Ahead, lonely amid open water, is Hark Island.
The boat has to circle the island to get to the landing jetty. Sheer cliffs of some grey stone, atop them the white walls of the old fortress. The spy can see other structures there, too, newer ones. Thin metal pillars–floodlights, maybe, or watchtowers. The roofs of new buildings within the walls. Small pillboxes, warded against hostile magic, and their guns pointing inland, towards the prison.
And there is the little tooth of stone the spy saw months ago, from the deck of Dredger’s ship. A rocky pillar, rising from the sea, four hundred yards or so offshore. There’s some sort of machinery there now, connected to the main island by thick pipes and weed-draped cables. Parts of it look brand new; technicians in the robes of the alchemists’ guild scramble amid the rocks like crabs. They don’t look up from their work as the boat passes.
The boat of saints lands at a little jetty, and its unwilling passengers disembark. Alic tries to stick close to Emlin, but the guards separate them, arranging the prisoners into a double file, like they’re children on a school tour. Emlin’s shivering, but he doesn’t struggle or stumble as they march him blindly up the jetty. He and the spy discussed, over and over, what do to in the event the city watch came for them. Escape, if you can. Endure, if you must. The boy’s getting ready to endure.
The ghouls stay on the boat, eyes gleaming hungrily as they huddle in the shade. There’s a cart waiting on the jetty, and two of the guards stay to unload it, throwing its contents to the ghouls. Whatever it is lands on the deck with a wet thump, and the ghouls scrabble for it hungrily, taking their grisly payment in the meat of saints.
The spy may have condemned Emlin to the same fate. As they march up the jetty, along the narrow switchback path to the fortress gates, Alic swears a silent oath to himself, and to the boy. I’ll get you out of this.
As they pass through the gates, the guards unholster gas masks and strap them on, but do not afford the same courtesy to the prisoners. They enter into what was once a wide internal courtyard, but is now the strangest prison Alic’s has ever seen. A three-quarters circle of cells, fronted with prison bars.
Less than half the cells are occupied, and the prisoners are arranged seemingly at random. The northern end of the arc is almost completely unoccupied, while the southern portion is triple-occupancy in some cells. A circular guard tower with many mirrored windows stands at the centre of the yard, watching the open-faced cells. It flashes with blinding light as the sun rises over the lip of the fort.
Spindly metal structures with bulbous heads, like skeletal watchtowers, dot the yard. They pass near one, and Alic suddenly realises why the guards wear masks. There’s some sort of mist-sprayer up there, hissing a thin stream of vapour into the yard. The spy’s thoughts suddenly feel leaden. A sedative drug, he guesses, something to block the concentration needed to wield miracles or sorcery. Fatigue settles on him more thickly than the soot from last night’s fires.
The guards bring them past that mirrored tower to a cluster of low-roofed temporary structures. Processing. A clerk–his moustache poking around the edges of his gas mask–examines each newly arrived saint, fills out some forms and assigns them a cell number. Some prisoners don’t seem to fit whatever classification system the clerk’s using, so they’re sent to a holding area. False positives perhaps. The ghouls don’t always catch the right scent.
There’s no sign of the elder ghoul. No ghouls at all. No, this place seems entirely clinical, born out of the designs of alchemists and architects. Alic relaxes, very slightly. They’ll follow a protocol, obey a bureaucratic checklist. They’ll be predictable cogs in a great machine. The spy’s good at manipulating machines. That ghoul scared him, but these are just mortals.
Emlin is ahead of him in the queue. He’s assigned a cell next to another prisoner from Jaleh’s house–the old woman with the clay icons of Kraken. The clerk orders the guards to take especial care of Emlin, and they escort him out of the room like an honour guard.
It’s Alic’s turn now.
“What god?”
“None.”
There’s some confusion and delay–they don’t have entry papers for him. On the far side of the island, there’s a inspection station where immigrants to Guerdon are processed, but he avoided going through it when he first arrived. He’s far from alone in that. And when he points out that he’s an Industrial Liberal candidate, it adds further confusion to the whole affair. The little of the moustache he can see droops nervously.
