Cameron Johnston - The Traitor God

Somehow I managed to sit up and find my voice. I sang, a very particular rhythm vomiting forth as a wail of hatred. What was left of Nathair writhed in agony, but I refused to stop. Artha’s gift to me was revenge for the murder of Lynas. I made it to my knees, then after an age up onto my feet. I kept singing as I hobbled towards the incandescent light hanging in the air before me.

I reached the god-seed before Nathair.

The storm of magic ceased. Just for a moment, I wielded all the power of a god. It was mine and mine alone. The remnants of Nathair exploded, motionless puddles dribbling down into the earth. Was he dead? Perhaps; I felt no thought left in it.

I sensed four muted presences far below my feet, buried deep under the black rock of Setharis. They felt familiar, almost like kin. The gods called me to them and my feet began sinking through the rubble. No! Whatever they were, they were no kin of mine. “I hope you are in torment, Byzant.” Gritting my teeth, I opened my tattered coat and forced my hand to drop the god-seed into the deep inside pocket, then collapsed like a puppet with its strings severed as strange presences and godly power both cut off.

I wanted to scream and kill, or to curl up and hide, maybe both. The Worm of Magic whispered desperate seductions but my despair was too complete to bother listening.

I was giddy with power and pain, my back crying out in distress. I was a wreck, and despite being full to bursting with stolen power it would take a long time to fully heal, if I ever did. Magical healing was not the same as never having been hurt. It might take years for my shattered bones to knit properly, and missing ribs did not re-grow. Still, I was alive and finally free of my daemons. I could share Charra’s last days.

Black shards of Dissever lay half-buried in the debris. I tried to pick one up with my left hand, but it dropped from trembling fingers. I clenched it into a fist and used my right, needles of black iron still buried in the flesh. Nothing but cold and lifeless iron in my hand, but the daemon’s presence still lingered at the back of my mind. At the moment it tasted content, with perhaps a smidgeon of pride. Godslayer, it whispered.

I limped towards a hole in the wall as the building crumbled around me. It was a strange feeling to be myself again, without disparate parts locked away and hidden in the darkened catacombs of my mind. But there was a hole burnt in my brain that would never heal, and aside from my left hand only time would tell what other problems that would cause. I staggered from the warehouse and it collapsed behind me. Lynas’ home crashed down to rubble.

“I got the bastards, Lynas. I got them. You did it, you saved us. If you hadn’t burnt down that temple and destroyed all that mageblood we’d all be worse than dead.” Tears welled up in my eyes. It was over and Lynas’ body was finally at rest, but I couldn’t let go. Some of my memories had been damaged or destroyed by the god’s brutal invasion of my mind, and more thanks to my own desperation. I felt their loss as much as you can without really knowing what you were missing, but other memories had been fully restored, fresh as ever and swimming about in my head. In a way that was far worse – it was like losing Lynas all over again.

I sat on the rubble, throat cracked and raw from screaming, stomach gnawing and empty, and looked up at the rock of the Old Town, where high up through the pall of smoke the five gods’ towers remained silent. With Nathair gone I had half-expected four of them to explode back into life at any moment.

Inside my pocket, power called, and if I wanted, one of those towers could be mine. Honestly, right then I’d have happily traded it for a smoke, a jack of cold ale and a hot roast chicken.

The streets were dead; not just quiet, actually dead. Corpses of cats and dogs and chicken and swine lay eviscerated and drained of blood, piles of feather and bone marking where the god had plucked birds from the sky. Even the tiny husks of flies and beetles littered the ground. Nathair had left nothing alive in his wake. I heard a wail and hobbled back the way I had come on my flight with the crystal with the vague hope of finding survivors trapped under collapsed buildings. Remnants of Skallgrim warriors were scattered across the street, a scrap of scalp and hair there, a finger here, and fragments of shredded armour and broken weapons that had proven useless.

I located the source of the noise and found Harailt still alive, if you could call the state he was in living. His body was a mound of quivering flesh wheezing and bubbling, and his mind a gutted and insane ruin. As I approached he mewled pathetically from a gash in what was left of his throat. Three battered and bloodied Skallgrim surrounded him – lucky stragglers arrived too late to enjoy Nathair’s attentions – prodding the mound with weapons. I took their minds without a second thought. They stood motionless, awaiting my orders.

I didn’t say anything as I approached the remains of Harailt. His single remaining eye begged me to end the agony. I knew that I should hand him over to the Arcanum, but I didn’t have it in me to allow him to live, even in eternal agony. I almost stopped myself, thinking it would be far too quick an end for what he had done. But none of it was Harailt’s fault, not really – he had been infested and controlled by Nathair and that Scarrabus parasite. Whatever he had done to me, nobody deserved this. I picked up a discarded Skallgrim axe and chopped, once, twice, a dozen more times to make certain.

He didn’t die easily, and it wasn’t quick. When he finally breathed his last I didn’t feel the satisfaction that I’d expected given our history. I just felt empty.

My three mind-broken thralls followed me as I wandered in a daze back to what was left of Lynas’ warehouse and slumped down atop a pile of rubble. I stared at nothing. Thinking. Hurting. Mourning. For what seemed like hours. Eventually footsteps crunching towards me made me look up.

Krandus and Cillian advanced on me through the smoke and dust. Cillian still looked half-dead, but had regained some of her strength since I’d seen her last.

My three Skallgrim thralls closed ranks around me. I wondered how I appeared to the Archmagus: guarded by the enemy, a torn and ragged figure dripping the blood and gore of a god and with a lake of stolen power seething inside me. My coat hung in tatters around my shoulders like a cloak of bloody skin, and at some point amidst the chaos I’d lost my right boot and the little toe with it, leaving just a ragged stump. I didn’t feel that pain yet. Funny the trivial details that strike you when imminent death comes knock, knock, knocking at your door. A toe was the least of my worries.

They stopped ten paces from me, power vibrating amongst them like a leashed storm ready to be loosed in the blink of an eye. I waved off my thralls and heaved myself to my feet.

“Magus Edrin Walker,” Krandus said, sounding exhausted. “The Arcanum has felt your power used against the populace of Setharis.” He calmly eyed my enslaved Skallgrim. “I am required by law to charge you with the ancient crime of tyranny. As of old, we cannot suffer an enslaver to live. How do you plead?”

I lifted a hand to slick gory hair back over my shoulders. The sea of magic in my belly spoke to the wounded animal inside that wanted to lash out, to bring death and ruin to my enemies. It whispered words of victory and assurances of my own might: I had taken three men as my own, and I could take many more if I wanted. It was so difficult to summon the willpower to shove the urges to one side. That was what had defeated Artha in the end: when the god started listening to the corrupting urges of the Worm he began acting on instinct rather than rational thought, and he went too far down that slippery slope to climb back up. Not as he was. I refused to fall as he had – too many innocents would get hurt.