The Broken God

by Gareth Hanrahan

  Cari brushes mud, ichor and soldier-bits off a can and tries to read the label. “Don’t we want to stay the fuck away from people? Anyone we meet here is probably going to try to kill us, right?”

  Myri injects another vial of her medication before answering. “The presence of the living to the south implies that conditions there currently permit life to exist in that region. That’s not true everywhere in the Godswar.”

  On the fifth day in hell, they come to the ghost of the city of Gissa. Even Cari knows that Gissa was destroyed, ten years ago or more, Gissa of the red roofs and the counting-houses, Gissa of the temples and the red walls, Gissa of the deep wells.

  Gissa should be a lot further south.

  They hide in a ditch and watch the city march past them. People, thousands of them, dragging sacks of rubble and brick, shoulders bowed under cloaks of red slate. Skins red with brick dust. They march in columns that mimic the layout of vanished streets – and a presence moves with them, invisible forces flattening the ground ahead of them, stamping the map of the crawling city into the mud. Some hold street signs like battle standards, others stumble through the mud with absurd pomposity, clad in the ornate robes of civic officials, of judges and councillors. There’s a carnival touch to the whole procession, wild abandon mixed with civic pride. All of their faces, from the starveling children to the oldest greybeard, touched with divine ecstasy. They live in Gissa, and Gissa is the heavenly city.

  Cari feels that sandpaper sensation again, and presses her face into the mud as a great temple-barge passes. It’s a huge pyramidal temple, the house of the civic god, mounted on gigantic runners of teak wood and dragged by a crowd of ecstatic worshippers. Atop the temple stands a young man, beautiful and shining, chosen of the god of the city of Gissa.

  “Tell me when they’ve gone,” whispers Cari, but before Myri can answer the saint raises his left hand. Trumpets sound, the earth shakes and the city settles around them. Their ditch is now surrounded on all sides by the memory of a ruined city, by the shambling crowds of the displaced and the divine.

  After a whispered conversation in the ditch, they agree that Cari should sneak out at twilight and try to find how close they are to the edge of this mobile city. Myri’s too weak to move quickly, so she’ll stay in their hiding place, drawing protective wards to ensure she stays undetected.

  “If you can’t find a quick way out, come back here,” says Myri.

  “Maybe we can wait ’em out,” suggests Cari. “Hide here until the city moves on.”

  “For all we know, they might be here for months. I don’t know why they’re digging in here.”

  “All right then. I’ll go. Just give me the money.”

  “You want to go shopping?”

  Cari shrugs. “It’s a city. There’ll be a market. At the very fucking least, we need a can opener.”

  “It’s not a city. It’s the ghost of a city, preserved by the husk of the city’s god.”

  “People still need to buy shit. Give me the coins.”

  “No.”

  “All right, I’ll steal.”

  Myri curses and hands over the pouch of coin, which Cari takes as a damning indictment of her talents as a pickpocket.

  “You’ll move faster if you leave your pack.” The fucking book is still slung on Cari’s back, along with the aethergraph, tied across her shoulders with a length of line salvaged from Tymneas. The rough rope digs into her skin, and the weight of the damn thing does slow her down. At the same time, she instantly imagines Myri staggering off with the book, sneaking out of this hallucinatory city the way she crept out of Guerdon years ago.

  “You’re right.” Cari unties the knot, lets the bundle fall. Then she darts forward, grabs a handful of Myri’s vials of medicine, stuffs them into her pocket as insurance. Myri scowls at her, but is too exhausted to object. “See you in a few hours.”

  The twilight makes the city even weirder. There are pillars of piled stones everywhere that seem to mark street corners, a few low walls, too. Cari can’t tell if these stones were carried all the way by the people of the city, or if the stones themselves walked along as part of the procession. Or maybe the stones were always here, only now they’ve been incorporated into the city, structure imposed on chaos. Many of them are topped with bone fragments, which put her in mind of sacrificial altars, and that’s always guaranteed to put her in a great fucking mood. This place makes her skin crawl.

