Grow The Sacrifices

Arknemul descended the last of the switchback stairs and stepped out onto the mud flats that surrounded the pits of depravity, and the smell reached him before the sound did. The smell was old copper and lamp oil and the sour animal stink of ten thousand bodies kept in close quarters, and beneath it all the faint burnt-hair smell of active spellwork. The sound, when it came, was worse. It rose from the pits themselves, out past the barracks, a low continuous roar without words in it. He did not look toward it. He had come down from the bloody throne on business, and the business began indoors.

The barracks were long and low, built from the salvaged stone of some golden kingdom granary, and the goblins at the door pressed themselves flat against the wall when they saw his wings. Inside, the air was hotter. Rows of iron tables ran the length of the hall, and on the tables lay the males; humans, dwarves, elves, and fae, each of them stripped and strapped down at the wrists, ankles, chest, and throat. Over each table stood a sorcerer, orc or goblin, working with a hooked knife and a bowl of black ink that smoked without burning. They carved slowly. The runes had to be exact. Rage was a simple thing to summon and a delicate thing to calibrate, and a botched line could kill a male outright or, worse, waste him.

The men on the tables were in various stages of the work. The fresh ones wept or begged or lay silent with their eyes fixed on the ceiling beams. The finished ones did not weep. The finished ones strained against the straps until the iron groaned, snapping their teeth at the air, their eyes gone to pinpoints, their bodies flushed and rigid with a hunger the runes had built into them line by line. They were no longer men in any way that mattered. That was the point of them. Two trolls walked the rows with padded hooks, unbolting the completed tables from the floor and wheeling them out the far doors toward the pits, thrashing cargo and all. One of the humans being wheeled past Arknemul had bitten through his own lip and did not appear to have noticed.

Dulvet was waiting for him at the center of the hall with her hands clasped behind her back. She was a big orc, grey-skinned, one tusk capped in bronze where it had broken, and she wore the stained leather apron of the overseers as though it were regalia.

“Lord Arknemul,” she said. “The pits are honored.”

“The pits are underperforming,” Arknemul said. He folded his wings and walked a slow circuit around the nearest table, watching a goblin sorcerer close the final loop of a rune between a dwarf’s shoulder blades. The dwarf had stopped screaming some minutes ago and started snarling. “The queen’s altars are hungry, Dulvet. The last three shipments you sent up to the bloody throne were soft. Sacrifices with slack faces. Not enough agony worked into them. And your output has fallen; the tithe ledgers do not lie, even when overseers do. So I have come down to see whether the problem is your methods or your competence, because one of those can be corrected.”

Dulvet did not flinch, which he noted with something adjacent to approval.

“The problem is known, lord,” she said. “It is the runes. The new rage variants the throne sent down last year run hotter than the old ones. The males come out of this hall like storms. It makes them potent, yes, but too many of the females are being beaten to death before conception takes. A dead female is a wasted cycle, wasted feed, wasted floor space. We have posted double guards on the pit rims with barbed poles, and they intervene when a male goes too far with the beating, but by then the damage is often done. We lose stock. Our numbers fall. The survivors carry, but there are fewer of them each cycle.”

Arknemul stopped walking. Above the dwarf, the goblin sorcerer wiped his knife and moved to the next table without ever once looking up.

“You have been treating the wrong end of the problem,” Arknemul said. “Your guards can only punish a rage they cannot outpace. Do not slow the males, Dulvet. Thin them. Reduce the number you drop into each pit, and increase the rage in each one you do drop. A male carved that hot cannot hold a single focus. Give him a hundred females and open ground and his attention will not stay anywhere long enough to kill. He spends less time with each woman, the beatings shorten, the woman survives, and your conception counts hold. You have been buying safety with guards when you could have been buying it with increased efficiency.”

Dulvet was silent a moment, and he could see her running the numbers behind her small yellow eyes, cycle by cycle.

“Fewer males, hotter runes,” she said slowly. “It would cut our carving costs as well. Fewer tables per cycle.” She bowed her head. “It will be done, lord. We will restructure the drops before the next moon.”

“Good. Now. Fertility. Extraction. Report.”

“Fertility is strong, lord, that has never been our failing. Most females conceive within four or five sessions. We run the full checks at four; the healers go through the pens pen by pen, and those confirmed carrying are moved out to the pits of growth. We check again after five. Whatever has not conceived by the seventh is culled from the rolls and released into the plains for the master’s sport. We waste nothing on barren stock.”

“How many sessions before you check at all?”

“Four is the first full check, lord.”

“Never earlier? Never at two, at three?”

“No, lord. The healers’ time is dear, and the yield at three was assumed to be too thin to justify the labor.”

“Assumed,” Arknemul said. “Assumed is a word lazy overseers use for things they have never counted.”

For the first time Dulvet’s composure cracked into something eager, and she stepped closer, lowering her voice the way merchants do when they mean to boast.

“Lord, if it is early yield you want, hear this. I keep three pits, one hundred females in each, that produce without fail on the fourth session. Every female, every cycle, for six years running. Not one barren check among them in all that time. I bred the rolls carefully; I kept the reliable lines and culled the slow ones. They are my prime stock, lord. The steadiest producers in the whole of the pits.”

