“Come on.” Acting on reflex, like he’d protect any member of the Brotherhood, Baston hustles Rasce off Crane Street, into the alleyway behind the lock-up. The nearest hiding place is… hell, it’s Baston’s own house. Fine. Downhill, then, towards the docks.
“How did you find me?” mutters Baston.
“I saw you. From up there.” Rasce waves up in the direction of the New City.
The few streets from the lock-up to Baston’s home have never seemed longer. The distance stretches, and the bomb grows heavier with every step. Fortunately, Rasce sways like a drunk, so they don’t draw as much attention as they might. To mortal eyes, Rasce is just another dockworker who’s already spent the day’s wages. To divine eyes – well, who the fuck knows?
Rasce is muttering to himself: “Argh, it’s like bees buzzing inside my head. A needle, quick. Steel, to pierce the skull. That way, isn’t it? Down there?” He tries to lurch off down a side street, but Baston restrains him.
“No. Just follow me.”
“Listen. He showed me… we hurt people, Baston, when we burned the yards. It’s not right. Here, I brought this to put it right. Take it.” Rasce pulls a purse from inside his jacket, spills the contents on the cobblestones. A fortune in gold falls around Baston’s feet. Rasce reaches down awkwardly, like his joints are stiff, his limbs heavy. Moving like a Stone Man.
Baston hauls him upright. “Come on! Leave it!”
“He keeps showing me their faces! Misery piled on misery – how can I stand it? He won’t let me look away.” Rasce lunges for the coins again. Baston kicks the money away – let the streets find a use for the dragon’s gold – and drags Rasce forward.
“We have to go,” he insists. The Spiders will come soon.
The front door’s locked. Karla must not be home yet. Baston juggles the bomb from one arm to the other as he fishes out his keys. There’s a spider two streets over, picking its way with silent grace over the terraces, eight glowing eyes like moons. What will it see if it looks at Rasce?
Baston shoves the Ghierdana inside, drops the bomb in the umbrella stand, shuts the door and bolts it. Presses his forehead against it, as if he can hold the world out by sheer willpower.
“Why,” asks Rasce, “do you have such a thing? Even in Guerdon, I did not think it customary to carry bombs of such size.” He talks like he’s half asleep, or drugged.
“Never you mind.” Baston grabs Rasce, shoves him down the little hallway into the cramped kitchen. “What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know. I think… I think I am going mad. My head is crushed by heavy stones. I see – I see too much.” Rasce presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. “What is this?”
“You’re seeing visions?”
“Would that it were only seeing!” moans Rasce. “It’s feeling them, knowing them. I saw the Tallowman on the rooftop. I should have died! But I live, while others die. There’s a woman dying of the flux in the New City, Baston! Too far gone for medicine, she gasps for breath. I am the rattle in her lungs! I smell the rank stench of her pissy sheets! And I know her husband’s fled. I see him in a tavern off the Street of Saints!” Rasce staggers across the kitchen to the window, looks out through the grimy glass. “And it’s easier down here, damn it! Up in the New City – it’s flying through a thunderstorm. I’m going mad. Help me!”
“What do you want me to do?”
“He knows you! Tell him to stop!” Rasce brandishes his dragon-tooth dagger, but he’s clumsy, his limbs as stiff as stone, and the blade goes flying out of his grip. It flies through the kitchen window, shattering the glass, and lands in the yard outside. Baston flinches; Rasce doesn’t react. His mouth moves, but the only sound he makes is the grinding of stone.
He knows you. What god knows Baston? He’s never knelt to any, not even in the churches of the Keepers.
The clouds overhead shift and roll, like the sky’s boiling over. Lightning flashes, illuminating for an instant the suggestion of titanic figures in the heavens. Across the Wash, ecstatic shouts. Whatever’s happening to Rasce echoes in the divine realm – they’re drawing attention.
In the months since the Armistice, Baston’s witnessed the gods of Ishmere claiming more than one saint. The Spider took a six-year-old girl on Slaughter Lane. Her mother put her to bed with a fever, and the child awoke eight-eyed and whispering prophecies, and the priests took her away. High Umur’s chosen was a beggar, legless and blind, who pushed himself around the alleys on a wheeled handcart – until he rose up, lifted by unseen hands, and looked down upon the rabble with a sneer, his eyes flashing with lightning, and spoke in a voice of thunder. Umurshixes drew his cart then, transfigured into a golden chariot.
