The Traitor God

Chapter 26

Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck…

I sprinted towards the Seth faster than I’d ever run in my life, feet barely seeming to touch the stone. They had caught my scent and I now had exactly one chance to live. I bolted towards the turgid roar of the river dead ahead.

A shadow cat the size of a horse padded from the smoke into the street right in front of me. It was Burn, scarred muzzle sniffing this way and that. My senses were befuddled by the smoke but it seemed she was affected just as badly. I slowed and circled right, trying to be quiet as I padded towards a side alley.

Matte black wisps of fur writhed across her body as her great head swung in my direction. Her shining eyes snapped to me and burned with hatred. It hissed, revealing obsidian incisors the length of my hand. Somewhere nearby yet more claws clicked on stone.

Cockrot.

Claws scrabbled behind me as I vaulted a low wall and leapt right. The shadow cat skidded past, sliding into an abandoned goods cart. The expected crash didn’t come, instead a twisting racked my guts as she vanished into the shadows beneath the cartwheels – only to slide from a darkened doorway further ahead.

I lurched from the alley, trying to make it to the river before the rest of the pack arrived. I was so close. Barefoot, I could feel the roar of water thrumming through the ground. A gust of wind thinned smoke to reveal the black bulk of cats stalking me on either side. It was pointless to try to fight.

Up ahead – the hazy forms of weather-worn statues lining the riverbank. I ran for my life. The tang of raw sewage and running water cut through the smoke. So near, but so damn far. Claws click-click-clacked, gaining with every step I took. My wounded leg was about to give out. Come on, not yet, not yet… A pitted statue coalesced from the smog. I panicked, dived blindly past it, hands up to cover my head. For a sickening moment I thought I’d misjudged, was about to smack face-first into the ground, but instead I plunged through smoke towards the river.

A great paw caught the back of my coat, jerking me to a stop. I dangled from Burn’s claws like a fish on a hook, flailing to break free. The beast growled, slowly hauling me up to its fangs. I swung both feet up, planted them against the stone banking and shoved with all my strength.

I swung out towards the river and desperately tried to shrug off my coat. Something tore and I fell. Air gusted across the back of my neck as another paw swiped out, barely missing. The thing yowled and scrabbled for balance, failed.

I hit the Seth, a hard belly-slap that exploded the air from my lungs. Coughing and spluttering, I surfaced just in time to see a thrashing mass of shadow and claw plunging towards my head. I dived. The beast hit the water, shockwave and heavy weight on my back pushing me deeper until my feet scraped the mud. Water churned as the creature struggled to the surface. I clamped a hand over the wound in my leg and played dead, letting the flow carry me downstream. A swarm of pale and bony corpse-fish surrounded me, tasting my blood in the water, then as one they swarmed the struggling shadow cat. Horrors lived in the Seth, and things canny enough to survive centuries of eradication attempts by the Arcanum wouldn’t have any hesitation in chowing down on my bones – if they didn’t have something bigger and meatier to attract their attention.

I drifted up with desperate slowness. When my face finally broke the surface the shadow cat’s screeches filled my heart with savage joy. After all these years I’d finally finished the damned fleabag off. Darkness steamed from Burn’s exposed insides and the water around her writhed with fish more teeth than tail. My toes instinctively curled up and my balls attempted to retreat into my body. I loathed swimming, hated not knowing what was lurking beneath me – I couldn’t help but imagine things with too many teeth eyeing up my toes like fat and juicy worms. I muffled a yelp as something big and spongy brushed past my dangling feet. The corpse-fish scattered. A second later something pulled the shadow cat under. Burn didn’t resurface.

I forced myself to stay still and waited to be carried down to Sethgate Bridge where I could use the steps to climb back up to street level. Flapping tails and snapping teeth churned the water to froth upstream as scavengers fought over titbits of daemon flesh and magic. Once they’d finished devouring the cat I would be next. As soon as the steps below the bridge came into reach I flailed for the bank and heaved myself up onto solid stone, crawling until my toes were well out of reach.

I lay on my back panting and looking up at the smoke-filled sky, letting my heartbeat slow and the fear drain from my body. Patchy blue and sunbeams struggled through smoke and cloud. “Not dead yet,” I said. My face felt strangely numb. I probed with a finger, finding something soft and squidgy attached to my cheek.

“Ew, ew, ew.” I pried the fat black leech from my skin by sliding a fingernail under its suckers and then tossed it back into the river, wiping blood from my cheek.

