The Shadow Saint

by Gareth Hanrahan

  The boy has abjured the Fate Spider. Denied the god. Broken their connection.

  Blasphemed.

  There are ways to re-establish the bond, though. Things best done under the cover of night. Atonement is not easy, nor will it be cheap.

  Alic lingers as long as he can, delaying his return to the House of Jaleh.

  Delaying the inevitable.

  Guerdon stirs around Terevant. The city rising with the dawn. Ships leaving the harbour with the morning tide. Factories whistling the day shift. Markets and stalls unfolding around him like flowers. A fresh crop of election posters like dew on the walls.

  He criss-crosses the city, train to street to alleyway to rooftop and back again. Moving at random. He wants to go to Lys, to talk to her, but he can’t. Olthic said she was at the Palace of the Patros, but he can’t show up at the gates and ask for her. Excuse me, I’d like to talk to my sister-in-law. You can’t miss her, she just manoeuvred her pawn onto your throne to seal her own coronation. Can she come out and play?

  And where is the sword, anyway? Still in the embassy? Only a member of the House Erevesic could carry it without harm–a blood member, so that excludes Lys. Terevant’s the last of the line. An unknown cousin? Some bastard child of Olthic’s? Of his? Or–a Vigilant could carry the blade. Maybe a human with sufficient magical protections, a saint or sorcerer, but only for a short time, before the blade’s magic unknotted any spells of containment. But all the Vigilants in Guerdon are back there in the embassy, and how could a saint or sorcerer powerful enough get in without being detected? Absently, he walks down a winding staircase to another train station. The platform is crowded with workers heading to the alchemists’ factories. He doesn’t get on the train–he walks the length of the platform and leaves by another stairwell. Hide and seek.

  He’s not sure if he’s hiding from Daerinth or Lys or himself. The looming fact of Olthic’s death stalks him, like a giant crashing through the streets. As long as he keeps moving, he can stay ahead of that giant, hide behind buildings and towers. He knows if it catches him, it’ll break him, crush him. That if he gives into his grief, then whoever did kill Olthic will get away with it.

  Words of a poem echo around the hollow spaces of his skull.

  Haith is dust

  And Grena a grave

  But Guerdon’s a mad god’s dream

  Five Knives to Glimmerside to the New City, then looping back along Holyhill, over the viaduct to Castle Hill. Morning rolling into midday, midday becoming a dull grey afternoon, the city subdued and hungover after the Festival of Flowers.

  He walks until he can’t feel his feet, exhausting himself. He can keep walking until he dies, then enter the Vigil and keep walking without breaking stride. Walk off the edge of the world into the sea.

  But Guerdon’s a mad god’s dream

  Fitful and dark

  Till stonily

  From soaring battlements

  The city eyes eternity

  It’s a moonless night. The stars are bright, but the streets below are dark enough. The city’s quiet, a collective hangover after the excesses of the Festival. The gutters are choked with discarded garlands and poesies of flowers. Alic leads Emlin through the Wash’s alleyways, and into the New City.

  They pass under a makeshift gallows–from a window far above hangs a body, turning on a noose. Emlin flinches and moves closer to Alic, but it’s just a grisly monument. The body is wax, not flesh. One of the city’s defunct Tallowmen, now held aloft to be pelted with stones and rotten fruit.

  They walk down the Street of Shrines without stopping. Out of the corner of his eye, the spy spots a city watch sentry. The shrines are under surveillance. The figure is masked, their eyes hidden behind lenses and thaumic probes. The mask’s machine-gaze focuses on Emlin, holds for a moment, then the sentry waves him on. This part of the New City is no place to bring a child.

  “Wait five minutes,” the spy tells Emlin, “then get to the Spider’s shrine, over there. I’ll distract the watch.” He forces himself to smile. “Ask the Spider for forgiveness, then send the message.”

  The shrine is a place of power for the Fate Spider. It will bolster the boy’s connection to the deity, force Emlin’s soul back to proper alignment. But it’ll hurt. Mortals are such fragile, changeable things, but gods are constant. Remorseless. Their love and hate equally terrible, equally heedless.

