The Broken God

by Gareth Hanrahan

  Others in Rasce’s army are made of harder stuff. Eshdana enforcers, who earned the ash in pirate raids or “business” overseas. Mercenaries and veterans of the Godswar. Even these soldiers might quail at setting foot in the tunnels under Guerdon, but they have nothing to fear tonight, for, as they descend, they’re joined by the third portion of his army. The ghouls wait there in the darkness, yowling and tittering. They grab the thieves, drag them into the underworld in crazed waltzes, or tug them forward down pitch-dark tunnels.

  Vorz accompanies Rasce, looking distinctly uncomfortable, his pale features rendered even more unnatural by the light of his aetheric lamp. One of the ghouls points and laughs at the little light. “Shut it off,” says Rasce, “we won’t need it. Trust our guides.”

  Alone of the company, though, Rasce can tell where they are. Even deep underground, he has reference points to navigate by. He knows the location of the New City at his back as surely as he knows his right hand, and he can also dimly perceive five points of light ahead of him, the five pebbles hidden by Baston within the walls of Mandel & Company. As his physical body moves away from the New City and closer to those five stones, he can track his progress through the underworld.

  They pass beneath the border of the New City, leaving the Lyrixian Occupation Zone. A breach of the Armistice and act of war if they walked down Mercy Street; instead, they walk a hundred feet beneath Mercy, through tunnels gnawed by the ghouls long before the streets above were named. They approach the Ishmeric Occupation Zone, and, as they do so, the ghouls begin to yowl in unison, a subterranean cacophony that hides them from the eyes of the gods. They pass by without incident.

  The Haithi Occupation Zone would be more of a challenge – the dead now patrol the labyrinthine tunnels under Holyhill. To avoid any confrontation, the ghouls lead Rasce and company on a long looping detour that runs under the northern portion of the Wash, under Duttin’s lithosarium, under ancient Castle Hill, to emerge briefly from a disused railway tunnel into the night air. Then they plunge back underground, down and down and down, into the ghoul tunnels that catacomb Gravehill.

  St Styrus’ Shaft is not far away, now.

  Rasce shifts his perception to the New City. For an instant, he senses a faint ghost of Spar Idgeson, in the same way one can tell that a room was recently occupied. The shade flees, and it’s much too small and weak to be conscious, let alone challenge him. No doubt lost in memory again, thinks Rasce. Perhaps that was as much the key to his triumph as any of Vorz’s tinctures and transfusions. Spar was consumed by thoughts of the past, but Rasce always looks to the future, to the days when he will soar again as Chosen of the Dragon.

  From the heights of the New City, he looks across Guerdon. A few candle-flames burn along the perimeter of the IOZ – and many more in the Fog Yards, guarding Mandel & Company. No doubt there are more Tallowmen waiting below in the darkness, or stationed at other watch posts. The creatures can cross the city with terrifying speed, leaping from rooftop to rooftop almost as fast as a dragon flies. As soon as the attack on Mandel’s begins, there will be a wildfire of reinforcements.

  Rasce looks to the south.

  A distant light. Fire at sea.

  It’s time.

  Karla wakes in utter darkness. She’s battered, every inch of her scratched and bruised as though she’d rolled down a mountainside, instead of…

  Instead of…

  Stone becoming liquid as it touched her. Sinking, the city passing through her, swallowing her. Devouring her. Entombed alive in a landslide that seemed to last for years.

  She screams, and her scream echoes off the vaulted ceiling of hell.

  And then she hears a voice, and it’s coming from her own mouth.

  “HELLO, KARLA.”

  The stink of ghoul, close at hand. The creaking of massive tendons as Rat squats down next to her.

  “Am I dead?”

  The sound of a rough tongue scraping over scaly lips. A lick of drool. “NOT YET. SOON MAYBE. BUT THERE IS WATER YOUR KIND CAN DRINK. AND THINGS LIVE HERE THAT I CAN KILL. THEY ARE NOT PLEASANT TO EAT, I THINK.” He throws something down nearby. Karla reaches out, probes it with her fingers. Matted fur, sticky blood… some sort of animal. But her blind exploration finds bird-talon feet, too, and a scaly tail, and soft, yielding eyeballs where no sane creature has eyes. A thing bred in the alchemists’ vats by mistake.

