The Traitor God

Chapter 18

“I’m so sorry,” she said, standing before the entrance to the Boneyards. “It’s our only lead.” She retrieved a small flask of whisky from a concealed pocket in her cloak and handed it over. I took a big gulp.

She was right, but it was all I could do not to piss myself. You need to do it, for Lynas. It took me a few minutes to compose myself and shrug off the terror. “I survived it once and I can do it again.” I tried to put bravado in place of abject terror. “You bringing along some of those big brawny guards of yours?”

She shook her head. “No, they’d just get in the way in narrow tunnels. I couldn’t ask them to risk their lives like this, not down there. I’m expendable, and I know exactly what I’m getting myself into.”

She was hiding something, but I had already pushed her more than enough in the last few hours. When we arrived at the temple I stashed the alchemic bomb into a hole in the wall. If it exploded amidst these plague-haunted ruins then at least nobody would die. I was certainly not taking it underground with us. What if I slipped and fell? The thought brought me out in goosebumps.

From the rooftops an entire flock of corvun watched us in eerie silence, their black eyes unblinking as we descended into the pit. A tad unnerving, but nothing compared to the dark, narrow entrance to the Boneyards that threatened to swallow me whole. I couldn’t look at it without breaking out in a cold sweat, and was about to take another fortifying swig of whisky, lips already touching the neck of the flask, when Charra grabbed my arm.

“You need to stay sharp,” she hissed, prising the flask from my death-grip and stuffing the cork back in. She stowed it away out of reach. “We will have earned a drink afterwards.”

I stared into the yawning darkness. The walls squeezed in around me, suffocating. I shuffled backwards, mouth ash dry, and then forced myself to stop. I couldn’t run: this had to be what Lynas was trying to tell me in his last moments by sending me a vision of the Boneyards. He had been telling me to look below the ground for answers.

“Walker,” she said, her hand firm on my back. “Edrin, I need you, but I will go in there alone if I must.”

I shook my head. “Stop. You know that’s cracked.” I took a deep cleansing breath. “It’s far too dangerous down there. The sort of danger that needs magic, or an army.”

She knew that fine well, and said nothing as she adjusted the short sword buckled at her waist. We both knew there was no way I would allow her to go in alone. It was just taking me a while to gird my loins for battle – whatever that actually involved. It was just a phrase to me but I had a vague notion that it was something to do with lifting the hem of your robe up and tying it around your groin to stop your cock from flapping about near all that sharp steel. I wished I could do something similar to strap down my imagination. It was strange to think that in the days of ancient Escharr robes had been common garb; by law only magi and priests were allowed to wear robes within Setharii lands, and–

“Walker!”

I blinked, dragged out of my escapist musings. “Right. Yes. Sod it. Let’s go.” I lifted my lantern and stomped into the tunnel without a backwards glance. If I were to look back at the diminishing circle of light my courage would crumble. Instead I focused on the light ahead and on putting one foot in front of the other. Most of all, I focused on Charra, Lynas, Layla, and on just why I found myself back in these foul catacombs I’d vowed never to set foot in again.

A soft moaning breeze cooled my sweat-slick forehead – the Boneyards’ dank breath. The tunnel of ancient stone blocks swallowed me. The light from the entrance dwindled and I slowed, panting, the handle of the lantern slippery in my grip. I couldn’t do this. I had to turn back, to–

“Did I ever tell you why I got together with Lynas instead of you?” Charra said. She never had, and her voice was incredibly welcome right then.

“No.” I couldn’t say anything more, voice catching in my throat, but she continued anyway, to give me something to focus on. It took everything I had to keep moving forward.

“Oh, he was cute enough, and both kind and funny, but he also made me feel safe,” she said. “He wasn’t like you and me.”

“Innocent?” I croaked.

“No, not that. How could he be after spending so much time around us? It was more like some part of him just didn’t get the point of lying and backstabbing. You know?”

“I do,” I said. It was the very thing I hated the most about the Arcanum. Her voice was soothing, and intimate despite all the years apart.

Her boots squelched in the mud with each step. “I found it so refreshing. His world was so much better than ours. So bright and shiny. Hopeful where we always expect the worst from people.”

With everything she had been through, somebody else might have called her damaged, and deduced that was why she’d wanted somebody safe. The simple truth was that she recognized Lynas had been made of something finer and better than we were. And with her history that had been like finding buried gold, even if they hadn’t lasted.

