The Broken God

by Gareth Hanrahan

  “Heinreil’s trying to kill me. He poisoned me. I’m not going to let him get away with it.”

  “He’s not here, if you’re looking to kill him.” A part of Baston’s mind wondered if he’d be willing to kill his friend, and prayed Spar wouldn’t push it.

  “I’m going to challenge him. For the title of Master.” Spar had to gasp out the words, the stone plates pressing on his lungs. He stamped on the ground, sending a shock running through his whole body, shaking the windows of Hog Close. The vibration shook some blockage loose, and he spoke more easily. “I’ll see him in Thieves’ Court. I know your father’s supported Heinreil in the past, and has done well out of it – but I’m asking you, Baston. It’s our Brotherhood now. We can make things better. It’s time for a change.”

  “You’ll never get the votes. Heinreil’s too secure.” He tried to convince himself of that, tried to tamp down any embers of hope. The idea that Heinreil could go, that the Brotherhood could be redeemed…

  “By tomorrow, I’ll have Tammur’s support,” said Spar. “I’ll have Tiske’s. I’ll have the Cafstans. And I’ve got something Heinreil doesn’t have – I’ve got a saint.”

  “What saint?”

  “Cari. She gets visions – of real things. She can see everyone’s secrets. Even Heinreil’s, soon. He won’t be able to hide anything from me. I can bring him down. It’s the right moment to turn the wheel.” Quoting his father’s writings. “Are you with me? Both of you?”

  Baston glanced over his shoulder. Karla had followed him out, and stood there like a shadow, listening to Spar’s plea. “Hedan’s upstairs,” she whispered. “He’ll call Heinreil if he sees you, put the Fever Knight on your trail. You’ve got to go.”

  “I’ll see you at Thieves’ Court.” Spar drew his hood back over his scaled head, stepped back into the shadows. Moving quietly despite the stone.

  “Spar,” Baston called after him, “I’m with you.” He never knew if Spar heard him.

  Two nights later, Spar challenged Heinreil at Thieves’ Court, and won. But Heinreil had an insurance policy – a bargain with the Crawling Ones. The best of the Brotherhood died that night in a barrage of death spells.

  Baston wasn’t there. Karla had convinced him not to go.

  The subway in the Wash has not run since the invasion, after Kraken flooded the tunnels. So Baston walks, his long legs carrying him steadily across the district. It starts to rain, a fierce downpour that sends muddy streams cascading down the alleyways. Rats scurry from the drainpipes – the rainwater’s picked up some caustic gunk from the clouds, and it makes his eyes sting.

  Greyhame Street’s up near Holyhill, outside the Ishmeric zone and near the Haithi border. Under the terms of the Armistice, papers must be produced when entering or leaving any of the three occupied zones. Occupying forces from one zone are supposed to stay out of the other two, and require permission to enter the neutral portion of the city. In theory, citizens of Guerdon are supposed to be permitted to enter any of the zones, but unusual movement risks scrutiny. One of the guards at the checkpoint sports a broken nose – from the bar fight, maybe. Baston keeps his head down, tries to avoid showing his face until he’s at the head of the queue. There’s no watch-priest at this gate – it’s Cruel Urid himself, a manifest demigod. Nine feet tall, bird-headed, a beak that can pluck out the hearts of the unworthy.

  Urid crows something in a language Baston doesn’t know.

  “What business among the faithless?” translates one of the priests.

  Baston holds out the tail of his coat. “I’m going to see about getting this mended.”

  Urid croaks, then anoints Baston with oil and lets him pass. The oil smells different – maybe they use different oil down at the other checkpoint, or it’s some ritual he doesn’t understand, or Urid’s presence changes it. Or they know what he intends, and they’re marking him. He imagines Urid stalking him through the streets, that curved beak smashing through his breastbone to pluck out his heart.

  Somehow, he can’t envisage his heart as a beating thing. In his imagination, it’s a hollow grey shell, an engine part.

  He passes through one of the scarred areas of the city. Buildings so damaged they cannot be repaired, awaiting demolition – and, for those blasted by miracles, exorcism. If he turned left instead of right here, Mercy Street would bring him up past the HOZ, to the place called the Peace Grave. The spot where Pesh, Ishmerian goddess of war, perished. The spot’s sealed off, buried in a containment vessel, an empty tomb. Alchemists are still studying it, and it’s said that those who were too close to the goddess’s death will never be whole again.

