The Shadow Saint Read online

  Now he’s banging the gavel, demanding order.

  “Old business,” says Kelkin. “Jarrit’s motion to recall parliament and hold a general election. I believe I postponed a vote on that motion at the last meeting.”

  He’s definitely mocking them. That motion was made five months ago; he’s postponed it more than fifty times since then.

  “I second the motion,” says Kelkin. “Let us vote on the proposal to hold a general election in the cities and hinterlands to choose a new parliament.”

  Dead silence. Jarrit, hesitantly, raises her hand. She has little choice. “Aye.” They go around the table.

  Two more ayes, then Abver. He looks at his allies on the council, whispers urgently with an aide, then speaks haltingly. “It’s… this council’s very purpose–is to, ah, deal with… After all, recalling parliament and holding an election will take weeks. You can’t–I mean, would the chair not agree that it would be exceedingly remiss of this committee to leave the city in such a state, to aggravate the situation by calling a contentious election?”

  “The city’s survived for ten months since the Crisis. I think we can muddle through another six weeks. How do you vote, sir?”

  Abver stares at Kelkin, incredulously. Kelkin’s entire platform is built on law and order, on stability. Now he’s not only poured phlogistonic oil over that whole platform, he’s handed the Hawkers a match. “I vote aye. If the chair refuses to lead this emergency council in actually tackling the emergency, let’s go back to parliament as soon as we are able. Let the people have their say.”

  Next to vote is Ogilvy, Kelkin’s second in the Industrial Liberal party. Ogilvy’s equally staggered by Kelkin’s call for a vote. He looks as though he’s about to vomit up a live fish as he raises his hand. “Aye,” he says weakly.

  The last is the young Patros, the head of the church of the Keepers. His features are perfectly composed, his eyes downcast in reverent prayer, but from her seat Eladora can see him nervously tugging at a gold prayer ring on one finger. The church of the Keepers used to be Guerdon’s state religion. For nearly three centuries, the Keepers kept both gods and laws, commanding a huge majority in parliament. Their power has dwindled since then. Kelkin dealt them a crippling blow early in his career when he passed the Free City act, allowing foreign faiths to open temples in the city.

  But ever since the alchemists and their Hawkers rose to power, there has been an uncertain alliance of the defeated between the Keepers and the IndLibs. Ten minutes ago, Eladora would have called Ashur one of Kelkin’s closest allies on the committee, but now everything’s uncertain. Finally, he lifts his head. Eladora’s struck by how nervous he looks.

  “This is a mistake, Mr Chairman, and the city will rue your decision. We looked to you for stability, and you’ve betrayed us. In the name of the most holy church of the Keepers, I vote nay.”

  Kelkin ignores his erstwhile ally. “The chair votes aye. The motion is carried. All other business is suspended until the calling of the one hundredth and fifty-third parliament. This committee shall only meet again if warranted by special circumstance. Until then, the chair thanks you all for your service.”

  He slams the gavel down.

  There’s a stunned silence for a moment, then it’s like Kelkin just kicked over a beehive, as an incredible deafening buzz of urgent conversation fills the room. The door’s unbarred, and the uproar spreads into the corridor. Eladora catches a brief glimpse of Perik, who’d already huddled in conversation with Abver; apparently his defection from the Hawkers to the IndLibs is already forgotten. Rats are quick to leave a sinking ship, of course.

  And there’s Kelkin, the captain who just steered the ship headlong onto the rocks. He turns first to Vermeil and hands back the red folder. “Bury it,” he orders, “and burn any copies.”

  He gives Eladora back section five of her report. He’s scrawled some numbers across a mostly blank page. Her estimated population of the New City, divided by the number of citizens per representative in parliament. Everyone else in Guerdon’s ruling elite sees the New City as a threat to public safety, a monstrous aberration that must be excised. Kelkin’s seen it for what it is–enough new votes to topple the balance of power in parliament.

  He hasn’t crashed his ship on the rocks. He’s beached it on a virgin shore.

