The Broken God

by Gareth Hanrahan

  Clambering over bodies. Something squishes beneath the weight of her numb right hand, and then she feels rubbery, writhing worms against her cheek. Twelve Shits Conspiring has collapsed into his constituent parts, all slithering around on the floor. The worms crawl towards her, tumbling over each other.

  One of them – some of them? All of them – is Adro. Everything her friend was, consumed in death and preserved in the worm. Eladora told her about their grandfather, Jermas Thay – he became a Crawling One, but he was still himself. Could Adro still be saved? Could she sift the worms, find the one that’s him? It’s madness, but is it crazier than saving Spar? Or are some forms of survival too awful to contemplate?

  The worm brushes against her skin, and she recoils, acts on instinct. One of the lamps is nearby; Cari gives it a shove with her leg so burning lamp oil sluices across the sloping floor, catching the bulk of the worms, never mind that she’s now scalded on top of everything else. I’m sorry. I couldn’t save you. I tried.

  Through a gap in the smoke, she glimpses the Ishmeric priestess, Damala, half buried by falling masonry.

  You, I don’t give a fuck about, whoever you are.

  She crawls on, ducking her head as there’s another burst of gunfire, heading for Myri, heading for the fucking book, lying next to the stunned body of Xargor Bane.

  She nearly makes it.

  Artolo grabs her from behind. He roars, an animalistic noise louder than the wrath of god in her ear. His tentacle-fingers grabbing at her hair, lashing around her neck. His face is a mask of blood. She struggles to breathe, her fingers scrabbling against the tiles as he tries to yank her backwards. Her numbed right hand scrapes across the floor, breaking through the binding circle around Myri. There’s a flash of sorcery that stuns Cari and sends Artolo flying across the room.

  Next thing Cari knows, they’re stumbling down a narrow stairway, leaning on each other. Cari’s got the grimoire and the aethergraph under her arm, although she can’t remember picking them up. Her skull’s ringing like a bell. The whole building is heaving and thrashing, as if it’s alive and wounded. More skyquakes overhead, artillery bursting in heaven.

  “What were you thinking?” screams Myri in her ear.

  Good question, but not the time for it. And the honest answer is “I tried to actually really carefully consider the outcomes of my action, and it turned out pretty much the same as acting on instinct, and everything exploded.”

  The light in the smoke-filled stairwell looks weird to Cari, and then she works out that Myri’s tattoos are glowing like they’re on fire. Shielding them from divine assault, or divination, or some other horrible fate. Cari feels a stab of misplaced jealousy – even in her wounded, exhausted state, the sorceress is vastly more capable than she.

  Outside is like inside with more mud. The city of Gissa started out ruined, but now it’s falling apart in places. Falling together in others, as the divine attention of Rhan-Gis sweeps across the wreckage, and, wherever the god’s presence passes, the city reasserts itself, stone crawling on stone to rebuild. Rhan-Gis is looking for another saint, a replacement for the avatar that Cari just shanked. Cari’s heard people compare sainthood to getting struck by lightning, and she’s just unleashed a great big thunderstorm. Some poor soul is going to find they’re the tallest tree in the forest when Rhan-Gis chooses them and fills them with His divinity.

  Until then, absolute chaos. The faithful pressing their faces into the mud, screaming prayers to their disrupted god or running riot. Resurrected guards and soldiers stumbling around, holding on to their brickwork patches, mortar running between their fingers like blood. Gunfire, off in the distance. Cari doesn’t like the look of the clouds on the northern horizon, either. They remind her of Artolo’s new fingers, writhing and grasping. Ishmerian cloud demons, the spawn of Cloud Mother. Fuck.

  A trio of kids run past them, burdened with loot. Cari has no idea what one would pillage in this broken place, but somehow the sight cheers her. She hefts Myri, helps her stumble down the street.

  Myri mutters a spell. It must be a big one – the backlash staggers her, arcane energies lighting up her bones and twisting her muscles, and Cari has to carry her until the fit passes. Still, Cari guesses the spell works – everyone’s ignoring them now. People look at them and don’t see them. The same trick Twelve Suns Bleeding did back in Ushket.

  “Go south,” hisses Myri, “you’re going the wrong way.”

  “East,” says Cari, “we’re going east. Back to the sea.”