  The city was too close, says a despairing voice in the back of his mind.

  Despite the effects of the war, the city’s commercial district still hums. Traders and speculators scrambling over the rubble, ignoring the damage around them. Shares in weapons shipments, in alchemical components, in companies and ventures overseas. More money changes hands here in a day than a thief could hope to steal in a lifetime – a thief from the Wash, anyway.

  He climbs up Holyhill, finds the tailor’s shop. The place mostly deals in robes for priests and students, a wasteland of grey and black cloth. It reminds him of an old railway tunnel near the Viaduct he knows, a haunt for thousands of bats, all hanging there, wings neatly folded. Sinister, lurking presences.

  The young woman behind the counter appears to recognise him. She takes his coat, folding it over her arm like it’s an expensive garment and not a filthy rag, and ushers him into a fitting room. There she fishes out a key, opens a cupboard. A magical sigil glows drawn on the wood for an instant, then fades back into invisibility. A mass-produced concealment ward, one of the more recent innovations of the alchemists. Sorcerous sigils drawn by machine.

  Inside is another creation of the alchemists. A strange machine, a typewriter awkwardly mated to a glass tank of some glowing fluid. A thick silver cord runs from the base of the machine to a hole drilled in the back of the cupboard.

  “Have you used an aethergraph before?”

  Baston hasn’t. The woman shows him how to position his hands over the keys of the communications device, then presses a switch, and the machine comes to life. He thought it might speak, or show him his interlocutor, but it’s stranger than that. While the aethergraph’s live, it feels like Sinter is in the room with him, looking over his shoulder, breathing down his neck. He can smell the priest’s odour, feel the scratchy robe rubbing against his wrists as he reaches for the keyboard. Baston’s fingers move of their own accord, tapping out a message.

  REPORT.

  He waits for a moment.

  Baston’s never touched a typewriter before, but the machine compensates, and the words fly from his fingers as fast as he can shape them in his mind. Such a device is dangerous; a stray thought could escape and be transmitted. He guards his thoughts as carefully as he would back in the Wash when the spiders are near.

  THE GHIERDANA BURNED DREDGER’S YARD.

  GOING AFTER YLIASTER SUPPLIERS.

  LIKELY CRADDOCK & SONS NEXT. NEAR TARGETS FIRST.

  THEN FOG YARDS.

  He can almost hear Sinter lick his dry lips. Baston’s knuckles twinge with phantom stiffness as the echo of the priest’s hands moves his own fingers over the keyboard.

  RETURN HERE IN ONE WEEK, replies Sinter.

  Baston types again, his fingers stabbing the keys. ONE JOB.

  The reply comes quickly, and carries the echo of a sadistic smile. DO YOU KNOW WHAT THE GHIERDANA DO TO INFORMANTS?

  And then the light from the machine fades, and the sense of the priest’s presence is gone. The girl returns instantly. She bustles about, handing Baston his mended coat, closing up the cupboard with its secret machine. Baston just sits there, admiring the neatness of the trap. Once, no one would have dared treat him like this. The Brotherhood looked after its own. The city watch had tried to find someone to inform on Heinreil for years, and never succeeded. Everyone knew that the pro
tection of the Brotherhood meant more in the Wash than anything the city watch could offer, knew that the Brotherhood’s threats had more bite. But all that’s changed now. The Brotherhood’s gone, leaving Baston as a man without a roof, without a shield against the powers that stalk the city.

  All very neat. But Sinter doesn’t see everything. The priest may have his spies and watchers, but he doesn’t know everything. He doesn’t know Baston’s soul. That’s the last redoubt, the one place they can’t reach.

  “See you next week,” he mutters to the girl as he leaves the tailor’s, and he can’t help but wonder if that’s a lie.

  Karla’s waiting for him around the corner from the Seamarket.

  “Rasce wants to see us,” whispers Karla, “another job.”

  “Craddock’s.”

