03 - God King (22 page)

“All’s bonny,” called the man. “None reddin the fire the night, eh?”

“Indeed,” agreed Alwin, though he had no idea what the clansman had just
said.

He moved on, looking up at the Namathir to Count Marius’ castle, its many
windows glowing with colour and light. The lord of Jutonsryk was a hard man to
like, but Marius knew how to ran a busy port, understanding that commerce and
trade would only flow into a city if its streets could be made safe. Merchants
would not come to a city where they feared for their life and cargo.

Which wasn’t to say the city was a Utopian society where crime didn’t happen,
far from it, but those who flouted the law were punished by Marius’ only
penalty—death. Justice in Jutonsryk was harsh, uncompromising and final. Which
made for a city where all but the most foolish drunks or desperate footpads
observed the law.

Alwin followed the line of the docks as he and his lancers made his way
towards Taal’s Fire, the most southerly beacon brazier of the docks. It burned
with blue fire, a shimmering lodestone for incoming ships. Further north, around
the curve of the bay, Ulric’s Fire wavered with a green light. Differing herbs
altered the colour of the flames, and it was thanks to these beacons, together
with the one atop the Tower of Tides, that not a single vessel had been lost
while navigating the treacherous channels around the Reik estuary.

As Alwin looked north, the light from Ulric’s Fire was momentarily obscured,
as though a shimmering curtain had been drawn in front of it. He frowned and
squinted through the darkness as it flickered and disappeared.

“Did you see that?” he said, turning towards his warriors.

They nodded and Alwin looked south towards Taal’s Fire. It too was gone.

“Damn me,” hissed Alwin. “I don’t like that, no I do not.”

He looked back at the Tower of Tides, reassured to see that its beacon light
was still lit. Low clouds clung to the distant tower, tendrils of mist that
seemed not to move with the wind. Alwin looked out to sea, and his mouth fell
open at the sight of a rolling grey fog coming in from the darkness. Living by
the ocean, with a coastline of marshland to the south, a man got used to mists,
but this was something more. It hugged the water, undulating over its black
surface like a scum of sea filth as it crept towards the city.

The fog was thick and reeked worse than a bloated corpse dragged from the
water. It drifted over the hundreds of berthed ships, slinking and creeping over
their timbers with an unclean touch. It slithered up the quayside, oozing onto
the docks with dreadful purpose, and Alwin knew he’d never seen anything quite
so unpleasant.

“It’s only mist, damn it,” he chided himself, irritated that something so
banal had him spooked. Even as he told himself it was only weather, he couldn’t
shake the feeling that it portended something far worse. No sooner had he formed
the thought than he heard the dolorous peal of a brass ship’s bell, a talisman
to guide a vessel through just such a fog, yet this familiar sound gave him no
comfort.

The sound was dead, without the natural echo or earthly touch of an
instrument forged by man. Another bell answered it, then another. Soon the
quayside was echoing to the ringing of dead bells, hundreds of flat peals that
slid through the darkened streets like midnight assassins. Sailors and traders
were emerging from the taverns, drawn by the deathly echoes and an instinctual
understanding that these sounds were just
wrong
in every way it was
possible to be.

Alwin wanted to tell these people to run, to flee whatever doom was soon to
overtake the city, but he couldn’t think of what to tell them that wouldn’t
sound ridiculous. He looked back out to sea, searching for the source of the
hollow bells, now hearing the sluggish passage of water over rotten timbers.
Lights began to appear in the fog, drifting corpse lights that rose and fell
with the tide, a hundred or more of them.

They shone like a host of candles for the departed, poisonously evil flares
that bridged the gap between the living and the dead. Or guided the dead
to
the living…

“Reinen, get back to the barrack house,” ordered Alwin.

“Gather everyone you can find and have them arm themselves before getting
down to the quayside.”

“Sir? What’s going on?”

“Don’t argue with me, just do it!”

Reinen nodded and sped off, grateful to be freed from remaining at the
water’s edge. Moments later, Alwin heard a clatter of armour behind him as his
lancers fled the quay, leaving him alone on the dockside. Though he knew
hundreds of people were nearby, he could see none of them as the fog thickened
around him.

