The setting sun’s on her left, falling behind the Rock – she’s heading the wrong way. They’re going back towards Ushket. Shit, she thinks, but that’s the least of her problems. She fights down the feeling of panic, and the effort makes everything go dark again for a minute.
Spar? I’m hurt. Spar was able to take her injuries back in Guerdon, protect her from harm, but she’s far away from him now. Her wounds are her own, and they’re bad. Everything around her seems so much harder now, a world of sharp stones and cruel foes, and she’s small and broken.
Think. She’s too hurt to move quickly, but she can still move. Her hands and feet are bound, but it looks like a rushed job. The same coarse rope used to secure the kegs in the wagon, and it’s not drawn tight. She can wriggle free, if she gets a chance. The four guards around her sound like they’re local boys, Eshdana conscripts, and they’re as scared as she is. Carrying sticks and knives, no real armour. Not soldiers. Just hired muscle. And they don’t know you’re awake. Wait for your moment. She imagines Spar giving her the advice. She’d never tell herself to stay still. Wait for the opportunity. Until then, play unconscious.
That part’s really easy. She blacks out again for a moment as the wagon rolls over a bump in the road. Liquid sloshes around in the kegs beneath her. Pain sloshes around within her, like it can’t decide which of her many bruises and cuts deserves primacy. Settles in her wrist, her knee, the ribs down her left side. She tastes blood in her mouth.
“The old woman’s after her,” mutters one of the guards. “We should leave her.”
“Word came down from Ushket this morning,” replies another. “The boss wants this one. She came off a ship yesterday.”
The first guard glances over at Cari. She forces herself to stay limp and feign unconsciousness. “For what? Who is she?” She watches him through a red haze of blood-matted hair and flying dust. He sounds young and scared. He keeps shooting nervous glances up the mountain, flinching at every breath of wind. Only the mule is calm, untroubled as it hauls the cart around the Rock of Ilbarin.
“Keep watch for the old woman,” hisses the other voice. “I have the gun. I’ll shoot her when she comes for us.”
Whoever this boss is, the one who wants Cari, they’re more scared of him than they are of a demigoddess.
Cari waits until the wagon hits another bump in the road, lets her head loll about until she happens to be looking in the right direction. Through her mostly closed good eye, she can see a man clutching a heavy rifle. Phlogiston charge, big bore – the sort of gun you’d use for fighting saints and godspawn. Not an equaliser, but enough to piss off a divine monster.
The Ghierdana tried using guns like that on her, back when she was the Saint of Knives.
Back when she had power.
“Lord of Waters, protect us,” mutters the nervous boy. A brief echo of the strange feeling she had on the mountain passes over Cari again. It feels like pressing on a scab. The hot, dusty wind blows.
“Idiot!” curses the rifleman, his ire directed at his young companion. “Don’t rile her up more! Don’t say a name.”
I trespassed, Cari realises. That must be holy ground up there. The mountain goddess, Usharet – she could tell that I was a saint of another power, and fought back. Cari shivers, can’t stop shivering. She’s freezing despite the heat of the day.
Cari’s avoided temples and churches for a long time. The last time she set foot in one was back in Guerdon, years ago, and that was a church of the Kept Gods of Guerdon when they were piss-weak. (They came back, she thinks bitterly. Why can’t Spar?) On her journey south, she kept mostly to godless territory, to Haithi outposts and empty lands, or she was at sea. Still, at times, she felt something similar – a tension, a burning. Like she was standing exposed to the desert sun at noon. Or the feeling in a crowd before a riot kicks off, this sick anticipation of violence.
The Ishmerians want to kill me. The Ghierdana want to kill me. And the gods want to kill me if I trespass on their turf.
Fine. She can use that. Everything’s a weapon. She learned that long ago.
“Holy Beggar,” she mutters under her breath. “Mother of Flowers. Holy Smith. Saint Storm.” The weak Kept Gods of Guerdon.
The hot wind blows. The mule whinnies.
“Fate Spider. Smoke Painter.” The gods of the Sacred Empire. “High Umur. Cloud Mother.”
