Cameron Johnston - God of Broken Things

It had been ecstasy to be filled with such power. I was only too aware of the new and gaping holes in my self-control left from one moment’s madness necessary to save a friend.

I reached into the patient’s mind to tinker with his awareness of pain, dulling and diverting the flow of sensation until all he felt was vague warmth.

At my nod, Old Gerthan tightened a tourniquet around the man’s upper arm and used a sharp knife to peel back flaps of skin before setting the saw to his swollen flesh. I shuddered and looked away as the saw bit through muscle and then began rasping through bone. I had never been squeamish, but it reminded me of far worse horrors. Thirty seconds later the man’s arm thudded to the sawdust and Old Gerthan swiftly tied off his arteries and blood vessels with thread. Then he pulled on a thick blacksmith’s glove and retrieved the dagger, the blade now cherry red. He pressed it to the other wounds. Flesh sizzled and steamed, but thanks to my ministrations the man on the table barely twitched. The apprentice chirurgeon applied pitch to keep the wounds clean but still allow fluids to drain, and then it was done. The nurses quickly set another man in his place.

There were always more in need of my numbing touch: today brought four amputations, three surgeries, and one painful investigation of post childbirth complications. It was a long and tiring day and Old Gerthan must have had inhuman willpower to do this for days on end. All magic had its limits where our bodies and sanity were concerned, even for canny old magi like him. I was a wreck after only one day here and there, but I owed the Halcyons: they had done all they could for my friend Charra and made her last days of illness as peaceful as possible. My streak of black bastardry was thick and rotten, and my friends had been all that was important to me. And now that they were dead and gone? What now? Lingering memories and half-baked promises to protect Lynas and Charra’s daughter Layla…

It was late and most of the hospital staff were finishing up for the day. They washed all the bloodied tools and bandages with boiling water and vinegar and left them out to dry for use in the morning. Tomorrow always brought more to fill up the hospital beds. Old Gerthan took me to one side and clapped a hand on my shoulder. “How are you doing, my boy?” He sagged with crushing weariness. He had been a loyal friend to Charra and that earned him as much respect and assistance as a wretch like me could offer. He’d readily cashed that debt in.

“Better than you, old man. You are dancing on thin ice. You need to rest.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “I’m in total control.” “For now.” I tapped my temple. “Who are you trying to fool? I’ve plunged into that icy abyss, remember? Let me take a wild guess how it’s getting to you?” I cleared my throat. “Imagine how many more you could save if only you had more power. Just open yourself up to the Worm and burst that dam, let magic pour through you…” His face grew stony “…you could do so much good if only–”

“I take the point, boy.” “Do you? I’m surprised you can string two words together you’re that knackered. When did you last eat a proper meal? Do you even remember?”

He grimaced and thumbed gritty red eyes. “Three months on and there is still so much needing done.” His voice held that haunted tinge of people who had seen too much. We all had. This was his way of dealing with it, trying to pour a little good back onto the scales in a futile attempt to balance out so much death and despair. Me, I wasn’t nearly so benevolent – I wanted to wreak bloody and brutal revenge. I still raged at what Heinreich and Nathair had done to my home and my friends, but with those two traitors dead I was left with this red mass of impotent fury eating away at my insides. Those alien parasites called the Scarrabus had been behind those two bastards, pulling their strings, and soon we would know what the creatures really were, and exactly what they planned.

“If they lose you, they lose everything,” I said. “They need you more than they need somebody like me. When you are this worn down you will make mistakes, or push yourself a step too far trying to save a life and it will all slip out of control. I don’t want to have to toss you on the pyre, Gerthan. Let the chirurgeons and nurses take care of them until you recover.”

He sighed and nodded. “Very well. You make irrefutable sense for once. However, don’t think you have dodged my question. How are you faring?”

“The usual.”

He grunted commiseration. “And Layla?” he continued. “How is she coping after her mother’s death?”

I shrugged. “Not very talkative, but holding up as well as can be expected. Everything going well I will see her tonight.”

He frowned. “I see. Do try and keep your head on your shoulders.” Ah, he knew what tonight held in store for me then. “I have no intention of dying; have no fears there.” It wasn’t surprising given his newly elevated status in the Arcanum hierarchy – I should have expected that all of the seven councillors of the Inner Circle would know exactly what prey I hunted tonight. I trusted that he had helped ensure that the information had also reached other, less trustworthy, ears.

With that I tossed my bloodied apron onto the wash pile, donned my coat and made my escape out into the night air. A chill breeze cleared the stench from my nostrils and the tiredness from my mind. I took several deep breaths, banishing the dregs of the patients’ fear and suffering from my mind. There was no room for such emotions this evening. The shattered face of Elunnai, the broken moon, was visibly smaller in the night sky and with her retreat the worst of the winter storms were already ebbing. Soon the sea routes would reopen, and with that would come more Skallgrim wolf ships and war. I relished the chance to pay back all the pain they’d caused.

Cold anger bubbled up. Heinreich could not have brought down the Templarum Magestus, the heart of the Arcanum, all on his own: he’d had Skallgrim allies without, and traitorous allies from within the Arcanum. Now I had narrowed it down to three magi.

I’d fully expected one or all of them to die tonight. First, I would be interrogating Vivienne outside a certain lusty warden’s house in the Crescent… how was I supposed to know the plan would fuck up so badly?

While I’d been tracking and waiting for Vivienne Adair, somebody else found out what I was up to and had spent those hours hunting me – my luck was as shitty as ever and I had just gone from predator to prey.

Cobbles and stone chips rained down all around me as I stared at Vivienne’s twitching corpse, impaled on stone spikes that had thrust from the ground beneath us. A geomancer had just tried to murder me.

I scrambled to my feet and pulled a knife from my belt. It was merely steel, and at times like this I missed Dissever’s enchanted black iron, despite the murderous and foul daemon that my spiritbound blade had contained.

My preternatural senses felt the air stir around me and pulled my gaze up into the night sky. Two robed men dropped on swirling wings of icy wind, splashing down into Vivienne’s pooling blood. One was burly and bearded, the other holding him aloft by the armpits, was freshly shaved and slim, almost androgynous: the big man was Alvarda Kernas, a geomancer of some small renown, and the other a nameless youngling freshly released from Collegiate training, new enough that I didn’t know his name. Both their expressions were curiously blank and emotionless – they were exactly who I’d been looking for. It seemed they had indeed heard I was closing in on them. Perfect.

I reached out with my Gift as Alvarda shrugged off the youngling and advanced on me. The merest brush of minds was enough to know I was correct – their thoughts were tainted with inhuman influence, a rancid oily scum spread across their emotions. The geomancer’s mind was a black morass of Scarrabusstain, indicating he had been infested for a long time.