“I need to talk to my son,” he insists.
“Not now.”
After a while, they take him away through a different door, and lead him back across the courtyard, giving him another look at the strange arrangement of the new part of the prison. He watches them lock Emlin in his cell, and the Kraken-worshipper next to him.
Suddenly the strange prison makes sense. The cells are arranged as a compass. They’ve arranged saints in their cells by direction from Guerdon. No saints due north, because the goddess of Grena is dead and Haith has no saints. Only a few to the north-east, because of the Haithi god-suppression in Varinth. A few to the east; not many people have fled Lyrix for Guerdon yet, and so there are few saints from that land. The southern part of the arc, though, is crowded. Saints from Ishmere, from Severast, from Mattaur. All blessed by the same fratricidal, bloodthirsty pantheon.
When the gods draw near, their saints grow in power.
It’s not just a prison. It’s a weatherglass.
A machine for detecting the movements of the divine.
The old part of the prison around the central courtyard was once a fort, and that’s where they bring the spy. Thick stone walls. Narrow windows, like arrow-slits. A sigil above the door has been chiselled away; he wonders what god’s symbol or king’s mark once lay there. Inside, it’s chilly and half derelict. They pass storerooms of supplies, boxes of machine parts, spare rubber tubes coiled like entrails, canisters of whatever soul-sapping gas pervades the whole prison. Only the rooms on the inner side of the corridor are in use; those across the hall, facing the sea, are too damp. Greenish-black colonies of mould sprout around the frames of broken doors.
The guards usher him downstairs, into an older sort of prison. No open cells, no mirrored tower. A dungeon for prisoners, a row of cages. They’ve installed aetheric lamps in the niches where torches once burned, but for the most part these cells haven’t changed in centuries. The hiss of soporific gas from a tube running along the ceiling of the corridor, out of reach of the prisoners in their cells. Little brass mouths breathe jets of gas into each cell.
“You’ll need to wait here until we refer your case to the mainland,” says one of the masked guards. He sounds apologetic. “The rest of the island’s not safe. I’ll bring down some blankets and something to eat.” He nods towards the other occupied cells. Two other prisoners, one unconscious, and one awake. “Don’t talk to them. Pay them no heed.”
They lock the spy in a cell. It’s cramped and cold, but not as bad as some he’s been in.
When the guards depart, he surveys his new domain. A small cot. A pot to piss in. A tiny window, high up on the inner wall. If he stands on the cot and reaches up, he can almost see out of it, get a look at the courtyard. The bars of the cell are old but sturdy; some have been replaced or remortared recently, so he doubts there’s any way to escape. The lock, similarly, looks solid and hard to open without a key.
He presses his head to the bars and tries to see the other cells along the corridor. The one at the end of the corridor is occupied. The prisoner there is a young woman, unconscious, lying on the bed. Her face is bandaged and smeared with healing unguents.
From this angle, the spy can’t see much of the other prisoner. Just a pair of long-fingered hands, resting on the bars. Filthy and very pale–this man hasn’t seen the sun in a long time.
“Hey, you there?” says the spy. “Who are you?”
The other prisoner’s voice is very soft. “I knew she
’d come back to me, before the end.”
“Who? Her? You know her?”
“She’s Carillon.” The prisoner’s hands suddenly clench, viciously, like he’s wringing someone’s neck, then relax. He presses his face to the bars, too, so the spy can see a little of his features. A youngish man, terribly thin, stringy hair falling over a knife-like face, a bushy beard.
“Call me Alic. What’s your name?”
“Do you know what time it is? Will the bells ring soon?” asks the other prisoner.
The spy’s always had a talent for keeping track of time. It’s nearly six. Across the harbour, the city’s church bells will be ringing. “Six o’clock, or thereabouts.”
The other prisoner withdraws. The spy can hear him taking shallow breaths, faster and faster, like a bull about to—
He flings himself full force against the bars, throwing his whole body against them. Gasping as the impact knocks the air from his lungs. His pale skin scraped and bloodied by the impact. The prisoner falls heavily to the ground, lies there a moment, then stands back up and resumes lounging against the bars as though nothing has happened, as though he didn’t just try to smash through his cell by sheer brute strength.
