The Traitor God

Chapter 34

“Artha, uh… m’lord,” I say. “Have you gone completely batshite insane?” I scan the inside of his tower, wary of currents of magic that can easily reduce me to ash.

“You test my patience, Edrin Walker,” the Setharii god of war says. He lies naked on his back atop the cold and unadorned stone slab that is his most holy of altars. “We have a bargain. Cut deep and cut now, while I can still keep my rage at bay. My will falters. My Gift opens and the Worm of Magic devours more of my self-control each time I succumb. Soon I will become more beast than man.”

I don’t know where to look. He is impressive, give him that. I avert my eyes and force my shaking hands to press the edge of Dissever to the notch in his chest just below the throat. I pause. “My friends – you’ve arranged their safety? You will heal Charra?” His promise to kill them if I don’t do what he demands still makes me furious, but now I understand the urgent necessity.

He stares up at the vaulted ceiling of twisted golden beams, to where a storm of magic rages above, not blinking as eldritch lightning flashes and arcs down all around us. “Yes. Their transgressions have been wiped from all record and false papers placed so their child need not suffer the Forging. The Lord of Bones and Lady Night will honour our deal and ensure that no magus or god shall ever harm them. They will see to the health of your friends and enforce our secrets.” He grits his teeth. “Do it now.” His voice brooks no dissent.

As I’d been shown, I open up my Gift and begin to sing, twisting my magic through the words in a very particular way. The words are meaningless, the mental and magical rhythm is the thing. I spit out words fast and sharp, my tune in time with the god’s heartbeat. I feel my Gift beginning to resonate with the inner core of his power, enticing layers of arcane protections to open up and accept my presence. I have been handed the secret of killing our gods, a heady and terrifying burden.

I cut deep, blood welling up as Dissever slices through skin. It’s tough going, even though Dissever goes through most things as if they are soft butter. The blade jars against bone and I have to brutally wrench it up and down to saw my way through, working the cut down the centre of his chest until a ragged red trench splits it in two. His flesh quivers, trying to heal, but somehow he holds that at bay.

Artha’s face is a mask of stoic suffering as he hooks his fingers into the wound and wrenches his ribcage open. It breaks with a crunch of cartilage and snap of bone, splaying open to display organs. His heart pulses with an eerie inner light.

He grimaces, one eye twitching at my hesitation. “Hurry. I can no longer keep the rage in check. My lucid periods grow steadily fewer. Unless you wish a mad god loose in Setharis do it now. Your friends will die first.”

I ram Dissever into his heart. The knife sinks a finger-breadth into the muscle. The altar stone shatters beneath us, shards shredding my coat and skin. Jets of hot blood squirt across my face, potent magic searing a path down my chin. The knife point scrapes something solid. I hack away, widening the slick hole. Fire and lightning blasts the tower walls, burning my skin and crisping hair.

Without a weapon like Dissever it would be impossible, but that minor detail wasn’t why they needed me – others far more reliable had spirit-bound weapons. I wrench the knife free and light bleeds from the wound. My hand is poised over the chasm in his chest, sparks of living lightning crackling from the organ to wind around my fingers.

Blind fury twists one side of the god’s face: the Worm of Magic manifesting an animalistic survival instinct all of its own. The other side is a mask of incredible concentration as he fights to keep his body motionless, but he is failing. It seems that the mind of a god is easier to break than the body.

I plunge my hand into his flesh, gagging at the sensation of beating muscle and ascended human blood flowing up my arm. My fingers touch the thrumming crystal, the god-seed at his centre. Light explodes in my mind and I vibrate with unfathomable energy. I wrap my hand around the crystal and pull. His flesh stubbornly resists. I put one foot up on the altar and heave. The god-seed tears free in a fountain of blood. I gag, spitting blood as Artha screams and convulses. The tower shakes. Then he flops down unconscious, his wounds closing. The shaking ceases and the lightning stops. All is silent apart from my terrified panting.

