The man fell back dead. Darath was there with blood on his sword and blood on his own face, his eyes round with terror. He was trying to say something, but his mouth moved without words coming out. A long low noise like Dion’s baby cries. A man came at Darath. Not a man. An enemy. These are not men. An enemy came at Darath, lashing out sword blow and sword blow, one might think it cared that its comrade was dead. Darath tried to fight it, warding off the blows with his sword and his arms that were shielded by a padded coat. Orhan struck back, until suddenly there was an enemy on him also, a sword in his face all he could see or think, fighting it off. A pain, in his arm. Heat on his face as the sky itself burned the city above him. So hot his eyes stung. A gust of black smoke hit his face and the face of the enemy. Gasped and coughed fighting blinded, choking. I can’t breathe. His body shaking in panic. A pain, on his face. Figures in the smoke, running. His eyes full of tears blurring them. Lash out. Cut out. The enemy’s dead. Him and Darath. Running. They had had soldiers of their own here. Standing guard. Block the enemy’s advance. All fled and gone. Six thousand men, the demon has in his army. This is the greatest city in the world, has never fallen, could never fall. Six thousand men could be swallowed up in the Grey Square before the Temple. Run. Flee. Hide.
Do as he asks and we will have ten days of grace, before he comes for us. Orhan thought: I would have given Dion’s life for that. The streets were crawling darkness. Shadows flew overhead and the streets were filled with flame. We would have rebuilt this city in its glory. All my life, Orhan thought, all my life I dreamed of making Sorlost what it once might have been. And this is the end.
Horses, galloping through the streets. Their riders soaked through red, cutting things. Rally! Hold them! There, at a corner, a group of women with knives out, a street blade in his white silks, pressed up against white marble walls, fighting to defend something. So few of the enemy. But the enemy pushed them back, killed them. From the middle of the group a child began to wail. Orhan thought: we should have opened the gates. I should have ordered it. Remembered Darath shouting it to him. Let them run out into the desert and be hunted down slowly. Some few might get away, survive it all, live. The street before him disappeared in fire. Darath pulled him back, like pulling a man back from the edge of a great cliff. A curtain of fire. The bodies of the women and the street blade were gone as if they had never been. One might lie to comfort oneself, think that they had fled.
White light, and music. The shadows themselves flew up shrieking in fear.
A man on a white horse. Nothing more. He was riding through the street looking around him. Not fighting. His sword resting gently in his hand, his face moving looking left to right, almost quizzical. People swirling in the ruins, drifting, don’t know what to do. He looks at them with weary interest. They see him. They kneel in the streets. They die.
“Orhan. Orhan.” Darath dragging him backwards. Darath knows. Sees. You sold us to the fucking Altrersyr! What the fuck did they offer you? How can anything have been enough for that? You know what they fucking are. A thousand thousand years our enemies! Death and ruin! And you sold us to them! You thought I was fucking him. You thought I was in love with him.
I’m so lost now I don’t know any more. I hired him to kill the Emperor and the High Priestess. Did I do this? Did I want this?
The man on the white horse turned his head from left to right, looking. His eyes met Orhan’s face.
“You,” he said in his soft young voice. “Lord Emmereth.”
Darath stepped between them with his sword up.
“I offered you terms,” the soft voice said. There was confusion in it. As if he truly couldn’t see why any of this should be. He rode his horse away from them into the fires. Darath dropped his sword. Clutched at Orhan.
Great creatures of shadows and darkness moved across the sky. Faceless and without limbs, maimed bodies, yet they bit and clawed at the city’s buildings, they were translucent, shadow-things, reflections, yet where they touched stone broke beneath them. They swarmed together, broke apart, indistinct and formless, one and many, effluence of disease. They are despair, Orhan thought. The void in the centre of a man’s heart. In the streets the soldiers of the enemy moved slowly. So few of them. Lost, overwhelmed, in the vastness of Sorlost. One breach in the wall at the Gate of the Evening, a handful of men scrambling in. In Fair Flowers, in the Gold Quarter and Yellow Birds Square, people could still be shopping, dozing, wandering undisturbed in the street deep in thought. They might look up, see the fire, see the darkness, wonder, shrug it off. They could fight, gather themselves, we are many, the enemy is so few. Take up arms. Save ourselves. Kill them all. Easily. But we do not kill them. We lie down and let ourselves be killed.