Pain, like her head’s in a vice. The guards hear her prayers. They grab at her, wrenching her legs as they pull her from the wagon, but she keeps chanting, forcing the names out even as she’s coughing up blood. She spits them like insults.
“Fucking Kraken.” Hot dirt rains on her face. “Fucking Pesh, the Lion Queen!” She remembers the sight of the goddess Pesh marching on Guerdon, taller than a mountain, waves breaking against her golden thighs. Pesh in her glory, her words an artillery bombardment, her gaze fire and destruction. Pesh, so beautiful and terrible that Cari had to stifle a prayer even as she pulled the trigger on the god-bomb that murdered her…
The mountain’s roaring again, earth thunder, the whole hillside writhing and groaning. Cari’s eyes are tightly closed, but she still gets the impression of the old woman rushing towards them.
Cari cries out, shouting the names of the Black Iron Gods – names she didn’t know she knew, never heard before, but they’re in her somewhere, and now she calls them aloud. Screams them, and they echo off the mountain.
The gun goes off, a flash of phlogiston and a barking report that half deafens Cari. Again, and again, and the third time there’s a hiss – not pain, but uncomprehending anger and amazement at the insolence of mortals.
Then the landslide hits them, sweeps guards and wagon and mule off the road. Cari’s already moving, already rolling off the wagon before it topples. Everything’s a confusion of dust and smoke, noise and flying stones. The screaming of the Ghierdana drowned out by the rumble of the falling mountain, of the goddess Usharet in her wrath.
The mule’s to her left, legs broken, squealing in agony. The wagon’s fallen over, the kegs spilling down the mountainside. One smashes open, spilling a glowing liquid out in a brilliant spray, mixed with a sludge of crystals like sea salt.
Guards to her right, one trying to dig himself out of the stones that half buried him. Another, buried and unmoving, one outstretched hand a marker for his grave. Somewhere off in the swirling dust, flashes of red as the gun goes off again, firing blind.
Cari twists around, finds her knife – pain shoots through her wrist. She’s half buried herself in moving stones as the landslide ebbs. She kicks free of the stones, brings her legs up to her bound hands so she can cut at the rope, once, twice, until it gives way.
One of the guards grabs at her, but Usharet grabs him first, thorn-fingers tearing his throat open, hands of dust seizing him with terrible force and flinging him away.
Down, she thinks. Got to get off this fucking mountain.
The guard with the rifle emerges from the dust. He fires at point-blank range, so close that Cari can hear the glass ampoule inside the phlogiston charge crack as the hammer comes down. Usharet whirls around, leaps on to the guard’s shoulders, rakes his face with her thorns. Howling all the time, a mindless keening.
Cari runs. Crawls. Falls, bouncing off boulders, slipping on loose pebbles – and then on mud. She falls to her knees again, sinks her hands into the deliciously salty mud of the shoreline. Pain bursts through her, broken ribs and twisted muscles. Bruises exploding like artillery beneath her skin. She fears that she might burst or break, but still she crawls.
Behind her, up the slope, the distant roaring of the goddess. The ground quakes beneath her, the earth cracking and sloughing away from the hillside, great gobbets of soil sliding into the sea, brown stains like blood spreading across the waves. The air is full of dust, full of pressure, like a great iron bell is tolling right next to her ears. Blind, she wades forward through the catastrophe until her feet find the road.
Stumbling, limping, fallin
g, crawling, but always moving, always running away from the wrath of the mad goddess she offended. She wipes away the dust that’s caked on her face and hands, but it’s futile. She must look like the goddess, she thinks distantly, a thin and broken thing covered in dust and mud and thorns.
She hears shouts from up ahead, and acts on instinct, a thief’s reflexes. She hurls herself into a ditch, muffles her own yelps of pain as armed men rush past to vanish into the roiling chaos of the dust cloud, and then there are more gunshots, the howl of a flash ghost detonation.
She staggers on. The act of walking becomes mechanical, a mantra spoken by her twisted ankles, by her tortured shoulders. Her own momentum carries her forward. She feels as though she has to keep moving, or the road around the mountain will rise up and strike her. Above her, the sun wheels through the sky; clouds white and dust-grey circle above her. Vultures, too, she thinks.
