A knock at the door. Lemuel. Eyes red-rimmed, just back from some nocturnal mission in the sleepless city outside the embassy walls. His bandage, too, is red-rimmed; the wound has opened again. “Are you done yet? The night train won’t wait.”
“Come in,” orders Terevant.
Lemuel enters, curses when he sees the blank page. “What’s the delay? I found Vanth’s fucking body for you. The Saint of Knives did him.” He picks at the edges of the bandage, wincing at the pain.
“I found this on Vanth’s body,” says Terevant, sliding the half-burned leaflet across the table. “A pamphlet from—”
“The Keepers, aye.” Lemuel glances over the paper with disinterest. “What of it?”
“Maybe it means something.”
“Maybe it means fuck-all. Gods below, it’s election season–you can’t walk five feet without some party hack pushing something into your hand.”
“The Special Thaumaturgist, too,” argues Terevant, “she suggested…”
“What?” snaps Lemuel, irritatably.
“That it wasn’t the Saint of Knives. Maybe Ishmere had a hand in Vanth’s death. We can’t be certain that there are no enemy saints in this city.”
“So which is it, then?” Lemuel raises his voice in anger. “Keepers, or Ishmere?”
Terevant taps the blank page. “This letter,” he says, “will go out with my signature on it, and the seal of House Erevesic. I need to be sure of what happened.” Vanth’s death is only the starting point. It can’t have been a random killing by some mad saint. It must be connected to the god bombs. “We need to investigate more.”
“We? We?” echoes Lemuel, “I found Vanth’s body. I know Guerdon. You have your fucking name and the seal of House Erevesic, and what else? I know all about you, you know. You’re the other Erevesic, the one who failed. And failed. And failed. And now you presume to give me orders?”
Terevant’s hand clenches in anger and shame, crumpling the blank sheet. Everything Lemuel said is true. He could have written that litany.
“Write the fucking letter,” insists Lemuel.
“Not until I’m sure.”
“When have you ever been certain of anything?” mutters Lemuel. Terevant tries to ignore the barb, but it troubles him. It’s too well aimed to be a random shot–either there’s another file somewhere in the building with Terevant’s name on it, or Lyssada has told Lemuel all about him.
Lemuel scratches his chin. His skin’s pockmarked and reddened by some irritant. He stalks across the room, looks at the ticking clock on the wall. “All right,” he says after a dozen ticks, “let’s go and talk to her.”
He brings Terevant out of the embassy, through the streets of Bryn Avane to another building. Long and grey, with many dark windows. A hive of bureaucracy; rows of offices and clerks’ cubbyholes, but at this time of night it’s almost deserted. Lemuel, it seems, knows the night guard, knows he can be bribed. Inside, the building smells of floor polish; a maze of grey and beige. “Board of Trade,” mutters Lemuel. “This way.”
The building would be utterly mundane by day; by night, when it’s empty, it’s eerie, as though they’re exploring a ruined city after some catastrophe. In Haith, of course, such a place would never be empty, even at night. The Vigilant work without cease.
They pass through a conference room, unlit lamps sitting on a mahogany table topped with green baize. A map on the wall shows Guerdon’s exports of alchemical weapons, red lines like veins linking the city to the wider world, the Godswar beyond the seas. The thickest lines pump to Haith; other trade routes connect to Lyrix, to Ulbishe. The map must be out of date–it shows Severast and Mattaur, and they’ve been swallowed by the great rival.
“Here we are.” Terevant’s heart jumps with excitement–maybe Lyssada has crept into the city for some clandestine meeting, and she’s waiting in the next room–but Lemuel opens the door to a small windowless chamber. There’s nothing inside except a table, a single chair and a curious machine: a cross between a typewriter, an accordian and some sort of aetheric lamp.
“Clever thing, this. Alchemists make ’em. It’s an aethergraph. Lets you talk to people far away,” mutters Lemuel. He adjusts the machine, plugging in a thick silver cord, pressing a key that makes the central column of the machine glow with an eldritch werelight. “They’ve got them all over the city–city watch, parliament, guildhalls. Even some out in the hinterlands. The Bureau’s got friends that let us borrow their set, when we need it. But we won’t have much time.” The machine clatters, the keys moving on their own. “Here we go,” he says. “Put your fingers there.” Terevant sits down at the machine and places his fingers over the keys. Lemuel presses another control, and suddenly there’s the sensation of someone else in the room. A warmth in the air; the ghostly scent of Lys’s perfume. Wind rustling in treetops, as if a vast forest has sprung up in the street outside.