  To the fishing village. To Yhandis.

  Artolo staggers through the ruins of the throne room. Worms shriek with human voices as they burn. He steps over bodies – the dead avatar, some of his own men, some of the city guards – to follow after Carillon Thay. She was within his grasp! How can she escape, again?

  A hand reaches from the rubble, clutches at his foot. Damala. He kneels down and clears away the fallen stones. They’re sticky with the old woman’s blood. He lifts away another brick, revealing her bruised and broken face.

  “The gods have foreseen—” She tries to speak, her voice a broken whisper.

  “I shall kill her,” he says. He prizes her hand away with his Kraken-fingers.

  “Give… me… drown… my body,” she gasps, her eyes pleading. The Kraken-burial. Her soul can only be claimed by her god if she’s given a water burial. Otherwise her residuum will curdle in her corpse until it’s taken by some other god or psychopomp, or until it seeps into the earth and dissipates.

  The sea’s on the other side of those mountains. Carillon has no boat now. Her only route is south, across the wastes. Every second he lingers here gives her more time to escape, delays his revenge.

  But he owes Damala’s gods. His gods, now. He has to honour the Kraken and all the gods of Ishmere, make the proper offerings – even if it gives Thay another day of unworthy life. He takes the heat of his anger, quenches it in dark, icy water.

  Gunfire, close at hand. He ducks down again, crawls through the dust and smoke to the door. His Eshdana soldiers hold the main entrance to the throne room against the servants of Rhan-Gis. “Boss! Too many of them! We’ve got to fight our way out!” One of them thrusts a gun into Artolo’s hand.

  He holds the weapon, feels its weight, then lets it slip. That’s not his weapon, not any more.

  “Bar the doors,” he orders.

  “There aren’t any other ways out. We’re trapped.”

  “Bring the remains of Damala,” he orders.

  He walks back into the devastation. He finds the overturned throne, shoves off the body of the saint of Rhan-Gis. There are already a few grave-worms, escapees from the fire, nibbling at the corpse’s ears and nose, and he brushes them aside and crushes them underfoot. “Check Damala’s remains for worms,” he shouts. The Crawlers will not take her soul. The worms desperately crawl away, wriggling down cracks in the tiled floor.

  The body of a saint has special potency. So much of the god was channelled through this mortal frame that what remains must be a rich offering. He lifts the body of the saint of Rhan-Gis. It’s oddly heavy, like it’s a sack of bricks, but he’s strong enough to lift it. Strong enough to carry it one-handed as he scales the wall, his tentacle-fingers extending to find cracks and finger-holds, lifting him up to one of the deep-set apertures that let light into this throne room, the uppermost chamber of the pyramidal temple. He climbs out on to the sloped roof, clambers up to the apex.

  From here, he can see all the city.

  Gissa convulses beneath him. A vast crowd, virtually all the population of this cursed city, surrounds the temple, a sea of mad humanity. They hammer on the doors, claw at the walls. Weep and scream, the anger of the god echoed in the souls of his worshippers. They will kill him, kill all the trespassers. He scans the crowd, looking for two women moving against the mob, but he can see no sign of Carillon and the witch.

  His revenge will not come today. But the gods have promised it to him. And the gods of Ishmere keep
their promises.

  He takes the still warm corpse of the saint of Rhan-Gis and splays it on the roof of the pyramid. He digs his tentacle-fingers into the saint’s belly, pulls out hot steaming ropes of entrail and organ, throws them down the roof.

  For a moment he’s back in his chambers in Ushket, when he murdered that stupid servant. Then, he spilled the boy’s entrails out of hatred and frustration and anger. Now, on this rooftop, he moves with a quiet reverence.

  This is an offering.

  Cloud Mother takes her souls in the air burial, and this is a rich bounty of soul-stuff indeed.

  And he is rewarded. Tendrils of solid cloud reach down from the chaos in the sky, lift him off the pyramid. Other tendrils pick up his surviving followers, and the body of Damala, and carry them into the sky.

  East, towards Moonchild and the sea.

  Dark clouds gather over Gissa, like the gods have poured ink across the sky. Saints ride there; hands of fog reach down towards the broken temple. Cari hustles Myri out of the city, following the trail left by the marching hosts. No one pays them any heed. Cari can’t tell if Myri’s attention-deflection spell is still working, or if everyone’s too shell-shocked to notice two women fleeing.

