The Broken God

by Gareth Hanrahan

  “Not here.” Baston leans forward. “And you’re going to be speaking for your cousin, right? So you’d better fucking swallow that doubt. Just tell Mandel that if he doesn’t take the deal, he’ll end up like Dredger. That’s all you’ve got to say, but you have to show steel. If you’re weak, they’ll never take the ash.”

  Vyr scowls. “You’re not even Eshdana. You don’t speak to me like that.”

  “And what,” says Baston quietly, “will you do about it?”

  The answer, it seems, is nothing. Vyr sits back, pressing himself against the seat to get as far away from Baston as he can. He looks strangled, his body twisting with nervousness and bile. He mutters to himself again, and it’s definitely a curse this time.

  The funny thing is, Baston’s instincts agree with Vyr. Baston’s cautious by nature; a good right-hand man has to be. You’re supposed to keep the boss from walking into danger, from getting overextended. To attend to practicalities instead of chasing bold visions. But he did all that, and where did it get him? Lost, left behind in a changed city. Play things too cautiously, and the world leaves you behind.

  There’s a certain quality in a great leader. The ability to see the gap between what everyone agrees can be done, and what’s actually possible, to push you into going beyond yourself. A catalyst, they’d call it, enabling things that would otherwise be unthinkable. Of course, go too far and that quality becomes dangerous, becomes explosive.

  Baston runs through his own litany – the masters of the Brotherhood. Idge, of course, was a perfect example of a leader who saw what was possible, but went too far. He gave the Brotherhood a dream and a purpose, warned them about the power of the alchemists, about how they would be more callous than any priest or god. But Idge pushed too hard, and the city pushed back. He died on the gallows when Baston was a boy.

  After Idge came a quick succession of forgettable men, bosses who just tried to hold the Brotherhood together. Even their names blur together in Baston’s mind – Tomas Whoreson, Starris, Gaern the Shipwright. All cautious by nature. Baston knows that if he’d ever risen to the rank of master, he’d be counted with them.

  Then, Heinreil. Even after all these years, Baston still doesn’t quite know what to think of Heinreil. He’d done things that no one else had thought could be done, but they were the wrong things – bringing in sorcerers and other monsters like the Fever Knight, cutting deals with Crawling Ones. Selling out to the alchemists. A twisted vision of the possible. He took the Brotherhood and twisted it. Twisted Baston, too, by apprenticing him to the Fever Knight. No one could deny Heinreil’s cunning – he led the Brotherhood through the candlelight, bargained with the alchemists, made more money than any of his predecessors – but the price was too high.

  Spar – Spar, the lost hope. All of Idge’s moral clarity, but tempered with grief, with an understanding of the costs of failure. If Spar had been master, then the Brotherhood might have become more than a band of thieves – a movement, a counterforce, something to grab the wheels of the terrible machinery behind the city and force them to turn the other way.

  On his own, Rasce’s just an interloper, a spoiled dragon-prince with no understanding of Guerdon’s history, of the Brotherhood’s purpose. But Rasce is not on his own. He’s got Idgeson’s blessing; he’s got Baston by his side. He may be an outsider, but he could be the leader they need. That’s the Guerdon way, isn’t it? Everyone’s from somewhere else. Even the first people to settle in this city found it abandoned and empty.

  There’s the dragon, though. There’s the dragon. Baston sticks his hand in his pocket, grinds the white pebbles he carries against each other as a nervous gesture, like a priest toying with prayer beads.

  The train grinds to a halt. Baston opens the door on to a platform crowded with grey-faced factory workers, coughing as the fumes fill the underground station. The Fog Yards.

  The dragon is a problem for another day.

  Mandel & Company is a big enough problem for today.

  Mandel & Company is a big enough problem for a lifetime.

  Mandel & Company is, literally, a fortress. Before Guerdon swelled in size and influence, the old city was guarded by walls and towers, and Mandel’s yards straddle that border. Most of the walls have long since been scavenged by stone-hungry masons, but not here. Mandel’s fort incorporates part of the old city wall, new fortifications piled on old stone. The wall’s scarred in places, which Baston realises must be damage from the siege of Guerdon three hundred years before, when the saints of the Kept Gods overthrew the cult of Black Iron. If the old wall’s intact, then that lends some credence to Heinreil’s claim of a secret tunnel in the depths, but he has to know for sure.

