“We don’t know how many are still alive down there.”
“I do,” says Carillon. “I can still see down there.”
Terevant raises a hand to speak, but Rabendath doesn’t notice.
That brings up another matter. We have received intelligence—
“I told you,” interjects Cari, sourly.
Rabendath continues. Regarding the location of the Sword Erevesic. It is in the lower Wash. He indicates tenements around Sumpwater Square.
“It’s a trap.” Sinter sounds incredulous that they’d even consider the possibility. “Ishmere knows that you want to recover the sword. They want to divide our forces. No doubt they’ve got some horror waiting for you to take the bait.”
It is not bait. It is the Sword Erevesic. And this is not our city. My orders are to recover the sword and all Haithi personnel, then retreat.
“No fucking way we hold the Viaduct without the dead,” says the mercenary. “No way we’re doing that. We’re out.”
“Eladora said to give her three days,” shouts Cari, “you don’t need to hold it for long.”
“And where the fuck is Eladora Duttin?” demands Sinter.
“I don’t know!”
“You and she,” says Sinter, “are ruinous. Had I but one wish, it would be that you died with the rest of your accursed family.”
Time is running out. If you do not fortify the Viaduct line soon, the enemy will break through. My troops shall coordinate our advance with your deployment, draw away some of the enemy forces. Rabendath acknowledges Terevant’s presence for the first time. The Erevesic must have his sword.
Lys squeezes Ter’s hand again. He takes his hand away and stands.
“Thank you, Colonel, but… the Erevesic can wait. Have our troops join Guerdon’s in the defence of the Viaduct gap.”
Rabendath’s skull swivels to face him. My lord, if we do not recover the sword now, it will likely be lost forever. The souls of your ancestors are in it. It is the Sword Erevesic.
Hold the line, hold the city. Give Eladora her full three days. Maybe save the rest of the city. Maybe seal an alliance between Haith and Guerdon.
Or lead his troops in battle against Ishmere. Maybe win the sword. A poet’s war, going for the dramatic gesture, the quest for glory. All his failures washed away as he saves Sword and House Erevesic at once. One grand moment where the world changes.
The easiest person to deceive is yourself.
“The enemy knows how valuable the sword is to us. They know what it means to me. Sinter’s right–it’s a trap, a scheme to divide our forces.” Terevant keeps his face impassive, his voice steady. “Hold the line, Colonel,” he orders.
For four hundred years I have fought under your family’s banner. In all that time, I have never known defeat when the Erevesic led us.
But it’s not Olthic, or anyone else. It’s me.
“You have your orders, Colonel.”
CHAPTER 51
The spy’s slow death is interrupted by a naval engagement, close at hand. Guerdon’s little fleet of ironclads have arrived from Maredon. The krakens are waiting for them–tentacles explode from the water, trying to pluck soldiers from the deck or drag the ships into the abyss. Cannons bark in response, searing the monsters with bitter clouds of withering dust or dragons-breath bursts of phlogiston. It’s a standoff–the guns are enough to keep the kraken at bay, but without miracles to counter the theft of the seas the warships dare not press on into the harbour.
They hold position beyond Hark, harassing the besiegers, launching rockets and shells over the island. The spy can’t tell if they’re holding position, waiting for some signal, or if they’re preparing to engage the main fleet when it arrives.
That would be a valiant effort.
Mortals are so good at valiant efforts.
Until a god reaches down and brushes them away.
Columns of troops march down from Holyhill towards the Viaduct gap. They go through the University District, down the Street of Philosophers, past Desiderata Street. The Vigilants in perfect formation, then ragged city watch, knots of mercenaries and irregular volunteers. Here and there a flaming sword, a divine gift.
Lys hurries to walk alongside Terevant. One of her bodyguards urges her to turn back, to return to the comparative security of Holyhill, but she brushes them away. She pulls Terevant to the side.
“You did the right thing, Ter. Without the sword, the Erevesic armies and lands will be taken into charge by the Crown. But if we save Guerdon, get control of the remaining god bombs, I’ll be the Crown.” Her eyes are bright, and her nails dig into his arm. “Olthic would understand. Hold the city, and we gain everything.”
