A Dark Sacrifice

by Madeline Howard

  “It’s the same spice they put on everything they eat,” added the other player, a knight named Brihac. “Everything they cook in the bazaar reeks of it.”

  But Cuillioc was scarcely listening. That the water came from wells inside the Citadel was all he needed to know. He sent the boy to the cellars for a cup of the rose-scented julla, then returned his attention to the ivory game board.

  The game went so slowly that after a time his attention began to wander. Stifling a yawn, he glanced around the garden. In the branches overhead he recognized a small green bird that sometimes raided crumbs from his breakfast table. She was beating her wings and darting about, trying to attend to the needs of a nestful of newly hatched youngsters. By his count, this was the third family she had attempted to raise since early spring, and if she seemed a little desperate in her efforts to provide for her brood it was hardly surprising—all of the previous fledglings had died before they left the nest.

  All at once, Cuillioc’s drowsy sense of well-being fled, and again he felt nausea clutch at his stomach. In the midst of this superabundance of life there was too much death, too many fatalities to be quite natural, like the slave woman earlier, like the baby birds who died before they even learned to fly. Even the drowned dragonflies floating in the gilded basin of the nearest fountain filled him with a sudden sense of dread.

  Something had changed. When the old lethargy threatened to take over again, this time Cuillioc found the energy to fight it off. It was as if all the vessels in his heart had shriveled and narrowed in the heat—but now they expanded with a fresh flow of blood.

  This change, however, was not an altogether pleasant one. He spent all the rest of that day in impatient anticipation, waiting for the young knight Gerig to produce the physician. When evening brought neither Gerig nor the doctor, the Prince dined with a very poor appetite and went early to his bedchamber.

  As he stood by an open window listening to insects creak in the hot, humid darkness, he cast his mind back, reliving the events of the summer, from the time he first landed with his sixty galleys of war, twelve hundred fighting men, and that viper’s nest of ambitious minor nobles, backstabbing place-seekers, and petty schemers, which his mother the Empress-Goddess had seen fit to inflict on him—whether to bolster his perceived inadequacy or to punish it, he could never be certain.

  He had begun wisely, that much he knew, by sending his scouts out to the rice fields, rain forests, and primitive little villages surrounding the city on three sides. The scouts all returned with similar reports: the farmers and villagers were just as complacent and superstitious as the city dwellers, and far less equipped to fight off an invasion.

  Cuillioc remembered asking himself: If the treasures of Mirizandi are to be so easily gained, why has no one ever invaded before? What do the kings and princes of Nephuar, Cenuphar, and Opidäia know that we never learned on Phaôrax?

  Surely it had been sensible to choose to investigate? To seek the answers to all such questions before he went blundering off with his army into the fields and forests, or gave up the thick walls of the Citadel for some other position of unknown strength? But then came the heat—so relentless, so intense—and all of his zeal had melted away.

  Idiot. Witling, he scolded himself now. You knew all along that conquering this city was only the means to an end. Mirizandi and her people are nothing to Ouriána—or at least they’ve no place in her immediate plans, except as a source of wealth to pay off her mercenaries fighting in the north. She wants to control those fabulous mines that rumors place somewhere in the interior.

  How could he have forgotten any of this, particularly with Ouriána’s priest always on hand? All during that wasted summer the only exception to the general torpor and stagnation had been Iobhar, haunting the dim corridors and shady gardens of the Citadel like some irksome spirit in his heavy red robes, exhorting the Prince to action.

  Cuillioc felt sick at heart when he considered what a tale the furiádh priest would have to tell when they returned to Apharos. He often thought he saw contempt in that bloodless face, disdain in those brass-colored eyes. Priests, warriors, magicians—the Furiádhin were not even human anymore, they were so steeped in sorcery, and it was useless to try to read their emotions. Yet this much he knew from experience: Iobhar hated anyone the Empress had ever honored with a scrap of her affection. He would do her son every injury and disservice he possibly could.

  And now he need not do anything. To simply tell the truth would be enough.

