They dive almost naked. The hot Ilbarin sun scorches her bare shoulders, and the saltwater and god-brine aggravate any scratches or wounds. Her fingernails are soon raw from scraping at the glimmering slime.
Down, down, into the chill depths. Ilbarin City is almost unrecognisable, a corpse city, but sometimes the rippling blue light catches the outline of some monument or street corner, and it all snaps back in her memory. The strange impression that if she swims deep enough into the darkness she’ll reach the old docks of ten years ago, before the war, with the Rose waiting for her. Captain Hawse on the deck, looking up at her swimming down out of the sky. But she can never go deep enough.
Swim up. Claw back the light. She breaks the water, drags herself over to the raft, and slings another sack of yliaster on to the pile. Then down again. They can only work for two or three hours a day before exhaustion and cold defeat them, and if they don’t have enough yliaster by then they won’t eat.
Adro’s the best of them, his lanky frame and big hands and feet thrashing through the water. Cari’s a powerful swimmer, too, but her injuries and the rope slow her down. Ren has the most experience of the trio when it comes to diving for yliaster, but the drowned city holds many horrors for him. There are more dangers than the cold down there. Ilbarin City was a battlefield for warring gods, a graveyard for broken gods, and miracles still crackle and blaze beneath the waves.
The Kraken of Ishmere touched this land, and spawned horrors. There are places where the Kraken-shape was imposed on everything, a fractal pattern of tentacles and teeth repeated over and over. Tentacled fish warped into tiny Krakens, dust clouds swirling in the water that form into ghost-kraken of mud and slime, rubble that’s sprouted razor-edged tendrils of stone. Swim through those cursed regions, and the Kraken-pattern replicates in your flesh. A doctor in the camp trades her services for chits, and excises Kraken-tumours with a stolen knife. In other places, other gods have left their mark. Ren warns them of traps left over by Smoke Painter: divers have found themselves in lush pleasure gardens under the summer moon, where veiled maidens teased them and fed them wine – only to discover it was all an illusion, and the wine drowned them. Where High Umur smote his lightning, the sea still rages and boils, fierce currents that drag unwary swimmers to their doom.
Cari dives again, looking for the telltale glimmer of the yliaster amid the broken stones. Swim down, scrape, scrape, claw at the rocks until there’s blood, smear the glimmering slime inside the sack. Then the moment of indecision – swim back up, or risk gathering a little more? Each return to the surface takes time, and even though her body craves the relief of fresh air, her soul is a leaden weight, dragging her down.
On the surface, everyone knows her. Her anonymity is gone. The guards know her. The other prisoners know her. The dragon and the Ghierdana know her. Worst of all, Adro and Ren know her, as the woman who ripped them from their safe lives in Ushket. As the woman who took their child away. They don’t say anything, but they don’t need to.
It’s all there in their hollow eyes.
Every time she swims down, she stays a little longer.
Cari reaches the surface again, gulping in great lungfuls of air. She throws a full sack on to the raft, grabs an empty bag and takes another, calmer breath. Adro grabs her by the arm before she can dive again. “You’re blue. We’re going back in.”
She drags the rope around so she can join the other two at the rear of the raft, and they start kicking, pushing the raft in towards the shore. Bits of flotsam bump against their makeshift vessel, and twice it gets caught on unseen obstacles, but soon they reach the shallows. They change to dragging the raft, wading through thigh-deep water. Ghierdana guards stand sentry on rocks like predatory seabirds, watching the rafts come in. Counting them, to make sure there have been no escape attempts.
Cari has tried escaping, of course. The fourth day, when she was partnered with three strangers, she waited until they were all diving down, and then swam for it – but she’d been spotted and dragged back. A gang of ten or twelve men, all grabbing her, pulling her back to the camp. They’d dumped her in front of one of the Eshdana guards. The guard threw a handful of chits into the middle of the mob, and laughed as they’d scrabbled for them, fought for them. After that, they started putting a rope on her, tethering her to her raft.
The ninth day, when she and Adro were together, he’d tried cutting her rope with a sharpened stone. The rope was tough, but gave way in the end – and then the Ghierdana showed up instantly in one of their little motorboats, nosing their way through the drowned streets. Cari suspects the rope was magically warded, and cutting it alerted the sorceress. That, or her luck is absolutely cursed, which she’d also believe.
