The Broken God

by Gareth Hanrahan

  Spar, thinks Baston. He wants to gloat, to torture Heinreil with the revelation that Spar Idgeson not only survived, but is now guiding Rasce.

  “You’ve got something,” says Heinreil. “What is it?”

  Baston plucks the worm out of the box and holds it aloft.

  “Careful with that. It’s one of the last in the city. Ghouls killed the rest.”

  “And when you die, you live on in this, is that it?”

  Urine dribbles down from beneath the blanket. “Ach, boy, does it matter? You don’t have much time. You want to know about Mandel? I’ll tell you.”

  Baston sits back down, still holding the worm between thumb and forefinger. The grub writhes around as if trying to bite him. It has two teeth that look horribly human. He squeezes it, enough to hurt it. “Talk.”

  “Mandel used to work for the Thay family, years ago. Long before my time. He went off with Erasmus’ boy, Jermas, on trading expeditions. Now, Jermas comes back from one of these trips to Firesea with a head full of madness. He squanders the Thay fortune on who-knows-what, and we all know how that ended. But Mandel saw which way the wind is blowing, and started up his own trading house. He took over a lot of the Thay business – as they declined, he rose. He started importing alchemical components on the side—”

  “From Ilbarin?”

  “Nah. Overland, mostly. Jashan. Ulbishe, too, I think.”

  “He’s an alchemist himself?”

  Heinreil shrugs. “High in the guild, aye. Mandel was in thick with them in the early days. I do know he got into trouble with the Keepers – they sent a saint round, to put the fear of the gods on him, and after that he stuck to business. Made his fortune when the alchemists’ guild was founded. Sensible man. More people should do that.”

  “Stick to the topic. What was your way in?”

  “Mandel took over part of the old city walls to house his refineries and holding tanks. There was a temple there, dating back to the bad old days. I dug around in the archives, found some old drawings, mapped the tunnels. There’s a way in there. That’s one thing I love about this city – so many hidden ways.”

  “They’ll have sealed it, surely.”

  “Oh, no doubt. They sealed all the deep ways. But this tunnel was different. You’ll see if you go there. It’ll be watched, but I don’t think they could close it. It wouldn’t stay closed.”

  “Where is it?”

  “You know St Styrus’ Shaft? There’s a branch off that. The ghouls know.” Heinreil coughs, his body wracked with pain. “Mortality is such shit. The gods and their spawn go on, undying, and what do we do? Rot when we’re alive and rot when we’re dead. Nothing lasts. You have children, and they’re ungrateful little scrotes who think you’re all that’s wrong with the world. You build something, and fools come in and break it.”

  “Why didn’t you use the shaft? If Mandel was that rich, why did you never go after him?” For a moment, Baston has an inkling of another Guerdon, another strand of some web of fate – a world in which Idge survived and used this tunnel to sabotage Mandel. No Mandel, no alchemical components. No alchemical components, no guild. This blight on the city, excised before it could fester.

  Heinreil grins, revealing a mouth of rotten teeth. “Because I was sensible. We were only mortals, Baston. Even back then, I knew that we weren’t enough.”

  Business is over. Baston holds up the grub.

  “You corrupted the Brotherhood. You could have done what Idge promised, fought the guilds instead of taking their scraps—”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” groans Heinreil, “how many times does Idge get to throw that argument in my face? The man’s twenty years down the shaft, and still he vexes me.”

  “Ideals can’t die,” says Baston.

  He squeezes the worm.

  Or, at least, he tries to.

  His fingers don’t move. He’s paralysed, caught in place by a spell.

  “Ideals are like gods. Fucking troublesome. And when you kill ’em, they come back warped.” Heinreil reaches forward, groaning with the effort, and plucks the grub from between Baston’s frozen fingers. As he does so, he whispers, “Be like Idge, boy. Say naught. All’s in hand.”

  Then he raises his voice. “Come and take him, if you want him.”

  The bookcase opens silently. A secret door. Rough hands grab Baston, lift him from his chair, drag him into the darkness.

  They drag him down a secret passageway. Too dark to see, he can only smell the dust that tickles his nose, feel the bump of each stone slab as his frozen feet pass over them. From the curve of the corridor, he guesses it runs behind several cells on this level.

