The Haithi troops are forming up at the Viaduct gap, signals Spar. The thought is accompanied by the sensation of vibration, of thousands of bony feet marching in unison.
“They’re going to lose, aren’t they?”
Probably.
Rat’s yellow eyes gaze out across the sea. He points. “Carillon.”
Cari turns. Striding through the harbour, hundreds of feet tall, her face more radiant than the sun. A wake of blood behind her. “Goddess,” says Carillon, and the word tastes of ash and iron.
I think this is the moment.
Naola’s kraken is a sorry thing. Unlike the massive tentacled monsters out in the bay, she’s still got traces of her humanity. Her legs have fused together into a mermaid’s tail, her arms have grown long and branched, pale tentacles ending in vestigial human hands. Her torso, though, is still mostly human, and there are fresh bullet wounds in her back. Her face is still human, too, but her voice is lost.
She pushes a raft through the flooded streets. Around her, she invokes the Kraken-miracle, transmuting the floods back to water so their raft can sail through, then stealing the water again as they pass, replacing it with molten glass. Kraken stole the seas, but Naola’s saint can borrow them back again. Her tentacle-hands run with silvery water as she works her miracle.
They sail through canyons that were streets. Reefs of debris washed out of houses and taverns and factories. All abandoned–the streets are empty of corpses. At first, Terevant wonders if the evacuation was unusually effective, but he soon realises that the bodies have all been taken by one god or another. Kidnapped to be given funeral rites, so the gods can claim the dregs of the soul left in the remains.
They pass the ruins of the Church of the Holy Beggar, one of the oldest churches in the city. The stained-glass windows have been shattered, the belltower toppled. The altar of the Kept Gods has been cast down, and now a creature of Smoke Painter sits in the nave, surrounded by incense burners and dancing shapes made of broken glass. The presence of the gods has warped this old portion of the city. The temple-ships have taken root. A tenement tower become smoke as it rises, the solid lower floors giving way to a smear of brown-grey mist in the shape of a building. Blessed Bol has claimed the old Seamarket, and now fish of solid gold wriggle through the unwater.
The enemy is all around them. Umurshixes perched on rooftops. They pass under a thick bank of low-hanging cloud, and the flash of an explosion illuminates the embryonic shapes wriggling inside Cloud Mother’s belly. Weird things birthed from the madness of the gods wait in the alleyways. Ishmeric marines, dug in amid the chaos, held in reserve until the gods need another saint, another soul to be sanctified and consumed in equal measure. The floodwaters ripple and the buildings shake as godspawn monsters shamble through the occupied city. All waiting in anticipation of a Haithi counter-attack, ready for a legion of dead soldiers to come marching down from Holyhill to find the sword.
They’re looking for the dead, not the living. Terevant and the mercenaries are on a raft, propelled by a kraken. In the fog and smoke of the tortured city, it’s easy to overlook them. No one challenges them as they press onwards, into the heart of the Wash.
Naola’s mercenaries are veterans of the Godswar. They hunch together, weapons ready. Their armour is studded with grounding charms and wards. They mutter prayers in an interference pattern. Watch one another for signs of religious ecstasy or divine revelation. Naola sits with Terevant in the middle of the raft. “You’re the money,” she whispers, like it’s an oath.
They pass the ruins of a hall that Naola whispers was once the headquarters of the Brotherhood, the city’s old thieves’ guild. Huge black spiders scuttle in and out of broken windows, weaving a grey cocoon around the building. The broken windows remind Terevant of multifaceted insect eyes, watching the city.
The kraken-woman has no voice, but her exhaustion is evident. She strains to push the raft. They’re approaching Sumpwater Square.
The sword might be nearby.
Terevant closes his eyes. Stretches out his hand. He could sense the family sword without touching it when it was in his kitbag, back on the train. He could feel the presence of his ancestors. There must be a connection.
Breath. Concentrate.
He imagines himself back at the Erevesic estate, playing in the woods with Olthic and Lys. Olthic would always climb higher than he could. In his mind’s eye, he looks in the treetops, imagining his brother caught in the crook of some forked branch.
His mental image of the forest shakes. A hurricane breath blows through it, bending the trees. He hears a roar. Closer now.
