The Traitor God

by Cameron Johnston

  The slums of East Docklands consisted of random formations of five- and six-storey tenements, no two alike, leaning drunkenly out over twisting alleyways. The luckier people lived along Fisherman’s Way in solid stone buildings built during the height of the empire, but here most had one or two storeys of stonework before extending upwards in wood. Every few years a dry summer hit Setharis and entire areas of the slums were razed by outbreaks of fire, only to be rebuilt in new configurations that looked like the scribblings of a mad cartographer.

  In the centre of the lower city, the Warrens boasted the worst streets, ones that squelched with ankle-deep shite and piss that autumn rains washed down from higher ground. Folk with decent professions and skills clawed their way upwind to West Docklands to avoid the stinking smog that prevailing winds blew southeast, and where sewage ran downstream into the Warrens instead of pooling at your doorsteps on rainy days.

  A sonorous DOOOOOOMMMMMM of a great bell tolling out mid-afternoon made me look up at the looming basalt rock that the Old Town was perched on, a place most low-born would never set foot in if they wanted to keep it attached. They couldn’t have the nobility and the magi rubbing shoulders with the poor – after all, that would be vulgar. On the far side of Docklands, over the river Seth and uphill towards the Old Town, the fine dressed stone abodes of the middle-classes fawned in a wide crescent of higher ground around the base of the rock. A peasant would be lucky to cross those bridges into the Crescent, never mind dream of setting foot in the Old Town.

  A pockmarked old whore sidled up to me and gave me a toothless smile. An overpowering floral scent followed her, probably intended to hide her rotten breath. She was no high-class lady of sheets, that was certain.

  “Not today, love,” I said, pushing past her and plodding on towards Sailor’s Spire. I had a man to find and kill.

  “Eunuch!” she spat at my back.

  Ah, it was good to be home.

  The black needle of Sailor’s Spire loomed ahead, a memorial paid for by the Docklanders’ own hard toil. Fresh flowers garlanded the stained stone edifice and a widow was on her knees before it, wailing as she offered two straw-woven likenesses of her dead. People paused in passing to lay down a parcel of food, a coin, or just to offer a respectful nod. In a place like Docklands every family had lost somebody to the sea.

  At the spire I turned up onto Fisherman’s Way, heading north towards Carrbridge. A short time later I felt eyes watching me from the alleyways. I wrung my hands and looked left and right, peering at the wooden signage of workshops and shop fronts in apparent confusion. Then, remembering the guard’s warning about where the thieves frequented, I turned off the Way and wandered down a side street, then into a darkened alley away from bustling open streets. The buildings above creaked and groaned as I penetrated deeper into the warren of narrow passages.

  I passed a group of torch-wielding women at the mouth of a vegetation-choked lane, all clad in thick leathers, busy beating back snapping green mouths of thorny witherweed and searing its roots with fire. The venomous weed was tenacious, hibernating for years in the mud before bursting up overnight to catch the unwary. A single bite could kill a child in seconds, and then it sucked them dry of all fluids before digesting their withered flesh. Witherweed was but one of the many twisted wonders of Setharis, some occurring naturally and others escaped experiments. I kept my head down and continued on through winding alleyways.

  Nothing looked familiar. My recollection of Lynas’ message was garbled, the images almost unintelligible and these alleys were all of a muchness. All I could see with certainty were those glittering daemons, a shadowed hood and a red-stained scalpel. I’d need Charra to help me decipher it.

  I heard soft footfalls behind me, as expected. I turned to see a rake-thin youth brandish a rusty knife. My heart sank. The pup couldn’t have seen fourteen summers, if that. A tarnished earring of twisted silver wire adorned his left ear.

  “Gimme your money,” he snarled, thrusting his weapon towards me.

  Staring at the knife, I made a show of cringing back against the alley wall with my coin pouch clutched to my chest. He swept closer and snatched it from my hand. Unseen, my other hand flicked out to his belt and pocketed his own pouch. The thief peered in at my few remaining copper bits and scowled. He’d been expecting more. He eyed my fine coat. It was all going exactly as planned.

