The Broken God

by Gareth Hanrahan

  Make him Chosen again.

  She took all that away. She’s less than ten feet away. Kill her. Kill her. Kill her.

  “No,” says Vorz. “Guerdon.”

  “Ah. What does my nephew report?” asks the dragon.

  Does he mean that arrogant brat Rasce, or Artolo’s son Vyr? Artolo hasn’t spoken to Vyr since he was exiled to Ilbarin. His only communication with the boy is through Lorenza. Artolo can hardly blame his son – pleasing Great-Uncle is more important than any other relationship. Artolo displeased Great-Uncle, so it’s right and proper that Vyr abandon him. But the betrayal still rankles. Artolo sacrificed his fingers to ensure that Vyr retained standing in Great-Uncle’s eyes – the boy should be grateful!

  “A moment, please.” Vorz taps out a message on the keyboard. He flicks a switch, and the machine changes to a slightly different, but equally unpleasant noise. Vorz types again, fingers flying over the keys. Steam rises from the metal coil, and the liquid in the tube bubbles. His work done, he switches the machine off and closes the box.

  He takes down the gilded skull from its shelf. Carillon threw down everything from that cabinet in her escape attempt yesterday, smashed all the jars, but this morning there’s not an item out of place, not even a stray shard of broken glass glinting on the floor.

  Vorz places the skull in Carillon’s hands, then steps back to a safe distance. Aetheric energy crackles for an instant, leaving after-images when Artolo blinks, making his ghost-fingers tingle. Cari stares into the skull’s eye sockets, and shudders.

  And that’s it.

  There are no demons conjured, no magical blast. No mad god appears in the lab, the skull doesn’t come to life and start disgorging prophecy. Everyone else in the room – Vorz, the witch, the dragon, even Cari – seems to perceive that something meaningful has happened, but it’s all opaque to Artolo. It adds to his frustrations – he has no desire to know anything more about their mystical nonsense, and it’s always been his philosophy that sorcery is all either portentous mummery or self-destructive madness, but he’s at a disadvantage here, in front of Great-Uncle.

  “Are you done with her?” Artolo demands.

  The Dentist ignores him. “There’s minimal spiritual contamination”, whatever the hell that means. “She remains primarily congruent with the Guerdon entity. And we are fortunate in the circumstance of her conception, too. If she were not the offspring of a formless one, the tincture would require much more denaturalisation. As it is, I can proceed to the next stage immediately.”

  From his black bag, he produces a metal syringe. Again and again, he takes blood from Cari. Wrists, ankles, chest, even from between her eyes. Each sample squirted into a neatly labelled glass jar, then tucked away inside his black bag. Cari shudders each time the needle pierces her skin, but she doesn’t struggle. She just bites her lip and endures. Artolo watches her throat move, imagines her swallowing all her clever retorts and insults. Imagines his ghost-fingers strangling her instead.

  “What do you have for me, Vorz?” demands the dragon.

  “Not yet,” replies Vorz, distracted. Cari chokes and shudders as he pulls two teeth from her mouth and collects the bloodied spittle from her lips in a vial.

  Vorz holds the last vial up to the light. He taps it with a gloved finger, and for an instant Artolo seems to see darker shapes congealing and then unravelling within. “A catalyst, I think. An accelerant.” His hands shake.

  “Come up. You, too, Artolo,” orders the dragon. Vorz closes his black bag and carries it with him as he crosses the gantry and climbs the rickety metal stairs to the roof.

  “Watch her,” snarls Artolo. The witch nods and turns to face Thay, catching her in the act of reaching for the tray of scalpels.

  “What?” says Cari, snatching back her hand. Artolo growls and follows Vorz up to the roof.

  Great-Uncle waits there, sitting on his haunches. The whole roof of the refinery flexes when he shifts his weight. Below, the athanor’s at full heat, and thick clouds of white mist whip across the rooftop, stinging Artolo’s eyes.

  “Vorz.” The dragon extends one wing, folds it to enclose the Dentist, then tucks his head beneath. A private conference. Artolo waits, enduring yet another snub. Great-Uncle may consult with his counsellor, of course, but the Dentist is only Eshdana. Artolo is Ghierdana. Has he not done enough to earn redemption? How much more must he sacrifice before Great-Uncle favours him again?

