The Shadow Saint Page 3

  The Dolphin, after all, flies the flag of Guerdon, and Guerdon is neutral in this war.

  Emlin cheers. The spy breathes again. He hands the weapon back to Dredger.

  The armoured man takes the gun, methodically unchambers the last round, checks the barrel, weighs the odds. Then says:

  “I’ll get your boy across safe, San. And then we’re square.”

  CHAPTER 2

  “Just think of it,” says Dr Ramegos, “as building a bridge. Opening a door.”

  Eladora Duttin nods, bites her lip to keep from stammering, then chants the spell Ramegos taught her. It’s not like opening a door, she thinks, it’s like pulling an anvil down on your head.

  Eladora’s unprepared for this lesson in sorcery, but that’s true of this entire impromptu apprenticeship. She cannot quite recall when she first met Ramegos–sometime in the painful, chaotic haze after the Crisis. The days after that horror are lost in fog–Eladora vaguely remembers stumbling down from the Thay family tomb on Gravehill, body and soul wounded by her dead grandfather’s blasphemous sorceries. After that, there were weeks spent in a hospital bed, the metallic taste of the painkillers, and a succession of half-remembered grey figures who questioned her, over and over. Men from the city watch, from the church, the alchemists’ guild, from the emergency committee, all trying to piece together the events that had remade Guerdon. To take the broken, reeling city and give it an account of itself that made sense.

  One of those figures never left Eladora’s side, and, over the weeks, resolved itself into a bright-eyed woman, too energetic to be as old as her wrinkled dark skin suggested. The endless interrogations and debriefings slowly became conversations and one-sided confessionals, and along the way Ramegos declared that she was going to teach Eladora sorcery.

  Eladora extends her hand, feels the power flow along her arm. Feels the pain, anyway, and she assumes that means she’s channelling something. She clenches her fist, slowly, imagining the spell paralysing a target, holding them in unseen chains of sorcery–but then she loses control, the magic slipping through her fingers. For a moment, her hand feels like she’s thrust it into an open fire, the unseen chains suddenly turned to molten metal, her skin blistering. A spell gone awry can discharge unpredictably–if she swallows the power she’s drawn down, she can ground it inside her body, risking internal damage. If she lets it go, she might ignite something, and this cramped backroom in the IndLib’s parliamentary office is crammed with papers and books.

  She holds her hand in the fire, trapped in indecision, until Ramegos leans forward and brushes away the errant spell as if it’s a cobweb clinging to her skin. The older woman’s casual use of power is impressive.

  “That was a good attempt,” says Ramegos, “but sloppy. You’ve been neglecting your practice.”

  “I-It’s been hard to find time. Mr Kelkin—”

  “Kelkin will work us both to death if we let him.” Ramegos tosses a damp cloth at Eladora, who wraps it around her hand. “Not everything has to happen according to his schedule.”

  It’s not his schedule, Eladora wants to protest, I’m working to fix Guerdon, and you’re… doing whatever a Special Thaumaturge does. But she doesn’t want to have that argument again. Ramegos may know, intellectually, what happened to this city, but she’s not from Guerdon. She doesn’t feel the same fierce urgency to save it that Eladora does.

  She picks another conversational tack. “Whereas you intend to kill me at your leisure.”

  “Sorcery,” says Ramegos, “is a perfectly healthy mental exercise, with only a small chance of self-immolation. If all you want out of life is wealth, power and sanity, go be an alchemist.” In the last century, Guerdon’s alchemical revolution has transformed the city–and the trade in alchemical weapons brought vast wealth in from overseas, as the Godswar consumes half the world.

  I don’t want to be an alchemist. Or a politician’s adviser. Or…

  “Now, again. But try not blowing yourself up this time.”

  Eladora groans and tries to clear her mind, or at least brush aside a few of her more urgent worries. She lifts her hand again, envisages the twisting, impossible shapes—

  And there’s a hammering at the door. Perik’s annoying voice shouting. “The chairman’s on his way! He’s called—”

  He’s cut off abruptly. Eladora opens the door to reveal Perik’s stand there, frozen by the spell in the act of knocking. Ramegos snorts in amusement, dispels the paralysis with a wave of her hand. Perik’s standing there in confusion, caught in the action of knocking.