  Myri stumbles, her legs giving out. She lets out a snarl of frustration that’s somehow also an incantation, her tattoos flaring with defiant light. Cari picks her up. “Come on. Come on. Move, wizard.” She’s like Spar was, towards the end. Inhumanly strong in his way, but also kitten-weak, fragile, prone to collapsing. Although Myri’s a lot lighter, which is a relief.

  “Come on,” urges Cari. Shit, she’s no good at being encouraging. She starts telling Adro’s story, about how they stole a cargo load of blue jade from the Eyeless priestesses on Mattaur. She tries to tell it the way Adro did, a farcical yarn involving a lot of running around pitch-dark tunnels – turned out stealing from blind priests wasn’t that easy – but she can’t remember half of his jokes. It sickens her that the worms have stolen that from her, too. There’s a Crawling One out there who could recite Adro’s story note-perfect, word for word, laugh for booming laugh, but her friend is gone.

  Myri isn’t even listening to her anyway, but Cari keeps telling the story. Reciting it like a prayer, like she’s staking a claim. So much has been taken from her, and so much of her life has become entangled with gods and sorcery and alchemy and everything else she flings into the bucket marked “magic shit”, that she’s determined to keep this story unsoiled. It’s a funny tale about incompetent thieves, and that’s all it is.

  In the distance, she hears the thunder of an antique cannon, firing wildly into the air. Mercifully, though, it’s not a full-on invasion by the Sacred Realm. The people of the city get to live, at least today. And hell, while Rhan-Gis is disorientated, maybe some of them will find the courage to walk away. There’s got to be something better out there, right?

  By nightfall, she’s not so sure. Hours of travel across the god-blasted wastes, and she’s seen nothing but desolation and horror. The landscape’s a palimpsest of broken miracles. Other than Myri, she doesn’t encounter another living soul – and, to be honest, Myri’s right on the borderline. Cari gives her the last of her painkilling drug – fumbling with the little vial, her frozen hand making everything awkward – and the sorceress slips into unconsciousness.

  Sighing, Cari picks up the sorceress again, staggers around until she finds a sheltered hole in the mud. It’s a big hole – a shell crater, probably, or some sort of blasting miracle. Either way, it tore a chunk out of the ground.

  “I mean,” says Cari as she drags the sorceress down the slope, “can you imagine a better fucking mud-hole in the middle of the Godswar? This is a great hole. Absolutely top-class.”

  She lays Myri down to rest in a cleft in the earth, and lies down next to her, trying to ignore the pangs of hunger gnawing at her belly. The Fucking Book between them like a metal child, all hard corners and edges. Cari’s hand remains numb. Divine punishment, she guesses. She blasphemed against Rhan-Gis by striking his saint.

  Nothing she can do about it now, and her mind’s too numb for fear. Maybe in Khebesh they can remove the curse.

  It’s a horribly warm night, like someone’s breathing on Cari’s skin all the time, so they’re not going to freeze to death. She’s still wearing the absurd temple-handmaiden outfit that they gave her in Gissa, although the skirts are no longer white as polished ivory. The belt of gold and emeralds is still gold and emeralds, though, so technically Cari’s richer right now than she’s ever been in her whole life. She’d trade it all for a sandwich. For Hawse’s fried fish. For Eladora’s soup, which in Cari’s head is still bubbling away on the stove on Desiderata Street, years ago and worlds away…

  She sleeps, thoughts breaking up, fracturing, dissipating into dream.

  Dreams are dangerous in the Godswar. Another attack vector, a way for the ghosts of broken gods or other spirits to strike. Before Gissa, Myri would draw protective wards every night so they could sleep safely, but she’s too exhausted to act. But no strange god or spirit troubles Cari’s dreams this night. Instead, she dreams of Desiderata Street, of the Raveller that chased her, emissary of the Black Iron Gods. In the dream, she flees across rooftops.

  Guerdon blurs into Ushket, another rooftop escape, and the Ravellers still pursue. The streets below seethe with writhing, glistening, fluid forms. The Ravellers are thieves of form, stealing shapes and faces from their victims. Flensing their souls away, stealing the bodies.

