“Ninia,” Thalia said softly. She bent, removed the mask from the dead woman’s face. “I hated her.” She looked around. “I wonder if Samnel is here somewhere. Or Helase.”
“What was she saying?” Marith asked Thalia. Looking at the body in its grey robe, he realized why she had chosen to wear a silver dress.
She shook her head. “Nothing.”
“It wasn’t nothing.” There was a flush like shame in Thalia’s face.
“She was reciting a verse from the Hymn to the Rising Sun,” Thalia said. “‘Look at the sun.’ That’s what she said.” She tossed the priestess’s silver mask away and a soldier grabbed it up. “She hated me,” Thalia said.
The soldiers were spilling out across the Temple, disappearing down corridors to the sound of screams. It was almost done. “Come on,” Thalia said. They approached one of the altars together. Divided off from the rest by a bar of iron, what Marith guessed must be the High Altar, where Thalia had knelt before the sacrifice. The candles crowning it had been overturned and extinguished. A single red glass lamp was still alight.
Thalia looked at it. Her hands went to her stomach. Her hands went to her throat.
“Great Tanis,” she said. “Lord of Living and Dying.”
The lamp went out.
Chapter Fifty-Six
My Temple, I used to call it.
The body lying nearest to the High Altar is that of a woman. I will remember that forever until I die. A woman in a dress as brilliant as peacock feathers, her hair is black her skin is brown. The look on her face is peaceful. As though she were merely asleep.
My Temple.
“You make things live. Keep the balance. You bring life to the living, and death to those who need to die. Which is not something anyone can say about many members of my family.”
“So that the living remain living, so that the dead may die. A good life and a good dying. And the things beyond either kept back.”
“Because of you, Thalia.”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Marith Altrersyr the Ansikanderakesis Amrakane, the chosen of the Chosen of the God Great Tanis the Lord of Living and Dying, once hired to kill the Asekemlene Emperor of Sorlost
The Great Temple of the God Great Tanis, Sorlost
There was a curtain behind the altar. Almost hidden behind its bulk. Dark cloth, metallic thread long tarnished away to black. Thalia stepped over the iron bar that ran around the High Altar, slipped past the altar, put her hand out.
“Thalia!” A great fear rose up in Marith. He ran forward to join her, his sword in his hand. This is not a good place.
“Cut it down,” Thalia said to him. Her eyes were huge and very deep blue.
A chattering of sound, from behind them. Marith whirled around. Laughed. On one of the altars a jewelled birdcage was still standing, somehow untouched in the shambles. Inside the cage was a tamas bird. It was old, its scarlet plumage faded to grey around its head.
“Temene elenaneikth,” the bird chattered. Which meant in Itheralik: “Joy to you.”
“It doesn’t know what it’s saying,” Thalia said. “It recites what it is told, without understanding it.” She grasped the curtain. “Cut it down.”
A yell. A soldier of the Army of Amrath ran out from a hidden doorway, dragging a woman in a grey robe. Long black hair fell loose down her back. So like Thalia’s hair. There was a spreading patch of red on the robe, between her thighs.
Her arms ended in bandaged stumps. She had no hands. She shrieked in Literan, “Spare me. Spare me. Great Tanis. Please. Please.”
“Ausa!” Thalia screamed.
The woman’s head jerked up.
She had no eyes.
“Ausa,” Thalia said.
“My Lady Queen?” The soldier dragging the woman shoved the wretched thing towards them. He was too frightened to look at them. “Do you… do you want her? My Lady Queen? I thought she was another woman from the Temple, that’s all. I’m sorry, My Lady Queen, gods’ truth, I thought she was, but if she’s your friend, if you know her…”
“Please,” the woman moaned.
Thalia said, not looking at either of them, “I don’t want her, no.”
The soldier, confused, dragged the woman off.
Thalia turned back to the curtained doorway. “Cut it down,” she said again. “Please.” Marith’s sword blade moved, almost without him thinking. Dust and fragments of tarnished metal thread. More cobwebs. The cloth was very heavy, hard to cut. Beyond the curtain there was a small room. Its walls and its floor and its ceiling were covered in gold. The light that flashed from it was blinding. A great gust of cold air seemed to rush at Marith, the golden light driving out the cold. Felt almost as though something was running past him, pushing past him, fleeing the light.