The glowing aether-tube is like a temporary phylactery, bringing both their souls together in a brief sorcerous union.
His fingers move of their own accord, pulled irresistibly to tap out a message, a letter at a time. H-E-L-L-O. T-E-R.
It’s weirdly intimate, as though he can feel her fingertips on the other side of the brass keys.
WE FOUND VANTH, he types.
The keys move again. Lys is typing. I KNOW. WELL DONE. Terevant finds an involuntary smile creeping across his face.
DO YOU TRUST ME? she asks. It feels like she’s sitting at the table with him, staring into his eyes.
ALWAYS, he replies instantly.
THEN TRUST LEMUEL.
The light in the aethergraph flickers, and Terevant’s suddenly aware of another phantasmal presence. He gets the impression it’s another woman. Older, greyer. He distantly hears the sound of bells ringing, and he doesn’t know if he’s hearing with his own ears, or if it’s coming over the psychic aethergraph link. His mouth fills with the taste of wine.
I HAVE TO GO, types Lys. I WILL SEE YOU AT THE FESTIVAL. KEEP—
And Lemuel reaches over Terevant’s shoulder, pulls the cord from the aethergraph. The machine shuts down abruptly, leaving a sickening psychic absence in place of Lys. The sensation of standing on the edge of a great emptiness.
“Time’s up,” says Lemuel, “but you heard her: send the damn letter.”
Back at the embassy, Terevant writes the letter. A few scant words, confirming that Third Secretary Vanth was killed by a criminal saint in the New City. Lemuel takes the letter, the wax seal of the Erevesics still warm and soft, and hurries off to the train station. There’s still time to catch the night train to Haith. Terevant imagines the letter flitting north, vanishing into the great machine of the Bureau. Bone-white hands breaking the seal, the empty eye sockets of some Bureau mandarin reading his hasty note.
He’s done what was asked of him. Swallowed his doubts. Done as Lys asked.
He wonders what he’s set in motion. He can dimly apprehend the movement of invisible powers, intrigues unlocked by that letter. The Bureau was worried by Vanth’s disappearance; they feared enemy action. Now, they’ve been reassured. Maybe it’s all as simple as removing a possible blemish on Lys’s record, so the necromancers don’t hold it against her in consideration for the Crown. He curses Ramegos–if she hadn’t planted these doubts in his mind, he’d never have thought twice about the flyer.
That’s when I passed through the Godswar. I know you’ve seen it, too.
At Eskalind, the saints of High Umur hurled fire from the sky. The saints of the Lion Queen grew claws that could pierce any armour. He sits in Vanth’s office and stares at the ranked folders and towers of notebooks, and remembers Eskalind.
What if we’re wrong? What if Ishmere’s already here? He remembers Ramegos’ chains of divine icons, the Fate Spider entangled with death. And her book–why did she show him the book? To warn him that rivals in the Godswar were already in the city?
He thinks of Lys and Olthic, pulling him this way and that. Each one trying to
command his loyalty and trust. Intrigues between the various Haithi Houses and the Bureau are never-ending, grudges and schemes perpetrated by the undying, and by the living desperate to earn a place among them.
What if they’ve missed something?
Vanth is dead. His vigil has ended. But there might be something left in him.
“Yoras,” calls Terevant quietly.
The door to the office opens a crack, and Yoras pops his skull in.
Sir?
“We’re not done yet,” says Terevant, surprising himself. “Go and wake the necromancer.”
The dead don’t sleep.
Terevant does. He snatches a few hours in the middle of the night. Wakes before dawn, hurries back down to the basement vault where Yoras stands guard. From inside, low chanting, a prayer to Death.
Vanth’s remains lie on a cot bed before the empty altar.
“How goes?” he asks the embassy necromancer.
