As if on cue, more white-robes appeared around the pyre, holding unlit brands. They set about lighting them as the soldiers stationed along the walls fought to push back the surging crowds.
Ash finally reached the top of the wall, and for some moments lay on the hard parapet. His skull felt as though it was trapped in a vice, sending nausea cascading through his body.
The wound in his leg had reopened, and he could feel his strength trickling and pooling in his boot, squandered out through the leather. Ash rummaged in a pocket, moving his arm and nothing else. He pulled out his pouch, drew some of the dulce leaves from it. He stuffed them into his mouth, rested his head against the stone once more. Immobile, he waited for the sickness to subside.
For as far back as Ash could remember, people had always complained that life was too short. He had often wondered at that because to him, for many years now, it had seemed life much, much too long. Perhaps he had simply experienced more incarnations than most – as some Daoist monks would have people believe – and the sheen on this game of life had simply worn thin for him, so that he could see through it too easily. Perhaps it was time to transcend this wheel of life for good, as those monks would say.
In his own questioning way, Ash did not know whether to believe in any of that. How could one know?
But he did know, now more than ever, that long ago he should have retired from this business, and taken himself to some distant mountain and built himself a hut there, to live out the rest of his years in simplicity. It wouldn't have brought him happiness – happiness was still part of the game after all. But perhaps, by setting everything aside, it might have finally brought him peace.
Ash lay his cheek against the cool concrete and closed his eyes. He could let it all go now, and never face what he would need to face any moment from now.
The boy had fought well.
Ash used his sheathed sword to help him rise unsteadily to his feet. He swayed, blinking to clear his vision. He turned to face the arena floor, distant from here, almost unreal.
Smoke already spilled from the base of the pyre. Acolytes stood around it, prodding it with burning brands as they set it to further life. The tethered young man began to struggle.
Ash hauled out the crossbow he had taken from Aleas. Carefully, he slotted the two bolts he carried into its grooves. It was a short-range weapon, but the bolts were heavy. From this height that might suffice.
Ash took another sighting of Nico, then hoisted the crossbow and aimed it high. He inhaled deep into his belly, concentrating on the flow of air through his lungs. His body slowly relaxed.
A moment arrived, and it still seemed strange to him, even after all these years, that moment in which he no longer felt that he was breathing, but being breathed. Slowly he exhaled and he felt his finger tighten against the trigger.
The bolt shot out faster than sight could follow. Ash didn't move from his posture, but stayed fixed like that as his eyes picked out the dark bolt falling in an arc towards the sand of the arena.
It struck the post just above Nico's head. Ash blinked away sweat. It was gushing now from his scalp like blood from an open wound, carrying his tears away with it.
Flames licked around the boy's feet. Smoke billowed about him. Nico was choking, and fighting to free himself.
Ash inhaled again. He lowered the crossbow by a fraction of an inch. Exhaled.
Released.
*
The more Nico struggled to breathe the more his lungs burned. He coughed and fought to break the chains that held him to the post. The smoke was making him light-headed; his bare soles flinched against the touch of flames. For a moment, he was back in Al-Khos, on the hot tiles of that roof, with Lena cajoling him from behind. It seemed as though his whole life revolved around that single mistake.
Nico would have done it all so differently, had he the choice.
He was close to his own death now. Strange how life seemed so vividly real near its end. Colours bled in tones he had never before noticed; even the tan sand was an infinite variation of light and shade, captivating his eyes. He could taste smells that went far beyond pleasant or unpleasant. He could hear individual voices in the great wash of the crowd; words even, tones of meaning. Why could it not always have been this way, so rich and vibrant? He could have sat for days on end and simply rejoiced in it all. Perhaps, he thought, this is what it is like, too, when we are born.
What a shame, then, to lose this brilliance of life until the very moment of our death. This was what the Daoists talked so much about, he realized. His master had certainly talked of it: the way the world stilled when you yourself became still, so that at last you could see it, sense it, capture it as it truly was. Real and infinitely uncoiling.
He heard something strike the wood above his head. Nico paid it no mind. Instead he looked down at his feet, and saw the pit of flames gathering force beneath him. A surge of heat billowed around him like scalding water. He was going to burn to death. He was going to be eaten alive by those flames.
Nico had heard a story once of the time the Mannians invaded the country of Nathal. A monk in the city of Maroot had sat in the street in front of the High Priest's manor and doused himself in oil, and then set the oil alight, and burned himself alive without the merest flinch, in protest at the crimes the Mannians were still perpetrating against his people.
How had the man done that, Nico now wondered. How had he found such stillness?
The heat was engulfing him. He blinked, trying to see. It was too real, all of this. Part of him refused to believe it was happening. It was not the part of him that mattered, though – not the part that recoiled from the flames and choked on the smoke and the smell of cooking meat, and began to scream and struggle in animal panic.
Nico rolled his eyes, desperately seeking something to grip his mind upon. The Acolytes stood with their burning brands, their eyes behind their inhuman masks narrowing against the drifting smoke.
The pain rising from his feet was quickly edging towards agony, an agony that he knew he could not bear. The smoke obscured everything now.
Nico tilted his head back in an attempt to draw air. A blue sky, the clouds breaking to the east and etched by sunlight. Amongst them, between spaces in the smoke, a sudden dark motion. Something falling towards him.
He gazed at it, mesmerized by its spinning flight.
He was shocked by a sudden impact. Began to choke again on a sharp taste of blood. His vision faded into itself, fixed blurrily upon the sun or something else that burned just as brightly. Then, even that faded to nothing.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Rites of Passage His snoring woke her early that morning. The light was still grey in the crack between the curtains hanging over the one small window of the bedroom. The air of the room was still, and stank of sex. Reese lay there in the dimness, watching Los sleep: the thin creases on his cheek against the feather pillow, his boyish open pout as he breathed, his blond lashes. She considered waking him with a probing hand in his lap. Some love play to ease the tightness in her chest, the anxiety coursing in her blood. But she made no move.
Instead, Reese studied the beams of the ceiling, and tried to make sense of her dreams of her son until the room became infiltrated by the first warming tones of the sun. Then she rose in silence.
She opened the back door and let the cats into the kitchen, simply to fill the cottage with some life, and pretended annoyance as they curled around her bare ankles as she washed and prepared herself for the day ahead. Los had stopped snoring now that she was up and about. She picked up his discarded clothes, reeking of wine and fragrances and smoke, and went out to the yard and threw them in a wooden tub next to the big stone trough full of rainwater which she would use to wash them later.