  The Fog Yards sprawl out from the line of that former wall – an industrial landscape, trail tracks spilling out like steaming steel entrails, sheds and factories and sullen red-litten mills. The streets here are wide. They have to be, to make room for the heavily laden wagons that crawl between the factories, drawn by teams of raptequines. Off in the distance, rising like skeletal giants, are the new towers of the alchemists. All steel and corrugated iron and vat-grown bone, not the dark stone of the city proper.

  The Mandel fortress may be older than the rest of the Fog Yards, but the defences are brand new. The guards walking the walls wear helmets with thaumic lenses and breather masks, the same as the city watch. Ensorcelled to spot hostile magic and miracles. A man could scale those old stone walls, but Baston doesn’t like the look of those gaps between the blocks. You could hide anything in those dark fissures. Biters. Green slime. Knife-smokers, spitting mist that cuts your fingers off. The four walls form a rough square around the Mansel compound; tanks and aetheric vanes rise above the parapet, suggesting the yard inside is filled with industrial machinery.

  It reminds Baston of the old Alchemists’ Quarter, with its impenetrable sheer stone walls rising like cliffs, looming over the lesser structures in the Fog Yards. It took the Gutter Miracle, Spar’s martyrdom and miraculous rebirth, to destroy the old Alchemists’ Quarter; it’ll take something equally divine to breach the wall of Mandel & Company.

  Vyr looks equally daunted. He shakes his head as he spots gun emplacements and aetheric vanes on the upper levels. “Even Great-Uncle would balk at this.”

  “It has to be doable.” From the shadow of the subway entrance, Baston gives the fortress a quick once over, casing it as best he can. There’s a statue at the subway entrance, depicting some dead guildmaster, cradling the cup of the alchemists. Baston reaches up, drops a marble pebble into the mouth of the cup. “Let’s go,” he says.

  Vyr squares his shoulders. His face adopts a cold sneer that makes him look like Rasce. He marches across the street, head held high, dodging the wagons. Pounds his fist on the door. The walls seem even taller up close, looming like a Kraken-wave of black stone. Above the door is a recess, and nestled there is a glass tank filled with greenish liquid – and a giant eyeball, as big as Baston’s fist. The thing’s alive – it stares down at Baston, and it seems to him that it’s pleading with him.

  “Mandel & Company export all over the world.” Vyr looks up at the eyeball, presenting his face to it. “They know the Ghierdana’s reach.”

  The door opens. A footman welcomes them in. “Mr Mandel will see you now.”

  They’re let through the outer walls of the fortress, but instead of passing into the central courtyard the footman leads them through another door into a long carpeted corridor. Portraits on the walls tell of the glorious works of the alchemists’ guild, and long series of studious men and women, pale faces lit by glowing flasks or blazing crucibles. Baston recognises some of the faces – a red-haired woman holding a candle must be Rosha, the former guildmistress who vanished in the Crisis. A few politicians he vaguely recalls, mainly because they took bribes from the Brotherhood of old. A group portrait, showing the founding of the guild, watched over by a frowning Keeper priest.

  Other pictures show other fruits of their labour – th
e burning ruins of cities, armies vanquished by alchemical weapons, new forms of life sprouting in vats. A Tallowman, and no amount of talent on the part of the artist could make that waxy horror appear noble. In the image, the Tallowman in city livery stands before a gallows, displaying Idge’s body like a prize catch.

  At the end of the corridor, a gigantic canvas shows the last moments of the invasion. The war goddess Pesh stands astride a shattered city, her claws tearing down churches and towers. There’s no sign of the hasty alliance of city watch, Keeper saints, and Haithi soldiers who fought against the invasion, nor is there any sign of the dragons, the threat of whom sealed the final Armistice. The only resistance to the invaders is the god-bomb in the sky, depicted as a pure, searing light. The giant form of Pesh seems ephemeral in comparison to the alchemists’ bomb.

