Shadow of a Dead God: A Mennik Thorn Novel

by Patrick Samphire

  I should have got myself arrested more often.

  Twenty seconds. Depths! There was no way to pause or stop the spell. It was running down, and there was nothing I could do about it. All I could do was get back out and think of another plan.

  Except there was no other plan, not one I could pull off before Benny was executed.

  He’s got to be somewhere.

  An iron-studded door stood at the far end of the hallway, past the cells. It was thick and heavy, with a solid lock. What would you keep back there? Buckets and mops? Hardly. I wrapped the spell around the door, feeling the magic drain further, tripped the lock, and threw the door open.

  Stairs led down into the dark and up to where light leaked beneath another door. Where would they keep condemned men?

  It had to be down. The instinct of every gaoler was to bury convicted criminals, to put them in the darkness, to deny them the light. This place had to have a dungeon or underground cells. I didn’t have time for another mistake.

  I stepped through, closed the door behind me, and conjured a faint light.

  Thirty seconds.

  If this led down to a cheese cellar, I was going to feel really stupid when they dragged me back out.

  I smelled the cells by the time I was halfway down. The cells on the ground level had been clean, airy, light, and spacious. Apparently, those privileges disappeared when you were convicted. The stench of unemptied chamber pots hung like a fever in the stairwell. Agatos had had proper sewers for over a hundred years, but no one had bothered to connect them to the cells, because apparently impaling convicted prisoners on a spear or chopping off their hands wasn’t sufficient deterrent.

  I hurried down the dark stairs, then through another locked door.

  The stink inside was orders of magnitude worse. The gaoler sitting at a table at the far end, picking through the remains of a meal, seemed not to notice.

  Forty seconds.

  There were a dozen cells. A single morgue-lamp above the gaoler’s table shed enough green-tinged light to hide my own conjured illumination.

  I crossed to the first cell and let my light spread inside. The man on the single bunk — a Kendarian sailor by the look of his sea serpent tattoos and his red-stained, beaded hair — shaded his eyes and squinted against the light.

  Forty-five seconds.

  The second cell didn’t hold Benny either, and neither did the third.

  Fifty seconds.

  In the fourth, I finally got lucky. I popped the door.

  “Benny!” I hissed.

  He looked around, confused. I took two quick steps into the cell, wrapped the spell around him, and grabbed his arm. The look of surprise on his weaselly face was almost worth the whole thing.

  “We have to get out of here. Now.”

  Fifty-five seconds.

  Benny didn’t hesitate. When you were a thief and someone told you to run, you ran. Together, we raced out the cell and for the exit.

  Fifty-seven. Fifty-eight.

  I felt the last of the magic trickle away. Mica had cheated me of two seconds.

  “Hey!” a voice shouted from the far end, followed by the sound of a table being knocked over and a plate smashing on the floor.

  Like an idiot, I glanced back and gave the gaoler a clear look at my face. He levelled a flintlock pistol. I grabbed Benny, and we slammed through the door into the dark stairwell. I heard the kick of the gun just as we spun out of sight.

  I pushed the door closed, pulled in magic, and tried to lock the door again. It didn’t work. The lock resisted. I must have overdone it earlier and bent the mechanism.

  “What are you doing?” Benny demanded.

  I took a breath and poured more magic into the lock. I felt something snap, then the door burst open as the gaoler slammed into it. It hit me full on the shoulder and the side of my face. I staggered back, tripping over the first step.

  Just let us get away!

  The gaoler had stuck his pistol back in his belt and drawn a knife instead. A knife might not seem much of a weapon compared to a pistol, but even an amateur could be dangerous with one, and this guy wasn’t an amateur.

  The gaoler feinted, and Benny scrambled back. I could only see this ending one way.

  I drew in raw magic, shaped it, and threw it at the man. It hit him like a bale of cotton being swung from ship. He flew backwards, cracking off the doorpost and windmilling into the space beyond.

