The dead woman’s tongue writhed, black and glistening, Chella’s words slipping from it. “Join with me, Jorg. There’s a place for you in this. There’s power to be taken and held.”
“There’s more to this,” I said. Even the high esteem in which I held my own charms didn’t allow me to believe her so smitten as to cross nations for this. And if vengeance drove her then she could take it easily enough now without this charade. “The Dead King scares you.” She sounded too eager, desperate even. “What does he want with me?”
Even with so many yards between us I could read her. She didn’t know.
I made to step forward but something caught my foot. Looking down I saw teeth, a dog’s skull half-buried, half-emerged, gripping my foot. Another ghost, but it pinned me even so.
I looked out across the dead horde, scanning the packed crowds of ghosts behind them. Chella couldn’t know about my dog, Justice. She couldn’t have gathered all the dead of Gelleth or learned their stories. Somehow this came from me. Somehow Chella was pulling the ghosts of my past out through whatever hole it was I made in the world. And not even the ghosts I knew of but the ghosts of those whose end I caused. I felt the corner of an idea, not the whole shape of it, but a corner.
The skull brought my gaze back to the ground at my feet. “You shouldn’t have done that,” I said. I tore free. I felt him rip me but Justice’s teeth left no marks upon my boot. It was just pain, no blood. It was just my mind that trapped me. The ghosts couldn’t harm us or we would have died in Ruth’s house, we would have burned with them when the Builders’ Sun lit. Chella brought them only to torment me.
“Let’s get married, dear-heart,” Chella said. “The congregation is assembled. I’m sure we can find a cleric to perform the ceremony.”
And pushing from the other ghosts came Friar Glen, a shade wavering in the daylight, less clear than the other spirits, as if something tried to keep him back. At my hip the box of memories grew heavy. I hadn’t known Friar Glen to be dead, but perhaps I knew it once and chose to forget. He came with a slow step, hobbling, though I could see no wound upon him, and he didn’t look well pleased. In one hand he held a knife, a familiar knife, red with blood. When a dead man shambled into his path the friar stabbed him in the neck. The creature toppled with the knife still in him. Ghosts couldn’t hurt the living, but apparently they could hurt the dead plenty. Friar Glen hobbled on until he stood at Chella’s side.
I wondered how the friar’s ghost came to be here, watching me with such hatred. I could feel it from fifty yards. But more than that-more than I wondered about Friar Glen-I circled around the words Chella spoke before she called him.
The congregation is assembled.
The quick-dead moved closer though I heard no instruction. They took slow steps, their hands ready to grab and twist and tear. Against so many we would last moments.
“It’s no kind of wedding if my family can’t attend.” I sheathed my sword.
“Some ghosts I can’t summon. The royal dead are buried in consecrated tombs and lie with old magics. If I could have made your mother dance for you I would have done so long ago,” Chella said. The whisper reached me through the crowd, writhing on the lips of the quick-dead as they stepped ever closer.
The congregation is assembled, but some ghosts she can’t summon.
The remaining horses nickered behind me, nervous, even the grey.
“I was thinking of my Brothers,” I said. I opened a hand to the left and right to indicate Makin, Kent, Grumlow, and Rike.
“They can attend,” Chella said. “I will leave them their eyes.”
“Will we have no music? No poets to declaim? No flowers?” I asked. I was stalling.
“You’re stalling,” she said.
The congregation is assembled. Aside from those she can’t summon. And those she does not wish to.
“There’s a poet I’m thinking of, Chella. A poem. A fitting one. ‘To his coy mistress.’”
“Am I coy?” She walked closer now, swaying through the dead.
The wisdom of poets has outlived that of the Builders.
“The poem is about time, at least in part. About how the poet can’t stop time. And in the end he says, ‘For Thus, though we cannot make our sun; Stand still, yet we will make him run.’”
Ghosts can’t hurt men. They can drive them mad. They can torment them to the point at which they take their own lives, but they cannot wound them. I felt this to be true. My stolen necromancy told me it was so. But they can hurt the dead, it seems. I had seen it with my own eyes. The corpses that Chella set to walking could be felled by spirits because they stood closer to their world, close enough to the gates of death for a ghost to reach out and throttle them.
“Very sweet,” Chella said. “But it won’t stop me.”
“So I’ll make you run.” And with every fragment of my will I summoned my ghosts. I pulled them through the gates that Chella had opened. With arms spread wide I returned each shade and phantom, each haunt and spirit that had trailed me these long years. I bled them through my chest, let them pulse through me with each beat of my heart. I couldn’t stop Chella drawing forth those she wanted but I could make damn sure they all came, each and every one. At a run.
And they came. The congregation Chella had chosen not to invite. The burning dead of Gelleth, those that the Builders’ Sun took first, not victims from the outskirts of the explosion like Ruth and her Ma, but those who burned in the Castle Red at the heart of the inferno. They poured from me in an endless torrent. Ten of them to every child of Gelleth that Chella had brought forth. And my dead, the burning dead, brought with them a fire like no other. They burned as candles in the hearth, flesh running, flames leaping, each man or woman screaming and racing or staggering and clutching. And behind them, with measured pace, a new kind of ghost, each glowing with a terrible light that made their flesh a pink haze and shadows of their bones.
I saw nothing but fire without heat, heard only screams, and after forever we stood alone on our mound with no sign of Chella or her army save for blackened bones smouldering on damp reeds.
“Wedding’s off,” I said, and taking my bearing from the sunset I led the Brothers away to the south.
Brother Makin has high ideals. If he kept to them, we would be enemies. If he nursed his failure, we would not be friends.
35
Wedding day
“A spade?” Hobbs said.
If there was ever a man to call a spade a spade, Watch-master Hobbs was that man. I was just impressed a man of his age had any breath left at this point, for stating the obvious or otherwise.
I kicked about in the snow. Spades lay everywhere, covered by a recent fall.
“Get Stodd and Keppen’s squads shooting down the slope. Harold’s men I want using these spades to dig,” I said.
“Stodd’s dead.” Hobbs spat and watched the snowfield. The gap between the Watch and our pursuit had vanished. Here and there men stopped running. Few managed to draw a blade, let alone swing, before they were cut down.
Blood on snow is very pretty. In the deep powder it melts its way down and there’s not much to see, but where the snow has an icy crust, that dazzling white shines through the scarlet and makes the blood look somehow richer and more vital than ever it did in your veins.
“Get men shooting down the slope. I don’t much care what they hit. Legs are good. Put more bodies in the way. Slow them down.”
An injured man is more of an obstacle than a dead one. Put a big wound in a man and he often gets clingy, as though he thinks you can save him and all he has to do is hold on so you won’t leave. The fresh-wounded like company. Give them a while and they’d rather be alone with their pain. For a moment I saw Coddin, odd chinks of light offering the lines of him, curled in his tomb. Some folk bury their dead like that, curled up, forehead to knee. Makin said it makes for easier digging of a grave, but to my eye it’s more of a return. We lay coiled in the
