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

or maybe fused to it, because she can’t tell if the man’s head is in the fish’s mouth, or if it’s more like a monk’s cowled hood instead of a mouth. The groaning gurgle goes on, a terrible keening, and she can nearly make out words in the sound.

Glass smashes – a bottle, thrown from a window across the street. Bluish blood runs from the fish’s back. Then a hail of stones rains down on the creature. As far as Cari can judge, the attackers aren’t scared, just irritated to be woken by the creature. Like it’s the town drunk, singing at the top of its gills in the middle of the night. The thing’s just standing there, taking the punishment.

It slaps on the window again as if it’s waiting for her.

Fuck it. She’s got no reason to stay. Cari grabs her pack and slings it on to her back. The weight of the fucking book makes her slip in the mud. She climbs out into the street. Someone above shouts a curse, and flings a bottle at her, too. It shatters on the wall nearby, showering her in broken glass. Cari grabs a stone and throws it up at the window. She’s a better shot; there’s a second, and considerably louder curse, and the window above slams shut.

The fish-headed thing – Monkfish, she decides to call it – begins to walk. There’s something absurdly solemn, even dignified about the way it staggers through the muddy streets, dragging the train of its massive fish-body behind it. The absurd entity makes its way downhill, and she follows, staying in the shadows cast by the creature’s radiance. As far as she can tell, she’s the only person on the streets of Ushket at this hour. The sun’s only just crested the shoulder of the Rock, sending long shadows striding west. The light shows her the town. Houses with large arched windows, flat red-tiled roofs, whitewashed walls. Shady green courtyards, to provide relief from the summer’s heat.

She was right about the transformed terrain. Ushket sits on a hillside, once high above the sea. Now the sea laps at the heart of the town. Through gaps in the buildings, dawn light flashes off the water, blindingly bright. The sea level has risen hundreds of feet; either that or the whole island’s sunk, buried by the divine wrath of the Kraken of Ishmere. When the gods go to war, the way the world works is the first casualty.

The Monkfish leads her through the streets. A different route to the hill she climbed last night. The streets are still eerily empty, but she can hear the town waking up on the upper levels. Glancing up, she sees rope bridges and walkways crossing overhead, linking the various buildings. The people of Ushket have moved up, ceding the streets to the tides. She spots early risers on some of the walkways, and some of them might be armed. She tries to stay hidden, but Monkfish doesn’t stop moving and the muddy ground is treacherous; at least one of them spots her. She hunches her shoulders and keeps moving. Moves her pack around, so it’s less obvious she’s got anything worth stealing.

More Monkfish come shambling down different lanes. It’s a congregation, a whole pack of animated-corpses-hauling-giant-fish-things. The fish all goggle at one another; their zombie host-bodies just keep trudging through the mud. Cari sticks close to her Monkfish, although she’s having second thoughts about this whole idea. Maybe she misinterpreted the creature’s intent entirely. Fuck, maybe it has no intent at all, and it’s as dumb as it seems.

The parade of Monkfish passes through an archway, and suddenly they’re at the edge of town, on the open hillside. There are sentries on the walls of Ushket, but they don’t spot Cari as she slips out and follows the parade down to the new shore, where waves break on the remains of drowned vineyards. It’s a graveyard of ships – there are a dozen hulks here, carcasses drawn up and left to rot. Their prows face the road, and the ebbing tide washes around their sterns. Mastless, some partially broken up. Dragged out of the water judging by the gouged tracks they left behind them, by the heaped and broken earth like frozen red-brown waves around their keels. Something big – a dragon, she guesses, if the fucking Ghierdana are in town – dragged those ships out of the sea and left them broken on the shore. It puts her in mind of beached whales.

One by one, the Monkfish wade into the water. As they enter the sea, the creatures become suddenly graceful, their human bodies going limp and trailing behind the dancing, leaping fish. They surge through the surf, joyfully, vanishing into this new sea.

All except her Monkfish. That one wades into the surf and stands there. The fish-eye stares are her, and then it haltingly raises a human arm and points to one of the more intact ships.

She recognises it. Gods below, she knows it. It’s the Rose.

Cari runs across the muddy hillside towards the wreck. When she glances back, the Monkfish is gone.

It’s the stillness that disturbs her. She still knows every inch of the Rose, could find her way through the compartments by memory alone. This was her ship, her home, her salvation. The Rose carried her away from Guerdon, away from the legacy of her family, away from her aunt’s curses and torments, away from the black iron dreams. This ship gave Cari her life.

But it’s all too still. Rose used to roll with the waves. Cari could feel every breath of wind or pulse of ocean through the decks. Now, the ship’s like another dead body washed up on shore, cold and still.

She climbs in through a hole in the hull and makes her way through the forward hold. The aft hold looks to be mostly flooded. She sloshes through stagnant water on her way to the ladder that brings her up on