There. The ends were joined.
Let’s see if that holds.
I was pretty certain my heart had stopped beating. I knew I wasn’t breathing.
I released the thread.
It snapped back. I froze, ready to run, panic, whatever it would take. But the thread held.
All right! I was getting good at this stuff.
There was only a single room at the bottom of the stairs. Shuttered windows and a barred door led to some unseen alley or garden, or even the rooftop of the next house down. The wall behind me was solid rock, cut into the hillside itself. Against it was the only other piece of furniture I had seen: a low cabinet. The top had been wiped clean, as though something was sometimes set upon it.
I knelt and pulled the cabinet doors open.
Inside was a safe. Heavy bolts drove deep into the bedrock of the hill, and there was a ward on the lock.
Got you!
The ward was complicated, and it would give me a nasty shock if I tried to open the safe, but it wasn’t powerful. A ward that could cause serious injury or death would have been detectable from the street, and Lowriver was clearly going for secretive rather than deadly here.
It took me a good half an hour to dismantle the ward. I was never going to put it back exactly the same. The next time Lowriver opened this safe, she would know someone had been here.
With the ward down, the safe opened easily. Within the safe was an old stone box. It had been crudely engraved with a hunting scene in the deep woods, or so I thought at first glance. Although as I looked more carefully, I realised I couldn’t see what the men and women were hunting. And, indeed, they didn’t seem to be carrying weapons. If anything, they were fleeing.
I wasn’t here to admire the art. I placed the box on top of the cabinet. There was a residual magic to it. I didn’t think it was a magically-imbued item itself, nor some god-touched relic, but it had been near one for long enough to absorb some of that magic.
Very carefully, ready to throw up a shield if it looked like exploding in my face, I lifted the lid. I wasn’t being caught out twice.
The inside of the box was mostly box. There was an empty, slightly curved space smaller than my thumb in the centre, lined with thick volcanic glass to prevent leakage of magic. Whatever had been stored in here must have been powerful, given that the magic had leaked into the stone anyway, but it was gone now.
I was about to close the box when I saw the symbol carved into the volcanic glass on the underside of the lid. It looked a bit like a semicircle on top of a diamond on top of a dagger blade. Or possibly a pair of upside down frog’s legs. I didn’t know. Maybe whoever had made this had had a thing about frogs.
What I did know was that I had seen that symbol somewhere before. I just didn’t know where. It prickled at my memory. Where in the Depths had I seen it?
The door upstairs opened with a bang, then a footstep creaked on the old floorboards. Light burgeoned above. Magical light.
Pity!
I shoved the box back in, closed the safe and cabinet, and stood, looking around. I couldn’t get out the way I had come in. I suddenly thought of the ghosts who’d been trapped in the Sunstones’ cellar by a barred door and murdered there.
That wasn’t happening to me. I would smash right through the door if I had to. I hoped I didn’t. It would hardly be subtle, and I needed a quiet getaway.
The footsteps crossed the floor above. Light grew at the top of the stairs.
Fuck it. I headed for the back door.
This time, I did miss it. My attention was diverted, and I was hurrying. When I ran into the second magical thread covering the back entrance, I was too slow to grab it. Both ends whipped away, and a screech stabbed through my brain like a nail. I staggered.
Magic rolled down the stairs towards me from the mage on the floor above. I threw myself to one side. The magic rushed by me and smashed through the back wall of the house, ripping the door out and sending it skittering down a steep alley.
That took care of my way out. I stumbled to my feet and followed the splintered door, sure that magic was going to hit me at any moment, scouring the flesh from my back.
Whoever had thrown the magic — Lowriver, I guessed, although I wasn’t looking back to check — must have wanted to see the damage she had caused, because, through the ringing in my ears, I heard feet thumping on the stairs. I put my head down, pumped my long legs, and sprinted down the alley.
Sprinted was a polite word for it. The alley was dark, uneven, and nearly vertical. I fell more than ran. I had no control of my body. It was all I could do to keep my feet, as cobbles slipped under me. I flailed, bounced off the high walls of houses on either side, and kept going into the dark. However this wild dash ended — a wall, the bottom of the hill — it wasn’t going to be pretty.
