God of Broken Things

Chapter 2

Nine hours earlier, I’d been surrounded by armed men and escorted to the Collegiate of the Arcanum for an urgent meeting with one of most important magi in the city. As usual, important people made you sit on an uncomfortable seat and wait an age for an audience, but at least I wasn’t suffering alone.

After a while the sound of screaming becomes white noise, a buzzing annoyance in the back of your head no worse than a yapping dog or a drunkard’s droning snore from the straw pallet right next to your own. I yawned, ignored the two armed wardens flanking me, and shifted on the hard wooden bench as I stared ahead at the iron-bound doors. My eyes traced and re-traced the all-too familiar patterns of glimmering arcane wards worked into the oak. The Forging Room was far from my favourite place in the Collegiate, not least because I had been through this particular magical rite myself as an initiate. All magi had but nobody remembers it all, just the agony and the raw-throated screaming. And the needles, we mustn’t forget the needles.

Inserted under the nails…slid into the eyes…piercing the tongue…the other bits…

I crossed my legs and pulled my great coat tight around me. I hated the bloody Arcanum – their brutal rules and rites had broken my old friend Lynas. He had never been the same afterwards. How dare they put innocent initiates through this! And yet… I now understood and acknowledged the necessity of magically enforcing loyalty to Setharis. You can’t begin turning people into living weapons and let them do anything they wish without a measure of control. After the catastrophe three months ago that we now called the Black Autumn, there could be no denying it. It didn’t mean I liked it.

The door to the Forging Room finally creaked open and I sat up straight, wincing as my spine complained. Pain was now my constant companion.

A young magus poked her head out. Her chestnut hair was pulled into a neat tail and she wore plain brown robes entirely lacking the ornamentation and wealth worn by most others – the dark stains marked her as a healing magus of the Halcyon Order. Once their robes had been pure white, but now they all wore cheap and practical brown. Me, I couldn’t stand robes and the status they proclaimed. Plain old peasant tunic and trousers had always suited me just fine.

Her eyes were wide and nervous. “Councillor Cillian bids you enter, magus.” She swiftly stepped back to make way for me. There was no sneaking about as an unknown face for me these days – every fucker and their horse seemed to know who and what I was. I suppose that’s what happens when you kill a god and save a city. Most seemed to doubt it was true that Nathair, the Thief of Life, had died at my hands, but many magi had heard enough rumours to make them nervous in my presence. And as for those that actually knew the truth of my part in it all, well, who could blame them for being afraid.

The sour stench of blood, sweat and piss mixed with vinegar assaulted me as I stepped inside, almost overpowering a sharp clean scent reminiscent of the aftermath of a lightning storm. Behind a wooden privacy screen, the room was ornate and bewilderingly complex. Copper pipes and bundles of golden wire covered one entire wall, humming with power like a hive of angry bees. Trapped inside glass jars, lightning crackled and spat. Brass cogs ticked and turned with mesmerising regularity. Five artificers wearing odd ceramic gauntlets sat studying arrays of glowing crystals and moving rods that flickered and danced in tune with whatever was happening to the poor naked git strapped to the table in the centre of the room. To me it was all just pretty lights.

Steel manacles bound the young Gifted initiate’s limbs to the table and leather straps held his head and body immobile for his own safety. His head was circled by an open helmet containing an array of needles, some of which were already embedded in his skull, connected to wires running back into the arcane machinery on the wall. A steel grate was situated directly below the table to deal with the subject pissing themselves from fear and pain. I shuddered, remembering that particular bit of humiliation only too well, and that was only a herald of far worse to come.

Cillian’s demeanour was unusually severe today as she bent over the initiate and slid another needle in, this time into his chest and heart. She attached it to a wire and stepped back. The nearest artificer nudged a lever up slightly. The boy convulsed and screamed as magic I knew nothing about poured into him.

