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

of Knives. She has followed me here.” Artolo rushes to the wardrobe, pulls out a gun, as if Carillon Thay might be hiding under the bed or behind a curtain.

“I’ll deal with her,” says the witch hastily. “You should go to the refinery, make sure the yliaster is ready.”

“No,” says Artolo. “No. I will find her. I will find her, and I will do to her what she did to me ten thousand times over.” He rushes over to the nightstand, pulls out his dragon-tooth dagger. The edge is blunt, but the blade is still strong.

His fingers are gone, but his grip is still strong.

Artolo drives the blunt blade into the servant’s stomach, putting his full weight on the knife’s hilt to push it deep. The servant shrieks in pain, bellows, hammers his bleeding hands against Artolo’s face, but Artolo is much, much too strong. The blade sinks in. Hot blood gushes across Artolo’s bare legs, stains his half-closed shirt.

Then he tears, ripping the stomach like a wet sack, spilling the man’s entrails out across the tiles.

Better than any drug.

“Witch!” calls Artolo from the puddle of gore. “Read this fortune!” He lifts up a handful of guts, feeling them drip through his fingers. “Read it and tell me where I will find Carillon Thay!”

By mid-afternoon, Cari thinks she might die here on the fucking Rock of Ilbarin. She pulls at her sweat-soaked clothes. She’d forgotten how hot the sun could get down south. Firesea’s well named.

The mountain’s steep-sided and treacherous, and she’s had to go higher and higher on the rocky slopes to avoid being spotted, picking her way past scraggly bushes and little thorny trees. There’s salt in the air from the unnaturally swollen seas, and white patches of dried salt on rocks around her. Below, she can see the white scar of the road from Ushket as it snakes around the mountain. The road shimmers and dances in the haze until it vanishes around the side of the Rock on its way down to Ilbarin. Beyond the road, the new shore, a treacherous silty slope, red mud dissolving into the sea like the mountain’s bleeding.

She couldn’t take the road. It’s guarded by armed men – she’s guessing Eshdana, The Ghierdana’s ash-bought mercenaries. There’s a lot of traffic on the road, too, mules hauling carts full of metal casks. She has no idea what they’re transporting, but she doesn’t want to get too close. There are plenty of hiding places amid the rocks, but Cari’s a creature of the alleyways and the docks, and feels horribly exposed without walls around her.

So, she went higher up the slopes, picking her way past unstable patches and the scars of recent landslides, only to discover there are farms up here. Fields of freshly cleared brownish-grey earth. The soil’s thin and full of stones. Cari doubts they can grow much of anything, but what choice do they have? Most of Ilbarin’s farmland got drowned by the Kraken – it’s spread out there before her, under the glittering waves. So, the survivors scrape what they can out of the rocky hillside. She watches them for a while from a hiding place beyond the barbed-wire fences: a host of people labouring in the parched field, working the ground with their bare hands. Thin and grey, faces aged by hunger and exposure, the commonality beneath the skin overcoming distinctions of age or sex. A field of almost-skeletons.

Watching over them are armed guards. Well-fed Eshdana, with clubs or guns. They’re running the farms now, running everything, it looks like. She saw the same thing back in Guerdon, in the early days of the New City. The crooks and the criminal syndicates were quickest to adapt to the catastrophe, and grabbed power. You’d hate that, she thinks to Spar. You’d go on about your father, about the Brotherhood, about making a fairer world out of the ruins. And where did all those good intentions and self-sacrifice get us? You dead, and me here on this bloody Rock. It’s a thought she’d never allow herself back in Guerdon, but Spar’s half a world away and can’t hear her anyway.

Her only route around the farms is to go higher, scaling the uppermost slopes where the air grows cooler and the terrain more broken. Up here, the mountain is a fantastic labyrinth of shattered stone, the only living things a few thorn bushes. She guesses that gods fought here. Those scars on the hillside were probably left by the acid-tripping tendrils that trail behind the creatures of Cloud Mother. These three parallel chasms must have been torn by the claws of Lion Queen. The damage is fresh, the rocks underfoot jagged. Broken goat paths end prematurely.

Not that she’s seen a goat all day. Her empty stomach rumbles. She’s getting weak with hunger. It’s getting harder to carry the weight of the fucking book, not to mention the rest of her gear.

She forces herself to keep going. She imagines that she’s back in the New City, Spar miraculously transforming the uneven terrain into a smooth path for her. Once she gets around the Rock, it’s downhill. Down to Ilbarin City. Even if most of the city’s gone, there’ll be places to hide there. She’ll find someone with a ship, someone who’ll take her coin.

Further up the slope there’s an area that’s less smashed up than the rest. Tired of slipping on jagged rocks, Cari climbs, pulling herself up on tufts of tough grass and the exposed roots of thorn bushes, until she reaches the unbroken section. Up ahead, she can see a small stone building. A goatherd’s shed, maybe, or a little shrine for pilgrims.

She can walk for a bit here, instead of having to climb through shattered terrain. She drinks the last of her fresh water, kicks herself for not collecting more before setting off. She blames Hawse for pissing her off, tries to keep that anger alive in her belly. Anger’s better than hunger. Anger keeps you sharp.

She sets