  A door opens, and he’s flung to the floor. A lamp on a rough wooden table illuminates a room that Baston guesses doesn’t appear on any plans of the Last House. Old rusty manacles on the wall. Old rust-coloured stains on the floor.

  Duttin staggers past him to sit in a chair. She cradles her right hand, and there’s a lambent glow to the blood that stains her fingers. She’s breathing heavily, and waves at the other two men to begin while she catches her breath.

  One of the two men Baston recognises. Sinter. The priest is armed, as before, and this time is careful to stay out of Baston’s reach, pressing himself against the wall as he circles around. The second man would be forgettable, if Baston had not seen his portrait downstairs. It’s Alic Nemon, minister for state security. Nemon gives Baston an encouraging little smile, then Sinter flings a chair in Baston’s direction.

  “A week, you little shit! You were supposed to report in after a week!”

  Baston stands, considers throwing the chair back at the priest with a lot more force. Instead, he rights the chair and sits. “I couldn’t get away, could I? The Ghierdana are watching me closely.”

  “It’s unwise to lie to me,” advises Nemon, like he’s remarking on the weather. “We know you returned to the Wash on the evening after you visited Craddock & Sons.”

  “The clue,” adds Sinter, “was when you set off a fucking siege charge in the middle of the Wash.”

  Baston stays quiet. What is there to say?

  “Talk, you little shit. Explain yourself.”

  “Who sent that candlejack? The one that tried to kill Rasce?”

  “The Ghierdana have many enemies,” says Nemon, blandly.

  “That’s not an answer.”

  Duttin dabs her bleeding fingertips with ointment. “As I explained when we first met, Mr Hedanson, my sole interest in this matter is keeping the Armistice intact. Your own actions severely imperilled it.”

  “I nearly got killed, too,” Baston mutters.

  “Martyrdom is no excuse for poor planning,” says Duttin, wincing as she applies her medicine.

  “Idiot. If you want to die, that can be arranged with a lot less collateral-bloody-damage.”

  “Out of curiosity, how did you escape the blast?” asks Nemon.

  Do they know about Rasce? About Spar conjuring up a tunnel? Heinreil warned him to stay quiet, give nothing away. Is this what he was referring to? But how could Heinreil know, when he’s locked away in his prison cell?

  “Ghoul-run. Out through the sewers.” Only half a lie.

  “Rasce’s criminal acts so far, while distasteful, can be tolerated for the sake of peace,” says Duttin. “I was aware of the nature of the dragon families when I invited them in. However, a move into the Fog Yards is impermissible. Guerdon’s alchemical industry requires a secure supply of yliaster, and it cannot be monopolised by a foreign power. The ambition of the Ghierdana must be curtailed.”

  The sight of the three bastards in front of Baston makes his anger swell, blood pulsing through his frame. They’re the worst of Guerdon made flesh, injustice and cruelty given form. Duttin stinks of money and alchemy; Nemon’s part of the corrupt parliament, and Sinter’s a Keeper priest. He can imagine the three of them agreeing to carve up the city, to hand the Wash over to the mad gods.

  Nemon continues. “Tell him that you saw H
einreil. Tell him that it was a fruitless meeting, that Heinreil said there’s no viable way into Mandel & Company. Slow him down. Give him nothing.” He stares intently at Baston, his piercing eyes incongruous in his doughy, unremarkable face. Some insect picks its way down Baston’s spine. “Do you understand?”

  He nods. Plays dumb, plays the whipped dog.

  “I’ll tell him there’s no way in.” He swallows his anger, even though it’s spiky and bitter going down his throat.

  Nemon stands. “I must leave. I’ll talk to the alchemists’ guild and bring the new guildmaster to heel.”

  “Very well. Sinter and I shall finish up here.”

  Nemon looks back at Baston for a moment. “My blessing upon you,” he says, and then he’s gone, slipping out through a side door.

  “Let the fuckers run to Ulbishe,” mutters Sinter. “The city would be the better for it.”

