Cameron Johnston - God of Broken Things

My head throbbed from the poor bastard’s ordeal, and I turned my back on them to study the walls until Cillian was done torturing him into unconsciousness. The artificer’s machines had done their work for the day and I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the boy – he had no idea the needles and bottled lighting were only the first of three sessions. A wave of nausea washed over me: I had been through this myself and knew what horrors were still to come. In the morning he would be dragged back in kicking and screaming to undergo an even worse set of procedures.

The brown-robed magus wheeled the unconscious patient out and the artificers filed out after her, leaving me alone with my old friend and ex-lover. It was only slightly awkward now that she was one of the seven members of the Inner Circle in charge of basically everything, and could order me tossed onto a pyre if she deemed it necessary.

The pretence of dispassionate control dropped away from Cillian and she sagged into a chair in the corner, ripping off her circlet to release her hair and taking a deep and ragged breath. “I hate this.” She bowed her head and hid behind a dark and curly veil. I didn’t play the game of politics, which made me one of very few people she could relax around.

“Don’t do it then.” My sage advice was not overly helpful to her. “I don’t order something done unless I could stomach doing it myself,” she snapped. “But it must be carried out. We have all seen the havoc a rogue magus can cause, and there are only a few of us with the skill necessary to enact the Forging with a minimum of pain caused to new initiates. All must take their turn and share the burden, even a member of the Inner Circle.”

Fair. “How are you doing? You look…” I didn’t want to say ‘like shite’, “…worn out.”

She sighed and her eyes drooped as if she would like nothing more than to sit on that chair and drop off to sleep. “As are we all. We must all do as much as we can for as many as possible. There is a mountain of issues that need attending to every single day.”

This was why they put people like her in charge and not people like me. I was selfish, and after a day like hers with all that heavy responsibility I would have pissed off to a tavern and gotten ratarsed on gutrot booze. I was far from the reliable type. Not her, she would be up at the crack of dawn and working before I fell out of my blankets with a hangover and a bad attitude.

“So why have you dragged me here?” I asked.

She swept her hair back to look me in the eye as she pulled a folded parchment from a pouch on her belt and tossed it over.

“Archmagus Krandus is in agreement.”

I opened it and examined the wax seals affixed to the bottom: the seven stars of the Inner Circle and the griffin rampant of High House Hastorum.

Magus Edrin Walker acts under my command and with my full authority. Give him whatever aid he requires and impede him at your peril.

Cillian Hastorum,

Councillor of the Inner Circle,

Seat of High House Hastorum

My eyebrows climbed and I whistled in appreciation as I noted the details of the writ. They were astonishingly brief and all-encompassing: I could legally kill people with this. “Are you cracked in the head? Must be if you’re authorising this.”

“Don’t abuse it,” she said, reading my mind. Not that it was difficult on this occasion.

I nodded and tucked it away inside my coat. “The hunt is on then?”

“Yes. You have identified three other magi possibly infested and controlled by Scarrabus parasites. Do not take any unnecessary risks. Investigate and report and I will do the rest. Should things go wrong you are ordered to capture them if you can and kill them if you can’t.”

I grinned. It was about fucking time to dish out some payback. She yawned and rubbed tired eyes. “Any questions?”

I thought about it, and the longer I did the lower her eyelids drooped. Her head bobbed up and down, and finally settled on her shoulder. I carefully and silently retreated. By the time I reached the doorway a soft snore came with each breath. As I left the Forging Room another magus and two scribes moved to enter bearing armloads of scrolls. Yet more work for Cillian. I barred their entry with an arm across the doorway.

I glared down at the young magus, barely out of Collegiate training probably. “The Councillor is not to be disturbed. She is attending to a vital issue.”

“But…” she withered under my glare. The scribes swallowed and backed away. The two armed wardens were still waiting for me, and they approached wearing their serious faces, hands wrapped around the hilts of swords.

I waved Cillian’s writ in front of their noses. “See this? You two are to guard this doorway for the next two hours and let nobody else in. The rest of you can turn right around and go do something else for a while.”

Their eyes flew wide and they leapt to obey me with a level of respect that I didn’t think I’d ever experienced before. Cillian would be furious when she found out I was letting her sleep. Not two minutes had passed since she had asked me not to abuse my new powers, but oh well, at least she would be a better-rested angry councillor. Besides, she had said I could do whatever I wanted to whoever I wanted.

I loved this writ already.

Cillian was exhausted and I was rapidly getting there myself, but I had an appointment at another hospital up in Coppergate that I refused to miss. After that my real work would begin – in the deep of night I would finally wrest some answers from the Scarrabus parasites that had tried to orchestrate the destruction of Setharis.

A couple of hours later, I was freezing my arse off hurrying halfway across the city to get to the hospital on time.

Winter’s grip on the ancient city of Setharis had broken, causing her cloak of pristine white to slump into piles of dirty grey slush. Her disrobing exposed the brutal scars of last autumn: the blackened ribs of burnt-out buildings, ruined streets and tumbled monuments, and worst of all, the frozen corpses of her murdered children. Far too many of them.

I splashed through reeking pools of corpse-melt and trudged up Fisherman’s Way passing patrols of armoured wardens and work-gangs of diggers carting away rubble in a long and gruelling attempt to return a measure of order to the streets. The wind bit at my skin and I tugged my sodden greatcoat tighter, for all the scant good it did. The ragged scars that cut from the corner of my right eye to my jaw and trailed off down my neck pulled tight in the cold, left unprotected by the absence of the forest of stubble which sheltered the rest.

I was bone-tired and half-starved but still had one last obligation before my hunt could begin, something that even morally bankrupt scum like me couldn’t bear to shirk. I always repaid a favour – good or bad; well, to people that mattered anyway.

The street led me uphill towards the Crescent and the Old Town and in my weary state it felt like a mountain beneath my aching legs. My belly rumbled, but I could only ignore it. Food was scarce right now – even for a magus – and our paltry rations never stretched far enough. With most of the grain stores torched and the fishing fleet wrecked we were barely surviving by stripping bare the farmlands and towns beyond the city walls. I was sick to death of fish, pickled cabbage, and turnips. Still, things could have been worse: the self-obsessed Arcanum magi and the High House nobles, safe in their mansions perched atop the high rock that loomed above the lower city, had opened their stores to the war-ravaged Docklanders below them. I… had not expected that from their sort, even given the horrors of Black Autumn. The cynical side of me suspected that Archmagus Krandus had threatened to seize it by force if they hadn’t taken the opportunity to flaunt their magnanimity.