Fifth moon, afternoon, day forty-three of the siege
Grand temple square, First Circle, Rilporin, Wheat Lands
The woman Lanta had taken seven of the captives so far and killed them, sacrificed them, butchered them while Crys waited bound on his knees in the centre of the square.
He’d thrown up as the first was killed even though he’d seen worse by now, so much worse. The woman died howling and writhing, bent backwards over a barrel and carved open. It was messy and fast, nothing like the sacrifice of Prince Janis that still gave him nightmares. As though Lanta was just warming up for the grand event.
Us.
The ground beneath the barrel was a red slurry of blood and piss and dust pooling on the stone, the sky fractured with screams as the crowd of prisoners shrank and the pile of corpses grew. Mireces were picking through the confiscated armour and weapons, while others checked the belts and hands of the dead for money pouches and rings. Scavengers. Raiders.
Lanta’s blue dress had darkened to purple and black in great sodden swathes, the cloth clotting about her legs as she chanted obscene prayers and slaughtered helpless men and women, even children, cutting hard and deep, opening the victims from sternum to groin while General fat fucking Skerris helped hold them down.
Dom watched, face bright with blazing exaltation, cackling at the screams. It was almost as bad as what Lanta herself was doing to the victims, seeing Dom so changed, so other. Almost.
What they’re doing to them, what they did to Janis … will it be that bad? Crys had tried to avoid asking the question, telling himself he didn’t want to know, but the screams were like rusty blades against his skin, pricking, scratching away at his will, his courage. The bones of himself.
The thing inside – he still couldn’t bring himself to name it – shifted and stretched, sliding beneath his skin, an odd unknowable comfort.
Worse.
Crys blew out his cheeks and clenched his arse before he shat himself. Fucking idiot. Never, never ask questions like that.
His attention was snagged again by Lanta gesturing with a bloody hand at the prisoners. Bound hands were awkwardly raised to press fingertips to hearts and lips mumbled broken, desperate prayers as the Mireces moved among them, choosing.
‘Convert or die, soldier,’ Lanta said as they dragged the man, young Captain Lark of Crys’s south wall command, towards the barrel. ‘Embrace the Dark Lady and Gosfath, God of Blood, or suffer the torments of agony and death, the slow leaching of your life into the earth.’
She gestured and Lark’s eyes rolled in their sockets as he strained to see the other bodies. Not all of them were dead yet, piled on top of one another, bleeding on to, into each other. Tangled in limbs and blood and the poison of opened bowels, suffocating under dead flesh.
‘I am a child of Light,’ Lark shouted into the woman’s face. He aimed a gob of spit at her, missed.
‘So be it,’ Lanta said, unemotional.
‘Dancer’s grace!’ Crys found himself shouting, before Valan kicked him between the shoulder blades and sent him face first on to the stone.
Lanta raised hand and knife and invoked her filthy gods, then slit the screaming man wide open, a great gaping red-lipped smile bulging with guts, a mouth teeming with frogspawn. The sweating Mireces lifted him off the barrel and tossed him on to the pile, intestines spilling out after him in a long, dragging mess across the stone. One of the men skidded in them as he passed, then kicked Lark right in the hole the knife had made in him. The strike ruptured something and blood gouted, flooded, flowed. Lark stopped screaming, then stopped breathing. A quicker death than some of the others.
It’ll be me soon.
Us.
Me or us is still fucking me!
He didn’t get a response to that. Crys pressed his eyes closed and inhaled through flared nostrils as Valan dragged him roughly back up on to his knees. ‘Hey, Skerris,’ he shouted to distract himself. ‘Whatever happened to the North Rank? Why didn’t they come?’
Skerris wiped sweat out of the folds of his chin. ‘Sent them a commission of new blankets soaked in poison and left to dry. When they went to bed, blankets touched their skin and body heat and the braziers released poison vapour. None of ’em ever woke up. Five thousand men, gone.’ He snapped his fingers.
‘That’s …’ Crys trailed off.
‘Inspired,’ Lanta cut in. She beckoned with a bloody hand. ‘Come, little fox. It’s time.’
Crys grinned at her, bravado the only thing between him and soiling his linens. ‘While it’s a lovely offer, and you’re a pretty woman in a terrifying touch-me-and-I’ll-carve-you-open sort of way, I’m just not interested. Sorry. So if you could just untie me—’
Valan’s fist crashed into his jaw.
