The Broken God

by Gareth Hanrahan

  A cavalcade of figures from Cari’s nightmares climb on board.

  First, the armoured witch, sorcery crackling around her hands. She moves to the side to allow the others to follow her up the ladder, staying in the back of the crowd.

  Dol Martaine, hustling Adro and Ren away from her at sword point, telling them to yield. Snatching Ama away from them. There’s a brawl, Adro throwing punches, but there are too many foes, and he goes down. Ama shrieking at the sight of her father’s blood soaking the deck.

  And then Artolo of the Ghierdana. Powerful gloved hands gripping the top of the ladder. He’s bigger than she remembers. He strides across the deck to her, steel boots ripping out chunks of the rotten wood.

  “Bring him up,” he calls.

  They’ve got Hawse. Two more Ghierdana come up the ladder, the captain between them. Hawse’s face is bloodied, his nose broken. Soot and blood cake his features. Every one of his finger bones has been snapped, his hands dangling like the fronds of some sea creature. His bloodied lips move – a message or a prayer, Cari can’t tell.

  Artolo takes out his dragon-tooth knife.

  “When last we met, Carillon Thay, I told you I’d kill your friends.”

  He rips her amulet from her neck.

  “I told you I’d kill your family.”

  He takes the blunt knife, hefts it, smashes the pommel into Hawse’s forehead. The old man staggers and falls. No one else moves.

  Artolo kneels on Hawse’s chest, brings the knife down again.

  And again.

  Dol Martaine holds Adro back. Cari crawls forward, head spinning. She feels like she’s drowning in a nightmare.

  And again.

  No sounds except the wet thud of bone and flesh against the wood. The waves crashing on the shore. The low rumbling laughter of the dragon.

  The world doesn’t move, but it breaks.

  Artolo stands up, letting the gore drip from his fingers.

  “I said,” he says thickly, “that I would kill you.”

  Something breaks inside her, flooding her with furious energy. Her anger unravelling like a fraying cable, snapping around inside her. Cari snatches up the sword, swings it like a club. Everything Hawse showed her about technique is forgotten – all she wants to do is smash Artolo’s skull. To open him up again, like she did back in the New City. To break him like he broke Hawse.

  The ferocity of her attack takes him by surprise. He leaps back, flipping his dragon-tooth knife in the air, catching it in his other hand. Urging her on. She stumbles across the blood-slick deck, feeling the worm-eaten timbers give under her weight. She slashes at him, and he dodges again. His face flushed red, taunting her, toying with her. Cari’s aware, distantly, of the massive dragon watching them from the beach, of Adro and Ren huddled behind her, of the Eshdana forming a circle around the pair, cheering on their boss as he takes Carillon apart, of the Rock on the horizon, rising up to dash all her dreams of escape.

  All of them, even the dragon, are remote. A painted backdrop.

  There’s nothing but Artolo, and the fight.

  She steps over a pool of the captain’s blood. Hawse’s dead eyes stare up at her. Sorry, captain.

  Cari knows she’s going to die here. She has no alchemical trickery that could deal with those guards, nothing that could stop the sorceress, and, well, there’s a bloody dragon right there, too, just to tip the whole situation over from merely doomed to thoroughly, absolutely no-question fucked.

  Sorry, Adro. You should have stayed away from me. I can’t save you.

  But Artolo’s only human. A vile shit of a human. If killing him is her last act, then she can live with that. So to speak.

  Sorry, Spar. I tried. I did.

  She has to keep Artolo at arm’s length. Up close, he’s too strong for her. She keeps moving, the sword between her and Artolo, feinting with the point to keep him at bay. On another ship, she knows exactly what she’d do – climb. On the Rose, she’d be up in the rigging by now, or up on the rail, walking on it like a New City alley cat. But the fucking worm-ship is too rotten for acrobatics. Even the deck is a gamble.

  Artolo makes a grab for her wrist, trying to wrestle the sword away. She twists, tries to slash him with the blade, but it’s too heavy, too slow; he dodges, backs away.