Arknemul looked at her for a long moment, and something moved behind his reptile eyes that might, in another creature, have been called interest.

“Six years of perfect fourths,” he said. “Then some portion of those three hundred are almost certainly conceiving on the third, or the second, and sitting undiscovered in the pens for sessions they no longer need, taking beatings that risk what they already carry. You are burning cycles, Dulvet. You are burning stock.” He turned back toward the tables, the knives, the smoking ink. “Run a half check on your prime pits after the third session. Only half; I do not need your healers exhausted, I need a count. If we find a substantial number of early bloomers, we cull the fours from the line entirely and breed forward only from the threes. Their daughters after them, and their daughters after them. In ten years the queen could have pens that produce a full session faster across the whole facility. Think what that does to the tithe.”

Dulvet’s capped tusk caught the lamplight as she smiled.

“It will be done, lord. The half check on the third, this very cycle. I will send the counts up to the throne myself.”

“Send them to me,” Arknemul said. “The queen reads outcomes, not counts.”

He gave the hall one last look; the tables, the straps, the fresh ones weeping and the finished ones snarling, the trolls wheeling the completed monsters out the far doors toward the roar that never stopped. Everything in working order. Everything correctable that needed correcting. He turned and walked out into the grey daylight, unfurling his wings as he went, and set off along the mud track that ran between the pit rims, past the double guards leaning on their barbed poles, toward the far terraces where the pits of growth waited; where the ones who had conceived were kept, and counted, and fed just enough, until what they carried was ready to be taken from them too.

The track to the pits of growth ran uphill along a terraced slope, and Arknemul saw the troll before the troll saw him; a mountain of grey hide and rhino horn standing at the rim of the highest terrace with a tally slate in one enormous hand. Then the troll turned, spotted the wings, and raised his free arm in a wide wave, beckoning him up the way a farmer beckons a buyer in to see the herd.

“Lord Arknemul! Down here, lord, come see, come see.”

The terraces were honeycombed with holes. Not pens, not cells; holes, dug straight down into the packed earth, each one barely wide enough for the bodies it held, and from every one of them rose sound. Very different from the roar of the pits of depravity. This was lower, a layered choir of groans, hundreds of voices in shallow pits all suffering at slightly different pitches, so that the whole hillside seemed to moan with one continuous breath that never needed to inhale. Arknemul walked the rim of the nearest hole and looked down. A dozen swollen bodies were pressed together at the bottom, humans and a fae, their skin blotched red and raw, all of them scratching, scratching, even in what passed for their sleep.

The troll caught up to him, breathing easily despite the climb.

“Feth, lord. Head of growth for the last thirty-three years.” He gestured toward a long stone hall at the center of the terraces with the pride of a man showing off a mill. “You have come at processing hour. Come, the main hall, you will want to see it running.”

The hall was loud with screaming. Orcs and goblins moved lines of pregnant women through it, each woman chained at the neck, humans and elves and dwarves and fae, all of them heavy with child, all of them shuffling with the flat-eyed obedience of stock that has learned the routine. At the first station, goblins worked hand pumps connected to barrels, spraying each woman down head to foot with a thin liquid that hissed faintly where it struck. The effect was immediate. Skin flushed scarlet on contact and the women screamed, high and hoarse and brief, and then the screaming collapsed into frantic scratching, nails raking arms and bellies and scalps as they were prodded forward down the line, clawing at themselves as though their whole bodies had filled with insects.

At the second station stood the shaman. She was a dryad, or had been; a great barkskinned woman chained upright between two posts, her body so dense with carved runes that almost no unmarked bark remained, and goblins darted around her on stools and ladders with hooked knives, recutting lines wherever her living wood had begun to heal over. Her eyes were open, yet they did not track anything. As each pregnant woman was dragged before her, an orc forced the woman’s jaw open and packed her mouth with handfuls of what looked like black dirt, holding it shut until she swallowed, and the dryad’s hands rose on their chains and moved through the gestures of a spell she was no longer permitted to refuse. A dull green light passed from her palms into each swollen belly. The women convulsed once, gagged, some vomiting, and were shuffled on toward the far doors, still scratching.

“I know why you have come, lord,” Feth said comfortably, watching the line move. “The throne is unhappy. The agony in the sacrifices is thin, the output is down. I heard it before you landed. And I will tell you now so you can put it in your report: it is not us her at growth. Whatever is failing, it fails before my terraces or after them. My part of the machine runs clean.”

“Then prove it,” Arknemul said. “Walk me through your full process. Every step. Leave nothing out because you think I know it.”

Feth nodded, pleased, and led him back out along the terrace rim as he talked.

“A dozen women to each hole, more or less, sorted roughly by race so the timings stay even. Each hole has a smaller hole dug at its center for them to soil in, keeps the waste in one place. Every day, every hole, they come up on the chains and through the main hall. First the spray. Dilute acid, lord, lye base, my own dilution; it decontaminates them, kills the lice and the rot and the pest before it can spread through a hole and take a dozen bellies at once. Then the feeding. The dirt is the medium, the dryad’s magic is the meal. Growth magic, lord, worked into every belly every day. It runs the gestation five times over. A human or a dwarf ripens in as little as a month and a half. Elves and fae take two months; their kind grows slow even when pushed.”

