The Traitor God

Chapter 9

With reluctance I reduced the torrent of magic running through my muscles to a trickle. A crushing and cramping weariness descended, and an almost overpowering urge to puke. Magi without any talent in body magics had killed themselves trying to learn to manipulate their flesh: bodies giving out, muscles tearing, organs rupturing, heart bursting. I knew a few tricks but couldn’t even think of approaching the sort of physical juggernauts that those knights with the true Gift for body-magic could become.

I stared up at the now-vacant window. Where had all that newfound strength come from? I looked at my hands like they belonged to somebody else. I should have needed to touch him to do something that quick and brutal; certainly I had not possessed such power ten years ago. I felt sick. Accident or no, I had killed a man just doing his job. I felt the ghost of Lynas’ disapproval. Damn it, I needed to be more careful. Whatever Lynas had uncovered was bigger than any single life, bigger than Lynas’, bigger than mine, and certainly this poor fool’s. I didn’t have time for guilt.

I didn’t let my guard down, still scouring the darkest shadows for shadow cats. I only had a short space of time to ransack the wardens’ minds, break through the wards and search the warehouse for clues. The Arcanum would have set wards that alerted them if broken.

I focused my Gift on the dazed wardens, fighting back a thrill of power, of mastery. “What do you know about the murder of Lynas Granton?” I asked, sifting through the sluggish tides of their thoughts. Their answer was bugger-all, just that all his papers had been taken from the warehouse to the Courts of Justice up in the Old Town. I would have to go up there myself if I wanted to learn more. “Sit down and go to sleep.” The two wardens did as they were ordered.

I extricated my mind from theirs, erasing my tracks and planting false memories of all three of them buying sweetmeats from a saleswoman on her way home for the evening. They would recall an amalgam of several people I’d seen recently, part toothless old woman, part street girl, and part serving girl, and of feeling suddenly sleepy. I shivered, disgusted at the thrill of control this gave me. Other magi didn’t know how this felt – how could they? I was the only magus alive with this accursed Gift – but I could well understand how those tyrants of old came to be. Power over others had a seduction all of its own, but I had no burning desire to rule. It was far too much work. Besides, one of the reasons I didn’t get on well with the Arcanum was that I didn’t like people telling me what to do and I refused to be as bad as them.

That was probably why I thought Nathair, the Thief of Life, was the only god worth acknowledging. Lucky me to get him as my patron. In Setharis it was tradition for all new mothers to gather in the temple squares at the first dawn of each month to beseech a god’s blessing on their newborns, to ask one of the gods to watch over and protect the child. A dunk in a basin of holy water drawn from the deepest well in Setharis, a chorus of prayer and then one by one the gods would choose, their temples shifting as if alive to give sign of approval.

Me, when the priest held me up in the air, apparently I pissed all over his face and fancy robes – a proper little waterfall my mother claimed, trying not to laugh. I think Nathair had a good chuckle at that himself, since it was one of the swiftest godly approvals ever known in Docklands according to her. At least Nathair had a sense of humour and didn’t try to tell you how to live your life. He was stubbornly independent and freedom-loving, just like me, and refused to squabble with the other gods for a greater share of Setharis’ sycophantic worshippers. Nor was he judgmental like the Arcanum.

It would go badly if the magi ever discovered that I had been manipulating the minds of anybody who wasn’t “worthless” Docklands scum. The fear was rooted deep in the psyche of all magi, which was why I had carefully cultivated my persona as a drunken wastrel, never allowing them to catch any hint of what I was truly capable of. But that didn’t matter now, what with Lynas dead and the Skallgrim invading Kaladon.

I took the dead warden’s gloves and tugged them on. It wasn’t like he’d be needing them. The fine leather would make it more difficult for any Arcanum sniffers to detect my presence for a short while, until my sweat and magical essence seeped into them. Every touch of skin left a trace of magic behind, which is how those damn shadow cats would always, eventually, track me down. There was a limit to how careful you could possibly be, and a man did have to piss now and again.

I examined a side door, finding thick chains had been looped through the door handles and welded closed by a pyromancer. I wasn’t getting in without a prybar, and I didn’t want to use Dissever – I needed to stay calm and logical to investigate, not thirsting for blood and slaughter or leaving behind strangely severed ends of steel.

I circled the building looking for another way in, and focused on a shuttered window – chained and locked, but my picks made quick work of that. The visible wards stood out stark red against whitewashed wood. They were too obvious, designed to keep out casual thieves. I explored with my Gift, trying to sense the vibrations of power running through the glyphs. The visible wards were petty things that would shriek and fire sparks into the air, relatively easy to disarm or avoid. What worried me was a cunning creation they’d buried inside those obvious weaves, a thing of killing power hidden inside patterns of petty magic.

I carefully picked the weaves apart and bled off all their stored power. Another once-over revealed no trace of any other dangerous magic. I reached for the shutters, but something pricked my attention, a scratch marring the white paint. I paused to take a closer look at the hinges. Hidden in the metal was something of deadly genius I’d never seen before – two inactive fragments of a lightning ward. It stored no power, meaning there was nothing magical to detect; instead it would draw power directly from its creator when it was triggered. If I opened the shutters the hinge would revolve to complete and activate the ward. This was a trap designed to kill magi. Just as well I’d spent the last ten years not relying on my Gift.

The interweaving skeins of warding were breathtaking in their complexity, comprised of several different flavours of magic. This had been created by somebody with knowledge and skill far in excess of my own. I had more experience than most at breaking and entering warded areas and I wouldn’t even know where to begin. It stank of elder. I studied it intently, memorising the structure – you never knew when you might have to kill another magus.

Had the ward been active I would have been out of luck, but as that was not the case the problem was easily solved. I hit it with a rock. Wood broke and the hinge dropped free. That sort of ward was too clever for its own good, really.

