The Broken God

by Gareth Hanrahan

  That’s all it is.

  “Are you all right?” asks Vyr, studying his face closely. Rasce grins, tries to speak, but another wave of dizziness washes over him – another building, a great stone hallway, the smell of burning paper, the desperate tolling of a distant bell. He’s seeing double. Baston’s face is cast in shadow, but the light from the fires outside makes Vyr look sickly, his face all rotten ghoul-flesh. Ghouls. Those are ghouls in the tunnels. How does he know that?

  Rasce grabs his breathing mask, presses it over his nose and mouth. It has to be the fumes. He opens the window and drops the ledgers and documents into the fires burning outside.

  “Let’s go!” he orders. “Now! Make haste!”

  Outside, Rasce glances back at the burning yards. In the distance, he can still make out the figure of Dredger, outlined against the inferno. The weapons dealer is no longer directing the effort to save his yards. Instead, he stands there, staring into the flames as a lifetime burns around him. The salvage dealer is no fool; Rasce wonders if he recognises the hand of the Ghierdana in his downfall.

  Rasce gives his defeated foe a nod of respect. Rasce always wins.

  Whistles in the distance. The city watch are on their way.

  The three thieves run along the dockside. Ahead of them, looming over the harbour, is the alien citadel of the New City. It looks different tonight in Rasce’s eyes, brighter somehow. But there’s a long, dark stretch of old Guerdon between him and the New City, a waterfront district of alleyways and tenement. Once they’re back in the New City, they’ll be back in the Lyrixian Occupation Zone. The watch won’t be able to touch them in there.

  Shapes rise out of the darkness and the drifting haze of ash. Not ghouls – it’s Karla’s crew. Most of them are local Guerdonese, but a few are Lyrixian, sent by Rasce to make up the numbers. Every one of them groaning under the weight of stolen alchemical weapons – boxes of ammunition, canisters of knife-smoke, blisterlight lenses. Karla pulls off her breathing mask to talk, gags at the smoky air. Her green eyes rimmed in red, face shiny from the heat.

  “Come on,” she shouts, “this way!”

  No. Ghouls have come out of the sewers. That way is blocked. They can’t get out that way. He knows that with an impossible certainty.

  Rasce turns to Baston. “How close are we to the Ishmeric Zone?”

  “Three streets over, top end of Heavengut Wynd,” replies Baston, “but why—”

  “There are ghouls there. We cannot return to the New City by the route you planned.”

  Vyr mutters an oath under his breath. “How—” Baston begins to ask a question, then shakes his head and changes tack. “We can stash this stuff at Tarson’s.”

  “Then, I pray you, lead on,” orders Rasce. “The rest of you dogs – be ready to become fine upstanding citizens as soon as we cross the border. Vyr, we may have to sacrifice you to some Ishmeric god, just to be sure of salvation.”

  They rush up the steep steps of Heavengut Wynd. The tenements along the wynd are waking up, the inhabitants’ fitful slumber disturbed by the commotion in Dredger’s yard. People peer out of their windows, wondering what fresh hell has come to Guerdon.

  At the end of the stairs, the Ishmeric Occupation Zone begins. Two statues with the heads of beasts stand watch at the top of Heavengut Wynd – Sammeth and Cruel Urid. Even at a distance, Rasce can sense a divine presence in both statues. Beyond the icons, the narrow streets of Guerdon twist into an enchanted realm. Purple fog that smells of incense coils around the temple precincts. The sanctum of the Smoke Painter hovers in the sky, held aloft by illusory pillars. Tentacles stir the waters down by what was once some Keeper church, now a temple to the Kraken. Even at this late hour, devotees of Cloud Mother gather in a market square, reading portents in the clouds illuminated by the burning dockyard.

  As a son of the Ghierdana, Rasce is not permitted to enter the Ishmerian Occupation Zone. The inverse is true for the Lyrixian Occupation Zone up in the New City. If one of those mad Ishmerian priests showed up in Ghierdana territory without permission, his life would be forfeit. His soul, too – no ritual burial, no final offering to the gods. Dragon-fire burns away all evidence.

  The ghouls aren’t supposed to cross the border, either.

