The Broken God

by Gareth Hanrahan

  “All things,” says Rasce, “belong to the dragons.”

  “Flattery.” Still, the dragon preens. “There is something different about you, boy. I smell it.”

  “I have been across the border. Even into the zones held by our enemies. Unlike you, great one, I can move unseen. Your presence is too glorious to go unnoticed by our foes.”

  The dragon stretches its wide wings. “Your Uncle Taras had better hurry back. This peace, I think, will not last for long. Haith is too withered. Ishmere is a caged beast. And Guerdon is too rich a prize to be left unplucked. The gold of the alchemists may be made in their factories, but it is gold nonetheless.”

  Silver, mutters Spar. Ishmeric miracles devalued silver, years ago.

  Rasce ignores him. “All things belong to the dragons.”

  “Yet you employ thieves who are not ash-bought. I hear you overruled your Cousin Vyr, and brought the unmarked back into your house. Why?”

  “Family business, great one.” Rasce bows, affects a mocking smile, but Spar can feel the man’s heart pounding in his chest.

  “It stays family business,” says Thyrus, “only so long as it does not trouble the other families. We must share this miserable city, boy. Do not overstep.”

  With that, the dragon’s gone. It opens its claws, falling from the tower, then spreads its wings and catches the air, swooping low over the New City and flapping away. Rasce waits until the dragon has vanished into the clouds before speaking again.

  “You will listen, won’t you, to what is spoken in the compounds? To know what Thyrus whispers to her Chosen, or to her counsellor, that would be a precious boon indeed.”

  I’ll try. It’s not always easy for me to focus.

  “I’m told that you struck down Ishmeric godspawn in the war, when they dared enter the New City,” says Rasce. “Could you strike down, say, a dragon in flight, if you had to?”

  Just making that tunnel cost me almost everything I had left.

  “I see.” Rasce pulls off one of his riding gloves, touches the stone with his bare hand. Toys, for a moment, with the jewelled ring he wears.

  Then steps forward, off the edge of the building.

  What are you doing!?

  “Catch me if you can!” shouts Rasce as he falls. His words are lost in the wind, but Spar hears them nonetheless.

  Spar gathers himself, a whirlwind of power. There are fragments of his soul all over the New City, tangled in objects. Now, with a desperate effort of will, he pulls them to the locus of his concentration, rupturing and straining his very soul as he draws all his remaining power into a point.

  Rasce tumbles down and down—

  —The past threatens to swallow Spar, to pull him back to that fall from the Seamarket, to the moment of his death, but he pushes it away, focuses on here and now, on the living man who falls, not the dead man who fell—

  At the moment of impact, Spar catches him, redirects the energy of the fall. The New City quakes, walls cracking, towers swaying. Like a sorcerer swallowing a spell, the worst damage is unseen, internal. Far below, tunnels collapse, foundations crumble.

  But it works. Rasce falls more than a dozen storeys to land as lightly as a cat. He looks up at the tower, at the ash falling around around him, and laughs. “See! You are stronger than you think, my friend! You need only a little encouragement!”

  Spar’s too broken even to form words. The stone around Rasce fluoresces dimly, as portions of Spar’s soul combust from the effort of the desperate miracle. Flurries of indignant fury and confusion burst from him, but his mind is too shattered to hold even those gusts of emotion. His feelings blow away from him, his anger like wild dogs running through the streets of the city, howling in the distance until they vanish.

  Rasce pulls the Ring of Samara from his finger. “An heirloom of my family. Enchanted to save a falling man. A useful thing for a dragon-rider – but you are more useful still!” He tosses it in the air, catches it again. “Forgive my deception! My Great-Uncle has commanded me to accomplish a perilous quest, and I had to know if you were ready for the battle to come!”

  The New City changes.

  Spar can feel the shift in mood. He feels the quick, subtle footsteps of thieves gathering in the house on Lanthorn Street; they come, sneaking out of the Wash and Five Knives, out of the Fog Yards and Glimmerside, from under the skirts of the Duchess Viaduct. Drawn by tales of dragon’s gold, by rumours of a new prince in the underworld, a new master. Some smugglers have thrived in this divided Guerdon, sneaking across the lines between occupation zones, but more have suffered. Neither Haith nor Ishmere have any love for thieves, and the free city’s new minister for security is eight times more vigilant and cunning than his predecessors.