“All those years,” I said. “And you couldn’t just tell me that? I must have asked you a dozen times.” We both knew that I’d never been in love with her, or ever wanted her that way beyond a few fleeting boyish desires – it would have felt unnatural and ruined our friendship. No, we were family and I was just being nosey, whereas she liked to keep her cards close to her chest, which was not the best combination of attributes.

“I’m just as awkward as you then, I guess,” she replied. “Well, that and you are a big, ugly, gloomy bastard.”

I laughed. In this claustrophobic pit I actually laughed! The panic retreated to a scream inside me. “I’ve missed you,” I admitted, trudging forward. “And just for the record: you’ve always been too skinny for my tastes, and you have a foul mouth. It’s not attractive at all.” The tunnel twisted round to the right and led into the remains of an ancient slime-covered cellar strewn with rotted refuse.

It was all too similar to the room I’d been trapped in once before, but this room had two yawning exits. The bone-walled tunnel to my right led down, cut steps descending into the depths of the basalt hill. I froze, hands shaking, lantern light dancing across the walls. Charra pushed past me and bent low to study the ground. Most of the footprints leading down to the right had filled with water, with long lines gouged on either side from whatever they’d been dragging.

Charra followed a set of footprints as they split off from the others, heading left to the entrance of another tunnel, this one smooth and organic, not formed by the hands of men but by some strange natural process. Empty niches lined the wall where skulls had once been placed to rest, but it looked to me like they had all been purposely cracked open and scattered across the floor. That trail ended at the entrance where mud had been ploughed by fresher prints. These prints were from no human, had taloned toes splayed out.

Air stirred my hair. My enhanced senses screamed as a pressure wave of warmer air pushed out of that lefthand tunnel, the reek of corrupt magic billowing with it. I grabbed Charra’s arm and yanked her back.

Something white and glistening surged from the darkness, fangs snapping shut on the air right where Charra had been standing. It had been human once, mottled hide covered in weeping sores, its empty breasts flapping loose. The face was broken and stretched into a fanged maw crusted with pus and filth, the hands and feet warped into the claws of a beast. But the eyes were wholly and unmistakably human, screaming silently. The thing mewled, sniffed the air, head lolling round to face me. I dropped the lantern and drew Dissever, bloodlust singing through me. The thing’s jaw split wide, revealing a squirming pink tongue and jagged yellowed teeth. It leapt for me.

Dissever sheared through one pale limb. Hot blood spurted across my face. My left hand clamped around its throat, barely keeping snapping teeth from tearing off my nose. My battle blood rose, heart hammering, barely feeling the claws raking down my shoulder, cutting through coat and flesh.

We rolled across the floor. I stabbed, missed, stabbed again, this time hitting flesh. Its mind was a churning mass of animal instinct, barely human. I forced my way in through the maelstrom, seeking some sort of mental purchase. It rolled on top of me and an elbow crashed into my forehead, snapping my head back to expose my throat. Claws cut down.

A steel blade crunched through the thing’s skull, the point quivering right in front of my eyes. Charra wrenched her short sword out and flicked off blood and brains. The thing twitched once and collapsed, pinning my legs beneath it. I rammed Dissever into its side, and just for good measure stabbed it twice more.

“Thanks,” I gasped, wriggling out from beneath it. In death it looked pitiful, just skin and bone instead of a horrific danger. But with magic, appearances could be wildly deceptive. My shoulder started throbbing.

“No,” Charra said. “Thank you. Was that a daemon?”

I shook my head. “Just some poor wretch with more Gift than sense, corrupted by something it couldn’t control. That’s why the Arcanum forces all Gifted through the Forging: it breaks you or it makes you. This sort of corrupted creature cannot be allowed.” I neglected to mention it could also be the end result of habitual mageblood use – I didn’t like to think that in some small way I’d been a part of that trade.

Charra shivered, her eyes avoiding me as she picked up her lantern.

I nudged the corpse, jerked back as its muscles twitched. I leaned in closer and lifted its chin with the flat of my blade. A red-raw wound circled its throat. I looked up at Charra and she furrowed her brow.

“Collared,” she whispered, fingers absently rubbing her own neck. “And for quite some time, I’d say.”

I held Dissever ready in my right hand and the lantern clutched in the left as I advanced down the tunnel it had emerged from. Dissever’s bloodlust kept my fear at bay.