She steps back, lets the guards whisk her away.
She doesn’t understand. She’s seeing conspiracies and stratagems, the same dance of ambition and intrigue that Olthic tried to join.
That’s not why he did it, not why at all.
One of the Erevesic troops–Iorial, he thinks, but it’s hard to tell in the smoke and steam rising from the flooded city–finds Terevant in the column. He hands Terevant a satchel of rifle ammunition. The Colonel advises that you find a position in the heights, well clear of the Viaduct gap. For your own safety.
“I’m the Erevesic. Shouldn’t I be at the head of our troops?”
As the Colonel said, the front lines are no place for the living. It’s usually hard to read subtext in the sepulchral voices of the dead, but Iorial’s tombstone-heavy tone is perfect for conveying the message here. Most of those who’ll fight at the Viaduct gap are alive, not Vigilant, but Guerdon’s mercenaries and city watch are better equipped for close-quarters battle in the Godswar than regular Haithi troops. It’s not worth the argument.
Perversely, Terevant takes a left turn, following a narrow street that runs down towards the Wash, towards occupied territory. There are warehouses along Hook Row that have a commanding view over the approaches from the Wash; he can station himself there. He loads his rifle, checks his breathing mask.
There was fighting on these streets earlier. Bullet holes in the walls, stains on the cobblestones. Relatively few bodies, though. Keepers and ghouls take the human dead, and alchemist scavengers take the god-touched monsters. All boiled down for their essences. Somewhere down there, behind enemy lines, is his brother’s essence. The essence of his House. But he can’t gamble the city. He doesn’t have the courage to stake the fate of so many others on his own skill.
He’s gone too far, in the mist. Gone past the warehouses. The street ahead is half flooded, water lapping against ground-floor windows, great shoals of debris bobbing along the Kraken-swollen river.
A bizarre shape emerges from the murk. A creature of spikes and claws, lumpy and irregular, propelled by a little thrashing tail… and then he sees it more clearly. Mercenaries crouched on a ramshackle raft, armed with rifles and swords, watching the shore. Some swimming creature at the rear, pushing the raft through the floodwater.
He raises his rifle, in case they’re Ishmeric, but the woman at the front of the raft waves to him in greeting.
“Hey,” she shouts, “it’s the boy from the Festival.” The soldier removes her breathing mask. It’s Naola, the mercenary.
Terevant stumbles down to the edge of the water, removes his own mask. “You were going to Lyrix.”
“The war came here,” replies Naola. “And Guerdon paid us more.” Naola springs ashore to stand in front of him. “Where’d you run off to, Festival night?”
He can’t help but laugh. “You wouldn’t believe me.”
“Maybe I would. We’ve seen the strangest of things. We’ve been fighting down in the Wash, last two days.” From the look of the cargo on the raft, though, they’ve been doing as much looting as fighting.
“How?” The Wash is occupied territory. Ishmeric gods and monsters everywhere.
“We fell in with a bunch of refugees in the New City. Some of ’em were close to the gods back in Severast, came here ge
ntled. Now that the gods are here, they’ve got power again.” Naola gestures back towards the shape that pushed the raft. “We’ve got our own kraken,” she says gleefully.
He stops and grabs Naola by the shoulders. “I am Terevant of House Erevesic. I’m absurdly wealthy. I’ll pay you a fortune if you can sneak me into the Wash.”
A hot wind blows across Hark, waking the spy. He stares up into a red sky, and cannot tell if it is night or day, or if all natural order is another casualty of the war. A wound opens in the crimson firmament, a slash of gold, and from it descends a whirling stairway of fire.
The stair spins and dances across the ruins of the prison, a blazing whirlwind. A tongue of flame touches the spy, and the stairs anchors itself to the ground where he lies. He is too empty to react; too tired even to blink.
Figures descend the stairs from heaven. Ishmeric soldiers. Priests of Pesh, their hands blood-slick, some carrying trumpets, others sacrificial knives. They walk ahead of Captain Isigi, who strides down the stairs carrying a bowl of freshly plucked hearts. The captain’s once-beautiful face is misshapen, her skull remade too many times. She glances down at the spy. Do you know who I am? he thinks, but she ignores him, stepping over him to gaze at the smoke-shrouded city beyond.