I collapse to the floor, entire body trembling, and try to scrub his blood from my face with a ragged sleeve. Power, absolute blissful power, throbs in my hand, flows into me even as Artha’s blood sizzles against my skin. This is the secret to ascension, a false Gift crafted from a flawless crystal of solidified magic, one capable of channelling more raw magic than anything of mere flesh and blood ever could.

I can be a god! I can take this power and do anything I wish, can cast down every bastard who… who… I shake my head groggily. No. That isn’t me, and that wasn’t the deal. I am human and intent on staying that way. I force my shaking hand to stretch out towards another figure coalescing from the shadows. I drop the source of the god Artha’s power into the waiting hands of the Lord of Bones. The old man’s white-bearded face is grim and riven by cracks of sorrow. He says nothing, only nods thanks for doing what he couldn’t, then dissipates back into the darkness, taking the god-seed to wherever it has to go. Stolen power thrums through me.

Artha’s chest rises and falls, his body twitching in the throes of foulest nightmare. I press my hands to either side of his head. He is so diminished, a mere Gifted mortal now, albeit still an ancient magus of such potency that he will stand head and shoulders above even the great Archmagus Byzant himself. As demanded, I begin using my power to wall away his memories. No other living magus is skilled enough to even attempt an act so deep and complex, and the other gods are either unable or unwilling to do it themselves.

I struggle to navigate the roaring floods of mental anguish and turmoil, to hide it all away beneath layer after layer of obfuscating walls, to twist his mental pathways away from the sources of his unreasoning rage. The changes to his Gift wrought by the Worm of Magic blindly resist at every stage but those Worm-wrought changes too are eventually bypassed and isolated from future thought.

When Artha wakes he will have no recollection of being a god or of having any magic beyond a certain innate physical strength and sturdiness impossible to hide. He will be spared memories of fields of rotting flesh picked over by crows and human scavengers, and of devastated tenements filled with the torn corpses of men, women and children slain to assuage his frequent rage. He will finally be free of the blight consuming his mind, instead blessed with a peaceful life tilling the soil of a small farm far to the north. I’m not sure he doesn’t deserve to die here, but the Lord of Bones said that thousands of years of service and sacrifice demanded otherwise, and I didn’t have a choice: Charra is sick and the Arcanum will burn Layla alive if I don’t complete this task.

It is the hardest, most exhausting thing I have ever attempted, hour upon hour of gruelling effort with his Gift fighting my foreign magic every step. Without the stolen power and my absolute need to protect those I love, it would be impossible.

Finally, somehow, it is done, and after a brief rest I begin the long descent. Much later I saunter out through the shattered door of the god’s tower and light a soggy blood-stained roll-up from the flaming wreckage. Artha’s “death” cry still echoes weirdly through the city as my plume of smoke twists into the air. Phantasms drift through the night and animals all across the city scream and scrabble in fear-frenzy as the ground shakes underfoot.

I flash a grin at the ominous black form of Lady Night, the god’s face a serene silver mask. Thick as thieves, her and the Lord of Bones. The gods owe me, and I will make sure they honour the debt. The bargain was struck and only the suicidal welch on deals with gods. The only one to suffer will be me, but I am fine with that.

“I’m gasping for a drink,” I say to her, my throat parched and my lips burnt and cracked. “You buying? I’m sure you lot can stretch to that.”

Icy eyes glare out from behind the mask, silver pupils as broken as the moon. My grin melts. “It is time for you to leave Setharis, Edrin Walker,” she says, her voice deceptively soft and melodious. “Forget, and never return.”

I swallow and nod. It was worth it.

Her power sears through my being, locking everything away.

Shock ripped Nathair from my mind. “Alive?” His hand squeezed my throat harder as he forced his way back into my mind. I convulsed, choking, blood gushing from my nose. “Artha lives,” he snarled, licking his lips. “He taught you how to kill us, and those two crusty old liars had a hand in it. Damn them, how did they know I would betray them given the chance? What else have you hidden from me?”

