“Here goes,” I whispered.
There were people who thought that being a mage was all about talent. You were born a mage or you weren’t. If you had the talent, they would tell you, everything else was easy. The truth was more mundane. Yeah, you needed the ability, but on its own, talent was nothing. The hard bit was the training.
The first year of mage training sucked. Literally. The unfortunate trainee mage — me, to take a random example — spent every day learning to suck in the raw magic around them and release it again, over and over, until it became as automatic as breathing. When he (still me) had finally mastered it, he would move onto the really difficult part: shaping and transforming the raw magic into spells that actually did something.
That was why it took so long to become a mage. A trainee could spend years learning to shape magic through concentration and willpower, peering at (or listening to, smelling, touching, you take your pick) magic, then trying to replicate it, like building muscle memory, until it was instinctive, repeating the Hundred Key Forms (there were more than a hundred key forms; that was something they didn’t tell you, either, when you started), and then learning to combine the forms into ever more complicated structures.
The magic I needed to break the curse was one of the basic key forms. The Sharpness of the Sun, my tutors had called it. They did love their stupid names. Me, I called it a scalpel. It was a very fine, very sharp extrusion of magic perfectly controlled. Usually I wouldn’t worry too much about using careful work on a curse. A quick burst of magic, and it would be gone. But we were in Carnelian Silkstar’s palace. If I used more than a trickle, he would detect it, and we would be finished.
I licked my lips, drew in a tiny amount of raw magic, then reached out with the thinnest scalpel I could manage.
I wasn’t the most powerful mage out there, but to compensate, I had developed the kind of fine control that some more potent mages never did.
I was sweating, my hands were shaking from the tension, but I didn’t let the scalpel of magic waver as I slid it into the net and carefully sliced one of the strands of the curse.
For a moment the curse held, glistening whitely around the ledger. Then it collapsed, falling in on itself, and was gone.
I let out a breath, settling back on my heels. I had done it. No one had noticed. I started to grin.
And that was when the booby trap went off.
Chapter Three
For a moment, everything was black. Then sensation washed back over me like a storm wave crashing over the harbour wall. I was on the floor. It was hard, wet. My head pounded. Nausea clung to my throat.
“Get up! Get up, Nik, you stupid bastard!” The words struggled through the ringing in my ears.
Fuck! Why was I lying on the floor?
Even with my eyes squeezed shut, everything seemed to be swaying around me.
“Get up!” The voice came again, dull and distant.
I shifted, and bruises I didn’t know I had flared. The air smelled of smoke and burned lavender. My mouth was full of that taste of chalk and garlic that said someone had hit me with magic, and not too long ago.
I forced my eyes open.
A thin, weaselly, smoke-blackened face with a scraggly beard and moustache stared down at me from just a foot away.
“Benny,” I croaked, and turned my head away.
Now I could see why the marble floor felt so wet. I had thrown up on it. Or at least I hoped I had. If I was lying in someone else’s vomit, I was going to be really pissed off.
Benny grabbed my face and pulled it back around.
“What,” he said, carefully picking out every word, “the bleeding fuck was that?”
“I was hoping you would tell me,” I muttered. My voice sounded like footsteps crunching over seashells. I tried to moisten my mouth, but all I got was more of that chalky, sharp taste.
I levered myself up onto one elbow and peered around.
We were still in the library, or what was left of it. Books had been torn from the shelves and tossed across the marble and rugs. Red-painted shelves had toppled and splintered. The ceiling was shrouded in slowly coiling smoke. The wood-framed window had been blown out, showing the painfully bright sky beyond. Something was dripping down the walls. In the centre of the room, the heavy cedar desk looked like it had been stamped on by a giant foot. It had split and collapsed right across the middle. Scattered, charred papers surrounded it, along with fragments of black and red pottery.
I had broken the curse on the ledger and then… Then something had exploded. Something big and magical. Depths!
