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

Cari runs. Crawls. Falls, bouncing off boulders, slipping on loose pebbles – and then on mud. She falls to her knees again, sinks her hands into the deliciously salty mud of the shoreline. Pain bursts through her, broken ribs and twisted muscles. Bruises exploding like artillery beneath her skin. She fears that she might burst or break, but still she crawls.

Behind her, up the slope, the distant roaring of the goddess. The ground quakes beneath her, the earth cracking and sloughing away from the hillside, great gobbets of soil sliding into the sea, brown stains like blood spreading across the waves. The air is full of dust, full of pressure, like a great iron bell is tolling right next to her ears. Blind, she wades forward through the catastrophe until her feet find the road.

Stumbling, limping, falling, crawling, but always moving, always running away from the wrath of the mad goddess she offended. She wipes away the dust that’s caked on her face and hands, but it’s futile. She must look like the goddess, she thinks distantly, a thin and broken thing covered in dust and mud and thorns.

She hears shouts from up ahead, and acts on instinct, a thief’s reflexes. She hurls herself into a ditch, muffles her own yelps of pain as armed men rush past to vanish into the roiling chaos of the dust cloud, and then there are more gunshots, the howl of a flash ghost detonation.

She staggers on. The act of walking becomes mechanical, a mantra spoken by her twisted ankles, by her tortured shoulders. Her own momentum carries her forward. She feels as though she has to keep moving, or the road around the mountain will rise up and strike her. Above her, the sun wheels through the sky; clouds white and dust-grey circle above her. Vultures, too, she thinks.

At one point, she reaches around to adjust her satchel, move it around so the fucking book isn’t digging into her spine quite so sharply, and her hand comes back wet with blood. She draws her knife, confused, unsure what she’s thinking.

It’s not like death is something she can cut. Her fingers are powerless, and the knife slips from her grasp. Lands in the middle of the road, the metal gleaming bright, unsullied by the dust that coats everything else. She stares at that knife for a long, long time, scared that if she bends over to pick it up, she’ll fall over, fall apart. Break the delicate balance between the weight of the book and her own forward momentum, disrupt the arrangement of wounded limbs that lets her keep going.

She can’t think straight. She’s inhaled so much dust, it feels like it’s coated her brain with a thick crust of earth. Her skull’s fit to burst. She wonders if it’s her fear, or if it’s Spar’s. He was always nervous about falling.

But that was when he was alive.

No, she tells herself. He’s still alive. I’m still alive, she thinks. And I’m going to fix this. I’ll go to Khebesh and fix this.

She steps over the knife. Keeps going. Keeps going. Keeps going.

Until she’s crawling through the hole in the hull of the Rose. Finding her way blindly up the ladder.

Falling down in her own bunk.

Home.

CHAPTER SIX

Three thieves running down a street. A heist gone wrong. An explosion.

That was how it began, wasn’t it? Is this a memory, or something that’s happening now? The footfalls of the thieves agitate his thoughts, the vibration in the living stone shaking his mind free. For a moment, part of Spar’s attention is drawn to that particular street in the New City, to these thieves. Enough of his consciousness gathers for him to be aware that he’s conscious.

This city he’s become is too big for his mortal mind – he can feel himself slipping away, parts of him following raindrops down windowpanes, ghouls down gutters, the delicate constellation of thought and memory that used to be a man named Spar Idgeson dissipating into the labyrinthine streets of the New City. Dissolving into the stone, like a drowning man.

Focus. Fight for focus. Pay attention. Stay awake. Hold on until she finds you again.

Three thieves run down a street. The street winds steeply down towards the edge of the New City, towards the docks where black water laps against white stone. They cross a narrow bridge that spans a gap in the streets. The bridge is made in the semblance of an angel, and they run across its outstretched wings. The angel’s face is that of Spar’s mother. Water cascades past her memorial, falling into the lower parts of the New City. A canal below.

(His mind slips, chasing the memory: fighting the Fever Knight. Charging the armoured warrior, sending both of them plunging into the stagnant water of a different canal. He couldn’t beat Heinreil’s bodyguard in a fight, so he tried self-sacrifice. That’s the thing about living with a fatal disease – death stops being unthinkable. You contemplate long enough, and it becomes just another thought.)

It’s no good. He’s falling again. He still senses the three thieves – he can feel their footsteps on the cobblestones that are his skin. He can watch them through every window. All three wear dark raincoats against the downpour. The rain’s washing away his mind, he thinks. How can he think when he also has to feel the impact of every raindrop, all clamouring for his attention? What’s the difference between a raindrop and a human, anyway? Both mostly water. Both burst on impact with the stone.

He burst on impact, too. Beneath the wide boulevards and twisting alleyways of his thoughts is an underworld of memory, a sucking sewer that traps him and drags him down. In memory, he falls from the dome of the Seamarket, his calcified joints and heavy limbs betraying him; all that strength and he can’t beat gravity. Failing at the last challenge. Cari’s eyes full of horror. Knowing as he dies that