The Broken God

by Gareth Hanrahan

  Only one of us gets to pass through the Ghost Walls, though. We only have one book.

  Cari lifts the Fucking Book. One corner is still stained with blood from when she fought off the ghouls. And Myri’s weak. Defenceless. One good swing…

  “Captain Hawse waited for us,” says Cari. “He kept the Rose riding at anchor in the bay, until Adro and I found our way out of the tunnels. Nearly drowned carrying the jade, so most of it’s at the bottom of the sea off Mattaur. But we made it.”

  She slings the pack on her back, the ornamented edge of the aethergraph digging into her sore ribs while the book scrapes the same vertebra as always. She’s really sick of dragging this stuff across the world.

  “Come on,” she says again. “We’ll rest in Yhandis.”

  Yhandis is wonderfully dull. It’s a few huts, a few leaky little boats, masts outlined against the tortured sky like armless signposts, as if to say “there’s nowhere to go from here”. Stony fields with a few goats grazing there. It’s all in a little enclave, surrounded on two sides by the new mountains and on the other two sides by the sea, with only a narrow pass affording access from the land. A sheltered place. Even the weather is dull and damp.

  Cari hides her cursed hand in a fold of her skirt, and bribes the sentries at the pass with emeralds. It’s that or have Myri blast them.

  The villagers look at them with suspicion. Cari tries to bargain for passage to Khebesh, but it turns out most of them never sail further than a few miles out. There’s one fisherman who might be willing to risk a longer voyage, Mad Quint, but he’s not due back until tomorrow.

  “We’ll wait,” says Cari. Like they have a choice.

  The villagers aren’t happy about that. Strangers out of the Godswar could bring anything with them, and it’s always more perilous at night. No one’s willing to offer them shelter.

  Cari points to one building, longer than the rest. A thin wisp of smoke rises from the roof, and the poles outside suggest it’s being used to smoke fish. Something about its outline reminds her of… of Captain Hawse’s books. There were once carvings on the door, too, but they’ve been hacked away. It was a temple to the Lord of Waters before it was a smokehouse. Declaring allegiance to a god here is probably like wearing a uniform in a regular war, or wearing the Five Knives gang kerchief in the Wash back in Guerdon.

  Still, people remember old oaths. Cari dredges up the memory of a prayer to the Lord of Waters, a plea for aid made by shipwrecked sailors. She leans towards one of the villagers, whispers it in the old man’s ear.

  “One night,” he says. “You can stay one night.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  “You spied on us?” Vorz bares his teeth and lunges for his bag of tricks. Baston grabs the alchemist’s hand, pins it to the desk, then punches Vorz in the face, stunning him, breaking his nose again. The pale man goes down in a tangle of limbs.

  Rasce doesn’t react. He picks up the bullet, holds it up to some light Baston cannot perceive. “I see it,” he says, dreamily. “There’s holy fire in this.” He reaches out his hand, holding the bullet above the stone floor. Then he tips it out. The bullet falls, and it’s like the stone is suddenly liquid, a marble pond. The bullet vanishes, ripples spreading out from the point of impact to break on the legs of the wooden desk, to splash against the toe of Baston’s boot. “And that’s that. What else did they have you do? What else did you tell them?”

  Baston shrugs. “Little enough they didn’t already know. But, boss – the gods in the street know that you’re going after Mandel & Company. They know about the tunnel. They’ll be waiting for you.”

  Rasce pours a glass of arax for himself, passes another to Baston. The Ghierdana prince sips the liquor. “You know, my friend, if you had taken the ash, I’d be obligated to kill you for this betrayal. Instead, I can act as I see fit. Tell me, Baston, if you were me, what would you do?”

  “Use the stone I planted and find Duttin’s Tallow Vats, and end them. Free the Rat, and work with the ghouls, the Brotherhood. Since the invasion, there are a lot of angry, scared people in this city. Give them weapons. Give them a champion. Give them… give them a future.” As he says those words, something touches Baston’s soul, and for an instant he sees as Rasce sees, as Cari must have seen. The whole shining promise of the New City whirls around him, a city made to be a refuge from the madness of the Godswar and the cruelty of tyrants. For an instant, it’s like a bomb going off inside his brain, and he soars.

