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

around, pushes Baston’s chin up, as if determined to dissect his larynx. Then it convulses, dropping the knife, scrambling backwards across the floor of the tunnel like a startled insect. The flame in its head flares, then turns a lurid blue, Its mouth opens, and it splutters gobbets of hot wax. It screeches something that might be a few words, then turns and runs.

Baston lies there in the mud for a moment, his whole body aching. The voice vomits out of him again.

“BASTON. TELL YOUR MASTER THAT I MUST MEET WITH HIM. TELL HIM I KNOW THINGS HE DOES NOT. TELL HIM I WANT TO SPEAK WITH SPAR.”

Rasce wakes, jarred from his sleep by dreams of ghouls. He opens his eyes, but the room’s too dark to see, and for a moment he’s confused – is he in the tunnel near Shriveport? Or is the tunnel part of him?

He opens his inner eye, taps into Spar’s perception, and sees everything. Sees the body in the bed, the stained sheets. He has to swim down towards it, reclaim the flesh – and then he’s in his bedroom on Lanthorn Street. It’s night outside, and the streets are slick with rain. It was daylight and dry a moment ago – he’s lost time again.

No. It’s Spar who fears being adrift in time, Rasce reminds himself. The lines between the two are blurring.

“Was I—” his throat is dry and painful, his voice a croak.

“Sssh. Don’t move.” Karla kneels at his bedside, pulling the coverlet back. Unwrapping a bandage on his leg. Pain shoots through him again.

“My leg! What’s wrong with it?”

Karla doesn’t look at him. Instead, she begins to change the dressing. “You stabbed yourself. You’d stabbed the walls a few times, then you started on yourself. Baston had to wrestle the knife off you.”

Rasce grapples with the memory. “I had to do it. The pain helped. It was like a sacrifice.”

“I know, I know. Stay still. Rest.”

The wound, when revealed, is deep and ugly, a gash in the muscle of his thigh almost to the bone. Karla gently cleans out the wound, slathers it with a healing ointment, then opens another jar and starts to rub a gritty slime into the skin around the injury. The ointment is numbing, making him feel detached from the experience of the pain.

“What’s that?” asks Rasce drowsily. There’s something odd about the injury. The skin around it is stiff, encrusted with greyish pus, and seems to glisten in the dim light.

“Alkahest,” says Karla. “For the stone skin. It’s just a little pebbling.”

“I have the plague?” Horror rushes through him, a cold bile-flood carrying memories that are not his – memories of Spar’s slow corruption by the Stone Plague.

Karla shakes her head, puts a reassuring hand on his chest. “I got to it in time, but I need to keep treating it. You’ve got to stay still and rest. It’s all right. Baston will handle things.”

He wants to protest. He tries to get up, but she pushes him back down. She puts a cup to his lips; a bitter draught, thick and medicinal, and it washes him back down into oblivion.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

This stretch of coast is a seawall of mountains, an absurd profusion of peaks. Cari can’t recall any mountain-gods of Ul-Taen, but one must have walked here. Or perhaps some expeditionary force from the north brought the miracles of Uriah Mountainmaker with them. Certainly, these mountains weren’t there the last time Cari passed this way, but Myri’s unperturbed. “Godswar,” she says, and shrugs.

They find a place to land Tymneas, a little cove where two mountains have toppled against each other, creating a gap in the seawall. As they sail through the titanic arch of stone, Cari glimpses white-furred apes clinging to the rockface far overhead. The creatures scream and hiss at the boat as they pass, and their faces are skulls.

Beyond the mountain wall, the lands are half familiar. The salt marshes and dunes of the Ul-Taen coast, the remnants of old roads and settlements dotting the broken landscape like scattered pebbles.

The other half is nightmare. Chunks of broken heavens, fallen from the sky and made material in the moment of their destruction. Malformed miracles leaking into reality, scabs of divine works. God-touched creatures crawl across the land, screaming hymns of gratitude. Strange plants grow, fiery-red bushes that ignite when touched, mountain-flowers disgorging virulent blue poison on to unseen winds. They travel through the meadowlands of some hunting god, through the burned-out stacks of a seemingly infinite library, through a desert of broken glass.

They are not alone here. Ghosts dwell in this land, the shades of divinities broken over and over until there is nothing left but mindless fragments. They move with the wind, trying to impose their pattern on to whatever they happen upon. Pebbles spontaneously pile themselves into little mountains, dust clouds take on the aspect of wolves and serpents. Tufts of grass become strings of angelic lyres. At one point, the stolen aethergraph tunes into some divine frequency and goes mad, keys hammering out incomprehensible prophecies until Myri finds the off switch.

Carillon and Myri, too, risk being remade by these vanished gods. Both women are fortified against the touch of the divine – one through her sorcery, the other through the remnants of her sainthood, through her eldritch heritage, and both have enough willpower to resist direct assault by these diminished spirits. These gods are still perilous in an oblique manner; at times, Cari’s attention strays from the dusty path, and alien thoughts infiltrate her mind. Once, she imagines what it would be like to tear Myri’s throat out with her teeth, to howl and call her vanished pack (Rat would howl back at her, she knows, and Adro if he was drunk enough). Another time, she finds herself reciting poetry, her words so sweet that honey comes dripping from her mouth. She has the presence of mind to keep reciting for a few minutes after the fit fades,