The Shadow Saint

by Gareth Hanrahan

  “It’s just… there are a few, ah, private matters that I’d like to d-d-discuss.” Eladora bites her lip; her stammer is always worse when she’s nervous or feeling childish, and she can feel herself slipping backwards in time as she sits down opposite her mother. All her cultivated masks–senior adviser to Effro Kelkin, postgraduate scholar at the university, radical anarcanist who believes the gods are nothing more than magical phenomena gone rotten, without any moral authority–fall away, and she’s the nervous, sniffling little girl crying because neither the gods or her mother love her.

  “Mhari’s an old family friend. She’s known you since you were a baby. And she knows all our secrets.” Silva sighs. “Ask your questions.”

  The first question that arises is why are you doing this? Eladora expected an awkward dinner where she and Silva went through the motions of being mother and daughter, as she promised to write more and fended off her mother’s suggestions that she marry some suitably devout landowner from Wheldacre. Where any questions about Jermas Thay or Carillon or related matters would be met with accusations that Eladora was a godless whore who had turned her back on the path of moral righteousness. This is something else entirely.

  The waiter ghosts in. Eladora has him fill her glass to the brim, and drains half in one gulp, to Silva’s disapproval. Voller, though, reaches across the table and clinks her glass against Eladora’s. “We’ve ordered for you, dear,” she says. “We couldn’t wait. Hope you don’t mind.”

  Food is the last of Eladora’s priorities. Her thoughts go back to the interrogation rooms down in Queen’s Point fortress, when they questioned her for weeks after the Crisis. The same questions, over and over, asked by different people. Now it’s her turn to be the interrogator.

  “Did you know Jermas Thay was still alive, all those years?”

  “My father died fifteen years ago,” says Silva. “The thing that ate him and… imprinted his personality was not him.”

  “Did you know the Crawling One was out there?”

  Silva shrugs. “No. I knew that Jermas had… intentions towards survival after death, but I thought they were just the ravings of a dying man. He wasn’t always coherent.”

  “Did you know about his experiments? About his worship of the Black Iron Gods? About Carillon?”

  “Yes. The whole family knew, to some degree. I even…” Silva trails off, then pulls back the sleeve of her dress, revealing an arm pockmarked with hundreds of old burn marks and scars. “He led us all astray with his obsessions, and when I recognised the evil in my father, I escaped. I atoned–and I saved you from it. Oh, he would have loved you, child, if he’d had the chance to mould you. All that arrogance–he’d have damned your soul and mated you to devils from the pit! Why do you think I left? Married your father, moved out to that horrid little farm in Wheldacre? To get away from him!”

  “But you went back. You brought me back.” They’d visited the Thay mansion several times when Eladora was a child, before the Keeper’s saints attacked it and killed the family in the dead of night. “And it was Kelkin who reported him to the church, not you!” Eladora tries to keep her voice under control, but she can’t keep her last words from becoming an accusation.

  “I was weak,” admits Silva, haltingly. “Your father had no head for business, and we needed money… and I didn’t understand entirely what was going on, either. It wasn’t always bad, at the start. And…” Silva falls silent, and Mhari Voller steps in.

  “Everyone knew that Jermas was, ah, eccentric, Eladora. He always associated with radical alchemists and sorcerers, and helped Effro Kelkin bring foreign religions into Guerdon. Everyone knew he was strange–we just didn’t know how far he’d gone. The real rot was only in the last years–after Silva left, after you were born. After little Carillon… why, Silvy, I dare say you were a brake on his worst excesses. Things only got abominable after you left.”

  Eladora ignores Voller and fixes her gaze on Silva. “What about Carillon? Did you know what she was?”

  “My brother’s bastard? A child who I thought I could rescue from a house of sin? A wound in my heart?” Silva hisses. “What?”

  “Bred to be a Black Iron Saint.”

  “I knew she was tainted. We all are–you and me, too. I tried to save you for years! I thought I’d failed when you came to this city of corruption, but it’s not too late! The fires of Safid will purify our wounded souls, if only we have faith!” Spittle spatters over the crystal and china plates. Mhari Voller gently takes hold of Silva’s hand.

