“I didn’t kill him. I don’t know how you did it, but—”
Daerinth scoffs. “More lies. You stabbed him.”
“You all fought at my brother’s side,” says Terevant, raising his voice. “You knew his prowess as a swordsman. He was peerless with an ordinary blade–you think I alone could have beaten him when he held the Erevesic sword?”
One of the embassy troops swivels his skull to look at Daerinth. Perhaps we should all return to the camp, your grace.
“There is no time for that. We are too close. On the other side of this wall are the remains of the last two god-bane weapons. The Crown has commanded me to obtain them. The Crown commands me.”
“He knows the weapons are there,” shouts Terevant, “because he sold the Erevesic sword to find this place!”
“That is a lie. The Crown would never—”
“Dr Ramegos, come forward!”
“Ah, hell.” The werelight flares into existence. Ramegos advances cautiously, emerging from the ghouls’ hiding place and picking her way across the wreckage. Daerinth stares in horror as she approaches; Ramegos gives him an awkward nod of greeting. “It’s true. There was a deal. A phylactery for the location of the bombs, the knowledge to use them. I can’t speak to what happened in the embassy, but I had the sword.”
She stands in the middle of the no man’s land between the ghouls and the dead, the pale conjured light falling around her, making her look like some accusing spectre.
“What does it matter!?” Daerinth shrieks. “Haith is in peril! After Guerdon falls, we are next! The Crown needs those weapons! Bring down the wall!”
The Crown troops push against the unyielding line of House Erevesic, and are forced back. Daerinth tries to reach to the Royal Engineers stationed by the wall, pushing through the host of the dead, but Rabendath steps forward and gently restrains the prince. We shall return to the camp, your grace—
And then everything goes to hell.
Rat sees it first–or senses it first. The big ghoul starts moving, an instant before it all begins. Scrambling up a scree of broken metal, his hot breath steaming in the chill of the cavern, wading through the wreckage. Claws outstretched, maw drooling. But he’s too far away.
Ramegos glances back, alarmed by the charging ghoul. The bristle of rifles from the Haithi ranks.
For an instant, there’s a shard of steel in the air next to Terevant. A spike of bright metal, sliding out of nowhere, materialising impossibly. Then there’s a man holding it, dressed in rags, young and pale, dark tangled hair and beard, his dirt-streaked hand clasping the handle of the knife. Moving like a dancer, always in motion, stepping from one place to another without passing through the intervening space.
From beyond the curtain wall, Terevant hears a distant grinding noise, some great mass of metal shifting against stone.
The knife blade disappears like a conjuring trick, reappears in Ramegos’ chest, plunging deep into her ribcage. A spell dies unspoken on her lips, and she begins to fall.
The assassin lets go of the knife handle with smooth grace, whirling on past Ramegos. He falls apart as he moves, dissolving into a spinning cloud of rags and tatters and bloody shreds. Rat reaches the assassin an instant after he vanishes, the ghoul’s massive claws closing on empty air. The name “MIREN” bursts from Terevant’s throat, leaving a bitter aftertaste of frustration and hatred.
Terevant catches Ramegos before she hits the ground. Her blood-flecked lips mutter the same word, the elder ghoul’s anger spilling out through every living mouth within range. The sorceress is bird-light, hollow-boned. He’s shocked by the heat of her life as it floods over his hand in a wet rush. He tries to staunch the bleeding, but he’s not sure how. If a soldier under his command was this badly hurt, he’d let the warrior die, start their eternal vigil. Abandon the flesh.
Rat’s roaring in anger. Erevesic soldiers rush forwards, swords in hand, forming a defensive line in front of Terevant. Swords ready, threatening Rat. The elder ghoul snorts and snarls; more ghouls push forward.
Ramegos clutches at him, trying to tell him something. He catches the words “Black Iron” and what might be “saint” or “sacrifice”, but nothing intelligible.
She’s dying. Think. She’s a sorceress. The periapts under his skin are necromantic talismans, blessed by Death to pin the soul in place, anchor it to the mortal world. He has no idea if it’ll work, but he grabs her right hand, her sharp-nailed fingers, and presses them to his wrist. Pushing against his skin so she can feel the iron lump of the periapt. Blood gurgles in her throat; her lung’s been pierced, but she manages to dig her nails into his wrist, and arcane energy floods through her into him, like millions of tiny bubbles rushing through his veins. The periapt grows blisteringly hot underneath his skin–she’s doing something with it. Using him like a drowning woman would cling to flotsam.
