The Shadow Saint

by Gareth Hanrahan

  ELADORA DUTTIN, it reads, ASSISTANT TO THE EMERGENCY COMMITTEE, and, below it, an address.

  Duttin. He could go to Duttin. But that book on architecture is back in his rooms in the Haithi embassy, and he can’t go back there. He could go to her empty-handed, throw himself on her mercy, but that’s a last resort.

  Another tavern welcomes him in. It’s crowded and raucous, full of sea shanties, toasts to the returned king, drunken prayers to Saint Storm and all the other sea gods. Sailors are the most ecumenical of souls, offering prayers to all the deities that share custody of the open ocean. He buy a drink, nurses it while he waits for the right moment. Tries to hold himself together. The crowd in the bar swirls around him, a sea of people that threatens to drown him. Olthic is dead, and so is their mother, their sisters, drowned long ago. Olthic is dead, and so is their father, and what would he say to see Terevant in another tavern?

  Terevant clings to the calling card in his hand, turning it over and over, an emotional periapt.

  And then a familiar face swims suddenly into focus, up out of the churning mob. There, a few tables away is the girl from the train. Shana. She’s in conversation with two men–well, one man, and one hulking thing in a baroque suit of armour, the creature’s body entirely concealed beneath hissing rubber pipes and metal plating.

  He can’t tell what they’re talking about, but he does hear her mention a name.

  Edoric Vanth.

  Across the city, the spy waits.

  Too many days have gone by since that visit to the shrine. Hot summer days, sticky and bright, the nights so fleeting they seem to slip from dusk to dawn without any true darkness. And by day, the spy is Alic, candidate for the Industrial Liberals, so he canvasses and campaigns and meets with people across the New City. Listens to them, reassures them of their bright, hopeful future in Guerdon, promises them that they will prosper. Allays their fears of war, while every night the spy creeps out onto the roof of Jaleh’s house and looks out to sea.

  Before the attack on Severast, the sky boiled, and there were terrible divine shapes in those angry clouds. Before the attack on Severast, the sea turned to glass. Before the attack on Severast, there were many signs and portents. Statues walked or wept. God-touched lunatics roamed the streets, shrieking about the wrath of the gods. Gold coins became sharp as knives when touched, and the alleys of the market ran with blood. There were sainted assassins on the streets, too, sent by the Fate Spider of Ishmere. They murdered the Kraken-saints of Severast, so they could not take on their war-forms and wrestle for control of the sea. Murdered the Spider-priests in the temples, calling them schismatics and heretics, until the shadows ate them. There were many omens before the gods came.

  In Guerdon, the sky is cloudless. The sea that laps the Wash’s shores is polluted, garbage-bobbed, but it’s seawater.

  There are signs and portents, but none are the ones he looks for. The city becomes restless, feverish in the summer heat. More saints of the Kept Gods appear. Crowds gather on Holyhill, looking for a glimpse of their new king, praying to the old gods of the city, and they are rewarded with minor, spasmodic miracles. Astounding, to the folk of Guerdon who have not seen significant divine intervention in two hundred years. The ambassador from Haith has been murdered, and the two governments trade angry letters. Haithi troops cross the border, encamp just outside the city, but there’s no fighting, just posturing and flag-waving.

  Days have passed, and there is no sign of the invasion. The Grand Retort, with its fearsome weapon, slumbers in its dock.

  Alic laughs, slaps people on the back, hosts meetings in the IndLib hall, smiles. Alic, the bastard, is happy. He spends IndLib money on healing-salve for Emlin’s wounds. Meets with Eladora, with Ogilvy, with other new friends.

  The spy cannot find the patience that has defined him for so long.

  Days have passed, and the wounds on Emlin’s face reopen every night.

  Terevant waits in the tavern, out of Shana’s line of sight.

  It’s clear that she’s not who she claimed to be on the train from Grena, that she’s not the sheltered daughter of some prosperous merchant. If there ever was any truth to that tale, then the father must have gone bankrupt long ago and his daughter learned to survive on the streets. She haggles with the two men, pleads with them, but whatever she’s selling the armoured man isn’t buying it. After a few minutes, he rises–a puff of steam jetting from his suit–and stomps off. Despite his bulk, the crowd makes space for him.