The God Lord Tanis the Lord of Living and Dying, weak and nothing beside the King of Death. Fleeing him. He almost saw it, he was sure.
A grief in him, quickly brushed away, that he had not seen it. A cry in his mind, quickly fading, his heart filled with sorrow as at a great and futile loss. So had Thalia cried, when the child—
Don’t think of it. There is nothing here, I have driven it out. Weak, cruel thing. Itself a god of child-killing. Look what they made Thalia do for it. It has gone, afraid, cowering, banished before me.
There was the altar stone black against the gold. Every man in Irlast must have seen it in his mind, the black stone and the ropes and a woman’s long-fingered hands reaching down. There beside it the bundle of cloth that contained the sacrifice knife. The altar stone and the floor were crusted deep with blood. The cloth around the knife was like a healer’s rag. Or like the cloths they had used—they had used—gods, don’t think of it.
I will dedicate myself tomorrow,
That I might see her close,
Hear her breathing, feel her skin,
My blood mingling with her bleeding,
Dying under her hand.
He had always known. But.
Squalid. And her beauty, and her splendour, and her light… And this, here, this obscenity… this is the cost of life.
Two men squatted in the far corners, behind the altar. Naked, also crusted with blood. Thin. Their hair lank and uncut. Their eyes were closed, hands up over their faces, blinded by the light. Grunting noises. If the woman outside had no hands and no eyes, they, he knew with absolute certainty, they had no tongues. Each held in his hands a long coil of rope. Beside the altar a child was crouching. A little girl. Her body was hunched up, curled up into herself. She had thin pale curly hair, thin flabby white legs. A white blank face. Her left arm was a mass of raw wounds.
He had always known. He had. Yes. She knew what he was. He knew what she had done. He was going to vomit. Black sand crunched in his teeth. He looked at Thalia, she did not see him, she did not see the child, she was looking at the altar. The chamber was so filled with light; in the light he saw that Thalia’s hair was dry, thinning, there were dry lines around her eyes, her belly sagged from carrying his children that had not lived. Her hand went to her throat, where the skin was dry and her body was too thin. She turned, very slowly, took a long gasp of breath like a man who has been drowning, or like a man who has woken from a long terrible dream. “Marith,” she said. “Marith.”
A woman’s scream, behind them somewhere off in the body of the Temple, and a child’s scream, higher-pitched. Somewhere off beyond the Temple’s walls a distant crash of a building falling. The child’s hand went out, stealthily, to the knife in its bundle of rags. Marith’s sword moved. Her hand dropped back. Huge child’s eyes stared up at him. He in turn held out his scarred left hand, his right still clasping his sword, carefully carefully helped her up. Now he thought, he could remember her also, robed and bejewelled in a silver litter, her white face staring around at a world she had never before seen. Just the same expression on her face, he was certain, that Thalia had had when he first met her, the same glorious wonderous baffled astonishment at the world. The white
face stared at him now with nothing but hatred.
“What should we… we… do with her?” he asked Thalia. Kill her, his heart said. Send her somewhere to be cared for, his heart said. She is like you are, his heart said. Pity her.
A scuffle. Grunting noise, “Uh uh uh,” something horrible trying to speak. One of the slaves had the knife in his hand, holding it oddly, a blinded witless dumb lump of flesh barely living trying to understand anything here, groping in the blinded remains of its human mind, this here that is happening is a bad thing a wrong thing. “They sat in the Small Chamber, night and day, they carried the bodies out, they had nothing beyond that, I never even thought of them as alive,” Thalia had said once to him, and she had never spoken of it again. The slave moved the knife up and down. Trying to remember himself in the living world.
Sacred, God-touched, as the High Priestess was. That knife could kill me, Marith thought. The slave—the man, he thought—the man standing there with the knife could kill me.