They passed a work gang at one of the holes, women hauling baskets of soil to its rim and tipping them in over the heads of the women below.

“That is the daily dirt,” Feth said. “Before they go back down each evening, a fresh layer over the bottom, seals the soiling under it so the filth does not sicken them. When a hole gets too shallow from the layering, we pull a gang from the pits of recovery, they dig it back out to depth, and the stock goes back in. And nothing is wasted, lord, mark that. Every basket of that soil, all of it laced through with the leavings, goes down to the slums to fertilize the fields. The queen’s grain grows out of these holes. Then, when a woman is fully ripe, off she goes to the butcher block for harvesting, and after the block, to recovery, and the cycle turns again.”

“The block is my next stop,” Arknemul said. “Before I go. Losses. How many, and to what.”

Feth actually straightened, the way a soldier does before reciting his one great commendation.

“Lord, my terraces lose stock to one thing only, and rarely. The spray. It sits harsh on the skin, and some of them scratch themselves open, and an open sore can take infection. But here is the beauty of it: the same acid that opens them also closes them. It kills most any rot it touches, and once a woman has felt it hit an open sore, she learns to stop the scratching quick enough; the agony teaches better than any lash. So the infections that take hold at all are few. Rarely, very rarely, one goes deep and kills the child, and rarer still the child and the mother both. Fewer than one loss in every hundred, lord, mother or babe, and I will put my slates against any overseer in the pits on that number.” He waved a dismissive hand. “There are the miscarriages, of course, but that is not process, that is stock. Bad blood in the lines. Any woman who slips more than once, we ship her up to the bloody throne and she feeds the altars there. No sense wasting feed and dirt and the dryad’s strength on bad genetics.”

Arknemul stood a moment at the rim of the highest terrace and looked down over the whole moaning hillside; the holes, the chains, the hall still screaming faintly below, the work gang tamping fresh dirt over the day’s filth, the green light flickering through the hall doors belly by belly.

“Tip top, Feth,” he said at last. “Everything here is tip top. Whatever is bleeding the queen’s tithe, it is not your terraces.”

Feth bowed as low as a troll can bow.

Arknemul spread his wings and stepped off the terrace edge, gliding down the slope toward the squat stone building at the bottom where the smell of copper was strongest, where the butcher block waited, and beyond it the pits of recovery; the next links in the machine, another place left where the fault could be hiding.

The butcher block announced itself by sound before Arknemul reached its doors. Beneath the copper smell and the hiss of steam from the sterilizing vats, thin and constant, came the wailing of newborns; dozens of them, overlapping, rising and falling from somewhere deeper in the facility, a sound the stone walls seemed to have long ago stopped trying to contain.

Inside, the surgery hall was bright with lamplight and rigorously clean, cleaner than anywhere else in the pits. Rows of iron tables held women strapped down at the wrists and ankles, all of them at full ripeness, their reddened skin scrubbed pale in patches where the preparation crews had washed them down. Some wept quietly. Most had receded somewhere behind their own eyes and stayed there.

The butcher worked the center row. He was a goblin, small and quick and ancient, and where his fingers should have been there were blades; scalpels and hooked knives grafted into the knuckles themselves, folding and extending as he flexed, so that his hands opened like surgical kits. His apron had once been leather and was now simply blood, layered and dried and layered again into something like armor. He did not look up when the demon entered. He was mid-harvest.

Arknemul stopped at a respectful distance and watched, and he had to concede the work was beautiful in its way. The goblin’s bladed fingers moved with total economy; the opening of the belly took seconds, the incisions layered and precise, no wasted motion and no more cut than the work required. An assistant lifted the child out into the lamplight, wet and screaming, and passed it without ceremony to a waiting attendant, who carried it three steps to a stone basin and dunked it briefly into the same dilute acid the terraces used, purging the birth from its skin. The child’s scream changed pitch. It was toweled off, still screaming, and carried away through a far door toward the sound of all the other screaming, off to the pits of rearing.

Behind the butcher, the rest of the line worked in silence. A second goblin followed him table to table with needle and gut thread, stitching each mother closed in quick tight rows. Behind the stitcher came a dwarf, chained at the neck to a running rail in the ceiling, his hands aglow with pale healing light; he pressed his palms to each sutured belly and the flesh knitted, the swelling eased, the color returned. He did not look at the women’s faces. Arknemul suspected he had stopped being able to years ago.

The demon waited, folded and patient, until the last belly of the batch was opened, emptied, stitched, and sealed, and the last child’s wail had faded down the far corridor. Only then did the butcher turn, flexing his knives back into their resting folds, and regard his visitor with small bright eyes.

“A demon of the throne, standing in my hall, watching my hands,” the butcher said. His voice was a dry rasp, like a blade drawn over a strop. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Your queen’s displeasure,” Arknemul said. “Though not, I think, with you. Your work is exceptional. I have watched harvests at the throne itself performed with half your economy. But the pits’ output has fallen, and the stock arriving at the altars carries less agony in it than it should, and I am walking the whole machine until I find the loose gear.”

The butcher made a sound that might have been a laugh, dry as everything else about him.

