God of Broken Things

Chapter 30

Eva plunged into the centre of the shield wall, her huge hammer smashing through shields and the men behind them, launching warriors through the air like they were nothing more than dolls. Axes and spears bounced off her armour and the magic-reinforced skin beneath, earning their wielders an early grave as elbows, fists and feet staved in chests and shattered bones even if they managed to avoid her hammer. She opened a hole in their line and her heavily armoured wardens took full advantage, shields up pushing through, swords swinging in the front, spears stabbing from behind. The gaps widened as more Skallgim fell. The enemy began to waver as casualties mounted and men pulled back from facing Eva.

Vincent loosed a roiling fireball into a clump of Skallgrim. It exploded to consume half a dozen men in an instant, and set as many more alight, their screams echoing across the valley. Their army’s morale crumbled, axes drooping, feet shuffling backwards in what would soon turn into a rout.

Horns sounded and a war-leader armoured in mail and a cuirass inlaid with a golden boar pushed forward to hold their line. His rune-etched axe trailed purple sparks of arcane energy as it destroyed swords and split shields. A warrior behind him thrust the boar banner into the air and roared. All resistance stiffened.

“Fight harder!” I shouted. “Push! The Free Towns Alliance will be here in only a day. I expect them to be greeted by a carpet of Skallgrim corpses.”

At my words the wardens and Clansfolk I had influenced threw themselves forward, heedless of personal safety, swords hammering down, boots lashing out, and teeth ripping out throats. I slipped into the minds of some of our wardens, directing them to attack where the enemy morale was weakest. Their fury and fear flooded through me.

“Kill them!” I snarled, sending my warriors into a frenzy fiercer than any berserker the heathen Skallgrim could offer. The snowy battlefield was a churning mass of heightened emotions. Bloodlust. Panic. Rage. Pain. Fear. I rode the swell, experiencing it from behind the front lines while resisting flinging myself right into the midst of it. The rising exultation of our approaching victory was intoxicating. Every mundane human I touched had a Gift, and small and stunted as they were, each of them seeped a little magic into me – I took it as my own and threw it against the enemy. My power was swelling.

I gathered all the additional magical might offered by my army and struck at the six linked halrúna. My blow smashed into the mind of the nearest like a charging bull. He reeled back clutching his head and the others followed. These fools thought the Gift-bond was a strength, and it could be, but what hurt one also hurt the other. I burst him like rotten fruit and the other five fell to the snow drooling and senseless.

I laughed and lifted my arms wide. With one wave of my left hand a line of wardens smashed through the enemy, and my right sent maddened Clansfolk charging to their deaths, taking three times their number down with them.

I stood there directing the battle with my coterie guarding me, being strong where the enemy were weak and inflicting them with panic wherever I desired. I saw through every eye and directed every hand. In that moment I was the greatest general who ever lived – because I cheated. “Victory is mine!”

Behind me: killing intent!

I spun, Dissever clutched in my fist. My guards shifted around me and Jovian peered back to see what I was looking at. There was nothing there. It had to have come from my own people. They were taut and ready for a fight, hearts hammering as they watched the conflict below. I shrugged it off, obsessed by the play of life and death enacted on the fields below me.

With the halrúna dead, or as good as, this battle was as good as won. Eva made it certain by blasting through another knot of axemen to reach their war-leader. His guards might as well have been cloth, and she swung her war hammer upwards into his cuirass. His chest crumpled. Blood exploded from his mouth as she launched him clear across his battle lines to land on one of Cormac’s spikes, stone piercing through metal. He hung there impaled, his heart’s blood spurting across his own men as they looked on in horror.

The boar banner fell into the snow and the will to fight vanished. The dam burst and thoughts of flight flooded the panicked minds of the enemy. This battle had been won. I was already plotting how I would control my forces in the next one.

I didn’t see the knife until it plunged between my ribs. I felt a punch to the chest, and looked down to see a horn hilt jutting out just below my heart.

“Fuck a pig!” I cried, staggering back. The front of my coat was already darkening with blood. “Who…” My coterie were all around me and scanning the area, but we were totally alone. Nobody else had been close enough to stab me, and I had enforced the former prisoners’ loyalty when I chose them.

