'You have never met him,' the boy had said but I'd had clues, many of them simple things, obvious things: the carefully designed metal clasps on the iron masks; the complex triggers on the Inquisitors' pistols, each detail a kind of metaphor for the perfectly crafted way each event had unfolded.

It was as if the whole world had become a machine built to this man's specifications.

'What's going on?' Brasti asked. 'Who is this arsehole, and what's he doing with a bunch of dead priests?'

'I am a blacksmith,' the man replied.

'He's lying,' I said, though it was a small lie, buried in one letter.

How many times had we asked ourselves who could so perfectly manipulate the country? The Dukes couldn't do it; even Trin, who was vastly cleverer, couldn't. I'd only ever met one person with the brilliance and cunning to pull something like this off. 'I'm a Tailor,' she'd told us, so many times. 'The last true Tailor in all of Tristia.' She'd been right, of course.

'Well, who is he then?' Brasti asked.

'He's . . . Whatever the Tailor is, he's like her. He's not a blacksmith. He's the Blacksmith.'

'Clever,' the man said, stepping out of the doorway of the chapel to face us. 'It's a shame to see a mind like yours go to waste, Falcio. I'll bet even the old woman never figured it out, did she?'

'She leaves the little things to me,' I said smoothly, trying to stop my voice shaking.

'Don't underestimate yourself. It is a remarkable thing to unwind the plans of those of us like the Tailor and me. Did you know, it turns out there's a word for us? Inlaudati: the Unrecognised. It's not an especially grand name, I grant you, but I suppose that's because our nature is to remain hidden.'

'And yet here we are.'

The Blacksmith spread his arms wide. 'And you should be proud. You found me.' His eyes showed genuine delight: the secret desire of every murderer to have someone admire his handiwork. But there was something else there, too: he was curious about me, whether I was going to figure out what he'd done.

I already had. I looked up at the figures hanging from the six wooden gibbets, swaying gently in the soft breeze. 'These aren't priests and they aren't Saints.'

'No . . .' Ethalia whispered. She and Erastian already knew what I had just now deduced. And then Brasti and Kest's expressions changed as they too understood what we had found here in this little chapel.

I'd always been the least religious of us all, so I felt it was up to me to say it out loud. 'This man killed the Gods.'

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE.

The Heretic

When you come upon a corpse, it's important to set aside emotion. Rage won't help you understand death, nor sorrow, and if there's one thing the dead deserve, it is for their true story to be told. As a Greatcoat, I'd seen no end of corpses in my time; it comes with the job. I'd seen bodies in every state of decay, from the still-warm victim whose eyes stare back at you, demanding answers, to desiccated skeletons picked clean by scavengers until the bones fairly gleam. What surprised me most, staring up at the dead Gods of Tristia, was how ordinary they looked.

'How can you kill a God?' Brasti asked. There was a brittleness in his voice, an almost child-like uncertainty that was unusual for him. I'd never really thought about Brasti and Faith in the same sentence; I'd never considered that deep down he might actually be religious.

'The same way you kill anyone else,' I replied, my eyes still on the withered corpses hanging above us. 'You take out your victim when he's at his weakest.'

'Correct,' the Blacksmith said, as if a favoured pupil had answered a difficult question. 'Although I confess I was disappointed when I found them so enfeebled there was barely any Faith left inside them with which to do my work.' He pointed towards the mine. 'They huddled like beggars in the tunnels, trying to get what warmth they could from half-remembered prayers.'

Though far out of my normal domain, it made a certain sense: faith in Tristia had been declining for centuries for all the piety-by-rote you'd see on high days and holy days, I didn't think many people really gave much credence to the Gods any more. Well, not until the Saints being murdered set off a religious panic. 'You didn't start with the Saints,' I said. It felt like I was slowly taking apart a clock, holding up every tiny wheel and pinion and spring; seeing for the first time how they connected to each other. 'You killed the Gods first.'

He smiled. 'Again, you impress me, Falcio: such a simple deduction, and yet one that would have eluded most people, so blinded are they by what passes for belief in this broken country.' He reached up a hand and squeezed the foot of the one I assumed was the hanging corpse of Duestre, God of Craft. 'We worship them, we pray to them so what does it tell you when no one even notices when they die?'

Even Kest looked troubled. 'But the risk of facing a living God . . .'

I was pondering the same question. I looked up at the iron masks covering their faces. Forget the fact that they're Gods and stick with what you know. 'You make sure the victim can't fight back,' I pointed out. If the masks were made from the ore from the mine, and it was the ore that had long ago transformed prayer into power, then it stood to reason that the Gods might be just as vulnerable to the effects of the masks as the Saints were.

'Right again. It's a shame we cannot help but be at odds, Falcio, when we share the same goal.'

I hated the raw confidence in the Blacksmith's voice, the way he could say such things without sounding smug or arrogant. I wanted to take the mace in my hand and shatter his skull for all the things he had done but I had to focus. He's an avertiere, remember? These thrusts and feints cost him nothing; they were intended to pull me off-balance. 'What goal is that?'