A thin smile, a wave of greeting. “I’m Miren.”
INTERLUDE II
Even at this early hour the heat from the summer sun is enough to crack the stones. Rasce swears as he hurries across the courtyard of the villa, cursing the weight of the leather armour and protective gear he has to wear. It’ll get worse once he puts on the breathing mask and helmet, so he leaves those off as long as he can. Without the mask, he can smell his Great-Uncle, who’s sunning himself by a statue of Rasce’s great-great-and-a-few-more-greats-grandmother. Great-Uncle stretches his neck lazily, spreads his wings so wide that the whole villa is plunged briefly into blessed shadow.
“It seems such a waste of a nice day, no?” says Great-Uncle. This close, Rasce can hear the dragon’s voice through his feet, his spine.
“Punishment for your sins, Great-Uncle,” says Rasce. A little impolite, but they’re about to fly into battle together. Informality can be indulged, today.
His Great-Uncle chuckles. “Is that what this is? About time, I suppose.” He coughs, scorching the already blackened stones. “A nice day for ending the world.”
Rasce clambers up into the battle howdah, straps himself in. The howdah’s more cramped than usual. The space normally reserved for treasures liberated from passing merchant ships is now crammed with alchemical weapons. He checks that the rip-lines for the sacks of acid seeds are clear of any tangles, then secures them where he can reach them in a hurry.
“Ready?”
The dragon chuckles again, then canters across the yard, heading for the cliff’s edge. Servants scurry out of the way, hurrying for the shelter of the villa. Rasce glimpses, for an instant, the faces of two of his cousins, watching jealously from a balcony. Artolo’s children. Great-Uncle picked Rasce for this flight, not them, so to hell with them. Their newly fingerless father’s been sent off to count coins in some backroom. Rasce makes the sign of the fig as Great-Uncle spreads his wings and they plunge, then soar on the thermals rising from the hot beach.
The dragon banks over the little island, then turns his head south. Rasce glances back at the other isles of the Ghierdana along the coast of Lyrix. There are other dragons aloft this morning, circling on thermals over their villas. It’s a clear morning–he can see the coastal villages, bristling with razor-edged church spires. He can feel the loathing of the gods of Lyrix. The Godswar may have forced a truce between those deities and their wayward creations, but they still hate the dragons and their adopted families.
Great-Uncle also senses it, and laughs. Either Lyrix survives the war, and the dragon families of the Ghierdana return to being pirates, or Lyrix falls, and the Ghierdana get to watch their former masters being destroyed by the mad gods of Ishmere. No matter what, the Ghierdana will get the last laugh.
They race south. Rasce consults the compass, tries to hold onto the chart in the rushing wind. “Down!” he shouts, thumping Great-Uncle’s scaly neck for emphasis. The dragon descends. The sea below is stained a virulent green, and steam rises from it. A line of floating acid seeds, each one slowly dissolving in the water, turning the sea to poison. A wall of acidic death.
In places, the wall’s been breached.
He checks his breathing mask, checks the seal on his goggles. Those fumes could blind him if he’s careless.
As Great-Uncle flies over the acidic scar, Rasce releases seeds to fill the gaps. The cabbage-sized weapons tumble down to splash in the sea below. They don’t have enough to plug all the breaches.
“Done!”
Great-Uncle flaps his wings, struggling to rise. The undersides of his membranous wings are now raw, burned by the fumes. They were too low. Rasce can feel tremors run through the dragon’s body each time with each painful wingbeat. When they’re back in the villa, his sisters will rub soothing ointments into Great-Uncle’s wings.
Then the dragon banks hard, turns back south. Crosses the line of acid again.
“What is it?” Rasce ties the rip-lines back in place, unholsters his rifle.
Great-Uncle doesn’t answer. He just keeps flying south, over empty ocean. Rasce checks the clouds ahead through his scope, looking for Ishmeric saints. Scans the waters. Looks for ships on the surface, or monsters moving in the deeps.
