The Dead King approached the dais, somehow a dark figure despite the sky-blue of Summerson’s cloak. Behind him a golden wedge of the emperor’s guard. My guard – Chella in their midst. And I stood my ground, upon the dais, before the throne, with the Hundred aligned behind me in their own wedge. Gorgoth joined me on the dais at my left shoulder, Makin at my right, Kent behind him, Marten behind Gorgoth, not a weapon between them. Sindri mounted the first step, Uncle Robert taking the same place on the far side. The guard who had watched over our Congression, a dozen men in total, stood with the Hundred, all save one who’d contrived to break his neck in the confusion and donate his sword to Rike.

I spared a glance for the men at my shoulders. I’d called them brothers on the road many a time, stood with them in the face of danger, shared meat and mead. A brotherhood of the road, sure enough, but a mean thing, men to die with rather than for. But in this place, before this enemy, who brought with him the certainty and song of death, who breathed a fear far worse than any I had felt upon the lichway when the ghosts came many years before, in this place it seemed that the men who stood with me were true brothers.

‘Hello Jorg.’ The Dead King looked up at me from the base of the dais.

His regard remained the same no matter whose eyes he watched me from. Somehow familiar, overburdened with accusation, a cold inspection that woke in me every sorrow I had known.

‘Why are you here?’ I asked.

‘The same reason as you.’ He never looked away. ‘Because others said that I may not.’

‘I say that you may not,’ I told him.

‘Will you stop me? Brother Jorg?’ His tone light but with the most bitter undercurrent, as if the ‘brother’ burned his tongue.

‘Yes.’ Just the nearness of him took the strength from my arms. He carried death, bled it from every pore, his existence an insult to all things living.

‘And how will you do that, Jorg?’ He climbed the first step of the dais.

I swung at him by way of an answer, iron-wood blurring through the air. Stick met flesh with a wet thump. The Dead King closed Kai’s hand about it, twisted the rod from my hand and smashed it into splinters on the edge of the second step.

‘How will you stop me, Brother?’ He climbed the second step. ‘You’ve no power. Nothing. An empty vessel. What little magic you ever held has long gone.’

We stood face to face, close enough to reach out for each other’s necks, though I knew how that would end.

‘And what magic do you bring, I wonder?’

For he carried something more complex than necromancy, more than horror and the crude animation of dead flesh. The despair, the longing, and the loss that threatened to drown us all, that made the kings of nations cower and pale, that wasn’t a weapon, not something made for us, but just an echo of what rang through him.

‘Only truth, Brother Jorg,’ he said.

And with those words the bitter play of my life rose around me, mother’s music wrapping it but played too loud, a jarring discord of sour notes. I saw the moments strung out across years, cruelty, cowardice, vicious pride, a failure at every turn to be the man I could have been, a path through days littered with the wreckage of lives I lacked the courage to protect or repair.

‘I’ve been a bad man?’ I struggled to keep the weakness from my voice. ‘The king of dead things has waded through blood to tell me I have fallen short of sainthood? I thought you came here for battle? Put a sword in my hand and dance with me? Do—’

‘You’ve been a coward, you failed at every turn to protect those you love.’ All his words fell like judgments, the weight of them crushing, though I sought to shrug them off with denial.

‘You came for the empire throne, so why this obsession with my failings? If you think me weak, if you want the throne … try to take it.’

‘I came for you, Brother Jorg,’ he said. ‘For your family.’

‘Try.’ The word burned my throat, forced past a snarl. The bond to your child can form in an instant or grow by stealth, hook by hook, until you could no more stand aside than let go your skin. In that moment I knew I loved my son. That my father’s strength had passed me by, and that I not only lacked the singularity of will to hold the empire throne but that I would die in the useless defence of a squalling infant too young to know I existed, rather than run to father more another day.

Without command, without battle cry, almost without sound the dead guard advanced, quick and open-handed, tearing the helms from their heads so that we could see the hunger in them.

Of the men at my shoulder only Gorgoth dropped back, retreating from the dais. If pressed to pick the man to run it would have been Makin or Kent. They had seen the quick dead in the Cantanlona Marsh and knew the horror of them, the awful strength, the way they fought on though cut almost to offal.

‘Run,’ the Dead King said. ‘I’ll let you go. Just leave the child to me. Leave this little Wennith whore of yours.’

The dead surged and Makin, Kent and Marten went to meet them passing to either side of the Dead King and me. Just moments left to us and I held nothing. Lights and doors. Empty hands. A few guards, finding their courage, sallied from the side entrances to attack their dead comrades. The first of the living fell to the dead with dismaying swiftness.

Something exploded from the floor around the dais. Somethings. In half a dozen places the flagstones shattered into sharp chunks and red blurs tore through the remains while they still hung in the air. It took long moments even to focus on the creatures as they ripped into the Dead King’s troops. Trolls, but red of hide, akin to Gorgoth rather than their cousins beneath Halradra, and of larger build. The first of them picked up an armoured man and threw him over the heads of the legion behind to strike the wall above the Gilden Arch. Claws scythed through the next man’s neck, mail links sheared away. Descendants of the emperor’s bodyguard, defending the throne. Six of them, terrible but too few.

I saw Kent snatch the sword of a fallen man just before another bore him to the ground. The dead swept round us, making the dais an island, cutting into the Hundred behind us.

‘Run!’ the Dead King said again. ‘They’ll let you go.’

‘No.’

‘No? But isn’t that what you’re good at, Brother? Jorg? Aren’t you well-versed in leaving the child to die while you run off to hide? Perhaps you could find another bush to cower in?’

‘What— who are you?’ I stared into Kai Summerson’s eyes, trying to see past them.

‘You’ve left mother and son to die before, Jorg, slip away again. I won’t tell.’ Acid on every word as though I’d done him some deep and personal hurt.

Somehow I had my hands on his throat, though I knew he didn’t need to draw breath, though I knew he could snap my arms. ‘You know nothing of them, nothing!’ I spun him around and he offered no resistance.

Over his shoulder Gorgoth, up against the wall, some small figure behind him, something dark in one hand, clutched against his chest. Two of the six trolls fought around him, an extravagance of violence, impossible speed, strength, skill, against impossible odds. Limbs, guts, armour, flying in crimson arcs, and still the dead rushed on. Gorgoth bent over his tiny burden, shielding it from the dead with his own body, crouching lower, lower, lost in the melee. Miana’s white face now seen above his shoulder.