  Artolo switches his knife from hand to hand. It’s a streetfighter’s trick she knows – forcing her to second-guess how he’ll hold the knife, where the attack will come from. This sword is as heavy as the fucking book, more than she can manage. She’d give anything, right now, for the gifts of the Kept Gods. Strength and speed and a flaming sword – Saint Aleena would have slaughtered Artolo in five seconds flat. Hell, Cari would give Aleena good odds against the dragon.

  Maybe the thought of Aleena shows on Cari’s face, somehow, because Artolo hesitates, just for an instant. She takes the opening, thrusts with the sword, puts everything into the attack—

  —and Artolo steps aside, casually. Drives his knife into her side. The dragon-tooth is blunt and it doesn’t cut deep, but it’s still harder than a steel bar. Cari goes sprawling, the sword flying out of reach across the deck, a mouthful of wooden deck and worm-husks.

  She rolls over, but Artolo’s already standing astride her.

  He raises the dagger.

  “Great-Uncle,” he cries, “this is the one who stopped me from finding the weapons of Black Iron! This is the one who drove us from Guerdon! I offer you her heart!”

  The dagger falls to the deck. Artolo’s gloved hands suddenly lose their strength, deflating and drooping. He roars, a furious animal noise. “Witch!”

  Sorcery crackles around the armoured sorceress. The guards back away. “Don’t kill her! That’s Carillon Thay,” shouts the witch. “She’s more valuable alive! I know all about her – her family, her gifts. She’s the Herald of the Black Iron Gods – the alchemists were willing to pay a fortune for her!”

  Cari wonders how the sorceress knows all that, but her confusion is eclipsed by the spike of hope. She’s not dead yet.

  The dragon snakes forward. “Carillon Thay? Truly?” The monster laughs, and it’s like deafening thunder. “Oh, oh, here is a jest for the ages.” The dragon chuckles and shakes its massive head.

  “She’s mine to kill!” roars Artolo.

  “No, nephew,” says the dragon, suddenly cold and humourless, “she belongs to me. How was she able to command this ship, I wonder?” The dragon lowers his massive head to the deck and takes a sniff. The rush of air nearly knocks Cari off her feet. “Aaah. Worms.” He draws the word out, making it a low rumble. Flames edge his smile.

  “What… what should I do with her, Great-Uncle?” Artolo asks.

  “Store her until I decide what to do with her. Put her to work in your camp. Everything is in order there, Artolo, isn’t it?”

  “Of course, Great-Uncle.”

  “Good.” The dragon’s head turns to address the witch. “That was a worthy suggestion. I commend you. But… you are only Eshdana, and you contradicted the command of a member of my family. Must I remind you of your place?”

  The sorceress’ face is hidden by her mask, but she bows her head, kneels before the dragon. Great-Uncle grunts with satisfaction. “Now,” says the dragon. “I have flown long, and I hunger. I must hunt. I shall see you at the refinery, and we shall examine the fruits of your labour.”

  The dragon takes off, the beating of its wings cracking the rotten timbers of the worm-ship. He rises above the smouldering wreck of the Rose. He soars over the town of Ushket, his wings darkening the sky, the walkways and rope bridges tearing in the hurricane of his passage. For an instant, he dips out of view – and there’s a flash of fire over the Street of Blue Glass.

  Cari, Ren and Adro are marched up the wet muddy hillside towards the hard-packed dirt road, where the carriages wait. A procession of the damned: Adro cursing, shouting at the Eshdana, calling for Ama. Ren grimly silent. Dol Martaine, dragging the child through the mud, one hand clasped over he
r mouth to keep her from crying out.

  On the shore behind them, the few stragglers of the morning-tide Bythos watch them with bemusement, until the Eshdana throw Hawse’s body into the sea.

  They’re loaded into the carriages, into the carts, and set off down the road to Ilbarin, the road around the Rock.

  And then they’re gone, and the shore is empty again.