  Crossing the room with a purposeful stride, Cuillioc took a handful of rolled parchments from a shelf and carried the maps over to the bed.

  Unfurling the first one he traced with his forefinger each of the features his scouts had sketched in: the city here; the indented line of the shore; a village; a long stretch of forest and swamp; the nearest cities, Persit, Meraz, and Pira. And all of the plans he had made before, the tactics he had devised with the help of these same maps and somehow forgotten, they all came swarming back into his brain.

  In a sudden fervor, he fell to his knees by the bed and performed the rituals of homage to the Goddess. For the first time in weeks he left nothing out, went through all of the hymns and chants without hurrying through a single passage. When he was finished he felt somehow cleaner and curiously exalted.

  The knight named Gerig was out all night, ranging through the city, first pursuing rumors of a highly skilled and revered physician, then pursuing the man himself. He finally caught up with him just after daybreak.

  But when the physician arrived at the Citadel, solemn in dark green robes and a five-cornered black hat, he had nothing much to tell, beyond what the chamberlain had already passed on. “It is the Summer Fever, a disease that crops up only in the slave quarters. I can assure you, Great Prince, there is no reason for you to feel the least alarm.”

  They were in one of the dim, thick-walled audience chambers. If there was any flicker of emotion in those jet-bead eyes, it was there and gone before the Prince could even be sure that he had seen it.

  “How can a disease know a free man from a slave? How did this one gain such a fine discrimination?”

  “There are many mysteries of the human body we do not comprehend.” The doctor continued to speak with that same unnerving calm. “But of course there are many theories: that the disease arises from an excess of the melancholy humor, that it comes of a derangement in the animal spirits. Others say—But I hardly think these abstruse speculations would interest you. Only know this: we who have lived in this city all of our lives have no fear. Why, then, should you?”

  After he dismissed the physician, Cuillioc turned to Iobhar. At his request, the priest had stood in the shadows as a silent witness to the whole conversation. “A very smooth and plausible liar, I think, but a liar nonetheless.”

  “He is lying about something,” Iobhar agreed. “Yet I believe he spoke truly when he said the citizens have no fear for themselves. We know how people react to even the threat of an epidemic illness. They have a hundred different ways of warding off contagion—with fumes and smokes, talismans and philtres—though few of those measures succeed. I have seen nothing like that here. The inhabitants do seem to be convinced this Summer Fever cannot touch them.”

  The Prince changed positions in his chair. “And should we, because of that, be just as certain of our own safety?”

  “I would not advise it, Great Prince. For your own protection, I suggest you remove yourself and the noble lords of your household out of the city, at least until we know more. You might go to your flagship. The winds blow inland, and the air will be purer out on the water.”

  Cuillioc studied the furiádh in a tight-lipped silence. The effects of yesterday’s uproar were still with him, stirring up his sluggish blood; his thoughts were more lucid now than they had been for many weeks. And first among those thoughts was an impression that Iobhar had been uncommonly helpful, unusually forthcoming with what he knew and what he guessed.

  S
weat gathered in the palms of the Prince’s hands, and he could feel it trickling down his sides; early as it was, it promised to be hotter than the day before. He was not quite certain which disturbed him more: the idea of Iobhar as his friend and counselor, or as his undeclared enemy. Weighing one thing against the other, he decided he would rather have one of the sacred crocodiles crawl into bed with him and declare undying friendship than form even a temporary alliance with the priest.

  Nor could he dismiss the all-too-likely possibility that Iobhar and his Pharaxion nobles had fabricated an elaborate hoax in order to further some convoluted scheme. They had been quiet far too long. Certainly, he could not imagine any one of them balking at the murder of a slave; most of them had connived at much worse. The only trustworthy men in the Citadel were those of his own household.

  But if there were plots, it would be better to pretend that he had no suspicions. So with his most guileless smile, he thanked the priest for advice he had no actual intention of following. To leave the city in Iobhar’s charge? He was not such a fool as that.

