“Seek out the harbormaster and she will point you to this Bar’ren. The island holds the answers we seek.”
“W-what about the girl?” Jesmin moaned, arching her back.
“The girl we will take. If she touched the artifact, you will know once I touch her through your Sin. If she didn’t, if she speaks true…” Katal’s snarl was filled with a Goddess’s anger. “If our Chan Sha turned traitor, we shall destroy them. Vodal and Wuxu will be my fists in the west and the two of you, Jesmin and Katal, will be my blades in the canals of Servenza.
“I have spoken.”
“And we hear!” the Sin Eaters shouted.
“And we hear,” Katal repeated, on the floor on newly skinned knees beside the table, spittle and tears running off his face. He drew a ragged breath, felt his Sin healing him, and waited for the pain to recede even as he longed for the ecstasy to remain. The girl will feel our blades and speak her truth, Goddess, Katal and his Sin swore as one.
We promise.
* * *
“Take me to Eld,” I told Joffers, jumping into the boat and plunging into the oilcloth tent he’d erected as protection from the storm. He nodded from beneath an oiled slicker that ran from his hat, around his face, and down past his boots. In the cloud-muted light, he looked like one of those ghosts children whispered about around fires at night, when the coals were losing their glow and the shadows gaining their length.
“You know where he is?” I asked as I pulled the tent shut.
“I remember the dock we dropped him off at, signorina,” he called, as the skies opened up again and rain beat down, drowning out whatever else he’d been going to say.
I settled back on the damp cushions and let the rain pound a frenetic drumbeat on the canvas. It was just as well, really: I wanted a word alone with Sin. I could have had one in my head, I suppose, but sometimes it was easier to speak out loud, and with none to hear, there were none to wonder if I’d lost my mind. I hadn’t. Yet.
“So what the fuck is going on, Sin?” I asked, pulling my lavender jacket tight over the light-grey shirt I had on beneath. My black trousers were already soaked through, not having the oilskin protection of the jacket, but given I couldn’t remember anything of the morn, I was glad I’d shown up to that meeting wearing clothes at all. My skin burned with magic before I could begin shaking and suddenly heat suffused me even as a yawning pit gnawed at my stomach. Whatever I’d done, I hadn’t breakfasted. Something I’ll need to remedy soon.
“Why can’t we remember anything that’s happened? Why is my memory full of holes?”
“I told you I don’t know,” Sin said, “but,” he hurried on when I growled, “I have theories.”
“Good ones, I hope,” I said. “Let’s hear them.”
“You know the Gods’ War predates your world, aye?”
“Aye, and you came from the skies.”
“We fought in the sky and beyond,” he agreed. “The very stars were our home once.” An image flitted through my mind of vast skies in colors I’d never seen before, filled with steel ships that flew through clouds instead of water.
“We were Ciris and Ciris was one. We were legion. Ciris and the people were one as well, which at first made the fight with the Dead Gods a nearly one-sided affair.” Another image formed, of a great, encompassing fire that burned across the land; I seemed to look down on it from a mountain above. The fire ran out into an ocean of pure white and even the water burned. “We were winning … until those corpses figured out that our greatest strength was also our greatest weakness.”
“How so?”
“Kill one of us, kill us all,” Sin said. “It wasn’t quite that straightforward, but the Dead Gods’ magic is cunning, insidious. A virus was devised and deployed and our legion became fewer even as we drove the undead bastards before us.”
More images, of bodies piled in strange streets made of gunmetal, with buildings that soared to touch the clouds themselves. I could practically taste the sickly sweet stench of death in the air.
“We were growing weak, but Ciris knew of an antidote … the poison that killed us could become our cure. But first we had to kill the undead once and for all.”
“Are you going to tell me what happened?” I asked when Sin fell silent.
“Perhaps, perhaps it would be easier to show you,” he murmured. “Aye?”