  CHAPTER 3

  Guerdon’s a neutral city, a city of weaponsmiths, sailors and mercenaries, of rich men and poor–and of spies. Observers to watch the harbour, to spot where ships carrying cargoes of death are going. Eavesdroppers to listen to whispered diplomatic overtures, to hear the bargains and betrayals in the coffee shops along Venture Square. Pickpockets and codebreakers to intercept and decipher messages carried by couriers. Hedge-sorcerers to read the runes and interpret omens. All the pantheons have their agents here. The alleyways of Guerdon are a front in the war, where–for now–battles are fought by mortals, not gods.

  That is why a man whose official title is Third Secretary to the Ambassador of Haith leaves the embassy by a concealed door. The embassy of Old Haith is perhaps the grandest of the mansions along Embassy Row, reflecting the long and close relationship between the two nations. The building is sombre, dark leaden windows and grey stone, no decoration other than the sigils of the various Houses whose scions serves as ambassadors to Guerdon over the decades. Many of the sigils are crowned with a bar of iron, which signifies that one ambassador or another inherited the family phylactery on returning to Haith.

  The Third Secretary will never see his family crest mounted on the walls of the embassy. He’s not a member of a great House. He’s a Bureau man. He serves the Crown of Haith another way.

  He walks past the embassy of Haith’s rival, the conquering Sacred Realm of Ishmere. Statues of the Ishmeric gods watch him as he passes by, and he can feel their hatred like heat from an open furnace. Snarling Lion Queen, the war-goddess of Ishmere. Writhing Kraken, who steals the seas. The mocking face of Blessed Bol, whose touch brings prosperity. Smoke Painter, hidden behind a veil.

  There’s no sign of Fate Spider, which worries him. Fate Spider is the Ishmeric god of destiny and secrets. There’s a belief–something between a running joke and an article of faith–among the intelligence staff at the Haithi embassy that Fate Spider’s statue comes to life to eat unwary spies. The Ishmeric pantheon is always in flux, always changing as the gods of one island rise in prominence, or one god metamorphoses through sheer madness into some new aspect. There are staff back at the Office of Foreign Divinities whose job it is to interpret tiny changes in the rituals and decoration of Ishmeric temples, in an attempt to divine shifts in the balance of divine power.

  The absence of Fate Spider might indicate that the secretive deity has fallen from favour. Or it might be a feint, to fool the watching spies. The line between madness and divine purpose has long since been erased in Ishmere.

  There are still a few lights burning in offices on the upper floor of the Ishmeric embassy. The Third Secretary looks up at them, idly wondering about his counterparts there. They also creep out at night, no doubt, sending vibrations through all the threads and webs of the shadow world. They have spies watching the harbour, and the alchemical warehouses and the mercenary hiring halls. They also have agents and informants; they have cover identities just like him, bland bureaucratic titles that cloak their true purpose, just like his heavy coat conceals the gun he wears.

  He wonders if they also call Guerdon home, as he does. He comes from Haith, but he hasn’t returned to that land in decades. His career has been spent in the various outlying colonies and conquered territories. You could trace the long retreat by mapping his assignments. As the years pass, and the borders contract, his postings are closer and closer to Haith.

  He has not taken leave in years, because if he took leave he would be expected to return to Old Haith, and he is no longer comfortable there. Haith hasn’t changed, but he has. Of course, he’s not wholly part of this city either; he may appreciate Guerdon’s f
ierce energy, its animal passion, its sordid ways of survival, but he’s still Haithi. His bones belong to the old Empire.

  Glancing back down Embassy Row, he sees a pair of watchmen, patrolling. There was a killing on this very street only a few weeks ago, a rival spy shot dead. A little splash of violence, like the first tentative raindrop before a storm.

  His business tonight is on the far side of Castle Hill. He ducks down a narrow flight of steps, slick with the afternoon’s rain, then goes through another archway that leads to another staircase, and that brings him down to a subway station. He remembers being amazed by the subway when he first came here. Haith has a few train lines running between cities and the estates of the great Houses, but the trains of Guerdon are a modern marvel. The tunnels they run in predate the city in places. Old abandoned ghoul runs. There’s more below the city than there is above, runs the old saying, although that’s no longer true. The addition of the New City tipped the balance to the surface.

