The Shadow Saint

by Gareth Hanrahan

  Up the stairs, though, things are different. There’s a toppled wardrobe blocking the upper landing. Two large holes have been punched in it–gunshots, by the look of them. And there’s a reddish stain on the far wall, amid cracked plaster, that lines up with one of the holes. There was some sort of squabble between rival gangs here. Weapons smugglers, he guesses.

  Burn marks. Someone waving a torch around–or a flaming sword.

  The rooms on the middle floor have been looted. It reminds him of a military encampment that’s been overrun. That room was the barracks, four beds crammed in. That was the mess hall. Rats scavenging whatever scraps of food remain. And this room…

  This one was definitely the armoury. Broken boxes stuffed with straw, bottles of watered-down phlogiston, grenades and other weapons lying scattered on the floor. A canister of withering dust kicked under a chair. The room stinks of something caustic, a smell like vomit mixed with ash. There are spots on the shelves untouched by dust or soot, suggesting weapons have been removed recently.

  Terevant kneels down and examines a broken crate. There’s a sigil on it, one he’s seen thousands of times before. It’s everywhere in the city, but he first saw it in the war. The brand of the alchemists’ guild of Guerdon.

  He tries to put it together. Someone with a flaming sword–Vanth’s killer? The Saint of Knives?–comes in the front door, smashes their way up the stairs. The defenders try to stop this assault, but are overcome. The attacker ignores this trove of valuable weapons; someone else steals them a few days later, literally after the dust has settled.

  The ceiling creaks.

  Someone else is in the house, on the floor above.

  Drawing his sword, Terevant creeps up the narrow stairs to the topmost floor. He passes a window, sees the street below, Yoras standing sentry outside the house. He waves, catches Yoras’ attention, then signals silently for the guard to come up. Yoras nods and advances up the steps with the Vanth-thing.

  The next floor’s like the one below. A deep gouge in the banister–someone clumsily swung a blade and missed. A broken door, smashed into a hundred pieces. Old bloodstains on the floor. He moves cautiously, looking for his fellow intruder, but there’s no sign of anyone.

  He enters a bedroom. Next to the bed is a chest of drawers, and it’s been shoved out into the room at an angle. In the gap behind it, Terevant spots a neat hole cut in the thin dividing wall, big enough to crawl through. A hidden room.

  He kneels down and peers into the darkness. It looks like an attic room beyond; he can see a trestle table covered in rolled-up papers and maps. He waits for a long moment, listening. There could be someone waiting on the other side of that wall, ready to stab him when he sticks his head through.

  For a moment, he debates retreating and grabbing that canister he saw earlier. Withering dust is a toxin that rots flesh; he could send a cloud of it wafting through the hole, clear out any ambushers. The dust is a horrible way to go, though, and dangerous to handle without the right protective gear.

  The canister is still downstairs.

  Of course, whoever’s in the attic doesn’t know that.

  “Hey!” Terevant shouts. “I’ve got withering dust,” he lies. “Come out peacefully, or I’ll dust that attic.”

  A woman’s voice replies. “Fuck you. You don’t have it.”

  “Yes, I do. One swing of this thurible, and your lungs will turn to jelly. Horrible way to die.”

  “You don’t have it.” There’s absolute certainty in her voice. “So fuck off.”

  From the sound of her voice, she’s close. Just on the far side of the divide. He sidles up, pressing himself against the wall so he can’t be seen through the hole, trying to judge where she—

  —a knife punches through the wall, piercing the crumbling plaster, cutting into his cloak, his tunic, his skin. It’s a shallow cut, but it hurts. The woman slithers out of the hole, rushing past him, driving her elbow sharply into his throat as she runs, winding him.

  Terevant chases after her, gasping for breath. The woman’s already down the stairs onto the first floor. Leaping down with divine grace. Saintly grace. The Saint of Knives. Lemuel was right, he thinks as he charges down the stairs onto the landing below.