“Sure—”
My eyes burned with the heat of a thousand suns and my vision went white, and when it returned, I looked out from foreign eyes on an impossible darkness that surrounded me on all sides, even below my feet. I stood on nothing and was surrounded by nothing and could feel my life force melting into nothing. Thoughts emerged, but without anything to give them meaning they were merely fleeting tendrils. I am disappearing—the walls of black are crushing me. Slowly, inexorably. Until I am gone and only darkness remains.
Pinpricks of light exploded around me, blinding me so that I had to clench my eyes shut and even then spots danced behind my lids. I could feel their heat, which gave me a sense of self again. When I opened my eyes, I walked amongst the stars and there was a presence beside me. Language doesn’t have the words for it, but something was there that dwarfed me in every way imaginable. When I looked to my left, I saw a blue-and-green orb covered in swirling patterns of white. It was so bright, so large, so completely there that even though I tried to pry my eyes wider there was always a little more to take in.
“You see the orb?” Sin asked from the void. I nodded. “I will show you a vision from the distant past, but today, right now, somewhere on that orb, on a tiny pinprick that looks more like a blot of ink than a bit of land, you’re sitting right now. Do you understand?”
“That’s our…?” I searched for the word and couldn’t find it. “Our home.”
“Yours,” he agreed. “This is where the undead cowards ran, this is where we followed after, and in the skies above, we delivered their ruin.”
My vision shifted. First the sun was bright in the air around me and then it was gone and full dark upon me, and I fell, only I wasn’t falling. One eye was still above, looking down at the swirling clouds and land masses below. The other eye fell, heat and flame around me as I plummeted to the ground. I landed on a grass-filled plain and looked up as the night sky suddenly filled with bright lights that hadn’t been there moments before. My eye above saw them arrive: the Dead Gods in their living ships of bone and flesh and viscous fluids … but we were waiting.
Clusters of iridescent lines shot across the horizon and where they touched the lights, more lights appeared in a cascading cacophony of color that made my eyes pop and my stomach clench. I moaned between my teeth; the moan became a scream, only it wasn’t coming from me, it was coming from the sky. Massive, clutching fingers of color were rending the night’s dark flesh with a savagery that brought tears to my eyes. Keening filled my ears as dozens of massive, flying volcanoes crashed into the grasslands around me. Each impact pummeled the core of the world and dark waters rose up to meet the sky where the volcanoes came down in the sea.
The land undulated beneath my feet, breaking upon itself again and again. The grasslands erupted in flame and ash. A stench filled my nostrils as hissing waters, steam, and smoke rose high into the sky, blotting out the still-rising sun and turning dawn to dusk.
Everything shimmered and stilled. Once more I stood on land, but the land was broken, twisted, and burned, a swirling deathscape where life had once been.
“They died as they came,” Sin said, “but Ciris needed a few of them alive just long enough to harvest the protection their blood offered. When she took from them, she laid herself bare and they used our oneness against us for the final time.” The eye that had fallen to the ground went black. The eye that flew in the sky flickered, fought, struggled, but finally succumbed to the greywash that swept over it. My vision went dark, then white, and suddenly I was back in the gondola, panting as if I’d run a marathon, the rain loud in my ears. Louder still were the screa
ms of the Gods as they fought and died all those millennia before.
“Motherfuck.”
“Precisely,” Sin whispered. “The Dead Gods finally died, but they put Ciris into a deep slumber, one that she almost never awoke from. Her weakness came from the oneness and so, when the Goddess awoke, she swore never to merge herself with her subjects, to never allow the two to become one.” He added, “That kind of magic doesn’t exist in this world, so it’s a bit of a moot point, but because of this, our sorcerous connection with the Goddess is tenuous. The rituals we use in Possession were developed to ensure that that connection is not severed.”
“I never completed the ritual, though,” I said.