Ramegos grabs his face with one hand, pushes at him. Turning his head so he looks across the cavern towards that curtain wall.
There, beyond the Vigilant, beyond Daerinth–the engineers. The military sappers brought down from Haith. There’s a brief flicker of a deeper shadow there, the same pale boy who stabbed Ramegos. He’s crossed the cavern in a heartbeat, teleported from the middle of the vast room to its edge.
A match flares in his hand. The sappers brought a blasting charge.
Stabbing Ramegos was a distraction, to draw attention away from that curtain wall for a moment so he could—
The wall explodes. The white soul-stone of the New City cracks and collapses, pearly shards falling like an iceberg calving. A billowing cloud of sparking dust rushes outwards, shot through with flying debris that rains down throughout the cave. He can hear shouts, screams of pain from the living engineers near the blast. Others are dead. Daerinth lies broken and bleeding.
For an instant, he can can see into another cavern beyond. It’s more crowded than this wasteland of broken metal, the machinery in there more intact. A sarcophagus for all the evils of Guerdon.
He sees, in that instant, twin massive containment vessels. Hatred seethes in them, a divine emotion so intense he cannot help but share in the feeling when he looks at them. The things held in those vessels are the shattered remains of the Black Iron Gods. For three centuries, the Keepers kept them trapped in bells as mindless, truncated deities; now, they’re unfinished god bombs. No longer mindless, but incapable of any thought but destruction. He glimpses other shapes in that moment, too. Wax-encrusted vats where still-living things crawl. A massive, blocky machine, adorned with a woman’s face in steel. Aetheric engines, still crackling with weird sorcery. Things he cannot name, things that slither and scream.
The shockwave from the explosion washes over him, and he can hear the unholy roaring of the things kept behind that wall. The blast has brought down the wall and unleashed monstrosities. Malformed, misshapen, tortured horrors, somehow made all the worse by their own suffering.
He looks into an alchemical hell. All the worst things in the world, distilled and transmuted into metal and glass.
But he sees it only for an instant.
Impossibly, the debris flying through the air halts. Reverses. The fallen shards of wall rise up. New stone, pristine as alabaster, gleaming with its own divine light, flows to fill the cracks. The sarcophagus is resealed once more. All those alchemical monsters and broken gods are locked away again.
Across the cavern, Miren howls a wordless cry of frustration and vanishes.
Across the cavern, Carillon Thay, shaken by the effort of her miracle, replies: “Fuck you.”
CHAPTER 46
Eladora’s guided through the New City streets more by sound than anything else. As long as she’s heading towards the Duchess Viaduct, she’s going in roughly the right direction, and there are artillery pieces on the Viaduct. So, keep walking towards the gunfire. She learns to distinguish the barking cry of one cannon from another, to tell the distant roar of the big guns on Queen’s Points from the staccato thunder
of smaller howitzers along the docks.
The alchemical hailstorm of the guns is answered with divine wrath. Smoke Painter draws purple sigils of glowing fog in the night sky–look at one and go mad. High Umur hurls lightning. Krakens in the shallows hoot and squirt jets of razor-water far inland, directing the silvery stream with gesturing tentacles. The waterspouts are liquid spears, impaling and slicing.
Streams of people stumble out of the Wash and Glimmerside and the market district, taking shelter in the labyrinthine cellars and ghoul tunnels of the New City. It’s a good plan–the New City is a blessing in stone. Its bones are divine and unyielding, and there’s some lingering sanctity about it that guards against hostile miracles. It’s not safe. Nowhere in Guerdon is safe, now the mad gods are here. But it’s safer than the Wash.
She can see parliament atop Castle Hill, across the Wash. A brisk twenty-minute stroll, yesterday. An impossibly perilous journey tonight. She shivers, still soaked and barefoot.
A masked city watch guard gestures at her to join the throng seeking shelter.
