The Broken God

by Gareth Hanrahan

  Scratch.

  A memory.

  Spar’s standing guard outside a house off Sumpwater. Baston’s there, too, staring nervously at passers-by on the street. Keeping the width of the door between the two, not looking at Spar. Saying nothing, because what is there to say to a terminal diagnosis? The notion that he is unclean settles around Spar like a heavy mantle, a wall coming down between him and the rest of humanity. Never again shall he know touch. Never again shall he know hope.

  Inside the house, a muffled scream. A thump. A moment’s silence.

  Heinreil emerges, jingling a bag of coin. “Well, that was unnecessarily messy. Spar, boy, you wait here. There’ll be a cleaner along presently, for… for…”

  The Fever Knight follows his master out, bending and twisting to get his massive armoured form through the narrow door. “Varot, wasn’t it?” He adds, “cloth”, as he passes, and Baston fishes out a scrap of fabric so the Fever Knight can wipe the blood from his gauntlets.

  “We’ve more work to do,” says the Fever Knight. “Bloody work, up in Five Knives district. Come along, Baston.”

  The armoured knight beckons Baston to follow. Baston glances back, but doesn’t speak; he follows doggedly along behind his tutor, leaving Spar alone on the street with Heinreil.

  “We’ll take care of you, boy,” says Heinreil. “The Brotherhood way. Make sure you have enough alkahest. Keep you useful. There’ll always be a place for Idge’s son in the Wash, aye? But not up in Hog Close – somewhere more, ah, private.”

  “More isolated.”

  “A bit of peace and quiet, aye – gods below, I’d give anything for time to just sit and think!” says Heinreil. “I’ll take care of you, and you’ll stay true to the Brotherhood.”

  Spar nods. The movement hurts his neck. He swallows, nervously, imagining his throat seizing up. The terror of the Stone Plague grabs him and freezes his bones, giving him a momentary presentiment of what the future holds.

  Scratch.

  Staring into the glimmering lens of Vorz’s loupe. The sharp pain of a syringe piercing skin, and Vorz has to try three spots before he finds soft tissue.

  “I’m still too weak!” says Rasce. “That brute nearly got me.”

  Vorz frowns. “Residuum is being absorbed much more slowly than I would have expected,” he admits. “I did not expect this resistance.”

  “My uncle will be displeased if you fail.”

  “There are other options.” He turns to examine one of the dead thieves in the mortuary at Lanthorn Street. “In any event, Taras’ displeasure will fall on you, not me. The dragon gave you this task.”

  “Then I shall not fail.” When he flew with the dragon, Great-Uncle would breathe his glorious fire and move on, and Rasce would never have to see the remains of the fallen. Now, the cellar is littered with all manner of corpses, but Rasce will not turn his eyes from them. He climbs down into one of the graves and begins to dismember the corpse with his knife. Digging for the soul within the carcass, the precious offering of residuum.

  Scratch.

  The ghoul slinks up Sumpwater Row. Pauses outside the door.

  “Boss sent me,” he says, licking his lips. Taps himself on the chest. “Rat.”

  “Spar.”

  “Idgeson, right?” The ghoul sucks his teeth. “I heard. Hard. Hard.”

  “Varot’s in here,” says Spar, opening the door.

  “Can smell him.” Rat slips into the house. Some morbid impulse makes Spar follow the ghoul in, and watch as Rat begins to expertly dismember the corpse. Limbs are cut off, wrapped, stowed away in a sack. A cross between a mortician and a butcher.

  Some bits, the ghoul pops in his mouth immediately.

  “That’s disgusting,” says Spar.

  Rat looks up at him. “Survive first. Can’t do shit if you’re dead. No dead man ever got a lucky break.”

  It’s good advice.

  Advice Spar remembers when they give him his first shot of alkahest. The sharp pain of a syringe piercing skin, and the doctor has to try three spots before he finds soft tissue.

  Scratch.

  Survive first. You can’t do the right thing if you can’t do anything.

  Spar can sense the bodies interred within the house on Lanthorn Street. Interred within him. He can feel their soft flesh, like moonshadows, ephemeral and fleeting. He can feel their bones, a little denser, a little more like stone. He can sense Rasce digging there, too.

  And he can feel, too, something else. He can feel their souls like they’re a physical thing. A dark, heavy liquid, pooling in the corpses. Condensing out of the aether.

