The Traitor God

Chapter 3

We spent five days hugging the Dragon Coast south, battered by huge waves and howling winds. Racked by hunger and constant vomiting, huddled up with the other refugees in that sodden and cramped cargo hold, I was desperate to be back on dry land. Only one more day confined in darkness.

I shuddered and tried not to think of the walls closing in on me, the darkness swallowing me once again – it was only a ship. Only a ship. I could escape into the open air above deck if I really wanted, and I only had to keep out of sight of the pyromancer and pretend to be nothing more than a meek little merchant for one more day, for Lynas. Haunted by feverish dreams of his murder, I endured the waking claustrophobia and dwelled on happier days, to when I’d last had hope.

The previous Archmagus of the Arcanum, Byzant, had taken me under his wing and helped me come to terms with the trauma of being buried alive beneath tons of stone and left for dead, thanks to that arrogant vermin Harailt of High House Grasske who had thought himself so much nobler than a poverty-stricken Docklands pup like myself. He trapped Lynas and I in the Boneyards below the city and left us to rot, sniggering into silken sleeves all the while. Lynas managed to get out. I did not. I’d have died there in the crushing darkness if Lynas hadn’t fetched help, if he’d not found Byzant to haul me back out into the light. They had both saved me in more ways than one.

Byzant had been the head of the entire Setharii empire, with hundreds of magi and noble High Houses under his command and a thousand tasks needing done every day, and yet somehow he’d made the time to mentor me when I’d needed it most.

Those had been the happiest years of my life, running the streets with Lynas and Charra. So many wild nights of drunken truths and raucous laughter with the very best company the world had to offer, touring the disreputable taverns of the city and drinking them dry, dreaming those golden days would never end. I had felt fulfilled doing tasks for Byzant to earn my Arcanum stipend and I’d had friends, a life, and a purpose. The old magus had been like a second father to me, and now he too was dead, reported missing only days after I’d fled the city.

The happier days turned to ash and all I was left with was trying to recall everything about the deal I’d made. As much as I had tried to remember during the voyage, all magic and mental trickery had failed. The locks on my mind remained solid. I would need levers to help crack them open, reminders from the old days. I swallowed, fearful of the atrocity I had been involved in all those years ago.

An age passed in that darkness, worrying at the holes in my memory, until rattling chains announced our ship had dropped anchor. The human cargo crawled up onto the deck, blinking against the burning dawn light.

Pauper’s Docks, the arse-end of Setharis. The air reeked, every sewer and stream in the city spewing out into the harbour our decrepit old coast-hugger was anchored in, almost a million bowels emptied daily. That thought forced me to lean over the side and retch, adding my vomit to the grey scum of shite, rubbish, and fish guts; if anything, it felt like I’d just made the sea a bit cleaner. Bloody ships. If I’d sailed for Ahram I might have died! My Clansmen cousins had the right idea in sticking to their hills and mountains in the rugged north. No mountain had ever rocked and pitched underfoot and made me empty my guts onto the ground… well, not while I’d been sober anyway. I tried to ignore my nausea, to focus instead on the familiar sooty stench of humanity crowded together inside the black granite walls of the ancient city. It smelled like home.

Autumn was waning and the broken moon, Elunnai, was swollen in the sky, every wound on her shattered face visible to the naked eye. One of her tears fell streaking across the sky, then another. It was an omen of bad luck for the tears to fall before winter had even begun, an occurrence that agitated water spirits in the Sea of Storms and caused the unusually vicious waves that had threatened to batter our ship to kindling against the rocks of the Dragon Coast and the hidden reefs around Lepers’ Isle. It heralded a harsh winter and the seas would soon grow far worse, not long left before the storms blew in and all sea travel ceased until late spring for anything other than great Setharii carracks protected by coteries of hydromancers.

Dusty memories woke and stirred. Ten years! It felt like another life. A part of me felt pleased to be home, despite the reason. A murderous grin slid across my face. Somebody had killed Lynas, and now they would burn for it.

