Shadow of a Dead God: A Mennik Thorn Novel

by Patrick Samphire

  I could break the spell, but it would take more time and effort than I could spare. When I found Benny, the Ash would kill it far more effectively.

  Except then she would know where we were, or at least where we had been when I’d found Benny. I didn’t want her waiting outside when we emerged, or sending in a bunch of people with knives to do it the simple way.

  Figure that one out once you’ve located Benny, I told myself.

  The spell I needed wasn’t that difficult. Sending an unstructured wave of magic out in every direction was one of the basic forms, and modifying it so the magic bounced back after a hundred yards wouldn’t be too hard. The difficulty would be making sense of the magic as it crashed back upon me, like being hit by a wave from every direction and trying to work out exactly where the driftwood that cracked me over the head had come from.

  I found a quiet alley off the main street, took some breaths to calm my nerves, and cast the spell. I saw the magic spread out in a sphere and disappear. A couple of seconds later, it was coming back, contracting on me like a swarm of wasps finding a jar of honey. I flinched involuntarily, and the magic was past, puffing away as it hit me.

  Great. I had got absolutely nothing out of that. If there had been a gap in the returning magic, I had missed it. It was too fast, that was the problem. Maybe I could slow it down as it approached me. And I didn’t need to examine the whole sphere. Benny obviously wasn’t directly overhead or under my feet. I ran through the forms until I was certain I had it. Then I let the spell go again.

  This time, when the magic returned, I had more time to examine it. It wasn’t a regular sphere. Lots of materials impeded or slowed magic — not just apple tree wood and volcanic glass, although they were the two of the more effective — but only Ash killed it completely. I turned slowly, examining the contracting magic. If anyone could see me, they would think I was completely mad.

  I clenched my fists in frustration. This was difficult. There might have been a gap in the direction of the market, but, if so, it had been at the limit of the spell.

  Patience. I would just have to get closer.

  I was on my fourth attempt and within sight of the Penitent’s Ear when I finally picked up Ash, and just for a bonus, I didn’t only pick up one but the presence of three distinct concentrations of Ash.

  Ash Guard patrols must be tromping around town ruining everyone’s magic. The commotion in the Stacks must have set them on edge. There was an unspoken agreement that the Ash Guard only went out carrying or dressed in Ash when there was a specific threat, because the Ash would wreck legitimate spells and wards as easily as it would magical threats. Giant, murderous ghost-beasts counted as legitimate threats.

  “You’ve really stirred things up, Lowriver,” I said.

  It was just a shame that the Ash Guard thought I was behind the whole thing. If I went charging towards them, thinking it was Benny, I was going to be in for a nasty surprise.

  Taking a good look up and down the street, I headed in the direction of the closest concentration of Ash.

  The Ash Guard patrol were heading for the Tide Bridge at speed. I detected them before I saw them, not by virtue of my magic disappearing, but from the way the crowd opened before them like panicked seagulls being chased by an irritating child. The Ash Guard were no danger to ordinary civilians — their dominion was solely magic and its users — but there was a certain paranoia engendered by a group of heavily armed, Ash-smeared, mage-killing men and women charging towards you that made better safe than sorry a highly rational response. It did mean they weren’t much good at sneaking up on you.

  I ducked into another alley and let them pass, then sent out my magic again. Now I was down to two sources. And if I was right, one had moved a good distance. That left a single static source. I couldn’t be sure it was Benny, but it was my best bet. Pausing to monitor the Ash signals every twenty yards, I crept towards it.

  The Ash was in an apartment on the edge of the market. It was far enough back from the street that a passing mage wouldn’t feel their powers diminished. There was nothing about the apartment that stood out. If this was Benny’s hideout, I would be leading Lowriver right to it. It was time to shake the magic squid. (I was never going to get used to saying that.)

