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

than acting. He has to build instincts, autonomic responses, cut his conscious mind out of the loop as much as possible. Simple rules first – help running thieves escape. Block the Tallowmen. Give shelter. Help those who want to be found, and those who seek to be lost. The Tallowmen come like falling stars, like a siege, each burning wick an incoming shell, and he deflects them as best he can. No stairs for you, candle-man! This alleyway has a doorway at the end when a thief passes through, but not when you follow! And those roof slates are treacherous, and prone to falling on wax heads.

In truth, he’s unsure how successful he is. Without Rasce as a focus, time and space become distorted. He reacts to block one Tallowman, and a day later the streets change. Or a day before. Or he moves the wrong stone, warps the city the wrong way. He observes far more than he acts, for few of the attackers cross into the part of the New City where he has the most power.

It’s easy for him to observe. Easy for a Stone Man to cut himself off. Loneliness and isolation are old companions of his.

His thoughts spin out, escaping him. Vanishing like runaway children down twisted alleyways of memory or might-have-been. Phantom conversations haunt him. He imagines long conversations with Rat. His old friend is the one other soul in Guerdon who might understand his situation. Both he and Rat underwent strange transformations during the Crisis. Spar became the New City, and Rat became an Elder Ghoul, something closer to dragon or godspawn than mortal.

Rat wouldn’t see it that way, of course. Like most ghouls, Rat is a survivor at heart. Relentlessly practical, unsentimental, even amoral. Rat would speak in his old voice, the voice he has in Spar’s memory, not the borrowed heralds the Elder Ghoul uses. You should have died when you fell from the Seamarket. Anything that keeps you going after that is life. I haven’t eaten you. That’s how you know you’re alive. And Rat would grin, showing his corpse-tearing teeth, and his eyes would burn with this fierce faith in Spar, this belief that his friend could endure anything.

Spar observes Rat moving through the New City. Now. This is happening now. Sees him speaking with Baston. Watches them descend to that empty vault in the depths to where Cari waits for them but that hasn’t happened yet.

Conversations with Cari, too. Most are memories from her time as the Saint of Knives, those madcap days after the Crisis, after she’d come into her power. Her happiness when he answered her from the stone, the zeal with which she threw herself into her self-appointed role as guardian of the New City (the eagerness to forget the tragedies and mistakes of the past). The two of them against the world, souls intertwined, unable to hide anything from the other. The city was hers, and she embraced it with violent joy.

Rasce was like that, too, he reflects. Both Rasce and Cari are wild, quick to act, fiercely loyal to their friends. But Rasce’s alliance with Spar is a temporary thing; he’s a shooting star flashing over the New City, crossing Guerdon in an eye blink.

Another memory – the god-bomb arcing over the New City, striking Pesh, the goddess of war, and annihilating her. And his own voice, saying we can remake the world, and Cari replying who wants to do that? You get it wrong, and the whole world is your fault. How do you live with that?

But later, she said, if you ask me, I’ll do it.

Spar can feel himself fracturing again. I’m dying, he thinks.

Cari, he thinks. Goodbye. I wish we had time.

The flames of the Tallowmen look like stars, he observes, and then everything vanishes behind grey clouds.

In his dream, Rasce has slipped from Great-Uncle’s back. He’s falling from the sky, falling through endless roaring storm clouds. Falling for hours, buffeted by winds, scorched by lightning. Plummeting through cloud-cities, falling through sheets of rain, and no end to this fall in sight.

He hears Spar’s voice like thunder, but he cannot make out the words.

He senses his body, lying in bed, but cannot find it.

He breaks through the clouds, falls towards a black ocean. It writhes, glistening like a sea of tentacles. A living darkness. He would scream if he had the breath for it, if he had the body for it. In the distance, beyond the rim of the world, the sound of chanting.

And then – miraculously, he’s rescued. For a moment, Rasce fumbles with the thought that he has the Ring of Samara, that its magic has saved him from this fate, but no – it’s something else. There are hooks in his elbows, his thighs, his chest, even between his eyes, burning bright as fire, wrenching him into the sky. Heat floods through his veins, like alkahest – no, that’s Spar, he’s the Stone Man, he’s got the plague, not I – as he flies in the dream.

Soars like a dragon.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Cari’s initial assumption can be summarised as I’m so stupid. Myri seemed too exhausted to move. Righteous fury wells up in her as she imagines Myri sneaking off into the wastes with the grimoire, cackling evilly. Immediately, Cari imagines what will happen next – she’ll track the sorceress down.

Maybe it’ll be a desperate chase all the way to the gates of Khebesh. She’ll hunt Myri through the Godswar, always one step behind her, stalk her just as she stalked her foes in the New City. The very moment Myri tries to use the book to get inside the walls, Cari will appear out of nowhere and cut the witch’s throat from behind. Serve her right for stealing from a thief. Or maybe it’ll be the lack of pills that does her in, and Cari will find Myri’s corpse in some ditch, all curled up and stiff like a dead insect.

As she searches, though,