The Broken God

by Gareth Hanrahan

  “And what do we do when the dragon comes back, and finds his kin gone, one grand-nephew dead and his Chosen bedridden?”

  Karla’s about to answer when a messenger hammers at the door. “Boss! Boss! Trouble up the Shad Rocks!”

  At the Shad Rocks, Baston finds worse than trouble.

  There’s a long jetty there, shit-encrusted pylons sunk into the scummy water of Shriveport Bay. Beyond, ramshackle warehouses, thrown up in the aftermath of the Crisis. All owned by an alchemical trader named Barrow. A month ago, Baston waded into that scummy water, held Barrow’s face under until he yielded and took the ash, swore eternal loyalty to the Ghierdana.

  Now, there’s a squad of city watch there, blue cloaks flapping in the sea breeze. On the roof of the warehouse, the fiery lights of a trio of Tallowmen.

  Baston studies them through a spyglass. They’re freshly cast, like the ones he ran into at Mandel’s, unlike the one that attacked Rasce. City watch cloaks nailed on to wax shoulders, hunched like gargoyles. Tallowmen, back on the streets. The bad old days on top of all the new strangeness.

  “We came down to collect off Barrow, like you told us. The jacks came at us without warning,” says one of the thieves, clutching his wounded arm. “We tried to fight, but they’re too fast. Watchmen came after. They’re questioning Barrow, yonder.” The spyglass shifts to a small office adjoining the warehouse. Baston can make out Barrow’s lean features. He’s talking to a watch captain.

  “How many of ours did they get?” asks Baston.

  “They arrested Sten Cantcount and young Leo. Jahn tried to fight, and they cut his throat. Rest of us made it out.”

  “Back to the New City,” orders Baston. “Watch can’t follow us back there.”

  “What about the jacks?”

  The Tallowmen are in the livery of the city watch. The last time the candlejacks were allowed out on the streets of Guerdon, just before the Crisis, they were bound by the same rules as the watch. So, by law, the Tallowmen shouldn’t be able to pursue them freely across the border into the LOZ. They’d need a pass from Lyrix to cross.

  And all of that and two coppers will buy you a two-copper meal. Tallowmen go where they please.

  “Run fast,” orders Baston. He digs in his pocket, finds a key. “There’s a lockup down on Crane Street, in the Wash. Send some lads down there, tell them to bring the contents back up to Lanthorn, all right? Every bit of it.”

  The thief nods.

  “And give me your rifle.”

  Baston lifts the weapon, tests its weight, its balance as the other thieves flee. They’ll need a distraction to get back to the New City safely, but more, there are rules to be observed. Those who take the ash must be loyal to the Ghierdana. To take the ash and then break the oath is unforgivable. A man’s oath has to mean something. Baston’s own refusal to take the ash is testament to that – if he can’t swear allegiance to the Ghierdana and mean it, then he cannot swear, no matter how useful it might be. There’s a special hell for oathbreakers.

  He cracks open the breech, checks the phlogiston cartridge, slots it back into the receiver.

  It’s not the first time Baston’s killed, far from it. His first kill came when he was fourteen, a thieves’ war against the Five Knives gang. They went after Heinreil and his lieutenants, went after Hedan. Went after the families, too. A gullhead broke into Karla’s room, he can still see its little black eyes, still hear it screeching. There were Brotherhood men there, guards sent by his father, and they’d wounded the thing, given their lives to save Hedan’s kids, but it was Baston who killed it. Hacked its seagull head from its human shoulders. He remembers the tangle of viscera in the neck bursting, high-pressure sprays of blood and gore, staining the world red.

  Heinreil apprenticed him to the Fever Knight after that. “The boy’s got a talent for it, Hedan.” The Fever Knight was Heinreil’s enforcer, his leg-breaker. More than legs. Name the limb, name the bone. Name the pain, and the Fever Knight knew how to cause it. In the Knight’s service, Baston killed several times, and hurt many, many more, some so badly they’d wished they’d died. Gods below, one boy they broke so badly he sold his body to the alchemists while still alive, volunteered to be sent to the vats to end the pain. It was Heinreil who made him do it, Heinreil who ordered the beating.

