The crowd edged forward to examine the body, prodding it out of morbid curiosity. Me, I tied the cord of my money pouch around my neck and tucked it beneath my tunic and used the distraction to slip out of the door before it got ugly. I was carrying a lot of coin and people might soon notice that unfortunate two now looked awfully like a High House card. I breathed a sigh of relief as I stepped out into the shadows, fumbling in my pockets for a smoke as the door closed behind me. Whoever had offed that gang boss had been good, and I’d had my back to them the entire time. Even with magic-wrought heightened senses there had been no–
My senses screamed a split-second warning before a hand clamped around my throat and pulled me backwards into a side alley. He stank of stale sweat and tarred leaf. Thick, calloused fingers squeezed. My head went tight and hot, pulse pounding. I flailed, ramming my elbow back into a man’s hard stomach. He grunted but the grip didn’t loosen, squeezed even harder. My Gift opened on instinct, magic lashing out into his skin. I savaged his mind like a wild beast. He choked, fingers going slack.
I slumped against the wall, wheezing for breath. The dockhand I’d beaten at cards earlier stared back at me dumbly, drool running down his chin. He dropped down in the muck, gurgling, fascinated with watching his fingers move. His memory was shredded. Seemed he had realized that he couldn’t beat me and instead decided to wait outside to get his hands on coin in a different way. Too clever for his own good. Still, I’d been a blind idiot to walk outside as unaware as any innocent lamb heading to the slaughter. Even if I had been rattled by the assassination, there was no excuse. Too much was at stake to be that sloppy. I massaged my throat. It had been so very easy to break him. First the guards and now this… I seemed to have actual might at my beck and call nowadays, and it was thrilling.
I imagined the Worm of Magic’s serpent smile growing wider as it waited for me to let go of all restraint. I’m not sure I wouldn’t prefer it to be a real entity as opposed to something that only personified my own desires magnified through the lens of magic. Nothing is ever quite as terrifying as your own mind.
“Sorry, pal,” I croaked. Reducing him to that infantile state had been a step too far. Instinctive reaction or not, I was powerful enough that I could have and should have left him puking up and cradling a broken nose, or, oh I don’t know, given him a nasty memory of lusting after and sucking off a dog or something. That sort of thing could scar a man for life. I shook my head. It was a shame, but I consoled myself with the fact that he’d likely learn to walk and talk again, and he might even remember his own name someday. That was more than most people got in the Warrens. Usually it was a knife across the throat and a swim in the river. He was lucky really.
As I limped away into busier streets, three men burst through the door behind me, tumbling over the gurgling dockhand. I wasn’t in the mood for teaching them a lesson now, and after using magic, I didn’t care to linger. I slunk off into the darkness as they scrambled to their feet, cursing and kicking, looking around in vain for the man they were supposed to have beaten and robbed.
As dusk drew in I bought a packet of smokes and spiced meat on skewers from a cart on Fisherman’s Way. My teeth sunk into the hot meat, spicy juices dribbling down my chin as I wolfed it down while listening to a group of musicians drinking and playing on a street corner. Docklands might be squalid in comparison to the Old Town, but it was far more alive: a real and vibrant community in many places.
Whoever the Skinner was, he had nothing to do with the usual underworld strife. That lot seemed more on edge than anybody. When I met up with Charra tomorrow I hoped everything would slot into place.
As I passed the dark mouth of an alley something bright and fluttering in the breeze caught my eye. Hidden in the shadows amidst a pile of refuse was the green of a torn coat: fine Clanholds wool distinctively tailored by Arlsbergh of Ironport.
It was my coat.
I peered into the gloom with knowing dread. A man’s corpse lay in the alleyway… well, not a corpse precisely, more like what was left of one. Chunks of raw offal had been strewn across the cobbles and tattered flags of flesh and skin hung from shards of stone and wood gouged from the walls by massive claws. I squatted down and picked up a silver earring of twisted wire still attached to most of an ear. Arse. It was the boy thief’s earring.
