The Brass God

by K. M. McKinley

  The wind blew now at a ferocious pace. Truncated lightning stabbed down from the clouds of sand, hitting the modalmen. Their clan markings flared brightly with these strikes of power, but they were unharmed, and did not move a muscle.

  The storm reached its climax. Through the hurrying veils of sand and dust the blue sky was occasionally visible where it had not been before. Rel had to be going. There were three bunches of keys in his hand still. He dithered, he could ride off, and give the last of the keys to the men to free the others. Looking back he saw them spilling from their cages. They were so feeble. He was faster, if he delivered the keys quickly, he would be away, losing but a little more time.

  “Hyah!” he spurred Aramaz on. The creature shied at being ridden into the abrasive wind, but did as he was asked. Rel rode at full tilt up the line of wagons, tossing the keys into the cages as he went. “Release yourselves, flee!” He called. “Head to the west, go home to your families!”

  Aramaz leapt over a stinking tangle of bones. Moving together in perfect synchronicity, Rel and his mount leaned far to the side, running around the last wagon and turning back toward the gate. As they sped back toward freedom, the wind once again at their back, he threw the last bunch of keys into the cage of bone situated upon the wagon bed.

  Rel spurred the dracon on. Aramaz arrowed forward, scattering escaping men before him. The wind was dropping. More blue streaks of sky showed through the sand. The last of the lightning cracked down from the sinking clouds, and the howling diminished.

  “Run you fools!” shouted Rel. Men were sinking to their knees. Now they were out they did not know to do. Others would not leave their cages, so conditioned by fear they had become. Those still possessing some strength and wit were running away, most toward the gate in the palisade, though a few scattered for the hills, trusting to broken ground to slow their pursuers. And they would be pursued. The storm was dropping quickly. Rel rode hard through the fleeing prisoners. They called after him to stop. He swerved when a man stood in his path, arms waving. Another grabbed for his bridle. Rel yanked Aramaz’s reins to the side too slowly. The dracon bit at the man’s arm, severing it above the elbow, and he fell screaming.

  “Get out of my way!” he shouted. “I have to deliver a message, I have to tell the Kingdoms they are coming!”

  Men sobbed as he rode away from them. Abuse fell upon his ears. The sandstorm was abating. The modalmen had thankfully yet to move.

  He was a fool to stay behind. In finding the keys and handing them out he had given up over an hour’s advantage in travel. The garau could never catch Aramaz, but the hounds would. He should have left his countrymen to their fate.

  He swore at himself for thinking that. He could still make it. The gate in the palisade was near. Nobody guarded it.

  “Fly Aramaz!” he yelled. “Fly! Fly!”

  The gate beckoned. The petrified forest lay beyond. On the other side was safety.

  They passed the gate in a blur of colour. Aramaz’s bright plumage streaked the air. Rel whooped with joy. He had never known his mount to run so fast. The bond between them was complete, they moved as one, master and beast.

  As they passed the gate, a rope jerked upward from the sand, catching Aramaz’s feet and catastrophically tripping him. Aramaz screamed as he fell at full pelt. His leading leg smashed into the ground, and for a moment it seemed he might right himself, but his foot hit badly, he rolled, sending Rel crashing into the ground. The dracon scrabbled with all six limbs to get up again, and had regained his feet when a broad spearhead slammed through his side, showering gore over the stunned Rel. Before his eyes, Aramaz fell face down, throat rattling in death.

  Brauctha’s face appeared over Rel, blocking out the sky; in his hand was the bloody spear. He bent low and pulled Rel up off the ground like a doll.

  “Shkarauthir’s last mistake,” said the modalman evilly. “I knew you would run.”

  Rel was bundled into a stinking sack and dragged back into the camp over a modalman’s shoulder. Through the cloth, the shouts of modalmen and the baying of their hounds mingled with the screams of men.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  A Spy Spied Upon

  THE DOOR TO Hissenwar’s workroom was open. Vand allowed the magister plenty of space for his work, and his room was full of half assembled devices, Morfaan artefacts, books and mugs of congealing tea. It was late, and all but a single wooden desk with a leather top was dark. The desk was of the sort with a high back full of small drawers. Three glimmer lamps were screwed into the uprights. The piece was expertly made, but poorly used. It was scratched, stained and battered by its careless employment as a workbench.

