We were two blocks away from the main thoroughfare of Fisherman’s Way. Lynas had been so near to safety.
The psychic pain coming through the Gift-bond was like a red hot nail driven into my brain. Lynas’ fear and agony was still imprinted on the very stones all around me. As I moved down the narrow street the muscles in my arm abruptly spasmed, a line of searing pain shooting down it. “This is the spot. Lynas was murdered here.” She nodded. This long after the event, there was nothing physical to show that a good man had died here, his hopes and dreams of a life full of love shattered.
I knelt on the cobbles and pressed my forehead to cold stone. The vision tore through me again. Panic. Burning need to warn people. Crystalline daemons. A hooded man in black shadow. The gods blinded and chained. I couldn’t breathe. Oh gods – the scalpel! I think I screamed as the scalpel cut skin from my flesh, then delved deeper to sever ligament and crunch through cartilage, and not because the murderer had to, but because they were enjoying it. The garbled details of the message Lynas had sent sharpened into brutal clarity. In incredible agony and terror he had tried to tell me something specific by sending the image of Harailt slamming a steel gate in our faces, locking us in the Boneyards. It was something more than merely bringing me home.
His last panicked gasp rattled in my chest, heart slowing.
I felt him die.
Panic tore me from the vision and sent me hurtling back into the present. I awoke face down and drooling, curled up on the ground and shaking uncontrollably. So this was the other reason that magi didn’t form Gift-bonds. The pain had relented but the mental scarring caused by Lynas’ death remained. Charra’s hands were holding me tight. “Hush,” she said softly. “It’s over. It’s over now. You’re safe.” I don’t know how long I lay there in her arms, recovering what wits I had left. Eventually, inevitably, the fear left and anger flooded in to replace it. I growled and forced myself up.
With a cry of rage I stormed up the alley, stopping every so often to run my hands over the walls and ground, sensing the faint residue of Lynas’ terror through the Gift-bond. I paused, eyes closed, sniffing for the psychic spoor of his fear. Charra followed in silence, holding the lantern aloft to light my path. My eyes opened again and I could picture it all in my mind. A crossroads. There – an otherness. Gouges in the cobbles. My fingers pressed into sharp indentations.
“What have you found?” Charra said.
“A shard beast was here.”
She looked at me blankly.
“Crystalline daemons from one of the Far Realms.”
She looked worried, “How can these things be here without anybody noticing? I thought the thick Shroud in Setharis made that impossible. What kind of magus could circumvent that?”
I felt sick talking about it, the memory of Lynas’ terror still too fresh, but she deserved answers. “No magus would resort to such a thing. We have more than enough power to kill already. No, I suspect a mageborn did this. Blood magic offers a torrent of power their own stunted Gift could never provide. I just don’t know how they managed it.”
Only a few magi had the talent, knowledge, and enough power to try to replicate such black rituals, and I had only ever seen the great Archmagus Byzant call up such things, under controlled conditions in an Arcanum enclave far from the city. In Setharis the Shroud was preternaturally resistant to such meddling so this blood sorcerer had to wield immense power. Daemons and spirits did not survive for long in Setharis: the very air of the place ate into them like acid. Many credited our gods with this protective boon, but not even the greatest of Arcanum scholars had ever gleaned the truth of the matter. Tiny, mindless plague-spirits were the only exception, breeding in the teeming masses of humanity faster than they died off. With so many people crammed inside the city walls the diseases those spirits caused were everywhere. Lucky for Magi that our Gift made us all but immune.
Like most people, Charra only understood about half of it. The unGifted couldn’t sense the magic all around and I pitied them for it, but I envied them too – they would never suffer that gnawing need to use it.
She followed as I retraced Lynas’ panicked flight through the slums, until, finally, I lost his trail. I skidded to a stop, snarled, pounded my fist against a wall so hard the old wood crunched inwards. Even with the Gift-bond his trail had faded beyond my ability to track, merging with other people’s thoughts into a hiss of emotion.
I spun to face her. “Where did he come from that night? His murderer said that the gods had been blinded and chained – how was it even possible that gods and sniffers both didn’t sense the foul corruption of daemons roaming Setharis that night? Unless what he said was true, or somebody or something was able to hide them.”
Charra shook her head. “We couldn’t find out. Nobody saw a thing. A few people heard shouts for help, but who in their right mind would go outside to see what was happening in the Warrens at night? Nobody knows anything about his murder, or if they do, they won’t talk, not even to me.”
I returned to where the hooded man had flung Lynas to the cobbles and examined the scratches on the wall. Lynas had thought the magus was alone loitering in the shadows, but then Lynas hadn’t known what to look for. I knew the unnatural nature of that darkness only too well, the obsidian fangs and hidden slits of green eyes. Lynas had been murdered by the very same man that had hunted me for years. And after running into one of his pets in Ironport I now had no doubt he was in league with the Skallgrim.
“When I find that hooded man,” I said, “however powerful he is, however rich and influential, he will die slow and he will die hard. I’ll take my time with him.” I paused, a dreadful suspicion bubbling up inside me. “Charra, tell me about the gods.”
Her face had gone ashen. “There are rumours amongst the priests that all their gods are missing.” She looked up at the soaring towers of the gods, to where magic should have been lighting up the night sky, to where there was only darkness. “The fifth god. The new one that took residence in the vacant tower after you left. It’s said that he wears dark robes with a hood always pulled over his face. People have taken to calling him the Hooded God. You don’t think…” She shook her head. “But no, it could be anybody wearing robes. Couldn’t it?”
My hand was on Dissever’s hilt. It was hungry. More! More! it howled in my mind.
I grinned a death-head’s grin. You’ll get your fill, Dissever. If it’s this new god then I’ll destroy him. I don’t know how, but I will find a way. And if it’s not this Hooded God, then I promise to bury you in somebody else’s guts.
“Maybe,” I said to Charra. “But what else could possibly explain the other gods being blinded and chained? God or not, I’ll find this hooded walking corpse and make him pay.”
“We, Walker,” she said coldly. “We will.”
Yes, it was better to follow Charra’s example and calm down. I let go of Dissever and felt that boiling bloodlust diminish not one bit, because this time it was all my own emotions. I took a deep breath and forged my red hot anger into a cold and deadly fury.
“What do you need?” she asked, face calm and collected. That was the old Charra all right, all business. She would mourn in private later, but first she would do what needed doing.
“He had been snooping around somewhere, I’m sure of it, and then something made him flee for his life. The question is: what was he up to that night, and where?” And what had Lynas been trying to tell me? I had a horrible feeling it involved the labyrinthine Boneyards, the deep darkness below the city streets.