  In the dim light, the suggestion of structures loom out at her. Ghosts of vanished temples and houses, giving her fleeting impressions of mighty buildings all around her. Godshit, why did they have to run into a city-god? It’s an uncomfortable reminder of her grandfather’s plan for Guerdon, to transmute the Black Iron Gods into something tame and civilised, civic spirits to guard the city. A reminder, too, of Spar. That boy atop the rolling temple is like she used to be, an avatar of the city, their version of the Saint of Knives. Only this place is a dead city tethered to a mad and broken god.

  No. Nothing like me. Nothing like Spar, she tells herself.

  Also, fuck you, Myri. Told you there’d be a market. Cari passes under an archway decorated with great bronze horses – no, under the memory of an archway – and wanders through the market. There aren’t any stalls, just merchants and hawkers standing around in the places stalls should be, like they’re play-acting. It’s all mummery – Cari watches a line of people pretend to eat at the counter of a nonexistent food stall, shoving imaginary food into their mouths, chewing and swallowing with gusto. One of them lets out a belch, and his breath smells of meat and spices. A low-grade miracle – for them, the illusion of food is enough to sustain them. She wonders what would happen to these poor people if they left the city and the realm of their city-god. Nothing pleasant.

  One passer-by grabs her arm, gestures at an empty spot on the far side of the market. “Look! Are the fountains not beautiful tonight? And tomorrow may never come! Join me for a cup of wine, and we shall celebrate Rhan-Gis!” He’s dressed in tattered rags, a long beard tangled with twigs and thorns, but he talks like he’s some handsome courtier. The remnants of the cloak around his shoulders look like it was once an expensive garment.

  “Very beautiful,” agrees Cari, in the same tone of voice she’d say nice horsey to a slavering raptequine, “but I have to, uh, go and pray at the temple.”

  “All these streets are His temple,” says the man, “and so all acts are acts of worship!” His tone leaving no doubt what sort of act he has in mind. Cari twists away from him, stepping into the press of traffic, vanishing into the crowd. The flow of people in the marketplace skirts around the empty spot, and Cari spots some young women sitting as if bathing their feet in the dust. The fountain exists for these people. Divine madness.

  Thunder rolls, somewhere in the distance. Cari tenses – such omens often accompany divine intervention, miracle bombardments. But the people of Gissa ignore it, secure in the knowledge that their city is inviolable, that Gissa will never fall. No foe will ever breach their walls.

  She does find one woman who’s selling actual food – a rack of dried fish and eels.

  “Do you take these?” The Haithi coins. The fishmonger says something in Taenish. Cari nods, uncomprehending, suddenly alarmed – if everyone in the city is a worshipper of the god of Gissa, then maybe they can instantly spot strangers. But the woman smiles and speaks in broken Haithi. “Yes, yes, praise Rhan Gis.”

  “Where’d you get the fish?”

  “Little village just east of here. Yhandin.” Uncertainty creases the woman’s face – Cari’s question exposes an inconsistency in the miracle of the city. If Gissa is as it once was, before the Godswar, then it’s located far from the village of Yhandin. The question forces the woman to complete actual reality. Cari grabs the fish and hurries away before she raises any more existential doubts.

  Finding the edge of Gissa is harder than she expected. The city can’t be that big – it’s not even a fucking city, it’s one minor go
d and his band of deluded worshippers, all dragging the corpse of the city with them – but space and time twist on the imagined streets. Cari can see the city walls in the distance outlined against the horizon, which is a whole other level of fucked she’s not going to contemplate right now, but she can’t find her way there. Straight streets don’t run straight here.

  The stars that come out in the night sky above Gissa are not the same ones she saw over Ilbarin.

  Defeated, she turns back towards Myri’s hiding place, and things instantly get worse. Her first clue is the fact that she can now see buildings around her, full-on towers and citadels, not the ruins of five minutes ago. At first, she guesses that she’s spent so long in Gissa that she’s fallen under the sway of the shared delusion, but then she hears a beautiful voice like a trumpet call, and her stomach sinks even as her heart sings.

