Harran waved at two of his men and they climbed down to inspect more closely.
I nudged Brath closer to the captain. ‘If it’s corpses we’re to fight, best to do it with our feet dry and space to see them coming. How deep is the water around us? I’d say two feet? Three? Not drowning deep? Even if the dead crawled through it a man might mark the ripples in their wake?’
‘Deeper in places,’ Harran said. Another captain disagreed. Harran and two more guard captains, Rosson and Devers, started to argue the lie of the land.
Marten rode through a gap in the fence, down into the flood. He stood in his stirrups to face us in the gloom, the water lapping his toes. ‘It’s about this deep, sire.’
‘Dozens,’ said the man checking the fence, peeling the garments from it. ‘Scores maybe.’
‘We’ll stay here,’ I said. ‘And ride into Gottering with first light.’
I accompanied Katherine and Gomst back to the carriage. ‘I’ll sleep in here tonight,’ I told Miana as she opened the door. ‘I want a sword close to you.’
‘I’ll marshal the guard around the carriage,’ Makin said from the saddle.
‘Put Kent on the roof. Rike and Gorgoth by the doors. Let Marten organize patrols through the fields. Better a drowned guardsman or two than being taken by surprise.’
Cold woke me in the night. Even with Miana pressed against me beneath a bearskin throw, and with Katherine’s weight through the thickness of her own furs, the cold opened my eyes. The faint slosh of horses moving through the standing waters became a fractured sound, a brittle tinkling and a creaking. Ice.
I leaned toward the nearer window, across Katherine, and found her watching me. In the dark her eyes made a gleam without colour. She drew aside the window cover and together we squinted through the perforations of the grille, the steam of our breath mixing.
The screams started faint and grew no louder, but with each passing minute the horror mounted. Screams reaching across the skin of ice, all the way from the dark shapes of Gottering. I knew it for pain. Terror has a different quality and pain will scare away fear quick enough.
‘I should go out.’
‘Stay,’ she said.
So I did.
Katherine sat up, straight-backed against the cushioned rest. ‘Something’s coming.’ I reached for my sword – she shook her head. ‘Coming a different way.’
For a moment, before she closed her eyes, I swear I saw them: green, grass-green, lit from within. She sat still, ice-still, painted in black and pale by moonlight through the window grille. I thought her perfect and need trembled in me. Screams I had heard before.
She sat without motion as the long night marched past, her lips twitching with an occasional word, muttered and indistinct. Miana and the old men slept, uneasy in their dreams but not tormented, and I watched Katherine, listening to the distant howling, to the crackle of ice, and to the drawing of her breath.
24
We came into Gottering at first light. The water sloshed around the carriage floor at the deepest point and brought the smell of the river to us, but we didn’t have to get out.
I climbed from the carriage in the town square, with the flood trickling down the step behind me. The place showed no signs of damage, a pleasant enough town in the most prosperous region of Attar. Bunting from the harvest festival still hung across the main street from rooftop to rooftop. A child’s hoop beside the carriage wheels. Birdsong.
‘Did it seem to the patrols that the screams came from town?’ I asked.
Harran nodded. ‘Couldn’t be more than an hour since they stopped.’
A sniff of the air spoke of rot and shit, cold against the sinuses, what you expect from any town. And something else.
‘Blood,’ I said. ‘There’s slaughter been done here. I can smell it.’
‘Search the houses.’ Harran waved his men on. Dozens of them set off, ducking through doorways, the dawn light gleaming on their mail.
The first of the guard re-emerged within minutes. He held some kind of garment out before him, a pale and wrinkled thing, his face, almost as pale, kept stiff in a mask of revulsion.
‘Here!’ I called the man to me and put my hands out to inspect his prize.
He placed it in my arms without waiting for further invitation.
Even with it draped across my forearms, with the weight of it, the raw scent, and the faintly obscene warmth still clinging there, it took several moments before I understood what I held. It took an effort not to flinch and drop the thing in that instant of realization. I lifted it up, let the arms hang, the scalp flop.
‘It takes some skill to flay a man so completely,’ I said. I scanned the company, meeting the gaze of each soldier. ‘Terror is a weapon, gentlemen, and our enemy understands its use. Let’s be sure that we also understand this game.’
I let the skin drop to the cobbles. A wet sound. ‘Find them all. Pile them here.’
I rode the empty streets with Red Kent and Makin, circling the town at the water’s edge, finding nothing. By the time the sun cleared the rooftops Harran’s men had made a heap of one hundred and ninety skins, taken from cellars, bedrooms, stables, chairs before hearths, all across town. Each of a piece with just the three slices that a practised huntsman would use to take the hide from a deer. Men, women, young and old, children’s skins lay there, all faces wrinkled now. I picked up the hoop toy from by the carriage and fretted it through my fingers as the guard built the pile.
Marten escorted Miana and Katherine from the carriage into the Red Fox Inn, Gottering’s only such establishment. Miana waddled, her belly impossibly large, discomfort written across her face. Marten saw them installed in cushioned chairs and kept their company while