If the last weeks had taught him anything, it was that the sound of a man screaming was enough to haunt the dreams of anyone listening. Trickster knew he’d made enough men scream on the long, bloody march from the Blood Pass Valley.
So now, though there was no one but enemies and prisoners to hear, he tried everything he could to hold them in. Even so, they roared and hiccupped and bellowed their way out of his throat, and every one of them tore a little splinter of Crys away and replaced it with something else.
No barrel for him to lie over, belly reaching for the sky, oh no. Lanta’s ingenuity knew no bounds, and they’d nailed rings into the grand temple’s oak door frame and stretched him by the wrists and ankles in its open maw. Stretched him so tight that the pain in his joints was almost worse than what was being done to him.
No, it really isn’t.
Behind him through the open door yawned the peace of the temple, the quiet slap of water in the godpool, heard but unseen, its breath cool on Crys’s naked skin. In front stood the Mireces and the East Rank, as many who could crowd into the square as possible to witness the death of a god.
Really not feeling too godlike at the moment, though at least they left me my linens. Be a fucking disappointment to all concerned otherwise.
Lanta stood in her bloodstained gown, her knife and hammer loose in her hands, watching with a small smile. She took no part in his torture.
‘Why?’ Crys gasped as Dom paused to catch his breath.
‘I am the instrument of the gods,’ Dom said, sucking at a split knuckle, cut on Crys’s tooth. ‘As are we all.’
‘I’m not,’ Crys grunted. ‘I’m not an instrument.’ He pushed his head forwards and did his best to glare at the calestar. The Godblind. ‘I’m the musician.’
Dom clapped. ‘I thought it would take you longer to accept,’ he said, ‘and yet here you are, proclaiming yourself divine before us all. Should I kneel?’
Crys spat bloody phlegm at him. ‘I thought you only knelt to Blood these days? I thought the Dom we all knew and loved was a husk, dead inside. Of all the names people have given you, Darksoul shames you the most. That one’s a stain you won’t ever wash clean.’
Dom’s mouth twisted and he picked up a chisel and hammer. Crys’s head filled with the image of Janis, upside down, bollocks nailed to his arsehole. He put every ounce of strength he had into snapping his thighs together. They trembled, didn’t move so much as a hair’s breadth, and sweat popped out on his brow, leaked down his spine and into the filthy waistband of his linens.
Dear fucking gods, please don’t, please. Hey, Foxy, you in here? You said worse but you didn’t mean this, did you? Trickster? Tell me he’s not going near my bollocks. Please?
No answer. ‘Look, Dom, I’m sorry, listen, I’m sure we can come to some sort of arrangement, just, you know, man to man. It’s a bit much …’
Dom looked at the hammer and then into Crys’s face. ‘Oh,’ he said, and grinned. Then he chuckled, waving it about. ‘Oh my, is that what you think?’ He set the chisel against the inside of Crys’s right leg. ‘We’ve a long way to go before that, Fox God,’ he said and, with a single blow, he drove the chisel underneath Crys’s kneecap and popped it out of place.
Crys screeched, for the first time his voice moving up a register into the realm of screams. Pain exploded beneath his kneecap, fire racing into his toes and up into his groin, his belly. Nausea surged up his throat as he made out his kneecap sitting on the side of his leg.
This is our test, our trial. This is our forging, two souls into one. Together, we’ll be unstoppable. If we live.
The voice in Crys’s head had really helped, right up until those last three words. He let out a sound, half-laugh, half-sob, and Dom leant in close.
‘Who are you talking to in there? Your brush-tailed friend?’ He jammed stiffened fingers up under Crys’s ribcage and lifted until Crys was howling. ‘Come out, come out, little fox, or I start taking pieces that won’t grow back.’
Crys made himself smile, though from the look on Dom’s face it wasn’t pretty. ‘Did the Dark Lady teach you all this, too?’ he asked. ‘To take pleasure in others’ pain? What do you think Rillirin will think when she learns what it is you’ve become? You—’
The words blended into a screech at the blinding, burning, searing pain in his hand. Dom held up a pair of slender tongs, a bloody fingernail clenched in their teeth. Crys roared, bobbing on a sea of hurt.
Funny how we tell the men in our command to be stoic when faced with pain, Crys thought in a not very funny way at all, revising his earlier opinion. Why do we do that? What possible good would it do me to stop screaming? I like screaming. It reminds me I’m still alive.
‘Rillirin, yes,’ Dom said, and for a second Crys saw sadness in his face. ‘She’s carrying my babe, you know. Conceived at the West Rank forts, back when I believed in happy endings. Back when they might even have been possible, if not for the choices we all made. Pity. Once they have the child, they won’t need her.’
