The magic leaps across Guerdon, drawn into the depths of the New City and then spat like an artillery barrage across to five targets in the Fog Yards.
There are five pebbles hidden around Mandel’s fortress. Five little pebbles cut from the New City. They’d fit into the palm of your hand.
The whole of the New City sprang from the corpse of a single Stone Man.
The five pebbles erupt, hissing like angry dragons. They sprout like vines, flow like lava. They smash through walls and pierce containment vessels. They rear up, five earthquakes, and shatter the fortress. It’s an explosion of solid stone, an ongoing devastation. Guards flee, firing desperately at the onrushing stone before they’re entombed or crushed. Tallowmen cackle, dancing through the chaos of living stone, slashing at it in confusion with their knives and axes, unable to comprehend this miracle.
The rushing stone sheds dust, and the dust is also alive. Where the dust touches human flesh, it burrows in like a spore. The Stone Plague can be a weapon, too. Dust clouds billow though the yliaster processing sheds at Mandel & Company, catching the workers there unawares. They pass through all the stages of the plague in an instant, beyond the help of any alkahest. A single Stone Woman, her lungs calcifying, her eyes gone to marble, stumbles out into the courtyard and fails to scream.
Where the dust cannot find purchase in flesh, it clogs vents, adheres to breathing masks and goggles and the joints of protective suits. Mandel’s guards are equipped to fight the Godswar, but even they are taken by surprise, easy prey for the host of ghouls that follows in the wake of the explosions. It clings, too, to the blazing wicks inside the heads of the remaining Tallowmen, snuffing them out.
In the space of ten heartbeats, the unvaniquishable fortress is conquered.
Rasce sinks back to himself. Sharp spikes of pain sear through his body – the stone plates in his side have sprouted five matching spurs, five stag-horned growths driving into his lungs, his bowels, reaching for his heart. The pain is enough to stagger him. His vision blurs.
“I was right,” breathes Vorz, his voice full of quiet amazement. “I’ve done it.” Almost absently, the alchemist produces a syringe and injects it into Rasce’s neck. More tincture or more painkiller, he can’t tell.
“I have to see,” says Rasce. He stumbles up the tunnel, coughing despite his breathing mask. He has to see what he has done.
It has to be enough for Great-Uncle. It has to all be worth it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
The mage-wind drives Cari through the darkness. She’s no idea how fast she’s travelling. For that matter, she’s hazy on where she’s going – she can navigate by the stars and keep the tiller straight on this heading north-east, but she can’t tell if she’s on course for Ilbarin or Firesea or if she’ll miss them both and break out into the Middle Sea.
She’ll run out of food long before then, of course.
And run out of water before that.
Oh, but she’ll probably fall unconscious out of sheer exhaustion even before that.
On the whole, one of my better plans, right?
All during that long night, the wind in her ears and the spray in her face, Cari has time to think. At first, she berates herself, cursing herself for once again doing something immensely stupid. Acting on instinct, mistaking an escape route for a plan. She can’t outrun Moonchild. She can’t lose Artolo either, not when he’s got the Kraken on his side. Even if the Bythos block him from directly striking her with miracles, he can find her by looking for the gaps, for the places they protected her. She remembers looking for Heinreil that way, long ago in Guerdon. The guildmaster stole her amulet, and that amulet blocked her from perceiving him through the visions sent by the Black Iron Gods. In the end, she worked out how to find the amulet by looking for blind spots. Artolo can do the same.
She glances over her shoulder, tries to draw on this knack for sensing godshit she’s developed. She strains her inner eye, searching for the knot of Kraken-shit around Artolo, but it’s too much for her. All she finds is a headache – and the feeling of a gathering storm. Tension all around her, electricity in the air. Power in the water, the spray tingling when it touches her skin. But there’s no hostility in it.
She tries to analyse the sensation, to put words to it. It’s not like back in Gissa, where she could sense that she and Rhan-Gis were kindred spirits of some sort, so she was able to slip inside his defences and stab him with her bloody dagger.
