The Broken God

by Gareth Hanrahan

  She bends down and starts scraping at the runes with her sacrificial knife, frantically trying to scratch away enough of the inscription to break the spell. The little cell fills with the ozone tang of aetheric discharge. Faster and faster she scrapes, the knife handle slick with sweat or blood.

  Come on, before Rhan-Gis comes back. Break.

  “Cari,” says a familiar voice behind her. “Look at you. You look like an altar-server who dropped the sacred wine.”

  Her heart leaps. Adro’s voice. Impossibly, it’s Adro. She turns around.

  Looks into a mask of porcelain.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  “You’re awake. This is promising.”

  Not Karla’s voice. Remote and cold, barely above a whisper.

  Rasce opens his eyes. The light is almost blinding, but he makes out a black-clad figure and a pale face that naturally falls into a scowl.

  Doctor Vorz.

  The bed’s covered with alchemical paraphernalia, knives and scalpels, too, and the white sheets are spotted with red. A complex thaumaturgical pentagram scrawled on the floor. Rasce’s head, though, is clearer now than it has been in weeks. He feels no pain, no fear; it’s like his spine and his skull have been flooded with icy water.

  He looks down. Radiating out from where he stabbed himself in the thigh is a ghastly wound, like a grey scab that covers him from his lower ribs to his right ankle. He stares at it, revulsion crawling beneath the icy calm of whatever drugs Vorz used on him. “The plague,” he says, weakly.

  “Yes. I cannot tell if the wound became infected due to poor care, or if this is some divine stigmata. The condition can be managed, though, as I’m sure you’re aware.” Vorz pulls the corners of his mouth into an ugly smile, meant to be reassuring. “I am aware of your other condition, too. You have served the dragon well.”

  Hope like a spike, breaking the thickness of the ice. He’s done well! The dragon is pleased. “Great-Uncle – you flew back with him? Where is he? I must go to him.” Rasce struggles to stand. The living skin on his right side tugs painfully as it’s held back by the weight of the stone.

  Vorz shakes his head. “He has not yet returned to Guerdon. He flew me as far as Lyrix, and there we parted company. He had business to attend to, overseas. He shall return soon. But you have done well, my prince.”

  “I dreamed Tallowmen were attacking our yliaster merchants,” says Rasce. He tries to sort dream from vision. Spar, show me, he thinks, but there’s no response.

  “That is true, but irrelevant. There are far greater opportunities here. Tell me, what can you see?”

  “Nothing.” No visions. He’s earthbound, limited to the perceptions of this body. He can’t even tell who else is in the house, other than Vorz perched at the end of the bed.

  “Good. I conducted an exorcism while you slept. I have banished the entity that troubled you, while augmenting your congruency with the underlying divinity.”

  “You killed Idgeson?”

  “Dissipated, to be accurate. The entity may reform, in time. But it need no longer distract you.”

  “How did you know?” snaps Rasce, infuriated at the insolence of the man. Vorz may be Great-Uncle’s adviser, but he’s only Eshdana. He’s a servant.

  “Know?” echoes Vorz, fitting a strange device to his eye. He peers at Rasce, adjusts the lens, peers again.

  “Vyr was reporting to you. You knew sainthood this would happen.”

  “We knew it was a possibility.” Vorz closes the lens with a snap. “No more than that. After the defeat of your Uncle Artolo, the dragon sought ways to counter the threat of Guerdon’s new saints. I advised him on methods that could be used. I have made a long study of similar techniques.”

  “You did this to me?”

  “Your Great-Uncle commanded you to take control of the yliaster trade.” Vorz digs around in his bag. “Is there any weapon you would dare not use? Any challenge you would not dare attempt, if commanded by the dragon?”

  “No. Never!” responds Rasce without thinking.

  Vorz takes a vial from the bag, holds it up to the light. Blood-red, and something darker. “Then give me your arm,” he says to Rasce. “This, too, is a weapon.”

  Baston smells the change as soon as he enters the house on Lantern Street. The familiar smell of the Brotherhood clubhouse – leather, sweat, tobacco, the lingering scent of phlogiston – has been replaced by the harsh tang of chemical cleaners, like an alchemist’s lab. A rotting stink, too, coming from the basement, the stench of decay. Everyone here seems to be Eshdana, faces he hasn’t seen before. The Brotherhood thieves must have scattered to adjoining buildings, or be out on the streets holding the line against the Tallowmen.

  “What’s going on? Where’s my sister?” he demands. Shrugs, blank faces. She left in the night, he’s told. Business down in the Wash.