  Gulls settle on the newest wreck, and burrow in the rotten boards looking for fresh worms.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  For all its many great civic buildings, those grand monsters of slate and glass that squat sullenly on the city’s hills, Guerdon is singularly lacking in prisons. There was little need for them in several periods of the city’s history. During the terrible years when Guerdon was under the sway of the Black Iron cult, prisoners were sacrificed to the Ravellers, their souls flensed and consumed by monstrous gods. For more than two centuries, the city was ruled by the Church of the Keepers, who were more concerned with building marble cages up on Holyhill for their own Kept Gods. Criminals were scourged with divine wrath, cursed by the Mother of Mercies. Few prisons were built in that era – but when the Stone Plague struck, those prisons were converted into lithosariums, where the infected were contained until they petrified. Most of those prisons were demolished afterwards, out of fears the plague still lingered in the walls. The rubble of prison and prisoners dumped in the harbour to make sea walls and artificial islands.

  The last forty or fifty years, the free city period – again, there was little need for prisons. Effro Kelkin and his Industrial Liberals built a new prison out on Hark Island, a symbol of their war on crime, but that prison rotted once the alchemists’ party took parliament, and the Tallow Vats took over. More efficient to recycle condemned prisoners into enforcers.

  All gone now. The Tallow Vats are shut down. The various occupation zones have their own ways of dealing with criminals – Umur’s law-giving sphinxes in the IOZ, something called Supplication in the Haithi district, and the Lyrixians use a prison hulk docked off the New City.

  But there’s still one prison left in Guerdon.

  The grey walls of the Last House rise up above Baston and Karla.

  “I’m going in alone,” says Baston. “You didn’t need to come.”

  Karla draws her cloak tightly around herself. “I’m going to wait out here for you, all right? Just remember to keep your head, Bas. You’re there to get what we need to know, that’s it.”

  Baston flexes his knuckles. He knows how to get information, all right. The Fever Knight taught him that.

  “Stop it,” says Karla. “Just ask him about Mandel’s, and then come back to me.”

  “I’ll just talk,” growls Baston. He glances up at the walls of the prison, sees armed guards patrolling. Sinter’s threats run through his mind. We know your sweet little sister. Your sinful mother. Your friends in Pulchar’s bar. We can ruin any of them. He imagines Karla being dragged by the city watch through those prison gates. “You get back to the New City. It’s safer there.”

  “Here.” Karla presses a small golden object into his palm. A box, half the length of his thumb, like a little casket or a snuffbox.

  “I’ve got the dragon’s gold for bribes.” The bag’s heavy on his belt. Even with the value of gold debased by miracles, there’s still a fortune in there, more money than Baston’s ever carried.

  “That’s from Mum. It’s for him, all right. Do it for her.”

  Baston scowls. His mother’s admiration for the old guildmaster is a point of contention between them. He puts the little golden box into his pocket.

  “Be quick.”

  Baston advances into the shadow of the Last House. Guards at the gate usher him through a side door into an office. A brief moment of haggling. Beneath a portrait of Guerdon’s new minister of security, a guard captain takes the money, then ostentatiously closes a ledger of visitors without entering Baston’s name. They don’t search him. They bring him like a condemned prisoner through a maze of dank tunnels. He’s heard tales that the prison is haunted, that the first Tallow Vats were made in secret in the cellars, that even the Holy Beggar turns his face from those sent here, but the Last House doesn’t need horror stories to chill the soul. The despair of the place sinks into his bones. The weight of the dead stone is enough to crush the spirits of those condemned to the dungeon cells on the lower levels.

  But they bring up him up out of the mire, up to the tower cells once reserved for the nobility. Just as that bag of dragon’s gold bought Baston access to the prison, money works its own miracles. Here, the air is fresher, the floor warmer.

  The guard captain knocks respectfully on one door, then unlocks it. Inside is a cosy room, the walls lined with bookshelves. A fire burns in the hearth, and a side table bears the remains of an evening meal. Seated in a wheeled bathchair by the window, head bent as if in prayer, is a little man in a dressing gown. A blanket on his lap cannot conceal his extensive injuries – his left leg is missing, and his right foot is twisted inwards, and painfully swollen. His abdomen, too, is bloated, pockmarked with needle scars, and there’s an undeniable stench that the smoke from the fire cannot hide.

  “Ten minutes,” whispers the guard, and the door shuts behind Baston.

  He spends thirty seconds of his precious ten minutes just waiting, breathing, letting the anger that wells up in him at the sight of the prisoner slowly drain from his blood.

  “Boss.”

