My hand was on Dissever’s hilt. It was hungry. More! More! it howled in my mind.
I grinned a death-head’s grin. You’ll get your fill, Dissever. If it’s this new god then I’ll destroy him. I don’t know how, but I will find a way. And if it’s not this Hooded God, then I promise to bury you in somebody else’s guts.
“Maybe,” I said to Charra. “But what else could possibly explain the other gods being blinded and chained? God or not, I’ll find this hooded walking corpse and make him pay.”
“We, Walker,” she said coldly. “We will.”
Yes, it was better to follow Charra’s example and calm down. I let go of Dissever and felt that boiling bloodlust diminish not one bit, because this time it was all my own emotions. I took a deep breath and forged my red hot anger into a cold and deadly fury.
“What do you need?” she asked, face calm and collected. That was the old Charra all right, all business. She would mourn in private later, but first she would do what needed doing.
“He had been snooping around somewhere, I’m sure of it, and then something made him flee for his life. The question is: what was he up to that night, and where?” And what had Lynas been trying to tell me? I had a horrible feeling it involved the labyrinthine Boneyards, the deep darkness below the city streets.
Our eyes met and I held Charra’s gaze. “Lynas was terrified of him beyond reason, but he had discovered something he feared far more, something he deemed worth spending his life to expose.”
Charra looked away, not wanting to show how distraught she was. “If he discovered something he shouldn’t, then perhaps the hooded man decided to clean house by killing Lynas’ assistants. I’ll trawl through my reports and find details of everybody else who went missing around the same time. If I mark them all on a map then perhaps that will give us some clue. Lynas wasn’t involved in anything terribly illegal. Oh, he wasn’t exactly whiter-than-white; he dabbled in some grey trading and a little smuggling, but he mostly kept to the spirit of the law. He was doing well and had been talking about buying new premises over in Westford to be closer to us.”
My mouth was dry. I felt a shiver ripple up my spine. “Smuggling?” I said, a nagging feeling at the back of my mind. “What sort of goods?”
Charra’s eyes narrowed. “Nothing too unusual. He had official permits to import expensive foreign alcohols, but he also dabbled in small shipments of luxury goods from the continent: spices, silks, tapestries, carvings, furniture, herbs, some from less than official sources. Why?”
I rubbed a hand across my jaw, the bristles rasping. “Not sure. After that vision, when you said smuggling it just felt right. A hunch perhaps.” Or a feeling he’d left me.
“I did look into it,” she said. “But I couldn’t find anything to connect the murder to his business. Perhaps you can convince others to talk, the sort that would never willingly help me. You have unique talents.”
I nodded. “First, I need to pay a visit to his home, his offices and warehouse, whatever property he has… sorry, that he had. I need to do it alone, I can’t afford distractions.” And I had to keep her away from me, for her own safety.
“The place is all locked up under Arcanum wards, but with your weird ways perhaps you can get in where I failed. Lynas lived above his warehouse in Carrbridge. Head up Fisherman’s Way and head over the bridge, take the left fork onto Coppergate Road and it’s the second warehouse on the left. I’m not sure what more you can find though, the wardens already carted off all his papers for investigation.”
So, Carrbridge, was it? As it turned out I hadn’t been entirely lying to that gate guard.
I tsked. “You are probably correct. Can you arrange to sneak me into the Old Town, and into the Templarum Magestus tomorrow? I expect they will have taken all of Lynas’ ledgers and scrolls to the Courts of Justice.”
“Will that be safe?” she said.
“Probably not. But I’ll manage. You know how sneaky I can be.” She looked dubious. Actually I was almost pissing myself just thinking about it. The tunnels of the Boneyards aside, the Old Town was the last place I wanted to be.
“Very well,” she said. “I had Old Gerthan look them over already but perhaps you can see something he did not. I’ll call in another favour and get you in tomorrow, around noon most likely. There’s an inn down by Pauper’s Gate that opens late, you might remember it as a pub called the Bitter Nag. If you lodge there I’ll send a message when it’s arranged.”
