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

watch the city march past them. People, thousands of them, dragging sacks of rubble and brick, shoulders bowed under cloaks of red slate. Skins red with brick dust. They march in columns that mimic the layout of vanished streets – and a presence moves with them, invisible forces flattening the ground ahead of them, stamping the map of the crawling city into the mud. Some hold street signs like battle standards, others stumble through the mud with absurd pomposity, clad in the ornate robes of civic officials, of judges and councillors. There’s a carnival touch to the whole procession, wild abandon mixed with civic pride. All of their faces, from the starveling children to the oldest greybeard, touched with divine ecstasy. They live in Gissa, and Gissa is the heavenly city.

Cari feels that sandpaper sensation again, and presses her face into the mud as a great temple-barge passes. It’s a huge pyramidal temple, the house of the civic god, mounted on gigantic runners of teak wood and dragged by a crowd of ecstatic worshippers. Atop the temple stands a young man, beautiful and shining, chosen of the god of the city of Gissa.

“Tell me when they’ve gone,” whispers Cari, but before Myri can answer the saint raises his left hand. Trumpets sound, the earth shakes and the city settles around them. Their ditch is now surrounded on all sides by the memory of a ruined city, by the shambling crowds of the displaced and the divine.

After a whispered conversation in the ditch, they agree that Cari should sneak out at twilight and try to find how close they are to the edge of this mobile city. Myri’s too weak to move quickly, so she’ll stay in their hiding place, drawing protective wards to ensure she stays undetected.

“If you can’t find a quick way out, come back here,” says Myri.

“Maybe we can wait ’em out,” suggests Cari. “Hide here until the city moves on.”

“For all we know, they might be here for months. I don’t know why they’re digging in here.”

“All right then. I’ll go. Just give me the money.”

“You want to go shopping?”

Cari shrugs. “It’s a city. There’ll be a market. At the very fucking least, we need a can opener.”

“It’s not a city. It’s the ghost of a city, preserved by the husk of the city’s god.”

“People still need to buy shit. Give me the coins.”

“No.”

“All right, I’ll steal.”

Myri curses and hands over the pouch of coin, which Cari takes as a damning indictment of her talents as a pickpocket.

“You’ll move faster if you leave your pack.” The fucking book is still slung on Cari’s back, along with the aethergraph, tied across her shoulders with a length of line salvaged from Tymneas. The rough rope digs into her skin, and the weight of the damn thing does slow her down. At the same time, she instantly imagines Myri staggering off with the book, sneaking out of this hallucinatory city the way she crept out of Guerdon years ago.

“You’re right.” Cari unties the knot, lets the bundle fall. Then she darts forward, grabs a handful of Myri’s vials of medicine, stuffs them into her pocket as insurance. Myri scowls at her, but is too exhausted to object. “See you in a few hours.”

The twilight makes the city even weirder. There are pillars of piled stones everywhere that seem to mark street corners, a few low walls, too. Cari can’t tell if these stones were carried all the way by the people of the city, or if the stones themselves walked along as part of the procession. Or maybe the stones were always here, only now they’ve been incorporated into the city, structure imposed on chaos. Many of them are topped with bone fragments, which put her in mind of sacrificial altars, and that’s always guaranteed to put her in a great fucking mood. This place makes her skin crawl.

In the dim light, the suggestion of structures loom out at her. Ghosts of vanished temples and houses, giving her fleeting impressions of mighty buildings all around her. Godshit, why did they have to run into a city-god? It’s an uncomfortable reminder of her grandfather’s plan for Guerdon, to transmute the Black Iron Gods into something tame and civilised, civic spirits to guard the city. A reminder, too, of Spar. That boy atop the rolling temple is like she used to be, an avatar of the city, their version of the Saint of Knives. Only this place is a dead city tethered to a mad and broken god.

No. Nothing like me. Nothing like Spar, she tells herself.

Also, fuck you, Myri. Told you there’d be a market. Cari passes under an archway decorated with great bronze horses – no, under the memory of an archway – and wanders through the market. There aren’t any stalls, just merchants and hawkers standing around in the places stalls should be, like they’re play-acting. It’s all mummery – Cari watches a line of people pretend to eat at the counter of a nonexistent food stall, shoving imaginary food into their mouths, chewing and swallowing with gusto. One of them lets out a belch, and his breath smells of meat and spices. A low-grade miracle – for them, the illusion of food is enough to sustain them. She wonders what would happen to these poor people if they left the city and the realm of their city-god. Nothing pleasant.

One passer-by grabs her arm, gestures at an empty spot on the far side of the market. “Look! Are the fountains not beautiful tonight? And tomorrow may never come! Join me for a cup of wine, and we shall celebrate Rhan-Gis!” He’s dressed in tattered rags, a long beard tangled with twigs and thorns, but he talks like he’s some handsome courtier. The remnants of the cloak around his shoulders look like it was once an expensive garment.

“Very beautiful,” agrees Cari, in the same tone of voice she’d say nice horsey to a slavering raptequine, “but I have to,