  “Ach, Baston. There’s no ash on your brow, so it should still be master to you.” Heinreil’s voice is only just above a whisper. The master – former master of the Brotherhood – gestures at an empty chair. “Sit. Let us talk. Tell me of my city.”

  Baston scowls. “The Ghierdana sent me. I’m here on business.”

  “Are you, now? You never had a head for business, in the old days, but I still found a use for you. There was a whole crop of you youngsters – Idgeson, obviously, but you, too. Lem, Rynn the Red, poor Hosker Venson – all raised on tales of how the great Idge defied the interrogators and preserved some dream of a better tomorrow. Thank the gods that Idgeson got the plague, or you’d all be dead in some ill-thought revolution. I tried to take you in hand, make something of you.”

  “They are all dead.” Spar and Hosker died in the Crisis. Lem in the invasion. Rynn, eaten from the inside out by spider-spirits two months ago. “And you made me do the things you didn’t have the stomach for.”

  “At least you’re not dead, lad.”

  “I always thought you were clever,” says Baston. “But you’re a bloody coward. You were so fucking good at undermining anyone who opposed you, anyone who questioned you, but you never did anything that could have made things better. You squandered the promise of the Brotherhood. Skimming off your take, while the city got worse, the guilds went unchecked—”

  “You said you were here to talk business,” interrupts Heinreil, “and you don’t have much time left. Old men like me will ramble on about the old days if you let us.”

  “The old days, then. Mandel & Company. Karla said you had a way in.”

  “Your sister is cleverer than you. You should listen to her more. She knows the proper way of things.” Heinreil’s stomach gurgles; he leans over in his chair and farts loudly, wincing in pain as he does so. There’s a metallic edge to the stench, like blood. “Ach. I was clever, Baston, but what did all my cleverness avail me when my carriage ran off the road? At least Myri made it out. Now there was a girl who understood business. Like your sister, aye? I should have put more trust in women, I think. They’re better at handling the slow days, the between days, and that counts for more than you think at first. Men tend to rush about shouting, and that’s what you need in a fight. But if it gets to a fight, something’s gone wrong, eh? There’s a woman who comes in to wash me. To talk to her, you’d think her empty-headed – but she listens, and watches, and I’ve no doubt reports everything. Not to the guards here, mind you, but—”

  Baston r
eaches over, puts one finger on Heinreil’s belly, and presses hard. The old man doubles over in agony, retching. “You sold us out. You think you’re broken now? The Fever Knight teach me how to hurt people.”

  “Gods below, boy!” Heinreil dribbles blood. “There are guards outside!”

  “They’re well bribed. You taught me that, too.”

  “Aye, well, I bribed the whole watch so well that they made the Tallowmen, so what do I know?”

  “Mandel & Company.”

  “Why them?”

  Baston reaches forward again. Heinreil raises a hand like a shield. “I’ll tell you, but I need to know the shape of the thing. Are you trying to rob Mandel? Kill him? What does the Ghierdana boy want?”

  “Control of some trade that Mandel’s involved in. The yliaster supply.”

  “Yliaster,” Heinreil echoes. “Where’s the profit in that? They dig it up for two coppers a sack.”

  “Talk.”

  “You have something for me, first.”

  “What is it?”

  “The last of my gold. Your mother kept it for me.”

  Baston digs out the little snuffbox. “This belongs to the Brotherhood, then. You stole from us.”

  “I earned that payment,” croaks Heinreil, “after Idgeson kicked me out. It’s mine by right.”

  Baston flips the snuffbox open. Inside is a fat white grub, its ridged body pulsing gently. The sudden light makes it curl up, wriggling into a corner.

  “It’s what you think it is,” said Heinreil. “If you’re going to go after Mandel on some fool’s errand, you’ll need sorcery or something like it. Alchemy, miracles – this is no city for mortals any more. Can’t do anything without power. I had Myri and the Fever Knight – and brave boys like you. I had the Crawling Ones. I had the support of Rosha herself, and the backing of the alchemists’ guild – yet Idgeson and his sainted bitch still took me down. Your Ghierdana boy can’t use their dragons, and I hear the Dentist isn’t around either. Muscle won’t be enough – what’s his edge?”