She shakes her head, asks him where the nearest watch station is. He can’t hear her over the din at first. He has to remove his mask and let her shout directly into his ear to understand her–he’s terribly young, terribly scared beneath it.
“Where’s the nearest watch station?” she asks, holding up her semi-sodden letter from Kelkin.
“Venture Square, but–all dead!”
“I need an aethergraph!”
The next closest station, she learns, is on the western slopes of Holyhill, but the fighting is too thick there for her risk it. She follows the arc of the New City around, darting from alleyway to alleyway, shelter to shelter. She passes a few more crowds taking shelter, but soon the streets empty out and she’s all alone.
Nearby, gunfire, running feet. The scream of a flash-ghost detonation. The lumbering tread of war-saints, advancing up the slopes. The carnage is all around her, but somehow she seems to miss it every time. She darts across a boulevard in eerie stillness, and then as soon as she’s clear it becomes a killing ground as the riflemen open fire. She finds aftermaths: golden statues, blood-hot to the touch, caught in the moment of screaming. A dozen soldiers, all impaled on a spear hurled by Cruel Urid, who nests in the ruins of a tailor’s shop and cracks skulls on the pavement like a thrush breaking snails.
Eladora doesn’t know if she’s lucky, or blessed, but she crosses the New City unharmed. She suspects blessed, and mutters a thank you to the stone as she passes.
Onto half-familiar streets. Glimmerside, where she spent her student days, now filigreed and interwoven with the New City. Steep steps bring her up to the northern flank of Holyhill, to the edge of the University District.
They’re setting up an artillery emplacement on the grassy quad. A spotter perched on the roof of the library shouts at her to get under cover, and the sight of her beloved college turned into a fortress is somehow more alarming than all the rest. Terrible things can happen in the Wash, or Five Knives, or the New City; they can talk of war in parliament and Queen’s Point, but the university is supposed to be inviolate and unchanging. It’s home.
She remembers the city watch station by the campus as a place where her classmates stole watchmen’s helmets as pranks, where drunken students who made the mistake of crossing the invisible line from Glimmerside to Holyhill were brought to dry out. Now, the station’s a fortified bunker, and a rough-looking band of mercenaries stand around outside, waiting to be issued with protective breathing masks.
In the back of her mind, a little voice tells her that this implies the use of heavy gas. Another little voice is screaming.
One of the watch officers stops her, and she holds up her tattered writ. “I need to use your aethergraph.”
He takes the paper off her, studies it. “This says something about taking a launch to Hark Island for the getting of prisoners. Ain’t nothing here about use of an aethergraph.”
Eladora stares coldly at him. “I am a representative of Mr Kelkin and the city is under attack. I need to use your machine.”
He relents. “If you want to risk it, though, go ahead. The blasted thing went mad last night, and we haven’t got a readable message since. Had to use runners instead.”
He shows her into a small room at the back of the station, where the aethergraph sits on a rather grand writing desk borrowed from some university study. The room’s been recently refurbished–she realises with a jolt that she’s living in what will one day be another historical period. Sacred and Secular Architecture in the Ashen Period will be shelved next to–what? Invocations and Innovations in the Post-Crisis Era? Or A Hasty and Expensive Folly: The Emergency Council of Guerdon?
She prays that there will still be someone sane enough to write histories when all this is done.
This aethergraph has rarely been used. The keys are stiff when she touches them, but the contraption crackles into life when she ignites the aetheric spark. A list pasted to the wall nearby gives her the sequence for the machine in parliament.
Laboriously, she keys in her message, but that’s only half of it. The machine needs a living operator at either end of the line. The alchemists, in their ingenuity, managed to reify a sorcerous incantation, replacing mental constructs with brass and copper, replacing chanted arcana with glyph-stamped keys, swapping a jar of alchemical slime for a soul, but it still needs intent. She’s read that experienced aethergraph operators share each other’s dreams, and that there are concerns about psychic leakage.
Kelkin offered to have one of the machines installed in her apartment–for parliamentary business only–but she’d refused without knowing why. Now, she understands why the machines disturbed her–her soul is an open wound, as Rat put it. Her grandfather tore her spirit open in his ritual, trying to make her into a hasty substitute for Carillon, and the damage will not heal. More of her could be torn away by this machine.
