Her eyes fall on another wonder. There, kicked into a corner, is her own little box that used to stand by her bunk. She filled it with treasures collected across the world. Coins from Lyrix, stolen – she was told – from a dragon’s hoard, blessed with the monster’s luck.
A playbill from a theatre in Jashan. Captain Hawse brought her there for her eighteenth birthday. They both dressed up for the occasion; Hawse had insisted. Cari wore a ballgown, and it was like a glimpse into another life, one in which she’d been born into a regular, wealthy family, instead of crazed demon-worshippers who bred her to be a herald to nightmare gods.
A petrified dragon’s scale. Scrimshawed whalebone. Blue jade from Mattaur.
But the box is empty now. There’s nothing there.
She only has one of those treasures left, and it wasn’t what she thought it was. Cari once thought the amulet she wears at her neck was a gift from her unknown mother. It was only years later, in Guerdon, that she learned the truth – that it was made by her grandfather, a ritual talisman for communing with the Black Iron Gods. She treasures it still, for her own reasons. It’s a reminder that she can take whatever the world throws at her and refashion it into a weapon. Everything’s a weapon if you’re willing to use it. And she has a second treasure, now – the fucking book. The weight of it reminds her she can’t linger here.
Wiping her eyes – it’s very dusty in there – she emerges back on deck. The masts have been cut down. The stumps that used to be the Rose’s graceful masts offend her to her core, and she adds whoever wrecked the ship to her shit list.
Across the deck, there’s the door to Captain Hawse’s cabin.
And in the doorway, Captain Hawse. Older, greyer, smaller somehow, but still himself.
A sword in his hand.
“Are you a dream?” demands Hawse. “A spirit, sent to torment me?”
Part of her wants to rush across the deck and hug the old man. Another part, the part that fought on the streets of Guerdon, watches that sword. He’s got reach, you’ve got speed, thinks that part of herself, and she hates it.
“It’s me. It’s Cari.”
“Cari,” echoes Hawse. He blinks, raises one hand to shade his eyes from the rising sun. “It is you. You came back.”
“Sort of.” Cari shrugs awkwardly.
“You left!” says Hawse, with apparent surprise, as if he just remembered the circumstances of their parting. “You just jumped ship. It was in Severast. We were in Severast, and you left without a word.” He shakes the sword at her. “After all I did for you.”
“There were fucking words beforehand,” Cari replies before she can stop herself. This isn’t what she wants, to go over decade-old arguments. “You didn’t listen to me.”
“Oh, I remember. Full of ideas, you were. Stealing from the Eyeless priests! Saying we should smuggle wine-of-poets out of Jashan. Making a run to the Silver Coast! A slip of a girl, telling me how to run my ship!”
Cari glances around at the wreck of the Rose, at the empty hulk lying in the sun. “Yes, well, you’ve clearly made a great success of it without me.”
He laughs at that, a chuckle that’s half a snarl. He waves the sword at her. “Cari. Where have you been? Why are you here?”
“All over. Guerdon. And…” She shrugs. “A dead guy with a fish for a head led me here.”
“That was a holy Bythos. Emissary of the Lord of Waters,” says Hawse reverently. Cari vaguely recalls the Lord of Waters as the Ilbariner sea-god.
“There was a shoal of them out there before dawn.”
“I know. The war broke the Lord of Waters, child, and his servants are lost. They wander the streets every night.” Hawse yawns, and Cari notices how old he’s become, how his jaw trembles. How much it costs him to lift that sword. She takes a step towards him, hesitantly, then another and another.
The sword comes back up. “What do you want? Nothing here for you to take.”
“I was looking for a ship. I need to get to Khebesh.” She nearly adds “sir”.
“The Rose is wrecked. You can see that.”
“But you used to know people in Ilbarin City. You’ve got to know someone with a ship, Hawse, you’ve got to. I’ve got to get to Khebesh. Please.”
Hawse lowers the sword. Cari takes another step forward, but he turns away from her. He digs around in his pockets, finds his pipe. Fills it, his hands shaking.
