Chapter 31: Sacrifice

It was an amphitheater, or rather, a crude sacrificial arena carved directly into the basalt rock of an extinct volcanic crater.

The sky above was choked with heavy, churning plumes of oily, purple-black smoke that blotted out the sun, leaving the world illuminated only by the angry, pulsing glow of massive braziers mounted along towering stone parapets.

Around the rim of the crater, packed into crude wooden bleachers and standing on stone tiers, were thousands of spectators.

They weren’t screaming in terror anymore.

They were chanting.

It was a low, guttural drone, thousands of voices harmonizing in an archaic tongue that made the tiny hairs on Lucien’s arms stand straight up.

The language sounded like slate scraping against slate, full of harsh glottal stops and wet, sibilant vowels that carried zero human warmth.

In the center of the arena floor stood a colossal raised dais of blood-stained granite, roughly thirty feet high, accessed by a ramp of carved obsidian slabs.

At the very summit of the dais was the pit.

It was a circular opening, twenty feet wide, glowing from within with a violent, unnatural, and blinding white-hot inferno.

The heat rolling off the lip of the pit was so intense that the air above it didn’t just shimmer; it warped into mirage-like distortions that made the stone columns around it look like they were drowning in molten glass.

Standing on the lower terrace, flanked by guards holding ceremonial halberds, was a man seated on a carved throne draped in ermine furs that were slightly yellowed with age.

He was corpulent, his multiple chins spilling over an intricately embroidered collar of his cloth, his bloated fingers heavy with rough-cut rubies.

He had a glass of dark, thick wine in one hand, which he lazily swirled while chewing on what appeared to be candied nuts from a silver bowl held by a trembling servant boy.

’It’s the landlord,’ Lucien identified, his obsidian eyes narrowing to cold, sharp slits. ’The noble lord who ordered the tithe.’

At the edge of the fire pit stood an ancient priest in robes of coarse, unbleached goat hair that had been dragged through ash.

His face was hidden beneath a cowl woven from dried reeds, his skeletal, liver-spotted hands raised toward the smoke-choked sky as he shrieked an invocation that sounded like a saw grinding through dry bone.

And then came the sound that made Lucien’s phantom stomach violently turn.

SCREEEEEECH!

It was the horrendous, metal-on-granite grinding of heavy iron skids being dragged across the obsidian ramp.

Lucien turned his head.

Being hauled up the ramp by a team of four blinded mules was an enormous, circular cage constructed from thick, rusted iron bars.

Inside the cage, packed together so tightly they looked like a single, trembling, and multi-limbed organism, were the girls that were abducted from the market.

There were at least thirty of them.

Their dresses were torn, their faces streaked with grime and tears. They were pressed against the cold iron, their knuckles white, bodies shaking with such terror that the entire iron cage rattled on its skids.

Yet... there were no words.

There were no pleas.

No screams of "Mercy!" or "Mother!"

All that emerged from the interior of that iron cage was a chorus of muffled, wet, choking animal noises, pathetic, truncated whimpers that died in their throats like the sounds made by wounded livestock.

Lucien leaned forward, his phantom form drifting toward the bars of the cage.

He looked through the rusted lattice.

One of the girls, the baker’s daughter with the auburn hair, was clutching the bars, her mouth wide open in a silent scream of pure terror.

Her tongue was gone.

It wasn’t a clean wound.

It had been severed roughly at the root, the stump charred with a branding iron to prevent fatal bleeding while ensuring total muteness. Dark, crusty streaks of dried blood coated her chin and soaked the collar of her torn linen bodice.

’They cut them out,’ Lucien realized, a mix of chilling cold and blinding spike of icy rage piercing through his usual layer of cynical detachment.

They didn’t want them crying out on the altar or disrupting the ritual rhythm, so they mutilated them so they could die quietly for an audience.

The noble on the ivory throne chuckled, leaning forward, resting his flabby forearms on his knees, nodding with deep, visceral satisfaction. He gestured with his wine goblet toward the pit.

The ancient priest screamed a final, high-pitched syllable that ended in a spray of spit.

Two knights, clad in identical plate armor to the raiders from the village, stepped forward from the ranks flanking the dais. They took their positions on either side of the iron cage, seizing two massive iron release levers mounted to the wooden hauling frame.

Clank!

A heavy counterweight dropped beneath the ramp.

The cage, perched upon a tilted wooden cradle at the very lip of the pit, groaned.

The girls inside realized what was happening.

They surged backward, away from the yawning white-hot maw, but the cage was circular, there was nowhere to retreat. Their bruised bodies slammed against the rear bars, the panic causing several of them to pass out, their limp forms trampled under the feet of their terrified companions.

The noble lord smiled, popping another candied nut into his mouth.

The crowd’s chanting reached a deafening, frenzied crescendo: "SOL-VULN! SOL-VULN! RECEPTACULUM CARNIS!"

CREAK— SNAP!

The two knights pulled the levers.

The wooden cradle tilted forty-five degrees forward.

The rusted iron cage, with thirty living, breathing, mutilated human beings packed inside, slid smoothly off the rollers.

It tipped over the edge.

It didn’t fall into dark embers. It plunged directly into a furnace of pure, blinding, white-hot magical combustion.

The sound was not human.

Even without tongues, thirty sets of lungs screaming in synchronized agony through blistered, boiling vocal cords produced a high-frequency, tearing shriek that shredded the roar of the chanting crowd.

FZZZZZZT!!!

Through the blinding white light of the pit, Lucien watched the horror unfold with terrifying clarity.