Setharis hadn’t changed one bit. Looking bored and miserable in the rain, wardens in rusty chain hauberks and burgundy tabards patrolled city walls slick with slime and moss, while beyond the smog-wreathed slums of the lower city the high and mighty swanned about in the lofty gothic palaces of the Old Town, high on its volcanic crag. The gleaming golden spires of the Templarum Magestus and the Collegiate, centres of Arcanum power, reared above every other building – well, those built by human hands anyway. From amongst the gargoyle-flocked buttresses and steeples of the merely rich and powerful, the five unearthly towers of the gods – slick black, almost organic-looking – jutted from the heart of the rock, twisting around each other like enormous snakes, so high they seemed to pierce the sky. Coronas of raw magic usually crackled from their spires, but now the gods’ towers stood as lifeless as any other lump of stone. The air felt subtly different, the heavy magical presence of the gods was missing. Another bad omen.

I grabbed the burly arm of a passing deckhand. “The towers – when did they go quiet?”

He refused to look up, “Few months back. Same day the earth tremors began.” He pulled his arm free and scurried off to avoid the topic, fingers tracing symbols to ward off evil.

I stared at the towers and recalled a fragment of the vision: Lynas’ murderer had said our gods were blind and chained. But what could do that to beings who could incinerate entire towns with the flick of a finger? Not that these towers were the homes of what other peoples would consider actual gods, mind – primitive worship of natural spirits that gained power from devout worship wasn’t tolerated in Setharis – but assuming a powerful magus survives that long, assuming they don’t burn out or give in to the Worm’s seductions and get put down like a rabid dog, then when they grow old and addicted enough you might as well call them a god for all the humanity left in them. Our gods had been human once.

The elder magi of the Arcanum stood far above the rank and file in power and skill, even as a magus like me stood above the lesser Gifted: the sniffers, hedge witches and street illusionists, unable to ever wield true power without burning their minds to a crisp. Then there were mageborn like Lynas, those whose Gifts never matured and opened up to the magic; mostly all those poor bastards got was good health, or some extra strength and speed as magic slowly dripped into them like water leaking through a cracked pipe. If their Gifts allowed them a drip of magic, I was a stream and the elders a swollen waterfall. And as the elders were to the lowly mageborn, so were our gods to the elders.

Our legends claim that long before the rise of ancient Escharr, the five Setharii gods had been mighty elder magi before they ascended. There was more to it than mere age and skill however, there was a secret to their ascension – I was sure of it; and just as sure that the answer was firmly locked away deep inside my head. My exile had begun the night a god died and that was no coincidence.

Any elder magi I’d ever met were obscenely powerful, deeply knowledgeable, and they always had to be right. They were much like inveterate drunks, their tolerance of magic increasing as the years went by to match their inflating egos. I didn’t think our gods any different. Derrish, Lady Night, The Lord of Bones, Artha the dead god of war, and even my patron Nathair, the Thief of Life – arrogant and self-centred pricks the lot of them, a veritable treachery of gods, though Nathair was better than all the rest. I shuddered at this line of thought. It was an unsettling subject for me, given what was locked away inside my head. Whatever happened back then, I was sure I was in the right. But for a magus certainty always merited scrutiny.

That’s the thing with magic: it erases your doubts and replaces it with a sense of your own magnificence. It seems to me that the more powerful you get, the more certain you are that your opinion is the only one that really matters. Almost every powerful magus I’d ever met had disappeared up their own arse long ago. Bugger that for a game of soldiers. Me, I was content to be a nobody.

A hand thumped down onto my shoulder. “All passengers off,” the captain said, his breath reeking of cheapest dockhouse rum. My grin dissolved back into a mask of queasy suffering as he spun me round and shoved me towards the gangplank where the rest of the refugees were massing.

I bobbed my head like a meek little merchant, then held a hand to my mouth as my stomach gave another lurch. “Thank you, Captain, thank you,” I said, my voice cloying with false humility as I shuffled over to join the others standing in the rain, as far away from the pyromancer as I could manage. Acting was all about the look in the eyes and the body language: most people didn’t realize how much they picked up, or just how much they gave away. It wasn’t magic but it could bloody well seem like it.