  Whoever the armoured figure is, he’s respected in the Wash. The other man follows; so does a brutish Gullhead bodyguard stationed at the entrance of the tavern. Terevant wonders what Shana has that could interest such a creature.

  Shana tries to slip off through a side door. Terevant hastily drops a few coins on the bar and follows her. She hurries through the streets, head down, jumpy as an alley cat.

  He steps up behind her.

  “Shana?”

  She tries to bolt, but he shouts, “I just want to talk,” and a spasm runs through her, driving her to her knees. Her face contorts. For a moment, it takes on an expression that reminds him eerily of his own mother. She touched the sword, he remembers. All the souls of the Enshrined Erevesics, briefly intermingling with hers before rejecting her as an unsuitable host.

  She rises, and stands there waiting for him, like she’s rooted to the ground.

  Shana takes him back to her bedsit. The room’s tiny, with only a single chair next to the bed. She sinks into it and draws her shawl around herself. She won’t look directly at Terevant; she addresses her account to a spot on the floor.

  He stands rather than sit on the bed. He draws the ragged curtain, just in case anyone might spot him from the street.

  She speaks like she’s exhausted from a long argument, too tired to fight or lie. “Lem hired us. He brought us on the train. He said to cause a scene when we got to Grena.”

  Terevant blinks. “Lemuel was on the train?”

  “He was wearing a false beard. Pretending to be my dad or something.”

  The chaperone. The one who’d called the guards, tried to get Terevant arrested.

  “Why?”

  Shana shrugs. “He didn’t tell us. Just said that we were to cause a fuss. He hired us for other stuff, too. Spying on people.”

  “That’s why you tried to take the sword?”

  “I didn’t know! I swear. I was going through your bag, I’ll admit that, but…” She looks up at him, and it’s not her behind those blue eyes. She speaks in a different tone, a different accent. “Claim thy sword, Erevesic. War is coming, and too long has it been since we have gone into battle.” She trails off, then whimpers and scrapes at her face with her nails. “They’re still there! Your ancestors, haunting me. I thought they’d gone, but you–you bring them back.”

  She looks at him. “Please,” she asks quietly, “go away.”

  “What else did Lemuel tell you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What happened to the other girl? Shara?” Terevant can barely remember her name, and can’t recall her face at all. He curses himself for not paying more attention.

  “She–we were at the Festival. And she saw the king, and recognised him. Oh, we thought it was so funny, that she’d dallied with the godsent king before he was crowned. We were laughing about it, and then Lemuel found us.

  “He took her away,” she says. “He’ll be back for me. I’ve got to get out of the city.” She’s trembling. Eyes like a trapped animal’s.

  Terevant rests his head against the wall. Lemuel’s cleaning up, erasing anything that might connect Berrick to the Bureau.

  “Please,” says Shana again, not looking at him, “go away. You’re Erevesic. You being here makes it worse.”

  He has to press her a little more.

  “What were you doing in the tavern? What does it have to do with Edoric Vanth?”

  “You weren’t the only man Lemuel had us spy on. The Third Secretary… he’d stay h
ere, some nights. And when he was asleep, I’d go through his bag. Take letters, papers, give them to Lem.” She touches her cheek; in the half-light, Terevant can’t be sure, but it looks bruised. “Sometimes, I’d give them to Lem. I kept some, hid them from him. I thought I could sell them to Dredger, buy passage out of the city.” A little half-smile crosses her lips. “Maybe see Old Haith again, before the end. But Dredger wouldn’t buy it. He said it was incomplete.”

  Pity wells up in Terevant. Shana was used just like he was–another of Lys’s pawns to be moved and discarded once they’d served some cryptic purpose. Unseen schemes have murdered his brother, taken the family sword, brought him to ruin. Everything’s turned to mist, all the fixed points of his universe have come unmoored. He doesn’t know who he is, or what he should do–but he can save Shana at least.

