The Broken God

by Gareth Hanrahan

  She’s stayed away from him, this whole journey.

  She’s made enough enemies for one lifetime.

  The Rock of Ilbarin grows as the ship struggles to make headway through a sea of debris. Floating wreckage bumps against the hull. The crew rush to the rail to take soundings, check the depth beneath the keel. They have charts, of course, but charts are useless these days. The gods can tear up the foundations of the ocean to throw at each other.

  It’s been five years since she last saw the Rock, but she still remembers Ilbarin City. Other travellers might speak of Ilbarin’s glittering fountains amid the lush green gardens, or the golden-roofed temples, but Cari chiefly remembers the crowded quays and the alleyways between the warehouses, the dockside inns and chandleries. She spent her formative years there, and on the Rose. She’ll be able to find her way on from there.

  The ship’s course shifts. The distant Rock of Ilbarin vanishes behind the bowsprit, reappears a moment later on the other side. They’re no longer heading for Ilbarin City, but instead making for the north end of the island.

  Cari stuffs Ramegos’ grimoire into her pack and swings it on to her back. The weight of the loaded satchel makes her feel lopsided, and the waters are choppy here. She finds Captain Dosca nearby, standing at the rail, spyglass raised. Something’s coming.

  “Hey,” she calls. He ignores her, so she puts her palm across the end of his telescope, blocking his view. That gets his attention.

  “I paid for passage all the way to Ilbarin City. I paid you extra to go straight there.” In fact, it was the first time in her life she’d ever had the money to pay passage instead of working it, and she’s damned if she’s not getting her money’s worth.

  Dosca sucks his stained teeth. “We must change course,” he says slowly. “Ilbarin City is no longer safe. There has been, ah, flooding.”

  “You said you’d take me to Ilbarin City.”

  “We cannot land there.”

  “I’ve got friends in the port.” Using the present tense is a risky assumption on her part; she had friends there, long ago. Family, sort of. She spent five years aboard the Rose. Hawse or Adro will help her. She’ll even go to Dol Martaine in a pinch – she’s got money to pay her way, now. Captain Hawse came from Ilbarin, and always said he’d retire there. She’ll take any ship that’ll bring her to the forbidden land of Khebesh, but secretly she’s harboured the fanciful notion that it’ll be the Rose that carries her there. “I need to go to Ilbarin City.”

  Dosca pauses for a long moment, then says, “We’re going to Ushket instead.”

  “Ushket… Ushket’s halfway up the fucking mountain!” How bad was the flooding? Shit, how out of date is her information? Sailing from Guerdon to Ilbarin usually takes four or five weeks, but Cari did it all arseways, took the long way around. She had to – there was no way she dared get anywhere close to the gods of Ishmere, not after what she did to their war goddess. She’s been travelling for months, with little news of the south until she reached the Caliphates. And she was so eager to find passage onwards to Ilbarin that she didn’t take any precautions.

  “We will put you ashore at Ushket. There is nothing else to be done.” He raises the spyglass again.

  “What is it?” Cari asks. She can see some other vessel approaching, a smudge of dark smoke above it. Alchemy-powered, probably a gunboat from the size. Ilbarin military, maybe? She reaches for Dosca’s spyglass, but he folds it up and tucks it away before she can take it.

  “An escort.” He glances down at Cari. “It would be best for you to stay hidden. I will tell them I have no passengers.”

  “Are they Ilbariners?”

  Dosca shakes his head. “No. They are Ghierdana.”

  Ghierdana. Fucking dragon pirates.

  Run. Hide. Cari sprints below deck, leaping down the narrow ladder, ignoring the curses of Eld as she shoves past him. His big, wind-pregnant belly nearly takes up the entire gangway. She races to the corner she’s been sleeping in and gathers her other few possessions. The hold stinks of rotten eggs, and the smell is bearable only if they leave the hatches half open most of the time. From down here, she can look up and see a bright blue sliver of sky, hear movement on the deck above.

