He climbs up narrow streets, shadowed by Castle Hill, and comes to the tavern that glories in the unlikely name of the King’s Nose. The sign outside shows a man’s head in profile, eponymous namesake prominent. The tavern’s busy enough that another customer goes unnoticed, quiet enough that he can find a table on his own. He orders a drink–a local speciality, some alarmingly brightly coloured synthetic sugar water shot through with alcohol–and waits. Someone’s left a newspaper tucked into the corner of the chair; he smoothes it out and pretends to read it while he listens.
Snatches of conversation about politics. Most people here voted for the Hawkers last time; most people here work, indirectly, for the alchemists. But as survivors share their stories of the Crisis, it’s clear that the mood’s against the old order. Too many people were hurt, or killed, or menaced by nightmarish slime monsters and Tallowmen, or blown up by rockets fired on the city. The events of the Crisis are still opaque to most people, but the one thing that can be agreed on is that something has to be done.
But what that thing is, no one can agree.
There, thinks X84. Those two. A couple, the woman middle-aged, hard-faced, a shopkeeper or a schoolteacher or something else forgettable. The man’s a little younger, weather-beaten, callused. A sailor? No, a mercenary. The spy intuits a cover story for them; the widow, and the returning veteran she took up with after her husband’s death.
X84 waits for them to approach him. He wonders which it’ll be. The “widow”, maybe asking the “merchant” about business?
No, it’s the man. He saunters across, draining his pint and putting the tin mug down on the bar as he passes. “Borrow that paper when you’re done?” he asks the spy.
“I’m finished.” He hands the paper over. The man runs through various job advertisements, circling promising ones with a pencil.
“Why do they call it the King’s Nose anyway?” asks the spy, idly, nodding at the pub sign outside.
“There was a king in Guerdon, once, and I guess he had a big nose. Maybe they all did. Royals fucked off three hundred years ago when the Black Iron Gods took over. People say the good days’ll come back again when the king returns. Or a queen,” replies the mercenary, grinning widely at some private joke. He rips out the page, hands the remains of the newspaper back. “Thank’ee for that. Have a good night.”
He vanishes back into the crowd. When the spy looks up, the pair are gone. He opens the newspaper. Written in the margin of one page is a message. An address in Newtown. Tomorrow night. Bring the boy.
The spy takes a last swig of his drink, then carefully slops the dregs of the chemical brew over the message, erasing it forever.
A day later, they arrive at the Newtown house. Alic and Emlin are ushered into a small dwelling that smells of cabbage. The pair from the King’s Nose attend to Emlin first, and dress him in priestly robes which are much too large for the boy, but his solemn mien robs the sight of any potential humour. His sainthood is no laughing matter. Emlin pushes the overlong sleeves back, and picks up a bundle of papers.
“I’m ready,” he says squaring his shoulders.
The woman whispers a word into his ear, anoints him with oil from a lion-headed vial. The boy descends into the cellar. There are no lights, but his feet find the uneven steps unerringly.
They show the spy into a little parlour where he sits down on a worn couch.
“I’m Annah,” says the woman, lighting a cigarette. She offers him one, too. “That’s Tander.” The mercenary grins and reaches over to shake the spy’s hand. As he does so, Tander runs his thumb over the spy’s palm, checking for the scar left there by Captain Isigi back in Mattaur.
From downstairs, the spy can hear Emlin chanting a prayer to Fate Spider. Soon, he’ll be in a trance, his whispers heard across the seas. He’ll chant those notes all the way back to Ishmere.
“Call me San,” says the spy.
“You didn’t come in under that name, though.” Annah takes a sip from the mug of coffee by her chair. “Dredger smuggled you in.”
She’s testing him, checking his account. “Via the Isle of Statues,” he replies.
Tander reaches over to a cabinet and pulls out a small jar of alkahest, smears the slime over his hands. “You’re safe,” says the spy.
