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

“In any event, Taras’ displeasure will fall on you, not me. The dragon gave you this task.”

“Then I shall not fail.” When he flew with the dragon, Great-Uncle would breathe his glorious fire and move on, and Rasce would never have to see the remains of the fallen. Now, the cellar is littered with all manner of corpses, but Rasce will not turn his eyes from them. He climbs down into one of the graves and begins to dismember the corpse with his knife. Digging for the soul within the carcass, the precious offering of residuum.

Scratch.

The ghoul slinks up Sumpwater Row. Pauses outside the door.

“Boss sent me,” he says, licking his lips. Taps himself on the chest. “Rat.”

“Spar.”

“Idgeson, right?” The ghoul sucks his teeth. “I heard. Hard. Hard.”

“Varot’s in here,” says Spar, opening the door.

“Can smell him.” Rat slips into the house. Some morbid impulse makes Spar follow the ghoul in, and watch as Rat begins to expertly dismember the corpse. Limbs are cut off, wrapped, stowed away in a sack. A cross between a mortician and a butcher.

Some bits, the ghoul pops in his mouth immediately.

“That’s disgusting,” says Spar.

Rat looks up at him. “Survive first. Can’t do shit if you’re dead. No dead man ever got a lucky break.”

It’s good advice.

Advice Spar remembers when they give him his first shot of alkahest. The sharp pain of a syringe piercing skin, and the doctor has to try three spots before he finds soft tissue.

Scratch.

Survive first. You can’t do the right thing if you can’t do anything.

Spar can sense the bodies interred within the house on Lanthorn Street. Interred within him. He can feel their soft flesh, like moonshadows, ephemeral and fleeting. He can feel their bones, a little denser, a little more like stone. He can sense Rasce digging there, too.

And he can feel, too, something else. He can feel their souls like they’re a physical thing. A dark, heavy liquid, pooling in the corpses. Condensing out of the aether.

It’s different in each corpse. Vyr’s soul-residue, for example, congeals in the man’s hands, in his throat, in his brain. Gingerly, Spar tastes it – and immediately recoils. The stuff is a soup of memories and stagnant thoughts, and he’s so fragile that he nearly drowns in it. Part of Spar’s consciousness carves off, sinking into the Vyr-ness of the residuum.

Scratch.

A lingering memory. Spar, lying on his reinforced bed, his body wracked by the Stone Plague. Rat squats by the fire, munching on something unmentionable, but he’s there. He’s the only one who didn’t leave Spar’s side. He’s loyal.

Scratch.

A memory. Rat at the door, in the rain. Bringing Cari home for the first time.

Scratch.

“Better,” says Vorz. The alchemist kneels by one of the graves in the basement of Lanthorn Street. The corpse is covered by a cairn, but beneath the pile the stones become knives, probing and slicing. Rasce’s will moves like the stone plague, consuming the flesh, consuming the bits of soul-stuff that remain in the nerve endings, in the deep pools of the brain. He gestures, and a dozen more grave-pits open up in the ground like hungry mouths.

“Will that be enough, do you think?” he asks Vorz.

Scratch.

They bring in more dead thieves, each one stabbed or shot or poisoned or starved, and they’re laid to rest in Lanthorn Street in Spar’s name.

And while Rasce takes the dragon’s share of each soul, Spar steals a little – just a little – from each, and hides it away.

Can’t do shit if you’re dead, Rat taught him. So survive first. Wait for a lucky break.

Scratch.

Scratch.

Scratch.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

“Miss Thay,” says the Crawling One, in Adro’s voice, though Adro never called her that in his… in his…

Fuck. He’s dead. He’s dead and a worm has eaten his brain and stolen his voice and she wants to scream.

“Call me Twelve Coins Bleeding. Forgive me for the circumstances in which we parted.”

She doesn’t know if he means the way the Crawling One abandoned her on her first attempt to escape Ilbarin, or if it’s Adro, regretting what happened in the camp.

“How…?”

She can barely speak; words aren’t equal to the maelstrom of horror and anger and self-loathing and confusion that churns in her brain. The Crawling One only picks up on the confusion. “Ah, I should explain. My kind are not as singular as yours. The names we apply reflect our constituent parts. Some parts of the entity you met in Ilbarin that you called Twelve Suns Bleeding exist in me. I hoped to liberate you from the prison camp, but the risk was too great, so I followed you after I learned of your escape. Other parts of me are derived from a Crawling One that advises Lord Rhan-Gis, the Cornerstone of the World.” He leans closer. “All cities are our home, in the end, so rest assured that our previous bargain endures! I shall assist you in getting to Khebesh.”

“What happened to Adro?”

The Crawling One pretends to kneel down next to her. She knows, distantly, that the thing is boneless, formless, only pretending to be humanoid. Only pretending to have legs that bend, feigning a hand that rests reassuringly on her shoulder. “I was badly injured, Cari. I succumbed to my wounds, and the Ghierdana threw my remains into the sea. But the Crawling Ones found me, and saved me.”

“You’re dead.”

“Everything I am, everything the individual you knew as Adro,” says Adro’s voice, “endures. I have the same memories, the same thoughts, the talents preserved. But we cannot linger here, talking philosophy as though we were sharing a bottle of wine-of-poets, can we? Come on. I must present you to your cousin.”

She’s so shaken that for a moment she imagines him bringing her to Eladora. Two images of Eladora war in Cari’s mind – her cousin as she usually thinks of her, nervous and prissy, a well-read churchmouse, and Eladora as Cari glimpsed her in the days around