The twelfth day, she’d suggested they ambush one of the guards. Maybe steal a weapon. Maybe fight their way out. But Ren refused.
“Then what? Even if we escaped, where is there to go?” His voice matter of fact, something of the bureaucrat he once was, like he’s reporting to some prefect, discussing a trivial case instead of pronouncing his own death sentence.
Cari pleaded with Adro, begged him to help. One last madcap heist, just like old times. They’ll dress up as guards and set fire to something. Setting fire to things always works, right? But Adro shook his head, went off to trade chits for food for them.
So on this, the seventeeth day, she just waits.
Cari’s special. They want something from her.
Maybe, maybe, it’ll give her something she can use. Everything’s a weapon, right?
They drag the raft on to the makeshift dock, adding it to the pile of other rafts. The guards take the yliaster sacks, weigh them, give them a measly handful of chits. Unlock Cari’s collar.
Cari’s too tired to eat, so she staggers to their room and collapses.
Time passes. She thinks she might have got up, worked another shift on the raft, come back here again, but she can’t be sure. It might have been a dream. She’s losing track.
She’s lost.
A shadow passes over the camp, waking her from fitful sleep. A few ragged cheers from the guards.
“Dragon’s back,” says Adro. “Here, I’ve got you breakfast.” He passes her a bowl of some unidentifiable slop and gives another to Ren. “Eat up before they send us out again.” Adro’s own bowl is less than a third full. “I already ate,” he says.
Both Cari and Ren protest at the same time at the obvious lie.
“We’re out of chits.” Adro shrugs. But he lets them divide the slop evenly, and they all eat. From the sea, the spluttering roar of the motorboat, following in the dragon’s wake, heading towards the refinery along the shore.
“Maybe,” says Ren, “they’d move us up there.”
“What’s up there?”
“They process the raw yliaster. Wash it, filter it. Do things to it. Some alchemical procedure. It might be easier work.”
“Up there, breathing those fumes? You’ve already been exposed enough, love.” Adro gestures at the striations on Ren’s skin. Since they started gathering yliaster, the marks have become angrily inflamed, and sometimes even glow softly in the dark.
Cari watches the dragon settle on the roof of the refinery. She wonders how swiftly that dragon could fly her home. I need three days, Eladora said during the invasion, three days to somehow teleport to Lyrix and bring a fucking army of dragons to the city. Cari only needs one dragon, to fly her to Khebesh and then back home.
Those three days cost Spar everything he had left.
“Let’s steal the fucking dragon,” she suggests, as a gallows joke. When all else fails, try the impossible.
Adro gets it, and chuckles. Ren just stares at her. “How?”
“Let’s go and earn some chits,” she says in resignation.
Artolo watches from the roof of the refinery as the great ship approaches. The titanic freighter is too large to sail safely through the ruins of Ilbarin City. She’ll dock at the new harbour in Ushket, by the yliaster stores.
“Is she not magnificent?” breathes Great-Uncle, admiring the freighter. “Moonchild, she is called. Doctor Vorz has overseen her refitting, to carry the yliaster you have gathered for me.”
Artolo grunts. “She’s big enough to be a warship. We could have made her a corsair. Does the dragon not take what is desired?”
“This is business, nephew. There are greater prizes to be claimed.” Great-Uncle scratches a loose scale. “I asked if she was magnificent.”
“Not half so magnificent as you, great one.”
A boat’s lowered from the iron deck of Moonchild. Artolo’s eyes are still keen, and he can make out a hunched figure at the back of the little boat. Doctor Vorz has returned to Ilbarin.
“Vorz also brought glad tidings from afar,” whispers the dragon, half mantling a wing around Artolo. “Now, my boy, fetch Carillon Thay.”
“Ten sacks,” says Cari, “let’s go for ten sacks.”
She slips from the raft, limbs numb in the cold water. The rubble directly below has already been scraped bare, so she emerges from the first dive with nothing. They agree to sail the raft further, closer to the heart of the ruined city, closer to where the Godswar hit. The waves break on broken spires and shattered temples, and Cari spots the carcass of some gargantuan sea monster washed up on one bank of rubble. She can’t tell what killed it, but it looks burned.