  It’s different in each corpse. Vyr’s soul-residue, for example, congeals in the man’s hands, in his throat, in his brain. Gingerly, Spar tastes it – and immediately recoils. The stuff is a soup of memories and stagnant thoughts, and he’s so fragile that he nearly drowns in it. Part of Spar’s consciousness carves off, sinking into the Vyr-ness of the residuum.

  Scratch.

  A lingering memory. Spar, lying on his reinforced bed, his body wracked by the Stone Plague. Rat squats by the fire, munching on something unmentionable, but he’s there. He’s the only one who didn’t leave Spar’s side. He’s loyal.

  Scratch.

  A memory. Rat at the door, in the rain. Bringing Cari home for the first time.

  Scratch.

  “Better,” says Vorz. The alchemist kneels by one of the graves in the basement of Lanthorn Street. The corpse is covered by a cairn, but beneath the pile the stones become knives, probing and slicing. Rasce’s will moves like the stone plague, consuming the flesh, consuming the bits of soul-stuff that remain in the nerve endings, in the deep pools of the brain. He gestures, and a dozen more grave-pits open up in the ground like hungry mouths.

  “Will that be enough, do you think?” he asks Vorz.

  Scratch.

  They bring in more dead thieves, each one stabbed or shot or poisoned or starved, and they’re laid to rest in Lanthorn Street in Spar’s name.

  And while Rasce takes the dragon’s share of each soul, Spar steals a little – just a little – from each, and hides it away.

  Can’t do shit if you’re dead, Rat taught him. So survive first. Wait for a lucky break.

  Scratch.

  Scratch.

  Scratch.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  “Miss Thay,” says the Crawling One, in Adro’s voice, though Adro never called her that in his… in his…

  Fuck. He’s dead. He’s dead and a worm has eaten his brain and stolen his voice and she wants to scream.

  “Call me Twelve Coins Bleeding. Forgive me for the circumstances in which we parted.”

  She doesn’t know if he means the way the Crawling One abandoned her on her first attempt to escape Ilbarin, or if it’s Adro, regretting what happened in the camp.

  “How…?”

  She can barely speak; words aren’t equal to the maelstrom of horror and anger and self-loathing and confusion that churns in her brain. The Crawling One only picks up on the confusion. “Ah, I should explain. My kind are not as singular as yours. The names we apply reflect our constituent parts. Some parts of the entity you met in Ilbarin that you called Twelve Suns Bleeding exist in me. I hoped to liberate you from the prison camp, but the risk was too great, so I followed you after I learned of your escape. Other parts of me are derived from a Crawling One that advises Lord Rhan-Gis, the Cornerstone of the World.” He leans closer. “All cities are our home, in the end, so rest assured that our previous bargain endures! I shall assist you in getting to Khebesh.”

  “What happened to Adro?”

  The Crawling One pretends to kneel down next to her. She knows, distantly, that the thing is boneless, formless, only pretending to be humanoid. Only pretending to have legs that bend, feigning a hand that rests reassuringly on her shoulder. “I was badly injured, Cari. I succumbed to my wounds, and the Ghierdana threw my remains into the sea. But the Crawling Ones found me, and saved me.”


  “You’re dead.”

  “Everything I am, everything the individual you knew as Adro,” says Adro’s voice, “endures. I have the same memories, the same thoughts, the talents preserved. But we cannot linger here, talking philosophy as though we were sharing a bottle of wine-of-poets, can we? Come on. I must present you to your cousin.”

  She’s so shaken that for a moment she imagines him bringing her to Eladora. Two images of Eladora war in Cari’s mind – her cousin as she usually thinks of her, nervous and prissy, a well-read churchmouse, and Eladora as Cari glimpsed her in the days around the Armistice. Somehow, it wouldn’t surprise her to hear of her cousin’s presence here.

  Then she realises that it means cousin in the royal sense. If Rhan-Gis is the embodiment of Gissa, then Cari’s the embodiment of Guerdon.

  “Wait. What about Myri? I can’t just leave her here.”

  “Artolo’s sorcerer?” Twelve Coins Bleeding sounds surprised. “I assumed she came with Artolo.” His hand – pseudo-hand, whatever – passes over Myri’s unconscious face.

  “No, with me.”

  “As your prisoner?” There’s a note of respect in Adro’s voice. In the simulacrum of Adro’s voice. She’s talking to a pile of worms, she has to remember that.