  Every time he’d killed, it’s been on the orders of someone else. At Heinreil’s command. At the Knight’s. Every kill had soiled him, until he was armoured in filth. He wants to wash it all away, but instead he’s wading deeper into the muck. His faith in the tenets of the old Brotherhood a thin cord that he hopes leads to a better place.

  Barrow’s still talking. Still spilling his guts to the watch. It doesn’t matter what he’s telling them. It matters that Barrow took the ash once.

  He aims the rifle, adjusts the sights. Barrow’s face in the crosshairs.

  Another step through the muck. A squeeze, and the window turns red.

  Baston drops the rifle, turns and runs even as the city strobes with fierce candlelight around him. This part of Guerdon is new, and he doesn’t know it well, so he has to guess which alleyways lead uphill over the headland and which come to dead ends. The pursuing Tallowmen are strong and light enough to spring from rooftop to rooftop, their heads flaring searchlights as they hunt for him. Shrieking, one to the other, in high-pitched squeals, like he’s being stalked by a pack of boiling tea kettles.

  Which way now? If he turns right, he might make it to an outcrop of the New City, a curious little cove on Shriveport Bay. Ghierdana ships dock there now. There’s a mess of buildings between him and the cove, though, a warren of sheds and lean-tos, built by rough folk out of Mattaur. If he gets lost, or if anyone slows him down, the jacks will have him.

  The other option’s a ghoul tunnel, straight ahead. It runs through the headland like a worm through an apple. Once, he wouldn’t have hesitated at taking the tunnel – this close to the surface, there’s little chance of running into feral ghouls. But now, the ghouls are working with the watch—

  —A flicker of light on the rooftop to his right, and the decision’s made for him. Baston lowers his head and sprints towards the tunnel, legs pounding, huffing like a freight train. Behind him, the Tallowmen closing, wax limbs tireless, the fires of hell behind their faces.

  He’s swallowed by the darkness of the tunnel, but that darkness is all too brief. It’s driven away by leaping light as one of the Tallowmen follows him in. Candle flickers on carved green walls, damp, beaded with water that shines like jewels, but the floor’s slick with slime.

  He’s not going to make it. The border’s at the end of the tunnel. Hell, for all he knows the Lyrixians have barricaded the far end anyway; it’d be just his luck. He runs ahead blindly, slipping on the wet rocks, splashing in the slime, picking himself up again. Somewhere in the distance, the sound of water gushing through some pipe. Maybe they’ll flood the tunnel, wash him and the Tallowman back down into Shriveport Bay. He’ll drown like Fae did: wouldn’t be a bad end.

  The Tallowman catches him, trips him up and he’s down in the mud again. A fist slams into his stomach, winding him. It catches him by the hair and slams his face into the wall, then throws him to the ground again. Giggling to itself, knife in hand, candlelight turning the bright blade to fire.

  “THIS ONE IS NOT FOR YOU.”

  The words come out of Baston’s mouth, but they’re not his words, not his voice. They taste of earth and rot and meat.

  The Tallowman freezes for a long moment, its flicking flame the only movement. The creature contemplates the voice without fear. Wax fingers probe Baston’s throat with surprising gentleness, as if amazed he could produce such a noise.

  “LEAVE.”

  The Tallowman flips its knife around, pushes Baston’s chin up, as if determined to dissect his larynx. Then it convulses, dropping the knife, scrambling backwards across the floor of the tunnel like a startled insect. The flame in its head flares, then turns a lurid blue, Its mouth opens, and
it splutters gobbets of hot wax. It screeches something that might be a few words, then turns and runs.

  Baston lies there in the mud for a moment, his whole body aching. The voice vomits out of him again.

  “BASTON. TELL YOUR MASTER THAT I MUST MEET WITH HIM. TELL HIM I KNOW THINGS HE DOES NOT. TELL HIM I WANT TO SPEAK WITH SPAR.”

  Rasce wakes, jarred from his sleep by dreams of ghouls. He opens his eyes, but the room’s too dark to see, and for a moment he’s confused – is he in the tunnel near Shriveport? Or is the tunnel part of him?

  He opens his inner eye, taps into Spar’s perception, and sees everything. Sees the body in the bed, the stained sheets. He has to swim down towards it, reclaim the flesh – and then he’s in his bedroom on Lanthorn Street. It’s night outside, and the streets are slick with rain. It was daylight and dry a moment ago – he’s lost time again.

