In the distance a great city burned. The mercenary watched it from his caravel voyager while a man cried out below deck. The waves were breaking upon the ship’s bow like a storm, but he could no longer tell if the ship was moving at all. Beneath the burning city, all was painted red or black, and in such blazing darkness nothing dares to move. It was trapped there in the dead of midnight, the vortex of flame engorging his view. The city still seemed so very far away.
A hand reached out of the darkness. The dying man grabbed the mercenary’s collar. “Tell me, I must know. Where are we?”
He sat beside the dying man’s bed. “You know where we are. We are journeying towards the City.”
Still his grip remained. “Before. Did I get out alright.”
“You’ve asked me that every time you wake up. No. Some bitch felled you with a bow.”
Both their figurines were stretched like shadows beneath the capricious red light. He heard the bedsheets rustle, and the smell of rot wafted in the air. The mercenary tipped a cup of water towards the dying man’s mouth; his eyes flashed, stained in the colours of blood, and the dying man fell back into his bed spluttering up some of the drink.
He was shaking, caked in sweat like some feverish demon. “Will I make it in time.”
“I don’t know. Sorry.”
The dying man coughed. “What are you sorry for.”
“I’m not sure.”
Sleepless. Days, nights, it was impossible to tell the difference. The mercenary stood atop a different part of the deck, staring at the red sky. The city’s ruin was far away, swallowing the darkness. Even from that distance it brought flickers of light upon his face. His barbarian hair blew in the wind.
He had crawled into the communal bedding still damp with sweat, but it was not long before he was awoken by his own movement, kicking and spinning, gasping, panting, clutching his thick chest. His dreams were tormented by the ignited seas; the sirens screams eclipsed by one violent inferno. The dying man cried out again. There could be no sleep while the city lay awake.
“Do you smell that.” The dying man said.
“What.”
“Burning.” Ash and smoke had long stained the wind, carried by the wailing ocean sprays hitting the wooden porthole. “I can smell burning.” The dying man hung on his words as though he were listening to something, listening to the wind as though it were a voice calling to him, then listening to something else. He whispered: “Am I going to hell?”
“No.” The mercenary said.
“How can you be so sure?”
The mercenary applied a sponge to the man’s burning forehead, feeling cold wet eels drip from his hand. “I don’t know.”
“I’ve been seeing visions of it.”
“They’re just nightmares.” The mercenary said.
“No. I’ve seen it.” His voice came from the darkness as though he were already a spectator, already adrift from this world. “I think it’s coming for me.”
 “Stop it. You’re delirious. I’ve seen men go mad thinking that way before.”
The dying man didn’t seem to care. He spoke with a kind of sibylline terror that could only be stirred by the last moments of life. “I wish I had the words to describe it how I’ve seen it. All is rocking there, like an uneasy cradle. And you can hear the ropes swinging. It’s a dead place, deader than dead, but the people there are laughing! They’re laughing as you arrive. They’re laughing at a joke they won’t tell you. Nobody screams there anymore.”
The mercenary’s voice was indolent. “They are nightmares, not visions. Drink some water.”
 “The night fires have long extinguished. You can see their faces born beneath it. Steam and ash, the smoke is always rising. They gather in some great hall. It’s like there’s a party put on just for you. Children, men, women, moving their arms about as though they’re waving from far away. Feeble like.” The words were gnashing against his teeth as though he were slightly possessed; but he had never been clearer in his life. “A part of me wonders if they’re being suffocated by something I can’t see. Like they’re asking for help. But from the looks of it they’ve never been happier. They’re smiling and they’re waving for me to join them.”
The dying man’s face could no longer be seen.  “Do you think it’s such a happy thing, to die.”
The mercenary heard the crackling of the faraway firestorm, where the flames of the burning city reigned over the sky and played upon the ocean waves. The contours of the world were emblazoned in water like a hallucination, two opposites, water and fire united in the madness of their illicit love. All hidden beneath the barking black winds.
“You tell me.” He said.
 “What.”
“You’re dying, you tell me if you’re happy. From the smell of it you seem right at home.”
A waft of foul-smelling rot lifted in the air. “I’m not dying.” The dying man spat into a tin cup which made a twang in the darkness. “I’m not dying. You wouldn’t dare say such a thing if it were true.” He started coughing, hacking up his lungs and drooling upon himself. Again, the smell of blood and rotting and death came upon the and the dying man shuffled in his bedrolls. His voice was weak. “But I know what I saw.”
Somewhere else now. The mercenary felt a bulge in his linens. The pointed sheath of a dagger, the leathery skin of a stolen pouch of coin, and a suit of armour which had come from a man who no longer had need of it. He sat caressing his weapons of war like an infant and their toys, one awoken by terrible nightmares, imaginary things that can be born only from the weaning mind. All was quiet there, the world rocking on the sea, rocking him back and forth. He listened to the wind.