“I took you in. I remember you trying to sneak on board, making enough noise to wake the dead. With your hair cut short, wearing trousers pinched from some farmer. And that voice!” Hawse mimics an absurdly deep, gravelly voice. “Begging your pardon, captain, but I’m a boy who ran away to sea. I’ll work my passage. I’ll scrub the decks, do whatever.”
“I fucking did work, though,” says Cari, cheeks flushing. It’s ancient history now, of course, but she thought she’d kept her secret for years. She remembers nervously admitting to Hawse that she was a girl, the look of surprise on his face giving away to laughter. She’d always believed he was laughing at his own foolishness in not seeing the truth.
“You did. I can’t fault you on that. Best topman I ever had. You proved Adro wrong – he said I should have sent you home.”
“Adro said that?” She and the first mate were friends for years; he was like a brother to her. A big ox of a man. They’d planned to conquer the world together, go crawling the dockside taverns together. She smiles at the memory.
“I stopped Dol Martaine from hurting you,” says Hawse, harshly. “He’d have cut your throat and dumped you over the side. But, no, I gave you a place on my ship. And then you left.”
“Look, I was pissed. I’m sorry, I should have—”
“Do you still have that amulet?” asks Hawse, turning back to her.
Cari unclasps it and hands it to him. Hawse holds it up to the light of the rising sun. “Remember that time in Ilbarin, you ran off and pawned this ugly thing. Threw the ticket into the bloody sea. Then came crying to me that night, begged me to help you get it back.”
“I remember,” says Cari. “I… look, I didn’t know back then, but I… my family, back in Guerdon, they…” She struggles for words. How can she convey the strangeness of her origins, the terrible destiny that was made for her? The dreams that haunted her when she was a child, the nameless terror that drove her to flee across the world. She knows now that it was the Black Iron Gods calling for their herald from their prison, but, back then, she only knew that she was always, always in the wrong place. Always feeling dangerous, like some great doom was following her, and if she stayed in one place too long it would fall upon her. “I can’t talk about it.”
Hawse snorts in anger. “You always had one eye on the door. Always looking to the horizon, to the next port. Six years on board my ship, and you just walked away.” He throws the amulet back to her. “So walk away. Go on. Go to Khebesh, if they’ll take you. Or go back to Guerdon for all I care. There’s nothing for you here.”
The door of his cabin slams shut, leaving her alone on the deck.
CHAPTER FOUR
Baston Hedanson debates the best way to kill the man standing at his doorstep.
“Can I come in?”
Tiske stands there, hands twisting nervously, beefy face half hidden by a hood. Laughing no longer. He looks like he’s been through the wars – he has that hunched, furtive look of a man who fears the wrath of the gods.
The proper thing to do, of course, is hang him from a drainpipe. That was what the Brotherhood used to do to traitors. String them up, where everyone could see them, as a reminder that the Brotherhood owned the streets of Guerdon. It was a warning, too, to the politicians and priests that they weren’t the only powers in the city. The authorities hung Idge, the great leader of the Brotherhood, from the gallows on Mercy Street, after Idge refused to recant, refused to betray the movement he’d led. A gutter death in some alley in the Wash wasn’t a mockery of that martyrdom; it honoured it.
“I just want to talk,”
says Tiske.
Drowning? The murky waters of the harbour are only a few streets away. Many a better man than Tiske has met an end there. You have to weigh the body down with stones, so it’s eaten by fish and not by ghouls. These days, even the corpse-eaters are informants.
“I don’t mean you any harm. The dragons didn’t send me, I swear.”
Burning? Now there’s a strong candidate.
It could be argued that Tiske deserves to burn.
Tiske makes the sign with his hand, the old distress signal of the Brotherhood. By tradition, no member of the Brotherhood of Thieves can refuse aid to one who makes that sign.
That sign shouldn’t hold any power over Baston now.
It does, though. A little. Enough to buy Tiske another few minutes’ life.
“Come in.” Tiske pushes past him, down the narrow hallway, into the kitchen. He peers out into the cramped yard behind the house
“Who is it?” calls Baston’s sister Karla from the floor above.