  The LOZ border is porous to them, secret ways opening as needed.

  In the evenings, Lanthorn Street is the Brotherhood clubhouse reborn. They toast the fallen, naming their kin who were taken by the gallows, or the Tallows, or the war. Idge, Ven the Goat, the Cafstan boys. Silken Tammur. Even Heinreil gets a round. Karla leads the toast to her father Hedan, gone underground two years ago tonight, and never came back.

  Another toast, to Spar Idgeson.

  Karla whispers into her brother’s ear, unheard by any in the room save Baston – and Spar.

  “What the fuck happened between you and Rasce?”

  “Trust me.”

  “Of course I trust you,” she whispers. “Make sure Rasce does. We should take the ash.”

  “There’s no need for that,” says Baston. “It’s Spar. Idge’s son came back.”

  Trust. Spar has to trust Rasce, trust this slender connection to the mortal world. This narrow crack in the walls of his living tomb.

  His trust is rewarded. Those poisoned by the fumes from the burning of Dredger’s yard are given money by Karla. She hires back-alley alchemists and whisky saints to tend to them, rough healers of the streets, but at least it’s some help. Rasce’s campaign against the city’s yliaster dealers continues – one by one, other merchants of raw alchemical materials along Guerdon’s docks take the ash and swear allegiance to the Ghierdana.

  Take the ash, or are given it. There are no more accidental conflagrations like the debacle at Dredger’s yard, but there are incidents of arson. Sabotage. The occasional beating. Spar learns much of this second-hand – the other alchemical supplies have their operations outside the New City, in the old docklands to the south or the new docks beyond Holyhill. From his spires, he sees columns of smoke, shadows moving on rooftops, but most of his knowledge comes from whispers heard by his walls. Thieves boasting about coin stolen from rich alchemical merchants (like they did in Idge’s day, thinks Spar, when his father led the Brotherhood against the crushing power of the alchemists’ guild). Grumblings from the other Ghierdana families, the subsonic rumbles of disquiet from the other dragons. The clatter of typewriter keys as Lyrixian soldiers write up worried reports about their unreliable allies.

  Spar relays all this information to Rasce, and Rasce puts it to work. Secrets are weapons if you know how to use them. Rasce sets dragon against dragon, buys off Major Estavo with the promise of intelligence gleaned from the other occupation zones, rallies the thieves. His swagger is infectious; the younger thieves feel like these streets are theirs. They no longer need to be furtive and god-fearing – Rasce offers them a chance to be respected, to take what they wish from the city.

  Spar watches Baston follow loyally behind Rasce, eclipsing Vyr as his right-hand man. It’s Baston who knows how to evade the city watch in Guerdon, Baston who knows who to bribe and who to intimidate, Baston who knows when to fall back to the inviolate fortress of the New City. No streets were ever so friendly to thieves and rebels as those changing alleyways of Spar’s mind.

  Listening to Rasce’s quick heartbeat, Spar no longer finds himself losing track of time. He’s anchored to the present now, no longer falling into regretful labyrinths of the past or fragmenting into confusion. Time proceeds in an orderly fa
shion for him. Days passing into weeks. He still feels fragile, still dares not work any miracles, but he’s himself again.

  In the dark of the night, while the New City sleeps, Spar’s mind scans the southern horizon, listening for a whisper.

  Hearing nothing except the mutterings and yowling of ghouls, deep underground.

  “What do you have for me?” asks Rasce. He flings himself down on a couch, closes his eyes, and Spar relays the day’s stolen secrets.

  The last shipment of Craddock’s yliaster has arrived; henceforth, he’s to buy only from the Ghierdana. Rasce orders Baston to pay a visit to Craddock, remind him of the oath he swore, of the ash he wears.

  More thieves out of the Wash; three are trustworthy, but the fourth is sworn to Fate Spider, a spy for the Sacred Realm. Rasce marks the woman’s face.

  Gossip from the Lyrixian quarter, rumours about places and people Spar’s never heard of. Rasce drinks it all in, his mind bloating on the flow of secrets. His appetite for this hidden knowledge is insatiable, and he consumes it very differently from how Cari did. A creature of instinct, she would seize on one image, one fragment, and go haring off after that secret. Spar might show her, say, a single act of injustice in the New City, some rape or murder or cruelty, and she’d spend the next week hunting the perpetrator. Rasce, by contrast, treats Spar’s revelations like a glimpse of some wide terrain. He looks at the city spread out beneath him like a great map and spots connections Spar does not.