  Assuming, of course, that there aren’t new labyrinths and catacombs beneath the eerie marble streets and dream-palaces of the New City. He hasn’t dared visit that part of Guerdon; there are dangerous powers in those streets, so he only interacts with the New City at one remove, through agents and hirelings. Watching from a distance, through the grimy window of the safe house on Gethis Row.

  As the subway train rattles through the darkness, the secretary amuses himself by imagining impossible pleasure domes and subterranean mushroom gardens in the depths of the New City, lurking out there in the black void beyond the tunnel. Every so often, a spark from the train’s wheels blazes, a flare that gives a flashing vision of the tunnels. It’s always graffiti-covered greenish rock, but the secretary cannot help but feel that if the spark happened a moment earlier or a second later, he might behold marvellous vistas.

  The train slows as it approaches the next station. Three other passengers get on. Two are young and drunk, in the grey robes of students. Laughing, they fall into a pair of seats near the door, kissing and pawing at each other. The boy’s eager fingers dislodge the flowers braided through the girl’s hair.

  The other passenger is an older woman carrying a handful of leaflets. Silver charms and amulets jangle as she picks her way down the carriage towards him. The Third Secretary recognises the symbols: the old woman is an acolyte of the Keepers. These days, the church of the Keepers is forced to compete for worshippers like all the rest of the faiths in Guerdon. The Third Secretary feels sorry for the old woman, who must peddle her beliefs to a cynical city. When she was young, the Keepers practically ran Guerdon, and a life in service to the church was considered glorious and rewarding. Kelkin’s reforms changed all that. The woman reminds him of an old crab on a dry beach, left behind by a wave that’s never going to come back in, scuttling this way and that in search of some tide pool.

  All his sympathy vanishes when, out of all the seats in this half of the carriage, she sits down next to him. The faint scent of incense clinging to her clothes does nothing to mask the yeasty old-woman stink. She proffers a leaflet. “The gods watch over you,” she says. “Holy Beggar, Saint Storm, Mother of Flowers–there’s a god set over each of us. They will not turn their faces from us. Only we turn our faces from them.”

  He takes the flyer to avoid argument. “I’ll read it,” he promises.

  Mollified, the old woman points to the entangled students. “Disgraceful,” she says loud enough for them to hear. “Like animals. Like whores.”

  He ignores her and pretends to bury himself in the flyer. One section is a cut-out-and-keep card, and the flyer exhorts him to carry such a card on him at all times. It’s for those too poor to carry a symbol of the Keepers, or too faithless to be recognised as members of the Church. The idea is to carry the card until you die, so when the time comes to dispose of your body, you get buried with the proper rites.

  The card doesn’t describe those rites, but the Third Secretary knows what they are. These days, the dead of the Keepers are given to the carrion-eating ghouls, the remains lowered down deep corpse shafts into the depths of the city. It’s a practical solution on multiple levels–not only does it reduce the need for graveyards in an overcrowded city, but the ghouls extract the residuum, the potent soul-dregs, from the corpse and consume it themselves. The Kept Gods take only the thin gruel of prayer, a starvation diet of faith that ensures that Guerdon’s gods are weak and manageable, compared to the crazed titans of other lands.

  The Third Secretary smiles inwardly. Death is a problem for other people, not a Vigilant-caste man of Haith. His soul isn’t going anywhere.

  The train emerges from its tunnel and rattles across a viaduct. Below is the tangle of streets and alleyways called the Wash, the most notorious old slum in Guerdon. The New City has engulfed half the Wash. Shimmering white towers and ethereal spires rise above the tenements and stagnant canals. This close, the Third Secretary can see that the New City is not as heavenly as it appears from afar. Washing lines have been strung between those spires; banners flutter in the night breeze. Graffiti scrawled across marble façades. Temples proclaiming themselves to be gambling halls, whorehouses, fighting pits.

  “Disgraceful,” echoes the old woman. “Filthy city. A canker, I tell you. A canker.”

  “This is my stop,” says the Third Secretary, and forces himself to sound apologetic.

  He rises, and she clutches at him, her hand grabbing his coat. He pulls free of her grasp, hurries away from her, down the carriage.

  “Read it!” she calls after him. “Your soul can still be saved!”