  She’s waiting for him in the doorway of the armoury room. Small and lithe, dressed in a leather jerkin and dark clothes. Her gamine features are oddly familiar; her face is pockmarked with tiny scars. A pack at her side is stuffed with papers clearly stolen from the attic room. In her hands she’s holding a metal canister.

  “I’ve got withering dust,” she says. “Fuck off peacefully, or I’ll dust the landing.” Her finger brushes against the release valve. Terevant suppresses a smile–she doesn’t know how to use the weapon. There’s a safety catch that needs to be pulled first before you press the valve.

  “All right! Look, look.” He puts down his sword. He feels his tunic sticking to his skin as he bends–he’s bleeding from the knife wound. “I just want to talk.” At least until Yoras and the zombie-Vanth get here. “My name is Terevant Erevesic. I’m from Haith.”

  “Really don’t care. Leave.”

  “One of our men—”

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “Then why did he lead us to you?” demands Terevant. Yoras should be here any second.

  The woman glances to one side, as if she can look through the walls, and she seems to see the danger, too. “Get back!” she hisses, and presses the valve. Nothing happens.

  Terevant lunges forward, but the woman’s faster than he is. She ducks nimbly to the side, then dodges out of the door. Yoras comes rushing up the stairs from the ground floor, but she’s already moving, running back up the stairs, always just out of reach.

  “Fuck! Spar, how does this thing work?” No one answers, but she seems to listen for a second, then unerringly finds the safety catch. “Got it!”

  “Back!” shouts Terevant. Yoras throws himself backwards as a greyish cloud of heavy dust hisses into the landing. The Vigilant doesn’t need to worry about inhaling dust motes, but a concentrated burst could rot his bones and destroy him.

  Edoric Vanth–what’s left of him–doesn’t stop. The zombie runs through the cloud of withering dust, stumbling as caustic grains pepper its skin. Dead flesh puckers and withers; one outstretched hand takes the brunt of the damage. The flesh sloughs away, the bone crumbles, leaving the zombie with a jagged stump. The dust canister must be an old one, though, as the zombie survives the cloud and crashes into the foot of the stairs. Still moving.

  The woman flings the canister through the glass of the window, then follows it out, levering herself up onto the windowsill and climbing onto the roof of the house. The zombie follows, undead strength and single-mindedness compensating for its patchwork clumsiness, its dust-withered limbs. Two sets of running footsteps–one soft and quick, one heavy and stumbling–thunder across the roof.

  “Yoras! Stop Vanth!”

  Yoras glances at the dust cloud–dangerous even to him–then runs back downstairs, out onto the street, in pursuit of Vanth.

  Terevant finds a bathroom, a cloth that he can soak in water. Waits until the worst of the dust has settled. He presses it to his mouth and nose to protect his lungs, wraps his cloak tightly around himself, then sprints through the dust field. They used tons of withering dust at Eskalind, to cover the retreat. He hastily checks the hidden room upstairs. Most of the papers are gone, and those that remain are clearly the dregs–he finds old maps of the city, a plan of the subway system you can buy for a copper at any station, a battered library book, dog-eared and crammed with notes.

  The title: Sacred and Secular Architecture in the Ashen Period.

  He prowls around the room, looking for something, anything, that might explain why the Saint of Knives murdered Vanth. And why Vanth would come here, to this hideout. Maybe he was killed here.

  There’s a thunderous crash outside. He darts to the window in the stairwell, sees only a cloud of rising dust. Shouts
of alarm.

  Sir? calls Yoras from below.

  “In here.”

  I fear I lost them, sir. And the city watch are coming–we must go before we’re discovered.

  Terevent gathers up the papers, stuffing them into the book to keep them bundled, then follows Yoras down the stairs onto the street outside.

  The right-hand side of the street, the row of tenements, is as it was when they arrived.

  The other side, the New City, has changed: the rooftops have sprouted spikes. The footbridge has vanished. That shimmering trade hall has lost all the windows on its topmost level.

  She ran through there, sir. Before the windows, ah, disappeared.

  “And Vanth?”

  Yoras points to a faint line of brownish patches on the wall–marks left by a one-handed zombie-thing as it scrambled over the rooftops in desperate pursuit of the mysterious intruder.

