Look, you, another squad commander might have raped her and passed her on to his whole squad. He’s a professional, yeah? We’ve already established that he doesn’t do things like that. Can hardly stop a war, can he? One bloke, like. He did try. You know he did. Pissed out four years of his life on it. Small things, doing what he can, achievable targets: kid of six isn’t gang-raped, dies fairly quickly. Be grateful.
Fairly quickly. Could have been quicker, yeah, maybe, okay, okay, yes, having your guts cut out maybe isn’t the cleanest quickest nicest death. But this is war, right? They’re all working at pace here… things happen like that, when you’re pressed. Also, he’s pretty certain Clews accidentally stepped on her head and finished her off, so it’s not like he left her alive with her guts cut out, is it?
Look you. All these soldiers, these men women he’s definitely seen soldiers that are definitely technically children in a strictly biological/temporal sense, all of them here from all over the world fighting like rabid beasts—they’ve got to live. Got to survive and earn money and eat. They love their family and their friends, they look up at the sky and appreciate the sunset, cry their eyes out when someone they care about dies, they’re loyal to those around them, they like to do well at what they’re employed to do, same as anyone does.
He killed someone that might well have been the kid’s dad, and went on. They stopped for a breather in a bit, very nice little wine shop that reminded him… he’d been in a very bad mood about something? No… couldn’t remember what it reminded him of. Meat and bread and wine and very good brandy. Weird coloured tiles all over the floor for playing some game nobody could for the life of them work out what. The lady innkeep and a random old bloke were lying dead on the tiles, for some reason the old bloke was wearing a woman’s coat.
They started off again to kill people, if there was anyone left in the city to kill. Sorlost, it was pretty bloody obvious, had been taken good and hard.
Clews was beaming from ear to ear, cause he’d found a handful of gold coins on the floor of the wine shop and was sure he’d made enough to buy his dad’s farm now.
Chapter Fifty-Four
Orhan Emmereth
The ruins of Sorlost
Running. Fleeing. Throws down his sword. Just run away and hide and pray. The city is ringed with fire. The sky is filled with shadows that bare their claws and their teeth. Dusk will fall in a few brief hours. He cannot think what it will be like here, when the dusk comes.
Home, he thinks. Back to my son. Die holding Darath’s hand, looking at my son. This whole world we had is gone.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Marith Altrersyr, Conqueror of the World, whose deeds now exceed even those of his ancestor the first Amrath
His city of Sorlost
They made a street woman walk before the horses, show them the way. The Great Temple of Lord Tanis being one of the few places in Sorlost he had been careful to avoid going anywhere near. Although it seemed to him he might lead them to a firewine den instead. He tried to remember how much he’d paid the last time. Little enough he could have bought more of it, if he’d been left there, he could remember that. Really really nearly managed to drink himself to death.
The streets were almost empty now. Bodies, and ruined buildings; at the high pinnacles of the city’s towers his shadowbeasts ate the hearts of those who had fled up and up. In the corners, the dark places, the best and worst of his men crouched and… did things. The air was getting thick with flies. Every fly in the desert, drawn back to Sorlost. Crows and carrion eaters. Pethe birds, larks, darting swallows, feasting on the flies that feasted on the dead. Hawks, to feast on the song birds. Jackals. Wild dogs. The creatures of the desert would glut themselves. The people of the desert, those who had not fought in his army, were picking their way forward, wide-eyed, to marvel and to feast. They would never have seen as many people in all their lives, some of them, as they would see here now dead.
He tried to see if he could recognize any of the streets. The Court of the Fountain he had known—but then he had known that anyway, before, from paintings and poems. The Four Corners, on the Street of the South. They’d got lost trying to find it, he remembered. “Bloody hopeless, all of you.” They’d got into a fight. Those pretty women who ran it, who’d smiled and flirted with him. And the armourer’s shop, he thought. The feel of his hand closing around a sword hilt. The jeweller’s shop, Landra, shouting, gold and gems scattered at her feet. Like the floor after the children Ti and Marith had taken their golden city, thrown their mother’s jewels about. I can’t remember where it was, what it looked like, thank the gods. But I should like to visit the Court of the Broken Knife again, he thought.