  “What is this place?”

  “A PRISON FOR DANGEROUS THINGS. WE KEPT THE LAST OF THE BLACK IRON GODS DOWN HERE. BUT AFTER CARILLON LEFT AND SPAR GREW WEAK, ELADORA DUTTIN CONVINCED ME WE SHOULD MOVE THEM TO ANOTHER HIDING PLACE. I WAS WRONG. I SHOULD NOT HAVE LISTENED.”

  Rat rises, stalks away from her in the darkness. She hears his hoof steps receding into the unknowable distance, but the voice that comes from her mouth is undiminished.

  “BUT I WILL PUT IT RIGHT, AND, OH, THEN I SHALL HAVE REVENGE.”

  He looks back at her, orange eyes glowing in the darkness. “EAT, CHILD. LIVE, AND SEE THE SURFACE AGAIN.”

  “This is going to be a mess,” mutters Sinter. He ambles across the little office in the lithosarium to the window, unable to sit still. “Come on, damn you. Sooner started, and sooner done.”

  Eladora Duttin looks up from her book. Sighing, she closes the heavy tome – Mondolin’s Aseria: A History Reconsidered – and puts down her pen. “We gave Mr Hedanson ample opportunity to take action. It’s certainly regrettable that he didn’t prove to be a more suitable agent.”

  “Damn right.” Sinter crosses the room again, looks down the corridor of cells. “I used to be good at this, you know. I ran the Keepers’ sanctified operations for ten years. I could tell you who makes a good tool. The right strings to pull. Now, I can’t even get one little grasping shit to kill another one. Assuming he could have managed it. Killing a saint is fucking hard. I know.” He turns back, crosses the room again.

  “This mood,” says Eladora, “does not become you.” She’s read this same page a dozen times. Noises from the dark city outside the window distract her. Every shout on the street outside, the rattle of carriages and the rumble of trains, all seem portentous, edged with danger. Tonight, she fears, is indeed going to be a fucking mess.

  Sinter stops his nervous pacing long enough to fix Eladora with a quizzical glare, then continues. “Any word from his highness?”

  Eladora gestures to one of the aethergraph machines on her desk. “He’s still cloistered with Kelkin and the guildmasters. When he last reported in, he said that the alchemists were still being… difficult.”

  “Keep a tight grip on that boy of his. Only real leverage we’ve got over a thing like him.” The defrocked priest scowls. “I remember the Patros saying the same about the alchemists to me when I was a noviciate. Faithless bastards. They’ll sell us all out if we don’t keep a tight leash on them.”

  “A city of nooses.” Eladora steeples her fingers. “That worked so well in the past.” And I have a noose of Black Iron around my own neck. A bargain unfulfilled.

  “We don’t know how far Vorz has taken the brat. Is he just god-touched, or has he fully beatified? Maybe we should have gone to the Keepers. Or the Bureau, and got a Haithi saint-hunter. Or—”

  “The weapons are available to Mr Hedanson,” says Eladora. “Clearly, the will to act was not. So, we must trust in Alic’s methods. And, failing that, we contain the problem as best we can.”

  Sinter opens the window, looks out south across the Wash. The heights of the New City glimmer in the distance. “Should have bloody started by now, shouldn’t it? Nemon set the dogs on each other. We should hear something from the watchers soon. A fucking mess.”

  “His scheme may not have worked. Rasce might not have turned on the Brotherhood, or they might have come to some arrangement. We have to proceed on the assumption that they still intend to attack Mandel & Company, and endanger the Armistice.” Eladora reaches for the second aethergraph. “I’ll check—”

  The first gunshot shatters the window.<
br />
  Sinter falls.

  Shattered, too.

  The second blows a hole through A History Reconsidered, showering Eladora in splinters and dust.

  She ducks under her desk as a hail of gunfire rains down on her lithosarium. The gunmen are on the rooftops opposite.

  “S-Sinter?” calls Eladora. The priest’s body quivers in the moonlight, then goes still. She stares at his corpse from her hiding place under the heavy desk, frozen in terror. Stares in horrified fascination at the ruin of what used to be his head. Broken teeth, and now a broken skull. Sinter’s brains, a lifetime of secrets and intrigue, spill out across her floor.