He’s praying. Everyone on the raft is praying in a language he doesn’t know. His tongue, his lips, his throat are no longer under his control.
He opens his eyes, and sees the goddess.
Pesh, Lion Queen, Goddess of War, steps over the raft. She strides towards the Duchess Viaduct and the fall of the city. Prowling through the streets after her come lion-spirits. Walking on the waters, made of her wrath, they scent the presence of Terevant and the mercenaries.
They’ve come too far. They’re trapped.
The last part of the New City to be conjured in Spar’s apotheosis was a sheltered cove and a small jetty, made of the same miraculous stone as the rest. It was an invitation to leave. Spar’s last thought in life was that Carillon should escape Guerdon, escape the shadow of her family name and the Black Iron Gods. She rejected it.
Now, she remakes it.
The stone wall of the jetty convulses and shimmers–then explodes outwards in a new miracle. Cari takes that raw creation and shapes it in her mind, drawing on the memories of half a lifetime at sea. A ship of stone, hull eggshell-thin, masts like columns. It shines as it finds its balance in the heaving waters. Sails of frozen moonlight unfurl. It’s a divine impossibility, a ship of dreams. When Carillon sneaked out of Silva’s house in Wheldacre and ran away to sea, this is the ship she prayed would be waiting for her.
The crew of grinning ghouls weren’t part of her childhood imaginings, but she’s glad to have them there.
She climbs on board, touches the stone railing. She can feel Spar’s life running through the ship, but it’s too small to contain more than a fragment of his mind. It can only carry a blessing, not a farewell.
“All right!” she shouts, “to Hark!”
Rat grins and yowls a command in the tongue of ghouls, and they cast off.
No earthly winds propel the ship–but she sails on no earthly seas. The waters of the harbour were stolen by Kraken; Spar wrestles for control of the sea, turning it to a milky liquid. The hull creaks as the first miracles strike it: Kraken-curses of bad fortune and shipwreck. The real attacks will come later, guesses Cari–the attention of the Ishmeric deities is turned towards the city.
They still have saints to contend with. Tentacles reach from the unwater, probing for crew to snatch and drown–but ghouls are stronger than humans, and have teeth and claws. When one tentacle tries to grab Rat, he sinks his nails into the pulpy flesh and hauls the Kraken-saint out of the ocean, beats it against the deck until it’s dead. The ghouls feast.
They skip across the waves, faster than any mortal vessel. Cari laughs at the unlikely grace of their creation. Their ship is a thief’s ship, a smuggler’s dream. Her exhilaration lets her ignore the soul-sapping effort of the miracle. Spar is not a god; he has no worshippers, and claims no residuum through secret rites. He can’t replenish his power–and they’re spending it profligately on this heist.
They approach the island. The seas around Hark have reverted to mundane water–Kraken has withdrawn his cruel blessing–but there’s a circle of steam around the wreck of the Grand Retort.
“Acid seeds,” whispers a ghoul. The weapons slowly dissolve in seawater, releasing an alchemical compound that eats away the hulls of ships that try to cross the blockade.
“Cover your eyes,” shouts Cari. She pulls a breathing mask over her own face, and spends the last few sec
onds wishing she’d prepared better before her ship plunges into the steam cloud.
It’s a brief hell. She curls into a ball as the mists roll over her, trying to guard her exposed skin. The mist is insidious, mixing her with sweat to make rivulets of agony. Her skin blisters. The mask’s filters can’t cope; she can’t breathe.
She holds her breath, closes her eyes tightly, and looks through the ship’s eyes instead. They’re lost in a caustic fog. The ghouls are tougher than Cari is, but it still burns them. They cower on the deck, meeping and grunting in pain. Only Rat is able to endure the cloud without flinching. He strides to the rear, puts one massive claw on the tiller. The other he places over Cari’s head, protecting the back of her neck.
There’s a horrible series of creaks and cracks from the hull. Patches of the stone peel away, rotted by the acid. Their once-shimmering vessel now resembles a victim of the Stone Plague, pockmarked with oozing patches and scales. But they’re through, they’re clear, into the eye.
“COME ON,” roars Rat. “BRING IT UP!”