  He roams the tin roof, the metal creaking under his boots. What was Vorz talking about, with his black box and his secret messages? Again, Artolo is left on the outside, exiled to this cursed Rock, banished from the councils of the family. His heart pounds; his blood thunders furiously through his veins, thick and hot with anger. He can feel it curdling in his brain, the fringes of his vision reddening.

  He needs to kill again.

  He can smell Thay downstairs. A few steps, and he’d be on top of her. Those blades are just there, in his mind’s eye. His own wounds ache with remembered pain. Gods, does he not deserve revenge?

  “Artolo!” roars the dragon.

  Slowly, he turns away from the stairs. Turns to face Great-Uncle. There’s an expression on the dragon’s face he has not seen before – a combination of bemusement and anger.

  “I am not accustomed,” says Great-Uncle slowly, “to repeating myself.”

  Artolo hastily kneels. “Forgive me.” Had he been so lost in his own thoughts that he failed to hear the dragon’s command? Thay’s fault, of course. It’s all Thay’s fault.

  “There was some benefit in your obsession. We can use the Thay girl to hasten our plans in Guerdon.”

  Artolo flinches. “Are you taking her away?”

  The dragon chuckles. “Quite the opposite. Hold her here. She must not return to Guerdon.”

  “Great-Uncle, there is no surer way to keep a prisoner than in a grave.”

  The dragon laughs. “You have the right of it, nephew. Take your revenge, and know this – you failed me in Guerdon, but you have atoned here. You shall not be my Chosen again – but your offspring shall be favoured.”

  A fierce joy blazes through his soul, hotter than dragon-fire. “I shall remind Thay that no one crosses the Ghierdana,” vows Artolo. He rises, bows and runs back towards the stairs. His ghost-fingers flex. He won’t use the knife. The dragon-tooth knife is the dragon’s symbol. No, no, he’ll strangle her. He’ll break her. He’ll—

  The explosion from below nearly knocks him off the roof.

  Artolo stumbles down the stairs, ears ringing. Vorz’s lab is afire, flames leaping purple and green and blue from the shelves of burning alchemical materials. There’s a gaping hole in one wall where the shoreside window used to be – and no signs of Carillon Thay.

  The witch lies slumped in a corner, her armour scorched by the explosion. Artolo darts over to her, but she holds up a hand. She doesn’t speak – jerkily, she points to her helmet, indicating that some mechanism has been damaged.

  “Where is she?” roars Artolo.

  The witch rises, unsteady on her feet, and points down at the shore below, a stone’s throw from the refinery. There’s a covered motorboat down there, one of the smaller skiffs used to patrol the ruins – and as Artolo watches, it takes off. Moving jerkily, as if the pilot is unfamiliar with the controls.

  “Contain the fires!” Vorz shouts from the top of the stairs, unwilling to leave the comparative safety of the roof and enter the growing blaze that used to be his laboratory.

  To hell with that. Thay will not escape him again! Artolo climbs out of the ruined window, clambers and slides down the outer wall of the refinery, clinging to pipes and vents until he lands heavily on the muddy ground at the foot of the wall. The boat’s already moving, its engine suddenly roaring as it rushes away. He charges down towards the water. She’s taunting him, waiting until he’s almost in reach and then dancing away. The boat’s pilot finds the throttle and opens up, the little motorboat shooting like a reckless rocket over the wa
ves, racing south over the drowned streets of Ilbarin City.

  Massive wings cover the sky as Great-Uncle swoops down from the refinery roof to land in the surf. He lowers his neck for Artolo to climb on board, and Artolo does so joyously, his face breaking into a wild, incredulous grin. He’s Chosen again, exalted again, flying again! Oh, the thunder of the wings! The rush of air! The thrilling leap as the dragon takes to the air, the lurching glory of the downsweep, the steel-cord strength of Great-Uncle’s muscles between his thighs. Artolo’s ghost-fingers cannot grab the ridged scales of the dragon’s neck – the magic of the witch’s spells pales in comparison to the divine vitality of the dragon – but he doesn’t need to. His hooked boots find the catch-scales instantly, leaving his hands free to wield a gun or spyglass.

  Each stroke of Great-Uncle’s wings lifts his heart. One wing beat, and he forgets his failure at Guerdon. He couldn’t find the words to win forgiveness from the dragon, but what are words compared to the headlong rush of flight, the sensation of it, the defiance – dragon and rider, defying sky above and earth below, hunting, devouring, burning as they choose.