Isolated in his mist-wreathed world, he saw nothing but the approaching
lights and heard nothing beyond the sullen bells, his thudding heartbeat, the
slurp of water and the rattle of dusty bones, chains and rusted iron.

A shape emerged from the fog; a black-hulled vessel wreathed in a spectral
light and which could surely never have remained above the waves such was the
rotten, holed nature of its hull. Its timbers were swollen and decayed, and
whole swathes of its side were missing. Stagnant water poured
from
it as
though recently raised from the deeps. The fog lifted momentarily, and Alwin saw
hundreds of these ships of the damned surging into Jutonsryk harbour, each with
tattered crimson sails that hung lank and limp, stirred by no wind and made fast
without ropes or crew.

Captain Raul claimed he had seen two hundred vessels of the dead, and Alwin
now knew the southern captain’s estimate of numbers had been conservative. The
black ships moved against the wind, relentless and inexorable as they drifted
over the sea to the quay. Black things moved through the sky, horrors thankfully
concealed in the thick fog, swooping over the city with murder in mind.
Chittering flocks of bats billowed in their wake and a distant screech of
something monstrous echoed through the fog-bound city.

Muffled by the fog, Alwin heard cries of alarm from the moored ships. Alarm
bells began ringing, on the ships and throughout the city, but Alwin knew it was
too late for any warning to save Jutonsryk. He heard a sickening crash of
timbers and looked back over his shoulder to see the
Ormen Lange
cloven
in two by an eastern war galley built in the style of a hundred years ago. The
galley slammed into the quayside with a thunderous crash of splitting timbers,
and Alwin had his first look at the damned crew aboard this abominable vessel.

All along the gunwale, dreadful figures with piercing green lights for eyes
stared at him with hungry fervour. Pale corpses, rotted skeletons in corroded
armour and hunched figures with water streaming from their wounds clutched
spears, axes and short blades in their dead hands.

They streamed onto the land, a host of dead sailors come for revenge on the
world of the living. Alwin heard the first screams from further along the quay.
The sound broke through the paralysing terror that held his limbs fast, and he
drew his sword, determined to fight these seaborne invaders with whatever
courage he could muster.

He ran back to the
Ormen Lange,
seeing the clansman he had spoken to
earlier crawling from the wreckage of his ship. Bloated, grey-skinned dead men
hacked at him with sharp cutlasses. As soon as they saw Alwin, they abandoned
their victim and lurched towards him with a dreadful hunger in their sunken,
dead eyes.

Alwin wanted to ran, to live, but he was a Jutone warrior, and he brought his
sword up.

“Come on then, you dead bastards!” he shouted, hurling himself at the damned.

His first blow clove a rotten corpse in two. Its flesh was soft and yielding,
and his blade easily cut through its sodden meat. Alwin slashed the neck of
another drowned man, and a froth of stagnant water bubbled from the wound. A
grinning skeleton came at him and he slammed his blade through its skull,
dropping it in a clatter of bone. The dead pressed in, dying by the dozen, but
they poured in unending numbers from the hundreds of ships.

He buried his sword in the guts of another waterlogged corpse, twisting the
handle to relieve the suction of wet flesh on the blade. A corpse fastened its
teeth on his arm and bit through the meat there. Alwin cried out and punched the
dead thing in the face. Its jellied eye squirted ooze, momentarily blinding him,
but momentarily was all the opening the undead needed.

Clawed hands fastened on his throat and tearing limbs pinned his arms to his
side, as they bore him to the ground. Sharpened teeth gnawed at his flesh and
Alwin’s sword was torn from his grip. He struggled furiously, but there were too
many and the pain was too great. He screamed as they devoured him, biting chunks
from his legs and stomach like warriors with hunks of roast boar at a victory
feast. Blood burst from his mouth, and the stink of it drove his killers to
fresh heights of hunger.

Alwin’s last sight was the beacon fire atop the Tower of Tides as it died,
plunging the world into a darkness which it could never survive.

The muster fields of Three Hills were thick with horses and the clamour of
warriors. Maedbh wound a careful path through the thousands of people gathered
here, nodding to those she knew and picking out the differing tattoos of various
tribal sword bands. Even within the Asoborns there were fiercely clannish
groupings, and though they were united by Queen Freya’s call to arms, each
swaggered with something to prove.