  Ushket into Ilbarin. The Ravellers are a flood, a tide of darkness, washing over the buildings below. The waters are rising. Kraken-tentacles rise. (Why do all these fucking gods and monsters love their fucking tentacles so much, she thinks.)

  Ilbarin into Gissa. The Ravellers wanted to raise her up, make her their queen. Make her into something like the saint of Rhan-Gis. She dreams of a dark city, a nightmare Guerdon, where writhing towers reach up and tear the stars from the sky, where terrified people flee down constricting streets until the city consumes them. A dragon soars over the city, and the towers burn.

  The floodwaters wash over the edge of the roof, leaving her with nowhere else to climb, nowhere else to hide, caught between the flood and the fire.

  Darkness consumes her.

  Waking in a panic, breathless, screaming. Tentacles become hands, pawing at her. Clawing at her, biting her. Fractured moonlight shows her a half-dozen humanoid figures crowding around her and Myri. Cari leaps up, slipping in the mud. No knife, no sword, no weapon – except the Fucking Book. The book, armoured in its steel-edged case. She grabs the Grimoire of Doctor Ramegos, a tome that holds secrets that wars have been fought over, gods have killed for, and uses it to club at her attackers.

  With a desperate, unexpected strength, she catches one of them in the side of the head, driving a corner of the book into the creature’s skull. The thing staggers back, falls, tumbling and sliding down into the crater. She turns, brings the book down hard on the forearm of one clawing at Myri’s unconscious form.

  The attackers shriek, turn and flee. As they crest the rim of the crater, the moonlight catches them and she gets a brief glimpse of what they look like. Small, thin-limbed, greyish flesh drawn tight over limbs and spines. Gods below, she can’t tell if they’re humans or ghouls or something else, but they’re no bigger than children. They scramble away, crawling on all fours, flinching as distant thunder rolls in the sky. Reciting a chanted litany of blasphemy, rote-learned, to fend off the attention of any passing gods.

  That’s what human survival looks like in the Godswar. Those are your choices – submit to the whims of some insane husk of a deity like in Gissa, or end up like a feral ghoul, an animal.

  “Come on!” hisses Cari. “We’re going, now!”

  “Sleeping,” mumbles Myri, curling around the rock she’s using as a pillow.

  “Come on!” Cari urges her. She transfers the Fucking Book to the crook of one arm, uses her good hand to yank Myri upright. They
’re not spending a minute longer than necessary here.

  They struggle up the slope and march off across the wasteland. Weirdland, wonderland. It’s like some god reached across Guerdon and grabbed all the unused backdrops and stage sets from the Metropolitan Theatre, and all the altar paintings and statues from all the temples, and then dropped them all in the mud. Stamped on them a few times, then vomited copiously on the mess. Oh, and then had an artillery battery shell the shit out of it all, for good measure.

  Around dawn, they shelter from an unlikely snowstorm in the hollow of a gigantic skull the size of a house, half sunk in the mud. They watch through the eyeholes as a titanic black serpent – beautiful beyond measure, its scales marked with astrological symbols – slithers by outside. The snake fades as the sun rises, dissolving like mist. It’s still there – just looking at it gives Cari that god-sense headache – and she guesses it’s slipped out of the mortal world, moved back to the aether.

  “You never finished the story,” says Myri.

  “What story?”

  “About blue jade. About you and Adro and Hawse, and the Rose.”

  “I did.” Cari feels oddly embarrassed. “You passed out.”

  “Oh. I was enjoying it.” A pause. “I can smell the sea.”

  Myri’s right – the wind has changed, and it’s fresher, cleaner. They’re nearly out. They’re nearly through.

  “We’re far enough south now, maybe, to be clear of the Kraken,” says Cari. “We get a boat at the fishing village. Sail as close as we can to Khebesh.” The sea is bigger than gods, she thinks, and it’s an odd thought, and not entirely hers.

  “It’s not far inland,” agrees Myri. She licks her broken lips with a blackened tongue. “In Khebesh, there are golden orchards of apples and figs. Wheat waving in the sun, behind the Ghost Walls.” Myri leans back against the inner wall of the skull. “I mean, fuck the masters of Khebesh, but it’ll be nice to get some real food. And to rest.” She closes her eyes.