“Commander, down there lies a weapon that’s key to the city’s defence. There are two other weapons like it, and they’re about to be taken by our enemies. We need to stop them.”
Aldras slaps the side of the boat’s searchlight. “I can signal the mainland, but we’re not leaving.”
The boat lurches, pushing Eladora against the railing. Aldras catches her, his other hand going to the wheel.
She looks over the side, and the reflection of the fires is distorted. The ribbon of fire’s breaking into many smaller streamers, flowing away out to sea. The boat’s still turning, the engine labouring to hold her in position. The topmost parts of the wreck are suddenly visible through the water.
Cari joins them in the wheelhouse. “What’s happening?”
“We’re being dragged,” shouts Aldras.
“The water’s going away,” says Eladora, confused.
“Kraken.” Cari pulls her away from the railing. “It’s a fucking kraken, stealing the sea!”
“KRAKEN!” roars Aldras. The boat’s crew stir themselves, putting on protective gear, readying weapons.
There were four other boats out there, circling the wreck. Four shapes, outlined in flame. Four lights on the dark water.
Now, there are three.
Aldras doesn’t hesitate. He’s Mattaur-born, and although he left that land before it fell to Ishmere, he’s seen Kraken-saints before. He knows their miraculous powers. Long ago, the gods of Ishmere stole the seas; he has seen the way Kraken’s miracle can turn water to a substance like liquid glass that no ship can sail through, nor any man swim in. If his boat’s caught by this miracle, they’ll be trapped, unable to do anything except sit and wait for the unseen monster’s tentacles to rise.
He turns the boat towards Guerdon, opens the throttle. The engines roar as the gunboat struggles to break free of the current, and then they’re moving quickly, plunging forward towards the distant city lights. Eladora falls to the floor, unbalanced by the rolling motion of the deck. Cari maintains her balance, knife in hand, watching for danger. Of the three, she’s the only one who’s travelled beyond Guerdon; she spent half her life on ships
There’s three lights behind them, and they’re not moving. The sea around Hark has turned to glass.
Two lights, and they’re racing for the safety of the city, its inner harbour. Spray from the bow splashes over them. The engine screams.
They pass the Bell Rock. Pass Shrike Island.
One light left astern, and they’re halfway there.
Then none behind them, except for the burning line of Hark on the horizon. Guerdon swells ahead of them–they can see the harbour clearly now, the New City on one side and Queen’s Point on the other. Aldras frantically flashes the signal light, beating out a warning to anyone who’s watching. Sensing its prey escaping, the kraken pursues, spitting miracles ahead of them. Glassy stains like oil-slicks appear in their path, and Aldras must weave a path between them.
“Hold fast,” shouts Aldras. Silkpurse scrambles forward to Eladora’s side. The alchemical engines belch smoke and scream as they’re pressed past the point of endurance. Noxious gas hisses from some overpressured valve.
A tentacle swipes out of the water, brushing almost gently over the boat. It drips with water turned razor-sharp. Eladora winces as one droplet lands on her thigh, slicing through her dress and her skin like a knife. Silkpurse shelters her, letting her back be flayed by the passage of the tentacle.
Aldras roars in pain, falling back. His mask protected him from the worst of the saint’s assault, but he’s still hurt. His arms and back are covered in welts. He’s holding one hand to a wound on his neck, and blood wells from between his fingers.
Cari jumps forward, grabs the wheel, while Eladora wriggles from under Silkpurse and helps treat Aldras’ injuries, wishing in that moment that she could call up the healing gifts of the Kept Gods again. She can’t bring herself to pray, and the gods aren’t so close to her that she can draw on their power without intervention on their part.
The kraken’s right behind them now–more tentacles rip at the boat’s stern, trying to disable their engine. For a moment, Eladora sees a huge eye, bloodshot and watery-green, peering at her from the churning waters.
Some naval gun emplacement on the shore has seen their signal, their plight. Shots fall into the water nearby, sending spouts of water leaping high into the air or cracking patches of glass. The kraken writhes, then dives, burrowing into the murk of the sea-bed for safety. From its hiding place, it spits a final, desperate miracle.