We clustered together at the gap in the rails, swaying on that nauseating, pitching deck while dockhands grabbed flung ropes and tied them to iron rings set into huge stone blocks. The wait was aggravating. I itched to get inside those walls and hunt down the man who murdered Lynas.

Our captain had been subtly persuaded not to pay good coin to berth his leaky old boat at the secure and guarded quays of Westford Docks, instead dropping anchor on the east of the city, amidst fishing boats and single-masted cogs offloading untreated wool, raw hides and other low-profit goods. This side of the city was more suitable for my needs: the guards cheaper to bribe and the sniffers a lot less competent. Back in my day, it was seen as a punishment posting, and I doubted much had changed in my absence.

An aura of utter disbelief still hung about the refugees. Only five days ago they had watched Ironport burn, seen their livelihoods destroyed and their family and friends slaughtered. In the space of an hour they had lost everything but their lives. Some whispered horrific stories of witnessing the Skallgrim shaman summoning daemons and allowing them to gorge on living human flesh.

Strictly speaking Ironport was a member of the Free Towns alliance and no longer part of the crumbling Setharii empire, but blood sorcery was an abomination, and I wondered if even the eternally bickering magi of the Arcanum political elite would be forced into taking action. After all, it was the lust for that vile power that caused the fall of the ancient empire of Escharr – the mightiest empire the world had ever known – and plunged humanity into a dark age of slaughter. Sorcerers had sacrificed untold thousands to sate their addiction to magic. The Arcanum had to recognize the danger the Skallgrim now posed.

Still, in my experience the councillors of the Arcanum would probably debate such hefty and urgent matters for years while the bureaucrats of the Administratum, the heads of the High Houses, and the high priests of the gods quietly ran the lesser affairs of the city: the likes of road and well maintenance, trade fees, crime and fire and plague prevention. A mageocracy like the Setharii Empire was probably not the most efficient of governments, but nobody else could ever dream of controlling the hundreds of Gifted throughout the empire. Without the Arcanum we would still be living in muddy huts and small villages like the Skallgrim, a mass of squabbling tribes loosely controlled by Gifted shaman wearing bits of dead animals on their heads and shouting at spirits. The Arcanum was a necessary evil. Now if only a god would show up and kick their arses into action, as they did on rare occasions when they deemed it important enough – even the mighty Arcanum dared not disobey the gods.

A yellow-robed priest of Derrish, the Gilded God claimed as the figurehead of Setharii commerce for obscure historical reasons I couldn’t care less about, shuffled into line behind the pimple-faced pompous prick of a nobleman I’d taken to thinking of as Lord Arse due to the amount of absolute shite he talked. I watched the priest look back over the sea towards Ironport, his haggard face tightening as this jumped-up lordling of some minor house began spouting more crap about his family’s extensive holdings in Setharis, of how Ironport’s fall wasn’t a total loss for him.

As the gangplank thudded down onto the rain-slick jetty Lord Arse strode to the front of the queue, his two retainers pushing the riffraff out of his way. He began whining at a leather-faced sailor, demanding to be let off immediately. Nobility and all that. Then the Arcanum magus walked straight past him to the front of the queue. Lord Arse ground his teeth but gave way. He wasn’t brave or stupid enough to risk igniting the volatile temperament of a pyromancer. After five days of my baiting and mental conditioning this brat was taut as a bow-string and ready to snap. Perfect timing. I shuffled up behind him and smiled at his belt. The idiot had left his purse tied there in full view of any would-be thief; he would need to learn quickly in Setharis. I slipped a nasty little present into it.

There was no way of totally avoiding detection by the sniffer on guard duty, but I could direct their sight elsewhere. My poncy tailored clothes were all well and good, but even after ten years some of the sniffers on gate duty might still recognize the unique scent of my magic if we came face to face. Better to keep my head down and hide amongst the herd while they focused on some other well-deserving git.

Lord Arse glanced back, frowning, but his eyes slid right over me. To him I was a nobody, just another hollow-eyed and newly-paupered merchant from Ironport bewildered by recent events. Under that perfectly boring mask though, I smiled on the inside.

