The Broken God

by Gareth Hanrahan

  “Taken from the dragon’s maw, and it marks me as the dragon’s favourite. Do not touch it, or I would be honour bound to kill you.”

  “So I’ve heard. Can you use it, or is it an ornamental piece?”

  “I can use it.”

  “Aye, aye.” Baston watches the light glimmer on the blade for a moment. “I’m in – on one condition. You’re coming, too.”

  “The point of hiring you,” says Vyr, “is to ensure the attack cannot be blamed on the Ghierdana.”

  “Or maybe the point of hiring us is so you can set us up.”

  “You come to our house and you dare accuse us of treachery?” Vyr goes for his own dagger, but Baston’s quicker. He springs to his feet, grabs Vyr’s wrist and pins it. “It was your father who tried to move in on the old Brotherhood territory last year, wasn’t it? Artolo, right?

  “Baston, I wouldn’t lie to you!” shouts Tiske, leaping up, too.

  “You did take the ash, Ben,” remarks Karla lightly. Like Rasce, she too has remained seated.

  “If the dragon wanted you dead—” begins Vyr, but Rasce interrupts him.

  “The dragon does not want you dead.” Rasce picks up the dagger, flips it in the air, and thrusts it into his belt. “And battle holds no fear for me. I shall be with you at Dredger’s yard. And to put your fears at ease, we’ll bring Vyr, too. Isn’t that right, Vyr?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Waking is always bad. The long scar on Artolo’s belly hurts, a dull ache. Groaning, he throws back the silken sheets, reaches for the glass jar that holds his pills.

  The idiot servants have put the lid back on. How many times must he tell these Ilbariners to leave the lid off in the morning? Artolo snarls and bats at the lid with his maimed hands. No fingers, no thumbs, just stumps. The horror still hits him every time he looks at his ruined body.

  He sweeps the heavy jar off the nightstand. It shatters on the tiles. Shards of glass and brownish lozenges scatter across the floor, some becoming lost under the ornate furniture. An oil-painting portrait of some long-dead Ilbarin minister or priestess stares down at him from her golden frame, as if disapproving of the criminal that now rules in her palace.

  The door opens a crack. One of the servants looks in. “My lord? I heard something break.”

  “Where is my witch?

  “I don’t know, my lord. I’ll go and look—” the servant pleads.

  “No. Come in here. Help me.” The servant enters the room like a mouse, his hands twitching, shoulders flinching as broken glass cracks underfoot.

  “Get me a pill,” orders Artolo. The servant rushes over, finds one of the pills, holds it out. “In my mouth.” He sticks out his tongue, and the servant places the pill there with outstretched arm, outstretched fingers like he’s reaching into a dragon’s maw. Artolo sucks the sticky lozenge, feeling it numb the inside of his cheek, his throat.

  The servant’s wholeness irritates him. The servant comes from Ilbarin. His homeland is drowned and ruined, his gods broken, his leaders fled. He’s lost – so how dare he stand so proud? How dare he remain unblemished? It’s an insult. A deliberate insult.

  “Now my boots.” The servant glances at Artolo in confusion – Artolo slept naked. “There is glass everywhere – would you have me go barefoot?”

  The servant fetches Artolo’s heavy boots from the wardrobe. They’re his old dragon-riding boots, armoured, steel-toed. Steel hooks at the ankles, designed to lock into the saddle-straps. He hasn’t flown since he lost Great-Uncle’s favour, but they’re still his boots. The servant helps him pull them on, one at a time. Artolo gives the servant a reassuring smile as the Ilbariner works the buckles. Artolo’s useless hands sit in his lap.

  “Now, clean. Be sure not to lose a single pill. Each one’s worth more than your life.”

  The servant nods. Crawls over on his knees, starts picking up the pills and piling them on the nightstand.

  Artolo stands. The pain of the old knife wound in his belly’s gone. He stretches, feels the warmth of the morning sun on his back as it shines through the window. “Did Dosca’s ship come in last night?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Good. Good.” Artolo looks out of the window at the rooftops of Ushket, at the cluster of masts in the port. Contemplates the light dancing on the water, the reflections on the walls of the buildings around the half-flooded streets.

