“Right. But… the ship was safe, then, wasn’t it? There was a time between Ilbarin getting fucked by Krakens, and the Ghierdana bastards showing up with their dragons and beaching the Rose, when you could have just sailed away, yeah?”
“I could have. I chose not to. Or it was chosen for me. It is folly, I say, to deny the gods.”
“Deny them – what? Deny them what you owe, is it?”
Hawse shakes his head. When he speaks next, it’s with slow deliberation, like every word must laboriously be twisted around the capstan of his mind. “I think that we do not… admit, as we should, that we are… flotsam on the waves. Everything we are, all we think, is shaped by the gods. By all the gods, blowing us this way and that.”
He looks across the table at Cari, frowning. “You told me that when the war goddess Pesh was destroyed—”
“When I fucking killed her.”
“Foul language is unbecoming of you,” he mutters, then continues. “When you slew Pesh, the people of Ishmere forgot how to make war.”
“Sort of.” A wave breaks loudly at the stern of the ship, and the sudden noise startles her. She can’t hear the cries of the birds on the shore, either, any more, although she can hear scraping and scratching on the cabin roof. She can’t shake the feeling that something’s eavesdropping, a prickling feeling in her soul. “After I hit Pesh with the god-bomb, the Ishmerians were confused. They could still fight, but it was like they’d taken a blow to the head.”
“It was like that everywhere. Pesh was war. She was on every battlefield, in the heart of every soldier.”
“Every Ishmeric soldier.” Cari pushes her own bowl away, feeling unwell.
“Every soldier,” repeats Hawse. He dips his spoon into the dregs of his stew, lets chunks of fish fall back into the gruel. Watching them splash, little droplets of grease landing on the table, like an augury. “Some more than others. A… way of war, of thinking about war, died by your hand.” He takes a deep breath. “When I sailed, I was more… no, there is no ‘I’. This… mortal shell…” He gestures down at his own body, “was inhabited more by an aspect of the Lord of Waters than any other god. When I bargained in the ports of the trader cities, was I not more Blessed Bol then? When I smuggled and stole, was I not Fate Spider? This thing I call my mind, what is it but, a – a weathervane for gods?” Hawse’s voice quavers with the effort of articulation, like he has to use his whole body to force out the word. Shoulders, hands, belly, all labouring. Something about his movements makes her think of a man wading through rough water, trying to make his way back to shore to tell her what he saw in the deeps.
“Godshit,” snaps Carillon. She hasn’t heard that exact philosophy before, but she’s heard variants. Safidists back in Guerdon, trying to hammer their souls into perfect alignment with the gods. Mystics who mutter that the physical world is an illusion, and that all that matters is the invisible, aetheric realm of the gods.
“No. The Lord of Waters filled me that day. I saw Him. I was Him. I am Him, I pray. What is time to the gods?”
“Godshit,” says Cari again. She’s about to say more – to decry Hawse’s fatalism, to say that it all means nothing anyway, that blaming the gods is just a coward’s excuse – but suddenly her stomach empties itself, everything rising up in a burning torrent and gushing out of her mouth. Unreasoning terror catches up with her, a wave crashing over all the walls she’s built around herself. It’s not true. People are more than puppets for gods.
She falls to her knees, shivering.
In the hollowness that follows the bout of vomiting, she finds a horrible thought. If Hawse is right, if mortals are nothing more than walking vessels for the stray thoughts of disembodied gods, then what is Carillon? She was made to channel the thoughts of the Black Iron Gods, to be their saint, their herald. Monstrous, murderous gods, full of hate and hunger. Machines for torture, great iron weights squeezing the breath out of the world.
But Cari ran away from home, ran away to the Rose, because the Black Iron Gods called to her. They called to her – they weren’t her. She’s not an embodied echo of a monster, a puppet without free will. She refuses to believe that. There has to be something inside her that doesn’t spring from the Black Iron Gods or any other deities, and wasn’t made by her grandfather’s sorcery, some inner core that’s uniquely hers.
