The Traitor God

Chapter 2

I fell to my knees screaming. I was frantic, stuck in this shithole town and unable to come to Lynas’ aid. A pair of young spearmen of the Ironport militia ran over to check on me, looking panicked. Blackest dread filled me as I realized my Gift had opened wide to receive the vision and that my magic was bleeding out into the world unchecked, advertising my presence like a blazing beacon in the night.

The shadow cat came from the direction of the Skallgrim shaman, a writhing mass of deepest dark the size of a horse leaping through a tenebrous doorway. They’ve found me. My eyes wanted to slide over it and I had to concentrate to see it at all. Obsidian fangs and claws glistened, wisps of black breath misting the air, green eyes fixed on me burning with recognition, with hatred.

Lynas’ terror eclipses my own–

He runs as fast as his bulk will allow, slipping and sliding across cobbles slick with the bouncing rain, splashes through a pool of street filth, the rotting refuse and sewage coating his boots. Puffing and panting, he staggers up to a crossroads, skids to a stop, backs away. Another daemon squats straight ahead. A whisper of memory, something Walker once said, names it: shard beast. He lurches right, down a dark winding alley. His only chance is to head for the open space of Fisherman’s Way.

His legs burn with the effort. He’s too old and too fat for this. Why couldn’t he just have met Charra and Layla for dinner and wine, as they did at the end of every week? Oh no, instead he had to go snooping! All this because he is trying to grow his business so his daughter is set for life. He crushes all pointless thought: ignorance means death. A pile of garbage trips him and he stumbles, almost falls, flails to a stop against the alley wall, breathing in ragged heaving gulps, his legs shivering beneath him.

But he can’t stop; he refuses to. Charra and Layla’s smiling faces flash through his mind. He has too much to lose.

Pushing himself off the wall, he forces leaden legs back into motion. He’s bought the city some time, but now he has to get out into a main street, to call for the wardens, the street gangs, anybody. He has to warn them all or thousands will perish. His family will die.

“Come on – you – fat – fool,” he pants, focusing on keeping his feet moving, trying to ignore the sweat pouring down his face and the salt stinging his eyes. He wipes them with the back of his hand, blinks his vision clear.

A hooded man in dark and sodden robes blocks the exit from the alley, loitering in deepest shadow. He prays it is a magus here to help.

“There are daemons back there,” Lynas shouts. As he tries to run past, the man hooks his arm out, slams it into his throat. Lynas’ feet fly out from beneath him.

“I know,” says the man.

His back crashing to the cobbles leaves Lynas gulping for air that his stunned body can’t provide. The shadows close in around them.

“I should know,” says the hooded man, pulling a scalpel from a voluminous sleeve. “I am their master, after all.”

I hissed in pain. Magic thudded through blood and muscle whilst my mind shuddered, the vision stabbing into my head in fits and starts. Burn all daemons!

For ten long years I’d had no inkling of who hated or feared me enough to set daemons hunting me. I had assumed it had something to do my part in the death of a god. And yet, perhaps I’d been wrong all those years, for I recognized this particular shadow cat’s badly burned muzzle from where I’d dropped a blazing house on her and her mate years ago. This daemon cat I called Burn had been summoned by the Skallgrim shaman in the skull-mask, but no untrained Gifted reliant on blood sorcery could compel the allegiance of a whole pack of such powerful daemons. Whoever their real master was, they were either one of those tribal savages, or allied. But who was it, and why me?

Now that the daemons had found me I didn’t have to hold back, reduced to relying on my paltry skill with two other – and to my thoughts lesser – magics dealing with air and manipulation of the human body. Every Gift processed the flow of magic differently, offering certain innate talents, and my accursed Gift to control the human mind was powerful when used subtly, and far more dangerous when used without restraint. It was the oldest and rarest of all human magics and these particular daemons could smell it from a league away.

The minds of the two militiamen were snarls of fear. If they caught sight of the shadow cat they would flee and leave me to die. One of them put a reassuring hand on my shoulder. I grabbed it and my magic surged into him, breaking into his thoughts. It was always easier with skin contact, and with all his panic and confusion it was a simple task to order him to defend me. The man spun and levelled his spear at the daemon. His confused companion followed suit.

I left them to delay the thing while I lurched towards the ships. They’d be dead anyway when the Skallgrim caught up with them. “I’m coming, Lynas. Hold on!” I tried to reach out to him through the Gift-bond but–

A warm wetness blooms over Lynas’ crotch: he’s pissed himself. “Please. Please, no,” he wheezes. “I won’t tell anybody.”

“No, you will not,” the man replies, a grin flashing inside the hood. “I have need of your flesh, mageborn. The magic it contains will be put to good use.” He kneels down to straddle Lynas, pinning his body to the cold cobbles, arm held skyward in a vice-like grip. A single deft slice and he opens Lynas’ arm from wrist to elbow.

Lynas screams, knows he’s about to die. “Gods save me!”

The hooded man chuckles. “The so-called gods of Setharis have been blinded and chained, Lynas. They are too consumed by their own struggle for survival to notice what happens here. You will get no help from them.”

He knows he has to keep trying to send a message through the Gift-bond. Others would claim it’s an abomination – an invitation to his enslavement by Walker’s stronger Gift – but that trust had already been repaid a thousandfold. Wherever Walker is in the world now, he has to reach him, to tell him of the threat to Setharis, to warn him that Layla and Charra are in danger. If he’s still alive, then maybe…

“I feel you, Lynas. Run! Get out of there. I’m coming. Please…”

It’s too late.