At the same time, it’s not like it was on the Rock of Ilbarin, before Usharet attacked here. There, it was a sense of opposition, of hostility. Usharet saw her as an enemy and struck at her. She got the same feeling when Moonchild approached Yhandis – a god perceiving her as something dangerous or unclean. A servant of a rival deity. That makes sense to her – she’s the Herald of the Black Iron Gods, Saint of Knives, Other Portentous Titles Pending. Eladora and Ongent were always going on about gods as patterns, as currents of psychic force. So, if Cari’s part of a current that flows one way, and she runs into a god flowing the other way, that causes friction. Hostility. Push far enough, and you get angry manifestations, the wrath of god.
She drums her fingers off the side of the boat. They’re so numb, she can’t feel the timbers. So, think of it like trespassing into another gang’s turf. She had the right idea in Yhandis, she decides, when she compared religious symbols and faith to declaring membership in a street gang. What does that mean for the Lord of Waters? Why doesn’t she get the same feeling of hostility from that god?
Almost experimentally, she nudges the tiller to starboard. For a moment, the feeling of friction increases by an almost imperceptible amount, then it fades away again. The Lord of Waters should be antithetical to her, but for some reason it’s suppressing that hostility. A temporary truce.
Cari tries again, and again, picking at it like a scab, until she’s sure.
Hawse said the Lord of Waters had a plan for her. He’d tried to help her escape Ilbarin because of that conviction. Hawse thought the god wanted him to assist her; she thought that it was nonsense, that Hawse was just dressing up his own desire to help her in religious trappings. Now, she’s beginning to suspect they were both wrong.
She nudges the tiller again, finds her course.
The mage-wind fails in the afternoon of the second day, but by then the storm’s already gathering. Behind Cari, lightning crawls and slithers over the dome of the sky, the bolts branching like the tentacles of the Kraken. Soon after that, sections of sea begin to freeze, the Kraken stealing the water and leaving razor-glass ghosts behind. Waves ahead of her bulge, then scab over like blisters, the Kraken sowing obstacles in her path. She weaves through them. Glances over her shoulder to see Moonchild on the horizon, the plumes of smoke from her funnels mixing with the gathering darkness of the storm clouds.
Just a little further. They’re nearly in Ilbarinese waters.
Ahead, more clouds. More darkness. Two storms at sea, rushing towards one another. An overwhelming sense of pressure weighs down on Cari, crushing her. She has to strain to lift her head. She shifts her grip, putting her heavy stone hand on the tiller, to keep the boat on course as the world howls around her, wind and wave and, horribly, her own voice joining in a wordless scream.
Moonchild’s closer now, cutting through the surging waves like an iron blade. She can see a figure on the prow, arms upraised, and she knows it’s Artolo. She can imagine him, bloated, skin growing scaly and blue-tinged, as the Kraken claims him. It’s not just the Ghierdana crime boss chasing her – he’s just the focus, the barrel of the gun. It’s the Kraken and the rest of the maimed pantheon of Ishmere that pursues her.
Just a little further.
A rushing wave tears the tiller from her hand. Her fishing boat spins this way and that, buffeted by the wild weather. Spray lashes over the side, nearly blinding her. All Cari can do is cling to the side and pray.
In the distance, Artolo moves his right arm in a sweeping arc, and a huge wave rises up
, mountainous, a blasphemy against gravity. The foam atop the wave is a forest of white tentacles. Kraken-shapes move within the wall of water. The wave mounts, and mounts, tall enough to swallow the New City and all its towers.
Then Artolo clenches his left fist, and the wave turns to Kraken-glass, every droplet a lethal knife. The miracle explodes invisible around her, filling sea and sky. So close she can see the gods, see the Kraken in the water. The waves are his writhing, hungry tentacles.
Cari shouts one last obscenity, but her word is lost in the roaring waters as the wave comes crashing down.
Artolo is gigantic, bigger than the sky. Only his steel boots keep him on the ground – without them, he would bestride the world, step from Ilbarin to Ishmere in a single bound. Another step would bring him to Guerdon – he will swallow Thay’s soul and carry it with him, make her watch as he washes away her New City like a child’s sandcastle in the rising tide. He shall throw Great-Uncle down, too, knock the dragon from the sky and quench his fires in the cold deeps.
