Feed The Throne

The bloody throne hall stank of wet iron and rot, and at the heart of it sat Kortul.

She had taken her tusks years ago, ground the stumps smooth so that nothing of the common orc remained in her face. What was left was colder. Her skin was the pale grey of a corpse pulled three days drowned, stretched tight over sharp bone, and her eyes caught the torchlight like wet garnet, red, slitted, and reptilian. Two horns swept back from above her brow, black and ridged and longer than a man’s arm. Behind her the great leather span of her wings shifted and settled with a sound like sails coming to rest. Her armor was a craftsman’s nightmare; dark plate worked over with thorns and rivulets of gold, every inch of it intricate and adorned with cut rubies, every line of it meant to wound the eye that looked too long.

The throne beneath her was worse.

It had been the golden throne once, the seat of the old human kings, but Torvakul’s coming had softened it like wax and Kortul had remade it in her own image. Swords jutted from the mass at broken angles. Shields had been pressed into the molten gold and left to set. Bones, femurs, jaws, the long curved ribs of giants, were fused throughout, and over all of it lay a skin of red flesh that swelled and sank with each slow breath. Organs glistened across that surface, hearts beating out of time with one another, lungs that wheezed and pulled, eyes set at random that rolled and wept and watched. Thin rivulets of blood ran constantly down its sides and pooled black across the dais. To sit upon it was to sit upon something that suffered, and that was the point of it.

Chained beside the throne knelt the angel.
You could still find the shape of her old beauty if you looked, buried under the ruin like a face under veil. She was naked. Her skin was a map of scars layered over scars, white and silver and angry pink, until there was no clean flesh left to find. Needles studded her by the thousands, driven into her arms, her thighs, and her cheeks so that she bristled like a pin cushion. The chains that held her were latched to piercings so large they had been set straight into bone; you could see the rings vanishing into the meat of her shoulders and her hips, the flesh around them grown thick and furious. Her wings hung bare behind her, the feathers plucked one at a time until only ragged quills were left. Her fingers ended in nubs. Her toes the same. And her eyes could not close, because the lids had been cut away long ago, leaving her to stare without rest at the ritual circle carved into the floor before the throne.

Kortul lifted one black-tipped finger and beckoned.

“Tark,” she said. Her voice was low and dry. “Bring in the next priest who aims to feed the throne.”

The goblin steward shuffled out of the shadow at the foot of the dais. He was old, Tark; his green skin gone grey and slack, his long ears drooping, his hooked nose hung low over a toothless mouth. He bowed without a sound and went to the great doors, and at his signal they groaned open.

The demon came through flanked by orc guards in black iron. Behind him, herded along a single long chain, stumbled his offering: elves and fae, dwarves and humans, two dozen of them or near it, wretched, their eyes fixed on the floor. The demon himself was young. His wings were folded leather across his back, his tusks small and his horns smaller, his reptile eyes bright with something that was almost eagerness. He crossed the bloody floor and went down to one knee before the throne, his head bowed low.

“My queen,” he said.

The guards drew up short. The chained ones huddled together behind him, breathing.

“I pledge myself to you, and to the work,” the demon went on, eyes on the floor. “I am called Yumevul. I have come to serve.”

Kortul leaned forward against the breathing arm of her throne. The motion sent a slow shudder through the flesh of it, and one of the embedded eyes wept down its side.
“You bowed, demon,” she said, puzzled. “Knee to the floor, head down.” Her grin came slow. “Not many of our kind have the humility for it. They strut into my hall and call me sister. They forget there is a rightful queen, and that she is not their equal.”

“They forget more than that, my queen.”

Yumevul lifted his head only enough to look at her. “They forget who opened the door. It was you who brought the master into the world. You who ended the Age of Man and broke the golden kingdom across your knee. The whole of Gyra burns because of your hand, and they have the gall to be jealous of you. As if any of them could have done it. As if any of them would have dared.”

The grin widened. A wicked thing, splitting that grey face.

“You are the most brilliant of us,” he said, warming to it. “The most worthy. The throne grew its flesh for you and you alone. They sit in their little courts and gnaw their little bones and dream of being a fraction of what you…”

“Enough.”

The smile was gone as fast as it had come, fallen from her face like a dropped plate. Her red eyes had gone flat.

“I have courtiers for flattery, and I have already heard all of it,” Kortul said. “I did not call you in to lick the floor I walk on. Show me what you can do, or be added to the next chain out.”

Yumevul rose. The eagerness came back into him, settling over his features like a second skin.

“With pleasure.”