Baston watched both transformations, and he’s learned a trick, too, from the priests who follow the saints like gulls after a fishing boat. Speak a saint’s name – their mortal name, their true name – and it grounds them, like an aetheric current returning to earth. It isn’t a sure thing. If a saint’s so far gone to identify more with the god than their mortal self, it won’t work. But here…
“Rasce,” declares Baston loudly, proclaiming the name. Putting as much weight on the name as he can.
“Rasce of the Ghierdana.” Nothing. Not even a twitch. The man’s name holds no sway over him. Baston thinks for a moment, and then tries again, one last time.
“Chosen of the Dragon.”
The title strikes Rasce like a blow.
“Ah,” says Rasce, “that’s better.”
And he falls to the floor of Baston’s kitchen, unconscious.
Spar’s closer to the mortal realm than he’s been in months, closer even than he came with Cari. Closer than he’s been since he died. He’d never have dared push like this with her, for fear of injuring her – but with Rasce, he’s willing to risk it. To press the psychic weight of the whole New City against the Ghierdana’s mortal brain. Rasce is on the very edge of Spar’s influence, outside the confines of the New City itself, but it makes it easier in a way. All of Spar’s mind, all his attention, his divided strands of thought all strain in a single direction, like a city’s streets all gathering at a crossroads, at a single bridge—
But the bridge breaks. The anchor-rope to consciousness shatters. He’s falling again, plunging into oblivion. Spar’s mind tries to seize on to Rasce, seize on to anything, but it’s no good. He’s cut off again from the mortal realm.
There are miracles in the New City as Spar falls, spasms of wild magic. In the tunnels below, passageways open or close spontaneously, like a dying man losing control of his bowels. Towers shake and convulse. Old memories, given shape in stone, lurch out of walls – spontaneous cryptic statuary depicting moments from Spar’s thoughts, old and new. Along Sevenshell Street, the sea wall collapses, sending chunks of stone splashing into the waters below. A child in the Armistice Gardens collapses, frothing at the mouth and reciting extracts from the writings of Idge.
They sound the alarm in the Lyrixian barracks. Soldiers scramble out to their guard posts, hastily donning what protective gear they can against divine assault – warding talismans, holy relics of the Lyrixian deities, armour shot through with aetheric dampening rods. Guns and swords in hand, they look out into the night, unsure if they’re under attack. The dragons of the Ghierdana bellow in alarm and take flight, flapping around the spires of the New City like startled crows.
Spar falls out of time. Above him, Cari’s frozen on a ledge, caught in Professor Ongent’s spell, and he’s falling. He’s out in the harbour, salvaging the last god-bomb from the wreck of the Grand Retort, and he’s falling into dark waters. Cari’s drowning, too, lungs filling with searing water.
And then – a connection again.
Penetrating his consciousness like the steel tip of an alkahest needle.
Hot, honey-sweet pain.
He’s himself again, coherent again. From the heights of the towers, Spar looks down on Guerdon. All his attention focused on a single point. He looks across th
e familiar streets of the Wash, their pattern more familiar to him than the back of his own dead and shattered hand, more constant than the plague-scales and scabs that ate his flesh. He sees a small yard at the back of a house near the docks. Baston’s house.
He’s lost hours. The night’s rolled on.
Rasce emerges into the yard from the kitchen door. He lifts his head to look at the New City on the horizon, and he’s looking right at Spar, recognition in his gaze.
“Spar Idgeson, I presume,” he whispers, but the words echo down every street and alleyway in the New City.
Rasce walks across the little yard, glass cracking under his borrowed boots. He searches around in the debris, and finds his dragon-tooth dagger. He holds it up, blade levelled at the distant city, and somehow it’s not an entirely absurd threat. The thought of being cut off again terrifies Spar. He’s unsure if he can survive another dissolution without going mad.
Yes.