  Duttin rubs her eyes. “We need the alchemists, just as we need the dragons – and the Kept Gods. We must work with the tools we have, no matter how unreliable. Mr Hedanson, I trust you will leave peaceably, and I shall not have to exert myself again.”

  “Who sent that jack?” he asks again. “Was it you?”

  Sinter grins, a mouthful of broken teeth like a graveyard. “There was a time,” he says wistfully, “when I’d have sent Aleena Humber or Holger Carlson to do a job like that, ’stead of some ratty candle. Make sure your boss stays on his side of the border, boy, or there’ll be worse coming.”

  “Our previous arrangements stand. Report back in via the aethergraph in the tailor’s shop. Once the danger from the Ghierdana is contained, we shall reward you commensurate with your service,” says Duttin. “Oh, one final question. I’ve had reports of…” She shakes her head, rephrases the question. “Have you seen or heard anything that might suggest Carillon Thay has returned?”

  “No,” replies Baston, and it’s the only wholly honest word any of them have spoken in the entire conversation.

  Baston finds Rasce in the house on Lanthorn Street, lying back on his couch, clad in a silken dressing gown. His eyes are closed, but he’s awake. Dreaming awake, guesses Baston, wandering the New City in his mind.

  “You just missed your sister,” says Rasce dreamily, without looking up. He smirks in response to some comment only he can hear. “Spar wishes to know what tidings you bring from the old master. Did Heinreil speak of him?”

  “Not really.” The casual nature of the question makes it uncomfortable. Baston can get his head around the concept of some spirit or ghost of his friend haunting the New City, and he’s lived in the occupied zone long enough to be familiar with the supernatural intruding into the mortal world. But spirits are supposed to be distant and inhuman, to talk in riddles and prophecies, not talk like this. His gaze flickers nervously around the room, unsure where to look.

  Stick to business. It should be safer footing, but it’s all tangled up with Eladora Duttin and that priest and their secret threats. The urge to confess wells up in him. He owes Duttin and her coterie no loyalty, but he doesn’t know how Rasce would take the admission.

  He could take the ash. If he swore an oath to the Ghierdana, then he’d have some protection from Rasce’s wrath. He’d be fully on the inside then – and it’s not like he’d be alone. He’s brought half the old Brotherhood up to the New City, and they’re all ash-marked now. It’s only his own stubborn pride that keeps him from swearing the oath. Rasce’s eyes are still closed, but Baston can somehow tell that he’s watching very, very closely. All the walls here are eyes.

  “Boss, there’s something. Something you should know.” His tongue feels like it’s turned to stone in his mouth. He stumbles over the words, uncertain of the path forward.

  He’s interrupted by Karla’s return. She enters, towelling her wet hair. Baston looks from her to Rasce, all thoughts of confessions and conspiracies falling out of his mind for a moment. “I thought I heard you. How did it go?”

  “Heinreil’s still alive, at any rate.”

  Karla gives him a furtive smile. It’s clear that she used him to smuggle that grub past the prison guards – the Ghierdana’s money ensured he wasn’t searched. Using him like that is the sort of trick Heinreil used to play, and it rankles.

  “What about the alchemists, my friend? What did your old master say?” asks Rasce.

  Give him nothing, they told Baston. Fuck that. “Heinreil said there used to be a tunnel or something under Mandel’s place. An old one. The Brotherhood thought it was too dicey to risk.”

  “And what do you think?” asks Rasce, quietly.

  “I don’t know. I’d need to take a look at the place, and I don’t know how we’d manage that. And I don’t trust Heinreil. But… I think we go for it,” says Baston.

  Rasce’s eyes flick open. “Karla, my sweet,” he says, “hand me my knife.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  It’s waiting that hurts the most. It’s lying here, hollow in belly and soul, knowing there’s nothing to be done. No escape route that hasn’t been tried by a hundred others, no appeal to be made, no hope of rescue, no clever plan. No divine revelation. Just the sound of the gulls, the clink of the metal fences shifting in the wind, the breaking of the waves on the shore. The sucking noise of garbage-clogged alleyways draining as the tide retreats.

  Everything tastes of salt, but no one weeps here any more. An ocean of tears has already been shed in this camp, to no avail.

