The Shadow Saint by Gareth Hanrahan

Author:Gareth Hanrahan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2020-01-06T16:00:00+00:00

Oona appears out of the darkness like a psychopomp, here to carry his soul to some forgotten sea god. The mer-woman frowns when she finds him alone. He holds up the tattered end of the rope. She makes a face to express her sympathy, then dives down and unbuckles his weighted boots. Freed, he floats up into her arms. Her tail beats the water, and they rush upwards.

Behind them, watch patrol cutters spread out, searching for the intruder. Soon, they’ll find the bodies. One, dead on the rocks. Another who tried to escape via the seabed, and never noticed that a stray shot had damaged his breathing apparatus. The poor bastard, marching to his death, not knowing he was running out of air. His remains shredded by the flash ghost, ensuring he could never be identified.

Oona speeds him out into the harbour. There’s the little boat, Dredger’s launch, idling in the water. Oona pushes him up, breaching the surface. Annah and Haberas help him in.

Annah’s face is expressionless, unreadable, even when Oona gestures that there’s no one else coming, that the spy is the only survivor.

Now is the most dangerous moment of all.

When Annah lifts the helmet off, he whispers to her, urgently. Like the words are fire, a burning torch he’s carried out of the dark waters, passed from hand to hand in a relay. Tander and the others died to bring you these words.

“They don’t have the god bomb,” he lies, “they’re bluffing. The city’s wide open.”

Annah takes a long, long, draw on her cigarette.

She cups the cigarette in her hand, shielding it so the little flare of light doesn’t give her position away.

She exhales.

Drops the butt overboard.

“That changes things.”

She turns, shoots Haberas neatly in the chest, dead centre. Fires again, into the water, hitting Oona. The mer-woman thrashes and flails in pain, her webbed hands splashing through the moon-silvered water, but then she sinks and vanishes. Annah fires at the water, twice, then sits down at the tiller and starts the engine.

The spy lies there, in the bottom of the boat, as they race south, away from Guerdon, following the coast. Passing the islands, past Hark and Shrike, past the Isle of Statues. Past the Bell Rock.

Exhausted, untroubled, the spy falls asleep next to the cooling corpse.

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