  “—the committee,” finishes Perik. He glares at Eladora and would glare at Ramegos if he dared. The sorceress ignores him, picks up her heavy grimoire and hurries off, floating through the uproar of the outer office.

  “Remember to practise your Khebeshi,” she instructs Eladora as she leaves. “You won’t get far as a sorcerer if your Khebeshi is poor.” Ramegos would say that–she’s from the distant city of Khebesh–and mastering the obscure and difficult tongue is very, very far down Eladora’s list of priorities.

  Perik waits until Ramegos is gone before speaking. “Chairman Kelkin sent an aethergraph message an hour ago,” says Perik venomously, “he wants your report. I didn’t want to interrupt your time with the Special Thaumaturge.”

  Eladora curses under her breath. She squeezes past Perik and hurries over to her desk in the outer office. A dozen other assistants to the emergency committee glance up at her, then return to their work, every one of them scribbling frantically like it’s the last minute of a final exam. The distant chatter of an aethergraph in another room; the hubbub of voices in the corridor, like a gathering wave. Kelkin’s nearly here.

  She piles papers into her worn satchel, praying to no gods they’re in the right order. In her mind’s eye she can see Kelkin–her boss, everybody’s boss, chair of the emergency committee and de facto ruler of Guerdon–stomping up from Venture Square like a little puffing steam engine, dragging behind him a huge crowd of supplicants and clerks, beggars and bodyguards, lunatics and journalists, and heaven knows what else. When Kelkin appears in public these days, it’s always one breath away from a riot. Normally, Eladora’s nervous that something will happen when Effro Kelkin’s out and about in the city he temporarily rules. Today, she almost wants something to happen.

  Anything to slow him down.

  She’s not ready.

  Eladora briefly wishes she’d been practising something more painful than a paralysis formula. Instead, all she can think to do is ask Perik for a favour. “Can you, ah, stall him? I just need five minutes.”

  In truth, she needs five months.

  Maybe five years.

  The gigantic report on her desk is an inquiry into the origins, demographics, structure and status of the New City.

  Ten months ago, at the height of what some call the Crisis and others the Gutter Miracle, a new city exploded into being within Guerdon. A warren of streets and tunnels, palaces and tower blocks, all made from pearly white stone, erupted from the corpse of a criminal named Spar and engulfed the south-east quadrant of Guerdon, inflicting untold damage on the Alchemists’ Quarter and the docks. Since then the New City has been colonised at speed. Refugees, mostly, but anyone brave enough could go down there and stake a claim to one of the empty palaces or the gleaming, silent arcades.

  Guerdon was already reeling from a series of attacks; the city watch overstretched. There was no way to take control of the New City when it formed. The newspapers ran riot with lurid tales of depravity and crime. Anything’s possible there; even reality isn’t quite nailed down in the New City–her report is crammed with accounts of miracles and magic that she cannot attribute to any known god. There are cries and editorials demanding the New City be tamed, be purged, be quarantined or demolished or dispelled, but no one can agree on what should be done or how to do it.

  Eladora’s impossible task was to understand the New City, to map it and take stock of it. Others on the Industrial Li
beral staff were to build on her work, as part of the great security bill that Kelkin demanded. He was once the great reformer, but his reputation of the last twenty years was built on law and order, and he was determined to bring order to the New City.

  Eladora glances at one page, which is entirely blank apart from the heading “Proposed Solutions”.

  She’s really not ready.

  “Can I stall him?” echoes Perik incredulously. “He’s already sent word to assemble the emergency committee. No, I can’t stall him. If you won’t take it, I will!”

  Perik used to work for Mr Droupe of the alchemist-backed Hawkers, the main rivals to Kelkin’s Industrial Liberals. The Hawkers are, officially, the City Forward party, but everyone still quotes a joke Kelkin made twenty years ago about how their only policy was selling weapons in the market, hence Hawkers.