We’re too weak, the way we are. One touch and we’ll crumble to dust. The enemy sees us for what we are. The enemy can see no reason not to kill us. As I predicted we would and they would. But I don’t understand, Orhan thought. I don’t understand this. How can we be dying? How can they bring themselves to butcher us?
A man dies. A woman dies. A child dies. A man dies. A woman dies. A child dies. They are men, as we are. How can they bear this?
There is nothing but fire. Shadows devour the city down to its roots. In Fair Flowers or in Yellow Birds Square, a woman raises her head in confusion, looking wonderingly at the madness in the sky; she is like someone diseased, who does not yet know that she is sick, the world is ending for her, her death is close whispering, she steps out into the street to stare and her death is so close before her.
Six thousand enemy soldiers, and this the greatest city in Irlast. Running, dying, panic, the soldiers of the Emperor’s army throw down swords that are sharp and could kill the enemy, strip off their armour that could protect them from the enemy’s blades. Flabby. Weak. Fingers tearing at the gates, bodies choked against them, we can no longer open the gates to flee for the gates are choked with our own dead. We cannot remember how to open the gates. We have no mind left to save ourselves. The enemy kills us as if that is all there is.
Chapter Fifty
Tobias, junior squad commander in the “Winged Blades”
Sacking Sorlost
Free as running water. Strolling through wide marble boulevards, killing people as and when. See a chap who looks like he should be dying? Stab him. He felt vast, a giant, wading through the people of Sorlost. Or they were small as animals, he was a farmer culling sheep.
Clews said, “Over there.” Four Imperial soldiers and a handful of other random people holed up in a courtyard, managed to get a barricade up in front of them. Gods knew what they were trying to achieve. All the houses behind them were burning. A tower, rising dizzyingly high, cool blue tiles carved lintels, a shadowbeast crawling along it. Spreading and growing, flexing itself; the whole top of the tower came down in the courtyard in a roar of blue tiles and white dust.
“Come on then, lads,” Tobias ordered the squad. “Come on. Get it done.” Butchered some people running away shrieking. Butchered a couple of people throwing themselves at his feet begging for mercy: “King Marith! Something something something in Literan! King Marith! King—” Proper fight, briefly and enjoyably, with the Imperial soldiers, armed with long spears and shielded by barricades bristling like a thorn bush. Tobias and his squad of sword boys at a bit of a disadvantage, reachwise, refreshingly. Fight went on for more than ten heartbeats as a result. One clever chappy had a proper grasp of it, got the random people lobbing blue tiles at them. Bloody vicious things, wall tiles. You laugh, right, but a blue tile got an old bloke in the squad right in the face, blood gushing everywhere, that was him done.
“Fuckers.” Clews hacking at their spear points with his sword, yelling. Lorn, the bloke with the gold armour, beside him hacking almost got a spear point in the neck. Aura, one of the women in the squad, weaving herself through the twist of spears, cutting. Flesh wound to a spearman’s arm, flesh wound to her face, the spear jerked at the pain of it, she got in and Clews got in, one man do
wn dead. Knives and hands, the random people fighting with their hands, throwing the tiles, hammering at her. Another of the women in the squad, Senesa, killed two of them one two stab stab. Fewer and fewer of them. Spear shaft cut down to splinters. Senesa with a cut to her arm seriously taking them. Clews being a bit useless but he’s trying, poor lad, all he wants is the cash for his dad’s farm. The final soldier went down to Lorn’s sword. People fighting on with a broken spear shaft and kitchen knives and a sword they can’t use. Lorn got whacked in the cheek with the broken shaft spear, ooh, nasty, could get a splinter from that. Tobias got a wall tile in the face and it wasn’t funny. Time to stop hanging around the back critically observing the squad, get it done. Went in hard at them. Two people dead. Easy. Quick. Neat. Starting to feel kind of impressed with himself. His arm feeling a bit shaky, his knee was a bugger still, but doing it. Proper beginning to get back in it.
