She types.
EMLIN ALICSON. I’M SORRY.
Naming the boy. Binding him.
Then she tears the orichalcum cable from the aethergraph, disconnecting it.
Ghouls are carrion-eaters. Connoisseurs of dead meat. Terevant assumes, therefore, that it’s a good sign that the big ghoul sniffs at Ramegos, then ignores her in favour of the newcomer. Rat stalks across the cavern towards Carillon Thay.
Terevant turns to walk over to the Haithi troops as they pick through the aftermath of the explosion, but the ghoul glances back at Terevant, and he finds himself hurrying to catch up. It seems the Elder Ghoul wants to use him as a mouthpiece.
“CARI.” The name rises unbidden from his throat, tinged with more warmth than Terevant expected. More than Cari expected, too, it seems, judging from her face.
“Rat, you fucker,” she says, “are we pax?”
“YOU ARE NO LONGER THE HERALD OF THE BLACK IRON GODS,” says Rat through Terevant. “YOU ARE NO LONGER A THREAT TO THE GHOULS.” He squats down next to her, inclines his massive head forward. “I SENT ELADORA TO FETCH YOU FROM HARK. WHAT FURTHER PROOF DO YOU NEED?”
“A fucking apology would be nice.”
Rat laughs his hideous gurgling chuckle. “NO.”
“Bloody ghouls,” says Carillon. “Right. Fuck it. What do we do about Miren?”
“SOMETHING CRUEL AND PROLONGED,” says the ghoul, “BUT HE IS GONE, AND I CANNOT TRACK HIM. THIS CAVE STINKS OF HIM.” Terevant wrenches control of his own voice back. “Excuse me, but I need to WHAT DO YOU WANT, MAN OF HAITH?”
The ghoul’s eyes glimmer with amusement.
“I need to,” begins Terevant again, and he’s interrupted again by his own tongue. “LEAD YOUR DEAD ARMY BACK TO YOUR DEAD LAND? No, I need YOUR PRINCE IS DEAD, O MAN OF HAITH, stop AND YOU MAY TAKE HIM damn you stop TELL ME CARILLON, HAVE YOU SEEN ANY OF THE CAFSTAN BOYS? OR ANY OF THE OLD BROTHERHOOD CREW?”
Terevant gasps for air.
Cari snorts, then thumps Rat’s leg. “All right, leave him. He’s quality, you know.”
“RICH OR POOR, THEY ALL END UP MEAT IN THE END.”
Terevant pulls himself upright with all the dignity he can muster. “Not in Haith. The Empire is undying. Now, if you will pray excuse MAN OF HAITH I AM NOT DONE WITH YOU.”
“Wait a moment,” says Cari. “We need a plan. What do we do about Ishmere?”
“THE GODSWAR IS HERE. THE CITY IS LOST. WE HIDE DOWN HERE.”
“‘The city’ includes Spar. I’m not letting him go. Not again.”
“I must—” begins Terevant, but it’s Rat who answers. “GUERDON IS BELOW. THE TUNNELS RUN DEEP. WHAT REMAINS OF HIM WILL ENDURE.”
“He’d want us to save people, too. Even if we can’t stop the gods, then we can bring people down into the tunnels. Fight a delaying action. Rat, you haven’t lived with him in your head for a year. It’s like having a really itchy conscience all the time.”
“I must BRING THEM DOWN SAFE WHILE THEY LIVE. A LARDER FOR THE GHOULS IF THEY–OW!”
Terevant punches the ghoul squarely in the snout. Rat yelps. “As I was saying, I must recover my family’s sword.” He nods at Cari. “You’re a seer–help me find the blade, and I’ll order my troops out of these vaults.”
Cari sticks out a grubby hand. “Deal.”
Some of the Haithi engineers caught in the blast had periapts; two might be able to attain the Vigil. Terevant orders them brought back to the camp outside the city, where the House necromancers can help pull them through.
Prince Daerinth, though, is casteless dead. Terevant stares down at the man who killed his brother, who tried to blame him for the crime. Who traded the Erevesic sword for the shattered scraps of a bomb.
“Take his remains,” he orders, “and treat them with the honour due to a prince of Haith. Bring them back to the Crown.”
As they wrap the body, Terevant wonders what secrets died with the prince. Did the Crown command him to betray House Erevesic, or was Daerinth scheming on his own, trying to get back into favour?
