There should have been wards on the Silkstar Palace, brutal, unbreakable magic that I couldn’t have passed through without having every cell in my body ripped apart, but they were down.
“No guards on the roof,” Benny added, rubbing at his scraggly beard. “We should go over the top, down into that little courtyard I saw before, in through Silkstar’s private meeting room.”
“No point,” I said. “They’re expecting us. We’re not catching them by surprise.”
Benny eyed the front door. Benny wasn’t really a front door kind of person. He was more jimmied windows, picked side entrances, and lifted tiles. Using the main door was a professional affront.
“Could they be in this together?” Benny said. “Silkstar and this Lowriver?”
Because one of them wouldn’t be enough trouble on their own.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. It didn’t seem likely. I had thought at first that Silkstar might have wanted to kill his own Master Servant if he had discovered she owed her position to the Wren, but I didn’t believe that anymore. “I don’t see Sunstone working with Silkstar after Silkstar took his wool contracts.” But then, Sunstone was dead. Could Silkstar have been playing him? Double crosses. Triple crosses. What the fuck did I know? “There have to be easier ways to dispose of your Master Servant than blowing up your study and letting the ghost of a beast god go rampaging around your palace.”
“Throw everyone off his trail, though,” Benny said.
“Or maybe Lowriver made a deal with Silkstar, blamed us, and promised to deliver us to him. Even if every high mage in the city is back there, it doesn’t change what we have to do.”
“Nah. It doesn’t.” Benny drew his dagger. “Come on.” He pushed the front door, and it swung open.
Not even locked, I thought.
The last time we had been here, on the Feast of Parata, the walls had been slid aside to clear a road through to the central courtyard. They had since been moved back. We now found ourselves in a plushly-dressed entrance hall.
“Which way?” I asked. Benny had always had a better sense of direction than me, particularly in the dark.
“Silkstar’s office, you reckon?”
I nodded.
“This way, then.”
The rooms we passed through were dark and silent. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought this a household peacefully asleep.
“You know what I don’t get?” I whispered. There were morgue-lamps on the walls, but they had been turned down, so all we could see were the vague humps and mounds of furniture and stray lumps of Mycedan-tat. I didn’t want to announce our presence by conjuring a light. “Silkstar ruined the Estimable Sunstone. So the plan is, they kill Silkstar, Sunstone gets his wool contracts back and as a bonus gets to see his god. That makes sense. I mean, it’s fucked up, but it makes sense. But what’s in it for Lowriver?”
It bugged me. It was the one thing I still couldn’t understand in the whole theory.
Benny shrugged in the dark, a shadow moving in shadows, scarcely an arm’s length ahead of me, but almost too faint to see. “Power. Wealth. Status. That’s what it always is, if it ain’t revenge or anger. What difference does it make? She took Sereh. I’m going to stick a knife in her throat. She went after my kid.”
It still niggled at me. “She could be a member of the cult. Maybe she just wants to see her god, too.”
“Nah. That’s never all it is. Religions, cults, they’re just an excuse. She can say she wants to raise her Depths-cursed dead god, but it still comes down to the same thing. Power. Wealth. Status.”
Benny could be surprisingly wise when he wanted to be. Ambition was a hungry beast. Just ask my mother. Her ambition to be high mage, with all the power it brought, and her ambition for me to succeed her, had come close to breaking me. Maybe it actually had broken me. For Lowriver, there was ambition in her cult, ambition in the city, ambition among mages. She would be the cultist of Ah’té who could summon their dead god. A mage who could rise up to take the place of the slain high mage — and I couldn’t think of any way this was going to end between Lowriver and Silkstar other than one of them dead and the blame placed on me and Benny. They were both too powerful to be working nicely together. Power. Wealth. Status. Just like Benny said. Lowriver might dress it up as something else, but that would be the core of it.
Mica had been lined up to be Mother’s successor as high mage from the moment I had been discarded. So, Lowriver had decided to make another vacancy.
Benny motioned me forwards, and we crept into the next room.
Me, I had a different motivation in all this. Power repulsed me. Maybe I had my mother to thank for that. I just wanted this over. I wanted us safe. That would never happen unless Lowriver was dead or in the custody of the Ash Guard.