“Suppose it’s better than going through Dredger’s yards,” says Tander to Annah. “Remember that one last year? Came out of the crate stiff as a board and all yellow?” He’s grinning, his tone light, but there’s a current of manic anger running beneath the surface. An easily tapped potential for violence.
Annah ignores him. “What’s your code number?”
“X84.”
“What have you done since you arrived?”
“We’ve kept quiet. Staying in a flophouse in the Wash. I told Dredger I might look him up in a few days, but haven’t talked to him since I arrived.”
“A flophouse?” Annah’s face is unreadable, but Tander’s isn’t.
“Jaleh’s gentling-house, you mean! What the fuck are you doing there?” His grin vanishes, face contorting with sudden anger. Volatile, thinks the spy. “Amateurs, that’s what they send us.”
“The boy knows who to pray to,” says the spy. There’s a note of pride in his voice that surprises him. “He’ll do his job.”
“That’s what Rhyna said, and that went well, didn’t it? Fucking marvellous, that was.” Tander jumps up. The man has too much uncontained energy for the spy’s liking.
“Who’s Rhyna?”
Annah glares at Tander, but the mercenary keeps talking. “Our former whisperer. Stupid cow couldn’t work a miracle on her own, despite all her prayers, so we had to smuggle her up to the Ishmeric embassy in Bryn Avane. There’s a shrine there.”
The spiritual potency of a saint is magnified in a holy place. It’s easier to work miracles at a shrine, easier for a saint of Fate Spider to whisper secrets across the ocean. “You were intercepted?”
“That’s enough,” snaps Annah. “We’ll take the boy from here.”
“What?” That would be a mistake, he thinks instantly, but it takes a moment for him to decide why it’s a mistake. It’ll damage his cover. That’s why.
Nothing more.
The boy is a tool. An asset, to be used. A weapon, made by the gods.
Nothing more.
“You’ll get your money now,” says Tander, “if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Your job was to bring the saint to us,” says Annah. “Nothing more.” The spy looks up, startled as she echoes his thoughts.
“Thought you’d want to be rid of the brat,” laughs Tander.
“Emlin’s my son. I’ve told people he’s my son,” says the spy. “It’ll draw attention if I just hand him over to strangers.”
“We may need to use him at short notice.” Annah studies X84. “You shouldn’t have claimed him as your kin. It complicates matters.”
She leans back, her expression unreadable. There’s an awkward silence, broken only by whispering from the cellar room.
The spy isn’t sure if Tander and Annah can hear it, but he can. Emlin’s voice, overlaid with the chittering of the god.
“I want to help. To serve. I was on the wrong side in Severast.” Live your cover. “How can I please the Sacred Realm?”
The silence lasts another heartbeat. Two, three, four.
And then Tander laughs loudly. “Oh, we can use you, all right.”
Annah lights another cigarette. Her fingers are mottled, the brown stains mixed with bleached spots from alchemical work. “We need information. The trade in illegal weapons has stepped up–and Haith and Lyrix are doing most of the buying. We need to know what they’re buying. How much, what sort of stuff. Whether it’s salvage, or new material.”
“I’ll see if any of my old business contacts are still active.”
Of course, the spy isn’t Sanhada Baradhin, and, while certain aspects of the dead man’s life are known to him, others are not. The spy knows, for
example, that he visited the temple of the Fate Spider many times. The man was a smuggler after all.
“I’ll see what I can do,” says the spy. “And I’ll take my payment. A man’s got to eat, after all.”
Annah produces a purse and hands it to him.
“I was promised silver. Not miracle-cheap gold.”
“I know what the gods said,” says Annah. “But this is my operation, and I’ll run it how I choose.”
He pockets the money.
“Leave a message for Tander at the King’s Nose if you need to talk to us in an emergency. Otherwise, we’ll use chalk signals.”
She recites a list of public places in the city they can use to leave messages disguised as graffiti or random scrapes. A mark on the steps of Saint Storm’s church means he’s under surveillance; a mark in the lavatory at Phaeton Street station means he’s got useful information and so forth. A mark near the door of a dockside tavern near Jaleh’s means he’s to bring Emlin back to this house that night.
