The House of Sacrifice

by Anna Smith Spark

  “My heart, is it?” A brilliant red ruby, with a great flaw running down the centre of it, like a scar. “Did you mean it to be quite so symbolic, Thalia?”

  “If it was your heart, Marith, I’d lock it away in a chest and bury it in a pit a thousand miles deep in the furthest corner of the desert wilds. If it was your heart, Marith, I’d sail out a thousand miles over the Bitter Sea and cast it away into the waves where no one would ever find it. No. I didn’t think of any kind of symbolism. I just thought you’d like it.”

  “I do like it.”

  “I knew you would.”

  He came out of the tent. It had got full dark now. The people of the town would have sat in silence listening to the twilight bell, in the Great Temple of Sorlost a child who was not Thalia might have sacrificed a man to their cursed god. I’ll tear that bloody temple down and melt the twilight bell to make myself a new throne as King of Sorlost, Marith thought. And I’ll stand in the Small Chamber, the sacrifice room, and I’ll curse their god in every language for what Thalia had to do there. I’ll break the altar stone to bits with my bare hands and spit on it and curse the god.

  Memory: a great gobbet of yellow phlegm on a gold-painted dais. Smell of shit. A wild man’s eyes and an empty hate-filled croaking voice. “Filth. Pestilence. Poison. Better all the world died in torment, than lived under your rule.”

  Ha! Set up a Temple to himself, in place of one to Great Lord pissing Tanis. Keep the altar and the priestess and the knife.

  Kiana Sabryya’s voice cut through his dreaming: “Marith. We’re ready.”

  The camp was alive with torches. Horsemen. Kiana rode up, eyes glittering.

  “We’re ready, My Lord King.”

  “Good.”

  Brychan led up the white horse. Gods, it really was a beautiful creature. It too looked excited, on edge and happy, it seemed to know what was to come. Marith swung himself up, spread his cloak out behind him. In the torchlight the horse looked red, his cloak looked black. The horse pranced joyfully. The bag with Osen’s head in it bounced up and down.

  Ryn rode over to them, smiling. Looked at the bag briefly. He’d never asked. Kiana must have told him? He’d never asked about Osen, so he must know. He’d never asked about Thalia either, come to that. Unless he thought it was her head in there.

  “Ready?”

  Marith smiled. “I think so.”

  A hundred horsemen, as many again on foot. He kept them in better order than Ryn had; they went on very quietly, even the new ones from the White Isles. The sand was lovely to ride over for keeping quiet. And then, very suddenly, the sand was growing up with crops, poor wretches trying to farm here, and there ahead were trees and houses. The town. Many of the houses still had lights burning. Noises. Midden smells. The smell of goat-dung hearth smoke. In the house nearest to them a window was lit up and a baby was crying and a dog was barking at the cries.

  Kiana took twenty of the horsemen off, skirting around to the other side of the town. Marith chewed a handful of keleth seeds, took a gulp of wine. Drew his sword.

  A bell began to ring in the town. Marith almost fell out of the saddle at the noise. More dogs began to bark. More windows lit up.

  “Amrath and the Altrersyr!” Marith kicked the horse into a run.

  The baby stopped crying. He remembered that very clearly. The town was alive with panic, but the baby stopped crying.

  The townspeople, crazed, all of them, came running out of their houses. Shouts and wails. Most of them weren’t even armed. Marith cut them down one after another. Blood. Blood. Blood. Blood. Blood. They tried to run, he came after them. They threw themselves at him, he broke them. Through the streets, crashing down killing as he went. On the horse he towered over them; the children especially made him laugh just how small they were, he had to bend forward in the saddle to reach them. They scattered before him, like birds flying up. There was no resistance to him. Men, women, children dying before him, so easy, simpler and easier than it had been for so long. A slaughter: he thought of the men who went out on the rocks on the north islands of the White Isles, killed the seal pups as they lay there on the rocks. No fear in him, or in the men: how could they be afraid, killing unarmed children, weeping women, screaming weeping shaking men? In his head all was calm and certain. Peace in him. Killing that does not need doubt or thought. A woman with two children in her arms was running, he pushed the horse after her. One of the children fell from her arms. Wriggled out of her arms. Purple-faced with fear. It rolled on the ground screaming, Marith rode the horse up to it, stopped over it, the horse raised one gilded hoof, stepped down. The woman ran on with the other child in her arms, had not tried to go back. Marith rode after her and killed her, and killed the child that she held clutched to her breast. She held it like a shield, over her heart. Gods knew if she was trying to protect it or use it to protect herself from him. He had to cut through it to get to her, either way. She dropped it, dying, as she died and he rode the horse over them both. The horse’s hooves were covered with blood. The blood was quickly covered in sand.