“Never mind.” Benny shook his head. I hoped I didn’t look half as cooked as he did. “We need to get out of here. Now. Half the city will have heard that.”
He was right. You wouldn’t have had to be sensitive to magic to feel the eruption. You’d just need a pair of ears. We needed to get out of here, or we were going to be in so much shit.
Grimacing, I pulled myself up.
Why in the all the Depths had I let Benny talk me into this? We were going to have words if we got out of here. Leaning on Benny’s scrawny shoulder, I staggered towards the door.
We were too late.
Just before we reached them, the doors burst open and a dozen guards piled in. Two of them were holding muskets, one a flintlock pistol, and the rest swords. All of them had their hands and faces smeared with thick, white Ash.
I felt the magic drain from the air around me.
Fuck, I thought. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. There really was no way this could have gone worse.
The Ash Guard had arrived.
To understand what was so terrifying about the Ash Guard, you had to understand magic, and to understand magic, you had to know where it came from.
When an animal’s body decayed — or a human body, for that matter — it leaked all sorts of disgusting smells and dubious liquids. It rotted. I had seen it, and it wasn’t nice. When a god died in the mortal realm, much the same happened, except that the stenches and oozing liquids from a rotting god’s body were what we called raw magic. It permeated the air and the ground and the water wherever a god was worshipped or feared, and where the god’s body lay. Those of us who could use that raw magic were called mages. This was the dirty little secret mages didn’t like to talk about. We were earthworms, dung beetles, tiny, unnamed, crawling, squirming microscopic organisms of the godly soil. We didn’t have magic of our own. We fed off the decaying effluent of dead gods.
It made the whole job sound a lot less glamorous.
The exact way we were able to gather and use raw magic, and why some people could do it and others couldn’t, nobody knew. Or, if they did, they weren’t telling me.
Now, imagine you had a city like Agatos, which had been around for thousands of years and which had seen countless gods rise and fall. Imagine you had a city full of mages who could wield the literal (if slightly rotting) power of the gods. Things could go to shit pretty quickly. I knew of at least seven smoking ruins where such shit had happened to previously thriving cities. It was partly to the credit of successive high mages that Agatos was still standing after all these centuries, but mainly it was down to the Ash Guard. Any mage who was foolish enough to start a serious, city-threatening smackdown with another mage or set off her own private volcano soon found the Ash Guard knocking on her front door and that, as they said, was that.
To really understand the Ash Guard, however, you also had to know about Sharshak, the least popular god at the party. There had been gods with all sorts of aspects. There had been gods of oceans and rivers and streams, gods of the seasons, gods of the hunt and the hunted, and there was even, infamously, once a god of bad knees. I wasn’t joking. Each of them had their own particular powers.
And then there was Sharshak. Sharshak was a god of the sun who had died thousands of years ago, or so the story went. (The sun had kept shining whether he was dead or not, so make of that what you will.) Sharshak had one particular power and that
was that his presence neutralised the powers of the other gods. It made a degree of superstitious sense; when the sun rose, the terrors of the dark, the unseen horrors that haunted people’s imaginations, faded away.
All I was saying was that Sharshak probably didn’t get invited to too many social occasions.
When he died, Sharshak’s body supposedly fell to earth, where it had been burning ever since in the imaginatively named Pit of Sharshak. The Ash gathered from the pit continued on Sharshak’s good work. It neutralised magic. Try to cast a spell in the presence of the Ash of Sharshak and the magic just wouldn’t be there. It didn’t matter whether you were a high mage or a second-rate chancer like me. All the magic that had made you someone powerful and special would be gone. A sack of the Ash of Sharshak was supposedly worth more than most cities, but the Ash Guard never sold it. Instead, they smeared it on their skin when they came for a mage, and that mage was rendered as helpless as a baby.
Of course, we only had the Ash Guard’s word for any of that, and no one else knew where the Pit of Sharshak was. But the Ash did work, and I was royally screwed.