  Acrid smoke crosses the sliver of blue, and she catches the whiff of engine fumes. The gunboat’s alongside. She hears shouts, thumping against the hull as people climb on board. Cari discovers a hiding place under a bunk, pressing herself into the shadowy corner, a child hiding from monsters. Knife clutched in her hand, ready to strike. Her heart pounding so hard it feels like it’s going to break her ribs.

  All her instincts are off. Back in Guerdon, she was fucking unstoppable. She was the Saint of Knives. With Spar’s miracles backing her up, she was invincible. Spar shielded her, took on any wounds that might hurt her. With his help she’d single-handedly stabbed the fuck out of the Ghierdana crime syndicate. Kicked them out of Guerdon without taking a scratch. Only a few months ago, she wouldn’t have had to hide. She’d have known where every Ghierdana bastard was, felt their footsteps on the stone floor. The walls would open for her, the New City reshaping itself according to her desires. She’d have shrugged off gunfire with marble-hard skin, defeated a dozen men with a saint’s cruel grace.

  Made them beg her for mercy.

  Pray to her for mercy.

  Sometimes, she’d given it. Sometimes, she hadn’t.

  Do you think they know who I am, she thinks to Spar, wildly. Hell, maybe they won’t. Maybe she’s overreacting. The Ghierdana are a big outfit, a syndicate of criminal families, each headed by a fucking no-shit fire-breathing dragon – there’s no guarantee that any of the ones here in Ilbarin know anything about what happened back home. Three times so far – twice in Varinth, and once on Paravos – she thought she’d spotted someone was following her, but she lost her pursuers each time. She doesn’t even know if they were Ghierdana or not – she’s made a lot of enemies.

  Maybe she can bluff her way out. Stick the knife in a pocket and stroll up on deck all casual. Who, me? I’m just another deckhand.

  But they might find the fucking book.

  So she stays hidden and waits. Her shoulder muscles and her legs ache from being crammed into the tight space under the bunk. The metal edge of the book digs into the small of her back. Roaches crawl over her hands, her collarbone. She doesn’t move. She cowers like a frightened child.

  Two men open the hatch and climb down into the hold. Both are wearing military garb, but it’s a mismatch of bits and pieces from different uniforms, all stripped of markings. They’re both armed. All she has is her little knife clutched in her hand. Two’s more than she can handle – two, when once she’d have laughed at a dozen of the bastards. They sweep through the hold, kick open the door to the bosun’s locker, give the place a cursory search, and leave. The creaking of the stairs under their boots signals they’ve gone above.

  She exhales. Amateurs, right? Not even worth my time. Spar might chuckle at that.

  Cari relaxes a little, but she can still hear the grumbling of the gunboat’s engines nearby.

  The sliver of blue light turns golden as the sun begins to set. From above, she can hear Dosca shouting orders. Sounds of sails being furled, the rattling of chains and the distinctive jerk as something starts tugging the ship forward. They’re being towed into port, presumably by the Ghierdana gunboat. Presumably into Ushket. The gunboat’s engine downshifts and strains, and the ship rocks.

  Plan: wait till they’re tied up at the quay. Wait till it’s dark out. Slip ashore; head south around the rock to Ilbarin City and the last leg of the journey to Khebesh. Even without Spar’s miraculous guidance, even with the weight of the fucking book, she’s still sneaky enough to get ashore without being seen. And if she is spotted, well, she’s had a lot of practice knifing the Ghierdana. But you’re not invulnerable any more, so don’t get hit, she tells herself in Spar’s voice.

  The golden sliver of light turns orange, then grey. Sunset’s quic
ker this far south.

  Outside, the noise of engines ceases, gives way to the creak of ropes, the muffled thump of the ship coming to rest against some jetty. Shouts of dockworkers. The journey’s end. Captain Hawse taught Cari always to thank the local sea-gods after a safe voyage, but she dares not even whisper.

  Not long to wait now.

  Then the stairs creak again, groaning under a heavy weight. There’s a hiss of a breathing apparatus. The daylight’s mostly gone, so Cari can only see a silhouette. A metal helmet. A rubbery suit, covered with tubes and metal plates that glimmer with arcane sigils. The armoured figure clomps into the middle of the hold and stops, scanning the room. Cari presses herself back into her hiding place again, heart pounding again, mouth dry.

