Feet pounded towards us down nearby alleys. Scuffles and cursing erupted as the narrow passages crammed with angry and frightened people. We slipped off the wider thoroughfare and into a narrow winding passage choked with filth. If they were Skallgrim then it wouldn’t take them long to figure out where we had gone.
Cillian was lighter than I’d expected. Somehow she exuded an aura heavier than her frame could possibly allow. My body felt leaden and clumsy and I had to draw in a trickle of power and flush it through exhausted muscles. Magic was all well and good but I badly needed decent food and a few weeks of rest. It was a wonder either of us were still moving.
Through drifting smoke and crumbled tenement walls I glimpsed the gods’ towers and we angled northwest, figuring it would be quicker heading for Westford Bridge rather than risk the centre of the Warrens. We hobbled through the small passages between listing buildings, bare feet squelching through mud and slime, Cillian hissing with each step. People were fighting and dying and a miasma of violence filled the whole area. Up ahead a cloud of anger and fear marked a full-blown riot, their emotions bleeding out into a communal torrent of rage.
Carrion spirits would be swarming over the city, drawn to the shedding of this much blood and magic like crows to a battlefield. The spirits would have a short existence in Setharis before the city devoured them, but they’d instinctively do their best to inflame the situation, to feed and breed and spread disease.
We burst from the gloom of the Warrens into a wider street, barging into some poor sap and knocking them to the cobbles. I turned to spit a quick apology but the words went unsaid as thick coils of smoke drifted past. Flames illuminated the black haze up ahead and terrified people were running for their lives towards us. I knew exactly where I was now. Charra’s Place lay only a short distance up the street towards Westford Bridge.
“Walker,” Cillian wheezed in warning.
I started, looked down at the person I’d bumped into. “Sorry, I–”
“Piece of dung!” The scars at either side of Rosha Bone-face’s mouth pulled white in a scowl. A dozen knives glinted in the gloom as more Smilers surrounded us.
I felt Cillian tense. “Easy now,” I said. “Stay calm.” These people had no idea how close they were to a very messy death.
Rosha scrambled to her feet. “Stay calm? I should cut your stinkin’ cock off!”
“I wasn’t speaking to you,” I snapped, nodding to Cillian. “I was telling this magus here not to burst you like rotten fruit.”
Despite Cillian’s bloodied state she must have given a fearsome glare judging by Rosha’s taken aback expression. “I have no time to dally… with the likes of them,” she said, staring at their scarified smiles.
“A magus?” Rosha growled, voice wobbling with uncertainty as she took in the ruins of Cillian’s expensive robes. The Smilers were used to intimidating people, but we weren’t displaying the slightest smidgeon of worry. “What would scum like you be doin’ with one of those daemon-touched bastards?”
“Councillor Cillian is right,” I said, opening up my Gift and reaching for Rosha. “We don’t have time for this crap.” Her eyes bulged as she felt me prod the inside of her mind. “So, are you going to get out of our way or are you coming to Charra’s Place with us?” I asked, withdrawing but keeping my Gift ready.
A strangled choke erupted from Rosha’s throat. “Councillor?” She coughed and cleared it, looking at us like we were daemons in human form. “That’s the direction we was goin’ anyways, you maggot.” A shocked expression burst across her face, and she paled as it dawned on her what she’d just called the magus. Her bad habits would get her killed some day, but not by me.
“Uh, sorry, my, ah, maguses,” she said. The rest of her gang looked like they’d collectively soiled themselves. Not surprising considering the dread stories that gleefully spread amongst the peasantry. Suddenly their knives seemed woefully inadequate. On the other hand, our reputation as magi was the only armour we had: all it would take was one idiot to stick a knife in my back and I’d be out of the game. I hoped they didn’t have somebody insane enough to risk attacking us. Cillian would slaughter them.
“Get a move on,” Cillian said, hobbling past two young Smilers, the puckered scars still red and angry on their cheeks. We limped uphill towards Charra’s Place, closer to a bridge over the Seth and closer to help. After a moment’s hesitation the Smilers followed us, their confidence returning with each step they took beside us. People coming downhill took one look at the angry wolf pack heading towards them and scattered, slinking off into darkened alleys or closing and barring their doors.
The smoke grew thicker, black coils writhing into the sky as flames licked up a nearby merchant house’s walls and roared from windows on the upper floors. A mob surrounded Charra’s Place, lusting for the riches inside, brandishing knives, sticks and broken bottles, flinging rocks and flaming debris at the shutters. The immaculate garden and delicate moonflowers had been churned into mud beneath their feet. A group of men had torn a heavy wooden beam from one of the burning tenements and was using it as a battering ram.
As we approached, a woman smashed a lantern across Charra’s front door and the oil exploded in a black cloud. Another crashed into the upper wall, flaming oil bursting across a shuttered window. The wood was ablaze but it didn’t deter the men with the battering ram as they continued pounding the door.
A wild-eyed woman in the torn and stained remnants of a dress turned to face us, her eyes catching sight of Cillian’s robes. She snarled, revealing a mouth full of broken teeth. “Old Towners! Get them!”
“Oh, shite,” I said, as the crazier half of the mob broke away and howled towards us. A few crossbow bolts zipped from slits in the brothel walls into the backs of the charging mob, dropping two to be trampled beneath their fellows without a second thought.
“Cillian,” I said. “A little help here?” The front rank of the mob dropped mid-step as something inside them burst.
The Smilers didn’t run. Maybe it was some sort of loyalty towards Charra and Layla, or perhaps this was part of their territory, but whatever reason they readied their knives and closed ranks around us.
The throbbing mass of rage surged towards me like an oncoming forest fire, and as much as I tried to keep it out, their emotion soaked into me.
I wrenched my Gift open as wide as I could manage. It was recovering astonishingly quick. Blissful power and pain roared through me in an uncontrolled wave to slam into the oncoming mob. One after another, I broke in and tore a part of their minds out. I felt laughter building up to eruption inside me as they fell face-first to the cobbles, drooling and blind. Only two survived to reach us, and the Smilers’ knives made quick butchery of them.
I grinned. It had been so easy. Was this the pleasure of potency felt by elder magi? It was glorious. Sudden horror helped me wrestle that ecstatic torrent of power to the floor and stuff the laughter back down my throat where it met the rising panic and disgust at my grisly handiwork.
A terrifying and monstrous strength was biding its time inside me. I couldn’t let the Worm of Magic take the reins again, no matter the cost. I glanced at the Smilers as they swallowed nervously and edged away from me. If I lost control I would take their minds, and they would be mine forever. I now knew exactly what it would feel like to be a tyrant. It was galling to admit the Arcanum were right to fear me.
Cillian stepped over a corpse and we advanced on the suddenly stilled and staring mob in front of Charra’s Place, the human vermin in it for loot, rape, or the primal joy of destruction. The shitweasels that had just come to the horrid realisation they had attacked magi.