The Traitor God

Chapter 24

The current tossed us around like rag dolls. Dazed, I scrabbled for purchase on slick rock, nails cracking. I clutched Cillian tight to my chest, blindly trying to keep our heads up and snatch breath from pockets of air. Icy water flooded my mouth and up my nose, choking me. The water fell away, as did my stomach, and we were washed down a long chute. All air exploded from my lungs as I bounced off a wall and tumbled end over end, one of my boots tearing free.

I flailed in vain, tried to slow down, couldn’t tell which way was up. My lungs screamed. Panic filled me, the need to breathe overwhelming. Our heads burst out into air and I sucked in another desperate lungful before a surge sucked us under, submerging again and again until a roaring filled my ears. We went over a waterfall and plunged deep into a pool; the impact tore Cillian from my grasp and the river pulled me backwards. I flopped this way and that, unseen tunnel walls pummeling me like a hundred hidden fists. With one last surge those walls were abruptly no longer there. The current dissipated.

Saltwater stung my eyes and a wavering light filtered down from what had to be up. Cillian’s motionless form was blurry shadow above me. Foul-tasting gunk clogged the back of my throat, like I’d bitten into something rotten. I tore off my remaining boot and took hold of Cillian’s arm in one hand, pulling great handfuls of water with the other as I made for the light, the wound in my leg burning with each kick. The surface neared with agonising slowness. Panic set in as the need to breathe overwhelmed me. My vision started to darken. With one last desperate stroke my face burst free and I took ragged heaving breaths. I’d never take air for granted again! Cillian didn’t move, unconscious or dead.

Coughing and spluttering, I wiped blurry, stinging eyes and treaded water, struggling to keep us both afloat amidst a froth of sewage and refuse. I gagged and spat at the foulness in my mouth. The underground river had washed us out to sea near Pauper’s Docks.

I started a painstakingly slow and pathetic paddle towards shore, towing Cillian behind me. Clumps of splintered wood and debris floated nearby, evidence of a ship going down. A dozen Setharii navy cogs were limping into the docks, their sails torn, hulls charred and studded with arrows. One of them was listing badly, a gaping wound in the starboard side bearing what looked like teeth marks. The road winding up to Pauper’s Gate thronged with wounded coming off the ships, and people running back and forth carrying tools and weapons.

I wallowed my way through the waves, already tired from the exertion of flailing around like a diseased hog. By the time I dragged us both onto the shingle beach I was panting and aching all over. I rolled Cillian onto her back. She was covered in angry welts and patches of raw skin where the creature had touched her. Four long bloodless gashes marred either side of her neck, as if something had tried to tear her throat out. She wasn’t breathing so I opened her sodden robes and fumbled for a pulse in her neck with frozen hands. Nothing. I had no idea what to do. I pressed on her stomach and water gushed from her mouth and from the gashes in her neck.

“Breathe,” I snarled, pumping her stomach. I tried to get it all out, but she still didn’t take a breath.

“Come on, Cillian. You are better than this. You were meant to do great things, not drown in the dark. Burn it, breathe.”

She didn’t.

I collapsed to the stones, trying to marshal enough will and strength to haul myself up and stagger towards the docks. My stomach growled, informing me that I was literally starving after all the quickened healing I’d had.

There wasn’t much of me left that wasn’t battered, bruised or bleeding. Some homecoming. If I wasn’t a magus I would have died five times over. How often did we shrug off injuries that would cripple or kill a normal person, without so much as a thought? It wasn’t surprising many thought themselves so far above mundanes as to be a different breed.

Eventually I managed to stagger to my feet and peeled off my torn clothes to wring most of the water out. I tried not to look at Cillian. I had no reason to feel guilty, but I’d known her well once and couldn’t help but feel responsible in some way. My body was a tapestry of black, green and blue bruises. Some were already blooming out into yellows and purples. I probed my head with my fingers and fortunately it didn’t seem like I’d broken anything after battering it off rocks, but then my medical skills extended as far as wrapping bandages and hoping for the best. Lynas always said I was thick-skulled. A hand raked through my hair dislodged squidgy debris it was better not thinking about.

The weeping hole in my leg burned from the saltwater. “Get the fuck out,” I said to Dissever, imagining the pain belonged to somebody else.

Tendrils of liquid black writhed from the wound. I clamped my jaw shut to muffle screams as Dissever birthed itself in a welter of blood. It clanged to the stones, jagged blade embedded a hairsbreadth away from severing my big toe.

“What are you, you vile thing?”

It replied only with alien mirth.