  I stripped off my coat and thrust it at him. “Here, take this. It has to be worth something.”

  He grabbed it and appraised the cloth; it would be worth a few silvers to a fence. He looked me up and down and saw that I had nothing else of worth. His intentions were obvious in his eyes, muscles tensing ready to plunge the knife into my chest. He didn’t want any witnesses left to raise a cry of thief! He stepped in close, knife poised.

  I let my mien of meekness slip, a sudden change in posture to radiate killing intent. My eyes hardened, fixed on his own. I’d kill him if I had to, and then find another thief. He flinched back. Street rats needed a strong survival instinct if they wanted to live for long. He had second thoughts, turned and fled down the street with my coat and almost-empty pouch.

  The pathetic merchant mask slipped back onto my face. Wringing my hands, I stumbled towards Fisherman’s Way after taking a quick peek into the youth’s own money pouch. I whistled at the sight of silver; seemed the boy had already robbed a few others today. Now I had enough coin for a few nights at an inn, and to my delight I found two tabac roll-ups in there. It was the good stuff too, not the usual choke-throat I found in far-flung villages and towns.

  The boy had tried to steal from a bigger and nastier thief than he was. The main thing was that my fine coat was into other hands and onto other backs. The shadow cats shouldn’t be able to survive in the daemon-toxic air of Setharis, but only fools left survival to assumption. If they still hunted me then they should instead pick up the scent of my magic in the wool. I’d been sleeping in it for days, letting it soak up my sweat. No amount of washing would be getting that out soon, not beyond the noses of those damn cats. It might buy me more time. Pity it’d been a barely-weaned pup that robbed me. Even if he’d been about to stick me with a knife, I would still have it on my conscience if the daemons caught up with him before he could shift it on to some nastier, hardened scumbag. Lucky my conscience was a withered husk of a thing. I wouldn’t shed any tears for the likes of him, and I had more urgent things to concentrate on: Lynas had been trying to warn me that far more that his own life was at stake. I owed it to him to finish what he’d started.

  The Gift-bond to Lynas was no longer a constant presence, his innate goodness helping to steer my wayward morality. When I’d been a Docklands street rat, that selfish mentality had been a boon to survival, but now that I wielded terrifying power it made me dangerous. I wasn’t one to shy away from abusing power if somebody deserved it, and if I could get away with it. Without his comforting guidance in the back of my mind all I could do was keep asking myself: what would Lynas do? I would try not to disappoint him.

  I had no intention of going to Carrbridge. Instead I searched for a suitable inn, some middling place with a bath where I could scrub off the ship-stink. I spotted one down a side street, the sun-bleached sign proclaimed it The Throne and Fire.

  Heading down the street I passed a scrawny girl at that awkward age somewhere between child and adult, a purple wine-stain birthmark covering her bruised cheek. As I approached she looked up at me without any trace of fear, just a dull acceptance, and held up a bowl. Too many Docklands girls had that same look. But for the grace of Gift I might have shared a similarly unsavoury fate. I had escaped thanks to my mother’s foreign bloodline, with all my father’s kin being about as magical as bricks; all gone thanks to the Grey Pox. I sighed. It had been a very long time indeed since I last thought of my parents, and I found the pangs of loss little dulled.

  I fished out a handful of coins; I was a sucker for underdogs and second chances, and had been given more than a few of the lat
ter myself. After a moment’s reluctance I added two silvers. It was what Lynas would have done. Easy come, easy go. The girl’s eyes went wide as the coins clinked into her bowl. She stared up at me with fearful hope, probably thinking I wanted something especially foul from her.

  “It’s not payment, girl,” I said. “Get some food in your belly and a new dress. Clean yourself up and go see if any of the inns are hiring. And don’t let anybody see you have silver if you want to keep it.”

  She swallowed and opened her mouth to reply but I didn’t want thanks, just waved her off and entered the inn. I hoped she wouldn’t spend it on drink and alchemics but didn’t care enough to stick around. I’d been disappointed far too many times for that, but everybody deserved a chance. What they made of it was up to them.