A ripple of magic runs through the sea, and all the waters along the shore turn to glass. A scum of razors, a foam of frozen blades. From the cape of the New City to Queen’s Point, the city’s edge is abruptly rimed with glass. Liquid glass breaks like a wave, sends a lethal spray over the city’s jetties and docks. They’re cut off from landing. Thirty feet from shore, an impassable barrier of knives.
Carillon prays, and the New City quakes. One of the unlikely spires that towers over the city lurches, half toppling so it overhangs the harbour. Chunks of miracle-conjured stone fall, and where they land, the glass turns back to water.
Carillon aims the boat for the narrow gap opened in the glass and brings them home.
CHAPTER 44
They land at a jetty. The New City rises above them, a sheer cliff of unlikely architecture. This was the edge of the Gutter Miracle, the last moments of Spar’s brief divinity, when he spent the accumulated power of the Black Iron Gods profligately. Fractal shapes frozen in stone, great plazas that end in abrupt cliffs, towers like fingers on the hand of a petrified giant, all growing from the same root structure. A few faces look down at them from balconies and walkways on higher levels, but the streets are unusually empty. Many of the inhabitants of the New City came to Guerdon from lands conquered by Ishmere, from Mattaur and Severest. They’ve seen the gods of Ishmere march to war before. They know what’s coming, so they’ve taken shelter. Only fools and saints would stand openly against the gods in their wrath.
It’s a struggle to climb out of the boat; the water level in the harbour is unnaturally low and they have to climb up a weed-tangled ladder at the side of the jetty. The falling seas have exposed discoloured walls swarming with shellfish and alchemical runoff. Seabirds flock to this sudden bounty, cawing and shrieking. Eladora catches fragments of a prayer to Cloud Mother in the calls of the gulls.
The gods are coming. None of them are safe here.
“Come on.” Cari leads Eladora and Silkpurse across the quayside towards the seawall. Even after months of study, Eladora’s grasp of New City geography is hazy, so it takes her a moment to realise they’ve landed near Sevenshell Street. Cari’s old house is several levels up, but only one street over.
“Wait,” shouts Aldras, scrambing out of the boat and hurrying after them. “You have to come with us to Queen’s Point. You’re still in custody.”
“Sure,” says Cari. “Come and arrest me.”
She touches the stone of the seawall, and it tears like wet paper, rolling back and ripping until it’s a doorway. Silkpurse and Eladora follow her through. Eladora gives an apologetic wave as the portal closes behind them.
The tunnel Cari opened leads to a stairwell. Cari looks at the narrow spiral staircase ascending into the darkness. “Fuck that,” she says. “Let’s talk here.” She sits down on the bottom step, resting her head against the stone wall.
“Hey,” she says to the stone. “I’m back.”
She seems stronger already, drawing vitality from the New City.
From all around them, Eladora can hear a sound like surging water. She doesn’t know if it’s the sound of the city streets far above her, or the sea draining from deep tunnels, or some tremendous stone heart beating in a distant chamber.
“Water level’s dropping. The whole harbour’s draining.” Cari sounds distracted, like she’s only half listening. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck,” she mutters to herself.
�
�What’s happening out there?” Eladora’s own fears conjure a litany of horrors.
“Oh, fuck.”
The streets of the Wash seem deserted this night. Still, whoever’s watching from spy holes or from the upper levels of the tenements that slump over the street must think them a strange couple indeed. The dead man and the sorceress hurry along the path, both carrying heavy burdens. The Erevesic sword strapped to Yoras’ back seems to squirm and writhe, digging into his spine, his ribcage.
Ramegos huffs and puffs as she carries her bag and her heavy ledger of sorceries. Yoras offered to carry one or the other, but she refused. “We’ll be parting ways soon enough,” she said, “soon as we get to the Dowager Gate, I’ll be going west and you north.” North, to the Haithi camp. West to… west, away from the Ishmere invasion fleet out there, in the conquered sea. Away from the wrathful gods.
A siren wails mournfully somewhere up on Castle Hill, signalling curfew.
The trains aren’t running. There isn’t a carriage to be had in the city. The streets are deserted, in anticipation of the storm.