I pried two more from my arms. And then something twitched inside my trousers. I shuddered, feeling sick as I undid my belt and whipped them down to my ankles. Horror stabbed me as something pale and cock-sized plopped out and rolled free across the ground. I cackled in relief – just a baby barrel eel.

I smiled at my crotch. “Still safe and sound, eh, old pal.”

“What a disconcerting sight,” Shadea said from the bridge above. “Just what are you doing, Edrin Walker?”

I groaned and looked up from my cock to see that old crone leaning out over the side of the bridge, eyebrows raised. Eva joined her, now dressed in full battle plate with a bastard sword strapped to her back. Both women were dusty, dishevelled and bruised but otherwise looked fine. I was glad that Eva had escaped the Boneyards alive but my feelings on Shadea’s survival were conflicted.

Ah, fuck it. “I’m looking at my cock, Shadea. Must be a while since you’ve seen one.”

Eva’s eyes dipped to my bare crotch, brazenly ogling me. “Oh my.” She choked back a laugh.

It didn’t faze Shadea. “Not at all,” Shadea said. “I dissected one last month. It was rather large in comparison to yours.” She looked to Eva. “Be a dear and fetch the miscreant.”

Eva vaulted the wall and dropped thirty-odd feet down to me, metal clad feet clanging. She bore the weight of all that metal like it was cloth. At least she had the good grace to look slightly embarrassed as I hastily yanked my trousers back up and tied my belt, not that she averted her eyes. She noted my torn and bleeding leg and then carefully swept me up into her steely embrace. I wrapped my arms around her gorget and held on tight as she climbed the steps back up to street level. Manliness be damned, it felt good. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so safe, and hadn’t much fancied scaling those steps with a wonky leg either.

My illusion of safety evaporated at the sight of the horrid old hag waiting on us and two squads of armoured wardens busy erecting barricades across the bridge. Shadea’s wards burned bright and baleful across the defences – nobody would get through those unscathed.

“What’s going on?” I said as Eva set me down. She held onto my arm to help keep weight off my wounded leg.

“We are securing the bridges,” Eva said. “Coteries of magi are currently moving forward to reinforce the wall guard.”

Shadea’s nose crinkled. “The stink of daemon spoor and blood magic clings to you.”

“Oh, you know me,” I said. “Always popular. A variety of interesting friends. Listen, Cillian’s been hurt. She–”

“Has already passed into the Old Town,” Shadea interrupted. “Your mageborn friend, Layla, is taking her to the healers. It is strange; I had thought that I knew the name of every living mageborn to undergo the Forging.” I swallowed my sudden fear, but she brushed past it. “Councillor Cillian will survive. You have the Arcanum’s thanks for that.”

I needed to change the subject, else Shadea might pick at the discrepancy until it got Layla killed. “Did she tell you about the Magash Mora?”

She looked at me sharply. “Cillian has been divulging restricted information. She shall be censured later; however, given the circumstances I will say that it is merely an opinion, one that lacks sufficient evidence. I shall, however, account for every possibility. I admit to some surprise that you survived the underground river.”

I smiled. “And spare the Arcanum the hassle of dealing with me? So sorry to disappoint. Where is Harailt?”

Shadea sighed and turned to survey the lower city. “He is currently being subjected to further investigation in the Courts of Justice below the Templarum Magestus. He passed every test I applied but it is a wise precaution given recent events.”

“I’ve been proven right about everything so far,” I said. “Just because you loathe me doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”

Columns of smoke billowed from many sites and the city gates were only now swinging shut after being choked by sailors, dock workers, and herdsmen driving in the last of their cattle ready for the Sumarfuin slaughter. The Skallgrim fleet would land shortly, unless the magi heading for the walls could burn their ships to ash before they even reached the beaches.

She pursed her lips, thinking. “Contrary to what you may think, Magus Walker, I have never harboured any particular dislike of you. In fact I feel nothing for you at all. Nor have I any solid evidence of you misusing your Gift, despite an extremely colourful variety of rumour to choose from.” She glanced back, that impersonal gaze sending shivers up my spine. “If I had, then you would have been disposed of.”

I bit back angry retorts. “As if I could believe that. None of you want a so-called tyrant walking about.”

Shadea was silent for a long moment, thinking. Eva shifted, metal and leather creaking, uncomfortable at the reminder of what the man she’d just held in her arms could do.

“There are no written histories from before the era of tyrants,” Shadea said. “However, I do believe that oral traditions contain a measure of truth distorted over time. The oldest tales all tell of an age where people cowered around their campfires, fearful of dire entities that stalked the night stealing children from their beds and spreading madness and disease. Humanity is not alone on this world.”