At any moment, the other mage was going to poke her head out through the wreckage, see my arse disappearing down the alley, and send something to warm it up.
I was going so fast, I almost didn’t notice the second alley branching off to the left. I threw myself to the right, bounced off the wall, and propelled myself back towards the side alley like a wildly kicked ball. I came close to overshooting, but I twisted my body, lost my balance, and careened into the corner of a house. My shoulder and my head hit stone. I dropped. Pain flared through my neck. My vision disappeared into a red haze.
Get up, Nik, you stupid prick!
Somehow, I shoved myself upright and down the side alley. All I could think was that I had to get out of sight before the other mage vaporised me. I wasn’t moving fast, but at least I was moving, and in the dark, I could soon disappear.
I hoped.
I also hoped I wasn’t going to have to use my right arm any time soon, because every step shot pain from my elbow all the way up to my neck.
I needed to throw up in a corner.
No time.
A wash of cold from behind made me stop and turn.
In the alley behind me, the figure of a little girl dressed in rags stood staring at me. She was white, tenuous, made of slipping ectoplasm: a ghost.
I just had time to mutter, “What the fuck?”
Then magic surged. In the blink of an eye, the ghost changed. It grew, twisted, erupted, and there was the ghost-beast filling the alley, massive shoulders pressed against walls.
“What the fuck?” I demanded.
I didn’t have any silver, charcoal, or arevena flowers to slow the beast, so I just turned and ran. Behind me, a roar shook the walls and rattled shutters. Paws pummelled the ground as the thing took off after me. I was hurt, damaged, but for just a moment, I didn’t feel a single one of my injuries. All I felt was bone-cutting terror. I didn’t know how that thing was here, but I had seen what it could do to people. I had seen the blood and the ruptured intestines. I had seen limbs hanging by skin. I had seen the shock and fear frozen on dead faces. We all died in the end, but I didn’t want to die like that.
The fear might be suppressing my pain and giving me a burst of energy, but that beast behind me was part wolf, and it was massive. In seconds, it halved the distance between us. It was going to catch me. Another couple of steps, and I could feel the hot air, the huff of its breath, the judder of the ground.
I couldn’t hurt it with my magic, but I was still a mage. I gathered in raw magic and used it like a paddle to scoop myself up and propel myself forwards. I felt my feet leave the ground like I’d been kicked in the back by a giant. Screaming, I tumbled over and over, as claws cut the air where I had just been. I hit the ground, rolling helplessly, cobbles punching into me. I gritted my teeth against the pain that hammered every part of my body and tried to regain my feet. The magic had thrown me thirty yards, almost to the end of the alley, but I could hear the beast still coming. Limping, the adrenaline no longer masking the pain, I kept moving.
Abruptly, the sounds behind me stopped. I turned. The beast was gone. Standing in its place was the ghost of the girl, watching me. Then
, the ectoplasm drifted apart and disappeared.
Breath whooshed out of me. Relief left me weak. I bent over, hands on knees, suddenly shaking and cold in the warm air of the night. The ghost was out of range, too far from her anchor. She couldn’t follow any further, and whatever it might be, the beast was tied to the ghost. Without her, it couldn’t maintain itself. Every bruise and scrape screamed at me until I gritted my teeth, but I wanted to laugh.
You lose. Stupid dumb beast.
Ahead, not ten yards away, the pale figure of another ghost drifted out through a wall.
Oh no you don’t. Oh no you fucking don’t.
This ghost was of a man, middle aged and portly, with a drawn face.
I didn’t wait around for a chat. There was a garden wall next to me, the leaves of a date palm just visible over the top of it. I threw magic, shouting at the pain that stabbed into every injury. The wall collapsed, and I was leaping over the rubble before I even felt the surge of magic in the ghost.
The small garden was steeply sloped. Along with the date palm, a couple of citrus trees rose like enormous legs in the dark. Crops grew on narrow terraces. I tripped, tumbled over the terraces, crushing and uprooting someone’s livelihood as I went, and fetched up against another wall.