  I climbed painfully to my feet and crossed to the man. The side of my face throbbed.

  The gaoler was bleeding heavily from the back of his head, and from the way he lay, his left shoulder was dislocated. I felt nauseous just looking at it. At least he was still breathing.

  Benny knelt beside the gaoler. I almost didn’t notice what he was up to until it was too late. He had gathered up the gaoler’s knife. I grabbed his arm just as he placed the tip of the knife under the man’s chin.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded.

  Benny looked up. “He saw us. He saw you. We’ll both end up on the end of a spear. It’s him or us.”

  “We’re not killing him.” He was just a watchman doing his job.

  “It’s him or us,” Benny repeated.

  I shook my head, sending needles of pain stabbing through my skull. “No. I could…” I trailed off.

  “What? What can you do? Scramble his brains? Make him forget us? You’re not that good a mage.”

  “Maybe I could.” The problem was, I couldn’t know for sure that it would work, and even if it did, it could cause irrevocable damage to his mind.

  This fucking job wasn’t getting any easier.

  Better to risk some damage than leave him dead.

  And who did I think I was to make that decision?

  Having a conscience was a bitch.

  The mind was a complicated thing. No. That was too kind. The mind was a fucking mess, a convoluted tangle of overlapping impressions, ideas, emotions, and memories. It was a miracle that any of us functioned at all. Trying to erase the gaoler’s memory of our escape after the memory had already formed would be like trying to unpick a hundred particular threads from a storm-tangled fishing net without touching any of the others. It was beyond my ability, beyond even the ability of a high mage, I suspected, because this wasn’t about power. It was about the ability of a mage to track down and excise specific images and connections in dozens upon dozens of parts of the brain.

  There was no point trying to remove the memory of the whole escape anyway. We weren’t going to hide the fact that Benny had escaped. The empty cell and beaten up gaoler would be a dead giveaway. What I needed was to take away his memory of me. That was easier. Kind of. It was only completely beyond my talents, not absolutely impossible.

  Life with Benny was always so much fun.

  I did my best to clear my mind. Sometimes, I thought the inside of my head was like a storm in the harbour: Everything was being tossed all over the place, and there was a constant danger of being hit in the face by a stray fish.

  “Hurry it up,” Benny hissed, glancing at the stairs.

  I glared at him. “You want to do this?”

  He held up his knife. “It’d only take a second.”

  “Just shut up and watch the stairs.”

  I went back to smoothing the seas of my mind, one worry-wave at a time. Out went Benny’s knife, the Ash Guard, Sereh, my mother, the murderous ghosts, the blister on my little toe, Silkstar and the Wren, the murdered victims Imela Rush, Uwin Bone, and the priest of Gwillan, and my forthcoming eviction. In their place I formed an image of how I must have looked as I fled from then fought the gaoler. A mirror would have helped.

  When I got the image as clear as I could, I stretched tendrils of magic into the unconscious gaoler’s brain, searching out memories that matched the image. When I found them, I sent delicate surges of magic to destroy them. It didn’t take much power, but the concentration I needed was exhausting, and memories crossed over. Parts of the memory of one
door, for example, were shared with the memories of other doors. The memory of my very manly shoulders would be shared in some respects with the memory of Benny’s more scrawny ones. By destroying all memories of me, I would be destroying parts of other memories. I just hoped they weren’t anything important. The worry that constantly itched at the edges of my brain told me I was taking away the memories of his family, his lovers, his father, his children if he had them. I pushed the worries away. If I lost my concentration, I really would damage him.

  At last, I rocked back, completely drained. I didn’t know if I’d caught all the memories of our brief conflict or whether I’d gone way too far, but it was the best I could do.

  “You done?” Benny asked.

  I nodded, too weary to reply.

  “Good. So what’s the plan to get us out of here?”

  Ah. I looked up at him with a pained smile and cleared my throat.

