The Traitor God

Chapter 13

Somebody crashed into my door. I jerked upright, blanket flying, and reached for my wicked knife. It was just a drunkard staggering down the stairs, hacking up his lungs as he went. I slumped back into a doze, immune to guests clomping on the stairs, the creaking of floorboards and the clatter of pots and pans in the kitchen below. For a single sublime moment I just lay there, numbly cocooned in my own safe little world.

My blissful numbness gave way to a growing itch. I sat up and scratched at my hair and body, peering down at the straw, at an almost imperceptible hint of movement. My skin crawled. Bile rose up my throat. Swallowing, I looked down at my itching crotch and with two fingers quested at the root of the hairs, pulling off a tiny hard speck smaller than a grain of sand. It squirmed between thumb and forefinger. Lice.

Fucking Docklands inns and their mangy pig-faced owners!

One of the first things that the Collegiate tutors beat into initiates was cleanliness, both magical and mundane. Most Gifted had one method or another, and luckily my meagre skills at aeromancy proved sufficient to avoid the worst of the beatings. Sod the risk; I wove a scouring blade of wind to strip away all the dirt, grime, dead skin, lice and bits of straw, and left a pile of gunge in the bed. My skin felt fresh, if a little raw, and the vile itching had ceased.

I beat the worst of the dust and dirt from my clothes and slipped them back on, then stomped downstairs to curse the sour-faced owner, telling her to burn her lice-infested bedding. She hissed like a startled alley cat and I was forced to duck a bowl flung at my head. I spat more curses right back at her as I stormed out into unexpectedly garish sunlight, quickly leaving behind the scabby inn and the hag shrieking obscenities at my back. If she was lucky I wouldn’t be back to burn the place down myself.

The city din washing over me was cleansing in its own way. Setharis was a place of mists, sea fog and rain, and the hubbub of daily life was usually somewhat muffled; it was a rare treat to enjoy such fine weather. The city had sprouted sails: linen hung out to dry on ropes between buildings fluttered and flapped in the crisp morning breeze.

Despite the glorious sunshine, there was still an undercurrent to the babble of voices, an edge of intangible tension flowing through the city streets. Setharis was worried sick. It was more than the usual disaffection amongst the peasantry or the influx of refugees from coastal villages around Ironport, nor was it solely due to the Skinner murders and the missing people. The lower classes might even have cheered had the murders been up in the Old Town instead of right on their own doorsteps.

With the shadow cats already in the city, I wasn’t about to linger where I’d used even a little magic, in daylight or not. I walked briskly towards Carrbridge, passing through the morning market at Pauper’s Gate where men and women were gathering to sign on to ships and work gangs. If they were very lucky, a labourer might get hired by the Arcanum, or find a place on one of the various guilds’ projects. For the few who excelled it might offer prospects of retention and steady pay. Of course such contracts were rare as diamonds.

A muddle of languages and accents filled the streets as travellers and foreign sellswords sought their fortunes, steady work, or to disappear. Setharis could easily offer that last. It was sometimes called the Dreaming City in the oldest of texts, depending on which translation you used, but City of Fever Dreams was to my mind the most accurate interpretation – for many newcomers it soon became a nightmare.

In the ten years I’d been gone the number of businesses and trading houses boarded up and abandoned had tripled, as had the number of beggars. Was trade really that bad these days? The poor clustered on every street corner, ragged figures squabbling over turf and doing their best to look worse off than any other: pinching their babes to make them wail piteously, grinning at me with soot-blackened teeth, cultivating fake limps or showing off bandaged stumps of missing limbs that were merely bent double and tied up. I knew most of these old tricks, had used many of them myself as a street rat. There was some real artistry on show here today and I wished them the best of luck.

There were only two tried and tested ways to climb socially into the upper city. One was by being fortunate enough to be born Gifted, and there was no shortage of sexual offers to male magi since the Gift tended to run in bloodlines. The parents of a Gifted child would quickly find themselves plucked from poverty and ushered into the relative luxury of the Crescent once their child became a full magus.

The other way was the old fashioned way: to get stinking rich and buy your way up. Of course, as Lynas’ family had discovered, it was easy for the unGifted to fall back into the filth of the slums if they were not cunning enough to survive the politicking of the Old Town’s magical bloodlines with their old money and old alliances. With extended family wielding political power in the Arcanum it was easy for the High Houses to remain in power and suckle from the flaccid teats of the city’s dwindling riches. Thoughts of politics always made my stomach heave.