  He hurries up the stairs. Rasce’s bed is empty, the stained sheets littered with empty alkahest syringes and soiled bandages.

  He eventually finds Rasce in the cellar, in the temporary mortuary they set up here for Vyr and the others who fell to the Tallowmen. Twelve neatly wrapped bodies on twelve trestle tables – but now the bodies are spread out across the broken floor. Some dismembered, gutted, their entrails spilled out across the white marble of the New City. Some buried in graves dug right into the floor of the cellar, or bricked up in holes smashed in the walls. One hanging from the ceiling, a noose around its neck. Another in a fucking bathtub, dissolving in a vat of alkahest, a thick scum of melted flesh and fat bubbling on top of the liquid. A trio of Eshdana stand by, pickaxes and shovels and bone saws at the ready.

  Standing over it all, a man in black, gloved hands dripping with gore, moving like a conductor in front of some mordant orchestra. He seems quietly satisfied with this scene of horrors, a craftsman at work. It makes Baston want to punch him.

  “Who the fuck are you? Where’s Rasce?”

  “I’m here, my friend.” Rasce steps out of a shadowed corner. Up and awake. His face is pale, glimmering with sweat, and the colour of it almost matches the glowing stone of the New City. “There’s no need to shout. I hear everything.” He gestures at the alchemist. “This is Doctor Vorz. My Great-Uncle’s counsellor, newly returned from overseas.”

  “What is this? What are they doing?”

  “Necessary things.”

  Vorz interrupts. “Try again,” he says to Rasce. With a wave of his hand, Rasce causes a fresh grave to open up in the floor. The stone flows sluggishly, a reluctant miracle.

  “Should you be up? Karla said you were still sick.”

  Rasce grips Baston’s forearm, leans on him. His grip is very strong now, but he’s breathing quickly, like he’s got a fever. “I have lain abed too long. Now is the time to act.” His grip tightens until it’s painful. “I owe you, my friend, for all you did while I was godstruck. I saw the secret path into the fortress of our foes. I saw the path we must walk.” He leans close, whispers in Baston’s ear.

  “Tell the Rat it’s time to meet.”

  They descend.

  It’s Rasce who leads the way, and he seems to grow stronger as they go, striding so quickly that Baston has to hurry to keep the other man in sight as they descend down endless stairs and tunnels. They wind through the bowels of the New City. They leave the streets behind, entering into a labyrinth of stone. Baston carries an aetheric lamp to light their way, but there’s little need for it, for the stone glows where Rasce touches it. The glow fades after he passes, though, so the light is like a bubble, a fragile vessel sinking into a vast darkness.

  Sometimes, Baston glimpses strange things down a tunnel branch – the glowing eyes of a ghoul, crushed pieces of machinery embedded in the walls, slithering creatures that flee the light. Rasce doesn’t pause, and Baston can’t linger. The air’s bad, a miasma of fumes and subterranean exhalations.

  Once, he thinks he sees a youngish man, rake-thin, with lank black hair. Well-dressed, like he’s on his way to dinner in Bryn A
vane. A silver blade in his hand. His gaze meets Baston’s – and he vanishes into thin air, face contorting in pain for a moment, then gone, leaving Baston to wonder if he dreamed the whole thing.

  Abruptly, the tunnel enters into a huge vault, so vast that Rasce’s stone-light is lost in the yawning reaches. Baston turns the aetheric lamp up to full so they can see their surroundings. Well, so he can see them, as it’s obvious that Rasce’s miraculous perceptions have returned. The light leaps, and Baston gasps as he beholds the full scale of the chamber.

  This hollow beneath the New City could swallow any of the cathedrals atop Holyhill and have room to spare. Littered around him is the wreckage of huge machinery, athanors and containment vessels, industrial crucibles and spawning vats. Littered around him, too, are the remains of products of those vats – corpses of splattered wax, corpses with organs from disparate creatures fused together, things he cannot name.

  The light from his lamp falls on a cleared area, a wide road cut through the debris. It’s obvious that someone – a great many someones – has dragged material out of the cavern. It might be a salvage operation, but some instinct tells Baston it was more of a heist. There’s something in the air, along with dust and the stink of incipient lung cancer.

  The trail leads across the cavern to a partially demolished curtain wall, a barrier breached by an ugly gash. There’s another vault through there, equally huge. Rasce hurries off that way, limping slightly now, sloshing through puddles of spilled alchemical run-off without care. Baston follows, unslinging his gun just in case something in here isn’t quite dead.

