Ah, fuck it. “I’m looking at my cock, Shadea. Must be a while since you’ve seen one.”
Eva’s eyes dipped to my bare crotch, brazenly ogling me. “Oh my.” She choked back a laugh.
It didn’t faze Shadea. “Not at all,” Shadea said. “I dissected one last month. It was rather large in comparison to yours.” She looked to Eva. “Be a dear and fetch the miscreant.”
Eva vaulted the wall and dropped thirty-odd feet down to me, metal clad feet clanging. She bore the weight of all that metal like it was cloth. At least she had the good grace to look slightly embarrassed as I hastily yanked my trousers back up and tied my belt, not that she averted her eyes. She noted my torn and bleeding leg and then carefully swept me up into her steely embrace. I wrapped my arms around her gorget and held on tight as she climbed the steps back up to street level. Manliness be damned, it felt good. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so safe, and hadn’t much fancied scaling those steps with a wonky leg either.
My illusion of safety evaporated at the sight of the horrid old hag waiting on us and two squads of armoured wardens busy erecting barricades across the bridge. Shadea’s wards burned bright and baleful across the defences – nobody would get through those unscathed.
“What’s going on?” I said as Eva set me down. She held onto my arm to help keep weight off my wounded leg.
“We are securing the bridges,” Eva said. “Coteries of magi are currently moving forward to reinforce the wall guard.”
Shadea’s nose crinkled. “The stink of daemon spoor and blood magic clings to you.”
“Oh, you know me,” I said. “Always popular. A variety of interesting friends. Listen, Cillian’s been hurt. She–”
“Has already passed into the Old Town,” Shadea interrupted. “Your mageborn friend, Layla, is taking her to the healers. It is strange; I had thought that I knew the name of every living mageborn to undergo the Forging.” I swallowed my sudden fear, but she brushed past it. “Councillor Cillian will survive. You have the Arcanum’s thanks for that.”
I needed to change the subject, else Shadea might pick at the discrepancy until it got Layla killed. “Did she tell you about the Magash Mora?”
She looked at me sharply. “Cillian has been divulging restricted information. She shall be censured later; however, given the circumstances I will say that it is merely an opinion, one that lacks sufficient evidence. I shall, however, account for every possibility. I admit to some surprise that you survived the underground river.”
I smiled. “And spare the Arcanum the hassle of dealing with me? So sorry to disappoint. Where is Harailt?”
Shadea sighed and turned to survey the lower city. “He is currently being subjected to further investigation in the Courts of Justice below the Templarum Magestus. He passed every test I applied but it is a wise precaution given recent events.”
“I’ve been proven right about everything so far,” I said. “Just because you loathe me doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”
Columns of smoke billowed from many sites and the city gates were only now swinging shut after being choked by sailors, dock workers, and herdsmen driving in the last of their cattle ready for the Sumarfuin slaughter. The Skallgrim fleet would land shortly, unless the magi heading for the walls could burn their ships to ash before they even reached the beaches.
She pursed her lips, thinking. “Contrary to what you may think, Magus Walker, I have never harboured any particular dislike of you. In fact I feel nothing for you at all. Nor have I any solid evidence of you misusing your Gift, despite an extremely colourful variety of rumour to choose from.” She glanced back, that impersonal gaze sending shivers up my spine. “If I had, then you would have been disposed of.”
I bit back angry retorts. “As if I could believe that. None of you want a so-called tyrant walking about.”
Shadea was silent for a long moment, thinking. Eva shifted, metal and leather creaking, uncomfortable at the reminder of what the man she’d just held in her arms could do.
“There are no written histories from before the era of tyrants,” Shadea said. “However, I do believe that oral traditions contain a measure of truth distorted over time. The oldest tales all tell of an age where people cowered around their campfires, fearful of dire entities that stalked the night stealing children from their beds and spreading madness and disease. Humanity is not alone on this world.”
I blinked, not entirely sure I was hearing her correctly. “Next you will be telling me you have samples of ghosts, ogres and darkenshae floating in jars in your creepy workshop, and that all the monsters of my childhood stories are real.”
She snorted. “Is it really so strange when you have fought daemons born on alien worlds beyond the Shroud? Perhaps you forget the creature you uncovered in the catacombs as a boy.”
Eva looked as flummoxed as I felt hearing this. I stared at Shadea, shuddering at the memory of huge bulky bones and a sloping skull with a third eye. “I thought that thing was an ancient magus changed by magic.”
“It was the corpse of what we call an ogre,” she said. “Ogarim, if you prefer the Clanhold oral histories which are less corrupted than ours. Other artefacts of those creatures’ presence in Kaladon have been uncovered over the centuries, but it is not commonly disclosed to magi of your humble rank.”
I licked my lips. “Then why now?”
“One last attempt to turn you from a dark path,” she said. “Some creatures of myth were said to take on human form, and others to inhabit corpses of the wicked. If, as current theory suggests, magic slowly adapts its hosts and their bloodlines to survive surrounding dangers, then it is logical to assume that tyrants might once have served the purpose of identifying such disguised creatures. Sniffers too, perhaps: two differing human responses evolving to meet the same threat.”
I must have looked incredulous, as she hastily continued, looking slightly irritated at getting carried away with her love of obscure research. “As fascinating as that conjecture may be, what I am suggesting is that you too may find a worthy purpose in the years to come. I deem it unwise to discard any tool unless it bites the hand that wields it.”
I swallowed. Such a thing had never occurred to me before. A purpose? Me?
Shadea smiled, a terrifying sight. “By both tradition and familial ties, I was destined to marry a rotund oaf of a high lord and birth him a litter of squalling infants. I chose otherwise.” Dear gods, Shadea wed? Children? I think all involved dodged an axe to the face there. “You too can follow a different path if you so choose.”
Down below, three wolf-ships beached on Setharii soil ahead of the body of the fleet, the tribesmen glinting dots on the beach. Pyromancers on the city walls began incinerating them with bolts of fire.
“What madness drives them to dash themselves against our walls?” Eva said, shaking her head as she surveyed the slaughter.
Before I could reply with: bet it has something to do with a bloody huge monster underground, Shadea’s head whipped around to face the Warrens.
“Oh no,” she said, and for the first time in my life I saw Shadea afraid.
The ground shook. Mortar pattered down from the surrounding buildings and pebbles rained from the cliff walls of the Old Town rock. My mind shook with it. Agony pierced right between my eyes. I screamed, barely feeling steel-clad arms keeping me upright.
“What’s wrong with him?” Eva said, as I jerked and bucked in her grip.
I dimly sensed Shadea’s fingers press first against my wrist and neck, then peel back my eyelid. The pain wasn’t mine, was cutting in from elsewhere and bypassing every defence I threw up to block it out.