It won’t be her. It can’t be her.
The creak of a door, the rustle of skirts. Another woman enters the little room. Slim and elegant, dressed in the black of mourning. She closes the door behind her and removes her veil, shaking out her hair. “Eladora Duttin. I’ve heard a great deal about you.” Silva slumps back down. Eladora gently tucks her mother’s arms back inside the bathchair, moves her head so it rests on a pillow, then turns to greet the newcomer.
“Lady Erevesic.”
Lys moves to the shuttered window, opens it a crack. “It’s very stuffy in here,” she says. “What did you hope to do with the church’s saints?”
Eladora swallows. “Fight the invasion.”
“You can’t beat the Sacred Realm, not without the god bomb. Guerdon’s lost.” Lys gives a little sympathetic smile.
“Is that the view of the king of Guerdon, or the Crown of Haith?”
Lys grins. “The Patros and his court want to run. My instructions from Haith are to go to the embassy and await rescue.”
“And the king?”
“I’m sure the king doesn’t want to lose his realm before he’s even crowned. And if he must lose his realm, then he’s determined to make Ishmere pay as high a price as possible.” Tendrils of cloud brush down from the sky over Five Knives, smashing rooftops. Cloud Mother’s saints, striking deeper into the city. Lys closes the window, turns back to Eladora. “Did Kelkin send you to fetch the Keeper saints?”
“Minister Kelkin didn’t send me,” admits Eladora. “I came looking for you, too.”
CHAPTER 48
Terevant doesn’t know how long they’ve marched for. He just stumbles along behind Carillon as she leads the motley host of ghouls and dead men through an endless maze of stairs and steep-sloping tunnels. Terevant’s the only one in the company who’s wholly human–even Carillon seems to possess unnatural vitality. She grows stronger as they climb towards the New City, while he falls behind. His chest aches where he was shot.
Rabendath steps to the side and lets the column march past him, before falling in with Terevant at the rear. My lord, the front lines of the Godswar are no place for the living.
“I fought on the front line,” gasps Terevant, “at Eskalind.”
You lost at Eskalind. Rabendath unslings a rifle and a breathing mask. It will be street fighting, messy work. The Guerdon saint–you’ve seen her powers at work, I believe.
Terevant nods, remembering the living stone of the New City miraculously changing at her command.
That may give us an edge, but we will need covering fire. He hands Terevant the rifle. I understand that the Ninth Rifles are good marksmen.
An hour later, he’s crouched on a rooftop on the edge of the New City, overlooking the maze of twisted streets that tumble down to the docks. One of the Ishmeric landing craft came to rest on the shore there; the waters of the harbour ripple as Kraken-saints slip beneath the moonlit waves. There’s an orange-red glow in the clouds over the city, but it’s not a presentiment of dawn–he’s facing west, towards Queen’s Point. The fortress must be on fire.
Carillon slips over to him. “Over there,” she says, pointing to the mouth of an alleyway. “Wait for the fifth one.”
He rests the sniper rifle on a ledge and squints through the sights. The first thing to scuttle out of the alleyway is one of the sacred animals of High Umur, an umurshix, a creature with the body of a scorpion and the head of a bull. He holds his fire as it passes. Three Ishmeric soldiers follow, their bodies wreathed in steel-smoke armour that flows around them. They carry lightning in their hands. Fifth–fifth, for an instant, is a priest of Smoke Painter. Spindly-limbed, clad in purple, twice as tall as a man, elongated fingers smearing reality with a touch.
He squeezes the trigger. The hot flash of phlogiston igniting, and the priest topples. No blood, just hissing purplish smoke, deflating instead of bleeding. The steel-smoke armour protecting the Ishmerians dissipates–and the trap closes. Vigilants charge from the cover of nearby buildings, striking down the suddenly vulnerable warriors. The umurshix, trapped in the suddenly narrow street, cannot turn around to bring its claws and teeth to bear, and its venomous sting holds no terror for the already dead. The Vigilants stab at the monster’s hindquarters, their swords seeking the gaps between its armour plates. Wounded, the beast bellows and scurries down the alleyway. Terevant reloads, the action as familiar to him as breathing. Six months since Eskalind, and he hasn’t lost the knack.
