Chapter 68: God’s Hand Opens the Red Harvest
A few days went by, or what I assumed were days.
You don’t keep count easily underneath a colosseum. There was no window, no sky, nothing but torchlight that never changed, and the only marker we had was the noise above our heads.
Because there was always noise above our heads.
The roar first, muffled through the stone, rising and falling in waves. Then the weapons, that dry clash of metal on metal, very recognizable once you’ve heard it once. Then the cries of the beasts, which were never the same twice. And at the end, always, the howl of the stands, which told us it was over without ever telling us for whom.
We found out later, when the door opened and we counted how many came back.
Nobody said anything at those moments. Faces closed up, somebody went and sat against the wall, and the food arrived, a bowl of something lukewarm and grey that we ate anyway because there was nothing else and never enough.
And even so, I’d got back up.
Still dragging that leg that didn’t answer, still holding my ribs every time I bent over, but I’d got back up. I’d gone and thanked them, all of them, one at a time, the way Blackbeard had told me to. I’d learned their names. I’d ended up sitting with them, listening to their stories, and one evening I caught myself laughing at a crude joke of Arthur’s that wasn’t even funny.
Thanks to them, I got through those days without going out of my mind with nothing to do.
I’d become myself again.
Well, half of myself. No skills, no mana, and a half-dead body I drag from one wall to the other.
"So, Blackbeard, if I’ve got this right, the cages only come out when there’s a new arrival? The rest of the time we’re packed in down here, under the colosseum?"
Blackbeard was the name everybody used for him here, and I never once heard anyone call him anything else.
He’d been a priest, before, somewhere in human territory. That was where what he knew about bodies came from, about poisons, about what you can take out of a wound and what you have to leave inside. Down here, he was the elder. Everybody’s mentor. He had no authority at all and everybody did what he said anyway.
"That’s right. It’s why you were in a cage when you arrived. It’s there to get the new ones ready for where they’ve just landed. They hang you over the sand, you get a good look, and you understand. And if the new one turns out to be belligerent, like you... well, you know the rest."
"I see."
He smiled somewhere in that beard.
"And do you know where we are?"
It was Arthur who answered. Bald, a temper you didn’t test before he’d eaten, and a build he’d managed to keep in spite of everything — like most people down here, in fairness, the ones without it didn’t last long.
"Nobody knows, unfortunately. All we know is that we’re in the kingdom of Florenzia."
I straightened up against the wall.
"Then it’s already fallen?"
A silence, then everybody burst out laughing.
"Where the hell are you from? Ahahahaha!"
Lucas picked it up, a man with long hair he tied back with a strip torn off what must once have been a shirt.
"Of course it’s fallen. You don’t know that the demon king marched on the kingdom himself? We didn’t hold. Not one day, not one city. Ahahaha!"
I scratched my cheek.
They were laughing. That was what unsettled me, more than the information itself. They were laughing about the fall of their own kingdom like it was an old story, and there I was, sitting among them, knowing nothing about anything.
The demon king in person. That was written nowhere.
I read everything that was put into my hands when I arrived in this world, everything Alexia brought me, and I never once saw his name attached to a single military campaign. He wasn’t anywhere. He was a threat at the end of the world, something you keep for last.
"Did any of you see him?"
Nobody answered.
The silence was abrupt this time. The laughing stopped, somebody looked away, Arthur started examining his fingernails.
Nobody, except one.
He was sitting right at the back, against the darkest stretch of wall, where he always sat. He was missing an arm at the shoulder, and he never joined in with anything.
Hercules.
"I saw him."
His voice was low and it didn’t shake.
"A little guy. Tiny. Some kind of outfit covering him head to foot, a mask over his face, and he was flying, alone, very high up. He had no army. He had nothing at all. He stayed above the city for a while doing nothing, and down below we watched him without understanding what we were looking at."
There wasn’t a sound left in the room.
"And then he raised one hand. One hand. He let it come down, calmly, in no hurry, and the water arrived."
He was looking at the floor in front of him.
"Not rain. Not the sea. The water. It came from everywhere at once, it rose above the roofs, it rose above the bell tower, and it took everything. The houses, the walls, the horses, the people running. I watched the whole southern quarter disappear before I had time to shout. I remember the sound. There wasn’t one. That’s the part I can never explain to people, it made almost no sound at all."
He shifted the shoulder that had no arm on it.
"One gesture. Thousands of people. One gesture."
Arthur sighed loudly.
"We’ve told you to stop with this nonsense, mate. How would you have come out of a thing like that alive, eh? Explain that to me."
"Tch."
Hercules clicked his tongue and turned to face the wall, and that was that.
Arthur turned to me and made a vague gesture toward his temple.
"Leave it. He hasn’t been right in the head for a long time."
I didn’t answer.
A water spell that powerful? And if—
I didn’t get to finish.
The bars of our quarters opened with a crash of metal.
And there he was.
