They burned the horses at dawn. Word had traveled fast in the city, and by the midnight break everyone knew what was coming. Wagons rolled out of the mines, the oil barrels glinting in the moonlight, headed for the Temple of Pain. With no recent skirmishes to speak of it wasn’t going to be a matter of prisoners, and even internally there was an unspoken but pervasive sense that too few people had been brought in for the question to fill the arena’s basin. Eventually someone—it could have been Bowd; it usually was for this sort of thing—recalled overhearing a troll who complained about lugging cages around for the expeditionaries. Something about a great herd, too. Animals, then, wild animals. They hated the animals. They hated anything that grew wild.
As daybreak approached Vik was holding her right hand in her left, like she always did by the end of the worknight. Carving the spiral sigil into the wooden shields was once something she dreaded, and after that something she took a perverse sort of pride in; now it was just drudgery, numbing to the mind and brutal to her hand. Her leg hurt, too, a powerful ache that traveled from her right foot up through her calf and thigh until it nestled in a knot below her ass. Attending the burning would give her a chance to walk off the pain before the daybreak cease, she thought as she tidied up her workspace. Even sitting on the stone rows allowed her to shift her weight off her right side. It was something to look forward to at least.
She fell in line with the other humans in the street, their faces flickering in the torchlight as they streamed toward the Temple. Orcs were out in force, baying and guffawing. They knew what they were in for. Vik saw a sizeable group of trolls, too, scaly knuckles dragging against the dirt road.
But it was the presence of ogres that frightened Vik the most. Ogres, bruise-yellow and black-eyed, towering into the sky. For ogres to interrupt their ceaseless searching—this was a surprise. They didn’t usually turn up for a burning, not unless called by the Higher Ups. That meant there’d be Higher Ups in attendance, Vik realized, and more than just the Vortex Wizard at that. Her nerves spasmed.
Her group were nearing the building now, a massive circle of black stone rising high above the ground, higher than any other building in the city. Fire glimmered in each of its windows, through which the hum of the already assembled crowd could be heard. The flaming spiral above the gates hurt her eyes if she looked at it, so she looked down. The dirt beneath her feet was the same color as her dress.
There was much of the usual shoving and pushing and roaring as the queue became a crush at the bottleneck. Vik let herself be pushed this way and that. Everyone was going to the same place. Why fight it.
Minutes later, as the sky began to lighten above, she was seated in a row distant from the center. She looked around and saw no one she knew well. That was fine, maybe even good. They didn’t want you getting close to people, not even your workmates, though they couldn’t stamp it out entirely. The Servants’ vicious camaraderie proved too much of an example for the humans not to emulate. Some Wizards, Vik had heard, even took this as a point of pride. The Vortex Wizard was not one of them.
Vik looked down across the basin. There he was, short and bald and small in his armor. His face was an unreadable mask, rendered illegible by the spiral tattoo that matched the engravings on every steel plate. With a shock, Vik saw he was not seated in the central throne. He was not alone in the Master’s Box this time. The Blue Wizard, whose skin and hair matched the azure hue of his robe, he was there. Vik recognized the Wizard of Knives, the Water Wizard in his tank—awkwardly crammed into the box; someone would pay for that—and the Ash Wizard.
But the tall, thin figure in the black robe, with his long hair and full beard and gnarled, peeling hands—he was new to her, to this place, but he could only be the Wizard of the Wastes. For him to be here, so far from the blasted lands, was a surprise. No wonder the ogres had come, Vik thought. He knows their names.
A portcullis at the opposite side of the Temple rose, and suddenly the arena was full of the sounds of horses. They were panicked, terrified. Vik watched as troll handlers, their muscled arms glinting green in the torchlight, beat the animals forward. If one bit or kicked, they were bit and kicked back. One troll got fed up, grabbed a horse’s leg, and snapped it in two. The bones hung together by muscle and sinew. He picked the horse up and threw it forward. It landed in the basin, where the oil waited, its fumes giving Vik a headache. Even as the rest of the horses were forced inward Vik watched the one the troll had tossed as it screamed and struggled. Not long, though: Once it got tired it couldn’t keep its nose above the level of the oil, and it drowned. Lucky.
One of the wizards was speaking. The Vortex Wizard; it was his Temple. Probably he was welcoming his honored guests. Vik clapped when everyone clapped and that was good enough. His whispering voice, amplified by magic, proclaimed this a great day, the day when the last of the free herds of the darklands would be put down. The smoke from the burning would blot out the hateful sun as the flames made mock of its cursed illumination, and all would know what the People of the Spiral had done to honor the Sorcerer.
Death to the Bastard Sun, roared the Servants. Death to the Wild Green, responded the humans.
A huge troll, its body resinous with burned tissue, strode to the box and handed a torch to the Wizard of the Wastes, the highest of them. With a nod to his host he tossed it down into the basin. It bounced off a horse’s head and into the oil.
The conflagration was immediate and the result unbearable. The horses screamed like men, eyes rolling, mouths frothing in agony. Their manes and tails went up like candles. Those that could still move trampled the fallen further into the flames before going up themselves. The smell was vile and also enormously appetizing. Vik’s stomach leaped and it took all she had not to vomit. Others were not as lucky, and there were orcs pointing at them, and the trolls were bellowing, and the ogres gazed in silence.
She looked away, back at the basin, back at the last of the great herds as it died. She looked to the sky, reddened now from the rising sun, darkened now by the smoke of the burning. She looked at all the Servants, the orcs and trolls and werewolves and the vampires behind their shaded glass. She looked at the Master’s Box, at the Vortex Wizard and the Blue Wizard and the Wizard of Knives and the Water Wizard and the Wizard of the Wastes. She looked at all of these telepaths and conjurers, these necromancers and elementals. She even, for as long as she dared, looked at the ogres.
She looked at them, and she hated them, and as the burning died down and the chants ended and she shuffled her way down the row and down the stairs and out the gate and through the streets and into her cell to wait out the day alone with the stink of death on her, she wondered why they had not killed her yet. Their hammers rose; their hammers fell; they would fall on her someday, she knew, but when they did they would crush her body but not her hatred. Her hatred would live on because she knew she was not alone, she could not be alone, it was impossible. Her hatred would leave her battered body and take root in another’s. She would be like a demon, a demon who yearns for life not death, for laughter not screams and not chants and not tears. Incorporeal and eternal she would one day look through other eyes and see the sun.
—originally published March 13 2020, revised Feb 8 2025
Tags: fantasy, fiction, in a lightless land