  Another barrage of gunfire. Bullets ricochet around the office. Plaster dust chokes the air. Gods, if one stray shot hits the wrong place…

  Another shot hits her desk, and she hears the delicate aethergraph machines shatter. She’s cut off. The city suddenly shrinks – a moment ago she was worried about all of Guerdon, connected to her agents in Castle Hill and the Fog Yards and the New City and further afield, the whole city occupying her thoughts. Now, all that exists for her is the little square of shelter offered by the heavy desk, while the gunfire rains down all around her.

  Eladora reaches over, grabs the third aethergraph, the one hidden under her desk. The soul of Alic Nemon’s son Emlin is in there, trapped in a constant loop. She shields it with her body, conscious of the fragility of the precious machine.

  Think. The aethergraphs are broken, but the cables are intact. The machines are alchemical reifications of sorcerous incantations, spells cast with wheels and wires and potions in jars. But she’s a sorcerer now, of sorts. Perhaps the least qualified Special Thaumaturge in recent history, but talented enough to replicate the aethergraph for long enough to send a message, a call.

  Send help.

  Baston wipes dust from his eye as he reloads. He knows the old lithosarium well – as a boy, friends had dared him to trespass in its abandoned cells, where people claimed the ghosts of Stone Men lingered. Later, when the thief-taker Jere Taphson and his crew took over, he recalls studying it, reporting back to the Fever Knight. Learning how to besiege the place, just in case the Brotherhood’s patience ran out and they wanted Taphson gone.

  There’s only one entrance on ground level, right in the middle. West wing is all cells, east wing has Taphson’s offices, barracks, an armoury. Least, that was what it was back when Taphson was alive. Now, it’s something else.

  He fires again, targeting the windows. Somewhere in there, Rasce told him, is the pebble Baston planted on Sinter. This is Duttin’s headquarters, her secret off-the-books lair. Baston’s surprised that she chose somewhere in the Wash. He’d have expected somewhere fancier, with the quality. A mansion in Bryn Avane, maybe, or a government building up on Castle Hill. Somewhere far away from the front lines, from the parts of the city Duttin sacrificed for her Armistice.

  Reload. Fire again.

  This is for you, Karla, he thinks, as he pumps shot after shot into what was once Taphson’s office. Maybe if he does enough damage, he can fix what was broken. Convince Rasce to step back from the brink, somehow reconcile him with Karla, free her from that prison. He curses himself for trying to play the game, trying to take the lead. All he’s good for is hurting people.

  He knows he hit someone with his opening barrage. Maybe Duttin’s already dead.

  This is for you, Fae. Another barrage of fire, the barrel hot enough to burn his gloved hand. The stink of phlogiston. Discarded cartridges fall from the rooftop, smouldering as they tumble down to the street below.

  Baston swings his rifle around, trains the scope on the gap between Castle Hill and Holyhill. There, leaping over the rooftops like a host of angry fireflies. The Tallowmen are coming, swarming up from the Fog Yards.

  Even if she’s bleeding out on the floor, Duttin won’t let her Tallowmen cross into the Ishmeric Occupation Zone. She has to preserve her precious Armistice to protect her Guerdon.

  Not his.

  His Guerdon is lost forever.

  He turns and flees into what was once the Wash, but is now the domain of mad gods.

  The armies of thieves go down the corpse-shaft.

  Perhaps it’s the only way down, but Rasce suspects the ghouls chose this route to mock their fellow travellers.

  The ghouls, inhumanly strong and agile, can scale the walls or swing from the chains that once used to lower corpses down for the ghouls’ feast. The humans have to descend in single file, down a stair that spirals along the edges of the shaft, steps unmentionably slick. Some, including Doctor Vorz, lose their nerve and have to be lowered on ropes, like corpses that don’t know they’re dead yet.

  Rasce is the first down. The first to search around the base of the shaft, wading through a mire born from the filth of centuries, gnawed bones protruding from the black slime like tree roots. He finds the entrance to the tunnel that Baston spoke of. It’s old, older than the shaft it connects to. He runs his fingers over the walls, and the carvings seem to writhe under his touch.

