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

hanged him.” The words come out of Rasce’s mouth, but they’re not his words. He grabs Karla’s glass of arax from her, washes his mouth out, swallows, gagging on the ash. “Ach! No. Why did I say that? No, my father is alive, but – weak. Too many scars, and he can no longer fly. A broken knife, we say. No matter. No matter.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“The fumes, I think.”

She rises. “Come back inside.”

“In a moment.”

She slips away, returning to the upstairs room. He should follow, but for a moment he feels rooted to the stone steps. The solitude is welcome, too – he’s used to spending long days strapped to Great-Uncle’s back, with no company expect the dragon and his own thoughts. A little silence is balm, and he sips the last of the arax.

From the bar downstairs he can hear the Ishmerians singing a familiar hymn of mourning, a song that’s sung many times a day in Guerdon. It tells of the death of their war goddess, brought down by treachery. The death of Pesh was more than a defeat for the Sacred Realm. It tore a wound in their souls and destroyed their ability to conceive of war. The empire’s collapsing – and in that chaos, the Ghierdana thrive.

A door at the bottom of the stairs opens. The sound of the hymn mixes with the sound of an argument.

“Who’s drinking that filthy arax? Who’ve you got up there?” An Ishmeric soldier shoves the waiter against the wall, heavy bottles clanking together as the waiter’s tray wobbles.

“No one,” insists the waiter. “Just a storeroom.”

“Kraken take your lying tongue,” slurs the soldier. He grabs one of the bottles, raises it like a club. He’s a big man, shoulders corded with muscle. A killer, forged in the Godswar. He won’t hesitate to smash the waiter’s brains out with the bottle.

The waiter, Rasce suddenly remembers, is named Pulchar. Another former member of the Brotherhood. He’s lived in the Wash all his life, watched the city change around him. Memories flash through his brain. Pulchar serving him a drink, shouting at other customers who refused to share a bar with a Stone Man. Pulchar, during the invasion, cowering on these stairs as water flooded the bar downstairs, as monstrous Krakens swam through the streets outside.

It’s not Rasce’s memory. It can’t be. He’s never met Pulchar before. These memories are coming from the same place as the visions that warned him of the ghouls, of the fires. But none of that matters right now. Pulchar doesn’t deserve what’s about to happen to him.

The soldier, Rasce decides, does.

Rasce jumps over the banister.

The split second in midair is liberating, like flying again. He feels thoroughly himself in that instant.

He lands squarely on the Ishmerian. The soldier crumples under the impact, ribs cracking. For good measure, Rasce grabs the wretch by the hair, drives his skull into the nearest step, and the Ishmerian goes limp.

The waiter stares in horror. Rasce barely notices. His mind is elsewhere. The memory of Pulchar hiding on the stair, the vision of Dredger’s yard – in both, it was as though he was looking down from some vantage point in the heights of the New City. He’s looked down from Great-Uncle’s back often enough to visualise the city spread out below, to imagine the angles and perspectives. Something has touched his mind. Something unnatural.

Something connected to the New City.

“Baston! Vyr!” calls Rasce. Faces appear at the top of the stairs. “We’re leaving.”

He kneels down by the terrified waiter. “Listen! We were never here, yes?” Rasce presses a purse of gold into Pulchar’s hand. “Take this, for the drinks. And the shelter. And the fire damage.”

“What fire damage?” mutters Pulchar weakly.

Unlike the soldier, the bottle of arax is still intact.

Rasce plucks a rag from Pulchar’s apron, stuffs it into the neck of the bottle. The Guerdon thieves did well tonight, he reflects, and it’s only fair to honour their efforts with a little extra payback. “We shall leave by the front door,” Rasce announces.

“The bar is full of Ishmeric soldiers,” says Vyr.

“The dragon walks where he pleases.”

A burning bottle of arax isn’t half as impressive a weapon as that blunderbore, but it still makes for a marvellous beginning to a quick and bloody brawl as the thieves charge through the front bar, scattering the soldiers of the Sacred Realm.

To Rasce’s delight, Baston comes alive in the fight. The man fights with brutal efficiency, moving across the bar like some remorseless engine. He wields a table leg as a weapon, bringing it down again and again on the skulls of Ishmeric soldiers. Never a blow wasted.

“We have to go,” shouts Karla. Blood runs down her face from a cut on her cheek, but she’s grinning broadly. Rasce claps her on the back. “Lead us out!”

She grabs him by the hand, fingers intertwined with his. The thieves spill out on to the streets, Ghierdana and Guerdonese alike, and vanish down back alleys and passageways, out of the sight of the city and its many gods.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Carillon wakes at dawn, hears the waves washing against the hull through a haze of dull pain. Hears Captain Hawse’s gruff voice in the distance. She thinks, maybe, that she saw a Monkfish – a Bythos – standing in the doorway of the cabin, but it might have been a dream. She’s dreaming again—

Waking in a cold panic, unsure where she is. She lunges for her dagger – unexpected, unfamiliar pain, how can she be wounded? – and reaches out for Spar with her mind. She’s the Saint of Knives, she’s got a thousand enemies in Guerdon. She can’t let her guard down. Spar? Who’s out there? Show me, she thinks, even as she falls out of the bunk to land heavily on the floor of the little cabin. Falls through the floor, into blackness. Into another waking dream.

Hours later, in the dead of night, she’s awake again. The bitter taste of