  And then it’s gone. Baston staggers, holding on to the desk for support.

  Rasce leans back. “And the dragon? My Great-Uncle’s commands?”

  “He’ll have to be patient, won’t he? We can retake what we’ve lost, but not overnight. Take out Duttin’s Tallow Vats first. And then… gods below, Rasce, look out of the window. We’ve got a fucking army there. Give me time, and—”

  “Idiot!” spits Vorz from the corner. “There is no more time. The dragon returns tonight!”

  “You don’t know my Great-Uncle, Baston,” says Rasce. “Patience is not among the virtues of the dragon. Doctor Vorz, go you to the cellars. I shall have need of more residuum, for the visions I must seek.”

  The doctor drags himself upright. “I’m not finished your injections,” he says sourly.

  “Baston will attend to those.”

  Vorz skulks out.

  Baston picks up one of Vorz’s tinctures. The vial contains something reddish, like diluted blood. Dark shapes congeal and then unravel, forming and unforming. “Are you sure you want this in your veins?”

  “Look at me, friend.” Rasce gestures to the stony plates that have spread across his chest. “A little more adds little to my burden.” One by one, Baston injects the syringes into Rasce. Finally, he picks up the heavy alkahest syringe. Unlike the tincture, the alkahest must be injected into the flesh beneath the stony plates. The needle is made of steel, to punch through the stone.

  “Should I summon Karla?” asks Rasce. “She has the knack of it.”

  “No,” says Baston hastily. “I’ll do it.” His fingers fumble with the heavy syringe. As the alkahest diffuses, Rasce shudders with release.

  “Now. I shall see.”

  The vision shows Rasce a room he has never seen before, but it’s thick with familiarity, a patina of Idgeson’s memories on every surface. It’s a prison cell of sorts, a large room, mostly flooded with stagnant water, with a small artificial island in the middle. A cell for Stone Men, who might otherwise use their tremendous strength to smash through the bars.

  Jere Taphson’s lithosarium, although he has no idea who this Taphson is or what he meant to Spar.

  His mind drifts in the vision, passing through the walls like a ghost.

  Many of the cells are occupied, but not by Stone Men. Other saints, other powers. In one of the flooded rooms, he glimpses a god-touched mermaid swimming through the water, her body partially transformed into a Kraken. A young red-haired woman lying motionless in a bed, eyes glassy and unseeing. A sailor, with bronzed skin and blue-tinged lips, bloodied by a recent beating.

  A collection of oddities.

  Tallowmen stand watch outside. The flames burning in their heads flicker as Spar passes by.

  Voices draw him in. His awareness moves down the corridor, towards an office. Now, he’s an invisible presence, his entry permitted by a pebble hidden in the pocket of a priest’s robe, hung on one of a pair of a hooks on the wall.

  Three people. Rasce recognises two of them – Eladora Duttin and Alic Nemon. The third is an ugly man in a priest’s cassock.

  “Still nothing?” asks Eladora. She’s seated behind a heavy desk. Two aethergraph machines on her desk, and a third – disconnected, looped into itself – on the floor by her feet. A cold cup of coffee, undrunk next to a stack of reports.

  “Nothing.” Sinter sucks at his broken teeth. “I don’t know if Hedan’s boy took the shot and failed, or if he lost his nerve.”

  “What about our other informants?�
��

  “Hard for any of my street-scum to get close. Not with the fucking streets watching. And there’s no time, anyway. They’re hitting the Fog Yards tonight. It’s going to be a fucking mess.”

  “We have our own interests in Mandel & Company to consider, of course,” says Nemon. The minister is not a small man, but he has the knack of fading into the background when he wishes to be forgotten. He looks around the room, and Rasce’s suddenly worried that Nemon can tell he’s being watched. “But Mandel assures me his defences are ready for any assault. Our task will be to contain the damage – and convince Ishmere and Haith that the Armistice holds.”

  “With the fucking Ghierdana running rampant across half the city? The only fucking reason the war stopped is because Haith needs the weapons we supply ’em. If they hear the Ghierdana are going after the alchemists…” Sinter groans and buries his face in his hands. “Godshit. I remember smuggling relics out of the monastery on Beckanore ten years ago, before the Haithi torched it. All part of the same fucking deal. Without alchemical weapons, Haith’s fucked. They won’t stand aside. It’ll be a fucking mess, I tell you.”