Adro sees it, too.
“You stay up,” he says to Ren. “Help us with the sacks. Keep watch. I’ll dive with Cari. If you see anything Kraken-shaped, you tug on the rope, right? And we’ll come up.”
“Keep watch,” Ren echoes. The waters are so silty, it’s impossible to see any distance. He finds a length of mostly rotten wood amid the floating debris, holds it up as a crude club.
They dive. Cari kicks ahead, using the weight of her iron collar to pull her down swiftly. The slime-bearing ruins are deeper here, so it takes them longer to descend to where they can gather yliaster. The pickings are richer, though – Cari’s filled most of her sack before Adro even touches bottom. Lungs burning, she shoves another handful of glowing muck into her bag, starts helping Adro fill his. Their hands tangle, and one glimmering lump gets knocked from Adro’s palm and floats off. Adro curses, angry bubbles bursting from his lips.
Cari swims after the glowing lump, snatching at it as it bobs out of reach. The ruined city drops away beneath her – they’re on the edge of the great rift, where the Lord of Waters fell. Looking down, the silt clears, and Cari glimpses strange fish swimming through the waters below.
Not fish – Bythos. She can see their dead human-halves trailing behind the living godfish. The way they swim makes their limbs wave, like they’re signalling to her. Fuck, maybe that’s a way out! The Bythos have helped her before! Hawse said the Lord of Waters had a plan for her, and she’ll take a crazy mostly dead god’s plan over rotting in the camps. If the Bythos can animate a dead body, then maybe they can keep a living one alive!
It’ll be a good thought to share with Spar. How did you save me, Cari? Well, it all started when I stuck my face up the bum of a divine fish and swam all the fucking way to Khebesh with a flounder on my head.
She and Adro swim back up. Dump their sacks. Fill their lungs.
“Eight more!” gasps Adro. “We can do eight.”
They dive again.
This time, Cari heads straight for the rift where the Bythos cluster.
Pressure as she descends – a pressure in her soul, just like she felt on the mountainside. She’s entering into the presence of a god.
She swims down. Leaves Adro far behind.
There’s something else down here, too, moving in the dark. Not a Bythos – somelike else, a congregation of dark shapes. A glimpse of many teeth. It vanishes into the mud as Bythos circle around her protectively.
Think. All godshit is the same shit, right? Self-perpetuating structures in the aetheric field, to quote someone who was at the top of the to-stab list for a while. Cari was made to be a saint of the Black Iron Gods, but ended up channelling Spar. Her cousin Eladora – for all her prissiness, El’s a spiritual slut, touched by the Black Iron Gods and the Kept Gods, too. Once the channel’s opened by one god, it’s sometimes easier for another one to make contact.
Cari opens her mind, tries calling. Recites in her head the prayers she overheard from Hawse. Come on! If you’ve got some divine plan, fucking show yourself. She can’t see the Bythos overhead any more. Can’t see anything apart from the glimmer of yliaster in the dark waters, and she can’t tell if those dim lights are five feet or five hundred feet down.
Then – building in the back of her mind, washing over her like a familiar drug – a vision.
Not like Spar’s crystalline regularity, his architectural mind, his voice guiding her through the images discarded on the streets of the New City.
Not like the screaming, desperate hunger and hatred of the Black Iron Gods, every thought stained dark and cruel, her soul blood-soiled and tattered afterwards, a thing sewn together from carrion birds.
No, this time the knowledge flows into her, fills her, then recedes. A tidal vision, a wave of revelation. It floods her mind completely, then retreats, leaving prophecy behind on her lips, little tide pools of memory left behind by the drowning god.
She sees—
Two men walking through the streets of Ilbarin long, long ago. Both young. One’s dark-skinned, keen-eyed. Dressed in bright robes adorned with the images of colourful birds, a heavy book in his hand. A heavy book, almost identical to the fucking book she haunted all the way from Guerdon. The other’s pale like Cari, black-haired like Cari. Memories of the father she barely knew, a dim shape from her childhood, colour the vision. It’s not him, though. It’s got to be Jermas Thay, like the Crawling Ones said. Jermas, hauled all the way from Guerdon. Hauled all the way from her nightmares.
Jermas looks up at her in the vision. In the memory. Like he knows she’s watching.
