The Shadow Saint

by Gareth Hanrahan

  “He’s showing off,” says Cari. They step through the wall into the second tower, and the wall shuts behind them, cutting off the winds whipping off the harbour. Eladora discovers she’s been holding her breath for at least a minute, and sinks down to sit with her back against the suddenly solid wall. She shakes silently for a few moments, closing her eyes as she tries to recompose herself. She cradles her wounded hand.

  She remembers endless interrogations and debriefings–in front of the emergency committee, or with Sinter, with Dr Ramegos, with Admiral Vermeil, with a dozen nameless, blank-faced men and women–where they asked her the same questions over and over: where is your cousin? Where is Carillon Thay? Is she still a saint of the Black Iron Gods? Is she still a threat to the city?

  And afterwards, when the interrogations were over, they decided that Carillon wasn’t a threat. They sent Eladora to confirm–her final test, completing her rapid ascent in the ranks of Effro Kelkin’s assistants. Eladora’s assessment was that Carillon would soon leave the city, running away to sea just like she did before. Eladora thought that her cousin was done with Guerdon, done with sainthood.

  Clearly, she was wrong.

  “Soup?”

  Eladora looks up to find Cari awkwardly holding out a steaming bowl. Eladora takes it, stirs the greyish lumps around the greyish liquid, puts it to one side and looks around her. The room they’re in is mostly bare apart from a small nest of blankets in one corner, a shelf crammed with knives and other tools, and a small cooking stove. A door in the far wall. No windows, just the glimmer of an alchemical lamp.

  “Huh,” says Cari, stripping off her shirt. There’s a fist-size hole where the bullet struck. “I was wrong. The other guy you came with–Alic–he’s alive. I could have sworn they caught him.” She thumps the wall with a fist. “You’re losing it, big man.”

  “Alic’s quite resourceful,” says Eladora, relieved. “I was at your house. There was… there was a body there.”

  “I didn’t kill him. I don’t even know who the fuck he was,” Carillon says indignantly. “They dumped him in my old place an hour ago. I was trying to work out what the hell they were doing when you showed up. I mean, yeah, they were trying to frame me for something, but…” She falls silent for a moment, then rolls her eyes.

  “He was a man of Haith,” offers Eladora.

  “Huh,” says Carillon. “That’s interesting.”

  “Your house was… ah, destroyed before the body was left there?” asks Eladora, cautiously. Questions make Carillon uncomfortable. Eladora thinks of her cousin as a feral alley cat: try to box her in, and she’ll bolt. She has to be relaxed before she’ll talk. Also, she’ll eat anything and is probably diseased.

  “Yeah. I pissed some people off.”

  “Who?”

  Cari shrugs. “Lots of people. I kicked the Ghierdana syndicates out two months ago–they tried to take over Heinreil’s old operations. They didn’t see me coming, and they don’t have their boss dragons over here. Might’ve been them. Or that glass-witch from Ulbishe. Or some of the fucking gunrunners. Or…”

  She pauses. “Yeah, or the spies. We’ve had a lot of them, lately, haven’t we? Poking around where they don’t belong.” Cari glances at Eladora. “I wonder if they mistook you for me.”

  “And tried to kill you on sight?”

  “To be fair…” Cari reaches down, and removes a wickedly sharp knife from some hidden sheath. “I’ve been busy. Not much happens in the New City that I can’t see, and if someone crosses the line—” Her hand twitches, and the knife embeds itself in the wall next to Eladora. “At least, El, that was the fucking plan. The Saint of Knives, that was me.” She pauses again. “Us.”

  Eladora gingerly touches the wall behind her. “I take it that your friend Spar is still…” She searches for the word. Spar fell to his death in front of hundreds of witnesses, but the New City was conjured from his remains. “Extant?”