  “It’s all right, dear. Jermas is gone.”

  “Is she?” hisses Silva, and her hand clenches. “The monster child?”

  Voller hastily pushes Silva’s hand out of view under the table. Eladora frowns–something just happened there, but she can’t tell what. Did her mother draw blood, cutting her own palm with her fingernails? Or break something? There’s a faint smell of burning, too.

  “The past is done with.” Voller takes a breath. “We must think about the future. Eladora, child, you were instrumental in stopping the Crisis that Jermas precipitated. You–and Saint Aleena–destroyed what remained of Jermas, and stopped the alchemists from taking control of the city. Jermas wasn’t the only lunatic trying to steal the gods–equal blame should fall on the alchemists, on the late Guildmistress Rosha above all. But also on myself, and the rest of the City Forward party. We were so drunk on power and wealth that we lost sight of what was right.

  “All of us have sinned, child. And it’s time to make amends.”

  Is this all a Safidist suicide pact? wonders Eladora suddenly. The Safidists believe that burning reunites the soul with the Kept Gods. She envisions a phlogiston bomb under the tablecloth, her mad mother hitting the plunger while Voller finishes the last of the wine. The thought is so absurd that she bursts out laughing.

  Silva frowns at her.

  Voller continues. “We can build a stable future for the city. You’re Effro’s assistant. He listens to you. You can bring him our proposal.”

  “Who’s we?” asks Eladora.

  “The church,” croaks Silva, “the blessed church of the Faith-Keepers. The true faith of Guerdon.”

  “So you want, what, an electoral pact? A proposal for a coalition against the Hawkers?”

  “We want Kelkin to come back to the faith,” says Voller. “Did you know he was in training to become a priest, once? We want Kelkin to return to the fold. The city needs a government of unity to see it through the Godswar, unity both spiritual and temporal. We want worship of belligerent gods banned from the city. Your grandfather was right about one thing–this city needs strong gods to guard it against attack. We don’t have much time.”

  Eladora’s left speechless. Voller has just casually discarded forty years of her own beliefs and policies. What could possibly force her into such a total reversal? “And what else? No more neutrality? Repeal of the Free City Act? Are you both utterly insane?”

  Silva’s face goes red, and her eyes blaze with anger. Eladora sees a flash of divine light in them, and when her mother speaks it’s like thunder bursting in the little dining room. Crystal goblets shatter, staining the tablecloth red as blood. “This is our chance at redemption, child! DO NOT SCORN IT!” Silva springs to her feet, a tower of wrath. Her withered hands clutch at the table, and her fingers break the solid hardwood. She’s suddenly clad in shining armour, haloed in fire.

  Eladora topples backwards out of her seat and cringes in the face of her mother’s borrowed divinity. The horror of sainthood.

  “Silva, please, please sit down,” says Voller. She’s scared, too, but not shocked. The blazing holy light fades, and Silva crumples back down into her seat. The armour vanishes. She hunches over and starts to weep, and Eladora can’t tell if they’re tears of sorrow or religious ecstasy.

  “Come on, Silvy. No more displays like that. Let’s get you cleaned up.” Voller gently leads Silva towards the powder room. “Eladora, please wait a moment. This is… there’s
nothing more important.”

  The two older women leave. Eladora, shaking, sits back down at the ruins of the table. Her mother’s brief, terrible blast of sainthood broke all the crystals. An antique mirror on one wall has a crack running down its face like a frozen lightning bolt. There are faint brown marks on the tablecloth that Eladora suspects are letters, the Litany of the Keepers burned onto the cloth in a miraculous transcription.

  She hears the door behind her open. “M-my m-m-m-mother broke a glass,” says Eladora, assuming the waiter has returned.

  “Looks like I missed a party.”

  A bald man, middle-aged, grinning with broken teeth. Sinter. A priest of sorts, the spymaster of the Church of the Keepers. She met him briefly during the Crisis, shortly after he’d tried to execute her cousin to stop her using her powers. Sinter sheltered Eladora for a night, until one of his men betrayed her and sold her to Jermas Thay’s agents.