Artolo’s skull is fit to burst with furious joy. Irritated by the constraints of bone, he dissolves it with a thought, drawing ever closer to the perfection of his new God – for his new god is very close, now. The waves are Artolo’s racing pulse; the seas his cold blood.
“We have to turn back!” shouts Dol Martaine over the tempest of wind and wave.
“No! Not until she is dead!” Thunder booms in the clouds, echoing Artolo’s words.
“It’s like the invasion of Ilbarin! We have to turn!” Martaine tugs at Artolo’s arm, disrespecting the living god. With a twitch, he flings Martaine across the deck; with a thought, he turns the seawater sluicing across the forecastle into razor-water, stripping the flesh from Martaine’s hands and knees.
Artolo reaches out into the churning waters and searches for his prize. Around him, Moonchild groans, pitching wildly from side to side as the storm pummels her. A few crew fall overboard, offerings for the Kraken. The whole ship could shatter, and Artolo would not be dismayed. He’s a thing of the sea now, a saint of the Kraken. His desire – the god’s desire – for revenge outweighs mortal necessities like shelter from the storm.
A tongue of water lifts the wreckage of Carillon’s little boat on to the deck before him. He sifts through broken timbers, finds her battered body.
A memory flows into Artolo’s brain, unimpeded now that his skull has become a fluid sac. He remembers when the gods of Ishmere made war upon the gods of Ilbarin, when he and his sisters brought low the Lord of Waters. Glorious was Pesh on that day, Lion Queen, war goddess, blood-crowned! And glorious was the Kraken on that day, diamond-dappled, master of the seas, and a million souls in Ilbarin drowned in celebration of His victory!
But Pesh died. It was another city, another sea, another war – but Pesh is on every battlefield, just as Kraken is in every sea. For the gods, there is neither space nor time, only the infinite iterations of their divine litanies, holy monads drawn in the heart of all things. Gods are beyond time, and cannot die – but Pesh died, her pattern overwritten by the abomination of Black Iron. It was Carillon Thay who struck her down, Thay who maimed both Artolo and Ishmere.
A death for a death. He lifts Cari’s limp body out of the wreckage, wraps his fingers around her throat. His touch is careful, almost gentle. This must be savoured. This must be sacred.
She must know it, too. He raises a slimy tentacle-finger, strokes Cari’s cheek. Traces the marks on her body – the burns from the shattered Black Iron God, the scars where the dragon bit her, a hundred other cuts and bruises. Her body a map of her failed journey. He can taste her skin through receptors that sprout in the suckers on his Kraken-fingers.
He examines the pale grey skin of her cursed hand, runs his new fingers – so wonderfully soft and adaptable! – between her frozen ones. It’s the only part of her that isn’t limp and unconscious. That won’t do at all.
He nibbles her earlobe, then bites, tasting her blood. “Carillon Thay,” whispers Artolo, “the gods say I shall kill you.”
“… what gods?” she whispers, still stunned, only semi-conscious.
“Pesh, the Lion Queen, shall be avenged. Kraken made me whole again.” The litany comes spilling out of him, like he’s just a mouthpiece for the unseen gods. As he speaks, the feeling of power grows, divinity pressing against his exposed brain. “Fate Spider set my destiny. High Umur judges your crime. Smoke Painter, Blessed Bol, Cloud Mother—”
“Lord of Waters!” she cries.
And the god rises.
For it is said in all the lands, gods cannot die.
The Lord of Waters, fortified by all the souls salvaged by his loyal Bythos, drawn by the blasphemy of the invaders, surges from the deeps. This reborn incarnation of the god is diminished, changed from the kindly deity who blessed the harbour at Ilbarin and guided the ships home safely. His once-glorious visage is ill-made, his body laden with seaweed and debris. His eyes are bleary, and his voice is no longer the booming of thunder, no longer full of wisdom and foresight, but an animalistic roar of hatred.
But his spear is sharp and true, and for a moment his face is that of Captain Hawse.
It wasn’t a physical blow.
Cari can’t tell what’s happening in the physical realm, and what’s bleeding through from the realm of the gods. She’s seen gods walk in the mortal world, so fuck it, maybe the Lord of Waters did just rise from the ocean depths and strike down Artolo. If he did, though, the attack left no physical mark. Artolo’s bloated torso doesn’t have a giant hole in it.