Somewhere in the dark, Lowriver was waiting, a tame god at her call and powers rivalling those of a high mage. I had Benny and a level of magical ability that had embarrassed my own mother.
There were too many rooms in this palace, that was the problem. Too many walls, too many doors, and too many places Lowriver could be waiting. If I tried to find her through magic, I would just be advertising my own position. I didn’t have the power to counter her or her god. The only reason I was still alive was that I had run.
This is stupid, really fucking stupid.
I was growing ever more tense. My thoughts were swirling faster and faster, inwards and down like a whirlpool.
You’re not good enough, you can’t do this. It sounded like my mother’s voice.
Benny glanced back. “You all right, mate?”
I nodded, even though I couldn’t tell if he could see me. I slowed my breathing, holding each breath before letting it slowly out.
Benny had reached a door. He indicated it with a tilt of his head.
“You smell that?”
I shoved the growing panic to the back of my mind and sniffed. Benny was right. There was something acrid and choking in the air.
“What do you reckon that is?” Benny asked.
“It’s not Ah’té, I know that much.” The ghost of the beast god hadn’t had a smell. Comes of being made of ectoplasm.
Benny straightened. “Yeah, well. If Sereh is on the other side, it doesn’t matter if it is. We’re going through every god, dead or alive, and every pissing mage in the city, right?”
“Right,” I said. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.
Benny eased the door open.
The smell washed through the doorway and over us. It was almost liquid in my throat, making me gag and choke. The air stank of piss, shit, and an unhealthy digestion, as well as blood, burned wood, and something else I couldn’t identify.
I squeezed my eyes and tried to only breathe through my mouth. Depths, that was vile. We stepped through into a big room. Large, immobile, regular masses on either side disappeared into the darkness. I couldn’t see the far wall.
“Pity, Benny, what is this place?”
“You don’t recognise it?” he whispered. “It’s Silkstar’s office.”
Yeah. Now I did recognise it. The masses resolved themselves into desks, some pushed aside, one nearby toppled. It was still too dark to see details.
“It didn’t smell like this last time.”
Except it had, hadn’t it? This was where Imela Rush had been killed, cut almost through in four places, the first victim of the ghost of Ah’té.
Hadn’t they cleaned it? Imela Rush’s mother had said they had taken her body to the Lady. I took a step forwards, and my foot squelched on the carpet.
“Nik…” Benny warned.
I unfocused my eyes. The room was thick with magic, the roiling, churning remnants of spells thrown around, power strong enough to tear me apart if I had been standing in its way.
I took another involuntary step forwards. My leg hit something that was giving and flaccid. I jerked back, and in that moment, I caught a movement at the end of the room. I must have been drawing in raw magic without realising it, because I let it fly, shaping it into an arrow of magic that I flung across the space between us.
It shattered on something I couldn’t see. I staggered, dropping to one knee, feeling the wet stickiness soak through my trousers.
“Is that the best you’ve got?” a voice called from the other end of the room. “With your heritage, I had expected more.”
Yeah, well. The speaker hadn’t been the only one. I had spent most of my life with people expecting more from me.
Light burst from the ceiling, illuminating the room. It blinded me for a second as my eyes struggled to adapt.
“Lady of the Grove,” I heard Benny mutter.
I blinked my vision into focus.
We were in Silkstar’s office, like Benny had said, and we weren’t alone. Half a dozen men in black mages’ cloaks sprawled across the green carpet between the rows of flanking desks. Although ‘sprawled’ wasn’t really accurate. They had been brutally torn to pieces, sliced through by gigantic claws and thrown aside. Parts of bodies lay everywhere. Even saying there were half a dozen men was only a guess. My brain tried to count limbs, but my eyes slid away. There was blood up the walls, on the ceiling, soaking the carpet black. The stench of ruptured bowels made my stomach rebel.
You stood and fought. Against a beast god. Idiots.
I pulled my eyes away from the dead men. At the far end of the room, Lowriver sat on Silkstar’s altar of a desk, sprawled comfortably back, legs kicking casually over the edge. Below her feet, Silkstar’s decapitated head stared blankly at me.
