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

“Idiot!” spits Vorz from the corner. “There is no more time. The dragon returns tonight!”

“You don’t know my Great-Uncle, Baston,” says Rasce. “Patience is not among the virtues of the dragon. Doctor Vorz, go you to the cellars. I shall have need of more residuum, for the visions I must seek.”

The doctor drags himself upright. “I’m not finished your injections,” he says sourly.

“Baston will attend to those.”

Vorz skulks out.

Baston picks up one of Vorz’s tinctures. The vial contains something reddish, like diluted blood. Dark shapes congeal and then unravel, forming and unforming. “Are you sure you want this in your veins?”

“Look at me, friend.” Rasce gestures to the stony plates that have spread across his chest. “A little more adds little to my burden.” One by one, Baston injects the syringes into Rasce. Finally, he picks up the heavy alkahest syringe. Unlike the tincture, the alkahest must be injected into the flesh beneath the stony plates. The needle is made of steel, to punch through the stone.

“Should I summon Karla?” asks Rasce. “She has the knack of it.”

“No,” says Baston hastily. “I’ll do it.” His fingers fumble with the heavy syringe. As the alkahest diffuses, Rasce shudders with release.

“Now. I shall see.”

The vision shows Rasce a room he has never seen before, but it’s thick with familiarity, a patina of Idgeson’s memories on every surface. It’s a prison cell of sorts, a large room, mostly flooded with stagnant water, with a small artificial island in the middle. A cell for Stone Men, who might otherwise use their tremendous strength to smash through the bars.

Jere Taphson’s lithosarium, although he has no idea who this Taphson is or what he meant to Spar.

His mind drifts in the vision, passing through the walls like a ghost.

Many of the cells are occupied, but not by Stone Men. Other saints, other powers. In one of the flooded rooms, he glimpses a god-touched mermaid swimming through the water, her body partially transformed into a Kraken. A young red-haired woman lying motionless in a bed, eyes glassy and unseeing. A sailor, with bronzed skin and blue-tinged lips, bloodied by a recent beating.

A collection of oddities.

Tallowmen stand watch outside. The flames burning in their heads flicker as Spar passes by.

Voices draw him in. His awareness moves down the corridor, towards an office. Now, he’s an invisible presence, his entry permitted by a pebble hidden in the pocket of a priest’s robe, hung on one of a pair of a hooks on the wall.

Three people. Rasce recognises two of them – Eladora Duttin and Alic Nemon. The third is an ugly man in a priest’s cassock.

“Still nothing?” asks Eladora. She’s seated behind a heavy desk. Two aethergraph machines on her desk, and a third – disconnected, looped into itself – on the floor by her feet. A cold cup of coffee, undrunk next to a stack of reports.

“Nothing.” Sinter sucks at his broken teeth. “I don’t know if Hedan’s boy took the shot and failed, or if he lost his nerve.”

“What about our other informants?”

“Hard for any of my street-scum to get close. Not with the fucking streets watching. And there’s no time, anyway. They’re hitting the Fog Yards tonight. It’s going to be a fucking mess.”

“We have our own interests in Mandel & Company to consider, of course,” says Nemon. The minister is not a small man, but he has the knack of fading into the background when he wishes to be forgotten. He looks around the room, and Rasce’s suddenly worried that Nemon can tell he’s being watched. “But Mandel assures me his defences are ready for any assault. Our task will be to contain the damage – and convince Ishmere and Haith that the Armistice holds.”

“With the fucking Ghierdana running rampant across half the city? The only fucking reason the war stopped is because Haith needs the weapons we supply ’em. If they hear the Ghierdana are going after the alchemists…” Sinter groans and buries his face in his hands. “Godshit. I remember smuggling relics out of the monastery on Beckanore ten years ago, before the Haithi torched it. All part of the same fucking deal. Without alchemical weapons, Haith’s fucked. They won’t stand aside. It’ll be a fucking mess, I tell you.”

“To my mind,” says Nemon, “the situation has run its course. The threat from Rasce’s attacks was enough to force the alchemists to put the Tallowmen under our control, and prompt parliament to reverse the ban on making more. We have the Tallows now.”

“‘We’,” echoes Sinter scornfully. “Do we now, minister?”

“Enough,” snaps Eladora. “Say you’re right, Alic. What do you propose?”

“The other Ghierdana families are already irritated by Rasce. Doubtless nervous, too, if they know what he can do. We send the Tallowmen into the New City – tonight, before Taras returns. We pray that the other dragons do not intervene.”

“An attack on the Ghierdana has to be met with retribution. That’s their code. ’S’why we needed Hedanson to pull the fucking trigger,” adds Sinter. “Little shit. Can’t get the staff, these days.”

“I won’t countenance an attack on the New City,” says Eladora. Nemon opens his mouth to object, but Eladora drops one hand beneath the desk and taps on the aethergraph.

“All right,” says Nemon, “then set them on each other. We let Rasce know what happened in the inn.”

“How will you do that?”

“Walls have ears.” He crosses the room and plucks the pebble from its hiding place.

Baston leaves the house on Lanthorn Street. As he closes the door, strange lights blaze from the walls in Rasce’s room. The air’s thick with magic. Static electricity crawls and leaps; Baston orders some of his lads to move the stocks of phlogiston away from the house, in case of explosion. When he opens his mouth, though, he finds himself reciting lines from the writing of Idge. Baston clenches his jaw and gestures at the crates instead.

Outside, the sun’s setting over the harbour, the sullen red light touching the ruins of