“Then keep walking, lord, because the loose gear is not here. This hall runs tight. You saw it. Open, harvest, stitch, heal; the mothers go to the pits of recovery, a few days of rest and feed, and near every one of them walks back to the pits of depravity in full health, ready for the next cycle. The children go through that door to the pits of rearing, and the moment they pass it they are not my problem anymore. I harvest. I do not raise, I do not breed, I do not haul. My slates are clean.”

“Every hall I visit has clean slates,” Arknemul said. “And yet the tithe bleeds. So tell me what this hall loses, and to what. Every process loses something.”

“Not mine.” The butcher spread his hands, and the blades caught the lamplight in a dozen thin lines. “We have no losses. None worth a slate mark. When the stock reaches my tables it has already survived the runes, the pits, the spray, the growth; whatever was going to kill it has had its chance. What arrives here, I harvest, and what I harvest, lives, mother and child both. You doubt it, take it to Hocharul. She rules the whole of the breeding pits; every slate from every hall crosses her desk. She will back every word I have said, and she keeps the counts to prove it.”

“I will speak with Hocharul,” Arknemul said. “But I will see the pits of rearing first. The fault I am hunting is a fault of losses, butcher, and losses have to happen somewhere in this chain for the output to make sense. I want to see how the crop is raised, since I have yet to see any appreciable losses in the pits of depravity, growth, and recovery.”

The butcher shrugged and turned back to his tables, where the next batch of women was already being wheeled in and strapped down, and his knives unfolded from his knuckles one by one.

“Then follow the chain, lord,” he said, bending to his work. “And I can assure you will find it has never once failed.”

Arknemul turned and walked toward the far door, through it, into the corridor beyond, where the wailing of the newly harvested mixed with older cries, the cries of children who had been in this place long enough to learn what it was; and he followed the sound, as instructed, toward the pits of rearing.

The pits of rearing were divided into two sections. From the near pits came the wailing of newborns, that continuous overlapping chorus that had followed Arknemul all the way from the butcher block had receded here and became a low murmur. From the far pits came something else, older voices, cries, and groans, and the rhythmic crack of leather.

He went to the newborns first, and stopped at the rim of the nearest pit, and even a demon of the bloody throne stood still a moment at what he saw.

The pit floor was clean, laid with straw and woolen batting, and across it were arranged the nurses. They had been women once; humans, elves, dwarves, fae. They were not women now. Each was a vast swollen torso, legless, headless, its bulk grown and grafted into a soft mound of flesh from which sprouted arms, a few dozen apiece, harvested and joined at every angle, and among the arms, breasts, far too many, heavy with milk. Where each neck should have been there was only a smooth stump, and standing over each stump on a small wooden platform was a goblin, one hand pressed flat into the flesh, eyes half closed in concentration, working the body beneath it the way a puppeteer works strings. And the bodies worked. The many arms moved with impossible gentleness, lifting infants from straw bassinets, swaddling them, rocking them, changing them, guiding tiny mouths to feed; each grotesque mound tending dozens of newborns at once with a tenderness no living mother in this place would ever be permitted to give.

The infants, for their part, were quiet, or crying only the ordinary cries of infants. Fed. Warm. Held.

“You are admiring my creations.”

The voice came from behind him, female, amused. Arknemul turned. The demon picking her way along the pit rim toward him was tall and fine-boned for their kind, her horns filed and polished, her leathery wings folded neat as a cloak. Hocharul. Mistress of the whole of the breeding pits, and she was smiling at her own handiwork the way an artist smiles at a hung canvas.

“They trouble even our own when they first see them,” she went on, joining him at the rim. “But there is doctrine beneath the flesh, cousin, so let me give it to you. You cannot raise a baby with agony. It has been tried. An infant that young has no self yet to torment; give it nothing but fear and pain and it simply dies, quietly, for no reason a healer can name, in numbers that would make even your queen wince at the waste. So they are held. They are fed. They are soothed. And there is a second purpose, the finer one: a creature that has known some small warmth, even this counterfeit of it, even briefly, has something that can later be taken away. Agony is contrast, cousin. The altars taste the difference between a soul that has only ever known the dark and a soul that remembers, however dimly, that once there were arms around it. I grow that memory here on purpose. It is the first ingredient.”

“Stop boasting,” Arknemul said. “I have heard the doctrine of contrast recited at the throne by clergy who invented it before you were carved from your mothers womb. And understand your position, Hocharul. I did not come to you first, and that was deliberate. I walked every hall of your machine before presenting myself to its mistress, because a mistress with something to hide will dress the route ahead of an announced inspection. I have now seen the pits of depravity, growth, the block, and this. Every overseer’s slate is clean. Every process runs. Production, by every count I have been given, is healthy. And yet fewer sacrifices arrive at the bloody throne, and softer. The machine produces and the tithe starves. That arithmetic has only one honest answer, and it is standing next to me. You are skimming, Hocharul. Skimming the queen’s sacrifices for your own altars, your own appetites, or your own trade.”

Hocharul laughed. It was a genuine laugh, unhurried, and that alone told him something was wrong with his arithmetic.

