Shadow of a Dead God: A Mennik Thorn Novel

by Patrick Samphire

  You’re just making excuses to lie to her.

  “No,” I said. “It wasn’t him.”

  I hadn’t sat, and Sereh had faded into the background in that disconcerting way she had. It wasn’t magic — I would have been able to detect that — but somehow she always seem to be able to insert herself into the shadows.

  Just find out what the Wren wanted Master Servant Rush to do and get out of here. Leave this poor family in peace.

  Rush’s mother moved to the door.

  “Merkys! Jirima!”

  A few moments later, an older man and a boy who appeared to be in his early teens appeared. The man looked ragged. If I had passed him on the street, I would have guessed he was sleeping in a doorway. His clothes were unwashed, his face unshaven, his eyes old and hollow. The boy, by contrast, seemed to have drawn himself in until he was as tight and rigid as an over-wound spring.

  “What does he want?” the boy demanded, jerking his head at me.

  “He’s from the Wren.”

  The boy’s face spasmed. He turned his head and spat.

  “Jiri!” His mother said, but only half-heartedly.

  “Tell him to get out.”

  Her eyes flicked towards me. “We can’t.”

  I thought for a moment that the boy was going to come at me, and I braced myself, but he took control of himself with a shudder.

  “This is all your fault!” he threw at me. He turned to glare at his parents. “And yours. If you hadn’t given in to Rella’s stupid whim, she would be fine.” Rella? That must have been Imela Rush’s real name, before the Wren had given her a new identity. Did it suit her? I still didn’t know anything about her. “But no,” the boy continued. “She had to have everything she wanted. Master Servant. What a joke! And then people like him come demanding payment and now she’s dead.” The last word was screamed.

  It wasn’t me, I wanted to say. I didn’t demand payment. I didn’t kill her. But I was trading on the Wren’s name to be here, and that meant taking the punches.

  “I want to find out who did it. I want to make it right,” I said. And I did. Not just for me and Benny, but for this boy and his broken family.

  “How?” The boy demanded. “Can your high mage bring her back from the dead?”

  “No,” I admitted. Not in any way you’d want her back. Magic could raise the dead, but when you brought them back, they came back wrong. They would remember their lives. They would look the same and sound the same. But they wouldn’t be same person, and they wouldn’t last. In the end, whatever was missing from them would draw them back. A lot of people thought they wanted their loved ones back, but what they got… No. I wouldn’t do it. It never ended well.

  “Then what bloody good are you?” Tears ran down the boy’s face, even though he didn’t seem to notice. His arms wrapped around his body.

  This was a bad idea. I shouldn’t have come. There had to be another way of finding this out. The Wren, for instance…

  “We can kill them.” Sereh’s voice was soft and quiet, but it still seemed to startle the boy and his mother. “We can kill the ones who did it.” The father, I noticed, had settled himself on one of the mats as though waiting for his lunch, and he wasn’t reacting to any of it.

  Something about the way Sereh spoke seemed to drain the fury from the air. I took my chance.

  “I want you to tell me how Imela was recently. Had anything changed? Did she say anything?”

  The mother glanced at her unresponsive husband, then nodded. “She was worried. I could tell. They trained her, but I’m her mother.” Her voice broke at the end.

  “Worried about what?”

  “She was loyal. She always was. Right?”

  I nodded. “Of course.”

  “It was her employer. That Silkstar. The merchant? Something was bothering him. It wasn’t his trade, though. Not his money. I know that. Rella took care of most of that, and she was good at it. It was something to do with magic. He was a high mage, you know?” Her eyes had unfocused, like mine did when I saw the magic around me, but I reckoned she was seeing something else entirely. Maybe a memory of her daughter. “Something was happening, upsetting the balance. That was all Rella would say.”

  Something had upset the balance all right. Or someone had. They had kicked a tangle of rattlesnakes, and I could hear the tail-rattling of the high mages from across the city.