  “Bring the unclean one to me,” commands Rhan-Gis, His voice echoing from the stones around her, resonating with her very soul. “She is nearby. I see her.” It’s the saint from the temple, and it would seem the fucker can do her trick, Spar’s trick, the seeing-through-stone miracle. She doesn’t know what “nearby” means—

  As if conjured by the saint’s commands, a group of soldiers appears at the top of the street. She’d almost mistake them for Stone Men, their bodies marked with stony growths, but in a flash she sees the distinction. These guys were all mortally wounded in the past – that one’s got a wide gash in his belly, that one was stabbed through the heart, another doesn’t have a fucking head – and the wounds were filled with pieces of the city. They’ve got chunks of brickwork and mortar shoved into their bodies, working as muscles and organs and, apparently, a head. One of them points at her with a hand salvaged from some marble statue, and Blockhead swivels to look at Cari like the thing’s got eyes.

  Fuuuuuuuuuuuck this.

  She runs.

  Sprinting forward, flagstones giving way to mud beneath her feet. The resurrected city fades as she gets further away from Rhan-Gis, returning to the mummery of ruins and lunatics. The guards keep chasing her with equal zeal, though, regardless of her perception of their surroundings. “Halt, in the name of the city!” cries one, and she guesses they’re still seeing the dream of Gissa. The guard’s words have power here, too – her limbs become leaden weights, almost too heavy to move, the streets grabbing at her feet. She can barely move, and the guards are gaining.

  She staggers around a “corner”, around one of the piles of stone, and then throws herself to her right. According to the rules of the imaginary city, she’s now inside a building, even though the streets are just lines drawn in the mud here. The guards run past her, even though she’s lying right there. The guards don’t share their saint’s power of perception. To them, the ghost of a wall is a wall. There are downsides to seeing heaven, she thinks, lips too numb to laugh.

  Cari lies there in the mud waiting for the paralysis to fade. She listens to distant drumming, interspersed with horns and trumpets. It reminds her of the Ishmeric temples back in occupied Guerdon; there must be some sort of ceremony or celebration happening at that big temple, which probably isn’t a good thing. She hides as dusk gives way to darkness. The night sky’s riven by fractures, and the stars shudder as gods fight far far above.

  A smaller procession halts outside her hiding place. A dozen or so citizens of Gissa, thin and ragged. Four of them pallbearers, carrying the body of a young woman; another walking behind, carrying a little bundle pressed to her chest. Two of them mime lifting tools, swinging them against the nonexistent wall like pickaxes. If there really was a wall there, Cari would be covered in debris and dust. The other mourners kneel by the wall, pretending to clear fragments of brick. They’re lifting nothing but memories, but still they huff and strain. Still their fingers bleed.

  They lay the body down in the imaginary hole they cut in the wall, then brick it up again. Every god has their particular rites and methods for consuming the souls of the dead. Some use particular funerary rituals, like this. The city-god has its worshippers interred in the walls, blood mixed with mortar.

  The dead woman’s eyes stare blankly at Cari. The woman’s belly is swollen, and there’s a lingering smell of old blood. She died in childbirth. That bundle must be the newborn. Gods below, what sort of life is that? At best, a lifetime spent wandering this god-torn world, blindly worshipping Rhan-Gis, force-fed tales of the glories of Gissa and the ghost of harvests pasts, until the walls close. Ilbarin’s better than this, and Ilbarin’s a prison camp in a dying land.

  If Eladora were here, lying in the mud instead of Cari, she’d stammer about confluences of geography and history, wealth and culture. Guerdon was spared because it was sheltered by Haith, able to stay neutral through economic independence. She’d talk about how a series of quirks of fate led to Guerdon being the epicentre of the alchemical revolution. But it’s all just fancy words for luck.

  Cari thought she was unlucky to be born – fuck it, admit it, made, not born. She fled, left everything behind and called herself unlucky for having to start from nothing. But she looks into the eyes of the dead woman and sees that starting from nothing is a blessing.