“Tiske.”
“Don’t murder him until I’m dressed.”
Baston advances into the kitchen. There was a time when Tiske would have been a regular visitor to this isolated house, Tiske and the rest of the Brotherhood’s inner circle. Heinreil, Tammur, Pulchar. Baston’s father, Hedan, too. His father grew up in this little house, and kept it even after his fortunes rose and he bought the big place up in Hog Close. Fortunes made and lives lost over this little kitchen table.
Baston recalls the Fever Knight standing guard outside that back door, the sound of rainwater dancing on the bodyguard’s armour.
Every one of them is dead, or gone – just like the Brotherhood.
“Your father,” says Tiske, “always had a bottle of wine to hand, for guests.”
“No. For friends.”
Tiske’s face falls. “I’d never wish harm on you and yours. I stood with you at the funeral, remember?” Funerals, thinks Baston, plural. Two in the last two years. His wife, Fae, was never part of the Brotherhood. She was nothing to do with this life at all. Fae was his second chance, his clean slate, and she’d died, too.
“I’d have carried your father’s body to the sisters with you,” continues Tiske, unaware he’s stepped on a mine, “if they’d ever found his remains.”
“And then you took the ash. You broke faith with the Brotherhood, and joined up with the Ghierdana.”
Tiske bristles. “I never broke faith. But I wasn’t going to shackle myself to a body that was already halfway down the corpse-shaft. The Brotherhood was as good as gone before I left.” He holds up his hands, like a priest giving a blessing. “I know you don’t see things the same way, Baston, but truth’s truth.”
We could have rebuilt, thinks Baston, if you and the others stayed true. It would have been hard, he knows that, with so many of their number dead in the chaos. But there’d been opportunity, too. The New City sprouting from the ruins – a literal rebirth of hope. If the Brotherhood had been united, they could have seized that divine blessing, taken the New City for their own. Instead, it fell into the claws of dragons, and the Brotherhood stayed broken.
“Tiske,” says Baston, “what do you want?”
“I want you to come up to the New City with me.”
“I won’t take the ash.”
Tiske rubs his forehead. “I’m not saying that. But—”
From outside, an uncanny sound, a chittering whisper.
“Quiet,” snaps Baston. Both men freeze.
Through the window, they see a spider’s leg the size of a tree trunk in the yard outside, stepping over the adjoining derelicts. Fine hairs bristle on the leg of the god-thing, twitching like antennae. Baston peers out – the spider-spirit straddles the house. The creature is only half real, its substance skittering in and out of the mortal world, moonlight reflecting off a shifting fog-bank. Eight eyes stare down at Baston as it probes his mind. He feels it, or imagines he feels it, picking its way over the folds in his brain.
He pushes his thoughts down deep. Weighs them down and drowns them in the dark recesses of his mind. Lets his conscious mind fill with quotidian thoughts – he wonders if there’ll be work down at the docks tomorrow morning, tries to recall if there’s bread in the cupboard, reminds himself to fix a broken window upstairs.
Finding nothing, the spider moves on, picking its way with unnatural lightness over the terraced rows of houses. From the street outside, Baston hears the chanting of the Ishmeric priests as they follow the emanation of their god on its nightly inquisition.
Tiske exhales. “By all the hells, Baston, how do you still live here with those things crawling around?”
It’s a fair question. And not one for which Baston has a good answer.
“Have you killed him yet?” Karla enters the room, pulling a shawl around her shoulders. “Hello, Tiske. Baston, if you’re going to murder someone here, put down a towel first.”
“There was a sentinel,” warns Tiske hastily. “It just passed.”
“I felt it. Oh, the gods of Ishmere don’t care much what we faithless do to each other. They only look for threats to the Sacred Realm.” Karla bustles around the kitchen. “Do you want a drink, Tiske?”
“Listen. This is for you, too, Karla,” says Tiske. “There’s a new Ghierdana boss. A young fellow, Chosen of the Dragon. He needs locals who know the streets. He’ll pay. Come on, lad, come up to the New City and meet him.”
“No,” says Baston.