  The innkeep overcharged me but I didn’t argue and allowed a young boy to show me to my first floor room. He brought up stones heated on the downstairs hearth and dropped them into a huge old ale barrel that served as a bath. Once it was hot enough I dismissed him and made sure the door was locked and barred before slipping in.

  It would be sheer bliss to soak and let the heat relax cramped muscles, but I wasn’t here to enjoy myself. I sank down, the hot water enveloping my head, scrubbing grease from my hair and washing myself thoroughly to get rid of the weeks of sweat caking my skin. Any daemons would have a harder time tracking me down now. I could have used a little trick of aeromancy to rid myself of the filth but with my horrid luck a sniffer or shadow cat would have been passing by at exactly the wrong moment. It wasn’t as risky as using my innate talent with mind magic but wasn’t worth the added danger.

  I scrubbed myself raw, then rose from the bath and dripped my way over to the bed. As it dried, my hair gradually lifted and spiked back into its usual unruly mess. It felt good to be able to sense movement again, like a blindfold had been removed. Every magus that had survived as long as I had inevitably suffered changes to their body in one way or another, alterations induced by the torrent of magic flowing through them. In some manner I didn’t understand, the black spikes of hair helped me to sense movement and vibration in the air currents. No whoreson would be sneaking up behind me in the dark. Maybe that said a lot about me.

  Examining myself in a copper mirror nailed to the wall, I checked to make sure all the ship-filth was gone. Grey flecked my stubble now; funny how that had crept up on me. Not that a single new hair had gone grey in years though – my aging had ceased. It happened to most magi sooner or later, and unlike some I hadn’t withered away to a wrinkled husk.

  I looked every bit as tired as I felt, but then I never had turned heads on entering a room – not for good reasons anyway – though I did like to imagine my scars lent me a sort of roguish charm. I shed the rest of my disguise, all the submissive mannerisms of a meek merchant, the slouching stance, and let my usual sneer creep back onto my face. It felt much like trying on an old pair of trousers and finding the fit a little too tight.

  I stuffed a roll-up into my mouth and lit it from a lantern, drawing the smoke deep into my lungs and blowing it out like dragon’s breath.

  “Welcome home, Edrin Walker,” I said to my reflection. For the first time in years I wasn’t running from place to place, adrift with nothing to live for but the next cup of ale. Lynas was dead, and suddenly I felt alive again, a monster roused from deep slumber for a single deadly purpose.

  “Now, my old pal,” I said to mirror-me. “Let’s go find out who we have to burn.”

  Chapter 5

  It was a short drop from the window to the cobbles, and then I was off through the warren of alleys in the opposite direction to Fisherman’s Way. My eyes darted to everyone I encountered, taking their measure. Paranoia had served me well over the years.

  I knew that I looked like an idiot in the oversized tunic and patched trousers I’d stolen from the inn, but beggars couldn’t be choosers. The inn’s locks had been a joke for my picks and the clothes newly laundered and laid out in some poor sod’s room. They’d have to repay the man. Served them right for overcharging me.

  My head snapped up as a shadow moved beneath a broken cart. I sighed in relief as the hairy black head of a hound peeked out to snuffle along the ground. Ha, I wished those shadow cats luck trying to find my scent – magical or otherwise – through the alleys of the Warrens. Any nose that sensitive would suffer in streets awash with raw sewage.

  First stop was Charra. If anybody knew the details of what happened to Lynas it would be her. I also hoped to pick up all my old gear I’d hidden away before boarding the first ship leaving Setharis ten years ago. I would need every weapon I could get. They had hopefully sat undisturbed in a chest at Charra’s Place all this time. I really hoped that she hadn’t let curiosity get the better of her. I didn’t fancy mourning two friends today. The twists and turns of the streets were unfamiliar to me now, and it would take time to find my way there. It gave me the opportunity to think, and that was never good. Lynas died over and over again in my mind, driving me to the edge of impotent fury. My hands curled into fists, nails cutting into my palms. If only I’d been here.