  She’s seen things like the armoured figure before. Suits like that were originally intended to protect wearers against alchemical fallout, plagues and toxins and knife-smoke and shit, but she’s also seen them adapted as containment suits for the incurably contaminated. Back in Guerdon, there’s a dealer in second-hand alchemical stuff called Dredger who uses one. Then there was the Fever Knight, the enforcer who worked for Guerdon’s old criminal boss, Heinreil.

  Spar killed the Fever Knight, but he nearly died in the process, and he had the strength of a Stone Man then. Cari broke Heinreil with a thought, but that was when she could work miracles. Here, she’s got nothing but this knife, no miracles or unnatural strength to back it up.

  The Fever Knight’s armour was a boiler with legs, the ironclad of the alleyways, all rivets and armour plating. This suit is delicate, ornate – more fragile, maybe? The helm is made to resemble a boar, and the mouth of the beast gapes wide to reveal a dispassionate metal face. A woman’s face, cold and cruel. Green lenses for eye sockets.

  Go for the breathing tube, go for the joints, she thinks, you won’t pierce the armour. The knife handle’s slippery in her grasp. She wipes her palm on her shirt, grips the weapon again. Go for the tube.

  The armoured figure raises a hand, gurgles something – and the hold’s suddenly flooded with light. A dozen little floating globules of liquid illumination dance through the air. Sorcerous werelights – the armoured bastard’s a sorcerer. Shit. Cari’s fear is now titrated with a cold flood of uncertainty, which she really hates. Sorcerers are hard to judge, hard to fight. You can’t tell how good they are until they start throwing spells. Can’t tell how strong they are, because that really depends on how desperate they are. Magic burns them up from the inside.

  A memory, the same memory she always sees when she closes her eyes: Spar falling, tumbling over and over as he plummets from the ceiling of the great Seamarket to break on the floor far below. His terrified face, eyes pleading with her as he falls, while she’s held paralysed and frozen by a spell.

  Hell, what can she do against a sorcerer? If she was still a saint, she’d have a measure of divine protection. Saints and sorcery both exist in the aether. Saints can brute-force their way through spells, smashing enchantments and breaking wards like they were physical barriers. If Cari were still in Spar’s grace, still the Saint of Knives, maybe she could charge through the sorcerer’s spells like a brick thrown through a spider’s web.

  Now, she’s powerless. Harmless as a fucking fly.

  The lenses whir and click as the helm slowly rotates, scanning the room. Cari tenses, ready to scramble out of her hiding place and attack if she’s spotted.

  Sorcery takes time. If she’s quick enough, maybe she can get out from under the bunk and get to the sorcerer before her foe gets a spell off. Maybe.

  The werelights follow the sorcerer’s gaze, sweeping towards her.

  Go for the breathing tube, she thinks, and get lucky.

  “Witch?” calls one of the Ghierdana from above. “Need you up here.”

  The armoured sorcerer snaps a hand shut. The werelights go out. Again, the mercifully, blessed, best sound in the world – footsteps creaking on the ladder.

  Cari slithers out of her hiding place, dragging the heavy pack behind her. From above, the sounds of an argument – the Ghierdana want Eld, the saint of Cloud Mother to go with them, and he’s not budging. From what Cari can tell from the noises, Eld’s trying to squeeze out a sylph-spirit on the spot to fight the Ghierdana.

  Terrible combat tactic for him. Brilliant distraction for her, especially when Eld starts bellowing in pain.

  She creeps through the hold to the aft hatch. She scales a stack of crates, hooks her pack on a convenient nail, then pulls herself up through the half-open hatch on to the deck. She glances towards the prow. Eld’s writhing around on the deck. She can see the phantasmal shape of a wind-spirit halfway out of a fresh cut on Eld’s stomach, but the armoured sorcerer’s standing over him. One armoured gauntlet extended, glimmering with power. The sorcerer’s pinning the spirit in place with magical force, half in and half out. Gusts of wind hiss from Eld’s distended belly, from the edges of his caesarian cut. Most of the Ghierdana have gathered around the contortions, other than a pair of gunmen who are watching Captain Dosca and the rest of the crew.