At a nod from the captain, the sailor began ushering us down the gangplank. The rain died off as we hustled along the jetty in a disorganized mass and slogged along the muddy track leading to Pauper’s Gate. It was a huge relief to have solid ground underfoot but my stomach still felt like it was pitching up and down. Weathered old men and women busy gutting fish paused to eye us dully as we passed their small shacks clustered around the warehouses. Drunken sailors crowded into makeshift drinking dens waved cups of grog and called us over for games of dice and the exchange of news. Some of the refugees drifted towards them; I suspected they’d wake up in the gutter the next morning, naked, penniless and feeling rough as a badger’s arse.

It was hard to imagine how this once-great city had looked when it had been the heart of an actual empire. All we had left was the southern half of Kaladon and a few far-flung colonies that drained coffers and barracks alike. The Free Towns had seceded before I’d been born, but some old folk still remembered, and lamented, that last gasp of imperial rule. Ancient gods of Setharis aside, the Arcanum’s elder magi were the only ones who remembered the city at the height of its power, before it became this lice-infested midden-heap.

Gulls wheeled above the docks, trailing in the wake of fishing boats offloading their hauls, screeching and cackling, diving down to fight over stinking piles of guts heaped outside the shacks. Unlike other ports, the gulls didn’t infest Setharis itself – the corvun saw to that. Akin to a cross between a sea eagle and giant crow, the corvun were the colour of deepest night, as vicious as debt collectors, and as cunning as any street urchin. They were found nowhere else in the world. One of the evil-eyed birds perched atop the fortified gatehouse we were making for, busy tearing chunks from a gull’s splayed belly. I glowered at a message daubed across the wall below it in bold red paint, barely legible: “Skinner’s gonna get you.”

Through the open gatehouse doorway, I glimpsed the wardens on guard duty yawning and rising from their benches, grabbing halberds to block the path. An Arcanum sniffer joined them, looking very grand in robes emblazoned with arcane symbols. That was half the battle with the subtle arts of suggestion: if somebody believed your power would work on them then self-suggestion dictated that it usually did. It was the difference between being confronted by a child waving a carrot and somebody dressed like an Arcanum magus pointing a sparking wand of glowing crystal at your face. One was far more likely to fuck you over than the other.

It took some blocking and shoving through the crowd to get ahead of Lord Arse. I ended up third in the queue for the gate, seeing no point attracting attention by being the first to be questioned and processed, and in any case that honour always belonged to magi. The pyromancer waved a parchment stamped with the wax seal of the Arcanum and walked straight past the guards to converse with the sniffer. They exchanged pleasantries while his papers were verified. The sniffer scrutinized him for traces of unfamiliar or dangerous magic and then waved him past. Ostensibly, nobody escaped their checks, not even the Archmagus himself, the head of the empire. It was far too dangerous to allow blood sorcerers or the magically-corrupted into the city, and any unregistered Gifted would be arrested and tried by the Arcanum unless they carried diplomatic papers from other lands. I could well imagine what they would do if they discovered a rogue magus like me standing before them.

The ragged young man next in line became irate as he argued about paying the gate tax. The guards were having none of it, told him to bugger off back to the docks and beg for work if he didn’t have the coin.

Just then the ground began to tremble, buildings creaking, the gatehouse doors and portcullis rattling their fixings. The guards glanced up at the wall as dust and stone chips rained down. It was over in a moment, but the ragged young man ahead of me took advantage of their distraction to make a run for Pauper’s Gate.

I winced as the ignorant fool darted past the sniffer towards the gatehouse. The guards didn’t even bother trying to stop him. The sniffer sighed and pressed the activation crystal set into the ring adorning his index finger. Ward glyphs carved into the stone archway sparked into life as magic fed into their patterns, flaring red as the man sprinted through.

The scream was brief and a smoking corpse dropped to the dirt, rags and hair burnt away. A grumbling, hungover guard dragged the blackened remains back out and booted it to one side, spitting on it for good measure. The corvun on the gatehouse ceased eating the gull and cocked its head, eying up fresh meat.

