What followed struck him as a carnival of horrors. Nightmare images came and went as he stumbled through room after room. Which were real, and which he imagined, he did not know. At one point he lurched into a horde of the black-robed children all gathered around a corpse, feeding. As one they raised their pale faces to him, their mouths bright crimson.
But no … their mouths had been sewn closed …
At some point later he faced a lone Thaumaturg in an empty hallway. Half the man’s head was gone, smashed in by a brutal blow. Yet awareness and intelligence filled the remaining eye. This wandering eye found him, and winked. ‘Where does life end?’ the man asked, his voice listless and dull. ‘With the mind or with the heart?’
Then the mage stiffened. The single eye widened; awareness of some secret known only to him dilated the pupil. The mouth opened as if he would speak but only fouled fluids poured out in a thick dark red sheen. He toppled — but not before the ghost of a sad smile touched those painted lips. Behind stood the begrimed and blood-smeared figure of a shaduwam. He held out his hand to show something to Jatal. It was a lump of muscle; a heart still quivering.
The shaduwam raised it to his mouth and took a great bite. Swallowing, he licked his lips. All the while his eyes gripped Jatal’s numbed gaze, eyes like black subterranean pools. ‘That is where we differed,’ he explained. ‘They say the mind. We say the heart.’
Everything came crashing down upon Jatal at that moment and he staggered against a wall. His stomach heaved and he vomited up what little remained. He felt as if he were sinking into that abyssal underground pool of icy water, drowning. He tried to speak but nothing came. The darkness swallowed him.
Roaring woke him. A distant constant roar as of a storm, or a herd of horses running. He raised his head, blinking. He sat beneath a smoke-filled night sky. The moon, which had been waxing, shone a watery silver light that was occluded by the burgeoning Visitor whose jade glare nearly flickered, so near did it loom. He was among a crowd of men and women: a mix of Adwami troopers, Thaumaturg acolytes and civilian peasants. Even one or two of the foreign mercenaries sat with them, their heads hanging. Everyone bore wounds, from sword strikes to beatings. All were disarmed.
They were crowded together in one of the stone courtyards of the Thaumaturgs’ Inner City. Shaduwam priests carrying clubs and staves guarded them. Now and then, two of the Agon priests came to collect one of the captives and drag him or her up the stairs and into what Jatal presumed was a temple or cloister. What went on within, he did not have to imagine.
Dully, he noticed that the roaring came from without — from beyond the tall walls of the Inner City where plumes of smoke coiled all about. The noise resolved into the sound of a city that has roused itself like a kicked beast. It struck him that even an anthill would rally to defend itself when disturbed. He hoped that Pinal had had the sense to pull the Hafinaj from the engagement. Yet he registered the concern distantly, and hazily.
Nothing, it seemed, troubled him at all at this moment. Not even his impending death at the hands of these betraying defilers. The only thing able to raise a slight crease in his brows was the utter stupid waste of it all. What could the damned Warleader hope to gain from all this? He could not possibly hope to rule here. Nor among the Adwami. What was his purpose — beyond the sowing of chaos and destruction? No doubt such was the goal of the shaduwam: the eradication of their rivals. But what of this old traitor general — if that was what he was. Mere vengeance? All this blood merely to wipe out the sting of some thwarted or blocked ambition? The idea that this was all his own life — and the lives of all those who had fallen around him — was worth just made him tired. In fact, everything made him tired now. Every breath. The idea of continuing to live through the next moment utterly exhausted him.
The group of captives dwindled as the night wore on. Eventually, as he knew they would, two Agon priests came for him. They had to lift him by the arms as he made no effort to put strength into his legs — he saw no reason to cooperate. Oddly, he felt as if he was watching the proceedings as from a great distance, looking down on a play, or a dance of meaningless shadow figures.
They dragged him up the stairs and into the darkened hall. Pools and streaks of messy deaths marred the polished set flags of the floor, as did bloody handprints and smears on the walls. Tapestries lay torn and wet with fluids. The heat of many fires struck him as a furnace exhalation and made him drowsy. He hardly registered a thick greasy miasma of roasting flesh.
A shout halted the two dragging him along. Another priest stood before him; Jatal raised his gaze up the man’s completely naked form, caked in drying gore, to the grimed shining face and wild, mud-hardened nest of kinked hair. The man smiled a mouthful of small white teeth filed to sharp points. He looked vaguely familiar.
‘Greetings, Prince Jatal of the Hafinaj,’ the Agon priest announced. He motioned and the two holding Jatal released his arms. Jatal straightened, swaying slightly. ‘I am told you are an educated man. A philosopher.’ He gestured for Jatal to join him. ‘Come. You may appreciate this.’
‘If you would take my heart — go ahead,’ he told the priest. ‘You are welcome to it. I have no more use for it.’
The priest gave a small deprecatory wave. Jatal now recognized him as the one who had confronted their council what seemed now so long ago. ‘If that is truly the case then we do not want it. We are only interested in what others value.’
Jatal frowned, puzzled. ‘You mean gold?’
‘Oh no. Not wealth. I mean what people really value about themselves.’ He leaned close to whisper and Jatal smelled the stink of rotting flesh. ‘The delusions people hold about themselves.’ The priest took his arm to usher him into a side chamber. Here a figure writhed, gagged and bound, on one of the ubiquitous stone operating platforms. It was a Thaumaturg captive. Shaduwam priests appeared to be in the process of burning the flesh from him piece by piece. They pressed white-hot irons to him then lifted them away taking the melted flesh with them. The figure flinched and squirmed with the hiss and smoke of every application.
‘So much for their vaunted negation of the flesh,’ the priest murmured, sounding greatly satisfied.
Jatal understood now; it came to him as an epiphany that somehow lightened the load upon his shoulders. ‘For you there is only the flesh.’
The priest smiled, pleased. ‘Exactly, my prince. I knew you would see through to the truth of it. For us there is only the flesh. No good or bad. Only the flesh and its demands. We are all nothing more than that. Why deny it? It follows, then, that there are no opposites. Nothing can be said to be negative, or positive.’ He waved his hand dismissing all such figments as he urged Jatal along. ‘That is all illusion. Constructs of epistemologies that are at their root flawed, deluded, or self-serving.’
Jatal felt dizzy once more. ‘You are saying that morality is an arbitrary construct?’
The priest steadied him as they came to a large chamber. He brightened even more. ‘Exactly!’ He squeezed Jatal’s arm. ‘You are a philosopher. You begin to see the absurdity of it all, yes?’
Jatal knew he ought to argue, but a strange numbing fog smothered his mind. He strove to rally his thoughts, but all that fell away when he saw that the room ahead was an assembly hall. Corpses littered it; the Thaumaturgs appeared to have put up quite a resistance here. But what he’d seen so far of the shaduwam suggested they were even more fanatical. At the end of the hall, slouched in a high-backed chair carved from black stone, was the Warleader. Shaduwam attended him. They were attempting to treat a wound in his side — though he still wore his mail armour. The priest marched Jatal straight up to him.