by Danie Ware
Anatar laughed, a rich noise that rang mirthless from the walls. ‘Oh Proteus, Proteus – what a partnership you two would have made.’ Her tone was raw and evocative; it sent chills through his exhausted nerves. ‘Too late now. He came down here angry, and thinking his righteous determination would be enough. Much like you, I fear, he’s learned a hard lesson. Love can make you do some very foolish things.’
Dried blood flaked from her hands and drifted downwards.
Proteus could feel the spark of anger in him climbing higher; it was good, cleansing. The warmth it brought chased the tails of her charisma away. His energy, the ability, it was all still there – he’d just run it down. Now, he had to recover it and nurture it until the tiny flame grew back into a full and blazing ferocity.
And then what?
My sister – betrayed me.
Austen – is not coming.
Caph – is lost.
Fine. I’ll do this myself.
‘But don’t fret,’ Anatar said. Cocking her head sideways, she was smiling at him. ‘Your Caphen has a future beyond his dreams – he can play again, have more power than he can ever use.’ The laughter came again. ‘He has a new family now, and you can be with him for as long as you want.’ She smiled, the expression welcoming, warm.
‘We all can.’
*
Slowly, Caph became aware that the pain had stopped.
The air was cold on his skin, drying streaks of blood and spit and tears; if he tried, he could just about open one eye.
In among the twisted angles of stonework, the rasping root-knots of metal, Anatar stood tall, his blood streaking her face and long throat. She was all tight anger and wary frustration; beside her, Ganthar sneered in fury. Pinned to the bench and ripped in a hundred places by the claws that held him down, Caph tried to smirk with lips that were torn to bloodied shreds of flesh.
There had been no screaming, not this time.
They’d failed.
His fingers were gnarled and ruinous; his body destroyed. Blood filled his mouth and furred his teeth; his breathing bubbled with it. He had been smashed and tormented, his every horror exposed. Anatar’s hands were blood to the wrists; her nails were caked with gore. And Ganthar had enjoyed the whole thing with a twisted-dark sadism that was the most repugnant thing of all.
But he’d beaten them.
He was swimming with pain and adrenaline and elation. They had nothing left they could do to him.
And he had nothing left they could take.
If he could have sneered at them, he would have.
In the blood-sick swim of his vision, he saw Anatar sit back, tapping her elegant chin with one long, stained finger. Her jacket was slick with fluid; the ring on her hand gleamed with a core of eager darkness.
She said thoughtfully, ‘Raife said you were strong. Interesting.’
He tried to speak, but his voice, like his face, was long gone. He felt the torn sides of his mouth, like ragged cloth.
Watching him, she felt in a pocket, pulled something free. When she held it in front of Caph’s vision, he blinked to see what it was.
It was a dice, four sided – one he’d been missing for several days.
‘This is yours, I think,’ she said, smiling. ‘Lost at the wharf, the night you and Proteus met. He kept it, a souvenir – he must’ve loved you even then.’
What… He tied to frame the word and failed, wanted to sit up, to stare at her. Cold echoed like horror through his heart. Where is he…? Where…?
She smiled like snake, hearing the unasked question. ‘He failed. One might even say: disastrously.’
No…
The coils rasped as if amused.
He held himself still, blood-warmth tricking over his skin and falling in deep red drops to the impossible floor.
He failed… disastrously.
Dice in hand, she came to sit on the on his other side.
‘Talmar,’ she said. ‘You’ve proven your strength. And now, I’m giving you a straight choice.’ She leaned down, her eyes met his, shining with darkness. ‘You don’t need to fight us.’ Her voice was alight now, glowing like the dark rock on her finger; her presence and passion were like a drug, compelling and beautiful. ‘Proteus is here, and you can see him, be with him.’ She stroked his cheek, kissed him. ‘You can save his life. If you just let go.’
Pinned down by his own skin, his home and family gone, lost to everything he loved…
…what other choice did he have?