I scowled and tore off strips of tunic to bandage my leg, grimacing as I took a few experimental steps. Dissever was carefully hooked under my belt and it was obvious I carried an unnatural weapon, but the time for subtlety was long past.

I wiped the worst of the blood and filth from Cillian’s face. We had not been friends at the end, closer to enemies in truth, but I could never hate her. In some other world I might have saved her, been a hero. But that wasn’t me. I sat her up facing the sea, dabbed away some more filth from around her eyes and nose. She would have liked to go with a view of the sea. “Goodbye, Cillian. And… I’m sorry.”

She opened her eyes.

I jerked my hand back, fell arse-first onto the beach.

She doubled over, coughing up water and clutching her head. “Where am I?”

My mouth opened and closed like an idiot fish.

She probed her matted hair with her fingertips, wincing as she found a lump the size of an egg. She looked at me blearily. “Edrin? What… Where are we?” She suddenly realized that her shoes were missing and her robes torn open and absolutely indecent. She hastily rearranged them and shot me a suspicious look.

I swallowed. “The beach near Pauper’s Docks. We, uh, got washed out into the sea.” I couldn’t quite believe this was happening. “You weren’t breathing. I thought…”

She tried to rise, groaned and sagged back. “I am a powerful hydromancer, you fool. You think I can drown? That a councillor of the Inner Circle is so weak amidst her own element? All of us with sufficient power have our adaptations.”

I wasn’t the fool she thought I was. Not entirely. “That creature ate magic. I felt the stolen Gifts of magi inside it and didn’t know if there was anything of you left.”

Her eyes flew wide with sudden remembrance. She shuddered, leant to one side and quietly vomited. I waited patiently for her to finish heaving up her breakfast of eggs and bread. “Dear gods, what happened?” she said, wrapping her arms around herself. “How am I alive? I felt it devouring my magic, eating me.”

“I cut the fucker’s heart out,” I said, sounding cockier than I felt.

“How? It ate magic and our blades would have been useless.”

“Your blades maybe.” That was all the answer I fancied giving a magus of the Inner Circle, even if she did happen to owe me her life. With Cillian the Arcanum would always come first. Nobody needed to know Dissever was more dangerous than any spirit-bound blade I’d ever heard of. Even I didn’t know the full extent of its powers. It was more aware than a crude hunk of metal infused with a spirit should ever be. And now it was mobile. Terrifying.

She studied Dissever’s barbed blade and tensed, but said nothing, for once letting me have my secrets. “That abomination was a thing of blood sorcery created to kill magi. It ate magic. You had to know that. And you still leapt onto its back to save me. Why?”

I groaned like an old man as I levered myself to my feet, stones sharp against my soles. “I’m a fool,” I said, shrugging. “Surely that’s not a revelation to you?”

She stared at me for a long moment, face inscrutable. “Thank you.”

“I’m just glad we both made it out of there,” I said, trying not to think about it.

“There were rumours,” she said, “about your involvement in various atrocities ten years ago. I did not like to think the worst of you, Edrin, but you must understand how the Forging changed you. Something dark entered your head and twisted your personality. It set you on a self-destructive path I feared would see you dead. Or worse.”

I shrugged, too tired to know how to react. “Did you believe the rumours?”

“I was uncertain, but I did know that you would never harm Archmagus Byzant.”

“And now?”

“I believe you had nothing to do with any of it.”

Words held great power. They hit me right in the heart. Cillian believed me, even after everything I had done to her in the past.

“Thanks,” I said gruffly. Of course, I had been involved in killing a god, but she hadn’t mentioned that part. Perhaps it was too unbelievable.

She sighed in relief. “At least that thing died before the sorcerer could unleash it. Thwarting this evil plot will go a long way in proving your innocence with the Courts of Justice.”

She caught my sick expression. Her brow furrowed. “What is it?”

I licked my lips, a sudden foul taste flooding my mouth. “The thing I told you I saw in the lake? Well that creature we killed wasn’t it.”

“What do you mean?”

“That thing in the lake was vast. The one we just killed was a pup in comparison. Lynas’ body and Gift weren’t a part of that one. His Gift still lives. I can feel it somewhere underground, though the bond is faint and disrupted.”

“You can’t possibly know that for certain. The only way you could is if–” Her eyes widened and her throat spasmed, threatening to throw up again. So now she knew that I had Gift-bonded Lynas all those years ago. Instead of chastising me she struggled to her feet, brushing off the hand I offered. “We must warn the Arcanum.”

“You go do that. I have Harailt to kill.”

My body seized up as foreign magic flooded my veins and threatened to burst every blood vessel in my body.

“You will come with me,” she stated.