  He’s gone, sir. We must go too.

  “This,” says Terevant, “could have gone a lot better.”

  Two days later, he listens to Olthic rage. Someone saw Vanth, or maybe Yoras–either way, Guerdon accuses Haith of letting undead Vigilants out onto the streets without permission, in breach of agreements between the two cities. Newspapers and rumour-mongers accuse Haith of plotting against Guerdon.

  Lemuel warns that this will prompt the watch to tighten security again, that there’s no way to smuggle the sword back into the city before the upcoming Festival of Flowers. Olthic will have to wait.

  His brother threatens to send Terevant back to Haith. It’s Daerinth who intervenes, Daerinth who calms Olthic down. He points out that it would reflect badly on House Erevesic, on Olthic’s prospects in the Fifty.

  “Patience,” he whispers. “None of us know when we shall be called to serve, so we must stand ready as long as the Empire endures. Death is no release from duty.”

  In the yard outside, Terevant marches the embassy garrison back and forth, back and forth, until his throat is raw from shouting orders and he’s so exhausted he can’t remember which troops are dead and which ones are still alive.

  CHAPTER 22

  So, fuck, there’s a zombie chasing her.

  Cari runs across the footbridge, but the thing’s right behind her. Not breathing, but there’s the fast patter of dead feet as it closes. Bastard thing is Tallow-fast.

  A miracle would be handy around now, she thinks. But she’s down on the edge of the New City, where such things are hard to come by. It’s difficult for Spar to manipulate the magical stone of the city down here. In fact, it’s getting harder for him everywhere, but she can’t think about that right now.

  She flings herself through an open window on the far side of the street, landing in a dusty attic, and then pushes. Cari’s learned that when Spar’s miraculous strength fails, she can make up the difference, martyr herself. It costs her; it hurts her. It feels like she’s birthing the miracle, like it’s taking her blood and bone and transmuting it into spell and stone. She lets out a yelp of pain, and the attic abruptly goes dark as the windows clench and vanish. From outside, there’s a crash as the other half of that jury-rigged footbridge collapses onto the street below. A heartbeat later, a thump as the fucking zombie slams into the wall that used to be a window. A scrabbling noise as it climbs onto the roof.

  “Great,” she whispers.

  He’s looking for a way in. Go through the door on your left.

  She can see the undead creature, sort of. Down here, Spar’s perceptions are fractured and imprecise. It’s like trying to catch a reflection in a broken mirror–either she loses sight of it, or she sees it from multiple angles and needs to work out exactly where it is.

  “How do I kill it?”

  Her knife’s useless against something that doesn’t bleed and doesn’t care if its organs are punctured. The withering dust didn’t work, either. She could double back and try to get to the weapons left in the Gethis Row house, or maybe head onto the cache of weapons she already stole…

  I think I should, suggests Spar, and he’s right.

  It’s a simple tactic, one they’ve used several times before. Against Ghierdana cutthroats, against a Gullhead. Cari sets them up, and Spar drops the stone on them. Splat.

  “Can you do it down here, though?” A quick miracle like that is costly for Spar. Too costly.

  I think so. His voice in her head fades in and out. Memories that aren’t hers come with it, carried like windblown leaves on the breath of his thought. His father’s body, twisting in the noose. Looking out of the window at Hog Close at the city’s skyline. Falling, always falling.

  That memory means he’s hurting. That he’s pushing too hard.

  Cari shakes her head, and whispers: “No. I’ll lure him further up into the City. Then splat.”

  She stuffs the papers she stole from the hidden room into her shirt, then sneaks across the attic. Loose floorboard. Sidestep right, warns Spar. Her heart pounding as she walks as silently as she can. The zombie’s still skulking on the roof, not ten feet away, but she’s the best thief in the world these days. Well, in Guerdon anyway. The Saint of Knives, angel of the New City.

  A bony hand smashes through a roof tile just overhead. Bony fingers claw at her face. She yelps and dodges forward, running blindly now. Crashing through a door as the revenant forces its way through the roof and into the attic behind her.

