It made the whole job sound a lot less glamorous.
The exact way we were able to gather and use raw magic, and why some people could do it and others couldn’t, nobody knew. Or, if they did, they weren’t telling me.
Now, imagine you had a city like Agatos, which had been around for thousands of years and which had seen countless gods rise and fall. Imagine you had a city full of mages who could wield the literal (if slightly rotting) power of the gods. Things could go to shit pretty quickly. I knew of at least seven smoking ruins where such shit had happened to previously thriving cities. It was partly to the credit of successive high mages that Agatos was still standing after all these centuries, but mainly it was down to the Ash Guard. Any mage who was foolish enough to start a serious, city-threatening smackdown with another mage or set off her own private volcano soon found the Ash Guard knocking on her front door and that, as they said, was that.
To really understand the Ash Guard, however, you also had to know about Sharshak, the least popular god at the party. There had been gods with all sorts of aspects. There had been gods of oceans and rivers and streams, gods of the seasons, gods of the hunt and the hunted, and there was even, infamously, once a god of bad knees. I wasn’t joking. Each of them had their own particular powers.
And then there was Sharshak. Sharshak was a god of the sun who had died thousands of years ago, or so the story went. (The sun had kept shining whether he was dead or not, so make of that what you will.) Sharshak had one particular power and that was that his presence neutralised the powers of the other gods. It made a degree of superstitious sense; when the sun rose, the terrors of the dark, the unseen horrors that haunted people’s imaginations, faded away.
All I was saying was that Sharshak probably didn’t get invited to too many social occasions.
When he died, Sharshak’s body supposedly fell to earth, where it had been burning ever since in the imaginatively named Pit of Sharshak. The Ash gathered from the pit continued on Sharshak’s good work. It neutralised magic. Try to cast a spell in the presence of the Ash of Sharshak and the magic just wouldn’t be there. It didn’t matter whether you were a high mage or a second-rate chancer like me. All the magic that had made you someone powerful and special would be gone. A sack of the Ash of Sharshak was supposedly worth more than most cities, but the Ash Guard never sold it. Instead, they smeared it on their skin when they came for a mage, and that mage was rendered as helpless as a baby.
Of course, we only had the Ash Guard’s word for any of that, and no one else knew where the Pit of Sharshak was. But the Ash did work, and I was royally screwed.
Just for the record, I blamed Benny.
I took a deep breath and plastered a wide, reassuring smile on my face.
“Don’t worry,” I said cheerfully. “I can explain everything.”
I regretted the line almost immediately. The problem with throwing something like that out there was that people expected you to follow through. And if I did explain, we would be spending a long, long time in a very small cell.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t a decent goat-shitter. A surprising amount of my job involved lying shamelessly. But my head was spinning like a priest of Putchek at the Feast of the Coming Ascension, my already empty stomach was trying to empty itself again, and this was the Ash Guard, not some client wondering why my services weren’t cheaper, eighteen years of mage training and experience counting for nothing, apparently.
Adrenaline, the need to fight, raced through me even though I didn’t have a target, narrowing my vision and clamping a fist around my brain.
Think! Think!
I had broken the curse and triggered a magical booby trap. Somehow I hadn’t even noticed that trap.
That’s what you get for playing with high mages.
I had taken its full brunt. It had been meant to rip whoever set it off to shreds, and it would have if I hadn’t already been on edge. I had managed to throw up a shield the moment I felt it trigger. Even so, it had smashed me back and knocked me senseless. If Benny hadn’t been standing behind me and sheltered by both the shield and my body, there wouldn’t have been much left of him. I swore creatively.
The curse itself had only been a trigger for the booby trap, and I had missed it entirely. I’d always known I wasn’t destined to be a high mage, but sometimes circumstances really rubbed that in.
The force of the booby trap had torn the library apart. Which did pose a question: Why would Carnelian Silkstar do that to his own library?
I had no time to worry about that. I could figure out the how and why if I survived this, because I hadn’t just pissed off a high mage. I had attracted the attention of the Ash Guard. It was the nightmare of every mage in Agatos.
The captain of the Ash Guard was a solid, muscular woman with dark hair tied back in a short ponytail. I couldn’t tell the colour of her skin beneath the thick layer of Ash, but her eyes were the brown of river mud. I could just about make out a long scar that cut diagonally across her face, narrowly missing her left eye. Even the thick Ash wasn’t enough to hide it entirely.
“Can you?” she said. “Explain everything?” It wasn’t a question.
I turned slowly — not just because I had an arsenal of weapons trained on me by professional mage-killers, but because if I turned too fast, I would topple over again.
My mind was slowly catching up with me. The room was a wreck. The magic had been potentially lethal, but it wasn’t city threatening and no one had actually died. Magical shenanigans like this weren’t serious enough to involve the Ash Guard, and the Ash Guard were the one group in the city who didn’t jump at the commands of a high mage, so Carnelian Silkstar couldn’t have summoned them. Why were they here?
“Bring them,” the captain said. Strong hands closed on my arms. I felt strangely weak, and not just from being blown up. Mages tended to subconsciously supplement our energy with the raw magic around us. That was how some mages could live for over a hundred years and still look young. Having this taken away by the presence of Ash made me feel sick. Except this isn’t being sick, I reminded myself. This was normal. To think I’d been moaning to Benny about how tired I was. I was lucky he hadn’t punched me.
We were hauled out of the ruins of the library. The door had been cracked by the force of the magic, and splinters had showered across the first dozen feet of the hallway, but beyond that it was clear. We marched unsteadily past Carnelian Silkstar’s private meeting room and into the high mage’s office.
I smelled her before I saw her. She had voided her bowels and her bladder. The stink of shit and piss almost overwhelmed the more delicate scent of blood. My stomach tried to retch again, and this time it managed a thin, acidic liquid that burned my throat. I didn’t realise I had stopped moving until the Guards’ hands pulled me forwards again.
I didn’t recognise the woman at first. She had been slashed across in four nearly parallel cuts. The top slash had taken away her jaw and part of her neck, leaving a ragged, inhuman mess. The second, across her chest, had splintered ribs. Fragments of bone jutted through her ruined flesh. The third had disembowelled her, and the fourth had nearly taken her legs off above the knees, leaving them hanging by little more than skin and an inch of bare, wet muscle.
My knees weakened, and somehow I found myself kneeling on the floor. That was when I recognised the victim from her robes and her height. She was the Master Servant who had gone to find Carnelian Silkstar for us.