The month of Leaffall was at an end and it was only three days before the festival of Sumarfuin was held to mark the onset of winter. The market area had been cleaned up and given a veneer of respectability. Country folk from the surrounding villages had been pouring into Setharis for the festival and to bring their cattle in for slaughter before the snows and ice arrived. The incomers held hands, laughing and kissing as they browsed the wares on offer, or danced to the bards playing tunes on their pipes. Grim-faced locals avoided any festivities and resented their carefree joy. I smiled at children wearing hideous horned masks as they wandered through the crowds carrying baskets of white heather sprigs, rabbits’ feet, boars’ tusks, black cats’ tails, and anything else that could conceivably be sold as lucky; others carried white quartz charm stone pebbles or strips of bright cloth that tradition claimed were offerings to appease the ancestors.

Sumarfuin must have held real meaning once, but these days it was just a bit of much-needed fun, a communal habit harking back to the tribal ancestors of both the Clanholds and the Setharii. It was older than the first words ever written by mankind during the era of tyrants, back when my wicked lot of bastards ruled. Some meanings and memories were probably better off forgotten.

The Arcanum and the nobility tended to frown on these old folk myths but some things even the rulers of the city couldn’t control. They certainly couldn’t stop young magi and nobles donning elaborate masks of their own and coming down to join in the revelry. It was the only time of the year when the social classes mixed freely.

A woman wearing some sort of foreign hedge witch costume, all bright beads and bones, thrust a necklace of carved wooden charms at my face. In a thick accent she declared it a talisman from some distant homeland with far too many vowels and apostrophes. She didn’t fool me; her voice was undiluted Docklands however hard she tried to disguise it. Seeing my lack of interest she thrust a basket of dragon bones and teeth under my nose. “Gathered from the beaches of the Dragon Coast, they was,” she said. “Grant you luck, so they will.” The stone bones looked genuine enough, still with traces of the costal rock they’d been dug from.

I waved her off and she moved down the line of newcomers peddling her artefacts. In the taverns and inns I’d passed through while travelling I occasionally heard tales of dragon sightings, but in ten years of travel I’d never met a single person that had personally seen a living one – well, nobody that was both sane and honest.

I bought some onion bread and chewed with relish as I made my way up Fisherman’s Wynd. The further from the market, the more sullen the city became. People kept their eyes fixed on the ground as if afraid to attract attention. A horse and cart tore down the street, causing a heavily-laden woman in the middle of crossing to leap back at the last moment to avoid being crushed. She fell to the ground. The cart didn’t slow, and nobody bothered to help her up.

Amidst the crowd somebody stumbled and bumped into my shoulder. I turned, something inside screaming wrongness. A richly dressed man stared up at me, bewildered, his pupils wide and dark, the whites shot through with red. I noted the tiny red cuts in his forearms where he’d been making blood offerings at the Thief of Life’s temple. He stank of stale sweat and sour puke, and his skin bubbled with pustules of corruption: low-level magical corruption at that. “All gone,” he muttered. “Gone. Ran out.”

A habitual mageblood addict too long without a fix. Panicked, I shoved the alchemic-addled idiot aside and hurried away. The man meandered his way down the hill, pawing at people and shouting obscenities, occasionally trying to bite chunks out of them. In that state it wouldn’t be long before the sniffers caught wind. Then it would be a quick knife across the throat and another corpse tossed onto the pyres. I kept my head down and quickened my step.

The wardens stationed on the Carr’s Bridge were carefully checking each cart as we stood in line to pay the toll and trickle over the hump of the bridge. No doubt my recent activities had caused the heightened security. Good, maybe if the authorities had been more vigilant they’d have caught the Skinner by now.

I filed in behind a gaggle of worshippers as they headed down onto East Temple Street. On entering the square a wall of incense hit me like a rock to the face. I’d never seen the point of the stuff; half the time it stank worse than the odours they were trying to mask.

By the time the bells in the Old Town tolled, the place was thronging with worshippers muttering prayers. I couldn’t help but think that our religions were an oddity flying in the face of Setharii inclinations towards practical cynicism. It was as if people refused to believe their gods had once been mortal men and women. Granted, the gods had been born Gifted, but they had still soiled their swaddling and spewed milk all over their parents at the most inopportune of times. Given time and centuries of hard work – and knowing that secret in my head – perhaps even the likes of me could find a way to become a god. Hah, wouldn’t that fuck them up!

I stuck a smoke between my lips and lit it from the sacred censor outside the Thief of Life’s temple. A priest frowned at me, but somehow I didn’t think my patron god would mind. Finally I caught sight of Charra entering the square, dressed in soft brown leathers cut for travel, a short sword sheathed at her hip and a small satchel slung over one shoulder. I gave her a wave and made my way over.

My tabac smoke wafted over and her nose wrinkled in disgust. “Do you have to use that muck?”

I shrugged. “No.” I took a long drag, then turned my head away and blew a long slow plume of smoke.

She scowled. “I hope your search was fruitful.”

“It was. I also discovered that the titans glow now. When did that happen?”