  Technically, Perik still works for Droupe, just like Droupe is still technically the head of parliament. But that parliament hasn’t sat in ten months, and won’t ever assemble again in its old form. During the Crisis Kelkin took control of the old Committee for Public Safety, declared a city-wide emergency and assumed special powers. Eladora has read enough history to know how fragile order can be, how easily the order of the world can be broken. Kelkin held law and order together through sheer determination and force of personality in those dark days, and for that she’s profoundly grateful.

  And as if to ensure that Droupe was forever routed and ruined, a scandal came to light three months after the Crisis. A forgettable affair involving bribery and corruption, but it was enough to make sure that he couldn’t return to Guerdon and claim the chair of the emergency committee. Eladora is quite sure that it was Kelkin who leaked the scandal to the press, and wonders how long the old man has been holding that in reserve. Effro Kelkin is sometimes an idealist and sometimes a vicious opportunist; his biographers are already digging in for trench warfare.

  “It’s my work,” snaps Eladora, pushing past Perik. His face reddens with anger, but she ignores him and calls for her assistant. Rhiado extrictates himself from a knot of aides and hurries over to her. He folds his lanky frame in an approximation of a bow–Rhiado’s only a year or two younger than Eladora, but he treats her like some elder stateswoman, when she’s only an assistant, too. He’s assistant to an assistant–an awkward title, but everything about the emergency committee is improvised. The city was gutted last year by the Crisis, and they’re holding its civic organs together like a pustulent bandage.

  “I’m heading down to meet the chairman. What’s on my schedule afterwards?”

  “You’ve got the reception at the Haithi embassy this evening. That’s it.”

  “Thank you,” says Eladora. She steps around Perik and weaves through the maze of desks in the outer office.

  “Oh,” calls Rhiado, “your mother wants to see you. She’s in the city.”

  Eladora walks straight into a desk. She stumbles, skinning her knee on the sharp edge. She loses her grip on the satchel, and papers spill across the floor. She can feel her cheeks burning as she bends down to pick them up, can hear Perik’s exasperated mutterings.

  “It’s fine, it’s fine,” she insists and brushes Rhiado aside when he tries to help. It’s not his fault–he doesn’t know Silva Duttin.

  Eladora has not spoken to her mother in more than three years. There are moon-shaped scars on her forearms that bear testament to that last encounter–she remembers sitting in the restaurant, digging her fingernails into her skin to stop herself screaming insults at the woman. In the Crisis, Eladora saw monsters and gods, but the thought of meeting her mother is still a knife in her stomach.

  No time for that now. She forces herself to stand, brushes herself off. Perik’s still glaring at her, but she has to ignore it. Kelkin needs her.

  Eladora hurries out of the door. Parliament is a labyrinth of tunnels, halls, offices and archives, but she’s learned to navigate it without thinking. It’s mostly empty, anyway. With the great parliamentary chamber upstairs vacant for nine months, the place can run with a much smaller staff. She ducks down a spiral staircase and cuts across an assembly room to get to the main corridor.

  She’s just in time to fall in alongside Effro Kelkin as he marches towards the council chamber at the head of his entourage. He puffs as he walks and she can see sweat on his balding pate.

  “Have section five to hand,” he orders her. Eladora nods and hopes that section five wasn’t left scattered across the office floor upstairs. Her heart’s pounding, and it’s not just the threat of her mother. She’s worked for Kelkin since the Crisis, but this is only the third time she’s accompanied him into the council chamber.

  Briefly, during the Crisis, Eladora channelled the power of the nightmarish Black Iron Gods. Proximity to political power is a pale shadow of that divine glory, but it’s closer than anything else.

  Admiral Vermeil holds the door to the council chamber open for her. She ducks around the bulk of the older man. Vermeil has his own, much slimmer report in hand, in a red folder. Eladora dreads what might be hidden inside.

  The admiral is Kelkin’s security adviser. The contents of that red folder contain Vermeil’s possible solution to the problem of the lawless New City. Ten months ago, at the height of the Crisis, the government bombarded parts of the city with rockets. Nothing’s unthinkable any more, nothing’s off the table.

  The admiral bows his head and mutters a greeting as Eladora passes by, as if he’s holding the door for her at a dinner party.