“Guess she ain’t working with Silkstar after all,” Benny muttered.
My spear of magic hadn’t even ruffled her neat hair. Pity! She is so out of your class.
“Practised that pose in front of the mirror, did you?” I said.
Anger twitched Lowriver’s face, and I used that moment of distraction to throw more magic, not at her this time, but at the desk under her. I intended to smash the desk and dump her on her arse. Even the most powerful mage could lose concentration and be vulnerable for a moment.
My magic didn’t even reach the desk. She dismissed it with a casual flick of her fingers.
“You’re pathetic.” She slid off the desk. “No wonder you were such a disappointment to your mother. You know, my one worry in this whole thing was that no one would believe you were capable of magic like this, even with your family blood. I should have chosen someone more impressive. Too late for that, now, I suppose. At least you were stupid enough to come here. I really thought I was going to have to hunt you down.”
I gathered in magic and used it to lift a desk and throw it at her. It hit an invisible obstacle and crashed to the ground. I couldn’t get close to her. She wasn’t even trying.
Benny took a step to the left. His hand whipped out, and a knife flashed across the room towards Lowriver’s eye.
It stopped dead two feet from her. She tilted her head, as though examining it. Then it shot back the way it had come. Benny dodged, but not quick enough. The knife thudded into the meat of his shoulder, and he grunted. There wasn’t much meat on Benny, and I was sure it must’ve hit bone, but his expression didn’t change. It was cold, flat, and dangerous.
“My turn?” Lowriver said.
She lifted a hand, and fire blazed towards us. You didn’t have to use a hand for that spell, but it always looked more impressive. I didn’t have time to appreciate her style. I summoned a magical shield, angling it, just as the fire hit. The fire deflected upwards off the shield in an unending stream. Plaster shattered, and flames played over the painted ceiling. The force of the fire was incredible. Despite the shield, heat battered my skin. Sweat sprung from my pores and evaporated. My eyes watered painfully. I poured everything I could into the shield, but it was crumbling. Lowriver wasn’t even exerting herself. She was watching me with an amused smile.
She’s just playing, I realised. She could kill us both in a single second. We couldn’t win.
“We have to get out of here,” I hissed at Benny. The ends of my fingers were blistering from the heat. I had hoped we might catch Lowriver by surprise or sneak Sereh out unseen. That wasn’t an option anymore. I had known Lowriver was powerful. I just hadn’t realised how powerful. High mage powerful. “Get some backup. Mica. Mother. The Ash Guard. Anyone.”
Benny’s jaw jutted, and I was sure he was going to refuse. Then he scurried back to the door, and I followed, holding the disintegrating magical shield behind us.
“Mr. Field,” Lowriver called to Benny. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
The fire died away, and behind it, I saw Lowriver standing watching us. She wasn’t alone anymore. Hanging in the air beside her, suspended by magical ropes, immobilised, was Sereh. Her blue eyes were open and furious, but she couldn’t move.
As I watched, blood blossomed from a dozen points on Sereh’s body.
Benny went for Lowriver. One moment, he was motionless, the next he was crossing the room, blood-stained knife before him.
He didn’t make it. A magical blow kicked him back. Sereh screamed, Sereh who never let anything frighten or hurt her. It was a scream of utter despair.
I lost it.
There weren’t many things that would make me lose all control, but I had known this kid since she’d been a baby. She was family, and now she was helpless. I opened myself and sucked in raw magic. Then I threw it at Lowriver, unformed, boiling. I had never channelled power like this before. It raged through me. I felt blood vessels burst, muscle fibres tear, fractures race across my bones. I must have been screaming, but I couldn’t hear myself. My magic smashed into Lowriver’s defences, splintering them. I saw shock on her face, then I fell.
I must have been unconscious for a moment, because the next thing I knew, Benny was shaking my shoulder. “Get up!”
I couldn’t see. I wiped my hand across my face, and it came away red.
“My eyes are bleeding,” I whispered to no one in particular.
“Nik!”
I blinked.