  “A temple of Black Iron,” whispers Vorz from behind him. The Dentist raises his lamp, conjuring shapes out of the darkness. “Ravellers, consuming sacrifices for the Black Iron Gods.”

  The amulet on Rasce’s chest squirms against his skin in an unsettling fashion. He lifts it out, tucks it between his undershirt and his leather cuirass. The motion makes his side hurt, the rocky scabs digging into the tightly laced armour.

  “Do you need more alkahest?” whispers the Dentist, opening his black bag.

  “No.”

  “More, ah, tincture?”

  “No.” Rasce checks his inner eye, looks out from the New City. At this distance, it’s an effort – he can dimly feel his mortal body stagger, the Dentist holding him upright – but he’s able to look out from the windows of the New City. He can see the lights of the Tallowmen moving, a swarm of fireflies, congregating at the lithosarium. Moving away from the Fog Yards. Good.

  “Up the tunnel!” shouts Rasce. “Smash the yliaster vats first, then take anything that isn’t nailed down! The dragon takes what he wishes, and, tonight, you are all blood of the dragon!”

  Ragged cheers, but the thieves are too cold and nervous to charge. There’s a great deal of hesitation over who should be first to navigate the tunnel. Rasce would prefer to lead the way himself, but the time is not right. Baston could keep them in line, he thinks to himself.

  The ghouls jeer at the idea of being sent to the front lines, so it comes down to the Ghierdana and the Brotherhood, and it’s the Brotherhood thieves who are pushed forward. They advance into the darkness.

  What will they find there, Rasce wonders. Wards? Traps? Armed guards, the narrow corridor a killing ground for alchemical weapons like heavy gas or knife-smoke. The sort of things Rasce has seen on battlefields from far above.

  Vorz makes him sit down. Insists on giving him more injections. “Wait until we have drawn out Mandel’s defenders,” whispers the Dentist, like he’s talking about pulling teeth. The ghouls cluster around, curious, leering at him. Jabbering among themselves, as if betting on when he’ll perish and be ready for eating.

  There’s every chance it might be very, very soon.

  The sound of gunfire echoes down the tunnel. Distant explosions. The attack has begun.

  It’s time.

  The dragon returns to Guerdon.

  This city is a wounded beast, thinks the dragon. The scars are plainly visible. He flies over the ruins of Queen’s Point, over the burned remains of Dredger’s yard. Wreckage from the invasion, scattered along the shore. The Haithi and Ishmeric Occupation Zones, like patches of disease.

  Even the New City is a mark of injury. A stone scab. This city is dying, thinks the dragon, even if it is in denial of its own mortality. Taras has sacked cities before. Feasted on their remains, and this will be little different.

  He circles down towards the towers of the New City. He can smell the mortals in those crowded towers, a mingling of scen
ts. Guerdonese, Severasti, Haithi. Folk from Jashan, from Mattaur, from Varinth and a dozen other lands.

  And beyond those towers, more towers, empty ones. Burned-out ruins.

  Vorz has made a study of those towers. Once, Carillon Thay fought a Keeper saint who wielded a flaming sword. The touch of the sword burned Carillon’s soul, and the city took the wound. The soul of the city burned.

  Vorz has determined that the reverse is also true.

  The dragon opens his jaws, and again the towers burn.

  For Rasce, it’s standing in the path of a raging hurricane – and the exhilarating joy of reaching up and seizing the wind, of directing the hurricane.

  He is with them as the people burn, as the dragon-fire consumes the towers and everyone inside them. The fires are so hot, the victims are consumed utterly, skin and muscle burning away in an eyeblink, the skeleton lingering a moment longer, then it too dissolves into the inferno.

  And the souls, the souls are captured in an alchemy of atrocity. All gods are carrion gods. The souls become fire, too, fire of a different sort. Raw power, flooding through the New City. Raw and full of pain. The dead don’t know they’re dead yet, don’t know they’ve been snatched from mortal existence and turned into fuel for miracles. Thousands of fiery meteors, souls crashing across the aether.

  Rasce draws on that power, channelling and shaping it. His blood burning, the stone scabs on his chest burning, everything’s fire and stone now, no distinction between the two, the aether and the material overlapping, god and man overlapping, and there’s nothing except his will, his power. He exhales, and his breath is hurricane fire. At this moment, he is the dragon.