  “Yeah,” I said. “About that…”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Benny stared at me. “Are you bleeding kidding?” I had just explained the limitation of the stored spell. “You’ve got nothing?” He gestured at the still unconscious gaoler. “This is going to be a bloody waste of time if every watchman between here and outside sees us leaving.”

  He was right about that. I doubted I had the strength to wipe the memories from a single other mind, let alone from a hundred watchmen and -women. And I didn’t want to. I felt guilty enough about I’d done to the gaoler.

  “Then we’re going to have to find another way out.”

  Benny’s face screwed up thoughtfully. “Maybe we could use the back door.”

  “There’s a back door?”

  “No, of course there isn’t, you tit. This is the bloody City Watch headquarters, not Dumonoc’s bar.”

  “I didn’t know Dumonoc’s had a back door.”

  “Fuck me.”

  Benny had a point. We weren’t getting out the front. There were too many witnesses with too many weapons. If your only option was ruled out, you had to create another one. There might not be a back door, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t make one myself.

  Light appeared at the top of the steps, followed by voices calling down. I swore.

  Sometimes you pushed your luck so far it decided to push back.

  “That’s why you need a plan,” Benny said. Which was a bit fucking rich coming from Benny, whose lack of a plan had landed us in this shit in the first place.

  “I had a bloody plan,” I muttered. It had involved Benny being upstairs and us walking out while everyone failed to notice us. It sounded ridiculous now.

  I drew Benny back into the shadows by the door.

  Someone lit a lantern, illuminating two watchwomen and a watchman peering down towards us.

  Lanterns were a bad idea in the dark. They might make you feel secure in your island of light, but outside of that they made the shadows deeper. Benny and I could see them, but they couldn’t yet see us or the unconscious gaoler.

  Benny shifted his grip on his knife. I laid a hand on his arm and shook my head.

  Calling again, the watchwomen and -man descended, swords drawn.

  I watched as the distorted circle of light drew nearer. I wanted them as far away from the door they had come through as possible, but not close enough to see our faces. I wasn’t a fan of balancing acts. Once, when I had been nine, Benny had dared me to balance along the wall of a tanning pit. It hadn’t ended well. It had taken me a week to get the smell of piss out of my raw skin, and another month before Benny stopped laughing at me.

  All of which was to say, I didn’t always get my balance quite right. I felt my chest tighten and my pulse accelerate with every step they took down the stairs.

  Enough. I threw the spell. Light burst in front of them like a sun exploding in the confined stairwell. It was directed away from me and Benny, but the reflected light from the walls and stairs seared into my eyes and left me staggering. I heard desperate screams ahead of us. Shit! I had only meant to dazzle them. I had been too tense and put in too much power.

  Benny swore and stumbled into the door. Then the strain of the raw magic ripping through me became too much for my battered body to bear, and the spell blinked out.

  I found myself on the stone floor, on my hands and knees.

  See, Mother, I thought. How do you like that for a powerful spell?

  Bannaur’s pissing balls!

  I squeezed my eyes shut over and over again until tears ran down my face. I forced myself up. There was no way someone hadn’t seen that light from around the door or heard the screams.

  I could hardly see anything in the dark of the stairwell. The afterimages were giant, drifting blobs of brightness in front of me.

  I grabbed Benny, dodged his flailing arm, and pulled him up the stairs.

  The watchman and one of the watchwomen sprawled unconscious across the steps, but the other woman still writhed in unseeing agony. She had clawed deep tracks in her cheeks, and blood seeped over her reddened skin. All three looked like they had been scalded by steam. I swallowed the bile that came rushing up my throat. I had done this. I had.

  There was nothing I could do to help them.

  We stepped over them and kept going up, past the door to the ground floor. There were too many people in there.

  “Come on,” I hissed at Benny, dragging him after me.

  We slipped through the door to the next floor up, just as a dozen watchmen and watchwomen burst into the stairwell beneath us and clattered down towards their fallen colleagues.

