I wondered if the titans guarding the other two bridges over the Seth also glowed. Each had been named after one of the cardinal disgraces; their real names, if they ever had any, were consigned to the same desert sands that buried their creators. At the centre of the Crescent, Wrath and Pride guarded the approach to Sethgate Bridge. At Westford Bridge Lust stood lone vigil. The titans were Escharric relics the Arcanum had excavated from half-buried ruins over two hundred and fifty years ago. Crusted in bird droppings and layers of soot, it was hard to imagine that they were in truth arcane war engines. The Escharric empire had fallen before the war engines could be used, and I wasn’t sure that was a bad thing, given the disaster caused when the Arcanum used them for the first and hopefully last time during the shockingly brief war against the Vanda city states.
There had once been a sixth and unfinished titan, later named after the final disgrace of Ignorance. In their lust for knowledge Arcanum artificers had tried to take it apart to study the construction. Texts record Ignorance exploded in a lightning storm that incinerated thirty magi and fused the desert sands to glass for leagues around. In our classes at the Collegiate I had been the only one to note that those same texts hadn’t bothered to record the number of servants and labourers killed. Hundreds more dead, and yet not worthy of mention.
Finally Carr’s Bridge itself came into sight, ancient pitted stone arcing over the turgid and infested waters guarding the Crescent from the undesirables of Docklands. The human features of statues lining the bridge and either side of the stone-walled riverbank were long since worn away by wind and rain.
I slipped into the shadow of a statue as a warden left the bridge tollbooth. Only rogues were abroad in Docklands at this time of night and I didn’t want to be remembered. He didn’t see me as he wandered over to Greed and dropped his trousers, whistling tunelessly as his piss splashed across the titan’s metal heel. I winced. He was pissing on a bloody monster! The lower classes thought them mere statues with a few fanciful tales attached, which was exactly how the Arcanum wanted it.
There were two things to note about the history of the titans: firstly, they had only been used once. History records that during the war with the Vanda city states two hundred years ago, the enemy’s mage-priests had conducted a mass human sacrifice of their own people to gain power. The ignorant savages ripped a gaping ragged hole through the Shroud and mistakenly opened doorways to dozens of other worlds. An army of daemons had poured through the breach, destroying their cities and beginning what came to be called the Daemonwar. The Arcanum had been forced to unleash the titans against the teeming hordes of inhuman creatures, and with the heroic sacrifice of half the entire Arcanum they ultimately thwarted that daemonic invasion from the Far Realms. The lush lands of the Vanda were reduced to a barren, cursed wasteland where nothing would ever live again.
The second thing was that the first was a big fat stinking lie. Many years ago in the Collegiate library I’d happened across pages torn from a diary – an eye-witness account of what had really happened: the Vanda city states neighbouring the desert of Escharr had joined in federation, and under the leadership of their mage-priests formed a collegiate of their own with the intention of rivalling the magical might of the Arcanum. The Setharii empire had been at its height, swallowing up the island nations of the Thousand Kingdoms one by one and forming colonies to exploit and export abundant natural resources. The Arcanum could not abide the birth of a magical rival, especially not one that threatened their monopoly on Escharric ruins and ancient artefacts buried beneath the sands.
And so the ignorant magi of Arcanum manufactured an excuse to wage war, and in order to learn more about the workings of their recently discovered titans they gleefully unleashed the ancient war engines upon the Vanda. The official histories were lies, and this horrific act was before the Daemonwar had even begun. The lands of the Vanda burned while the Arcanum looked on in impotent horror, unable to stop the titans slaughtering everything: men, women, children and even animals. It was a mass death of our own devising. We rent the Shroud that protected our world from the depredations of daemonic invaders. The greatest disaster in all Setharii history had been caused by the Arcanum’s morbid curiosity, by arrogant children playing with Escharric toys they didn’t fully understand. It wasn’t the first time dabbling with that fallen empire’s artefacts had exploded in our faces and it wouldn’t be the last.
It was ancient history to me, but those torn pages showed the Arcanum for the self-serving political entity it truly was and I’d never forgotten the lesson. It is so much easier to blame crimes on the voiceless dead.
In any case, the titans were too dangerous to re-bury and attempt to forget, too massive to hide, and much too valuable to destroy; instead they were deactivated and had spent the last two centuries where the Arcanum could keep close watch over them.
The guard fumbled his cock back inside his trousers, wiped his fingers on his tabard and then joined his colleague in warming their hands over a glowing brazier outside the tollbooth. They were ostensibly stationed here to maintain the peace and keep traffic moving, but in reality their role was to dissuade thieving little Docklands toerags swarming over the bridge at night. If the poor wanted in and out for a spot of thieving they would have to swim the Seth, and I didn’t fancy the odds of them making it across in one piece. A thousand years of Arcanum experimentation had let all sorts of abominations escape into the river.
With shard beasts on the loose I dared not rely overmuch on the fabled daemon-devouring air of Setharis. Nobody else was out this late, and the running water should confound the magical senses of any shadow cats and sniffers nearby, so I reluctantly accepted the risk and eased open my Gift.
I eavesdropped on the wardens: just the usual moans about drink, gambling debts and women. Guards proved much the same in whatever city or town I passed through. It was simple to fog their minds and walk straight down the middle of the bridge. As I passed the tollbooth they glanced up, but I was just part of the furniture, entirely expected and effectively invisible.
Unlike the shifting sands of the Docklands slums, Carrbridge looked exactly how I remembered it. Cosily nestled between the massive cliff walls of the Old Town rock on one side and the Seth on the other, the old, stone buildings were plain but solid, and the signs above shop fronts bright with new paint. The Crescent was the domain of the richer merchants and the poorer nobility and Carrbridge was the least of these areas, the furthest east and consequently the recipient of more smoke and foul odours blown in by prevailing winds.
Before long I was passing the mouth of East Temple Street leading into the district’s square of worship. The temples here were smaller and less ostentatious than the grand square up in the Old Town, but then Carrbridge was a more practical sort of place, less given to garish displays of wealth and magic when compared to Westford, Sethgate, or the Old Town itself.
The emblems of the gods of Setharis looked down upon the square. Facing me was the ossified throne of the Lord of Bones and the broken moon of Lady Night, both gods’ original names long since lost to the mists of time. On my right were the gleaming golden scales of Derrish, the Gilded God and Lynas’ patron deity, and next to it a smaller temple bearing the blood-filled hourglass of Nathair, the Thief of Life. On my left was the grim temple of this new god, marble statues of a faceless hooded figure standing sentinel either side of its entrance. Over the door the emblem of the Hooded God had been painted over the axe of Artha the Warlord. The dead god. I ground my teeth and had to force myself to look away. Now was not the time to pick at that scabbed-over wound in my memory.