  The New City was supposed to be a place where people could be safe. Spar made it for the people of Guerdon’s poor districts. He tried in his dying moments to fulfil the promise of the Brotherhood, but that’s still thinking small. She’s guilty of the same sin, Cari thinks. When she first discovered her gift for visions, she used it to get revenge on Heinreil and bring down the old master of the Brotherhood. And after, when she was the Saint of Knives, the vigilante guardian of the New City… what did that achieve, really? She hurt some bad people, stopped anyone getting their hands on the remaining Black Iron Gods, but was that enough? She and Spar, together against the world, but everything she did drained him. Every miracle ate his soul away.

  The world’s too big to handle, too broken to fix. Even when she had power, she didn’t know where to start.

  Her face is wet with tears. Angrily, she wipes them away.

  Get up, she urges herself. Get to Khebesh. Then go back and do better.

  Hawse thought she was worth helping. Hawse saved her.

  And in the camp, she was able to save Adro, right? She sacrificed herself to get him a healer. That has to count for something.

  A city starts with one brick laid on another. Get to Khebesh. Save Spar.

  She pulls herself upright, leaning on the dead woman’s tomb until she’s able to stand.

  Take all you can. Use it to better ends.

  This time, she ignores the streets. She steps over the imaginary walls, refusing to let the delusions of mad gods shape her world. She walks in a line straight as a gunshot, heading for Myri’s hiding place.

  Make your own luck.

  But when she gets there, the sorceress is gone.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Shriveport wasn’t the only place they got hit.

  In the house on Lanthorn Street, another half-dozen reports of attacks. All outside the borders of the Lyrixian Occupation Zone. Craddock’s is gone – there are Tallowmen on the streets of Glimmerside, along the border of the HOZ. Craddock was arrested and taken to the Last House; one of his sons is now in charge. The other yliaster merchants in Glimmerside and along Mercy Street, gone, too. The thieves bring the bodies of the fallen back to Lanthorn Street, so the ghouls don’t get them. Baston orders them brought down to the cool cellar, to be laid alongside Vyr’s wrapped corpse.

  Along the waterfront, Tallowmen have raided the warehouses, hitting anyone connected with the Ghierdana or the Brotherhood in a concerted effort to push the Ghierdana and their allies back beyond the Armistice Line. They came in from the sea, on city watch gunboats. Bloody hard there; the lads got the cache of weapons from the Crane Street lockup in time, and were able to fight back against the Tallows. The candles are stronger and faster than any human, and bullets don’t do much to wax that doesn’t bleed or break, but there are alchemical
weapons that do the trick. Knife-smoke to trim a wick, and transmutation clouds can melt wax as well as flesh. Phlogiston-shells work, too. Fight fire with fire that’s on fire.

  The Tallowmen fell back to their boats. First time Baston’s ever heard of the jacks retreating, but, then, the thieves never had this sort of firepower before. But one victory among a half-dozen defeats is scant comfort.

  “How’s Rasce?” he asks Karla for the hundredth time.

  She shakes her head. “No better.” She glances at the walls, the ceiling. “We need to talk about what we’re going to do now.”

  “The jacks aren’t crossing the border into the LOZ.”

  “Not yet,” echoes Karla, “but they’re everywhere else in the free city. Kicking us out of everywhere we’ve taken.”

  “We still have the old docks.”

  Karla makes a derisive noise. “You’ve got them tonight. Who knows about tomorrow? Or next week? And when Rasce’s Great-Uncle comes back and finds everything’s fallen apart, we’re fucked. Either we staunch the bleeding, get back all we’ve lost and take down Mandel, or…” She lowers her voice to a whisper.

  “Or?”

  “Baston, you’ve got the loyalty of the thieves. We’ve got the Ghierdana’s money. We could go.”

  “You shouldn’t talk like this.” He killed Barrow only a few hours ago for betraying his oath. Karla took the ash, too. If she runs, the Ghierdana will be after her forever. They’ll want to make an example of her. The image of his sister dead, her throat cut by a dragon-tooth knife… He shakes his head. “Go and see if you can wake Rasce. I ran into Lord Rat earlier, I think. He wants to talk.”

  Karla wrinkles her nose at the mention of ghouls. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. Magic shit.” Baston rubs his head. His hair is rank with sewer-water. “I’m going to go and talk to the other dragons. Convince ’em they’re in danger, too, maybe.”