Cari concentrates. Spar’s too far away–it’s all on her to shape the stone. Their vessel quivers as she sends out spikes of stone, reaching down to the wreck. It’s the same as the New City, she tells herself. On the edges, Spar interwove old and new, mortal and divine. It’s Gethis Row, where heaven brushed against the grimy alleys of the Wash. The stone spikes divide, becoming harpoons, becoming claws, ripping at the wreckage, pulling it up towards the surface.
She can sense the god bomb now. It’s very close. It’s screaming at her.
The ship lurches. Water runs over Cari’s feet. She’s distantly aware that they’re taking on water, that she’s had to use too much of the substance of their vessel to conjure this unlikely claw. The Retort is ten times bigger than they are, and she doesn’t have a fucking idea what she’s doing. She thought it would be like picking a lock, but it’s more like trying to rescue a drowning man.
She’s being pulled down with the Retort. They all are.
Close the gap in the hull, she thinks, but the hull’s turned solid. The divinity in the stone has calcified, eroded.
Sinking like a stone.
Terevant clings to the little raft as Naola snaps off a shot from her pistol at the nearest lion-spirit. The bullet passes right through the creature.
“Figured,” she mutters. “This is going to be rough. They’re only solid when they kill.” The other mercenaries ready their weapons, watching the circling lionesses. When one of the Circle of Eight dies, the rest can strike. There’s no question that some of them are going to die.
“Stay on the raft,” mutters Naola as she reloads. Terevant’s own rifle is equally useless against the spirits. He’s baggage. The money.
Two hundred Haithi soldiers landed on that beach at Eskalind. Only seventy-two sailed away. Only a dozen or so of those were still alive, but they were all–living and dead alike–haunted by the war. The Godswar followed him home to Haith, clinging to him, not like a stench or a stain, but like a perverse thought he could never drive from his mind. His mind is occupied terrain. The whole world’s caught in the Godswar. The whole world’s a battlefield, even in places like Guerdon where the fighting has only just turned physical. It was a spiritual war for a long time before that.
A wild impulse takes hold. He strips off the signet ring from his finger, tucks it into Naola’s pocket–if they make it out, they deserve payment– and jumps from the raft, landing in the knee-deep water. Naola shouts at him, but he’s already running, wading through the muck. The lionesses roar and chase after him. Maybe the mercenaries can get away.
He runs through the flooded streets. The ground shakes with the footfalls of the goddess, and the roaring of the spirits as they chase him is a hymn to war. He runs uphill, towards the base of the stairs. He’ll die with his back against the wall of Castle Hill, he decides.
The lionesses keep pace with him. Toying with him. Herding him. He dodges through a ruined building that was once a temple of the Last Days Cult. The room stinks of spilled wine and vomit–the apocalyptic cultists celebrated the invasion, danced and drank themselves to death as the Kraken-waves crashed down on them.
The war is all around him. Gunfire and the clash of swords on Castle Hill. Bodies tumble down from fighting on the cliffs above him. Naval cannon fire out in the harbour. Gods wrestling in the sky above Holyhill. Rabendath told him there were more troops coming down the railway from Haith, that three more House legions had crossed the border.
A lion-spirit appears next to him, swipes at him with a claw. He dodges into a doorway. The ground floor is abandoned, fragments of furniture and other debris floating in the water. Fearful faces on the stairs. Children, huddled together, watching him from an upstairs landing. He splashes through the water, climbs up onto the broken stairs. They don’t speak.
“Hide!” he tells them, pushing them back into the nearest doorway. Through there he sees a few piles of bedclothes, some shapes on the ground, and against the far wall is a small home-made shrine, decorated with candles. A crudely carved lion, and the sigils of Pesh carved into the wall. A bowl of what must have been some red fruit.
He rushes up the stairs. The lion-spirits keep pace, leaping from floor to floor, passing through the walls. There were bodies in that crude shrine, he realises, those were the shapes on the floor. Sacrifices to Pesh? The proximity of the goddess inspiring those who had never even heard Her name? He can’t think as he climbs. The horrors churn in his brain. He passes more rooms stacked high with the dead.