  Lamps burned at the market stalls, a mad constellation of overlapping, flickering stars. Crowds shifted between them, the noise a rising and falling murmur, interspersed by shouts from vendors. I could see piles of fruits and vegetables, cloth and cheap clothes, and stalls stacked with medicines that would do no more than give you the shits, and I could smell spiced meat — goat, I guessed — frying somewhere out of sight. A dozen people could be watching me, and I would be none the wiser.

  The obvious thing to do would be to march up, get in range of Benny’s Ash, and let the magic disintegrate. Lowriver would lose track of me, and we would make a break for it.

  The problem was, I didn’t know how closely Lowriver was following behind, nor how quickly she could tag me again if I left the Ash’s influence. When I had been running from the ghost-beast in the Stacks and the Ash Guard patrol had passed, they had been close enough that I had felt all magic disappear. Lowriver must have tagged me again right after. If she did it once, she could do it again. And if we took the Ash with us, which would be the most sensible move, well, if I could track Ash then so could she.

  Of course, she might have forgotten about you already, and all of this is for nothing.

  The magic squid on my back spoke against that.

  I eased myself into the market and let the flow of people carry me along.

  I had to kill the squid, no question, I had to find a way of getting clear afterwards, and I needed to do it soon, before Lowriver could put some kind of more mundane tail on me.

  I checked the location of the Ash again to reassure myself. The concentration I took to be Benny was still where I expected it to be. The other was making its way towards me across the market. I craned over the heads of the crowd, hauling myself up on the supporting post of a stall selling charms and personal wards.

  I was right. The Ash Guard patrol was making its way across the market. They would wreck the charms and wards on the stall if they passed. Or they would have, if any of those charms and wards had ever actually worked.

  I let myself down, ignoring the complaints of the stallholder, and retreated. I couldn’t afford to be seen by the patrol, but in amongst the press of sweaty bodies, I could get close enough that their Ash would de-squid me. Then all I would have to do was trail them until they passed close enough to Benny’s apartment to make a dash for it.

  Certain critical friends (Benny) had told me that my plans were crap, but for once I pulled it off without a hitch. I trailed a couple of times around the market, following the Ash-smeared men and women until they passed close to the apartment, then split off.

  With luck, if Lowriver tried to track the Ash, she would track the patrol instead for the rest of the night. By the time she figured out I had done a runner, Benny and I would be long gone.

  Always assuming Benny answered the Depths-cursed door.

  I hammered on the wood, simultaneously trying to keep it quiet enough that no one in the street would pay attention but loud enough that it would carry to the back of the house.

  There was no answer. I thumped louder.

  Nothing. If Benny had left the Ash here and buggered off to a bar, I was going to kill him.

  I was well aware I had been out here too long. I bent down, pressed my mouth to the keyhole, and hissed, “Benny!”

  He was either asleep, dead, or missing.

  Fuck it. The Ash Guard patrol was gone. Benny’s Ash was out of range. I popped the lock.

  A hallway led into the building. I ignored the doors leading off to the side and headed straight for the back of the apartment. Within half a dozen steps, I felt the influence of the Ash, and by the time I reached the end of the hallway, I was as weak and helpless as a baby.

  Benny was i
n the room beyond, and he wasn’t dead, missing, or sleeping. He was lying on a couch, feet up on a cushion, book in one hand, half-eaten pastry in another, with a glass of wine on a table beside him.

  He looked up guiltily when he saw me, eyes flicking between me and the pastry, before shoving it quickly into his mouth.

  “For Pity’s sake, Benny!”

  “What?” he mumbled around crumbs.

  “Why didn’t you answer the door?”

  “Didn’t know it was you. Might have been an assassin.”

  “And you thought they would go away if you didn’t answer the door?”

  He shrugged. “You look awful.”

  I pushed his legs off the couch and dropped onto it. “That’s what everyone keeps telling me.”

  The room was a good size. Crumbling white plaster, a tired wooden floor, closed, painted, flaking shutters. Still. I wondered if it was for rent. I needed a new base.

  “I mean, it’s not just that.” Benny waved a hand at the dirt and tears on my clothing. “Why are you wearing something six inches too small? And, I don’t know, finickity. Weird. You look posh. Apart from looking like you’ve been mud-wrestling with a thorn-bush.”

