“Targeting. It’s a targeting problem. How to strike a god.”
Terevant laughs hollowly. “I saw gods at Eskalind. They were… really big. Not hard to miss.”
“No,” says Alic thoughtfully. “It would be a problem. If Fate Spider is all secrets, he’s here in this room. If Lion Queen is war, then she’s on every battlefield. You encountered manifestations of the gods. Saints or avatars, pieces of the divine, not the whole of the god.”
“Grena must have been an ideal test case,” says Eladora. “The goddess they killed was the goddess of the valley–a localised deity–and she was manifesting through a saint at a time of impact. Her whole essence was concentrated to a single point.”
“So the bombs on their own aren’t enough?” asks Terevant. “Haith would need something else to kill an Ishmeric god?”
“Possibly. It would depend on circumstances. Without a-a ‘local maxima of divine presence’–maybe a temple full of saints and fervent worshippers, where the god’s close at hand. Or you’d need to wait for the god to manifest fully, which would be…”
“Terrible.” Alic sounds broken. “It’s terrible to face a god.” He stands. “I should go.”
“Now?”
“I need to get back to Emlin,” he says quietly. He doesn’t sound like Alic at all for a moment, and then he’s back. “And anyway, Miss Duttin, all this sounds like something I’d be better off not knowing about.”
She walks Alic to the door. He whispers to her, out of earshot of Terevant. “If you want my advice, miss, you’ll bring him to Mr Kelkin right away. It sounds like he’s found out some secrets about the city’s defences, and you don’t want that falling into the hands of your enemies. He’s Haithi–and for all we know, he did kill his brother.”
She nods. “Thank you. Please, don’t mention this evening to anyone.”
“I can keep a secret,” Alic says. And then he’s gone, hurrying down the stairs. Shoulders bowed like he’s carrying the secret and it’s a heavy load to bear.
Eladora closes the door.
“Is there anything about the actual bombs in here?” asks Terevant, leafing through the Khebeshi papers. She can almost hear Kelkin snap it’s a matter of state security in her head.
“No. But there’s no order to these papers. Lots of missing sheets.”
“There’s something else,” says Terevant. “The house Vanth led us to–there was a woman there. About your age. She had powers of some sort–it was like she knew what was coming, or could see things.”
“Knives? Little scars on her face, like freckles? Immensely frustrating to deal with?”
“You know her?” Terevant’s eyes widen.
“She’s my cousin. Carillon Thay.”
“She stole more of the papers,” says Terevant. He pauses a heartbeat, then adds, “I think she killed Vanth.”
“Ah. That I can shed some light on.” She has to think for a moment to work out how long it’s been. It feels like months. “Just over three weeks ago, I met Carillon in the New City, and she warned me that unknown persons had, er, planted a body in her house. The ruffians attacked me, too.”
“Did you see them plant Vanth’s body?” Terevant asks morosely. He picks up his coffee cup and looks into it, as if checking the dregs for poison or doubting its existence. His capacity for trust has taken a pounding.
“No. Carillon has certain… spiritual gifts. She was, ah, integral to the Crisis last year, and it left her… changed.” Eladora pauses, mentally reviews what she was told. The inquest determined that Carillon was broken, her sainthood lost. That her amulet was magically inert, and that Spar was gone completely. That the Black Iron Gods were all destroyed. But who made that determination? Did they make a mistake, or did they lie to Eladora?
“I think,” says Eladora, “that we should talk to Cari.”
“She tried to stab me.”
“Yes, that does sound like her.”
The streets around Venture Square are crowded–a backwash of revellers from the Festival of Flowers, mummers who’ve hastily written or exhumed street-plays about the kings, hawkers and Hawkers. Children and drunkards climb on monuments to forgotten saints or great victories. Eladora steers them around the side of the square, avoiding the crowd near the Vulcan coffee shop. Even at this hour, it’ll be full of IndLibs, and she doesn’t want anyone she knows asking questions about Terevant.
The crowds thin out as they head towards the sea and the New City. Ahead is the half-demolished, half-erupted bulk of the Seamarket, where the Gutter Miracle began. Somewhere in that twisted mess of masonry and magic are the remains of Spar–and Professor Ongent, too.