Lowriver was still standing. There were burn marks on her clothes and a scrape on her cheek, but she was still standing. She had dropped Sereh, and her smile was gone.
“Hit her again!” Benny urged.
I couldn’t. Another attack like that would kill me. I would split, burst apart.
Lowriver sucked in raw magic. The whole room seemed to empty, like all the air was suddenly gone. With my magical vision, I saw the raw magic fill her, blazing like a midday sun. This was it. She wasn’t playing anymore.
Sereh rose behind her, as silent and smooth as one of Lowriver’s ghosts. Her knife had appeared in her hand. It slid into Lowriver’s lower back.
Lowriver convulsed. She lost control of the raw magic. Her knees gave way, and she screamed. Then, she lashed out with a half-formed spell, knocking Sereh back. She jerked out the knife in a gush of blood and another scream of pain. She clapped a hand over her wound, and as I watched, the blood slowed and stopped.
How the Depths had she done that?
Painfully, Lowriver climbed to her feet. From a pouch at her side, she pulled out what looked like a claw. It was smaller than my thumb and curved.
The relic of Ah’té.
I knew what would happen next.
Above the brutalised bodies of Silkstar’s mages, ectoplasm gathered. Ghosts of the dead mages.
Sereh had disappeared in the chaos, slipping off into the shadows in that way only she could.
I grabbed Benny by the shoulders, hauled myself up, and shouted, “Run!”
It wasn’t really running. More like painful, uncoordinated hobbling. We did have one advantage, though. The ghost of Ah’té was so big that it was going to have to go through the walls to get us, and there were a lot of walls in Thousand Walls. Possibly a thousand. Not all of them were brick or stone, though. Most of them were constructed of wood panels capable of being slid into or out of position. They wouldn’t hold the god long.
Benny swore and sputtered under his breath as he ducked through the first door and into the next room. There was no point in trying to hide anymore, so I conjured a light to stop us running into anything.
Behind us, I felt a surge of power as Ah’té possessed a ghost and its godly might manifested in the world. The wall behind us juddered and cracked. One moment it was bowing inwards, then claws longer than my arm cut through and ripped half of the wall away.
We staggered to the next door and shouldered it open, just as the ceiling came down behind us. Splinters, bricks, and plaster filled the space we had just vacated. Dust billowed up and out. I heard Ah’té smash its way through. We kept on moving.
Without silver, charcoal, or arevena, there wasn’t much I could do to slow the dead god, but the dumb bastard of a beast was doing a decent job on its own as it collapsed another wall on top of itself. I whacked Benny on his good shoulder to speed him on.
“I ain’t a bleeding mule,” he muttered.
We stumbled out into a hallway, and I dragged Benny to a halt. I could hear Ah’té roaring and crashing and destroying Silkstar’s furniture and tasteless Mycedan-tat sculptures. I had no doubt Lowriver had me tagged again and was directing her god after us. If she were smart, she would summon another ghost ahead of us, wait for us to blunder into it, then spring the god. But right now, she wasn’t thinking straight. A knife in the kidney would do that to you, mega-powered mage or not.
I pulled Benny around to face me. “You need to find Sereh and get her out of here. I’ll distract Ah’té and lead it away.”
I could see Benny’s instinct to protect his daughter warring with his loyalty to me. I knew Sereh would win out in the end, but I didn’t have time to waste.
“You can’t beat that thing on your own,” he said.
“I can’t beat it with your help, either. Find Sereh. Fetch the Ash Guard. Get them up here.”
I wasn’t suicidal by nature. If I thought we could get out together, or if I thought Benny’s help would be enough to defeat Ah’té, I would have grabbed hold of him and refused to let him go. But nothing he could do would help. No matter how unlikely, this was our only chance. I gave Benny a shove down the hallway.
“Circle around. Get Sereh.”
Then I pulled in raw magic and sent a futile burst at the god.
“Come on, you bastard,” I shouted, and staggered off in the opposite direction to Benny.
Apparently, needling an ancient, dead beast god wasn’t the best of ideas. It came through the wall behind me in a single bound, exploding wood panels like autumn leaves. It missed me by an arm’s-stretch and smashed into the opposite wall, collapsing it.
