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

she finds clear signs of a struggle, of a magical blast of some sort. Myri was surrounded, attacked on all sides. Scorched areas, with drag marks nearby – Myri used sorcery to kill some of her attackers, and their bodies were later removed. No doubt they’ll be interred in the walls, too, the dregs of their souls fed to the god of Gissa. And that deformed building wasn’t there earlier. Cari’s one of the few people in the world who can give constructive criticism on weaponised architecture-miracles; she guesses that Rhan-Gis himself was here, the saint of the city, using the power of Gissa to counter Myri’s spells. No wonder Myri fled.

Cari climbs down into the ditch where Myri was hiding. The epicentre of the battle seems to have moved away from their original hiding place. She guesses that Myri was already sneaking out with the book when she was spotted, had to fight her way clear.

Cari’s foot brushes against a stone, and there’s a pop as a concealment ward fizzles out.

Oh.

Oh fuck.

There, hidden beneath the stone, warded against discovery – there’s the fucking book. The remainder of their supplies. The aethergraph in its case.

The sorceress left the book. She drew her attackers away from the book. She left it for Carillon. She saved it for Cari, sacrificed herself so Rhan-Gis and his minions wouldn’t find it.

Cari sinks down in the mud, unsure what do with all her anger. She shoves the rock in frustration – betrayal she can cope with. Bastard sorcerers with their schemes and treacheries, she knows how to deal with. Someone helping her? What do you do with that? She can imagine Myri’s thought process. The sorceress is cold enough to weigh the odds, to decide that Cari’s got a better chance of reaching Khebesh on her own than the sorceress has of escaping Gissa without her. To decide that the optimum outcome is for her to hide the book and draw the foes away.

Hawse did the same, but that’s something Cari can understand. You take risks for your friends, for your crew. Myri hates her, and it’s fucking mutual. She was looking forward to stabbing the witch, and now that joy’s been taken away from her.

With shaking hands, she picks up the grimoire. She hesitates, then grabs the aethergraph and the rest of the bundle, too. There has to be some configuration of the controls that’ll let her contact Spar. Or, failing that, someone in Guerdon. Some military channel, maybe. Carillon Thay calling Queen’s Point, calling Parliament, fuck it – calling Eladora Duttin, are you annoying, over? She’s maybe got enough supplies to make it to that fishing village, Yhan-something. It can’t be that far. And she’s got some coin to buy passage to Khebesh. That, or she steals a fishing boat. Dodge the Kraken somehow.

Walk away, she tells herself. Get to Khebesh. Get moving, while you’ve still got cover of night.

Her feet seem rooted to the ground, like they’ve turned to stone.

Myri’s probably dead. If she isn’t, she’s the prisoner of a mad god, and she’ll be dead soon anyway. That Rhan-Gis is as powerful a saint as you used to be, back in the New City, she tells herself. You broke the Ghierdana, remember? Remember all the shit you did to people who came after you with guns and magic? Walk away.

She takes a step in what is utterly, unambiguously, the wrong direction.

Myri told you to run. She might as well have painted a big sign on the ground saying “leave me and go”.

A second, stupid, step.

Spar would tell you to leave.

But she knows, sure as anything, that that’s a lie, and it only makes her take another step, and another, and fuck it, now it’s a rescue mission.

A few hours sneaking around Gissa, and Cari’s learned three things.

First, it’s really easy to work out where Rhan-Gis himself is. There was a trail through the city that led from his big mobile temple to Myri’s ditch and back again, a trail of reassertion. Places where the dream of old Gissa condensed into mortal reality, where muddy ground transmuted into paved streets, where scattered stones rose up as towers and walls. Divine urban renewal. Cari saw flowers blossom where saints of the Mother passed, back in Guerdon. Same thing, only with the city. Unlike the miraculous flowers, though, the renewed buildings wilt pretty quickly, rotting and crumbling away. She hopes that means that Rhan-Gis is low on divine strength, that he’s depleted himself. Keeping the city intact, keeping his worshippers fed, his motley-guards alive, and fending off rival gods – all that has to sap his strength, and there aren’t that many people in the city.

Another clue – she can feel that same friction that she experienced on the mountain at Ilbarin, and in the water. Thinking about it, she felt it in Guerdon, too, but back then she either had the Black Iron Gods screaming in her head or had far more powerful divinatory senses through Spar, so she hadn’t paid much attention to the feeling. (Also, you were drunk a lot, says a whisper in the back of her mind.) Other saints can do it, too, she guesses – she remembers Saint Aleena talking about sensing Ravellers and the Black Iron Gods, but no one ever trained Cari in sainthood.

The presence of Rhan-Gis scrapes her mind, but not that much. She guesses – and this is very much in the realm of things that Eladora or Myri or someone should be dealing with, not her – that it’s to do with divine congruency. Spar’s not a god, but he’s similar enough to the god of Gissa if you squint your inner eye. Maybe the sandpaper effect comes from the friction between Cari’s lingering sainthood and the sort of holy ground she treads on. The more different the god, or the more hostile, the more friction.

She wishes she had Spar to help her make sense of these thoughts. Part of sainthood is