A Game of Thrones 4-Book Bundle

cold?
    Ghost backed away from the door. There were deep gouges where he’d raked the wood. Jon watched him with mounting disquiet. “There’s someone out there, isn’t there?” he whispered. Crouching, the direwolf crept backward, white fur rising on the back of his neck.
The guard
, he thought,
they left a man to guard my door, Ghost smells him through the door, that’s all it is
.
    Slowly, Jon pushed himself to his feet. He was shivering uncontrollably, wishing he still had a sword. Three quick steps brought him to the door. He grabbed the handle and pulled it inward. The
creak
of the hinges almost made him jump.
    His guard was sprawled bonelessly across the narrow steps, looking up at him. Looking
up
at him, even though he was lying on his stomach. His head had been twisted completely around.
    It can’t be
, Jon told himself.
This is the Lord Commander’s Tower, it’s guarded day and night, this couldn’t happen, it’s a dream, I’m having a nightmare
.
    Ghost slid past him, out the door. The wolf started up the steps, stopped, looked back at Jon. That was when he heard it; the soft scrape of a boot on stone, the sound of a latch turning. The sounds came from above. From the Lord Commander’s chambers.
    A nightmare this might be, yet it was no dream.
    The guard’s sword was in its sheath. Jon knelt and worked it free. The heft of steel in his fist made him bolder. He moved up the steps, Ghost padding silently before him. Shadows lurked in every turn of the stair. Jon crept up warily, probing any suspicious darkness with the point of his sword.
    Suddenly he heard the shriek of Mormont’s raven.
“Corn,”
the bird was screaming.
“Corn, corn, corn, corn, corn, corn.”
Ghost bounded ahead, and Jon came scrambling after. The door to Mormont’s solar was wide open. The direwolf plunged through. Jon stopped in the doorway, blade in hand, giving his eyes a moment to adjust. Heavy drapes had been pulled across the windows, and the darkness was black as ink.
“Who’s there?”
he called out.
    Then he saw it, a shadow in the shadows, sliding toward the inner door that led to Mormont’s sleeping cell, a man-shape all in black, cloaked and hooded … but beneath the hood, its eyes shone with an icy blue radiance …
    Ghost leapt. Man and wolf went down together with neither scream nor snarl, rolling, smashing into a chair, knocking over a table laden with papers. Mormont’s raven was flapping overhead, screaming,
“Corn, corn, corn, corn.”
Jon felt as blind as Maester Aemon. Keeping the wall to his back, he slid toward the window and ripped down the curtain. Moonlight flooded the solar. He glimpsed black hands buried in white fur, swollen dark fingers tightening around his direwolf’s throat. Ghost wastwisting and snapping, legs flailing in the air, but he could not break free.
    Jon had no time to be afraid. He threw himself forward, shouting, bringing down the longsword with all his weight behind it. Steel sheared through sleeve and skin and bone, yet the sound was
wrong
somehow. The smell that engulfed him was so queer and cold he almost gagged. He saw arm and hand on the floor, black fingers wriggling in a pool of moonlight. Ghost wrenched free of the other hand and crept away, red tongue lolling from his mouth.
    The hooded man lifted his pale moon face, and Jon slashed at it without hesitation. The sword laid the intruder open to the bone, taking off half his nose and opening a gash cheek to cheek under those eyes, eyes, eyes like blue stars burning. Jon knew that face.
Othor
, he thought, reeling back.
Gods, he’s dead, he’s dead, I saw him dead
.
    He felt something scrabble at his ankle. Black fingers clawed at his calf. The arm was crawling up his leg, ripping at wool and flesh. Shouting with revulsion, Jon pried the fingers off his leg with the point of his sword and flipped the thing away. It lay writhing, fingers opening and closing.
    The corpse lurched forward. There was no blood. One-armed, face cut near in half, it seemed to feel nothing. Jon held the longsword before him. “Stay away!” he commanded, his voice gone shrill.
“Corn,”
screamed the raven,
“corn, corn.”
The severed arm was wriggling out of its torn sleeve, a pale snake with a black five-fingered head. Ghost pounced and got it between his teeth. Finger bones crunched. Jon hacked at the