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

his constituent parts, all slithering around on the floor. The worms crawl towards her, tumbling over each other.

One of them – some of them? All of them – is Adro. Everything her friend was, consumed in death and preserved in the worm. Eladora told her about their grandfather, Jermas Thay – he became a Crawling One, but he was still himself. Could Adro still be saved? Could she sift the worms, find the one that’s him? It’s madness, but is it crazier than saving Spar? Or are some forms of survival too awful to contemplate?

The worm brushes against her skin, and she recoils, acts on instinct. One of the lamps is nearby; Cari gives it a shove with her leg so burning lamp oil sluices across the sloping floor, catching the bulk of the worms, never mind that she’s now scalded on top of everything else. I’m sorry. I couldn’t save you. I tried.

Through a gap in the smoke, she glimpses the Ishmeric priestess, Damala, half buried by falling masonry.

You, I don’t give a fuck about, whoever you are.

She crawls on, ducking her head as there’s another burst of gunfire, heading for Myri, heading for the fucking book, lying next to the stunned body of Xargor Bane.

She nearly makes it.

Artolo grabs her from behind. He roars, an animalistic noise louder than the wrath of god in her ear. His tentacle-fingers grabbing at her hair, lashing around her neck. His face is a mask of blood. She struggles to breathe, her fingers scrabbling against the tiles as he tries to yank her backwards. Her numbed right hand scrapes across the floor, breaking through the binding circle around Myri. There’s a flash of sorcery that stuns Cari and sends Artolo flying across the room.

Next thing Cari knows, they’re stumbling down a narrow stairway, leaning on each other. Cari’s got the grimoire and the aethergraph under her arm, although she can’t remember picking them up. Her skull’s ringing like a bell. The whole building is heaving and thrashing, as if it’s alive and wounded. More skyquakes overhead, artillery bursting in heaven.

“What were you thinking?” screams Myri in her ear.

Good question, but not the time for it. And the honest answer is “I tried to actually really carefully consider the outcomes of my action, and it turned out pretty much the same as acting on instinct, and everything exploded.”

The light in the smoke-filled stairwell looks weird to Cari, and then she works out that Myri’s tattoos are glowing like they’re on fire. Shielding them from divine assault, or divination, or some other horrible fate. Cari feels a stab of misplaced jealousy – even in her wounded, exhausted state, the sorceress is vastly more capable than she.

Outside is like inside with more mud. The city of Gissa started out ruined, but now it’s falling apart in places. Falling together in others, as the divine attention of Rhan-Gis sweeps across the wreckage, and, wherever the god’s presence passes, the city reasserts itself, stone crawling on stone to rebuild. Rhan-Gis is looking for another saint, a replacement for the avatar that Cari just shanked. Cari’s heard people compare sainthood to getting struck by lightning, and she’s just unleashed a great big thunderstorm. Some poor soul is going to find they’re the tallest tree in the forest when Rhan-Gis chooses them and fills them with His divinity.

Until then, absolute chaos. The faithful pressing their faces into the mud, screaming prayers to their disrupted god or running riot. Resurrected guards and soldiers stumbling around, holding on to their brickwork patches, mortar running between their fingers like blood. Gunfire, off in the distance. Cari doesn’t like the look of the clouds on the northern horizon, either. They remind her of Artolo’s new fingers, writhing and grasping. Ishmerian cloud demons, the spawn of Cloud Mother. Fuck.

A trio of kids run past them, burdened with loot. Cari has no idea what one would pillage in this broken place, but somehow the sight cheers her. She hefts Myri, helps her stumble down the street.

Myri mutters a spell. It must be a big one – the backlash staggers her, arcane energies lighting up her bones and twisting her muscles, and Cari has to carry her until the fit passes. Still, Cari guesses the spell works – everyone’s ignoring them now. People look at them and don’t see them. The same trick Twelve Suns Bleeding did back in Ushket.

“Go south,” hisses Myri, “you’re going the wrong way.”

“East,” says Cari, “we’re going east. Back to the sea.”

To the fishing village. To Yhandis.

Artolo staggers through the ruins of the throne room. Worms shriek with human voices as they burn. He steps over bodies – the dead avatar, some of his own men, some of the city guards – to follow after Carillon Thay. She was within his grasp! How can she escape, again?

A hand reaches from the rubble, clutches at his foot. Damala. He kneels down and clears away the fallen stones. They’re sticky with the old woman’s blood. He lifts away another brick, revealing her bruised and broken face.

“The gods have foreseen—” She tries to speak, her voice a broken whisper.

“I shall kill her,” he says. He prizes her hand away with his Kraken-fingers.

“Give… me… drown… my body,” she gasps, her eyes pleading. The Kraken-burial. Her soul can only be claimed by her god if she’s given a water burial. Otherwise her residuum will curdle in her corpse until it’s taken by some other god or psychopomp, or until it seeps into the earth and dissipates.

The sea’s on the other side of those mountains. Carillon has no boat now. Her only route is south, across the wastes. Every second he lingers here gives her more time to escape, delays his revenge.

But he owes Damala’s gods. His gods, now. He has to honour the Kraken and all the gods of Ishmere, make the proper offerings – even if it gives Thay another day of unworthy life. He takes the heat of his anger, quenches it in