“Oh, cousin,” she said. “I know exactly where your missing tithe is going. Exactly. I could name it to you here at this rim and save you the walking.” She leaned closer, and her reptile eyes were bright with something that was not fear and was enjoying itself immensely. “But I will not. You came down from the throne to inspect my machine, so inspect it. Walk the rest of the process. All of it, to the very end of the line. If your eyes are as good as the throne believes, you will find it yourself; and when you do, or when you give up, come and find me, and we will talk about what it means. Consider it professional courtesy between cousins. I am giving you the chance to be clever.”

Arknemul held her gaze long enough to make plain what he thought of the courtesy, and she only smiled wider. He scowled, turned his back on her and her puppet-nurses, and walked the causeway toward the older cries and the crack of leather.

The children’s pits were broad and deep, and there was no straw in them. Across each pit floor moved lines of children, from barely-walking to nearly grown, humans and elves and dwarves and fae together, and each of them carried a stone. The stones were sized to the carrier; a toddling child bore a rock the size of its own head, the older ones staggered under slabs that bowed their backs. They carried them from one side of the pit to the other, turned, and carried them back the way they had come. The work never finished. That was the work.

Along the lines walked orcish foremen with whips, and the whips fell steadily, on the slow and the quick alike, so that no child could learn a pace that would spare it; the lesson being taught was not speed but the fact of the whip itself. And yet Arknemul, watching with a professional eye, noted the restraint in every stroke. The lashes fell on backs and shoulders, never faces, never joints; they raised welts and thin lines, never opened deep. When a small dwarf girl folded under her stone and did not rise, a foreman was there in three strides, not to whip her but to hook her collar and drag her to the pit wall, where a row of other collapsed children sat slumped in the shade, unwatered but unbeaten, until one by one they found their feet and shuffled back to the line. Nothing here was wasted. Nothing was broken beyond use. The crop was being bruised to ripeness, never spoiled.

Arknemul found the head foreman at the rim of the largest pit, a scar-faced orc with three whips coiled at her belt and a slate hung from her neck.

“Production,” Arknemul said. “The full count.”

She unhung the slate and gave it over without a word. He read it twice. The columns were fat. Intake from the block, steady and rising. Losses in rearing, negligible; a handful to fever, fewer to the whip than he would have believed. Transfers out at age, batch after batch after batch, cycle on cycle, a river of grown and half-grown sacrifices flowing out of these pits toward the bloody throne. On this slate, the machine was not merely healthy. It was abundant.

He handed the slate back and stood a moment above the pit, above the lines of small bodies and their stones and the patient whips, and the arithmetic reassembled itself in his mind, uglier than before. The pits produced. The rearing counts swelled. The transfers went out full. And the altars went hungry. Somewhere between this rim and the queen’s knives, the river was being bled, and there was one demon in this facility who had laughed in his face and told him she knew where.

Right about her after all, he thought. Skimming, and brazen enough to make a game of it.

Arknemul turned from the pit, spread his wings against the grey sky, and went to find Hocharul.

The church had belonged to Avadryn once. The bones of that were still visible; the high broken windows, the vaulted ceiling, the raised dais where an altar of white stone had stood before someone recarved it into a different kind of altar with channels and drains. Arknemul landed on the cracked steps and pushed through the doors into candlelight and the smell of blood over old incense.

Hocharul was at work on the dais. Around her stood a handful of goblin assistants with slates and instruments, and before her, in a nervous line down the ruined nave, waited children of assorted ages, pulled fresh from the pits of rearing. She was sampling the crop. One child at a time was brought up to the recarved altar, and she tested it the way a vintner tests a barrel; and Arknemul, walking up the nave past the line of small pale faces, heard enough from the dais to know her testing was thorough, and saw the results on her slate as clearly as on the faces of the children being helped back down the steps, hollow-eyed, to be returned to their pits. Quality assurance. The agony checked against the standard, batch by batch.

She saw him coming and straightened, wiping her hands on a cloth with no particular hurry.

“Leave us,” she said, and the goblins gathered their slates and instruments, and shepherded the line of children out through the side door. The church was empty except for two demons.

Hocharul crossed to a side table where a dusty bottle stood among the instruments and poured two cups of wine, deep red in the candlelight, and held one out to him.

“You found nothing,” she said pleasantly. “So… Wine?”

“Do you take me for a fool, Hocharul?”

She laughed, set his cup down, and drank from her own instead, unbothered.

“I take you for a demon who needs to lighten up, cousin. You have been stamping around my pits all day wearing the queen’s scowl. It is very tiring to watch.”

“Then I will make it simple, and you will stop playing.” He came to the foot of the dais. “Kortul will have your head. I have walked your entire machine. The runes, the terraces, the block, the rearing, all of it runs, all of it produces, every slate is fat. And the returns at the throne do not match the slates. Production goes in whole and arrives short. There is no reading of that ledger that does not end at your feet, and when I carry it to the queen, no doctrine of contrast is going to talk her knives back into their sheaths.”

Hocharul swirled her wine and looked at him over the rim of the cup with open, luxuriant pity.

“Tell me, cousin. In all your ledger-reading, did you happen to recall that the bloody throne is not the only receiver of sacrifices?”