  “If I may make a suggestion, Great Prince. Your little rat of a page seems to be cultivating friendships in the kitchen, and indeed all through the servant’s quarters. Perhaps you should instruct him to question his friends about the disease.”

  Cuillioc turned the idea over in his mind, trying to uncover the hidden snare. Never had Iobhar made a suggestion that was not part of some scheme. Yet after a long period of examination Cuillioc could only conclude that this time his own advantage and Iobhar’s marched hand in hand.

  Accordingly, he did as the priest advised, sent for his page, and gave him his instructions.

  11

  The sun dipped behind the mountains, but King Ristil would brook no delay. Dusk lasted long at this time of year, and he was determined to keep his riders moving.

  So great was his desire for speed that they rode for a time under the stars. More than once, those who rode to the fore nearly came to grief riding too close to the edge of a sheer drop, or barely missed tumbling into some deep chasm when the road turned and the land fell away. They were saved each time by Prince Ruan’s keen night vision. At last the King said they might stop a while and rest the horses. Everyone dismounted and sat on the ground; they lit hundreds of little fires, but no one slept.

  At the first tint of purple dawn above the peaks, they were up and riding again. The weather remained clear and bright; melting snow formed thousands of tiny rills and rivulets running along beside the road. They travelled all through that day with the fewest possible stops to breathe the horses, and took their meals in the saddle, when they even thought to eat. So swift was their progress that those who rode in the vanguard reached the valley under the pinewood shortly before nightfall and saw the Old Fortress rising up ahead of them in the fading light.

  It took Sindérian’s breath away: her first glimpse of the ancient fortified city, piled stone upon stone, level upon level, to such incredible heights. Every stone shone with a pearly luster; every roof tile was afire in the sunset. Yet something that might be a memory, or a warning, or an omen, hovered at the edge of her thought.

  As they approached the walls, a deadly silence hung over the entire valley. Even the birds had fled—even the carrion eaters, and that was strangest of all. Sindérian had seen battlefields before, but never anything like this. Wherever she looked there was desolation: hundreds of bodies left to rot; immense wooden siege engines, broken and abandoned, looking like nothing so much as gibbets waiting for someone to come and be hanged.

  All the horses began to jibe and balk. From his perch on her saddlebow Faolein bated and screamed like a wild hawk, protesting something large, dead, and covered in dirty white fur lying directly in their path. Steering the black mare in a wide circle, Sindérian glanced over her shoulder to get a better look. It lay stretched out on one side, with an arrow piercing a bizarrely elongated throat.

  “Skinchanger,” she said under her breath.

  “Varjolükka,” answered one of the King’s men. “Our horses can never abide them, alive or dead, but the barbarians teach their own beasts to endure them.”

  She saw just ahead a gaping hole in the fortifications, and all around where the wall had been there was great debris of shattered stone and pulverized rock. When they reached the outskirts of the wreckage, horses shied again, this time from a gigantic, sprawling man-shaped figure pinned in place by a pile of stone blocks and the splintered remains of a ladder.

  Worst of all was a pervasive smell, a taint, infinitely worse than anything rising from the decomposing bodies, with a stomach-churning familiarity about it that Sindérian could not immediately place. Then she did remember; the muscles in her abdomen clenched, and sweat broke out on the palms of her hands. It was the stench of blackest magic, and the last time she had encountered it in such strength was on the road from Gilaefri after the fall of Cuirarthéros.

  So it was true, just as she had feared even before the thunderstorm: Ouriána’s priests had arrived here first.

  Weaving a path through the rubble, Sindérian and those who rode with her came at length into the outer bailey. White marble walls rose sheer on either side; buildings stared blindly into the yard with dark, shuttered eyes. And everywhere was the drip, drip, drip of melting ice falling on marble pavements.

  Here, someone had at least made an effort to pile up hundreds of the bodies as if for burning, until the work of gathering so many must have proved overwhelming. Following after the King, the first riders passed under the arch of a broken gate and into a second yard, then into a third, and each was the same: silent buildings and piled corpses. Meanwhile, shadows were steadily lengthening and it grew darker and darker between the walls.