  “In here,” hisses Karla. She leads them into a building off Heavengut, three doors shy of the border. Through a hallway crammed with old furniture and debris and up another staircase, until they’re nearly to the roof. Then down a narrow corridor, its walls covered with old graffiti and thief’s marks, into an adjoining building. From there, they cross through an attic, down another set of stairs, across a little rope walk strung across an alleyway, through a dozen secret paths. The border’s porous to a Guerdon thief.

  Karla brings them down yet another staircase and stops at a door. She makes an intricate series of hand signals. A chain’s drawn back, the door opens and they’re in, a dozen heavily burdened thieves crammed into the hallway of a little flat. Karla and Baston are like conjurers, making everything incriminating vanish into hiding places. A cupboard with a false back swallows the alchemical gear and the ledgers stolen from the yard. Their soot-stained cloaks and gas masks are stuffed into sacks for disposal. Guns get bundled up and hidden up the chimney. Rasce hands over the blunderbore with reluctance. He really wants a chance to fire the thing. He keeps his dragon-tooth knife, of course, and no one dares ask for it.

  Karla passes around a damp cloth to wipe the ash from their faces. Her brother Baston hands around a flask of brandy. A hulking sailor with a scarred face hustles them back out through the door, and they leave by a different route, emerging on to the streets of the Wash well inside the boundary of the IOZ.

  Cousin Vyr stares up at the temples of the Ishmerian gods.

  “We should get back to our zone. Get out of here.” The presence of the gods in those temples – in all but one of those temples – is as palpable as the heat from a furnace.

  “The ghouls will still be on the streets,” says Baston.

  “Or under them,” adds Karla, looking warily at a sewer inlet at the side of the street.

  Rasce takes a deep breath. The air of the IOZ smells of incense and the ozone tang of magic, but his head’s stopped spinning. That strange fit he experienced at Dredger’s has passed. No more bizarre convictions. Whatever touched him on the docks can’t reach him here.

  “We’ll wait a few hours.” Rasce claps Baston on the back. “The gods send dragons to scourge the sinner and honest man alike.” An old saying in Lyrix, meaning this is our fate, we just have to live with it. “Find us somewhere profane, eh?”

  The restaurant, Baston mutters, was part of a theatre once. They enter by a back door. An old man with a long moustache greets Baston like a long-lost nephew, then smuggles them up some stairs to a back room. Rasce peeks through a door into the main bar. The walls are a deep crimson, smoke-stained; the ceiling overhead is an ornate plasterwork, the details lost in the gloom. The clientele there are Ishmerians. Soldiers in dishevelled uniforms, priests in flowing robes, huddled around hookahs. The priests smoke to find the gods; the soldiers, Rasce guesses, to hide from their memories. The war’s turned against Ishmere in the last half-year.

  Rasce follows the others up the stairs. The back room is equally opulent, although there’s a musty smell in the air that tells him this room hasn’t been used in months. Rasce sinks into the welcome embrace of an overstuffed leather chair, and his gang gathers around him. Baston and Karla on either side of a sofa, their men perched on the armrest or pulling up armchairs. The old man returns with a tray of drinks. Brandies and alchemical gins for locals, a bottle of arax for the Lyrixians. The thieves laugh, joke with one another, tell tales of narrow escapes and alchemical monsters. The two groups beginning to mingle. They’ll take the ash soon, thinks Rasce.

  Only Cousin Vyr remains standing, shifting awkwardly from one foot to the other.

  “Sit down,” orders Rasce.

  “We should get back to the New
City.”

  “Vyr, trust me. We’ll lie low here, have a few drinks, wait until it’s quieter.”

  “We’re in the Ishmeric Occupation Zone. This is madness. You’ll provoke—”

  Rasce draws his knife, points it at his cousin.

  The laughter stops.

  “Sit,” he orders again.

  The knife’s a sign of Rasce’s rank in the Ghierdana, of his favour with Great-Uncle. Vyr has to back down. He sits.

  To break the tension, Rasce slams the knife down on the table, spins it with his fingers. The dragon-tooth blade whirls around and comes to point at Baston.

  “Give us a toast, my new friend,” says Rasce.

  Baston hesitates, and Karla steps in.