He tore my mind wide open, shattering every lock and door; all except for one, an old barrier of a different nature. He cursed me, but it wasn’t my lock, it wasn’t my door, and I hadn’t even known it existed. Somebody else had blocked off that part of my memory long ago and hidden it from me – but he didn’t care about that. He ignored the burnt-out part of my mind and focused his entire attention on tearing that last barrier apart to bathe in the hidden memories.

Beyond that last locked door lay the great and wonderful Byzant, my friend and mentor. All the times the elder magus had helped me, listened to my worries and soothed my fears – except, now, everything was changed, darkened, and my horror was complete. I now knew what that bastard did to me.

Flashes of Byzant strapping me to his chair flicked through my mind’s eye, Nathair watching and laughing voyeuristically as I relived the vile sensation of Byzant being in my head, adjusting things to make me into the bitter and contrary bastard that I was – ensuring that I’d build myself an early pyre. It was no wonder that all magi of my sort to appear in the last five hundred years had died young. They were not allowed to live. Those bastard elder magi refused to take the risk and made it look like every one of those poor fools had done it to themselves. Lacking my true Gift for such magics, Byzant utilized a crude but effective alternative to my own techniques, one that exploited my trust in him.

My world rocked, any sense of self torn free. I was not the hard drinking, wild-eyed rebel I thought I was. All I had ever been, Byzant had crafted. Paranoia and self-doubt crippled me, but then came anger. He had made me one thing, but I had burnt that old Walker away.

Nathair lapped it all up from inside my mind, drank in all my secrets and exulted in my utter betrayal and his complete victory. The bastard was distracted, out of his body and far from his home turf. It took a special kind of arrogance to enter the mind of a tyrant, even for a god. It was time to kick him in the balls.

I’d always held back. Always terrified I’d lose control. Lynas had helped steer me right, but he was gone. Byzant had tried to get me killed and Charra was dying. I loosed my rage and savaged the bastard’s mind, as brutal as I’d ever feared I would become – one last gasp of power shredding the soft underbelly of his mind. He screamed and squeezed my throat. Everything went black.

I woke sprawled on the floor, blood oozing from burst lips and a broken nose, but that pain was nothing compared to the rest of me. I groaned and flopped over, throat bruised and swollen. The god was still standing, arm outstretched, his face a rictus of horror. I had no idea how much time had passed.

Something was very, very wrong with him. Whatever damage I’d done went beyond the mental, as if his body was merely magical artifice, a glove he wore at whim. The Shroud shuddered and strained as ribbons of emotion burst from his chest in a spray of gore. A multitude of stars and swirling globes of thought drifted through the fabric of his existence. His body deformed, stretching and contracting into impossible angles that transcended physicality. Eyes, jaws, tentacles, wings, claws and other things and feelings I didn’t have names for erupted in endless variety.

I dragged myself away, inch by agonizing inch. His eyes flared into blood-red suns, bleeding enough power to turn a village to dust in an instant if it hadn’t all been focused on survival. He reconstructed his body like a disassembled blacksmith’s puzzle, but his flesh was all wrong: bone jutted from pulsing flesh, gaping wounds oozed blood and fluid and torn veins dangled like branches on a willow. An arm was on backwards.

“What… did… you do… to me?” the god gasped. “I have forgotten… things.”

I shook my head and almost blacked out, barely able to think through the pain flooding my body.

I crawled towards the merchant’s chair. What pit that thought came from in my fragmented consciousness I didn’t know, but I heeded the desperate impulse. I had one last, secret weapon.

Nathair’s breath came fast and ragged. Like a wounded beast he turned towards me, air whistling through holes torn in throat and chest.

I wasn’t going to make it. The merchant’s chair might as well have been leagues of rugged moor and mountains away.

A foot slammed down on my spine. Droplets of blood pitter-pattered onto my back.