“Good, I’m just hoping that Lynas was still using his old cipher.” She quirked an eyebrow so I elaborated: “We used to exchange secret notes as initiates. There is a small chance that he might have left a message before he headed out that night, just in case the worst happened.” I shook my head, trying to clear some of Lynas’ confusion and terror still lingering after the vision. “I don’t think he had any idea it would be that dangerous, but I still have to check.”
My dried drool and blood crusted the sleeve of her coat. I was one suave and sexy man alright. I held out a hand. “Sorry, but I’ll need to take your coat. Just in case anything out there comes across my scent on you.” Some things I was not willing to risk. It was unlikely that shadow cats could survive in Setharis, but with shard beasts on the loose and their master prowling the streets she was better cold than cold and stiff and dead.
She set her lantern down and slipped off the coat, handed it over without complaint. “I’ll grab something off one of the Smilers.”
“Will you be safe out on your own?” I said, worried. “This is the Warrens after all.”
She snorted and picked up the lantern. “Walker, we girls stick together. Too many men think they can own us, and sometimes they’ll only take a rusty blade to the balls for an answer. In any case, my girls keep their ears to the ground, their lips sealed, and their blades handy.”
She reached out to touch my face, stopped, slowly drew her hand back. “I’m more worried about you.” She didn’t want more of my scent on her but the gesture was still touching. The only other affection I’d seen in the past ten years had been bought and paid for, or from fleeting drunken fumbles.
“I have always held myself back,” I said, looking up at the strip of stars visible between looming buildings and banks of thick cloud. “Never really felt the need to stretch my limits. I didn’t have any cause to take such risks, you know?” Apart from my mastery of mind magic I could also grant myself a little extra strength and speed and manipulate the air currents in small ways. It was difficult and gruelling, but doable. Would it prove enough? I scowled. “No more holding back.” My eyes fell back to Setharis, back to Charra’s dark eyes. I drew Dissever and the black iron blade squirmed in my hand, eager to kill.
“You don’t need to worry about me, Charra. Not tonight. It’s everybody else that needs to be worried.” After reliving Lynas’ agony I needed to be alone with my grief. It went far deeper than mourning for a friend. He was a part of me torn away, leaving only a gaping wound. I was dangerously unbalanced, so what did I do? What I always did: I went looking for trouble.
Chapter 8
Even the unnatural vitality of a magus’ body had limits: I was mentally drained by the vision, and physically from five days of seasickness. I needed to sleep and regain my strength – oh, to sleep on solid ground again! I found the inn and haggled with a sour-faced woman for three nights’ lodging, paying extra for no questions asked. It was strange to be back in a building I once drank in with Lynas.
Sadly I couldn’t spare the time to sleep, only taking a few minutes of rest before heaving my sorry arse back up off the bed. I had some small affinity with both body magic and aeromancy, nothing much to speak of really, but occasionally useful. I tweaked my body functions a little, stimulating a few fleshy inside bits I’d discovered as a Collegiate initiate studying for examinations – last minute, naturally. False freshness cleared away the cobwebs and I felt like I had emerged dripping from a mountain stream, but I would pay for it later; the comedown was
a bitch.
I slipped back out into the night and headed for Lynas’ warehouse. Before long I would sight the titanic black armoured statues flanking Carr’s Bridge, looming chest and shoulders over even the tallest of tenements. Cowardice and Greed, two of five titans wrought from enchanted black iron and forgotten magic in ancient days, bearing enormous swords that only god-like strength could lift without rope and pulleys and two dozen cart horses hitched up. They fascinated and terrified me in equal measure.
I turned a corner and missed my step. Their features were visible in the darkness, emitting an eerie green phosphorescence. What. The. Fuck?