And Thalia knew it, and Brychan, still loyally there behind her in the doorway to the Small Chamber, terrified, and the little girl High Priestess with the same eyes as his own.
Thalia said to the other slave, the one who had not moved or tried to speak, “Kill him.”
Could almost ask whom she meant.
The two slave men fighting. They wrestled at each other, shoving, grunting, each trying to carry a dead body’s weight. They grappled together for a long moment, then with a cry the man with the knife brought it down, slicing at the other’s arm. The sexual obscenity of it. Two naked groping men. The man with the knife reeled backwards, his face contorted. The other leapt on him, he had the knife now, its blade flashing, stabbing out and down. The blade bit home into the soft hollow in the throat where the pulse beats. Blood sprayed up. A man lay dead on the floor in the blood-muck; a man stood over him with the knife raised, staring, as if he suspected a trick.
The child High Priestess in her turn screamed, “Kill them!”
The man with the knife did not move.
Distant crash of a building falling. Woman’s shriek. A little girl of eight, crying. The slave man cut his own throat with the sacrifice knife.
Something’s coming. Shadows. Sorrow. Death.
We can’t go on, the way we are. And yes, that does mean blood.
The little girl High Priestess crumpled at his feet in a child’s sobs. Thalia said, awkward, “Find someone. To take care of her. Sissley, her name is. Sissaleena.”
A shuffling, fidgeting; a soldier in the Army of Amrath came forward, a woman, blood all over from the killing here but she took the girl’s hands in her hands, led her off. Gods only knew to what.
“Take care of her,” Thalia cried out. “She is a child. Nothing more.”
“I am the High Priestess of Great Tanis Who Rules All Things,” the child shrieked in a high thin terrified voice.
They walked out of the Temple together hand in hand. Stopped on the top of the six worn black steps. The crack in the stone ran beneath Marith’s feet. The city was ringed with fire still, where the walls were burning. In the square, in the streets, his soldiers picked over the last of the dead and the dying, their arms piled high with loot. The Summer Palace, the Imperial Palace of the Asekemlene Emperor of the Sekemleth Empire of the Eternal City of Sorlost, was burning now also. Again. The people of the city, those few still living, knelt to them, kissed them embraced them showered them with gifts. Through the wreckage of the Grey Square, tiptoeing through the slaughter, a man in fine silk robes made his way towards them, stopped at the foot of the steps to prostrate himself in the city’s blood. Grey Square was filled with their soldiers, rejoicing. The paean rang out, their names, shouts of “King and Queen! Eltheia and Amrath!” Behind them, the door to the Temple slammed shut in a breath of wind. A cracking sound. The dark wood of the Temple door torn with claws.
Looked up and saw black fire. Coloured stars. Broken glass. There was a dream there once, he thought, in the glass falling. But I’ve done now what Amrath Himself could not do.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Orhan
The ruins of Sorlost
It was dark before the soldiers came for them. Bil was weeping, stunned, Dion finally asleep on her lap, his hair damp with sweat, tears staining his face. They had put out every lamp and candle, dismissed any servant who had not already fled. Two had gone: a boy from the kitchens, who had taken two cook’s knives with him tucked in his belt, “You should have taken me out to fight, my Lord Emmereth,” his face said to Orhan, “I would not have run away back here like a coward”; one of Bil’s serving girls, hoping for things, dreaming of things. All the rest stayed with them. The household of the Lord of the Rising Sun, his people: they barricaded themselves into the breakfast room that opened onto the east garden, one wall a trellis of white jasmine. The beautiful furniture, the pearwood table, the chairs with their ivory backs and gilt legs, they piled against the doors as a barricade. Why that room, Orhan could not say. Some vague thought perhaps of Janush’s words about Dion playing in the garden. Here they could feel the living air, see green leaves. Bil had already arranged, before Orhan and Darath returned, the order in which they would kill each other when the soldiers of the Army of Amrath came.
The soldiers had come in at the Gate of the Evening, this is the House of the East: we have a little time still, Orhan thought. Thank Great Tanis the Lord of Living and Dying that Felling Street is plain and narrow, that the gates of my house are tatty and old.