  “Here,” says Terevant, emptying his purse on the bedside table. “Take this. Go. Not to Haith, the war’s going there–run to the Archipelago or somewhere. Don’t tell anyone where you’ve gone.” She snatches the money from the table and bolts for the door–and then stops, frozen by some last echo of the Erevesic sword. She points to a drawer then vanishes, her feet pounding on the wooden stairs as she runs. Terevant waits until he hears the front door slam downstairs, then opens the drawer. Inside are papers. Some are diagrams of machinery, of alchemical engineering, and he feels dizzy with excitement–Vanth was looking for the god bombs. Other pages are covered in some thaumaturgical notation that reminds him of marginal notes in Duttin’s book.

  He can’t decipher them.

  But he’s sure Eladora Duttin can.

  CHAPTER 33

  Poor Alic looks exhausted, thinks Eladora. Or maybe thinner–like he’s fading away. The confident smile and boundless energy he demonstrated at the start of the campaign has diminished. He stares out of the carriage window at the city lights, too tired to read the documents on his lap.

  Eladora suppresses her own yawn, then gives in to it. A most unladylike gesture, but Alic doesn’t even notice. The raptequine pulling the cab hisses and yowls in answer.

  She thought she was tired before the Festival, but the last few days have shown her what war must be like. Taking over managing the New City campaign from Spyke was enough to fill her days to overflowing, a dozen candidates to meet and another two score clamouring for attention. Most of them off the list she provided–or rather Cari and Spar provided–and full of passion and concerns and ideas, and hungry for party cash. The money that Alic provided got added to another pile from Kelkin, but the safe at the party headquarters is almost bare again.

  The cab slows as it approaches her building. She knocks on the ceiling so the driver can hear her. “Just here, please.” To Alic, she says, “I’ll see you in the morning. Don’t walk home–take the cab. You need the rest, and the party will pay your fare.”

  “All right,” he says. “Goodnight, Miss Duttin.”

  She alights, grabs her satchel, and turns towards the archway leading to the stairwell—

  Yelps in alarm as she sees something moving in there. Miren, she thinks, imagining a pale face in the shadows. Her heart’s pounding, but there’s nothing there. Nothing that she can see. There are two flights of dark stairs up to the door of her flat, and the street’s deserted apart from the departing carriage.

  The carriage stops again, and Alic hops down. He slaps the back of the cab, and the cabbie drives off towards the busier environs of Venture Square.

  “Heard you shout,” says Alic. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s nothing.” She discovers she’s holding the broken hilt that Sinter gave her. She stares at it in confusion, then shoves it back in her bag.

  Alic peers into the dark archway. “Can’t be too careful, these days. Could be all sorts of thieves and spies lurking.” He shrugs. “I’ll walk you up.”

  “Thank you.”

  They climb the stairs together. Halfway up, Alic tenses. Pushes her back down a step, takes the lead. Walks soundlessly ahead of her.

  There, sitting on her doorstep, head in hands, is an unfamiliar figure. A beggar? Street-stained cloak–and a Haithi uniform.

  “Lieutenant Erevesic?” she says in confusion.

  “I can’t go back to the embassy,” Terevant insists, over and over when they get him into Eladora’s flat. “I don’t know what to do. Olthic…” Terevant can’t sit still. He moves from couch to chair, to pacing up and down, to the window, back to the couch. Alic busies himself in the kitchen, brewing coffee and getting food. She’s grateful for his discretion–Alic has clearly decided that this is none of his business, so he’s just making himself useful, bless him.

  Eladora watches Terevant warily. By rights, she should go to the watch. Go to Ramegos–or Kelkin. Sheltering a fugitive criminal from Haith could blow up into a huge scandal, and she can’t forget the impending election. She has no doubt that Kelkin has agents like Absalom Spyke who can make problems disappear.

  But she remembers sitting in a cold alleyway off Desiderata Street, after ancient horrors suddenly exploded out of the history books and destroyed her old life. She remembers wandering the city, alone and penniless, and how Kelkin and Jere Taphson took pity on her.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  Terevant’s account of his time in Guerdon is that of a man picking his way across a causeway of slippery stones over dark water. He hesitates, he backtracks, he lingers at one place or another because the way ahead is dangerous and he must gingerly test each possible foothold. She guesses that much of his hesitation is connected to Haith’s mysterious Bureau of spies. Figures rise out of the narrative and fall back into the shadows, their significance obscured. He talks about his walk in the Grena Valley, about the grave of the goddess there, about intrigue in the embassy, about Haithi internal politics between Crown and House and Bureau.