Her eyes are quite, quite mad.
After Isigi follows a woman in the silken robes of a priestess of the Fate Spider, a woman who kneels down by the spy and dribbles water into his mouth from a flask, then sits back and lights a cigarette.
“X84,” says Annah, “how the fuck are you still alive?”
“Just lucky,” he mutters.
“Lucky,” she echoes, looking at the wreck of the Grand Retort. “We all got lucky. You lied to us about the bomb. Do you have any idea what they’ll do to you?”
“Nothing that has not been done already.” His throat is so dry he can only manage a whisper, a breeze stirring cold ashes.
Annah shakes her head slowly. “Idiot. When the war is over, the gods will amuse themselves devising new ways to punish apostates and traitors. But we won’t wait that long for you.”
“When the war is over?” says Isigi. “The war is holy. The war is eternal.” She looks at Guerdon and laughs. “But here I will dance in the ruin.”
Isigi strides off across the rocks, down to the shore. She wades into the sea, careful to avoid the froth of the acid seeds. She wades until the water is up to her chest, and keeps striding forward, her skull cracking and reshaping as she dons the war-form of Pesh. Her frame swells, the waves breaking against the muscles of her back as she grows. The foam of her wake is pink-tinged with blood.
Taller than the towers, now, a goddess wading through the murky depths of the harbour. She brushes aside sandbars, breaks the Bell Rock island. Her strides send smaller waves rushing across the bay, drowning Shrike. On the Isle of Statues, terrified Stone Men fling themselves to the ground and press their faces into the dirt rather than look at her terrible countenance. Some will never rise again.
She exhales, and lion-spirits of steam and hate run ahead of Pesh, heralding the arrival of the goddess.
As she draws close to the city, a few of the remaining guns open fire upon her. Cannons on the heights of Holyhill, weapons brought over from the alchemists’ warehouses and hastily put into the field. But Pesh is the war incarnate, and their fury is her fury. They cannot harm her.
She roars a lion’s roar of triumph, and the world shakes. She unsheathes her claws with a trumpet blast from the priests on the shore. With one tremendous swipe of her divine paw, she crushes the seaward bastion of Queen’s Point.
Godswar has come to the city.
Annah watches the goddess in her wrath. “Well, then. Not fucking smooth at all, but that’s that.” She counts out a handful of golden coins, leaves them on the rock next to the spy. “All accounts settled at the end.”
She finishes her cigarette. “In other circumstances, we’d take you to the Paper Tombs, and my god would unmake you. Like Tammur. But Fate Spider has fled this place, because of your actions, so we have to resort to secular means.”
From beneath her robe, she produces a small gun, an expensive repeater. Points it at the spy’s face. “We vetted you, Baradhin. You were no one–a petty smuggler. No faith. No surviving family. No loyalties. We were thorough.”
It’s true, thinks the spy. Sanhada Baradhin was an ideal recruit for the Ishmerian Intelligence Corps. That’s why he was chosen.
“You didn’t sell us out to Guerdon. Was it to Haith? To Lyrix? Who bought you, Baradhin? Give me something, and maybe I’ll be merciful. Mortals can be merciful. Gods cannot.”
She’s right. He mutters something under his breath.
“What’s that?” Annah leans down, the gun aimed now at his belly. The priests of Pesh glance over, knives in hand, ready to act.
“Annah,” whispers the spy. And he speaks another word, a secret word, known only to those who have worshipped at the temples, who have descended into the Paper Tombs.
She straightens up. “My god,” says Annah quietly.
The gun fires one, twice, three times, four. The four priests topple. A secular sacrifice.
Annah places the gun in her own mouth and pulls the trigger. Five.
Pale spiders emerge from cracks in the rocks.
The spy walks down to the beach while the spiders cocoon the remains.
CHAPTER 52
Three days, Eladora said.
Patience has never been one of Carillon’s gifts.