  He also notes that the frame of that huge painting is decorated with silver leaf and sapphires. A fortune squandered on extravagant folly that only a handful will ever see, while people starve in the shadow of those dark walls. In the painting, Pesh’s gigantic feet trample the familiar streets of the Wash.

  Baston’s hand brushes against the painting. He hides a second pebble of stone in the frame.

  The footman brings them to another double door and shows them into Mandel’s chamber. The room is long – you could fit Craddock’s whole building in here twice over – and lit by glowing panels of gold that cast patterns of light shimmering over the polished tiles of the floor. Marble walls rise in flowing shapes to meet in the arched ceiling overhead, giving the unsettling feeling of movement, as though the stone might without warning transmute to fluttering fabric. A dark-skinned scribe sits on a stool near the altar, scratching notes in a great ledger, but the shifting light makes it hard to see his face. Baston wonders if the creature is really a man at all, or something grown in a vat. Certainly, the scribe doesn’t react to their presence at all. Only his withered hands are clearly visible, moving ceaselessly across the page, recording everything.

  Nothing is solid here, nothing certain except the great black altar of Mandel’s desk at the far end.

  Mandel himself looks like a judge, white hair worn long enough to touch the collar of his dark suit. A golden amulet on his chest, the eye-and-cup of the alchemists his only adornment. Gloved hands steepled in front of him.

  It’s all theatre, Baston guesses. All to make people feel small. He holds his head up, refuses to let the weight of Mandel’s gaze intimidate him. The Brotherhood will get you in the end, Baston promises silently, and we won’t need a picture to remember. Still, he finds his pace slowing, and has to fight the urge to bow his head. Instead, he sits in one of the two low chairs in front of the massive desk.

  He slips a third pebble out of his pocket, tucks it into the lining of the chair.

  Vyr draws his knife again, holds it up. “I am here as a representative of my cousin – and my Great-Uncle, Taras the Red. I speak for the Ghierdana.”

  “Speak, then,” booms Mandel, his voice brassy and deep.

  “We offer a simple arrangement. My family has secured a large supply of yliaster. We ask that you purchase all your yliaster through us, instead of your existing sources.

  “My present arrangements are satisfactory to me. I have no interest in bargaining with you. Good day.”

  “Ah,” says Vyr, “but our rates are cheaper. You shall profit greatly by agreeing.”

  “Your supply comes from Ilbarin.” The scribe makes a note. “Much farther away than my existing sources of yliaster. Your rates cannot be cheaper – unless the dragon is subsidising the cost for his own ends. I have no intention of surrendering control of the guild’s yliaster to the Ghierdana.”

  “Your—” Vyr’s voice cracks. He swallows, tries again. “Many of your competitors have already taken the dragon’s bargain, and you would be wise to do the same. It is better to be the dragon’s friend than his enemy!”

  “The whelp threatens us, Tym,” laughs Mandel, and the scribe makes another note. “The whelp mistakes us for grubby dealers in scrap. Out of respect for the dragon – not you, and certainly not your cousin, who lacks the courage to come himself – I shall say this: the alchemists’ guild sees no profit in a pointless quarrel with the Ghierdana, but we shall not tolerate thuggery or insolence. Walk away now, whelp, and I shall forget you ever spoke so unwisely.”

  Vyr opens his mouth like a gaffed fish, unsure of how to respond. Baston steps in. Time to growl, to be the savage brute that makes Vyr look reasonable and statesmanlike in contrast. He launches into a snarl, a rant, hunching his body forward like he’s about to fling himself across the deck and go for Mandel’s throat.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, you fat prick, this isn’t the guild’s city any more. You’re not in charge. You’re fucked and you know it!” Baston’s intimidating enough for the scribe to lay down his pen, to raise his hand in a curious contorted gesture. He keeps going, droplets of spittle mottling the pristine surface of the desk, waiting for Vyr to say something, to lay a restraining hand on him or to interrupt him, but Vyr’s just sitting there gawping. Baston’s words keep coming, exploding like the siege charge. He rises from his seat, slams his hand on the desk. “You haven’t got parliament in your pocket. Your Hawkers lost last year, and you can’t buy enough votes to cover your shame. There’s a king up in Holyhill now, and every dog in the street knows he’s on our side, not yours. The Keepers are back, and they hate you, too. There are fucking mad gods squatting in the Wash. You don’t even have your candlejacks no more. This city hates you! The streets will rise and we will finish you!”