  She takes one of the stools crammed around the walls of the little chamber. The emergency council consists of eight members and a few clerks, so the room gets uncomfortable at a dozen people. Today, it’s more like thirty, and there are more crowding in the door. Eladora’s stomach sinks at the thought of presenting her draft report to such an audience. Ramegos is on the other side of the room, deep in conversation with one of Vermeil’s staff, and can offer no reassurance. Eladora catches sight of Perik’s pinched face, scowling at being shut out of the council room again, but then Kelkin raps the gavel, the door closes, and they’re on.

  “I call the, ah, what’s the count?”

  “Ninety-four,” whispers Eladora.

  “Ninety-fourth meeting of the emergency committee to order. We’ll dispense with a reading of the minutes. Jarrit, let’s start with you.”

  Jarrit–an elegant, grey-haired woman from Maredon, largest of the outlying towns–rises and launches into roughly the same speech that’s been made at the last seventy committee meetings. She eloquently argues that the immediate crisis has passed, and that it is time to call a new parliament and give rule of the city back to the citizens.

  By which she means the alchemists’ guild and their wealthy allies. Jarrit’s a Hawker through and through. Without mentioning him by name, Jarrit insinuates that Kelkin has subverted democracy and six hundred years of parliamentary tradition. (Eladora, still a history student in her battered soul, can’t help adding mental footnotes: the rotten parliaments when the institution was a room full of hostages to the king; the fifty-year gap when Guerdon was dominated by the monstrous Black Iron Gods; the blessed parliaments where the Church of the Keepers filled nine-tenths of the seats.)

  No sooner has Jarrit sat down than another speaker springs up. Another Hawker, castigating the emergency committee for its lackadaisical and half-hearted response to the security problem facing Guerdon. No one knows what to do about the city that appeared at the end of the Crisis. It’s flooded with criminals and cultists, the city watch lack the courage to patrol all the alien streets and the committee has refused to authorise the creation of new Tallowmen.

  At that, Eladora smiles inwardly. The Tallowmen are monsters made by the alchemists’ guild. At the height of the Crisis, the alchemists were given leave to grab suspected criminals off the streets and render them down in the tallow vats, to make an army of horrors to usurp the city watch. If Kelkin did nothing else, he’d still hold Eladora’s loyalty for keepin
g those leering candle-man horrors in check. And she wouldn’t be the only one who feels that way; if there’s one thing Guerdon agrees on, it’s that the Tallowmen are monsters.

  It’s just that half the city thinks they were necessary monsters, to keep the other half under control.

  The chairman listens to the speech without expression. Midway through, he leans back and snaps his fingers at Eladora. She rifles through her satchel, and hands him as much as she can find of section five. He leafs through it, makes a few notes, then he takes Vermeil’s red folder and lays it beside section five on the green baize of the conference table. She wonders if the admiral chose that red deliberately. It looks like a pool of fresh blood that Kelkin’s about to dip his hands into. As he flips through it Eladora tries to read over his shoulder. Catches sight of words like Tallowmen. Like prison ships. Forcible decontamination. Heavy gas.

  “Is there anything else before we move on to new business?” asks Kelkin when Abver’s done. He lays his right hand on the red folder. “No?”

  A hush descends over the conference room. Heads incline forward. Ramegos is unreadable, unmoving. Vermeil holds his breath. The Hawkers lick their lips. The Keeper priests fan themselves, their scratchy robes uncomfortable in this summer’s dead heat.

  “I have no new business,” says Effro Kelkin.

  Uproar. Every other member of the committee, and their aides and advisers, all shouting at one. Eladora looks to Vermeil in confusion, wondering what Kelkin’s doing. Is he just taunting his rivals on the committee by dangling Admiral Vermeil and his proposal in front of them, then denying them a vote on it? Did he plan on calling a vote, then decide against it at the last moment, perhaps reading some subtle change in the room? Or–Eladora worries–is this a sign of Kelkin’s ill health? The chairman is more than seventy years old, and was badly wounded during the Crisis. The city won’t survive without a firm hand to guide it.