  “What is this place?” he breathes. He can’t bring himself to speak loudly. It seems oddly disrespectful, like this place is a church. Or a tomb.

  “The ruins of the Alchemists’ Quarter,” says Rasce. “Spar buried their works here. Ghouls guard the tomb. Behold!”

  He flings his arms wide, and the curtain wall flares with light, like there’s fire buried deep within the stone. The light outlines a figure sitting cross-legged in the breach. Gigantic, hunched, its horns like antlers, long clawed fingers caked with grave dirt. Hooves crusted with a mash of wax and ordure.

  “Gods below,” mutters Baston, and then invisible fingers grab his tongue, his throat, and words exhume themselves through his mouth. “SO, AT LAST, THE DRAGON’S BOY SHOWS HIMSELF. I AM TOLD YOU CAN DO WHAT CARI DOES.” The ghoul’s long tongue, like a black snake, slithers out and tastes the air. “I WOULD SPEAK WITH MY FRIEND.”

  “He is here,” says Rasce. “He is all around us. But first, Lord Rat, I would bargain with you.”

  The ghoul laughs, a sound like an earth slip, like an open grave caving in. Then he speaks through Baston again. “I KNOW ALL ABOUT YOUR PLANS AND DESIRES, DRAGON’S BOY. I KNOW WHERE YOU SEEK TO TRESPASS. KNOW THIS – IF YOU SET FOOT OUTSIDE THE NEW CITY, I WILL EAT YOUR BONES AND SEEK MY FRIEND IN YOUR MARROW.” Rasce takes a step back. Baston’s grip on the gun tightens.

  “SPAR – THERE IS MUCH WE MUST DISCUSS.” Rat waves a paw towards the inner vault. “HOW MUCH DID YOU SEE?”

  “He – he says he was confused,” says Rasce. “Weak and scattered, after the invasion. What happened here?”

  “HURRH.” The massive elder ghoul scratches the ground with one paw, hunches his shoulders. Its claws stir up piles of slag, intermixed with blackened bones, scraps of metal and leather. A shattered Haithi helmet. Rat’s nervous. The thing seated before them is a necrotic demigod, one of the most powerful entities in Guerdon, but Baston can tell that Rat is… embarrassed. “I FAILED IN MY VIGIL. SINCE THE ARMISTICE, ELADORA DUTTIN’S INFLUENCE HAS GROWN. SHE HAS SOME HOLD ON THE NEW MINISTER OF SECURITY, NEMON. AND THROUGH HIM, THE CITY WATCH. SHE HAS GATHERED OTHERS TO HERSELF, TOO. SAINTS. WILD TALENTS. MERCENARIES, INCLUDING A DEAD MAN OF HAITH. NOW, THANKS TO THIS FOOL’S ACTIONS” – he waves a claw at Rasce – “SHE HAS CONVINCED THE ALCHEMISTS TO GIVE HER THE TALLOWMEN.”

  Baston has to gasp for breath, interrupting Rat. The ghoul frowns in irritation. “WITH CARI GONE… WITH YOU GONE… SHE CONVINCED ME THAT THE NEW CITY WAS NO LONGER A SAFE RESTING PLACE FOR THE THINGS YOU BURIED HERE. SHE TOOK THEM AWAY.”

  “What did she take?”

  Baston’s stomach turns. It feels like his guts are overflowing with dirt, like he’s swallowed handfuls of earth and stone. Still, the words come, the ghoul using him as its herald, like Rasce speaks for Spar Idgeson. “THE BLACK IRON BELLS. GUILDMISTRESS ROSHA’S CASKET. OTHER TREASURES OF THE ALCHEMISTS’ GUILD.”

  “And where does she keep these treasures?” asks Rasce.

  Like Rasce’s supposed to speak for Spar Idgeson.

  “I WISH TO SPEAK WITH MY FRIEND,” Rat growls.

  “Oh, he is here,” replies Rasce. He speaks quickly, like he’s rehearsed this speech. “But my services as mediator are not without cost, and here is my price. Your ghouls control the underworld. You will help me get to St Styrus’ Shaft.”

  “YOU DO NOT DICTATE TO ME!”

  Rat rises to loom above them – and there’s an earthquake, right there, a spasm of the New City. Baston falls to his knees, and the Rat’s flung backwards as the hexagonal hunk of stone he was seated on suddenly rebels, knocking him over. He lands heavily on the far side of the curtain wall, a grunt of pain escaping both his lips and Baston’s simultaneously. Then he’s up like a panther, leaping back towards the breach.