  Always, in the back of Rasce’s mind, Spar can dimly perceive the remembered presence of the dragon. Even this ragged sort of sainthood with all its attendant miracles is nothing compared to the joy and glory of being Chosen of the Dragon.

  “Show me the Fog Yards,” says Rasce. He sips arax, and Spar finds he can taste the burning alcohol.

  They’re far away. Spar does his best to comply, drawing up an image from his tallest towers. The industrial district is on the far side of Guerdon, blocked by the cathedral-spangled shoulder of Holyhill and the eponymous smog. It’s hard to focus at that distance, hard for him even to think about a place so far from the New City. City-dredged visions jostle with memory-fragments of the few times he visited the Fog Yards in life. As supernatural visions go, it’s blurred and confused.

  Sorry.

  “Ach! It’s like having a broken spyglass shoved into your eye socket. Enough!” Rasce waves his hand, and the vision vanishes. “I couldn’t see a single thing about Mandel & Company. They control the bulk of the remaining trade in yliaster. Great-Uncle demands I bring them to heel.” Outside the room, Karla approaches. Spar sees her through the stone, and thus so does Rasce. The Ghierdana prince drains the arax. “Come in,” he shouts.

  Karla slips in, shuts the door behind her. She peers curiously around the room. “I heard you talking to someone. Is… is he here?” she whispers in awe.

  Tell her I’m here.

  “He’s here. He says hello.” Rasce moves over on the couch to make space for her, pours her a glass of arax. “And he will leave, now, I think”.

  I’m omnipresent. I exist throughout the New City.

  “Exist elsewhere, please.”

  “It’s all right,” says Karla. “This is business.”

  Rasce pouts. “Just business?”

  “What did you expect?”

  “Back home, the peasant families would happily send their comeliest daughters into my bed, in the hopes of winning the dragon’s favour.”

  Karla rolls her eyes. “Well, I’m not some cow-eyed doxy, here only to warm your bed.” She dances away from him, leaving him alone on the couch. She crosses the room, and toys with the box of ash. “It’s about Mandel & Company, actually. I asked around a bit. Talked to some of Dad’s old cronies. Turns out you’re not the first to contemplate making a move against old Mandel.”

  “And?”

  “There’s a secret way in.”

  “Where is this secret way?”

  “It wouldn’t be very secret if I told you, would it? I don’t know it, but I know who knows it.” She grins, then dips her finger in the ash. “There’s a price.”

  “The dragon,” says Rasce, “does not bargain.”

  Karla brushes the ash across his lips. “But the dragon,” she says, “could favour some of his servants above others. The dragon could lift up those who have been cast down.”

  He kisses her forehead, leaving the trace of ash on her brow. Claiming her.

  “Who knows this secret way?” he asks again.

  She speaks a name, and a shudder runs through the New City.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Twelve Suns Bleeding offers to go across town and collect Adro’s family, but they decide the best thing to do is for them all to go. The Crawling Ones are exempt from the Ghierdana curfew – or so Twelve Suns Bleeding says, anyway. Cari pities the poor Eshdana guard who tries to tell a Crawling One to stay off the streets.

  Cari and Adro fall into their old habits, keeping to the shadows. The Bythos have departed with the falling tide, although Cari hears the occasional distant bellow. The streets are mostly empty.

  Mostly. Ahead, a trio of Eshdana. She ducks into a doorway, clutching her little knife, but Twelve Suns Bleeding just glides up the street towards them, its worm-voices chanting. The three men freeze, caught in a spell.

  “You may pass freely,” says the Crawling One. “They cannot see or hear you. I have their attention.” Like it’s something you can seize in your hand. The three men stare unseeing into the night. Cari wonders what Twelve Suns Bleeding has made them see instead of their quarry. Are they wandering the empty streets of Ushket in their minds? Or somewhere darker? The lips of one of the trio quivers, like he’s about to say something.

  She’ll need to be careful. The Crawling One could do the same to her, just as easily. It could kill her, or Adro, with a word.