  So – wait. Wait and rot.

  A small part of Ilbarin City that escaped the flooding has been turned into a work camp. The Ghierdana have cordoned off the streets, turned the ruins into an open-air cage. Fences, guard towers, heavy locked gates. Walkways overhead like in Ushket, gantries for the guards to move between rooftops. The stairs up to walkway level blocked or collapsed. People staring blankly, watchful but too exhausted and hungry to do anything except stay on guard, a hollow place on the far side of fear. It all barely registers on Carillon – these places are the same the world over. She was locked away in one back in Guerdon, on Hark Island. Anywhere humans draw a line and declare that everyone on the other side has to be contained, it’s the same. They start out as prisoners, as refugees, as victims of illness, and the fence works its alchemy, turns them into problems to be overcome or caged animals to be tamed instead of people.

  Cari’s a special case. An especially dangerous animal. She still gets thrown in the camp with everyone else, but the guards all know who she is. They give them a room to sleep in, but the roof’s missing, so the guards can watch Cari. There’s nothing between her and the pitiless stars. Twice now, she’s seen the armoured sorceress watching her from the gantry, werelight flooding the cell, but both times the woman left without speaking.

  Each day, the prisoners are sent out to gather yliaster. They gather at the main gate, and the Eshdana split them into work teams. Each team gets a raft and a bunch of sacks, and then wade out into the flooded city. If they come back with sacks full of yliaster, they get a chit, stamped in some bureaucratic joke with a seal from the provisional government of Ilbarin. Trade chits for food. Trade enough chits for passage out, or so the sign in the commissary claims. In the camp you can trade chits for food, for medicine, for sex. Trade chits so the gangs leave you alone.

  But, fucking hooray, she’s a special case. She knows the guards won’t let the gangs murder her. But she’s also damn sure they won’t step in for anything short of murder, so she stays on her guard. They’ve taken everything from her, not that she had much left. They took the captain’s sword, her amulet. They even took her clothes and gave her a grey shift to wear.

  Yliaster, Ren tells her, is a precipitate of clashing miracles. Two gods hammer the shit out of each other, and you get yliaster. Here, it mixes with seawater to form this phosphorescent gunk, like a wet scab. They process it in the refinery near the camp, to get the glowing brine that they’re shipping out from Ushket. There are still a few patches in the shallows where yliaster can be found. The
prisoners gather it with their bare hands, scraping it off the rubble and smearing it into the sacks. It stings, and Cari quickly learns to recognise the prisoners who’ve been here the longest. The god-brine’s in their bloodstream, dissolving them from the inside. Mottled patches on their skin, like Ren.

  They have to dive for the yliaster deposits, swimming down to the drowned city below. Ren tells her that it clusters around the temples, around the sunken battlefields where saints and monsters clashed. Sometimes, it looks to her like the yliaster collected around the bodies of the slain. The remains are mostly gone, eaten by scavengers or washed away, so only the outline remains – humanoid figures sketched in glimmering slime, bodies huddled in doorways or fallen in the streets.

  The biggest deposits are in the lightless chasm where the Lord of Waters perished, but Ren cautioned her against diving down there.

  “You’ve been here before.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you get out? Did you earn enough chits or—”

  “Adro found me. He was one of the guards. He’d taken the ash, and that bought him a favour. Me.”

  But now Adro’s down with them, another prisoner. On good days, Cari manages to get assigned to the same raft as Adro or Ren, but usually the guards partner her with strangers. Strangers to Cari – but they all know her. All daring her to make a move, to try to escape. Some prisoners do try – they float their rafts to the fringes of the harvesting zone, then make a break for it. But there’s nowhere to go. South and east and west, there’s the ruin of Ilbarin City and the drowned lowlands, a handful of small islands that used to be the southern hills, and then the open ocean. North, there’s the Rock, and Ushket.

  To ensure Cari doesn’t escape, the guards shackle her every morning. A collar around her throat, and a long rope tying her to the raft. The rope is long enough that it doesn’t restrict how far she can dive, but it’s a heavy drag, especially when wet, and she has to constantly worry about it getting fouled on some protrusion in the ruins.