The Wings of Ashtaroth

Chapter 20: Conquerors: Section I: Iridescia

Iridescia: The Streets of Ipsis: Indas

Roewyn Roewyn Roewyn. Let that be the only thought inside her.

Iridescia had lost her shoes somewhere between Mount Nuna and the streets of Ipsis. She ran anyway, imagining the pain in her feet as a slate she could scrape clean. Her feet were hardened clay. Her feet were iron. Would that they pounded the road with the strength of metal and the speed of thunder.

Deserted buildings stared back at her with empty eyes, and the alleys bristled with unearthly stillness. The faces she'd have expected to see were silent.

Up on the hill, the night had burst with a chorus of screams, but grim quiet had met her at the base of Mount Nuna, along with a darkness so thick it seemed alive. This was no true night; it thrummed in the bones like the plucked cord of a lute.

Most of the city had congregated in and around the big eghri to watch the troops march out. And yet—surely there should be someone outside? The army had already left by the time she and Liberio had fled the thieves' den, and the streets had been filling up again.

Ipsis's fires were snuffed, her people vanished.

Up ahead, in the middle of the road, heaps of what looked like tattered cloth lined the street all the way to the river.

Iridescia stopped.

Something about the piles was all wrong. At a distance, they could be rugs, or cloaks, or even leaves. Except they weren't any of those things. She knew they weren't any of those things.

Iridescia started walking more slowly.

Her heart hammered in her chest.

Warm wetness met the pads of her feet.

Iridescia stopped about five cubits from the thing on the ground. The smell of a butchery wafted off it—the tang of raw meat and underneath it all a swampy stink like a latrine.

She covered her mouth and nose, fighting the urge to vomit.

A ring of blood wept outwards around the pile of body. What lay before her was so much worse than what the shadows had done to Star's guards in the Haven. Ribbons of flesh cut thin as cotton robes had been stripped from the Yirada officer's body, till barely anything thicker than a papyrus sheet remained. It was as if a cloud of claws had slashed him apart from inside—not only his skin torn from his muscles and fat, but each part of him peeled apart and left almost neatly. It was a mess shaped into a tidy pile like some kind of present. The only signals he'd been a Yirada officer were the splinters of reed armour that speared through the jelly of his organs.

There were so many piles along the road.

Iridescia had called the shadows down from the Haven. She'd done this.

Tears poured down her face and mucus from her nose. She rubbed her face with her forearm to clean away the snot, but she was shaking so violently she only smeared it across her cheek. The taste of salt filled her mouth, better, at least, than the pungent smell coming from the corpses, which stunk so thick it had a taste.

She couldn't stop staring at what had once been a man. Maybe she'd even passed him on the street on the way uphill. Maybe he'd had children—

Iridescia gazed out at the piles along the road, eyes wide. Were some of them smaller than the others?

An animal scream rang from the direction of the palace, shearing through Iridescia's guilt. The darkness that choked the city was denser in and around the palace complex. It hung in the air above the lotus-tipped towers that Oran had mistaken for pine-cones. It flowed through the air like airborne canals filled with the Haven's black water. Whatever Iridescia had unleashed, it was concentrated there.