Rasce glances back at the kitchen window and nods. Baston emerges from the house, almost shyly, not daring to believe.
“I know you, now. Baston has told me a great deal about you, about you and Carillon Thay. My uncle, too – he told me a lot about Guerdon, back home. Other things, you showed me. And you aided me in Glimmerside, yes? Tell me, what are you? A ghost? A god?”
Honestly, I don’t know.
“In truth, it matters little. We may be friends, but you will not use me. I am not some empty vessel for you to fill. Understand this – I am a prince of the Ghierdana, Chosen of the Dragon. Cities burn at my command, yes?”
I’ll help you, says Spar, if you help me. A partnership.
Rasce considers. “Among my cousins, only one can be Chosen of the Dragon. Each of us strives alone to win Great-Uncle’s favour. I am Chosen, and so I have no peers. How can I have a partner?”
A friend, then.
“Friends may prove false. I know what Carillon Thay did to my Uncle Artolo – with your help, yes?” Rasce’s grin is visible across the city to Spar. “But the dragons are here now. Soon, my Great-Uncle will return. It is better for us all – for you, for me, for this city – if he is satisfied with my progress when he arrives.”
The Ishmerians are coming. You’re surrounded. Spar can see some of the Ishmerian forces closing on the house – phantasmal spiders skittering over the rooftops, cloud-spawn swimming towards Rasce, saints and soldiers on the streets. Other forces he perceives with senses he has no mortal words for – High Umur’s judgement coalescing, Fate Spider weaving an unseen web to catch the thieves in misfortune. You’ve got to run.
“Well then,” says Rasce, “let us put you to the test. Do for me what you did for Carillon Thay. Shape the stone.”
I had more power then. Spar still feels as weak as gossamer. Merely talking to Rasce at this distance is taxing him. Having Rasce as a focus helps, but it’s still an effort. His mind is scattered across the whole New City, so his thoughts arrive like footsore pilgrims, stumbling as they march. I’ll try.
“Do more than try, spirit, or we are both lost.” Rasce ducks back into the house, calling for Baston. The saints are nearly at the door.
The borders of the New City are not clearly drawn. At the edges, the two cities – New and Old – intertwine. Buildings half made from wood and brick, fused with miracle-spawned stone. Bridges and walkways like marble filigree, leaping above the old streets.
And as above, so below. Under the New City are many miles of tunnels and passageways, and some of those too connect to older ghoul-runs and smugglers’ tunnels under the Wash.
Now, Spar puts what remains of his strength into one of those. The stone softens, like a Stone Man’s sinews under alkahest. It melts, flows, re-forms, remaking itself according to Spar’s will. The tunnel becomes a serpent, burrowing through the earth, questing for the surface. Inside, the floor reshapes itself into a stairwell. The tunnel mouth breaks through, emerging out of the ground in Baston’s yard.
The two thieves rush down the stairs, nearly falling down the tunnel in their haste. Baston’s carrying two large bags, everything he could take from his house with a moment’s notice. Rasce carries only the dagger.
The effort of conjuring the tunnel exhausts Spar. He summons up an image of the route through the deeper tunnels, and gives the knowledge to Rasce. He also sends a warning – he’s too weak to reseal the tunnel mouth. The way into the tunnel remains open in Baston’s yard, the clearest possible sign of the thieves’ escape route. They’ll follow you.
“That,” laughs Rasce as he descends the stairs, “shall not be a problem.”
Back on the surface, an agent of the Fate Spider is the first to arrive. An assassin, dispatched by the cult to deal with saboteurs and traitors. Her thin blade drips with the Poison Undeniable. Behind her cluster umurshixes, spiders, cultists of one god or another, all eager to punish whatever intruding saint breached the sanctity of the Temple Quarter. The assassin reaches out and slowly turns the handle of the front door, anticipating an attack. Anticipating martyrdom.
She does not, however, anticipate the detonation trigger for the siege charge just inside the door.
For an instant, a new sun blooms in the street.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The days go by, falling one by one behind the flank of the Rock of Ilbarin.