  “Enough.” Guards in Mandel & Company livery flood from concealed side doors, faces masked by black helms.

  Hands grab at Baston. He breaks them, twisting free, grabbing fingers, twisting them too, then driving his knee in hard enough to snap ribs. Elbows one man in the face, punches another.

  He knows that this is stupid, but his blood’s up.

  A fourth guard moves in – Baston grabs the chair he was sitting on, flings it towards the man, but the guard’s not there any more. The fucker moves far faster than any human could, ducking under the flying chair with easy grace, and now his too-soft, too-strong hands are at Baston’s throat, pushing him to the floor with horrible ease. He can feel the heat of the candle-flame inside the guard’s skull – a Tallowman.

  Not like the one that attacked Rasce in Glimmerside. This candlejack’s fresh, its waxy form recently recast. He doesn’t have a fucking chance against this one.

  He tries anyway. Slams his fist into the monster’s flank, its neck, anywhere the wax might be exposed. The Tallowman doesn’t react, it just pins him to the floor. Little drools of melted wax from its mouth drip through the faceplate of the helmet.

  Vyr pulls himself free. “I’m Ghierdana! I’m Ghierdana! Blood of the dragon!” he shrieks.

  The guards – the human ones – hesitate and glance towards Mandel. They know the reputation of the Ghierdana, and how laying hands on a member of the dragon’s own family is an unforgivable offence. Mandel makes a dismissive gesture. “Let him go. As I said, I want no quarrel with the dragon. Your blood will not be on my hands.”

  Vyr darts to the doorway, then looks back at Baston, still pinned by the Tallowman. Baston still hasn’t taken the ash. He’s not Eshdana. Just a stray dog. By the customs of the Ghierdana there’s nothing stopping Vyr from walking out the door and leaving Baston behind.

  Vyr knows it. He wavers at the threshold, looks down at Baston for a long moment, his breathing fast and shallow, weighing the risk to himself against Rasce’s anger if he returns alone.

  “Wretches like him,” remarks Mandel, “are fit only for rendering in the Tallow Vats. I have it in mind to remake him into something useful to society.”

  The scribe coughs. Mandel nods, and the Tallowman releases Baston.

  He crawls clear, staggers to his feet, leaning against the wall for support as he and Vyr stumble out of the fortress. A fifth chip is tucked
behind one of the glowing panels as he passes.

  “A disaster. A disaster,” repeats Vyr to himself. “Rasce should have gone himself. I was doomed from the start, yes? The fault is his, not mine. I must tell them that.”

  “There was every chance it was going to play out like that.” Baston rubs his neck. “Rasce knew there was little chance of Mandel taking the deal straight off. It was always going to get rough.”

  “You made certain of that, dolt, by shouting in Mandel’s face! Useless bluster!”

  Baston rolls the last of the pebbles between his fingers. “Wasn’t useless.”

  Vyr stares at him, uncomprehending, then says: “Go and tell my cousin of our failure here. Tell him that Mandel is secure in his fortress, and will not bargain. Perhaps we can bring another of the families in, pay Carancio or one of the other great ones for aid. Nothing short of a dragon could break those walls, yes?”

  “Looked like.” Unscalable, invulnerable walls, patrolled by Tallowmen and gods know what else. A challenge. Definitely a challenge.

  Vyr narrows his eyes. “This is a ploy. Some scheme of his? We’re far outside the New City. The thing that Rasce communes with – it can’t do anything here… can it? What have you done?”

  Baston scowls. “Stay quiet. Wait till we’re safe.”

  “Safe? Safe?” echoes Vyr. His whole body quivers with nervous excitement or fear. He shakes his head. “Meddling with divine powers is never safe. This has gone far enough.”

  It’s not some mad god, Baston thinks, it’s Spar Idgeson. The son of the man who made the Brotherhood.

  The train slows, stops at Venture Square station. Vyr rises.