They were all dead, all the people at the barricade. No, wait, one was down but alive, pretending, the sneaky fuck. “Clews,” Tobias said, “do it.”
“Do what?”
Aura pointed with her sword. “Kill her.” The corpse whimpered and started trying to crawl away.
Clews did it smoothly. She had a pretty gold necklace on that he cut off once he’d cut her throat. “Clean it up a bit, that’s a couple of sheep for my dad, I reckon.”
“Could be, Clews, lad. Well done.” The price of gold would be plummeting, the kid’d be lucky to buy half a rat with it by dusk. Distant unknown islands in the Bitter Sea where the people lived on fish guts and they’d be turning their noses up at it by dusk tonight.
“This way, then,” Tobias said. “Onwards.” Which meant backwards and wander around for a bit, taking down more random people, as the whole row of buildings in front of them went down in black fire in a rotting mass blocking the street. Shadows eating it. Crushing the stone to meaty shreds. Tobias went up to a block of masonry lying toppled before him, big column top, fancy carvings of seabeasts as carved by someone who’d never seen the sea. The stone looked strange. Smelled strange. Tobias touched it and it crumbled away, kind of like a clod of earth crumbling. Not into dust. Soft, yielding stuff.
A wide street, a running battle between horsemen of the Army of Amrath and Imperial soldiers, a proper lot of them, a proper battle, almost. Seemed a shame to get involved. Clews grabbed Tobias’s arm and pointed. “Look! Gods and demons, look!”
Marith, in the fighting, flushed and happy, literally just decapitated someone. The body actually did that thing where it stayed upright swaying around for a bit before it fell down. The head had ended up at Clews’s feet, Tobias noticed then, which must be what had drawn the lad’s attention to it.
“Hit my foot,” said Clews.
“I’m disappointed you didn’t kick it back.”
A moment’s darkness and a moment’s blinding light. The shadows were dancing in the sky. People wailing in the streets driven mad with fear. Cowering in their houses, running out into the streets, wailing on and on, throwing themselves on the swords and the flames.
Some more brief resistance coming up ahead of them, up in the street in a pack, killing soldiers from the Army of Amrath. Twenty of them. Thirty, maybe. Not Imperial soldiers, but hard tough men. Hard faces. Armour. Swords. In the time it took his squad to get near, halt, think about it, Tobias saw two men go down from the squad of the Army of Amrath already fighting them. Four soldiers from the Army of Amrath already fighting them left now. Three. Two, maybe.
“Fucking kill them,” Lorn shouted, running at them.
Leg ached. Arm ached. Twenty-five against ten. “Get after him,” Tobias yelled at the squad. Hack slash hack slash kick slash. Good, these boys. Properly knew how to wield a sword. Just not that good.
It was all really coming back now. Professional pride in the way he offed the next bloke at him. His squad were going through them easy. Clews took one and Senesa took one. Getting fun. Blood shit stink and his arm ached a bit and it was almost over. The guy in command of the enemy shouting something that must be Literan for “Leg it, chaps, yeah?” Empty street full of dead men.
You really saw the difference, Tobias thought. Not having been in a fight recently, he could see it clearly, thinking about his squad and the Sorlostians they’d just been fighting. All the time spent hanging around the Army of Amrath, he’d got used to it; seeing them in action up close made him see it again. They were different, the soldiers of the Army of Amrath. Been fighting for so long, so hard, so fierce… It wasn’t even that the people of Sorlost were mostly useless. These guys they’d been fighting, hard men, criminals and killers, he’d guess. But the men of the Army of Amrath were changed and different. As a wild beast is to something tamed.
When this is… over. Clews on his farm, talking with his dad, shearing sheep, bringing the harvest in. Aura bouncing a fat baby on her lap, ducking her head obedient to her husband.
“Fuckers!” Clews screamed. The blokes they’d just seen running off in panic were coming running back, more of them. Criminal gang, yeah. Obvious, from pulling a trick like that. Voice shouted in Literan: “Paetyr’s Men! No mercy! Kill them!”