The city bowed down before him. Knelt, cowered, laid itself out for him. Like a lover lying back, waiting. No. Ha. Too kind to him. Like a beaten dog. He had read more about this city than any other place in all the world. All his life, he had dreamed of seeing it.
He tried to think to himself: there’s Immish, a great and powerful country, very large; I can sack their cities, burn the Immish Forest, turn the waters of the river Immlane black with poisoned filth; they have great armies they will raise against me, strong well-fed men and swift horses, fine armour made by skilled ironsmiths. He had sworn once, hadn’t he, to kill every living soul in Skerneheh and Reneneth? And there were still a few other places yet unconquered. Turain was shrieking out for his vengeance. Every stone, every roof tile, every bone in every child’s body, the maggots crawling on the dead… Build my great monument to my glory on the southern shores of the Sea of Tears, where nobody will see it because nobody goes there: King of All Irlast! And Alleen Durith, he thought. Treacherous bastard. What I’ll do to him. I’ll need to sack Malth Tyrenae all over again. It was lucky, he thought, that I lost my damned empire, I can indeed go round and round and conquer it all again.
There was the wine shop he had had a drink in before he killed Emit. Wasn’t it? No, not the same place. That place had been bigger, brighter, cleaner, much nicer. He glanced over at Thalia, who sat very straight in the saddle, her eyes flicking around the street, staring. She had seen him studying the wine shop, was studying it too, curious, trying to understand something. She saw his attention move to her, blinked and looked back at him.
“What?”
They both laughed at nothing, shrugged. It all felt very strange.
“I sat there for a while,” she said. “In the doorway there. I think. I remember the flowers growing by the door. The place was closed up. I didn’t know what it was. I’d never seen a wine shop. Then a woman came and turned me off.”
Marith thought: we’ve both been kicked out of tavern doorways! Oh, I’m glad I know that.
Marith thought: you’d never seen a wine shop? Well, no, I suppose you wouldn’t have… Gods.
“We’re almost there,” Thalia said.
The woman guiding them led them left, then right. The troop of soldiers who followed them looked edgy; Thalia’s guardsman Tal was muttering that their guide was betraying them, leading them into a trap. Narrow streets, stringing out the soldiers, even in Morr Town they would almost be classed as alleyways. Very few bodies here. Very little evidence of fighting. Because my men were afraid to come here, Marith thought.
“We’re almost there,” Thalia said again.
They turned suddenly into a wide street paved in white marble. The buildings lining it were very grand, white marble like the flagstones, gilded and painted, some of them looked very old, the stone worn translucent as fingernails by a city’s lifetime of weather and washing. Carved flowers, carved faces, blurred away with age. Down the centre of the street there was a long bed of yellow lilies. They were in bloom, every flower open, the petals heavy and huge. Like thick strips of yellow skin. They looked too large for their stems, swollen up by something.
“The Street of Flowers,” Thalia said. “It must be.”
They passed a pair of vast black gates in a high black wall, all carved into flowers,
closed and surely sealed up forever, a gate into another world forever closed. The last time he came here, Marith thought, he would have been frightened of what might lie behind them. Black flames rose behind them now, and the hungry beating of his shadowbeasts’ wings. A woman’s voice briefly screamed. Like the walls of the city, the black walls shivered and hissed and began to burn as he rode past them.
“The House of Flowers,” Thalia said. “From the Song of the Red Year.” She said, “I hadn’t really thought… it’s a real place.” She said slowly, “All of it, everything I read and was told about my city… it’s a real place.”
Thus the Temple was just before them now. Behind the black fire where the house burned, Marith could see the towers and domes of the Summer Palace. Behind that, a wall of fire surrounded the city, red flames leapt from the bronze. The central dome of the palace sweated gold tears.
