The Traitor God

Chapter 14

My breath misted the air of the dusty, disused cellar. I was starting to shiver so I pulled the threadbare cloak tighter around my bony, gangly body, feeling like a shabby street rat amidst the finery of the high-born boys that surrounded us. There wasn’t any chance of escaping; they were older and bigger than me, already with hair on their chins, and more importantly they were blocking the only way back. I had no idea how Harailt had got the keys to this room and disabled the wards – the lower levels of the Collegiate were forbidden to initiates and usually heavily guarded, but the corridors had been strangely empty today as they marched us down here. I supposed that Harailt was Archmagus Byzant’s favoured student…

“No,” the fat boy beside me pleaded. “I… I don’t want to go.”

The chorus of older boys kept up the chant: “Boneyards, Boneyards, Boneyards, Boneyards, Boneyards.”

“Are you quite sure of that?” Harailt said. “We have all taken this challenge. Do you not want to be one of us?” I could see the dangerous twitch start at the corner of his mouth. The fat boy was in far more trouble than he realized. “Are you really going to let poor little Edrin here go into the tunnels all on his own?” His half-dozen idiot cronies kept up the heckling chant.

The fat boy looked back at me, swallowed, and lowered his eyes. He edged away from the steps leading down past the huge steel gate that yawned open into unknown depths below the Old Town. The darkness loomed behind me like a living, breathing thing, and I clutched the lantern they had given me even tighter.

The group of seniors pushed forward, herding the fat boy towards me, and towards the entrance to the catacombs. “Boneyards, Boneyards, Boneyards, Boneyards.”

Harailt glowered at me and jerked his head towards the darkness.

I took the hint, and began to descend the steps, taking my own good time about it as some sort of lame protest. Heir to a High House or not, if Harailt had been alone I might have smacked him one and burst his nose, but I wasn’t about to try to fight seven initiates whose Gifts had already begun to mature. Instead I satisfied myself by imagining my fists beating his face to a pulp and his silver-threaded tunic stained with his own blood. Lately it seemed like he found an opportunity to harass me every other day. If things got much worse I’d have to revert to my old Docklands ways and stick a knife in his back when he wasn’t looking. I didn’t want to have to do that. I’d tried so hard to fit in and I was every bit as good as they were! It wasn’t my fault I’d been born in a Docklands tenement and them in lofty palaces.

I reached the gate and looked back, happened to catch the fat boy’s eyes. I flicked a look at Harailt and back again, gave him a curt shake of my head. The boy finally seemed to realize that he didn’t have a choice. He took a great shuddering breath, held up his lantern like a shield, and followed me through the gate.

Harailt gave a sarcastic cheer. “Finally! Go on then, find a relic from the Boneyards to prove your bravery.”

We slowly edged forward into the darkness, batting cobwebs away from our faces. The light from the lanterns went nowhere near far enough down the tunnel. The air was dank and stale, leaving a foul taste in my mouth.

“Don’t worry,” I said, trying to show a confidence I didn’t feel. “We won’t be in here long. We’ll just grab something and run straight back out.” I almost dropped the lantern as the gate clanged shut behind us with an eruption of laughter and jeering.

“What are you doing?” I shouted. “Let us out!” We ran back but it was much too late. The gate was locked and they were running away, laughing and patting themselves on the back.

Harailt was the last to leave the room. He turned, silhouetted in the doorway. “Perhaps if you beg I will come back to free you both.” His lips twitched with derision. “Beg.”

To my surprise the fat boy didn’t immediately fall to his knees offering to lick Harailt’s boots. He was made of sterner stuff than I’d thought. I hocked up a blob of phlegm and spat it in Harailt’s direction.

His face reddened at the insult. “Find your own way out then, you grubby little drudges. You poor excuses for magi do not belong in these hallowed halls. Better get moving before your oil runs out.” Then he was gone. The heavy door thumped closed behind him, cutting off the sound of their mirth.

“I hope your cocks rot and fall off,” I shouted after him, booting the gate and succeeding only in causing pain to shoot up my leg. The fat boy grabbed the spars and tried to wrench them apart, but the gate was completely and utterly immovable.