The easiest route to the Dowager Gate would be to keep going through the Wash until they cross over Mercy Street, then follow that boulevard north under the viaducts, but Mercy Street and Venture Square have become armed camps in anticipation of attack, and neither Ramegos nor Yoras can afford to be stopped and questioned. Therefore, they circle around the foot of Castle Hill. The rocky cliffside has, over the centuries, been turned into a vertical city, a district of stairs and ledges under the shadow of the parliament building. It’s easy to move unseen there.
Ramegos–the only living thing, it seems, in all the Wash–mutters instructions to Yoras between breaths, telling him what to say when he gets to the camp. It’s clear to him that there’s some intricate web of intrigues and bargains involved, but making sense of it is beyond him. He just listens while he helps the older woman up the steep steps that rise from the Wash to the rocky heights of Castle Hill.
“When you get there, don’t stop. Don’t let anyone take that sword off you, until you find the heir and put it right in his hand. The phylactery will know its own. Watch for…” Ramegos clicks her tongue, then shakes her head, deciding not to put that thought into words. “I never meant any of them ill. There was never supposed to be any bloodshed on my account.” She makes a curious sign with her hand, and Yoras suspects that there’s some sorcerous taboo involved. Her worry about bloodshed is more that simple guilt.
He doubts whoever she conspired with feels the same. The dead do not feel as the living do. In Haith, life is a brief, wild fling with unreason and passion. The Empire is founded on cold obedience to tradition and iron-boned discipline.
There are a great many steps, and they’re only halfway up Castle Hill when Ramegos calls a halt. She reaches inside her coat, pulls out her chain of gods, examines it.
“Well, then.” She turns and faces south.
Gunfire rings out over the city. It’s directed away from them, out to sea. Flashes from Castle Hill, from directly above them. Then answering fire from Queen’s Point, from the docks. A massive, earth-shaking fusillade–and the earth keeps shaking even after the guns of Guerdon fall silent.
There’s a rushing, rumbling noise, bigger than the sky. So wide it cannot be distinguished from its echoes. The whole horizon’s screaming.
Yoras can see in the dark. The living cannot. All they know is that terrible noise.
He can see the waters draining from the harbour. The white line of the surf retreating. The masts of the docked ships toppling out of sight behind the row of warehouses like felled trees. Huge freighters settling into the mud as the sea withdraws. All across the bay, the water’s going away.
A dark wall, terrible and vast, rises up in the bay. A tidal wave, taller than the towers.
Long ago, Ishmere conquered the seas.
Now, the sea goes to war for the Sacred Realm.
As the wave rolls over Shrike Island, it does not break. Instead, it splits, and splits again and again. Not one wave but a dozen, a dozen arms of of water, immense, Kraken-shaped. Riding atop each of the twelve arms is a huge, grotesque warship. Misshapen things laden with shrines and relics, vessels that could never sail in mortal seas. Bourne by krakens across the endless ocean from Ishmere.
The first tentacle breaks over the harbour, sending a cascade of razor-water flooding over the quayside. Another two, three, maybe more, wrap around Queen’s Point. When the tentacles collapse, they leave behind the warships they carried. There’s a ship left stranded high atop the fortress, toppled over on some upper courtyard.
Another wave-tentacle stretches out of the invading ocean. It reaches over the docks, over the Wash, arching directly above Yoras’ skull. He glimpses the keel of the Ishmere warship as it rides the wave, hears the battle-cries of the saints and monsters on board. The tentacle can stretch just far enough to reach the edge of the plateau of Castle Hill, and the warship grinds to rest perched atop the precipice.
Muddy water crashes down onto them. Yoras flings Ramegos into an alcove. The razor-edged water tears through his uniform and scores his bones with deep scratches, but he can endure the assault infinitely better than her mortal flesh. The stairs become a waterfall.
Ramegos is shouting something–a spell–but even though her face is only inches away from his skull, he can’t hear her. The world is shattered by six more cataclysms, six more waves crashing to earth. And where each wave lands, it leaves behind a warship crewed by god-touched monsters and fanatic priests.