Going further south than they’ve dared fly in weeks.
Empty ocean. Empty as far as his scope can see.
Nothing.
No invasion force. No ravening fleet of mad gods and warrior-saints.
No end of the world today.
At least, not here.
CHAPTER 36
Eladora spends the rest of the night in a shelter in the New City, a common room in a cellar run by an old man named Cafstan. It’s too dangerous to go home, she tells herself, with parts of the New City ablaze. Too dangerous for whom, though? She can still sense the terrible attention of the Kept Gods lingering upon her. She feels like she’s been soaked in phlogiston, that a single spark might turn her into a pillar of fire.
Cafstan mumbles at her, tells her she’ll be safe here, and that he doesn’t ask questions of those who stay under his roof. She lies on a narrow cot, restless, listening to the city outside the window. Distant bells, shouting, the aftermath of the fires. The other beds are taken by those fleeing the fire. The room smells of soot and tears. She gives up her bed, finds a place on the floor instead.
Some of them are wounded. She wants to help, but fears that if she tries to treat those wounds she’ll open some door within her that she cannot close. The sweet warmth of a healing miracle and the all-consuming fire of a blazing sword come from the same divine source.
She sleeps fitfully, in dream-filled bursts. Some of the dreams are familiar ones–the tomb under the hill, her grandfather’s worm-fingers brushing against her skin. Then Jervas becomes Miren, young and handsome, but his hands are knives that slice into her and spill her blood. Impaled on him, she can’t escape as he steps backwards over a cliff and they both plunge into darkness.
Other dreams are strange, and she doesn’t think they’re meant for her. Some are, she guesses, her mother’s dreams. Full of brightness, like the sun seen through a cracked crystal. Full of pain, so she wakes up in agony, red welts on her breast where her mother was shot.
She dreams, distantly, of the Kept Gods. Of giants walking across the city, moving away from her.
During the night she wakes to see Cafstan sitting on a stool across the room. His scarred hands glow with a miraculous light, as though he’s holding an invisible lantern. The old man cries and laughs quietly, and speaks to the light like it’s a lost child.
The Holy Beggar bears a lantern. The holy light of revealed truth.
Cafstan’s an unwitting saint, she guesses. One of many created by the proximity of the Kept Gods this night. She contemplates rising from her little
nest of blankets and offering the man what counsel she could. How to channel and control this miraculous talent, or, better yet, how to reject it. The connection between man and god is new-made and fragile. It could still be severed, if he acted in ways displeasing to the god. She tries to bring to mind the Beggar’s ancient forbiddances–scorning the dead, thievery, malice–but the thought of speaking to Cafstan while he’s in the grip of sainthood scares her. There’s the old man across the room, chuckling as he conjures light from his fingers, and there’s the god, trying to find a foothold in the mortal world.
What would Cafstan do if he knew she’d struck down a saint of the Kept Gods earlier that night? Her own mother!
And more to the point, what would the Holy Beggar do?
The crown of flowers that Sinter gave her is still in her satchel. When Cafstan’s not looking, she takes it out and dismembers it, scattering the petals and shoving the remains under a bed. The touch of the Kept Gods may feel warm and loving, but it’s no different from the worm-fingers of her dead grandfather ripping a hole in her soul. I am Eladora Duttin, she shouts to herself, I am not to be used.
The next morning, she leaves Cafstan snoring, his head resting on a table. She empties her purse, keeping only enough coin to get home. Then reconsiders–is giving the man alms part of the Beggar’s bargain? Will that ritual act deepen his connection to the god? And who is she to decide, anyway? She scoops up the coins, stacks them neatly, and leaves a note, making it clear that it’s payment for a night’s accommodation, not a gift.
She doesn’t even know if the gods can read.
She’s home for maybe a minute before she hears a scratching at the door. Silkpurse. Sighing, Eladora undoes the locks and wards, lets the ghoul scramble inside. Silkpurse looks wilder than Eladora’s seen her before. The ghoul sniffs the air; yellow eyes narrow.
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