At the centre of the maelstrom, Freya directed her warriors with fiery sweeps
of her spear and shouted pronouncements. Her twin boys were at her side, their
faces downcast and sullen. Maedbh could guess the reason why, now understanding
a measure of Wolfgart’s reluctance to see Ulrike trained in the arts of war.

Five hundred chariots were lined up along the edge of the field or rolled in
to take up position by the rutted track that led towards the river. Two acres of
forest had been felled to corral the horses and a neverending train of wagons
was assembling on the far side of the hills to carry their fodder. Sword bands
in their hundreds milled around the field, warriors from all across Asoborn
lands greeting one another like long lost friends. Many of these warriors would
not have seen each other for years, and Maedbh lamented that it took times of
such darkness to bring them together.

Ulrike walked beside her, holding tightly to her hand. Every night since the
attack of the wolves, she had woken in the darkness, screaming and weeping
uncontrollably. Maedbh had held her tight, hating that her little girl was
suffering like this. She remembered her own first blood, a desperate chariot
ride before a mob of greenskins raiding the eastern lands of the Asoborns.
Freya’s mother, Queen Sigrid, had broken the enemy horde, but Maedbh never
forgot the exhilarating terror of riding close enough to the enemy that she
could smell their rank, rotten-meat breath and feel the bite of their axes on
her chariot.

“Is the queen going to fight the wolves?” asked Ulrike.

“Yes, my dear,” said Maedbh. “That’s exactly what she’s going to do. All
these men and women are going to ride south and hunt them down. They’re going to
kill every one of them so they never hurt anyone ever again. Do you understand
me? The queen doesn’t tolerate bad wolves in her lands.”

“Good,” said Ulrike. “I hope they kill them all. I hate wolves.”

“Those weren’t real wolves,” said Maedbh, stopping and coming down to
Ulrike’s level. She looked her daughter in the eye and said, “Real wolves are
servants of Ulric, the god you were named for, so don’t hate them. Those things
that attacked us were once noble wolves, but an evil man made them into monsters
with his dark magic.”

Ulrike nodded, though Maedbh saw she was yet to be convinced. Maedbh led her
through the sword muster, passing mail-clad fighters of the east, bare-chested
horse archers of the hill folk, colourfully tattooed women of the Myrmidian
sects and burly horsemen from the northern woodlands with their long iron-tipped
lances. Everywhere she heard proud boasts of the monsters the warriors would
kill, tall tales of martial prowess and bravado, but it rang hollow to Maedbh’s
ears.

Mixed in with the Asoborns were perhaps two hundred Brigundians and a hundred
Menogoth warriors; all that had survived the invasion of the dead. Hundreds of
refugees from both tribes were sheltered in Three Hills, but these men, with
their grief-etched faces and hollow eyes, sought only vengeance. Maedbh didn’t
blame them; their lands had been ravaged, their homes destroyed and their
families murdered. With nothing left to lose, they were only too glad to join
the Asoborn war muster.

Maedbh knew how she would feel if Three Hills suffered as their lands had
suffered, and that thought gave her stride fresh purpose as she marched through
the uprooted warriors towards the Asoborn queen.

Freya stood beside her chariot, a gold and bronze creation of deadly power.
Its sides were reinforced with iron cords and layered wood against the grain.
Golden fire was inlaid in finely crafted carvings of flaming wheels and blazing
cornets. A dozen of the Queen’s Eagles surrounded her, mounted on tall,
wide-chested geldings, their golden-winged helms shining like sunlight on
silver. Sigulf and Fridleifr harnessed two beasts Maedbh recognised as having
once belonged to Wolfgart’s herds to the chariot, though it was clear the boys
were less than happy with their mother.

Freya herself was clad in her finest armour of bronze and iron, and, as
always, the queen was attired to impress as much as protect. Bronze mail hung in
a weave from her shoulders, and the plates protecting her chest and belly were
moulded to the form of the muscles beneath. Iron greaves and vambrace were
strapped to her shins and forearms, leaving the curved sway of her hips and
thighs bare. A scarlet cloak was pinned to her shoulders with silver brooches in
the form of snarling wolves.