“Anything else I should know?” asks the spy. Thinking of invasion fleets surging north, about the gathering wrath of the gods. About the god bombs.
“Tander will find you if circumstances change. Otherwise, we’ll review the situation in a few weeks,” says Annah. She finishes her coffee, stands and walks downstairs to the cellar room.
The whispering doesn’t stop. It’s more insistent now, as though Emlin’s words have sprouted legs and are crawling up the walls. The whole house is thick with stolen secrets, a parade of encrypted messages scuttling up the chimneys, to take flight on the warm summer winds that blow south.
Tander senses it too, shudders. He takes out a metal hip flask and tops up his coffee. He waves the flask at the spy. “Welcome to Guerdon, friend.”
“It’s safer than Severast, anyway,” says the spy, and Tander laughs. He pours a generous measure into the spy’s cup, too.
“Aye, well, you weren’t here for those bastard Tallowmen,” says Tander. “Thank the gods they stopped making those things.”
“Was it the Tallowmen who caught your previous saint?”
“Nah. City watch. It was only a few months ago. After the Crisis.”
“Rhyna, was it?”
“Aye. They grabbed her coming out of the embassy, and tried to drag her into a carriage. But I had a loaded gun in me pocket, praise be to the gods. Shot her from forty yards away.”
“How’d you escape?”
“Same way I survived the Godswar. Ran like fuck.” Tander grins. “Give me the watch over gods any day. At least Rhyna died like an honest woman. Much worse ways to die than a bullet in the head. I tell you, better to see out the war here than anywhere else. Never does anyone any good to get too close to the gods.”
Is this genuine cynicism, or a trap to test X84’s devotion to the Sacred Realm?
“The gods bless us all,” he replies.
Tander seems about to reply, but then the whispering stops and he too falls silent. After a few minutes, Annah returns, with Emlin. The boy’s dressed in his street clothes again. He’s shivering, leaning on Annah for support, but there’s a look of immense pride on his face, a grin that he can’t hide.
“Come on, I’ll walk ye back down to the Wash,” says Tander, slapping the boy on the back. As they leave the house, the spy glances back and sees Annah watching them from the upstairs window. There are few lamps on the road and the night is dark, but he feels her gaze on him all the way down the hill to the watch post and the stairs leading down to the Wash. He can hear invisible spiders of divine attention scuttling over the walls around him, stalking him down the street.
That night, Emlin is restless in his bunk. The spy lies awake, listening to the boy thrash and turn in the bed above him. Muttering prayers under his breath. Across the room, Haberas sleeps soundly.
“What’s wrong?” asks the spy.
“Nothing.”
He waits.
“I just… I wish the gods were closer. They’re very far away.”
“You said the message got through. You did well.”
“I don’t want to go to Jaleh’s prayers tomorrow.”
“You have to.” The boy stinks of divinity after the miracle. If the city watch caught him, with their thaumaturgic lenses and their saint-hunters, it would all be over.
“I guess, but…” Emlin turns over heavily. “You wouldn’t understand.”
Emlin’s tasted sainthood. In the cellar of that house in Newtown, he channelled the power of a distant god. No wonder he can’t sleep. No wonder he’s praying in secret, trying to reach the god again.
He thinks the spy wouldn’t understand the divine beauty of the gods. How it feels to know them, to look beyond the portents and manifestations in the mortal world, and see the gods in all their glory on the other side. The unutterable radiance, complexity beyond measure, that divine certainty and oneness of purpose. The euphoria of knowing all the world’s secrets, seeing all the connections in Fate Spider’s web. The power to shape destiny, to navigate the threads of the future.
The terror of being separated from the gods. The nauseating fall back to the flesh. The sensation that you’ve left parts of your soul behind as you struggle to return to mortal existence, the long unwelcome journey back from divinity.
Alic wouldn’t understand that. Neither would X84.
The spy understands.