‘You think Corvus will kill his sister?’ Crys managed as the thing inside rumbled interest, pressed forwards.
‘The Blessed One will, of that there is no doubt.’ Dom gave a small shake of the head, but forestalled further conversation with a knife, flensing strips of skin from Crys’s arms and chest until he bucked and roared and blood dripped from his toes on to the stone below.
‘Getting tired?’ Crys croaked through a raw throat when Dom paused to flex his hands and roll his shoulders. The Godblind casually punched him in the balls and Crys’s world contracted, his eyes bulged and he didn’t scream, but only because he couldn’t breathe.
Endless seconds until he forced away the nausea, his body straining against the ropes. ‘Wondered,’ he gasped, ‘wondered how long it’d take … before you … felt me up.’ He puckered split lips and kissed the air.
Dom disappeared behind him and Crys chanced a glance at his audience again: Corvus’s cool amusement, Lanta’s white-knuckled intensity, the jeering laughter of the warriors.
Dom’s finger poked into the ragged slice in the side of Crys’s thigh, eliciting another roar, and then his forearm came around his throat and began to squeeze. Crys gladly gave himself up to darkness.
More time had passed; he didn’t know how much. Everything hurt. Everything hurt. And despite his jabbering pleas to the thing inside to come the fuck out and kill everyone in the square, himself included if necessary, something else gathered close, a brooding darkness at the edges of his vision, a sound like madness beneath his bellows and screams.
‘Time to wake up, Fox God.’
‘What?’
Dom leant in close and pressed a kiss to Crys’s cut eyebrow, tender, almost loving. ‘Time to wake up.’
‘What are you doing, Godblind?’ Lanta demanded, moving swiftly to Dom’s side and yanking at his arm.
‘I brought Him,’ Dom said, glancing at Lanta but pointing to Crys. ‘He comes and so does She.’ He looked back at Crys. ‘Time to wake up, Fox God. Time to meet your new mistress.’
‘Wake up,’ Dom repeated, and then clutched at his head. ‘My love, my love,’ he called, ‘He’s here. I found Him. I found the Trickster for you.’
The sky darkened and a cold wind blew, a sudden howling gale that swept around the temples, whistling down the roads, stirring the hair and clothes of the sacrificed.
Crys boiled with sudden heat, sudden fury as something, Someone, shimmered into being between Dom and Lanta and they fell to their knees before it.
All around the square, soldiers and Mireces knelt and pressed their faces to the stone. Even the prisoners were felled by the appearance. She was the most beautiful, the most terrifying woman Crys had ever laid eyes upon. Lanta was an angry, petulant child in comparison.
An uncomfortable lust rose in Crys when She swept Her gaze across him. He felt his mouth dry under that flat, reptilian regard. She approached, flashes of thigh and belly through Her dark, smoky robe, until She stopped close enough that Crys could smell Her. Taste Her on the wind. Musk and madness.
She extended a finger and pressed it to his chest, the nail sliding easily through the skin into the flesh beneath, blood dribbling. Cold and heat chased each other through his body and Crys was horrifyingly aware of his burgeoning erection.
Ash, I love Ash. Think about Ash.
She chuckled, as though She knew exactly what was going on in his head. ‘The Trickster in a mortal’s flesh.’ She leant in so close Her breath tickled his face. ‘Those eyes.’ Her tongue darted out impossibly far, impossibly fast, and tasted his blue iris. Crys jerked and blinked, the thing inside growing angrier.
Now’s the time, Fox God. Now is really the fucking time.
The Dark Lady turned Her attention on Dom. ‘You have done well, my love,’ She said.
Crys watched, sickened, as Dom stood and stroked Her cheek. ‘I live only to serve you,’ he said. ‘This is my gift to you, my love. One of your greatest enemies, bound and helpless and at your mercy.’
This time when She looked at him, there was such hunger in Her eyes that Crys writhed with the animal instinct to flee. ‘Then let us pull the little fox free,’ She said, licking Her lips and reaching for the ropes binding Crys, ‘and have some fun.’
Shouts erupted from the eastern end of the district, and moments later from the western. ‘Attack,’ came the call, ‘full attack on the gates!’
The Dark Lady snarled Her frustration and snapped the ropes holding Crys, dragged him free and clutched him to Her chest like a doll.
Finally, finally, the thing inside Crys began to move.