He went to the chain and ran a clawed finger along it until he found an elf, a young one, his leaf-hair gone brown and dying at the temples. Yumevul unhooked him and dragged him forward to the very lip of the ritual circle, then put a hand on his shoulder and pressed him down until his knees struck stone. The elf folded there and began to weep, quiet and hopeless, the sound of someone who had long since stopped expecting to be heard.
Then Yumevul went back and chose a dwarf. A woman, broad and grey-faced with terror, her stocky frame trembling as he unhooked her. He walked her around behind the kneeling elf and positioned her there like a piece on a board.

“Hands on his head,” he said.

She obeyed. Her thick fingers settled into the elf’s hair, and at the touch she too began to weep.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered to the back of his skull. “I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I’m…”

“Quiet.” Yumevul did not look at her. “You will keep him alive. You will keep him awake. That is all you are for, and I do not need your voice for it.”

He drew a short blade from his belt and slid it into her side, slow, between the ribs, deep enough to silence and not deep enough to kill. The breath went out of her in a thin whistle. Her words stopped. Her hands stayed on the elf’s head, shaking now, and a faint light began to bleed up out of her and into the kneeling figure beneath her palms, a sick grey shimmer, the borrowed life that would not let him go.

Yumevul stepped back and raised his hand over the ritual circle.

The stone beneath the elf came apart. Out of it rose a torrent of blades, hundreds of them, small and bright and turning, a churning bed of edges that hung in the air a hand’s breadth below the elf’s folded knees. They turned faster. They began to climb.

They took him from the bottom up.

The first of it was his shins, and the elf’s weeping broke open into a scream that filled the whole of the hall and rang back from the breathing throne. The blades did not cut him clean. They ground him, slow, rendering flesh and bone alike into a fine red paste that dripped away into the circle and steamed there. He did not faint, and he did not die, because the dwarf’s light kept pouring into him, holding his mind bright and whole and present for every turning inch of it. He felt his knees go. He felt his thighs. The scream never stopped; it only changed, climbing registers no living throat should reach, breaking and reforming and breaking again as the bed of edges rose past his hips, his waist, the small of his back. The angel’s plucked wings trembled against her chains.

It was not until the blades reached nearly to his shoulders, until there was almost nothing of him left but a head and a ragged collapsing ruin, that the light finally guttered out of him and the life went with it. The screaming stopped. The hall rang with the absence of it.
Yumevul reached down into the red churn and lifted the elf’s head clear by its dying hair. He turned, and held it high over the circle for the throne to see, blood sheeting down his wrist.
On her chains, the angel made no sound. But from her lidless, staring eyes, two thin lines of tears ran down through the needles in her cheeks and fell to the stone.

Kortul began to clap.

It was slow applause, deliberate; the dry crack of palm against palm echoing alone in the great hall. She let it run a while before she spoke.

“Creative,” she said. “I will give you that much. The idea itself is old, for you are not the first to think of stealing one slave’s healing to keep another awake through the worst of it, and you will not be the last, but I have never seen it married to so many blades. The grinding is new to me.” Her red eyes drifted to the steaming circle, to the wet ruin still settling there. “And from the bottom. From the feet up, so that he must feel himself made small before he is permitted to die. There is something poetic in it. To be unmade in the order in which one stands.”

Yumevul’s grin spread wide, showing off the small points of his tusks.

He held the elf’s head out, and Tark shuffled forward to take it from him in both grey hands. The old goblin carried it up the dais and offered it to the throne, and Kortul lifted it free of his palms by a hank of the dead hair.

“You will notice the quality of the screaming,” Yumevul said as she turned it in the torchlight. “At least, I thought you might. These were not brought up out of the breeding pits, my queen, and they did not come from the slums. My guards took them off the great plains, wild, every one. They have never been broken to the work of the slums. They do not know yet how to flinch from it or how to fold themselves small to survive it. Their agony comes raw. Unfettered. And best of all, the fear that has infected them comes from our master’s great hunt. They have all felt the touch of Torvakul.”

Kortul made a low sound in her throat that might have been approval.

She turned and pressed the head down onto one of the swords that jutted from the body of the throne, skewering it through the base of the skull until it sat fixed there like an ornament. At once the throne began to take it. The flesh of the head softened and ran, the blood thinning and spreading, and all of it sank slowly into the breathing red skin of the seat, drawn down and swallowed until there was only a smear on the sword and then nothing at all, another offering folded into the mass.

“Exquisite,” she said, and settled back.

For a moment she watched him with those flat reptile eyes, the way a thing watches another thing it has not yet decided whether to enjoy or to break.

“So. Is this the whole of what you carry, demon? One clever trick with borrowed magic and a bed of knives?” She gestured loosely at the huddle of the chained, the elves and fae and dwarves and humans still pressed together at the foot of the dais. “Or do you have plans for the rest of them?”