Lys might know, but Terevant realises that he’ll never get a straight answer from her. Everything will be distorted or shifted by the crooked glass of the Bureau. If he’s learned anything in the past few days it’s that they’re never going to get back to that bright lawn he remembers.
“Captain Brythal.” Lys’s dead father snaps to attention. “Escort the casualties to the main camp. Then make for the Palace of the Patros. The Lady Erevesic is there; guard her and give her whatever aid she requires.”
What of the living troops at the camp?
“Guerdon’s no place for the living. Tell them to hold the camp and the railhead, to keep open our lines of retreat.” Terevant picks up a sword that belonged to one of the fallen soldiers. It’s an ordinary sword, without marks or sigils. It’s not the Sword Erevesic, but it will serve. “Colonel Rabendath, ours is a rescue mission. The Erevesic sword is on the battlefield. Carillon can help us find it. Once we have it, we’ll fall back and retreat in good order.”
Rabendath’s has been the right hand of the Erevesic for four centuries; Terevant remembers his father and grandfather in grave conversation with the Vigilant. The ancient warrior listens to Terevant’s orders, and–is there a moment of hesitation before he salutes and says, It shall be as you command, my lord.
What about the sorceress? asks Brythal.
“Leave me here,” groans Ramegos from the ground. “The ghouls never let me get this close to the foundries before. Got work to do.”
“I’ll stay with her,” says one of the ghouls wearing a ragged oilskin. The creature has salvaged a medical kit from somewhere and treated Ramegos’ stab wound as best she can. She’s unable to keep from licking her lips.
“What if that… assassin-saint returns?”
“Oh,” says the ghoul, showing her teeth, “I’ll have words with Master Miren, you’ll see.”
CHAPTER 47
Eladora is not the only person to seek shelter in the church. The grand courtyard in front of the Victory Cathedrals heaves with crowds. Most came to catch a glimpse of the new king; others fled the carnage in the city below. Now they’re trapped here. A thin line of Keeper guards defends the entrance to the courtyard, pikes set against the darkness and any monsters that might come charging up the hill.
Where are their saints? wonders Eladora. Where is her mother? If the city’s to be troubled by a resurgence of Keeper saints, then surely now is the time to send them out! There’s some protection here, just like there is in the New City. The Victory Cathedrals were wrought by human hands, not conjured by divine intervention, but they’re still sanctified. The lightning bolts and curses that the invading gods hurl at the Wash, or at parliament, or at Queen’s Point haven’t yet touched Holyhill.
Yet, she thinks.
She pushes through the crowd as best she can, past children clinging to weeping mothers. Old women mumbling prayers to the Mother of Mercies. Young men roaming the square, arguing what to do, doing nothing. The doors of the three cathedrals are all closed and barred; so, too, are the doors of the Palace of the Patros. There are more guards there, pikes ready to drive the crowd back. The cries of the people echo off shuttered windows.
Eladora approaches one of the guards, and he stabs his pike at her, shouting something incomprehensible as he forces her back. The crowd shouts, heaves, throws stones, but aren’t willing to charge the pikes.
Yet, she thinks.
She’s pushed through the crowd, this way and that. Someone tears at her oilskin jacket; someone else screams at her, gesturing towards the purple sigils in the sky. She trips over the leg of a little girl, who sits shivering on the rain-slick cobblestones. Eladora leaves her jacket with the child and finds her way to the edge of the square, where the crowd thins out. Administrative buildings, servants’ quarters. Here she finds gilded saints with bronze swords and shields looking out over the square.
In the shadow of the colonnade–Sinter. Th
e priest’s walking back and forth in front of a small side door, shoulders hunched. His bald pate beaded with sweat or raindrops. He sees her and snarls. Darts forward and pulls her into the shadows.
“What’s going on? Did Kelkin send you? Is there a plan?”
“I-I haven’t seen Kelkin since yesterday. Since before…”
“Is there a plan? What’s he doing?” Sinter grabs her arm like he’d prefer to be grabbing her throat. His own voice is strangled as he tries to keep from screaming at her.
“Kelkin had a plan.” Eladora shoves at Sinter’s arm, but he doesn’t let go. “Your gods ruined it.”
