The House of Sacrifice. Anna Smith Spark

far off in the trees, a voice screamed.

      Naillil looked up. Tobias looked up.

      A howl in the air. A great gust of hot wind. More voices shouting. Screaming.

      ‘The dragon! The dragon!’ The sky lit up crimson. Fire blazing across the sky. ‘The dragon!’ a voice screamed. ‘The dragon!’

      It came rushing over them, green and silver, huge as thinking, writhing and twisting and tearing at itself, swimming in the flames. Spewing out fire. Again. Again. Again. Again.

      Soldiers came tramping towards them. Armed. Began killing them. Killing women. Killing children. The trail of lives that followed where the army led. Their women. Their children. Killing them.

      Run.

      Just run.

      Tobias was gasping, wheezing, limping. His leg shrieking in pain and his arm shrieking and his heart and his ribs. Rovi next to him staggering, gasping, rot stink coming off him. Almost fell. Teeth gritted with pain. Up the slope of the mountain, towards … something. Nothing. Just run. Good rich black earth clinging sucking to his boots. Streams of people. Soldiers. Panic. Naillil shouted, ‘Look.’ A dark little cleft in the rocks, a cave, could hardly see it in the night and it looked like a wound in the hillside and it stank of blood like everything everywhere they had been. They scrambled up to it, crouched into it, sat in the dark, like sitting inside a wound. Stone walls close around them. Tobias gasping and sobbing in pain. Trying to gasp loud enough to drown out Rovi wheezing his horrible broken dead bad-water breath.

      ‘It will be over soon,’ said Naillil. ‘Few hours, at most.’

      ‘Yeah. Few hours. Like last time.’

      ‘She’ll stop it. Or Lord Fiolt will.’

      Noises in the night. Wing beats. Voices shouting. Then horsemen passing very near them, riding hard. Trumpet calls. Then silence.

      They emerged from the cave in the first light of morning. Voices crying. Footsteps on loose pebbles, jangle of bronze. A soldier’s voice shouting commands.

      ‘Line up there! We’re marching now.’

      The slope of the mountain fell away very steeply beneath them, they must have scrambled up it climbing, Tobias could barely remember except that it had hurt. In the valley beneath them, a column of soldiers was marching off south. Staring straight ahead, everything neat and tidy, armour polished, red crests to their helmets very bright. They marched past in silence. Another column, spearmen with long sarriss, a raw red banner at the head of their files. It hung limp in the still air. Further up the slope, very near them, a party of horsemen. The smell of the horses was strong and pleasant.

      There were great burn marks across the mountain. The fruit trees were burned away, rocks smashed up. The earth bare and black and dead. Figures picked their way across a wasteland of black ash.

      A woman was standing a short distance from them. A dead baby in her arms. Her face and body were streaked with blood. Further down the slope a dead child lay sprawled, flies buzzing over it. A dead woman lay near it, her arms thrown out towards it. There were flies everywhere.

      Oh Thalia, Tobias thought. Oh Thalia, girl.

      ‘She’s lost four pregnancies now,’ said Naillil. ‘Four pregnancies in four years.’ Naillil’s hands folded over her stomach. ‘You could almost pity her.’

      She must have heard the sound Tobias was trying not to make. ‘I said almost,’ she said.

      They began to walk slowly down the burned slope. Following the way the horsemen had gone. Tobias groaned in pain, rubbed at his arm. ‘Any chance any of our stuff survived, you reckon?’ One of the pointless things they said. Survivors coming together, the old hands who knew what to do to avoid the soldiers on the bad nights. Pedlars began to shout that they had cloths and blankets and cookpots for sale, cheap and best quality, lined up waiting for those who had lost everything overnight. The woman holding the dead baby began walking behind them. After perhaps an hour she grew calmer. Dropped the baby’s body. Walked on and walked on.

      They stopped that night to make camp on the banks of a stream. Tobias made up the fire. Naillil began to prepare a pot of stew. Rovi sat and stank.

      ‘Why … why did he … do it?’ the woman whose baby had died asked them. Her name was Lenae. Couldn’t bring himself to ask about the baby’s name. Her hands moved and for a moment Tobias almost saw a baby cradled in them.

      Why? Oh gods. Don’t ask that.

      ‘You haven’t been with the army long, then?’ said Naillil at last.

      Lenae flushed red as the fire. Pulled her cloak around her tight. ‘I … My husband was a merchant in Samarnath. When the Ansikanderakesis Amrakane’s army came … One of the soldiers was kinder to me. Stopped another from killing me. He – so I – everyone there was dead, and he – I – then he must have been killed, at Arunmen.’ She looked away. ‘Why did he do it? Kill the children? Burn the camp?’

      A branch moved in the cookfire, sending up sparks. The fire died down to embers. ‘Damn,’ said Naillil. Tobias got up and poked at the fire and moved bits of wood around and eventually it flared up bright and hot.

      ‘The queen lost her baby,’ said Naillil. ‘She was pregnant, and she lost the child … And last night the king … He …’

      ‘He was angry,’ said Tobias. Say it. That fucking poison bastard Marith. That sick, vile, diseased, degenerate fucking bastard. My fault my fault my fault my fault. ‘He ordered the … the dragon … ordered his soldiers to kill the children. All the children in the camp. He’s done it before. Twice.’

      ‘He’ll feel remorse, soon enough,’ said Naillil. ‘He probably does already. Gets drunk, orders it, cries when he’s told what he did. He’ll probably give a bag of gold to anyone whose child died in it. To make amends.’

      ‘Like he did before,’ said Rovi. ‘Twice.’

      ‘So you’re quids in, then, woman,’ said Tobias. He stared into the fire. ‘You can go home to the smoking ruins of Samarnath and live rich as an empress in the ashes there.’

      Thought then: I let Marith kill a baby, once.

      Once?

      A few years ago.

      Let Marith do it?

      Encouraged him. Swapped a baby’s life for a sleep in a bed.

      You look like what you are, boy, he’d told Marith before the boy did it.

      Three days later, Lenae had five thalers in a bag around her neck she didn’t know what to do with. Buy a house somewhere and live long and peaceful. Bury them in a hole and piss on them and curse Marith Altrersyr. Drink herself senseless and pay someone to slit her throat.

      The first, almost certainly. That’s what most of the women had done. Twice before.

      That’s not fair, Tobias thought. Not fair. She’s got every right to make the best of her crapped-on ruined wound of a life.

       Chapter Eleven

      Turain! The land fell away sharply, the plain of the Isther river opening up, black earth and rich fields before the desert and the mountains rose again. Groves of white oleander. Peach trees. Dates. Golden plump wheat. Ah, gods, the smell was mouthwatering. The wind blew up from the south scented with ripe fruit, everyone drooled as they breathed it in. The river lay a wide silver ribbon, fat, smooth and sleepy, worn out from rushing through the mountain slopes. It is good here, Tobias thought. Really bloody nice. Turain smiled at them on the horizon. Not a very big city. Maybe even just a large town. Not much to look at, either, said someone who knew someone who knew some bloke. Grey and square and low, houses with narrow windows, gloomy inside and out. It had been sacked and pillaged and burned and smashed up and