could hear the howls and snarls of the other dead men and the Brothers cursing as they fought. The reeds rose about my head like forest giants, swaying gently against the blueness of the sky.
By the time I found my breath and returned to the cut clearing, the fight had ended.
“Row’s dead.” Makin scrubbed at rips on his cheek with a handful of reeds. They seemed to make matters worse, but maybe he wanted to bleed it clean.
“I never liked him,” I said. We said that sort of thing on the road. Also it was true.
“Make sure there’s nothing left for Chella to play with,” I told Kent.
He set to beheading the first of our attackers. Someone had already taken its arms off and mud filled its mouth, but it still wriggled and glared.
Seeing Makin tend his wounds I thought to pat myself down. Sometimes it’s hours before you notice an injury taken in battle.
“Fuck,” I said.
“What?” Makin looked up.
“I’ve lost the box.” I ran my hands over my hips as if I could have missed it the first time.
“Good riddance,” Makin said.
I walked back along the path of flattened reeds where the dead man had pushed me. Nothing. I reached the sucking pool.
“It’s sunk here,” I said.
“Good.” Makin came up behind me.
I turned away. It didn’t feel right to lose it. It felt like something I should keep. Part of me.
“Kent!” I shouted. He stopped with his axe poised overhead, Row’s corpse at his feet.
“Leave him,” I said.
I walked back and knelt beside Row. Death isn’t pretty close up. The old man had fouled himself and stunk even worse than usual. Red-and-pink tatters of his throat hung down over his collarbones; loose ends of white cartilage reached out to frame the dark hole to his lungs. Trails of snot and purple blood had run from his nose, and his eyes had rolled to the left at a painfully sharp angle.
“I’ve not finished with you, Brother Row,” I said.
I took his hands in mine. Dead men’s hands are not intrinsically unpleasant but in truth it did make my skin crawl as I laced fingers with him. He lay limp, the hard skin at the top of his palms scratched against me.
“What’re you doing?” Grumlow asked.
“I have a job for you, Brother Row,” I said.
I searched for him. He couldn’t have gone far in just a few minutes. I felt the pulse of necromancy in the unhealed wound in my chest. A dark hand closed around my heart and a chill wrapped me.
I knew I had very little power, just a trickle, like the ribbon of water in those wide avenues of mud. But Row still held warmth. His heart didn’t beat but it twitched and quivered, and more important-I knew him blood to bone. I’d never liked him, but I knew him.
To make a dead man walk you have to wear his skin. You have to ease under it, to let your heartbeat echo in him, to run your mind along his thoughts.
I spat like Row did. I lifted my head and watched the Brothers with narrowed eyes, seeing them with Row’s likes, dislikes, jealousy, old grudges, remembered debts.
“Brother Row,” I said.
I got up. We got up. He got up.
I stood face to face with his corpse and he watched me from a distant place through eyes he once owned. The Brothers said nothing as I walked back to the pool and Row followed me.
“Find it,” I said.
I didn’t have to explain myself. We wore the same skin.
Row walked into the pool and let it take him. I crouched to watch.
Row had sunk from view before I felt the steel at my neck. I looked around, up along the blade.
“Don’t ever do that to me,” Makin said. “Swear it.”
“I so swear,” I said.
I needed no convincing.
34
Four years earlier
It seemed that we had been running in the marshes for most of our lives. Mud spattered each of us to the tops of our heads. The Brothers showed white skin only where they had scraped the filth from around their eyes. Now as the sun lowered red toward the western horizon it gave them a wild look. Soon, when the sun drowned in the marsh and left us in darkness, we would drown too.
“More of the bastards,” Rike shouted. Once again he was the only one who could see over the reed-sea.
“How many?” I asked.
“All of them,” he said. “It’s like all the reeds are falling.”
I could hear the snarls, faint but clear on the evening air. I patted the box at my hip. It took Row two hours to find, two hours before his hand finally broke the surface to give it to me. The Brothers had not liked waiting, but two more hours would not have got us out of Chella’s muddy hell. We left him in the pool. I told Makin I had set him free. But I didn’t.
“Can you see any clear ground?” I asked.
Rike didn’t answer but he set off with purpose so we followed.
The snarling grew louder, closer behind us. We ran hard, the splashing of quick dead feet closer by the second, and the shredding of reeds as they tore their path.
One moment I ran through a rushing green blindness and the next I broke clear onto a low mound. It felt like a hill though it rose no higher than three feet above the water level.
“Good work,” I told Rike, then gasped in breath. It’s better to die in the open.
Chella’s army converged on us from all sides. The quick ones, mottled and mire-stained, undying rage on their faces and an unholy light in their eyes, dozens of them, flowing out to surround the mound. Behind them, minutes later, shambling in through the flattened reeds, came the grey and rotting dead, and amongst them the bog-dead from the depths, cured to the toughness of old leather and of a similar colour. I saw Price’s tall bones and tattered flesh overtopping all others. Chella walked at his side wearing a white dress, all lace and trains such as might be worn at a royal wedding. Hardly a touch of mud on it.
“Hello, Jorg,” she said. She stood too far away for me to hear but every dead mouth whispered her words.
“Go to hell, bitch.” I would rather have said something clever.
“No harsh words on our wedding day, Jorg,” she said, and the dead echoed her. “The Dead King is risen. The black ships sail. You’ll join with me. Love me. And together we will open the Gilden Gate for our master and set a new emperor on the throne.”
The dead of Gelleth came then, wandering through the marsh as if lost, ambling one way and the next. Ghosts these, but looking real enough, with their burns and their sores, teeth missing, hair and skin falling away. Hundreds of them, thousands, in a great ring of accusation. They pressed so hard that at the back some of the bog-dead were pushed aside and trampled under.
“So,” said Rike. “Marry the bitch.”
“She’s going to kill you all either way, Rike. She’ll have your corpse walking beside her. Price on one side, you on the other, the brothers back together again.”
“Oh,” he said. “Fuck that then.”
“Come now, Jorg, don’t be a baby,” Chella said, and the dead spoke with her. She spoke again, echoed this time by just one voice, from a corpse woman close by the edge of our mound. A muddy corpse, one arm chewed to the bone, her skin stained, lips grey and rotting, but something of Ruth’s lines in her face. “The Dead King is coming. The dead rise like a tide. They outnumber the living, and each battle makes more corpses, not more men.”
