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

his remit. “The Dentist was running things in Guerdon, but he’s left now. The new boss, Rasce – he’s just a boy, green as canal-weed. He doesn’t know the city at all. I came to you first, Baston, I came to you because it’s an opportunity. They have money, power – and they can’t be touched, up in the New City.” Tiske peers out of the window at the distant shape of the sentinel, and shudders. “Get in with him now, and you’ll have the dragons on your side when you need ’em.”

Baston stays seated until the front door shuts behind Tiske. He doesn’t trust himself not to do something violent to the older man, so better to stay put until he’s gone.

Karla studies her brother from across the room, letting the rain and the distant chanting from the temples fill the silence. It’s a comfortable silence. Karla’s silver-tongued and can talk for hours with people she despises, charm them and enchant them, and they’ll never know it’s an act. Words are a costume for her; it’s in silence that she’s her true self.

Baston’s house has been very, very quiet since his sister moved in to take care of her widowed brother. A long, slow silence, where he could heal.

Karla watches, and waits, and thinks. Finally, she speaks.

“You should do it. Meet with this Rasce at least.”

“Why should I go to the Ghierdana to sell my soul, when I could spit on a dozen temples from here?”

“So long as spitting is all you’re doing to them,” says Karla. She pulls the shawl up over her head. “I’ve got to go out. There’s dinner in the pot – or are you going out to Pulchar’s?” Pulchar’s restaurant used to be a Brotherhood haunt, back when there was a Brotherhood. Now, it’s just a few tired old men reminiscing.

“Not tonight.”

A quick kiss on the cheek, a reassuring squeeze of his shoulder. “Think about what Tiske said. We don’t have many friends left. It might be good to make some new ones.”

And she’s gone. Baston doesn’t know where his sister goes, which temple she worships at, or if she has some other business. He wonders if she’ll come back tonight, to sleep in that little attic room intended for a child’s bed.

He hopes she does. This house feels like it should be haunted, but it’s empty of ghosts.

Too full of gods.

The next morning, he goes down to the docks. That means leaving the Ishmeric Occupation Zone, means waiting in line at the checkpoint for an hour, shuffling along until it’s his turn before the sentry-clerics.

“Name?”

“Baston Hedanson.”

“What business?”

“Docker.”

The mad-eyed cleric studies him for a moment, as if he can see into Baston’s soul, then reaches up and anoints him with foul-smelling oil.

“Blessing expires at sunset,” snaps the cleric, “and then thy soul is forfeit to Cruel Urid, watcher of the night hours.”

Baston trudges down the hill, joining the crowd of dockworkers who jostle for labour every morning along Guerdon’s wharves. The others back away from Baston, give him space. They remember who he used to be.

These docks are neutral territory, but they’re sandwiched between the Lyrixian and Haithi Occupation Zones, between the dragons and the mad gods, so there are fewer ships berthed here than there might once have been. No captain wants to leave his ship in between two warring powers, and trust to the fragile Armistice to preserve the peace. The big freighters go to the new docks in Shriveport, on the far side of Holyhill, long piers running out into deep water. Fewer ships mean less work.

He waits in the chilly spring drizzle for his name to be called. Distantly, he knows that he’s better off than most of the poor bastards huddled along the dockside. He won’t starve if he misses a day’s work. For others, there’s the span of a single coin between a good day and a bitter one.

Gunnar Tarson sidles up to him in the crowd. Another Brotherhood boy cast adrift. Tarson’s young and eager, starts talking about some job he has in mind, breaking into a merchant’s house. It’s not the time. Not with the spider-sentinels crawling over the district. It hasn’t been the time for months. Maybe it won’t ever be the time again.

He imagines himself as part of a broken mechanism. A coil or spring, wound ever more tightly, but disconnected now from whatever apparatus might once have given him release or function. He bows his head, waits to be called, and feels the tension in his belly ratchet forward, an inch of bile at a time.

The foreman starts calling names.

“Baston Hedanson?”

He steps forward.

“Sheds on Acre Lane. Boss wants ’em cleared.”

The sheds are a maze of rotting timbers. Raindrops swelling through narrow cracks in the roof, like a man bleeding from a dozen cuts. Floor slick with foamy run-off. This place hasn’t been used in months. Abandoned when an alchemist’s freighter went aground off the Bell Rock, and the evening tide ran yellow with poison. Another bit of the city gone rotten, ceded to something toxic and inimical to mortal life. Baston sniffs the air – as a creature of Guerdon, the smells from the alchemists’ smokestacks are as familiar to him as church bells. The burned sourness of phlogiston, the effervescent, tickling saltiness of yliaster, the cloying stench of melting wax.

There’s something else as well. A faint, floral scent. Perfume, maybe?

He’s not alone here. He tenses, his broad shoulders hunching. Hands bunching into fists. This isn’t the occupied zone, he tells himself. There’s no reason to assume trouble.

He prowls through the sheds, moving deeper into the maze. There’s a large space in the centre. Once, it was a trade hall, ornate iron pillars supporting a high ceiling, glass skylights green with moss and scum. The green light shifting like the whole place is underwater.

Two figures wait for him there. One’s an old man, bald, a face like a gargoyle. He’s wearing a priest’s cassock, but there’s a gun in his