He should stay silent, but Alic feels compelled to give some words of comfort. “It’ll get easier. The gods are closer than you know.”
“But they’re going to make war on Lyrix, I think.” The boy whispers, careful not to wake any of the other sleepers in the shared room. “They’re not coming here,” he adds bitterly.
“You need to sleep,” says the spy. “And stay hidden. Fate Spider is patient, isn’t he? You’ve got to be patient, too.”
“I guess,” says Emlin again, unconvinced. “What do you think of Annah and Tander?” he asks quietly.
What does he think of them? Tander is, in the spy’s estimation, an idiot. Probably a useful one–the man seems physically competent–but sloppy, undisciplined, unreliable. He’s an attack dog. They must have leverage on him, some sure way of controlling him. A leash, pulling him to heel.
Annah, now–Annah’s a rarity in Guerdon, but something the spy has seen elsewhere. She’s a true believer. She understands that the gods dictate the laws of reality, that the mortal world is just a shadow cast by the unseen powers. That sort of person is always on the watch for omens, for traces of divine intention made manifest in material events. The spy wonders what she makes of Guerdon, where the local gods are weak and docile. When the gods fall silent, anything goes. Annah, thinks the spy, warrants careful handling. She’ll take nothing on faith from mortals. She needs the right sign.
He admits none of this to the boy. Instead, Alic shrugs. “I don’t know. I hope they don’t push you too hard.”
After a moment he says, “Tander said I should stay with them. He said I could stay in the cellar and make it a shrine, and work in Annah’s shop by day. He said they’re rich.”
“A son belongs with his father,” says Alic.
“But you’re not my father. We’re just pretending.”
The spy gets out of bed and stands so that he can look Emlin in the face. He doesn’t bother to light a candle–the boy can see in the dark.
“Listen. The first rule is to live your cover. Every day, every heartbeat. You’ve got to be my son. Think it and know it, so that when the city watch stop you or some sorcerer comes sniffing, you don’t hesitate. And you’ve got to step lightly. Give the world no reason to notice you. Understand?”
The boy nods.
“Does Emlin know Annah and Tander? Does Alic?”
“No.”
“That’s right. X84 knows them, not you or I.”
“What about the shrine?”
The spy considers the question for a split second. Sanhada Baradhin knows little about gods and saints. The merchant made his
devotions at the temples, but never stepped beyond the first mystery. Live your cover is the first rule, but not the only one.
“A shrine?” scoffs the spy. “A shrine would help, but it’s not the important thing. Living your cover is all about the face you show to the world, right?”
“I guess so.”
“Well, there’s more than one world, isn’t there? There’s the world most folk see, where everything’s solid and it’s all real things. And there’s the world people like you see. The god’s world. The aetheric plane, the alchemists call it. To be chosen by the gods, your soul–your face there–has to be pleasing to them, aye?”
“Yes.”
“So, what do you think would please Fate Spider more–you sitting in some cellar, or out in the world, listening and learning secrets?”
“In the monastery,” says the boy, “I sat in a cell and listened to the whispers in the shrine.”
“Aye, well, that was in Ishmere. The air’s filled with gods there, and they’ll lay claim to anyone who breathes a prayer. They’ve nothing to fear there. Things are more delicate here. Fate Spider isn’t the only god walking the night here. You’ve got to meet him in secret, and make yourself known to him by the right signs and watchwords.
“Now get to sleep, son. We’ve got work to do in the morning.”
The boy studies his face for a long minute in the darkness, then turns over, apparently satisfied.
“Sleep,” insists the spy.
He waits until the boy’s breathing becomes regular. Waits as the hours of the night wheel by.
He whispers into Emlin’s ear a prayer of his own.
And when the boy wakes, sobbing, from a nightmare, the spy is there to comfort him. To chase away his fears, and dismiss his terrors as nothing but a dream. “There were these masked men there, and they were dragging me away to a carriage. And–and Tander was there, and he had a gun, and…” the boy whispers, clutching his head as if he expects it to burst.
The Shadow Saint Page 10