  Hissenwar had removed his magister’s jacket, and worked in his shirtsleeves, intent upon a tiny mechanism in his hands. This could conceivably have been the reason he did not see Filden approach, though it was not, because nobody ever saw Filden coming.

  “Do you have it for me?” Filden asked.

  Hissenwar jumped, scattering the pieces of the machine he was working on across his desk and the floor beneath.

  “Omnus’ balls, Filden!” he snapped as he hunted for the spilled components.

  Filden cocked his eyebrow.

  “Do you have to sneak up on a man like that?”

  “Force of habit, Magister,” Filden said.

  Hissenwar grunted as he folded his ample frame double to retrieve the pieces from the floor. His fingers failed to gain traction on the components, so he licked their tips and dabbed them up. He held them up to the arrangement of magnifying lenses covering his eyes. “Ruined!” he grumbled. “Look! Covered in dust!” He held out his fingertip in accusation. A tiny golden flywheel sat on the ridges of his fingertip.

  “It is just dust,” said Filden.

  “To you, it is just dust!” said Hissenwar. He was very angry. His cheeks were florid with it.

  Hissenwar had never allowed himself to get so furious at Filden. Every man has a trigger, thought Filden. And here is another I can pull.

  “To me it is not just dust. It is a mess of organic particles lousy with residual life memory, rogue glimmer, electrostatic charge and other forces and contaminants that will render this piece unusable!” He peered at it again. “Oh! I shall have to cast and enchant another. You have wasted me an hour of my spare time.”

  “What is it that you are making?”

  “Nothing,” said Hissenwar, hunching protectively over his work. “A hobby.”

  He looked at a perfect one-to-one scale model of a finch, clamped wings spread, upon a small stand. Entirely made of metal, it had a marvellous plumage of copper, bronze and steel. Hissenwar noticed Filden follow his glance, and cast a handkerchief over the bird.

  “Will it fly?”

  “Yes, no. I don’t know,” fumed Hissenwar. “It will take me longer to find out thanks to you.”

  Filden plucked a coin from his belt and tossed it onto Hissenwar’s desk in one swift movement. Hissenwar noticed the flight of the coin too late to catch it, and cringed as it sailed toward his delicate engines, but it landed, perfectly flat, upon one of the few clear spaces.

  “For your troubles, in addition to our agreed fee. Now, have you finished what I requested?”

  Hissenwar pulled off his headgear. His owlish eyes blinked at Filden. “I have. It’s not the sort of work I would normally do. Tyn magic. I had to go to the Watermarket. It took me several attempts get one of them to help me. They’re only too pleased to sell me the ingredients, but entirely resistant to the idea of teaching me how to blend them.” He pulled open one of the many small drawers of his desk, and fished out a small, waxed paper parcel sealed with blue wax. “You open it. I can’t touch it.” Filden took the parcel. Hissenwar grabbed his wrist. “Nobody but you can touch it, do you understand?”

  “I have utilised magic before, you know.”

  “Even Tyn filth?”

  “Even that.” Filden broke the seal and unwrapped the item in the paper. It was a small amulet, covered
in odd Tyn runes, similar to the mind-clouder he already possessed.

  “I don’t care for the aesthetics,” said Hissenwar. “But it will work.” He grinned. “I too have had dealings with the little bastards. I had the one that did the work geas himself up to the arsehole with negative consequence should it fail. That’s the best guarantee of their work there is.”

  Filden weighed the thing in his hand. It was light, looked like steel but had the greasy feel of lead. His fingers numbed while he held it.

  Hissenwar held out his own hands warningly toward Filden. “Don’t!” he said. “Don’t keep it in contact with your bare skin for long, and don’t let anyone else touch it. As soon as it is touched by any other human being or Tyn, the enchantment will be reversed and the...” He almost said the name, but caught himself in time. “The target, will become aware of you, and will be drawn to you. You will not be able to hide from him, quite the opposite in fact.”

