“Things are more complicated than that. I’ll brief you on it later.” She hands him another envelope. Train tickets. “We’re leaving tomorrow evening on the sleeper.” She pauses for a moment, reaches out and grips his forearm. “There’s something else, which is why it has to be you for this.”
“What?”
“Olthic needs the sword.”
The bedroom is stiflingly warm. It’s still early afternoon, and the sun must still be shining beyond those thick curtains, but there’s a huge fire blazing in the grate. The scent of burning pine can’t quite hide the smell. Terevant’s father–the Erevesic–sits by the fire, the family sword naked across his lap. His fingers run over the spell-forged steel of the blade, tracing the runes, the family crest. Communing with the weapon.
Also on his lap is a folded letter; the same paper, the same seal as the one brought to Terevant. The Crown commands, the Crown requires.
A young necromancer sits in the corner. The heat of the room has forced him to open his heavy robes; his face has a sheen of sweat.
“I want to go,” croaks the Erevesic. “I want to go. I did enough, didn’t I? Accomplished enough. But they won’t let me in.” The old man’s wrists are marked with hundreds of scabs and thin white scars. “I want to go.”
“I know you do. But… Olthic needs the family sword, Father, and you know how proud you are of Olthic. You told me so yourself. You tell me very, very often.”
“He should come himself, then. He could tell them to let me in. I’m still the Erevesic, am I not? They should listen to me!”
“Forget about the sword, Father.” After months of nursemaiding the old man, Terevant has little patience left. “I’ve got my orders. Look, I’m still an officer.”
“Still an officer. Still an officer. Idiot. The Bureau doesn’t have officers.”
“I didn’t join the Bureau. That was years ago. I joined the army, like you wanted.” Five years late. From disgrace to disgrace. “They’re sending me down to Guerdon. I’m leaving tomorrow night.”
“Fine. Go, all of you. Leave me alone. Just leave me with the sword.”
Terevant straightens up. “If you were going to be Enshrined, they’d have taken you already. There’s no shame in Supplication.”
Everyone says that. No one believes it. The lowest, commonest death-caste is for low, common people. The ambitious strive to become valuable enough to Haith that they warrant preservation as Vigilant; only members of a few noble families, like the Erevesics, can even hope to be Enshrined in a family phylactery.
“I am the Erevesic!” shouts the old man. He tries to grab the sword and rise from his chair, but the weight of it is too much for him, and he topples. Terevant catches him, letting the ancestral blade crash to the ground, ringing. “I am the Erevesic!” insists his father, sobbing. Gently, Terevant lowers him back into the chair. Careful not to touch the blade, he wraps his hand in a blanket and replaces the weapon on his father’s lap, then steps back.
His father clutches the blade, knuckles white, blood oozing from cuts on his thin hands. The blood is absorbed by the metal of the sword. “Mother, uncle, grandfather, all of you. I’m here,” whispers the old man to the sword, “I’m here. I am the Erevesic, too. Let me in.”
The necromancer whispers from the corner. “It will not be long now. The phylactery has closed itself to him–if that channel were still open, he would have passed on quite naturally by now. He must choose quickly which of the other castes to die in. And I fear he has lingered too long to achieve Vigilance. I shall do what I can for him.”
They wait there in silence, the necromancer and the soldier, until the old man’s breathing becomes rhythmic, until his hands stop their spidery tracing of the runes. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, thinks Terevant. Olthic should be here, and all the Erevesic officers, the Vigilant warriors who’ve served the family for generations. Old Rabendath, Iorial, all the rest. If they were here, then maybe his father would have the strength to achieve Vigilance. Or maybe they know he doesn’t, and that’s why they stay away.
Death and duty are inextricably entwined in Haith. Dying well is a duty. The skeletal Vigilants and the iron vessels of the Enshrined watch their living kin not with jealousy, but with cold expectation. I did not flinch, they say silently, will you be the one to fail? To break the chain? To let down our great lineage? Haith is full of monuments to past conquests, past glories. Die well, and you’re part of something greater.
Instead, he’ll die with only Terevant and an anonymous necromancer for company.
