“Oh.” King Berrick Ultgard sounds disappointed. “I suppose that’s the way of things. Leap from the moving train, and you get an instant of freedom before you hit the ground. I hope it was worth it.” He takes a mouthful of wine, rolls around, swallows, sighs. “I am told that it’s necessary to maintain good relations with the Empire of Haith. That Guerdon’s parliament and the Church of the Keepers are agreed that you are to be given over into the custody of Haith, to, ah, Daerinth?”
“Prince Daerinth.”
“My royal cousin!” Berrick laughs mirthlessly. “What will he do to you, my friend?”
“I don’t know. He thinks I killed my brother. He ordered the guards to kill me, in the embassy. I suppose there’ll be a trial.” Another court martial, and this time, no Olthic to intervene. Terevant tries to recall the protocol. It’ll come before the Crown, he guesses. And with no other Erevesic heirs, the Crown will take command of the Erevesic estates and armies.
“I am also told that I can’t show you mercy or set you free.”
Told? “Things happen, whether you want them to happen or not.”
“It’s not much of a kingdom, I suppose.” He wanders over to the window and opens it, listens to the distant crowd chanting his name. “I don’t know what I expected. I thought nothing would come of it, when they sent me to Guerdon.”
The Bureau, guesses Terevant, but he doesn’t dare speak. The king’s already giving away far too much to any eavesdroppers.
Berrick takes the crown from his head, and dangles it out of the window as he ruffles his hair. “It’s something of a family tradition. They did the same with my grandfather, about forty years ago. Some other political strife when it might have been useful to bring back a king. But I thought it would end like that–bundled back home in the dead of night. Guests of the Crown, that’s what they call my family.”
“We each have our part to play.” Terevant remembers the train journey with Berrick. They were both pieces being shoved around a board, but at least Berrick knew then what he was, while Terevant had been unaware of his status. Now, he too knows.
Is it better to resign oneself to being a pawn, or try to play the game and lose? Is there honour in going unflinchingly to one’s fate? When he tried to join the Bureau, he tried to move against the rules, to jump to a square he wasn’t permitted to move to, and he failed–or so he’d thought. At Eskalind, he tried to play like Olthic and failed. And in between, he’d knocked himself off the board in a fit of self-pity.
“Are you sure you don’t want this last drink?” asks Berrick.
“I must decline.”
“We both have things we must do, I suppose.” Berrick raises his voice. “Guards! Take him away. Give him to Haith.”
Queen’s Point is in uproar when Eladora arrives. Battalions of city watch hurry past her, raptequine-drawn wagons race through the streets. They’re preparing for an attack on the city.
Crowds have gathered on the quayside, to watch the ships go out. Guerdon’s main naval strength is stationed down the coast at Maredon, but there are still half a dozen ships at Queen’s Point and they’re all going out. The crowds cheer as the newest warship in the fleet, the Grand Retort, is dragged out into the harbour by tugboats. She gleams in the afternoon sun like a new-polished sword. Alchemy-powered, birthed in the foundries and laboratories of Guerdon. Her hull’s marked with protective spell-wards and arcane dampeners; she bristles with guns to spit alchemical shells into the face of any god or monster who dares threaten the city. She cost a fortune to build; the yards that wrought her were once owned by Eladora’s family, before they were sold off to cover her grandfather’s mounting debts. Grand Retort is another monster made possible by Jermas Thay, like Carillon or Miren. Only Grand Retort wears its monstrous nature openly instead of cloaking it in flesh.
There, on her forward deck, ready to be launched, is the dark shape of a god bomb. Eladora feels ill at the sight of it. It’s horrible to look at, and even when she closes her eyes and looks away it’s still there, like a spiked stone pressing on her head. No one else in the crowd has the same reaction. None of them know the terrible power of that weapon.
Grand Retort turns her prow south, the steel ram cutting the oily waters of the harbour.
Eladora hurries into the fortress, and shows the letter–marked with Kelkin’s seal–to the officer at the desk in the main hall. Authorisation to requisition a launch to go to Hark Island. The clerk mutters to himself, fetches an officer who’s struggling into a heavy greatcoat, gas mask and sorcery-ward dangling from leather straps. She holds her breath for a moment, worried that her ruse has been discovered already, wondering if she’s forgotten some point of military protocol that gave her away. Then the officer bows, a grin breaking across his bearded face.