I recognized the bite marks on a hunk of thigh, made by fangs the length of my hand. Shadow cats! Of all places, I should have been safe from daemons in Setharis. Lynas had seen shard beasts, and now these were here hunting for me. Somebody or something had to be protecting them from the city’s corrosive effects.
My plans were just grand in theory, not so great when I was confronted by my own bloody handiwork. Still, the lad had been no innocent and had dug his own grave, and not undeserved either. Such a waste of a life. I took one last look at the remains and then ran for the inn.
I kept Dissever naked in my hand and found my eyes flicking to every darkened doorway, every corner and pool of darkness, watching out for anything lurking in the shadows. How had those damned shadow cats located me so soon? It could take a week, usually two or three before they narrowed down my location, and this time I had travelled over the accursed sea, which should have made it more difficult. A thought struck me: with their master here, perhaps some of the damn things had never left Setharis at all, had sat waiting and watching all these years just in case I should ever return. If one knew I was here then the rest of the pack surely did. I would have to keep moving from now on. There went any chance of a good night’s sleep.
I blocked off the door to my room and carefully set an array of the nastiest wards that I could remember – things that would blast your mind and burn flesh from your bones. Only then, weary with the effort, did I shrug off my clothes, climb onto the pallet and pull the blanket tight around me.
My fractured dreams were stalked by a butchered boy in a tattered green coat running from shadows, and the night echoed with Lynas’ screams.
Chapter 13
Somebody crashed into my door. I jerked upright, blanket flying, and reached for my wicked knife. It was just a drunkard staggering down the stairs, hacking up his lungs as he went. I slumped back into a doze, immune to guests clomping on the stairs, the creaking of floorboards and the clatter of pots and pans in the kitchen below. For a single sublime moment I just lay there, numbly cocooned in my own safe little world.
My blissful numbness gave way to a growing itch. I sat up and scratched at my hair and body, peering down at the straw, at an almost imperceptible hint of movement. My skin crawled. Bile rose up my throat. Swallowing, I looked down at my itching crotch and with two fingers quested at the root of the hairs, pulling off a tiny hard speck smaller than a grain of sand. It squirmed between thumb and forefinger. Lice.
Fucking Docklands inns and their mangy pig-faced owners!
One of the first things that the Collegiate tutors beat into initiates was cleanliness, both magical and mundane. Most Gifted had one method or another, and luckily my meagre skills at aeromancy proved sufficient to avoid the worst of the beatings. Sod the risk; I wove a scouring blade of wind to strip away all the dirt, grime, dead skin, lice and bits of straw, and left a pile of gunge in the bed. My skin felt fresh, if a little raw, and the vile itching had ceased.
I beat the worst of the dust and dirt from my clothes and slipped them back on, then stomped downstairs to curse the sour-faced owner, telling her to burn her lice-infested bedding. She hissed like a startled alley cat and I was forced to duck a bowl flung at my head. I spat more curses right back at her as I stormed out into unexpectedly garish sunlight, quickly leaving behind the scabby inn and the hag shrieking obscenities at my back. If she was lucky I wouldn’t be back to burn the place down myself.
The city din washing over me was cleansing in its own way. Setharis was a place of mists, sea fog and rain, and the hubbub of daily life was usually somewhat muffled; it was a rare treat to enjoy such fine weather. The city had sprouted sails: lin
en hung out to dry on ropes between buildings fluttered and flapped in the crisp morning breeze.
Despite the glorious sunshine, there was still an undercurrent to the babble of voices, an edge of intangible tension flowing through the city streets. Setharis was worried sick. It was more than the usual disaffection amongst the peasantry or the influx of refugees from coastal villages around Ironport, nor was it solely due to the Skinner murders and the missing people. The lower classes might even have cheered had the murders been up in the Old Town instead of right on their own doorsteps.