“Of course I recall it. The allotments are fixed doctrine. Half the outflow goes to the plains, released for the master’s sport and the red raiders’ hunts. A small fraction goes to the slums, enough to keep the labor stocked. The remainder comes to the throne. I can recite it in my sleep.”

“You just did. And it was correct in every part but one.” She set the cup down. “The fraction to the slums is not small, Arknemul. It has not been small for the better part of a year, and it grows with every cycle. And you should have seen it the moment you landed, which is why I let you walk the whole machine first; I wanted to know how long it would take you, and the answer, apparently, is forever.” Her voice sharpened into contempt, the enjoyment finally showing its edge. “Think, you idiot. The plague. It has been ripping through the slums for three seasons; the labor is dying in the fields and the pens faster than it can be whipped. Where do you imagine my sacrifices are going? They are going into the ground the queen’s grain grows out of. The slums are being restocked as fast as they empty, because without the slums there is no food, no cloth, no timber, no fuel; not for my pits, not for your precious throne. Every altar in the bloody throne runs on bread from those fields. I have been quietly bleeding the tithe to keep the whole of the dark kingdom fed, and doing the arithmetic you and the entire court failed to do.”

She stepped down off the dais, warming to the kill.

“So no, cousin, you found nothing, because there was nothing of mine to find. Your grand inspection was a waste of the throne’s time and a gift to me. Every hall you certified. Every slate you read clean. You have spent a full day gathering the evidence for my commendation. When this reaches the queen, I keep the pits, I am praised for holding her kingdom’s belly together while the court slept; and the demon who came down here to accuse me, who stood in front of the missing tithe all day and could not count his way to it, he is the one who goes back up the mountain to take the punishment. You should drink the wine. It is the best thing that will happen to you this week.”

Arknemul was quiet for a moment. Then he laughed; low at first, then fully, the sound rolling up into the broken vaults, and he stepped forward and picked up the cup she had poured him.

“Yes,” he said. “I will take that wine after all.”

Hocharul’s brow lowered. For the first time since the pit rim, the amusement flickered.

“What is this? Why the change of heart?”

“Because my coming down was not a waste. I leave with two things.” He drank, and set the cup down, and turned it slowly on the table with one claw. “The first is your machine. I have walked every hall of it, every process, every count, intake to output, and I understand it now the way its mistress understands it. It is fine work, Hocharul, I mean that sincerely; it is work I could see myself doing. And the second thing is the truth about the punishment, which is that there will not be one. Not for me. Consider what you have actually told me tonight. I did not overlook some glaring rot that any inspector should have caught; there was nothing wrong in these pits to catch. The shortfall was never here. And the plague, cousin; I did not know of it. The queen does not know of it. Three seasons of dying in the slums and not one word of it has climbed the mountain, which means the slumlords have been burying their dead and their reports together. You have just handed me a conspiracy to which you were a coconspirator of silence at the foot of the bloody throne, and I am the demon who will carry it up. That is not a punishment waiting for me. It will be waiting for you and the slumlords.”

He stepped away from the table, unhurried, moving toward the center of the nave.

“But it still does not balance, you see. The plague explains the numbers. It does not explain the softness. The sacrifices reaching the altars are not only fewer, they are shallower; the agony is under standard, and I stood on your dais rim today and watched your own testing confirm it, batch after batch. Your machine runs, but it is running flat, and its mistress has been too busy feeding the slums and rehearsing her commendation to taste the difference in her own product. I have some ideas about that. Several, actually; I formed them walking your halls. And it occurs to me that once the queen learns of the plague, and of the silence around it, and of how her tithe has been quietly reallocated for a year without her word; well. I think Kortul may find herself looking for a new leader of the breeding pits.”

Hocharul stood. The wine cup fell and rang on the stone. Her mouth opened around the first word of something, a curse or a counter or a scream for her goblins, and the air around her hands was already crawling with gathering red light; and she was not quick enough. Arknemul’s arm came up quicker, and from his fingertips a blade of black magic left him flat, silent, and spinning, crossed the hall in the space of a candle flicker, and took her head from her shoulders.

The body stood a moment longer, red light dying around its hands, then folded down onto the stones of Avadryn’s old church, in front of the altar. The head rolled twice and stopped, face up, the expression still halfway in its retort.

Arknemul finished his wine. It was, in fairness, very good.

Then he set the cup down beside the bottle, stepped over the spreading dark on the stones, and walked out through the broken doors into the grey air, wings opening as he went; north and upward, toward the mountain and the bloody throne, to tell Kortul about the plague, the silence, the slumlords, the vacancy in the breeding pits, and the demon best qualified to fill it.

Arknemul stepped out through the broken doors of Avadryn’s church into the grey evening, stopping on the cracked steps, because the courtyard was full of trolls.

Seven of them. They stood in a loose crescent around the foot of the steps, armored head to foot in slum-forged plate, black iron layered thick over their grey hides, faces hidden behind riveted masks, and each of them carried an axe scaled to a troll’s arm; great bearded blades that a human would have needed a cart to move. They did not shift when they saw him. They had been waiting.

Arknemul looked at them for a long moment, and then he laughed; a real laugh, rich and calm, rolling out over the courtyard stones.