'We both want to make this a better country.' His sincerity unnerved me.

'You son of a bitch,' Brasti spat, and drew a long knife from inside his Inquisitor's coat, but I held up a hand to stop him.

'Wait,' I said.

The Blacksmith shook his head. 'You see? This, right here, is the difference between us: you're all posture and preening. You seek to change the world through grand acts of daring and cleverness.' He gestured at Saint Erastian. 'You came all this way and risked your lives in an admittedly brilliant gambit for what? To rescue the doddering remains of a nonentity: an old fool clinging to a fading romantic dream the world long ago forgot.'

'Better a fool dreaming of love than a butcher who commits atrocities to satisfy his own perverse religion,' Erastian said.

'"Religion."' The big man repeated the word as if it were an insect he'd spat from his mouth. 'I'm a craftsman, not some pious preacher selling false hope. I make tools. I forge weapons.'

'Fine,' Brasti said, 'you're a blacksmith, we get it.' He looked at me. 'Can I kill him now?'

'No,' the Blacksmith replied, 'I don't think you can.' He signalled with his hand and a figure stepped out from the chapel. The man stood a little taller than me. I could make out broad shoulders and a warrior's build beneath draped white robes like those the nobles had been wearing in the mine. The man was hooded, but I caught a hint of a smile that made me cold inside.

I forge weapons, the Blacksmith had said.

Brasti was unimpressed. 'Go ahead, tell your little God's Needle to make his move. All you've shown us so far are madmen, and we're getting pretty good at killing those.'

The Blacksmith ignored him and looked at me, visibly disappointed. 'Really, Falcio? You haven't solved the last piece of the puzzle yet? You must have figured out by now that the Needles were just a means to an end?' He stepped behind the figure in white. 'This, I think, will impress you.'

'I thought you said they couldn't make Saints,' Brasti said to Erastian.

'They can't,' he replied, his eyes narrowed as he looked at the figure in front of us.

'The old man is right,' the Blacksmith said, reaching his arms around the front of the figure's white cloak and unfastening the clasp. 'It turns out making Saints is much harder than it's worth that's why I decided to go for something considerably more ambitious. Rejoice, for I have forged our salvation!'

The Blacksmith drew back the hood and dropped the man's robes to the ground. The figure wore armour underneath: a sculpted, gold-rimmed steel chest-plate that left his powerfully muscled arms bare. His face was that of a hardened soldier; his eyes were dark, as if he were staring down at his enemy dying on the blood-soaked ground. When he lifted his hand, it held a great axe and I knew that weapon better than I knew my own rapiers, just as I knew the lines of this man's face more clearly than my own. I had seen the man only once before, fifteen years ago, and yet his features were etched into every nook and cranny, every scar on my soul. This was the man who had come on that fine spring day to the little farm Aline and I had built together; this was the man who had urged his Duke to take Aline from me.

The man's name was Fost, and he belonged in hell.

'Say hello to your new God,' the Blacksmith said.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR.

The God

It was Kest who spoke first. His voice was quiet, as it often was when he was saving the air in his lungs to prepare for his first attack. 'How is this possible?'

The God didn't reply, but the Blacksmith did. 'The way you make any great work: by finding the proper materials. That was the difficult part, of course.'

Ethalia was still gazing up at the bodies hanging from the gibbets. 'You discovered the Gods were too weak to give you what you needed, so you pursued the Saints instead.'

'I knew that power like that couldn't simply fade away it had to go somewhere,' the Blacksmith said. 'Then I made my most important discovery: Saints like Erastian and and I know you will forgive me for saying this, my Lady yourself are nothing but spiritual thieves, pilfering Faith from the Gods like back-alley pickpockets. I have simply stolen it back.'

'Why him?' I asked. I was trying not to tremble as I stared at Fost. 'Why, of all the faces in the world, his?' My hand fumbled for the mace hanging at my belt, but my fingers were trembling so badly I knew that if I tried to lift the weapon, it would only fall from my grip.

The Blacksmith looked at his God, then back to me. His eyes were oddly sympathetic. 'Tell me what you see, Falcio.'

I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of an answer but the words came out anyway. 'I see the man who buried the blade of his axe in my wife's skull, a man deserving of a thousand deaths at my hand, not reverence not Godhood.'

Brasti swung round suddenly. 'What! Have you gone blind?' He pointed at the God. 'It's exactly what I told you when this whole mess started: it's fucking Trin.'

'No,' Kest said, 'neither Fost nor Trin stand before us and nor is it the man I see.' He was blinking furiously, beads of sweat dripping from his brow into his eyes.

'Who do you see?' I asked, my voice suddenly gentle.

'I see Caveil-whose-blade-cuts-water. I see every detail of his face his gaze, his smile, the way he stood when I faced him . . .'

'Mortal eyes were not meant to gaze upon the Gods,' the Blacksmith said, 'and so we each see what our minds will allow.'

And what do you see, Blacksmith? I wondered.