With the shadow cats already in the city, I wasn’t about to linger where I’d used even a little magic, in daylight or not. I walked briskly towards Carrbridge, passing through the morning market at Pauper’s Gate where men and women were gathering to sign on to ships and work gangs. If they were very lucky, a labourer might get hired by the Arcanum, or find a place on one of the various guilds’ projects. For the few who excelled it might offer prospects of retention and steady pay. Of course such contracts were rare as diamonds.
A muddle of languages and accents filled the streets as travellers and foreign sellswords sought their fortunes, steady work, or to disappear. Setharis could easily offer that last. It was sometimes called the Dreaming City in the oldest of texts, depending on which translation you used, but City of Fever Dreams was to my mind the most accurate interpretation – for many newcomers it soon became a nightmare.
In the ten years I’d been gone the number of businesses and trading houses boarded up and abandoned had tripled, as had the number of beggars. Was trade really that bad these days? The poor clustered on every street corner, ragged figures squabbling over turf and doing their best to look worse off than any other: pinching their babes to make them wail piteously, grinning at me with soot-blackened teeth, cultivating fake limps or showing off bandaged stumps of missing limbs that were merely bent double and tied up. I knew most of these old tricks, had used many of them myself as a street rat. There was some real artistry on show here today and I wished them the best of luck.
There were only two tried and tested ways to climb socially into the upper city. One was by being fortunate enough to be born Gifted, and there was no shortage of sexual offers to male magi since the Gift tended to run in bloodlines. The parents of a Gifted child would quickly find themselves plucked from poverty and ushered into the relative luxury of the Crescent once their child became a full magus.
The other way was the old fashioned way: to get stinking rich and buy your way up. Of course, as Lynas’ family had discovered, it was easy for the unGifted to fall back into the filth of the slums if they were not cunning enough to survive the politicking of the Old Town’s magical bloodlines with their old money and old alliances. With extended family wielding political power in the Arcanum it was easy for the High Houses to remain in power and suckle from the flaccid teats of the city’s dwindling riches. Thoughts of politics always made my stomach heave.
The month of Leaffall was at an end and it was only three days before the festival of Sumarfuin was held to mark the onset of winter. The market area had been cleaned up and given a veneer of respectability. Country folk from the surrounding villages had been pouring into Setharis for the festival and to bring their cattle in for slaughter before the snows and ice arrived. The incomers held hands, laughing and kissing as they browsed the wares on offer, or danced to the bards playing tunes on their pipes. Grim-faced locals avoided any festivities and resented their carefree joy. I smiled at children wearing hideous horned masks as they wandered through the crowds carrying baskets of white heather sprigs, rabbits’ feet, boars’ tusks, black cats’ tails, and anything else that could conceivably be sold as lucky; others carried white quartz charm stone pebbles or strips of bright cloth that tradition claimed were offerings to appease the ancestors.
Sumarfuin must have held real meaning once, but these days it was just a bit of much-needed fun, a communal habit harking back to the tribal ancestors of both the Clanholds and the Setharii. It was older than the first words ever written by mankind during the era of tyrants, back when my wicked lot of bastards ruled. Some meanings and memories were probably better off forgotten.
The Arcanum and the nobility tended to frown on these old folk myths but some things even the rulers of the city couldn’t control. They certainly couldn’t stop young magi and nobles donning elaborate masks of their own and coming down to join in the revelry. It was the only time of the year when the social classes mixed freely.
A woman wearing some sort of foreign hedge witch costume, all bright beads and bones, thrust a necklace of carved wooden charms at my face. In a thick accent she declared it a talisman from some distant homeland with far too many vowels and apostrophes. She didn’t fool me; her voice was undiluted Docklands however hard she tried to disguise it. Seeing my lack of interest she thrust a basket of dragon bones and teeth under my nose. “Gathered from the beaches of the Dragon Coast, they was,” she said. “Grant you luck, so they will.” The stone bones looked genuine enough, still with traces of the costal rock they’d been dug from.
I waved her off and she moved down the line of newcomers peddling her artefacts. In the taverns and inns I’d passed through while travelling I occasionally heard tales of dragon sightings, but in ten years of travel I’d never met a single person that had personally seen a living one – well, nobody that was both sane and honest.