Foolish girl, she berates herself. The city’s under divine assault, there are soldiers marching off to fight gods and saints, and she’s worried about a little psychic scarring?
Anyway, if you’re going to worry about anything, worry about the spider-monster that might be hiding in there, she tells herself, and presses the activation key.
HAVE RETURNED FROM HARK. NEED TO DISCUSS OPTIONS. ELADORA DUTTIN.
It’s nowhere near as bad as she feared–a rush of nausea, but no more taxing than one of Ramegos’ sorcerous exercises. There’s an aftertaste of panic, though, a psychic backwash from whoever received the message.
The first reply clatters out of the machine almost instantly, the keys moving her under her fingers, spelling out words. A-T-H-E-R-G-R-…
AETHERGRAPH LINES COMPROMISED. CODE-BOOK ONLY.
She has no idea what this codebook might be; some military protocol she’s not privy to.
NO CODEBOOK, she replies.
The second reply comes a few moments later. It might be her imagination, but she can feel Kelkin’s bristly chin pressed close to her face, smell his pipe. Hear his waspish irritation.
DO YOU HAVE THAY?
It takes her a moment to work out who he means. Carillon–her father was Aridon Thay. She’s the only one in the city who might still lay legitimate claim to that storied, terrible name.
YES.
The reply comes hastily, a torrent, keyed in so quickly the machine splutters under the load.
NAVAL RELIEF EN ROUTE FROM MAREDON. REQUIRE THAY AID IN SALVAGING RETORT.
Guerdon’s navy is well equipped, but too few in number to lift the siege. Even if Cari somehow brought the Grand Retort back up to the surface using Spar’s miracles, they’d have one bomb against a raging pantheon, and no way to constrain the target god. Not without the machinery on Hark.
Thoughts of the the machine lead to thoughts of Alic. Silkpurse described to her how he died trying to free Emlin from that machinery. There’s no time for tears now, not for the man nor what he represents.
In
Alic, and the other candidates she’d recruited, the work she did, she’d hoped to shape the city. To repair it, fixing the damage done in the Crisis, assuring the next chapter of its history would unfold in safety and prosperity. To lift the crushing worry from her soul, the burden of guilt and shame and responsibility that comes with what her grandfather did.
There will be no inspiring rally in the election, no full-throated cry for freedom. No atonement by that path. Just the bitter calculus of survival, of seeing which side can throw more bodies and souls into the maw of the Godswar.
Another clatter of keys. Another message from Kelkin.
YOU ARE AUTHORISED TO NEGOTIATE WITH HAITH WIDOW, SECURE LANDWARD REINFORCEMENTS.
The Widow–it takes a moment for Eladora to realise he means Lyssada Erevesic. Kelkin scorned Haith’s offer of alliance once, but that was before the invasion. Kelkin is a man who sets a high price on his principles, but is still willing to bargain them away if he must.
Before she can respond, the keys start moving again of their own accord.
PARLIAMENT UNDER ATTACK. STAND BY FOR—
The message ends abruptly.
A moment later, the psychic wave washes over her. Eight eyes gleaming in the darkness, the sensation of a thousand thousand legs crawling over her skin. There he is, moving invisibly through the aether. Skittering through the web of wires and sorcery that runs through the city.
Outside, a guard hammers at the door, telling her that she’s got to leave. The advancing monsters of Ishmere are prowling the university grounds. They have to fall back.
Through the machine comes a torrent of half-heard whispers, the impression of a gathering storm. Ishmere’s full strength has yet to strike the city. The carnage outside is just the leading edge of the wave.
PESH LION QUEEN GODDESS OF WAR WAR IS HOLY WAR IS DIVINE PESH IS COMING IN HER FULL MIGHT AND MAJESTY
She doesn’t know if it’s a threat or warning. It tells her what she needed but didn’t want to know.
A memory: Professor Ongent talking about naming traditions in Guerdon. How the aristocratic families adopted family names like Thay or Voller, the names of ancient houses, in imitiation of Haith. But some folk of the Wash kept to the old Varinthian ways, naming sons after fathers. Taphson, Idgeson…
The Shadow Saint Page 50