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

He recognises the dead man, although he’s never laid eyes on him directly. It’s Mandel himself, his throat cut. His beard is matted with blood. His fingers have been cut off to get at the rings he wore. The golden sigil of the alchemists he wore around his throat is gone, too.

“We offered you the chance to take the ash,” Rasce says, choking on the dust, trying to find his bravado, but he has the horrible feeling that even though Mandel’s lying there dead at his feet, the old alchemist still knows more than he does.

Near Mandel’s body, he finds another corpse, burned beyond recognition. The slightest touch causes the remains to crumble and blow away on the hot winds that rush through the tunnels. Stepping out of the path of the swirling dust, Rasce stumbles over a heavy ledger, discarded in the chaos. He’s seen it before, too, through other eyes – it’s the ledger held by Mandel’s scribe. Rasce kicks it over, discovers to his confusion that it’s a scrawl of incomprehensible arcane glyphs. Khebeshi, maybe.

It’s irrelevant. A distraction. He kicks the ledger into a puddle of some caustic slime that drips from the ceiling. He hurries down the corridor, but the double doors at the end are sealed with fresh spell-wards so strong that his dagger cannot even scratch them. The stone spears that impale the fortress have not penetrated this inner vault either – some tremendous act of sorcery deflected them, preserving the contents of the vault. Rasce steps back, dumbfounded. He tries to imagine what treasure might be worth such defences – but there’s no time to linger.

The yliaster vats. He has to get to the yliaster vats. Has to do as Great-Uncle told him. The vats will be on the surface. Turn back. Find a way up.

He finds another staircase, climbs to a saner level. The basement of the alchemical works, a realm of pipes and wires and storage vats. All ruined by his miracle. He hurries on through the devastation. More bodies. Is this what war is like from the ground? It’s not right for him to have to see all this. He has to get up, get out to the air. He won’t stay trapped in this tomb.

More stairs, more corridors. He tries one way, finds the door hot to the touch, and the glow of flames visible beneath. He backtraces, finds another, trying to remember the route the Tallowman took in his vision, but everything’s changed. He’s broken this place, rewritten it. Everything’s rubble and broken metal now, smoke and stone dust. He’s not even sure if he’s looking out through the eyes of his body, or if he’s watching himself.

He clambers up another set of stairs, passes through an arch, and suddenly he’s outside, in the great courtyard of the fortress. Burning metal towers above him, impaled on stone spikes. Everything encrusted with white dust. He glimpses patches of night sky through the pall of smoke.

“My lord! Over here!” A Lyrixian accent. One of the Ghierdana emerges from the smoke, his face hidden behind a breathing mask. “We’ve found their yliaster warehouse!”

“Who are you?”

“Gallerus.”

Gallerus. A distant cousin. Blood of the Dragon.

Rasce clasps him on the shoulder. “Great-Uncle will be pleased!”

Behind the mask, Gallerus beams with joy.

Rasce follows Gallerus through the burning courtyard. Someone thrusts a gun into his hand, and he puts it to good use. There are Tallowmen scaling the outer walls of the compound, hidden by the smoke. Rasce can see them through the stone, triangulate his shots from a dozen angles. He snaps off a few rounds, splattering the waxy heads of the monsters.

The yliaster warehouse. Rows of casks, stacked high. The Eshdana plant explosives, tuck sticks of jellied phlogiston amid the casks. Dangerous work, with all the world on fire. Someone should put up a red flag, thinks Rasce, and the thought is so funny he starts laughing. He can’t breathe in this smoke. He’s getting light-headed, but how can that be, when he’s got a whole city in his head?

“Burn it all!” Rasce giggles.

He reloads the rifle, ducks down into the cover of a shattered storage tank. More Tallowmen crawl over the walls. He fires at them, holds them back while the Eshdana work.

Gallerus, brave soul, moves forward with a burning brand to light the fuse. “Once I light it, get clear!” he shouts. “Back down to the shaft!”

Then a Tallowman breaks through. The thing flings itself down from the parapet, landing heavily atop Gallerus. His head smashes into the ground, cracking his breathing helmet and the skull underneath. More Tallowmen converge on the warehouse, scuttling from all angles now. Knives go in and out, spilling more blood on the floor. The blood of the dragon.

No one crosses the dragon.

Rasce levels the gun. He sees through the stone, letting him precisely aim one perfect shot, targeting the phlogiston charges.

The fire consumes him, just as it did the towers in the New City.

INTERLUDE II

By tradition, Keeper priests are burned, not buried or sent down the corpse-shafts. On another day, Eladora might have quibbled at using the university chapel in the Haithi Occupation Zone, but the whole city’s choked with black soot after the Fog Yard fires, so one more pyre won’t make a difference.

Sinter’s funeral is thinly attended. Eladora. Two old aunts, and a girl who worked in a tailoring shop Sinter owned. A man from the Haithi Bureau, bearing a private letter from the Crown of Haith, currently embodied by Lyssada Erevesic, but that’s all. It’s sadly fitting that a man like Sinter, a spymaster at the centre of so many plots, could vanish with so few traces. The only person who weeps is one of the aunts, and she cries because it’s not an official church service. Well, he was defrocked for proposing a mass slaughter, thinks Eladora, he’s lucky to get this much recognition. She wants to feel nothing. Sinter