She shrugged. “Started about a year ago and has been getting steadily brighter. It’s a great mystery.”

I chuckled. “I can imagine the Arcanum’s consternation. Not knowing must be driving them mad. It certainly gave me pause when I was heading to Lynas’ warehouse.”

“I can imagine. Well, let’s go somewhere quiet and get down to business.”

At the entrance to East Temple Street we met a squad of wardens coming from the opposite direction. “Oh, come on,” I muttered, heart sinking as I recognized Eva in the vanguard. I forced myself to smile.

Those glorious green eyes flicked from Charra to me. “Well, well, if it isn’t Master Reklaw.” She inclined her head to Charra. “Business is well, I trust?”

Charra smiled thinly. “And entirely legal as always, Magus Evangeline.”

“Oh, I am positive that we wouldn’t find a single thing out of order,” she replied. “If I may offer a word to the wise: I would keep my eye on this one. Your lover, is he?”

“Ha!” I blurted. “As if.”

Charra stared daggers at me. Eva’s eyebrow quirked.

“I have better taste than that,” Charra said. “He’s all yours, if you want him?”

“Perhaps another time,” Eva said. “I am on duty at the moment. Good day to you both.”

After we turned the corner, Charra stopped and wagged her finger at me. “I thought you were supposed to be laying low? Be wary of that one, she would snap you like a twig.”

I rubbed my arm. “I’m already aware of that. Have no fears of me dipping my wick there.”

She led me to a near-deserted tavern called The Fuddled Ferret. We sat at a bench and ordered ale, being entertained in the loosest sense of the word by a hungover bard in a colourful patchwork coat plucking the strings on his lute in vague accompaniment to the lacklustre tale he was telling to two snot-nosed pups staring up at him, rapt with wonder.

After the drinks arrived she busied herself sorting her map and papers while I listened to the bard’s tale. A poor rendition but it still evoked golden memories. I knew this story well: The Journey of Camlain Calhuin had been one of my mother’s bedtime stories. Young as I’d been, the sense of wonder my mother’s tales evoked in me was still vivid. It had been one of the last before the voices in her head finally drove her to fevered madness and death. This dreary-tongued bard was mangling it. Perhaps it was a cultural thing between the Clanholds and the Setharii, but this version had none of the details that made my mother’s so real to me: it lacked her gritty humour as she told of the time Camlain learned which mushrooms were safe to eat, and which gave him explosive squats, or how he’d tried and failed and tried again to learn hunting and fishing on his epic journey north. It had been as instructive as it had been fascinating to hear Camlain Calhuin grow from boy into doomed hero. This bard’s hero was seemingly born with the innate ability to be the greatest at everything without putting in the sweat to learn, and I suspected that none of this bard’s heroes ever took a shite, ate a dodgy meal, got ill, or had wounds that took months to heal. Pah, a pox on that! Still, it was a happy reminder of my youth.

“Are you ready?” Charra said.

We barely touched our drinks as I related what I’d discovered in Lynas’ warehouse and the Templarum Magestus, and what I’d learned from the information broker and gang boss in the Scabs.

“Why chase him through the Warrens and kill him there if they could just steal what they wanted from his warehouse?” I said. “If the Skinner had wanted to murder him beforehand then he would have. No, Lynas had been snooping into something, I’m sure of it.” I massaged my temples, trying to recall the fractured details of the vision. “Something big. He bought us time, paying with his life.”

Charra cleared her throat and studied the map in front of us. It was fairly crude and the further away an area was from main thoroughfares like Fisherman’s Way the less detail it depicted. The Warrens was mostly just blank space with a few older points of note marked. It would be nigh-impossible to keep a map of the Warrens current: by the time you finished such a time-consuming task you would find entire areas had already changed due to fire, collapse and construction.

“While you were up in the Old Town I compiled all the information I have on what occurred on the fourteenth of Leaffall,” she said. “This…” she swallowed, “this is where Lynas died.” She had marked Bootmaker’s Wynd with an X, smudged where a charcoal stick had broken from pressing down too hard.

I clenched my jaw as resurgent terror drifted to the surface of my mind. I felt the ghost of the scalpel’s bite and our hot blood pattering down across our face. “The air smelled of blood and smoke as he pounded on doors asking for help.”

Her finger pressed down on a circle, not far from the first mark. “This old abandoned temple is within running distance of Bootmaker’s Wynd. It burnt down that same night, which explains the smell of smoke.” Two marks were next to it. “Multiple fatal stabbings here and here, a small-time alchemic-dealer named Keran and his gang, the Iron Wolves. Could be coincidence. Could be that Keran and his men saw something they shouldn’t. Normally I’d say good riddance to the filth.”

I gulped ale like water. “Did anybody live in that temple?”

