The Traitor God

Chapter 7

The Warrens was not a place to venture at night, not unless you were suicidal or had a full gang at your back. Charra led the way, a lantern illuminating the narrow winding paths between buildings. Normally this would be the height of idiocy, something that would end up with you being bundled into a doorway with a knife at your throat. Not tonight. Not for us. The closer we came to where Lynas was murdered, the hotter my anger burned. I wanted somebody to step out and try something, to give me an excuse. My head was thumping and Lynas’ death was an unbearable itch deep in my blood and bones, one I couldn’t scratch. If any would-be thieves got in my way tonight then they would end up smeared across the walls of their mouldering homes.

Lynas and I had shared a Gift-bond, something that would have had me imprisoned if the Arcanum ever discovered we’d broken that age-old taboo. Nobody liked their heads being messed with, magi least of all, and in the dawn days of human history those with my rare Gift had carried the darker name of tyrant, and enslaved magi and mageborn through an enforced Gift-bond, a permanent linking of magical Gifts that allowed the tyrant unfettered access to their minds. But I wasn’t them, hadn’t enslaved people, and didn’t deserve the black looks other magi aimed my way – well, not for that reason anyway. As a full blown magus I could have mentally forced Lynas to do as I wished, but I never had, and never would. Lynas and I had been true friends and it had been no burden to bear, nor a thing to fear between the two of us. Instead it was something beautiful. We could always find each other in a crowd or come to the other’s aid when they were hurting. He shared my confidence and resilience and I his hope and conscience, while still respecting the privacy of his deeper thoughts. There was nothing we wouldn’t have done for each other.

Charra spent the time telling me all she knew of the Skinner murders, and bringing me up to date with notable events of the last ten years. I already knew that Krandus had become the new Archmagus after my mentor Byzant’s disappearance – him being the most powerful person in the world made that sort of knowledge widespread – but it was difficult to get specific details way out in the hinterlands. I was in mixed minds about Krandus’ ascension. I’d never warmed to the man: far too cold and controlled, too inhuman to be likable, not like Byzant at all.

I actually stumbled over my own feet when Charra told me that Cillian Hastorum had recently joined the Inner Circle of the Arcanum and was now one of the seven most powerful people in all Setharis, and the world.

Charra savoured my reaction. “Probably shouldn’t have been such a rotten cur to her, huh?”

You couldn’t argue with that. We’d had a “thing” once, Cillian and I, back when we had both been lowly initiates. She’d been slumming it so far beneath her lofty station when by rights I should have only been visible with an eyeglass. It never would have worked out between us. At least, that’s what I told myself. After we went through the final rite of the Forging and were acknowledged as proper magi, it had quickly become clear that she was better off without a wretch like me dragging her down. People had a bad habit of getting hurt around me.

“You two fought like cat and corvun,” Charra added. “And as I recall, she usually won.” All that earned was a grunt from me.

We approached a group of grubby youths, mostly girls from what I could tell, huddled in a doorway that stank of the heady aroma of sour wine and piss. Scarified smiles running up their cheeks marked them as Smilers, a street gang that had been in Setharis as long as anybody could remember, and with magi that was a very long time indeed. Their initiation ritual was to stick a blade into a supplicant’s mouth and cut up at either side to give them a permanent smile. Nobody ever left the Smilers breathing, not unless they could find their way out of Setharis to some godsforsaken hole that didn’t know what the scar-sign meant.

It would have been nice to think that my glower was enough to scare them off but they barely looked at me, their predator eyes fastening on Charra. The girls ceased lounging against the walls and slunk forward to meet us. Damn the Night Bitch, if they wanted a fight I was happy to oblige.

My hand slipped beneath my coat, wrapped around Dissever’s hilt. Its hunger was infectious. Bloodlust bubbled up inside me and I felt a manic grin growing.

Their demeanours changed as we drew closer. They smiled – a disturbing sight – in genuine pleasure.

“Hey Charra-doll,” the oldest girl said, a tall youth with bone hoops through her ears, eyebrow, and nostril. “What you two be doin’ down the Warrens tonight?”

A stocky girl with greasy hair and a pockmarked face favoured me with a lewd grin. “You lookin’ for a little somethin’-somethin’?” She flicked her cut-throat razor open and closed. “I likes ’em rough.” She took a pull from a jug of wine, belched, and then looked me up and down in such a filthy, lecherous way that it made my skin crawl. Was this how women felt when drunken arses like me leered at them?

Charra rolled her eyes. “Not tonight, Tubbs, him is with me.” Her accent dipped back into the rough patois of the Warrens. I was sure the girl’s sort of “play” would not be my idea of fun. Charra turned to bone-face. “Hey, Rosha, good to see ya. Me and him got business down Bootmaker’s Wynd.”