“Much more, my queen.” Yumevul inclined his head. “Much more, up my sleeve. The blades were only to open the evening.”

Something in her settled at that, pleased, anticipatory.

She turned her head toward the steward.
“Tark.” The name came soft and almost fond, the way she might speak to an old dog. “Go down to the cellar and bring up the good spirits. Not the swill the priests drink. The ancient elvish brandy, the casks from the golden kingdom. If we are to be entertained, we will be entertained properly.”

The old goblin bowed low, his long ears brushing the bloody stone, and turned without a word. His hastened footsteps carried him the length of the hall, and the great doors groaned once more as he passed out through them and was gone.

The old goblin took the stairs the way he took everything now, slowly, one hand trailing the wall to steady himself against a body that had given out on him decades back. The throne room sat at the very peak of the place, where the cathedral’s great spire had once reached up toward Avadryn’s sky, and so every errand of Kortul’s began with a long way down.

The cathedral had been beautiful once. Tark could remember the shape of that beauty if he made himself, the soaring vaults, the windows of colored glass that had thrown gardens of light across the floors at dawn. None of it was left whole. The glass was gone, knocked out and replaced here and there with stretched and stitched skins that filtered the daylight into a dim red glow. The carved saints had been hammered from their niches, and into the empty hollows the new denizens had wedged their own idols; crude things, horned and grinning, smeared with old blood. The stone wept damp in the dark, and the whole vast bone of the building had been broken and reset wrong, so that it leaned and sagged and held itself up out of spite.

Off every landing opened the cells the priests had claimed for their work.

He passed them without slowing, though there was no shutting out the sound. The priests of the bloody throne competed at their craft the way courtiers compete at flattery, each striving to invent some torment more vile than the last, some new method to break a body slowly enough to please the queen and the master both. From one doorway came a wet rhythmic sound and a voice counting under its breath, pleased with itself. From another, a thing was being done to a fae that drew from her a single endless note, high and thin, that did not pause for breath because the breath had been taken from her control. Sacrifices were being prepared everywhere in that place, made ready for Kortul’s circles and for whatever sacrifice could be made in Torvakul’s name, and the readying of them filled every level of the descent with a chorus of agony so constant that the silence between screams had come to sound stranger than the screams.

Goblins scurried past him on the stairs, up and down, up and down, the small workers of the cathedral. They carried buckets and blades and bundles of clean needles, fetching for the orcs and the priests and the trolls who could not be bothered to fetch for themselves. They did not look at him and he did not look at them. Each of them had learned, as he had learned long ago, that to be useful and unseen was the only safety the bloody throne offered.

Lower, the stair opened out into the grand hall.

This had been the heart of the cathedral, the nave where the faithful once gathered in their thousands, and its ruin was the most complete of all. The floor was tacky underfoot, dark and gleaming, stained so deep with blood and viscera that no scrubbing would ever lift it now. The great walls still climbed toward what remained of the ceiling, and across every surface of them the denizens had made their decoration. Heads were nailed in rows. Limbs hung from hooks. Organs had been strung up to dry like garlands at a festival, and here and there among the dead things were sacrifices still living, pinned spread against the stone by long spikes through the wrists and ankles and gut, kept breathing for as long as the spikes would let them, their eyes following the small grey shape of Tark as he crossed beneath them. Where the old architecture had failed, where vaults had cracked and pillars split, the orcs had driven in their own metal to hold it up. Brutal stuff, ugly, all rivets and raw welded plate with no thought to anything but force, run through and around the broken bones of the cathedral like a dark iron skeleton wearing a corpse. The whole hall stood only because that metal refused to let it fall.

He did not stop. He had crossed this floor more times than he could count, and the heads on the walls were no longer faces to him, only weight he carried behind his eyes.

At the far end, behind the place where the high altar had stood, a narrow stair wound down into the dark, and Tark followed it down out of the noise and the red light and into the cold.

The catacombs took him in. Here the screaming faded to a memory carried in the stone, and the air went still and damp and smelling of earth and old rot. These tunnels predated the cathedral itself, the burial vaults of a kingdom now twice dead, and the new masters had little use for them beyond storage. His own breath was the loudest thing in the world. He passed the niches of the long forgotten dead, their bones undisturbed in the dark, and went deeper, until the passage widened into a low cellar lined with wood.

And there they were. Row upon row of casks, fat and dark and furred with the dust of centuries, the casks the conquerors had not yet thought to drink. Tark lifted his guttering light and read the old elvish marks burned into the nearest staves, and stopped before the ancient brandy of the golden kingdom, untouched since before the world had ended.