  “He’s extensively extant,” says Cari, “in places.” She sighs and leans back, staring at the ceiling. “It’s getting harder to reach him, though. Up here’s one of the few spots left where things are still, I dunno, fluid. He’s close to himself, up here, and he can do stuff to the stone. Down at street level, though, he’s more…” She pauses–no, listens. “Constrained. He can show me what’s happening anywhere in the New, it’s like the visions, only he doesn’t shout at me to free a bunch of evil monster gods all the time. But he doesn’t think like we do any more. His soul’s sort of smeared–I don’t know, you tell me–all right, his soul encompasses the whole New City, but he’s still human, not a god. So, he’s all cracked and bitty. There are streets where the only part of him is anger, or places where it’s just his memories, and I can’t talk to his, uh…”

  “His conscious mind,” suggests Eladora. The whole situation is fascinating and bizarre. The desperate final act of the Crisis–Carillon channelling the collective power of the trapped Black Iron Gods into her dying friend–has created something new. Not just a new city, but a new order of being. A living city, a genius loci, with Carillon as something like a saint. She really wants to talk to Dr Ramegos about this. “Would you come down to Queen’s Point with me? There’s someone I’d—”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Like you to meet.”

  “El, no.”

  “Let me talk to Kelkin. We can—”

  “No.”

  “All right.”

  Cari eats in silence for a few minutes.

  Eladora stirs the soup, then puts it aside again.

  “I see your vigilantism has ensured the New City is a place of safety and public order.”

  “I’m trying, all right?” Cari spits out a fishbone. “There was a bottle of wine around here, wasn’t there?” she says, addressing the air. Talking to Spar. Whatever the response is, it’s not to Cari’s liking, and she wrinkles her nose in irritation.

  “I can see you’re trying.” Eladora gestures with her spoon towards the small arsenal of blades and guns by the bed. “But surely it’s folly to attempt this alone–well, physically alone.”

  “It is all going fine, mostly.” Cari applies a whetstone to her knife blade with irritation. “I’d be doing a lot better if those fuckers weren’t sending death squads after me.”

  “Well, that’s an even better argument for being reasonable, isn’t it?” says Eladora. “Carillon, if Mr Idgeson is amiable, you could work with the emergency council, use your talents with official sanction…”

  “El,” says Cari, “no. Gods below, you’re maybe the one other person in Guerdon who should understand what it’s like to have the gods of the city nesting in your skull. You know what the watch would do to me if they caught me. Best fucking case, I end up in a prison cell for the rest of my life.”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “Send me to Hark as a dangerous saint. Dissect me in some alchemist’s lab. Burn me at the stake.”

  “Well, those are more plausible.” Crestfallen, Eladora watches her cousin sharpen the knife. She remembers the night Professor Ongent showed up at the door of the house on Desiderata Street with Cari in tow, stunned and scared by her mysterious visions, unaware then that they stemmed from the nightmarish Black Iron Gods. Cari looked so fragile and exhausted that Eladora had almost forgotten the mutual loathing of their childhood, and had reached out to help.

  Carillon doesn’t look fragile now. There’s an angry strength in her, a confidence born of a willingness to act, to do violence. She scares Eladora now, in a way that she never did before. Cari always carried a knife, but somehow Eladora could tell that she’d never killed with it.

  The knife in Cari’s hand now seems well used.

  An image flashes through Eladora’s mind, a vision as clear as any divine foresight–Carillon lying dead on a rooftop, gunned down by some foe. Too much strength can be dangerous, if you forget when to stop and regroup.

  But Eladora can’t think of the words to make Carillon see that,
and she certainly can’t force her to listen. If she knew how to make Cari see sense, she’d have done it long ago. In the house on Desiderata Street. Or back on the farm where they grew up, out in Wheldacre.

  “I ran into my mother.”

  “How is the hag?” asks Cari, still sharpening.

  “She’s a saint now.”

  “Fuck!” Cari’s knife slips, cutting her knee. Blood spurts from a shallow wound. “A what? A Keeper saint? Are you fucking serious?” She laughs as she presses a rag to her bleeding leg. “Silva’s a saint?”

  “The Kept Gods have chosen her as their vessel. It’s all very solemn and holy.”

  “Well, she must be happy. What was that thing she kept talking about? Saffy-something.”

  “Safidism. The belief that it is right and proper to seek sainthood, and that one achieves sainthood through humility and concordance with the divine, by suppressing one’s own will in favour of submission to the gods.” A reddish liquid, thin and flecked with little chips of stone, oozes from the wall near Cari. Eladora stares at it, but doesn’t say anything. Some sort of echo, she guesses, Carillon’s wounds mirrored by Spar.

