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

Gunfire, close at hand. He ducks down again, crawls through the dust and smoke to the door. His Eshdana soldiers hold the main entrance to the throne room against the servants of Rhan-Gis. “Boss! Too many of them! We’ve got to fight our way out!” One of them thrusts a gun into Artolo’s hand.

He holds the weapon, feels its weight, then lets it slip. That’s not his weapon, not any more.

“Bar the doors,” he orders.

“There aren’t any other ways out. We’re trapped.”

“Bring the remains of Damala,” he orders.

He walks back into the devastation. He finds the overturned throne, shoves off the body of the saint of Rhan-Gis. There are already a few grave-worms, escapees from the fire, nibbling at the corpse’s ears and nose, and he brushes them aside and crushes them underfoot. “Check Damala’s remains for worms,” he shouts. The Crawlers will not take her soul. The worms desperately crawl away, wriggling down cracks in the tiled floor.

The body of a saint has special potency. So much of the god was channelled through this mortal frame that what remains must be a rich offering. He lifts the body of the saint of Rhan-Gis. It’s oddly heavy, like it’s a sack of bricks, but he’s strong enough to lift it. Strong enough to carry it one-handed as he scales the wall, his tentacle-fingers extending to find cracks and finger-holds, lifting him up to one of the deep-set apertures that let light into this throne room, the uppermost chamber of the pyramidal temple. He climbs out on to the sloped roof, clambers up to the apex.

From here, he can see all the city.

Gissa convulses beneath him. A vast crowd, virtually all the population of this cursed city, surrounds the temple, a sea of mad humanity. They hammer on the doors, claw at the walls. Weep and scream, the anger of the god echoed in the souls of his worshippers. They will kill him, kill all the trespassers. He scans the crowd, looking for two women moving against the mob, but he can see no sign of Carillon and the witch.

His revenge will not come today. But the gods have promised it to him. And the gods of Ishmere keep their promises.

He takes the still warm corpse of the saint of Rhan-Gis and splays it on the roof of the pyramid. He digs his tentacle-fingers into the saint’s belly, pulls out hot steaming ropes of entrail and organ, throws them down the roof.

For a moment he’s back in his chambers in Ushket, when he murdered that stupid servant. Then, he spilled the boy’s entrails out of hatred and frustration and anger. Now, on this rooftop, he moves with a quiet reverence.

This is an offering.

Cloud Mother takes her souls in the air burial, and this is a rich bounty of soul-stuff indeed.

And he is rewarded. Tendrils of solid cloud reach down from the chaos in the sky, lift him off the pyramid. Other tendrils pick up his surviving followers, and the body of Damala, and carry them into the sky.

East, towards Moonchild and the sea.

Dark clouds gather over Gissa, like the gods have poured ink across the sky. Saints ride there; hands of fog reach down towards the broken temple. Cari hustles Myri out of the city, following the trail left by the marching hosts. No one pays them any heed. Cari can’t tell if Myri’s attention-deflection spell is still working, or if everyone’s too shell-shocked to notice two women fleeing.

Myri stumbles, her legs giving out. She lets out a snarl of frustration that’s somehow also an incantation, her tattoos flaring with defiant light. Cari picks her up. “Come on. Come on. Move, wizard.” She’s like Spar was, towards the end. Inhumanly strong in his way, but also kitten-weak, fragile, prone to collapsing. Although Myri’s a lot lighter, which is a relief.

“Come on,” urges Cari. Shit, she’s no good at being encouraging. She starts telling Adro’s story, about how they stole a cargo load of blue jade from the Eyeless priestesses on Mattaur. She tries to tell it the way Adro did, a farcical yarn involving a lot of running around pitch-dark tunnels – turned out stealing from blind priests wasn’t that easy – but she can’t remember half of his jokes. It sickens her that the worms have stolen that from her, too. There’s a Crawling One out there who could recite Adro’s story note-perfect, word for word, laugh for booming laugh, but her friend is gone.

Myri isn’t even listening to her anyway, but Cari keeps telling the story. Reciting it like a prayer, like she’s staking a claim. So much has been taken from her, and so much of her life has become entangled with gods and sorcery and alchemy and everything else she flings into the bucket marked “magic shit”, that she’s determined to keep this story unsoiled. It’s a funny tale about incompetent thieves, and that’s all it is.

In the distance, she hears the thunder of an antique cannon, firing wildly into the air. Mercifully, though, it’s not a full-on invasion by the Sacred Realm. The people of the city get to live, at least today. And hell, while Rhan-Gis is disorientated, maybe some of them will find the courage to walk away. There’s got to be something better out there, right?

By nightfall, she’s not so sure. Hours of travel across the god-blasted wastes, and she’s seen nothing but desolation and horror. The landscape’s a palimpsest of broken miracles. Other than Myri, she doesn’t encounter another living soul – and, to be honest, Myri’s right on the borderline. Cari gives her the last of her painkilling drug – fumbling with the little vial, her frozen hand making everything awkward – and the sorceress slips into unconsciousness.

Sighing, Cari picks up the sorceress again, staggers around until she finds a sheltered hole in the mud. It’s a big hole – a shell crater, probably, or some sort of blasting miracle. Either way, it tore a chunk out of