The scene ripples. Only the book remains constant, and now it’s being carried into the deeps by a shoal of Bythos. Cari struggles in confusion, unsure if this is another vision or if she’s opened her eyes and spotted the actual book, Ramegos’ grimoire, being carried away into the deeps.
Even as she thinks that, the image breaks, and she’s storm-tossed, hurled from the heavens to the fundament of the world and back again into a different vision. Powers thunder and spit around her, reality cracking. The Lord of Waters rises, and she’s caught in his net. She’s the point of his spear, too, at the same moment. It’s the invasion of Ilbarin, simultaneously years in the past and happening to her, to the Lord of Waters, right now. Cloud Mother breeds monsters in the sky. Kraken steals the seas, and the saints of the Lord of Waters cry out in agony, for the sea is their blood, and they’re transformed into desiccated husks in an instant, a legion of bone-dry corpses standing in a line on the shore. The stolen water draws back, and a host of horrors marches across the suddenly dry seabed, crosses the dry Firesea to lay siege to Ilbarin. At the head of the host is Pesh, Lion Queen, war goddess of Ishmere.
Her eyes are the golden fire of burning cities. Her voice is every battle cry, her roar every explosion, every cataclysm. She is bloody-clawed war, tawny-flanked victory, glory and power.
The churning waters draw back, and Cari spots a tiny speck tossed in the waves. The Rose! Save them, she thinks. She prays. The Lord of Waters reaches down and picks up the Rose.
She’s back in Guerdon. She’s in the ship made from Spar, in the ship that is Spar. They’ve got the last god-bomb, but the Ishmerian invasion is all around them. Pesh stands in the floodwaters of the Wash, her legions advancing into Guerdon. Artillery thunders from the heights, and somewhere in there the city’s last defenders rally along Mercy Street. Cari aims the ship, Rat lights the fuse and the bomb launches, arcing over the city to explode into nothingness.
Hands grab her, pulling her. Darkness all around. She struggles. Adro, the fucking idiot, her brave moron of a friend, pul
ls her out of the rift, drags her back towards the surface.
He doesn’t understand. She’s made contact, but she hasn’t got through. The Lord of Waters is an idiot, too, a broken god, spitting out whatever random thoughts and memories he thinks might connect to Cari. He doesn’t understand. She’s got to make him understand, got to find a way to use his power. The Bythos can carry them home. The Bythos can get them to Khebesh.
Her lungs are full of water. Her head’s full of gods.
Adro shoves her roughly out of the water, throwing her on to the raft like a sack of yliaster. He drags himself out, groaning, rolls her over so that she throws up over the edge. He’s bleeding from a fresh wound on his chest. A small bite mark.
“I’ve got. Go back,” she moans between gushes of seawater and vomit. Her puke glimmers with yliaster, and she doesn’t know if that’s some mystical side effect of the vision or just too much exposure to the raw stuff.
“I tugged on the rope,” says Ren, “when I saw them.”
Cari raises her head, and sees the approaching shape of the Ghierdana motorboat, and the armoured sorceress is standing at the prow like a figurehead made from the same gunmetal.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Baston sits in silence as the train rushes under Guerdon. Vyr squirms, nervous at being so far from the safety of the New City. The air down here is hot, full of soot and steam. Flashes of light give unconnected glimpses of the tunnel outside – here a brick wall, water from some buried river beading on its surface, there a graffiti-marked arch. Now darkness, darkness, ghoul eyes, darkness again.
“My cousin… he is not wholly himself,” Vyr begins, keeping his voice low. “You were there when it began. Tell me what you know about the thing that speaks to him.”
“We shouldn’t talk about it,” grunts Baston. “Not here, not now.” They’ve got a job to do.
“Here is exactly where we should talk about it. He cannot eavesdrop on us here.” Vyr shakes his head. “Back home in Lyrix, they lock saints away in madhouses and call them monasteries. It’s for their own protection. Saints have their eyes fixed on heaven and cannot see the mortal world. Cannot see the harm they do. We never use saints.” He mutters to himself in Lyrixian, a quick litany of curses or prayers, then glances back up at Baston. “We walk a dangerous path. He goes too fast, without supervision. He shall bring ruin on us.”
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