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

Moonchild’s engines are gigantic, furious – and wholly mundane. Whatever lingering power of the Lord of Waters that counters the Kraken can surely have no effect on the engines. Come the rising tide, they can catch Carillon long before she escapes. Where is there to go? There are no landing places on the west coast, not with that line of errant mountains. Does she flee back to Ilbarin? To the Isle of Fire?

There is no escape from Artolo.

Only another delay. An infuriating, knife-twisting delay, but soon…

“We wait for the tide,” he agrees.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

It is an army of the unseen, a thieves’ invasion.

They descend through hidden ways into the tunnels under the New City. Rasce shows them the way, or opens the way where necessary. He can see the fear on the faces of the Brotherhood thieves, many with the ash still fresh upon their faces. These men and women are dockworkers, tanners, factory workers and furnace-stokers, labourers and pedlars first, thieves second. They followed Baston into the New City hoping for relief from the mad gods who occupy the Wash, and now find themselves conscripted into another strange conflict. They clutch their Ghierdana-bought guns as they step gingerly into the shadows.

Others in Rasce’s army are made of harder stuff. Eshdana enforcers, who earned the ash in pirate raids or “business” overseas. Mercenaries and veterans of the Godswar. Even these soldiers might quail at setting foot in the tunnels under Guerdon, but they have nothing to fear tonight, for, as they descend, they’re joined by the third portion of his army. The ghouls wait there in the darkness, yowling and tittering. They grab the thieves, drag them into the underworld in crazed waltzes, or tug them forward down pitch-dark tunnels.

Vorz accompanies Rasce, looking distinctly uncomfortable, his pale features rendered even more unnatural by the light of his aetheric lamp. One of the ghouls points and laughs at the little light. “Shut it off,” says Rasce, “we won’t need it. Trust our guides.”

Alone of the company, though, Rasce can tell where they are. Even deep underground, he has reference points to navigate by. He knows the location of the New City at his back as surely as he knows his right hand, and he can also dimly perceive five points of light ahead of him, the five pebbles hidden by Baston within the walls of Mandel & Company. As his physical body moves away from the New City and closer to those five stones, he can track his progress through the underworld.

They pass beneath the border of the New City, leaving the Lyrixian Occupation Zone. A breach of the Armistice and act of war if they walked down Mercy Street; instead, they walk a hundred feet beneath Mercy, through tunnels gnawed by the ghouls long before the streets above were named. They approach the Ishmeric Occupation Zone, and, as they do so, the ghouls begin to yowl in unison, a subterranean cacophony that hides them from the eyes of the gods. They pass by without incident.

The Haithi Occupation Zone would be more of a challenge – the dead now patrol the labyrinthine tunnels under Holyhill. To avoid any confrontation, the ghouls lead Rasce and company on a long looping detour that runs under the northern portion of the Wash, under Duttin’s lithosarium, under ancient Castle Hill, to emerge briefly from a disused railway tunnel into the night air. Then they plunge back underground, down and down and down, into the ghoul tunnels that catacomb Gravehill.

St Styrus’ Shaft is not far away, now.

Rasce shifts his perception to the New City. For an instant, he senses a faint ghost of Spar Idgeson, in the same way one can tell that a room was recently occupied. The shade flees, and it’s much too small and weak to be conscious, let alone challenge him. No doubt lost in memory again, thinks Rasce. Perhaps that was as much the key to his triumph as any of Vorz’s tinctures and transfusions. Spar was consumed by thoughts of the past, but Rasce always looks to the future, to the days when he will soar again as Chosen of the Dragon.

From the heights of the New City, he looks across Guerdon. A few candle-flames burn along the perimeter of the IOZ – and many more in the Fog Yards, guarding Mandel & Company. No doubt there are more Tallowmen waiting below in the darkness, or stationed at other watch posts. The creatures can cross the city with terrifying speed, leaping from rooftop to rooftop almost as fast as a dragon flies. As soon as the attack on Mandel’s begins, there will be a wildfire of reinforcements.

Rasce looks to the south.

A distant light. Fire at sea.

It’s time.

Karla wakes in utter darkness. She’s battered, every inch of her scratched and bruised as though she’d rolled down a mountainside, instead of…

Instead of…

Stone becoming liquid as it touched her. Sinking, the city passing through her, swallowing her. Devouring her. Entombed alive in a landslide that seemed to last for years.

She screams, and her scream echoes off the vaulted ceiling of hell.

And then she hears a voice, and it’s coming from her own mouth.

“HELLO, KARLA.”

The stink of ghoul, close at hand. The creaking of massive tendons as Rat squats down next to her.

“Am I dead?”

The sound of a rough tongue scraping over scaly lips. A lick of drool. “NOT YET. SOON MAYBE. BUT THERE IS WATER YOUR KIND CAN DRINK. AND THINGS LIVE HERE THAT I CAN KILL. THEY ARE NOT PLEASANT TO EAT, I THINK.” He throws something down nearby. Karla reaches out, probes it with her fingers. Matted fur, sticky blood… some sort of animal. But her blind exploration finds bird-talon feet, too, and a scaly tail, and soft, yielding eyeballs where no sane creature has eyes. A thing bred in the alchemists’ vats by mistake.

“What is this place?”

“A PRISON FOR DANGEROUS THINGS. WE KEPT THE LAST OF THE BLACK