Can you be sure? a cruel voice within her asks, and in that moment she doesn’t know if it’s a part of her mind or if it’s coming from outside her, or if there’s even any of her at all, and not just the Godswar in miniature inside a mortal skull. Rat was possessed by a ghoul demigod, and tried to kill you. Your friend tried to murder you. You’ve seen saints channel the gods, talk for the gods. Silva channeled the Kept Gods, and they tried to kill you, too. You’ve seen gods intervene in big ways. Why not in small ones? What if you don’t exist, and it’s all just the gods pulling this way and that? What if you’ll never be free of the Black Iron Gods because they’re you?
She refuses to believe it, rejects the poisonous thought. Spar, she thinks, is the counterargument. Spar disproves everything. Her friend isn’t a god. She watched him live as a mortal, watched him struggle with the twin burdens of his disease and his legacy. Spar Idgeson, forever the son of the great Idge, the man who was supposed to remake the city. When Spar talks to her in her mind, it’s not like he’s controlling her.
What if this very thought you’re having now is just some fucking god of mischief fucking with you, she thinks.
Hawse’s rough old hands on her elbows, helping her sit down. “Ach,” he mutters, stepping around the pool of vomit.
“Sorry.” She forces a grin. “If you want to have that sort of deep philosophical conversation with me, I should get drunk first.”
“It is of no importance, and I am no philosopher. I only say what I think – ach, I say what seems true.” He wipes her chin with a cloth. “When you first came on board, you were seasick everywhere. This is nothing in comparison.” He bends over to clean the mess on the floor.
“I’ll clean it.” She takes the cloth from him, and he sits down heavily, letting out a groan. Cari scrubs and wipes, cleaning the worn planks, digging into the gaps between them to erase any trace of the thought.
“I should go,” she says after a few minutes. “I’m putting you in danger here. Martaine or some other Ghierdana could show up here.”
“Stay. Give me more time.” There’s a plaintive note in his voice that she hasn’t heard before, but when Cari looks up Hawse’s face is unchanged, as impassive and weathered as a figurehead. “I told you, the Lord of Waters guided you here, and He has a plan for you.”
“But if… if you’re right, and we’re all just receptacles for the stray thoughts of gods, and you’re especially attuned to the Lord of Waters—”
“His last priest,” says Hawse quietly.
“—then you’re channelling a broken god! You’re like the Bythos, just flopping around at random.” She wants to be angry, discovers she’s scared and full of worry, and not just for herself or for Spar. She slumps down at Hawse’s feet.
Hawse takes her hands. “I know. This thought, too, is in me. But I believe that I am… like a lighthouse. I shall guide the Lord of Waters back home.”
The Ishmeric priestess sits like a beggar on the doorstep of the prefect’s palace in Ushket. Her sea-green robes are stained by the reddish mud of the Rock, and soaked in briny water. Her long fingers are so bloated that the gold rings and jewels she wears on them are almost lost in the pale bluish flesh. Her face, though, is ageless and proud, a temple statue come to life.
“Blessings of the gods upon you,” she says as Artolo emerges from the main gate.
“Fuck your gods. What do you want?” Ishmere may be in disarray, but the Sacred Realm is still an enemy. Artolo remembers sitting in the villa back in Lyrix. Outside, Rasce, Vyr and the other youngsters preparing to defend the isle against invaders, swords flashing in the sun. Lorenza and her sisters laying in supplies
for a siege. Artolo in the middle of it all, sitting by the fire like an old man, useless and broken.
The invasion never came. Ishmere struck at Guerdon instead, and foundered there.
The priestess rises, leaning on her staff for support. Amulets hang from it, depicting the gods of the Sacred Realm. High Umur, Smoke Painter, Kraken, Fate Spider. And the Lion Queen, although that amulet is scorched and cracked. “May I enter?”
Artolo addresses one of the guards. “When did she show up?”
“At dawn, lord. She said she would speak only to you.”
“She came alone?”
“Yes, lord. But not by ship. I… I think she walked here, over the ocean.”
“My name is Damala. May I enter?” she says again.
