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

to the deck. Rose is listing over to the side; the deck slopes, like the ship’s caught in a never-ending wave. The door to the forecastle, the crew cabin, is open, and Cari stares at it for a long while. For five years, that was her home, her first real home. Her aunt’s house in Wheldacre was never as welcoming or as loved as that little nook under the bowsprit. Unconsciously, as if enchanted by her own past, she re-enters the room, finding memories with her fingertips.

That bunk on the right, that used to be where the first mate, Adro, would sleep. Dol Martaine on the other side. She still instinctively steps to the right to avoid the empty bunk – Martaine would beat anyone who woke him. Gods, she hated him, still hates him, but somehow it’s a fond memory, too.

She ducks to dodge the lamp that used to hang there, steps over the memory of Cook’s boxes. There are rusted hooks in the walls, for the hammocks were once slung there, a labyrinth of canvas, the crew of the Rose crammed in tighter than sleepers in a flophouse. Storage lockers and boxes, all broken open and empty. The floor’s dirty, too, and that’s so wrong it hurts her bones. Cari’s stolen from temples, faced down saints, even killed a goddess, but this is blasphemy.

Finally, she sits down on her bunk. For a moment, she imagines what she would do if she could step out of time and reach across the years, speak to the girl she was when she first came aboard, curled up and seasick on this little bunk. Dressed in boy’s clothes, frantically trying to work out how to go to the toilet without giving away her secret. Thinking that was the only secret she had. If you ever go back to Guerdon, Cari thinks to her twelve-year-old self, things will get fucking weird. You’ll make friends, and one of them will turn into the king of the ghouls. And you’ll get the other one killed. And then you’ll be an avenging saint for a while, and that’ll be fun – only it’s killing him again, and you’ve got to cross the world to save him. And don’t get me started about gods and alchemists.

Oh, and you’ll have to put up with know-it-all Eladora again.

Look, don’t go back to fucking Guerdon, all right.

But if she never went back to Guerdon, she’d never have known Spar.

And Spar would still be alive, she reminds herself. Her presence in Guerdon brought ruin to the city. So much of the suffering is her fault.

Her eyes fall on another wonder. There, kicked into a corner, is her own little box that used to stand by her bunk. She filled it with treasures collected across the world. Coins from Lyrix, stolen – she was told – from a dragon’s hoard, blessed with the monster’s luck.

A playbill from a theatre in Jashan. Captain Hawse brought her there for her eighteenth birthday. They both dressed up for the occasion; Hawse had insisted. Cari wore a ballgown, and it was like a glimpse into another life, one in which she’d been born into a regular, wealthy family, instead of crazed demon-worshippers who bred her to be a herald to nightmare gods.

A petrified dragon’s scale. Scrimshawed whalebone. Blue jade from Mattaur.

But the box is empty now. There’s nothing there.

She only has one of those treasures left, and it wasn’t what she thought it was. Cari once thought the amulet she wears at her neck was a gift from her unknown mother. It was only years later, in Guerdon, that she learned the truth – that it was made by her grandfather, a ritual talisman for communing with the Black Iron Gods. She treasures it still, for her own reasons. It’s a reminder that she can take whatever the world throws at her and refashion it into a weapon. Everything’s a weapon if you’re willing to use it. And she has a second treasure, now – the fucking book. The weight of it reminds her she can’t linger here.

Wiping her eyes – it’s very dusty in there – she emerges back on deck. The masts have been cut down. The stumps that used to be the Rose’s graceful masts offend her to her core, and she adds whoever wrecked the ship to her shit list.

Across the deck, there’s the door to Captain Hawse’s cabin.

And in the doorway, Captain Hawse. Older, greyer, smaller somehow, but still himself.

A sword in his hand.

“Are you a dream?” demands Hawse. “A spirit, sent to torment me?”

Part of her wants to rush across the deck and hug the old man. Another part, the part that fought on the streets of Guerdon, watches that sword. He’s got reach, you’ve got speed, thinks that part of herself, and she hates it.

“It’s me. It’s Cari.”

“Cari,” echoes Hawse. He blinks, raises one hand to shade his eyes from the rising sun. “It is you. You came back.”

“Sort of.” Cari shrugs awkwardly.

“You left!” says Hawse, with apparent surprise, as if he just remembered the circumstances of their parting. “You just jumped ship. It was in Severast. We were in Severast, and you left without a word.” He shakes the sword at her. “After all I did for you.”

“There were fucking words beforehand,” Cari replies before she can stop herself. This isn’t what she wants, to go over decade-old arguments. “You didn’t listen to me.”

“Oh, I remember. Full of ideas, you were. Stealing from the Eyeless priests! Saying we should smuggle wine-of-poets out of Jashan. Making a run to the Silver Coast! A slip of a girl, telling me how to run my ship!”

Cari glances around at the wreck of the Rose, at the empty hulk lying in the sun. “Yes, well, you’ve clearly made a great success of it without me.”

He laughs at that, a chuckle that’s half a snarl. He waves the sword at her. “Cari. Where have you been? Why are you here?”

“All over. Guerdon.