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

the stink of the bilges. The creaks of rope and timber, the slap of water on wood, the shouts of sailors, all this was her life before, is now her life again. The wide world, sea under sky. She leans on the railing by the prow of the ship, watching the horizon. The empty expanse makes her feel deliciously anonymous. The open ocean accepts no name that mortals or gods might try to put on it. It admits no history, existing in one present and eternal moment. On the ocean, it feels like she could be born anew with each swelling wave.

On the ocean, her life ashore feels like a dream.

But it wasn’t a dream, was it, she thinks to herself, her fingers closing around the black amulet that once more adorns her neck. She’s not expecting an answer here – Spar is half the world away. And even if Cari was back in the New City, standing in the heart of the great metropolis that she inadvertently conjured from his corpse nearly two years ago, she doesn’t know if he’d be able to answer her.

Still, she prays for an answer. Strains whatever the psychic equivalent of an ear is.

Nothing.

Just the jagged whirling of her own thoughts.

She can’t help but be amused by the irony. She ran away from home long ago because she was haunted by the fear of unseen powers that called to her, and she found solace in the anonymity of the ocean. Distance muted the voices. Every mile she sailed away from Guerdon was a balm to her scarred soul.

Now, she’s terrified by the absence of one particular voice, and every day she sails is time she can’t afford to spend. If she could have teleported across the world, instead of spending months travelling around the Godswar, she’d have done that, and damn the cost.

Nothing’s ever simple with you, is it, she thinks to herself. Again, there’s no answer. Just a memory of her cousin Eladora, lying bleeding in an alleyway off Desiderata Street, whispering to her: You ruin everything.

Not this time.

“Ilbarin!” comes the shout from the crow’s nest. “Mark, the Rock of Ilbarin.”

Cari stares at the horizon, looking for the distant hump of the mountain, but she can’t see it from down here yet. She suppresses the urge to climb up into the rigging and get a proper view. She spent half her old life aloft, and the swaying of the mast holds no fear for her. But she can’t abandon her prize. She pats the heavy oilskin bundle that hasn’t left her sight in six months, feels the comforting weight of the book inside.

Comforting weight? More like fucking inconvenient weight. The book’s absurdly huge, and the cover is shod in metal, with a hefty lock built into it. Probably magic wards, too. The thing could stop a bullet, and not a small one either. If Cari’s ever caught in an artillery bombardment (again, she adds), she’s hiding under that fucking book.

The Grimoire of Doctor Ramegos, to give the book something like its proper title. From what Eladora explained, it’s some sort of magical diary. Cari wishes she knew which pages were actually important. If she knew what was valuable, she could just steal that, cut the pages out and wrap them up in a nice neat bundle. But no – it’s all incomprehensible arcane runes in there. She can’t distinguish between the world-shattering secrets and the magic equivalent of “day eight of gastric distress. Today’s bowel movements were mostly greenish and inoffensive” so she has to carry it all. She’s dragged this fucking book from Guerdon to Haith, across the sea to Varinth, down south to Paravos, across to the Caliphates into the Firesea, and now nearly to Khebesh.

Thinking about it, six months with this book can be counted among her longest relationships, and she can’t even read the thing.

She listens again. Spar was always amused when she got ranty. She’s still curating her own thoughts, storing away things that he might enjoy. But he’s an absence in her soul, an unseen wound. A phantom limb that other people don’t have. She’s left only with her own thoughts, and Cari’s always been poor company for herself.

Some of the crew of this ship might understand. Some of them, too, have walked in the shadow of divinity. It’s not a Guerdon ship; she boarded this ship in… one of the occupied Caliphate ports? Taervosa, maybe, or some other stop on her long, meandering journey. Not a Guerdon ship means not a Guerdon crew – there are god-touched on board. They’ve got a weatherworker, Eld, a minor saint of Cloud Mother. Waddling around, complaining about his swollen ankles and swollen belly, occasionally called on to birth sylph-spirits to fill the sails and speed the ship along. Another sailor has a Tomb Child from Ul-Taen riding on his shoulders, the shade of a child sacrifice. Cari can see the Child, sometimes, if the sun catches it at the right angle. And there’s one mercenary who has the Lion Queen’s sigil tattooed on his chest.

She’s stayed away from him, this whole journey.

She’s made enough enemies for one lifetime.

The Rock of Ilbarin grows as the ship struggles to make headway through a sea of debris. Floating wreckage bumps against the hull. The crew rush to the rail to take soundings, check the depth beneath the keel. They have charts, of course, but charts are useless these days. The gods can tear up the foundations of the ocean to throw at each other.

It’s been five years since she last saw the Rock, but she still remembers Ilbarin City. Other travellers might speak of Ilbarin’s glittering fountains amid the lush green gardens, or the golden-roofed temples, but Cari chiefly remembers the crowded quays and the alleyways between the warehouses, the dockside inns and chandleries. She spent her formative years there, and on the Rose. She’ll be able to find her way on from there.

The ship’s course shifts. The distant Rock of