  “It’s a long story. I think I’ve figured out who’s behind this.”

  Benny’s eyes sharpened, and his body grew abruptly very still. “Who?”

  “One of the Countess’s mages. Her name is Enne Lowriver.”

  “Nah. Your mother wouldn’t do that to you.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, I am. She might think you’re a disappointment and a waste of space, but she’s always protected you. In her own way.”

  I snorted. “Anyway, there’s no evidence the Countess is involved. Lowriver is up to something on her own.”

  “What?”

  It was my turn to shrug. “She had this box. At some point, it held a kind of artefact. She must be using it to summon that ghost-beast I told you about and then using the creature as a weapon to take out, well, pretty much anyone. There was this symbol in the box.” I shook my head. “I’ve seen it somewhere before. I just don’t know where.”

  Everything about Benny was tense. I could see that he had to hold himself back from going after Lowriver right now. I knew how he felt, but unlike him, I had seen what she was capable of, and I knew we couldn’t beat her ourselves.

  “Maybe you saw it at your mother’s house?” Benny said.

  “No. And not at Mica’s, I know that.”

  “And it’s important?”

  It had to be. I had nothing else to go on. “I think so. I mean, if this artefact is providing the power Lowriver is using and we figure out where it’s from, maybe we can figure out what we’re facing and how to stop it.”

  Benny brushed crumbs out of his scraggly beard and moustache. He passed a scrap of paper and a stick of charcoal to me. “Think you can draw it?”

  I sketched the symbol and handed it back.

  “What the fuck is that supposed to be?”

  I shrugged again.

  Benny squinted at it. “Well, I know I haven’t seen it. So where have you been recently? Where might you have spotted it?”

  “Thousand Walls, of course,” I said, ticking locations off on my fingers. “The Ash Guard headquarters. Dumonoc’s Bar. Imela Rush’s family home. The university. That warehouse where Uwin Bone was killed. The Sunstone place. A couple of coffeehouses. The City Watch headquarters. My apartment.”

  “I think you’d know if it was in your place, and I don’t remember seeing it in Thousand Walls or the City Watch.”

  “Me neither. And it wasn’t in the Rush house.”

  “The Ash Guard?”

  “No.”

  “So, the warehouse, the Sunstones’, the university, or Dumonoc’s.”

  “Or the coffeehouses,” I said. “Or just in passing on the street.”

  “Nah. Forget those. If they were where it was, that’s no use to us. How about Dumonoc’s?”

  I closed my eyes and tried to visualise it. It would be easy for something to go unnoticed in the cheapskate darkness of Dumonoc’s bar. Isolated glows of light where customers had brought their own candles or lamps or paid Dumonoc to light one, all sunk in the enclosing dark. Dumonoc didn’t like me. But then, Dumonoc didn’t like anyone, and more than hating them, he just couldn’t bring himself to give a shit. The idea that he would drag himself up enough to organise a campaign of murder was absurd.

  I shifted my attention to the warehouse. That was a more likely option. There had been all sorts of stuff piled around, things that the Wren had stolen, things he had traded. As a high mage, objects of power would be of interest to him. I had taken down the door, shearing its hinges. There had been stacks of chests, crates, and sacks of grain and flour, and piles of stolen crap. No symbols that I remembered on them. I had come around them and seen Bone’s body lying on a rug near the desk. There had been objects on and around the desk, but I hadn’t been paying attention to them. I had been looking at the body, at the blood on the rug and the floor, smelling the overwhelming, throat-tightening stink, feeling the cold shock on my skin. Any one of those objects could have had a symbol on them, and I wouldn’t have taken it in consciously.

  I pushed away the memories of Uwin Bone’s corpse and tried to remember.

  It was no good. Short of going back and hoping the Wren had left it all the way it had been, I was never going to be certain. Put the warehouse aside.

