I swallowed. “The beach near Pauper’s Docks. We, uh, got washed out into the sea.” I couldn’t quite believe this was happening. “You weren’t breathing. I thought…”
She tried to rise, groaned and sagged back. “I am a powerful hydromancer, you fool. You think I can drown? That a councillor of the Inner Circle is so weak amidst her own element? All of us with sufficient power have our adaptations.”
I wasn’t the fool she thought I was. Not entirely. “That creature ate magic. I felt the stolen Gifts of magi inside it and didn’t know if there was anything of you left.”
Her eyes flew wide with sudden remembrance. She shuddered, leant to one side and quietly vomited. I waited patiently for her to finish heaving up her breakfast of eggs and bread. “Dear gods, what happened?” she said, wrapping her arms around herself. “How am I alive? I felt it devouring my magic, eating me.”
“I cut the fucker’s heart out,” I said, sounding cockier than I felt.
“How? It ate magic and our blades would have been useless.”
“Your blades maybe.” That was all the answer I fancied giving a magus of the Inner Circle, even if she did happen to owe me her life. With Cillian the Arcanum would always come first. Nobody needed to know Dissever was more dangerous than any spirit-bound blade I’d ever heard of. Even I didn’t know the full extent of its powers. It was more aware than a crude hunk of metal infused with a spirit should ever be. And now it was mobile. Terrifying.
She studied Dissever’s barbed blade and tensed, but said nothing, for once letting me have my secrets. “That abomination was a thing of blood sorcery created to kill magi. It ate magic. You had to know that. And you still leapt onto its back to save me. Why?”
I groaned like an old man as I levered myself to my feet, stones sharp against my soles. “I’m a fool,” I said, shrugging. “Surely that’s not a revelation to you?”
She stared at me for a long moment, face inscrutable. “Thank you.”
“I’m just glad we both made it out of there,” I said, trying not to think about it.
“There were rumours,” she said, “about your involvement in various atrocities ten years ago. I did not like to think the worst of you, Edrin, but you must understand how the Forging changed you. Something dark entered your head and twisted your personality. It set you on a self-destructive path I feared would see you dead. Or worse.”
I shrugged, too tired to know how to react. “Did you believe the rumours?”
“I was uncertain, but I did know that you would never harm Archmagus Byzant.”
“And now?”
“I believe you had nothing to do with any of it.”
Words held great power. They hit me right in the heart. Cillian believed me, even after everything I had done to her in the past.
“Thanks,” I said gruffly. Of course, I had been involved in killing a god, but she hadn’t mentioned that part. Perhaps it was too unbelievable.
She sighed in relief. “At least that thing died before the sorcerer could unleash it. Thwarting this evil plot will go a long way in proving your innocence with the Courts of Justice.”
She caught my sick expression. Her brow furrowed. “What is it?”
I licked my lips, a sudden foul taste flooding my mouth. “The thing I told you I saw in the lake? Well that creature we killed wasn’t it.”
“What do you mean?”
“That thing in the lake was vast. The one we just killed was a pup in comparison. Lynas’ body and Gift weren’t a part of that one. His Gift still lives. I can feel it somewhere underground, though the bond is faint and disrupted.”
“You can’t possibly know that for certain. The only way you could is if–” Her eyes widened and her throat spasmed, threatening to throw up again. So now she knew that I had Gift-bonded Lynas all those years ago. Instead of chastising me she struggled to her feet, brushing off the hand I offered. “We must warn the Arcanum.”
“You go do that. I have Harailt to kill.”
My body seized up as foreign magic flooded my veins and threatened to burst every blood vessel in my body.
“You will come with me,” she stated.
I gurgled a negative. She gave my insides a squeeze and then let go.
I staggered, nearly fell. “Nice way to treat somebody that just saved your life.”
“Grow up. This is bigger than either of us. To save this city I would tie you to a horse and drag you over every cobble if necessary.”
“So what is the bloody big secret here?” I said. “Why do you need me when you have the rest of the Arcanum at your beck and call?”
She suddenly wavered, eyes glazing over, stumbled and nearly fell. I instinctively steadied her, despite my distaste. She groaned and leant on my arm, still suffering from that knock to the head.
She blinked and refocused, looked up into my eyes for a confusion-filled moment before brushing me off and backing away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m not being vindictive. I suspect that we will need every magus we have.”
“Why?”
She chewed on her lip. “If this creature is what I fear then we will need every resource of the city to withstand it. You are involved in all of this, and you did manage to kill that smaller one.”
“Then dust off your old war engines and all those artefacts locked away in the vaults below the Templarum Magestus,” I said. At the height of its empire Setharis had fielded a bewildering array of deadly weapons dug from the ruins of old Escharr, so why not just use those? “If it’s really that bad then have them raise the bloody titans. You don’t need me.”
She hesitated for a moment before shaking her head. “The titan cores have been buried in the deepest of vaults behind layers of protection that even the archmagus cannot easily remove. It would take weeks to access them. In any case, the Arcanum will never again sanction their use. We are already worried about their strange luminescence.”
“Old Boney’s balls, it’s like pulling teeth – just tell me what that bloody creature is! I have a right to know.”
“If it is what I fear, then its nature is chronicled in fragments of ancient scrolls recovered only recently from an Escharric dig site, knowledge meant to be restricted to the Inner Circle.” She hesitated. “Damn the rule, that time has flown. The creature’s attributes perfectly match all those reported of the Doom of Escharr, the monstrous beast that devoured the heart of that ancient empire. It is the thing those few surviving magi named Magash Mora – the Devouring Flesh.” She shuddered. “Oh dear gods, all those disappearances in the city, the skinned mageborn! How could we have suspected anything of this scale?”
A cold shiver rippled up my spine. Hair prickled all over my body. “How is that even possible?” I said, grabbing her tattered robes, knuckles white. “Was it not destroyed with the rest of Escharr?”
She shrugged me off. “We cannot know for sure if this is the same creature. It was reputed to have eaten all it could and then starved to death. Its insides eventually burned to ash under the desert sun.”
I goggled. “The Arcanum have been digging up their ruins for centuries – how could you not know? Even with help from the Skallgrim, it would be impossible for Harailt to create a new one.” My hands trembled. “Impossible.” He brought this monstrous thing here to my home, to my city. He’d murdered Lynas, tried to abduct Layla, and now he wanted to take even more from me? Something inside me teetered on the edge of losing control and tearing loose as a rabid howling beast. “Harailt is not powerful or clever enough to enact all of this alone. Only a god could fool Shadea like that. He is in league with greater powers. This new Hooded God, he–”