Ruler, Rival, Exile

“Only to the mess,” Kas said. “But there are slaves for such things, I suppose.”

“Hail the First Stone,” Vexa said, without any particular enthusiasm.

It was a moment of triumph. More than that, it was the moment that Ulren had worked toward for years. Now that it was here, it felt strange to actually sit in the First Stone’s seat, lowering himself down onto the granite of it.

“I have already taken Irrien’s interests,” Ulren said. He waved his hand in Borion’s direction. “But feel free to help yourselves to the boy’s.”

They would. Ulren had no doubt that they would. That was what this city was, after all.

“And, of course, we will need new Fourth and Fifth Stones,” Ulren said.

That should have been their cue to move up a space. Neither did, though. They kept the seats that they’d fought for, leaving the Second Stone’s seat empty. Ulren wasn’t sure he liked that, even if he could understand the fear behind it. They weren’t coming for his new seat, but it was a sign that they didn’t consider this settled, and that they weren’t going to fall into line with the new order.

They were hanging back the way he’d hung back when Irrien had first come to power.

More than that, they were acting as if this wasn’t over.

CHAPTER SIX

Stephania woke to a world filled with agony. The whole universe seemed to have screwed itself up into a ball of pain wrapped up in her stomach. She felt as though she’d been torn to pieces… but then, she had been sliced open.

That thought was enough to make her scream again, and this time there weren’t any priests or warriors there to hear her agony, only the open sky above her, visible through the blur of her tears. They’d dragged her outside somewhere and left her to die.

It took all of her strength to lift her head even enough to look around.

When she did, she quickly wished she hadn’t. Trash surrounded her, as far as the eye could see. There was broken pottery, animal bones, glass and more. All the detritus of city life spread out in a seemingly endless landscape of despair.

The stink hit her in the same moment, fetid and overwhelming, seeming to fill the space around her. The stench of death was mixed in with it too, and Stephania saw the bodies then, simply abandoned as if they were nothing. In the distance, she thought she saw funeral fires, but she doubted they were the elegant pyres of funerals. They would simply be pits, waiting for more and more bodies to consume.

Stephania knew where she was now, in the garbage area beyond the city, where a thousand middens found themselves emptied, and the poorest of the poor scavenged for what they could find. Normally, the only bodies that ended up there were those of the people who couldn’t afford a grave, or who were there to be lost in death, victims of criminals.

Stephania collapsed back for what seemed like an interminable time, the sky swimming above her in waves. Only strength of will kept her from giving in and succumbing to the blackness that threatened to consume her. She forced herself to raise her head again, ignoring the pain.

There were figures moving over the garbage heaps. They wore ragged clothes and their faces were smeared with dirt. Many of them were little more than children, their feet wrapped with rags against the sharp edges.

“Help… help me,” Stephania called out.

It wasn’t that she had much of a belief in the generosity of others. It was simply that she had no better choice. After everything that had happened to her, there was no way she could survive without help. They’d cut her child from her to sacrifice. They’d stolen him!

As if the thought summoned it, agony shot through the wound in her stomach, and Stephania screamed. Her cry for help hadn’t brought the scavengers, but her scream did. They came stalking over the heaps of broken things as if certain that this was all some kind of trap. They didn’t look like Felldust’s people, though. It seemed that the lowest of the low could survive even a war with nothing changing.

Stephania wished that things had been so stable for her. She’d been so certain that she could control things in the city; that she could wait out the siege and come to an arrangement with Irrien. Now she was lying discarded on a garbage heap, and she barely had the strength to keep breathing.

“She’s alive,” someone said.

Stephania looked up, and the presence of the garbage pickers so close to her took her a little by surprise. Had she blacked out for a moment? They stood around her in a pack, seeming to tower over her even though most would have been smaller than her if she’d been standing. Some were children, some were people twisted by illness or war, missing limbs or bearing scars.

“Help me,” Stephania said.

Maybe they wouldn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts. Most people didn’t do that, in her experience. Even Thanos had abandoned her eventually. But there were other reasons to help someone. Stephania knew that she was beautiful. Maybe they would want to sell her to a slaver for a profit. Maybe she could find one to seduce while she recovered.

The very fact that she was thinking it told Stephania just how desperate she was right then. It was true though. Give her any kind of chance, for any reason, and she would find a way to take control of the situation.

“I get her slippers,” one of the scavengers said.

“You do? Who says you do?”

There were hands on her then, a seeming horde of them. Every touch was agony, so that Stephania screamed and writhed. Worse, every touch seemed to ignore her completely. They tore at the few scraps of possessions she had left, tearing them from her while ignoring her completely.

She tried to fight, although the truth was that she couldn’t have fought off so many even if she’d been well. As it was, they tore every scrap from her, even though she tried to fight back. She grabbed for a sharpened piece of pottery, swinging it at the nearest of them.

They danced back.

“We can’t leave her like that,” one said.

For a brief moment, Stephania dared to feel hope. Maybe her few scraps of silk were the price for saving her.

“Throw her on one of the pyres,” another said. “No one will know.”

“No,” Stephania begged. “No!”

They grabbed her, ignoring the way she tried to fight as they lifted her. They carried her between them, and it was like being held aloft by a rolling wave of people. Stephania barely had the strength now to turn in their hands, but whichever way she turned, there seemed to be people there ready to hold her.

They carried her across the garbage the way servants might have hefted an old piece of furniture waiting to be demolished. There was no care to it, no gentleness, not even a fundamental acknowledgment that Stephania was alive. To them, she seemed to be nothing more than a thing to be disposed of.

She could see the fire pits ahead now, and that only fueled her struggles. They were big enough that each could have swallowed a house, flames coming up in spurts from them, as bodies broke down in their heat. There were corpses piled near them, each stripped of all valuables, while figures in the rags of the scavengers lifted them and threw them to the flames.

Stephania could feel the heat of the pit from here as they carried her toward it. It was like standing in front of a blacksmith’s forge, or having the fire of an alchemist’s burner skimming across every inch of her skin.

She didn’t want to think about how much worse it would be if they threw her in there. When they threw her in there.

It was impossible not to think about it. Stephania had seen people burn before, in the middle of battles, or when she’d had them tortured. She knew the smells of burning hair and skin, and just the memory of those told her what her future would involve.

“Please,” Stephania begged. “You don’t know who I am. You don’t know what I can give you!”

“Doesn’t look like you have much from here,” one of them said.

They lifted her higher above their heads, ready to fling her down into the pit. Stephania screamed even though she knew it wouldn’t do any good. From there, she could see into the deep, white-hot heat of the pit’s heart, where corpses were slowly turning to gray ash and charcoal.

They pulled Stephania back to throw her, and she knew then that she was going to die.

She found herself thinking of Thanos, despite herself. Part of it was hatred, because if it hadn’t been for him, then she wouldn’t have ended up here. That hatred had her thinking of Ceres too, and everything the pair of them had done to her.

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