I approached with a degree of superstitious dread, studying Greed’s heavy jowls and tiny piggish eyes for any hint of movement, then Cowardice’s hollow-cheeked cringing expression. There had always been an indefinable something about them that perturbed me, even before I knew what they really were – and now this. The glow was a new aspect, and I should know since I’d once tried to climb the heights of Cowardice on a drunken dare. I think I managed to reach the knee before getting stuck, not that I received any sympathy whatsoever from Lynas. New occurrences were never to be trusted in Setharis, because it usually meant magic gone awry.
I wondered if the titans guarding the other two bridges over the Seth also glowed. Each had been named after one of the cardinal disgraces; their real names, if they ever had any, were consigned to the same desert sands that buried their creators. At the centre of the Crescent, Wrath and Pride guarded the approach to Sethgate Bridge. At Westford Bridge Lust stood lone vigil. The titans were Escharric relics the Arcanum had excavated from half-buried ruins over two hundred and fifty years ago. Crusted in bird droppings and layers of soot, it was hard to imagine that they were in truth arcane war engines. The Escharric empire had fallen before the war engines could be used, and I wasn’t sure that was a bad thing, given the disaster caused when the Arcanum used them for the first and hopefully last time during the shockingly brief war against the Vanda city states.
There had once been a sixth and unfinished titan, later named after the final disgrace of Ignorance. In their lust for knowledge Arcanum artificers had tried to take it apart to study the construction. Texts record Ignorance exploded in a lightning storm that incinerated thirty magi and fused the desert sands to glass for leagues around. In our classes at the Collegiate I had been the only one to note that those same texts hadn’t bothered to record the number of servants and labourers killed. Hundreds more dead, and yet not worthy of mention.
Finally Carr’s Bridge itself came into sight, ancient pitted stone arcing over the turgid and infested waters guarding the Crescent from the undesirables of Docklands. The human features of statues lining the bridge and either side of the stone-walled riverbank were long since worn away by wind and rain.
I slipped into the shadow of a statue as a warden left the bridge tollbooth. Only rogues were abroad in Docklands at this time of night and I didn’t want to be remembered. He didn’t see me as he wandered over to Greed and dropped his trousers, whistling tunelessly as his piss splashed across the titan’s metal heel. I winced. He was pissing on a bloody monster! The lower classes thought them mere statues with a few fanciful tales attached, which was exactly how the Arcanum wanted it.
There were two things to note about the history of the titans: firstly, they had only been used once. History records that during the war with the Vanda city states two hundred years ago, the enemy’s mage-priests had conducted a mass human sacrifice of their own people to gain power. The ignorant savages ripped a gaping ragged hole through the Shroud and mistakenly opened doorways to dozens of other worlds. An army of daemons had poured through the breach, destroying their cities and beginning what came to be called the Daemonwar. The Arcanum had been forced to unleash the titans against the teeming hordes of inhuman creatures, and with the heroic sacrifice of half the entire Arcanum they ultimately thwarted that daemonic invasion from the Far Realms. The lush lands of the Vanda were reduced to a barren, cursed wasteland where nothing would ever live again.
The second thing was that the first was a big fat stinking lie. Many years ago in the Collegiate library I’d happened across pages torn from a diary – an eye-witness account of what had really happened: the Vanda city states neighbouring the desert of Escharr had joined in federation, and under the leadership of their mage-priests formed a collegiate of their own with the intention of rivalling the magical might of the Arcanum. The Setharii empire had been at its height, swallowing up the island nations of the Thousand Kingdoms one by one and forming colonies to exploit and export abundant natural resources. The Arcanum could not abide the birth of a magical rival, especially not one that threatened their monopoly on Escharric ruins and ancient artefacts buried beneath the sands.