“Form up!” Tobias yelled at his squad. “Form up, hold steady. Wait.”
Thirty of them, maybe. At least. One of them had a fucking axe. Tobias stopped feeling huge and smug very quick.
They were oozing it, fighting. Brace. Keep together. Thirty men hitting them like a wave. Hack slash hack slash hack slash pray somewhere in the back of your head. The squad oozing blood and piss itself, now. Lorn in his fancy gold armour that he’d brought with him all the way from the White Isles, he went down quickly mouthing blood; the boy, the youngest one, Tobias could never remember his name which was shameful, he went down nasty, clutching his chest. Aura smiling and bloody and her face came open even through the helmet, her smile going on wide as wide across her whole face chin to ears. Fuckers. And this would be why I was never a one-in-the-lines soldier boy, Tobias thought.
Some horsemen came up, relieved them. Mauled the bastards up. A shadowbeast came down. Ripped with formless teeth and clawed formless wings.
“Get moving, lads,” Tobias shouted at the remains of the squad. “Come on.”
Two of the blokes they’d been fighting turned out to be women. One of the blokes they’d been fighting turned out to have a pretty boy’s face. Several of the horsemen dismounted, decided to take a nice little relaxing break.
“Come on, lads,” Tobias shouted to his squad. “Give the blokes some privacy. Come on.”
Sick fuckers. Unnecessary. Dangerous, too. A couple of lads in the Free Company once started on this girl who had a pruning hook behind her back, and… ouch. Wince. Cross your legs. But way more trouble than it would be worth right here right now even hinting at suggesting at stopping them. “Oi, wait your turn, mate,” a bloke shouted. “Queue starts here, right. Where’s your manners?” Senesa looked interested in watching but Tobias dragged her away.
“Come on. Keep out of the way here. More of them over there to kill.”
Chapter Fifty-One
My city. My home.
I follow the soldiers of my army in through the breach in the walls. The ground beneath us is hot and wet with metal. Setting into twisted shapes. Like someone has tipped over my jewellery box, necklaces and bracelets piled jumbled on the ground. All this, he has given me. My horse shifts and snorts, its hooves wounded by the heat. I ignore this. The men are half-ruined, and they ignore it.
Beyond there is nothing. Death. I wonder briefly where Marith is. Brychan beside me has his sword drawn, he is not happy that I have come here. Wanted me to stay safely in my tent.
“Take care, please, My Lady Queen,” he says.
“Of what?” I can only say to him.
I nudge the horse forward. Through the square beyond the Gate of the Evening, buildings rearing up blackened with smoke. Wide streets and narrow alleys. It comes to me suddenly with absurdity that I have no idea where in the cit
y my Temple stands. I have never seen this square and these streets. This is my home and it is the most alien place in all Irlast to me. I need Marith to show me around. I only know the name of the gate itself because Marith told me it. I laugh aloud and Brychan stares at me.
“Come on,” I say to Brychan.
I look around me as we ride. High towers, fine houses with carved stonework thick and fretted. A magnolia tree is in flower, perfect, untouched, grotesque in these clouds of stinking smoke. It is familiar to me, all of this, in the strange way of a dream. I remember and I do not remember. A sheet of fire sweeps the magnolia tree away into nothing; a shadow rises, vast, the tower behind it falls with a crash. Like memories, the city is unmade and changed as I move through it. It strikes me suddenly, a thing I had never thought of: I was born here somewhere; I must have a mother and a father living somewhere here. Brothers. Sisters. I assume that they are or will be dead. I wonder what they would say if they saw me. Did they know that the High Priestess was the baby they handed over? Have they realized who I am? Marith talks so often of his family. Perhaps, I think, there is a woman here with my eyes, my skin…
“Which way, My Lady Queen?” Brychan asks. He looks around him nervously. The street is empty, two dead bodies are lying in the rubble in a doorway, I can hear the sound of fighting over to the left. A squad of my soldiers runs past me, disappears around a corner.
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