  Adro’s place. The tall, narrow houses remind her of Guerdon’s Gethis Row. Here, though, the stairwells are open at the top, an internal ventilation shaft to cool the buildings in the Ilbarinese heat – but that was when Ushket was far from the cooling sea. Now, water drips down in unlikely cascades from the tiled roof above. They climb the stairs without incident.

  Adro knocks on the door twice, a heartbeat pause, another double knock. A code. Instantly, the door’s opened from the inside revealing a smaller man, his features fine as china, marred by an odd mottling of the skin on his neck and left cheek. “Thank the gods! How did—”

  He sees Carillon. Sees the looming shape of Twelve Suns Bleeding behind her.

  “Adro. What’s going on?”

  “A thousand pardons for the disturbance,” says the Crawling One, gliding in past Ren.

  Inside, Adro moves quickly, stuffing clothes and other belongings into bags. “Change of plan, love,” he says to Ren. “We’re getting out, tonight.”

  Ren pulls Adro away into a side room, where they talk in quick, angry whispers. Cari glimpses a child’s bed in there before Ren shuts the door firmly in her face.

  Cari glances around the little apartment. Clothes drying on a rack. The embers of a fire in the stove. An unwashed pot with a crusted residue. A piece of blue jade on the shelf, twin to her own lost souvenir from that botched heist in Mattaur. She tries to imagine Adro’s life here; all she can visualise is an idealised scene, like an oil painting. Adro and Ren talking by the fire, some rosy-cheeked cherub of a child playing on the floor.

  That sort of cosy domestic normality would have her crawling up the walls in days.

  Ren and Adro’s argument gets louder.

  “We must go,” says Twelve Suns Bleeding, “before we are discovered.”

  Cari joins the Crawling One at the window. Down on the street – the armoured witch, and four Ghierdana soldiers.

  “Godshit. Can you magic them?”

  The Crawling One stares down at the witch, and there’s a moment of pressure in the air, a roll of thunder as unseen wills contend. Humans aren’t usually a match for Crawling One so
rcery, but the porcelain mask snaps back as though struck with a hammer. “They are protected by a powerful sorcerer. A talented brain.” The worms squelch, like he’s licking his lips only it’s his whole body, and Cari really wants to set him on fire at that moment. “I shall delay them.” It glides over to the door of the apartment and draws a blazing sigil on the wood.

  Adro emerges from the bedroom, a light-haired child clinging to him. Ren follows, carrying a bundle wrapped in cloth.

  “Come on, we’ll go up,” she urges, making for the door.

  Adro and Ren don’t move. They look at each other, a moment of silent debate. They could turn Cari over now, save themselves.

  Ren moves. He reaches inside the room, fetches the captain’s sword. “Adro will have to carry Ama,” he says. “You take this.” He hands the blade to Cari.

  Out over the rooftops.

  Cari’s the fastest of the four, the most at home in the uneven landscape. Adro’s burdened by the precious weight of the child, which seems exaggerated, multiplied by the four-storey drop to the street below. Ren moves cautiously, too, and he’s got a cough that speaks of some long illness. He has to stop, twice, to catch his breath, as Cari leads them back across town. Twelve Suns is gone – the Crawling One crawled into a drainpipe and is now back on ground level. She’s spotted him twice, keeping pace with them on the streets below, illuminated by flashes of sorcery.

  It’s easy to navigate from up here with the Rock behind her and the moon-dappled sea ahead, the bulbous towers of the citadel to her right. She just has to find a route they can all traverse. She darts ahead, looking for walkways over the flooded streets, for gaps between buildings they can jump.

  Encumbered by her armour, the sorceress can’t follow.

  Her guards can.

  One of them catches up. Cari gets a glimpse of his face – young, his features reminding her horribly of Adro’s kid. His armour’s mismatched, and he holds his weapon as awkwardly as she holds the captain’s sword. When he sees her, he snarls and charges her, swinging his blade wildly. She brings up her own sword, but the thing’s heavier than she likes, and it’s an awkward parry that knocks her off balance. He comes at her again, and she dodges away, dancing over the roof tiles. Even without Spar to guide her and anchor her, this is her element. Heights and unsure footing hold no terrors for her. The boy tries to follow her, but he’s clumsy, and he slips.