“We have to get below,” shouts Ramegos. “The tunnels! The tunnels!”
A shrieking storm blows in with impossible speed, the clouds boiling out of the night. There are war-saints in the sky.
The feeble gods of Guerdon could only muster a single thunderbolt. The gods of Ishmere have the blessing of High Umur, and he commands the lightning-sheaf. The night sky explodes into a hundred false dawns as the gods smite gun emplacements and fortifications across the city. One bolt strikes the stairs, and the impact sends him tumbling over the edge.
He splashes into the floodwaters, and the current catches him. The streets of the Wash have become fast-flowing rivers, rushing blindly down towards the sea. He’s not the only corpse carried by these waters. The dead are all around him, dancing with him as he’s carried off into the maelstrom that was Guerdon.
Carillon presses her hand to the stone wall–more for support than for any magical connection to Spar, guesses Eladora. Her cousin’s voice shakes as she relays what the visions tell her.
“A dozen Ishmeric ships. This… tidal wave tentacle thing carried them inland, way past the shore. They’ve landed all over the Wash. Castle Hill, too. Saints and… fuck. The watch is fucked. Lots of them near Queen’s Point, more down the docks. The camp down in Venture Square got washed away. It looks like there’s fighting near the Keeper Churches, and in Glimmerside.”
“They’re going after temples,” says Eladora, recalling briefings from Admiral Vermeil. In other lands conquered in the Godswar, the temples and sanctums and saints of the enemy are the first targets for any attacker. Anything that denies the gods’ ability to coalesce.
She wonders if the Admiral’s alive or dead. The guns up by parliament have gone silent. She remembers the spider-monster made from Emlin invading the aethergraph network, and there was an aethergraph in the war office in parliament, too. The spider could have bypassed parliament’s outdated wards, jumped from Hark to the heart of government in a flash. For all Eladora knows, Kelkin and Vermeil and the rest of the emergency committee are all dead, and the city’s leaderless.
Cari wrenches her attention away from the visions. “You’ve got to run, El. I can’t leave, but you can. Get out of the city.”
Everyone keeps telling her to run. Ramegos, Rat and now Cari. Telling her to escape, to look away from the danger. She’s rejected her own proffered sainthood, and she’s not a master sorcerer. She’s not a soldier or a general or a sain
t or a spy. What role is left to her to play in this?
She shakes her head, unsure of what the answer might be.
“Do we hide? Go deep?” Silkpurse asks, burying her face in her hands at the thought. “That’s what Rat’s planning, I think. There are places under the city where even the gods of Ishmere won’t find us.”
“Fuck that,” says Cari. “We need to stop the invasion. It’s going to be a fucking slaughter. Again. We need weapons. There’s the one on Kestrel, but that’s sunk. There are two more buried down with the alchemical shit, and now Rat’s complaining about Haithi soldiers in his shitty ghoul tunnels.”
Eladora nearly adds Ramegos found the bombs and sold their location to the Haithi, but she holds her tongue. Carillon doesn’t need to know that, and might react by stabbing someone.
Cari snaps her fingers. “That’s fucking it. Haith’s after the bombs. They’re trying to break open the vault, but they’ve got to be careful ’cos of all the alchemical stuff down there. I can just shape the stone. We get in quick, steal ’em first, use them. Boom.”
“No,” says Eladora quietly.
“No what?” snaps Cari. She hops up. “What’s the alternative? If you want to stay, you fight, right? Or are you going to run back to bloody Effro Kelkin? Write reports while the navy tries to fight ’em off? Because I fucking know what he’ll say, El–they’ll write off the New City, and the Wash, and half the low city. Like they did before. They’ll defend the rich folk and tell the rest to go hang. I fucking know, El, all right? I’ve been protecting the New City single-handed for months!”
“Cari, calm d-down.” Eladora says. “I need to think.”
“We don’t have time. We have to get those bombs.”
“Those weapons are unfinished. They’re just broken bells.”
“The alchemists turned the Tower of Law bell into a weapon in a week!” spits Cari. She prowls up and down the landing, the knife she stole in her hand. Unable to sit still, consumed by the need to act.
The Shadow Saint Page 48