  “To my mind,” says Nemon, “the situation has run its course. The threat from Rasce’s attacks was enough to force the alchemists to put the Tallowmen under our control, and prompt parliament to reverse the ban on making more. We have the Tallows now.”

  “‘We’,” echoes Sinter scornfully. “Do we now, minister?”

  “Enough,” snaps Eladora. “Say you’re right, Alic. What do you propose?”

  “The other Ghierdana families are already irritated by Rasce. Doubtless nervous, too, if they know what he can do. We send the Tallowmen into the New City – tonight, before Taras returns. We pray that the other dragons do not intervene.”

  “An attack on the Ghierdana has to be met with retribution. That’s their code. ’S’why we needed Hedanson to pull the fucking trigger,” adds Sinter. “Little shit. Can’t get the staff, these days.”

  “I won’t countenance an attack on the New City,” says Eladora. Nemon opens his mouth to object, but Eladora drops one hand beneath the desk and taps on the aethergraph.

  “All right,” says Nemon, “then set them on each other. We let Rasce know what happened in the inn.”

  “How will you do that?”

  “Walls have ears.” He crosses the room and plucks the pebble from its hiding place.

  Baston leaves the house on Lanthorn Street. As he closes the door, strange lights blaze from the walls in Rasce’s room. The air’s thick with magic. Static electricity crawls and leaps; Baston orders some of his lads to move the stocks of phlogiston away from the house, in case of explosion. When he opens his mouth, though, he finds himself reciting lines from the writing of Idge. Baston clenches his jaw and gestures at the crates instead.

  Outside, the sun’s setting over the harbour, the sullen red light touching the ruins of Queen’s Point fortress across the bay. Baston climbs up one of the other towers to get a look at the border. There are a few candle-flames visible on rooftops, but fewer than other nights. He can guess where the Tallowmen have gone – they’re waiting at the other end of the tunnel.

  Karla joins him. A rifle slung over her shoulder, a breathing mask hanging from her neck. Ready for the attack.

  “How did it go?” she asks.

  Baston glances back towards the house. Light still blazes from the windows, where Rasce communes with an unseen power.

  “I got to punch Vorz.”

  “That’s something.” She leans her head on his shoulder. “I don’t want to go below, Bas,” she says softly. “Not like Dad. I don’t want to die in the dark.”

  He nods towards the distant fires of the Tallowmen. “I was always more scared of those lights.”

  “I guess we’ll have our pick of troubles,” says Karla.

  “I’ve told him that it’d be madness to press on. He’ll listen. Spar will make him see reason.”

  Baston glances back. The light has faded from Lanthorn Street. Rasce is done.

  The city trembles, almost imperceptibly. Then again, a bigger quake.

  “Something’s wrong.” Baston can feel the magic in the air turn sour.

  “Oh gods,” breathes Karla, and then she breaks into a run, dragging Baston down the stairs, out onto the street. “He knows! Rasce knows!” Terror in her eyes, like the mad gods are at her heels.

  Hand in hand, the two stumble down Lanthorn Street, but it’s too late. The ground beneath their feet turns treacherous and clutches at them, slowing their steps. Hot, angry winds blow down the canyons of the narrow streets, buffeting them. Everyone – even Baston’s thieves – backs away from them, a circle forming around them.

  Like they’re the target for an artillery bombardment, and everyone’s trying to get clear of the blast zone.

  Karla unslings her rifle, but it’s too late.

  Rasce approaches, like a wrathful god. The stone burns beneath his feet. His jacket hangs open, and his chest is bare. The stone scabs on his side blaze with the same light. He limps towards them, every step causing the city to convulse. His eyes are closed, but his wrathful gaze is every window, every tower.

  In his hand, the dragon-tooth knife.

  Vorz comes running after him, alchemist’s robes like wings, panic on his face.

  Rasce gestures, and Karla falls, like a trapdoor’s opened up in the ground beneath her. She drops two feet in an instant. The street has swallowed her legs, the stone turned to quicksand, now solid again. She’s trapped, half entombed in the New City.

  “You killed my cousin!” shouts Rasce.