Just for the record, I blamed Benny.
I took a deep breath and plastered a wide, reassuring smile on my face.
“Don’t worry,” I said cheerfully. “I can explain everything.”
I regretted the line almost immediately. The problem with throwing something like that out there was that people expected you to follow through. And if I did explain, we would be spending a long, long time in a very small cell.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t a decent goat-shitter. A surprising amount of my job involved lying shamelessly. But my head was spinning like a priest of Putchek at the Feast of the Coming Ascension, my already empty stomach was trying to empty itself again, and this was the Ash Guard, not some client wondering why my services weren’t cheaper, eighteen years of mage training and experience counting for nothing, apparently.
Adrenaline, the need to fight, raced through me even though I didn’t have a target, narrowing my vision and clamping a fist around my brain.
Think! Think!
I had broken the curse and triggered a magical booby trap. Somehow I hadn’t even noticed that trap.
That’s what you get for playing with high mages.
I had taken its full brunt. It had been meant to rip whoever set it off to shreds, and it would have if I hadn’t already been on edge. I had managed to throw up a shield the moment I felt it trigger. Even so, it had smashed me back and knocked me senseless. If Benny hadn’t been standing behind me and sheltered by both the shield and my body, there wouldn’t have been much left of him. I swore creatively.
The curse itself had only been a trigger for the booby trap, and I had missed it entirely. I’d always known I wasn’t destined to be a high mage, but sometimes circumstances really rubbed that in.
The force of the booby trap had torn the library apart. Which did pose a question: Why would Carnelian Silkstar do that to his own library?
I had no time to worry about that. I could figure out the how and why if I survived this, because I hadn’t just pissed off a high mage. I had attracted the attention of the Ash Guard. It was the nightmare of every mage in Agatos.
The captain of the Ash Guard was a solid, muscular woman with dark hair tied back in a short ponytail. I couldn’t tell the colour of her skin beneath the thick layer of Ash, but her eyes were the brown of river mud. I could just about make out a long scar that cut diagonally across her face, narrowly missing her left eye. Even the thick Ash wasn’t enough to hide it entirely.
“Can you?” she said. “Explain everything?” It wasn’t a question.
I turned slowly — not just because I had an arsenal of weapons trained on me by professional mage-killers, but because if I turned too fast, I would topple over again.
My mind was slowly catching up with me. The room was a wreck. The magic had been potentially lethal, but it wasn’t city threatening and no one had actually died. Magical shenanigans like this weren’t serious enough to involve the Ash Guard, and the Ash Guard were the one group in the city who didn’t jump at the commands of a high mage, so Carnelian Silkstar couldn’t have summoned them. Why were they here?
“Bring them,” the captain said. Strong hands closed on my arms. I felt strangely weak, and not just from being blown up. Mages tended to subconsciously supplement our energy with the raw magic around us. That was how some mages could live for over a hundred years and still look young. Having this taken away by the presence of Ash made me feel sick. Except this isn’t being sick, I reminded myself. This was normal. To think I’d been moaning to Benny about how tired I was. I was lucky he hadn’t punched me.
We were hauled out of the ruins of the library. The door had been cracked by the force of the magic, and splinters had showered across the first dozen feet of the hallway, but beyond that it was clear. We marched unsteadily past Carnelian Silkstar’s private meeting room and into the high mage’s office.
I smelled her before I saw her. She had voided her bowels and her bladder. The stink of shit and piss almost overwhelmed the more delicate scent of blood. My stomach tried to retch again, and this time it managed a thin, acidic liquid that burned my throat. I didn’t realise I had stopped moving until the Guards’ hands pulled me forwards again.
I didn’t recognise the woman at first. She had been slashed across in four nearly parallel cuts. The top slash had taken away her jaw and part of her neck, leaving a ragged, inhuman mess. The second, across her chest, had splintered ribs. Fragments of bone jutted through her ruined flesh. The third had disembowelled her, and the fourth had nearly taken her legs off above the knees, leaving them hanging by little more than skin and an inch of bare, wet muscle.