And then it was my turn to stand in front of the wardens on guard duty. I wrung my hands and did my best to look nervous and pathetic. “It is so good to be back on dry land again, sirs,” I said, sniffling and wiping at my nose. I reached out and shook the guard’s hand vigorously, pressing my last remaining silver coin into his palm. The coin disappeared into his pocket with a deftness equalling that of any thief or street magician I’d ever seen.

“I am here to meet my kin,” I said. “I am hoping they will have a job for me at the smithy after… after…” I made my eyes go glassy and distant.

“Which family?” the warden said, narrowing his eyes and studying my expensive green coat. “Might be I know them. That be Steffan’s smithy?”

I shook my head. There was no Steffan’s smithy in Setharis as far as I knew. It was an age-old trick. “I’m kin to Old Carthy living in an area called… Carrbridge, I think it was.”

The warden grunted. “Good luck with that then. Old Carthy is one mean old bastard.”

A nod and a smile for him, doing my best to look reassuringly bland. There wasn’t much I could do to hide the ragged scars marring my face, but I was doing my best to play the part of the spineless, boring merchant, and plenty other refugees bore scars and wounds of their own, albeit fresher. In many ways my scars were a better disguise than the fine coat I wore – for those in the city who had known my face ten years ago anyway. I’d ditched my tattered pack days ago to avoid any possible suspicion of smuggling, only keeping my coin pouch, loaded dice stuffed down the front of my trousers, and a set of lockpicks in my boot – just the essentials.

I paid the gate tax, scrawled “Reklaw” on the admittance scroll, and was waved onwards. “If you want Carrbridge,” the guard said, “take a right at Sailor’s Spire and head on up Fisherman’s Way. I’d avoid the alleyways just after the spire, friend, what with you dressed so fine. The scum have recently taken to loitering thereabouts – they will have you marked in no time.”

“Thank you, warden,” I said. It always helped to slip them a little something. How very useful for my purposes.

The sniffer was young, and not the ageless youth retained by some magi either but with a trace of puppy fat still on his bones, so I wasn’t worried about him recognising me. He was entirely disinterested in his job, which is what I’d been counting on. Their peculiar talent for scenting the unique flavours of magic aside, sniffers were only a little better than street magicians and hedge witches. Their main tasks were to identify Gifted children, detect a variety of magical corruptions, and most importantly, to sniff out any and all traces of vile blood sorcery. A sniffer would burn their Gift out or go insane if they tried to open themselves up to the amount of power a full magus could channel, and their magical dexterity – akin to a toddler playing a musical instrument next to a master bard – was distinctly lacking. Even if they’d had the raw power, they failed to feel the rhythms in the magic and thus were unable to twist it into the forms needed to carry out their will with precision. They were blunt tools of the Arcanum, but effective.

It was far from glorious work for a sniffer to be stuck on guard duty at Pauper’s Gate, where nothing interesting ever happened. I didn’t dare use my Gift to try to manipulate the sniffer’s mind into letting me pass through – even if I managed to stop him raising the alarm the moment he sensed my magic slipping into his head, in Setharis you could never be sure who, or what, else might be watching.

The sniffer was just about to raise his hands to sweep me for traces of magic when I sent the mental command that set off my little present inside Lord Arse’s coin pouch. Magic burst into the air behind me, thick and potent, and undetectable by the mundanes around us. The sniffer’s eyes went wide, flicking from me to Lord Arse. He waved me off and barrelled past, dismissing my cringing form as that of any other mundane merchant, exactly as I’d intended. “By the Night Bitch, beware! Gifted!” he shouted. Lord Arse reeked of my magic more than I did at the moment, making it an easy mistake to assume he was the source, at least for the next few minutes until the miasma dissipated. No harm done beyond broken bones, bruises, and a few hours of painfully invasive questioning.

Taut by my days of constant baiting, the foolish nobleman snapped and ordered his retainers to draw swords. The refugees scattered, shrieking as the wardens piled into the fight and the sniffer began running through his repertoire of disabling arts.

While they were distracted subduing the idiot I slipped through the gatehouse, fearful that – even here – my daemons might show up at any moment. I paused on the other side and took a deep breath.

I was home.