That killing intent…

I searched. Again, I felt that distant attention watching me, but that presence withdrew before I could seek it out. The presence didn’t seem directly malevolent, so I disregarded it and instead searched for minds in my immediate area. I discovered somebody right in front of me despite the area looking clear, their thoughts quiet and calm as a mouse. “No you fucking don’t,” I gasped. They were disciplined and highly trained but not truly prepared for the likes of me. Few were. I hammered my way through their defences and started to crack them open.

Light wavered and shattered right in front of me. A line of footprints appeared in the snow, then Secca’s oddly familiar face, her black and white hood pulled back and a feral snarl twisting her lips. A second dagger was in her hand, raised and ready to plunge into my chest.

Secca? I… I had thought she liked me.

Jovian intercepted her with a shoulder charge and slammed her to the ground. He sat atop her, the point of his sword pressing into the soft flesh beneath her chin. Blood welled up in the hollow of her throat.

“Hold the traitor there!” I gasped as the pain suddenly hit like a red hot poker to the chest. “You maggoty cunt! Why the fuck did you do that?” I was deep in her head and I would rip out why she had betrayed us before I killed her.

“Monster!” she hissed, squirming in Jovian’s grip. She was stronger than she looked and Coira, and then Vaughn, had to pile on to hold her down.

My Gift was stronger than hers, and with her discipline and defences broken I cored her like an apple and held her secret seeds up to the light. A man’s face was forefront to her thoughts. It took me a moment to recognise the heavily built older man wearing a flat cap, a clay pipe clamped between rotten brown teeth.

Her father was the man I had left mindless in a ditch outside a gambling den in the Warrens while investigating Lynas’ murder.

“The fucker tried to rob and kill me!” I protested. “And you stab me for that?” By The Night Bitch, it really hurt… ah shite shite shite, it was getting harder to breathe. The bitch had punctured a lung. I dampened down my sense of pain and tried to ignore the length of sharp steel in my chest.

“Liar!” she snapped. “My father was no murderer; at most he would have demanded his coin back. After cheating him at cards you burned out his mind! I know you were there. You were seen, but as usual nobody cared about what happened to a poor dockhand. Especially not with you being some kind of big deal now.” She spat at me, but it only landed on my boot. “You left him drooling and pissing himself on the street.” She sobbed and tears glistened in her eyes. “You did worse than murder him.”

Visions of her father blankly staring at a wall in a room that reeked of piss. Secca trying to feed him porridge and it dripping down his chin. The pain, the loss, the rage as her investigation found the culprit. Her coin drained away by the costs of constant care and helpers, her from a background as poor as my own…

Oh fucking Night Bitch, had he really not meant to kill me? I remembered that hard calloused hand wrapped around my throat, the panic of being caught unawares and then lashing out. Was it murder or was it self-defence? I… I wasn’t sure.

I shivered, then grimaced as the knife grated between my ribs. Best not to remove it just yet. “You could have snuck into my tent and stabbed me while I was defenceless, lying on my face and healing up. Why didn’t you?”

She glared up at me, brimming with fierce regret. “I wanted to. I had to know first. I thought maybe you’d have a reason, an accident… that you weren’t what they all said you were. But look at what you’ve done.”

I rocked back. “Are you mad? I’m trying to save everybody here!” “By enslaving them all yourself?” she shouted. “You are the monster they all said you were, and every bit as bad as the enemy.”

_I am the monster_… my own words echoed back at me with a shock like I’d dunked my head into a barrel of ice-water.

A flock of bone vultures descended from the sky.

Jovian and Coira rolled away from Secca to fight them off. I didn’t move, because I knew they weren’t real. I sensed no thought or life from the illusions flapping around us, and inside her head it was full of deception. She tried to veil herself in light and then run for it.

“No,” I said. She flopped down to the snow and her magic cut off. “I am in your head now. It is pointless to try to resist.”

“Do we kill her, Chief?” Coira asked, a knife in her hand. She didn’t look entirely happy about it.

I sighed. “No. She is a magus and while this battle might be won they will regroup and be back with more daemons and who knows what else.”

“Never leave an enemy at your back,” Jovian said. “Especially one you wronged.”

I glared at him. “She is no enemy. Or rather, she won’t be when I am done with her.”