  No. It’s Spar who fears being adrift in time, Rasce reminds himself. The lines between the two are blurring.

  “Was I—” his throat is dry and painful, his voice a croak.

  “Sssh. Don’t move.” Karla kneels at his bedside, pulling the coverlet back. Unwrapping a bandage on his leg. Pain shoots through him again.

  “My leg! What’s wrong with it?”

  Karla doesn’t look at him. Instead, she begins to change the dressing. “You stabbed yourself. You’d stabbed the walls a few times, then you started on yourself. Baston had to wrestle the knife off you.”

  Rasce grapples with the memory. “I had to do it. The pain helped. It was like a sacrifice.”

  “I know, I know. Stay still. Rest.”

  The wound, when revealed, is deep and ugly, a gash in the muscle of his thigh almost to the bone. Karla gently cleans out the wound, slathers it with a healing ointment, then opens another jar and starts to rub a gritty slime into the skin around the injury. The ointment is numbing, making him feel detached from the experience of the pain.

  “What’s that?” asks Rasce drowsily. There’s something odd about the injury. The skin around it is stiff, encrusted with greyish pus, and seems to glisten in the dim light.

  “Alkahest,” says Karla. “For the stone skin. It’s just a little pebbling.”

  “I have the plague?” Horror rushes through him, a cold bile-flood carrying memories that are not his – memories of Spar’s slow corruption by the Stone Plague.

  Karla shakes her head, puts a reassuring hand on his chest. “I got to it in time, but I need to keep treating it. You’ve got to stay still and rest. It’s all right. Baston will handle things.”

  He wants to protest. He tries to get up, but she pushes him back down. She puts a cup to his lips; a bitter draught, thick and medicinal, and it washes him back down into oblivion.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  This stretch of coast is a seawall of mountains, an absurd profusion of peaks. Cari can’t recall any mountain-gods of Ul-Taen, but one must have walked here. Or perhaps some expeditionary force from the north brought the miracles of Uriah Mountainmaker with them. Certainly, these mountains weren’t there the last time Cari passed this way, but Myri’s unperturbed. “Godswar,” she says, and shrugs.

  They find a place to land Tymneas, a little cove where two mountains have toppled against each other, creating a gap in the seawall. As they sail through the titanic arch of stone, Cari glimpses white-furred apes clinging to the rockface far overhead. The creatures scream and hiss at the boat as they pass, and their faces are skulls.

  Beyond the mountain wall, the lands are half familiar. The salt marshes and dunes of the Ul-Taen coast, the remnants of old roads and settlements dotting the broken landscape like scattered pebbles.

  The other half is nightmare. Chunks of broken heavens, fallen from the sky and made material in the moment of their destruction. Malformed miracles leaking into reality, scabs of divine works. God-touched creatures crawl across the land, screaming hymns of gratitude. Strange plants grow, fiery-red bushes that ignite when touched, mountain-flowers disgorging virulent blue poison on to unseen winds. They travel through the meadowlands of some hunting god, through the burned-out stacks of a seemingly infinite library, through a desert of broken glass.

  They are not alone here. Ghosts dwell in this land, the shades of divinities broken over and over until there is nothing left but mindless fragments. They move with the wind, trying to impose their pattern on to whatever they happen upon. Pebbles spontaneously pile themselves into little mountains, dust clouds take on the aspect of wolves and serpents. Tufts of grass become strings of angelic lyres. At one point, the stolen aethergraph tunes into some divine frequency and goes mad, keys hammering out incomprehensible prophecies until Myri finds the off switch.

  Carillon and Myri, too, risk being remade by these vanished gods. Both women are fortified against the touch of the divine – one through her sorcery, the other through the remnants of her sainthood, through her eldritch heritage, and both have enough willpower to resist direct assault by these diminished spirits. These gods are still perilous in an oblique manner; at times, Cari’s attention strays from the dusty path, and alien thoughts infiltrate her mind. Once, she imagines what it would be like to tear Myri’s throat out with her teeth, to howl and call her vanished pack (Rat would howl back at her, she knows, and Adro if he was drunk enough). Another time, she finds herself reciting poetry, her words so sweet that honey comes dripping from her mouth. She has the presence of mind to keep reciting for a few minutes after the fit fades, and Myri collects the honey so they have something to eat at least.