  The spy takes out the lion-headed vial and anoints the boy. Giving him Annah’s mark, her seal, so the Ishmeric fleet will know this message comes with her blessing.

  Emlin squares his shoulders and looks towards the darkness of the shrine. “I’ll do it,” he says to Alic, but it’s the spy who answers.

  “Good boy. Tell them the city’s ripe for plucking.”

  In the shrine, Emlin kneels before the statue of the Spider and prays.

  The shape of the statue is the same shape that’s in him. His soul is unfolded by it, cracked open and pulled apart, losing its human aspect, extending eight legs to skitter across the web of whispers. Sprouting eyes that see beyond the material world. He digests the words that Alic spoke to him, wraps them in psychic silk, carries them onto the web.

  It’s hard. It’s much harder than before. The shrine gives him the strength to try, like the statue’s taking the weight of the burden. Emlin fears that the god will be angry with him, that when he meets Fate Spider he’ll be judged. Punished.

  It would be fair. It would be just. He’s sinned. He deserves whatever he gets.

  And Alic wouldn’t send him into danger.

  Emlin rips free of his mortal body–unsure, in divine ambiguity, if his body is the eight-legged statue or the two-legged boy–and moves across the web. There are others like him, he can feel their movement in subtle vibrations. Spies in other cities, other lands. The web covers the world.

  The strand he’s crawling along is one of the northernmost. Most of the web is in the south, centred on Ishmere. There are thousands of saints there, thousands of his counterparts, soul-siblings. The web’s so thick in places that it smothers the material plane beneath it; in those holy temples, fate is malleable.

  He resists the temptation to take certain paths. The web is timeless, and some paths lead into the past or future. As an initiate, when he first came into his power, he succumbed to weakness, and crawled back into the past to look at his own family. Watched his own childhood, and saw his mother’s face again. The priests chastised him for that, his first failing–and then Fate Spider forgave him. The Spider is his family now, his only parent, his greater self. He pushes away the thought of Alic’s face that flickers through his mind. The future-paths are more perilous still, especially now that the web is wounded.

  He crawls around the fringes of the damaged region, the aftermath of the sundering, and tastes sorrow and ash. The temples of Severast burned, and their priests vanished into the future. The web was torn. So much was lost. He does not envy the work of the spirits who toil there, reweaving fate to bring certainty to the ruins.

  But Severast isn’t his destination. He stops, senses the vibrations. He thought he’d continue south, to the heart of the web, to Ishmere.

  But the god isn’t there. For an instant, he’s confused, wondering if he somehow got turned around, because it seems like Fate Spider is right on top of him. Then, he finds the right path. No wonder it was hard to read the vibrations–Fate Spider is not at the centre of the web today. The locus of the god is off in the fragile, unsteady regions where the web crosses the sea. He crawls along quivering strands until he approaches the divinity.

  He asks for forgiveness.

  The god considers him. Tastes him. Dissolves him, injecting venom into his brain so it can read all his thoughts. He is still pleasing to the Spider; his offence was grave, but there’s still a place for him in Fate Spider’s plans.

  Moving out of time, now. He is Fate Spider, and the web is Fate Spider, and all things are Fate Spider. The message is delivered, always was delivered, for
all things are known to Fate Spider. With eight eyes, he beholds the cosmos. He knows all secrets now. He sees the web of causality and chaos that births the future.

  His mandibles, dripping with the Poison Undeniable, speak the secrets he brought out of Guerdon.

  The weapon is a lie, whispers Fate Spider, Guerdon has no weapon that can slay us!

  Emlin–his name is Emlin, he reminds himself–struggles to reassert his selfhood as other gods move around him. The pantheon of Ishmere gathers. Mercifully, Cloud Mother cloaks them in mist, so Emlin is not annihilated by the radiance of their divine majesty. He senses rather than sees them–the Kraken slithering beneath the surface of the world, vast and timeless. Blessed Bol, drawn back from his dreams of the dragon-hoards of Lyrix, hands running with coins. Smoke Painter, sliding past him, trailing perfumed vapours. High Umur, infinitely remote, attends this divine council by sending an emissary of holy fire, and Emlin recoils from the heat.

  He’s too close to the gods, too much of him has been sublimated into Fate Spider.