'How many of my brethren did you desecrate to make this pretty toy of yours?' Erastian demanded, but the Blacksmith was unaffected by the Saint's anger.

'No more than was necessary,' he replied, offhand. 'Perhaps a hundred.'

The old Saint looked stricken. 'A hundred . . . but there were never more than twelve score of us. You killed-?'

'I did. I killed them,' the Blacksmith confessed. 'The first one was Anlas, Saint of Memory. He was always the cleverest of you lot do you know there's remarkably little written about Saints? They aren't even mentioned in our oldest scriptures, but from his screams I tore the truth: that the power you wield is stolen from the Gods. Better yet, with his wheezing final breaths, Anlas told me of this old cult of wealthy zealots who believed they could take that power for themselves by drinking the blood of Saints.' He shook his head with feigned disgust. 'Isn't it odd that the richest among us are such petty creatures?'

Every time he spoke, Ethalia looked pained. 'You speak of murder as if it were nothing more than-'

'Nothing more than melting down old horseshoes in order to make new ones,' the Blacksmith finished. 'And that, of course, was the real challenge: how to harness the power of Faith once a Saint has been properly desecrated.'

He was trying to make it sound simple, but that too was a ruse meant to deceive us. The perfectly executed murder of Saints, drawing in followers to create the God's Needles, tricking the churches into bringing back the Inquisitors without his own identity becoming known . . .

'The Pilgrims,' I said, my voice sounding faint to my ears. 'You did all this to spread fear throughout the country, convincing people that the Gods had turned away from them so that you could-'

The Blacksmith's composure broke for the first time. 'The Gods did turn away from us!' he shouted.

I looked into his eyes, searching for some sign of weakness, for despite his rough appearance, this was a man of the purest intellect. Show me how to wear you down.

'You are in agony,' Ethalia said to him, her voice gentle, probing. 'I can see it in you.' I could see she was seeking out some shred of humanity with which to draw him back, but it was a mistake.

The Blacksmith took in a slow, deep breath, and when he looked back at her, his eyes were dead. 'You know nothing of pain, my Lady, but do not worry, for I will rectify that ignorance very soon.'

'I really don't think you will,' I said, but even before I'd finished the sentence, I knew he'd tricked me.

'Ah, Falcio, you never fail in your consistent inability to surprise me. You want an enemy: a cruel villain you can hate and fight and kill, but I am not he, I'm afraid.' He ran the back of his hand across his brow like a labourer coming to the end of a long day's work. 'People laugh at you, you know. Everywhere you go in this country your Laws are met with disdain. When a peasant farmer thanks you for risking your life in a duel to get his land back, do you think he cares one bit about which Law was broken or restored? Of course not; he just wants his land. Our countrymen don't wish to obey your Laws.' He walked back to stand behind the man with Fost's face and placed his hands on his shoulders. 'They want to obey their God.'

'Then maybe you shouldn't have murdered the six we had,' Brasti pointed out.

'Those half-remembered fools? Their era was long past. Our people want a new God: one strong father to lead them.' He turned to admire his creation. 'Look at what I have made; tell me he isn't beautiful beyond all things.'

'What I see,' Erastian said, stepping forward to stand between us and the God, 'is an arse, standing next to another arse, both of whom are deserving of a fine beating.'

The God opened his mouth and spoke for the first time.

'Blasphemer.'

The word made no sound it was a shadow wrapping itself around my heart, forcing a scream from so deep inside me that it threatened to shatter my inner ears. The word was the scent of death and decay, worming its way into my nostrils; it was the weight of defeat, settling upon my shoulders. I realised that it wasn't just me moaning, and I dragged my head around to see Kest and Brasti had both succumbed to the same sensations I had.

'Tricks,' Erastian announced, reeling but somehow unbowed. 'Is that what you have to offer our people?'

'You show a remarkable lack of Faith for a Saint,' the Blacksmith replied.

The old Saint planted his feet a shoulder-width apart and faced the God square-on, though he spoke to the Blacksmith. 'That Faith of which you speak so glibly came from men and women fearing the darkness of the night, the yoke of their oppressors. It is from that Faith that the Gods were spawned.' To the God he said, 'You did not create us. We created you.'

The Blacksmith waved a hand. 'Does the mother of the child who becomes King get to ignore his rule? Why does it matter how a God is created? All that matters is that you obey him.'

Through the fog of my own terror, I managed to say, 'It matters when that God was created through fear and manipulation-'

'No,' he countered, 'I am the Blacksmith. I do not manipulate, the way your Tailor does. I forge. I shape. I create.' He looked at me without ire or hate. 'Don't you see, Falcio? You and I both know how weak this country has become, how corrupt its citizens, from the highest noble to the lowest peasant. You and the Greatcoats . . . for all the honour and decency you've tried to bring to these people, how have they repaid you? With derision, betrayal. You've given your lives to save a country that is nothing more than a rotting carcass being fought over by venal noblemen. You know what I say is true, Falcio; you know Tristia can't survive as it is. We must make it strong again it will thrive under a God's rule.'