  A man came at him. He cut the man down. The man died. A woman came at him. He cut the woman down. The woman died. It blurred. Became nothing. One shapeless mass of bodies, that he was cutting at. People were trying to run, and he chased them down, and he killed them.

  A yell. Looked up. A woman leapt from the roof of a building, screaming; it was a tall building, three storeys, she made a gasping sound as she struck the ground. One of his men was up on the roof behind her. Disappointment on the man’s face.

  The building was a caravan inn. Large and crumbling, painted façade all rubbed away by the desert wind. Leprous, like a man with rotting skin. Marith recognized it. “The Seeker After Wisdom.” Its sign showed a dead man hanging suspended from a dead tree. He’d stayed here, with Thalia and Tobias, after they’d left Sorlost. He’d first slept with Thalia here.

  He looked up. There. There was the room.

  Two soldiers came out of the inn laughing, swords in one hand bottles of drink in the other. Marith called to them and they fell over themselves to pass him the bottles.

  “Your health.”

  “Your health, My Lord King.” The wine tasted of ripe fruit.

  Kiana rode up with two of her men behind her. Her sword was brilliant with blood, there was a smudge of blood on her face. “I think we’ve got most of them,” she said triumphantly. “There are still some people clinging on hiding in a couple of the houses. I’ve given the order to burn them. Other than that, we’re done.”

  “Good.”

  Even as he spoke, he saw flames beginning to rise from the window of the inn.

  Oh.

  Kiana said, “It’s been stripped clear, don’t worry. Not that it had much to strip. Ryn has got men loading a couple of carts up.”

  A shower of sparks as the shutters caught fire. Burning wood spiralling to the ground.

  A scream. A man leapt from the burning window. Unlike the woman, he survived it, lay scrabbling on the ground like an insect, staggered to his feet. His nightshirt was on fire. The soldier who had given Marith the bottle wandered over and killed him. Blood pooling out into the sand. A fine thing.

  Marith turned his horse around. “Call the men together. Let’s get back to the camp, then.”

  Columns forming up, men flushed-faced, laughing, shouldering bags of loot, hurriedly refastening their clothes.

  Chapter Forty

  They lost four men in the attack. Two were killed by the townspeople, one fell off his horse during the first charge, one got knifed by his best friend over something or other of no monetary worth. Marith had the friend killed as well, as an entirely futile warning to others, “Try not to knife your best friend to death; or, if you do knife your best friend, try not to get caught.” So five men. To balance it, two townspeople had surrendered and begged to join the Army of Amrath. A young couple, a boy and a girl. The girl looked delighted to be among soldiers, her eyes followed Kiana as though she
was in love.

  “They gave her a sword and she held it like she’d been born to it,” Ryn told Marith. “Said she’d never held one before. Real find, there. Sadly her man’s useless, terrified: they gave him a sword and took it away again quick. But she’s wanted this her whole life, she said.”

  “Yes.” Thought about this suddenly. “I’m… delighted I’ve given her a chance to fulfil her dreams, then. I hope it all works out well for her.”

  I wonder if anyone here remembers me? he thought. The joyful young man buying clothes and food and horses, eyes bulging out of his head because the most beautiful woman in the world somehow agreed to sleep with him.

  He untied the bag containing Osen Fiolt’s head from the saddle. Held it out to Brychan.

  “Brychan—?”

  “My Lord King?”

  “This… I…” Tied the bag back to the saddle. “Nothing.”