People who associate with Carillon Thay end up changed. Or dead. Or both.
“I’m not quite sure how to find her. I roughly know how to get to where I last saw her, but she may have moved on.”
Terevant gives her a sidelong glance from the hood of his own cloak. It covers his uniform, barely, but it’s too small for his frame.
There’s something strange in the sky, black pillars of smoke rising from Holyhill, from the Wash, behind Castle Hill. Eladora stares at the smoke, wondering if there’s been an attack–and then the wind shifts, and the smell hits her. They’re cleaning out the corpse shafts. Beneath the churches of the Keepers is a network of deep wells that lead down to the ghoul tunnels. For hundreds of years, the church has given the dead of Guerdon to the corpse-eaters. Eladora remembers the funeral of a neighbour; once the ceremony was done and the mourners departed, a black-trimmed cart left the village church in Wheldacre and rattled down the road to Guerdon. No one thought it strange. After death, the body becomes property of the church. It was Eladora’s family who were seen as eccentric, with their Safidist insistence on burning the dead.
Now, wafts of greasy smoke billow from the corpse shafts. The Safidists are in the ascendance, and the holy fires will carry what remains of the soul’s spiritual energy, the residuum, up to the Kept Gods. The smell turns Eladora’s stomach.
Somewhere, in heaven, a dam is close to bursting.
She quickens her pace, and Terevant follows her down the warren of confused streets south of the former Seamarket, on the edge of the New City.
“We’re being followed,” he says after a few minutes. He takes her by the arm, leads her down an alleyway. Rats scurry away from them as they wade through drifts of trash, a humus of torn-down election posters and broken boxes. Shapes bound along the gutters overhead.
“Two of them,” says Terevant. “In grey robes. They’ve been following us since we left your place.”
“Students.” She recognises the grey robes. University students, a common sight on Guerdon’s streets. A common disguise for anyone who wants to walk unseen.
“Are they the ones who attacked you at Carillon’s house?”
Eladora tries to remember. It’s all a mess of gunfire and stabbings and botched spells, but she recalls her attackers then as burly, hard-faced. “I don’t think so.”
Terevant pulls her into another side street, picks up a rock from the mud. It’s pearly stone, a broken shard of the New City. Eladora dips into her pocket for her own pistol before remembering that she gave it to Alic. She finds the broken hilt of Aleena’s sword and hefts it. It’ll do in a pinch.
“Ready?” whispers Terevant.
Eladora stammers, then just nods.
“Now.”
He charges out of the alleyway, unhesitating, into the teeth of danger–then skids to a stop.
“What the hell?”
The street they just left has been transformed into a garden of flowers. It’s too dark to see the colours, but the perfume from the blooms is overwhelming, sweetness mixed with the roast-meat stink from the corpse shafts that drifts over the city. Every surface sprouts flowers, growing from the mud, from cracks in the walls, from trash, from window frames, even from the metal flanks of a half-barrel. Terevant turns slowly around, holding his rock.
There’s one patch of floral growt
h, in the heart of this sudden garden, where the flowers grow thickest, and beneath it is a ragged piece of grey cloth. A student’s robe.
A miracle.
This time, she’s the one who pulls Terevant away. Behind them, she hears the rustling of the flowers.
A prayer comes unbidden to her lips. Mother of Mercies, Mother of Saints.
Mother of Flowers.
Whatever it is, whatever this miracle, they can’t fight it with a rock.
Running now, through dangerous streets. Through what used to be part of the Alchemists’ Quarter, but is now the heart of the New City. Eladora looks for the tower where she met Carillon last time, but she can’t see it. She doesn’t know if she’s simply lost, or if the city’s geography shifts.
She glances behind. She can’t see any grey robes in the grey gloom, but there’s something there. She can feel it. A gathering presence, like a wave.