I blinked, not entirely sure I was hearing her correctly. “Next you will be telling me you have samples of ghosts, ogres and darkenshae floating in jars in your creepy workshop, and that all the monsters of my childhood stories are real.”

She snorted. “Is it really so strange when you have fought daemons born on alien worlds beyond the Shroud? Perhaps you forget the creature you uncovered in the catacombs as a boy.”

Eva looked as flummoxed as I felt hearing this. I stared at Shadea, shuddering at the memory of huge bulky bones and a sloping skull with a third eye. “I thought that thing was an ancient magus changed by magic.”

“It was the corpse of what we call an ogre,” she said. “Ogarim, if you prefer the Clanhold oral histories which are less corrupted than ours. Other artefacts of those creatures’ presence in Kaladon have been uncovered over the centuries, but it is not commonly disclosed to magi of your humble rank.”

I licked my lips. “Then why now?”

“One last attempt to turn you from a dark path,” she said. “Some creatures of myth were said to take on human form, and others to inhabit corpses of the wicked. If, as current theory suggests, magic slowly adapts its hosts and their bloodlines to survive surrounding dangers, then it is logical to assume that tyrants might once have served the purpose of identifying such disguised creatures. Sniffers too, perhaps: two differing human responses evolving to meet the same threat.”

I must have looked incredulous, as she hastily continued, looking slightly irritated at getting carried away with her love of obscure research. “As fascinating as that conjecture may be, what I am suggesting is that you too may find a worthy purpose in the years to come. I deem it unwise to discard any tool unless it bites the hand that wields it.”

I swallowed. Such a thing had never occurred to me before. A purpose? Me?

Shadea smiled, a terrifying sight. “By both tradition and familial ties, I was destined to marry a rotund oaf of a high lord and birth him a litter of squalling infants. I chose otherwise.” Dear gods, Shadea wed? Children? I think all involved dodged an axe to the face there. “You too can follow a different path if you so choose.”

Down below, three wolf-ships beached on Setharii soil ahead of the body of the fleet, the tribesmen glinting dots on the beach. Pyromancers on the city walls began incinerating them with bolts of fire.

“What madness drives them to dash themselves against our walls?” Eva said, shaking her head as she surveyed the slaughter.

Before I could reply with: bet it has something to do with a bloody huge monster underground, Shadea’s head whipped around to face the Warrens.

“Oh no,” she said, and for the first time in my life I saw Shadea afraid.

The ground shook. Mortar pattered down from the surrounding buildings and pebbles rained from the cliff walls of the Old Town rock. My mind shook with it. Agony pierced right between my eyes. I screamed, barely feeling steel-clad arms keeping me upright.

“What’s wrong with him?” Eva said, as I jerked and bucked in her grip.

I dimly sensed Shadea’s fingers press first against my wrist and neck, then peel back my eyelid. The pain wasn’t mine, was cutting in from elsewhere and bypassing every defence I threw up to block it out.

Eventually my desperate hands latched onto Dissever’s hilt. Fury crashed into pain.

Shadea hissed and snatched her hand back. “Drop him!”

Eva let go and stepped away, drawing a green-flecked sword. I fell on my arse, but immediately rolled to my feet with knife in hand, lips twisted into a feral snarl. I barely noticed them, instead growling at the Warrens as an entire street of rotten tenements collapsed in a cloud of dust.

Shadea waved the wardens back, but I only had eyes for the source of the pain twisting behind my eyes.

In the distant heart of the Warrens wood and stone exploded upwards. A block of tenements bulged and burst apart as something huge and fleshy and glistening rose from the depths of the Boneyards in a cloud of debris and death. Mental screams emanated from the thing’s insides as it absorbed the tenement’s occupants. I could feel them all: a small town’s worth of agony crashing into me, their minds not quite alive, but horrifically far from dead. Only a fraction of the thing had emerged but I could already sense a dozen mature Gifts of magi flaring bright with magic deep inside that screaming mass, surrounded by uncounted stunted mageborn trickling in power. I was instinctively drawn to one amongst the many, the source of my agony rising from the depths.

Lynas, my Gift-bonded brother.

I gripped Dissever in trembling hands. Hard to think. Pain. Fear. Confusion.

Shadea cursed. “Disable him. Be careful of that blade.”

I brandished Dissever, growled at Eva and shifted my feet for a better stance. Magic flooded through my muscles, readying for the kill.

“Sorry,” she said with a metallic shrug. She blurred and something slammed into my face. Everything went hazy as I toppled.