He has had many names in his life. The land in which he earned his first now curses it. A deserter from some deserted army; a runner, a thief, a vagrant. What did all that matter? Those past things. A mercenary does not think of his deeds. A faithless pilgrim, he thinks only of where he is going, where he must go, for a mercenary can never stay too long.
“How is he.” Came a voice. They walked along the deck.
“He’s talking about hell.” The mercenary said.
The ship’s crewmates were already awake, yanking the chords and instruments of the sail to steer the great mast now breaking upon the dark wind. Pleasantries were shared in silent glances or shared not at all.
“Is that good?”
“I can’t imagine a world in which it would be.”
Onwards, sleepless, hanging and falling beneath uncertain light, he looked upon the water, an invisible lagoon, where his own reflection joined the burning waltz. It seemed trapped within the fury of the city like a caged creature. A great visage gilded in flame, all else faded behind that ignoble seraphine; that which groped at twilight and ate away at the darkness like it were sucking in the very essence of the earth.
“How long do you think he has?” He recognized the voice to be a young warrior named Rjarirk.
“He smells like death.” The mercenary responded, looking at nothing.
The black sail ropes were crying like the shadow of a noose hanging above their necks. Footsteps began to stomp along the hard wooden flooring and the sound of men joined behind them, a company of warriors appearing from the darkness all sharing the same confused look of uncertainty.
“What do we do?” One of them asked the mercenary.
“Do we need to do anything?” Another voice said.
The group all looked at this other voice. “Let’s just throw him overboard.”
“We can’t do that.” Said the mercenary.
“Why not?”
“He’s one of us.”
“So?”
The mercenary deepened his words. “So, he’s one of us. We can’t just let the seas have him.”
“What are you proposing to do with him then? He’s going to die either way.”
The mercenary looked upon the flaming city as though its destruction were bespoke, that it spelled ruination for him and him alone. They could have been the only things left living on the earth, observer and observed. All else faded; the stage light focused upon their paired isolation. Two lonely objects destined to collide, locked together by their soliloquy dance. Did Narcissus stare upon his reflection, or was it the pond that drew him in? Perhaps the distinction did not matter. In that blazing black horizon each reflected the other, both as much of the world as all condemned and inexorable futures.
One of the warriors raised a hand.
“You got a suggestion, spit it out.”
“I’m voting.”
 “What are you voting for.”
“I don’t know. To try and help him.”
The sea vessel shook upon a gale of red wind, smelling of ash and dust. “That hardly needs voting on.”
The younger warrior, Rjarirk, moved his head. “When will we make it to the City.”
“Dawn, most like.”
“He’ll die before dawn.” The mercenary said as if he knew. “I’m hoping one of you knows last rites.”
In another life the ship had hauled slaves, but since the ship’s seizure by the mercenary’s band, the quarters were to provide seafaring lodgings to a dozen or so shuffling travellers of indiscrete origin. Wastrels, vagabonds, and thieves, some made makeshift warriors who joined the mercenary band for spoils and riches of any kind, most made up of those who did not want to, or have the funds to, pay for a voyage in more pleasant conditions. They found a man in tattered robes in the lower bowels of their ship who called himself a priest. This ecclesiastical vagrant said he was a part of a congregation from Spain many years ago, though they had no way to verify such a fact other than the fact that could say words to them in what sounded like Latin.
This priest knelt beside the dying man and inspected his wound by candlelight. The dying man’s flesh had been ripped and torn where the arrowhead was removed, as though the wound had been first seared for dinner and then savaged by an animal for dessert. Yellow-stained bandaging had poorly concealed what was now totally bruised skin, stained with dark unhealthy contours of blood and bile. When the bandage peeled away the room’s stench of ash and sweat and putrid rot became almost too much to bear, but the priest seemed unmoved. He took the candlelight up to his own face, to where his mouth was covered by a lengthy ungroomed moustache which came down in individual hairs over his lips.
Through the gaps of his facial hair they could see that several of the priest’s teeth were missing. “I can do nothing for your Saint Sebastian.” The vagrant priest said, the words whistling.
The group spent their gaze upon the figure. Some closed their eyes, sadness, frustration, it was impossible to tell. But the mercenary kept his stare.
“We do not want you to heal him, we know that is impossible.” The mercenary said for them.
“We want you to bless him on his way.” The younger mercenary Rjarirk spoke.
The priest had an arcane figure which gave him an eminent presence, standing out in the darkness in the same way freezing water can fool the skin into thinking it is touched by heat. A kind of algid feeling left in the room, all the while the city’s distant fire crackled far away.  He kept the candle close to his face, its light woven in his eye. He looked down at the dying man who was by now gurgling and rustling in his sweat-stained covers, his skin scorched by the fire of the world and the fever that now lived within him. Under the shadow he seemed to be glaring and waited a long time before he spoke.