Smiles died and hands dropped to hidden weapons. They shuffled a little closer together. “Bad business that,” Rosha bone-face said. “Not the Blinders or the Scuttlers either. That was magic, that was.” She shrugged, then looked me up and down, sneering. “Sure this piece o’ shit enough fer you, Charra-doll? Doesn’t seem like much of a man. He couldn’t make ye scream, so how’s about we make him a woman fer’ye? With that arse he’d look good in a dress. Shame about the face.” The Smilers broke out in raucous laugher.

The urge to ram Dissever into her guts flooded through me, to plunge it into soft flesh and slowly work my way up. I prised my fingers off the hilt. The desire to kill faded. Mostly.

Instead of gutting her I smirked, prodding her in the chest, skin to skin. “You shut your flapping fish-hole,” I said. “You’ll never be half the man your mother was.”

Her instant of confusion was all I needed to slip magic into her through the skin contact, minimising the danger of detection by any sniffer who might be passing, as vanishingly unlikely as that was in the Warrens at night. Her mind opened up to my Gift like a ripe corpse swollen with gas. It wasn’t all rot though. Far from it.

She slapped my hand away and squared up to me, thrusting her chest out and her shoulders back as she stared me straight in the eye and stepped in close, knife in hand, preening in front of her gang.

I leaned in so nobody else could hear. “Haven’t told them where you get the coin for all that extra food, have you? Working side jobs with bent wardens is bad for the reputation. And my, my, rutting with him too. How do you think that will go down?”

She went still for a second and then backed off with a flicker of fear blooming in her eyes. “Who are you, man?”

“I’m nobody worth knowing,” I said with a shrug.

Charra snorted. “We don’t have time to spend jawing with you lot.” She grabbed my sleeve and pulled me onwards past the gang. “Be seeing you later, girls.”

As we neared our destination, that nagging, throbbing itch in blood and bones progressed into a full-blown body-ache, my head pain into piercing agony. My hands shook as I trailed fingers down the grimy wooden walls of the buildings lining Bootmaker’s Way. The smell of leather lingered in the air even though the dozens of small workshops had closed their shutters hours ago.

Finally she stopped. “This is the place.” Her eyes glistened, but I knew she wouldn’t cry. Charra had used up a lifetime’s worth of tears long ago. She once said that an ocean of tears had never solved anything for her, and that a stolen knife in the dark of a grubby backroom had. Over the years she had hunted down everybody that had once harmed her. She had blood on her hands, but then so did I.

We were two blocks away from the main thoroughfare of Fisherman’s Way. Lynas had been so near to safety.

The psychic pain coming through the Gift-bond was like a red hot nail driven into my brain. Lynas’ fear and agony was still imprinted on the very stones all around me. As I moved down the narrow street the muscles in my arm abruptly spasmed, a line of searing pain shooting down it. “This is the spot. Lynas was murdered here.” She nodded. This long after the event, there was nothing physical to show that a good man had died here, his hopes and dreams of a life full of love shattered.

I knelt on the cobbles and pressed my forehead to cold stone. The vision tore through me again. Panic. Burning need to warn people. Crystalline daemons. A hooded man in black shadow. The gods blinded and chained. I couldn’t breathe. Oh gods – the scalpel! I think I screamed as the scalpel cut skin from my flesh, then delved deeper to sever ligament and crunch through cartilage, and not because the murderer had to, but because they were enjoying it. The garbled details of the message Lynas had sent sharpened into brutal clarity. In incredible agony and terror he had tried to tell me something specific by sending the image of Harailt slamming a steel gate in our faces, locking us in the Boneyards. It was something more than merely bringing me home.

His last panicked gasp rattled in my chest, heart slowing.

I felt him die.

Panic tore me from the vision and sent me hurtling back into the present. I awoke face down and drooling, curled up on the ground and shaking uncontrollably. So this was the other reason that magi didn’t form Gift-bonds. The pain had relented but the mental scarring caused by Lynas’ death remained. Charra’s hands were holding me tight. “Hush,” she said softly. “It’s over. It’s over now. You’re safe.” I don’t know how long I lay there in her arms, recovering what wits I had left. Eventually, inevitably, the fear left and anger flooded in to replace it. I growled and forced myself up.

With a cry of rage I stormed up the alley, stopping every so often to run my hands over the walls and ground, sensing the faint residue of Lynas’ terror through the Gift-bond. I paused, eyes closed, sniffing for the psychic spoor of his fear. Charra followed in silence, holding the lantern aloft to light my path. My eyes opened again and I could picture it all in my mind. A crossroads. There – an otherness. Gouges in the cobbles. My fingers pressed into sharp indentations.

“What have you found?” Charra said.

“A shard beast was here.”

She looked at me blankly.

“Crystalline daemons from one of the Far Realms.”