*
In a grinding effort of pure stubbornness, Proteus walked.
He may have legs as weak as a cripple’s, the shakes like a reforming addict – but he wasn’t going to be carried like some hellsdamned sacrifice.
The spark in him was growing, rising in strength – but he had to keep control, understand everything, before he moved to stop it. Fuelled by his core of determination, he could feel his flesh solidifying, growing stronger with every step.
At his shoulder, Lyss hovered graceful and ghost-silent – one sideways glance at her had been enough. Proteus lifted his white and featureless chin and stood on his own damned feet to finally face what he had come for.
Artifice herself.
And, Anatar before him like a herald, he came into a room of pure nightmare.
It staggered him, swamped him, overpowered him and bore him to the floor. It robbed him of breath and of vision, massive beyond encompassing. The roots of the ouroboros writhed through his brain like a parasite; it called to the fragment in him, the thing that had given him his ability. It was everything and nothing, metallurgy and wisdom, Kei and Vei, all-powerful and all-knowing.
It was the Artifice’s heart, of course it was. And it was waiting for him – for the last piece of itself.
But somewhere, a spark of sanity: Austen had beaten this once. And so could he.
The creature sang loud, of welcome and celebration, of power and luxury, of glory and elevation. Its music was every spirit, every level of hell. The sheer force of it crushed water from his eyes; he was gasping for bare life as its presence overcame him. Around it, everything writhed and rasped, rust and metal and oil and power.
And yet…
A core of refusal. A fragment of defiance. A spark of courage. Down though all the years of Austen’s training… he was stronger than this. Stronger than stonework and metal coils. Stronger than those who stood beneath it, the parts of its fragmented whole. Waiting.
Katalyss.
Ganthar.
Anatar herself.
And the last one, the tall, dark figure with his shaven head – Thantar Vel Raife. The man who’d destroyed Caph’s family. The metallurgist, the healer. The summoner.
The orchestrator of all of this.
Flanked by his siblings, he stood below the great coils of the creature as though it were his to wield; as if he had only to raise his arms to send the thing rasping across the stonework to devour anything he chose.
His presence was languid, cool and massive; his control absolute. Proteus could control his own flesh…
But it was Raife that could control the flesh of others.
Looking at him, at the reflection of light-on-metal that limned his handsome face in pale fire, Proteus’s spark of anger rose. He found he could breathe, could force the pressure of the oozing metal coils out of his forebrain and reclaim his thoughts from its slithering grip.
No.
You will not do this.
Slowly, he stood up.
As he moved, Raife’s eyes fixed on his, his gaze like a spear. When he spoke, he had a voice like molasses, as dark as honey.
‘Stay still, now.’ The command was gentle but absolute; it welded him feet to the spot. ‘Artifice has missed you. We all have.’ The words echoed in Proteus’s soul like truth, like the embrace of the family he
’d never known, warm and sweet. ‘And enjoy the welcome home.’
‘Shove it.’ His voice rasped harsh.
Raife smiled. ‘Twenty-five years we’ve waited for you, Proteus. But soon, it will all be done.’
Charm rose from him like good body-scent – but Proteus didn’t care. He could move his feet; straighten his stance, stand upright. ‘You can’t make me acquiesce to this.’
‘You have no choice,’ Raife said. ‘Fragment by fragment, our family is come. As Lyss before you,’ he glanced at her, smiling, ‘this will happen whether you wish it or not.’
The coils over him rasped in response to his litany, writhed across the mad angles of the ceiling as though the whole hellsdamned place was alive. Proteus could feel it – Artifice was in here. She was waiting, whetted and trembling with the eagerness to return.
To return to her servants, her city, her people…
‘So that’s it,’ he said. ‘That’s how you get your freedom. You want Artifice to tear down City Hall.’
