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

horizon. Baston’s perspective warps when he gets too close to the temple – for a moment, that symbolic act of worship becomes real and true, and the priests really are igniting the morning sun. He’s too close to the goddess’s influence. He crosses the street hastily, and reality snaps back.

He tries to cut up Crascuttle Walk, up the worn steps with the rusted black handrail running down the centre, but his path is blocked by a monstrous bull-scorpion creature. An umurshix, they’re called. Sacred animals of the father-god, High Umur. Baston can’t tell if the monster is sleeping, or meditating, or just unmoving. It’s not a natural beast, anyway – it’s godspawned. Maybe it only moves when the god wills it.

A bomb under it could kill it, he thinks, remembering the weapons they stole from Dredger’s yard. Then he hides that thought as quickly as it came to him. There could be sentinel-spiders nearby, scanning for blasphemous or seditious thoughts. Tiske was right – things were simpler in the old days. Back then, it was enough for a thief to hide from sight. Now, he has to patrol his thoughts, too.

He wonders how many of his neighbours in the Wash have given in and bowed to the Sacred Realm. The occupying forces of Ishmere favour those who convert. More potent, though, is the favour of the gods. Worship Blessed Bol, god of trade, and your business will thrive. Worship Smoke Painter, the divine muse, and your dreams will seep into the waking world. All you have to do is submit, and be exalted.

He breaks his fast in a food hall across the street from Pulchar’s restaurant. He hasn’t been back there since the raid on Dredger’s, since Rasce got them involved in that absurd bar brawl with the Ishmerians. The stupid arrogance of the Ghierdana, drawing attention like that. Baston spends his days hiding from psychic spiders, always holding back, always waiting for his moment, and Rasce just comes in and starts punching.

But damn, it felt good to hit the bastards.

In recent weeks, it’s become Baston’s habit to go to the church of the Holy Beggar and watch as the congregation spills out through the doors. The crowds grow smaller every week. The Keepers have already abandoned one of the Wash’s great churches, the church of St Storm down by the water. How long before some alien god squats in the vestry of the Beggar’s sanctum?

This morning, Baston scans the crowd, marking the faces. Some are defiant, but most are furtive, or worse, empty, walking downcast like automatons. They deny the strangeness of the city around them by clinging to old customs and habits.

One face is missing from the crowd – his mother.

Reluctantly, Baston trudges up the hill to Hog Close. The lower Wash is stinking and grimy in a way that defies even miracles. The temple of Blessed Bol had two idols of solid gold outside the doors, two saints so holy they transmuted into precious metal when they perished. Within a day of the statues being installed in the Wash, they were covered in a thick scum of soot and grease and alchemical run-off. (And within a night, one statue was missing its ears, nose and three fingers, and the other had vanished entirely.) Hog Close, though, borders on respectable – literally. It’s right up next to a high, sheer wall that divides the Wash from other, better parts of the city. That wall has become the border of the IOZ; another umurshix patrols atop it, an unsleeping guardian monster out of myth prowling at the bottom of the garden of Baston’s childhood home.

He lets himself in, unlocking the heavy door. Notes the unwelcome smell of incense.

“If you’re here to rob me,” calls his mother from upstairs, “my jewellery case is on the table in the front room. First door on the right. If you come upstairs, I shall throw shoes at you.”

“It’s me,” shouts Baston.

“Oh, then ignore the case. All that’s left is costume jewellery and contact poison.”

“What about the shoes?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

He risks it and climbs the stairs. The wallpaper’s peeling in places, and there’s a damp spot on the plaster that wasn’t there last month. There’s a portrait on one wall of Karla, standing next to her former betrothed. Karla never speaks of him any more. It wasn’t a love match. The boy was the scion of an alchemist family, immensely rich. The match arranged when there was a secret alliance between Heinreil and the guild. All gone now, of course, all the money and connections. No house in Bryn Avane for Karla.

He finds his mother kneeling before a small shrine to the Ishmeric god Smoke Painter. Incense fumes from two braziers coil around her. Multicoloured streamers of smoke twine and dance. Baston coughs.

“Nearly done,” says his mother, her eyes closed – in concentration or prayer or just making him wait, he can’t tell. The smoke slithers in and out of her nostrils, flows across her face like a veil.

“You weren’t at the Holy Beggar this morning.”

“You were at Dredger’s last week.”

Baston considers his response carefully. Elshara Teris spent thirty years married to Hedan, thirty years married to the Brotherhood. Hedan may be two years in the ground, but those connections don’t just fade away. She still has connections, still hears whispers in the underworld. At the same time, she was never really part of the Brotherhood, not like Hedan. Not like her children. And she’s kneeling in front of an Ishmeric shrine. It would be folly indeed for Baston to hide from the spiders and the spies, only to be turned in by his own mother. If she’s gone too far, and fallen under the divine influences of the god…

“All right,” he concedes, “I’ll stop checking up on you, if that’s what you want.”

“I don’t mind what you do, as long as it’s you doing it, and not your father.” She turns. “What do you think?”

She looks thirty years younger, and radiant. She