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

Rose and Ushket, she can see a few thin figures stalking up and down the muddy fields, poking at weeds or searching through the other wrecks.

They’re looking for her.

For them, passage off Ilbarin. Hawse told her that the first thing the Ghierdana did when they arrived, after Ilbarin City drowned, was make sure they controlled all the ways off the island. Their dragons destroyed the ships that weren’t Ghierdana. Burned most of them, dragged others – like the Rose – out of the water to rot. Tens of thousands of people died in Ilbarin City, but tens of thousands survived, too. For now – this island is dying, she can taste it in the air like a ghoul. Not enough food, not enough drinkable water. The farms up the slopes look like they don’t produce much, and she’s got no idea where Hawse got the fish he fed her, because the only others she’s seen are the piles of rotting fish-kill along the water’s edge. The seas are fucked, too, ruined by the battle between Kraken and the Lord of Waters. She wants passage off this rock, but so does everyone else.

What about Dol Martaine? Hawse claims she can trust their former crewmate, that Martaine won’t break his word to the captain – but Cari needs to know the source of that certainty.

She leaves the rail, makes her way slowly downstairs into the dark bowels of the ship.

The forward hold is pitch-black apart from the wan light that spills in through the breach in the hull. She has to navigate by touch, by memory, until she finds the doorway that leads into the aft hold. The tide’s coming in, water gushing through the wounds in the aft hull. She climbs down the ladder, wincing at every rung, cold and slimy tongues lapping against her ankles, her calves. The salt stings the cuts on her knees.

There’s another sensation, too, like she’s passing through invisible veils. She has to push at the empty air; something unseen and unnamable passes through her. It tickles her skin, her bones, her mind – it’s like the feeling she experienced on the mountain, just before the goddess of the mountain nearly beat her to death, but she doesn’t get the same feeling of hostility here. Just a feeling of presence. One time, back in Severast, Cari robbed the house of a dead man. He was a wealthy merchant who died suddenly, and all his family and servants were away at the funeral rite in the temple of the Dancer. Cari had slipped away from the rites, swapped her acolyte’s robes for the more practical garb of a sneak-thief, and made her way through the cobbled lanes of Severast until she found the empty house.

She remembers making her way through the rooms, knowing the owner was gone, but still sensing him everywhere. Papers left on a desk, a half-finished bottle of wine, a caged parrot demanding attention – as though the merchant had just stepped out for a moment. A house that was unoccupied but not empty.

The aft hold is like that.

Captain Hawse is there, waist-deep by a makeshift floating altar, on which he’s laid the sacred icons of the Lord of Waters. Blue light wells from the water when he touches it. As Cari enters, there’s a sudden splash and ripple from the far side of the room. One of the Bythos, maybe, vanishing into the water.

The expression on Hawse’s face is one she’s never seen before. His eyes are closed – in prayer? In pain? – but he senses her approach.

“I said I would tell you, did I not?”

“What is this, captain?” asks Cari. It’s obvious what it is – a little temple to the Lord of Waters, with Hawse as priest. But in all the time she knew him, Hawse’s approach to religion was pragmatic. He made offerings to the Lord of Waters, but also to all the other sea-gods, to Kraken and St Storm and Vas and the Whale-God. Sailors are syncretists; you never know which god, if any, is going to have influence over the shifting currents and storms of the open ocean, so you hedge your prayers. “Have you gone hallowed on me?”

“The man you knew is dead, Cari,” says Hawse.

“How metaphorical are you being, here?”

Hawse ignores her, and speaks without opening his eyes. He recites rather than replies, as if he’s quoting some ancient prayer from thousands of years ago. “When the Sacred Realm of Ishmere made war upon the land of Ilbarin, there was much suffering. From Ishmere came the Kraken, bearing the temple-fleets, the armies of the mad gods. The sky darkened with the demon offspring of Cloud Mother. The hearts of brave men were dismayed by the horrors conjured by Smoke Painter, and the minds of women were poisoned by the whispers of Fate Spider. Woe and suffering came from Ishmere. Anathema upon the gods of Ishmere!

“The kindly gods sent forth a host of saints to defend the shores of Ilbarin. Their battle cries shook the mountain. Their blades were fire and thunder. To look upon them was to go mad with joy.”

She’s never heard him talk like this. Never heard him talk for so long. Hawse was always a man of few words.

“The Rose was caught between them. We were on our way back from Paravos, and I sailed us right into… into…” He opens his eyes, fixes his gaze on Carillon. Moistens his lips. “The Krakens stole the seas, and we couldn’t move. I saw the clouds eat my crew. I saw everything breaking. And they were in me, too. I was their battlefield. We all were. They’d command us, and we obeyed. Gods sending us this way and that. Jumping into the water. Or the sky. It was all one. Everything was broken. Pesh told me to kill, and I killed. But death was no release from their commands. Even the men I killed kept fighting. It was madness.”

She remembers the attack on Guerdon,