The Shadow Saint

by Gareth Hanrahan

  He leaves the shadow of the trees, trudges over a blasted land. The valley was a battlefield in the Godswar. He steps around glistening alchemical fallout, steps over fragments of bone and twisted metal. The wind whistles through the rubble of this scarred land.

  The path leads down towards the ruined city of Grena. There’s a Haithi flag fluttering in the breeze from a newly constructed fort. That flag is almost the only motion in the leaden valley.

  Almost. There are a few people listlessly working in the fields. They look confused, as if unsure how they got here. Swinging the scythes awkwardly, as though they’ve never used them before, even the horny-handed old farmers whose weathered skin speaks of a lifetime outdoors. They bow their heads, flinching away from Terevant when they see his uniform.

  The Empire of Haith once occupied the land of Varinth, across the ocean. There, they banned worship of the local gods. Killed the priests and saints, tore down the temples. They provoked the gods until they manifested in some form, then blasted those manifestations of the gods with cannon fire until they fell. Gods of winter and justice, sun and moon, harvest and poetry–their titanic corpses all lying in the surf by the shore, ichor mixing with the foam of the waves. The occupying forces declared that anyone who prayed to the old gods would be punished. They were part of the Empire of Haith now; their only loyalty should be to the distant Crown. New rules: no prayers. No rites. No saints. The dead get handed over to state necromancers for processing.

  Still, they’d creep away in the night to worship. They’d hide shrines in their homes, or sneak off into the forests. Smuggle the dead out to be buried according to the old rites, so the residuum of their souls would feed the gods.

  And the gods came back. Rolling down from the mountains and the forests and the wild places to besiege the forts of the occupiers. The Empire of Haith maintained such occupations only at great cost–and great cruelty. And those are minor deities, local gods like the goddess of Grena, unlike the expansionist gods of Ishmere.

  Terevant wrote poems decrying the Crown’s actions, then carefully burned them when he joined the army. No doubt some clerk in the Office of Sedition has copies.

  He avoids entering the shattered town, circling around it, following the river down towards the sea. Lumps of mud on the riverbank vaguely suggest humanoid forms, piled in great numbers on either side. Naiads, maybe, servitors of the goddess, annihilated with her. A mass killing.

  Along the estuary, he walks amid rushes. Some seabirds wheel overhead, calling to one another. Other birds of the same species stand stock still in the middle of the path, paying no attention to his approach. Like the people of the valley, they’re wounded. Thrust into a strange world of surfaces with nothing beyond. Weeds grow along the shore in profusion, and that eerie stillness of the upper valley is gone. The estuary is being reclaimed, the emptiness left by the goddess filled by something else, an anonymous, blind natural order.

  There’s a different quality to the plants that grow by the shore. They grow in fierce profusion, sprouting like a conquering army.

  Out there in the bay, according to Lys, was where the god bomb went off. A war ended in a flash. And there are other such bombs somewhere in Guerdon. Half the spies in the worlds must be crowding into the city.

  How frustrating it must be for the gods, to have to work through mortal agents.

  A sudden shiver runs through him, like he’s being watched. In other lands, he’s heard people compare the feeling to someone stepping on one’s grave. The phrase makes no sense in Haith, where only the disgraced casteless have graves. In Haith, they call it the eye of history, and say that it portends great deeds in one’s future.

  He turns and hikes back up the valley.

  After a few hours, the train to Guerdon arrives, shattering the silence of the station with the roar of engines. He climbs on board, eager to be on his way.

  He’s seen the grave; now he’s going to the city that murdered a god.

  CHAPTER 11

  Absalom Spyke, Eladora decides, is a monster grown in some alchemical vat, with legs of steel and stomach of stone. On Kelkin’s orders, the pair of them have walked every street and alleyway in the Wash, visited every ale house and watering hole in the lower city. Politics for Spyke, it seems, has nothing to do with the policy papers and grand debates of parliament. It’s backslapping and drinking with old friends, all of whom are quietly influential in their districts. Some of these friends bring Spyke problems to be solved–a troublesome gang, a leaking sewer, a tale of unexploded ordnance from the Crisis–and Spyke promises to take care of it. Others come with a list of names, their own name usually at the top of it, and Spyke ceremonially folds these and slips them into a pocket. They’ll be remembered, he says, after the election.

