Hundreds of years ago, not many miles from this spot – this one, right here – there lived a warmaker, a powerful general with no heart and a lot of spite and a thirsty ambition that drank blood like water.
This was not unusual at the time. Nor was it unusual when that warmaker laid low a city or two, not far from here at all. Nor when she had the subjects of that city paraded in front of her in chains and hobbles, with the skulls of their leaders smouldering in a great brazier-banner. What WAS unusual was what that warmaker did next.
“Bring me their architects,” she said.
This took some time, but after an hour or so and some beatings, she was presented with a hundred or so men and women. Some were thin, some fat, some old, some young. Most were terrified, a few were numb.
“I have destroyed your people because I am great and they were small,” declared the warmaker, from atop the small sturdy wooden stool that served as her throne. “And I wish this to be commemorated. You will build for me a monument, the grandest that has ever been raised. It will measure no less than eleven hundred tro in height, and of sufficient width to support this, tapering as it rises. There will be braziers for the skulls of defeated armies. There will be a grand mirror to shine the sun back at the sky, so that it knows that I am its match. This will be done.”
The warmaker watched the eyes of the architects carefully as her words ended. Then she pointed with her little steel knife.
“Him. Him. Her. Her. Her. Him. Her. Him. And those four. Do it.”
Small, sharp blades made fast motions.
“The rest of them, bring them shelter and food. And plenty of parchment. Their work begins.”
The monument took shape as clay on a potter’s wheel, spun out of stone and suffering on the backs and beneath the hands of ten thousand tired slaves. In their tent the architects brooded and bickered and learned and somehow pieced together a plan of a million parts without killing each other. And day by day, a shadow of their own making rose a little higher in the sky over their heads.
On the fifth year of its construction, horns and drums roared down from the hills. The warmaker had returned at the head of a groaning host, laden with several king’s ransoms of treasure carried in the unlikeliest kind of chest.
“The islands of Nilaa are mine,” she declared, “crushed between a hurricane and my men. This was their flagship, the Gorkoko. Hang it entire from the monument. Let their precious jewels shine for the sky’s amusement.”
The Gorkoko was three hundred tro long, and had never left the embrace of the water in its life until now. The architects became shipwrights from necessity, and the monument’s plans were destroyed and remade, its scale redoubled. The winches that hauled the Gorkoko to its resting place took three years to forge, and were hauled upon with miles of rope, scores of pulleys, and thousands of men and horses.
It hung just below where the monument’s former peak would’ve been, a dejected old beast. The architects felt its sour gaze upon them each morning.
On the twelfth year of construction, the air rattled again with the sound of marching men and ringing instruments, and the warmaker had her architects gathered once again. They stood at the head of her army, and they saw that each soldier carried another on his or her back.
“This is the army of the Mrtami,” she said, and she shrugged the two bodies she had carried atop her own shoulders to the ground. “And this was their general and their queen. Grant them crypts within the monument, armour and all. Let them not know the peace of their precious dirt, let the birds mock their tombs.”
The Grand Army of the Mrtami – the Grey-Clay Army, as they had known it – held more than fifty thousand men. Each casket, each tomb, was designed by hand. Each body was mummified by the dry air and the heat. Each was sealed away in a great wall that stretched up what was now the main trunk of the monolith, high in the sky.
On the twentieth year of construction, the warmaker brought the broken spires of the Citadel of Jhe, and demanded they be reborn as wings of the monument.
On the twenty-eighth year, the warmaker had the Six Kings of Selkorr decapitated, and each of their heads was placed in a sepulchre within the monument shaped to resemble its own misery-filled face a thousand times its size.
On the thirty-ninth year, the blood of every single horse of Hynm – a line of battle-bred steeds six hundred years old and more – was brought in iron basins, and placed within a great glass globe to dangle nine hundred tro above the lonely and desiccated frame of the Gorkoko.
On the fifty-seventh year, the skulls of the warmaker’s four daughters and three sons who had sought to usurp her were placed in a great brazier thirty hundred tro above the ground, along with all of their children.
And on the sixty-fourth year of construction, the warmaker came to the monument with her army, the empress of a continent, and looked up at it with rheumy eyes that stared harder than cold stone.
