Cameron Johnston - The Traitor God

An age passed in that darkness, worrying at the holes in my memory, until rattling chains announced our ship had dropped anchor. The human cargo crawled up onto the deck, blinking against the burning dawn light.

Pauper’s Docks, the arse-end of Setharis. The air reeked, every sewer and stream in the city spewing out into the harbour our decrepit old coast-hugger was anchored in, almost a million bowels emptied daily. That thought forced me to lean over the side and retch, adding my vomit to the grey scum of shite, rubbish, and fish guts; if anything, it felt like I’d just made the sea a bit cleaner. Bloody ships. If I’d sailed for Ahram I might have died! My Clansmen cousins had the right idea in sticking to their hills and mountains in the rugged north. No mountain had ever rocked and pitched underfoot and made me empty my guts onto the ground… well, not while I’d been sober anyway. I tried to ignore my nausea, to focus instead on the familiar sooty stench of humanity crowded together inside the black granite walls of the ancient city. It smelled like home.

Autumn was waning and the broken moon, Elunnai, was swollen in the sky, every wound on her shattered face visible to the naked eye. One of her tears fell streaking across the sky, then another. It was an omen of bad luck for the tears to fall before winter had even begun, an occurrence that agitated water spirits in the Sea of Storms and caused the unusually vicious waves that had threatened to batter our ship to kindling against the rocks of the Dragon Coast and the hidden reefs around Lepers’ Isle. It heralded a harsh winter and the seas would soon grow far worse, not long left before the storms blew in and all sea travel ceased until late spring for anything other than great Setharii carracks protected by coteries of hydromancers.

Dusty memories woke and stirred. Ten years! It felt like another life. A part of me felt pleased to be home, despite the reason. A murderous grin slid across my face. Somebody had killed Lynas, and now they would burn for it.

Setharis hadn’t changed one bit. Looking bored and miserable in the rain, wardens in rusty chain hauberks and burgundy tabards patrolled city walls slick with slime and moss, while beyond the smog-wreathed slums of the lower city the high and mighty swanned about in the lofty gothic palaces of the Old Town, high on its volcanic crag. The gleaming golden spires of the Templarum Magestus and the Collegiate, centres of Arcanum power, reared above every other building – well, those built by human hands anyway. From amongst the gargoyle-flocked buttresses and steeples of the merely rich and powerful, the five unearthly towers of the gods – slick black, almost organic-looking – jutted from the heart of the rock, twisting around each other like enormous snakes, so high they seemed to pierce the sky. Coronas of raw magic usually crackled from their spires, but now the gods’ towers stood as lifeless as any other lump of stone. The air felt subtly different, the heavy magical presence of the gods was missing. Another bad omen.

I grabbed the burly arm of a passing deckhand. “The towers – when did they go quiet?”

He refused to look up, “Few months back. Same day the earth tremors began.” He pulled his arm free and scurried off to avoid the topic, fingers tracing symbols to ward off evil.

I stared at the towers and recalled a fragment of the vision: Lynas’ murderer had said our gods were blind and chained. But what could do that to beings who could incinerate entire towns with the flick of a finger? Not that these towers were the homes of what other peoples would consider actual gods, mind – primitive worship of natural spirits that gained power from devout worship wasn’t tolerated in Setharis – but assuming a powerful magus survives that long, assuming they don’t burn out or give in to the Worm’s seductions and get put down like a rabid dog, then when they grow old and addicted enough you might as well call them a god for all the humanity left in them. Our gods had been human once.

The elder magi of the Arcanum stood far above the rank and file in power and skill, even as a magus like me stood above the lesser Gifted: the sniffers, hedge witches and street illusionists, unable to ever wield true power without burning their minds to a crisp. Then there were mageborn like Lynas, those whose Gifts never matured and opened up to the magic; mostly all those poor bastards got was good health, or some extra strength and speed as magic slowly dripped into them like water leaking through a cracked pipe. If their Gifts allowed them a drip of magic, I was a stream and the elders a swollen waterfall. And as the elders were to the lowly mageborn, so were our gods to the elders.

Our legends claim that long before the rise of ancient Escharr, the five Setharii gods had been mighty elder magi before they ascended. There was more to it than mere age and skill however, there was a secret to their ascension – I was sure of it; and just as sure that the answer was firmly locked away deep inside my head. My exile had begun the night a god died and that was no coincidence.

Any elder magi I’d ever met were obscenely powerful, deeply knowledgeable, and they always had to be right. They were much like inveterate drunks, their tolerance of magic increasing as the years went by to match their inflating egos. I didn’t think our gods any different. Derrish, Lady Night, The Lord of Bones, Artha the dead god of war, and even my patron Nathair, the Thief of Life – arrogant and self-centred pricks the lot of them, a veritable treachery of gods, though Nathair was better than all the rest. I shuddered at this line of thought. It was an unsettling subject for me, given what was locked away inside my head. Whatever happened back then, I was sure I was in the right. But for a magus certainty always merited scrutiny.

That’s the thing with magic: it erases your doubts and replaces it with a sense of your own magnificence. It seems to me that the more powerful you get, the more certain you are that your opinion is the only one that really matters. Almost every powerful magus I’d ever met had disappeared up their own arse long ago. Bugger that for a game of soldiers. Me, I was content to be a nobody.

A hand thumped down onto my shoulder. “All passengers off,” the captain said, his breath reeking of cheapest dockhouse rum. My grin dissolved back into a mask of queasy suffering as he spun me round and shoved me towards the gangplank where the rest of the refugees were massing.

I bobbed my head like a meek little merchant, then held a hand to my mouth as my stomach gave another lurch. “Thank you, Captain, thank you,” I said, my voice cloying with false humility as I shuffled over to join the others standing in the rain, as far away from the pyromancer as I could manage. Acting was all about the look in the eyes and the body language: most people didn’t realize how much they picked up, or just how much they gave away. It wasn’t magic but it could bloody well seem like it.

We clustered together at the gap in the rails, swaying on that nauseating, pitching deck while dockhands grabbed flung ropes and tied them to iron rings set into huge stone blocks. The wait was aggravating. I itched to get inside those walls and hunt down the man who murdered Lynas.

Our captain had been subtly persuaded not to pay good coin to berth his leaky old boat at the secure and guarded quays of Westford Docks, instead dropping anchor on the east of the city, amidst fishing boats and single-masted cogs offloading untreated wool, raw hides and other low-profit goods. This side of the city was more suitable for my needs: the guards cheaper to bribe and the sniffers a lot less competent. Back in my day, it was seen as a punishment posting, and I doubted much had changed in my absence.