The Traitor God

by Cameron Johnston

  He suddenly wavered, shaking his head groggily. He staggered back and barely caught his balance. “What did you burn from my mind? I will find out one way or another.”

  Clumsy mental probes battered into me again, deeper and deeper, but I wasn’t in any condition to try to resist. It wasn’t easy for him. Even without conscious thought, the core of my mind was a devious, cruel creature. I’d long ago taken precautions against the very talent that I knew best. He wouldn’t enslave me easily. The weakened god groaned and sagged against the wall as the mental effort of twisting his power into my peculiar path took its toll. I tried to stand, to run, but my shaking legs refused to bear my weight. I flopped to the floor, screaming, arms clamped to butchered side and broken back that hadn’t fully healed yet.

  “I see a part of your brain has been destroyed to keep the answers from me,” he said. “Those memories I cannot obtain, but I am confident we can piece together enough fragments from your dead flesh to grant me some answers.”

  “Please,” I said, defeated and out of options. Whatever last desperate hope I’d stashed in the merchant’s chair was out of my reach. I’d failed and he knew it. “No more. I… I’ll talk. Tell you everything you want to know. Please…”

  “Of course you will,” Nathair said, smiling at my abject defeat. Like all gods, he loved to feel superior. “The oh-so-witty little mortal reduced to this quivering slime. Pathetic. But you will still serve me well.” He limped over to the fine merchant’s chair opposite whilst worrying at the very last bastions of my mind. He collapsed into it, smirking, looking oh-so-regal.

  The seat of the chair clicked, metal meeting metal.

  Understanding hit us at the same moment. I realized what that burnt-out memory had been, and he was in my head, could see it all in my mind’s eye: the seat pressing down on the brass cone, the nose clicking, setting off the alchemic bomb I’d stashed inside.

  His hatred stabbed into me. “You little–”

  A wall of blood and flesh smashed into me. The world went silent. I bounced across the floor in a cloud of dust and grit, the flesh of my back shredded and burning. The back wall collapsed in eerie silence, stones noiselessly careering across the floor. The entire upper storey and roof of the building was missing.

  I blinked away dusty tears, utterly confused that I was still alive. Of the Thief of Life’s ravaged body, nothing solid remained. A lightning storm raged in the space where he’d been sitting, bolts of incandescent energy arcing inwards to a single point of blinding light where his heart had been. The storm spun around a shard of glimmering crystal, spiralling ever faster inwards until it met a single point of brilliance that eclipsed that of the Magash Mora’s crystal core. His god-seed.

  Slowly, sound began to filter back. The building creaked and groaned around me, the cracking of wood and stone, pitter-patter of fragments of ceiling, the drip-drip-drip of blood and minced godflesh, the fizz and crackle of lightning. Fires kindled of their own volition mid-air, churning upwards in spinning vortices.

  Blood and god-mush oozed around the floor with a queer life of its own, began blindly flowing back towards the crystal. He was not finished yet and his body yearned to rejoin the god-seed.

  My Gift flailed away inside, desperately trying to repair all the damage to my body. I shook, god-blood drenched skin sparking with unfocused power. My body sucked it in like a sponge. Too much power. It filled me, stretched me, threatened to tear me apart. My Gift didn’t have a hope of containing it: I wasn’t a damn god!

  Somehow I managed to sit up and find my voice. I sang, a very particular rhythm vomiting forth as a wail of hatred. What was left of Nathair writhed in agony, but I refused to stop. Artha’s gift to me was revenge for the murder of Lynas. I made it to my knees, then after an age up onto my feet. I kept singing as I hobbled towards the incandescent light hanging in the air before me.

  I reached the god-seed before Nathair.

  The storm of magic ceased. Just for a moment, I wielded all the power of a god. It was mine and mine alone. The remnants of Nathair exploded, motionless puddles dribbling down into the earth. Was he dead? Perhaps; I felt no thought left in it.