“Hello?” he shouted. “Hello! Is anybody there?” He kept up the shouting for a few minutes until it finally got on my nerves.

I prodded him in the side. He turned, and it was only then that I realized he was on the verge of tears. “I think we’re on our own, pal,” I said. “Those gangrenous scrotes ain’t coming back for us.” His tears started to well up. Great. Why did I have to be stuck here with the likes of him? “Well, I’m going to prove that those bawbags aren’t better than me. I’m finding my own way out and I’m going to bring back something awesome to rub in their stupid faces.” I backed away from the gate. “You coming?”

He stared at me for a few seconds, sniffling, then looked back out into the darkened cellar. He scrubbed his face with a sleeve. When he looked back the tears had dried up. I was surprised at his fortitude. He stuck his hand out. “Um, hello. I am Lynas Granton. Sorry about…” He waved a hand indicating the whole of himself. “I… I guess we do have to go down there.”

We clasped wrists. “Edrin Walker,” I said. “Call me Walker. I hate Edrin. Bloody parents, eh.”

He frowned. “I haven’t heard of a House Walker before.”

“Ain’t no house at all,” I said, preparing to judge him by his response. “My father is a dock worker. Walker comes down from my mother’s side. It’s a clan-name.” It was how I chose to honour her, that and I preferred it to dreary old “Edrin of Hobbs Lane”.

Lynas looked embarrassed, but showed no sign of the derision I’d learned to expect from high-born magi and initiates. “Oh. Sorry.” He took a few deep calming breaths and seemed to relax a bit. “So they pick on you as well?” he ventured.

I shrugged. “No more than anybody else who isn’t from a High House. What about you, pal, are you…?”

He shook his head. “I’m not one of them. I’m the heir to House Granton, but we are just a Low House. Grandfather distinguished himself during the last big war in the colonies and bought his way up into the Old Town. My family have…” He seemed to search for the correct words, but gave up. “We’ve lost almost all our money, to be honest.” He looked at his feet, face reddening. “It’s my father. He gambles.”

He didn’t need to elaborate. That particular curse hit high and low alike. He may have been low nobility but he didn’t seem the same as those arrogant, self-entitled pricks who thought that locking us down here was a bit of a lark and a jolly old jape. Their families probably had enough money and power to let them get away with anything they liked – especially when it concerned little first-year initiates like us without any connections, and whose Gifts hadn’t matured yet, and might never.

I uncorked the oil reservoir of my lantern and peered in. “Stinking book-lickers have left me hardly any.”

Lynas frowned. “Book-lickers?” He checked his own and cursed.

I sneered. “You think those boil-brained buffoons have any idea what to do with a book?”

The tunnel ahead sloped away into the yawning darkness like we were sliding down the gullet of some huge beast. We shivered and clutched our lanterns tight. “I’d better turn this down low,” Lynas said. “We need to ration the oil.”

I blinked. He was right. To my chagrin I hadn’t thought of that; instead I’d been wanting both lanterns up full for as much light as we could get. I turned mine down as well, the darkness creeping closer as the light dwindled.

At first the tunnel was square and formed from blocks of cut stone, but as we trudged on into the depths it changed, becoming a cruder passage hacked though the black basalt rock below Setharis. Yellowed skulls grinned at us from niches cut into the walls. They might have sat there for unfathomable eons for all we knew.

We paused to scrape an arrow into the wall with a shard of stone, joining a collection of other symbols that valiant adventurers like us had left in past years, decades, or even centuries. We took the right-hand passage and walked for a good half an hour, carefully marking each new turn and split until we came to a circular chamber with five stone archways leading off into the depths. Human bones carpeted every wall and each block of stone in the arches was inlaid with grinning skulls. Lynas shuffled closer to me.

“They’re just bones,” I said, but it didn’t seem to comfort him much. Their hollow stares were a little unsettling, but I wasn’t about let him know that. We made idle chatter as we walked, more to hear the comforting sound of our voices than anything else.

While Lynas had his back turned studying a tunnel, I grabbed a skull and held it up at his head. He glanced back, “Which way do you–” He shrieked and I dissolved into laughter.

