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

really worked, once you stripped away all pretence, all the holy scriptures and divine commandments.

You were strong, or you suffered.

Ilbarin was his proof of that. This land of crushed and broken gods, without the wit or strength left to them to spawn a saint. Lawless and godless, too many people and not enough food. There’s only one way off Ilbarin, and he controls it. He can reward the worthy, the ones with the courage and sense and strength to become Eshdana, and the others suffer.

He’ll make Carillon suffer. He’ll… he’ll bury her on this mountain. There must be hidden caves in the depths of the Rock, cracks and crevasses where he can entomb her alive, down in the darkness, surrounded by stone, the roots of the thorn bushes pushing into the fecund stickiness of her eye sockets, drinking her soul…

That’s not my thought, he realises.

The warding runes flare. The ground shakes.

She’s right below them.

The witch senses it, too, but she’s clumsy in her articulated armour, too slow to react. Artolo grabs her and sprints forward as the hillside explodes behind him. He shouts a warning, but it’s lost in the thunder of the eruption. Boulders crash around him. Dust billows up, and through the choking clouds he sees the goddess. He tries to bring the long rifle to bear, but she’s too close.

Witless, broken, but cunning like a fox. The goddess recognised the long guns, knew they were a danger to her.

The goddess is a leafless tree, barren and bare, twisting in the force of some unseen gale – but every time she bends, every time her long tangled arms reach down, they come up dripping with the entrails of one of Artolo’s men. She shakes her arms, scattering the gore like dew, and green shoots begin to sprout across the mountainside. Bits of rifle and rifleman land in front of Artolo, both horribly mangled.

Ghost-fingers close on the trigger. The recoil hammers through his body and tears at every old wound. He feels it in his finger-stumps, in the belly-wound, in his spine. The flash blinds him; his nose fills with the caustic stink of sulphur and phlogiston.

Usharet roars in pain. The blast catches her in the chest, nearly severing one arm. She comes running towards him, sliding – he’s standing in the path of a landslide. Thorn-fingers reach for him—

—And stop. Usharet’s frozen, held paralysed by the witch’s sorcery. A cage of ebony lightning flickers around the goddess, tendrils flickering and snatching at the human-shaped assembly of rock and dirt that makes up Usharet’s form.

“Can’t. Hold. Her,” groans the witch. Unearthly light blazes from every joint of the armour; black liquid drips from the witch’s wrists, sizzles on the ground. Every syringe in the armour clicks into position, pumping drugs into the witch’s sorcery-riddled body. If it were not for the rigidity of the locked armour, she’d be writhing in agony from the arcane backlash.

Artolo draws his dragon-tooth knife. The blade is blunt, but it’s still got power. He leaps on to the back of the frozen goddess, drives the blade like a chisel into the wound, cleaving the arm from the body. The arm falls apart, dissolving into its components in a rain of stones and roots and rot.

The knife breaks the spell, too, freeing Usharet. She crumbles, hunching over, keening like a wounded beast. Turning, she scrambles away from Artolo, loping up the hillside towards the shrine. Her monstrously long strides carry her away across the mountain. If the goddess escapes, she can draw power from the shrine to heal herself. Maybe come back and hunt them down for profaning her mountain, or go and find a potential saint.

“Hold her again,” he orders the witch.

“I might not be able to,” the witch whispers, but she tries anyway. She extends her hand, chants the spell again, and again the goddess is caught mid-stride, paralysed by the spell. Bolts of arcane energy leap from the witch’s body to the soil. The smell of burning flesh.

Artolo ignores it. He cups his hands, shouts an order. “Martaine! Bring the explosives back here! Quick!”

He can’t see Martaine in the dust and confusion, but a few moments later there’s a flash, a roll of thunder, a rain of stone. The witch collapses at his feet, gasping in relief. As the smoke clears, the ruin of the goddess becomes apparent. A blackened thing that somehow recalls a woman, lying at the bottom of a fresh scar in the mountainside.

Artolo marches across the hillside, stepping over the remains of his soldiers. Ignoring the witch’s whimpering behind him. There’s a job to do first. He climbs down into the hot pit, holding his breath to ward off the acrid fumes. The withered god husk raises the stump that used to be her head, and for a moment he sees the statue, the girl from the shrine, superimposed over the ruined form of Usharet. Her expression hasn’t changed – there’s no pleading for mercy, no fear. Just defiance.

The dagger’s blunt, so it takes him several long, lung-searing minutes to saw through the thorn-root sinews of her neck, to cut through the mud-flesh and part the stone vertebrae.

Fuck saints and fuck gods.

It takes them nearly an hour to rally the scattered Eshdana, and to gather any dropped weapons or unused explosives. By then, a living veil has grown over the slopes like a spreading bloodstain. Artolo tugs at one of the new plants, pulling it out of the dusty soil. The miracle-spawned growth is the only patch of green on the whole mountainside. The plant is misshapen, a weird amalgamation of different species that once grew on the Rock, on the foothills now lost beneath the new sea. It’s probably poisonous or tainted – eating the flesh of miracles is foolish in the extreme. Letting a god into your body… madness.

“Clear the corpses from the mountain,” orders Artolo. If they don’t, worshippers of Ilbarin’s broken gods could use the remains as offerings, extract the residuum with funeral