More bricks and mortar showered into the garden as the ghost-beast smashed through. I pulled myself up, watching it. Enormous wolf eyes stared down at me. Then it leapt.
Its arc carried it the full length of the garden. I darted to the side. It turned its body in the air, reaching for me, but its momentum carried it past. It hit the wall and carried on, leaving only rubble behind. The wall didn’t seem to hurt it — I wondered if there was anything that could — but it did knock it off balance. The creature’s limbs scrambled for grip as it smashed through another wall and dropped out of sight.
I took off at ninety degrees.
I had thought the creature was linked to the ghosts in the Sunstones’ cellar, but I had been wrong. Lowriver seemed to be able to use any ghost to summon it. She was raising ghosts, using them to manifest this beast, and sending it after me.
Ghosts strong enough to go drifting around all by themselves were rare, but faint remnants that could be raised for a brief time through magic before sinking again, well, Agatos was an old city, and there were layers of history, death, and trauma here. Search hard enough, and you could find a ghost remnant on any street.
Which was bad news for me.
I had raised a ghost or two during my mage training, but it had been difficult and slow. I didn’t know how Lowriver was managing it so easily, and I didn’t want to wait around to find out.
I burst through a gate, out onto one of the switchback roads leading down to the main city. My only hope was to keep moving quickly enough that I left each ghost behind before it was possessed by the beast. Ghosts could never stray far from their anchors, even the powerful ones.
A ghost rose ahead of me, and I changed direction again.
I wondered how long I could keep this up. Lowriver must be tracking me somehow, but surely she would run out of power eventually. Raising ghosts at a distance and sending the beast up through them couldn’t be easy, even for her.
Another ghost manifested in front of me, an old, bent man in a tunic. This one was too close for me to dodge, so I sent a jolt of magic into it, disrupting its essence before the beast could possess it. It burst into ectoplasm then was gone. I stumbled, bent over by the pain. Shit. I wasn’t going to be able to do that too often. I needed to get far away from Lowriver, somewhere she wouldn’t dare try this. Except I didn’t know where that would be. She had raised that thing inside Thousand Walls to kill Imela Rush. The presence of a high mage hadn’t put her off.
I took an abrupt turn to avoid another ghost that drifted out of a house. Keep going down, towards the city, that was all I could think. Would she really risk sending the ghost-beast into the heavily populated markets and streets of the lower city? So far, she had tried to keep out of sight and pin all of this on me.
I kept running, choosing down whenever I could. I just had to get out of the Stacks, through the Grey City.
There were more people here. I heard gasps and shouts as they spotted the ghosts.
Then, at the corner of the street, fifty feet ahead of me, a ghost appeared, flickered, and disappeared again. I reeled to a halt, instinct making me step into shadows. What had happened? Was I finally out of her range or…? My arms and legs shook uncontrollably. My throat felt like it had been scraped with broken shells. My vision swayed, making me feel seasick.
Please let me be out of her range.
I wasn’t. The reason for the fading ghost showed itself a moment later, an Ash Guard patrol running past, heading up the hill. I felt the magic that sustained me fade, and if I hadn’t been leaning against the wall, I would have fallen. The Ash smeared on the Guards’ faces and hands leeched the magic from the air. Another ghost faded, the magic Lowriver had used to sustain it disappearing, too.
For a second, I seriously thought about handing myself in and telling them everything. Except I had no proof, and I couldn’t leave Sereh and Benny unprotected. Then it was too late, and the patrol were past.
Benny!
Why hadn’t I thought of it before? The Ash Guard weren’t the only ones with Ash. Benny had a whole pouch of it to hide him from Silkstar. If I reached him, we would be safe from Lowriver’s magic.
I cursed myself. Why had I insisted he didn’t tell me where he was going to hide?
I felt the magic begin to return. Through sheer willpower, I shoved off the wall and began running again.
Benny had started to tell me where he was going, and I had cut him off. What exactly had he said?