  Filden nodded, and slipped the amulet into a leather pouch.

  “You’ll need this too,” Hissenwar said, handing over a silver die stamp. “The Free Tyn are an odd lot, but they have their friendships and alliances. I couldn’t trust the fellow who made it with the target’s name, and he probably would have had a fit had I told him. You need to stamp it in yourself. That’s all you need to do. I made the die. It should work. Do test the amulet first, mind. And when you stamp it, remember the die is silver. It is soft. It will only stand a couple of strikings before it loses definition and becomes useless, so make sure you hit true. I have a hammer...” He pulled objects off one another as he searched his desk, finally fishing out a rounded cobbler’s hammer from under a pile of paper. “There you are. Go into the next room and do it. You have to be alone, focus on the name and the target’s face. Then please bring both back. As soon as the die is used, the silver must be melted down. I’ve warmed my crucible. I’m ready.”

  Filden, whose actual depth of experience with magic would have shocked the magister, nodded. “Simple,” he said.

  “Are you sure you want to do this? I’ve had a few of my contacts ask around. This Sn...” He gulped. “This Tyn is not well liked by anyone, and he has a reputation. They say he is very dangerous.”

  “So am I,” said Filden.

  The look of fear on Hissenwar’s face was gratifying.

  FILDEN KEPT TO the shadows. He preferred the night. He was at home in it. The dark embraced him like a lover.

  Being abroad at that hour in those streets was risky. The watch patrolled the lower parts of town in force. They worked on the assumption that anyone about at three in the morning was either up to no good or drunk, and they tended to arrest both sorts. Filden’s outfit of dark clothes, hat and mask put him firmly in the camp of ne’er do wells, but he had nothing to worry about. The watch would never see him, let alone catch him.

  The White Moon shone brightly on the Lemio district, turning it into a charcoal sketch of chimneys and tottering apartments. This part of Karsa was not scheduled for rebuilding, it being safely out of the way of Per Allian and Prince Alfra’s idealised vision. It would remain, therefore, a maze of modest factories, and all the small businesses required to fuel a city of Karsa’s size. Most of them reeked; backstreet abattoirs, tanneries, bone renderers, wood cookers and the like, all crammed up against people’s homes. Modern sanitation helped not one bit. The smell of clotted blood welled thickly from inadequate sewers.

  Filden’s new amulet vibrated in its pouch, rattling softly against the stiff leather and drawing him toward the Sniffer’s location. He saw the Tyn intermittently. It moved far more quickly than it should, disappearing from view into the deepest shadow and reappearing scores of yards away. Its humpbacked shape scuttled over rooftops and vanished. The next moment it crept from an alleyway. Filden remained at a safe distance, wary of the Tyn’s preternatural senses. He waited while it tottered precariously on a roof ridge, its large carpet bag out to balance it. The Sniffer did not fall, but dropped to all fours and ran, like a black, bloated spider, its bag in its teeth. It bounded down the slant of the roof. It paused, looking back toward him, nose quivering, then ran vertically down a wall in a way that gave Filden pause. From there it leapt through a window. A moment later a scream chased it out, and it bounded impossibly along the wall.

  Filden looked about to make sure he was not seen. The street was deserted. He slipped after the Sniffer.

  For a time he lost sight of the Sniffer, relying on the intensity of the amulet’s vibrations to draw him on. This was nervous work. He had tracked and slain many men in his old role, even a few Tyn. They had been difficult to kill, and none had been like his current quarry. The Sniffer was the being he went to when his own prodigious skills were inadequate. He played a dangerous game following it. But he followed it because it was dangerous, and because he was afraid of it.

  Filden feared nothing but the Tyn. There was a thrill in this chase utterly lacking from all his other hunts.

  The amulet led him away from the flatter part of the Lemio bowl, toward the steep hillsides where the moors around the city began their curtsey to the sea. The slopes were as built over as the flat, full of precipitous streets and buildings that optimistically defied gravity. There were a couple of scars in the cityscape there, where the tremors stirred up by the approaching Twin had brought down parts of the hill and the houses on it.