She looked worried, “How can these things be here without anybody noticing? I thought the thick Shroud in Setharis made that impossible. What kind of magus could circumvent that?”

I felt sick talking about it, the memory of Lynas’ terror still too fresh, but she deserved answers. “No magus would resort to such a thing. We have more than enough power to kill already. No, I suspect a mageborn did this. Blood magic offers a torrent of power their own stunted Gift could never provide. I just don’t know how they managed it.”

Only a few magi had the talent, knowledge, and enough power to try to replicate such black rituals, and I had only ever seen the great Archmagus Byzant call up such things, under controlled conditions in an Arcanum enclave far from the city. In Setharis the Shroud was preternaturally resistant to such meddling so this blood sorcerer had to wield immense power. Daemons and spirits did not survive for long in Setharis: the very air of the place ate into them like acid. Many credited our gods with this protective boon, but not even the greatest of Arcanum scholars had ever gleaned the truth of the matter. Tiny, mindless plague-spirits were the only exception, breeding in the teeming masses of humanity faster than they died off. With so many people crammed inside the city walls the diseases those spirits caused were everywhere. Lucky for Magi that our Gift made us all but immune.

Like most people, Charra only understood about half of it. The unGifted couldn’t sense the magic all around and I pitied them for it, but I envied them too – they would never suffer that gnawing need to use it.

She followed as I retraced Lynas’ panicked flight through the slums, until, finally, I lost his trail. I skidded to a stop, snarled, pounded my fist against a wall so hard the old wood crunched inwards. Even with the Gift-bond his trail had faded beyond my ability to track, merging with other people’s thoughts into a hiss of emotion.

I spun to face her. “Where did he come from that night? His murderer said that the gods had been blinded and chained – how was it even possible that gods and sniffers both didn’t sense the foul corruption of daemons roaming Setharis that night? Unless what he said was true, or somebody or something was able to hide them.”

Charra shook her head. “We couldn’t find out. Nobody saw a thing. A few people heard shouts for help, but who in their right mind would go outside to see what was happening in the Warrens at night? Nobody knows anything about his murder, or if they do, they won’t talk, not even to me.”

I returned to where the hooded man had flung Lynas to the cobbles and examined the scratches on the wall. Lynas had thought the magus was alone loitering in the shadows, but then Lynas hadn’t known what to look for. I knew the unnatural nature of that darkness only too well, the obsidian fangs and hidden slits of green eyes. Lynas had been murdered by the very same man that had hunted me for years. And after running into one of his pets in Ironport I now had no doubt he was in league with the Skallgrim.

“When I find that hooded man,” I said, “however powerful he is, however rich and influential, he will die slow and he will die hard. I’ll take my time with him.” I paused, a dreadful suspicion bubbling up inside me. “Charra, tell me about the gods.”

Her face had gone ashen. “There are rumours amongst the priests that all their gods are missing.” She looked up at the soaring towers of the gods, to where magic should have been lighting up the night sky, to where there was only darkness. “The fifth god. The new one that took residence in the vacant tower after you left. It’s said that he wears dark robes with a hood always pulled over his face. People have taken to calling him the Hooded God. You don’t think…” She shook her head. “But no, it could be anybody wearing robes. Couldn’t it?”

My hand was on Dissever’s hilt. It was hungry. More! More! it howled in my mind.

I grinned a death-head’s grin. You’ll get your fill, Dissever. If it’s this new god then I’ll destroy him. I don’t know how, but I will find a way. And if it’s not this Hooded God, then I promise to bury you in somebody else’s guts.

“Maybe,” I said to Charra. “But what else could possibly explain the other gods being blinded and chained? God or not, I’ll find this hooded walking corpse and make him pay.”

“We, Walker,” she said coldly. “We will.”

Yes, it was better to follow Charra’s example and calm down. I let go of Dissever and felt that boiling bloodlust diminish not one bit, because this time it was all my own emotions. I took a deep breath and forged my red hot anger into a cold and deadly fury.

“What do you need?” she asked, face calm and collected. That was the old Charra all right, all business. She would mourn in private later, but first she would do what needed doing.

“He had been snooping around somewhere, I’m sure of it, and then something made him flee for his life. The question is: what was he up to that night, and where?” And what had Lynas been trying to tell me? I had a horrible feeling it involved the labyrinthine Boneyards, the deep darkness below the city streets.

Our eyes met and I held Charra’s gaze. “Lynas was terrified of him beyond reason, but he had discovered something he feared far more, something he deemed worth spending his life to expose.”