  Left now. She turns, find herself in some little garret room with a single window. She forces it open, crawls out onto the rooftop again. Runs along the gutter. Behind her, the glass shatters as the zombie takes a more direct route.

  She stumbles, catches herself. The night air is clearer than usual–fewer fires in summer, and the new factories are on the far side of Holyhill–but her lungs still burn as she runs. The heavy bag throwing her off balance.

  Get back to the New City. Get back to where the streets love her, where the living stone enfolds her. Get back home.

  Ahead, there’s the domed mountain of the old Seamarket. To her left, the tonier parts of town, Venture Square and Mercy Street and the Tower of Law where her old life ended and her new one began.

  The one where she’s being chased by a fucking zombie, and her dead friend is making the rooftops sprout stone caltrops to slow the fucker down.

  Faster, Cari.

  Easy for him to say. She slides down a slanted roof, hops across a gap–a six-storey drop to some pissy alleyway–and clambers onto the next rooftop.

  The skeleton leaps the gap and lands right in front of her, blocking her path.

  Change of plan. She throws herself backwards off the rooftop.

  Her connection to Spar manifests in three miracles.

  Visions.

  Stoneshaping.

  And a third trick.

  Spar can take the force of a blow, absorb most of the damage from an injury or impact. But it’s not guaranteed. They both have to will it, at the same moment. He’s got to catch her, like it’s a trapeze act.

  Be ready, she prays. Also, we’ve never done this outside the New City so I pray to

  fuck

  it

  works

  Impact.

  Carillon lands heavily, six storeys down, smashing into the cobblestones. Alive, unbroken. In the distance, there’s a noise like a crack of thunder as some part of the New City suffers in her stead.

  She lies there an instant, winded. There’s no sign of her pursuer.

  “Spar, where is he?” she asks, as she tries to call up a vision. Nothing. No response.

  “Spar?” Cari staggers to her feet, limps down the alleyway. The people on the street outside are all looking up at the New City, at the cloud of dust that’s rising from a broken spire, glittering in the moonlight. They don’t pay attention to the thief girl who emerges from the alley and pushes through the crowds.

  Still. Here. Spar’s thoughts are slow and laboured. Catching her cost him.

  A moment later, a vision of the zombie drips into her mind. It’s stopped chasing
her. It’s following the street north, heading inland. Heading in the rough direction of the Haithi embassy.

  “Ow.”

  Tell me about it.

  Carillon follows the streets as they rise towards the New City, as the grimy soot-stained greyness of old Guerdon gives way to miracle-spawned wonder. She feels better the closer she gets to home.

  If that Haithi creature comes back, then I’ll splat it. Spar sounds stronger, too, closer.

  “Sure,” she mutters. Drawing on Spar has to be a last resort, she tells herself. She worries that too many miracles will diminish him, snuff out the last remnant of his consciousness. I can’t let him go again, she thinks, in a private part of her mind that she hopes he can’t read.

  Later, Cari finds a quiet rooftop and takes out the papers she stole from that hidden room. She mentally curses the other Haithi guy, the living one who disturbed her. Curses herself, too–she should have found that hidden attic earlier, searched it thoroughly instead of grabbing whatever was on top of the pile.

  She looks through the papers. Her eyes water, and she blinks rapidly, washing out little specks of white stone grit. Spar’s reading through her eyes.

  Some sort of alchemical machinery, he guesses. She can’t tell–there’s a semicircle of boxes that might be a floorplan, and lots of weird runes, and some sort of structure on the edge of the design that reminds her horribly of Professor Ongent’s sorcerous constructs. “No clue.”

  She opens another page. Stops in horror. “Fuck.”

  This one she can read clearly. This one she sees in her dreams.

  It’s a map of the city, New overlaid on Old. A map of Guerdon as it was before the Crisis, with the Alchemists’ Quarter clearly visible, all their foundries and vats. The outline of the New City sketched atop it. And there, drawn in ink and pencil, a map of the tunnels and vaults below.