  “Yeah. They want to see us up on Lanthorn Street. Tiske was right – this is the chance we’ve been waiting for. We’ll stick close to the Ghierdana boy and grow strong again. Better days are coming.” Karla’s excited by the prospect, her eyes bright as she looks up at the shining citadel of the New City. Baston, though, feels the familiar grime of the Wash cling to him, call to him. These are his streets, the old lanes and wynds and alleys between Castle Hill and the docks. He was made for these streets, not that eerie labyrinth. His feet drag as he approaches the border, but Karla pulls him onwards.

  They cross into the New City. The Eshdana at the checkpoint recognises them, waves them through, and from there it’s only a short walk to Rasce’s headquarters. A short walk in the New City, of course, is always a confusing and tangled thing, but that’s to their advantage – any pursuers would be shaken by the twisted route they take through the shimmering arcades.

  Baston pauses outside the house. It’s uncannily similar to his mother’s, to all the houses along Hog Close. It looks like a ghost of a house, a pale apparition in stone.

  Karla doesn’t hesitate, and walks straight in.

  INTERLUDE I

  The aethergraph on Eladora Duttin’s desk spits out a brief message, wreathed in Sinter’s distinctive combination of musty odours and spite. HEDANSON IN.

  Eladora sits back in her chair and allows her eyes to close for a blessed moment of rest. The situation with the Ghierdana is an unwelcome distraction from other, more important duties, and it’s a relief to know that their stratagem is working. There’s something satisfying, too, about using one brutish criminal to counter another.

  The work continues. Officially, Eladora is the city’s special thaumaturgist, in charge of regulating sorcery. She picks up a stack of applications for licences to practise magic and leafs through them. A few renewals. A greater number of cancellations – sorcery takes its toll. She skims them all, then scribbles her approval on each.

  The new applications are of more interest. All from newcomers to the city, refugees from the Godswar or agents of occupying powers. They’ll go to the minister of security for investigation. There are less than a dozen, all told. Kelkin wants to put a law through parliament rescinding the right of the alchemists’ guild to internally regulate its own sorcerers, instead putting them back under the thumb of the special thaumaturgist.

  Eladora wonders if she’ll still be in this seat when that happens.

  She wraps the stack of new applications in a length of purple ribbon and walks out to her assistant in the outer office.

  “Rhiado? I’m going to walk over to Minister Nemon’s office.”

  “Excuse me, miss, but you’ve a visitor.”

  Waiting for her is a round-faced little man, red-cheeked, his black robes mottled with spilled droplets of bleach or acid. A golden eye-and-flask chain of office around his neck, studded with gems.

  Of course, they had to make a new chain. The old one was lost with Rosha in the Crisis.

  “Guildmaster Helmont,” says Eladora, curtseying. “Forgive me, I didn’t know you’d made an an appointment.”

  “Oh, I haven’t, I haven’t. This is just a brief social call. May we?” He gestures back towards Eladora’s office.

  “Of course.”

  She stuffs the applications into a warded drawer and checks to ensure the aethergraph is locked down before settling back into her chair. Helmont – the master of the alchemists’ guild – waits patiently until she’s done.

  “You never considered a career in alchemy?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “A pity. I’m sure you’d have done very well in the Crucible.”

  The alchemists’ guild holds tests for schoolchildren at the age of fourteen; those who meet the grade have their further education paid for. For the worthy, an apprenticeship and a lifelong career in the guild. “My m-mother never let me attend the Crucible.”

  “Well, you’ve risen very high, nonetheless. Still, what might have been, eh?

  Eladora considers the man as she clears her desk. From what she understands, Helmont was a compromise candidate – elevated as a caretaker guildmaster. A cautious, plodding lab worker, not a brilliant mind or respected captain of industry like his predecessors. The weakest master, her informants tell her, since the founding of the guild.

  “What can I do for you, Guildmaster?”

  “Nothing. I’d like you to do exactly nothing. Simplest thing in the world.”

  “In connection to…”

  “The guild intends to recover certain treasures that were buried under the New City when the Alchemists’ Quarter was destroyed. Valuable experiments, relics of the guild, and whatnot.” He waves his hand, as if he’s talking about mere trifles – not the remaining god-bombs, or Guildmistress Rosha’s phylactery, or all the other horrors entombed there. “I’ll put a proposal before the security committee. I just want you to refrain from objecting to it.”