For a long moment there was only the old goblin and the dust and the soft rasp of his own breathing in the dark. He set his light on the head of a cask and reached for the elvish brandy with both hands.

A shadow came apart from the wall without sound, a piece of the dark deciding to have a shape. A fae, slight and long-limbed, wrapped head to foot in black rags that drank the lamplight rather than catching it. Stealth magic clung to him like a second skin, smearing his edges into the stone at his back so that even now, moving, he was less a figure than a wrongness in the air. He crossed the space behind Tark in three soundless steps. One thin hand closed over the goblin’s mouth. The other drew a knife across his throat.

It was a kitchen knife. Nothing more. Plain steel with a worn wooden handle, the kind of thing that lived in a slum kitchen and gutted fish, and it opened the old goblin’s neck as easily as it would have any other soft thing. Tark did not even struggle. There was a wet sound, a brief stiffening, and then the fae lowered him to the cellar floor as gently as a parent settling a child, holding him until the last of it left him and the small grey body went slack against the stone.

The fae crouched over him.

He did not hurry. He studied the corpse the way a scholar studies a text, taking in every part of it; the exact stoop of the shoulders, the droop and notch of the long ears, the particular way the toothless mouth had folded in on itself over a lifetime, the splay of the wide flat feet, the spots and creases that age had written into the grey skin. His lips moved as he looked, naming each thing to himself, fixing it. When he had the shape of the body whole in his mind he reached out and pressed one finger to Tark’s temple, soft, almost tender.

Something passed up his arm. A faint light, drawn out of the dead goblin’s skull like thread off a spool, and the fae closed his eyes and guided it home into his own temple. For a moment he was very still, sorting through it, walking corridors that were not his, learning the way a dead servant had learned to bow and the route his slow feet had worn through the cathedral and the sound of the name his queen called him by.

When he opened his eyes again there were tears in them. This was his chance to get close to Kortul.

“Great tree,” he breathed, the words barely shaping the air. “You have brought me through. You set me on this errand and you set me on her trail, and now I stand at the door I could not find. I see the way forward. I thank you for it. I thank you for the luck of it, and I will not waste what you have given.”

A short prayer, and a fervent one. Then he wiped his eyes with the back of a ragged wrist and went to work.

The stealth magic that had hidden him now turned to another purpose. He drew it up off his skin and reshaped it, and where it had blurred him into the dark it now lay over him like a mask, settling, thickening, until the slight black-wrapped fae was gone and Tark stood in his place. The stoop. The ears. The folded mouth and the flat wide feet. Every detail he had studied, worn now as comfortably as the dead goblin had worn it, down to the faint tremor in the trailing hand.

He dragged the body behind the farthest cask, tucking it into the dark where no quick glance would find it. He found a bottle, set it under the tap of the ancient brandy, and let the amber run until it was full; the good spirits, exactly as the queen had asked, drawn from the casks of the golden kingdom.

Then he reached into his rags and brought out a small vial.

The liquid in it was thick and yellow, slow to move when he tilted it, clinging to the glass. He worked the stopper free, poured the whole of it into the brandy, and watched it sink and curl and vanish into the amber until the bottle looked once more like nothing out of the ordinary. He held it up to the light a moment, turning it, satisfied with what could not be seen. Then he corked it.

And in the borrowed body of a dead servant, carrying poison up to his queen, he climbed back out of the cold and the dark, past the silent dead and up into the red light and the screaming, up the long stair toward the peak of the ruined cathedral, until the great doors of the throne room stood once more before him.

The doors let him through, and the heat and the noise of the throne room closed over him again.

Yumevul had not been idle while the old goblin was away. A human hung upside down above the ritual circle now, strung by the ankles, his arms swaying loose toward the bloody floor. From his open mouth a single red tendril descended into him, thick as a wrist and crowded along its whole length with tiny thorns, and it was moving, worming itself slowly down his throat and into the dark of him, feeling its way. Below the swaying body knelt the dwarf from before, the same broad grey woman, her wound still weeping at her side. She held the human’s head in both hands and poured her light up into him, keeping him awake, keeping him whole enough to feel it, while his blood ran down out of him in a thin steady thread and fell across her upturned face and into her hair. She had stopped flinching from it.

Kortul looked up as the fae came through the doors, and her face split into a wicked grin.

The fear went through him like cold water down the spine. Every careful thing in him went still at once. She had not smiled at Tark before. The old goblin came and went beneath her notice, a piece of the furniture, and now the queen of the dark kingdom was grinning at him across the length of her hall. He felt the disguise on his skin and could not tell, suddenly, whether it held. Did she see the fae beneath it? Did she see the knife and the body behind the cask and the yellow thing curling in the bottle in his hand? He kept his slow shuffling pace. There was nothing else to do.