His laugh was deep. ‘I’m a physician, Proteus, a metallurgist, a scholar. I have no interest in violence; I want to help the people of this city. We work for an end to City Hall’s control, its brutality. Artifice built the mines – did Caphen tell you? – she’s always been our ally, she’s helped us before. And we want to bring her, and her knowledge, back.’
Slightly cynically, Proteus said, ‘So – what? You’re going to raise a hellspirit, the soul of an ancient Builder, and she’s just… going to do what she’s told?’
Anatar and Ganthar, one either side, exchanged a sharp, glittering glance.
‘She loves us,’ Raife told him. ‘She always has.’
‘Proteus said, ‘I hope you got that in writing.’ He was still trying for the core knowledge, for the key that would tell him how to stop this. ‘So – what now? You free her from the beastie up there? How the hells is that going to work?’
Raife laughed again. He said, ‘Artifice is already free, Proteus. I’ve given her new flesh, new life. You should make her welcome.’
With a gleam to his white grin, he stepped sideways.
Behind him, the man who had once been Caphen Talmar raised his hands to the light. Each one was encased in a fine metal filigree, silver and copper, like the most delicate of gloves – and the metal was embedded in his skin. His eyes were rust-red, like old blood, like Austen…
Like Artifice herself.
Slowly, Caph stretched his fingers, popping each one out straight, perfect, unbroken.
And he raised his hands and his gaze to the coils of metal – and he laughed as they slithered at him, laughed like the end of the world.
CHAPTER 20: MUSIC
As she returned, the city knew her. Remembered.
This was Artifice, founder and Builder. This was Artifice, the renegade who’d broken from her faith and her people to commit blasphemy, to cut and mine the living stone. This was Artifice, who’d caused the war and the ultimate deaths of the Builders themselves.
If Artifice had a conscience, then it was something more than human.
At the city’s apex, the nine headless pillars trembled. The stairs shook and the waterfalls faltered, their flow interrupted for the first time in ten thousand years. Blind eyes in the stonework ran with dust like tears. Gates creaked and twisted. Encased by the stone of the City Hall, the dancing lights themselves wavered. Many of them flared like fireworks – merchants’ lives, artisans’ lives, the lives of Kier, Thale, Rhentaka. They lit brighter than their surroundings, and they dazzled the reading to brilliance and to bafflement. The shine of the walls glimmered glorious, and then it dimmed completely as if the flare had been too much.
Above it, the Builders’ ancient, metal guards creaked with suspicion, like old men waking after a deep sleep.
Thantar San Winsen, eldest member of the Assembly, stood alone with the dancing harmony that had been City Hall’s strength and power. She stared horrified as the lights flared and extinguished. She had no answers, no comprehension; nothing in her years of knowledge understood this. As the creaking guards ground into full life, welcoming their new awareness, she turned and stared at them, dumbfounded.
City Hall had no staff of its own, only tradition – only Thantar and the other families Elect, only the harmony of peace that danced in the floor. If it had ever had records, they had been unused for years without number – it had never had a need for them. The readings had spun unchanged for centuries; there was no-one now living who knew how to react when the harmony was broken.
Raife had known this, from his very visit when he was still a boy.
And there, the core of his ambition was first discovered.
And Thantar San Winsen was his great-aunt, and old. Past her century, and tired. When those metal guards had begun to move, their failsafe, their inbuilt security that had stood timeless against betrayal at the very core of City Hall, their wheels and blades all rusted with the centuries and protesting at the motion….
She had been the first to die.
And no-one had heard her, and no-one had remained who knew how to shut them down.
In the Hospital, Caphen Jul Bectar felt the tremor – she looked up from Darrah’s unconscious form. Her heart trembled, echoing the stone beneath her; quakes that made her breath tight and her oldest fears rise. Few were those in the upper city with a terror of heights, but now, some childish nightmare loomed large – the tall towers tumbling to the pattern of streets, the screaming as the tiny figures fell, the smashing as the masonry hit the running, scattering shapes in the streets below…
Darrah slept on, safe and oblivious. Leaving him, Bec ran for the doors, for the forecourt, and for the open stretch of the gardens and the shuddering, breathing stone. Somewhere in the depths of her fear, her mind turned to the Caphen mines…
And, as she came out of the doorway, she saw the heights of the city tremble.