“Not funny!” he grumbled.

“Oh come on, it was a little bit funny,” I said. “It’s just bones, they can’t hurt you. Don’t be so serious.” He glared at me, but his lips quirked into the first smile I’d seen from him.

“Let’s go through here,” he said, waving me to go first. The tunnel walls were slick with damp and stalactites grew from the bones of the ceiling and doorways. The only sounds were our ragged breathing and the steady drip-drip of water.

We felt compelled to keep our voices down. Everybody knew that monsters made their lairs deep in the catacombs, their burrows dug into piled bones of the dead.

“Why am I the one in front anyway?” I said. “I’m no leader.”

Lynas just shrugged and scanned the room, peering into each doorway in turn.

I carefully slid my eating knife from my belt. I’d concealed it at dinner after seeing Harailt watching me, then lean in close to his lackeys and laugh. Dull-edged as it was, I felt safer with the knife in my hand.

Lynas noticed, gave a scared little chuckle. “That’s why you go first.”

Despite my fear, I returned a grin. “Smartarse.” That caused him to smile again.

Some of the doorways led nowhere, fresh rubble and piles of shattered bone filling the tunnels beyond. Above one blocked passage I noticed a small opening in the ceiling. I edged closer, listening for any sign of further collapse. A faint breeze caressed my skin.

“Lynas,” I whispered. “Over here.”

He crunched over, gaze following my pointing finger. “Is it a way out?” His voice trembled with hope.

I bit back the caustic reply I was about to make. No wonder I didn’t have any friends. “Hope so,” I said instead. I put away the knife and tried to scramble up to check it out, but the scree was too loose to get good purchase and I refused to let go of my lantern. “Give me a hand.”

Lynas interlocked his fingers to create a foothold, hoisting me up. The extra height allowed me to clamber up over the lip of the hole. I lifted up my lantern, turning the oil flow up to illuminate the room.

“What’s up there?” Lynas said.

The cracked walls were slick and black, made of some queer sort of stone, and the ceiling was high and tapered to a point. “I don’t know,” I said. “An old bedroom maybe. There’s a rotted old heap of slime in a wooden frame that looks like it used to be a bed, and what might be the remains of a wardrobe, table and chairs. There’s a breeze coming from beneath a big door up here so it could be a way out. No bones, so maybe Old Boney’s priests haven’t been here in before.” Which meant it might have something worth stealing – no, recovering, I corrected myself. It wouldn’t be stealing this time.

I placed my light to one side and stretched a hand down. Lynas passed his lantern up and then scrambled up to join me. By the Night Bitch, he was heavy! With one last heave that almost dislocated my shoulder he was up and through the hole.

He sat panting, craning his neck around the room. His eyes were bright, curiosity overcoming his fear for the moment. The floor was strewn with rat skeletons and desiccated droppings and the ceiling mostly obscured by curtains of cobweb. In the centre of the room was a shattered stone block, the eerie carvings covering every surface defaced or hacked off. What I could see of them made my vision swim. We decided to give that a wide berth.

Every initiate had heard thrilling stories of adventures in the Boneyards, of people coming back laden with jewels and sacks of gold. Somebody a few years back had even claimed to have found a spirit-bound sword amidst a pile of skulls. But then there were the other stories – the ones we whispered to each other at night, huddled under blankets in our dorms – the stories of people that just disappeared, their bodies consumed by ancient traps or ravenous monsters, and of the agonized wails heard at night that were said to be the cries of warped magi gone insane, their minds and bodies consumed by the Worm of Magic. The tutors themselves told us those dark and cautionary tales as a warning not to succumb to the lust for power and the lures of our Gift. But for the moment we were both far too excited to care: Gold! Jewels! Magic stuff! I’d never go to sleep hungry again, and I could even get a new cloak, a warm one for those cold winter nights. My dreams were small and simple things.

We crept around the room hunting for treasure, wincing at every crunch of stone and bone underfoot. I caught a whiff of something dead and rotting in the room. “Ugh. Do you smell that?” I said, fully expecting to find a maggot-ridden corpse. “Something reeks like a dead…” I caught Lynas’ guilty expression, and laughed.