  “To Tiske,” she says. She tips out the last of her brandy, then refills her glass with arax. She produces a cigarette lighter and ignites the liquor. She lifts the blazing glass, the flames reflected in her green eyes.

  Rasce takes the lighter.

  Tiske, he realises, was the first man to die under his command.

  The man who carries the knife cannot carry any burdens, any dead weight. He cauterises any regrets.

  Rasce sets fire to his own drink. A more fitting toast to doomed Tiske.

  “To Tiske.”

  More bottles of arax. The Guerdon thieves are drinking it now, faces grimacing at the gritty, ash-flecked taste. Like licking an ashtray, says Karla. Vyr tells them how it used to be made from the seared grapes from vineyards on the Lyrixian mainland that got burned by dragon-fire. These days, the farmers themselves set fire to the fields every season and smuggle it out to the Ghierdana islands. Good arax is expensive.

  “You should call it the Wash,” mutters Baston to Vyr, “not the Ishmeric Zone.”

  “Call it what you will,” replies Vyr. “It doesn’t change the fact that we’re surrounded by foes.”

  “We’re surrounded by friends, Vyr,” says Rasce. “Admittedly, those friends are then surrounded by foes.”

  “Why—” Baston coughs, to clear his throat of the smoke. “Why take down Dredger? He was always willing to pay his money to the Brotherhood.”

  “Ah, the famous thieves’ guild of Guerdon!”

  “Not a guild,” snaps Baston. “We fought the guilds, and stole from ’em, same as you.”

  “A revolutionary Brotherhood, yes? Sworn to overthrow corrupt politicians and crooked guildmasters.”

  “That’s how it was,” says Baston.

  Rasce grins. “Mortal men are easy for the dragon to kill. But the dragon sees further.”

  “Everyone knows Dredger,” adds Vyr. “Everyone will pay attention to this message.”

  He sips his own arax, throws one leg over the arm of his chair. “Yliaster! Next on the list is Craddock & Sons. Mr Craddock will see sense, or he’ll have fewer sons, and I do not anticipate any difficulty there.”

  “I know Craddock’s’,” says Baston, leaning forward. “I used to go there with the old master.” Talking business draws him out. “When?”

  “A few days, for Craddock. But my aim is higher still. Bend your thoughts, please, on the problem of the other yliaster importers.”

  “About a third of ’em import by sea,” says Baston. “They’re all along the docks. The rest go by rail, or caravan. They’re based mostly in the Fog Yards. Far side of the city.” He sits back. “Close to impossible, now that the city’s chopped up into occupation zones.”

  “Ah, the invaluable insight of a local,” laughs Rasce. “See, Vyr, this is why we need our new friends!”

  Vyr looks queasy, and he’s hardly touched his arax. “We shouldn’t be discussing business here.”

  “And yet, we are. Baston – if I wished to strike at a foe in the Fog Yards as we burned Dredger, how would I do it?”

  Baston considers the problem. “Without knowing the specifics… you’d need a hell of a lot more men than we had tonight. And you’d have to get them all the way across Guerdon without the watch crying foul. Tunnels, maybe. Go through the undercut.”

  “Is that not under the control of the ghouls?”

  “It is. You’d need to cut a deal.”

  “With the Rat?” asks Rasce, or tries to, but as soon as he says that name, the world seems to lurch around him. For an instant, the entire room is transformed from the back room of a bar to some little bedsit down in the Wash. Everyone vanishes, or almost everyone – only Baston and Karla remain, and they’re transformed, too. Baston has become ghoulish and hunched, his face lengthening into a wolfish muzzle. Karla’s replaced by another woman, smaller and slighter with gamine features, her hair darkening, her fingers toying with a chain around her throat. Rasce tries to speak, but his throat is blocked as if he’s swallowed a stone.

  The vision lasts only a moment, but when reality snaps back the conversation’s moved on and Rasce has lost the thread of it. An argument about some gang from Five Knives. Karla looks to Rasce, obviously waiting for him to respond to a question.

  He coughs, covers for himself. “Actually, my good cousin has the right of it. We shouldn’t talk business any more tonight.”

  Awkward silence falls over the table. Baston and Karla glance at each other, some unspoken signal between siblings. Vyr reaches over and sniffs the empty arax bottle.