  “Well, she must be happy.”

  “Actually,” says Eladora, “she was quite… fervent in her attitude towards you. I think you should stay well away from her. Honestly, we all should. I think she’s gone mad.”

  “‘Gone’, yeah.” Cari closes her eyes, looking inwards. “Well, that’s nice for Silva. May she get martyred really fucking memorably.”

  Eladora sniffs, unsure how she feels about Cari’s casual wish for her mother to meet a grisly end. On balance, she decides, she’s mostly fine with it.

  “You’re still working with Kelkin’s lot?” asks Cari.

  “By ‘lot’, you mean the emergency committee delegated power by parliament for the duration of the present crisis? Yes, I’m still one of Mr Kelkin’s aides. For the moment.”

  “Have you…” Cari pauses, then asks her question in the most casual tone she can muster. “Seen Rat lately?”

  “This morning, actually. There’s some friction between the ghouls and the Keepers, so he is consumed with politicking.”

  “Poor bastard,” says Cari, with little sympathy in her voice. “You know there are corpse shafts under the New City? Miles of tunnels, too, just like the rest of the city. Spar was thinking of the ghouls when he built this place.”

  “I can pass a message on, if you’d like.”

  “Don’t you fucking dare. The bastard tried to kill me. Rat’s dead, and something else is wearing his name.” She gingerly peels back some of the bloody rag. The bleeding’s stopped.

  Eladora doesn’t argue.

  “How about Miren?”

  Eladora freezes. She hasn’t seen Professor Ongent’s son since the Crisis. She believed herself to be in love with the cold boy for a long time. It was only afterwards, in the months since his disappearance, that she’s understood something of his true nature.

  Miren’s knives, too, were very well used.

  “I haven’t.”

  “I thought I spotted him, once or twice, poking around the New City, but he’s a sneaky fuck. He vanished when I went after him.”

  “He can’t have retained his teleportation, can he? It was a gift of the Black Iron Gods.”

  “Yeah, well, he got away somehow, the shit.” Cari removes the rag, probes the wound with a grubby finger.

  “Come here,” orders Eladora. She finds a jug with some relatively clean water. She’s dropped her handkerchief in the carnage, so she makes do with a strip of cloth cut from her own dress, and expertly cleans out the wound.

  “You’ve been practising.” Eladora nods–after the Crisis, she found it calming to study what to do in an emergency. She’d make a passable nurse now. “And thanks for that spell, too.”

  “I don’t know if it was necessary. You seemed to be very—” murderous springs to mind, but Eladora manages to says “competent” instead. “The knife wounded you, but the bullet didn’t?”

  She shrugs. “Some saints can teleport, some get flaming swords. I’ve got a city with a martyr complex looking out for me. I can… sort of shunt injuries to him, but it takes concentration. We can do other stuff, too. Those fuckers got off easy. If we’d been a few floors higher, I could’ve closed the walls on them.” She considers her words, then adds, “Maybe. It’s getting harder all the time, or he’s getting weaker.” Carillon looks up at Eladora, suddenly subdued. “It’s all the same, over and over, isn’t it? Spar and the stone. And Silva and me, too–instead of her chasing me around the kitchen with a wooden spoon, she’ll be chasing me around the city with a flaming sword.”

  “Some patterns break,” offers Eladora. “You didn’t run away. It was, ah, assumed that you had, but you stayed and you’ve tried–in your way–to help the New City.”

  Cari flexes her wounded hand. “Not entirely my idea. I have a friend who’s civic-minded.”

  “Actually,” says Eladora, almost shyly, “that’s why I sought you out. As I said, I’m working with Mr Kelkin’s Industrial Liberals in preparation for the upcoming elections.”

  “So?”

  “Well, given your unique insight into the New City, I was hoping that you’d be able to assist in selecting promising candidates for election. We’re looking to recruit leaders and champions from the newly arrived communities, groups that—”

  “You came to me for polling advice?”

  “I just thought that you might have an invaluable perspective.”

  “Fuck off,” says Cari, bluntly.