  Brychan nodded.

  His shoulder was hurting again. Throbbing, itching, he wanted to tear his armour off, rip out the maggots that must be crawling there. It was alive with insects, it must be, running with filth down all over his arm, his back, it was torturing him, and they would spew out, everyone would see and be revolted. But when he finally got to his tent—Ryn’s tent—and Brychan helped him get his armour off, the skin was white and perfect, only the faint silver traceries, like lacework, where the wound had been. He felt the skin itch and ripple, poison moving beneath it, maggots gnawing at it. Had a bath and washed it clean.

  A war council, the next morning, after a good long night’s sleep. He had gone to bed almost sober. Woken with a clear head. “It went well. The men enjoyed it. Good new supplies. A few of them got off towards the city, as you wanted, My Lord King. But now we ourselves are less than a day’s march from Sorlost.”

  Marith thought: we are? I thought it was further. I thought I still had another night away from it, at least. I remember… that night with Thalia, when she sat by the stream, she’d never seen a stream before, I remember that, it was like a gift she gave me, her face, when she saw the stream running, heard the sound of it, we sat beside the stream in the dusk and I told her about myself, and she seemed not to care about it. And I… yes, that was it, yes: I thought I had a day, a night, at least, before we reached Sorlost.

  Dryly, at the back of his mind: she slept with me the next night, so she can’t have cared about it. And it occurred to him suddenly to wonder what she’d have done if he hadn’t told her who he was. Told her he was a goatherd from Belen Isle, where the soil was so poor even the lords ate grey bread off clay plates. He’d never . . . never thought of it like that.

  “The men are rested,” said Kiana. “Give the order now, and we could be at the gates not long after sunset.”

  “They know we are here,” said Alis Nymen. “Why do they not send out a messenger to us?”

  “What would they say?”

  “We march,” said Marith. He got to his feet. “Give the order. I wanted them on the move by noon. Kiana. Ryn. With me. Have our horses saddled.”

  “With you?” said Ryn.

  “I want to be the first of the army to see it.” I want to remember it as I was. Alone. I have put this off for a long time. I hesitated, I let the men of Turain harm me, because I was afraid of reaching this place. That was why I lost. Yes. That was why. Not because of Alleen Durith betraying me. Not because I thought, I wanted . . . I made myself lose because I did not want to come here. I will stand before the bronze walls and I will see too many things. Did I think that I could come here and not be changed? I will cry out and the walls will shatter before me. I will speak and the walls will open to welcome me in. City of death and dreaming. Had every man in my army sunk down into death and nothing, had I been left to crawl through the desert on my hands and knees, I would have come back here to destroy it.

  He rode like the wind for hours. Ah, cliché. But in the desert, on a horse bred for kings, it was almost true. Yellow air yellow dust yellow sky, and the horse flying, his hair and his cloak flying out. He kicked the horse and it gasped beneath him, running with its hooves throwing up the sand like they were running through water, its trappings were hung with silver bells and they chimed as it ran. On and on, it was dying, its heart would burst, foam and blood were pulling around its mouth. On and on, and his own body was exhausted, clinging on to it, kicking it to make it run. Like the wind. Tearing across the desert, trampling the earth, almost like riding a dragon, I should have tried to ride one of the dragons, he thought, Thalia and I, together, ridden a dragon into the sky up into the stars and gone.

  The horse pulled up, blown and shaking, lathered to the eyeballs. Covered in sand. Marith pulled himself from its back, also shaking. Wiped dust from his eyes. All grey and green, scrub plants, withered grasses, dull life clinging on. A village, off to his right, distant, a single column of smoke rising. A stream cutting through rocks, dirty and choked with rubble—Thalia’s stream? Empty ground before him, where the people of Sorlost buried their dead. Barren soil. A few grave markers, a patch of new-turned earth, a thorn bush.

  The bronze walls of Sorlost. Golden as fire in the afternoon sun. Blinding. The Golden City, ringed round with a wall of golden flame.