“Whoops,” he said. “Sorry about that. I do not think dinner agreed with me.” He began poking through the ruins of the wardrobe, muttering about cabbage. I chuckled and picked up a length of petrified wood, whacking what I assumed had once been a bed. Beneath a crust of hardened slime, layers of rotten cloth and mould had fossilized into a hard shell surrounding something underneath. With my stick extended at arm’s length, I carefully started chipping away at it. My avaricious little heart hoped to find a skeleton still wearing jewellery. Not much else would have survived for long down here. I wasn’t squeamish when it came to money or corpses; Docklanders couldn’t afford to be.

Lynas sighed and grumbled as he sifted through his pile of debris. Me, I was filled with morbid curiosity as the shape of a person gradually emerged from its cracked coverings. I whacked it again and the whole shell shattered. I squeaked in surprise as three mummified rats plopped to the floor right next to my foot.

Lynas yelped in fright at my sudden noise. I leapt back, spun, stick whipping up. We looked at each other sheepishly. He padded up beside me, glancing back at the pile of junk he’d been investigating and then shrugging despondently.

I couldn’t take my eyes off the bed. There were no jewels or gold rings, but what we did have was a bloody huge skeleton. The bones were all wrong, surely too large to be human. Desiccated skin clung to it, and a mane of straggly white hair was still attached to a large skull with a strange hole right in the middle of a thick sloping forehead. It wore intricately crafted bronze armour that looked like it was designed more for show than out of any sense of practicality. Arcane wards the likes of which I’d never seen had been inlaid into the cuirass in untarnished silver that glimmered in the lantern light. A black hilt jutted from the chest piece, piercing wards and armour both to stab through the heart. I swallowed and exchanged a glance with Lynas.

He moistened his lips. “Finders keepers.”

“Hold up the light,” I said.

He held his lantern over the bed. We stood in silence for a few moments, staring at the skeleton.

“Who do you think they were?” I said, then after a moment’s silence added: “What do you think they were?”

Lynas shook his head. “Look at the armour. That exquisite workmanship was wrought by a master smith.” He pointed to the one side where the metal was melted and stained dark. Looking closer the armour had numerous gouges and scrapes as if it had seen battle. I tapped the bronze with my stick, then again, harder. The end of the stick snapped clean off. The armour was still solid, and might even be worth something.

“Do you think that there is still magic in it?” I croaked.

Lynas shivered, shrugged, and eyed the wooden door that was our only exit. I wanted to leave, badly. Standing in front of a weird skeleton in this horrid place was creeping me out; it wasn’t anything as ordinary as being back in the Warrens and coming across somebody that’d been stabbed. Lynas looked sick and terrified. What brave adventurers we were. But I refused to leave without a prize to prove Harailt hadn’t made us cry like babies and piss ourselves down here in the dark. Even if it was almost true. I placed my stick on the ground by my feet and wiped sweaty palms on my cloak.

My hand hovered over the black hilt jutting from the skeleton’s chest. Then I thought better of it, picked up the stick and handed it to Lynas. “Just in case,” I said, mimicking him using it as a club. You could never be too sure where magic was concerned.

My hand was back over the hilt. I extended my index finger and forced it down, bit by bit until it was almost touching the hilt, then that last little push. I snatched my hand back, heart hammering. Was my skin tingling? Was I imagining it? Was it magic? Was I being paranoid? Yes – my finger was fine. I took a deep calming breath.

“Don’t scare me like that, Walker,” Lynas complained, his knuckles white around the stick.

“Sorry,” I whispered. Steeling myself, I wrapped my hand around the hilt and pulled. It slid out easily in a shower of bone dust and curled bronze shavings.

We stared at the large barbed black iron knife in my hand. It was a hideous and crude weapon, but the sort of crudeness you could only get from a careful and studied artistry in brutality. I hefted it in my hand. It felt perfectly balanced despite the strange design. This was more like my idea of a magic weapon, not a poncy prettified sword all shiny silver and gold. To my mind, weapons were made for killing.