“Tark.” Her voice cracked across the room. “Come here. Pour me a glass.”

He obliged.

She had turned the whole of her attention on him now, those flat red eyes tracking him the length of the floor, and his heart slammed so hard against his ribs that he was certain she could hear it, certain it would betray him where the magic did not. Even Yumevul had paused his work. The demon stood with one hand still raised over the strung human and watched the steward cross the room, curious why the queen’s eye had fallen on so insignificant a thing. The only creature in the whole hall that did not turn to look was the angel, who could only ever look at the circle.

He reached the throne. He uncorked the bottle. His hands did not shake, because he had spent a long time learning not to let them, and he poured the ancient brandy into the waiting glass, amber and clear, the yellow thing hidden somewhere inside it. Then he took his place at the side of the throne, in the spot the dead goblin had stood in a thousand times, and he waited.

She took the glass. She did not drink.

Her attention had already slid off him and back to the demon, the small unexplained entertainment of the steward finished. The fae stood at her shoulder with his heart still trying to break itself, alive only because she had lost interest.

“Continue,” she told Yumevul.

He did, warming again to the sound of his own cleverness. “The beauty of it, my queen, is that the thorns do not stay on the vine. Once it has run its course through him, every thorn ejects itself and goes worming off on its own path through the meat of him, hundreds of them, each finding its own way. They turn the inside of a body to pulp. Liquefy everything within while leaving the skin whole and unbroken. You would look at him after and see a man. You would only know what he had become when you lifted him and he poured. That’s why I hang them outside down. Makes them easy to drain.”

Kortul raised the glass toward her lips.

The fae’s heart skipped in his chest. She is about to do it. Please, just drink.

She stopped, the rim a hair from her mouth, and lowered the glass again to ask her question.

“How well does it reach the ends of him.” She turned the glass idly as she spoke, the brandy swaying within it. “The hands. The feet. The vine runs the gut and the gut alone, by the look of it. It can only go where the throat will take it. So tell me how the thorns find their way out to the far edges of the limbs, where so much of the good suffering lives.”

Yumevul’s mouth opened. For a moment nothing came out of it. “It, um… the spread of them is when they eject, they…”

He stuttered, and could not finish, and the truth of his answer was written plainly in the stammer of it: he did not have one.

Kortul set the glass down on the breathing arm of the throne.

She still had not drunk.

“You strung him by the ankles,” she said, and her voice had changed, gone quiet and patient and cruel. “His arms hang there, untouched. His hands. His feet, the soles of them, every nerve waiting, and you send your clever vine straight past all of it to ruin the one part of him you most need to keep working. Do you understand what you have shown me. You have shown me a technique that spends the most magic to damage the most vital place first, so that you must then spend more magic still to hold him alive through it. You make the work cost double and you leave the richest agony untouched on the bone.” She let it sit. “Start at the limbs. Always at the limbs. Begin at the far ends and work inward and you draw out everything, and do you know the best of it. You need no healing magic at all. A creature does not die from damage to its hands. You can take a body apart from the fingers and the toes and it will stay awake to feel all of it on its own, no borrowed light required, because you have not yet touched the parts that keep it breathing.”

Yumevul had begun to shrink. The pride had gone out of his frame, and he folded smaller with every word, his wings drawing in. “My queen, I… you are right, of course you are right, the oversight is mine, I should have seen, forgive me, I will…”

“It is too late for that.” She did not raise her voice. She did not need to. “You have disappointed me. Do you understand that the only reason you are still standing whole on my floor is the first hour of this evening. The first few sacrifices were great, but your talent has been dwindling. Had you walked in with nothing but this vine and this fumbling, I would be taking you apart myself, from the fingers, as a lesson to the rest. But I liked the beginning. So I will be merciful. I will spare you, and I will give you a single chance to be worth the sparing.”

“Anything. Anything, my queen.”

“One day.” She held up one black-tipped finger. “By this hour tomorrow you will bring me something better than that vine. Something that shames it. Fail, and you will be the demonstration. Succeed, and we will forget this ever embarrassed you.”

“Thank you…” The demon bowed so low his horns nearly met the floor. “Thank you for your mercy, my queen, you are… I will not waste it, I swear it to you, I will bring you something worthy…”

“Go.”

He went, backing away, still bowing, until the great doors took him.

Kortul let out a slow breath and turned her head toward the steward at her side, the poisoned glass still untouched at her elbow.