Charra looked away, not wanting to show how distraught she was. “If he discovered something he shouldn’t, then perhaps the hooded man decided to clean house by killing Lynas’ assistants. I’ll trawl through my reports and find details of everybody else who went missing around the same time. If I mark them all on a map then perhaps that will give us some clue. Lynas wasn’t involved in anything terribly illegal. Oh, he wasn’t exactly whiter-than-white; he dabbled in some grey trading and a little smuggling, but he mostly kept to the spirit of the law. He was doing well and had been talking about buying new premises over in Westford to be closer to us.”

My mouth was dry. I felt a shiver ripple up my spine. “Smuggling?” I said, a nagging feeling at the back of my mind. “What sort of goods?”

Charra’s eyes narrowed. “Nothing too unusual. He had official permits to import expensive foreign alcohols, but he also dabbled in small shipments of luxury goods from the continent: spices, silks, tapestries, carvings, furniture, herbs, some from less than official sources. Why?”

I rubbed a hand across my jaw, the bristles rasping. “Not sure. After that vision, when you said smuggling it just felt right. A hunch perhaps.” Or a feeling he’d left me.

“I did look into it,” she said. “But I couldn’t find anything to connect the murder to his business. Perhaps you can convince others to talk, the sort that would never willingly help me. You have unique talents.”

I nodded. “First, I need to pay a visit to his home, his offices and warehouse, whatever property he has… sorry, that he had. I need to do it alone, I can’t afford distractions.” And I had to keep her away from me, for her own safety.

“The place is all locked up under Arcanum wards, but with your weird ways perhaps you can get in where I failed. Lynas lived above his warehouse in Carrbridge. Head up Fisherman’s Way and head over the bridge, take the left fork onto Coppergate Road and it’s the second warehouse on the left. I’m not sure what more you can find though, the wardens already carted off all his papers for investigation.”

So, Carrbridge, was it? As it turned out I hadn’t been entirely lying to that gate guard.

I tsked. “You are probably correct. Can you arrange to sneak me into the Old Town, and into the Templarum Magestus tomorrow? I expect they will have taken all of Lynas’ ledgers and scrolls to the Courts of Justice.”

“Will that be safe?” she said.

“Probably not. But I’ll manage. You know how sneaky I can be.” She looked dubious. Actually I was almost pissing myself just thinking about it. The tunnels of the Boneyards aside, the Old Town was the last place I wanted to be.

“Very well,” she said. “I had Old Gerthan look them over already but perhaps you can see something he did not. I’ll call in another favour and get you in tomorrow, around noon most likely. There’s an inn down by Pauper’s Gate that opens late, you might remember it as a pub called the Bitter Nag. If you lodge there I’ll send a message when it’s arranged.”

“Good, I’m just hoping that Lynas was still using his old cipher.” She quirked an eyebrow so I elaborated: “We used to exchange secret notes as initiates. There is a small chance that he might have left a message before he headed out that night, just in case the worst happened.” I shook my head, trying to clear some of Lynas’ confusion and terror still lingering after the vision. “I don’t think he had any idea it would be that dangerous, but I still have to check.”

My dried drool and blood crusted the sleeve of her coat. I was one suave and sexy man alright. I held out a hand. “Sorry, but I’ll need to take your coat. Just in case anything out there comes across my scent on you.” Some things I was not willing to risk. It was unlikely that shadow cats could survive in Setharis, but with shard beasts on the loose and their master prowling the streets she was better cold than cold and stiff and dead.

She set her lantern down and slipped off the coat, handed it over without complaint. “I’ll grab something off one of the Smilers.”

“Will you be safe out on your own?” I said, worried. “This is the Warrens after all.”

She snorted and picked up the lantern. “Walker, we girls stick together. Too many men think they can own us, and sometimes they’ll only take a rusty blade to the balls for an answer. In any case, my girls keep their ears to the ground, their lips sealed, and their blades handy.”

She reached out to touch my face, stopped, slowly drew her hand back. “I’m more worried about you.” She didn’t want more of my scent on her but the gesture was still touching. The only other affection I’d seen in the past ten years had been bought and paid for, or from fleeting drunken fumbles.

“I have always held myself back,” I said, looking up at the strip of stars visible between looming buildings and banks of thick cloud. “Never really felt the need to stretch my limits. I didn’t have any cause to take such risks, you know?” Apart from my mastery of mind magic I could also grant myself a little extra strength and speed and manipulate the air currents in small ways. It was difficult and gruelling, but doable. Would it prove enough? I scowled. “No more holding back.” My eyes fell back to Setharis, back to Charra’s dark eyes. I drew Dissever and the black iron blade squirmed in my hand, eager to kill.

“You don’t need to worry about me, Charra. Not tonight. It’s everybody else that needs to be worried.” After reliving Lynas’ agony I needed to be alone with my grief. It went far deeper than mourning for a friend. He was a part of me torn away, leaving only a gaping wound. I was dangerously unbalanced, so what did I do? What I always did: I went looking for trouble.