  But before he can reach it, Rasce gestures, and the stone of the curtain wall melts, flows, knits together. It’s sluggish, and seems to fight against him, pseudopods of stone rolling backwards against the flow. Fires blaze within the wall; bloodstains appear on Rasce’s leg, his side.

  Across the great cavern echoes the hooting and yelping of ghouls. A great many ghouls.

  The hole’s become too small for Lord Rat to squeeze through, but one of his long ropy arms snakes through the gap. The claw grabs Rasce’s foot and yanks him over. Baston glimpses Rat’s drooling maw on the other side of the wall, eyes blazing with fury.

  He reacts on instinct, the way the Fever Knight taught him. Reacts the way any right-hand man should.

  The gun in his hand barks as he shoots Lord Rat in the face.

  The ghoul flinches – the gun’s too small to do real damage to such a monster – but it only takes a moment. Rasce pulls himself free and deliberately slams his hand into a shard of jagged metal. Blood sprays across the white marble of the wall as the breach suddenly seals, leaving Rat trapped on the other side.

  They lie there for an instant, amid the rubble, in the brief silence.

  Scratch.

  Scratch.

  Scratch.

  Baston opens his mouth, finds the words are his own. “What the fuck have you done?”

  “What’s necessary.” Rasce hauls himself upright, leaving bloody handprints on the wall. “Reload.” Dozens of ghouls lope and skulk across the cavern towards them. Feral ghouls, savage and unthinking. This little handgun is useless against such a horde. Fuck, even if he’d brought that lovely repeater, Baston wouldn’t have a hope in hell against so many.

  “I WILL EAT YOU.” Rat’s voice comes from a chorus of ghouls as the circle closes.

  “The gun,” says Rasce, holding out his hand. Baston passes the loaded weapon to him, and Rasce aims it at his own temple. “Listen! Carillon Thay’s gone. I’m the only connection left to Spar Idgeson. If I die, so does he! So, O Rat of Guerdon, what is it to be? Your friend’s life – or shall you be a thief again, instead of Duttin’s bootlick?”

  “YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT YOU ASK,” say the ghouls in unison.

  Rasce grins, showing bloodied teeth. “The dragon does not ask. The dragon takes.”

  Baston feels Rat’s mind settle on him again, feels the ghoul’s thoughts worming their way into his jaws. He tastes Rat’s mordant humour, tastes some cynical joy. Despite being imprisoned, Rat still somehow thinks he has the upper hand.

  The ghoul pack snarls, but they do not advance. “Threaten us!” shouts Rasce, “and I shall bring
the ceiling down upon your Lord!”

  The assembled ghouls howl and gibber. Shit, most of them are ferals, middle-ghouls. Baston prays there are a few young surface ghouls in the mix, ghouls like Rat used to be, ones who understand human speech and can relay the threat to their feral kin. Rat is now the only Elder left – without him, the ghouls are kingless.

  “Behold,” shouts Rasce. “I lay a curse upon this place. Should anyone, ghoul or human, living or dead, touch yonder prison wall, then the chamber beyond shall collapse, and all within shall perish. The power is in me to do this.”

  Baston’s got no idea if Rasce’s bluffing, but it’s clear that the ghouls buy it. The ferals closest to the wall shuffle away. Rasce advances, and the pack parts to let him through. The gun still pressing on his forehead. “Come on, Baston,” he says.

  “WAIT. SPAR. SPAR, ARE YOU THERE?”

  Rasce’s face contorts. He takes on the same expression Baston had, as words try to fight their way out of his mouth. He breaks stride, the hand holding the gun shaking for a moment. Then, he regains control. Swallows hard, spits.

  “He’s here. But you shall not speak to him. Not until I have done what my Great-Uncle commands.”

  Rat does not respond, but the thought of his unspoken words flickers through Baston’s mind.

  THEY KNOW ALL YOUR PLANS. YOU WILL FAIL.

  “My lord, I never fail.”

  The words come out of Baston’s mouth reluctantly. DO AS HE COMMANDS.

  They leave the vault, and behind them the only sound is Rat’s claws scraping on the stone.

  Scratch.

  Scratch.

  Scratch.

  Scratch.

  The sound, the sensation of Rat’s claws on the stone.

  Like a beacon. A point of reference. The claws scrape on the stone. The stone of the New City was born from stone that was once flesh. That flesh was the flesh of a man, and the man was Spar Idgeson.

  Spar hangs in the abyss, the sound a thin cord drawing him back from oblivion.