“Tark,” she said. “Fetch me Ud.”

The fae, alive a moment longer, his heart still hammering its borrowed rhythm, bowed his old grey head and shuffled away across the bloody floor to do as his queen had asked.

The dead goblin’s memory carried him there as surely as a map. The fae let Tark’s memories steer his feet, down one level and along a gallery of weeping stone, to the chamber the troll had claimed for his own work; and the sound of that work reached him before the door did.

Ud filled the room. He stood near fifteen feet at the shoulder and had to stoop beneath his own ceiling, a troll of the old heavy stock, his skin the dark green of deep forest gone to shadow. His brow was a slab, his jaw another, set so heavy that his face seemed built to break things. Three horns rose from his skull, one center and one to either side, worn smooth at the tips with handling. Every visible inch of his hide was leather, thick as armor, and marked all over with branding, long deliberate lines burned into him in no pattern the fae could read, crossed and recrossed by older scars he had earned or given himself. And he was clothed. That was the worst of it, the thing the eye took longest to understand: he was wrapped head to foot in tanned skins, full hides of human and elf and fae and dwarf, faces and all, stitched one to the next with braided cords of their own hair, so that the troll went dressed in the people he had unmade.

Half a dozen goblins worked around his feet. They mopped at the floor where his labor spilled over, they ran tools up into his great waiting hand the moment he grunted for them, they pressed cups and gobbets of food on him between his exertions and darted clear of his stride. On the table before him a thing was happening to a body that the fae made himself not look at too closely, lest the old goblin’s face show something the old goblin’s face never would.

He stopped in the doorway and bowed his grey head.

“Master Ud. The queen requests your presence.”

The troll straightened with a creak of skins and braided hair. He did not look pleased to be interrupted, but a summons from the bloody throne was a summons, and his branded face arranged itself into something close to appetite.

“Does she.” He set down his tool. “Then she will want a proper offering, not whatever scraps are left moldering upstairs.” He swung his great head toward the scuttling goblins. “You. All of you. Down to the pen and bring me fresh ones, the loudest you can find, as many as your arms will carry.” His small eyes found the disguised steward in the doorway. “Tark. You go with them and help. I want a glut of them. I want her drowning in choices.”

Then he lumbered out, ducking the lintel, the whole floor seeming to give under each step, off toward the peak of the cathedral and his queen.

The fae went down with the rest.

They poured down the stairs together, the goblins and the thing that wore a goblin’s face, down into the old dungeon of the golden kingdom. Once these cells had held the kingdom’s worst, a handful of murderers behind honest iron. Now they held the innocent in their hundreds. Humans, elves, fae, dwarves, packed so tight into each old cell that there was no room to sit, a chain run through an iron collar at every throat and drawn taut, so that the whole heaving mass of them was leashed together and could not so much as turn without dragging on the necks of the rest. The air was thick and hot from their labored breaths. Orcs stood guard along the row, and to amuse themselves they pushed the points of their spears in through the bars and pressed them into whatever flesh was nearest, drinking in the howls that answered, laughing at the way the packed bodies surged away from the steel but could not get clear of it.

Through the great door at the far end, the one that climbed toward the grand hall above, a fresh line was being marched in from the slums, more collars, more chains, the pen refilling as fast as it emptied. Goblins threaded everywhere through it all, darting in to haul this one or that one from the press, dragging the chosen up the stairs to feed the work of their masters.

Ud’s goblins scattered along the row, each making for some favorite, each with an eye already trained on which bodies screamed best.

The fae walked alone toward a cell near the end.

Inside, pressed against the bars among all the others, an elvish woman caught sight of the shuffling old steward and went still, her brow furrowing. There was a question in her face. Something in the way this particular goblin moved, or did not move, did not sit right with her, and she stared at the disguise as though she could almost see the seam in it.

He reached her, and he did not speak aloud.

‘It is me,’ he told her, the words laid gently straight into her mind. ‘Do not let your face change. It is me.’

He felt the shock of it go through her, and then the flood of emotions behind it.

‘It is done,’ he went on, before she could risk a sound. ‘I reached her. The poison is in the brandy. It is only a matter of time now. She will drink, and she will die, and it will have been worth every hardship we have endured to make this happen.’

The elf’s eyes shone. Her lips moved, barely, around a prayer she could not voice. ‘Great tree. Jorduth, I thank you.’ He saw her say it into her own chest, the relief of it nearly buckling her where she stood crushed among the others.

‘I have to take one up with me,’ he told her then, and he hated the shape of the words. ‘Ud wants offerings, and a steward who returns empty-handed draws the wrong eye. I have to carry someone up to the hall.’ He let her feel how little he wished it. ‘Tell me who.’