Terevant remembers his father being angry when news of his mother’s death came. Being angry, again, when Terevant followed Lys to the Bureau. Both times, the chain was tested nearly to breaking point.
I came back, didn’t I? I’m trying again, thinks Terevant, hoping that his father understands. But the Erevesic’s head droops forwards, and he begins to snore.
Terevant fetches a pair of heavy riding gloves from his father’s dresser. The gloves fit him, he thinks, but would be comically undersized on his giant brother. He puts one glove on before taking the sword. When he lifts it, he hears a distant roaring, like the echo of his blood in a seashell. He transfers the sword to his old kitbag and closes the drawstring.
“Go,” counsels the necromancer. “Attend to your duty, and I shall attend to mine.”
“No,” says Terevant, sitting down by the bed. “I’ll wait.”
CHAPTER 7
In Jaleh’s house, Alic and his son share a room with a man who wakes up screaming every night, and another who has roots and branches growing from his flesh. There are other prodigies in other rooms; a dying man whose innards are turning to gold, a woman whose skin blisters when she speaks the name of any god but the one who’s claimed her, a child who laughs and dances on the ceiling. It’s a refuge for those damaged by the war. A gentling-house, they call such places, where those too close to mad gods are carefully cleansed of their spiritual entanglement. Half of Jaleh’s residents would otherwise be interned on Hark Island as dangerous miracle workers, and she reminds everyone that the only prayers permitted under her roof are ones to the safe, weak gods of Guerdon. The prayers are deliberately dull and droning, meant to numb the soul, not stir it. To replace divine rapture with deadened, uninspired, half-hearted belief. Taking a saint away from a god is like trying to take a ball away from a toddler. Reach for the soul directly, and they’ll snatch it away, or throw a tantrum. Ignore it, show no interest, make it boring, and they’ll abandon it.
Alic watches Emlin as he prays. The boy eagerly took part in the rites for the first few days they spent in the house, overly fervent as he tried to convince Jaleh or any other observers that he’d abandoned his devotion to Fate Spider. After that, he started to avoid the evening prayers, looking for excuses–work to be done, stomach cramps, or just vanishing into the warren of alleyways around the Wash. Jaleh warns Alic that unless the boy submits to gentling, the gods of Ishmere will never let him go. Alic nods, says humbly that he’ll talk to the boy, make him join the rites.
He needs to maintain the boy’s sainthood, but to refuse would be suspicious. So, he compromises. Some days he brings Emlin along, and on others he lets the boy slip away. The gods can make of the boy’s soul an unseen battlefield, tugging it this way and that, but as long as Emlin keeps his silence no one will be suspicious. The boy is young. He can endure, live his cover.
The spy mouths the prayers with the rest of them. There will be no effect. No god has any claim on him.
Not everyone can be saved. Some of the people in the House of Jaleh are too deeply changed for the curses ever to be undone; others cling to their curse, finding strength in it. Others simply don’t understand what Jaleh offers. The screaming man, Haberas, for example: his wife Oona was touched by the Kraken-god of Ishmere, and transformed into a sea creature. Every morning, Haberas stumbles downstairs and prays for her curse to be lifted, then he spends the afternoon down by the dock. He watches Oona swim thro
ugh the murky waters, her mermaid tail kicking up mud. Oona breathes through gills now, and, no matter how fervently he prays, Haberas can do nothing for her. The god’s touch remade her physical body, not her soul. All the prayers in the House of Jaleh won’t change her back.
Those who can, work. There’s plenty to do. The old house was abandoned before Jaleh claimed it, so roofs need endless patching. She has arrangements with a few grocers, so every day boxes of the market dregs must be collected and boiled down into huge cauldrons of vegetable stew. Some beg on the streets by day; others find casual work down at the docks. And some of the residents have their own needs; Michen, for example, must be pruned every night, so the spy cuts bleeding branches from the cursed man’s back. They keep the branches for firewood, even though it crackles and smells like pork when burned.