“Is it magical?” Lynas said. “It looks stupid.”

Each to their own, I thought. “I have no idea. My Gift hasn’t begun to mature yet. Yours?”

“Not yet, though I have high hopes it will happen soon.”

I examined the blade, carefully touching one of the barbs and finding it still sharp. I upended it to examine the plain hilt for sign of any maker’s marks. Nothing. I blinked, realising that blood was gushing from my finger and down the blade, dripping onto the skeleton below. When had that happened? Suddenly my finger started to throb. I hadn’t even felt it cut my flesh.

“Ow, this thing is sharp as–”

Fuck? a searing voice said in Old Escharric. I winced in pain, the word burning into my mind. I only knew what it meant because curse words were the first ones I’d researched after entering the Collegiate.

I brought up the knife and spun around, scanning the room. “Who said that?”

Lynas looked confused. “Said what?”

I glanced at the bloody knife and then to the skeleton. I froze in horror. The skeleton’s empty eye sockets and the hole in the forehead now pulsed with septic green light.

There needs be a pact, the voice said. Be quick.

“W- W- What?” I stammered. “I don’t know what you are talking about. Who are you?” The knife throbbed in my hand.

Runes on the skeleton’s armour flared bright. The hardened shell of slime dissolved into ropes of ooze that squirmed over the bed, snatching up and absorbing the dead rats as it went, transforming them into ribbons of pulsing flesh that twisted up the bones and across the crude skull. The huge skeleton lurched upright, at least seven foot high, eye sockets and the hole in the forehead blazing with eldritch fire. It reached for me while I stood like a statue.

Lynas saved my life. He shrieked and swung his stick. It crunched into the skull and caved it in.

The thing collapsed back onto the bed, into a mass of writhing flesh that flowed in and around it. Dust swirled up from the floor and into the corpse. Pink and grey organs formed, slurped through spaces between bone and bronze to pulse obscenely in its abdomen. A mutely screaming inhuman face of glistening muscle began to form on the skull. Jellied eyes oozed into sockets, one forming right in the middle of its forehead.

“Run!” Lynas shrieked, shoving me towards the door, his stick raised defensively.

Something dug into my mind, barbs of alien thought ripping their way inside me. I staggered and fell to one knee. When the barbs retreated I knew what I had to do. A quick glance at the undead thing reforming convinced me that it was the only option.

A name coalesced in my mind. “Dissever,” I intoned, slicing the knife across my forearm. “My blood, your blood. My flesh, your flesh. My enemies, your enemies.” A frisson of energy ran through me, linking us. This pact, it went both ways. It urged me to attack.

The knife punched straight through enchanted bronze into the undead thing’s insides. The creature reeled back, shrieking. I stabbed and cut, reeking fluids spurting across my face. A mad energy filled me. I was out of control, wild and screaming with rage that stormed into me from the knife.

“Run!” I snarled at Lynas, struggling to resist the urge to tear his throat out with my teeth and gulp down hot spurting blood. Instead I hacked away at the fleshy thing growing from dead bones. An unbearable pressure began building behind my eyes.

Lynas ran. I heard the door crash open and glimpsed his light receding down the tunnel, chased by my manic laughter. The black knife cut though the thing with ease, and the armour may as well have been soft cheese. My vision ran red as bloodlust howled deep in my heart. The pressure in my head exploded. Something inside me broke.

My Gift awoke.

Wind shrieked around me, tearing at stone and rubble. Unearthly strength flooded through me. A thousand fragmented thoughts from the city above roared into my mind. Too much. All too… much…

When my senses returned I was drenched in blood and covered in bits of bone and gobbets of flesh. The thing’s head – a ruined mass of cracked bone and rotting flesh – gaped at me like a freshwater pike, impaled on a spike of wood rammed into the floor, its over-large jaw still gnashing. Light guttered behind its three malformed eyes. Whatever the thing had been, even it couldn’t handle what I’d done to it. I both laughed and cried as we stared at each other, my body trembling with the afterbirth of magic.