“They are as tall as giants,” one of Bil’s serving girls would say to no one, “they eat human flesh, their spears are taller than the city’s walls.”
“Stop,” Janush the bondsman would say, looking at Dion sobbing in his mother’s lap, his eyes blank with fear. He could understand everything, his huge child’s eyes would move to the speaker’s face and then to the doorway, as if they were coming now. But he had lost all power of speech. A little time would pass, one of the servants would start up again crying, running mad for the door then running back, clapping their hands over their mouth. “They are as tall as giants and they have no mercy,” one of them would say. “They take their enemies’ heads as trophies. Build them into towers of skulls.” It grew dark: they sat in the cool green breakfast room with all the lamps and the candles extinguished, waiting. The dusk seemed to come very early, because the sky was so dark with smoke. For the first time in all the history of Sorlost, dusk came and the twilight bell did not ring.
The ferfews sang and darted among the trees of the garden. The jasmine was in bloom and smelled very strong. In the breakfast room with its wall of jasmine, the smell of smoke and blood almost did not reach. The sounds almost did not reach. The soldiers seemed to be a long time coming: “You should be offended,” said Darath, trying to magic it all away, “that they don’t think your house worth gutting like they did mine.” Bil laughed at him in the mad way of someone grieving beyond reason: “Even the army of the demon,” said Darath, “must have heard that the Lord of the Rising Sun is poor. Or did you come to some arrangement with him, Orhan, when you paid him and fucked him and begged him to sack our city if only he’d let you look at his cock?” Bil laughed and laughed, Orhan laughed also. Pathetic kind of magic: if it is ridiculous, it cannot be true. Just once, the sky through the jasmine leaves flashed white and silver, a flash like lightning that left them all blinking, was that my mind or my eyes?
“The palace,” said Darath. “The palace has been destroyed.”
It was only a little while after that that the soldiers came for them. A crash of someone hammering on the door, a crash of the door being broken down. A voice shouted in Pernish, “Lord Emmereth! Come out!” In the dark of the breakfast room Orhan could feel the faces turning to the door, waiting.
“Lord Emmereth!” the voice shouted. “Lord Vorley!”
“If you don’t come out,” a second voice shouted, “we will burn the house down around you.” It was hard to understand what it
was saying, between the accent and the absurdity of the words.
Back to the traitor’s death, thought Orhan. He felt all the faces watching him. Too frightened to make a sound, all of them; he could not speak for the sword blade was already at his throat cutting, I wonder what it feels like, really feels like, to die? He thought: hadn’t we agreed to kill Dion and the women, before they came? And that too had seemed the rational thing to do. Tried to move his hand to his own sword on the floor beside him. Dion, and then Bil, and then the women. And then Darath, if he had the time for it before they came, if Darath let him do it, which he would. At the same time, stabbing each other, eyes on each other, left hand gripping left hand. Orhan thought: my blood and Darath’s blood.
You have to do it now, Orhan. Before they come. You still have time. He could feel the sword. See the sword, in the darkness. All their fear lighting up the blade. He could feel them all watching him.
“Lord Emmereth! Lord Vorley! Come out!”
They won’t come. If they come, they won’t kill us. If they do come, which they won’t, they’ll leave us alone. They won’t fire the house. It’s full of valuable things. This cannot be. This cannot cannot be.
We still have an eternity of time, Orhan thought, before they find us here. There’s still the entrance hallway, the dining room, the courtyard with the fountain…
They won’t come. They can’t be.
The silence broke: one of the servant girls let out a scream. Dion, in Bil’s arms, joined her in a scream. Darath and Janush and Bil cried out together, “Stop. Dion. Stop.” Tramp of footsteps, shoving at the doors, the doors smashed against the table and the chairs they had piled against them. The girl screamed on. Dion screamed on. Unable to bear it, wanting the soldiers to come and find them, get it over with. The peace of death. Or they screamed because they still believed that something would hear them. In the dark Orhan saw Janush’s arm move. The girl’s scream cut off in a raw ragged choke.
The House of Sacrifice Page 43