The war claimed Olthic, too. And Vanth. Their murders like the small waves, breaking on the shore in advance of the rising storm. The gods invaded Guerdon with their mortal agents first, before the war of miracles began, but it’s all the same war.
He emerges onto the roof through a trapdoor. He can see the remnants of the Duchess Viaduct in the distance. The Haithi forces arrayed in the gap below, between Castle Hill and Holyhill, polished armour and polished bone. Towards them, hundreds of feet tall, invincible and glorious, strides Pesh.
Terevant falls to his knees.
Haithi snipers fire at the approaching goddess. Their bullets become prayers.
Haithi swordsmen charge towards her, stabbing at her feet, slashing at her massive paws. Pesh laughs as they draw blood. She swipes with one claw, cutting deep into the rock of Castle Hill. An avalanche buries half the Haithi troops, choking the river, smashing through the breweries and warehouses along the riverbank.
One of the lions materialises on the roof nearby, slates cracking as the spirit takes physical form. It pads towards him, eyes blazing. Terevant lifts his rifle–and throws it away over the edge of the roof. It spins in the air, splashes into the water below.
“No.”
“Blasphemy,” says the goddess. She speaks through the lion in front of him, but it’s Pesh. All things of war are Pesh. “War is holy.”
“No,” says Terevant again. He closes his eyes, imagines he’s back in the forests outside the mansion. Waits for the lion’s jaws to close.
But the goddess is there, too, in the woods. “Before you took up a sword, I knew you. How could I not, son of Haith, heir to conquerors? Great is my love for you. For a thousand generations, you have made offerings to me with sword and fire.”
“I’ve never worshipped you!”
Pesh’s claw caresses his cheek, his jaw. “All wars are mine. All war is holy. My rivals shall be dismembered, and I will eat their hearts, and raise my banner in the ruins of their temples. You still walk in my presence at Eskalind, mine forever. Did I not pull you back from my brother’s webs, when you blasphemed, led astray by lies? Do you not seek revenge?”
The forest dissolves. He’s back on the rooftop, but instead of Guerdon he’s looking out at Old Haith. The city’s on fire. Half the fortresses of the Houses all fly the Erevesic banner. The Crown’s palace is under siege, the pyramid of the Bureau broken open, all their files burning. He sees Daerinth’s head on a trai
tor’s pike, sees the Houses rally to his side when he accuses the Crown of betraying the ancient compact.
“No,” he says a third time.
Excuse me, sir. Yoras crawls from the attic door behind Terevant. Through the tatters of his uniform, Terevant can see that the Vigilant soldier is horribly broken. His body ends at his ribcage. His left arm is gone. His skull, cracked. He pushes the Sword Erevesic with his remaining hand.
“It’s a miracle,” says Terevant, his voice cracking with hysteria. There are no coincidences in the Godswar, only warring destinies decreed by mad gods.
This is yours.
Terevant takes the sword.
And Pesh laughs again.
CHAPTER 53
Carillon wrestles to keep the ship of stone afloat.
For an instant, a breath of wind forces a gap in the steam, revealing the nearby shore of Hark. A man stands on the shore, watching them. She recognises him as that IndLib politician who came up into the New City with Eladora and Silkpurse–but it can’t be him. He died, shot by Sinter’s men.
The spy raises one hand in a gesture of blessing.
Cari feels a rush of strength. The feeling is sickeningly familiar–back during the Crisis, when the servants of the Black Iron Gods sacrificed their victims to her–it’s the same quicksilver rush in her veins, the same thrill. Rat smells it, too.
Right now, she’s not going to question this gift. She takes the power, channels into the stone. There’s a wrenching shift as part of the Grand Retort breaks free.
Working quickly now, her hands moving like a weaver, shuttling threads of Spar’s miracle-transmuted flesh back and forth. The foredeck of the Retort is like one of the buildings of the Wash that got caught in the Gutter Miracle, oily metal intermingled with shimmering stone. The launcher mechanism holding the last god bomb rises from the sea, water cascading from its housing, and settles onto the prow of the stone ship.
The last gaps in the hull reseal. An unseen wind fills the sails again, and the ship makes a tight turn. They pass back through the seething acid. Rat cradles her exhausted body, sheltering her from the burning spray.
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