  Eladora suspects that Sinter was one of the people who questioned her in the days just after the Crisis, but it’s hard for her to recall that week. Other parts of her past–like Miren, like Ongent–Eladora deliberately doesn’t think about, but the time just after the Crisis she cannot recall, other than blurry faces and the taste of bitter medicine.

  “Miss Duttin,” says Sinter, sitting down in her mother’s chair. He puts his three-fingered hand into the dents left by Silva. “Gods above,” he mutters, “mysterious are the ways of the Kept Gods, for they reserve their most potent blessings for the most bloody awkward of women. I take it you and your mum are getting on like a house under artillery fire.”

  “Mhari Voller made a proposal. I rejected it. My mother was displeased. And, apparently, is chosen of the gods.”

  “We have a sudden surfeit of saints.”

  “I thought Aleena was the last.” During the Crisis, the Church of the Keepers had only been able to muster a single war-saint, and while Saint Aleena of the Sacred Flame had worked miracles, it still marked a precipitous decline of the church’s power.

  “She was. Things have changed.” Sinter shrugs. “The Crisis stirred up our friends upstairs. There’ve been miracles out in the hinterlands. Old village priests and strapping young farmboys getting blessed with sainthood. A good harvest this last year. Best I’ve known.”

  She imagines the gods fleeing Guerdon during the Crisis, bolting like animals attacked in their own stables. Running for the hills, looking for shelter. Looking for weapons. The gods blindly grabbing the most convenient mortal tool–and finding her mother. It’s what Silva always wanted. “‘To offer up the soul entire to the will of the divine’,” quotes Eladora, “although I don’t know how much choice anyone had in the matter.”

  “That,” says the priest, grinning, “is fucking heresy. To imply that the gods are not all-wise and all-knowing. To suggest that sainthood’s a matter of bad luck and circumstance, like getting caught out on the moor by a sudden storm and getting hit by lightning–it’s shameful. Didn’t your mother teach you anything?” His greasy bonhomie is unpleasant, but it’s less terrifying than her mother’s wrath.

  “Saint Aleena compared the Kept Gods to cows. She said they were like beautiful, dumb animals.”

  “Aye, well, she should have known, right. Although…” he swills his wine around, stares into the glass, “it’s not that fucking simple, is it? They don’t fucking know that. Everything’s off balance.”

  “With the Kept Gods?” She wonders who they are.

  “With everything.” He picks up a fork and devours the remains of Mhari Voller’s starter as he talks. “Here’s how I see it. This city’s like a big machine, right, an engine rattling along the tracks. If you keep it fuelled and oiled, bread and money and shit, and don’t fuck with the levers too much, it’ll run along nicely as long as the tracks stay safe. Sometimes, someone would step out of line–like your grandfather–and have to be put back in their place to make sure things kept running smoothly.”

  He snarls. “But people stepped out of line, and we weren’t strong enough to knock ’em back–I mean mainly Rosha, but she wasn’t the only fucker. Now everything’s spinning out of control and we’re all just hoping it doesn’t fucking explode.” He points a fork at Eladora. “Your man Kelkin knows. Everyone knows it. Look at them. No one wants to be stuck driving the engine when it’s like this. You think the Crisis is over? This is the Crisis, still. Rosha pulled the big red lever, and no one knows how to stop it.”

  Eladora decides that she’s tired of cynical old men telling her how the world works. “Tell me, Mr Sinter–are you here as a representative of the Patros?” If Sinter’s still working for the main church, and the Patros shares his views about the city careering towards disaster…

  “I’m just hanging on, child. A humble servant, I.” He picks up a napkin and goes to dab his face, picks some broken shards of mirror from the cloth instead. “Gods below.”

  Mhari Voller and Eladora’s mother come back in, along with a swarm of waiters, who change the tablecloth so quickly one might suspect the use of sorcery. Broken crystal is cleared away, spilled food swept up, fresh cutlery conjured. One of the waiters scoops up a knife from the ground near Silva’s chair; the handle’s crushed, four dents matching Silva’s fingers as they clenched it, and the blade’s scorched as if held in a flame. Without breaking stride or changing expression, the waiter whisks it away with the rest of the mess. In a trice, the only signs of the divine intervention left are the damaged table and the unnoticed crack in the mirror.