  I sensed four muted presences far below my feet, buried deep under the black rock of Setharis. They felt familiar, almost like kin. The gods called me to them and my feet began sinking through the rubble. No! Whatever they were, they were no kin of mine. “I hope you are in torment, Byzant.” Gritting my teeth, I opened my tattered coat and forced my hand to drop the god-seed into the deep inside pocket, then collapsed like a puppet with its strings severed as strange presences and godly power both cut off.

  I wanted to scream and kill, or to curl up and hide, maybe both. The Worm of Magic whispered desperate seductions but my despair was too complete to bother listening.

  I was giddy with power and pain, my back crying out in distress. I was a wreck, and despite being full to bursting with stolen power it would take a long time to fully heal, if I ever did. Magical healing was not the same as never having been hurt. It might take years for my shattered bones to knit properly, and missing ribs did not re-grow. Still, I was alive and finally free of my daemons. I could share Charra’s last days.

  Black shards of Dissever lay half-buried in the debris. I tried to pick one up with my left hand, but it dropped from trembling fingers. I clenched it into a fist and used my right, needles of black iron still buried in the flesh. Nothing but cold and lifeless iron in my hand, but the daemon’s presence still lingered at the back of my mind. At the moment it tasted content, with perhaps a smidgeon of pride. Godslayer, it whispered.

  I limped towards a hole in the wall as the building crumbled around me. It was a strange feeling to be myself again, without disparate parts locked away and hidden in the darkened catacombs of my mind. But there was a hole burnt in my brain that would never heal, and aside from my left hand only time would tell what other problems that would cause. I staggered from the warehouse and it collapsed behind me. Lynas’ home crashed down to rubble.

  “I got the bastards, Lynas. I got them. You did it, you saved us. If you hadn’t burnt down that temple and destroyed all that mageblood we’d all be worse than dead.” Tears welled up in my eyes. It was over and Lynas’ body was finally at rest, but I couldn’t let go. Some of my memories had been damaged or destroyed by the god’s brutal invasion of my mind, and more thanks to my own desperation. I felt their loss as much as you can without really knowing what you were missing, but other memories had been fully restored, fresh as ever and swimming about in my head. In a way that was far worse – it was like losing Lynas all over again.

  I sat on the rubble, throat cracked and raw from screaming, stomach gnawing and empty, and looked up at the rock of the Old Town, where high up through the pall of smoke the five gods’ towers remained silent. With Nathair gone I had half-expected four of them to explode back into life at any moment.

  Inside my pocket, power called, and if I wanted, one of those towers could be mine. Honestly, right then I’d have happily traded it for a smoke, a jack of cold ale and a hot roast chicken.

  Chapter 35

  The streets were dead; not just quiet, actually dead. Corpses of cats and dogs and chicken and swine lay eviscerated and drained of blood, piles of feather and bone marking where the god had plucked birds from the sky. Even the tiny husks of flies and beetles littered the ground. Nathair had left nothing alive in his wake. I heard a wail and hobbled back the way I had come on my flight with the crystal with the vague hope of finding survivors trapped under collapsed buildings. Remnants of Skallgrim warriors were scattered across the street, a scrap of scalp and hair there, a finger here, and fragments of shredded armour and broken weapons that had proven useless.

  I located the source of the noise and found Harailt still alive, if you could call the state he was in living. His body was a mound of quivering flesh wheezing and bubbling, and his mind a gutted and insane ruin. As I approached he mewled pathetically from a gash in what was left o
f his throat. Three battered and bloodied Skallgrim surrounded him – lucky stragglers arrived too late to enjoy Nathair’s attentions – prodding the mound with weapons. I took their minds without a second thought. They stood motionless, awaiting my orders.

  I didn’t say anything as I approached the remains of Harailt. His single remaining eye begged me to end the agony. I knew that I should hand him over to the Arcanum, but I didn’t have it in me to allow him to live, even in eternal agony. I almost stopped myself, thinking it would be far too quick an end for what he had done. But none of it was Harailt’s fault, not really – he had been infested and controlled by Nathair and that Scarrabus parasite. Whatever he had done to me, nobody deserved this. I picked up a discarded Skallgrim axe and chopped, once, twice, a dozen more times to make certain.