Artolo grunts, and they pass through the tall green gates of the palace into an inner courtyard. His steel boots scrape the mud away from the elaborate mosaic inlaid in the floor, revealing glimpses of lost beauty. Two Eshdana follow close behind, ready to strike down the priestess if she invokes any divine powers. There’s no Armistice here, no truce between Lyrix and Ishmere. Not that such a truce would bind the Ghierdana – sons of the dragon walk where they wish, take what they wish.
“I dreamed of this place,” Damala murmurs, “when my gods conquered Ilbarin.”
“You lost,” snaps Artolo. “You failed to hold the island. It’s mine now.”
“The mortal portion of it. The gods of this land are broken, and no longer challenge the Sacred Realm. Without offerings, they shall fade, driven before us as hollow phantoms. Your little gods in Lyrix, too, shall fall to us, in time.” She has to force the last words out, as if they stick in her craw. It’s true, then – the Ishmerians can barely conceive of war since the death of the Lion Queen.
“If you came here to threaten me, you wasted a journey.”
“I come to bargain, not to threaten. You shall have the murderer. The one who loosed the god-killing weapon. Carillon Thay.”
Artolo’s jaw clenches. “Who says this?”
“Fate Spider. He has foreseen this. He has seen you strangle the life from her with your own hands. I have followed signs set before me, read omens given to me. The gods have decreed your fate, and I have heard them speak it.”
“The prophecies of your gods are worth shit.” Artolo tears off his right glove, holds up his maimed hand to the priestess so she can see the stumps of his fingers. The witch’s ghost-fingers glimmer, but they’re not his. “How would I strangle anyone with these hands?”
The priestess grabs his hands. “Our purposes are aligned. We both thirst for revenge! Your mortal body is wounded – and so is the soul of my pantheon! Her death shall be offering and memorial to blessed Pesh! Lion Queen, goddess of war, goddess of the hunt, sacred killer—”
Artolo snatches his hand back and punches the old hag in the face. Sends her sprawling into the dirt, blood spraying from her broken cheek. How dare she touch him! How dare she remind him of his wounds!
“That’s what I think of your gods and their prophecies. Fuck your gods.”
“You have blasphemed against the Sacred Realm,” says the priestess, clutching her cheek. “And there shall be a price. But it changes nothing. Your fate is ours.”
He could kill her. Fuck her prophecy – it’s her life that’s in his hands.
“Strip her,” he orders. One of the Eshdana hesitates, unwilling to lay hands on a priestess, but the others fall on the old woman eagerly. They tear off Damala’s rich robes, grab her staff, rip the rings from her fingers. Her treasures are piled at his feet.
“All this,” says Artolo, “belongs to the dragon.”
Damala drags herself back up. “The gods sent me.”
“Throw her out.”
Somehow – stripped of her finery, bloodied, mud-soiled – Damala retains that infuriating serenity even as the guards fling her back on to the muddy streets. A confidence born of the knowledge that greater forces watch over her.
He had that once, when he was Chosen.
He’ll have it again, he swears.
The captain goes off again, trudging across the mud, towards the town. The Bythos crowd around him, pulling at his coat, and he waits patiently until their curiosity is exhausted before continuing on. Cari spends the day assembling her gear, repacking her bag. That fucker Martaine took her money and the gun, and the fucking book is still in the captain’s hiding place. It only takes her a few minutes to put the rest together.
So, she does it again.
And again.
She’s well enough to travel. She can’t wait any longer, can’t stay patient with Hawse’s slow and careful approach. As soon as the captain’s back to fetch the book for her, she’ll go. Sneak into Ushket by dark, stow away on one of the Ghierdana ships. Screw it, maybe she’ll have to backtrack a bit, but she’ll soon be on her way to Khebesh again. Hawse will be safer when she’s gone.
She picks up her mother’s amulet. Holds it in her hands. She remembers an afternoon, long long ago, back in Guerdon. She’d have been five years old, six maybe. A few months after the Thay family were murdered, their mansion attacked by unknown assailants. She knows now that it was the Church of the Keepers who executed her hateful family, but, back then, she wasn’t even really aware anything had gone wrong. It was just a visit to the countryside, to her aunt’s house that went on forever.
