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

grows heavier with every step. Fortunately, Rasce sways like a drunk, so they don’t draw as much attention as they might. To mortal eyes, Rasce is just another dockworker who’s already spent the day’s wages. To divine eyes – well, who the fuck knows?

Rasce is muttering to himself: “Argh, it’s like bees buzzing inside my head. A needle, quick. Steel, to pierce the skull. That way, isn’t it? Down there?” He tries to lurch off down a side street, but Baston restrains him.

“No. Just follow me.”

“Listen. He showed me… we hurt people, Baston, when we burned the yards. It’s not right. Here, I brought this to put it right. Take it.” Rasce pulls a purse from inside his jacket, spills the contents on the cobblestones. A fortune in gold falls around Baston’s feet. Rasce reaches down awkwardly, like his joints are stiff, his limbs heavy. Moving like a Stone Man.

Baston hauls him upright. “Come on! Leave it!”

“He keeps showing me their faces! Misery piled on misery – how can I stand it? He won’t let me look away.” Rasce lunges for the coins again. Baston kicks the money away – let the streets find a use for the dragon’s gold – and drags Rasce forward.

“We have to go,” he insists. The Spiders will come soon.

The front door’s locked. Karla must not be home yet. Baston juggles the bomb from one arm to the other as he fishes out his keys. There’s a spider two streets over, picking its way with silent grace over the terraces, eight glowing eyes like moons. What will it see if it looks at Rasce?

Baston shoves the Ghierdana inside, drops the bomb in the umbrella stand, shuts the door and bolts it. Presses his forehead against it, as if he can hold the world out by sheer willpower.

“Why,” asks Rasce, “do you have such a thing? Even in Guerdon, I did not think it customary to carry bombs of such size.” He talks like he’s half asleep, or drugged.

“Never you mind.” Baston grabs Rasce, shoves him down the little hallway into the cramped kitchen. “What are you doing here?”

“I don’t know. I think… I think I am going mad. My head is crushed by heavy stones. I see – I see too much.” Rasce presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. “What is this?”

“You’re seeing visions?”

“Would that it were only seeing!” moans Rasce. “It’s feeling them, knowing them. I saw the Tallowman on the rooftop. I should have died! But I live, while others die. There’s a woman dying of the flux in the New City, Baston! Too far gone for medicine, she gasps for breath. I am the rattle in her lungs! I smell the rank stench of her pissy sheets! And I know her husband’s fled. I see him in a tavern off the Street of Saints!” Rasce staggers across the kitchen to the window, looks out through the grimy glass. “And it’s easier down here, damn it! Up in the New City – it’s flying through a thunderstorm. I’m going mad. Help me!”

“What do you want me to do?”

“He knows you! Tell him to stop!” Rasce brandishes his dragon-tooth dagger, but he’s clumsy, his limbs as stiff as stone, and the blade goes flying out of his grip. It flies through the kitchen window, shattering the glass, and lands in the yard outside. Baston flinches; Rasce doesn’t react. His mouth moves, but the only sound he makes is the grinding of stone.

He knows you. What god knows Baston? He’s never knelt to any, not even in the churches of the Keepers.

The clouds overhead shift and roll, like the sky’s boiling over. Lightning flashes, illuminating for an instant the suggestion of titanic figures in the heavens. Across the Wash, ecstatic shouts. Whatever’s happening to Rasce echoes in the divine realm – they’re drawing attention.

In the months since the Armistice, Baston’s witnessed the gods of Ishmere claiming more than one saint. The Spider took a six-year-old girl on Slaughter Lane. Her mother put her to bed with a fever, and the child awoke eight-eyed and whispering prophecies, and the priests took her away. High Umur’s chosen was a beggar, legless and blind, who pushed himself around the alleys on a wheeled handcart – until he rose up, lifted by unseen hands, and looked down upon the rabble with a sneer, his eyes flashing with lightning, and spoke in a voice of thunder. Umurshixes drew his cart then, transfigured into a golden chariot.

Baston watched both transformations, and he’s learned a trick, too, from the priests who follow the saints like gulls after a fishing boat. Speak a saint’s name – their mortal name, their true name – and it grounds them, like an aetheric current returning to earth. It isn’t a sure thing. If a saint’s so far gone to identify more with the god than their mortal self, it won’t work. But here…

“Rasce,” declares Baston loudly, proclaiming the name. Putting as much weight on the name as he can.

“Rasce of the Ghierdana.” Nothing. Not even a twitch. The man’s name holds no sway over him. Baston thinks for a moment, and then tries again, one last time.

“Chosen of the Dragon.”

The title strikes Rasce like a blow.

“Ah,” says Rasce, “that’s better.”

And he falls to the floor of Baston’s kitchen, unconscious.

Spar’s closer to the mortal realm than he’s been in months, closer even than he came with Cari. Closer than he’s been since he died. He’d never have dared push like this with her, for fear of injuring her – but with Rasce, he’s willing to risk it. To press the psychic weight of the whole New City against the Ghierdana’s mortal brain. Rasce is on the very edge of Spar’s influence, outside the confines of the New City itself, but it makes it easier in a way. All of Spar’s mind, all his attention, his divided strands of thought all strain in a single direction, like a city’s streets all gathering at a