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

“Word came down from Ushket this morning,” replies another. “The boss wants this one. She came off a ship yesterday.”

The first guard glances over at Cari. She forces herself to stay limp and feign unconsciousness. “For what? Who is she?” She watches him through a red haze of blood-matted hair and flying dust. He sounds young and scared. He keeps shooting nervous glances up the mountain, flinching at every breath of wind. Only the mule is calm, untroubled as it hauls the cart around the Rock of Ilbarin.

“Keep watch for the old woman,” hisses the other voice. “I have the gun. I’ll shoot her when she comes for us.”

Whoever this boss is, the one who wants Cari, they’re more scared of him than they are of a demigoddess.

Cari waits until the wagon hits another bump in the road, lets her head loll about until she happens to be looking in the right direction. Through her mostly closed good eye, she can see a man clutching a heavy rifle. Phlogiston charge, big bore – the sort of gun you’d use for fighting saints and godspawn. Not an equaliser, but enough to piss off a divine monster.

The Ghierdana tried using guns like that on her, back when she was the Saint of Knives.

Back when she had power.

“Lord of Waters, protect us,” mutters the nervous boy. A brief echo of the strange feeling she had on the mountain passes over Cari again. It feels like pressing on a scab. The hot, dusty wind blows.

“Idiot!” curses the rifleman, his ire directed at his young companion. “Don’t rile her up more! Don’t say a name.”

I trespassed, Cari realises. That must be holy ground up there. The mountain goddess, Usharet – she could tell that I was a saint of another power, and fought back. Cari shivers, can’t stop shivering. She’s freezing despite the heat of the day.

Cari’s avoided temples and churches for a long time. The last time she set foot in one was back in Guerdon, years ago, and that was a church of the Kept Gods of Guerdon when they were piss-weak. (They came back, she thinks bitterly. Why can’t Spar?) On her journey south, she kept mostly to godless territory, to Haithi outposts and empty lands, or she was at sea. Still, at times, she felt something similar – a tension, a burning. Like she was standing exposed to the desert sun at noon. Or the feeling in a crowd before a riot kicks off, this sick anticipation of violence.

The Ishmerians want to kill me. The Ghierdana want to kill me. And the gods want to kill me if I trespass on their turf.

Fine. She can use that. Everything’s a weapon. She learned that long ago.

“Holy Beggar,” she mutters under her breath. “Mother of Flowers. Holy Smith. Saint Storm.” The weak Kept Gods of Guerdon.

The hot wind blows. The mule whinnies.

“Fate Spider. Smoke Painter.” The gods of the Sacred Empire. “High Umur. Cloud Mother.”

Pain, like her head’s in a vice. The guards hear her prayers. They grab at her, wrenching her legs as they pull her from the wagon, but she keeps chanting, forcing the names out even as she’s coughing up blood. She spits them like insults.

“Fucking Kraken.” Hot dirt rains on her face. “Fucking Pesh, the Lion Queen!” She remembers the sight of the goddess Pesh marching on Guerdon, taller than a mountain, waves breaking against her golden thighs. Pesh in her glory, her words an artillery bombardment, her gaze fire and destruction. Pesh, so beautiful and terrible that Cari had to stifle a prayer even as she pulled the trigger on the god-bomb that murdered her…

The mountain’s roaring again, earth thunder, the whole hillside writhing and groaning. Cari’s eyes are tightly closed, but she still gets the impression of the old woman rushing towards them.

Cari cries out, shouting the names of the Black Iron Gods – names she didn’t know she knew, never heard before, but they’re in her somewhere, and now she calls them aloud. Screams them, and they echo off the mountain.

The gun goes off, a flash of phlogiston and a barking report that half deafens Cari. Again, and again, and the third time there’s a hiss – not pain, but uncomprehending anger and amazement at the insolence of mortals.

Then the landslide hits them, sweeps guards and wagon and mule off the road. Cari’s already moving, already rolling off the wagon before it topples. Everything’s a confusion of dust and smoke, noise and flying stones. The screaming of the Ghierdana drowned out by the rumble of the falling mountain, of the goddess Usharet in her wrath.

The mule’s to her left, legs broken, squealing in agony. The wagon’s fallen over, the kegs spilling down the mountainside. One smashes open, spilling a glowing liquid out in a brilliant spray, mixed with a sludge of crystals like sea salt.

Guards to her right, one trying to dig himself out of the stones that half buried him. Another, buried and unmoving, one outstretched hand a marker for his grave. Somewhere off in the swirling dust, flashes of red as the gun goes off again, firing blind.

Cari twists around, finds her knife – pain shoots through her wrist. She’s half buried herself in moving stones as the landslide ebbs. She kicks free of the stones, brings her legs up to her bound hands so she can cut at the rope, once, twice, until it gives way.

One of the guards grabs at her, but Usharet grabs him first, thorn-fingers tearing his throat open, hands of dust seizing him with terrible force and flinging him away.

Down, she thinks. Got to get off this fucking mountain.

The guard with the rifle emerges from the dust. He fires at point-blank range, so close that Cari can hear the glass ampoule inside the phlogiston charge crack as the hammer comes down. Usharet whirls around, leaps on to the guard’s shoulders, rakes his face with her thorns. Howling all