The spy watches for a week, biding his time. He sees the half-gold man die when his bowels transmute. The spy cleans the blankets off the stinking deathbed and washes the gold-streaked chamber pot, while outside family members squabble over ownership of the half-gold body. They were happy enough to leave him with Jaleh for the slow decline, but now he’s dead and no longer shitting everywhere, they want his precious corpse back. They’ll be disappointed; gold is cheap these days.
He watches other comings and goings. Some of Jaleh’s former residents have moved on; once their magic has faded, or they learn to hide their divine gifts or curses, they can be treated like any other refugee and seek their fortune in Guerdon. They come back sometimes with donations of coin or food, or just to help out. Jaleh blesses all of them with her claw-hand and prays to the Holy Beggar; cautions them not to make trouble, to avoid the attention of the authorities. Guerdon is open to the coin of the faithful, not their gods. Temples are permitted, but no miracles on the streets. Another balancing act, like the city’s tenuous hold on neutrality in the war.
One of the regular visitors is a ghoul woman. Unlike the other miracle-blighted prodigies of Jaleh’s house, ghouls are a common sight on the streets of Guerdon, so this one named Silkpurse isn’t a former resident. Unlike the other rag-clad ghouls who skulk in the sewers and catacombs under the city, Silkpurse puts on a scavenged approximation of human clothing and walks in the sun wearing wide-brimmed hats. She carries a bag stuffed with election leaflets, and talks about Effro Kelkin and the Industrial Liberals with a zeal that could conjure miracles if a god were listening. Many years ago, Kelkin passed the Free City Act that gave the ghouls free run of the surface, and for that he has won her undying loyalty.
Twice in that first week, Silkpurse arrives with new residents for Jaleh’s, folk she plucked off the streets of the New City before anyone else saw their divine curses. A young girl with a scarred face, just like Captain Isigi–some animal-headed god once used her as its earthly vessel. An older woman who’s recently been beaten–the spy recognises her as the woman from Dredger’s ship, the refugee with the clay icons. She made it through processing at Hark Island, but the others fleeing Mattaur still suspected her of being an Ishmeric spy and drove her away, her clay idols broken along with her fingers.
Jaleh binds her fingers and sets her to work in the laundry, while the the actual Ishmeric spy in Jaleh’s house fixes the roof and watches.
They watch him, too, wondering who he is. Still, as long as he works, he’s welcome to remain for a while longer.
Days go by. His orders from Ishmere were to wait a week, then show up in the common room of a tavern, the King’s Nose. Someone will meet him there, some other spy from Ishmere. He wonders how they know he’s coming. Do all newly arrived spies from Ishmere go to that tavern? That sounds like a death trap: for all the spy knows, Guerdon’s counter-intelligence has the place staked out already. Did some other courier bring word of his arrival? Or do the spies in the city have some magical method of communicating with their masters in the south–and, if so, why did they need him to bring Emlin?
One evening, the spy is pruning Michen in their shared room while the screaming man–Hebaras–sleeps fitfully. Each night, it gets harder to trim the branches from Michen’s skin without gouging out huge chunks of flesh. Emlin watches from the top bunk, not daring to blink, barely breathing.
“Did you fuck a dryad, man?” mutters the spy.
Michen laughs, then winces in pain as two twigs tangle. “I was a mercenary for Haith. We ran into a god. He was thirty feet tall and covered in these vines that ate people, so he wasn’t my type.”
“Was that up in the Grena Valley?”
“Nah, further off. Varinth. The Haithi broke the old gods there, but the bastards are still up on their sacred mountains, and come shambling down whenever anyone breathes a prayer. We thought it’d be an easy tour–easier than going to the Caliphates, anyway. But no… half my troop just turned into trees when He came down, and I was right on the edge of the miracle.”
“Hold still, this is a deep one.” Michen braces himself as the spy tries to wrench a branch out. It’s right above the small of Michen’s back. “What about him?” asks the spy, nodding towards the sleeping form of Haberas. “Was he in Varinth, too?”
Michen shakes his head. “Him? Last ship out of Severast. He stayed until he found a captain that would tow Oona along.”
“Ah.” Alic wasn’t there, but Sanhada Baradhin was at the fall of Severast, too.
And so was the spy.