  And prowling, stalking around him, something huge and predatory. Hot breath as the beast snuffles at him. The mists cannot wholly conceal the regal divinity that examines him. The Lion Queen’s claws tear the web as She moves. Circling around the Fate Spider. Eight glittering eyes watching two of gold, brighter than the sun.

  The Spider cringes. Emlin cringes, his heart racing, his eight legs coiling beneath him protectively. Shuffling back into some dark corner of heaven. The glory of union with the god goes sour; there are other powers in the pantheon, divinities stronger and fiercer than Fate Spider, and they are ascendant. Lion Queen considers the message.

  “War,” she says. “War is holy.”

  Lion Queen roars, and heaven breaks. Emlin falls, plummeting out of the realm of gods, falling back towards the realm of mortals. He’s lost the protection of the god’s favour–where once Fate Spider might have eased this transition, handled the fragile mortal vessel gently, now the god discards him like something soiled.

  His offence was only partially forgiven. He must still suffer.

  Emlin tries to become human again, but it’s not easy. His skull cracks, again and again. Pain shoots through his head. Weeping wounds rip open along his side as four of his spiritual legs are severed as he drops to the physical realm.

  He falls to the hard floor of the shrine, his face burning in agony from half a dozen wounds. Screaming in pain. His eyes screwed tightly closed, hiding from the Lion Queen’s terrible radiance.

  Alic appears next to him, helps him up, wipes his face.

  Blood flows from six wounds on Emlin’s forehead, stigmata of the Fate Spider. In time, those wounds may ripen into eyes.

  “It’s done,” says Alic thickly, hugging the boy close.

  And they are left alone in the shrine, all gods gone for now.

  The customs post at Guerdon’s northern border could, perhaps, have coped with a single train. There are a few watchmen there, a few guns pointing towards Haith. The border commander is woken in the middle of the night by the arrival of the first train. While he inspects the train’s travel paper, he sends his watchmen down to inspect it. They peer in through the windows with their alchemical masks, scanning for concealed miracles and hidden saints. It’s absurd, and they know it–Haith has no saints save the Enshrined, and what miracle could be more obvious than the hundreds of Vigilant soldiers who sit there patiently.

  An examination of the travel papers reveals a hitherto unfortunate discrepancy between Guerdon and Haithi law on the topic of death. The regulations covering the train link between the two cities strictly limit the number of Haithi soldiers who can pass through Guerdon’s territory, but have a much more generous allowance for the number of civilians.

  The commander of the forces on the train smiles at the border guard. (Skulls always smile.) Why, all these Vigilant soldiers are on leave, and aren’t currently soldiers by the letter of the law. They’re off duty, unarmed and out of uniform.

  The border guard points out that the city has an even stricter limit on the number of undead permitted in Guerdon.

  Ah, says the train commander, the undead soldiers on leave aren’t going to the city. They won’t enter Guerdon itself. They’re going to holiday in the countryside. And the restriction on the number of Haithi civilians makes no mention of whether those civilians are living or dead.

  It’s patently absurd.

  The border commander could order the guns to fire on the train. He could blow up the tracks, protect the city from this potential threat. But there are more lights coming down the track, more trains approaching. His watch post would be overrun. He and all his border watch would be slaughtered.

  He’s also uncomfortably aware that tomorrow is supposed to be a busy day. Haith has stepped up its purchases of alchemical weapons in the last few weeks, and more of those weapons are being transported by train instead of ship, to avoid Ishmeric krakens or sky pirates from Lyrix. A fortune in trade. What will the alchemists’ guild do to him if he closes the border unnecessarily?

  The commander huffs and puffs, his nervous breathing in time with the wheezing of the idling train engine outside the window. He rereads the regulations again, consults his timetables, all under the unblinking scrutiny of the train commander’s eyeless gaze. He digs out old railway maps.

  A compromise–a blessed way out. There is, the border commander crows, a disused siding yard just north of Guerdon city. Big enough to take all four of the “holiday trains”. He can send a message ahead, have the city watch rush troops to monitor the yard, ensure that the Haithi “civilians” behave. The train commander grins and agrees.