Over the last three days, she’s taught the Ishmerians to fear the Saint of Knives. Every window is her eye. The New City streets are a maze of traps and ambushes; her soldiers a mob of thieves and sainted footpads, who mug any god who trespasses in her sacred alleyways. She prowls on rooftops and gutters, watching the monsters get closer.
At night, the ghouls came out. Rat’s legion from the tunnels, to claw and strangle any invader caught out after dark. The Ishmerians turned what used to be Mercy Street into a seething river of unwater, a barrier between the occupied zone and Carillon’s domain. Some of the folk of the Wash made it out before the waters rose, and now the tunnels and vaults under the New City are crowded. She protected them as best she could.
Spar protected them better, shielding them from miracles, sealing off tunnels before the monsters could reach them.
Now, the fighting’s gone to other parts of Guerdon, up Mercy Street to Glimmerside, Holyhill, the Viaduct. It’s a sort of victory, Carillon guesses, but it leaves her feeling frustrated.
At dawn, she visits the burned-out ruin of her house on Sevenshell Street. From there, she can see across the glittering harbour. Out beyond the horizon is Hark Island and the wreck of the Grand Retort.
“If they want us to fucking raise her,” she mutters, “why wait?”
Eladora asked you to, comes the answer. Spar’s answers in her head have started to sound less like him, more like her own voice.
“She’s probably dead, you know? If she hasn’t got distracted by a ‘particularly fine example of pre-Crisis cloacal architecture’, or started blubbering.” Cari drums her fingernails on the stone. “If we’re going to go, we should go.”
We should wait for the right time.
“The city’s under attack!”
Yes, I did notice. She can sense Spar gathering himself, his consciousness trickling through unseen channels in the stone. I feel it all, Cari. I share in every death. I’m struck by every gunshot. But this war has been coming for longer than either of us have been alive. Waiting three days is insignificant, when you consider how long the Godswar has lasted already.
“Easy for you to say when you’re not the one getting shot. Tell everyone who dies today that we’re sorry, but now’s not the right time, and it serves them right for being murdered according to schedule.”
That’s not what I’m saying.
“It’s a pretty detached perspective, is all.”
I know. What more would you have me do?
&nb
sp; It’s not him that should do more. Spar’s given his life already. She wants to do more. Do something. To act, not wait.
Cari listens to the distant sound of gunfire out at sea. It echoes off the seawall behind her, like the whole sky’s falling.
Rat’s here. The ghoul clambers down the side of a building, stalks over to where Cari sits. He folds his massive frame, bowing his horned head down until it’s nearly at Carillon’s level.
“TELL SPAR—” Rat tries to speak through her, but she fights him off. “Fuck that. You can speak for yourself. I’m already carrying two-thirds of the conversation. I’m not going to sit here and let you two argue through me.”
Rat reaches up and waggles his wolf-like jaw. He tries to speak around his fangs. “Isn’t comfortable to speak like this.” His words sound like they’ve been exhumed, deep and doleful, and his breath is a graveyard stink.
“Oh, poor you.” She pauses for a moment. “You heard the Keepers killed Cruel Urid?”
“A demigod,” scoffs Rat, “and he’ll come back. Diminished, yes, but not destroyed. Not without the god bomb.” Irritated, he adds, “And they burned the body.”
“How’re your ghouls doing in all this?”
“We have seen the city fall before. We have known war and invasion before, plague and much death. Such times are feasts for our kind. This is different–all gods are carrion gods, these days, so desperate for souls that they’ll claim the meanest corpse. There may be poor pickings for my kind in days to come–but we will survive. Dig deep. Guerdon is older than gods.”
“The pair of you,” says Carillon, “are shit at being comforting.”
Sorry.
“You worked with Eladora in Kelkin’s government, right? What’s she like there?”
Rat considers the question. “I dismissed her as one of Kelkin’s acolytes, but she is… deep-rooted. When she dies, I think her soul will be one of those that clings to the earth and the bricks, and is… indigestible to ghouls.” He chuckles slowly. “Sometimes, actually, she reminds me of you, Spar. Other times…” He snorts.
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