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

“Good. I conducted an exorcism while you slept. I have banished the entity that troubled you, while augmenting your congruency with the underlying divinity.”

“You killed Idgeson?”

“Dissipated, to be accurate. The entity may reform, in time. But it need no longer distract you.”

“How did you know?” snaps Rasce, infuriated at the insolence of the man. Vorz may be Great-Uncle’s adviser, but he’s only Eshdana. He’s a servant.

“Know?” echoes Vorz, fitting a strange device to his eye. He peers at Rasce, adjusts the lens, peers again.

“Vyr was reporting to you. You knew sainthood this would happen.”

“We knew it was a possibility.” Vorz closes the lens with a snap. “No more than that. After the defeat of your Uncle Artolo, the dragon sought ways to counter the threat of Guerdon’s new saints. I advised him on methods that could be used. I have made a long study of similar techniques.”

“You did this to me?”

“Your Great-Uncle commanded you to take control of the yliaster trade.” Vorz digs around in his bag. “Is there any weapon you would dare not use? Any challenge you would not dare attempt, if commanded by the dragon?”

“No. Never!” responds Rasce without thinking.

Vorz takes a vial from the bag, holds it up to the light. Blood-red, and something darker. “Then give me your arm,” he says to Rasce. “This, too, is a weapon.”

Baston smells the change as soon as he enters the house on Lantern Street. The familiar smell of the Brotherhood clubhouse – leather, sweat, tobacco, the lingering scent of phlogiston – has been replaced by the harsh tang of chemical cleaners, like an alchemist’s lab. A rotting stink, too, coming from the basement, the stench of decay. Everyone here seems to be Eshdana, faces he hasn’t seen before. The Brotherhood thieves must have scattered to adjoining buildings, or be out on the streets holding the line against the Tallowmen.

“What’s going on? Where’s my sister?” he demands. Shrugs, blank faces. She left in the night, he’s told. Business down in the Wash.

He hurries up the stairs. Rasce’s bed is empty, the stained sheets littered with empty alkahest syringes and soiled bandages.

He eventually finds Rasce in the cellar, in the temporary mortuary they set up here for Vyr and the others who fell to the Tallowmen. Twelve neatly wrapped bodies on twelve trestle tables – but now the bodies are spread out across the broken floor. Some dismembered, gutted, their entrails spilled out across the white marble of the New City. Some buried in graves dug right into the floor of the cellar, or bricked up in holes smashed in the walls. One hanging from the ceiling, a noose around its neck. Another in a fucking bathtub, dissolving in a vat of alkahest, a thick scum of melted flesh and fat bubbling on top of the liquid. A trio of Eshdana stand by, pickaxes and shovels and bone saws at the ready.

Standing over it all, a man in black, gloved hands dripping with gore, moving like a conductor in front of some mordant orchestra. He seems quietly satisfied with this scene of horrors, a craftsman at work. It makes Baston want to punch him.

“Who the fuck are you? Where’s Rasce?”

“I’m here, my friend.” Rasce steps out of a shadowed corner. Up and awake. His face is pale, glimmering with sweat, and the colour of it almost matches the glowing stone of the New City. “There’s no need to shout. I hear everything.” He gestures at the alchemist. “This is Doctor Vorz. My Great-Uncle’s counsellor, newly returned from overseas.”

“What is this? What are they doing?”

“Necessary things.”

Vorz interrupts. “Try again,” he says to Rasce. With a wave of his hand, Rasce causes a fresh grave to open up in the floor. The stone flows sluggishly, a reluctant miracle.

“Should you be up? Karla said you were still sick.”

Rasce grips Baston’s forearm, leans on him. His grip is very strong now, but he’s breathing quickly, like he’s got a fever. “I have lain abed too long. Now is the time to act.” His grip tightens until it’s painful. “I owe you, my friend, for all you did while I was godstruck. I saw the secret path into the fortress of our foes. I saw the path we must walk.” He leans close, whispers in Baston’s ear.

“Tell the Rat it’s time to meet.”

They descend.

It’s Rasce who leads the way, and he seems to grow stronger as they go, striding so quickly that Baston has to hurry to keep the other man in sight as they descend down endless stairs and tunnels. They wind through the bowels of the New City. They leave the streets behind, entering into a labyrinth of stone. Baston carries an aetheric lamp to light their way, but there’s little need for it, for the stone glows where Rasce touches it. The glow fades after he passes, though, so the light is like a bubble, a fragile vessel sinking into a vast darkness.

Sometimes, Baston glimpses strange things down a tunnel branch – the glowing eyes of a ghoul, crushed pieces of machinery embedded in the walls, slithering creatures that flee the light. Rasce doesn’t pause, and Baston can’t linger. The air’s bad, a miasma of fumes and subterranean exhalations.

Once, he thinks he sees a youngish man, rake-thin, with lank black hair. Well-dressed, like he’s on his way to dinner in Bryn Avane. A silver blade in his hand. His gaze meets Baston’s – and he vanishes into thin air, face contorting in pain for a moment, then gone, leaving Baston to wonder if he dreamed the whole thing.

Abruptly, the tunnel enters into a huge vault, so vast that Rasce’s stone-light is lost in the yawning reaches. Baston turns the aetheric lamp up to full so they can see their surroundings. Well, so he can see them, as it’s obvious that Rasce’s miraculous perceptions have returned. The light leaps, and Baston gasps as he beholds the