  “Your holiness! So glad you could extract yourself from affairs of state,” says Voller to Sinter. She helps Silva lower herself into a chair. Silva’s head lolls, her eyes unfocused. She’s muttering to herself. Eladora wonders if her mother has had a stroke, and discovers that she has absolutely no desire to get any closer or provide any aid or comfort whatsoever. “We’ll have no more exuberance,” Voller proclaims gaily, patting Silva’s hand.

  Waiters whirl around again, bringing in the entrées. Sinter digs into his steak; Eladora shoves her fish around the plate. It’s exquisite, but she can’t stomach it.

  “How much have you told her?” asks Sinter around a mouthful. He’s nearly done already.

  Eladora answers before the other two. “You want the impossible from my employer, and want me to convey your absurd r-request to him.”

  “In some respects,” says Voller, “there is room for negotiation. If Kelkin wants to save face, for example, we can frame it as a coalition pact. But the gods cannot be denied.”

  “Fire shall destroy the blasphemers,” adds Silva, “storms shall wash them away, and from the ashes, flowers shall grow.” She hasn’t even touched her food. She’s staring at the floor, and Eladora has the horrible impression that her mother doesn’t even know that she spoke. Eladora has seen creatures like elder ghouls use human mouthpieces before.

  “And campaigns change.” Sinter wipes his lips with his sleeve. “I like Kelkin, really I do. Honestly, he runs the city better than whatever pious yokel our lot would put in charge. But he needs to come back to us, not fight us. He hasn’t seen half of what the church will bring to the field, if we have to.”

  Eladora’s had enough of this ambush. She pushes back her chair and rises. “Rest assured I shall give a full accounting of this meal to Mr Kelkin–threats and all.”

  Mhari Voller slumps back as if defeated and takes a large gulp of her wine. Silva Duttin doesn’t move or react as her daughter leaves.

  “Good night, Mother, Lady Voller. Thank you for the…” Eladora waves vaguely at three largely untouched plates, “wine.”

  Sinter hurries out after her. “I’ll see you to the station.”

  “This is Serran, not the Wash. It’s not necessary.”

  “You never know,” mutters Sinter.

  “The last time you offered me protection, I ended up kidnapped and lying on a sacrificial altar before the night was through.” Eladora plucks her coat off a hook, ignoring the horrified expression of the footman
who was about to fetch it for her. She knows she shouldn’t speak about the events of the Crisis openly, but if her mother–her sainted mother–is throwing around minor miracles over dinner, then apparently the seals of secrecy have been broken.

  “Fair enough,” says Sinter, “but let me offer it again. Like I said, you don’t know what’s coming. When all seems lost, look to the gods for aid.”

  He presses an object into her hand and vanishes back into the private dining room.

  As she walks towards the train station, she examines Sinter’s gift. It’s a fragment of burned metal. The hilt of a broken sword, she realises, blasted by fire, pitted by sorcery, stained by the ichor of a million dead worms. A piece, a relic, of Saint Aleena of the Sacred Flame. She remembers Aleena saving her from Jermas Thay’s clutches, remembers the blessed fire. Imagines, for a moment, Aleena’s rough hand holding the sword hilt. Eladora only knew Aleena briefly, but cherishes the memory of her stalwart presence, her unnerving, unyielding determination. Her knack for thumping evil things with a fiery sword.

  She tries to think why Sinter would give her such a valuable relic, but her head just spins in circles. A message? A gift? A threat, reminding her of the power of the Kept Gods? A clue about his intentions?

  “Fucking fuckers are trying to fuck us,” whispers Eladora, recalling Aleena’s most heartfelt prayer.

  CHAPTER 12

  When the train reaches the border, Guerdon city watch sweep through the carriage, inspecting papers and souls. One of them, her face hidden behind a mask of whirring lenses, stands over Terevant as he digs out the travel documents Lys gave him. The woman flips through the papers, then calls over her supervisor. The second guard examines the papers again, cross-referencing them against their own lists.

  “You were supposed to be on yesterday’s train.”

  “We stopped at Grena, and I went to stretch my legs. The train left without me, so I caught this one.”

  “You’re travelling alone?”

  “Just me.”