Terevant’s pulling her along, dragging her by the arm, but he doesn’t have a clue where he’s going. He plunges blindly through the city, into regions where the Gutter Miracle faltered. Where Spar’s vision of orderly streets and civic pride became blurred, mixed with his own thoughts and fears. Distorted buildings, shapes in stone that might be faces. A row of stone fingers rise from the street like bollards, carved so intricately Eladora can see the whorls of the fingerprints in the moonlight. Eladora stops to lean against one, to catch her breath. Sweat runs down and pools at the base of her back; the city presses close around her, hot and airless.
A house on one side of the street is slurred, the left-hand side perfectly shaped, the right-hand half an unformed mess of flowing stone, like the sculptor had lost interest in the piece.
And standing in that half-door is Carillon Thay.
“I know you.” Carillon’s eyes gleam in the darkness. “You’re the fucker who sent that zombie-thing after me.”
“Lieutenant Terevant, of the House Erevesic.” Terevant half bows, but he doesn’t take his eyes off her.
“Fuck it. Come in.” Cari turns her back on him and opens the working half of the door, inviting them into the half-house. Empty bottles clink underfoot as she closes the door after Eladora.
“I didn’t see you on your way up,” remarks Carillon.
“We were followed–a Keeper saint, I think.”
Cari concentrates. “No one nearby now. Guess you lost ’em. Or they’re hiding from me.”
“Carillon,” says Eladora, “do you know anything about the death of the Haithi ambassador? Or the theft of his sword?” It feels like asking an oracle for divinations, but in her mother’s stories prophets lived in caves or forests, and didn’t have so many knives close to hand.
“Who?”
“What do you know about Edoric Vanth? What were you doing on Gethis Row?” demands Terevant.
“Who’s asking, Eladora? You, or the bloody city watch and parliament and the Patros and Effro Kelkin and all?”
“Right now, just me.”
Cari rolls her eyes. She leads them into a kitchen, finds a bottle on a shelf. She takes a swallow, then offers it to Eladora. Eladora refuses; Terevant holds his rock in a vaguely threatening manner while still reaching over to take a drink.
Cari twitches her nose, and the rock leaps from Terevant’s hand, flying of its own accord across the room to merge with the stone wall. She keeps talking like the minor miracle didn’t happen. “Right. Edoric Vanth.” She takes a drink. “After the Crisis, every fucker was running around the New City trying to find the god bombs. The alchemists captured four of the Black Iron bells before… before it all went to shit. Beckanore Bell got used for the test run.” There isn’t any furniture in the unfinished room, so Eladora shuffles about, uncomfortably. Carillon leans against the wall; it reshapes itself subtly, the stone growing a lip for her to sit on.
“At Grena,” says Terevant. “I visited there. It was… strange.”
“Yeah, well, it was fucking apocalyptic here. The Ravellers were everywhere. Anyway, they got three other bells in the confusion. The Tower of Law, the Bell Rock out in the harbour, and the Holy Beggar. They got all of them back to the forges in the Alchemists’ Quarter and started the conversion process before—” She shrugs.
“Before the Miracle.” Eladora takes over. “The other Black Iron Gods, the ones still trapped in bell form, were destroyed when you transferred their power to Mr Idgeson. The three bells that were in the process of being converted to weapons–well, I know at least one survived and is usable as a god bomb.” The other two might have survived, too. Their stored power gone, but not their malice.
“That’s the Tower of Law bell,” says Cari. “They converted that as quick as they fucking could, because they knew they might have to use it on the city. Kill the Black Iron Gods and the Kept Gods, too.”
“The city watch recovered that bell from the rubble. What about the other two?” asks Eladora. Mentally, she tries to reconstruct the scene, to map the Alchemists’ Quarter to the New City. Damn it all, this is archaeology– why wasn’t she involved in this?
Cari swirls the liquor in the bottle. “Spar buried them deep. It’s hard for him to see them. From a divine perspective, they’re fucking awful to perceive. Like looking straight into the sun, if the sun were a black void of poison and death and screaming hatred.” She pauses for a moment, listening to a voice only she can hear. Shakes her head.
“So, like I was saying, afterwards every fucker was looking for the remaining potential bombs. City watch, obviously. Alchemists. That shit Dredger from down the Wash. Adventurers. And spies. Lots of spies.”