I gurgled a negative. She gave my insides a squeeze and then let go.

I staggered, nearly fell. “Nice way to treat somebody that just saved your life.”

“Grow up. This is bigger than either of us. To save this city I would tie you to a horse and drag you over every cobble if necessary.”

“So what is the bloody big secret here?” I said. “Why do you need me when you have the rest of the Arcanum at your beck and call?”

She suddenly wavered, eyes glazing over, stumbled and nearly fell. I instinctively steadied her, despite my distaste. She groaned and leant on my arm, still suffering from that knock to the head.

She blinked and refocused, looked up into my eyes for a confusion-filled moment before brushing me off and backing away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not being vindictive. I suspect that we will need every magus we have.”

“Why?”

She chewed on her lip. “If this creature is what I fear then we will need every resource of the city to withstand it. You are involved in all of this, and you did manage to kill that smaller one.”

“Then dust off your old war engines and all those artefacts locked away in the vaults below the Templarum Magestus,” I said. At the height of its empire Setharis had fielded a bewildering array of deadly weapons dug from the ruins of old Escharr, so why not just use those? “If it’s really that bad then have them raise the bloody titans. You don’t need me.”

She hesitated for a moment before shaking her head. “The titan cores have been buried in the deepest of vaults behind layers of protection that even the archmagus cannot easily remove. It would take weeks to access them. In any case, the Arcanum will never again sanction their use. We are already worried about their strange luminescence.”

“Old Boney’s balls, it’s like pulling teeth – just tell me what that bloody creature is! I have a right to know.”

“If it is what I fear, then its nature is chronicled in fragments of ancient scrolls recovered only recently from an Escharric dig site, knowledge meant to be restricted to the Inner Circle.” She hesitated. “Damn the rule, that time has flown. The creature’s attributes perfectly match all those reported of the Doom of Escharr, the monstrous beast that devoured the heart of that ancient empire. It is the thing those few surviving magi named Magash Mora – the Devouring Flesh.” She shuddered. “Oh dear gods, all those disappearances in the city, the skinned mageborn! How could we have suspected anything of this scale?”

A cold shiver rippled up my spine. Hair prickled all over my body. “How is that even possible?” I said, grabbing her tattered robes, knuckles white. “Was it not destroyed with the rest of Escharr?”

She shrugged me off. “We cannot know for sure if this is the same creature. It was reputed to have eaten all it could and then starved to death. Its insides eventually burned to ash under the desert sun.”

I goggled. “The Arcanum have been digging up their ruins for centuries – how could you not know? Even with help from the Skallgrim, it would be impossible for Harailt to create a new one.” My hands trembled. “Impossible.” He brought this monstrous thing here to my home, to my city. He’d murdered Lynas, tried to abduct Layla, and now he wanted to take even more from me? Something inside me teetered on the edge of losing control and tearing loose as a rabid howling beast. “Harailt is not powerful or clever enough to enact all of this alone. Only a god could fool Shadea like that. He is in league with greater powers. This new Hooded God, he–”

“Calm yourself,” she interrupted. “I cannot imagine the gods are involved in the destruction of their own city. They have protected Setharis for a thousand years, and the Lord of Bones, Artha and Lady Night were gods here before there even was a Setharis.”

“They have all protected Setharis for an age, all except one.”

That gave her pause. “You were proven correct about one claim. I would be a fool to dismiss the other. When I return Harailt will be subjected to every test possible, however invasive. We will determine the truth beyond any possible doubt.

“That creature we encountered was not merely resistant to magic,” she continued, “it fed on it, and if that was a mere spawn then even the gods may have cause to fear. I can only imagine the horror we now face. We must retreat and formulate a plan of action.”

“Your plan is to hole up behind the walls of the Old Town until you think of something better.” Her expression told me I was correct. “What about Docklands? What about every other poor sod living there? Just going to abandon them to that creature, are you?”

Her mouth opened and closed. She looked surprised, and didn’t quite know what to say to me. I scowled and turned away. “I’m not sure what’s worse, that you are abandoning them or that you forgot to consider them at all.” She was a good person, but sadly still a product of her upbringing and environment.

“We are simply concentrating our power,” she said. “It is the logical solution.”

“Logic be damned, I…” My words drifted off as plumes of roiling smoke caught my eye. Ships berthed at Pauper’s Docks were burning. So were maybe a dozen sites spread across the city, what looked to be the warehouses that held a goodly portion of the city’s grain. A vicious melee erupted on the docks as a mob cornered a number of armed men – surely the arsonists – and began beating them to death.

“We are out of time,” she said.

