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

“All these streets are His temple,” says the man, “and so all acts are acts of worship!” His tone leaving no doubt what sort of act he has in mind. Cari twists away from him, stepping into the press of traffic, vanishing into the crowd. The flow of people in the marketplace skirts around the empty spot, and Cari spots some young women sitting as if bathing their feet in the dust. The fountain exists for these people. Divine madness.

Thunder rolls, somewhere in the distance. Cari tenses – such omens often accompany divine intervention, miracle bombardments. But the people of Gissa ignore it, secure in the knowledge that their city is inviolable, that Gissa will never fall. No foe will ever breach their walls.

She does find one woman who’s selling actual food – a rack of dried fish and eels.

“Do you take these?” The Haithi coins. The fishmonger says something in Taenish. Cari nods, uncomprehending, suddenly alarmed – if everyone in the city is a worshipper of the god of Gissa, then maybe they can instantly spot strangers. But the woman smiles and speaks in broken Haithi. “Yes, yes, praise Rhan Gis.”

“Where’d you get the fish?”

“Little village just east of here. Yhandin.” Uncertainty creases the woman’s face – Cari’s question exposes an inconsistency in the miracle of the city. If Gissa is as it once was, before the Godswar, then it’s located far from the village of Yhandin. The question forces the woman to complete actual reality. Cari grabs the fish and hurries away before she raises any more existential doubts.

Finding the edge of Gissa is harder than she expected. The city can’t be that big – it’s not even a fucking city, it’s one minor god and his band of deluded worshippers, all dragging the corpse of the city with them – but space and time twist on the imagined streets. Cari can see the city walls in the distance outlined against the horizon, which is a whole other level of fucked she’s not going to contemplate right now, but she can’t find her way there. Straight streets don’t run straight here.

The stars that come out in the night sky above Gissa are not the same ones she saw over Ilbarin.

Defeated, she turns back towards Myri’s hiding place, and things instantly get worse. Her first clue is the fact that she can now see buildings around her, full-on towers and citadels, not the ruins of five minutes ago. At first, she guesses that she’s spent so long in Gissa that she’s fallen under the sway of the shared delusion, but then she hears a beautiful voice like a trumpet call, and her stomach sinks even as her heart sings.

“Bring the unclean one to me,” commands Rhan-Gis, His voice echoing from the stones around her, resonating with her very soul. “She is nearby. I see her.” It’s the saint from the temple, and it would seem the fucker can do her trick, Spar’s trick, the seeing-through-stone miracle. She doesn’t know what “nearby” means—

As if conjured by the saint’s commands, a group of soldiers appears at the top of the street. She’d almost mistake them for Stone Men, their bodies marked with stony growths, but in a flash she sees the distinction. These guys were all mortally wounded in the past – that one’s got a wide gash in his belly, that one was stabbed through the heart, another doesn’t have a fucking head – and the wounds were filled with pieces of the city. They’ve got chunks of brickwork and mortar shoved into their bodies, working as muscles and organs and, apparently, a head. One of them points at her with a hand salvaged from some marble statue, and Blockhead swivels to look at Cari like the thing’s got eyes.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuck this.

She runs.

Sprinting forward, flagstones giving way to mud beneath her feet. The resurrected city fades as she gets further away from Rhan-Gis, returning to the mummery of ruins and lunatics. The guards keep chasing her with equal zeal, though, regardless of her perception of their surroundings. “Halt, in the name of the city!” cries one, and she guesses they’re still seeing the dream of Gissa. The guard’s words have power here, too – her limbs become leaden weights, almost too heavy to move, the streets grabbing at her feet. She can barely move, and the guards are gaining.

She staggers around a “corner”, around one of the piles of stone, and then throws herself to her right. According to the rules of the imaginary city, she’s now inside a building, even though the streets are just lines drawn in the mud here. The guards run past her, even though she’s lying right there. The guards don’t share their saint’s power of perception. To them, the ghost of a wall is a wall. There are downsides to seeing heaven, she thinks, lips too numb to laugh.

Cari lies there in the mud waiting for the paralysis to fade. She listens to distant drumming, interspersed with horns and trumpets. It reminds her of the Ishmeric temples back in occupied Guerdon; there must be some sort of ceremony or celebration happening at that big temple, which probably isn’t a good thing. She hides as dusk gives way to darkness. The night sky’s riven by fractures, and the stars shudder as gods fight far far above.

A smaller procession halts outside her hiding place. A dozen or so citizens of Gissa, thin and ragged. Four of them pallbearers, carrying the body of a young woman; another walking behind, carrying a little bundle pressed to her chest. Two of them mime lifting tools, swinging them against the nonexistent wall like pickaxes. If there really was a wall there, Cari would be covered in debris and dust. The other mourners kneel by the wall, pretending to clear fragments of brick. They’re lifting nothing but memories, but still they huff and strain. Still their fingers bleed.

They lay the body down in the imaginary