At one point, she reaches around to adjust her satchel, move it around so the fucking book isn’t digging into her spine quite so sharply, and her hand comes back wet with blood. She draws her knife, confused, unsure what she’s thinking.
It’s not like death is something she can cut. Her fingers are powerless, and the knife slips from her grasp. Lands in the middle of the road, the metal gleaming bright, unsullied by the dust that coats everything else. She stares at that knife for a long, long time, scared that if she bends over to pick it up, she’ll fall over, fall apart. Break the delicate balance between the weight of the book and her own forward momentum, disrupt the arrangement of wounded limbs that lets her keep going.
She can’t think straight. She’s inhaled so much dust, it feels like it’s coated her brain with a thick crust of earth. Her skull’s fit to burst. She wonders if it’s her fear, or if it’s Spar’s. He was always nervous about falling.
But that was when he was alive.
No, she tells herself. He’s still alive. I’m still alive, she thinks. And I’m going to fix this. I’ll go to Khebesh and fix this.
She steps over the knife. Keeps going. Keeps going. Keeps going.
Until she’s crawling through the hole in the hull of the Rose. Finding her way blindly up the ladder.
Falling down in her own bunk.
Home.
CHAPTER SIX
Three thieves running down a street. A heist gone wrong. An explosion.
That was how it began, wasn’t it? Is this a memory, or something that’s happening now? The footfalls of the thieves agitate his thoughts, the vibration in the living stone shaking his mind free. For a moment, part of Spar’s attention is drawn to that particular street in the New City, to these thieves. Enough of his consciousness gathers for him to be aware that he’s conscious.
This city he’s become is too big for his mortal mind – he can feel himself slipping away, parts of him following raindrops down windowpanes, ghouls down gutters, the delicate constellation of thought and memory that used to be a man named Spar Idgeson dissipating into the labyrinthine streets of the New City. Dissolving into the stone, like a drowning man.
Focus. Fight for focus. Pay attention. Stay awake. Hold on until she finds you again.
Three thieves run down a street. The street winds steeply down towards the edge of the New City, towards the docks where black water laps against white stone. They cross a narrow bridge that spans a gap in the streets. The bridge is made in the semblance of an angel, and they run across its outstretched wings. The angel’s face is that of Spar’s mother. Water cascades past her memorial, falling into the lower parts of the New City. A canal below.
(His mind slips, chasing the memory: fighting the Fever Knight. Charging the armoured warrior, sending both of them plunging into the stagnant water of a different canal. He couldn’t beat Heinreil’s bodyguard in a fight, so he tried self-sacrifice. That’s the thing about living with a fatal disease – death stops being unthinkable. You contemplate long enough, and it becomes just another thought.)
It’s no good. He’s falling again. He still senses the three thieves – he can feel their footsteps on the cobblestones that are his skin. He can watch them through every window. All three wear dark raincoats against the downpour. The rain’s washing away his mind, he thinks. How can he think when he also has to feel the impact of every raindrop, all clamouring for his attention? What’s the difference between a raindrop and a human, anyway? Both mostly water. Both burst on impact with the stone.
He burst on impact, too. Beneath the wide boulevards and twisting alleyways of his thoughts is an underworld of memory, a sucking sewer that traps him and drags him down. In memory, he falls from the dome of the Seamarket, his calcified joints and heavy limbs betraying him; all that strength and he can’t beat gravity. Failing at the last challenge. Cari’s eyes full of horror. Knowing as he dies that she’s doomed, that Guerdon’s doomed and the Black Iron Gods will reign in tyranny forever…
That’s a memory. Focus on the now. Focus on the thieves. They’re important, somehow. Two are foreigners, new to the city. They’re wearing raincoats, but he can see beneath those, too. He can taste their weapons. The one in the lead carries a dragon-tooth knife that burns in Spar’s vision. A Ghierdana boy, from the dragon families. (Spar remembers another knife, just like that one, cutting into Carillon’s throat. Cutting, miraculously, into his own stony flesh – but that’s another door into memory, another stairway leading down to the underworld. Close it, quick. Focus.)