Cillian ran for the docks, heedless of sharp rocks and sucking mud under her bare feet. Despite taking a hefty hit to the head, she left me puffing and panting in her wake. Knowing her, she probably rose at first light and followed an exacting exercise regime. She had told me that “a healthy body means a healthy mind” at some point in the past. My dislike of her grew.

A chain of people were ferrying buckets of seawater up onto the burning ships with impressive efficiency. Even so, sooty flames grew higher, hissing tongues of red and orange crawling up their masts. Rigging and sails flared as they went up. On the other side of the city, a pall of black was rising from Westford Docks.

“Are they trying to burn every seaworthy ship here?” Cillian said. “This is deliberate. But why?”

I licked my lips. “To stop us escaping.”

“Explain.”

“The Skinner – Harailt – was hunting down mageborn, and then he moved on to full-blown magi to fuel his blood sorcery. It seems to me he’s stepping it up, that he wants our people confined within the city walls. In an evacuation of the city, who or what would be on the first ships out?”

“The Arcanum and the High Houses of course,” she replied. “Along with our most dangerous weapons… Son of a whore!”

“Exactly. Nothing is getting out now.” It was strange hearing her swear at something other than me; always a rarity, and now that she was a high and mighty councillor I didn’t imagine it ever happened in public.

A soot-smeared dockhand, yoke across his shoulders weighed down by two full buckets, slowed and glared at us as he passed. “You two scruffians just goin’ to stand here and watch? There’s goodly folk trapped. Get in line and lend a hand.”

Cillian straightened and hoisted her chin. “No need.” Her magic flared up around her and she stretched a hand out towards the nearest ship. It started to pitch and rock as the sea churned to brown froth beneath. Gasps rippled up the waterline of people as tentacles of seawater rose around one of the ships like a sea monster about to pull the vessel under. Instead water crashed down across the deck, snuffing out flames in clouds of steam. It was an awesome display of power, more so for me than the people on the docks – they had no idea of the obscene volume of magic Cillian was channelling.

The dockhand gaped, head snapping from the ship to Cillian and back again. A strangled choke emerged from his throat and his face reddened. “Beg pardon, magus,” he forced out. “Didn’t mean no offence.”

“I took no offence, my good man,” she replied, glancing at me from the corner of her eye. “Every life is precious, is it not? It is my duty to provide what assistance I can.”

He bobbed his head and backed away from us as quickly as possible without actually fleeing. Everybody staring at us suddenly decided that gawping at the bedraggled magus was bad for their health and went back to hauling buckets of water down to the fires.

“Nice words,” I said. “Did you mean them?”

She scowled, face taut with concentration as water writhed over a second ship that was already listing badly, flames consuming the starboard side.

“I am not a monster,” she said, “whatever you may think. I will do what I must for Setharis and the Arcanum. However, I do accept that I am a product of privilege, and capable of oversight. I’m only human, you judgmental prick.”

I grunted. “Well said. Anyway, see you later.”

Her concentration almost faltered, but it took more than that to disrupt the focus of a magus of her prowess. Her eyes narrowed, lips thinning with both anger and the effort of directing so much complex magic. “You are coming with me, Edrin. If you try to leave you will regret it.”

I nodded towards the ships. “People are trapped and you are their only hope. How many will die if you try to stop me? I won’t make it easy for you.” My smile crumbled. “Don’t try to out-bastard me, Cillian. I’ll win every time. I am going to find Harailt and I am going to kill him. There is no need for your tests.”

My head ached from the strain both body and Gift had been under, and the secret locked away in my head was ever-present in my thoughts, the power that locked it away finally crumbling. I felt like a pus-filled boil ripe and ready to burst. The mere thought of reliving those memories caused me to break out in a cold sweat, but they were also the key to defeating the traitor god that was helping Harailt.

She shook her head slowly. “No, even you would not condemn innocent people to death. That would make you just as bad as all those uncaring, privileged bastards that you rant about with such vehemence.”

I looked her right in the eye. I’d already killed one innocent man since returning. “Oh, I’m far worse.” And I meant it. She’d no idea about all the dirty, devious, and just plain brutal things I’d done to survive over the years; the rich had no conception of that sort of life. I turned my back on her and headed for the city, every step exuding carefree confidence. In truth I was near pissing myself wondering if she’d stop the blood in my veins, or even burst a non-vital body part, maybe one I’d really not be keen to lose. But she didn’t, instead she cursed and focused on saving lives. She thought I really was that much of a bastard.

I didn’t examine myself too closely as to what I’d have done if she tried to stop me. I suspected neither of us would have liked the answer.