The Wings of Ashtaroth

Prologue: Children: Section I: Samelqo

Samelqo: Qemassen: The City Streets

20 Years Ago

Samelqo eq-Milqar, high priest of the great city of Qemassen, had a headache.

He'd hoped he might find relief once he returned to his litter, but the dry airs and scorching heat of the desert sun pervaded beneath the litter's canopy. Each bump in the road, every jostle atop the shoulders of Samelqo's acolytes, was a spear of pain piercing past his left eye to the back of his skull.

And the smoke. No smell would ever root itself in Samelqo's body like that sulfuric stench. It lingered thick in the nose, and the throat, and on the tongue, and when many sacrifices were burned one after the other, over a period of days during the hottest summer in fifty years, the smoke hung thick as memory. It drifted, oily, beside the litter, just as it had all the way from the temple district. It drowned his breath like sour, black water.

Samelqo smoothed a hand over his bald scalp, eyes closed but vision seething. He could still see the lines of supplicants outside the temples downhill: desperate mothers lined up for grain the priests didn't have to give, desperate fathers leaving the death god's gardens with empty hands and emptier stomachs, their sacrifices already burned to ash in the god's golden hands.

His throat itched. He coughed into his fine azure sleeve. When he drew it back and opened his eyes, he half expected to see blood, but the fabric was clear. The high priest—the heq-Ashqen—did not bleed for his city. As the dryness of the river proved, the heq-Ashqen did little for Qemassen.

Nothing, at least, that had not also been for himself.

Samelqo scowled. Tonight's festival would absolve him of whatever wrongs had drawn the gods' ire. The sacrifices of the peasants were clearly insufficient. The gods demanded a greater price—one only a king could pay.

He searched out the letter buried in the folds of his robes and curled his fingers around the rough papyrus. Its surface seemed to burn hot as coals. The letter had finally convinced King Eshmunen his sacrifice was necessary, but the words Samelqo had written there were as false as his intentions were true.

Swallowing, he withdrew his hand.

What was one more lie to add to a lifetime's deceits?

The acolytes ducked down suddenly. Samelqo gripped the cedar handrests inside his litter, biting back a curse. With a grimace, he shoved the curtains aside to spy out at the twisting cobble street. The fine palace of Qemassen's kings and nobles—its Semassenqa—loomed above the flat-roofed mud-brick apartments of the lower city. Its myriad colours—blues and oranges and pristine whites—were like a million flowers blooming against the sky. As a child, Samelqo had thought those palace towers beautiful, but if they were, it was the beauty of death, the unkindness of a jewelled dagger against the throat.

Shit, as his father had used to say, flowed downhill.

"Why have we stopped?" he asked.

"Apologies, Sese," mumbled—and Samelqo had warned them about mumbling—one of his acolytes. "A gull swooped. We—we were avoiding it. It . . . defecated on Bilan's head."

Restraint. Samelqo would restrain himself. His tongue had ever been razor-sharp, Esha had once said. He breathed in, sucking back foul airs, and swallowed the cough that threatened to follow. Jaw clenched, he drew the curtains.

"Carry on," he announced. When the litter did not continue he called louder, and it lifted into the air.

Samelqo's temple throbbed, and he gripped his handrests, running long, thin fingers over wood so smooth it could be skin.