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

IRON GODS DOWN HERE. BUT AFTER CARILLON LEFT AND SPAR GREW WEAK, ELADORA DUTTIN CONVINCED ME WE SHOULD MOVE THEM TO ANOTHER HIDING PLACE. I WAS WRONG. I SHOULD NOT HAVE LISTENED.”

Rat rises, stalks away from her in the darkness. She hears his hoof steps receding into the unknowable distance, but the voice that comes from her mouth is undiminished.

“BUT I WILL PUT IT RIGHT, AND, OH, THEN I SHALL HAVE REVENGE.”

He looks back at her, orange eyes glowing in the darkness. “EAT, CHILD. LIVE, AND SEE THE SURFACE AGAIN.”

“This is going to be a mess,” mutters Sinter. He ambles across the little office in the lithosarium to the window, unable to sit still. “Come on, damn you. Sooner started, and sooner done.”

Eladora Duttin looks up from her book. Sighing, she closes the heavy tome – Mondolin’s Aseria: A History Reconsidered – and puts down her pen. “We gave Mr Hedanson ample opportunity to take action. It’s certainly regrettable that he didn’t prove to be a more suitable agent.”

“Damn right.” Sinter crosses the room again, looks down the corridor of cells. “I used to be good at this, you know. I ran the Keepers’ sanctified operations for ten years. I could tell you who makes a good tool. The right strings to pull. Now, I can’t even get one little grasping shit to kill another one. Assuming he could have managed it. Killing a saint is fucking hard. I know.” He turns back, crosses the room again.

“This mood,” says Eladora, “does not become you.” She’s read this same page a dozen times. Noises from the dark city outside the window distract her. Every shout on the street outside, the rattle of carriages and the rumble of trains, all seem portentous, edged with danger. Tonight, she fears, is indeed going to be a fucking mess.

Sinter stops his nervous pacing long enough to fix Eladora with a quizzical glare, then continues. “Any word from his highness?”

Eladora gestures to one of the aethergraph machines on her desk. “He’s still cloistered with Kelkin and the guildmasters. When he last reported in, he said that the alchemists were still being… difficult.”

“Keep a tight grip on that boy of his. Only real leverage we’ve got over a thing like him.” The defrocked priest scowls. “I remember the Patros saying the same about the alchemists to me when I was a noviciate. Faithless bastards. They’ll sell us all out if we don’t keep a tight leash on them.”

“A city of nooses.” Eladora steeples her fingers. “That worked so well in the past.” And I have a noose of Black Iron around my own neck. A bargain unfulfilled.

“We don’t know how far Vorz has taken the brat. Is he just god-touched, or has he fully beatified? Maybe we should have gone to the Keepers. Or the Bureau, and got a Haithi saint-hunter. Or—”

“The weapons are available to Mr Hedanson,” says Eladora. “Clearly, the will to act was not. So, we must trust in Alic’s methods. And, failing that, we contain the problem as best we can.”

Sinter opens the window, looks out south across the Wash. The heights of the New City glimmer in the distance. “Should have bloody started by now, shouldn’t it? Nemon set the dogs on each other. We should hear something from the watchers soon. A fucking mess.”

“His scheme may not have worked. Rasce might not have turned on the Brotherhood, or they might have come to some arrangement. We have to proceed on the assumption that they still intend to attack Mandel & Company, and endanger the Armistice.” Eladora reaches for the second aethergraph. “I’ll check—”

The first gunshot shatters the window.

Sinter falls.

Shattered, too.

The second blows a hole through A History Reconsidered, showering Eladora in splinters and dust.

She ducks under her desk as a hail of gunfire rains down on her lithosarium. The gunmen are on the rooftops opposite.

“S-Sinter?” calls Eladora. The priest’s body quivers in the moonlight, then goes still. She stares at his corpse from her hiding place under the heavy desk, frozen in terror. Stares in horrified fascination at the ruin of what used to be his head. Broken teeth, and now a broken skull. Sinter’s brains, a lifetime of secrets and intrigue, spill out across her floor.

Another barrage of gunfire. Bullets ricochet around the office. Plaster dust chokes the air. Gods, if one stray shot hits the wrong place…

Another shot hits her desk, and she hears the delicate aethergraph machines shatter. She’s cut off. The city suddenly shrinks – a moment ago she was worried about all of Guerdon, connected to her agents in Castle Hill and the Fog Yards and the New City and further afield, the whole city occupying her thoughts. Now, all that exists for her is the little square of shelter offered by the heavy desk, while the gunfire rains down all around her.

Eladora reaches over, grabs the third aethergraph, the one hidden under her desk. The soul of Alic Nemon’s son Emlin is in there, trapped in a constant loop. She shields it with her body, conscious of the fragility of the precious machine.

Think. The aethergraphs are broken, but the cables are intact. The machines are alchemical reifications of sorcerous incantations, spells cast with wheels and wires and potions in jars. But she’s a sorcerer now, of sorts. Perhaps the least qualified Special Thaumaturge in recent history, but talented enough to replicate the aethergraph for long enough to send a message, a call.

Send help.

Baston wipes dust from his eye as he reloads. He knows the old lithosarium well – as a boy, friends had dared him to trespass in its abandoned cells, where people claimed the ghosts of Stone Men lingered. Later, when the thief-taker Jere Taphson and his crew took over, he recalls studying it, reporting back to the Fever Knight. Learning how to besiege the place, just in case the Brotherhood’s patience ran out and they wanted Taphson gone.

There’s only one entrance on ground level, right in the middle. West wing is