The same one. Dark grey, wings already spread in a room too low for them, that perfectly calm anger sitting on his face. The one who’d pulled me out of my cage by the ankle and dragged me the whole length of the sand.
Something came up in me all at once, and it was neither fear nor caution.
A hand came down on my shoulder.
I turned my head.
Blackbeard. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t even shake his head. He simply looked at me, and I understood everything there was to understand, and I brought my breathing back down.
All right. All right. Not now.
"On your feet, you pieces of shit! Everybody up!"
His voice filled the whole room.
"Today is a special occasion. And your death. Ahahahahah!"
He was still laughing when we started moving out behind him.
The corridor climbed. There was a gate at the end of it, then sand, then light.
The sun hit me full in the face and I put my arm up over my eyes, the way every other man around me did, and we stood there for a while, thirty-odd men blinking in the middle of an arena.
Then my vision settled, and I looked around.
There were ships.
Two actual ships, whole wooden hulls, sitting on the sand on either side of the arena. And between them, driven into the ground, rocks, arranged, positioned, put there by somebody.
They’ve built a set.
The stands were packed solid, packed right up to the back rows, and the sound coming down off them had nothing to do with the first day. It was denser. More impatient.
And in the middle of the spectators, a demon stood up.
Red skin, red horns, a red tail beating behind him. Small wings on his back, ridiculous next to the jailer’s, and which lifted him above the crowd all the same.
His voice arrived everywhere at once, right into my ribs.
"DEAR SPECTATORS, COME FROM THE SEVEN CORNERS OF THE DEMON REALM!"
Seven? Not four?
"TODAY WE OPEN THE GAMES OF THE RED HARVEST! LET THE MOST AWAITED WEEK IN THE WHOLE EMPIRE BEGIN! AHAHAHAH!"
The entire colosseum went off around us.
"RED HARVEST! RED HARVEST! RED HARVEST! RED HARVEST!"
I looked at the men beside me.
Not one of them moved. Arthur was staring at the sand. Lucas had his eyes closed. Blackbeard was looking straight ahead and letting nothing show on his face at all, and I understood that this was a name they already knew.
The red demon raised one hand.
The silence came down at once, over tens of thousands of people, in an instant.
"AND TO OPEN THESE GAMES, WE HAVE A GUEST OF SUCH PRESTIGE THAT I CAN HARDLY GET HIS NAME OUT! A GUEST WHO DOES US THE HONOR OF BEING HERE, TODAY, WITH US!"
He put out an arm toward a box, high up, carved directly into the stone above the stands.
I put my hand back over my eyes to look, and every man around me did the same thing at the same moment.
And all our blood went cold together.
A figure rose in the box.
A man. The shape of a man, at least, slender, very straight, dressed in white. And out of his back, six wings opened slowly, wide, until they hung past the box on either side.
They were black. A black that gave nothing back to the sun.
And they were covered in eyes.
Eyes everywhere, between the feathers, all the way down, in every color, blue, gold, green, red, opening and closing at different rhythms, sliding from one feather to the next, moving across the surface of the wings without ever stopping. Some were fixed on the arena. Others on the crowd. A few were rolling in place.
His face, though, was beautiful.
Beautiful and smiling, and he raised a hand and gave the crowd a cheerful little wave, a greeting with the tips of his fingers, his head tilted slightly to one side.
No.
No, no, no.
That thing is at Lamielle’s level. At the very least. Possibly above.
There was nothing around him, no aura, no pressure, no manifestation. It was worse than that. My whole body had decided on its own, without consulting me, that what was standing up there was not something I was allowed to look at.
He’s one of them. He’s one of the seven. I’m certain of it.
And as though he’d been waiting for me to put it into words, the red demon confirmed it.
"WE HAVE THE HONOR OF RECEIVING THE FORMER RIGHT HAND OF GOD! HE WHO BETRAYED HEAVEN! HE WHO CAME TO PROCLAIM HIS SINS ALOUD UPON OUR WORLD! THE GREAT SERAPH, AZARKIEL!"
The colosseum lost its mind.
"AZARKIEL! AZARKIEL! AZARKIEL! AZARKIEL!"
Tens of thousands of demons on their feet, screaming the same name, stamping hard enough to shake the stone, and him up there still waving to the crowd with that front-of-house smile and those eyes running everywhere across his wings.
Then his gaze came down.
It crossed the stands, crossed the arena, and it stopped on me.
My whole body locked. All of it. The way it had with Lamielle.
I had no clothes on. I had no skin on. I had nothing left protecting me from anything at all, and above all I was of no importance, none, and the thing looking at me knew it before I did.
His smile widened, barely.
Then he turned his eyes elsewhere, and I realized I was breathing again.
The red demon launched himself off, flew a full circuit of the arena, and screamed at the stands.
"LET THE RED HARVEST BEGIIIIIIIIIIIIN!"
And the colosseum answered him.