“Commander Aldras,” he says, waving a gloved hand. “Can you be ready in twenty minutes or so? And is it just yourself? We’re heavily loaded.”
“It’s just me,” says Eladora, “but I’ll be coming back with others.”
“I wouldn’t count on making the return today. It’s going to be rough.”
There’s hardly a cloud in the sky, and the air’s still, but she doesn’t have time to question Aldras. She just asks where the boat is.
“Dock Four,” he says, “do you know the way down?”
It’s a stone’s throw from Ramegos’ laboratory in the bowels of Queen’s Point. She’s been there a dozen times. Once more, she thinks, to say goodbye.
CHAPTER 38
The waiting room down the corridor from Ramegos’ office is empty; the desks in the outer office are abandoned and bare, boxes of papers stacked waiting to be brought to some archive. Eladora walks uncertainly down to the inner door. This corridor always reminded Eladora of walking down a dragon’s throat. The uneven stones of the arched ceiling, hot, foul-smelling exhausts from subterranean engines. At the end of the corridor was Ramegos’ office, where the sorceress served her mint tea, taught her magic, and gossiped about history. A little hedge-school, hidden in the depths of Guerdon’s fortress.
But Eladora never forgot that Ramegos was as dangerous as any dragon. Humans, Ramegos taught her, are ill suited to sorcery. Casting a spell means taking hold of the unseen aether and warping it by force of will, to command the raw stuff of gods and souls directly. Casting a spell is an act of hubris. It’s trespassing in the domain of the gods. There are precautions that can be employed–using a thaumaturgical fetch to take the brunt of the backlash, carefully constructing the spell so the excess energies cancel each other out, or casting along the grain of existing miracles, mimicking previous acts of gods.
Ramegos cautioned her against that last technique. Said that the weakness of Guerdon’s kept gods meant that their miracles were weak, so the aetheric field around the city was chaotic and mostly unformed, so there were no local currents or channels to exploit, no grain in the world to follow. Now, Eladora wonders if Ramegos was cautioning her against getting too close to the Kept Gods.
How much did Ramegos know? Was the older woman her friend, or her keeper? Has Eladora been punished, yet again, for putting her trust in someone older and wiser?
She pauses outside the door.
Ramegos warned her not to open it without permission–the sorceress uses potent spells to guard her sanctum. One of the first sorcerous incantations that Ramegos taught Eladora was the creation of wards to seal a door. Eladora’s wards might briefly stun a burglar; she’s quite sure Ramegos’ wards are strong enough to kill. There are other spells, too, far beyond Eladora’s ability. She’s spent what felt like hours studying in that office, only to find that mere minutes have passed outside.
She knocks. “Dr Ramegos?”
No answer.
“Doctor?” she calls again. Again, silence.
Is Ramegos gone already? Kelkin said she had suddenly resigned her post as the IndLibs’ occult adviser–has she also left Queen’s Point? She’d spoken about returning to Khebesh when her work in Guerdon was
done, but it seems odd for her to depart so suddenly. Odd and cruel.
Impulsively, Eladora grabs the handle and turns. The door opens, revealing an empty room, somehow much smaller than she remembers it. A typewriter and a chair on an otherwise bare desk. Everything’s gone–Ramegos’ books and curios, her thaumaturgical fetches, her records. The divine icons, strung on a cord, proclaiming that all faiths were one and nothing at the same time, just eddies in some aetheric current.
As if she was never here.
Eladora sighs. Tears burn her eyes, but she wipes them away. She doesn’t weep. She doesn’t have time. She needs to get down to the docks, get a boat to Hark Island.
She turns and hurries back through the maze of tunnels under Queen’s Point, conscious that the boat will depart soon. She files Ramegos away in the same part of her mind where she keeps Ongent and Miren, another foolish indulgence on her part. She wonders if she’ll have to put Kelkin under the same heading. She’s done her part–delivered him the New City, if the polling’s correct. Convinced him to stay out of any doomed alliance with the Keepers. But despite all that, they still don’t trust each other. Does he look at her and see her grandfather, or her mother? He didn’t listen when she told him that she believed Terevant Erevesic was innocent. Letting the Church hand him over to Haith was tantamount to murder.