There’s a knock at the door, and Jaleh comes in. “Alic, could you and Emlin go and fetch some clean blankets, please?” She wants to talk to Michen alone, because the gold man downstairs has died and now the room next to the infirmary is available. The room for the dying. In a few days, there’ll be a half-wooden corpse there instead of a half-gold one. Alic, the spy has decided, is kind and tractable; Alic’s always happy to help. “Come on, son,” he says. Emlin slips down from the bunk, landing like a cat.
The spy makes a circuit of the upper floor of Jaleh’s house after fetching the blankets, checking every window. When he comes back, Jaleh and Michen are gone, and Michen’s bed has been stripped down to the mattress. Haberas moans and mutters in his bed.
The spy sits down on his own bed, thinking again about his appointment. His thoughts turn to Emlin and he wonders what happened to their previous saint. Were they killed? Captured? Or did they succumb to the terrible pressure of the divine, warped like Haberas’ wife into something inhuman? The touch of the gods makes no allowances for mundane anatomy, for the base necessities of the flesh. The saints of Smoke Painter have no faces, just a caul of skin like the veil that covers the god’s face. As long as they remain in the god’s favour, they have no need to eat or drink, no need for eyes to see. But if the god rejects them, the sorry creatures are doomed.
“What will become of her?” groans Haberas. The spy looks up, sees the man staggering towards him, caught in a waking dream. “Give me an oracle!”
He’s mistaken the spy for one of the priests of the Fate Spider. In Severast, the priests once predicted the future, traced the strands of fate for the faithful. Another mask the spy once wore that he’s had to cast aside. Still, there are lingering obligations. He can’t refuse the old man’s plea out of hand.
“Hey,” the spy whispers, “remember the temples at Severast before they burned? Remember the dark alleyways of the market? There was a candle-seller’s place, right in the shadow of High Umur’s tower–remember?”
“I… remember.”
“Remember the secret door at the back of the chandlers. How cool the shadows were there. How restful. Like still water after the hubbub of the market.”
Haberas never went there in his waking life, never knew about that secret door, but the spy knew it so well, his whispers conjure it in Haberas’ mind.
“Walk through it. It’s dark in there, so you can’t see, but there’s a staircase winding down. Feel the steps with your feet,” insists the spy, “they won’t find you there.”
The shadows in the bedroom in Jaleh’s house grow darker, grow legs, scuttle around the roo
m. Haberas isn’t a saint, but he’s spiritually dislodged, polarised by his experiences in Severast. It takes only a little push to align him with one deity or another.
Fate Spider, god of thieves and secrets–and spies–is shared by the pantheons of Severast and Ishmere. Down in that hidden temple were little cells where saints lay, whispering to one another across the world, sharing holy secrets through vibrations on a magical web. All-knowing omniscience takes a lot of legwork, and Fate Spider has many legs.
The temple of Fate Spider in Severast is gone now, but it still exists in thought, and in thought Haberas enters it. Without quite knowing why, he curls up on a stone shelf in the blessed darkness of his dream, and curls up on his bed in the House of Jaleh.
“She will live,” whispers the spy, and Haberas echoes him, “and through all the storms she’ll find her way back, and her hands will run with silver for the alchemists’ cure.” A liar’s prophecy, and without any power behind it, but it’s comforting for Haberas.
The man slips back into a deep sleep.
After a few minutes, Emlin comes back, clutching a bundle. He looks at Haberas in surprise, amazed at the silence in the room, the lack of weeping or screaming. The spy just shrugs.
Emlin crosses to sit next to the spy and shows him the bundle. Inside is an alley cat, fur filthy and matted, half starved. The creature’s alive but stunned, breathing shallowly. “I caught it,” whispers Emlin, “I need a knife.”
“Why?”
“I need to be ready.” The boy’s quivering with excitement, too, his heart racing. “For when we meet the others. They’ll need me to walk the web. I should make an offering.”
The spy takes the kitten from the boy. “Is that what they taught you in Ishmere? That Fate Spider would be pleased by such cruelty?”
“How can I please Him, then?”
“Go and find six ways to enter and leave this house without being seen.”
The Shadow Saint Page 8