Carillon grabs Terevant. “Get off the roof,” she shouts. She doesn’t wait for him–she leaps down to a neighbouring roof, landing unerringly, vanishing into a doorway.
A bank of cloud descends towards him from the seething skies. He can dimly make out a figure at its heart, and snaps off a shot from the rifle. A wild miss. The cloud extends tendrils of mist, unfolding like some exotic aerial anemone. They look as fragile as gossamer, but Terevant has seen them rip people asunder, or carry them away into the sky. He follows Carillon on her headlong flight, landing awkwardly on the far rooftop and ducking into the doorway after her. He turns to slam the door behind him and finds that it’s already vanished, and there’s just blank stone there now.
“This is fun,” mutters Carillon. He’s not sure if she’s talking to him or to the city around her.
“Any sign of my sword?” He reloads in the darkness, finding the rune-scratched glass and smooth wood of the cartridge by touch.
“It’s down there, in the Wash. I can’t see it clearly, but it’s there.” She swallows. “They know it, too.”
The forces of Ishmere may not be able to touch the sword, but they know its value. They’re using it as bait, trying to lure the Haithi army into making a doomed sortie down the hill. It’s an obvious trap, but every second that goes by makes it more tempting. The sword’s more than a symbol–it could give Terevant the strength he needs to lead his House to victory.
Something scrapes against the exterior wall of the building. The bull-scorpion? The cloud tentacles? Another conjuration of the belligerent gods of Ishmere? The rifle will be no use in these close quarters if something breaks in. He draws his sword.
Another scratch, from below. A frustrated roar.
“The bastards are looking for us,” says Carillon. Her eyes tightly closed, her hand pressed to the glimmering stone wall. “Stay still. There are more of your dead lads coming down Holyhill way.”
Bryal and the troops from the camp. With their added strength, there’s a chance they can push past Ishmerinans, grab the Erevesic sword, and fall back intact. At Eskalind, he lost because he overextended himself, because he pushed the Ninth Rifles too far into enemy territory. Is he making the same mistake here? What would Olthic have done?
“Are you all right?” asks Carillon. “You look like you’re about to puke.”
His heart’s pounding, all right. He shakes his head.
“I’m fine.” Then, to distract himself: “You’re not in the Bureau files. Vanth wrote a lot about the Thays, and your cousin Eladora, but not you.”
Cari shrugs. “I came back to Guerdon just before the Crisis. I was sick and starving on the streets, not hanging about with spies or diplomats.” She pauses, then replies to an unheard comment. “Yes, you’re fucking diplomatic, fine,” she says to the wall.
To Spar. Terevant brushes the wall with his fingers. It feels like stone. He can’t sense anything in there. “It’s like a phylactery, I suppose.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Ask Eladora or someone.”
“Where were you before you came back here?”
“At sea, mostly. Serevast. Ulbishe. Paravos.”
“I lived in Paravos for a few months.”
“Part of the Haithi garrison?”
“No. Down in the Flowing Gardens.” A warren of poets and thieves, addicts and mystics.
“I loved it there. Up by the holy springs by day, and then down to the waterfront and the Dancer’s temple.” Cari’s face breaks into a grin.
A s
kittering noise from the far side of the wall. The umurshix is still out there, inches away from them, trying to find a way in. There’s a series of horrible, measured tap-tap-taps as it probes the stone with its forehooves, searching for a weakness.
“Can’t you, I don’t know, imprison it or cast it into a sewer?” asks Terevant.
Carillon scowls. “We wait. Once your soldiers get here, I’ll open another door and we can lead that bastard right to them, and they can shoot it. It can’t get—”
The bull-scorpion throws its full weight against the sealed door, but the stone holds. It roars again. Terevant can hear words in the monster’s bellowing; a prayer litany, or a summoning. Drawing the attention of the gods to their hiding place.
“—in. Maybe. Shit.” They scramble downstairs, through rooms recently abandoned. If the inhabitants were lucky, they found shelter deeper in the New City. Carillon’s also sealed the exit to ground level. She concentrates, and the stone begins to weep, beads of pale reddish liquid appearing on its surface and flowing down to pool on the floor.