And so the ignorant magi of Arcanum manufactured an excuse to wage war, and in order to learn more about the workings of their recently discovered titans they gleefully unleashed the ancient war engines upon the Vanda. The official histories were lies, and this horrific act was before the Daemonwar had even begun. The lands of the Vanda burned while the Arcanum looked on in impotent horror, unable to stop the titans slaughtering everything: men, women, children and even animals. It was a mass death of our own devising. We rent the Shroud that protected our world from the depredations of daemonic invaders. The greatest disaster in all Setharii history had been caused by the Arcanum’s morbid curiosity, by arrogant children playing with Escharric toys they didn’t fully understand. It wasn’t the first time dabbling with that fallen empire’s artefacts had exploded in our faces and it wouldn’t be the last.
It was ancient history to me, but those torn pages showed the Arcanum for the self-serving political entity it truly was and I’d never forgotten the lesson. It is so much easier to blame crimes on the voiceless dead.
In any case, the titans were too dangerous to re-bury and attempt to forget, too massive to hide, and much too valuable to destroy; instead they were deactivated and had spent the last two centuries where the Arcanum could keep close watch over them.
The guard fumbled his cock back inside his trousers, wiped his fingers on his tabard and then joined his colleague in warming their hands over a glowing brazier outside the tollbooth. They were ostensibly stationed here to maintain the peace and keep traffic moving, but in reality their role was to dissuade thieving little Docklands toerags swarming over the bridge at night. If the poor wanted in and out for a spot of thieving they would have to swim the Seth, and I didn’t fancy the odds of them making it across in one piece. A thousand years of Arcanum experimentation had let all sorts of abominations escape into the river.
With shard beasts on the loose I dared not rely overmuch on the fabled daemon-devouring air of Setharis. Nobody else was out this late, and the running water should confound the magical senses of any shadow cats and sniffers nearby, so I reluctantly accepted the risk and eased open my Gift.
I eavesdropped on the wardens: just the usual moans about drink, gambling debts and women. Guards proved much the same in whatever city or town I passed through. It was simple to fog their minds and walk straight down the middle of the bridge. As I passed the tollbooth they glanced up, but I was just part of the furniture, entirely expected and effectively invisible.
Unlike the shifting sands of the Docklands slums, Carrbridge looked exactly how I remembered it. Cosily nestled between the massive cliff walls of the Old Town rock on one side and the Seth on the other, the old, stone buildings were plain but solid, and the signs above shop fronts bright with new paint. The Crescent was the domain of the richer merchants and the poorer nobility and Carrbridge was the least of these areas, the furthest east and consequently the recipient of more smoke and foul odours blown in by prevailing winds.
Before long I was passing the mouth of East Temple Street leading into the district’s square of worship. The temples here were smaller and less ostentatious than the grand square up in the Old Town, but then Carrbridge was a more practical
sort of place, less given to garish displays of wealth and magic when compared to Westford, Sethgate, or the Old Town itself.
The emblems of the gods of Setharis looked down upon the square. Facing me was the ossified throne of the Lord of Bones and the broken moon of Lady Night, both gods’ original names long since lost to the mists of time. On my right were the gleaming golden scales of Derrish, the Gilded God and Lynas’ patron deity, and next to it a smaller temple bearing the blood-filled hourglass of Nathair, the Thief of Life. On my left was the grim temple of this new god, marble statues of a faceless hooded figure standing sentinel either side of its entrance. Over the door the emblem of the Hooded God had been painted over the axe of Artha the Warlord. The dead god. I ground my teeth and had to force myself to look away. Now was not the time to pick at that scabbed-over wound in my memory.
I’d never seen any hint the gods paid a blind bit of notice unless they wanted something in exchange, and I doubted they would even bother to piss on their worshippers if they were on fire. Charra and I were agreed that it was folly to worship the Setharii gods, but Lynas had felt very differently. It was not a thing we discussed often, mostly because I tended to end up ranting like a drunken oaf. In this very square Lynas had once slugged me in the stomach and hadn’t talked to me for a week. I’d probably deserved it.
The street split and I went left down Coppergate Road. A grinning copper lion reared over the entrance to an inn that beckoned me with buttery light, scent of roasting meat, merry music and laughter.
The Traitor God Page 8