Page 10

SHE HAD TO LOOK. HAD TO SEE. IT WAS AS IF THE BURNING homes were calling her, her shrines crying out under cracking roofs and falling stone.

Daesmouth.

She found one. A forgotten shrine where three hundred years before, a wealthy merchant had sacrificed a goat and buried it with a moss-and-twig figurine. For her.

It gave her leave to appear into life in a burst of ash and twigs.

Someone cried out. She saw frightened faces. People huddled together in a room that had once been grand, but now had been emptied of valuables and provided shelter to what looked like seven families.

A great boom shook the windows from outside, followed by a cacophony of screams. One brave woman picked up a poker and waved it threateningly at the fire. Tears were leaking from her eyes.

‘Leave!’ she said. ‘Leave here, fire god.’

Hestra recoiled. But she was here now, she would not run yet. Instead she threw herself up the chimney in a shoot of sprigs and embers. When she burst into the air, she realised why they were afraid of fire.

Hseth.

The god had manifested again. She stood towering over the city like a behemoth, smashing stones beneath her feet like a child who loved to crush insects and watch them die.

Behind her, the Talicians had raised their flags around the port. Amongst the wreckage of Middrenite ships, there were northern raiding boats and Restish battleships, only prevented from sailing upriver by a blockade that still held between two of the Daesmouth bridges.

But in the wake of the god there came soldiers in red, marching steadily. Between them, they dragged a burning, bloody brass statue on wheels.

A portable shrine. Hseth’s shrine. A priest walked behind it, ringing a bell, while still tangled about its feet was a matt of burned hair from someone whose head must have been pressed there, their throat likely slit. By it, was a lone finger, curled like a question.

They had killed people to summon her. Had drawn her to their battlefront with death and pain.

And now she was the worst kind of weapon of war: a being of horror and ultimate power.

Her fire-flesh hardened into shifting armour, her red locks twisted between flame and hair.

In her chest was a tangled weight of dull metal, a strange mirror to Arren’s own wound, where Hestra usually resided.

The ore clung to the great god like a spider, tendrils wrapped over her ribs. Briddite.

A cry came from below. A Middrenite brigade was charging through the city on horseback, light flashing on their armour as they went to confront Hseth. On the folds of their blue cloaks, Hestra could see the circle and rune symbol of the veiga. Godkillers. Ones that belonged to Arren’s army.

But leading the charge was a woman in a cape of Yether-yellow. This was not the Lord Yether Hestra had watched murder his father, her will hot and fierce upon him. It must be one of his daughters.

This Yether gathered her forces in line with the fire god’s passage, shouting orders that Hestra could not hear from her rooftop vantage. They took up their bows, dull grey, briddite-tipped, and took aim.

Hestra knew the pain of briddite; every god who had lived long felt its burning at some point, the curse of the metal that ate their flesh and burned their being. So, when the arrows flew upwards, she flinched.

But when the metal struck her fire-flesh, Hseth did not. The arrows clung to her, little needles, but did not make her scream.

Because briddite was in her making.

The great god’s attention turned as the priest in white screamed instructions, their mouth a round black hole. She had already diminished in size, using her power too exuberantly. Soon she would have to disappear, wait for the prayers to build again. Or the sacrifices.

The yellow-cloaked captain held her ground, still bellowing out orders though her horse had its ears back in panic.

The godkillers nocked their arrows, tightened, and loosed.

More of them stuck, but still Hseth came.

She reached for them with her hands, smashing them through chimneys, through walls.

She ripped blazing curtains out of windows.

A woman screamed from a room now open to the flame, her children’s beds half tipped from the shattered wall, the young ones missing in the rubble.

Hseth did not care. She was growing bright, bigger, twisting into a pillar of flame as she dove towards her aggressors. Hestra wanted to howl at the veiga who hadn’t moved, at the woman in yellow whose skin must be burning in her proximity to the god.

The next wave of arrows burst into flame before they struck. Hseth was too close to them now, too close to run.

The god crashed down upon them in pain and light, eviscerating the defenders in an instant of fury; a terrible, brutal show of power.

And the Talicians cheered.

Hestra found herself screaming. All those brave lives, all those colours of feeling, ripped into darkness in a single instant. It wasn’t even a sacrifice, it did not build her power. She had killed them for the sake of killing, when she could have left them alone and lost nothing.

Hseth rose from the wreckage she had made. Broken horses, flaming bodies, charred bones. She was smaller now, human size, her power used up in burning them.

Hestra ran. She let herself disappear in a burst of embers and smoke, and fled back to the dark safety of the king’s chest, where a small spark of her power kept him breathing, his blood flowing, his mind alight.

‘Hestra, what is it?’ he said to her as she settled, silent in her nest of twigs, barely bigger than a shrew. ‘Where did you go?’

She didn’t answer. She didn’t know what to say.