  Then he slams his boot into the servant’s face. Stamps on the servant’s hand, grinding his boot to press the servant’s fingers into the broken glass. Kicks the man in the stomach, twisting his heel so the boot-hooks tear the flesh. The servant’s other hand, too, deserves attention. Artolo wrenches the portrait off the wall. The thing’s fucking heavy, and he can’t get a proper grip with his maimed hands, but he manages to sort of twist it as it falls, so the sharp-edged corner of the heavy frame lands squarely on the servant’s palm. The painting falls with a crash. The servant starts to scream, but Artolo fumbles a silk pillow off the bed and shoves it at the man’s face. The servant buries his mouth in the pillow, muffling his whimpers and groans.

  “Gods below.” The witch stands at the doorway. Her voice drips with revulsion, but the metal face on the helmet is expressionless.

  “You’re late,” snaps Artolo. He kicks the servant again for emphasis. “This is your fault.”

  “There was a problem with Dosca,” says the witch. Her suit whirs and clicks; some clever magical clockwork hisses as it injects her with her own painkillers. They’re both damaged goods, debris from the wars. Discarded on this ruin of an island.

  “Gloves first,” he orders. The witch opens the wardrobe, takes out Artolo’s heavy riding gloves. She removes her own gauntlets, studded with little shards of ruby like spots of blood, exposing her hands. Her flesh is marbled, scarred with forking, coiling burn marks. The lines of nerves set alight by sorcery, Artolo guesses – humans aren’t made for working magic. She needs to be free of the unwieldy gauntlets, though, to strap on his gloves properly.

  “Any word from my son?” asks Artolo. His son Vyr has hired doctors and artificers in Guerdon to make him a set of mechanical fingers, like the witch’s suit.

  “I told you, that sort of precision work takes time.”

  “And much money,” says Artolo sourly. “For the price they charge, they should be done by now. If I was there—”

  “Would you beat them, too?” mutters the witch. “Ready?”

  Artolo grunts in acknowledgement. The witch takes his gloved hands in hers, and concentrates. Artolo can feel the invisible filaments of sorcery pushing against the stumps, worming their way into his own nerves. The gloves flex, inflate, stiffen. A thrill runs through his hands as the witch’s spell takes hold. He feels the ghosts of finger-bones form within the gloves, feels spectral muscles and sinews sprout and knit themselves into his living flesh. He flexes his new hands, feeling the strength in them again, better than any drug.

  The witch lets out a groan, and her suit fusses over her. It clacks as it injects more drugs, leeches poisons from her. Aetheric energy discharges from the suit in crackling arcs of blue light. She leans heavily against the wardrobe as she laboriously pulls her gauntlets back on. Tendrils of smoke rise from her blistered fingers.

  Artolo whistles as he pulls on a shirt and watches the servant laboriously pick up every spilled pill with broken fingers. Fastening each button is a joy. It’s the little things. The witch’s spell will only last a day or so before it will have to be cast again, but until then he’s whole.

  He wonders how long she’ll last at this rate. If she dies, he’ll have to hire the fucking Crawlers again, and he has no desire to sit across a negotiating table from those wormy horrors. They demanded a fortune the last time he dealt with them.

  “What happened with Dosca?” he asks.

  “The gunboat caught him trying to go to Ilbarin City first.”

  “What was he planning on doing? Stealing raw brine?”

  “He had a passenger on board
who paid for passage to Ilbarin,” says the witch. “That’s all. He’ll know better in future.”

  “Who was this passenger?”

  “No sign of them. Must have jumped ship as soon as they got here.” The witch starts to reattach her own gauntlets, laboriously plugging little wires and veins back into place.

  “But you have a description, yes? Dosca told you who this passenger was, yes?” Something’s amiss. Artolo takes the witch’s blistered fingers, squeezes them – gently, but with enough pressure to hurt, enough to remind her who’s in charge.

  “A woman. From Guerdon. No name, but the crew said she was dark-haired. A thief, some of them said.” Artolo squeezes a little more. “Scars on her face. Little scars!” admits the witch, wincing in pain.

  “It was HER. The Saint of Knives. She has followed me here.” Artolo rushes to the wardrobe, pulls out a gun, as if Carillon Thay might be hiding under the bed or behind a curtain.

  “I’ll deal with her,” says the witch hastily. “You should go to the refinery, make sure the yliaster is ready.”