“Harder to make this work down here,” she mutters. “Foundations are more solid. Give me a moment.”
“Why did you stay?” asks Terevant suddenly.
“When?”
“After you came back to Guerdon. It sounded awful.”
“I had a friend who was better than I am,” says Cari. She touches the wall, and the stone under her fingers slowly melts, folding back on itself like it’s alive. Sluggishly, painfully, it opens into a hole. “Come on!” she shouts as she slithers through.
Terevant’s bigger than she is, slower, and he’s got to wrestle the bulky rifle through after him. He’s only a few seconds slower, but it feels like minutes. She’s halfway up the twisted street by the time he’s through, and the bull-scorpion is right there, right on top of him, so close he can smell the digestive juices dripping from its fangs, read the sacred scriptures patterned in the creature’s shell. The umurshix’s eyes are human–was it once a saint or worshipper of High Umur?
He scrambles up the steep street after Carillon, the monster at his heels. Above, the sky’s writhing with low-hanging tentacles of solid mist.
The bull-scorpion knocks him down with a swipe of its massive hoof, sending him sprawling. It runs past him, over him, ignoring him–Carillon’s a saint, the emissary of a rival god. In the sightless eye of Ishmere, Terevant’s just another mortal. The saint is the threat. The umurshix’s stinger lashes out at him–trying to kill him as an afterthought–but he rolls to the side before it strikes. The bull-scorpion races after Carillon.
Terevant unslings his rifle, and fires. He can’t tell if he hit the monster, but the umurshix rears up in surprise, and turns to face him again, roaring and rattling. He’s got nowhere to run. Nowhere to retreat. To his left, there’s a high wall of pearly stone; to his right, smouldering rubble that used to be a tower. He reaches for another cartridge, but it slips from his fingers, shatters on the ground. The monster’s bullet-proof anyway.
And then the wall cracks, and a huge slab of it comes crashing down, right on top of the umurshix. The impact shatters the monster’s shell, and there’s a tremendous wet splat as the weight of the stone crushes the thing’s organs.
Cari emerges from the dust and helps Terevant up. She kicks a fragment of stone, sending it splashing into the pool of ichor that oozes from the titanic corpse. “You’ll kill yourself!” she mutters, bitterly. Then, to Terevant: “Come on. Stay low.”
They clamber over the rubble, sneak through winding back alleys. The low-hanging clouds deny them the rooftops. The New City is a maze, but Carillon leads him unerringly through the streets until they make contact with the Haithi reinforcements.
Bony hands clap Terevant on the back, salute him as he pushes through the formation. There are living soldiers here, too; their faces wear an expression that he remembers from Eskalind–the Godswar bursting around them, the shock of sudden divine wrath and rampaging monsters, but beyond and beneath that, the overwhelming horror of knowing that the gods have gone mad. The creeping, undeniable realisation that heaven is a storm at sea, and the timbers of the world are breaking.
Still, there’s less than a quarter of the soldiers he expected. Even with some left behind to guard the camp near the alchemists’ factories at the rail yard, there should be more Haithi troops here. He remembers Eskalind, looking back from the threshold of the temple and seeing only a handful of the Rifles still standing. Terevant leads Carillon through the ranks, up towards the company’s banner where Bryal waits. He’s talking to some woman in a city watch jacket, her face hidden in a breathing mask. For a moment, Terevant’s heart leaps at the thought that it might be Lys, but it’s not her. Some other woman.
Bryal reassures him. We’ve secured the Palace of the Patros. The king ordered us to open the doors of the Cathedrals, so the faithful in the courtyard could take refuge there. I left two companies there to guard our allies.
“The king ordered it–or the Lady Erevesic?”
“I ordered it.” Eladora pulls off her breathing mask, sniffs the air, puts it back on.
“Duttin!” gasps Terevant. “What happened? How did you… I mean, those are my troops, so—” The last time he’d seen her, she was as broken as he was, shattered by the revelation that Sinter had used her, just like Lys had used him. They’d both been manipulated and used by others. Lost in a fog of lies.