  Circling the third enclosure looking for a way into the next, Sindérian heard a faint rattle of chains, followed by the sound of timbers scraping over gravel. An inner gate began to open slowly, a foot at a time. Lantern light flashed from within as someone peered out, and a moment later the gate swung wide.

  A crowd of gaunt-faced men, followed by women and children like pale ghosts of famine erupted into the yard. Most came silently, but no few wept unashamedly as they fell to their knees before the King. Visibly moved, Ristil swung down from the saddle and walked among them, dropping a comforting hand on a man’s shoulder, a light caress on a child’s hair. Their hands reached out eagerly to touch his cloak as he passed; men and women cried out his name, followed his every movement with hungry eyes.

  Sindérian felt her throat close up and her eyes sting—how could he bear this tide of suffering, sorrow, and loss?

  “Haestan,” said the King, stopping before a man with grizzled hair and a scarred face. “It is Haestan? You are one of Prince Kivik’s captains.” The old warrior nodded. “Then you will tell me what has happened here, and if my son is alive.”

  With his grey head sinking under the King’s regard, the old man answered in a voice roughened by grief. “Highness, our losses have been heavy. Most of the men who came with the Prince from Lückenbörg are dead. Your son is alive and so is Lord Skerry, though both suffered many wounds. But—” He choked on the words, shuddered, and went on with an effort. “But our Lady Winloki is gone.”

  “Gone?” Ristil seemed to sway, then quickly regained command of himself. “Where has she gone?”

  “No one knows where. The Princess was stolen away from us. But perhaps—it may be—Prince Kivik would wish to tell you more of this himself.”

  “Yes,” said the King. “Yes. I am eager to speak to my son. Take me to him at once.”

  Prince Kivik’s tale—after an emotional reunion with his father—was so convoluted and full of strange twists, he was more than halfway through before Sindérian and the rest began to make sense of it.

  They were seated with the Prince and his cousin by one of the cavernous fireplaces in the keep, sipping a thin broth of uncertain origins out of cracked wooden bowls. After many digressions, he finally came to the point
in his story where the wall near the gatehouse shattered in a burst of light and sound. “And then I saw them picking their way through the rubble. They weren’t Eisenlonders, nor dead witch-lords as I first thought, but creatures I had never seen before, all in red robes, like to men in form—but not like them either.”

  “In truth, they were Furiádhin,” said Sindérian, putting her bowl aside. With the first pangs of hunger dulled, she had no desire for more of the bitter broth. “Accompanied, no doubt, by their acolytes and temple guards.”

  Kivik frowned and shook his head. “I never imagined that Ouriána’s priests might look like that.” Then he shrugged, a movement that brought on a little grunt of pain. She suspected cracked ribs or a broken collarbone.

  “And yet it is the only thing that would make any sense of what happened next. One of the Skørnhäär came striding in after them, stepping over bodies and broken walls. We both saw that much”—he and Skerry exchanged a bleak, frustrated glance across the room—“but we didn’t know what they were after; even if we had guessed, we thought that Winloki was safe in the infirmary behind six more gates. And in the confusion of organizing an orderly retreat, getting our men down from the walls and across the outer ward to the second gate, fighting every step of the way, we never knew until afterward that our cousin had been abducted.”

  Skerry took up the story from that point. “Somehow the giant knew where to find her. Those who saw everything said that he led the strangers straight to the healers’ tent, where she was working. A dozen men rushed to defend her but it was no use; the riders and the ice giant just trampled them down. Then one of the creatures—the Furiádhin—snatched her up onto his horse, and away they all went as they had come, back through the gap in the wall.”

  His jaw was bruised and his left arm in a sling. Like everyone else who had been holed up in this place for weeks, the two Skyrran princes were knife-blade thin, as haggard as ghosts, but there was also an unnatural pallor, an unsteadiness to their movements, which spoke of illness and injuries beyond the obvious ones Sindérian could see. They were probably on their feet at all only in stubborn defiance of their own healers.