There’s no air in these tunnels, and it’s hotter here than it was on the Festival field. The aetheric lights flicker, reacting to some magical discharge elsewhere in the fortress.
She’s taken a wrong turn, she realises. There should be stairs here, leading down to the docks. She should be able to smell the sea from here, smell rotting seaweed and engine oil and the stink of the city, but all she can smell is an antiseptic tang, some chemical cleaner. This part of the base is deserted, so there’s no one she can ask for directions. Her heart pounds; if the boat leaves without her, Cari and Alic will be stuck on Hark Island. They need her, and she’s lost in the cellars of Queen’s Point.
Backtrack. Take that turning instead. For an instant, as she comes around the corner, she glimpses a hunched shape hurrying ahead. A beggar in rags, carrying a lamp–and then it’s gone. The fumes are getting to her. She’s seeing things… The chemical smell is stronger down here, emanating from a door down the corridor, and she hears a familiar voice cursing in Khebeshi.
“Dr Ramegos?” She pushes open the door. It’s a morgue. A stack of empty coffins against one wall, the sealed kind they use for victims of alchemical attacks. Lying on a gurney is an oddly shaped corpse under a grey, moth-eaten sheet. Ramegos is on her hands and knees nearby, scrubbing the floor with a chemical-soaked rag like a washerwoman.
She looks up, scowling, then breaks into a smile when she sees Eladora.
“My dear! I didn’t think I’d see you before I left.”
“What are you doing?”
“Just a little spillage as I was packing.” Ramegos stands, carefully putting the rag down on a counter, wiping her hands with another cloth.
“You didn’t tell me you were leaving.”
“I’ve finished my work here, and I’m needed back home in Khebesh.”
“K-Kelkin still needs your advice.”
“I’m done here,” snaps Ramegos, defensively. Eladora can tell she’s had this argument with others recently. “I did everything I could, Eladora. But it’s not a Crisis. You all need to stop thinking that what happened was an isolated event, like the city could go back to what it was before. Like it was a storm that passed, and now it’s clear seas forever. This is the world now. All the gods are mad.” She sighs. “I can’t steer the city through the storm. All I could do was give Kelkin a fighting chance.”
“And that’s it? You vanish like a thief?”
Ramegos looks heartbroken. “It’s coming, Eladora. I’ve lingered here as long as I can, but I’m not getting caught up in the Godswar.” She pauses, then extends a hand to Eladora. “Neither should you. Come with me. Come to Khebesh. You’ll like it–the schools there put your university to shame.”
“I can’t.”
“El–they’re coming. Look.” Ramegos walks over to another table, where she’s got a shapeless bag. She produces her chain of god-tokens and holds it up, divinities clinking and clattering as it unrolls. Some of the tokens seem to move and change expression as they swing from the chain. Fate Spider’s legs twitch. Lion Queen roars. Saint Storm brandishes a sword. Holy Beggar lifts the lamp of truth. And the Mother of Flowers clasps her hands, cradles them as if they’re painful. “You can feel it directly, can’t you? The gods moving on the city. Eladora, there’s a reason your cousin fled Guerdon–she should have stayed away. There’s nothing more monstrous than the kindness of the gods. Come to Khebesh.”
Eladora fretfully toys with one of the holes in the sheet. “I need to go to Hark,” she says. “Carillon was arrested and brought there. And Alic—”
“Who’s that?” asks Ramegos, packing the chain of gods away again.
“He’s…” The scorched holes remind her of the little burn marks on Carillon’s face, the scars from when the Black Iron Gods first reached for her. Like tiny sparks scorched holes in the sheet.
“Don’t touch that,” snaps Ramegos. “The body–it’s tainted. Withering dust.”
There’s something else under the sheet. Not just a body.
“But he died in fire,” says Eladora, and she doesn’t know where the words come from.