  Eladora gives him a pinched smile. “Guildmaster, you know that previous attempts to open that vault met with disaster. In any event, the vault’s beneath the Lyrixian Occupation Zone and any intrusion would endanger the peace.”

  His face falls theatrically. “Oh, I see. I see. Endangering the peace, yes, that would be a grave concern.” He rubs his jaw. “You know, I’ve heard the strangest rumour. Damnedest thing. I’ve heard that you’ve already done exactly what I propose to do. Broke into the vault under the New City and looted the place.”

  “I- I,” begins Eladora, but Helmont rolls on.

  “Nonsense, I’m sure. I mean, you’d have to have the help of the ghouls, wouldn’t you, to pass through their domain and open the vault?” He sniffs the air. “By the by, have you seen Lord Rat lately? Or does he not show up in person any more? Maybe you’ve recently met one of his proxy mouthpieces. I understand you and he worked together closely during the invasion.”

  “Lord Rat,” says Eladora, “serves the city. As do I. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Guildmaster.” She rises.

  “Now, if you had taken those relics from the vault,” says Helmont, almost to himself, “you’d need somewhere to store them and repair them. And it’s not like you’ve got an alchemical factory under this desk.” He raps the desk with his knuckles. “Or down in your little prison in the Wash.”

  Eladora probes with her mind, invoking a little sorcery. Unsurprisingly, Helmont’s chain of office is woven with potent countermeasures. Her spells have no chance of piercing his defences. She sits back down, her fingers resting on the handle of a desk drawer.

  “Where indeed could you keep such dangerous alchemical relics? Oh!” Helmont feigns a gasp of revelation. “You also know Johan Mandel, don’t you?”

  “Mr Mandel is a family friend.”

  “Of course, of course. Nothing untoward there. A friend of your father’s, no doubt. I’m sure Mandel had lots in common with… what was it? Ah, a dairy farmer in Wheldacre.”

  Eladora loses what patience she had with Helmont’s feints and insinuations. “Mr Mandel is a member of your own guild, is he not? If you have questions, speak to him. I have work to do.”

  “You’re so clever, Miss Thay!” Helmont claps his hands.
“That’s exactly what I’ll do. I’ll speak to Mandel. It’s an internal guild matter, after all. Nothing you need to concern yourself with. You just do nothing, like I said.”

  “If I did nothing,” snaps Eladora, “the Godswar would consume you. Good day, Guildmaster. You can see yourself out.”

  Helmont grins. “Before I go, I have a present for you. I understand you’re a historian.” He claps his hands, and Rhiado enters carrying a wooden box. “We found this when clearing out some old stores. It’s at least a hundred years old.”

  He opens the box. Inside is a glass jar, two feet high, sealed with a wooden lid. Brimming with murky liquid. A figure floats in the jar – a figurine of a naked youth, blue-tinged, a waxy sheen to its flesh. “It’s a homunculus,” says Helmont. “One of the first attempts by the guild to produce artificial life.” He taps the jar, and the creature’s eyes flicker open. It swims to the glass, peering out.

  Its features remind Eladora of Miren.

  “You know,” muses Helmont, “back then, they used horseshit. To get the right temperature, you see. They buried the jar in warm horseshit so the homunculus would grow. Nowadays, we have athanors and furnaces and spawning vats. I think it’s good to remember our roots. To remember the guild was founded in horseshit, but moved on to greater things. We can always move on.” He bows. “I’ll have words with Mandel. Good day, Special Thaumaturgist Duttin.”

  After Helmont goes, escorted out briskly by loyal Rhaido, Eladora contemplates the homunculus in its jar. The thing stares back at her, its beautiful features impassive. Homunculi are mindless and soulless, but they can be animated with magic, used as an extension of a sorcerer’s will. Is the thing listening to her? She imagines it crawling out of its jaw in the dead of night, unscrewing the jar from within, creeping naked and dripping through the corridors to relay its stolen secrets to Helmont. Imagines it finding her in her bed by night, and cutting her throat.

  She opens the drawer and takes out her gun. A twin to the one she lent to Carillon. Sturdy, reliable, unassuming. Easily overlooked, just like Eladora.