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

“I mean,” says Cari as she drags the sorceress down the slope, “can you imagine a better fucking mud-hole in the middle of the Godswar? This is a great hole. Absolutely top-class.”

She lays Myri down to rest in a cleft in the earth, and lies down next to her, trying to ignore the pangs of hunger gnawing at her belly. The Fucking Book between them like a metal child, all hard corners and edges. Cari’s hand remains numb. Divine punishment, she guesses. She blasphemed against Rhan-Gis by striking his saint.

Nothing she can do about it now, and her mind’s too numb for fear. Maybe in Khebesh they can remove the curse.

It’s a horribly warm night, like someone’s breathing on Cari’s skin all the time, so they’re not going to freeze to death. She’s still wearing the absurd temple-handmaiden outfit that they gave her in Gissa, although the skirts are no longer white as polished ivory. The belt of gold and emeralds is still gold and emeralds, though, so technically Cari’s richer right now than she’s ever been in her whole life. She’d trade it all for a sandwich. For Hawse’s fried fish. For Eladora’s soup, which in Cari’s head is still bubbling away on the stove on Desiderata Street, years ago and worlds away…

She sleeps, thoughts breaking up, fracturing, dissipating into dream.

Dreams are dangerous in the Godswar. Another attack vector, a way for the ghosts of broken gods or other spirits to strike. Before Gissa, Myri would draw protective wards every night so they could sleep safely, but she’s too exhausted to act. But no strange god or spirit troubles Cari’s dreams this night. Instead, she dreams of Desiderata Street, of the Raveller that chased her, emissary of the Black Iron Gods. In the dream, she flees across rooftops.

Guerdon blurs into Ushket, another rooftop escape, and the Ravellers still pursue. The streets below seethe with writhing, glistening, fluid forms. The Ravellers are thieves of form, stealing shapes and faces from their victims. Flensing their souls away, stealing the bodies.

Ushket into Ilbarin. The Ravellers are a flood, a tide of darkness, washing over the buildings below. The waters are rising. Kraken-tentacles rise. (Why do all these fucking gods and monsters love their fucking tentacles so much, she thinks.)

Ilbarin into Gissa. The Ravellers wanted to raise her up, make her their queen. Make her into something like the saint of Rhan-Gis. She dreams of a dark city, a nightmare Guerdon, where writhing towers reach up and tear the stars from the sky, where terrified people flee down constricting streets until the city consumes them. A dragon soars over the city, and the towers burn.

The floodwaters wash over the edge of the roof, leaving her with nowhere else to climb, nowhere else to hide, caught between the flood and the fire.

Darkness consumes her.

Waking in a panic, breathless, screaming. Tentacles become hands, pawing at her. Clawing at her, biting her. Fractured moonlight shows her a half-dozen humanoid figures crowding around her and Myri. Cari leaps up, slipping in the mud. No knife, no sword, no weapon – except the Fucking Book. The book, armoured in its steel-edged case. She grabs the Grimoire of Doctor Ramegos, a tome that holds secrets that wars have been fought over, gods have killed for, and uses it to club at her attackers.

With a desperate, unexpected strength, she catches one of them in the side of the head, driving a corner of the book into the creature’s skull. The thing staggers back, falls, tumbling and sliding down into the crater. She turns, brings the book down hard on the forearm of one clawing at Myri’s unconscious form.

The attackers shriek, turn and flee. As they crest the rim of the crater, the moonlight catches them and she gets a brief glimpse of what they look like. Small, thin-limbed, greyish flesh drawn tight over limbs and spines. Gods below, she can’t tell if they’re humans or ghouls or something else, but they’re no bigger than children. They scramble away, crawling on all fours, flinching as distant thunder rolls in the sky. Reciting a chanted litany of blasphemy, rote-learned, to fend off the attention of any passing gods.

That’s what human survival looks like in the Godswar. Those are your choices – submit to the whims of some insane husk of a deity like in Gissa, or end up like a feral ghoul, an animal.

“Come on!” hisses Cari. “We’re going, now!”

“Sleeping,” mumbles Myri, curling around the rock she’s using as a pillow.

“Come on!” Cari urges her. She transfers the Fucking Book to the crook of one arm, uses her good hand to yank Myri upright. They’re not spending a minute longer than necessary here.

They struggle up the slope and march off across the wasteland. Weirdland, wonderland. It’s like some god reached across Guerdon and grabbed all the unused backdrops and stage sets from the Metropolitan Theatre, and all the altar paintings and statues from all the temples, and then dropped them all in the mud. Stamped on them a few times, then vomited copiously on the mess. Oh, and then had an artillery battery shell the shit out of it all, for good measure.

Around dawn, they shelter from an unlikely snowstorm in the hollow of a gigantic skull the size of a house, half sunk in the mud. They watch through the eyeholes as a titanic black serpent – beautiful beyond measure, its scales marked with astrological symbols – slithers by outside. The snake fades as the sun rises, dissolving like mist. It’s still there – just looking at it gives Cari that god-sense headache – and she guesses it’s slipped out of the mortal world, moved back to the aether.

“You never finished the story,” says Myri.

“What story?”

“About blue jade. About you and Adro and Hawse, and the Rose.”

“I did.” Cari feels oddly embarrassed. “You passed out.”

“Oh. I was enjoying it.” A pause. “I can smell the sea.”

Myri’s right – the wind has changed, and it’s fresher, cleaner. They’re