  “No. She wants to get to Khebesh, too. We’ve been helping each other.”

  “Ah.” It’s Adro’s voice, but she can’t read the emotion behind it. Surprise? Amused acknowledgement of yet another absurd situation involving wild Cari? A piece of a puzzle slotting into place? “I must present you. Emissaries of Ishmere are here in Gissa, and it is necessary to convince Rhan-Gis to protect us from them so we may travel in safety. Come with me.”

  The Crawling One glides out of the cell, and she follows. She doesn’t have much choice – it’s as powerful a sorcerer as Myri, if not more so, and it doesn’t suffer the same ill effects as she does when it uses magic. And the little sacrificial knife she stole isn’t going to cut it, so to speak. They pass back the way she came – the corpse of the man she killed is now covered with little white dots that must be worm eggs. Soon, they’ll hatch and bore into his brain, and eat whatever remains of his soul, his memories. Gods below, he’ll come back and know she murdered him. She wants to tell him to get in line behind Artolo and the whole bloody Sacred Realm and everyone else, but she can’t summon up the bravado right now.

  Instead, she whispers, “I’m sorry” as she passes.

  “That reminds me,” says Twelve Coins Bleeding, “I presume the Ghierdana took the worm I gave you. No matter – I have a prodigious supply.” Putting just enough of one of Adro’s leers in to sound right. “You recall what you are to do with it?”

  “Put it in the sorcerer’s tomb in Khebesh.”

  “Exactly. I shall ensure your passage to Khebesh is untroubled. Trust me, Cari.”

  She really, really doesn’t.

  Apparently, getting presented to Rhan-Gis first means getting bathed and anointed by handmaidens, then putting on the most absurd outfit Cari’s ever worn in her life. A dress of shimmering samite, whiter than fresh-fallen snow. A necklace of glittering gems, rings of gold. She horrifies the handmaidens by insisting that she gets to keep wearing her walking boots – and while they’re distracted by that outrage, she slips that sacrificial knife into a fold of the dress and hides it with a belt of gold and emeralds.

  She’s very, very glad for once that Spar’s thousands of miles away and can’t see her.

  They’ve taken her stuff, including Ramegos’ grimoire and the aethergraph. Twelve Coins Bleeding tells her that she’ll get it back, that he’ll get her to Khebesh as promised. She doesn’t have a choice but to comply. She feels like she’s in a den of snakes, where one false step would get her bitten. Typical – the first time in her life she’s treated like royalty, and she can’t relax and enjoy it.

  The handmaidens offer her a plate of grapes and sweetmeats, and she nearly accepts – then she remembers the plate must be empty, that those grapes and sweetmeats are dust and pebbles transformed by the miracles of Rhan-Gis. This city is doing her head in. Food isn’t food, walls aren’t walls, the thing that talks like Adro certainly isn’t Adro, and she’s sitting here dressed like a princess, which certainly isn’t her. She’s got to get out of here.

  “You have ’em,” she says when the handmaidens offer her the plate again. The girls fall on the plate like hungry ghouls, coughing out prayers of thanks to Rhan-Gis between bites of dust. Cari sits back down on the edge of a bench and tries to stay sane. She has to stay out of the god’s influence, to see the world clearly in all its broken horror. It’s the only way she’ll be able to find her way out of this city.

  Long ago, she guesses, Rhan-Gis was just a minor god. The embodiment of the city of Gissa, venerated by a few priests, celebrated in some annual festival or when some new civic building was established. A handful of miracles to His name. Cari’s encountered gods like that on her travels, in places yet untouched by the Godswar. Not Kept Gods like in Guerdon, starved of power so they don’t become monstrous titans, but slumbering, placid gods, little more than abstractions given a name, a face.

  Then there was some wound. Some attack or injury that ruined that tranquil order, damaged the god’s perfectly ordered domain. A first cause. The god sought power to heal the wound, to correct the wrong, or the people turned to the god with more fervent prayers, more votive offerings and sacrifices. Maybe Rhan-Gis inspired his people to start moving the city, to bring Gissa out of danger or shift it closer to some font of magic. Maybe the priests thought the best way to aid their god was to offer him sacrifices, or to steal power from another deity. Cari imagines the world as some great invisible machine, the gods as spinning cogs, each in their place, each serene and balanced. Then one wheel flies off its axle, knocks into another, and it all collapses into chaos. Into the Godswar.