“Well played.” He laughed, an executioner’s mirth. “To think you had that left.” His foot pressed harder, grinding down.

I prayed for somebody to save me as he ground his foot down, forcing shrieks of agony from me.

It made him laugh. “Your petty gods cannot help. And ah, such delicious irony, the Hooded God certainly would never help you of all people, for he is your beloved mentor Byzant ascended to take Artha’s place.” His foot lifted for a few moments, “I know his betrayal hurts, I can feel it’s delicious pain in you. It is his forte, however. You have no idea of the number of magi he killed on his path to ascension and the search for Artha’s god-seed.” The god chuckled and his foot slammed back down. “The ignorant, arrogant fool. He did not understand that to be a god of this accursed place is to be its servant and prisoner. I hope he is enjoying being chained in the darkness below. Now, what shall I do with you, hmm?”

Coughing, I tried to plead for mercy. “I–”

Crack, my spine shattered under his foot. My legs went numb. I blacked out.

Brutal healing ripped through my body.

“Not yet,” Nathair growled. His exhaustion was a palpable force emanating from his ruined body. “Let us just make sure we have scoured every shred of knowledge from you, then your indoctrination as my servant can begin.” He plunged his fingers into my chest and teased out a rib. I screamed as he snapped it between two fingers. Healing power gushed into me again as he tossed the shards of rib at my face. “You will not need that.”

He suddenly wavered, shaking his head groggily. He staggered back and barely caught his balance. “What did you burn from my mind? I will find out one way or another.”

Clumsy mental probes battered into me again, deeper and deeper, but I wasn’t in any condition to try to resist. It wasn’t easy for him. Even without conscious thought, the core of my mind was a devious, cruel creature. I’d long ago taken precautions against the very talent that I knew best. He wouldn’t enslave me easily. The weakened god groaned and sagged against the wall as the mental effort of twisting his power into my peculiar path took its toll. I tried to stand, to run, but my shaking legs refused to bear my weight. I flopped to the floor, screaming, arms clamped to butchered side and broken back that hadn’t fully healed yet.

“I see a part of your brain has been destroyed to keep the answers from me,” he said. “Those memories I cannot obtain, but I am confident we can piece together enough fragments from your dead flesh to grant me some answers.”

“Please,” I said, defeated and out of options. Whatever last desperate hope I’d stashed in the merchant’s chair was out of my reach. I’d failed and he knew it. “No more. I… I’ll talk. Tell you everything you want to know. Please…”

“Of course you will,” Nathair said, smiling at my abject defeat. Like all gods, he loved to feel superior. “The oh-so-witty little mortal reduced to this quivering slime. Pathetic. But you will still serve me well.” He limped over to the fine merchant’s chair opposite whilst worrying at the very last bastions of my mind. He collapsed into it, smirking, looking oh-so-regal.

The seat of the chair clicked, metal meeting metal.

Understanding hit us at the same moment. I realized what that burnt-out memory had been, and he was in my head, could see it all in my mind’s eye: the seat pressing down on the brass cone, the nose clicking, setting off the alchemic bomb I’d stashed inside.

His hatred stabbed into me. “You little–”

A wall of blood and flesh smashed into me. The world went silent. I bounced across the floor in a cloud of dust and grit, the flesh of my back shredded and burning. The back wall collapsed in eerie silence, stones noiselessly careering across the floor. The entire upper storey and roof of the building was missing.

I blinked away dusty tears, utterly confused that I was still alive. Of the Thief of Life’s ravaged body, nothing solid remained. A lightning storm raged in the space where he’d been sitting, bolts of incandescent energy arcing inwards to a single point of blinding light where his heart had been. The storm spun around a shard of glimmering crystal, spiralling ever faster inwards until it met a single point of brilliance that eclipsed that of the Magash Mora’s crystal core. His god-seed.