The necromancer–a young woman, auburn hair beneath her cowl, rings and necklaces of polished bone clinking as she moves–rolls her eyes. “There wasn’t much left of body or soul here. We must be grateful for whatever we receive, no matter how meagre. But we are nearly done.” She’s dressed the former Third Secretary in a grey shift, and now she’s taking a knife to the tattooed flesh on his wrists and ankles, his heart and neck and groin, gently exposing the periapts that made him Vigilant-caste. To reanimate him, she needs to remove him from the death-castes entirely.
It, thinks Terevant. The corpse on the floor isn’t Vanth any more. Anything that was Vanth got burned away when he was destroyed with holy fire. And all they want from it is some lingering memory, a name or a clue engraved in scar tissue in the brain.
“This body has been tampered with,” says the necromancer.
“Other than getting shot, stabbed and set on fire?”
“Yes.” She peels back an incision to reveal Vanth’s guts, sorts through them. “It’s beyond my skill to read these signs.”
“Can you still bring him back?”
She taps an exposed periapt with her knife. “Little life will cling to these bones, but I will try,” she whispers. The temple seems to swallow all sound. Even the scraping of the serrated knife is muted.
Yoras comes in and watches the knife work in silence for a few minutes, then says it itches, sir, when they flense you like that. Strangest thing, having itchy bones. The skeleton shivers.
“Quiet,” hisses the necromancer.
The silence that fills the cellar room becomes a prayer, a hymn to Death. There are words in that silence. The necromancer draws on the urn of souls in the courtyard above to fuel her sorcery–the books in the Office of Supply will have to be balanced later, but the Erevesic estates produce plenty of peasant souls to recompense the embassy account. An eerie bluish mist precipiates in the room. A ghostly miasma, chill to the touch. It adheres to periapts–both Terevant and Yoras end up with streamers of ghost-mist trailing from them, but the necromancer gathers the greater mass of soul-stuff and herds it towards Vanth’s corpse. His periapts swallow it.
Terevant has seen the dead rise before, many times. Most often, it was the Vigilant soldiers of Haith rebinding their souls to mortally wounded bodies. There, the body moved like a marionette for the first few minutes, and you could see the glowing shadow of the spirit, anchored to the iron periapts. The Vigilant didn’t really come back, because they never really left. They lashed themselves to their bones rather than cross over. Like a shipwrecked man clinging to a rock while the current tries to drag him out to sea.
He’s seen enemy dead rise, too, resurrected by the mad gods. In their blind haste, the gods vomited up souls and crammed them into bodies called back into service or shaped by remorseless miracles. He’s seen soldiers rise up on the battlefield, alive but horribly mangled. Seen them return in bodies assembled from the stuff of the gods, brought back with tree branches replacing arms, or scabs of solid gold to staunch arterial bleeding. The resurrected never come back clean.
This is different.
Edoric Vanth doesn’t come back at all.
The thing they’ve made moves like an animal, snuffling and whining to itself. It crawls off the bier in the necromancer’s shrine, shambles upright to walk in halting steps.
The Vanth-thing prowls around the cellar room, sniffing and pawing at everything. Terevant keeps one hand on his sword in case it turns violent.
Without looking over at the necromancer, he calls out, “How long will it last?”
“A few days.” She takes a deep breath, “Unless I renew the spells again then. Not as hard, but…” She pauses. “Where are you going to keep it? You can’t leave it down here.”
A good question, and not one Terevant has an answer for yet. “I’m not going to keep it,” he says, “and do not speak of this to anyone. It’s a matter of state security.”
Yoras escorts the thing into an anteroom and dresses it in a hooded cloak, in an attempt to hide the worst of the burns. On a dark night, in the rain, if you were blind drunk, you might not spot that the cowled figure you just passed was not alive–but if you’re that unobservant you probably won’t make it home alive yourself.
“Let’s see what he remembers.” Terevant steps forward, raises his voice. “Vanth?”
The undead thing flinches, turns its gory head to face him. There’s something in there, some intelligence beyond the rote motions of a zombie, but it’s not Vanth.
“Do you remember who killed you?”
The ruined jaw moves soundlessly. The thing paws at its throat in frustration.
Then nods its head.
CHAPTER 21
They leave the embassy through a side door. Yoras pauses at the threshold. As Vigilant, I’m not allowed to leave the embassy grounds.