  As long ago as tomorrow, beneath the brazen walls of Sorlost. They had no seams or joins, a perfect ribbon of metal twisting around the city, punctuated only by the five great gates. Thus they had no beginning and no end. A snake swallowing its own tail. On and on and on.

  The horse gasped and stumbled beside him. He’d ruined it. Broken it. It shied away from his hands. It sighed, bent its head to him as the dragons once had.

  He had dreamed of seeing this place. Dreamed, often, as a child, like every child on the White Isles must have dreamed, of sacking it. He and Ti had played games with walrus-ivory toy soldiers, sacking it. Heaping up their mother’s jewellery to make the shining walls. A golden city, so it must be made of their mother’s gold. “Your soldiers in at the main gate, Ti; mine round the back; trebuchets—loose!” and the gold piles fell with a wave of his hand, in a sparkling jangling crash. He had first seen the bronze walls of Sorlost lit by the sunrise, the metal turning from inky dark to blazing fire, more beautiful and vivid than the dawn itself. The moment the light hit them had been like watching someone thrust a touch into a bowl of pitch. Dragon fire. The feeling in his heart when he first saw Thalia’s face. Now the setting sun caught the walls and made them burn darker, harsher, a savage brilliance, not dragon fire but dragon’s eyes. He thought then of the mage in the Court of the Broken Knife, bathing a weeping woman and her child in mage fire, and the woman had not even seen that she burned with light.

  Brilliant as all the stars and the sun and the moon and all the gold and silver in the world, a city of pure blazing screaming raging light. He shouted aloud. Screamed. The sun sank away behind the horizon. The shadow fell over the walls. The walls were dead cold killing bronze. The sand in which they stood looked black. It was full dark when Ryn and Kiana finally rode up behind him. A full moon shone down on the city. The walls were black and pale together. Within the walls a hundred thousand lights burned. Numberless as the stars in the sky… and indeed the stars were half-hidden by the city’s light. Ryn and Kiana checked their horses and stared.

  “There,” said Marith. “Sorlost. Easy, don’t you think? One day, do you think, our armies will take to destroy it? Or two?”

  Ryn closed his eyes. Opened them. “No army in the world…”

  “Except ours,” said Kiana.

  Marith clapped him on the arm. “Except ours, Ryn.”

  He sat out in the desert alone that night, drinking firewine, taking hatha, thinking. The world spinning over him, breaking over him. Blind. Floating. Crawling. His body writhing with insects.

  Hatha rips your mind apart. Some people drink firewine to see visions. They are fools. Piss-puke-sweat-spit-shit. But oh gods we’ve seen so clearly that there’s a truth in that. He was swimming in the darkness, sinking.
Onwards forever. On and on. And it was morning, he was lying in the dust, with the walls of Sorlost rising before him. They looked dark and cold against the pink dawn sky. His shoulder hurt. He felt as though he was swimming deep beneath the surface of a great sea in glorious sunshine, looking up at the world above. He had crawled somehow into the midst of the city’s burial ground, the earth was raw in places over new graves, he was lying huddled in the shelter of a grave mark.

  A city built on dying. Tear it down, shatter the Temple into the dust. Look what they did, what they made her do. Look what happened to me there. Their death god, the child-killer they worship. Put up in its place a temple to myself as King of Death.

  For a little while, he thought, I was a man again. Briefly. Nothing and no one.

  “Marith.”

  Thalia was standing over him.

  Her dress was ragged, her hair was full of dust. Her skin was dry and burned by the sun. All the light in her, like the first time he had seen her, offering up hope to him.

  “I knew you’d come back,” he tried to say. “I knew you were alive.” He coughed and swallowed, spat into the sand. “I knew,” he said.

  She looked at him in disgust.

  Chapter Forty-One

  There are so many things I can be and do, I am certain. Good things. Joyous things. Kind things. Pointless things. From the fear of life and the fear of death, release us. Humble, mundane things.

  What I want is to live and to live and to live.

  He is drunk and a monster. He is not worth a moment’s thought. But I have had wonder and glory. And I want him, in the end, I want him also to live.

  I know him. I care for him. Therefore I want him to live.

  Chapter Forty-Two