“What kind of a priest says ‘no’ to a dying man?”
“You may judge it wrong, but I will not bless him.” His face and his voice there seemed beyond his years, which against the declining figure of the burning city’s porthole light, gave this vagrant the impression of some antediluvian spirit lecturing from the rim of knowledge and sanctity.
When asked why, the priest said it could not be explained easily. The band stood there, silent, stunned, thinking his defiance must requisite madness or sin.
It was the mercenary who spoke for them. “Have we done something to offend you?”
The priest considered his words. “Not directly, no.”
“And yet you deny him access to God?”
“The god you seek already cherishes you.” The priest’s voice somehow deepened through his mislaid incisors. “It takes him, and it will take the rest of you.”
“What in Christ’s name kind of a holy man are you?” The mercenary said loudly, his voice echoing over the thick ill miasma and into the ocean night.
The priest said something in Latin.
“Excuse me?”
 “I do not have to prove myself to you.”
“Kingdom.” The dying man muttered. “Kingdom.”
“And why is that?” The mercenary said. “I insist you tell us why you will not bless his journey.”
The priest’s eyes seemed somehow deepened behind their cataracts. “You might feign misunderstanding, but any fool could see the truth here. I am only a hermit upon your ship, but do not think I have watched idle; I have seen into your faces on this voyage, short though it has been. You are no men of God, no, you men are none at all. Each of you are the same. Be warned here, travellers of death. I will not put my Lord’s name in vain to service your malcontents. The punishment you are given is just.”
“Rising.” The dying man whispered. “Rising.” The room did not look at him.
“How can you judge me if you don’t know me, holy man.” The mercenary said to the shadow.
“I know you.”
“How do you know me?”
“I have met men like you.”
“There are no men like me.”
The priest shook his head. “There are many men like you.” He said.
“Are you calling me a killer.”
“Have you killed?” He asked.
“Never in my life.” The mercenary said.
At that the priest refused to look at him. But the mercenary leant closer. “Don’t you believe me. Killer is just a word.” He took a closer look at the toothless man. “What are you to me, priest. Who are you to say what we deserve.”
“Nothing.” The priest whispered strangely, like in his words lay the very essence of the burning city’s final light, a kindling ash upon the horizon that seemed all the more distant now. “I am nothing, you are nothing. We are not the ones who may judge. But I will not bless you.”
The mercenary made a noise like laughter, but there was no humour in it. “What a troublesome priest you are. I do not want your wordplay.”
“It is not wordplay; it is the truth.”
“And so you judge but are not the one who judges.”
“You may believe whatever suits you. I will not bless what you are or what you will do.”
A silence gripped the room. It was dormant, stagnant in the foul taste of the air. The dying man had since ceased his breathing, and so too had the light of the burning city. Their shadows around the bedside seemed ethereal in the grip of darkness.
“I ask that you let me leave now.” Said the priest. His candlelight had faded, and his words no longer seemed to have any meaning.
The world heard two distinct splashes as dawn arose. Quickly their contours disappeared, falling beneath the rumble of the limestone-coloured ocean as indistinct lines upon the grey face of morning. A brief flash of red light made the mercenary think the burning city was now upon him, bearing down with its oppressive glare. But instead daybreak turned over the horizon. He felt the dull orange heat upon his skin. Rising, rising, the stretch of daybreak welcomed atop the ashen breeze. His killer’s brow morphed beneath its glare.
As daylight revealed the world, the ocean stood there as some accursed limbo crossing bridging the distance between the ship and the blackened metropolis. Its outline seemed a visage of mystical origins beneath the canopy of the sun, but long had the night raged through it. The ruins of the city now stretched across the landscape like the embers of a charred corpse, dominating the coastline as far as could be seen. What distinguished the city was the survival of its highest monuments, an enormous trifecta of towers residing overhead the torrefied buildings. The sun had by then eclipsed the very matter of the earth into a silhouette of its own enormity, but what withstood both celestial and temporal fires, the triumvirate of spires reigned. There was an ostentatious and lonely beauty to them, like a bed of dried flowers which jut only from the deepest soil. The mercenary looked up at these great statues of civilization, observing their ritual eminence as all foreign men do, with one part curiosity and another reflective for the customs he no longer held.
“What should we do?” The younger mercenary Rjarirk spoke, his face still red with the recent labour.
The band had lost their official leader, and as the mercenary was eldest among the warriors, the others sought his observation. “If the great city has fallen,” He said, cleaning his knife, “we would be seeing more smoke. We must hope that the cause of these defenders is not yet lost.”
Rjarirk met the mercenary’s eyes. “And if it is?”
The mercenary did not respond.