Focus, Nik!
Another ghost appeared, and I changed direction once more.
I needed a moment’s peace to think. I had asked Benny if he had somewhere to go, and he had said... Down by the market. That was it.
It wouldn’t be Mile End Market. Benny would stand out like a Brythanii in the mid-day sun in the posh part of town, and I doubted he knew anyone near Cheap Gate Market, either. That left the Penitent’s Ear. There were other, smaller markets around the city, but you wouldn’t describe them as ‘the market.’
So, near the Penitent’s Ear. Which, by my estimate, only covered a couple of thousand homes and businesses.
The ground levelled, and I realised with surprise that I had finally made it out of the Stacks and reached the edge of the Grey City.
On the flat, my exhausted legs felt twice as heavy. I had to get through the east of the Grey City, over the Tide Bridge or the Sour Bridge, then through the western part of the Grey City, before I would reach the market. Then what? How the Depths could I find Benny in that chaos of people, businesses, and small houses? He could be anywhere. I couldn’t even use magic to track him down because of the damned Ash I had given him.
Or maybe I could.
The thought gave my legs a new rush of energy. I increased my pace, dodging between the evening’s traffic.
There was raw magic everywhere in Agatos. It infused the air, the rocks, the plants, and the people, drifting, in my visualisation, as a green fog, rising from the ground, unimpeded by obstacles.
Except where there was Ash.
Ash killed magic. In a space of twenty feet around Benny, there would be no magic of any kind. If I could somehow fashion a spell that spread out and echoed back, like a bat hunting a moth, then I would be able to see where there was Ash.
I would have to be close, but I could do it, I knew I could.
The ghost-beast came out of a side alley like a charging bull. I felt the surging magic a split second before I caught the movement from the corner of my eye. I didn’t have time to run.
The momentary warning was enough to save me from its claws, but its shoulder smashed into me, throwing me from my feet and knocking me across the road. I hit a wall and slid down.
Screams sounded as people scattered. Fo
r a moment, the ghost-beast seemed confused by the noise and motion, and I took my chance. I cast a burning magical light right in its eyes and joined the fleeing crowd.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I was finding it hard to breathe. I didn’t think I had broken any ribs, but I had certainly bruised them.
I was starting to really dislike Lowriver.
I crossed the Tide Bridge in a crowd of hurrying pedestrians. The beast hadn’t followed, its range limited by whatever ghost Lowriver had hauled up from its rest.
Until the next one, I thought grimly. I couldn’t run forever.
But the next one didn’t come. There were no more ghosts, no more beast. Whether it was the distance or the crowds or the Ash Guard patrols, I didn’t know, but for whatever reason the attacks had stopped.
With a groan, I dropped to the street, ignoring the looks from the passers-by. The panic caused by the sudden appearance of the ghost-beast seemed to have dissipated, along with the frightened witnesses, and the city was already resuming its usual rhythms. It took a lot to make more than a ripple in Agatos. We were used to weird crap here.
Of course, just because the attacks had stopped for now, that didn’t mean they were over. This might only be a pause until I was somewhere more secluded, where Lowriver could finish me off.
I forced my breath to settle back to something approaching normal, then let my eyes unfocus, studying the magic around me. For the most part, all I could see was the green of raw magic. A woman passing on the far side of the street was wrapped in a disintegrating curse. It wasn’t going to do her much harm, and it would fall completely to pieces in a day or two. The steady stream of magic that powered the morgue-lamps thrummed beneath the street. A kid squatting in a doorway a block up appeared to be a natural magical talent, absorbing raw magic subconsciously and using it to sustain himself. Nothing unusual in any of that.
At least until I looked over my shoulder. Clamped to my back was what looked like a squid constructed of shifting yellow magic. Every few seconds, the magical squid (there was a phrase I never thought I would say) emitted a pulse that disappeared into the night. Lowriver had tagged me. I didn’t recognise the spell, but it was complex and powerful. I hadn’t even noticed her hit me with it.
Shadow of a Dead God: A Mennik Thorn Novel Page 28