Parts of the ceiling had collapsed, burying both the doorway and the small hole through which we had originally entered under blocks of stone I hadn’t a hope of moving. I was trapped, but held onto a shred of hope that somehow Lynas had got out and was running to summon help. I sobbed at the thought: who would come back for a nobody like me? Lynas barely knew me. If the streets of Setharis had taught me anything, it was that you could only rely on yourself. And even if Lynas did get out, nobody would get up off their arses to dig all the way down here. My lantern was almost out of oil.

After the last flicker of light died away I spent days – I didn’t know how many – in that near-darkness, the dim septic green from the thing’s eyes my only source of light. I went a little mad, I think, shrieking for help and clawing at the walls until my fingers were raw and bloody. My throat slowly dried to sandy parchment, lips cracking and hunger churning in my stomach. Eventually I took to licking damp from the walls, and then, eventually, gnawing putrescent flesh from the undead thing’s bones while it watched. In my delirium a macabre amusement filled me at the foul act, supposing that it was one way to ensure the thing did not rise again. Consciousness came and went. I talked to the head, even asked it questions about its past, though it never answered. The knife, however, whispered incessantly inside my head, promises of war and slaughter yet to come.

I’d given up hope, had no energy left to fight, and had curled up to sleep, maybe for the last time. I slept for what felt like an age, barely stirring as hallucinated sounds of digging drew closer. That’s where the magi found me as they dragged out the last boulder – curled up on the floor in front of the still-living head, my black knife cradled in my hands. I blinked as torchlight seared my eyes.

Archmagus Byzant was first to squeeze through the gap, his craggy face and neat white beard streaked with dust, emerald ring glowing like a verdant sun. He took one look at the head on a spike and held up a hand to still those behind him. He approached carefully, his eyes never leaving me, ignoring the blinking head completely.

“Are you well, boy?” he said softly, comfortingly. “Are you able to talk?”

Kill, Dissever demanded. Blood. Strong blood. My body throbbed with the illusion of strength. I almost did it. I almost snarled and tried to leap forward to kill and eat the Archmagus. What stopped me was the sight of the two initiates behind Byzant tasked with holding lanterns. The look on Harailt’s face, the shock and disbelief as he stared at me, the naked fear in him, stirred something inside of me, a wordless and horrible rage – I needed to split his face with an axe and hack him into quivering pieces. But it was something more powerful than anger at Harailt that stopped me flinging myself at them; it was the honest worry – for me! – on Lynas’ face that shook me to my core and threw off the bloodlust. He was a wild mess of scrapes, cuts, and bruises. He must have suffered terribly on his flight out of the Boneyards, and his hands still shook with fear. He had crawled blind through the tunnels for days to reach help and then insisted on coming back down to retrace his steps to find me. I didn’t think I could have done the same.

My eyes hurt, vision blurred with tears. I owe you my life, Lynas Granton. One day I’ll do the same for you or die trying.

“I’m fine, Archmagus,” I croaked. “I just had to deal with this… this…”

“Revenant,” he said. “It is the Worm-taken corpse of some sort of magus, mindless and animated only by magic.” His eyes narrowed as he noticed Dissever. “Hand me that blade, boy.”

I swallowed. My hand shook but didn’t obey me. “I… I don’t think I can, master.”

He looked at me, looked into me, nodded, lifted his hands and snapped his fingers. “A blanket, you fools, fetch water and a blanket. You are very lucky that he lives, Harailt, you boil-brained whelp.”

Byzant studied my weapon, his frown deepening. Dissever did not like that one bit. It hunkered down in my mind and went quiet. I felt my hand loosen around the hilt.

The Archmagus pried it from my hand. “A spirit-bound blade,” he said. “A most impressive find. The making of such objects is a lost art. Only the gods can forge such items now.”

He did something to me. I felt it happen, but didn’t know what. I sagged, eyelids drooping. “Mine,” I mumbled.

“Yes, boy. I understand now how you survived. This knife is undeniably yours.”

The last thing I saw was Lynas grinning at me, his joy and relief piecing my heart. As sleep crushed down on me, I couldn’t help but wonder: had I actually, somehow, acquired a friend?