“And therein lies our problem,” Sin said. “On my own, trapped in that artifact, my magic remained pure. Within you, my magic has had to adapt and you’ve had to adapt to me … only somehow the incantations have gone awry. It’s the only explanation for these lapses—and the only cure is to complete that ritual, Buc. To become one with Ciris.”
“Save you’ve just told me that’s not possible.”
“Not in the original sense, no,” he agreed. “But enough that she can fix our magic, make us—you and I—whole again.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then this is only going to get worse,” Sin said.
“How long?”
“For the ritual?” he asked, relief palpable in his voice.
“No, how long do I have before I can’t remember anything?”
“Oh.”
He went silent. The images and sensory details he’d shared with me came rushing back, dwarfing me with their enormity. I got seasick on a boat; what would it feel like to ride a ship through the sky? I already knew the answer, because through Sin, I’d done it. Wondrous.
I’d never considered the Gods to be divine beings that could save our souls and bring us joy and pleasure after we died or punishment if we’d earned it. I’d never thought to pray to the Dead Gods for healing because they rarely offered their services without requiring gold or flesh to be paid in return. Worse, they relied upon local priestesses to determine how much one owed, and I’ve always found that old saw about power and corruption to cut deep.
Power—I’d never reckoned with what that kind of power actually meant. What the Dead Gods had done, could do … Anyone not born in the streets, where audacity was a strength that made up for any number of weaknesses, might have been inclined to slit their wrists and be done … but Sin had just shown me the gods were not invincible. They had been hurt once, nearly destroyed. I need only do it again. Somehow.
“Are you listening?”
“No,” I admitted.
“I’m just making guesses here, wild shots in the dark, as it were,” he said, “but I think we’ve a few months before the gaps begin to outnumber what we can remember, and after that it’s likely to go downhill fast.”
“The Chair already has us on a tight timeline,” I told him. “I guess we’d better find out who is trying so damned hard to assassinate the Doga, win control of the Company, and take down the Gods. Soon would be good. Like tomorrow.”
“You’ve a shit sense of humor, Buc,” Sin growled.
“I’m not joking.”
“You think I don’t know that?!?” he shouted. “But I’m not joking either. I didn’t spend centuries stuck inside that fucking altar just to sputter out because you think you’re a God yourself.”
“Goddess,” I told him, “and I don’t think I’m a Goddess. Yet.” I laughed. “Given your calculations, that doesn’t seem to be in the cards, does it? But I don’t need to be a God to kill one.”
“You’re insane.”
“We both are, apparently.”
“Then what now?”
Then the gondola shook and I felt footsteps reverberate through the deck. A moment later Eld thrust his head into the tent, his golden locks plastered against the side of his face, and the rest of him followed, his midnight-blue clothes dripping and soaked through.
“Damn it, Buc, it’s pouring buckets down out there and you’ve not only Joffers out in all of this—the man’s liable to catch his death of ague at his age—but you drag me out into it, too?” He coughed and sat down opposite me, cursing when he removed his tricorne and inadvertently dumped another cupful of water down his back.
“Where were you?” I asked him.
“You don’t remember?”
“Say I don’t.”
“Ch-checking on Govanti like you asked,” he said after a moment. Eld squeezed his hair and water ran in a stream from his locks. “Another of your little fishes has gone missing, Buc.”
“The gondola we’re in has holes in it,” I muttered. “Not the literal one,” I told Eld as he made to stand. “Metaphorically speaking. We need to get to bailing. Fast.”
“What now?” Eld asked, echoing Sin’s earlier question as he sat back against the cushions.
“I tell you a little story about how the Gods came to be, while Joffers takes us off in search of Mosquitoes,” I said, answering both of them. “Oh, and you’re not allowed to ask any questions.”
“What the what?” Eld asked, sputtering.
“I just said, no questions.”
“Leave me one.”
“Very well,” I said after a moment. “One.”
“How are we going to find mosquitoes in this downpour? And in winter no less?”
