Anna Smith Spark - The House of Sacrifice

‘Hold!’ a voice was screaming. ‘Whatever comes at us! Hold! Hold!’ Gritted lines gritted teeth gritted spears, grey hopeless dead men. The last defenders of Arunmen. Marith felt almost sorry for them. Their swords and spears trembled in their hands. They knew. When he first crossed the river Alph, Arunmen had surrendered unconditionally, thrown open its gates, feasted and crowned him king. Hanged its last king from the gates of the palace as a welcome gift. Two months after they crowned him, the people of Arunmen had declared themselves a free city, massacred the garrison he’d left. Ungrateful bastards! Just because he’d been a bit tied-up in Samarnath city of towers and wretchedly difficult suicidal ‘freedom or death we shall not yield’ maniacs, they thought they could turn around and thumb their noses at him?

He charged into the line of defenders, hacking at them. An arrow thudded into his back; he felt the heat of its fires, shrugged it off, killed someone. The dead horse screamed. Its mane was burning. Delightful smell of burning hair. There were spears in his face, jabbing at him hitting out with his sword. The ruby on the hilt shining. White light rainbows on the blade. His face flushed, bloodied. Blood and dust in his hair. Beautiful. Shining like diamonds. Shining like all the stars in the heavens, like sunlight on water, beautiful perfect shining with rainbows, moon-white skin and red-black shining hair, killing them. White-silver blood-red scab rot filth death ruin screaming his men on in through the rubble of the gate. The men coming on behind him, grappling with the defenders, climbing and tearing at the inner wall.

He killed someone else. A third. A fourth. Shouts from the walls: they’d got a bridgehead up there on the battlements. A body crashed down in front of him. Helpfully took out an Arunmenese soldier rushing forward with a nasty big sword. A crash and a cheer off from the Salen Gateway. That gate too was breached. Osen and his men would be in.

‘Amrath!’

‘Amrath and the Altrersyr!’

‘Death!’

A horseman came riding at him, the horse already maddened by the screaming stink of blood. He struck the horse with his sword and it shattered, flew apart all these dark shapes. It was just a shadow. The rider came crashing down, the hilt of a sword in its hands, crumbled metal, crumbling away into dust, its hands were eaten away by the eaten metal. You see now, you see, even my touch is corruption, I am ruin, I am a god and after me is only death. He killed his enemies. Five, ten, twenty to a stroke. A hundred dead. A thousand. They crumbled before him, they were nothing, he is death and ruin, he cannot be harmed. Alone, he could kill them all, on and on, killing, he could stand here and kill for all eternity, every man and woman and child who walks the earth, he could kill. This is all that I am, he thought. All that I could ever be and do.

His hand moved, holding the sword. He closed his eyes. He felt things die beneath his sword strokes. Cut through them, cut the world open, they were ragged and torn apart, they looked like clouds torn ragged by the wind and the moonlight shines through them and the sky behind them is both darker and bright with light.

Smoke was rising over the city. Marith raised his face in joy as the red dragon flew overhead. A great warm wash of dragon fire. Warm soft flames caressing his face. He could feel the battering ram pounding against the Sea Gate, the storm waves smashing against the harbour. Crash as the siege engines loosed. More and more of his men coming in around him, fanning out, pushing the defenders back. The city before them burning. Dragon fire. Mage fire. Banefire. Falling from the heavens. A roar of triumph off to his left from the walls: voices shouting, hailing him. Fighting. Killing. Pressing onwards. His men pouring in. Flowing into the city, fighting, killing, tearing it down. The red dragon came down to land. Crushed bodies: soldiers, women, children; children throwing roof tiles, firewood, fighting trying to defend the city with ragged bare hands. The dragon breathed out flames and consumed them. Children throwing roof tiles. Women with kitchen knives. Smashed the buildings of the city down over them. Burned them. Cut them open in its jaws. The shadowbeasts lifted them, dismembered them, dropped them falling in pieces spiralling to the ground. Snow falling around the bodies. Red blood. White ash. White snow. Soldiers in at every breach, fighting. Pressing forward. Over and over. Endless. Rolling climax building. Wave after wave after wave. His soldiers ripping everything apart. Dismembering everything. Opening the city up like a body. Battering it like waves on rock. Marith fighting, killing, the whole city spread before him, watching it fighting, watching it falling, watching it burn and break and yield and fall into dust. On and on his men running through the city, killing everything. The storm beating against the harbour. The siege engines loosing banefire and rock.

The defenders retreating. Their city burning. Blood running in torrents. Pulling back to their own houses. Hoping without hope that their own families might somehow be saved. The snow coming thicker. Muting sound and vision. Cold sweet silent white air. The Army of Amrath spilling over everything. Wading through the city’s dying. Soaked and mired in death. That smell it had! Heavy, sweet, honeyed tang. Breathe it in, it never goes stale. The smell of the butcher’s block that is the smell of power and the illusion of living. Every death to be treasured. Hoarded. I did this. I made this.

Blood and filth and human ruin: that is the face of god. Arunmen is taken! Arunmen is fallen! And here now he is king.

Osen Fiolt and Valim Erith met him at the gates of the palace of Arunmen. Onyx towers like the city walls, high as cliffs, black as storm clouds, its roofs gold tiles but they’d stripped off the tiles to pay for their pointless futile war. Osen had a squad of men guarding it. They can have the city, Marith had told his captains, but the palace is to be kept intact for me.

‘It’s clear,’ said Valim. ‘We’ve been through it.’ Lord Valim of Fealene Isle; a companion of Marith’s father, older therefore than Marith and Osen, too cautious in his thinking but a good leader of men, as many older men are. He had been with them since the beginning of everything, had fought in every battle, had lost his son and his brother in battle, but still Marith felt something like shame around him, who had seen him as a child, been a young man armed and shining when Marith was a child staring up in awe.

Valim got down on his knees before Marith. ‘ Ansikanderakesis Amrakane . My Lord King of Arunmen.’

‘I was already King of Arunmen.’ So unnecessary. All of this.

‘Come on, then,’ said Osen. ‘Let’s go and have a look, see what they’ve left us.’

‘Tell the men three days,’ said Marith. He looked at the snow falling. ‘Try and make sure they don’t burn absolutely every building down.’

Valim nodded.

‘Have they found the ringleaders?’ asked Marith.

A look of irritation. ‘We will.’

‘You hope,’ said Osen. Marith gave him a look.

They went into the palace together, Marith and Osen. Marith’s footsteps rang very loud on the tiled floor.

Hated this part, somehow. Walking through halls and corridors, walls closing around him, on and in and in. Smell of smoke. Servants’ faces. Dead faces. Dying faces. So many times, we’ve done this, he thought. But always so strange.

‘I thought Valim said it was clear,’ said Osen. He kicked a slumped body, one of their soldiers. It groaned. ‘This isn’t clear.’

They came to the throne room. Servants and nobodies in grand rich clothing, faces grey with terror, trying to protest with every fibre of their being that they’d always worshipped Marith Altrersyr as their true king. More bodies. Marith’s soldiers and the Arunmenese soldiers who had tried to fight them off.