Aunt Silva brought Cari and her cousin Eladora back to Guerdon. She had business in the city, meetings with lawyers and the watch, talk of wills and inheritances, so she left Eladora and Cari playing in the Meredyke Park, under the supervision of Silva’s husband, Wern. It was easy to slip away from Wern, and Cari went running off into the tangled trees on the north side of the park, with Eladora following her, slow-footed and indecisive, looking back to her heedless father but still trying to keep Cari in sight.
There was a tree, a gnarled oak, perfect for climbing. In her memory, it’s tall as a church spire. She’d scaled it, laughing, intoxicated by the immediacy of the challenge, risk transmuting to certainty as her fingers closed around the next branch, her bare feet finding purchase. She remembers pushing her head through a gap in the leaves, seeing the city – and then sudden, unreasoning, directionless terror, and the confused impression that the tree was trying to eat her. She’d fallen, screaming, tearing at herself, as great invisible forces reached out of the sky, reached out of the darkness, reached out from inside her to seize her and carry her away.
And even after Aunt Silva was done with her business, even when they were in the carriage and the city dwindled behind them, Cari could still feel invisible hands at her throat, at the base of her skull. Claiming her.
She opens the clasp of the amulet and puts it around her neck without fastening it.
Spar, are you—
Drops it like it’s poisoned.
She’s being foolish. Spar’s half the world away, and he can’t help her. He can’t reach her.
She’s got to get to Khebesh. He’s the one who needs saving.
The captain’s late. He misses the slack-tide prayers. The stars come out above the Rock, and he’s still not back.
Cari goes down to the lightless shrine, just in case she somehow didn’t spot him returning across the muddy slope, but the hold’s empty. There’s that feeling again, a faint, distant feeling of pressure, which reminds her of a dog growling when another animal trespasses in its territory. A god growling – but nothing happens when she brushes her hand across the blue stone of the altar.
The stairs in the forward hold creak.
It’s not the captain.
She moves through the waters as silently as she can and climbs through from the aft hold to the forward. She can barely see the intruder, a darker shape in the shadows. He’s big, but he moves quietly. A heavy sack slung over his back as he crosses to the ladder.
Shit, she doesn’t have her knife, but there’s an old crowbar to hand. She sneaks up and—
—the intruder bangs his head on a lo
w beam, just like he always did.
“Adro!” she squeals, and hugs him.
They sit down in the forward cabin, and Cari lights the lamp so she can get a better look at her old friend. Adro was the heart of the crew when she sailed with them, her closest friend. They’d been a pair of laughing rogues, treating smuggling and thievery as a great game, running off and exploring every port. The gods watch over fools, the captain always said of them.
“The captain’ll be here soon,” says Adro. “It’s better we arrived separately, in case anyone’s watching, so I came ahead. And look, look, I brought wine.”
The wine’s awful, but that doesn’t matter.
“Look at you!” laughs Adro. He pokes her in the bicep. “You look like a Guerdonese sell-sword! I was counting on you running home to your rich aunt, then taking us all in.”
“I wish I’d done that.” The thought of a crew of smugglers marauding around Aunt Silva’s kitchen in Wheldacre is delicious. “She would have hated you. It would have been glorious.”
“Oh, aunts love me,” says Adro. “But, Cari, if you didn’t go back home, where did you go? What happened to you?”
“Gods below,” says Cari. How to summarise her experiences since leaving the Rose? How to talk about the revelations about her family, the Black Iron Gods, Spar and Rat, everything that happened? The Gutter Miracle. The war. “Magic shit.”
“Say no more.” Adro raises his glass. “We’ve had plenty of that down here, too. We’re better off out of it. I miss the days when we could look across at some city like Ul-Taen,” – he puts on the portentous voice of some epic-taleteller – “lo! with its stepped ziggurats, the fabled underworld of the spectral tomb children, the sorcerers in their jars, and gribbly things in the city, and say ‘fuck it’ and sail off somewhere else.”
He scowls at the taste of the wine. “Remember that time in Jashan, when we got drunk on wine-of-poets?”
“We wrote a play.”
“We thought we wrote a play!” laughs Adro. “We had three scribbled pages of nonsense, and then we broke into a playhouse and held those poor actors hostage! What was it you said?”
The Broken God Page 18