The effects, though, are undeniable. Artolo topples, bonelessly, collapsing to the deck. All around them the storm rages. Moonchild spins wildly, thrown by the churning seas. Dimly, Cari’s aware that a blow has been struck in the Godswar, that Kraken has been wounded and thrown into disarray. The storm around them shifts in a way she can recognise but not name, like the wind’s howling in a different key. It’s still about to sink the Moonchild, though.
Cari crawls away from Artolo’s unmoving form, finds Dol Martaine lying there, face pressed against the deck, hiding from the gods. She grabs him, shakes him until he looks at her. “Pray!” she shouts, “tell them all to pray!” She shoves him towards the nearest hatch.
The crew are mostly Ilbariners. Some taken as slaves, others wiping away the ash-marks from their foreheads, but all take up the prayer, following Dol Martaine as he recites words Captain Hawse taught him. A prayer for deliverance from the storm.
It’s not enough. Moonchild begins to capsize as the raging waters crash against her.
Cari bends over Artolo’s body. Boneless, it sags and spreads over the deck like a beached jellyfish. He’s still alive, staring glassy-eyed into the sky. A bloody stain begins to spread beneath the unbroken skin of his breast. Divine stigmata.
“Hey, fucker.” By a stroke of luck so apt it must be divine, she still has her fish-gutting knife.
His slack lips twitch, like he’s about to try to speak, but it’s too late. She drives the knife in, starting with the old scar, the place where she cut him in Guerdon, but she keeps going. His Kraken-touched flesh yielding to the knife, parting like a wet bag as she carves him up. She dives into Artolo’s body, searching for his heart.
A terrible, intoxicating feeling of rightness flows through her. You were made for this, it seems to say.
She finds her enemy’s soul, seizes it, and flings it into the sea. The Bythos will take it to the Lord of Waters. The soul of a saint is a great prize, easily enough to pay for their passage to safety.
The storm subsides. The clouds clear. Moonchild rests on a calm ocean, so tranquil that Carillon can see the flooded ruins of Ilbarin City beneath the keel.
The surviving crew emerge from below. In their terrified eyes, Cari can see how she must appear to them – clad in the tattered remains of a royal gown, knife in hand drenched in blood and gore. Beautiful and terrible at the same time, a saint of terror and darkness who has come out of the Godswar to bring r
uin upon them all.
Dol Martaine crawls towards her on his bloody knees, babbling about how he tried to stop them killing Adro, how he’s protected Ren and Ama, pleading for her mercy. He thinks that she wielded the power of the Lord of Waters. He doesn’t know that she’s got no miraculous power here, that she’s far from Guerdon’s New City. That she’s human.
Mostly human, anyway.
But there are other forms of power, and other ways to wield it. Cari looks down the length of Moonchild, feels the vibrations of the alchemical engines through her legs, notes the deck cannon installed by the Ghierdana. Moonchild’s not the Rose, but Cari’s not the scared girl who ran away to sea any more, either.
“Set a course for the Rock of Ilbarin,” she orders, “and ready the guns.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Rasce emerges from the mouth of the tunnel into what must be the heart of the old temple, a great high-ceilinged hall that nevertheless reminds him of a slaughterhouse. The place is thick with ghouls, laughing and hooting. The beasts cluster around two ugly lumps of twisted metal. The ghouls are tying ropes around them, preparing to drag them into the abyss.
Those have to be the two surviving Black Iron Gods, stolen from the vault under the New City, and brought here. More prizes for Great-Uncle. Rasce advances into the temple.
“What are you doing? Onto the surface! Get to the yliaster vats!”
The ghouls ignore him. They haul on the ropes, pulling the two bells towards a shadowy archway. The misshapen lumps of shrapnel catch on the flagstones, like they’re trying to keep themselves from being dragged away into the depths.
“Those are mine!’ shouts Rasce. “They belong to the dragon!”
A ghoul breaks from the pack, lopes towards him. It’s Silkpurse, but it’s Rat who speaks through her. “NOT YOURS. NOT FOR YOU. WE WILL KEEP THEM SAFE. AWAY FROM FOOLISH MEDDLERS.”
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