  He talks about Eskalind, which has little to do with recent events, but he still returns there. Eladora’s not familiar with the particular battle that Terevant fought in, but she’s heard of Eskalind. The peninsula is strategically valuable, so it’s been the site of innumerable clashes in the Godswar, changing hands over and over. The sands soaked in blood. The foundations of the world there torn up by miracles, leaving the place hellishly unstable.

  He doesn’t talk about his brother at all. He circles around the topic. Eladora recognises the habit–she and her mother never ever talked about how the rest of the Thay family were exterminated by Keeper saints. Some things are so vast and terrible they go unspoken, because afterwards, really, every conversation you have is about them to some degree.

  Start with what you know, Eladora tells herself. “The book, Sacred and Secular Architecture in the Ashen Period–where did you find it?”

  “A house on Gethis Row. Vanth led us there.”

  “After you resurrected him?”

  “It wasn’t him. He wasn’t on Vigil. Just a sort of echo of him. I don’t know how the necromancer did it.”

  Eladora makes a mental note to ask Ramegos about necromancy. “And Vanth was looking for, ah.” She hesitates herself. She’s sworn not to discuss the secret events of the Crisis. The bombs, though, are an open secret. Terevant passed through Grena. He saw what they can do–and something tells her she can trust Alic. “The god bombs.”

  Terevant nods.

  “Did you read the book?” she asks.

  “I glanced at it. Most of it didn’t seem relevant. Discussion of old buildings. Demons in the depths. Maps of the city. Lots of handwritten notes in the margins.”

  “Some of those notes,” Eladora admits, “were written by me. Last year, in the middle of the Crisis. I was looking for the hiding places of the Black Iron Gods–the raw materials the alchemists used to make those bombs. But I lost the book. It got left behind in a safe house belonging to Sinter.” She tries to think of how it might have ended up at Gethis Row. Sinter’s safe house was, she vaguely recalls, searched by the city watch in the weeks after the Crisis, while Sinter was missing. D
id Sinter spirit the book away before they found it, or did it end up in some watch evidence locker at Queen’s Point?

  “And there’s this,” says Terevant, producing a few loose sheets covered in notation. The glyphs are similar to those in other sorcery texts she’d studied. There’s a commentary in Khebeshi–Ramegos taught her that the best sorcery texts are written in the tongue of Khebesh. And diagrams, wiring charts, schematics.

  “Where’d you obtain this from?”

  “Someone who knew Edoric Vanth,” answers Terevant. “I can’t read it.”

  Alic settles on the couch next to her and reads over her shoulder. He points at one diagram. “Doesn’t look like any bomb I’ve ever seen.”

  “The god bombs are much simpler,” says Eladora. “Brutal even. This seems to be precision work.”

  “An aetheric engine. Some sort of industrial ward generator?”

  “Not a ward,” mutters Eladora, puzzling over the glyphs. “More… the inverse. A summoning circle. A very powerful one.” Parts of a great machine. She turns one page, finds an illustration of a glass tower unlike any she’s seen in Guerdon. Turns another, and is confronted with densely written Khebeshi text.

  “What does the Khebeshi say?” asks Alic.

  “I’m trying to work it out.” She translates it haltingly. “‘To ensure complete annihilation of the aetheric weave, it is necessary to achieve a local maxima of divine presence. A lesser concentration of teleological elements would result in only a partial erasure of the weave.’”

  “What in the heavens does that mean?” asks Terevant.

  Eladora recalls her own experiences, during the Crisis, when she was trapped in her grandfather’s tomb and her soul was exposed to the horrific attention of the gods. The Black Iron Gods, reaching for her from their iron prisons, dark tendrils stretching out across the city. The Kept Gods, though–they were inchoate. Everywhere and nowhere. A million little flickering candle flames, all across the land.