  Another, and he forgets his maimed hands, his whole mind afire with the joy of flying.

  The dragon twists in the air above the boat, and Artolo leaps down, landing cat-like on the aft deck. He should have a sword in his hand, should have the Ring of Samara on his finger, but it’s still the most alive he’s felt in years. Oh, to be raiding Haithi trader vessels again!

  He stomps forward, eager to find Thay. It’s just her and him on this little boat. His revenge is finally at hand! Artolo tears back the awning, an overture to the violence he will do to Carillon Thay when he finds her.

  But she’s not here.

  The boat’s empty.

  The controls move of their own accord. They’re limned by faint traceries of purple light, the lingering after-energies of a spell.

  Hollowly, feeling like he’s operating his own body at a distance, Artolo takes the helm. He throttles back on the spluttering engine, turns the boat around in a wide arc. The dragon circles overhead once, then flies off towards the shore. Artolo follows.

  The fire in the refinery is still burning, but is still contained to the upper room. Workers hastily drag the troughs of unrefined yliaster out, so the smoke doesn’t contaminate the brine. Other workers drive cartloads of casks down the road to Ushket, in case the fire spreads. Black smoke mingles with white vapour from the athanor. He imagines Vorz gliding around on the refinery floor, the Dentist’s well-ordered realm of calibrated gauges and titrations thrown into disarray. A little taste of the chaos and ruin that Thay brings.

  Refinery crew call for his aid. Artolo ignores the commotion.

  He abandons the boat close to the shore and steps into the surf. His steel boots sink deep into the mud as he climbs up the last slope. Waiting for him in the shadow of the refinery is the witch. Unmoving, as if frozen in fear.

  “You did this,” Artolo growls – and then he sees it. The stillness of the armour. The syringes do not hiss, the tubes don’t gurgle or throb.

  He shoves the armour in the chest, and it falls over, collapsing and breaking apart as it lands in the mud. A dissipating haze of purple light as the animating-spell breaks. Sections of the suit go rolling down the slope to be swallowed by the sea.

  Other parts land at his feet, metal tapping against metal like a distant bell.

  Artolo falls to his knees, pawing through the empty armour with his fading ghost-fingers. Trying to read his future in entrails of rubber, casting syringes like runes upon the sand.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The city takes on Rasce’s fury as he marches downhill. His passage becomes a hurricane, pebbles and dust flying up around him, as though an invisible dragon flies overhead. Crowds part to let his host pass, and church bells jangle in alarm. A mob forms around him – ash-marked Eshdana, Ghierdana kinfolk, Brotherhood thieves, and even ordinary folk of the New City, who take up sword and club and follow him without knowing why.

  When he comes to the border, the Guerdon city watch soldiers stationed there try to bar his path, but there’s an unseen contortion of the ground, and they topple as he strides past. Guerdon shivers, struck by an earthquake. Broken glass from a hundred shattered windows crunches under Rasce’s steel boots. He marches down Seamarket Way, Mercy Street, the thoroughfare emptying as the crowds flee from his mob of thieves.

  “Secure the inn,” he orders. In his mind’s eye, he sees the building, sees every way out. Watches his mob of thieves and pirates swarm in, smashing through the door of viridian glass that gives the place its name, forcing their way through the side doors, the back. Even scaling the walls to climb in the upper windows.

  Rasce enters through the wreckage of the front door. The inn’s customers – rich merchants, speculators, lawyers, alchemists – are all frozen in their seats, staring in confusion as the place is suddenly overrun with thieves. Rasce ignores them, ignores the whistles of the city watch sounding in the streets. He climbs the stairs, enters Vyr’s room.

  He shuts the door behind him, plunging the room into a stilled silence, as if the chaos of the world outside is suddenly paused. He watches himself through the window. It seems safer, somehow, to think of himself as something remote. To imagine his body as a tool.

  Rasce watches himself cross to Vyr’s side. His cousin is quite, quite dead. Vyr’s face is purple, his tongue bitten and bloodied. His fingers are scraped raw, too. A strange apparatus is clamped around his neck, and it’s clear that this machine strangled him. Carefully, Rasce prises the machine away with his knife, and it’s only when it falls away that he recognises what is it. The prosthetic hands that Vyr commissioned for his father Artolo, like a jewelled crab cunningly wrought of brass and steel. Patches of skin from Vyr’s neck caught in the gears.