  But had Silkstar really been concerned about something magical, or had he just grown suspicious of his Master Servant? That would be enough to make her nervous, and a move by the Wren against Silkstar would certainly upset the balance.

  “Imela owed the Wren a favour,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “Did she ever tell you what he asked her to do?”

  The mother’s face crumpled. “Is that why she’s dead? Did we—?” Her hands came to her mouth, cutting off the words.

  “Why don’t you know?” the son demanded. He was peering at me suspiciously again.

  Shit.

  “I just need to know what she told you.”

  The mother shook her head. “Nothing. She told us nothing.” She looked scared.

  Damn it all. I had messed that up. Now she would never tell me, because she would think I would take it as her daughter betraying the Wren.

  “There was that woman.”

  For a second, I didn’t know where the voice had come from, then I realised the father had spoken for the first time. Haggard eyes gazed up at me.

  “A woman?”

  But his eyes had clouded again. I turned to the mother.

  “A woman?”

  She bit her lip. “She… A woman came to our door. Three days … four days ago. She wasn’t from here, not from the Warrens or from the Grey City. From the better parts of town. You could hear it in her voice. She was asking about Rella, except she called her Imela, like you did. She wanted to know if she was our daughter. Our name’s not Rush, you know that, right? It’s Cord. Your master gave her a new name when he … when he arranged everything for her.” Rella Cord. I wondered if Rella Cord was that different to Imela Rush. Rella Cord hadn’t been a Master Servant, that was for sure. Just an ambitious kid. “We didn’t say anything, though.” The mother’s eyes darted to me, as though she expected me to be angry at her for talking about this. I guessed if I had been one of the Wren’s men, I might have been, but I couldn’t bring myself to fake it. “We know we’re not supposed to say anything. We knew it would make things difficult for her.”

  The son snorted contemptuously.

  So, someone had been looking into the Master Servant. One of Silkstar’s people? It would confirm that Silkstar had been suspicious.

  “What did she look like?”

  The mother hunched her shoulders. “I … I don’t remember.”

  I glanced at Sereh, but she didn’t seem to be interested in intervening. I guessed there were only a certain number of times you could be existentially menacing before it lost its edge.

  “Tall? Short? Agatos native?”

  The woman pulled her shoulders in, her chin down. She was still taller than me, but somehow she looked smaller.

  “I don’t know.”

  I looked across at her husband, but he wasn’t answering.

  “You can’t remember anything about the way she looked? How about what she wore?”

  A shake of the head.

  Any competent mage could obscure their appearance — or, more to the point, interfere with the memory of their appearance. Silkstar could have sent one of his mages to poke around, but Silkstar didn’t employ female mages, and the one thing both of Imela Rush’s parents seemed sure about was that their visitor had been a woman. Of course, Silkstar could have imbued some object with an obscuring spell. It was harder to do than to perform the magic directly, but at a pinch, even I could do it. It would be child’s play for Silkstar.

  Making you think you’d seen one specific thing when you’d seen another was harder, but just confusing things so you couldn’t rem
ember was trivial. The brain was fairly stupid anyway, and people remembered less well than they thought they did. A spell like that was just helping along the natural order of things. All it had to do was chuck some interference into the short-term memory and stop the permanent memories being formed. It wouldn’t matter that you could see and even recognise the person in front of you. A minute or two later, the memory would be gone, flushed out by newer experiences. You could beat the spell — if you knew it was happening — if you had the mental discipline to keep that short-term memory front and centre until the spell had passed, but Rush’s parents had had no reason to do that.

  There were even a few priesthoods who used similar spells as a matter of course. It was far easier to get someone to believe in your god if they were confused about what was real and what wasn’t.

  The sound of the front door opening made me straighten. I glanced at Rush’s mother, but it wasn’t her who answered my questioning look.

  “My brother,” the boy said. He must have noticed the brief beat of confusion on my face. “You don’t know him?”

  I tried to keep my face neutral. Why would I know him?

  “Mam?” A voice called. “Da? Jiri?”