Could taste blood and raw alcohol in his mouth. Thought he was going to be sick or faint. Felt himself falling. Gritted teeth, half-crawling, bent under a weight. A man’s face staring at him: the Yellow Emperor, the Asekemlene Emperor of the Sekemleth Empire of Sorlost, eternally reborn. In the man’s face there was sorrow and pain at what he was doing. At what he was. Pity, almost. “I’ll kill you, then,” he had whispered. His words were red in the red filth. But he could… he could still have walked away.
Thank you, Thalia, he thought, for not wanting to go to the palace.
They rode on and rode on, this was a long street, the horses seemed to be going slowly. The lilies were beginning to wither, now, as they rode past them. Petals curling up, turning black.
“We must be almost there,” Marith said to the woman guiding them.
“Yes,” she said.
“You did not go there?” Thalia asked. “When you were here before? Just to see it?”
“No.” What would have happened, Marith thought suddenly, if it had been Tobias’s squad who had been sent to the Temple that night to kill her? It had never occurred to him before, that Skie might have sent him. But it might so easily have been.
Is there a god there? he thought. Does it—he—feel that I am coming for him, his enemy?
“The God is there,” said Thalia. She pushed her horse closer to his, reached out, brushed his hand. “He will not harm you.”
The Street of Flowers opened out into a square. There before them was the Temple.
It was a square of black stone. That was all. Black steps leading up to a narrow closed door. A black box in which Thalia had lived the first twenty years of her life. He felt sickened, looking at it, thinking that. A charnel house, he thought. The waste of her life.
The square before it was filled with fighting. A seething mass of his men and enemy, struggling together, tearing bitter limbs. As Thalia had told him, this was the place he must destroy. The centre of Sorlost. Thalia had pulled her horse to a standstill, was staring at the Temple. Her right hand went to her stomach, then to her left arm where her skin was scarred and marked. “After each sacrifice,” she had said to him long long ago, “the High Priestess must cut herself, mingle her blood with the victim’s blood.” He had already known. A little thing everyone knew about the cruelty of the death god of Sorlost and its child-killer priestess.
“That’s what it looks like,” she said quietly. “The Great Temple.”
The fighting swarmed around it. Soldiers of the Army of Amrath; enemy soldiers in gold armour and in black armour; the common people of Sorlost in silk and jewels and tatters, armed with kitchen knives. The last stand of the Sekemleth Empire here beneath the barren Temple walls. Marith drew his sword, cried out to his soldiers to rally to him. “Stay here, at the edge of the square,” he said to Thalia. “Take care of Brychan,” he almost said to her.
He waded into the fighting and took them apart beneath his sword. Endless numbers of them, dying. The last defenders of the city, they must be, howling out their last defiance, believing that their god could still save them. Your god kills children, he thought, your god wanted my love to kill for him, to shed her own blood. These poisonous insults you fling at me. Cut them down uncaring, they were not living beings to be thought about. The Grey Square is running with slaughter, the black stain on the flagstones was their blood that had been spilled here so deeply it had sunk down into stone from when the world began. The flagstones were scored and scorched by the strokes of his sword as he killed. His army drew back, watching, awed, as he alone killed everyone, everything. A river in spate, a flood channel in the desert surging in storm rain, the winds and the waves Ranene had called for him tearing themselves apart taking the world apart losing himself grinding the world into pain and ruin and nothing nothing beyond. The Grey Square was emptied of living. The flagstones were shattered, the bodies uncountable, rendered down to nothing, everything that had been in this place he wiped off the face of the world as if it had never been.
He was himself nothing. A sword, an act of butchery. Murderous revenge. But he felt her there watching, sitting on a white horse with diamonds at her throat and in her hair, dressed all in silver, she sat with wide cool eyes seeing these her people die. She had never before seen this place from the outside.
It ended. Everything everyone there was dead. It faded. He came back a little way into himself. He was tired. Aching. His horse moved slowly through the clogged flesh and blood. He rode back to where Thalia was waiting. Brychan beside her had seen him fight endless battles, Brychan’s face was death-white, Brychan’s whole body shook.
