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.
Why? Marith thought. Why did they try to fight them off? It’s an old wooden chair.
The walls of the throne room were made of amber. Thick and drowning: Marith stared at the walls, looked through the amber like looking through water, there were flowers trapped in it, insects, encased in the walls. He put his hand on the amber and it was almost warm. It felt like skin. Not cold, like stone. The throne on its dais: wood, twisting patterns in the grain, red canopy old and cracked and dusty, that was said to be the skin of a sea beast that a king of Arunmen had once killed. The steps of the dais were thick with gold paint.
Tasteless. Like every single bloody one of them. Power awe glory power wealth! Bloodstains on the wood that nothing could scrub out. Marith climbed the dais. Sat down on the throne.
‘The King of Arunmen!’ Everyone kneeling, Osen, the soldiers, the servants and officials of the palace who had surrendered to them, all kneeling with their faces pressed on the stone floor. Gold-coloured skin in the amber light. Like they were all yellow and sick.
Yellow light and smoky, bloody chambers. Marith closed his eyes. Panicked fear he was going to throw up.
Arunmen had surrendered to him. Made him sit here once already, king and master, all enthroned in yellow light. Filthy poxy place in the middle of sodding nowhere. No desire in him then ever to come back.
‘Marith?’
Marith opened his eyes. Osen was staring at him, everyone else still prostrate heads down, crouched beetled staring at the floor. Pile of dead bodies. Dying bodies. Valim Erith had said the place was clear. Here I am seating myself on my throne in a room full of corpses. We don’t even try to pretend it’s anything else any more.
‘Get up,’ he said. Creak of armour. Creak of old men’s bones. Some of these servants must have turned their coats three times now, from the dead king Androinidas to Marith Altrersyr to the pretender who’d rebelled against him to Marith Altrersyr again.
He said, ‘Kill these people. All of them.’
Osen tried to smile at him. ‘You need a drink and a hot bath, Marith.’
Marith took the flask from his belt, discovered it was empty. ‘I do.’
‘I sent riders. Thalia will be here in a few days, I should think, unless the snow gets much worse. So cheer up. Look, let’s go and get you clean.’ ‘Don’t kill them,’ he saw Osen mouth over his shoulder at his soldiers.
They went up to the king’s private rooms, up in a tower above the throne room. The bedchamber had windows of green glass, the light cool like the light beneath trees. Marith felt easier here, breathing in the green. The walls were hung with leaves and flowers, preserved by magecraft fresh and perfect as the day they were first picked. The bed had curtains