Secca’s mouth snapped open and her eyes flew wide as I opened her up to alter her memory. I burned away old links whilst forging new ones between thought and feeling and image. Most think of memory as something chiselled in stone, but really it’s far more like squishy wet clay. It was always easier to take what really happened – or at least what they thought really happened – and sculpt a few minor details to create an entirely new narrative based on the same old structure.

What she would now recall was investigating her father’s attack and finding out that her father was robbed outside of the gambling den. All sorts of scum loiter in the alleys in the Warrens so it could have been anybody. A blow from a club had rattled his skull, addling his mind (I added some lovely images of extensive bruises all over the back of his head). Nice, simple and entirely believable, as all the best excuses were. I tied that memory to all the pain she had revealed to me and made sure it was not one she would ever wish to examine carefully for minute discrepancies.

Say nothing, I advised my troops. Vaughn, you big lump, get off her.

The big man stood, and moments later Secca shuddered and blinked, then rose to her feet and frowned at her sodden robes. “What was I saying?” She stared at the knife jutting from my chest, then winced as she discovered the cut under her chin caused by Jovian’s sword. “Sweet Lady Night! What happened here?”

“You don’t remember?” I said, wheezing for breath. “Two enemy scouts attacked us. Fortunately I managed to take their minds and send them off to attack their own side before they did more harm.” It was a crap excuse, but I massaged her mind to accept it and forget it and then I carefully withdrew.

Her eyes remained glazed for a few moments, then she looked at me in horror and ran to place both hands on my chest as she studied the knife. I remained very still, fighting the urge to kick her the fuck away.

“We need a healer,” she said. “This is bad, yes very bad indeed. You mustn’t move! You, Esbanian fellow, go fetch a healer!”

Jovian looked at me for permission, his expression flat and lacking any of his usual energy. Everyone was silent.

I nodded and he hurried off to find a warden handy with needle and thread.

What was wrong with them? I peeked inside their heads and did not like what I found. What trust we had forged together was dust and ashes now. They would still do their duty because I magically forced them to do so, but for a short time there they had also wanted to. We had been, if not friends exactly, a team.

Now they saw me as the monster I was, the tyrant the Arcanum had always feared. Killing somebody was something they understood and could deal with, but this forced each of them to look inward and pore through their memories looking for my manipulations. Paranoia bloomed unchecked as their realities came unspooled in my hands. They feared they were puppets dancing on my strings.

How could I claim otherwise? It was all true.

I’d taken them from the cells of the Black Garden and bent them to my will.

I’d taken the Clansfolk.

I’d taken the wardens.

And I controlled them all, forcing them to obey my commands. I considered making changes to their minds, to force them to accept what I had done, even approve of it… but no, they were totally correct. I looked downhill to the wardens mopping up stragglers, and at all the bodies scattered across the bloodied snow – witnessing my handiwork. What would my old friend Lynas have said about my actions? I had enough of a conscience left to feel… not ashamed, because I still thought what I did was necessary, but regret. I had lost control and drifted into the whirlpool of tyranny. Had Secca not shocked me out of it I might have been consumed.

I tried to take a deep breath and gasped with pain as the blade shifted. Pink bubbles frothed around the wound and caused Secca to fuss over me. Coira was eyeballing me, her scarred smile seeming more like a scowl. She’s alive isn’t she? I said to her. Would you rather I had killed her?

She turned away rather than answer, but I felt her fear and disgust all the same.

I could not continue this way. My Gift was cracked and leaking and it was impossible to keep people out. It was growing harder not to meddle in their minds as my powers grew – with but a thought I could change their memory and correct my mistake.

It was so very tempting. I knew my weaknesses and I was deeply selfish. It would begin with small things, necessary things, but that was a slippery slope and what was merely convenient now would eventually become necessary. What did it matter? It didn’t really hurt them after all…

I was a monster.

They had made a grave mistake giving me an army. If by some miracle we survived this I would need to take myself away from people and live in the wilds. I could not be trusted.

When Jovian returned with the healers I welcomed the pain of them drawing out the dagger. It was a quick and hasty battlefield surgery and less than neat, but I was a magus and this little prick would not be enough to put me down. As long as I didn’t try to run or fight I would be fine – I laughed at my own joke. I would never be that lucky.

If the enemy didn’t get me then somebody else would stick a blade or arrow in my back if they realised what I had done to them.