I winced, his panic and pain seeping into my mind through my cracked Gift. I couldn’t keep the thoughts of others out entirely anymore, not after what I’d been through. The buzzing machinery gave off a whiff of magic that smelled reminiscent of my own. Not entirely surprising since all this weird and unsettling machinery was designed to do one thing – to burn loyalty to Setharis and the Arcanum into a Gifted mind. It was a relic built at the very founding of the Arcanum in the years following the destruction of ancient Escharr. Those refugee magi had created it using long lost knowledge for unknown reasons, and I had to wonder if this was one path of knowledge that they had purposely let fade away.

The initiate’s eyes rolled to me, pleading to make it stop. Tears wet his cheeks.

“Ah, Edrin,” Cillian said. “I am glad my messengers finally found you.” I always forgot how tall she was, and how beautiful. She was wearing her formal azure silken robes and an elegant gold circlet to restrain her unruly mass of long dark curly hair. Her pale olive skin appeared sallow and waxy from exhaustion. Knowing her she hadn’t stopped for more than a short nap every night for three months solid.

I eyed the torture table; there was no other suitable word for it. “Enjoying yourself are we?” Messengers she said! More like a pack of armed wardens hauling me straight to her whether I liked it or not.

She ignored my jibe entirely, which in all fairness is a wise tactic when faced with annoying people like me. Her lips pursed. “It is only a few hours until nightfall. I had not expected it to take quite this long to find you. I assume they checked all the ale houses first, then the brothels… which were you in?”

“Neither. I was in a hospital.”

She looked concerned for a moment, but I was an experienced magus and with magic we didn’t have much need for powders and potions and healing in general unless it was from enormous trauma. If it didn’t kill me outright I would generally be back on my feet in a ridiculously short time.

“I work there on occasion,” I added.

Surprise flickered through her expression, but not as much as I might have expected given my blackened reputation. “Well well. It is good to see you putting your unique talents to use. Speaking of which, I have a task you are especially suited for.”

A ruby began blinking in the machinery and she held up a finger. “Do not go anywhere. This may take a while.”

She leaned over the delirious, moaning boy and began asking him questions:

“Are you loyal to Setharis and the Arcanum?” “Would you ever take coin or favours from foreign powers?” “Would you ever consider using blood sorcery?”

The questioning went on for an age, and whatever the machinery and needles did to him they seemed to force truthful answers. When they uncovered an answer they approved of an artificer would pull a lever and his body would shudder with crackling energy, leaving him gasping and sobbing. They were burning it into his mind so that betrayal was not something he could ever seriously consider.

Once or twice they came across opinions or inclinations that they did not approve of and an artificer would lean forward to study the instrumentation and then call over to Cillian – who would then get to work inserting needles and applying shocks and pain and magical manipulations until those opinions were bent back toward compliance, then burned into place. I was living proof that it didn’t always hold entirely, but then I was messed up in the head in all sorts of ways.

It would have been easier and less painful if I did it for them, but that was not a role I would ever volunteer for, and in any case the Arcanum would never trust a wastrel tyrant like me to make a proper job of it.

Cillian and her machines got to work on keeping away the Worm of Magic, that seduction to use more and more magic until all of your self-control was eaten away and your body and mind were warped into a mere shell for magic itself. My mouth went dry. This part was the worst. “Open your Gift,” Cillian said, pressing a wooden rod wrapped in leather between his teeth and securing it there. “Let as much magic as you can flow into you.”

At this stage in his development nobody knew if the youth’s Gift would mature enough to become a full magus, but they enforced their hidebound rules all the same. Better now than too late. When the artificers read certain arcane signs in the machinery they gave the word that the subject’s Gift was straining, and then the real agony began. Needles jabbed and bottled lightning sparked into human skin, releasing a stench of burnt hair into the room. The machinery whined as magic poured into the boy’s skull to stamp a single message: overextending your Gift was a very bad thing. This agony waits for you if you try! He screamed through the gag until blood mixed with the spittle.

My head throbbed from the poor bastard’s ordeal, and I turned my back on them to study the walls until Cillian was done torturing him into unconsciousness. The artificer’s machines had done their work for the day and I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the boy – he had no idea the needles and bottled lighting were only the first of three sessions. A wave of nausea washed over me: I had been through this myself and knew what horrors were still to come. In the morning he would be dragged back in kicking and screaming to undergo an even worse set of procedures.