  “No,” says Artolo. “No. I will find her. I will find her, and I will do to her what she did to me ten thousand times over.” He rushes over to the nightstand, pulls out his dragon-tooth dagger. The edge is blunt, but the blade is still strong.

  His fingers are gone, but his grip is still strong.

  Artolo drives the blunt blade into the servant’s stomach, putting his full weight on the knife’s hilt to push it deep. The servant shrieks in pain, bellows, hammers his bleeding hands against Artolo’s face, but Artolo is much, much too strong. The blade sinks in. Hot blood gushes across Artolo’s bare legs, stains his half-closed shirt.

  Then he tears, ripping the stomach like a wet sack, spilling the man’s entrails out across the tiles.

  Better than any drug.

  “Witch!” calls Artolo from the puddle of gore. “Read this fortune!” He lifts up a handful of guts, feeling them drip through his fingers. “Read it and tell me where I will find Carillon Thay!”

  By mid-afternoon, Cari thinks she might die here on the fucking Rock of Ilbarin. She pulls at her sweat-soaked clothes. She’d forgotten how hot the sun could get down south. Firesea’s well named.

  The mountain’s steep-sided and treacherous, and she’s had to go higher and higher on the rocky slopes to avoid being spotted, picking her way past scraggly bushes and little thorny trees. There’s salt in the air from the unnaturally swollen seas, and white patches of dried salt on rocks around her. Below, she can see the white scar of the road from Ushket as it snakes around the mountain. The road shimmers and dances in the haze until it vanishes around the side of the Rock on its way down to Ilbarin. Beyond the road, the new shore, a treacherous silty slope, red mud dissolving into the sea like the mountain’s bleeding.

  She couldn’t take the road. It’s guarded by armed men – she’s guessing Eshdana, The Ghierdana’s ash-bought mercenaries. There’s a lot of traffic on the road, too, mules hauling carts full of metal casks. She has no idea what they’re transporting, but she doesn’t want to get too close. There are plenty of hiding places amid the rocks, but Cari’s a creature of the alleyways and the docks, and feels horribly exposed without walls around her.

  So, she went higher up the slopes, picking her way past unstable patches and the scars of recent landslides, only to discover there are farms up here. Fields of freshly cleared brownish-grey earth. The soil’s thin and full of stones. Cari doubts they can grow much of anything, but what choice do they have? Most of Ilbarin’s farmland got drowned by the Kraken – it’s spread out there before her, under the glittering waves. So, the survivors scrape what they can out of the rocky hillside. She watches them for a while from a hiding place beyond the barbed-wire fences: a host of people labouring in the parched field, working the ground with their bare hands. Thin and grey, faces aged by hunger and exposure, the commonality beneath the skin overcoming distinctions of age or sex. A field of almost-skeletons.

  Watching over them are armed guards. Well-fed Eshdana, with clubs or guns. They’re running the farms now, running everything, it looks like. She saw the same thing back in Guerdon, in the early days of the New City. The crooks and the criminal syndicates were quickest to adapt to the catastrophe, and grabbed power. You’d hate that, she thinks to Spar. You’d go on about your father, about the Brotherhood, about making a fairer world out of the ruins. And where did all those good intentions and self-sacrifice get us? You dead, and me here on this bloody Rock. It’s a thought she’d never allow herself back in Guerdon, but Spar’s half a world away and can’t hear her anyway.

  Her only route around the farms is to go higher, scaling the uppermost slopes where the air grows cooler and the terrain more broken. Up here, the mountain is a fantastic labyrinth of shattered stone, the only living things a few thorn bushes. She guesses that gods fought here. Those scars on the hillside were probably left by the acid-tripping tendrils that trail behind the creatures of Cloud Mother. These three parallel chasms must have been torn by the claws of Lion Queen. The damage is fresh, the rocks underfoot jagged. Broken goat paths end prematurely.

  Not that she’s seen a goat all day. Her empty stomach rumbles. She’s getting weak with hunger. It’s getting harder to carry the weight of the fucking book, not to mention the rest of her gear.

  She forces herself to keep going. She imagines that she’s back in the New City, Spar miraculously transforming the uneven terrain into a smooth path for her. Once she gets around the Rock, it’s downhill. Down to Ilbarin City. Even if most of the city’s gone, there’ll be places to hide there. She’ll find someone with a ship, someone who’ll take her coin.