  The man who came through the living room door shared the same slim height as Imela Rush and her mother, although his skin was a shade darker. He was hardly an adult at all. His cheeks still had that slight kid’s roundness, and there was no hint of stubble. He was at most twenty years old, I guessed, probably younger. And he was wearing the black cloak and hood of a mage.

  That explains the wards, I thought, randomly.

  He came to a halt when he spotted me. “Who’s this?” He didn’t seem to have noticed Sereh, but then people rarely did when she didn’t want to be seen.

  The mother glanced at me, her forehead crinkling. “He’s from the Wren.”

  “No, he’s bloody not.”

  This kid must be one of the Wren’s acolytes. That would teach me to take advantage of a misunderstanding.

  “I never said I was.” I just hadn’t denied it.

  “You’re him, aren’t you? The one who killed her.”

  His fists came up. I took a step back, raising my hands placatingly.

  “No. I didn’t. I’m just trying to find out who did.”

  He wasn’t listening. I saw him pull in magic. He had some power, but no real control. I could throw a spell faster, knock him down before he could release, but I was already on thin ice. If I started a war with the Wren, it wouldn’t be a long one.

  The kid was probably an apprentice. If he let that magic fly, someone could get hurt, and there was no telling who. He was too emotional, too unfocused.

  “Don’t do it, kid,” I said. I took a step to the side, to circle around him to the door. “We’re leaving.”

  The kid shaped his magic. It was almost painful to watch him struggle to get it right. A spear. It was one of the simplest of the Hundred Key Forms, not so different from the arrow, but it was easier to control and he wouldn’t have to throw it. It was still potentially deadly.

  Then Sereh was beside him, her knife poised against his flank, ready to thrust into his kidney.

  “We’re going,” I said again. I was quickly learning not to be embarrassed about being saved by an eleven-year-old. “Don’t try to follow.” I nodded to the family. “I really am sorry about what happened to Imela. I will discover who did it.”

  I took Sereh by the shoulder, and together we backed out of the house.

  “He’ll find you,” the older son shouted after us. “The Wren will find you and tear out your heart.”

  And on that cheery note, Sereh and I hurried away as quickly as we could manage.

  Chapter Ten

  I dropped Sereh off at Benny’s house. She wanted to come with me, but I managed to fob her off. Having her hovering in the corner of my vision wasn’t doing anything for my ability to think calmly.

  And I did need to think. I had no idea what my next move should be. Somehow I had believed this would be easy. Find a lead, follow it to the next, then the next and the next until I found the fucker pulling all the strings. It hadn’t worked out like that. I needed space to sit and think right now more than I needed a homicidal adolescent stalking my shadow.

  The mid-afternoon sun drenched the streets in an inferno-like heat. The mountains, stepping higher and higher, shimmered in the distance. On top of Horn Hill, black flags hung limp from the Senate. The White City always retreated back behind its shutters at this time of day in the summer. I would have loved to have done the same thing. But I could feel time dripping away like wine from a cracked glass. Every minute I wasted chasing the wrong leads or getting rebuffed was a minute I’d never see again.

  Imela Rush owed the Wren. I knew that. And Silkstar had been growing uneasy about … something. Someone — a mage, or someone sent by a mage — had been poking around, looking into Imela Rush’s background. I knew people were being killed, and I knew for sure that Benny and I weren’t behind it.

  It wasn’t enough. The clues were like dots on a map, except I couldn’t see which map it was, how the dots joined up, or if all they would spell out when they did join up was a big ‘you failed’.

  I needed information, and I wasn’t going to get it bouncing back-and-forth across Agatos like a confused moth. There was, however, one place where I might find out what I wanted. It just happened to be the last place any mage in my position should even consider. Then again, I had never been good at common sense.

  So, I went up to the Ash Guard fortress and knocked on the front door.

  It took a couple of minutes for Captain Meroi Gale to emerge, and when she did, she looked dressed for action, sword and pistol at her belt and skin smeared with Ash. It was more than a little off-putting, and I took a step back, certain for a moment that she was about to arrest me or execute me on the spot. I swallowed, tried not to look nervous, and gave it up as a bad job.