  And then, louder, incredulously, and clearly directed to the ceiling above her. “Fuck off. No. No.”

  She turns back to Eladora and says in hollow tones. “Oh, gods below. He’s interested. He wants to help.”

  Eladora wishes that there was a shrine or a statue or a manifestation of some sort, instead of speaking to the empty air. “Ah, Mr Idgeson, I know that your father and Mr Kelkin had considerable disagreements once upon a time.”

  “Kelkin had his dad executed, but, sure, considerable disagreements,” interjects Cari.

  “However, circumstances have changed for all of us, and I’m sure we can find common ground and areas of mutual interest.”

  The building quivers slightly, as though a train passed beneath it, or the earth trembled. Cari clutches her head. “Ow. Gods, you’ve got him all riled up now. Like I said, he doesn’t think like we do any more. I can’t make sense of what he’s saying–I’ll need to move around the city, pick up different bits of the thought from different streets.” She crosses the room, finds a battered coat in a pile of clothing. “Thanks a lot,” she adds, sourly. “Like I had nothing better to do than wander around, dodging assassins, for fucking this.”

  “I am in your debt,” says Eladora.

  “Get some sleep. While I’m out, I’m also going to find out who the fuck that Haithi corpse was, and why they wanted someone to think I killed him.”

  Eladora stands. “Before you go… you said people were combing the New City for leftovers of the Crisis. What are they looking for?”

  Cari scowls.

  “You don’t want to know, El.”

  “Of course I do. It’s important. Tell me.”

  Her cousin’s face darkens with anger. “But it wouldn’t be telling you, would it? It’d be telling Kelkin, and Rat, and all the rest. Fuck. That. And stay here.” The wall opens at her touch, swallowing her, resealing behind her.

  Leaving Eladora trapped in this tower with no doors.

  CHAPTER 17

  The spy walks out of the New City, wearing the mask of Alic. He draws a worried frown on this mask as he descends, passing through the bizarre transition zone between the New City and the Old. The district of Glimmerside, where conjured shapes interweave through structures built with mortal hands. Stalactites of stone cling to the façades of taverns and bookshops like some angelic fungus.

  A chattering gaggle of students outside a tav
ern, all sitting on a delicately beautiful spiral staircase that springs from the tavern yard and ascends to empty air. An entire apothecary’s shop sits on a tongue of stone that lifted it into the air nine months ago, so the Gutter Miracle could conjure a dancing fountain where the shop once stood. A crowd laughs at a puppet show, where Kelkin beats the previous First Minister, Droupe, with a stick until he bursts in a shower of golden coins. Toy violence, only a few minutes’ walk from where people died in the streets.

  The crowds change like the sky as he moves through the streets.

  Up in the New City, people were like autumn leaves, many colours all tossed on the wind, each one different, all fallen from dying trees across the sea.

  In Glimmerside, close to the university, the shapeless grey robes of students are dark clouds scudding across the sky.

  And here, down near Eladora’s apartment, it’s like a brilliant sunset. With the Festival of Flowers in a few weeks, the bohemian section of Glimmerside is alight with summer finery and laughter.

  His own clothes–drab, forgettable–remind him oddly of a bird on the wing, a lonely flyer crossing many skies. He’s never liked birds before.

  Eladora’s apartment is on the second floor of a townhouse near Venture Square. He’s watched this building before. Watched her and several other senior aides in the Industrial Liberals come and go. Waiting for an opportunity. His fingers clench the opportunity in his pocket.

  Even if he hadn’t seen Eladora blast that attacker with a spell, he’d have suspected her home was magically warded. The party would have seen to that. These days, with sorcery taught in universities and mass-produced in weapons factories, it’s a necessity to protect important people and information from supernatural attack. Picking a lock is trivial for the spy; bypassing magical wards without being detected is harder.

  The stairwell outside the apartment is empty. There’s another flat on the far side of the landing, but the spy can’t hear anyone inside. He kneels down and blows softly on the lock of Eladora’s door; traceries of magical sigils glow blue in response. Some wards blast trespassers; he doubts Eladora would employ such lethal countermeasures, but it would sound the alarm, maybe capture his image.