Karla laughs. “Baston won’t take the ash, Tiske. He’s Brotherhood till the day he dies.”
Tiske reddens with frustration. “And when will that be? When some giant fucking spider decides you’re a sinner? When the clouds eat you? When High Um—”
“Don’t say a name,” snaps Karla. Mentioning a god by name is perilous.
Tiske catches himself. He spreads his hands across the table, takes a slow breath, smiles a sad, weary smile. “Do you remember what it was like before the Tallowmen?”
“How young do you think we are, Tiske?” says Karla from the window. Tiske knew their father, knew them when they were children. He still thinks of them that way. It’s how he can get away with calling Baston Hedanson “lad”. Baston’s north of thirty.
They’d have been nine or ten, still living up on Hog Close, when the alchemists’ creations were first loosed on Guerdon. The wax monsters were made out of condemned thieves, remade to hunt down their former brothers. Baston used to have nightmares about looking out of his bedroom window and seeing the face of his father lit from within by candle-flame.
“Ah, back then, things made sense to a simple man like myself. No gods except the Kept up on Holyhill, and the watch were flesh and blood. You could bribe ’em to look the other way, and they all knocked off at sundown. Then they sent the Tallows, and we were fucked.”
“The Brotherhood,” says Baston, “was fucked when Heinreil took over.”
Tiske sounds bashful, like he’s speaking beyond his remit. “The Dentist was running things in Guerdon, but he’s left now. The new boss, Rasce – he’s just a boy, green as canal-weed. He doesn’t know the city at all. I came to you first, Baston, I came to you because it’s an opportunity. They have money, power – and they can’t be touched, up in the New City.” Tiske peers out of the window at the distant shape of the sentinel, and shudders. “Get in with him now, and you’ll have the dragons on your side when you need ’em.”
Baston stays seated until the front door shuts behind Tiske. He doesn’t trust himself not to do something violent to the older man, so better to stay put until he’s gone.
Karla studies her brother from across the room, letting the rain and the distant chanting from the temples fill the silence. It’s a comfortable silence. Karla’s silver-tongued and can talk for hours with people she despises, charm them and enchant them, and they’ll never know it’s an act. Words are a costume for her; it’s in silence that she’s her true self.
Baston’s house has been very, very quiet sinc
e his sister moved in to take care of her widowed brother. A long, slow silence, where he could heal.
Karla watches, and waits, and thinks. Finally, she speaks.
“You should do it. Meet with this Rasce at least.”
“Why should I go to the Ghierdana to sell my soul, when I could spit on a dozen temples from here?”
“So long as spitting is all you’re doing to them,” says Karla. She pulls the shawl up over her head. “I’ve got to go out. There’s dinner in the pot – or are you going out to Pulchar’s?” Pulchar’s restaurant used to be a Brotherhood haunt, back when there was a Brotherhood. Now, it’s just a few tired old men reminiscing.
“Not tonight.”
A quick kiss on the cheek, a reassuring squeeze of his shoulder. “Think about what Tiske said. We don’t have many friends left. It might be good to make some new ones.”
And she’s gone. Baston doesn’t know where his sister goes, which temple she worships at, or if she has some other business. He wonders if she’ll come back tonight, to sleep in that little attic room intended for a child’s bed.
He hopes she does. This house feels like it should be haunted, but it’s empty of ghosts.
Too full of gods.
The next morning, he goes down to the docks. That means leaving the Ishmeric Occupation Zone, means waiting in line at the checkpoint for an hour, shuffling along until it’s his turn before the sentry-clerics.
“Name?”
“Baston Hedanson.”
“What business?”
“Docker.”
The mad-eyed cleric studies him for a moment, as if he can see into Baston’s soul, then reaches up and anoints him with foul-smelling oil.
“Blessing expires at sunset,” snaps the cleric, “and then thy soul is forfeit to Cruel Urid, watcher of the night hours.”
Baston trudges down the hill, joining the crowd of dockworkers who jostle for labour every morning along Guerdon’s wharves. The others back away from Baston, give him space. They remember who he used to be.
The Broken God Page 5