My knees weakened, and somehow I found myself kneeling on the floor. That was when I recognised the victim from her robes and her height. She was the Master Servant who had gone to find Carnelian Silkstar for us.
Finally, I did manage to throw up again. I fell forwards onto my hands and retched over and over again, until my stomach couldn’t convulse again. I didn’t dare try to stand, because I knew I would fall again. I just knelt there on all fours staring at the pool of blood and the bile that I had vomited into it.
How had this happened? The spell had been confined to the room. Surely I couldn’t have diverted it out here with my hastily-raised shield. Could I? Maybe this was what was supposed to happen to me when I triggered the booby trap. My stomach heaved again.
“Denna’s mercy,” I heard Benny whisper.
A pair of worn boots appeared in front of me. The captain of the Ash Guard reached down, grabbed my hair, and dragged my head up. I stared into her scarred, Ash-coated face.
“Explain this,” she said.
Explain this.
How in all the Depths was I supposed to explain it? I could have practised magic my whole life and not been able to do this much damage. It couldn’t have been the booby trap, either. There would have been damage to the walls of Silkstar’s office, or to the desk or the ceiling or somewhere else.
“She was attacked,” I said, knowing how ridiculous I sounded. My voice was dry, and it hurt to speak. I could still feel the acid burn in the back of my mouth and my throat. “Soldiers. Assassin.”
The captain let go of my hair. I almost fell flat, then forced myself up, swaying.
“Four simultaneous, parallel cuts,” the captain said. “And ragged. Not swords or a knife.”
I glanced around. Benny had retreated as far as his Guards would allow him. His usually olive skin looked drained, and his eyes were wide.
“What, then?” I croaked.
“If you had to press me,” the captain said, thoughtfully, “I’d have to say claws.”
I wet my lips. “A … giant bear?” I felt stupid saying it.
She snorted. “Did you happen to pass any giant bears on your way in? With paws the size of a man? No. The only thing that causes an injury like that is magic.”
&n
bsp; At the word ‘magic’ all of the Ash Guard seemed to lean forwards restlessly, almost eagerly. I saw fingers subconsciously rub against Ash.
At least now I knew why the Ash Guard were here. Magical murder was their domain, and clearly I was their prime suspect.
Chapter Four
The city of Agatos sat at the southern end of the Erastes Valley, where the valley narrowed to no more than a couple of miles across before opening onto the Yttradian Sea.
To the west and east of Agatos, the hills rose quickly to steep, jagged mountains that buttressed the sea with sheer cliffs. It was cosy, in a kind of rocky way. In the west of the city, a precipitous ridge of rock, called Giuffria’s Spear (or, in parts of the Warrens where they were always impressed by their own sense of humour, Giuffria’s Cock) jutted from the mountains into the body of the city, effectively cutting off the southern, ocean-facing part of the western city from the northern, valley-facing part. The Ash Guard fortress sat hard against the end of the ridge. It was an old building, far older than the Senate and the palaces on Horn Hill, dating back to the days when Agatos was still a contested city. Unlike the rest of the city, it was not whitewashed. It crouched like a belligerent stone toad, letting the rest of the city know exactly what it thought of it. I had never been inside — like most mages, I kept as far away as possible — but behind its four-storey bulk, I suspected it stretched deep back into the rock of the ridge.
Where they put mages they don’t intend to let out again. I shuddered.
The Ash Guard didn’t tie my hands or blindfold me. They simply closed around me as they marched me from Thousand Walls, down Agate Way, and through the city to their fortress. You would be surprised at how quickly people cleared out of the way of the Ash Guard, even if they weren’t mages. I tried to make a joke about it, but not a single one of the Guard cracked a smile.
“Tough crowd,” I muttered.
Shadow of a Dead God: A Mennik Thorn Novel Page 4
