corridor and halls beyond. A pounding from down below stopped him in his tracks. It sounded more like a battering ram than the crash of shield on wood that we’d heard before.

“Tuttugu! Oil!” And Snorri hauled the cover from the murder-hole. He stared down, brow furrowing. “There’s nothing th—”

BOOM!

The sound of the impact drowned him out.

“Hel! It’s coming from the inside!” Snorri whipped round towards Ein, who stood at the doorway with his back towards it.

“I’ll find out—” Ein bit his sentence short and staggered forwards, accompanied by a splintering thud. Something sharp and thick and gore-coated now jutted from beneath his sternum. A moment later the door came off its hinges and the horror beyond shook the door and Ein’s corpse from the appendage it had impaled them both with.

“Jesus!” A shriek. Something hot ran down my leg. I’d like to say it was blood. The thing blocked the corridor, a rolling mass of melted and blackened flesh, bones embedded, here a cloven helmet, there a skull, still smouldering—the stinking remnants of the bone-fire, quenched and animated into something more like a corrupt and giant slug than any man.

Snorri leapt past me, roaring and hacking. Chunks of steaming flesh flew across the room. The stench of the thing put me on my knees vomiting. Most of my puke went down the murder-hole, but there was nobody to receive the torrent. Snorri’s roaring continued for quite a while, punctuated by the booms from below.

At about the time I finally raised my head, Snorri paused in his assault. The nightmare had sagged in the doorway, spilling a yard or so into the room, overflowing part of the door and covering Ein’s legs to the hip. Apart from where Snorri sank his axe into it once more, for good measure, it didn’t seem to have any motion left in it.

“It’s done.” Tuttugu from beside the fire, nervous, almost hopping on his one good leg.

Tuttugu had barely shut his mouth when Ein’s head snapped up from the floor. The eyes he fixed me with were eyes I last saw on a mountain in Rhone and held the same undead hunger. Lips twitched but whatever the thing that was Ein had been about to say was cut off, with his head, by way of Snorri’s descending axe.

“Sorry, brother.” He snatched the severed head up by the hair and threw it into the blazing hearth.

“This isn’t all of it,” I said. There had been much more in the bone-fire than the mass before us.

By way of confirmation the doors below splintered open; in truth the restraints on the locking bar must have broken rather than the doors. Two men could have opened the gates from inside without much problem, but the insensate monster the necromancers had raised lacked the required dexterity or intelligence. Instead it had battered the locking bar free and now, spent like its smaller counterpart up above, it collapsed through the opening it had made.

“What now?” I needed somewhere to run.

“We run,” said Snorri.

“Oh, thank God!” Although I couldn’t do more than hobble with my shattered ribs. I paused a moment and looked at him. It seemed his final admission of defeat, Snorri running from the fight. “Where to?”

Already he’d pulled open the second door, the one leading to the chambers within the walls’ thickness on the left of the gatehouse, opposite those where we’d battled the Broke-Oar.

“There’s a strong-room in the keep. Iron doors. Many locks. We need to hold out for morning.” He hurried through into the freezing corridor beyond, breath steaming around him.

“Why?” I hollered after him, trying to keep up. I was all for running and hiding, but I hoped there was a better reason than delaying the inevitable. Behind me Tuttugu’s crutch clacked against the flagstones as he swung along with what speed he could muster.