  “Carillon. It’s time.” Adro’s voice.

  Now, to avoid getting crushed by a spinning wheel.

  Up close, Rhan-Gis is easily the most beautiful human Cari has ever seen.

  The young saint-king of the city, the avatar of the god Rhan-Gis, supreme master of the eternal city of Gissa offers her a glass of wine. “My Crawler tells me that you are Queen of Guerdon. I traded with you, before the barbarians laid siege to my walls! Had you presented yourself to me openly, instead of fleeing and entering my temple by stealth, I would have welcomed you with all proper ceremony. Nonetheless, let our friendship be renewed. We champions of civilisation must stand against the madness of this war. We shall protect the blazing lamp of civility, you and I.”

  Rhan-Gis’ eyes are finely inlaid stained glass, and there’s nothing behind them, nothing at all. The mortal man in front of her has been hollowed out. There’s nothing left of him except the mad god.

  Cari gives him a weak grin and pretends to down the wine. The glass is empty while she holds it.

  The rest of the people in this palatial council chamber aren’t much better. The Crawling One’s slithering around, whispering in Rhan-Gis’ ear, in Cari’s. “Trust me, Cari, I’ve got this. We’ll be home and dry in no time,” he whispers. He talks to her in Adro’s voice, but switches to an older, deeper voice when speaking to the saint-king.

  On the other side of Rhan-Gis is his court wizard, who looks like he’s stepped out of a storybook – sky-blue robes, long white beard, stupid hat and all. Twelve Coins Bleeding introduces him to Cari as Xargor Bane, Master of the Star Tower, and it turns out that the chief advantage of the porcelain mask is that you can keep a straight face when introducing someone as Xargor Bane, Master of the Star Tower. He strokes his chin with a wizened hand as he pages through the grimoire, muttering to himself. The aethergraph and their supplies are next to him, too, tucked under his chair. He holds the heavy book up to the light of a lamp hanging beside the throne to see better. Unlike Myri, whose body bears the marks and scars of her sorcery, the court wizard’s body bears the marks of too many pastries and fine wines. “
Very interesting, very interesting,” he mutters to himself. “Yes, yes, clearly Khebeshi.”

  Cari decides that Xargor Bane, Master of the Star Tower, is dumb as a gullhead.

  Rhan-Gis gestures at an empty spot next to his throne, and a chair rises from the stone floor. A servant darts over with a silken cushion, and Cari sits down, adjusting her ridiculous dress to keep the knife hidden.

  Rhan-Gis leans over. “The hateful emissaries of the Sacred Empire are at my gates. My Crawler tells me they hunt you, but you are under my protection. No harm will come to you while I watch over you.”

  “Uh, thank you, your honour. Your majesty.”

  “He is the Cornerstone of the World,” says Xargor Bane, “and properly referred to as ‘his divine radiance’.”

  “However, I have a duty, too, to my city, and the people who dwell within the holy walls of Gissa. A thousand armies have broken on those walls! And a thousand times a thousand brave souls have given unto me to bolster the city’s defences. The forces of the Sacred Realm are not as great as they once were, and my Crawler tells me I have you to thank for that—”

  He reaches out and strokes Cari’s cheek. For a moment, the spell of the god is all-consuming, and she’s filled with ecstatic joy at being in the presence of Rhan-Gis, here in the heart of the holy city of Gissa, and she can see the towers and walls rising through the windows of the temple. She pulls back, fights it off, but she’s missed what he was saying to her. Plus, now she’s got a pounding headache, like the sandpaper’s scoured her brain raw and bloody. On the bright side, her wine glass is now brimming with the genuine article.

  “… Assures me he can broker an arrangement.” Rhan-Gis claps. “Bring in the prisoner!”

  A set of double doors open, and two guards enter, carrying Myri between them. She’s bound hand and feet, gagged – and looks furious, eyes flashing with anger. The guards hastily shuffle her over to a spot in front of Rhan-Gis’ throne, and Twelve Coins Bleeding kneels down to draw another containment circle on the ground, his worm-fingers searing sigils and arcane curves into the tiles. Xargor Bane nods approvingly. “Yes, yes. Excellent work. I would have used a dampening monad in that quadrant, but what this design lacks in subtlety it compensates with animal vigour. Good. I deem the sorceress secure, my lord.”