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

That’s a memory. Focus on the now. Focus on the thieves. They’re important, somehow. Two are foreigners, new to the city. They’re wearing raincoats, but he can see beneath those, too. He can taste their weapons. The one in the lead carries a dragon-tooth knife that burns in Spar’s vision. A Ghierdana boy, from the dragon families. (Spar remembers another knife, just like that one, cutting into Carillon’s throat. Cutting, miraculously, into his own stony flesh – but that’s another door into memory, another stairway leading down to the underworld. Close it, quick. Focus.)

The Ghierdana boy swaggers along. Hair cut short to fit under a flying helmet, a thin moustache to show he’s a man. Olive skin marked by dozens of old scars, knife cuts, on his hands and forearms, but no bigger wound. A boy who’s fought many, many times, but never lost. He’s got a well-used breathing mask hanging from his neck; he wears the distinctive leathers of a dragon-rider under the cloak, heavy gloves and fur-lined collar. Is he a fool to wear such an outfit on a heist, or is he declaring his rank to those who recognise it? Arrogance or pride? The difference between them is one of balance – take pride just a little too far, and you’ll slip and fall. (Fall from the dome of the Seamarket, to burst on the rocks below.)

The boy is important. Spar doesn’t know how or why he knows this; an instinct he cannot name, a way of sensing that mortals do not possess.

Rasce. That’s his name. It’s a name that Spar’s heard many times, whispered in his streets.

The other Ghierdana, also male, about the same age, but wearing street clothes. Hands sweaty on the grip of his pistol. No dragon-tooth knife for him, no mark of the dragon’s favour. Strapped to his side is a cloth bundle, carefully wrapped to keep the contents in place. Thieves’ tools, lockpicks and cutters. And explosive charges, little glass balls of phlogiston. This second Ghierdana man scowls at the dragon-rider when Rasce’s back is turned, malice mixing with fear. Bile rising the man’s throat, like rainwater rising in a blocked drainpipe.

The third man, Spar knows. Familiar people are a trap for him; watching them, it’s too easy for him to lose track of time, to slip into his memories of them instead of tracking their present existence. Carillon anchored him in the present, focused him – but thinking of her is like falling.

(From the dome of the Seamarket, tumbling end over end, bursting on the stone. The memory reaches for him hungrily, like a Raveller’s tendrils, flensing away another portion of his consciousness.)

Focus! Pay attention! The third man… the third man is… Baston Hedanson. A Brotherhood man. The Fever Knight’s apprentice. Spar used to be friends with Baston: they ran together when they were younger, before the Stone Plague took Spar’s youth and friends and standing in the guild away from him. Two versions of Baston war in what remains of Spar’s mind. In the present, Baston’s glancing at the shadows, scanning for trouble. The years haven’t been kind to him – he looks worn, face gaunt. In memory, Baston’s fifteen years younger. A few years older than Spar, half a man when Spar was but a boy. Sitting on a wall in Hog Close, watching Spar run with Karla and the other kids. Baston acting aloof, but twitching to join the game.

Hog Close. The memory of Spar’s own youth rears up, hoary and potent. He tries to fight it, tries to pay attention to the present city, to these three thieves, but he can’t hold on. He can feel his consciousness breaking apart again, pulled apart by the sheer size of the New City. He’s grown too large to encompass himself. His mind is like a little spider trying to weave a web around the whole city.

Spar wonders, as he breaks apart for the millionth time, if there are other fragments of his consciousness out there, other parts of his mind that have found each other, hung together long enough to think the same thoughts. Is he Spar, or just one of Spar’s many ghosts?

He falls. His awareness like droplets of rainwater running down the walls, dividing and recombining and breaking apart again, a silver tracery of thought that pools in the deepest parts of the New City, in the deepest parts of his soul. He can no longer tell past from present, distinguish his own memories from the shadows that play on the walls of the New City.

He falls.

In Hog Close, Spar plays watch and thieves with Karla and a gang of other kids, dodging in and out of the alleyways. He’s the tallest in the group, the fastest. No one can catch him. Karla shouts after him, threatening to invoke the wrath of her big brother the way a saint calls on a god. Spar vaults over the garden hedge that represents the edge of the Alchemists’ Quarter, pretends to gather up handfuls of gold coins and flings them over the wall, then runs before the watch can get him. He runs down the street, racing ahead of his pursuers.

A group of older men enter the close. Brotherhood all.

“Gods below, it’s the son,” says one of them. “Get his mother, she should be the one to tell.”

“No,” says another, softly. The old man kneels down, puts his hand on Spar’s shoulder, looks him right in the eye. His breath smells of tobacco. “The city watch arrested your father. He’s done for. Listen, the Brotherhood will take care of you, but there’s nothing that can be done for him. We can’t help him.”

“Will they hang him?”

They will hang him. They hang Idge.

It’s twenty years ago, and it’s always now.

Spar watches in the garden of the Hall of Law. The bell tolls the noon hour, and the gallows drops beneath his father. Idge falls, and