“Disappointing,” I told him. He arched an eyebrow. “I offer you up the origin story of our world and you want to know about bugs?” I chuckled. “We don’t need mosquitoes, I misspoke. We just need one certain Mosquito. Formerly leader of all the other bugs,” I added.
“The Castello?” Eld asked.
“The Castello,” I confirmed. I’d visited my favorite bookkeep and while she hadn’t had the original blueprints—apparently they’d been lost for a century or more, and I had a feeling the Doga’s great-great-whatever had had something to say about that—she did have a copy of a copy. She hinted there was some question regarding the legality of even possessing those, but I was her best customer so she’d taken me into the private folio room and given me a sense of what we were dealing with.
“In this weather they’re not like to see us coming,” Eld muttered, running a hand through his wet locks. “Might take it as an attempted jailbreak and open up on us with the cannons.”
“That would be unfortunate,” I admitted.
“Any number of ships in the Crescent might ram right through us and not even notice, with this tempest pouring down.”
“Anything’s possible.”
“Lightning could find the metal with which we are each amply festooned and turn us into crisps.”
“It’s a risk.”
“So we’re going to take a gondola out to the middle of the Crescent in a fucking typhoon to an impregnable fortress prison to interrogate a man everyone thinks is dead to find out who is trying to assassinate the Doga?” Eld asked.
“Aye, that’s the size of it,” I agreed. “And you’ve run well past your allotted questions.”
Eld’s sigh blew rainwater off his lips. He shrugged and leaned back. “Then I guess I’m ready to listen to your tales about the Gods. I hope there’s more to it than they said, ‘Let there be light.’”
“Oh, there’s more to it than that,” I chuckled. “A fuck ton more.”
26
The Crescent, the bay shaped by the curve in Servenza that gave way to the Tip at one end and led to the finer Quartos at the other, was marked by human-made barriers across its mouth. Built up over centuries, they served as protection from rogue waves. Ships sailed through openings in the barriers that could be closed in time of war. In times of peace, the vessels moored at floating docks and were greeted by waiting barges that would carry their goods into land.
Closer in, in summer, gondolas and pleasure barges dotted the water; sometimes half a dozen or more were anchored together to form miniature palazzos for the wealthy.
Ay
e, in summer, the Crescent was often placid and smooth as glass. In winter the bay was a dark, roiling mass that often kept ships waiting days before they could attempt anchorage and drove the pleasure barges back to their docks.
The bay I looked out onto now, sticking my head through the narrow opening of the tent, wasn’t quite roiling, but even with the slackening rain, it was difficult to see more than a few score of paces off our gondola’s prow. Luckily, the Castello was so large that it loomed like a sea God of old, lumbering up from the white-capped surface to flex its massive granite shoulders.
Built at a time when invasion was more a question of when than if, the Castello had originally been a fortress, meant to protect Servenza’s harbor. It still was a fortress, with rumor of three hundred cannon or more to call on and scores of mortars, besides, but these days it was primarily known as the Empire’s gaol. Here were held local Servenzan toughs who didn’t warrant an immediate hanging, debtors, political prisoners, enemies of war, and the assorted scum scraped from the bottom of any number of criminal barrels. Theoretically, the Castello was off-limits unless one had a signed letter from the Doga, the Empress, or their captain-generals, but I was betting that the Doga’s Secreto sigil would gain us entry.
Up close I could make out two massive buttressed towers with concentric rings of stone walls, stepping down to the famed, thousand-paces-thick wall that ran between the towers and made up the bulk of the jail. All was dark save for ragged patches of light that shone from the lanterns of whichever poor souls had drawn sentry duty and from lamps within a half-dozen windows, far above. I could barely make out the docks, lined with cannons, that waited to welcome us.
I ducked back inside and shook rainwater from my hair, half my braid shaking loose and springing into a mass of curls. “Doesn’t look like we have to worry about ships running us over or cannons hulling us,” I told Eld. “Not a soul in sight.”
The Justice in Revenge Page 19