The tunnel opened into a smooth bubble of rock with a bricked-up exit at the far side. Two sets of shackles dangled from iron spikes hammered into the walls, the collar and wristbands hanging empty. Charra gasped, eyes wide. “Two!” She swung round, her sword up and ready.

“Don’t worry,” I said, pointing over to one side, to what I’d taken to be a pile of sticks at first. “Looks like she got hungry.” Looking closer, it was a heap of gnawed bones that had been cracked open to get at the marrow.

She lowered her sword. “Guard dogs?”

“Looks like. Poor twisted bastards.”

I peeled back bloodsoaked wool from my shoulder to check the damage, grimacing in pain. Angry red furrows bled freely.

“Stay still,” Charra said. She held up the lantern and peered at the wounds. “Can’t see too well down here but your skin looks inflamed.”

I cursed. That blasted thing’s claws had probably got filth into the wounds. Normally I wouldn’t have been too worried, since even for a magus I was a fast healer, but that thing had been corrupted by magic, and those sorts of changes came with danger of magical poisons and plagues. Joy. Still, better me than Charra. UnGifted people were so brittle.

She told me to stop squirming. Her whisky flask was open and in her hand. I winced, knowing what was coming. She poured the alcohol over the wounds. Searing pain left me shaking, my jaw clenched so as not to cry out.

Charra groaned.

My own pain forgotten, I looked her over. “Are you hurt?”

“No, it’s not that,” she said. “It’s criminal to waste good whisky on your sorry hide.”

I huffed. Good old black humour; after all these years she still knew me well. If by some miracle we survived all of this then I’d need to come up with a spectacular revenge for the dress and the whisky comment.

We backtracked and turned right, feet crunching through bone shards as we followed the trail. My battle blood was still up, and Dissever was far from satisfied with feasting on something already half-dead. My claustrophobic panic retreated into a grim and blessedly numbing acceptance, allowing me to open my Gift. The tunnels oozed magic, a miasma seeping from the very rock hanging like a fog in front of my Gifted eyes. It made any sort of magical detection impossible.

We doggedly followed their winding trail through passageways so choked with fresh rubble that we were forced to scuttle along like rats, cheeks brushing against the remains of the dead. Picking our way round a ledge above a gaping chasm, I accidently dislodged a rock and we listened for it hitting the bottom. No sound ever came. I kept Dissever in my hand, relying on its anger to distract me from dwelling on the tons of stone crushing down above my head. It kept me sane.

Legend said the tunnels and caverns were wont to lead to different places at different times, and whatever the cause, maps of the Boneyards had never proven reliable beyond a few years of their penning. I was paranoid we would lose their trail, our only clue to Lynas’ murderer. And then we did, the tunnel ahead blocked by a very recent rock fall. We frantically searched for signs, finally finding a single boot print in the dust pointing into a crevice and up a crude staircase into an area of more solid human construction. Scents of honeysuckle and sage enticed us into a high-vaulted chamber of white marble blocks and tumbled pillars of faded beauty. The whole chamber slanted to one side, floor crazed with cracks, as if over centuries an entire building had sunk down through the stone. A broken statue of a woman lay on its side, half buried in rubble and shattered pottery. Her arms and face had been destroyed long ago, but there was still a lingering echo of once-powerful benign magic.

It felt so peaceful and open, a soothing balm to my besieged mind. There were no skeletal remains as a reminder of my own approaching demise. It seemed that even the priests of the Lord of Bones found no cause to bring the dead here. The pain in my shoulder subsided to mere gentle warmth. I took a deep breath of fresh air and forced Dissever back into its sheath – which it resisted – and then became aware of my utter exhaustion. Charra settled on the floor, stretching out cramped and sore muscles. She yawned, infecting me with one of my own. Gods, I was so tired. We needed to rest.

My eyes were gritty and I found it difficult to focus. I sat down, resting my back against a warm pillar. My eyelids started to droop. A sudden spike of interest forced them back open to squint at broken pottery piled at the foot of the statue. Below the potsherds a dark stain had spread out across the cracked marble. A plug of forest-green wax still clinging to the broken neck of a wine jar stirred a vague recollection of having seen that exact colour somewhere before. Drained and aching, it was difficult to think, but I struggled to stay awake – this was important.