  Further up the slope there’s an area that’s less smashed up than the rest. Tired of slipping on jagged rocks, Cari climbs, pulling herself up on tufts of tough grass and the exposed roots of thorn bushes, until she reaches the unbroken section. Up ahead, she can see a small stone building. A goatherd’s shed, maybe, or a little shrine for pilgrims.

  She can walk for a bit here, instead of having to climb through shattered terrain. She drinks the last of her fresh water, kicks herself for not collecting more before setting off. She blames Hawse for pissing her off, tries to keep that anger alive in her belly. Anger’s better than hunger. Anger keeps you sharp.

  She sets off again, trudging across the hillside. She’ll be around the Rock by dusk. She can make it to Ilbarin City by noon tomorrow. She may not have any food left, but she still has money. She doesn’t need the captain to find her a ship to Khebesh. She hasn’t needed Hawse in years. The Ishmerians want to kill me, the Ghierdana want to kill me, and my best friends are a city and a ghoul. I’ve clearly made a fucking great success of it without you.

  The wind picks up, flinging dust in her face. She pushes on, head down, one step after another after another. She’ll get to Khebesh, she tells herself. Get rid of the fucking book, trade it for the sage counsel from the master sorcerers of the forbidden city. She doesn’t even know what she’s going to say to them when she gets there. My grandfather made me to be the centrepiece of a ritual to bring back the Black Iron Gods, and I sort of accidentally dumped all their power into the corpse of my dead friend. And then he turned into a city. And I could hear him in my head, and together we beat the shit out of the Ghierdana, and fought off an invasion, but now he’s fading. Is there a lotion you’d prescribe?

  What happens if it doesn’t work?

  What happens if it works?

  For a moment she feels a strange friction in the air, like there’s an invisible wall blocking her path that she has to push through. It scrapes against her skin, then becomes a weight inside her skull, a building pressure.

  She suddenly has the terrifying sensation of motion, like the whole hillside is trying to push her off. She falls to her knees, clutches at the ground, and the dirt stings her bare skin.

  Then, as quickly as it came, the sensation passes. The mountain’s just a mountain again.

  “Okaa
ay,” she mutters to herself.

  Then she’s flung bodily into the air.

  Sun and sky and sea and Rock whirl around her, and then she lands heavily in the dirt, the impact knocking the breath from her lungs. Stones digging painfully into her face, her chest. The weight of the book sends her pack sliding forward, slamming into the back of her skull. Fuck. She tries to scramble back up, pain shooting through her wrist as she puts weight on it. The ground shifts and slides underneath her, and she falls again.

  She glimpses a blur of movement. Not human, a whirling blur of dust and stones, but as it rushes towards her Cari suddenly sees it as an old woman, hunched and grey, her face scarred by claw marks. Stones for teeth, thorns for nails.

  It’s the spirit of the mountain, Cari thinks a second before it hits her again, square in the chest. Ribs crack, and she’s sent tumbling back, rolling down the mountainside.

  The earth around her screams and roars. Rocks fall with her, pelting her with debris. Clouds of dust block out the light. The old woman’s everywhere around her, everything around her, hammering and clawing at her. The wind spits curses loud enough to deafen. All Cari can do is curl up, a mortal in the face of divine wrath.

  In Ilbarin they worship Usharet, goddess of the mountain.

  And the mountain lands on Cari.

  Cari wouldn’t put much money on it, but she thinks she’s still alive. She feels like a sack of bone shards and pulp. Her thoughts drip slowly through the mush of her brain. It takes her a while to work out that she’s moving, not lying on the hillside. She’s in the back of a wagon. Creaking of wheels, whispered voices, the clank of heavy metal kegs next to her. Hands bound with rope, but she can tell from the way it’s digging into her back that she’s still got the fucking book. They haven’t even searched her satchel. She tries to whisper a cheer, but the effort sends a spear of pain through her side.

  One of her eyes has swollen shut. Four men she can see, all armed, but they’re not watching her. They’re all looking up the slope of the mountain, watching the slopes. Fuck, that thing that attacked her, that goddess or whatever it was, it nearly killed her. It must have kicked her all the way down to the road.