  When all else fails, when the friend brings nothing to Spyke except crossed arms and a smile that’s a little too wide, that’s when Spyke reaches into another pocket, and brings out a roll of notes–as much cash as Eladora has ever seen in one place, and her grandfather was the wealthiest man in the city. She bites her lip.

  From time to time, Spyke remembers that she exists, and introduces her to his old friends and ward-captains as “one of Kelkin’s”. One of Kelkin’s what, she wonders. Mostly, though, she’s invisible, trotting after Spyke like a stray dog.

  After the Wash, they climb into the New City. Spyke walks more slowly here, his route is more uncertain. The dance is the same, but the tempo is slower and his partners are different. Refugees fleeing the Godswar occupy many streets in this conjured city, and Spyke meets with their leaders. Hesitantly, he makes his overtures to them, but he doesn’t understand their problems or can’t solve them, and they’re not interested in the kickbacks and sinecures he can offer. They complain about new powers that have arisen to take advantage of the fall of the old Brotherhood, like Ghierdana criminal gangs and the Saint of Knives.

  Spyke is less sure of himself here and turns to her for counsel, asking her questions about the New City and its denizens. She can quote figures at him, tell him the numbers she got from Hark Island or compare the histories of Severast and Ishmere, but they’re effectively speaking different languages. After a swelteringly hot afternoon made frustrating by spending long hours trying to get to a seemingly inaccessible tower block, clambering up and down the stairs and alleyways that wind like intestines around and through the buildings, Spyke announces a retreat. They fall back to the Wash, to a tavern not far from Lambs Square.

  Spyke’s carrying a king’s ransom in his pocket, but sends her to buy the drinks.

  When she returns, he’s in conversation with yet another rogue. Spyke’s grin lights up the room, his cackle is like jingling gold, and his backslaps echo like thunder. He’s a fountain of enthusiasm.

  The other man leaves, and Spyke slumps down in his seat. Takes his drink from Eladora with a grunt of acknowledgement, and stares into the brown liquid inside the mug.

  Eladora sips her drink–it’s better than what she had to stomach earlier, but still rancid. The city hasn’t had good wine since the fall of Severast. “Isn’t it rather inefficient to approach these people one at a time? Shouldn’t we rather hold a public meeting where we could describe policies, talk about how to reform the New City?”

  “Too early for speeches an’ rallies. And half those fuckers would knife the other half, I’ll wager. Nah, t’would be a riot. Maybe when we know who our friends are, in the New, but not yet.”

  “Still, you’ve hardly mentioned policies. How will people know what we stand for if we don’t tell them?”

  “Standing is shit,” declares Absalom Spyke. “These people stand all day–at work, in the factories or the boats, or in queues. They don’t care, girl. They don’t care who rules the city as long as it ain’t the Tallows. By nature they won’t vote at all, except where there’s graft to be made. We bribe ’em, church bribes ’em, and a few old fools vote for the monarchists or some other loons.”

  “Bribery,” says Eladora, �
�is illegal.”

  “Paying for votes ain’t legal. Paying folk to get voters to the polls is legal, and old as the hills.” Spyke leans over the table, so close that she can smell his foul breath. “Let me guess, girl–you’re Bryn Avane born and Glimmerside bred, and you think you know how this city works. You think everyone else is stupid or crooked, and that it’s up to you to fix everything so’s the common folk can curtsey and thank’ee. You don’t know nothing.”

  He slumps back in his chair, drains the last of his beer. He digs into his pocket, pulls out the roll of notes. Waves one at Eladora. “Get me another, there’s a good girl.”

  She stands. “I have a previous engagement, Mr Spyke. I’ll bring your concerns to Mr Kelkin when I meet with him. And since those are party funds you’re spending, I trust you’ll be responsible with them. Good night.”

