Published at 29th of December 2023 9:42 am

Chapter 34: Four years earlier

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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.” 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.

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