Her answer came without hesitation, steady through her tears. ‘A human,’ she said. ‘Take a human. Not one of ours.’

He did as she asked. He found a human pressed nearby, a man too hollowed by the pen to do more than stumble, unhooked his collar from the common chain, and drew him out into the corridor. Then he turned the old goblin’s slow body back toward the stairs and the red light waiting above.

‘I will come back,’ he told her, the thought reaching out behind him as he climbed away from her, as her face slid out of sight among the bars. ‘For you, my love. I swear it on the great tree. Hold on a little longer. I am coming back.’

He found the others where the corridor opened back toward the stairs, each of Ud’s goblins with a catch in hand. They ran a single chain through the lot of them, throat to throat, the fae’s hollow human roped in among the rest, and began the long drive up toward the peak; prodding, herding, the whole wretched line stumbling ahead of them step by bloody step.

One of the goblins eyed the fae’s choice as they climbed and let out a wet little snicker. “That one.” It nodded at the human swaying half-conscious on the chain. “Look at it. Half dead already. No fight, no life left in it to burn. The queen wants screaming and you bring her a corpse that hasn’t lain down yet. Poor eye, Tark. Poor eye.”

The fae reached into his quick wit and found, waiting there, a lifetime of knowing exactly what to say to keep the wrong attention off himself.

“Sometimes the best test of a technique is the one already wrung dry,” he said, in Tark’s slow crackly voice. “Any fool can pull a scream from a fresh and frightened body. The fresh ones give it up for free. But take one that has already been through the worst the slums can do, one down to its last thread, and draw fresh agony out of even that, and then you know. Then you know your method is sound. The strong are a poor measure. The ruined are the proof.”

The goblin’s mouth worked, found nothing to put in it, and shut.

They reached the throne room together and drove their offering in through the great doors.

Ud had near finished with what Yumevul left behind, the last wet remnants of the strung human reduced now to something the troll picked through without much interest. And Kortul was enjoying herself. She had the angel pulled close against the throne and was pressing the needles back into her one at a time, slow, savoring each, and from her throat came a high delighted howling that filled the whole hall and rang off the iron bones of it. The brandy glass at her elbow stood empty.

She stopped when the fresh chain shuffled in. The howling died. Her red eyes swept the new offerings, and then found the old steward among them.

“Tark.” She crooked one black finger. “Come here to me.”

He went.

She watched him cross the floor, and as he came her grinning face split wider, and she began to laugh. Not the howl from before. Something low and private and pleased, a laugh with a secret folded inside it, and every hair on the fae beneath the disguise stood up at the sound of it.

“Pour me another,” she said. “The brandy. Go on.”

He poured. The amber ran clean and clear into the glass, and she watched his steady old hands do it, and laughed again.

Then she raised a hand toward the troll. “Ud. Stop. Stop a moment.”

The room went silent. Ud straightened from his work. Every face in the hall turned toward the throne, the goblins, the chained, the orcs at the doors. She lifted the full glass and tipped it toward the troll in a small mocking toast, and brought it to her lips.

And as the rim touched her mouth, she looked back at Tark.

The glass came down.

“Did you truly think,” she said, soft, almost kind, “that you would succeed?”

She turned her wrist, and poured the brandy out onto the floor, the poison Jorduth’s servant had carried up through the catacombs and up through the grand hall, spilling unspent across the bloody stone.

Everything in the fae screamed at him to move. To throw off the dead goblin’s shape, to pull the dark up around himself and be gone, to run. His magic was right there under his skin, waiting. Yet he could not reach it. He stood rooted to the floor as though the stone had grown up around his feet, frozen, watching the last of the brandy run from the glass.

“I am the demon queen,” she went on, unhurried, turning the empty glass in her fingers. “There is a reason for that. My own brothers and sisters set their full strength against me and could not put me down. So tell me what made you think a little fae and his dead tree of a god would manage what they could not. I called the master back into the world. I watched the other gods be scattered into magic and banished, screaming, by his hand. Darkness is the deepest power there has ever been, and there has never been anything strong enough to unmake it. Least of all you.”

She set the glass aside.

“But I will thank you for one thing. You have shown me some of your friends.”

The doors opened. An orc came through them dragging a body, and the fae’s heart fell out of him, because he knew the shape of her before he saw her face. The elvish woman from the pen. They walked her into the center of the room and forced her down into the ritual circle, and she looked up and found the old steward standing by the throne and understood, all at once, everything that had gone wrong.

Kortul rose from her seat. She came down off the dais and crossed to the frozen fae and stood over him, and when she spoke again it was close and quiet, meant for him alone.