Her hand twitches, and the sheet falls to the floor. The ruined body of Edoric Vanth stares back at her. The remains are more mangled than the last time she looked at the corpse. She remembers how the face and head were horribly burned. The gaping wound in the throat. Puckered wounds in the chest, stabbed and shot and burned. Those wounds she remembers from her glimpse of the corpse at Sevenshell Street. But now the rotting skin’s pocked and bleached by withering dust, exposing the crumbling bones. Scars and sutures where the necromancer cut deep to reach the periapts. Fresh cuts on his arms, glittering with shards of glass. A cracked rib protruding from his broken side.
His forearms have taken the brunt of the withering dust; all the flesh has sloughed off them, and one has broken off entirely, the dust leaving the bones of his arm weak as chalk. His other hand has been scorched by some arcane discharge, the flesh discoloured and iridescent. It’s as though the man’s body has suffered all the wounds the city could inflict on it.
Atop him, clasped in that spell-scorched hand, is the Erevesic sword. She recognises the sigil on the crossguard. Terevant has the same sign on his uniform, Olthic on his door.
“You took it.” Eladora stares at her mentor in horror. Another betrayal. She’s been taken for a fool again. Like Ongent. Like Miren. Like the gods. A memory that isn’t hers spills across her mind–her hands holding a burning sword, Vanth’s face vanishing in a burst of holy fire. Her mother killed him. “YOU TOOK IT,” she says again, and her voice is a thunderous choir. For a moment, the mortuary’s bathed in heavenly light that radiates from Eladora’s face.
Ramegos raises her hands, conjuring a defensive ward.
“I hoped it would be your mother who came for me, not you,” sighs Ramegos. “Or did you go to them?”
“I would never choose that,” Eladora says firmly, as much to herself as to Ramegos. “Sinter–he drew them on me. He used me to counter my mother’s sainthood.” She takes a deep breath, clears her mind. Recites a sorcerous incantation in her head. The pressure of the Kept Gods withdraws. A last echo of her mother, she hopes.
“You’ve been vulnerable ever since your grandfather’s ritual,” says Ramegos, concern in her voice warring with caution. She still has her spell to hand. “There are other things I can try—”
Eladora makes a dismissive gesture. “It doesn’t matter now. Why is the Erevesic sword here? Where are you taking it?”
Ramegos relaxes a little, dropping her gesture of warding. “Back home, like I said. To Khebesh. As to why… that’s a more complicated question.” She picks
up her heavy ledger, flips to one page–or, rather, the absence of a page. A whole page of records, torn out. Those records describe acts of sorcery, miracles, divine interventions, fluctuations in the aether.
“The god bomb.”
“Very good,” says Ramegos. “I was in Lyrix when it went off, on business for the masters of Khebesh. By the time I made it to Guerdon, the Crisis was already over. Spar had destroyed half the alchemists’ guild, including their laboratories. The guildmistress, Rosha, was dead. Most of the records relating to the creation of the weapons were lost, too–and Carillon had drained the power of the Black Iron Gods from the intact bells.
“Kelkin asked me to look into the remaining weapons. We salvaged one in the first week, but the other two bells are lost to us, buried deep under the New City. We worked out where, but we couldn’t get to them–not without pissing off the ghouls and causing more chaos in Guerdon.
“One bomb wasn’t enough. Rosha knew that–with only a few Black Iron bells to turn into bombs, she was looking for ways to make them count. All lost with her.”
“You sound regretful,” says Eladora, suspiciously.
“She was a monster,” says Ramegos, “by any standard. But also a genius.” She points to the Erevesic sword, careful not to touch it. “The masters wanted me to recover a god bomb. I couldn’t do that–but then, I thought about the Haithi phylacteries. They’re like the Black Iron Gods. Both repositories for souls, both physical structures. But you need the blessing of the Haithi death-god to make a phylactery.”
“You cut a deal with Haith,” says Eladora, “to get the Erevesic sword.” The sword quivers. Something stirs beneath the steel of the blade.
“Any phylactery would work. But the phylacteries and the Haithi Great Houses are one and the same, and the Houses control the army–if they knew that the Crown was selling their aristocracy to convert them into weapons, there’d be a civil war. Daerinth arranged it.” Ramegos brushes her hands. “I’m not proud of what’s happened, child. This is bloody work, and I’ll be damned for it. But it’s that or war without end.”
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