It would never be the sa, Mavius knew that with the bone-deep certainty of a man who has watched a beloved city burn. The flesh across his forearm looked like a bruise hamred into him by so enormous fist , not the tiny mole it had been three months ago but a spreading black that inched outward when he blinked.
He started scratching hard on it until blood ca out...he realised with a grimace that he was starting to lose feelings in there as he continued even as warm liquid pooled around his nail.
He wanted to tear it free with his teeth, to rip the disease from himself and spit it at the shaman’s feet. Instead his fingers found only scar r where the physicians had tried to cut it away. They had hacked at the surface and only revealed how deep it ran.
Was he going to die?Gods he hoped not.
And yet his current status only brought him to that prediction.
The mirror was a thing of rcy he no longer allowed.
When he had last looked, most of his face had been old, the skin a mottled map of dark and pale. n no longer pressed for the honor of sleeping beside him; won offered nothing but a polite fear. Where once his presence had pooled attraction and obedience, it now drew only the animal instinct to recoil.
He was even obliged to take his wife by force whenever he wished to lay with her. He could feel her disgust with him every seeping second he watched her face.
There was no longer any place for him in that ho
He crouched sotis in the hours when dawn was only a rumor and imagined himself in a small courtyard with a blade. He pictured the shaman bound to a stake while flas licked the air and the crowd’s hiss beca a single, clean sound.
His cri?Having made him this monstrosity.
He would burn the man alive with his own hands and then the world would be clear again, and he would be forgiven for his sin, indeed that was to happen.
But the shaman was useful. The blight had bought Mavius advantage even as it stole him. He could not yet cast the coin he had paid for; the war needed the bastard’s cunning, the secret that had propped his life back from the brink. So the rage stayed inside him like winter water in a closed fist.
For now he perford the rituals they told him were necessary. He fed the n. He watched them.
It had been a month’s habit: he stood in the low barn with the smoke and the sweat, stepping around sacks of grain, feeling the coarse make of rope and burlap under his palms. The shaman black-nailed as always, handed over a handful of sothing wrapped in oilskin. He called it smujk. The na sounded like a curse and maybe it was: a paste of salted offal, so fernted thing that made a man’s gut curl but stoked appetite like charcoal stokes fla.
Still they could have enough of that.
Every week the shaman increased the ration by a handful. The n whenever it was thrown, attacked it like wolves. They lunged, shoved, clawed; their faces were the faces of n who had been promised sothing better than hunger. The first week they ate it like scavengers; by the second week they began to grudge anything else. Bread without smujk tasted tinny and pointless. Soup without the black al made them push the ladle away.
When there was no smujk they muttered and scratched and found ways to steal from each other smujk that they did not have. But when the paste appeared, order collapsed into a humane sort of frenzy, hands reached, elbows smashed against belly and heads, their violence justified by the joy of being fed.
This apparently was how those warriors without fear were made, yet as he looked at their moving mass fighting over that handful of smujk, he only felt disgust.
When the battle ca, they would be, apparently, each of them fed an entire bowl of the thing and sent forward.
The blackened patches on his skin itched and flared at the spectacle. He dread of a thousand knives. He dread of crowns as if they were weights on his skull, and of the shaman’s smile splitting in ash. He dread of that final long-craved victory.
He had given his only child for it, he had sacrificed more than his brother, it was only right that he was the one to clasp at it.
"It’s disgusting."
Mavius turned his head to look at his father in law.
He stood with arms crossed, head turned, as if the sight in the pen might spit on him. The n in the trough looked like animals co down with a sudden religion, biting and pushing each other away like pigs. Landoff’s lip curled down; he had spent a life polishing dignity out of himself, and here dignity lay in the filth, chewed and buried.
"But effective. Terribly effective." The shaman’s voice was flat, resigned, as he spooned another handful of the black paste into the trough. He did not look up; his hands worked as if tending a hearth. The sound the n made as they ate filled the barn like a benediction. The shaman’s eyes glittered in the smoke; there was no triumph in them, only a surgeon’s detachnt.
To him it was a craft.
To Landoff it was profanity.
To Mavius, standing with the sunless bruise on his forearm throbbing like a second heartbeat, it was the sword to his success.
Mavius could have watched forever: the way the piglets of n shoved and fought over the ladle, the way one strong hand might suddenly clamp over another and hold it down while the other snatched at the food. He had counted thirty the day they took into that pen; twelve remained.
Those who ate the smujk even the diluted kind, had dull eyes, and swayed one way and the other. When they would be fed properly, they would apparently charge forward without feeling anything.
"Your Grace, permit one more warning." Landoff’s voice fell to sothing like begging now. "If word gets out that you traffic with this...black art, no priest will stand with you. The Southern lords will call you a witch-emperor and the Church will strike you down with a zeal that does not bargain. You risk more than reputation. You risk the army’s soul and yours."
Mavius t him without flinching. The rot had taught him a new kind of calm: the patience of a man who knows there are only small windows to work in. He had sacrificed all the good in life, and all that remained was this cynical detachnt.
"The nobles to the south promised loyalty and gave none," he said quietly, the words coating the barn with a slow threat. "If, after the field, they still kneel only to their own purse, I will hang their banners on the city gates. As for the Pontifex....’’ his mouth tightened at the na, a contempt like a fist "my standing with the priests has been broken long before this pot found its way to the trough. The Pontifex is a man who keeps his church warm with favors from emperors; I will be a colder wind. When I hold the scepter, he will learn what it is to eat what I give him."
Landoff’s shoulders shuddered ,not with fear for the priests so much as with the tremor of a man who realised he had bet wrong since the start.
"Perchance," Mavius added, "I will feed them smujk and tell them they will get more only if they butcher their sons. Wouldn’t that be a pretty sight?"
He looked at Mavius as if he were seeing him for the first ti , not the once-glorious son-in-law who had swaggered into courts, but a hollowed figure crowned with rot.
Hatred and pity warred on Landoff’s face. The ledger of his life unrolled in a single, accusing image: choices made for the sake of expedience, bargains struck with hands that stained, the price paid during a child’s sleep and a household’s peace.
They had failed....he realised that now.
The gamble that had gone wrong. He should have left that broken thing to drown where it belonged, raised the boy properly, taken the regency and shaped the future himself. Instead he had thrown his coin on a different table and, by doing so, exchanged a sure inheritance for a dangerous hope.
The Finger was more than enough to hold the rein from foreign hand...what need had he of this black miracle? Now the thought sat in his throat like bile.
They were dieval...they were grotesque. For what good can co out from the figure erging from the blood of his young?
He had failed on all things...but above all he had failed in his humanity and he realised that he would pay for it after death claid his body and the fire his soul.
Cursed be the world that gave power to n like them.
He had traded his grandson’s safety for a pawn that had gone mad with gifts of shadow. Nights replayed themselves: his daughter’s cry,lanting of the forceful touch of her husband.
He had made this , all of it.
There was no undoing it. The best now was to ride the storm and search for whatever silver lining might still be fished from the wreckage. He would bend and bargain where he must, watch the next plays, and, if fate allowed, salvage sothing that might keep the house from ruin.
But for now they would march south.
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