  The air in the street outside the inn is warm and sticky. For the last few months, the skies above the city have been unusually clear, as the majority of the alchemists’ factories were shut down by the Crisis, but the weather tonight makes for choking smog that hangs low over Guerdon. The streets are awash with a yellowish, gritty fog, making the city look like it’s been submerged below a polluted sea. Wrapping her scarf around her mouth for protection, Eladora hurries away from the tavern, heading for the small apartment that Kelkin arranged for her.

  It’s not far to walk. Still, these streets aren’t safe, so she hurries and keeps one hand on the little pistol concealed in her pocket. She’s never fired the little thing in anger, only practised with it.

  Miren showed her how to use guns.

  She takes that memory, folds it neatly and pushes it into a mental folder that’s crammed to bursting with similar little notes. She then returns the folder to a heavy iron safe, wrapped in chains, and submerged in the deepest, coldest part of the ocean. She does not think about Miren Ongentson any more.

  Instead, she runs through the sorcerous incantations Dr Ramegos taught her. At Eladora’s degree of sorcerous talent, trying to use a spell to defend herself is unlikely to be a very effective weapon, but it’d certainly be unexpected–and reciting the chant in her mind reassures her.

  Eladora reaches the apartment building without incident. The walls of the stairwell are covered with election posters. She counts the number of IndLibs compared to Hawkers. They’re outnumbered two to one, and this is supposed to be a part of the city that supports Kelkin. Another bad omen.

  When Eladora comes to her door, she turns the lock, then the second, heavier lock she had installed. Then she stops, takes a deep breath and presses her fingers to the centre of the handle. Runes flare red for an instant, then vanish in a puff of sulphurous smoke. Her stomach lurches. Eladora picked up the basics of thaumaturgical theory at university, but she never dared cast a spell until after the Crisis. The warding spell that guards her door marks the limit of her abilities so far, and the spell takes such a toll on her that she’s unsure if she wants to go further. Humans aren’t meant to wield such powers directly, so most thaumaturges die young, their bodies ruptured or minds corroded by arcane energies. Heavy-duty sorcery is the domain of inhuman entities like Crawling Ones. Alchemy is a much safer way of handling such fundamental forces.

  She hesitates before entering. For an instant, she imagines that her grandfather is waiting for her beyond the door, his gold mask reflecting otherworldly lights, his worm-fingers glistening with unholy magic. Or Miren, with a knife.

  A deep breath. No. Jermas Thay is dead and gone. Miren’s gone. She takes that memory and locks it away in the same prison as the memories of Miren, and Ongent, and the rest of the Crisis.

  She lingers for a moment, though, on one element of that catastrophe. Her cousin Carillon Thay was at the very centre of the Crisis. Eladora is one of very few people in the city who know the truth about her–that she was created by their grandfather as a conduit to capture the power of the imprisoned Black Iron Gods. An unwitting, unwilling saint. Spyke’s insults earlier still sting. Eladora’s determined to make the most of this second professional life of hers, to be a better political operative than she was a scholar at the university. She failed to connect her cousin’s supernatural curse with the ancient history of the city and the Black Iron Gods until after Carillon had fled Desiderata Street on that awful night. If she’d better smarter, braver, then so much suffering might have been averted. Every widow in black, every missing child, every wound and scar is a potential accusation, a victim of her failing. That truth is unerasable; when they finally write the histories of this time, her guilt, and the guilt of her family, will be plain for all to see.

  She can’t undo the Crisis, but she can ensure that the new Guerdon that rises from the ashes is a better, fairer place than the city of Tallowmen and worms and chained gods it used to be. Mentally, she retraces her steps through the New City. Recalls every fruitless conversation between Absalom Spyke and the various leaders and chieftains and power blocs he met there. What’s needed is information, a divine perspective on the New City. To know their desires before they do.