“Edoric Vanth,” says Eladora.
“Among others, yeah.” Cari takes a drink. “None of those fucks could be trusted. There’s too much shit down there. After his body got dumped in my old place, I backtraced him to that house on Gethis Row.”
Terevant spots something tucked in a corner of the room. A wooden crate, and a leather satchel on top of it, brimming with canisters and guns. “You’re the one who stole the weapons from that house.”
“A girl’s got to eat.” Cari gets up, moves to stand between Terevant and the crate, daring him to cross her. He doesn’t move, and she continues.
“There were maps upstairs, too, documents and stuff–I don’t know who made ’em, but they were good. Someone worked out where Spar put the bombs.”
“Where are they?” demands Terevant.
Cari glares at him. “Aren’t you listening? Fuck off, Haith’s not going to dig up all that alchemical shit again.” She waggles the empty bottle. “Look, El, I’m being responsible.”
Terevant probes the half-formed stone frame where there should be a window. “What happened to Vanth, zombie-Vanth I mean? I saw him chasing you.”
Cari shrugs. “He didn’t follow me into the New City. If he had…” She grinds the base of the bottle against the wall, like she’s crushing a bug.
“He’s still intact?”
“Was last time I saw him.”
Terevant drums his fingers on the stone. “I was told that you killed him. I think they wanted me to find his body, to make me believe you did it. To hide…” He trails off, his face ghastly pale. He pushes at the stone frame again, pressing at the cracks. “You’re a seer. Give me an oracle. Tell me, what happened to my brother?”
“The embassy,” says Eladora, “is too far from the New City, I fear.”
“Yeah,” says Cari. “Anything north of Castle Hill, I don’t have eyes on.”
“The Sword Erevesic–it was gone from the embassy.” Terevant’s shivering despite the summer heat. “Did you see who took it? Did they pass through your domain? Where is the sword now?”
“What’s it worth?”
“Money,” he says. “The Erevesic estates can pay.”
“You don’t have two coppers,” laughs Cari. “You’re not even worth robbing.”
“My money is in Haith.”
“And we’re not.”
“Can you find the sword, Carillon?”
asks Eladora, quietly.
Cari shrugs. “Maybe. If it’s in the New City, or close enough.”
“I know what you can give us,” says Eladora to Terevant. “The election. Expose the new king as a Haithi plant. We all know that’s what he is. Give us proof.”
Terevant rubs his wrists, his fingers probing at something beneath the skin. He stands up, shakes his head. “I can’t. I’m sorry, but I can’t. I took an oath to the Crown. I made a promise.”
“Well, then, fuck off.” Cari marches into the half-made hallway and flings open the front door. “Go on, I’m not—”
A gunshot. A crack in the night, a different sort of gunshot to any Eladora’s heard before. She freezes. Shards of stone and dust tumble through the air above her head. In that moment, she’s not sure if she’s been hit.
Terevant throws himself on top of her, tackling her to the ground. Another crack, and Terevant’s hit, his body suddenly crumpled, limp. Eladora feels the shock run through him, hears him grunt and gurgle in shock. Blood spurting over her, everywhere, a red flood. Running through her fingers.
“Sniper!” shouts Cari. “Fuck, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. He’s up there, four streets away. Shit.” Another shot rings out, but Cari’s ready for it. It hits her in the back, and the walls shake as they take the impact instead of her. Eladora hauls Terevant away from the door, blood trailing behind him. Cari slams the door.
She tries to remember what she learned about treating gunshot wounds. He can reanimate, Eladora tells herself as she tries to staunch the bleeding. Everything’s very distant, suddenly, like she’s watching it all from far away and far above.
“Spar,” prays Cari. The unmade half of the house shimmers, like it’s carved from ice that’s beginning to thaw.
From outside comes a voice that makes them both freeze.
“COME OUT, CHILD. IT’S TIME.” A voice of thunder and music and, divine glory, a sound that should come from no human throat, but one they both know so very well.
Silva Duttin.
The Shadow Saint Page 36