“Is it done?” she asked. “Is it done? Where is Glaglin? Summon Glaglin. I must know if it is done.”
A murmur travelled through the crowd of architects, drifting from end to end and back again, and at length it emerged that Glaglin had expired of old age six years ago.
“What of Telll? Niminsor? Ribst? Where are they? I must know if my monument is done.”
Dead and gone, old and dead, and passed away in the winter’s cold.
The warmaker clawed at her thin grey hair, fingers losing skin against her iron crown. “Anyone? Is there anyone at all? There must be one! I chose you, I chose you all! Why are you all strangers!”
“Not all,” said one. Grey Genless had arrived, carried in the arms of two slaves. “Not all, though I am the last you chose. Our children plan now, and our grandchildren learn from them.”
The warmaker’s gaze wavered, trying to find a face it knew in all those wrinkles. “Do they do it well?”
“As well as ever we did.”
“Yes. Yes of course. But then… but then when? When will it be done?”
Genless shrugged. “We are nearing the summit. The capstone will be finished before the month is out. We had planned to dispatch a messenger before the week ende-”
“Too soon!” said the warmaker. “Too soon! It can’t be done! Not now! There must be more!” Her legs shook as she slid off her horse, but anger kept her upright as she marched to the monument’s stone base, where the stone blocks stood as tall as houses. She craned back her neck and looked up until it hurt. “There has to be more! There has to be!”
“But lord, we have received no word of additions.”
The warmaker’s arm was old, but anger gave it speed. The little steel knife tasted blood for the first time in a decade from Genless’s chest, and the architect’s life slipped out of her with no more than a small sigh.
“There will be more!” shouted the warmaker at the architects, at her army, at the world. “There will be! I will see to it! There will be a, a tomb for this one, yes! A tomb for all of you! Yes, that’s it! Craft a sky-cage and seal your bones into it, and make it large enough to hold a cathedral!” She slipped, caught herself on the foundation, felt her bones shake, and she glared up at her monument as though it was pure poison. “There must be more, and there will be more! I will see to it! I will!” And the warmaker drew back her arm and drove her old, old fist into the foundation stone with force to shatter bones.
It was a very small thing, a tiny wave, a little ripple. But it travelled up, up, and up,
past the stones
past the treasure-filled Gorkoro
past the Grey-Clay army’s rest
past the still-crumbled spires of Jhe
past the tombs of the Six Kings
past the great globe holding the blood of the dead horses of Hynm
past the ever-lit brazier where the warmaker’s sons and daughters smouldered
and it reached at last the unfinished peak, where a single stone lay idle and loose, left by the hand of a tired slave.
It tipped.
Ten thousand tro below it landed, and it shattered at the feet of the warmaker.
She blinked in surprise, blood flowing into her eyes from a stray shard. She couldn’t see, but she could hear shouting. The horns and drums were sounding retreat. She hadn’t called for a retreat. She’d never called for a retreat. What was happening? She pawed at her eyes. What was happening?
And she never knew, for as the warmaker stood there, pawing at her eyes, her monument fell, and it fell with the slow, endless majesty of the enormous. The world could’ve ended and begun again in the time it took for the last stone to tear itself loose, but it was still impossible to outrun. It swallowed up the warmaker, the army, the little bluff with the architect’s tent, the architects themselves, and last of all itself. A valley had become a field of broken stone.
The empire fell too, as empires are fated to do. Kingdoms arose from its corpse, fell, rose again. History books mentioned it in passing, lied about it, corrected themselves, told new lies.
The monument itself went on unmentioned and unknown to all save a few. A small village of shepherds moved in not far away, but they were not builders, and their homes were fashioned from straw and clay. They never asked what the field of stones was made for, and in time rain, wind, and sun covered it with dirt, then grass, and the question became moot.
Sheep grazed on its surface. A boy watched them idly, pleasantly half-cooked in the mid-day sun. His eye halted, catching sight of something shining in the grass. A quick rummage brought it to the surface from the soil, but disappointment followed. Useless.
The warmaker’s blade was returned to the dirt, covered carefully with several large stones so that nobody might cut themselves on it. And the boy went home, and the world walked on without it.