The brown-robed magus wheeled the unconscious patient out and the artificers filed out after her, leaving me alone with my old friend and ex-lover. It was only slightly awkward now that she was one of the seven members of the Inner Circle in charge of basically everything, and could order me tossed onto a pyre if she deemed it necessary.

The pretence of dispassionate control dropped away from Cillian and she sagged into a chair in the corner, ripping off her circlet to release her hair and taking a deep and ragged breath. “I hate this.” She bowed her head and hid behind a dark and curly veil. I didn’t play the game of politics, which made me one of very few people she could relax around.

“Don’t do it then.” My sage advice was not overly helpful to her. “I don’t order something done unless I could stomach doing it myself,” she snapped. “But it must be carried out. We have all seen the havoc a rogue magus can cause, and there are only a few of us with the skill necessary to enact the Forging with a minimum of pain caused to new initiates. All must take their turn and share the burden, even a member of the Inner Circle.”

Fair. “How are you doing? You look…” I didn’t want to say ‘like shite’, “…worn out.”

She sighed and her eyes drooped as if she would like nothing more than to sit on that chair and drop off to sleep. “As are we all. We must all do as much as we can for as many as possible. There is a mountain of issues that need attending to every single day.”

This was why they put people like her in charge and not people like me. I was selfish, and after a day like hers with all that heavy responsibility I would have pissed off to a tavern and gotten ratarsed on gutrot booze. I was far from the reliable type. Not her, she would be up at the crack of dawn and working before I fell out of my blankets with a hangover and a bad attitude.

“So why have you dragged me here?” I asked.

She swept her hair back to look me in the eye as she pulled a folded parchment from a pouch on her belt and tossed it over.

“Archmagus Krandus is in agreement.”

I opened it and examined the wax seals affixed to the bottom: the seven stars of the Inner Circle and the griffin rampant of High House Hastorum.

My eyebrows climbed and I whistled in appreciation as I noted the details of the writ. They were astonishingly brief and all-encompassing: I could legally kill people with this. “Are you cracked in the head? Must be if you’re authorising this.”

“Don’t abuse it,” she said, reading my mind. Not that it was difficult on this occasion.

I nodded and tucked it away inside my coat. “The hunt is on then?”

“Yes. You have identified three other magi possibly infested and controlled by Scarrabus parasites. Do not take any unnecessary risks. Investigate and report and I will do the rest. Should things go wrong you are ordered to capture them if you can and kill them if you can’t.”

I grinned. It was about fucking time to dish out some payback. She yawned and rubbed tired eyes. “Any questions?”

I thought about it, and the longer I did the lower her eyelids drooped. Her head bobbed up and down, and finally settled on her shoulder. I carefully and silently retreated. By the time I reached the doorway a soft snore came with each breath. As I left the Forging Room another magus and two scribes moved to enter bearing armloads of scrolls. Yet more work for Cillian. I barred their entry with an arm across the doorway.

I glared down at the young magus, barely out of Collegiate training probably. “The Councillor is not to be disturbed. She is attending to a vital issue.”

“But…” she withered under my glare. The scribes swallowed and backed away. The two armed wardens were still waiting for me, and they approached wearing their serious faces, hands wrapped around the hilts of swords.

I waved Cillian’s writ in front of their noses. “See this? You two are to guard this doorway for the next two hours and let nobody else in. The rest of you can turn right around and go do something else for a while.”

Their eyes flew wide and they leapt to obey me with a level of respect that I didn’t think I’d ever experienced before. Cillian would be furious when she found out I was letting her sleep. Not two minutes had passed since she had asked me not to abuse my new powers, but oh well, at least she would be a better-rested angry councillor. Besides, she had said I could do whatever I wanted to whoever I wanted.

I loved this writ already.

Cillian was exhausted and I was rapidly getting there myself, but I had an appointment at another hospital up in Coppergate that I refused to miss. After that my real work would begin – in the deep of night I would finally wrest some answers from the Scarrabus parasites that had tried to orchestrate the destruction of Setharis.