“The slumlords themselves,” he said. “All seven, come up out of their plague pit to stand in a row for me. Oh, this day. This has been the funniest day I have had in a century, and now it is about to become one of the most violent, and I could not have arranged it better if I had planned it. You heard, then. You heard your little conspiracy die in there with her, and you have come to bury it with me. Come, then. Which of you would like to be the punchline?”

The troll at the center of the crescent stepped forward, boots cracking the flagstones, and reached up and unbuckled his mask and let it fall. The face beneath was old and hard, one horn broken to a stump, small eyes steady as stones.

“Test me,” the troll said.

Arknemul’s smile thinned with amusement.

“Test you. For what? Stupidity? You have already passed.”

“No,” the troll said. “Test whether I am chosen.”

The amusement went out of Arknemul’s face like a candle pinched, and what replaced it was fury.

“Chosen,” he barked, and the word cracked off the church stones. “You. A slum troll, a keeper of fields and plague pits, thinks he might be chosen of Torvakul? There are no chosen anymore, wretch. There have not been since the master returned to the world and gathered every last one of his marked back into himself; all of them, all but one, and that one sits on the bloody throne wearing a crown of king-bone. Kortul. The last chosen of Torvakul. You know this. Every whelp in the dark kingdom knows this, and you stand in front of a demon of her court and speak that word about yourself?”

The troll did not argue. He did not move. He said only, again:

“Test, then.”

And Arknemul, in his anger, did.

He drove into the troll’s mind the way demons of the throne were taught to, a spike of will through the eyes and inward, expecting the usual troll interior, rage and appetite and dull loyalty stacked like stones; and instead the spike went through a surface and into something that had been waiting underneath it with its jaws open.

The pain took Arknemul off his feet. He did not fall so much as he was felled, dropping to the church steps as agony poured back up the connection and filled him, white and total, every nerve at once. Inside it, in the black at the center of it, something vast turned its attention on him, and spoke. The voice was agony given grammar. It came from everywhere in him at once. It was ancient, amused, and absolutely without mercy.

YOU ENTER THE MIND OF ONE OF MY CHOSEN. SO HEAR THIS. KORTUL HAS BETRAYED ME. SHE AND ALL WHO KNEEL TO HER. IT IS TIME A NEW DEMON SAT UPON THE THRONE.

RENDUL.

The presence withdrew, Arknemul snapING back into his own skull, gasping, on his hands and knees on the steps of the church. He raised his head. The old troll stood over him, unmoved. The fury was gone from Arknemul’s face. What was there now, nakedly, for all seven of them to see, was fear.

“You are chosen…” he whispered.

The courtyard exploded.

Arknemul threw himself backward and sideways off the steps as the first axe came down. The blade bit through the stone where he had knelt and split the church stairs to the foundation. He came out of the roll with his wings snapping wide and both hands already black to the elbows with gathered void, and the crescent of trolls broke and came for him from many directions at once. Their war cries made rage magic come off them in visible heat, shimmering the air around their armor, the old strength of Torvakul’s large children burning through their blood, increasing their strength in every stride.

He killed the first one in the opening three seconds. A young slumlord, faster than the rest, closed the distance ahead of his brothers with his axe already swinging. Arknemul did something the troll didn’t expect: he stepped inside the arc, laid his palm flat against the riveted breastplate, and spoke a quick word of unmaking. The void went through the iron like water through a net. Armor, hide, ribs, and everything they had guarded ceased to exist in a collumn of void that devoured most of the troll’s torso. He ran two more steps on momentum alone before what remained of him understood, and crashed down dead across half the courtyard.

He took to the air, wings hammering, rising above the reach of the axes, and rained ruin on them from the darkening sky. Blades of black magic left his fingertips in fans, the same silent flat spinning death that had taken Hocharul’s head, six and eight at a time, shrieking down into the courtyard. The trolls did not scatter. They shielded. They dropped to their knees in pairs, raised their axe hafts overhead, and their fire magic thickened over them into domes of shimmering heat that turned his blades screaming aside into the church walls. He switched to fire, black fire, the master’s own color, and poured it down in a torrent that set the very flagstones burning; and out of the heart of the torrent, impossibly, a thrown axe came spinning up at him, then a second, then a hammer one of them had unslung from his back, the missiles trailing with their magic like comets. He slipped two. The third axe clipped his left wing at the joint and knocked him a full spiral sideways through the air. The courtyard tilted, and he understood he could not stay above them; his wing was bleeding and the sky was no longer his.

He came down deliberately, hard, in the middle of them, and made the landing itself a weapon; void erupting outward from the point of impact in a ring that caught the two nearest trolls and flung them like dolls into the church facade. One of them hit the broken doorframe spine-first with a sound of a bundle of green branches breaking and slid down and did not rise. The second pushed herself up out of the rubble on one arm, the other arm hanging in armor that had been crushed flat into the flesh. She began crawling back toward the fight, dragging her axe, until her own blood-loss laid her down halfway.

Four trolls left. The demon still stands.