  Filden found himself by the Lemio itself, at a place where one of its many small tributaries joined its flow. The Lemio and Var were short rivers, but fed by the moorland’s many streams, they grew rapidly. The Lemio itself was young there, stepping down old weirs and rubbish-choked cataracts toward its truncated, overbuilt flood plain. From there it flowed around the new docks toward its old meeting place with the Var at the Lockside, though the rivers were now forever divided by man’s artifice. A bridge crossed the Lemio ahead, the road turning to follow the river up the hill on the other side. The road in front of him rose gradually toward the east. He turned to face each direction in turn, paying attention to the signals of his amulet. It thrummed as he faced the bridge, so he crossed it, and went upward.

  THE TYN WAS in an old mill perched halfway up the hillside. “The Lemio Clothing and Shoddy Company” its sign read. Filden recalled news of the mill orphanage’s closure in the broadsheets a little while ago. That led him to guess the girl the Sniffer hunted was among their number. Such information would be useful. His opinion of the Sniffer lessened; men made mistakes like that. He expected more.

  The mill gates were barred, but there was no one on watch, and Filden climbed the wall around the place quickly, landing with a soft thud on the far side. A few buildings were within the yard: an engine house, a newer building, and an ancient watermill, its origins clear from the structure over the water which had once held the wheel. According to the amulet, the Sniffer was in the old mill.

  Filden ran silently across the moonlit courtyard. A glance at the main sliding door, and he saw chains locking it shut. Filden dare not chance picking its padlock or cutting the links, so crept around the building until he found a door that was easily forced.

  He was in the same building as the Tyn. He had to be careful. He pulled out a four-shot pistol, loaded with specialised bullets made for killing the Sniffer’s kind. The core was glimmer covered in thin silver, as in a normal bullet, the projectile impelled when the sliver jacket was struck and pierced by the iron firing pin. But the front of Filden’s bullets were also coated in iron, a substance deadly to the Tyn. Magister’s marks enchanted them with increased accuracy, and warded them against Tyn spells. Creating such a bullet from so many layers was dangerously tricky. Imbuing them with magic more so. They were therefore very expensive.

  Old machines filled the factory floor, covered with scrapper’s signs. Since the orphans had gone the machinery had probably become uneconomical to use, though it was as likely that the Grostimans were being quick to wipe away all traces of evidence, Filden thought.

  He held his breath,
moving with all the stealth he could muster. The Sniffer was nowhere to be seen. A noise drew his eyes to the floorboards of the storey above. Holding his pistol lightly, he went to the stairwell door at the side of the factory floor, and crept upstairs.

  The first floor was empty, everything gone. A few scraps of cloth and a thick dust of fabric particles made it likely this was the shoddy room. Still no Sniffer.

  The second floor had been a dormitory. Beds were heaped untidily in one corner, ready for disposal. It was a grim place, full of draughts.

  The Sniffer was in the centre of the room, muttering to itself. Filden retreated out of sight.

  “We’ll find you my pretty,” the Sniffer said, and tittered to itself. “For this we have a night with a goodlady!”

  Filden’s eyes set over his mask. He thought Vand had been rash to promise his daughter to this thing. Even Filden had limits.

  Humming a song popular a hundred years ago, the Sniffer unclasped its tatty carpet bag. Witch light shone up from the interior, bathing the room in a ghoulish glow. The Sniffer peered inside, thrust its arm in and rummaged around.

  “Where are you?” it growled. Its arm went in right the way to its armpit, so far in the Sniffer had to lean its head against the bag. His tongue poked out between his teeth, he would have looked comical were he not so grotesque. The bag could not possibly be so deep.

  The Sniffer put his head into the bag, then his shoulders. Then he slipped inside, all of him, though the bag was far too small to contain his body. Singing came from its depths. Filden cocked his pistol, the precision engineering rendering the action soundless.

  A moment later a bundle wrapped in a rag flew up out of the bag and thumped onto the floor. The Sniffer scrambled out and crawled to fetch it. The Tyn seemed more comfortable with this manner of locomotion than walking on two feet.

  Cackling softly, the Sniffer unwrapped the rags, then squatted, caressed the contents, and kissed it.