  “We can’t make it all the way by land,” mutters Myri. “Maybe we make for the coast again once we’re south of Ram’s Head. Find another ship for the last leg to Khebesh.”

  She sounds like Cari. Just get south of Ram’s Head. Just get to Ilbarin City.

  Khebesh is always just out of reach, a retreating mirage.

  Other thoughts that cross Cari’s mind are equally disturbing, but they’re all her own. She thinks about Adro, and hopes he’s recovering from his wounds. Thinks about Ren and Ama, and how glad she is that they never came here. The child, especially, would be vulnerable. Children are impressionable, easy clay for the gods to work. Jermas meant to use you when you were nine, she remembers, and thinking of her grandfather puts her in mind of the Crawling Ones. Would Twelve Suns Bleeding have been able to find a better path to Khebesh?

  Most of all, she thinks of Spar, and how far from home she’s strayed.

  Cari suggests they head south for the market town of Erephis. It’s years since she was last there, and all she remembers of it is watching soldiers from Ul-Taen marching through the square on their way to war with Ishmere. The crowds cheering, and robed priests scattering holy sand in their path. Back then, the Godswar was far away. Now, it’s all around them, in their lungs, on their skin, seeping into their souls. Writ on the ruined world around them. And this still isn’t the front lines – the real fighting’s moved back north-east, she guesses, towards the heart of Ul-Taen. Ever since the Sacred Realm of Ishmere lost their war goddess and had to fall back, the resurgent deities of these conquered lands have reasserted themselves, broken gods shambling to war once more.

  Cari shivers; she killed the war goddess, she launched the last god-bomb. How much of the devastation around her is her fault? It’s not like she has any love for Ishmere and its mad gods, but there’s still that sickening doubt in the back of her mind that she’s only made things worse. How do you trust your actions when you can’t predict the consequences? Fuck it, look at Artolo – if she’d killed the fucker stone dead back in Guerdon, then everything would be different.

  “Carillon. Watch yourself,” warns Myri. Carillon glances down, realises she’s nearly walked straight into a patch of poisonous flowers. “Stick to the path. And let me lean on you.” Myri’s hand, trembling and scabby, threads through the crook of Cari’s elbow, but the sorceress is hardly any burden at all. She’s burned hollow.

  They cross the broken land. The spirits of thi
s place seem especially offended by Cari’s presence. The same feeling of friction and pressure that she felt before encountering Usharet, but it’s a constant here, like the air’s made of sandpaper that only affects her soul. Several times, godhusks manifest to strike at her. Most of these manifestations are more pathetic than dangerous, the god appearing as nothing more than a cloud of dust, a single serpent that speaks with a human voice, or a shambling mound of rubble that crawls slowly across the landscape towards them. Other manifestations, they flee or fight, Myri’s spells flashing in the twilight. Mostly, though, it’s just mud and dust and shattered stone. A no-gods-land where nothing lives.

  The fighting seems worse to the west. That way lies the Sacred Realm of Ishmere. It’s over the horizon, too distant to affect them directly. The sky over there looks like it’s on fire, and Cari discovers she can’t sleep when facing that way without being troubled by nightmares of a hammer falling on her. She wakes screaming about the judgement of High Umur.

  They do not go west. They go south, stumbling for days through the ever-shifting lands.

  Erephis is gone. “I think a really, really big snail ran over it,” says Myri, and Carillon wished she didn’t agree. By the edge of the glistening canyon, Myri bargains with some ghosts, trading a handful of coins for the location of a cache of food and news of the wider war.

  “What the fuck do ghosts want with cash?” mutters Cari as she digs a handful of tin cans out of a mudbank. There are more bodies buried here, too, the flesh seared by slime, and the bones turn to mush in her hands as she pulls them out of the way. A military expedition, she guesses. She salvages a miraculously intact jacket from one of them.

  “The Empire of Haith broke the local death-god, years ago,” explains Myri. “It was the custom of these people to put coins on the eyes of the dead, to pay for their passage into the afterlife. The Haithi forced the goddess to only accept Imperial currency, but now Haith is in retreat and it’s hard to get Haithi coins this far south. So, the dead souls go unclaimed and the dead walk the earth.” She counts out her remaining coins, hides them away. “Just in case we need to pay for passage elsewhere. Anyway, they said there are living folk a day’s travel south. We’ll head that way.”