“I have so many plans for you. Do you know, I do not believe for a moment that you brewed that poison, you or her. A thing that subtle takes an alchemist’s hand, and neither of you has one. Which means somewhere there is one, and somewhere there is the rest of your little resistance, and you are going to take me to all of it. Every cell. Every name. You are going to walk me to your alchemist’s door.”

She reached out and laid one cold black-tipped finger against his temple, where his own finger had rested on a dead goblin not an hour before.

“But first you will do me a kindness. First you will do my bidding. And the bidding I have chosen for you is this: you are going to watch yourself take apart the one you came down here to save.”

The disguise let go all at once. Tark’s stoop, Tark’s ears, the grey and the folds of him sloughed away like a shed skin, and the slight black-wrapped fae stood revealed and shaking in the heart of the bloody throne. The elf in the circle saw his true face and made a sound that had no words in it.

Then Kortul entered his mind.

It was nothing like recieving a memory. It was an invasion, a flood of cold pouring in through the place her finger touched and spreading out along every pathway of him at once. He felt his nerves split and lift away from his own command, each one taken up and held by something that was not him, his hands no longer his hands, his feet no longer his feet, every part of him strung now on the demon queen’s will like the angel strung on her chains. He was still in there. That was the cruelty of it. She left him awake and whole behind his own eyes, a passenger in the body she now wore, while she turned his face toward the circle and his stolen hands toward the woman weeping in it.

And he watched, screaming where no one could hear it, as his own fingers reached down and began the demon queens work upon the elf he loved.

–

Deep in the bones of the earth, where the corrupted forest sent its roots down through the stone, an archon sat in an old cave and worked.

He was a slight figure, archon-built, taller yet thinner than the elves who his god had also created. The sharp features of his kind were drawn finer still by long work in the dark. Two delicate antennae rose from his brow in place of horns, twitching at the air, reading the cave’s faint currents the way another might read a room by sight. His eyes were the great faceted eyes of his people, dark and many-surfaced, catching the dim glow of the place and throwing it back in a hundred tiny points. From his back rose three sets of insect wings, folded close and still, their thin membranes veined and softly iridescent even in the gloom. His hair grew in the manner of his elvish line, a fall of pale moss and trailing vine, and his skin held the dull faded blue of old ash. He had the look of something built for quiet and patience, and the cave around him was built for the same.

Roots laced the whole of it, thick old roots come down through the ceiling and the walls, some of them rotting now and feathered with decay. Across every surface mushrooms grew in pale colonies, and between them the mycelium spread in fine glowing threads, a ghostly bioluminescent web that lit the chamber in soft cold blue, just enough to work by. And work he did. A small laboratory stood among the roots, intricate glasswork laid out across a worktable; coiled tubes and slender retorts and vials no thicker than a finger, the delicate instruments of the alchemist’s craft, gleaming faintly in the mushroom light.

He held a vial up before one faceted eye now, a thin blue substance turning within it, and stirred it slowly and watched the way the glow passed through, judging its opacity by the light that survived the crossing.

A rustle came from above. An elf descended through the curtain of roots, picking his way down into the chamber.

“We have detected a shard of her magic. Close. Closer than we would like.” He kept his voice low even here. “Kortul’s mark, drifting somewhere nearby. The watchers want everyone on alert.”

The archon lowered the vial. “Thank you for bringing it to me.” He was already setting the glass down with care. “A shard of her own magic, this near. That is no accident, and it is no good sign. It means we may be found, if we are not found already. We do not wait to learn which. Pack what you can carry and rouse the others. We leave tonight.”

The elf nodded once, grim, and turned to climb back up through the roots and spread the word.

The archon began breaking down his work. He wound vines gently around each piece of glass, padded the joints with soft folded leaves, packing the instruments away with the patient sureness of a man who had fled before and knew that haste was how things shattered. Coil and retort and vial, each swaddled and stowed, the little laboratory coming apart in his careful hands.

And in the far corner of the cave, where the mushroom light did not quite reach, a shadow began to change.

He did not see it at first. It moved the way deep shadow moves, slow, almost not at all, the dark thinning and folding and gathering itself into a shape. An edge resolved. A slight long-limbed form, wrapped in black, stepping forward out of the corner as though stepping through a door that had not been there a moment before.

The archon turned with a vine still half-wound in his fingers, saw, and went utterly still. He recognized the fae standing before him.

“You actually made it back,” he breathed, his faceted eyes wide with surprise and terror masked as recognition. “Did you succeed in your mission?”

The fae shook his head.

“Not yet. But I’m about to.”

Credit: Grant Howard

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