The ceiling came down. I just had time to throw up another magical shield. A heavy beam hit my shield, and I felt the impact all through my body. I shoved myself away, using the shield as a lever, and ran.
The next I-didn’t-know-how-many minutes became a game of giant cat-bear-wolf and tiny wounded mouse as Ah’té stalked me through Silkstar’s palace. The trail of destruction was something impressive to behold. How half the city hadn’t turned up to watch the spectacle was a mystery to me.
Because it’s only been a couple of minutes, I told myself, and most of the people in Agatos are sensible enough to keep well clear of out-of-control magic.
Eventually, the Ash Guard would show up. If Lowriver hadn’t managed to pin this on me by having her tame god turn me into thinly-sliced mage and leaving me as prime suspect (deceased) by then, she was going to find herself in a city load of shit.
All I had to do was hang on for — what? — twenty minutes?
Some hope. Every part of my body was in agony. The magic I had thrown at Lowriver had done me damage inside, and every step was ripping me up.
I was halfway across a large drawing room when Ah’té broke through the wall behind me. Its fur was spiked with broken wood and matted with dirt from the half demolished building.
The beast god was vast. Its arched back pressed up against the ceiling, sending cracks racing across the painted plaster. Claws chewed holes in the marble floor. Its eyes fixed on me, and I felt a surge of primal, ancestral terror, that of a child fleeing a stalking beast through the dark forest, knowing he couldn’t escape. Every fear that had fed the god over generations, making it strong. Thousands of years when humans had shivered around their fires, listening to the howl of wolves or the soft padding of feet just beyond the firelight, all the desperate sacrifices and prayers to the beast god to turn its gaze from them. That terror was part of my blood, no matter how distant it was. This brief, modern city, this veneer of civilisation wasn’t enough to breed the terror out of me. There was nowhere to run from a beast god.
You died! You’re dead! I didn’t know how gods were born or how they died, but I did know that Ah’té was ancient history, only an echo. Men had found their way out of the dark and left their old gods behind.
“I’m not some frightened hunter,” I shouted. “I’m a mage of Agatos!”
I wrenched my eyes away.
Ah’té roared and leapt at me.
Depths! Now I had really done it.
I threw myself backwards. My foot caught on a stool. I fell, rolled, came up again, and sprinted for the shuttered door ahead of me. I chucked a spell at it, smashed it open, and dived through a couple of yards ahead of Ah’té.
Stone rained down around me as I hit cool flagstones. I was in the central courtyard of Thousand Walls. Around me, bees hummed uneasily in dozens of hives. Silkstar had been an adherent of Belethea, goddess of bees. This was a holy place to her.
Except Belethea wasn’t here. She was as dead as Ah’té was supposed to be.
Even so, something about the place gave Ah’té pause. The beast god stopped at the edge of the courtyard, sniffing. I found my feet and stumbled away across the flagstones.
Still the beast god hesitated, and the beehives seethed with growing rage.
Ah’té placed one great paw into the courtyard. Nothing happened. It put back its head and howled. The sound turned my spine to liquid. My knees bent, and I almost fell.
The beast god padded towards me. I drew in raw magic and prepared for a last, futile gesture.
If there was one thing I had noticed about Lowriver during our brief and unpleasant acquaintance, it was that she couldn’t resist a gloat. As I backed away from the approaching god, she emerged from another doorway, dragging Benny behind her.
I swore. You were supposed to get out of here, you daft bastard.
Benny winked at me.
I stared at him. He had lost it. He had finally snapped. It had all been too much for him. Gods, magic, his kid in mortal danger. His mind had gone. I couldn’t say I was surprised.
I prepared another arrow of magic. If only Lowriver could be distracted for a second.
Lowriver’s other hand was still pressed against her wound, somehow holding the injury at bay. I wouldn’t have known how to start with a spell like that. The wound wasn’t enough to weaken her magic, though. I could see the defensive spells woven about her. My arrow wouldn’t dent them. The pouch at her belt blazed with the power held in the relic of the dead god. It was sustaining Ah’té’s connection to the world and feeding Lowriver with all the raw magic she could ever need.