I grabbed one of the wardens’ lanterns and climbed through the window, sawdust puffing up around my boots as they thumped onto the floorboards. The warehouse was practically empty. It didn’t look like business had been going well. I walked past racks of wooden shelving, examining the goods: a few boxes of scrimshaw walrus ivory carved with ship-borne scenes and Skallgrim runes, a grand Ahramish-styled tapestry of lush red and thread of gold depicting some sort of king bestowing blessings on his subjects, then crates containing a mishmash of dusty and weird-looking foreign sculptures with grotesquely enlarged genitalia. Then I came to the booze. From the quantity and quality it looked like Lynas had got himself a niche market on foreign imports: amphorae of fine Esbanian wine, barrels of Ironport ruby ale and Port Hellisen cider, even a half-dozen expensive fluted glass bottles that shone a lurid green in the moonlight spilling through the open window. I suspected those last originated in one of the Thousand Kingdoms. There were three small casks of Clanholds whisky, old, rare and hideously expensive.

In one corner sat an assortment of imported Esbanian furniture, all carved from rich mahogany: a heavy desk with dozens of small drawers, a series of tables that fit snugly one under the other, and a large ornate merchant’s chair that could almost have been a throne. It was high-backed, gilt-edged, and the glossy wood held a hint of blood-red in the grain. It looked uncomfortable, but I supposed it was more for show. Instead of individual chair legs the velvet seat rested on a box platform, the panels all carved with lordly scenes. The seat of the chair was slightly lifted, revealing enough space for a small lockbox. Perhaps used for smuggling if Charra was correct. Questing fingers tapped on the bottom of the space. A hollow sound. There was a tiny hole in one corner and with the help of a stray nail I was able to pry open a false bottom. It was empty, but I bet it hadn’t been when it arrived in Setharis. I moved on, aware that the sands of time were draining quickly.

As I walked past a rack of bare shelves a shiver ran up my spine, with no obvious cause. I felt a jumble of faded emotions, and a vague sense of wrongness. The harder I looked for a cause, the less I felt it. It took me a moment to realize that some shelves had less dust than others and a few fresh-looking scrapes in the old wood. I squatted down and examined the floor. Scuff marks in the sawdust, as if people had been moving something heavy from these shelves in the not-too-distant past. A few cracked bits of forest-green wax and some tiny chips of pottery lay on the floor, brushed under the bottom shelf. I squatted down to study them and caught the sharp scent of vinegar. Somebody had scrubbed the floor clean, likely after dropping a jar of wine.

I scanned the rest of the warehouse, finding nothing else of note. If there had once been more evidence, then the boots of the wardens had obliterated any trace. I climbed the creaking steps to his personal rooms and peered into the study and bedroom – all empty; drawers torn out and left broken on the floor, furnishings gutted and abandoned, even the floorboards had been ripped up. Anything that might have proven useful had already been carted off for investigation.

I gritted my teeth in frustration and stomped back downstairs. There was something of Lynas lingering by those bare shelves, an undecipherable hint of strained emotion ticking the back of my mind that would have been undetectable if we hadn’t been Gift-bonded. I didn’t have the faintest clue what it meant, but a foul metallic tang now lingered at the back of my throat.

Had somebody wanted what was on those shelves? Or was it whatever had been stored in that chair? They were possibilities at least, and more than I had to go on before.

I climbed out the window and carefully closed the shutters behind me, making my escape back over Carr’s Bridge and past the oblivious mind-fogged guards, tossing the dead warden’s gloves into the river as I went – they were an unpleasant reminder, and already tainted with my scent.

The warehouse had given me no answers, only more questions, but it felt like I was on a trail now. Lynas had made his coin from imports, and I couldn’t imagine he’d made much in the way of any enemies while I’d been away – he was the nicest person I’d ever met. Sure, he’d been a bit cracked in the head after going through the Forging rite and failing – which meant the Arcanum booted him out onto the street – but then who wasn’t a little broken in one way or another? I was sure he wouldn’t have been involved in anything particularly illegal, not knowingly anyway. What goods had those shelves held? Had they been removed before or after his murder, and were they connected to Lynas’ presence in the slums that night? Meeting a buyer perhaps.

I had hoped to find something more solid to go on but now I was forced to head up into the Old Town for information, and if I was recognized they would hunt me without mercy. Legend had it that in the dark days before the rise of Escharr, my sort of magus had dominated the tribes of man and made endless war on one another until the sanctors appeared, immune to the tyrants’ powers, their Gifts solely used to close down other magi and kill them. No wonder the Arcanum took precautions when a dangerous throwback like me appeared, even if nominally every magus was welcome within their ranks. Not that my sort ever lived long enough to become anywhere near as powerful as the tyrants of old. Once the nature of my Gift became apparent I had researched all my accursed predecessors in the Arcanum records: suicide, street stabbings, tavern brawls, drunken accidents. We were not a lucky lot. And with me fleeing Setharis without leave, I’d been listed as gone rogue. A rogue tyrant was the stuff of nightmares, which is why I’d been forced to fake my death years ago.

In my current state there wasn’t much else I could do this evening. Tomorrow I would get in and out of the Old Town in one piece, everything going to plan. After that I planned to kick over some anthills and shake down some local scumbags until all the information I wanted dropped out of their heads. I just needed Charra to tell me which particular vermin I needed to talk to and where they holed up.

With my mental tweaking slipping into crushing comedown, I made my way back to the inn, hammering on the door until the sour-faced woman unbarred it to curse me. I swept past without a word, up the stairs and into the windowless room, making sure the door was barricaded before crawling onto the straw pallet. Sleep proved elusive, the dead warden’s face plaguing my attempts, staring with accusing eyes. Eventually, exhaustion brought welcome blackness.