“They’ve turned on me,” says Sinter. “I can’t go back in. I can’t go.” Thunder rolls above the square, and he scurries back into the shelter of the doorway. He’s staying in the cover of the pillars, she realises, keeping out of the line of sight of those gilded statues.
Everyone else in the square is here to shelter from the gods of Ishmere, but Sinter now lives in terror of the wrath of his own gods.
“I need to talk to the Patros.” With parliament overrun, with Queen’s Point under siege, the Patros is perhaps the highest authority in the city. Or the head of the alchemists’ guild, the head of the watch. The king. The gods. Carillon.
Anyone but me. Anyone but this.
“Yes,” says Sinter, “yes! You–Silva’s daughter, they’ll let you in. Listen, listen. Give him this.” He produces a crumpled sheet of paper, ripped from a prayer book. On the back, in the margins, he’s scribbled a note. A plan.
“Straight to the hand of the Patros, understand? Don’t let anyone take it from you.” He fumbles in his robes for a key. “I told you, didn’t I? Told you that all this was spinning out of control. Now it’s fucked, everything’s fucked. Give him that. Tell him it’s the only way. Tell him we’ve got to act now.”
He unlocks the little side door. Just inside, there’s a statue of the Mother, garlanded in fresh flowers. Sinter ducks to the side so the statue’s sightless marble gaze doesn’t fall on him. He closes the door behind Eladora. “Tell him,” he shouts from the other side.
The flowers, she notes dispassionately, are growing from the stone. A minor miracle.
She unfolds the note. Reads it. Mass sacrifice… the mob in the square… a great offering, a jubilee of souls, as Safid wrote… A proposal to buy his way back into the favour of the gods with the souls of everyone in the courtyard outside. The fires of Safid shall carry the souls… air-burst phlogiston shells… heavy gas…
A monstrously cruel plan. Mistaking brutality for decisiveness, cruelty for courage.
Eladora tears up the note. “By the by,” she says to the closed door, knowing he’s still listening. “My cousin is still alive. Terevant Erevesic shall have his sword back. To hell with you and your schemes–I’ve a better plan.”
Once she’s inside the palace, she’s ignored by the courtiers and priests who mill around. They’re trapped here, unwilling to brave the city outside. The palace has become an ark, adrift on a stormy sea. Small knots of clerics conspire in twos and threes; servants either busy themselves with pointless tasks or eye the exits. Eladora’s reminded of Terevant’s description of the Grena river valley, after the god bomb. The Kept Gods are still here–she can distantly sense them in some corner of her soul, but the pressure of incipient sainthood is gone–but there’s some absence at the heart of the church. Sinter’s hiding, and no one else has taken charge yet.
She enters the golden court of the Patros. They’ve tried to make this into a throne room for the new king of Guerdon, too, but there seems to have been some dispute over which ruler takes precedence here. The Patros’ seat has pride of place, right in front of the high altar, but the king gets a bigger and more elevated chair over at the side of the chamber. Neither the Patros nor the king are present in the room, but with the palace sealed the newly minted courtiers have nowhere else to go. As Eladora arrives, some ancient bishop tries to make himself heard over the noise of the crowd and storm outside. “The strength of the church has always been in the fields and farms. In the humble villages. In the little churches. It is to them–it is in them–we must seek renewal,” he shouts.
Mhari Voller detaches herself from a group of courtiers behind the king’s throne and totters over to Eladora. Voller’s wearing a jacket emblazoned with the crest of the king. The Festival where the Kept Gods “discovered” the king was a week ago–Eladora wonders if Voller had the jacket embroidered in secret before the Festival, or if her family kept it in some attic for three centuries until it become politically expedient again.
“Eladora! What are you wearing? Were you caught without an umbrella?” Voller’s breath smells of alcohol. “This is all just ghastly. Sinter has caused such a muddle–I don’t quite know what happened, but Silva is quite unwell. And this trouble, now–we’re discussing where to decamp to. I suggested Maredon, but the consensus seems to be some awful backwater like Wheldacre–oh, I’m sure it’s delightfully rustic of course, but it’s hardly—”
“This trouble?” Eladora says, incredulous.
“Whatever’s going on in the harbour–we heard gunfire, earlier. Pirate raiders from Lyrix, someone said.”
“It’s the Godswar. It’s Ishmere.”
