Cameron Johnston - The Traitor God

I winced as the ignorant fool darted past the sniffer towards the gatehouse. The guards didn’t even bother trying to stop him. The sniffer sighed and pressed the activation crystal set into the ring adorning his index finger. Ward glyphs carved into the stone archway sparked into life as magic fed into their patterns, flaring red as the man sprinted through.

The scream was brief and a smoking corpse dropped to the dirt, rags and hair burnt away. A grumbling, hungover guard dragged the blackened remains back out and booted it to one side, spitting on it for good measure. The corvun on the gatehouse ceased eating the gull and cocked its head, eying up fresh meat.

And then it was my turn to stand in front of the wardens on guard duty. I wrung my hands and did my best to look nervous and pathetic. “It is so good to be back on dry land again, sirs,” I said, sniffling and wiping at my nose. I reached out and shook the guard’s hand vigorously, pressing my last remaining silver coin into his palm. The coin disappeared into his pocket with a deftness equalling that of any thief or street magician I’d ever seen.

“I am here to meet my kin,” I said. “I am hoping they will have a job for me at the smithy after… after…” I made my eyes go glassy and distant.

“Which family?” the warden said, narrowing his eyes and studying my expensive green coat. “Might be I know them. That be Steffan’s smithy?”

I shook my head. There was no Steffan’s smithy in Setharis as far as I knew. It was an age-old trick. “I’m kin to Old Carthy living in an area called… Carrbridge, I think it was.”

The warden grunted. “Good luck with that then. Old Carthy is one mean old bastard.”

A nod and a smile for him, doing my best to look reassuringly bland. There wasn’t much I could do to hide the ragged scars marring my face, but I was doing my best to play the part of the spineless, boring merchant, and plenty other refugees bore scars and wounds of their own, albeit fresher. In many ways my scars were a better disguise than the fine coat I wore – for those in the city who had known my face ten years ago anyway. I’d ditched my tattered pack days ago to avoid any possible suspicion of smuggling, only keeping my coin pouch, loaded dice stuffed down the front of my trousers, and a set of lockpicks in my boot – just the essentials.

I paid the gate tax, scrawled “Reklaw” on the admittance scroll, and was waved onwards. “If you want Carrbridge,” the guard said, “take a right at Sailor’s Spire and head on up Fisherman’s Way. I’d avoid the alleyways just after the spire, friend, what with you dressed so fine. The scum have recently taken to loitering thereabouts – they will have you marked in no time.”

“Thank you, warden,” I said. It always helped to slip them a little something. How very useful for my purposes.

The sniffer was young, and not the ageless youth retained by some magi either but with a trace of puppy fat still on his bones, so I wasn’t worried about him recognising me. He was entirely disinterested in his job, which is what I’d been counting on. Their peculiar talent for scenting the unique flavours of magic aside, sniffers were only a little better than street magicians and hedge witches. Their main tasks were to identify Gifted children, detect a variety of magical corruptions, and most importantly, to sniff out any and all traces of vile blood sorcery. A sniffer would burn their Gift out or go insane if they tried to open themselves up to the amount of power a full magus could channel, and their magical dexterity – akin to a toddler playing a musical instrument next to a master bard – was distinctly lacking. Even if they’d had the raw power, they failed to feel the rhythms in the magic and thus were unable to twist it into the forms needed to carry out their will with precision. They were blunt tools of the Arcanum, but effective.

It was far from glorious work for a sniffer to be stuck on guard duty at Pauper’s Gate, where nothing interesting ever happened. I didn’t dare use my Gift to try to manipulate the sniffer’s mind into letting me pass through – even if I managed to stop him raising the alarm the moment he sensed my magic slipping into his head, in Setharis you could never be sure who, or what, else might be watching.

The sniffer was just about to raise his hands to sweep me for traces of magic when I sent the mental command that set off my little present inside Lord Arse’s coin pouch. Magic burst into the air behind me, thick and potent, and undetectable by the mundanes around us. The sniffer’s eyes went wide, flicking from me to Lord Arse. He waved me off and barrelled past, dismissing my cringing form as that of any other mundane merchant, exactly as I’d intended. “By the Night Bitch, beware! Gifted!” he shouted. Lord Arse reeked of my magic more than I did at the moment, making it an easy mistake to assume he was the source, at least for the next few minutes until the miasma dissipated. No harm done beyond broken bones, bruises, and a few hours of painfully invasive questioning.

Taut by my days of constant baiting, the foolish nobleman snapped and ordered his retainers to draw swords. The refugees scattered, shrieking as the wardens piled into the fight and the sniffer began running through his repertoire of disabling arts.

While they were distracted subduing the idiot I slipped through the gatehouse, fearful that – even here – my daemons might show up at any moment. I paused on the other side and took a deep breath.

I was home.

The noise and odour of the city hit me like I’d walked into a wall. I lost myself among the smell of roasting meat and fried onions, mixed with dozens of other nostalgic scents. A hundred accents and a dozen languages merged into a constant babble, broken here and there by street traders hawking their wares at the top of their lungs. A dozen languages, and I was proud to say I could curse in every one. It wasn’t hard to pick up foreign tongues when you could peek into people’s minds to find out what they were gibbering on about.

Gaunt refugees from the coastal areas of the Free Towns huddled in small groups, begging for scraps of food from anybody that passed by. There was a suspicious lack of corvun, cats, and dogs in the area. I suspected they were now wary of the starving packs of refugees. I often felt that animals had more sense than humans.

Rickety stalls and spread blankets surrounded the inside of Pauper’s Gate, selling everything from baskets of bruised fruit and “bags o’mystery” sausage made from, well, something, to gaudy and supposedly enchanted trinkets, secondhand clothes, and skins of homebrewed ale.

Everything was for sale in the dark underbelly of Setharis, if you knew where to look. Every possible vice catered for, from rare and expensive alchemics and nubile younglings sold in the flesh markets of the Scabs, to serial debtors bought for darker purposes, likely destined to die in brutal cavern fights. Life could often be exchanged for a loaf of bread in the slums of Docklands, where coin was rare and corpses common. Whores of both sexes plied their trade openly and the wise dared not antagonize the lords and ladies of sheets, as the polite called them. In the Free Towns they’d have been driven into the shadows out of sight of so-called righteous folk, but not here where most Docklanders were a step away from starvation, a mere crust away from selling themselves.

The empire of Setharis might be almost dead and gone, swallowed up by apathy, corruption, and perpetual political deadlock, but as an artefact of history the city was a melting pot of peoples from all over the world. Pasty-skinned locals like myself rubbed shoulders with pale Clansmen from the mountainous north, while olive-skinned sailors from Esban bargained with darker local traders whose ancestors had come from our island colonies amongst the Thousand Kingdoms south of the desert of Escharr. To my great surprise I even spotted an exotic duo of snowlanders passing through, their ice-blue flesh beaded with sweat. It was said that the sea itself was frozen solid around their homelands, and that they made their homes from snow and sculpted ice much as we made ours with earth, wood and stone.