Benny winked again, meaningfully.
What do you expect me to do? As a message, a wink was surpassingly crap.
Maybe he just had something in his eye.
Fuck it. I threw the arrow.
Lowriver smiled as my magic shattered.
If I hadn’t been watching Benny like a hawk, I would never have seen his hand slide down and his nimble fingers pry open Lowriver’s pouch. I pulled in more power. Watch me! Not him! Lowriver’s gloating smile widened.
Then Ah’té’s claw was in Benny’s hand. In the same movement, he twisted, breaking Lowriver’s grip, and skipped a couple of steps away. He held up the claw triumphantly.
Lowriver spun on him with a shout of rage. Raw magic waterfalled into her. She shaped it into a weapon and raised her hands.
Benny, whose plan clearly hadn’t stretched beyond this point, glanced desperately around for some way out. There was nothing. No defence. Nowhere to run.
He popped the claw into his mouth and swallowed.
I just had time to shout, “For fuck’s sake, Benny!” before everything happened at once.
The raw magic from the claw that had fed Lowriver and sustained Ah’té and that was now inside Benny cut off abruptly. Ah’té disintegrated into ectoplasm, its link to the ghost finally severed. Lowriver threw the magic she had already drawn in at Benny. It engulfed him in blinding fury. Lowriver sagged back, drained. And I lobbed a broken brick at her head.
I missed with my aim, but the brick caught her a glancing blow on one arm, knocking her further off balance and probably hurting like a bastard.
The magic around Benny faded. I expected to see him in pieces, blood and bone and flesh shredded and cast about the courtyard. Instead, I saw two things. Benny bent over, arms wrapped around himself as though trying to hold everything in place, and, seemingly superimposed over him, as if they occupied the same space, the ghostly figure of Ah’té. Benny’s skin heaved, as though it were trying to reshape itself.
Lowriver stared at him, her face uncomprehending. The ghost of Ah’té put back its head and howled silently.
Lowriver broke. She must have seen her plans crumbling in front of her and chosen the only option left to her. She ran.
She headed for the main courtyard doors. I didn’t even try to stop her. I had nothing left.
Then Lowriver’s magic finally seemed to fail. Her legs gave way, and blood pumped from her wound again. With an effort that must have been pure will, she rose and kept going.
I felt it just as she reached the door. My own magic failing, too, as raw magic disappeared around us. I didn’t think Lowriver even realised what was happening.
She dragged the door open and stopped. She stood there, frozen. Then a sword blade erupted from her back. She jerked and desperately reached for magic, but there was none to be had. She slumped, and her body slid off the sword to the flagstones. Captain Meroi Gale strode out of the doorway, face and hands smeared with Ash, and looked around. Her gaze settled on me.
“You’ve made a bloody mess of this place, haven’t you?” she said.
I wobbled over to Benny and knelt beside him. His fists were clenched, and his face was tight.
“You all right?” I asked.
He nodded towards Captain Gale. “Think the Ash took care of it.” His voice sounded like a wood saw.
Now that I could see he wasn’t seriously harmed, I was furious. “What in the Depths were you thinking? You can’t do something like that. That was part of a fucking god, not some gem you nicked out of somebody’s jewellery box!”
Benny shrugged.
I looked up from my friend as Captain Gale crossed the courtyard to us.
“How did you know?” I managed.
She looked down at me, pityingly. For some reason, I seemed to get that look a lot.
“I did my job,” she said. “It would have been a whole lot easier if you had kept me better informed. We might have been able to prevent … all this.” She offered me a hand. “Can you stand?”
I nodded and let her help me to my feet.
“Good,” she said. “Because you’re under arrest.”
It was my turn to stare down at her. It was all too much. After everything that had happened, all the fit-ups and false allegations? I had been dragged through the Depths. My friends — my family, because that was what Benny and Sereh were — had nearly died. Only blind, stupid luck had seen us through.
“No,” I said. “I’m not.” I lifted my chin with dignity. “I’m tired, I’m hurt, I’ve nearly been killed half a dozen times tonight. I need to look after Benny and Sereh. I’m going home.”