  The local thieves didn’t bother me this time. They could tell that I belonged here from my jaunty walk, the flash of a feral grin and the aura of imminent violence that said I’d as soon smash their head in as look at them. Of course, in these borrowed clothes I also didn’t look like I had two copper bits to my name either. Might have helped.

  I was glad I didn’t have to risk using my magic on such lowlifes. I tried not to use magic to mess with people’s heads if I could avoid it – it was a sickening violation of privacy and it hadn’t been terribly difficult to swindle a living out in the hinterlands of the Free Towns, where people were more naive and trusted far more readily than properly civilized Setharii folk like myself. Unlike pyromancers, burning bright and burning out quickly, I was subtler and canny enough not to let the magic run riot through my body long enough to risk more changes, rationing it until needed instead of putting on flashy shows. A magus is too fragile a channel to let the sea of magic roar through unchecked for long, and the more you used it the more you wanted to; no, the more you needed to. Want was far too weak a word.

  Affinity for one of the elements was by far the most common Gift, but I was different, classing myself as a right manipulative bastard, or a peoplemancer if I wanted to be polite about it. Most people had worse names for those with my rare sort of Gift: tyrant if they were being polite, mindfucker if not. The Arcanum kept an eye on all magi and made sure we didn’t abuse our powers too much, and they’d known I had the potential to enslave people to my will and become a true tyrant. They had always watched me with an extra level of vigilance, one hand on a knife ready to plunge into my back. Happy times.

  As it turned out, Charra’s old premises were long-gone, burnt down and replaced by a creaking block of slum housing. A copper in a beggar’s bowl gained me the information that Charra was still very much alive, much to my relief. She had shifted her business all the way over to West Docklands, which was impressively upmarket for a brothel. The new Charra’s Place was as close to the luxury of the Crescent and the Old Town as such an establishment could get without the wardens and the Arcanum taking exception to such undesirables getting above their station.

  It took a good half day to make my way west through the maze of narrow streets, and as I walked I gradually became aware that something was not right below the surface of the city. An atmosphere of fear and uncertainty pervaded the seemingly cheerful chats and greetings of friends and neighbours. It wasn’t what they said, it was what they didn’t. I witnessed an old woman ask how a carpenter’s sister was doing. He didn’t answer and just looked away, focusing on repairing a door. Her face paled and she didn’t enquire further. I eavesdropped on other conversations and asked people a few leading questions on my way, and it seemed a worrying number of people had gone missing over the last few months, especially those with a touch of magic in their blood. “The Skinner”, t
he same name daubed on the gatehouse wall, seemed to be on everybody’s lips; a deranged madman some said, while others called him a daemon from the Far Realms.

  By the time I found the right area dusk had fallen and the great bell up in Old Town was tolling its last until dawn. A few travellers new to the city paused in the middle of the street to gawp up at the great houses and gothic spires as illusionary faerie flames flickered into life all along their walls and rooftops, painting them with hues of light that swirled through red, pink, green and blue at the artistic whims of the lords of the High Houses. It was beautiful, but I had seen it countless times and knew just how much gold the noble families wasted on maintaining such magical frivolities.

  Charra’s new place of business was a large building of fine grey stone decorated with fluted columns and delicate ornamentation, all set within small but meticulously maintained gardens. Elunnai was almost full tonight, her tears diamond-bright and scattered across the sky. The silvery light lent an ethereal beauty to the garden as hundreds of delicate moonflowers rose from the earth, translucent buds blooming, petals glowing gently as they bathed in Elunnai’s radiance. It must have cost a fortune to build this small oasis of tranquility and for me it was far more magical than the illusionary artifice adorning the manses of the High Houses on the rock above.

  Charra had gone up in the world.

  Two bullish red-haired clansmen – twins, all looming muscle and whorling blue tattoos, short necks and bristling beards – stood flanking the main entrance. Their hairy arms crossed over leather vests as they watched my approach. I noted the wooden hilts of clubs peeking out from the square-sheared low hedges on either side of them. These two were as well-armed and armoured as the wardens would accept in the lower city. I could tell from a glance that they were seasoned warriors: the knife scars on the arms, the solid stance, the way their eyes sized me up. They had smashed more than a few heads in their time.