Clearly, Eladora has been through many ordeals since then, but something has changed in her. She seems out of the fog now. Terevant envies her, envies that wellspring of certainty she’s found.
“There is little time, and much to do,” says Eladora.
“Thank you for…” Terevant begins, then trails off. Healing me when I got shot? Finding out who stole my sword?
“We can settle all accounts if we survive, Lord Erevesic.” Eladora glances back east up the hill, towards Holyhill. The sun rising behind the Cathedrals outlines their spires in rosy fire. “King Berrick and the Patros are conducting a ceremony, praying for victory over the city’s enemies. I have sent… allies… to the House of Saints, to fetch all the holy relics they can muster. It will, I p-p… I think, refocus the Kept Gods, bolster the strength of the saints. The Kept Gods will take to the defence of the city.” The way she speaks reminds Terevant of when he first met her, weeks ago, in the waiting room outside Ramegos’ office. Then, she sounded most confident when reciting from a history book.
Now, she sounds like she’s anticipating what they’ll write about her. Meeting the judgement of history without flinching, impatient for events around her to catch up.
“Full-on Godswar, El?” says Carillon quietly.
“The Kept Gods are still weak. Their newfound power is brittle–the presence of the king has given them a focus, and the faith he inspires gives them a flush of power… like an apprentice sorcerer who’s just mastered a spell for the first time. But it won’t last. They’re still no match for the pantheon of Ishmere.” She takes a deep breath. “But they’ll help you hold the line.”
“What do you mean?” asks Terevant. Cari says nothing, but her dark eyes watch her cousin intently.
Eladora takes a breath, pauses for a moment at the brink.
Then.
“I need three days.”
CHAPTER 49
Eladora walks in the darkness, holding Carillon’s hand. She’s got an alchemical lamp in her pocket, but she doesn’t light it. She knows Cari can sense every footfall, every imperfection, through the stone of the tunnels around them. Eladora follows her cousin in silence, trusting in Cari to guide her down to the vault of horrors beneath the New City.
The sounds of the war fade as they descend. Soon, it’s just Eladora’s breath rattling in her mask, Cari’s knife tapping nervously on the walls.
“Is it much further?” asks Eladora. Part of her wants these stairs to elongate, to put this off as long as possible.
“Spar buried them deep,” replies Carillon, “but we’
re nearly there. Here, feel this.” She guides Eladora’s hand so she can feel the jagged metal of a broken alchemical tank that’s embedded in the tunnel wall. There’s some waxy residue in the tank that squirms beneath her fingers. She lingers there a moment, seeing how flexible the stuff is, how much it can be pressed before it breaks.
They emerge into the outer cavern. The fresh scar-stone of the curtain wall is dimly luminescent, but the main source of light is Ramegos’ fading werelight. The sorceress lies with her head on a folded jacket, salvaged from remains of the Haithi excavation. Silkpurse sits next to her, chewing on a hunk of meat that Eladora suspects was also salvaged from Haith remains.
“Miss Duttin!” squeaks Silkpurse, running over to greet her. “Lord Rat said to tell you that they’ve evacuated parliament through the tunnels. The army’s digging in at Gravehill, to keep ’em penned in the lower city.” Castle Hill, Queen’s Point and Holyhill form three points of a rough triangle around the harbour and the Wash, with the New City off to the side. “Same thing they did in the Crisis,” mutters Cari. “Keep the fighting where the poor live. Can’t have the quality up in Bryn Avane suffer.”
“It’s a matter of geography,” says Eladora defensively. “The heights can be defended, and the only gaps between them are fortified. There are guns on the Duchess Viaduct.”
“Good thing,” says Ramegos weakly from the ground, “that gods can’t fly. Or throw thunderbolts from heaven. Or—” She’s stopped by a coughing fit. Silkpurse rushes to her side, lifts her so that she can breathe. “It was over when the interceptor sank.”
I hoped you’d be like Jermas was in the old days, Kelkin said. He had fucking steel in his spine.
“I have a proposal,” says Eladora.
She stoops and picks up a piece of shimmering New City stone from the ground. “Carillon, you can invoke Spar. The city is alive. You can reshape its stone–you even did it out in the harbour. You can reach out to Hark, raise the Kestrel.”
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