The Ghierdana boy swaggers along. Hair cut short to fit under a flying helmet, a thin moustache to show he’s a man. Olive skin marked by dozens of old scars, knife cuts, on his hands and forearms, but no bigger wound. A boy who’s fought many, many times, but never lost. He’s got a well-used breathing mask hanging from his neck; he wears the distinctive leathers of a dragon-rider under the cloak, heavy gloves and fur-lined collar. Is he a fool to wear such an outfit on a heist, or is he declaring his rank to those who recognise it? Arrogance or pride? The difference between them is one of balance – take pride just a little too far, and you’ll slip and fall. (Fall from the dome of the Seamarket, to burst on the rocks below.)
The boy is important. Spar doesn’t know how or why he knows this; an instinct he cannot name, a way of sensing that mortals do not possess.
Rasce. That’s his name. It’s a name that Spar’s heard many times, whispered in his streets.
The other Ghierdana, also male, about the same age, but wearing street clothes. Hands sweaty on the grip of his pistol. No dragon-tooth knife for him, no mark of the dragon’s favour. Strapped to his side is a cloth bundle, carefully wrapped to keep the contents in place. Thieves’ tools, lockpicks and cutters. And explosive charges, little glass balls of phlogiston. This second Ghierdana man scowls at the dragon-rider when Rasce’s back is turned, malice mixing with fear. Bile rising the man’s throat, like rainwater rising in a blocked drainpipe.
The third man, Spar knows. Familiar people are a trap for him; watching them, it’s too easy for him to lose track of time, to slip into his memories of them instead of tracking their present existence. Carillon anchored him in the present, focused him – but thinking of her is like falling.
(From the dome of the Seamarket, tumbling end over end, bursting on the stone. The memory reaches for him hungrily, like a Raveller’s tendrils, flensing away another portion of his consciousness.)
Focus! Pay attention! The third man… the third man is… Baston Hedanson. A Brotherhood man. The Fever Knight’s apprentice. Spar used to be friends with Baston: they ran together when they were younger, before the Stone Plague took Spar’s youth and friends and standing in the guild away from him. Two versions of Baston war in what remains of Spar’s mind. In the present, Baston’s glancing at the shadows, scanning for trouble. The years haven’t been kind to him – he looks worn, face gaunt. In memory, Baston’s fifteen years younger. A few years older than Spar, half a man when Spar was but a boy. Sitting on a wall in Hog Close, watching Spar run with Karla and the other kids. Baston acting aloof, but t
witching to join the game.
Hog Close. The memory of Spar’s own youth rears up, hoary and potent. He tries to fight it, tries to pay attention to the present city, to these three thieves, but he can’t hold on. He can feel his consciousness breaking apart again, pulled apart by the sheer size of the New City. He’s grown too large to encompass himself. His mind is like a little spider trying to weave a web around the whole city.
Spar wonders, as he breaks apart for the millionth time, if there are other fragments of his consciousness out there, other parts of his mind that have found each other, hung together long enough to think the same thoughts. Is he Spar, or just one of Spar’s many ghosts?
He falls. His awareness like droplets of rainwater running down the walls, dividing and recombining and breaking apart again, a silver tracery of thought that pools in the deepest parts of the New City, in the deepest parts of his soul. He can no longer tell past from present, distinguish his own memories from the shadows that play on the walls of the New City.
He falls.
In Hog Close, Spar plays watch and thieves with Karla and a gang of other kids, dodging in and out of the alleyways. He’s the tallest in the group, the fastest. No one can catch him. Karla shouts after him, threatening to invoke the wrath of her big brother the way a saint calls on a god. Spar vaults over the garden hedge that represents the edge of the Alchemists’ Quarter, pretends to gather up handfuls of gold coins and flings them over the wall, then runs before the watch can get him. He runs down the street, racing ahead of his pursuers.
A group of older men enter the close. Brotherhood all.
“Gods below, it’s the son,” says one of them. “Get his mother, she should be the one to tell.”
“No,” says another, softly. The old man kneels down, puts his hand on Spar’s shoulder, looks him right in the eye. His breath smells of tobacco. “The city watch arrested your father. He’s done for. Listen, the Brotherhood will take care of you, but there’s nothing that can be done for him. We can’t help him.”
The Broken God Page 8