  “I’ll say this for old Dredger,” says one of the thieves, breaking the silence, “he was good to the Stone Men. My cousin got the pebble-pox, and he worked in the yards for ten years before he went to the isle.”

  “I’ve heard that Dredger has the plague,” says another, “and that’s why he always hides in that armour.”

  “He doesn’t have it,” says Rasce without thinking. How the hell does he know that? The adrenaline’s wearing off now. The arax sits heavily in his gut – and it’s gone right to his head, too, skipping past merry and straight to a pounding pain in his temples. He slips away from the table, leaves the clamour of the back room for the quiet of the stairwell.

  Outside, there’s a landing. A few yellowing playbills from old performances in the vanished theatre. The Sewer Children. The Tragedy of Gethis. The Badger and the Nightingale. The last one’s got a notice stamped across it – CLOSED BY ORDER OF PARLIAMENT. PUBLIC GATHERINGS FORBIDDEN. DANGER OF CONTAGION. He examines them in what he first thought was moonlight spilling in through the high window, but now he realises it’s not the moon – it’s the nocturnal glimmering of the New City, its magical radiance lighting up the night.

  Without quite knowing why, he feels compelled to raise his glass in salute.

  “My mother.” Karla’s voice.

  He turns around. She’s followed him out, and now stands by one of the playbills. She taps the poster with a fingernail. There’s a sketch of a woman’s face, and he can see the resemblance now. “She played the nightingale.”

  “Ah.” At the mention of Karla’s mother, he feels unwell again, and sways at the top of the stairs. The image of glass shattering pops into his head, the sounds of a loud argument, a man and a woman screaming at each other. It feels like a memory, but it’s not. He has no idea where it came from.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I just need some air,” he says. “This city chokes me, yes? All the chimneys and the factories spread a miasma through the sky.”

  “You get used to it.”

  He sits down on the top step, to avoid showing any more weakness. Great-Uncle would be displeased.

  “Does she still act, your mother?”

  Karla sits down next to him. Back home in the isles, it would be unthinkably presumptuous for someone like her to sit next to a scion of the Ghierdana. Her unwitting insolence amuses him. “Not professionally, any more. Not since she met my father. She taught me. In another life, maybe I’d be up on the wall, too. But I was always my father’s daughter.”

  “He was a thief, yes?”

  “He was one of Heinreil’s crew from the start. Rose with him.” She raises her glass in a silent toast and takes a sip.

  “Tiske
said your brother worked for Heinreil, too.”

  “Bodyguard. No one’s better in a fight than Baston.”

  Rasce laughs. These Guerdonese thieves are so provincial. “Indeed? A mere mortal man, and yet he can wrestle a wereboar or stand against a Nightshade! What a prodigy!”

  “I’d take those odds,” says Karla quietly.

  Rasce was trained from a young age to excel and catch Great-Uncle’s eye. Baston’s bigger than him, doubtless stronger – but Rasce’s sure he could defeat the Brotherhood enforcer in a duel. He always wins.

  “And you? What was your place in the Brotherhood?”

  She smiles. “I kept my hands clean.”

  “Tiske told me your father has passed. The war?”

  “Before that. The Crisis. He went down a crypt on Gravehill, and we never saw him again. Ghouls got him.” She sips her arax, tries and fails to hide the scowl. “What about your parents?”

  “My mother is still alive, of course—”

  “Of course?”

  “On the isles of the Ghierdana, the daughters of the dragon are princesses, and treated accordingly. They rarely leave the family compounds.”

  Karla snorts. “Sounds boring. And your father?”

  “They hanged him.” The words come out of Rasce’s mouth, but they’re not his words. He grabs Karla’s glass of arax from her, washes his mouth out, swallows, gagging on the ash. “Ach! No. Why did I say that? No, my father is alive, but – weak. Too many scars, and he can no longer fly. A broken knife, we say. No matter. No matter.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “The fumes, I think.”

  She rises. “Come back inside.”

  “In a moment.”

  She slips away, returning to the upstairs room. He should follow, but for a moment he feels rooted to the stone steps. The solitude is welcome, too – he’s used to spending long days strapped to Great-Uncle’s back, with no company expect the dragon and his own thoughts. A little silence is balm, and he sips the last of the arax.