“This counts as official businesses. Come on.”
It really should be in writing, mutters Yoras, but the Vanth-thing is already shuffling down the street, so he follows, fastening his face mask into place as he runs.
Vanth leads them towards a subway station. Terevant suppresses a nervous laugh as the zombie-thing pats its rags, looking for a coin to buy a ticket. Terevant circles around the undead thing and buys three tickets from the clerk.
“Your friend all right?” asks the clerk, nodding towards the hooded figure.
“God-touched.” The cruelties of the Godswar explains all sorts of weirdness. “We’ll take care of him.”
At this hour, the train is mostly empty, and they have a carriage to themselves.
Vanth’s half-burned neck struggles to hold the weight of his skull. His head bobbles back and forth in time to the rocking of the train as it rattles through ghoul tunnels under the great city. The carriage fills up as they pass through Five Knives, through Glimmerside, through Castle Hill. A few look suspiciously at the hooded figure and the masked soldier, but Terevant just smiles and waves back, and they look away.
We’re past the junction for the New City, observes Vanth, next stop is the east Wash, and then the docks.
Terevant shrugs. “Let’s see what comes of it.”
At a stop in the Wash, the Vanth-thing lurches up. Terevant hurries to make sure the cloak doesn’t fall away. Guerdon has its share of horrors and monsters, but walking corpses aren’t a usual part of the menagerie.
They follow Vanth back to the surface, follow it through the warren of little streets in this ancient part of Guerdon. The creature’s moving easier now, as if taking up the habits of its life as it gets closer to where it died.
This part of the city is the shoreline between Old and New, the westernmost extremity of the Crisis and its spasm of impossible building. On their right, dark-windowed tenements and rookeries leer out, a warren of alleyways and thieves’ hiding places in the spaces between ill-built walls. On the other side of the street, the same–but punctuated by the eerie angel-built intrusions of heaven. A footbridge arcs above their heads–three-quarters of the span is Crisis-built, an elegant arch of moon
stone, but it fell short of the far side, so the locals closed the gap with a tangle of ropes and planks salvaged from a wrecked ship.
Unfriendly eyes watch them from the alleyways on either side.
It’s dark; the only illumination comes from the stone lamps that glow on the left-hand side of the street. The moon’s a thin sliver in the sky. They duck into alleyways to avoid the crowd spilling out of a tavern, circle around to bypass the fleshpots near the Seamarket by night. Hide from a passing city watch patrol.
The corpse leads them to an alleyway, pauses there for a moment. One hand strays to its throat, probing the wound. The jaw moves, but it still can’t talk. The other hand flexes, paws at its waist as if looking for a weapon. An alarming thought strikes Terevant–what if it’s looking for revenge on its killers? While Terevant wants to see them identified and brought to justice, he doubts the zombie retains the same appreciation for legal niceties–and it would be a hell of a diplomatic incident if the former Third Secretary of the Haithi embassy were found to be running around Guerdon murdering people, even those who arguably deserved it.
“Vanth,” calls Terevant. “We need information. How did you die? What were you doing that night?”
The zombie turns to him. The jaw moves spasmodically–and then it’s off again, heading back towards the street.
They pass a line of abandoned townhouses. He spots a street sign, naming it as Gethis Row.
Some of the houses have wreathes of fresh flowers laid at their doors. Memorials, mutters Yoras. This street got cleared out in the Crisis. People got killed here, or brought up to the Seamarket.
Vanth pauses outside one house, then turns to climb the stairs to the front door.
“Hold him there,” orders Terevant. Yoras hurries forward, pulls the zombie back. The Vanth-thing doesn’t resist, but again one hand goes to its throat, the other searching for a sword or knife at its belt.
Terevant brushes past the two and walks up to the front door. It’s unlocked.
Inside, the house is deserted. He walks through the rooms, reconstructing the history of the place as best he can. There were families living here before the Crisis, crammed seven or eight to a room. Three rooms on the ground floor. All empty now, but there are signs of later occupation, squatters and thieves. The rooms have been stripped of anything valuable. His boots tread on shattered plates, on rags, on chunks of fallen plaster from the ceiling. A broken alchemical lamp smears greenish light across the walls of the backroom.
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