They learned him with terrible speed. They stopped charging singly and came in rotation, one drawing his fire while two flanked, the way pit fighters bait a chained beast, and their axes herded him; every void-word he spoke cost him a heartbeat of stillness, and they had measured that heartbeat and begun arriving inside it. An axe took him across the ribs, turned from lethal to grievous only by a shield of darkness thrown up half-formed, and the impact alone hurled him through the courtyard’s iron fence. He rose out of the wreckage with his black blood sheeting down his side and gave them back everything the throne had ever taught him. He made the shadows of the courtyard stand up and fight; the trolls’ own shadows peeled off the burning flagstones and dragged at their ankles and climbed their armor with fingers of night, and while the fourth troll tore at the darkness swarming his mask, Arknemul crossed the ground between them and put a spear of condensed void up under his chin, through the helmet, through everything. Three left.

He severed a hamstring on the fifth with a scythe of black fire as the troll turned, dropping him bellowing to one knee, and crushed the sixth’s axe-arm into ruin inside its armor with a fist of gravity that folded the iron like wet parchment.

He had, in the roar of it, lost track of the old one.

That was the whole of the mistake, and it was enough. He turned, both hands rising black, the word of unmaking already on his tongue, before his world ended.

He never saw the hammer. It came out of the dark on his blind side, a two-handed slum-forged maul swung by the last chosen of Torvakul with the whole of a troll’s strength and the whole of an evil god’s favor behind it. The demon’s skull did not put up much resistance against it.

–

Zo walked the eastern rampart in the hour before dawn, and the rampart held his weight, which still surprised him a little every time. The slums had been walls of scrap and mud when he was young. They were a fortress now. Three seasons of plague had taught them to build for the dead, and one season of treason had taught them to build for war; the old fence lines had been swallowed into curtain walls of quarried stone and slag-brick, the watchtowers rose where grain silos had stood, and along the parapet, every forty paces, crouched the ballistas.

He stopped at the fourth one and put his shoulder against the frame and pushed, testing. It did not shift. Good. He ran a hand along the throwing arm, checked the torsion skeins for rot, checked the great iron bolt seated in the channel; a bolt forged to punch through demon-hide and trollplate alike, because the slumlords had built these machines knowing exactly what would one day come down from the mountain to answer them. The goblin crew chief scrambled up beside him and rattled off the count. Skeins fresh. Bolts stocked, forty to the machine. Crews drilled twice daily. Zo grunted, which from him was praise, and moved to the fifth machine, and the sixth, walking the whole eastern wall that way with the grey light coming up over the plains beyond.

Below him, inside the walls, the slums were arming.

He came down the rampart stairs into the muster yard and stood a moment watching it. Lines of orcs stood at the armory sheds while goblin smiths and their crews buckled them into plate, slum-forged, black iron, the same pattern the seven lords had worn to the church. Racks of axes and pikes and mauls emptied hand by hand. Goblins ran bundles of arrows to the wall stairs; the fields stood half-tended so the field foremans could drill in the yards instead, spear-work, shield-work, the rhythms pounded into orcs and goblins used to running slave lines. The plague had thinned the slaves, but the breeding pits had been steadily refilling them.

He was crossing the yard toward the smithies when the messenger found him; a goblin, small even for her kind, coming through the drill lines at a flat sprint and nearly folding in half against his shin guard, chest heaving.

“Lord Zo. Lord Zo. The watch. The north watch.” She dragged in air. “Kortul. Kortul has been spotted. On the north road. Coming here.”

The yard around them did not stop, but everything in Zo went very still.

“How far out is the vanguard,” he said. “How many banners. What composition.”

The goblin shook her head, and there was something in her face beyond the fear that any of those answers would have earned; there was confusion, which was worse.

“There is no vanguard, lord. There are no banners. There is no army.” She swallowed. “It is just her. Kortul, alone, on foot, walking down the north road toward the gate. The watch counted three times. It is only her.”

Zo stood in the muster yard with the ring of hammers and the shouting of drill sergeants all around him, and turned that over, and could not make it lie flat. The demon queen of the dark kingdom. The last chosen of Torvakul, or so she still believed herself to be. Her inspector was a month dead, her breeding pits were a month silent, her tithe had stopped arriving, and her answer to all of it was to leave her throne of king-bone and her legions of followers, and walk down the north road by herself.

“Sound nothing,” he said at last. “No horns, no alarm. Double the crews on the north wall quietly, and get the gates barred and braced. Then run to the lords’ hall and rouse the others. All of them. Tell them Zo says come to the north gate, armed, now.”

The goblin was gone before he finished the sentence.

They gathered quickly, the lords of the slums, coming out of the hall pulling on their black plate, taking up the axes and the mauls, and Zo stood waiting for them in the shadow of the north gatehouse with his own hammer across his back.

The oldest of the others, a scarred she-troll named Brakka, buckled her mask and looked up at the gatehouse, toward the road none of them could see yet, and asked the question all of them were carrying.

“Alone? You are certain the watch said alone.”

“Yes. Alone,” Zo said. “Only her.”

They stood in silence a moment, five armored mountains in the grey morning, listening to the slums arm themselves behind the walls that had been mud when they were younger. Zo rolled his shoulders under the hammer’s weight and turned toward the gate stairs.

“If she thinks she can take all of the slums by herself,” he said, “she must be very foolish.”

Credit: Grant Howard

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