  They wouldn’t stay there long. Once they had kicked their way through the cells, intimidated the prisoners, and found Benny missing, someone would think of upstairs and we would have more trouble up our arses than either of us could deal with.

  We came out into a corridor that ran the width of the building, dead-ending against dressed stone walls at either end. It was hot and stuffy and needed ventilation. Sensible architecture had taken second place to impenetrability here. The corridor smelled of too many sweaty bodies and poor dietary choices. A series of half a dozen doors ran along the front wall in one direction, and a further two in the other. The back wall was blank. I suspected it abutted the cliff face.

  “What do you reckon?” I whispered. “Store rooms?”

  “Nah. Barracks for the off-duty watch.”

  “You could have gone with store rooms,” I said resentfully.

  This wasn’t good for us. There was no way out. We could go back to the stairs and keep going up, hope to reach the roof and climb down the outside. But we would be seen.

  We would have to go through the walls. Some mages, like my little sister, could have punched a way out with no more than the flick of a finger. I didn’t pack that kind of power. I would have to work at the mortar between the blocks, then try to pop them out one by one with magic. It wouldn’t be quick, and it wouldn’t be quiet. I needed a distraction.

  “Follow me.” I took off at a jog to the far end of the corridor. For once, Benny followed without arguing.

  The wall at the far end wasn’t any less solid than the first one, but there was a door right next to it, and that was what I was interested in.

  “What do you reckon’s the chance that’s unoccupied?” I said, indicating the room beyond.

  “It isn’t. You know it isn’t.”

  I did. Everything that could go wrong with this job had.

  “I thought you were lucky,” I said.

  Benny threw me a bitter glance. “I was until I started bringing you along on jobs.”

  It didn’t matter if the room was occupied or not. I needed a view onto the plaza, and I wasn’t getting it from the corridor. I looked at Benny. He shrugged. I eased the door open.

  The good news was, it wasn’t a dormitory. It was a washroom, with a row of washbowls built along one side and a bathtub at the end.

  The bad news was, the bathtub was occupied.

  I was ready this time. As the watchman surged
up from the water — revealing that, apparently, the bath must have been getting cold — I threw a light in his face, a small, weaker one this time, but it did the job and I managed to control it.

  The watchman flinched back, slipped, the back of his knees hitting the side of the bath, and fell. He hit the floor with a smack that made me wince, and his head bounced off the tiles.

  Benny was there instantly, wrapping a bony arm around the man’s neck and holding a hand over his mouth and nose until he stopped struggling.

  “I don’t know how this is supposed to help,” Benny grumbled, rolling the unconscious, naked watchman off him and standing up, attempting to brush the water off his clothes. “We can’t hide here.”

  There was a small, barred window high up on the outside wall.

  “Give me a boost up.”

  Muttering things I made an effort not to hear, Benny helped me onto the shelf of washbasins. I stretched to peer through the glass. I could just make out the plaza. In the peaceful, bright afternoon, you would never have guessed the chaos we were causing in here.

  It was time to cause some chaos out there, too.

  I focussed on a point maybe a hundred feet across the plaza, near the base of the Leap, where impromptu stalls were selling food, drink, and souvenirs commemorating famous executions. Hey, at least I was going to get them some attention. Sometimes, I thought I should be paid more.

  Casting a spell at a distance was one of those skills that some mages never mastered. Most spells emanated from the body of a mage, where they drew in raw magic and formed it into a coherent spell. To cast a spell at a distance, you had to hold the form of the actual magic and project it, before releasing it.

  You try it if you think it sounds easy.

  I drew in magic, shaped it, drew in more, and threw the whole thing like a fisherman spinning a net into a river.

  I was quite proud of this spell.

  The cobbles in front of the stalls erupted in a mad rainbow of explosions. An unearthly, deafening scream shook the walls of the Watch headquarters. The canopies of the stalls flapped wildly. In the raging light, dark shapes seemed to clamber from the ground, clawing from beneath the cobbles.