Slowly, sound began to filter back. The building creaked and groaned around me, the cracking of wood and stone, pitter-patter of fragments of ceiling, the drip-drip-drip of blood and minced godflesh, the fizz and crackle of lightning. Fires kindled of their own volition mid-air, churning upwards in spinning vortices.

Blood and god-mush oozed around the floor with a queer life of its own, began blindly flowing back towards the crystal. He was not finished yet and his body yearned to rejoin the god-seed.

My Gift flailed away inside, desperately trying to repair all the damage to my body. I shook, god-blood drenched skin sparking with unfocused power. My body sucked it in like a sponge. Too much power. It filled me, stretched me, threatened to tear me apart. My Gift didn’t have a hope of containing it: I wasn’t a damn god!

Somehow I managed to sit up and find my voice. I sang, a very particular rhythm vomiting forth as a wail of hatred. What was left of Nathair writhed in agony, but I refused to stop. Artha’s gift to me was revenge for the murder of Lynas. I made it to my knees, then after an age up onto my feet. I kept singing as I hobbled towards the incandescent light hanging in the air before me.

I reached the god-seed before Nathair.

The storm of magic ceased. Just for a moment, I wielded all the power of a god. It was mine and mine alone. The remnants of Nathair exploded, motionless puddles dribbling down into the earth. Was he dead? Perhaps; I felt no thought left in it.

I sensed four muted presences far below my feet, buried deep under the black rock of Setharis. They felt familiar, almost like kin. The gods called me to them and my feet began sinking through the rubble. No! Whatever they were, they were no kin of mine. “I hope you are in torment, Byzant.” Gritting my teeth, I opened my tattered coat and forced my hand to drop the god-seed into the deep inside pocket, then collapsed like a puppet with its strings severed as strange presences and godly power both cut off.

I wanted to scream and kill, or to curl up and hide, maybe both. The Worm of Magic whispered desperate seductions but my despair was too complete to bother listening.

I was giddy with power and pain, my back crying out in distress. I was a wreck, and despite being full to bursting with stolen power it would take a long time to fully heal, if I ever did. Magical healing was not the same as never having been hurt. It might take years for my shattered bones to knit properly, and missing ribs did not re-grow. Still, I was alive and finally free of my daemons. I could share Charra’s last days.

Black shards of Dissever lay half-buried in the debris. I tried to pick one up with my left hand, but it dropped from trembling fingers. I clenched it into a fist and used my right, needles of black iron still buried in the flesh. Nothing but cold and lifeless iron in my hand, but the daemon’s presence still lingered at the back of my mind. At the moment it tasted content, with perhaps a smidgeon of pride. Godslayer, it whispered.

I limped towards a hole in the wall as the building crumbled around me. It was a strange feeling to be myself again, without disparate parts locked away and hidden in the darkened catacombs of my mind. But there was a hole burnt in my brain that would never heal, and aside from my left hand only time would tell what other problems that would cause. I staggered from the warehouse and it collapsed behind me. Lynas’ home crashed down to rubble.

“I got the bastards, Lynas. I got them. You did it, you saved us. If you hadn’t burnt down that temple and destroyed all that mageblood we’d all be worse than dead.” Tears welled up in my eyes. It was over and Lynas’ body was finally at rest, but I couldn’t let go. Some of my memories had been damaged or destroyed by the god’s brutal invasion of my mind, and more thanks to my own desperation. I felt their loss as much as you can without really knowing what you were missing, but other memories had been fully restored, fresh as ever and swimming about in my head. In a way that was far worse – it was like losing Lynas all over again.

I sat on the rubble, throat cracked and raw from screaming, stomach gnawing and empty, and looked up at the rock of the Old Town, where high up through the pall of smoke the five gods’ towers remained silent. With Nathair gone I had half-expected four of them to explode back into life at any moment.

Inside my pocket, power called, and if I wanted, one of those towers could be mine. Honestly, right then I’d have happily traded it for a smoke, a jack of cold ale and a hot roast chicken.