  “It was Mandel!” she shrieks. “Mandel! Vyr was plotting against you, you said it yourself! You’re wrong! Baston, tell him he’s wrong!”

  Baston opens his mouth, but no sound comes. He’s not wrong.

  “How much of the dragon’s gold have you stolen? How else have you betrayed me? You broke your oath, Eshdana! You all conspire against me.” Rasce’s voice becomes a wail, almost child-like in its anguish. “I thought you were my friends!”

  Baston steps forward, putting himself between Rasce and Karla. His hands close into fists, but he knows that Rasce’s invulnerable to any weapon he could bring to bear. The only thing that could kill him was Sinter’s bullet, and that’s gone. Baston cannot protect his sister against Rasce, any more than he could hold back the floodwaters. The saint trick, he thinks, desperately. Name him.

  “I am your friend. Rasce of the line of Taras,” he says slowly, carefully, “Boss. Chosen of the Dragon.”

  Nothing happens. It’s not enough.

  “My friend,” says the saint, “stand aside of your own will.”

  “I can’t, boss. She’s my sister.”

  “She betrayed me. She has broken her oath to the Ghierdana. But, oh!” Rasce grins, and his teeth glow with the same holy light, “she can still serve the dragon. Doctor Vorz tells me we shall need sacrifices.” He gestures with the knife, a little flick of the blade, and Baston’s flung aside. “Give me your heart, my love! An offering! A bloody sacrifice!”

  NO.

  The word is unspoken, but it’s like thunder, a hammer blow that hits all of them. Karla screams. Baston staggers, half-blind. Rasce brandishes his knife at the city around him.

  “You betrayed me, too! Wretch! You stood by as she poisoned me! I shall—”

  The city convulses, and so does Rasce. Tremors race through the stone. The stone plates on Rasce’s chest blaze, and then begin to grow. Rasce’s breathing becomes laboured. He falls to his knees and stabs at the pavement with the dragon-tooth, screams words in a tongue Baston doesn’t understand. Baston grabs Karla, tries to pull her out of the ground, but she’s stuck fast.

  “The dagger! The dagger!” shouts Karla.

  The dragon-tooth can cut stone. Baston crawls across the quaking ground, and every inch he gets closer to Rasce, the pressure redoubles, as though the whole of the New City is falling on him. Rasce is screaming, blood bub
bling from his mouth. The dagger falls from nerveless fingers.

  Suddenly, Vorz steps into the middle of that divine whirlwind. He holds aloft a black amulet. Carillon’s amulet, Baston thinks distantly. Cari wore that. Vorz has to strain to move the amulet – it’s caught in the grasp of invisible forces.

  “Spar Idgeson!” shouts Vorz. “I compel you! Remember your death! Remember the fall! Remember!”

  WHERE’S CARI?

  If Spar’s first word was like thunder, this is a cannon-blast. It smashes Vorz aside, sending him flying. The amulet tumbles – and Rasce catches it.

  “This is my city now. The dragon takes what he desires. If you shall not claim this power, I shall.”

  He slams it down into the ground.

  “Begone!”

  And it’s over. The sense of divine presence vanishes, snuffed out in an eye blink. There’s only Rasce, terrible and glorious. He draws himself back upright. Picks up the dagger with his other hand and takes a lumbering step towards Karla. “Your life is forfeit.” She scrapes her fingers bloody trying to claw her way out of the stone trap. She grabs her rifle from where it fell and fires it point-blank into Rasce’s chest. The walls of Lanthorn Street echo with the gunshot, but Rasce is undamaged. “Monster!” she spits at him.

  “Wait!” Baston pleads desperately.

  “Not you, too, Baston.” Rasce wipes blood from his mouth. “Not more treachery.”

  “I’ll take the ash. I’ll be Eshdana.” The words stick in his throat. They’re like a noose around his neck.

  Vorz sneers as he stumbles to Rasce’s side. “An irrelevant technicality.”

  “A measure of indulgence,” says Baston. “Please.”

  The whole city seems to wheel around them. Everything’s unmoored.

  “Doctor Vorz,” snaps Rasce. The doctor extends his hand. He’s wearing black leather gloves, but they’re dusted with ash. Rasce dips his finger in the ash, then marks Baston’s forehead.