  The watch confiscate firing pins from the train’s artillery pieces, promising to return them when the Haithi leave Guerdon soil. The Haithi do not object. Indeed, they cooperate, helpfully disassembling the cannon mechanisms. It’s the living troops who operate the artillery, not the dead. The dead are slow to learn new tricks. Slow, but steady.

  One by one, the trains pass through the border post.

  As ordered, one by one, they stop at that siding, arriving in the dead of night. Guerdon is a looming shadow to the south-east, fitful and dark, sleepless on this sweltering summer night.

  CHAPTER 32

  Terevant spends the first night at a flophouse in the Wash.

  He doesn’t sleep–or, if he does, he doesn’t recall it. Sleep would bring nightmares, and nightmares are indistinguishable from the waking world.

  His second day he spends wandering again, hiding, thinking. He feels like a hollow vessel, a soul-urn without a soul, filled instead with questions that rattle around his skull.

  Olthic is dead. That fact feels too huge to fit in Terevant’s tattered mind. He has to focus on fragments of the fact to keep his thoughts from straying. He’s a man making his way across a narrow bridge, a dark gulf on either side.

  Olthic is dead. What caste did he die in? Not Vigilant, clearly. Did he make it to the Erevesic sword in time, did the ancestors accept him? Or, did he die casteless and ashamed? A Supplicant, his soul trapped in the husk of his body until it’s extracted by the necromancers and put to use in the temples of the nameless?

  If he stops thinking, stops moving, he’ll never move again.

  Olthic is dead. How was he killed? He had the Sword Erevesic in his possession, able to draw on the stored strength and skill of a hundred generations of Erevesics. He must have been taken by surprise. Ambushed in a moment of weakness.

  Killed by someone he trusted.

  She played us both.

  Haith is built on two pillars, the Houses and the Bureau, two arms of the state, directed by the immortal Crown. Every schoolchild knows that. The Crown desired Guerdon, so Houses and Bureau both went to work. The Houses sent Olthic–a war hero, a living legend–to dazzle parliament and convince them to ally with Haith. The Bureau sent Lys, to manoeuvre their pawn into place.

  To ensure Olthic failed, Lys kept the sword from him. She took
advantage of Vanth’s botched resurrection–did she also take advantage of the incident on the train at Grena, or did she engineer it? Terevant’s stomach sinks with realisation: Lys asked me to bring the sword instead of having a Vigilant honour guard carry it because she knew she could manipulate me.

  Terevant’s aware he’s mumbling to himself. People on the street give him sidelong glances. He takes to the alleyways, sinking deeper into the Wash.

  Lys manipulated him. Outmaneovred Olthic. Betrayed their trust. But… that doesn’t mean she killed Olthic, does it? Even if she saw Olthic as a rival for the Crown, and was willing to commit murder to win the highest prize in Haith, then Olthic was a defeated rival.

  “They’ll eat you alive in this city. You’ve got to learn to act.” Lemuel told him that. But Lemuel is Lys’s creature. It was Lemuel who followed him at the Festival, drew him away from the warmth and safety of Naola’s fire. Terevant touches the tender lump on the back of his head. He can almost feel the churning of his thoughts beneath his bruised skull.

  And what to make of Daerinth? Did the old man suspect something? Is that why he tried to get Terevant to flee? No, that can’t be–Daerinth was quick to accuse Terevant of Olthic’s murder. Daerinth’s no ally.

  Terevant doesn’t have a single living soul in the city he can trust. Guerdon’s full of unfriendly eyes. City watch everywhere. Every time a watchman passes, Terevant flinches. Newspaper barkers all over the city shout about the Haithi troops encamped on the edge of the city, about the murder of the Haithi ambassador. It’s only a matter of time before someone recognises him. He’s still wearing a Haithi uniform beneath his cloak, for death’s sake. He turns back the narrow alleys and teetering buildings of the Wash, full of places he can wait, where people are more interested in the contents of his purse than his face or uniform.

  Olthic is dead. Olthic is dead, and he’s not coming back.

  Terevant is the last Erevesic.

  He’s light-headed from lack of food. He finds a street stall, buys a meal of mushy vegetables and fried fish from a one-legged vendor. When Terevant digs in his pocket for a coin, he finds a small hard rectangle of cardboard.