The Broken God by Gareth Hanrahan (desktop ebook reader .TXT) 📕

Bah. Another of our works taken from us, and all in pursuit of Duttin’s lunacy.”

“Like old times,” laughs the scribe. “A Thay ruining us.”

“I fail to see the humour,” says Mandel.

“The Great Work endures, my friend. We are close. A little longer, and we can set all the world to rights.”

Mandel replies, his mouth moving and making sounds, but the Tallowman’s lost interest. Now, it’s fascinated by the motion of Mandel’s jaw, the way his beard hairs move when his mouth opens, the moistness of his tongue, the pulsing of the arteries in his neck. Wouldn’t it be enlightening to bludgeon his skull open with a brick? Or a knife, a sweet sharp knife?

The flame in the Tallowman’s skull dances through random fantasies of cruelty. Unseen, the stone in its side begins to slip as the wax around it softens.

Spar’s mind retreats from the Tallowman, the backwash of a psychic wave.

“What are you doing?” hisses Rasce. He’s distantly aware that his body is soaked with sweat, the dragon-tooth knife slipping from his slick grip, but that body is many streets away and mostly irrelevant.

I can’t hold on.

“We must divine if there’s a way in. Heinreil’s tunnel – does it still exist? Look deeper! I care not for the mystic jabbering of alchemists!”

The Great Work. In his death throes, Spar swallowed the old Alchemists’ Quarter of Guerdon. Portions of their library are still lodged in his bowels, in the tunnels below the New City, and knowledge leeched into the stone. The Great Work is the long-held mystic obsession of the alchemists’ guild, the goal of spiritual transformation and perfection. For some, it was metaphor – lead in gold and flesh into transcendent matter just another way of talking about coaxing fire from phlogiston. A secular philosophy in a godless city to lift the alchemists’ work above grubby commerce, just like the Brotherhood clung to Idge’s writings.

A memory opens up beneath Spar, triggered by words he heard while eavesdropping. Professor Ongent’s querulous voice, asking him, Are you familiar – I would assume not, not to cast aspersions on your education – with the Theory of Forms?

He once was. He’s not any more. That knowledge is scattered across the city, tucked away in odd corners and alleyways, memories left stranded on rooftops and attics, buried in cellars, and he doesn’t have the strength to collect it all. Something to do with the movement of souls, with the physical plane of mortals and the aetheric plane of gods and spells. It’s important, he knows that. Help me, he pleads to Rasce. Rasce is the fixed point of his consciousness now – he can use Rasce as an anchor as he collects his scattered thoughts.

It’s important, thinks Spar.

“NO!” Rasce drives the dragon-tooth blade into his own thigh.

And then he’s flung forward, as though a volcano of pure willpower has erupted beneath the New City—

The flame in the Tallowman’s skull flickers and bends as some unseen wind breathes on it. A new impulse fills the Tallowman. It wants to go down. Down and down.

So it goes, leaving the maker and the scribe behind. The cellars under Mandel & Company are a labyrinth of pipes and valves, holding vats and deep-storage vaults girded with dampening rods and containment wards. The Tallowman slips by them all, sniffing its way to the oldest, deepest part of the fortress.

Down.

It leaves the hiss and hum of industry behind, the rumble of the trains and the complaints of the roaring furnaces in the high-pressure athanors. A stray moment of sympathy crosses the Tallowman’s mind, a thought of kinship between itself and the caged infernos in those furnaces. They’re both things of flame, and would delight in running rampant across the city, consuming all those lovely breakable flammable things – oh, imagine the screaming! – but they’re both chained in houses built by the alchemists. Both yoked to useful tasks. It moves on. Stainless steel and orichalcum wiring give way to grey stone blocks mortared with blood.

Down. Down.

And oh – what is this? The Tallowman enters into a large underground chamber. The only light here is from the candle-flame inside, and the fiery light dances over flagstones carved with runnels, over walls with depictions of mass sacrifice at the knife-tentacles of hideous formless horrors, over an altar of onyx.

Over two great lumps of iron that rest here in this tomb. Both deformed, half-melted and half-congealed, neither bell nor icon. The Tallowman’s flickering gaze passes over the pair of junked effigies without pausing. The flame flickers again, compelling it onwards.

Silently it moves through this unholy place, through this temple to forgotten gods, until at last it comes to the brink of a dark well. A tunnel of black stone, dug long, long ago.

The Tallowman leans over the edge, staring down into the darkness.

And it is not only the flickering of the candle that makes those shadows move.

“The tunnel exists!” crows Rasce. He imagines Baston and the rest climbing up that tunnel, bearing guns and bombs. Revenge for Vyr! Great-Uncle’s commands achieved!

Spar doesn’t respond, but Rasce senses their shared awareness unspool, their prolapsed soul unravelling as it retreats across the city. For an instant, he feels Guerdon as Spar must, streets like veins, his mind slithering down Heinreil’s tunnel to brush against something dark and deep.

And then he falls back into his body, and is met with pain.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

They fall into a simple routine on board Myri’s little boat. Cari does all the work, and Myri concentrates on staying alive.

To be fair to the sorceress, she does one other thing, and it’s key to their chances of making the voyage to Khebesh. Each morning, Myri binds wind and wave, commanding them to carry Tymneas swiftly over the ocean. It’s the easiest sailing Cari’s ever done.

Myri claims that the spells are easy, too. The gods have already fucked up the aether here with discordant miracles, Kraken and the Lord of Waters clashing over command of the seas, so it’s trivial