  He didn’t die easily, and it wasn’t quick. When he finally breathed his last I didn’t feel the satisfaction that I’d expected given our history. I just felt empty.

  My three mind-broken thralls followed me as I wandered in a daze back to what was left of Lynas’ warehouse and slumped down atop a pile of rubble. I stared at nothing. Thinking. Hurting. Mourning. For what seemed like hours. Eventually footsteps crunching towards me made me look up.

  Krandus and Cillian advanced on me through the smoke and dust. Cillian still looked half-dead, but had regained some of her strength since I’d seen her last.

  My three Skallgrim thralls closed ranks around me. I wondered how I appeared to the Archmagus: guarded by the enemy, a torn and ragged figure dripping the blood and gore of a god and with a lake of stolen power seething inside me. My coat hung in tatters around my shoulders like a cloak of bloody skin, and at some point amidst the chaos I’d lost my right boot and the little toe with it, leaving just a ragged stump. I didn’t feel that pain yet. Funny the trivial details that strike you when imminent death comes knock, knock, knocking at your door. A toe was the least of my worries.

  They stopped ten paces from me, power vibrating amongst them like a leashed storm ready to be loosed in the blink of an eye. I waved off my thralls and heaved myself to my feet.

  “Magus Edrin Walker,” Krandus said, sounding exhausted. “The Arcanum has felt your power used against the populace of Setharis.” He calmly eyed my enslaved Skallgrim. “I am required by law to charge you with the ancient crime of tyranny. As of old, we cannot suffer an enslaver to live. How do you plead?”

  I lifted a hand to slick gory hair back over my shoulders. The sea of magic in my belly spoke to the wounded animal inside that wanted to lash out, to bring death and ruin to my enemies. It whispered words of victory and assurances of my own might: I had taken three men as my own, and I could take many more if I wanted. It was so difficult to summon the willpower to shove the urges to one side. That was what had defeated Artha in the end: when the god started listening to the corrupting urges of the Worm he began acting on instinct rather than rational thought, and he went too far down that slippery slope to climb back up. Not as he was. I refused to fall as he had – too many innocents would get hurt.

  My finger probed at a loose tooth, shoved it back into its socket; it was only a tiny pain compared to my back. I cleared blood and gunk from my throat, spat it out. “The gods as my witness, I am no tyrant, if by tyrant you mean my power was used to enslave people outwith self-defence. What did you expect me to do? Let the Skallgrim tear me to pieces?” I nodded to Cillian. “Let Councillor Cillian be murdered?”

  We faced each other down, the Archmagus studying me. The god-seed beat hot against my breast. My hand inched towards it. All I had to do was accept it and ascend, and then they would have to face a tyrant god. Ha, wouldn’t the look on their faces be precious then. The Worm of Magic urged me to take the power for my own, but I was beaten down by the world, by pain and death, and didn’t much fancy living forever. I imagined being a god with that slimy hooded arsehole Byzant at my side and not being able to kill him. Nathair had spoken of an endless duty and despite everything I didn’t think him a liar; me and duty did not see eye to eye at the best of times. No, godhood was not for me. My hand dropped to my side.

  Before Krandus could reply, the sky darkened. Feathery, screeching darkness descended. I didn’t have the mental energy left to care as a whole flight of corvun alighted on the rubble all around me, dozens of razor claws and vicious beaks between the Arcanum and myself. I chuckled, figuring that it would be just my luck to survive the Magash Mora and the Thief of Life only to be pecked to death by fucking birds. They didn’t look at me – bad meat perhaps – instead they cawed and flapped angrily in Krandus’ direction.

  I looked left and right at the vile creatures, then shrugged. “Ah well, doesn’t look like everybody has it in for me.”

  The Archmagus stared, not at me, but at the birds. His lips twitched into a smile. “It would seem not.” I hadn’t taken him for one to pay heed to superstitious portents. He hesitantly nodded to them. “I think that clears things up. Do you agree, Councillor?”

  Cillian relaxed. “I do.”

  “Then the law is satisfied,” Krandus said. “Magus Edrin Walker is declared innocent.”