“The Godswar,” says Voller, with misplaced confidence, “is very far away. Is Effro with you? He acknowledged King Berrick’s claim earlier, when he endorsed the decision about Ambassador Olthic’s murderer–that’s the first step in him seeing sense, you know. I told you he’d come around.”
Eladora stares at her for a moment, then says, “I need to see the Patros. Or the king. Both. Whoever’s in command.”
“Well, that’s a matter of some debate. Interesting times, but—”
“Where is my mother?”
Silva’s in an antechamber off the court. She sits in a bathchair, staring at the shuttered window. Bandages on her burned hands, a naked sword on her lap.
She doesn’t react when Eladora enters. Doesn’t react when Eladora kneels down beside her. How much of her soul is left? How much has been torn away by fickle gods when they withdrew from her? She opened herself to greater forces, and paid the price.
Eladora tries anyway. “Silva, it’s Eladora. Can you hear me?”
Nothing.
There’s a garland of flowers on the table. A talisman of the Mother. And the sword on Silva’s knee. Tokens all, but Eladora doesn’t dare touch any of them. She needs to remain spiritually intact. Re-establishing her connection to the Kept Gods, here and now, would ruin her plan. It might ruin her, leave her a hollow shell like the woman in front of her.
She tries again.
“Mother. The Godswar is here. I need… I mean, the city needs—” She stops, assailed by doubt. “M-maybe you should…”
When Saint Aleena spoke aloud, her voice was like a fanfare of trumpets, a triumphal thunder, the dawn breaking through the walls of night. Her words were touched with light and power; they fired the soul of anyone who harkened to them.
The voice that slithers from her mother’s slack lips is the wheeze of a broken bellows, the spit and crackle of embers in a dying fire. The slow fall of ash.
“Why did you never embrace the gods, child? I brought you to the chapel in the hills. I taught you all the litanies. Why did you hold back?”
“I-I… I don’t know.”
“Deceitful child,” says Silva, and Eladora can somehow tell that the anger in those words comes from her mother, not whatever force is speaking through her–or with her. But she can’t tell how much of the entity in front of her is Silva, and how much is the Kept Gods. “Three times you called the gods. Three times you were answered. Three times, you rejected them.”
Three times–at Gravehill, when Jermas tried to use me as Cari’s proxy in the ritual to call the Black Iron Gods. In the New City, when I fought you. And in Queen’s Point, against Ramegos.
“I didn’t call. I mean–it was Grandfather who… he damaged my soul, Mot
her. That’s what Dr Ramegos said. A spiritual wound. And then Sinter used me to counter you. He dressed me up as a saint to fool the gods, to make them believe I was you. There was nothing to reject, it wasn’t me who chose it.”
Out of nowhere, that same sensation of terrible pressure that she felt on the Festival ground, the awful proximity of the divine. Her skull is a door, and they’re pressing against it, trying to get in. Cleaving it with swords of fire.
Silva’s head lifts to look at Eladora. Her eyes are sightless, unfocused, but she’s not the one looking through them. “Who are you to question the will of the gods? This world is broken–the path to heaven must be made from cracked and jagged stones. It is still you who chose not to walk it.”
“Cracked and jagged–you’re saying that the Kept Gods wanted Jermas Thay to torture me? That Sinter was doing their bidding when he used me to hurt you? That’s nonsense.” Eladora rises. “So-called gods are self-perpetuating magical constructs that draw power from the ritual actions and residuum of their worshippers. They’re… aetheric vortices, parasitic spells. No more than–spiritual tapeworms!” It’s an argument that Eladora imagined having with her mother a thousand times, ever since she first went to university and studied under Professor Ongent. Now, she spits the words at her. “I won’t give myself over to such things. I won’t prostrate myself before them, or indulge their.… their ritual delusions!”
“Such arrogance. You think you can stand aloof? You think the gods are not in your blood and bone? In the earth you walk upon, and in the air? You want to be mistress of your own fate–but you shall be betrayed, time and time again.” Silva rises from the bathchair, held aloft by unseen hands–and then something snaps, and she falls back. She paws at Eladora, reaching for her hand.
Eladora snatches her arm away, steps back. “I won’t be your focus. I won’t serve you. Not like that.” She can sense, dimly, forces whirling around the palace, around Holyhill. The Kept Gods are scattered, disorganised. They need a rallying point, something to assert their shape and purpose.
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