  “Can I talk to you?”

  “I don’t suppose you’re here to turn yourself in?”

  “No.”

  “A pity. Is anyone about to die horribly?”

  “Apart from me?”

  She waved a dismissive hand. “You’ll be fine.”

  Well, thanks. “I just need to talk.”

  “All right.” She glanced up at the sky. “Shall we say six o’clock?”

  That was two or three hours off. I had thought that she would be working on my case full-time. What could be more important than a magical murder in a high mage’s house? I had a deadline here — possibly literally. I didn’t know exactly when it would fall, but I knew that when it did, it would be too soon.

  “You’re busy?” I sounded petulant.

  She flashed a one-sided smile. “I’ve got to see a man about a god.”

  I gave her a look, which she returned far more effectively. Having a face smeared with magic-deadening Ash gave you an unfair advantage.

  “Dumonoc’s bar,” she said. “All right? That’s where you like to hang out, isn’t it?”

  I must have let my surprise show, because she snorted in amusement.

  “I told you we have a file on you. We do our job properly in the Ash Guard. Now.” She glanced up at the sky again. “I really do have to go.”

  I clenched my teeth. This was a delay I didn’t need. But I didn’t have the power here. Captain Gale did.

  “All right,” I said. “Six o’clock.”

  I stood, watching her re-enter the Ash Guard fortress, until the doors closed behind her. Then I swore creatively.

  Another dead end, or a delayed one, at least. A sewage-filled flood on the street of progress.

  I was out of ideas. I could wait, and waste the next few hours, or I could get another set of eyes on it. I had been avoiding visiting Benny again. I was going to have to tell him about Uwin Bone and my failure to find answers. Maybe Benny would have some insight or contacts I could approach.

  For a man who had spent the last day and
a half locked up in a noisy jail cell, Benny was looking remarkably rested and refreshed, certainly more than I was.

  Maybe I should try it sometime.

  The mage who had been waiting outside the cell last time I had visited was gone. I didn’t know if that was a good sign or not. It either meant that he had decided Benny had nothing useful, or he had decided he had everything he needed. Or it meant he had been caught short and was now holed up in the less-than-fragrant City Watch toilets.

  I still checked the cell for any sign of magical eavesdropping, but if anyone was in the metaphorical eaves, I couldn’t detect them. I would have to take the risk.

  “Thought you weren’t coming,” Benny said.

  I shrugged. “Yeah, well. I’ve been kind of busy.”

  He gave me the once over, taking in my dirty, battered clothing and my bruises. “I noticed. You find out who framed us yet?”

  I lowered myself into the chair opposite to delay the inevitable answer.

  “Yeah. About that. I’ve got some bad news. Uwin Bone is dead.”

  Benny blinked. “He’s what? Lady of the Grove! What happened?”

  I sighed and rubbed a hand across my face. I really didn’t want to think about this again.

  “I went there when you said, but he wasn’t waiting, so I let myself into the warehouse—”

  “Pity, mate! That’s one of the Wren’s warehouses.”

  “I know that now.” I was obscurely irritated that he hadn’t warned me, even though there had been no reason for him to think I would go breaking in. “He was dead, Benny. Murdered, in just the same way as the Master Servant.”

  Benny swore.

  “It happened earlier in the day, maybe not long after the stuff up at Thousand Walls.”

  Benny’s wrinkled brow furrowed even more. “You reckon someone’s cleaning house?”

  I nodded. “They set us up for this, and they don’t want anyone around who can contradict that narrative.”

  “Just tell me no one saw you at the warehouse.”

  I winced.

  “Have you thought about just throwing yourself off the Leap? It might be less painful.”

  “I did discover some stuff,” I protested. I told him about the favour Imela Rush owed to the Wren and my suspicions that Silkstar might have found out. “I was wondering if you’d heard anything that might be relevant. You keep your ears open with all that dodgy shit.”