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

conjured your mother. The amulet was a relic of the Black Iron Cult, repurposed by Jermas Thay’s sorcerers to be a link to the sleeping gods. But it also housed a fragment of the god’s hunger, a manifest emanation.”

“A Raveller,” says Cari. The thought sickens her and fascinates her in equal measure, and Myri’s the first person she’s met who might be able to answer some of her questions. Well, the first person she’s met that wasn’t trying to use her in some arcane ritual, throw her in a prison for saints, or that she wasn’t actively trying to murder. “But I’m human, right?”

Myri wrinkles what remains of her nose scornfully. “What a stupid question. Humanity is an accident of birth, not something to cling to or take pride in.”

“Well, I’m not a fucking Raveller, am I?”

The sorceress rolls over, draws a blanket around herself. “Clearly not. I’m tired. Wake me when the wind fails.”

“Hang on. I want the rest of the story.”

The rest of the story is short, painful, and Carillon’s fault.

Cari doesn’t mention that part. She stays quiet as Myri describes her attempt to flee Guerdon at the height of the Crisis. Myri and Heinreil sold Eladora and the amulet to the Crawling Ones in exchange for a fortune in gold, and tried to drive out of the city in a carriage. But Cari had power that night, and from across the city she saw her enemy and struck at him. With a thought, she could have crushed Heinreil’s soul, smashed through all Myri’s wards and destroyed her. Instead, she snuffed out the life of one of the raptequines drawing the carriage, sent them careening into a wall.

Heinreil, his legs shattered, was arrested.

Myri escaped. She fled south, to Ulbishe. To survive, though, she had to use sorcery despite her wounds. Like a gambler on a losing streak, taking double-or-nothing bets to turn it all around. The cost paid in stigmata on her body and scars on her soul. In Ulbishe, she traded what coin she carried out of Guerdon for the containment suit. The first time she’d passed through Ulbishe, the quality of the alchemy work there was far behind that of Guerdon, but the alchemists of Ulbishe had improved greatly in the intervening years, and anyway, she had little choice. Augmented by the iron prison, she continued south. Skirted the Godswar—

“Is that when you signed on with Artolo?”

“No. Ilbarin was under siege by the gods of Ishmere. I took Tymneas east, beyond the Isle of Fire, and reached Khebesh by that route. Only the Gates were closed to me, and they would not open.” Myri shivers beneath the blanket. “I tried every opening spell I knew. I hammered on the Gates. I argued, demanded, pleaded, begged. But the city remained closed.” Her gaze lights on the book. “But I shall return there, and the Gates will open.”

“Say you get back to Khebesh—”

“I will.”

“Say you abandon me to get eaten by wild gods or something.”

“I may.”

“And you show up with Ramegos’ journal, and they let you in, and they heal you. What then?”

Myri’s words are a whisper. “Then I spit in their faces and depart again. My present circumstances have no bearing on the fact that I am right and they are wrong.”

Cari sullenly checks the fishing line. There’s little chance of them catching anything at this speed, but they’ve nothing else to eat. The dark coast of the mainland slips by to starboard. Dark shapes in the water, too – she wonders if they’re not fish at all, but Bythos. An escort sent by the Lord of Waters? Some ghost of Captain Hawse, still watching over her? More likely they’re just carrion hunters, waiting to collect two fresh corpses, brimming with residuum for their broken god.

She shakes the line, taking her frustration out on it. She wonders why the end of Myri’s tale angers her so much. The sheer selfishness of it, maybe – Myri threatening to take Spar’s one chance for survival. It’s her only chance, too, of course, but Spar’s a better person than Myri, damn it. If Cari gets to choose, she chooses Spar.

Oh, now you want it to be up to you. Now you want to be the one who sorts the living and the dead. It was easy, back in the camp, to choose between her freedom and Adro’s health.

Tymneas rolls and shivers. Cari leaps up and scans the seas behind them, a lifetime of instinct warning her of danger. There’s a long band of oddly still, glassy water stretching out from the north, from the smudge on the horizon that’s the Rock of Ilbarin. The band rolls west, reaching and rotating, like the spoke of a tremendous wheel – and there’s another band moving in from the east, visible in the distance as waves break along it.

Cari’s seen it before. At Guerdon, before the invasion. She knows that if that glassy, stolen sea touches Tymneas, they’ll be caught like a fly in amber. It’s the Kraken’s miracle.

“Kraken!” she cries, slicing the line free with her knife. She leaps to the tiller, hauls it around. She kicks the wood next to Myri’s head to wake the sorceress. “Kraken! We’ve got to get out of the water!”

Myri wakes, and with a word she wakes a hurricane.

Tymneas races west, the sails straining to contain the conjured wind. So fast they leave the Bythos far behind.

The Kraken-miracle reaches for them, like the fingers of some gargantuan hand, searching and probing, but they outrun it, too. The mainland coast swells ahead of them. As they draw closer, Cari sees the distant flash of miracles reflecting off the low clouds.

“We have to get off the water,” she repeats.

“That’s the Godswar,” warns Myri. “We’ll have to pass through the Godswar.”

“Let the fuckers try to stop us.”

Artolo watches the Moonchild approach from the tower of the prefect’s villa in Ushket. The freighter is too large to make its way through the flooded streets of the