I groaned and heaved myself up, dragging my sorry arse over to squat down beside the statue. The pottery was still covered with a sticky residue of what looked like red wine. I dipped my fingers in and lifted it to my nose. It smelled oddly metallic. I dabbed it on my tongue. Tasted of iron – and magic! A fiery surge of alchemic euphoria blew away the cobwebs of exhaustion, like nothing I had ever experienced before. I felt like a god! By the Night Bitch, no: I’d just supped mageblood. The life-force of other magi surged through my body.

My mental fog was blown away by alchemic-fuelled storm winds. “Son of a sow,” I growled, snatching up the disc of wax. It was the exact shade I’d found in Lynas’ warehouse. I dashed it to the ground and crushed it beneath my feet. Then I stamped on the pottery, exulting in destroying the remains. This was why they killed Lynas – he had been unwittingly importing mageblood, and when he found out what they were doing, the virtuous fool must have tried to stop them. It sounded like something he would do. I staggered to and fro, panting, hands clenching spasmodically as alchemic and strange magics both took hold, wanting to rip and tear something apart. The air took on an acrid, sour scent.

I shook with fury. I’d kill them. Destroy them. Cut them to pieces and swim through rivers of blood. I’d tear into their minds; turn them into my wailing playthings. I would – No! This wasn’t me; I refused to let myself become everything that I despised. This was the alchemic’s influence.

Wrongness assailed me. The air stank like a midden, not the sweetly floral scent I had smelt at first. Neither was the chamber pure white marble, but was instead stained and mottled with a spongy carpet of pale mossy growth. Two mounds of reeking compost lay wrapped in some sort of fibrous cocoon and– Ah. A pair of hob-nailed boots poked out of the bottom of one mound, the tough leather half eaten away. The mageblood smugglers had encountered that recent rock fall and had been forced to carry the jars through this chamber, but some had fallen foul of whatever ancient power lingered in this place.

Charra was curled up on her side and slumbering peacefully. Tendrils of white root had squirmed up from the cracks in the floor and wrapped around her. Where they touched flesh, her dark skin was red and puffy.

“Charra!” She didn’t stir at my shout. I charged over to tear at the sticky roots with my bare hands, heedless of the stinging pain. With a sound like straining rope more tendrils writhed up to clutch at my boots. I opened my Gift, reached for power. Unspeakable agony exploded in my head.

I came to a split second later, mid-collapse. Checking my fall, I crashed down to one knee, head ringing from magical backlash. I’d never felt anything like it. It was akin to a thousand people screaming in my mind all at once. Impotent alchemic-driven rage lashed my ego.

I snatched up my lantern and broke it apart, pouring a circle of oil around Charra. I stepped in close and flung the burning wick down. The room flared bright as flames roared up to encircle us. Roots charred with almost animal squeals and withdrew back into the cracks in the floor. What was left I tore from her and flung into the flames. Red-raw fury throbbed inside me but there was nothing more to kill. My stinging hands burned with the itch to rip and tear and – Charra! – I shook my head, clearing some of the alchemic haze. I’d fought Dissever’s bloodthirsty influence for so long that it helped me shunt the alchemic’s effects aside and squash it down to a dull throb of madness in the back of my head.

I slung her over my shoulder, and carefully lowered myself to pick up our one remaining lantern. Seconds trickled by as the surrounding flames waned. I had to time it perfectly because there would be no other chance. An overwhelming malevolent presence emanated from the statue as it creaked into life, stone muscles flexing as a broken and forgotten idol woke to find more clumsy intruders in its temple.

Before I leapt the flames I spat foul insults at the statue, in a medley of languages. The ground rumbled and more cracks spread through marble. A crazed laugh burst from my mouth: it seemed to understand me. Charra snoozed on, a blissful expression on her red-streaked face. I suppressed an irrational surge of anger towards her and cursed the alchemic taint in my body.

As the flames flickered low, pale roots began reaching towards us again. I held onto Charra for dear life and leapt. Fire licked the seat of my trousers, and then I was past, boots pounding across the marble, crushing clutching roots with every step. I could barely see the crumbled archway out of the chamber, lantern light swinging crazily, praying it wouldn’t fall or dash against rock and plunge me into suffocating darkness. The presence surged up behind us moments after we passed the archway. The doorway shook from the impact.

I glanced back to see the statue stopped in its tracks, seemingly unable to cross the threshold, hacked-away face turned to regard me. It stood immobile in the doorway, still as stone should. Roots trailed from its feet, burrowing into the cracks and into the cocooned people it was digesting. I wasn’t about to wait for it to change its mind and took off as fast as I could manage.