  At the university, I had been taken directly to Scholar Longstream’s study. There had been plenty of artefacts lying around, but I had examined them closely, and none of them had had the mark.

  So, the Sunstone house. I had spent more time there than anywhere, four nights in the pantry, one seeing the priest slaughtered, and one in the cellar with the ghosts. I knew damned well it wasn’t in the pantry. I could remember where every last lentil and clove of garlic was. I hadn’t exactly had much to do in there. I remembered the ram’s head symbol carved above the doors, the sigil of the Sunstones’ involvement in the wool trade, but no geometric frogs’ legs. It hadn’t been in the hallway or the kitchen. It hadn’t been the symbol of the priest of Gwillan-Whose-Light-Shines-on-the-Few-Not-the-Many, either. That had been a broken eye.

  Depths! I was coming up blank. Where had I seen it?

  Not in the cellar where the ghosts had fled and where I had, I’d thought, destroyed the ghost-beast. If the symbol was going to be anywhere, I would have expected it there, but it hadn’t been. Nor behind the false wall nor under the flagstone with the spiral wedding bands, either.

  Where?

  I had come to the house six times, four times under Galena Sunstone’s supervision to be shut in the pantry — good times — and once after I had been fired to beg for my job back. That time I had been met by the Estimable Sunstone and ushered to the kitchen before everything exploded into blood and horror. And then at Galena Sunstone’s invitation to finally — I thought — do away with the ghost-beast. I had gone into the Estimable Sunstone’s study so he could insult me and—

  I leapt up, sending the table and Benny’s wine flying. Sunstone had been sliding a book into the desk drawer. I had only caught a glimpse of it, but it had had a symbol on the cover. I was sure it was the same one. Sunstone, you bastard! No question. He wasn’t just a patsy. He had been involved all along.

  “Hey!” Benny protested, staring at the spilled wine. “I paid for that!”

  I stared down at him, thrown. “You did?”

  “Well, no. But I could have.”

  I cut him off. “Come on. We’re going to the Sunstone house. We’re getting answers.”

  The Sunstone house was draped in red mourning banners. It seemed like I was going to be making a habit of intruding on people’s grief. I had less sympathy for Galena Sunstone than I’d had for Imela Rush’s family. A lot of people had died and been injured because of the Estimable Sunstone. Galena could mourn later. If she was part of this, she could do it in a cell.
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br />   I hammered on the door and didn’t let up until I finally heard footsteps approaching. The door opened a crack. I leaned on it, forcing it wider.

  In keeping with mourning traditions, Galena Sunstone had dismissed her servants, and she was the one who had answered the door. She looked old and tired, her face emptied by grief. Her eyes flicked past me to Benny, then away again, dismissing him.

  “Please go away, Mr. Thorn,” she said. “You did your job. I paid you. We are done.”

  Her voice was robbed of energy and passion. She sounded more like the ghosts I had exorcised than the woman she had been yesterday.

  “We’re not. I have questions, because you’ve been lying to me.”

  She didn’t answer, but her weight shifted from the door, and it swung open all the way. I stepped past her into the darkness of the entrance hall. Last time I had been here, the space had been illuminated by a dozen lamps. She was taking this mourning thing seriously. In my opinion, the Estimable Sunstone has been a sneering, superior slimeball, but I didn’t think she was putting this on.

  I felt a twinge of guilt, but less than I had expected.

  “Your husband was involved in something that has killed a lot of people. It almost killed me and Benny here. Now, I’m sorry you’re upset, but I am going to find out what your husband was doing, and I recommend you don’t get in my way.”

  Her eyes flicked uncertainly from me to Benny, then she slumped.

  “Ask your questions, Mr. Thorn, then leave me be.”

  “Do you know what your husband was involved in?”

  She looked for a moment as though she were about to lie again, but then the futility of it seemed to overwhelm her. Her voice was emotionless as she said, “My husband told me he had found a way to get his wool contracts back.”

  “Which was?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “Fuck’s sake.” Wool. This really was about fucking wool.