  No one’s looking her way.

  Cari reaches back into the hatch and unhooks her pack. The weight of it nearly pulls her back into the hold, but she drags it out, secures it on her back. There’s a boarding plank, but Eld’s thrashing about next to that, so she sneaks to one of the ship’s toilets – a precarious little platform that hangs out over the side, near the stern.

  From there, she climbs down on to the quayside.

  The quay’s newly built, the concrete smooth and unweathered. There’s something deeply strange about her surroundings – it’s like they’ve docked in the middle of a market square. She finds a hiding place amid stacked boxes near a chain fence. It’s deathly quiet, and the streets beyond the fence are deserted. It’s hard to be sure in the dim light, but it looks like they’ve carved this harbour out of a flooded part of Ushket. She can see a narrow channel that must have once been a street – the gunboat must have towed Dosca’s ship along that route. It’s the only path that leads back to sea. The ruins on either side of that channel are scorched and blasted. Dragon-fire maybe. Or a miracle.

  There are four other ships tied up at the dock, like prisoners in a chain gang. That’s what this is, Cari realises – a prison for ships. Only way in or out is by tug, and with a pilot who knows the waters. She can imagine all sorts of obstacles and dangers in those waters, ruined buildings like reefs that’d tear a hull open. A prison for ships – and she can guess who the fucking gaolers are. The Ghierdana.

  She scurries, shoulders bowed under the weight of her back, running along the edge of the quay, staying in the shadows. As the last rays of the sun vanish, Carillon vanishes into the night.

  The streets are unfamiliar, the buildings strange: the ones nearby are closely packed along steep lanes, but she can hear birdsong, smell greenery not too far away, so there must be gardens here, too. It’s a moonless night, and the twilight’s going fast. She splashes through puddles, skirts around the silt and debris that’s everywhere. It reminds her of parts of Guerdon after the Kraken-fleet of Ishmere attacked. That must be what happened here, too – the gods seized the sea and wielded it as a weapon, dropped an ocean on this place.

  She needs to get off the streets before she’s spotted. The lower floors of the buildings look flooded out and abandoned. She spots an open door – broken, one half off its hinges, leaning against its mate like a drunk looking for support. Cari slips through the gap into a once-grand hallway. Paint peeling from rotten timbers stains her hands. Stairs in front of her lead up, but she hears the sound of distant snoring and guesses the upper floors must still be inhabited. This ground floor is caked in drifts of mud and flotsam, but there are no fresh prints past the stairwell. She forces a door into a derelict apartment, long since looted of anything valuable.

  That’s fine. All she needs is a place to hide for the night. In the morning, she’ll get her bearings, get out of town, walk around the mountain to Il
barin City and find a ship going south. She sits down in a dry corner, aching and exhausted.

  Cari opens her pack and checks, for the thousandth time, that the grimoire is still there. It’s the only thing she has to trade to the sorcerers of Khebesh.

  Eladora’s words replay in her mind: “Bring them this. Trade it for what you need. I don’t know if they can help Mr Idgeson, but I hope it’s possible.”

  Not long now, Spar, she tells herself. Maybe, somehow, she tells him, too.

  The lapping of the water in the street outside lulls Carillon to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The dragon Taras circles over Guerdon.

  Great-Uncle’s massive frame soars through the sky, gliding on leathery wings so wide they cast a shadow over the world. Titanic muscles move beneath his ancient hide, marked with thousands of scars. Some are centuries old, made by arrows and crossbow bolts, by the javelins and lances of saints. Others are fresh: bullet wounds, acid burns, the bloody patina of knife-smoke or the marks left by the tendrils and claws of divine monsters. The Godswar has wounded everyone, thinks Rasce, even Great-Uncle Taras.

  But the dragon is invincible.

  He circles lower. Rasce’s mask was damaged by a stray shot during the bombing raid, leaving a spiderweb of cracks across his field of vision. He has to tilt his head this way and that to see different parts of Guerdon as it spreads out below him. From here, Great-Uncle seems to fill the world – no matter where Rasce looks, there’s always some part of the dragon, a wingtip or claw or tail.