He gathers the power of his stunted Gift, lets it fill him until he’s almost bursting, hoping it will prove enough to bring his friend home. He imagines Walker: that cynical smile, those exhausted and haunted eyes as he walked out of Lynas’ door for the last time.

The scalpel cuts deep. Bright arterial blood spurts across the silvery face of the broken moon.

Lynas feels his power building, eager to surge through the Gift-bond, but then the knife twists and he screams instead.

The hooded man’s grin widens, white teeth gleaming in the moonlight. He shakes his head and tuts. “Nobody will be coming to the rescue, you pathetic waste of the Gift. To think you once thought to become a magus.” He starts to cut the skin from Lynas’ flesh, the scalpel shining red and silver.

Lynas screams as hot sticky rain drips onto his face. He yearns to be home with his family in front of a crackling fireplace, merry with food and wine. All he’s ever really wanted is for everybody to be happy and healthy. And he’s failed them. He closes his eyes and wills the pain to stop, prays for death.

“Death won’t save you either, Lynas,” the man says. “I have something far more useful planned for you.”

A memory surfaces, Walker’s words: unbalance the bastards; kick them in the balls and do what needs doing while they’re busy puking. He can’t give up yet. He has no idea what he’s doing, but if he can somehow distract the hooded man then he has one last chance to bring Walker home.

He fastens his eyes on an imaginary saviour behind the hooded man’s back, starts laughing – mocking laughter that reverberates down the alley.

The man’s eyes widen. “What are you…?”

As the hooded man jerks back, spins to look behind him, Lynas fires off another message, fuelled with every last ounce of his life-force, hoping it’s just enough, that at least part of the message might make it through and speed off into the night, to reach…

Agony exploded inside my skull. I clutched my head as blood gushed from my nose. It felt like something inside my brain had burst. Gods no! Lynas! Lynas! There is no answer. The constant and comforting presence in the back of my head that had kept me sane for ten wretched years began to fade. Then, nothing.

I was truly alone.

Pyromancer or not, I knew what I had to do. Instead of boarding the Ahramish merchantman I staggered onto the battered old caravel, collapsing to the deck just as the sailors cast off ropes and began pushing us away from the dock with long poles. I was going home and wouldn’t allow anything or anybody to stop me.

Memories forgotten for ten years had been torn loose, were bleeding back into my conscious mind, mixed with something from Lynas. The scent of smoke and blood filled my nostrils as one memory surged to the fore, summoned by the vision: a steel gate slamming shut. As if I were floating outside my body I saw our horrified expressions as that bastard Harailt locked Lynas and I in the catacombs of the Boneyards. Oh how he laughed! The darkness, the harrowing darkness…

The details of the vision drained away like sour wine from a burst skin, leaving behind a fearful mass of muddled imagery and a sudden certainty that by going home I wouldn’t have long to live. So be it.

Canvas snapped taut as sails caught the wind. We slid from the docks, leaving the two militiamen to be torn to pieces by the claws and fangs of my personal daemons. Out of frustration Burn took her time with them, tearing off their arms and legs one by one before finally burying obsidian fangs in their throats. She watched me leave, gaze dripping with malevolence – I had killed her mate.

As the caravel surged out to sea we stared at the forest of masts and sails filling the horizon, an enormous fleet of wolf-ships bearing the emblems of dozens of tribes: rearing bears, wolves, dragons and various runic emblems. Ironport’s sheltered bay was the largest and safest on the east coast, making it the perfect place to anchor a fleet, and with the town’s abundance of mines and smithies they would have a plentiful supply of weapons. Nobody brought a fleet eight hundred leagues across the Sea of Storms just to see the sights and indulge in a spot of raiding – this was an invasion of all Kaladon. The savages had always been numerous, but riven by tribal blood feuds, religious warfare, and hobbled by a strict and somewhat fatal code of honour. Something of huge import must have occurred to see blood-sworn enemies travel halfway across the known world to fight side by side on our shores. Bile rose up my throat. Those sailors’ rumours of stolen children and human sacrifice had not been as wild as I’d thought.

And then my guts heaved as it hit me – Lynas was dead, really dead. He was supposed to have been protected! I had made a deal with somebody too dangerous and powerful to refuse; the reward was the lives of my friends at the cost my exile. There was a secret buried deep inside my mind, locked away by powers far beyond my own, one so dire that even I couldn’t be allowed to know what it was. All I knew was that it had something to do with the death of a god. Every time I tried to remember it only brought back paralysing panic and blackest terror, but now the deal was off and I had to find a way to recover those memories.

The details of the deal itself were fragmented, most of it locked away with that dire secret in my head. I couldn’t remember who, but still knew some of the why: it had been the only way to keep Lynas and Charra safe, their daughter Layla too. They had made some kind of deadly mistake, and Charra had taken dangerously ill. I had been promised that mistake would be rectified, Charra healed, and all three kept from harm if I completed their task and then left Setharis, forgetting everything. Whoever they were, they had broken our deal. And that would not, and could not, be forgiven. I held my head in my hands, throat seized up, eyes gone tight and watery. The sorrow didn’t last. It drowned in a flood of anger. That hooded man would burn for this. Charra and Layla must be protected at all costs.

It was time to go home to a city that feared and despised me. It was time to kill, and I didn’t care how many or how powerful they thought they were. Lynas had always been my conscience, urging me to use my power wisely and well, but now my friend was dead and that “wisely and well” could go fuck itself. I would rip his murderer apart and then I would deal with these Skallgrim that thought they could hunt me with impunity.

The deal was off, and so was my leash.