I bought some onion bread and chewed with relish as I made my way up Fisherman’s Wynd. The further from the market, the more sullen the city became. People kept their eyes fixed on the ground as if afraid to attract attention. A horse and cart tore down the street, causing a heavily-laden woman in the middle of crossing to leap back at the last moment to avoid being crushed. She fell to the ground. The cart didn’t slow, and nobody bothered to help her up.
Amidst the crowd somebody stumbled and bumped into my shoulder. I turned, something inside screaming wrongness. A richly dressed man stared up at me, bewildered, his pupils wide and dark, the whites shot through with red. I noted the tiny red cuts in his forearms where he’d been making blood offerings at the Thief of Life’s temple. He stank of stale sweat and sour puke, and his skin bubbled with pustules of corruption: low-level magical corruption at that. “All gone,” he muttered. “Gone. Ran out.”
A habitual mageblood addict too long without a fix. Panicked, I shoved the alchemic-addled idiot aside and hurried away. The man meandered his way down the hill, pawing at people and shouting obscenities, occasionally trying to bite chunks out of them. In that state it wouldn’t be long before the sniffers caught wind. Then it would be a quick knife across the throat and another corpse tossed onto the pyres. I kept my head down and quickened my step.
The wardens stationed on the Carr’s Bridge were carefully checking each cart as we stood in line to pay the toll and trickle over the hump of the bridge. No doubt my recent activities had caused the heightened security. Good, maybe if the authorities had been more vigilant they’d have caught the Skinner by now.
I filed in behind a gaggle of worshippers as they headed down onto East Temple Street. On entering the square a wall of incense hit me like a rock to the face. I’d never seen the point of the stuff; half the time it stank worse than the odours they were trying to mask.
By the time the bells in the Old Town tolled, the place was thronging with worshippers muttering prayers. I couldn’t help but think that our religions were an oddity flying in the face of Setharii inclinations towards practical cynicism. It was as if people refused to believe their gods had once been mortal men and women. Granted, the gods had been born Gifted, but they had still soiled their swaddling and spewed milk all over their parents at the most inopportune of times. Given time and centuries of hard work – and knowing that secret in my head – perhaps even the likes of me could find a way to become a god. Hah, wouldn’t that fuck them up!
I stuck a smoke between my lips and lit it from the sacred censor outside the Thief of Life’s temple
. A priest frowned at me, but somehow I didn’t think my patron god would mind. Finally I caught sight of Charra entering the square, dressed in soft brown leathers cut for travel, a short sword sheathed at her hip and a small satchel slung over one shoulder. I gave her a wave and made my way over.
My tabac smoke wafted over and her nose wrinkled in disgust. “Do you have to use that muck?”
I shrugged. “No.” I took a long drag, then turned my head away and blew a long slow plume of smoke.
She scowled. “I hope your search was fruitful.”
“It was. I also discovered that the titans glow now. When did that happen?”
She shrugged. “Started about a year ago and has been getting steadily brighter. It’s a great mystery.”
I chuckled. “I can imagine the Arcanum’s consternation. Not knowing must be driving them mad. It certainly gave me pause when I was heading to Lynas’ warehouse.”
“I can imagine. Well, let’s go somewhere quiet and get down to business.”
At the entrance to East Temple Street we met a squad of wardens coming from the opposite direction. “Oh, come on,” I muttered, heart sinking as I recognized Eva in the vanguard. I forced myself to smile.
Those glorious green eyes flicked from Charra to me. “Well, well, if it isn’t Master Reklaw.” She inclined her head to Charra. “Business is well, I trust?”
Charra smiled thinly. “And entirely legal as always, Magus Evangeline.”
“Oh, I am positive that we wouldn’t find a single thing out of order,” she replied. “If I may offer a word to the wise: I would keep my eye on this one. Your lover, is he?”
The Traitor God Page 13