“A few years back the area was ravaged by a flesh-rotting plague and it’s been abandoned ever since. Rumour claims it’s cursed. It was a rat-infested shithole by all accounts, occupied by a dozen or so alchemic addicts. None survived the fire so far as I know.”

“Whose temple was it?”

“I suppose that it must have been inherited by the Hooded God after Artha died…” She let the comment drift off unsaid, studying me.

I examined the map, trying to trace Lynas’ likely route. “I still don’t know what happened that night.” Not yet. All I knew was a deal had been cut amidst fire and blood. She had no need to know that I left to keep Lynas, Layla and her safe. I wasn’t about to lay guilt on Charra that wasn’t her fault.

I cleared my throat. “Assuming he started from the temple, the quickest way for Lynas to get to a public place and any hope of help was through the streets near Bootmaker’s Wynd.” If only you had made it my friend.

“Where do we go from here?” she said. “We know Lynas was working with Bardok the Hock, who is apparently newly flush with coin, and we know Bardok works with the Harbourmaster at Pauper’s Docks. The Harbourmaster is in the pocket of the alchemic syndicates and not exactly inclined to be friendly to me, but if all these murders are linked then the Skinner is a bigger threat to all of them than I am.”

“True. Can you can get me in and out of the docks under the sniffers’ noses?”

“Of course.”

“Well then, it’s settled. First we investigate that razed temple to see if there is anything left to uncover, pay that slimy git Bardok a visit on the way back and then, if needs be, we find out what the Harbourmaster has to say. We’ll leave him to last, no point putting ourselves in danger if we don’t have to.”

She nodded agreement and fingered the hilt of the short sword at her hip. “Drink up. We have work to do. If Lynas bought us time then I won’t waste it. Whatever it takes.”

It was so good to work with people who didn’t mind getting their hands dirty.

The reek of burning still lingered around the site of Artha’s old temple. The blackened stonework had once been part of a proud and martial edifice, albeit latterly left to decay and swiftly hemmed in by cobbled-together wooden structures propped up against its walls. Ironically, that very sodden decrepitude had been what had saved most of the surrounding buildings from the worst of the blaze. We circled the site, kicking over the occasional cracked stone or burnt cinder. I squatted down and touched fragments of an arrow slit and a spiked iron rail twisted by heat, but if Lynas had indeed been here on the night he died I felt nothing, not a whisper of magic or hint of his emotions. Fire was the great devourer, and hungry tongues of flame had destroyed anything that might have been imprinted on the surroundings.

“Not much left,” Charra said, stating the bloody obvious.

“There must be something here. Some clue they’ve overlooked.” I picked up a sodden doll made from straw and flicked off grey ash. It had been bound into a human shape with clothes of coloured rags, two twists of yarn carefully woven and teased into the hairstyle a proper Old Town lady might wear.

The stone cobbles underfoot began shaking as another earth tremor shook the city. The building to my right creaked like an old man, gave a splintering crack and listed a hand-span towards me. A rain of rotted wood pattered down nearby. The place was an ill-omened death-trap; no wonder it was deserted. Soon it would collapse in on itself – hopefully long after we were out of here – and then it would be reborn once people got up the nerve to pilfer the stone from the ruined temple to build a new tenement.

As the buildings settled I sensed a tiny tremor of movement from a roof behind me. I opened my Gift, trying to sense any stray thoughts or emotions. I relaxed as a corvun screeched and took flight from behind one of the crooked chimney stacks that leaned like bad drunks over the alleyways.

While I was busy examining the buildings, Charra climbed over a pile of rubble and scanned the ground for clues.

“Walker, look at this.”

Something cracked underfoot and she disappeared shrieking into a hole.

“Charra!” I scrambled over the rubble.

She was sitting on her arse in a muddy hollow half-filled with debris, wincing and holding her chest. Her face and hair were grey with ash. She coughed, spitting mud and blood.

I opened my mouth to comment.

“Don’t you dare say a word,” she said.

“As you wish, my lady.” I lowered my hand to help her out. Stale fetid air wafted up out of a dark opening in one side of the pit, sending a shiver up my spine. “Merciless Night Bitch,” I cursed. “There is an entrance to the Boneyards here. This old temple to Artha must have been built to guard the exit.”

She looked up at me in alarm, recalling our old stories of the things that lurked in those dark catacombs. Once upon a time she had liked to sit with us and listen to gruesome tales of the twisted, broken things gone howling mad down below her streets, but that was when our tales had merely been scary stories of a strange place she would never see.

The stink of the Boneyards summoned the foul taste of bile to burn the back of my throat. Dizziness and terror overcame me. I stumbled, foot falling over the edge, blood flooding my mouth from a bitten lip. Charra’s eyes widened, her arms opening to catch me as I fell, racked by old nightmares of being trapped in the darkness…