  I blinked. That was it? A charge of tyranny and the two of them dismissed it like it was nothing?

  Cillian caught my look. “Martial law, Edrin. Two of the Inner Circle are enough to pass a judgement. The correct one, as it happens.”

  Every single corvun in the city shrieked and took flight, wheeling above our heads in a vast screeching flock. For the first time in recorded history the great birds ventured beyond the walls of Setharis. Black wings cut through the smoke as they headed out over the docks and across the bay to descend on the surviving Skallgrim wolf-ships fleeing back out to sea. This was no mere murder of crows – this was a carnage of corvun. People watched from rooftops and windows, through destroyed streets and fallen walls, as black death enveloped the ships. When the birds took flight again they left nothing human on those decks.

  Krandus glanced at the remains of the Magash Mora, a hill of dead meat made from the corpses of hundreds of thousands of our people and then extended a hand to me. I stared at it for a moment and then clasped it, flesh to flesh. He didn’t seem overly worried about a tyrant’s touch. It was a display of trust that I had never expected to see. He turned and began the long trudge back up to the Old Town to resume control of his city. Cillian gave me a brief hug before she too left, and I thought my past misdeeds were forgiven as far as she was concerned. I suppose I had saved the city. What more could you ask of a man?

  Perhaps the gods, wherever they were trapped, had heard my plea and borne witness after all. The Arcanum weren’t all bad, just horribly entitled and not a little arrogant. Sometimes they forgot what it was like to be merely human, not much different from me at times.

  As people began to return to the area, staring in shock at the ruins of their homes, I decided to slink off and find a hole to crawl into. I was exhausted and broken and needed to be alone. My thralls stood watch as I curled up in a ruined corner of a building and collapsed into blessedly dreamless sleep.

  I woke to a symphony of pains and tried to take the stress off my damaged back and ribs by resting against the wall. Sitting next to the smouldering ruins of the room I had taken only a few days before in the Throne and Fire, it all seemed like an age ago. Another life. The scorched stone was still warm from last night’s blaze. Morning mists and drizzle had killed off most of the smaller fires but columns of black smoke still snaked upwards from dozens of sites all across the lower city.

  I was a wreck: exhausted, torn up and used up. My right hand itched: I scratched at the black specks, but the iron shards of Dissever were buried too deep to tease out. Every breath hurt and I barely had enough strength to turn my head as somebody slid down the wall next to me.

  Dying as she was, face crisscrossed with scabs, Charra’s smile was a beautiful thing. I didn’t have words good and glorious enough to describe the feeling of being back home with her. In fact, she was my home.
My home was people not place. She stifled a cough with a kerchief then wiped the blood from her lips. We sat in silence, watching people wander the streets dazed and smeared with soot, some raking through the debris of their homes on the slim chance of salvaging something of their lives, others weeping and cradling their dead or sitting numb with shock and staring off into the distance. The lucky ones gave shouts of joy and ran to envelop relatives and friends in fierce hugs. Most waited in vain for people to return home, knowing they would likely never see the bodies of their kin. Most of the dead had been melded into the reeking corpse of the Magash Mora.

  “I don’t have any words for this,” Charra said.

  I didn’t reply, didn’t feel there was much point. I couldn’t even bring myself to meet her eyes. She was going to die, and far too soon.

  Charra sighed. “Not everything in life ends well, Walker. I’ve tried everything possible to get out of this but I’m at the end of my voyage. At least I had my Layla and a few good friends. I have few regrets.”

  Despite the outcome, I felt like all I’d done was pointless. Now that I wasn’t living under a death sentence I was terrified of the vast and empty gulf of life ahead of me. Now I knew why elder magi kept themselves apart from normal people: they were so short-lived and gut-wrenchingly fragile.

  I eased open my tattered coat to show her the god-seed snug in my inside pocket. “How do you fancy being a god?”

  “A god?” she asked, raising an eyebrow. “You jest.”

  I was utterly serious, and she understood that a moment later. She gasped, hand stretching out towards the shining crystal. Her finger stopped a whisker away from touching it.