The Wheel of Osheim

“We’ll hold.” I expected Rotus to make the pledge, but it was Serah who spoke. She held my gaze for a moment and I saw something familiar. Something I last saw in her grandmother’s eyes on the walls of Ameroth.

“I know you will.” And I began pushing my way through the troops, aiming for the main street from the Appan Gate, lit only by a scatter of dropped lanterns.

SIXTEEN

“Marshal!” Renprow at my shoulder. “You can’t go alone!”

“We need every man here.” I really didn’t want to go alone, but we really did need every man at the breakthrough.

“I’ll come too. Just let me gather a squad.” He caught hold of my arm. “A squad who can ride? And have horses?” My stallion and the mounts of the men who had ridden from the Morano Bridge had been stabled at a tavern a hundred yards along the Appan Street. It would take an age to gather those riders together, if they still lived, and many of the horses weren’t the sort to take kindly to a new rider.

“I’ll come.” He reached out and took two soldiers by the shoulder. “And these men can ride with us. There are messenger horses in the stables.”

“You know more about this city’s defences than anyone else, Captain.

You’re needed here. These two I’ll take.”

Coming to the edge of the press of soldiers and wall guards I found myself suddenly reluctant to leave. Stepping beyond the crowded bodies, out into the dark, seemed like a very bad idea indeed. The men huddled together as sheep will in the pen, so tight I’d had to force a path through them. Fear bound us close, herd animals before the predator, though it appeared that only I had truly appreciated the nature of the threat haunting this night. The dead had fallen silent. That meant the lichkin had left. I would have liked to think it had retreated back over the wall to some devilry outside amid the firestorm. But looking at the dark I knew.

The lichkin was in my city now. Out there in the streets. Loose among the innocent, and believe me when I say that before the ancient malice of the lichkin we are all innocent.

Leaving the shelter of the men took all my meagre reserves of courage. Once out in the open, with the pair of guards following, pride kept me moving. Pride has always been my most lethal character flaw. Worse even than being cursed through my grandmother’s blood with the tendency to infrequent berserker rages when pushed to the edge. Pride lets a man be skewered on the point of other people’s expectations. How often had I walked into the proverbial, and sometimes literal, fire with Snorri watching on, my justifiable instinct to run in the opposite direction crushed under the weight of his confidence in me?

I collected a lantern hanging from a pastry stall abandoned when the crowd panicked and led the way across toward the stables, the light jittering in my grasp. I hurried across Appan Street in the dark with the two soldiers at my back.

Appan Street lay eerily quiet, no sounds but the distant cries from the fighting at the wall. Tell-tale cracks of light at upper windows and the occasional shadow moving behind closed shutters were all that betrayed the fact the city hadn’t been abandoned.

“Easy now.” I held up a hand to stop the soldiers and drew my sword.

The stables’ door stood ajar. I could hear the stamps and whinnies of the horses inside. “Something’s got them spooked.” Any number of dead men could have broken away from the battle by the gates—one of them could be lurking in the darkness behind the door, bloody and silent. I raised my lantern. “You go in first.” A nod to the larger of the two soldiers, a sturdy fellow though still lacking a good few inches and pounds on me. “Sir.” He gave me a “why me” look but since it wasn’t actually possible to find two men in Vermillion whose military ranks stood further apart than mine and his, he stepped forward. I handed him my lantern and he prodded the door open with his sword. He edged in, reluctant as a man dipping a hand into a jar full of spiders.

“All clear, Marshal.”

“You’re sure?”

“Just horses. Must’ve been the smoke that spooked ’em.” I followed him in. He wouldn’t be safe to lead Murder out, otherwise I’d have stayed in the street.

Within two minutes we had Murder and two of the messenger horses out in the road. I swung into the saddle, feeling slightly better as I always do with four legs under me. It was probably a good thing for my honour that the city was besieged on all sides, because if I’d known there was a gate open then I might well have been overwhelmed by the temptation to gallop out of it and ride off until I found somewhere safe. “The palace!” I pointed my sword in the appropriate direction, gripped the reins in my lantern hand, and clattered off.