At the harbour, Ebi stopped dead, her breath frozen in her throat. She didn’t know what had made her pause – a ghost touch, cold fingers at the back of her neck – but the sensation was too strong to ignore. Outside, the greycoats barked orders; she ignored them. Reacting on pure instinct, she reached for the bag that contained her little figures.
She remembered Aden – drawing death, truth and deception – his comments about a hellspirit. As the voices of the soldiers condensed suddenly into alarm, into orders and running feet, into a terrifying grind that came from the stone itself, she sat very still, her hand in the bag.
Her question formed, fragile as a snowflake.
She retrieved her answer.
And then she blinked at the little figure in her hand, its coils perfect and engraved in bone.
It was the oldest figure she had – the one she’d been given as a child, the one that had started her fascination with foretelling, and foreseeing, and foreboding.
Her jaws wide open like she was swimming through the water; the little figure was the coiled serpent of Vei herself.
*
‘Proteus,’ Caph said. ‘I should thank you.’
Caph was raw with power. It shone from his red gaze, his skin. Tails of blood still clung to him, but he blazed with knowledge. And there were new, white scars where the metal claws of Proteus’s visions had bitten into his flesh. ‘You’ve done me so many favours.’ He smiled, caressed Proteus’s face with fingers that were cold in their embedded metal gloves. ‘You’ve brought my family back together and new life within my reach.’ His smile was so familiar, and so utterly strange. ‘And I’ve been hearing it for a such a long time.’
His mind framed the question, ‘Hearing what?’, but it was lost under the disbelief. For one mad, impossible moment, Proteus gaped. He could feel Caph’s last embrace, heard his own promise to return…
Why didn’t you stay at the house? He wanted to rage in Caph’s face. Why the hells didn’t you st
ay at the house?
But he needed his focus, now more than ever. He couldn’t lose control, not here.
Instead, he hit Caph hard enough to knock Artifice loose like she was some kind of parasite.
It was not a loss of control.
It was pure, focused violence.
As Caph reeled back, Proteus went straight after him, ready to beat him unconscious if that was what it took.
Lyss was shouting, sudden and shocked; Anatar was closer, her cane in her hand. But he was focused now. One sharp backhand was enough to send her sprawling, stumbling in her perfect jacket across the root-knotted floor.
She tangled herself in the cane and fell, swearing.
Ganthar leapt over her. For a moment, Proteus had a powerful compulsion to spin round and hit him head-on, to prove that he could take this stubborn bastard down, once and for all. But, his heels spitting stone-dust, Proteus ducked, swift and sideways and past he and Caph both. Ganthar twisted after him, caught his boot-tip on Anatar’s cane and stumbled. He didn’t fall.
Proteus grabbed Caph, spun him, pulled him upright. Shook him, shouting at him, looking into his face to search for anything he recognised – any glimmer of his lover, of the man he’d been.
There was nothing.
His red eyes held something else completely.
Then one huge fist slammed Proteus in his kidneys, dropped him like a stone at Caph’s feet. A moment later, Ganthar had ducked down and picked him up bodily, lifting him like he would hurl--
Raife said, ‘Stop.’
Ganthar dropped him – smash – to the floor. Yanked him up again by his hair. Shook him, then let him go with a gesture that was almost scornful.
Reeling, blinking a haze of shock from his vision, Proteus looked round.
‘Watch him.’ Raife’s tone was a velvet cover on a mailed fist – force disguised as caress. ‘If he moves, break his arms.’
Ganthar shook him, again, like a tarras. Anatar was getting to her feet, covered in dust and her expression a thundercloud. Lyss stood beside her, her faceted crystal eyes reflecting everything, remembering everything.