  He leaves the train and hurries down the platform. Behind him, the two drunken students peel themselves apart and stumble out, too. He crumples the flyer up and is about to throw it away when he spots something unusual. The fires of Safid shall carry the soul…

  He uncrumples it, skims it, then folds it carefully and slips it into a pocket. As far as he can tell, the flyer’s from some minority sect, the Safidists, who don’t normally proselytise in the city. He’ll send it home to the Office of Foreign Divinities, for their archives. The mainstream Keeper Church is faltering, overtaken by its radical fringe. He’s seen too much of the Godswar to pay much attention to the divinities of Guerdon. Compared to the fighting gods of Ishmere, Guerdon’s deities are somnolent, barely aware of their worshippers or their peril. But divinity isn’t his department.

  He strolls out of the station. Finds his focus as he mounts the stairs one step at a time, managing to make himself trudge like a tired labourer on his way home despite the adrenaline flooding his veins. The Wash is emptier these days than it was when he first came here, when he first built his web of contacts in Guerdon’s underworld. Now, that underworld has shifted south and east, vanished into the unknowable white labyrinth of the New City. One day soon, he’ll have to brave the new terrain of his adopted home, but tonight he has more urgent matters.

  His destination is a house on Gethis Row, where he is to meet his contact: a dealer in alchemical weapons. Haith buys such weapons in great quantities direct from Guerdon through legal channels. But there are some weapons that cannot be bought for any amount of coin, and this meeting is part of a long and delicate negotiation to settle on a price that cannot be spoken.

  The light above the door is dark. That’s not right. His contact should be there, waiting for him, and why would she be waiting in the dark? The street is too quiet, too empty. The secretary sniffs the air, wondering if there’s a hint of blood on the breeze. He doesn’t break stride or show any reaction–just walks on by.

  It isn’t enough. The first attacker darts out of an alleyway, the second from the shadows of a doorway across the street. The secretary goes for his gun, but someone else in an upstairs room already has him in their sights.

  He feels the impact before he hears the roar of the gun, and then he feels the pain three heartbeats after that.

  He tumbles into the gutter, and one of the attackers is now on top of him. It’s the girl from the
train, the student who had her tongue down the boy’s throat. She cuts his throat, with a single slash of a little knife. She doesn’t twist his head to the side, though, so she’s rewarded with a gush of blood over her hands and knees. She shrieks.

  Amateurs.

  The Third Secretary no longer has breath to sigh with, but he still has enough control to roll his eyes. Daerinth is going to kill him for dying. Sloppy. Sloppy. It’s not just the black mark on his career, it’s all the little bits of living he’ll miss. Not just pretty girls, but good food and wine. Damn it, now he’s going to miss the reception tonight, too. He was looking forward to that.

  Approaching footsteps, accompanied by a stronger smell. A young man’s voice, nervous and excited. The knife-wielding girl is joined by her lover from the train. “I hit him! The gods guided my hand!” he says. “Did you see that! What a shot! What a… ugh!” And then the sound and smell of vomit.

  Definitely amateurs.

  They lift his corpse by the feet and shoulders and carry him into the alleyway. He considers his options. His training urges him to continue to play dead–play a corpse, to be precise, because he’s genuinely dead. He waits for his opportunity.

  As he waits, he ponders: is his death connected to his contact’s apparent absence?

  He’s pretty sure it is–it’s not likely to be a coincidence that he’d get murdered right outside the house where he was supposed to conduct a major illegal arms deal. Still, stranger things have happened, and it’s remotely possibly that the two supposed students from the train just happened to rob and murder him here. If they go for his coin purse, that might be a clue.

  They dump him in a pile of garbage. The stench is overwhelming in his dead nose. He can feel some of his senses sharpening, others diminishing. The sensation of concrete pavement and rotten fruit against his face is very far away, and seems just as unimportant to him as the blood draining from his throat wound or the gaping bullet hole in his right side. His sense of smell has improved, and beyond the sickly sweet rot he can smell his blood on the woman’s hands, her floral perfume, her partner’s oniony breath. The distant, fainter tang of alchemical discharge from the gun that ended him. It’s a temporary condition–he’s read that when the necromancers flense him down to polished bone, he’ll lose his sense of smell. Enjoy it for the moment, he reflects.