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

“I- I,” begins Eladora, but Helmont rolls on.

“Nonsense, I’m sure. I mean, you’d have to have the help of the ghouls, wouldn’t you, to pass through their domain and open the vault?” He sniffs the air. “By the by, have you seen Lord Rat lately? Or does he not show up in person any more? Maybe you’ve recently met one of his proxy mouthpieces. I understand you and he worked together closely during the invasion.”

“Lord Rat,” says Eladora, “serves the city. As do I. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Guildmaster.” She rises.

“Now, if you had taken those relics from the vault,” says Helmont, almost to himself, “you’d need somewhere to store them and repair them. And it’s not like you’ve got an alchemical factory under this desk.” He raps the desk with his knuckles. “Or down in your little prison in the Wash.”

Eladora probes with her mind, invoking a little sorcery. Unsurprisingly, Helmont’s chain of office is woven with potent countermeasures. Her spells have no chance of piercing his defences. She sits back down, her fingers resting on the handle of a desk drawer.

“Where indeed could you keep such dangerous alchemical relics? Oh!” Helmont feigns a gasp of revelation. “You also know Johan Mandel, don’t you?”

“Mr Mandel is a family friend.”

“Of course, of course. Nothing untoward there. A friend of your father’s, no doubt. I’m sure Mandel had lots in common with… what was it? Ah, a dairy farmer in Wheldacre.”

Eladora loses what patience she had with Helmont’s feints and insinuations. “Mr Mandel is a member of your own guild, is he not? If you have questions, speak to him. I have work to do.”

“You’re so clever, Miss Thay!” Helmont claps his hands. “That’s exactly what I’ll do. I’ll speak to Mandel. It’s an internal guild matter, after all. Nothing you need to concern yourself with. You just do nothing, like I said.”

“If I did nothing,” snaps Eladora, “the Godswar would consume you. Good day, Guildmaster. You can see yourself out.”

Helmont grins. “Before I go, I have a present for you. I understand you’re a historian.” He claps his hands, and Rhiado enters carrying a wooden box. “We found this when clearing out some old stores. It’s at least a hundred years old.”

He opens the box. Inside is a glass jar, two feet high, sealed with a wooden lid. Brimming with murky liquid. A figure floats in the jar – a figurine of a naked youth, blue-tinged, a waxy sheen to its flesh. “It’s a homunculus,” says Helmont. “One of the first attempts by the guild to produce artificial life.” He taps the jar, and the creature’s eyes flicker open. It swims to the glass, peering out.

Its features remind Eladora of Miren.

“You know,” muses Helmont, “back then, they used horseshit. To get the right temperature, you see. They buried the jar in warm horseshit so the homunculus would grow. Nowadays, we have athanors and furnaces and spawning vats. I think it’s good to remember our roots. To remember the guild was founded in horseshit, but moved on to greater things. We can always move on.” He bows. “I’ll have words with Mandel. Good day, Special Thaumaturgist Duttin.”

After Helmont goes, escorted out briskly by loyal Rhaido, Eladora contemplates the homunculus in its jar. The thing stares back at her, its beautiful features impassive. Homunculi are mindless and soulless, but they can be animated with magic, used as an extension of a sorcerer’s will. Is the thing listening to her? She imagines it crawling out of its jaw in the dead of night, unscrewing the jar from within, creeping naked and dripping through the corridors to relay its stolen secrets to Helmont. Imagines it finding her in her bed by night, and cutting her throat.

She opens the drawer and takes out her gun. A twin to the one she lent to Carillon. Sturdy, reliable, unassuming. Easily overlooked, just like Eladora.

She opens the jar, removes the twitching homunculus.

Eladora smashes the wax effigy with the butt of the gun, beating it into a waxy pulp.

History no longer concerns her. The future is coming too fast for her to look back, even for an instant.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Early evening in occupied Guerdon.

Across the city, in the Fog Yards and the New Alchemists District, the whistles sound a shift change. Workers spill out of the factories, a human tide pouring through the streets, breaking into tributaries that fill the taverns and the playhouses, waterwheels of commerce. They pour down spiral stairs into underground rivers where the subway trains thunder. They pool in Venture Square. Different districts of the city flow with their own colours – the grey cassocks of the university students, the tawdry sequinned glamour of Glimmerside, black suits and starched collars of parliament clerks. It’s hard to distinguish one droplet of life from another, when they all mix in the churning rivers that race down the streets.

But the rivers are dammed, and cannot flow free. At the borders of each of the occupation zones are checkpoints and guard posts, each according to their own methodologies. In the Haithi zone, it’s all regimented, with undead soldiers, bureaucratic ledgers, an arrangement of chits and passes, while Ishmere’s borders are watched by gods and monsters. The routes into the Lyrixian Occupation Zone are guarded, too – some by Lyrixian soldiers, nervously holding on to this little foothold on the edge of the city. Others by Ghierdana thugs, hungry for bribes.

The flow of those rivers of life is strangled. The city’s arteries cut.

Spar sees all this, and now he can know all this, too. For months, his mind was broken and scattered, unable to form a coherent thought. Now, suddenly, he has focus. A fixed point of reference, one that is here and now.

Rasce. Rasce of the Ghierdana.

It’s the second time Spar has gone through this strange experience of reintegration, and it’s very different this time. The first time it happened, after he died, after