  I’m sorry. Spar’s presence in Rasce’s mind is awkward, uncertain. Shuffling around the edges of perception, trying not to intrude. Still, it’s impossible for some of Spar’s thoughts to avoid leaking into Rasce; when he looks down at Vyr, he sees, from certain angles, the face of Spar’s father Idge. The faces of strangled men have a grisly commonality. They hanged Idge slowly, as a warning to the Brotherhood, and his face had the same cast to it. The same desperate air-hunger, the panic reducing the features to something animalistic and primitive and scared.

  “I didn’t even like the boy,” says Rasce quietly. Gently, he lifts Vyr’s body from the floor, lays it on the bed. Draws a sheet over the contorted face. “But he was family. He belonged to Great-Uncle. This insult cannot go unavenged.”

  What was Vyr doing in this room when he was attacked? Not sleeping. No sign of a woman. Rasce finds a heavy case of dark wood, lined in velvet, that must have contained the mechanical hand. Inside, a letter from the shop on Glimmerside, a certificate of authenticity, heavy with the wax seals of various craftsmen who worked on the prosthetic. The eye-and-flask design of the alchemists repeated on each seal.

  Including the last – a stern and stately capital M, a fortress flanked by two towers. The “&co” almost an afterthought. Aetheric enchantment services. Rasce imagines his cousin opening the box, and the hands coming to life, scuttling towards him, strangling him. An alchemist’s assassin. He imagines it as clearly as any of Spar’s visions, sees the hands throttling the life from Vyr.

  This insult cannot go unavenged.

  Trouble, warns Spar, and, moments later, Karla hammers on the door. “Boss! City watch! Lots of them!”

  Rasce ignores them both. He lets himself drift from his body again, shares Spar’s perspective. Sees the little specks moving in the streets, a stain of blue-cloaked city watch surrounding the inn. A little spurt of red, a puff of smoke as some thief panics and lets off a pistol, but the line of the watch holds. Rasce can see the house on Lanthorn Street in the New City; he can see the Inn of the Green Door only a short distance away. He’s aware of the underground line below, like he’s aware of the bones beneath his skin. Why d
id Vyr come here to open the box, instead of continuing on a short distance into the safety of the New City? Such a treasure as these hands would doubtless be sent by Ghierdana messenger, maybe even by dragon, to the distant land of Ilbarin where Uncle Artolo serves.

  There must be something else here. Rasce prowls around the room, ignoring the shouts from outside. The nightstand on the far side of the bed has toppled to lie against the wardrobe – and the wardrobe has been ransacked by the attacker, all except one compartment. Rasce tries the drawer, but it does not budge. He pulls on it with all his might, and it still doesn’t move, even though the whole heavy wardrobe rocks slightly. He kneels down and examines the drawer.

  “Rasce! Are you all right? Let me in!” Karla shouts from outside, a note of mounting panic in her voice.

  A carriage is coming, intones Spar, many guards, and parliament livery on the doors.

  “Shut up, both of you,” snaps Rasce. The drawer’s not locked. It’s got to be magic. A spell-ward is one of the easier sorcerous enchantments, but Vyr’s no sorcerer – someone else sealed the drawer. Another trap? Or did Vyr want to keep something safe? Wards can only be opened with the right token. Blood’s the most common key, but it might be something else – and, for all he knows, Vyr’s murderer has already stolen the token. Rasce draws his dragon-tooth blade, presses the tip into the wood like he’s picking a lock. The magic in the blade reacts against the magic of the ward, giving the illusion of physicality, and he gingerly cuts the threads of the spell until they give way.

  Inside – papers, handwritten notes in Lyrixian. Vyr’s handwriting. By the Scourge! Notes about the yliaster trade, about all their crimes outside the occupation zone. Names, dates – the burning of Dredger’s yard, the brawl in the Haithi zone, Craddock’s, all the yliaster merchants. Even the explosion in the Wash, at Baston’s. What is this – Vyr’s archive of blackmail material? Did he think to present all this to Great-Uncle when the dragon returned, to replace Rasce as Chosen? Or, far worse, has Vyr betrayed the Ghierdana?