  Church bells echo across the city from the triple cathedrals on Holyhill. Eight o’clock. She shakes herself from her reveries, curses, and hurries over to her wardrobe, stripping off her street-stained clothes as she does so. Fretting, for a moment, at her appearance in the mirror. She finds a dress that’s clean and moderately flattering–and, as a bonus, modern enough to annoy her mother. She pulls it on hastily, then sits to apply some makeup. Her mother’s dinner invitation is for nine o’clock, so she has to hurry.

  The creak of a floorboard makes her jump, spilling powder across her dresser. She carefully wipes it away, listening intently as she does so. The floorboard was on the floor above, wasn’t it? Not in the room outside? Her door is locked. No one can get in. But Miren could, she thinks, and wipes that thought away, too.

  It’s been a week since the first invitation arrived, the day after the reception in the Haithi embassy. Eladora parried that initial summons with a note saying that she was regrettably busy with election-related matters, and suggesting a lunch meeting the next day. Her mother riposted with another letter, pointing out that the next day was a holy day for the Keepers–the feast of Saint Storm–and so it was of course impossible for any of the devout to contemplate a lunch engagement. They sparred back and forth by messenger, and Eladora had even dared hope that things would end like they had on the previous three occasions when Silva Duttin came to the city–that they’d go through this dance of conflicting obligations and clashing appointments until Silva had to go home, and the two could avoid having to spend any time together. Avoid acknowledging that mother and daughter had taken opposing positions on church, state and everything else.

  But no–Eladora’s last thrust resulted in an invitation to dinner at a terrifyingly expensive restaurant, and she can’t tell if this is a victory or a hideous mistake. Arrayed for battle as best she can, Eladora hurries down the stairs–first checking the spell-wards that guard her front door–and then down again, into the city’s subway.

  Waiting for the train, she stares into the dark mouth of the tunnel, and remembers her grandfather’s worm-fingers draping a black amulet across her chest.

  She wonders, not for the first time, what Silva Duttin had known of her father’s heretical, monstrous work.

  The restaurant her mother chose is in Serran, one of the wealthiest districts in Guerdon, although its star has faded in recent decades. The king’s pleasure palace is at its heart, although it’s been abandoned for more than three hundred years, after the royal family fled to escape the Black Iron cult. The same cult Eladora’s grandfather revived.

  On arrival, Eladora confuses the maître’d by inadvertently asking for the Thay table, not the one booked under the name of Duttin. The Thay family is best remembered these days for being mysteriously murdered one night fifteen years ago, so the waiter’s confusion is understandable. Eladora corrects herself, and follows him, cheeks burning, through a maze of
wood-panelled corridors decorated with paintings and relics from the old Barbed Palace.

  “Mrs Duttin is in the Rose Room,” announces the servant. “Wine has been served already, although if there is anything you would like, pray name it and it will be provided.” As he opens the door, Eladora hears the sound of what she can only describe as cackling from within.

  Her mother’s sitting there, along with–to Eladora’s surprise–Mhari Voller. Both women have nigh-empty glasses in hand; Silva’s wiping away tears of merriment.

  “Eladora! Join us, my dear!” says Voller, pouring the few drops from the bottom of a bottle into a third glass. She waves the empty bottle at the waiter, who takes it and vanishes like a ghost.

  Eladora watches her mother warily as she sits down. She’s become old in the five years since Eladora last saw her. Her hair has gone grey, her eyes are too bright, feverish. There’s a croak in her voice now. Mhari Voller must be thirty years older than Silva Duttin, but she looks younger.

  “I-I-I didn’t know Lady Voller would be joining us,” says Eladora. For that matter, there’s a fourth place set at the table, implying another unknown guest.

  “Forgive me,” says Voller, “I’ve been trying to catch up with dear Silvy for days now, and this might be my last chance for a while. We’re all busy people, after all, especially with all the fuss.” Her fork describes a little circle in the air, which Eladora takes to encompass parliament and the city and the election and the state of the wider world.

  “And it might be best to have a referee. Or a witness.” Silva spears a piece of grapefruit and raises it, dripping, to her mouth.