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

in Spar’s memory the fall seems to go on forever, far longer than any rope could possibly allow. He clutches his mother’s hand, imagining somehow that his father will fall through the earth, fall into some subterranean wonderland of the ghouls, escape through the endless tunnels below the city. Survive, transformed into some strange new form. Survive through his writing if nothing else.

The fall an escape, a miraculous victory in the face of death.

But the rope snaps taut, and the fall ends.

In a tunnel under the New City, a ghoul crouches by a stone wall. It’s dark, but darkness means nothing down here – both Spar and the ghoul have transcended the need for anything so mundane as eyes to see in the dark.

He knows the ghoul. It’s Rat. When he contracted the Stone Plague, that mysterious disease that slowly ate away at his flesh, transmuting it to rock, his Hog Close friends abandoned him, one by one. Their father hustling Karla out of Spar’s room, Baston hovering at the threshold, unwilling to leave, too scared to come closer.

Some saw that he would never take his father’s place at the head of the Brotherhood. Others, he drove away. But Rat stayed. Ghouls can’t get the Plague. Ghouls don’t care about bitterness, or self-loathing, or despair. Everyone else, Spar could find some leverage, some weak spot to push, but Rat had decided Spar was his friend, and that was that.

Rat, but not Rat. Rat has suffered a change almost as complete as Spar’s. His friend was a street-ghoul, a young ghoul, lurking in the alleyways and stealing carcasses from slaughterhouses to slake his hunger for dead meat. But Rat was – possessed? Chosen? Consumed? – by one of the Elder Ghouls of Guerdon, the necrotic demigods who dwelled in the depths below. All the other elders are gone now, killed in their war with the Crawling Ones, all save the thing called Lord Rat.

Rat scratches at the tunnel wall with his massive paws, tapping on it. His huge jaws part, his long purple tongue licking at his teeth. Sharp fangs for ripping corpse-flesh from bone, wide flat molars for cracking bones to get the marrow, the residual soul-stuff. Haltingly, Rat speaks. He’s trying to tell Spar something important. The ghoul gestures, says something about Black Iron. Something about alchemy.

The vibrations echo through Spar’s mind. He fights to pay attention again, to pull fragments of his mind together so he can listen, but it’s so hard to focus. To… coagulate.

Rat’s voice becomes an echo, robbed of meaning. His words join the chorus of other words spoken in the New City, lost in the tumult of noise. He strains to pick meaning out of the seething chaos of life. Spar’s aware that he’s only been a city for a short time, but his grasp of the mortal world is slipping. To distinguish individual words, individual days, individual lives from the masses that swarm through him, their passage clear to him only in aggregate, in the way their feet wear away well-travelled steps, in how their hands rub certain lucky carvings smooth.

Frustrated, Rat scratches on the stone again.

Spar’s eyes are the tunnel wall, the ceiling, the stones all around. His eardrums are every surface. He sees Rat from a hundred different angles, and every one of those viewpoints is a portion of Spar’s attention that threatens to slip away. His thoughts are a host of children in a crowded city – it’s all too easy for him to lose them down the twisting alleyways of memory.

He follows the scratching sound, back three years.

Scratching at his door. It’s Rat. Spar puts down his papers and levers himself up from his chair. If he grabs on to the edge of the shelf nearby, he can pull himself up, avoid putting added pressure on the left side of his back. There are jagged plates of stone on his skin there that dig into the underlying muscle if he puts weight on them, and every time he does he feels the chill numbness of petrification take hold.

The shelf creaks under his weight. Dents in the wood match his stony fingertips. He stands, but his left leg seizes up, goes numb. Like he’s balancing atop a precarious pillar of stone.

He’s in danger of falling. The room spins around him. Terror seizes him; he can’t breathe.

Falling’s always a danger for him – if he smashes to the floor, the impact might cause internal damage he can’t see, damage he won’t catch until it’s too late. He imagines smashing heavily on to the dirt floor. Maybe hitting his head, or getting dirt in his eyes that scratches the delicate tissue, blinding him with stony cataracts.

He tells himself that he’s not that fragile. He’s seen Stone Men like him shrug off bullets, smash through brick walls, endure terrible beatings. As long as he takes the hit on a part of his body that’s already gone to stone, it doesn’t matter. He’s just got to protect his dwindling stock of flesh. Measure out his life in square inches of flesh, in nail breadths of unpetrified skin.

“Give me a minute.”

“Hurry up,” mutters Rat. “It’s pouring out here.”

There’s a vial of alkahest on the shelf, just within reach. Spar leans over, pressing his other hand against the wall for balance. He scoops it up, finds the gap between stone scabs on his leg, and drives the needle home. Fiery sensations, exhilarating and agonising in equal measure, rush through his leg. The paralysis in his knee melts away, and the limb moves freely again. He can feel his toes for the first time in days. The alkahest seethes through his bloodstream in a blazing flood. It feels as though the stone has melted away to become supple flesh again. He knows it’s only a temporary relief, but, still, it’s enough for now.

He strides across the little room, unbolts the door. Rat’s outside, with some human girl leaning on him for support. She’s deathly pale,