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

for her to take the tatters of reality and weave them into a new spell. But Cari can see the strain on her face, the way she braces herself against forces that Cari cannot feel. She watches Myri measure out her remaining drug vials like Spar used to space out his alkahest shots. They split the boat between them, an unspoken border zone running amidships. Cari spends most of her time aft, Myri forward.

Sometimes, a strong gust whipping off the Firesea tears through Myri’s spells, and Cari has to scramble to trim the sails to match, but for much of the journey there’s time to kill.

Or not kill. The sorceress may be quite far down Cari’s list of enemies, but she’s on there – and a lot of the names above her have been scratched off. But it’s not the time. Get within sight of Khebesh, then their little private Armistice ends.

Cari’s not much for conversation, but maybe talking will take her mind off the gnawing hunger in her belly. Her attempts to figure out the aethergraph have yielded nothing but frustration. She’d hoped, somehow, that the machine would work like her amulet and let her thoughts reach Spar all the way across the world, but so far the contraption’s proved unresponsive. She has to fight the urge to throw the damn thing overboard.

And maybe talking will stop Myri from staring at her like she’s something dangerous, something venomous. The sorceress is the dangerous one here, right? Far from Guerdon, far from Spar, Cari’s got nothing.

“What’s Khebesh like?” Cari asks.

“When I first went there, I thought it was the most marvellous city in the world. It was only later that I realised it’s a hermitage. Tranquil, deliberate, all things carefully balanced.” She glances at Cari. “You’ll hate it.”

Cari shrugs. “As long as they help Spar, doesn’t matter. Where’d you come from? Before Khebesh, I mean.”

Myri rubs her tattooed wrist. Little crackling bolts of aetheric energy dance around her hand. She flings them out over the railing like snot, the magic dissipating over the wide ocean. Then she begins to speak, her voice a painful whisper that’s often lost in the wind and the creaking of the sails…

She was born in the forests of Varinth, and it was whispered she burned her way out of her mother’s womb with words of fire, nursed by a boar-spirit from the dark of the wood. A wild talent – a twist of mind and soul that gives a natural ability for sorcery. They called her a witch, too, and apprenticed her to the priestesses who wove effigies of green branches for the boar god.

In those days, the tribes warred with the Empire of Haith, and Myri made her first kill at the age of six. Men of Haith marched on the forest villages in orderly columns, living and dead soldiers advancing in lockstep, indistinguishable until the blasts of sorcery struck them. The flesh withered and the living bones collapsed, but the dead kept on walking.

The boar god died a hundred times, brought down by massed artillery fire. Each time a new saint or avatar emerged from the thorn forest, the men of Haith would kill it again. They burned the temples, toppled the effigies and spilled the offerings in the mud.

The tribe surrendered. The warriors exchanged swords for saws and axes; Haith’s shipyards were hungry for timber. The surviving priestesses fled into the dark, where no man could follow. But they left Myri behind, and the dead men captured her.

Cari drops a fishing line into the water. They’re nearly out of food, and while Myri hardly eats, Cari’s belly is pressing against her spine, and it’s making her irritable.

“If you want to play who had the shittiest childhood, I’m game.”

“Oh, please. I know all about your past, remember? I was with Heinreil when he found out who you were, Carillon Thay. You were sent to live with your aunt. Your childhood was scraped knees and picnics and farmyard animals.”

“My aunt tried to murder me.”

“Because you were bred to be the Herald of the Black Iron Gods and bring doom upon the world? Because you were spawned from a Raveller summoned up by your mad grandfather? Or because she had to spend time with you?” Myri rolls her eyes. “And I don’t want to play, as you put it. The circumstances of my childhood were harsh, but there’s no point complaining to anyone. My past doesn’t define me. I choose my own future.”

Her story’s interrupted by a fit of coughing so intense that Cari crosses the demarcation line to help Myri breathe. After a few moment’s retching over the side, the sorceress continues.

All things have a place in the orderly Empire of Haith, even wild girls from the wood. They sent her to a Bureau school for sorcerers in the mountains north of Paravos, where they shaped her talent, taught her rote incantations from musty grimoires. Her classmates an unlikely mix: children like herself, the others from poor families hoping for advancement, criminals judged to have enough wit to attempt thaumaturgy, the desperate or god-touched, who had nowhere else to go. There were other schools, she learned, where sorcery was treated as an academic discipline, a prerequisite to the high science of necromancy, but the Empire of Haith also needed disposable war-sorcerers. Spellcasters to let off a few big blasts before the aetheric feedback ruined them. Even in Myri’s youth, such practices were seen as crude and old-fashioned – alchemical weapons promised more destructive power, and did not require any souls to be torn asunder in the process. But the Empire of Haith changes very, very slowly; if military protocol called for each cohort to have a combat sorcerer attached, then combat sorcerers they shall have.

But they would not have Myri. She learned all they had to teach her, honed her natural talents for sorcery – then escaped.

Cari’s attention is distracted when she hooks a big snapper on her fishing line. Myri