His soldiers knelt in wonder. Reminded again of what he was. He hoped very much that some of them had returned from Alleen Durith’s turncoat army. Remind them exactly what they’d almost set themselves against.
“Shall we go in, then?” Marith said to Thalia. He dismounted, she slid down from her horse beside him. Lifted her skirts to stop them trailing in the muck, had to walk carefully wading across the square.
“I fasted and sacrificed to keep these people alive,” Thalia said. “Life for the living, death for those who need to die.”
“They made you kill children.” His voice sounded more savage than he’d meant.
“Not often.” She pointed. “There’s a child there.” They stepped carefully over the fallen body, arms thrown up to shield its face.
“And the things beyond either kept back,” Thalia said.
Marith laughed.
Wished he hadn’t laughed.
Six steps, up to the door of the Temple. Black granite? Black marble? Worn down uneven by a city’s lifetime of pious feet. Pock-marked, dimples in the stone like the dimples carved into some of the oldest of the godstones back home on Seneth. In winter sometimes village women would make offerings of beer and honey and human piss there. Ward off the winter cold. On the top step a flaw in the stone ran across the threshold, a white crack in the black stone. The door at the top of the steps was closed. It was made of dark wood, also very old, uncarved, crude. It was in shadow, after the bright light of the square; Marith had to squint to look at it. The wood had a rough loose grain to it. It reminded him of an old man’s coarse-pored skin.
Thalia walked up the steps lightly and quickly. “The door should be open,” she said. This should be the most momentous thing for her, coming back here. On the top step, before the door itself, she stopped; he thought that she had realized that. She said slowly, “It is not locked. It should not be locked. You open it,” she said. Marith reached out, pushed.
Some trick of the afternoon light, a shadowbeast flitting over the square, a flicker of flames where a gilded mansion burned: a mark appeared very clear on the door, a long jagged slash in the wood. It is well-known, Marith thought, that there is a crack like claw-marks in the door of the Great Temple of the Golden City of Sorlost. The door opened, there was a darkness before them. A second closed door of darkness.
“It’s a short corridor,” Thalia said. And then she paused, and said, “Wait.” She bit her lip, the way she did sometimes when she was nervous.
Her
light filled the corridor. Soft white light. Waking up in the morning in the middle of summer, long after the sun has risen, the day already warm.
They stood on the threshold of a short corridor. Plain black stone. Water-stained in places, cobwebs thick with dust. The same worn and pitted stone floor. Thalia let out a breath. It felt like nothing, like it should feel like so much more, as they walked down it.
And the chamber at the end…
There were a thousand people crammed into the Great Chamber. The priestesses moved among them in their silver and lapis masks. The place was so filled with candles. The walls were polished bronze, mirror-smooth, and their faces were reflected back and back. Thalia was bright as the candle flame. Marith saw himself shapeless, one of his shadowbeasts, with the red blaze of his blood-clot cloak. The priestesses themselves were skull-faces, turning to look at him. Grey desert rainclouds, his victims’ smiling skulls.
Don’t try to frighten me, god of child-killing. You have more blood on your hands than I do. My soldiers, Marith thought, kill for me willingly. Are rewarded for doing it. I pay them, god of child-killing. I pay them, and I give them pride in themselves, and I mourn them when they are dead. Look at them, god of child-killing. They will take all the wealth piled up here, and they will spend it, use it, do things. Been poor their whole lives and now they’re rich as bloody kings.
“I want thirty men, with me,” Marith called back to the soldiers milling behind them. “Then close the door, let no one out or in.”
He left it to his men to do it this time. He stood with Thalia, their backs resting against a warm bronze wall. Think how many swords and spear points one could get from the bronze here. Some of the people tried to beg his mercy, supplicate themselves to him. Some of them even tried to hurl themselves murderously at him. Two of the priestesses did, one of them a fat old woman with wrinkled hands like chicken legs. She came at him crying out in Literan, so fast and savage Marith could not understand her, threw herself at him.
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