Hawse insists they must be careful to avoid any sudden changes that might draw attention. He’s even more insistent that Cari not leave the Rose at all. So, for a few days, Hawse spends his time in the temple to the Lord of Waters, chanting his rough prayers, and Cari lies in her bunk in the forward cabin, stewing. She tells herself that she needs time to heal, that a few days’ delay isn’t much compared to the months she’s already squandered, and it’s true, but still every part of her soul cries out for action.
She finds the ship’s carpentry tools, busies herself with them. Fixes the holes torn in the roof of the cabin by dragon claws. Repairs the broken steps leading up from the darkness of the hold. Wanders the little country that she dwells in now, the portion of the deck that cannot be seen by unfriendly eyes on the shore, and looks for things to do.
She’s lost her knife, so she borrows Hawse’s old sword, and practises with that instead, though the weapon’s unwieldy for a fighter of her size. Cari’s never had any formal training in fighting, except what she learned on the alleyways and docksides. Her instincts are still off, she discovers. When she was the Saint of Knives, Spar could miraculously take her injuries from her and on to himself, on to the New City, thus shielding her from harm. That let her be as reckless as she wished, quick and savage, her approach focused solely on slashing and stabbing with the sharp blade, on wounding her foe. Now, she has to think about self-preservation, too. Every movement makes her ache, reminding her of what she’s lost. She imagines making Spar laugh with her clumsiness with the sword, and that thought aches, too.
She reads, which was previously something she only did in dire need. Not the fucking book, of course – it’s hidden wherever the captain put it to conceal it from Dol Martaine. Instead, she reads sodden, half-destroyed religious texts from a temple of the Lord of Waters. Chunks are missing, pages stick together, words become a mush of paper and ink, so reading them is listening to the ravings of a mad god. Still, she reads, because it’s better than sitting there in the dark, listening to the Bythos bump against the hull.
The Bythos rise every night, ambling out of the surf and marching off into the darkness. Usually, they parade through the streets of Ushket, or try to stumble up the slope of the Rock – they’re absurdly ungainly climbers and don’t get far – but sometimes they gather around the Rose, keening and burbling in a strange echo of the captain’s prayers. Cari learns to distinguish one from another by their markings. The fish-portion of the creatures always remains the same, but the rotting human corpses that carry them on land change, although they’re all so bloated and half eaten that it’s hard to be sure. The discarded remnants wash up along the shore from the Rose, and a fe
w mountain vultures pick at them, shrieking angrily at the unfamiliar sea.
The Bythos wander around, aimlessly, then slip back into the waters. She’s certain that they’re psychopomps, like the ghouls of Guerdon or the sacred birds of Cloud Mother. They’re supposed to collect the freshly deceased and bring that potent residuum, the corpse-dregs of the soul, to the gods. Now, what’s the point of them?
Captain Hawse makes tentative expeditions to Ushket. Carefully scouting out the town, planning his route, making contacts, waiting for moonless nights. Like she’s a hot cargo that he’s trying to smuggle past customs patrols.
She pleads to be allowed go to town with Hawse, but he shakes his head. Everyone knows that the mad old hermit of the wreck lives alone, so he goes alone. He brings a basket of fish to trade. Without the gifts of the Bythos, he and Cari would soon starve to death, as there’s little food for sale in Ushket – unless you have connections with the Ghierdana, of course.
Each time the captain goes, Cari spends hours crouched at the rail, watching the empty shore for his return. Carts go by under armed guard, carrying food and supplies from the mountain farm, or casks of that glowing silt. From what Hawse tells her, she guesses those casks come from the work camp on the far side of the island. They’re doing some sort of alchemical work there near the ruins of the drowned city. The only way to leave the island is through the Ghierdana. Want out? Then pay. Can’t pay? Then work for the Ghierdana until you’ve earned your passage. Ilbarin’s a corpse-land. No one wants to stay here, except maybe Captain Hawse with his weird vigil for the Lord of Waters.
She confronts him about it one morning, after a sleepless night spent wondering.
“Captain… you said there was a storm when Ishmere attacked, and the Lord of Waters pulled the Rose out of it. That’s why you think you owe him, right?”
“I asked the Lord of Waters to save me and my crew, and we were saved.”
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