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

But the bridge breaks. The anchor-rope to consciousness shatters. He’s falling again, plunging into oblivion. Spar’s mind tries to seize on to Rasce, seize on to anything, but it’s no good. He’s cut off again from the mortal realm.

There are miracles in the New City as Spar falls, spasms of wild magic. In the tunnels below, passageways open or close spontaneously, like a dying man losing control of his bowels. Towers shake and convulse. Old memories, given shape in stone, lurch out of walls – spontaneous cryptic statuary depicting moments from Spar’s thoughts, old and new. Along Sevenshell Street, the sea wall collapses, sending chunks of stone splashing into the waters below. A child in the Armistice Gardens collapses, frothing at the mouth and reciting extracts from the writings of Idge.

They sound the alarm in the Lyrixian barracks. Soldiers scramble out to their guard posts, hastily donning what protective gear they can against divine assault – warding talismans, holy relics of the Lyrixian deities, armour shot through with aetheric dampening rods. Guns and swords in hand, they look out into the night, unsure if they’re under attack. The dragons of the Ghierdana bellow in alarm and take flight, flapping around the spires of the New City like startled crows.

Spar falls out of time. Above him, Cari’s frozen on a ledge, caught in Professor Ongent’s spell, and he’s falling. He’s out in the harbour, salvaging the last god-bomb from the wreck of the Grand Retort, and he’s falling into dark waters. Cari’s drowning, too, lungs filling with searing water.

And then – a connection again.

Penetrating his consciousness like the steel tip of an alkahest needle.

Hot, honey-sweet pain.

He’s himself again, coherent again. From the heights of the towers, Spar looks down on Guerdon. All his attention focused on a single point. He looks across the familiar streets of the Wash, their pattern more familiar to him than the back of his own dead and shattered hand, more constant than the plague-scales and scabs that ate his flesh. He sees a small yard at the back of a house near the docks. Baston’s house.

He’s lost hours. The night’s rolled on.

Rasce emerges into the yard from the kitchen door. He lifts his head to look at the New City on the horizon, and he’s looking right at Spar, recognition in his gaze.

“Spar Idgeson, I presume,” he whispers, but the words echo down every street and alleyway in the New City.

Rasce walks across the little yard, glass cracking under his borrowed boots. He searches around in the debris, and finds his dragon-tooth dagger. He holds it up, blade levelled at the distant city, and somehow it’s not an entirely absurd threat. The thought of being cut off again terrifies Spar. He’s unsure if he can survive another dissolution without going mad.

Yes.

Rasce glances back at the kitchen window and nods. Baston emerges from the house, almost shyly, not daring to believe.

“I know you, now. Baston has told me a great deal about you, about you and Carillon Thay. My uncle, too – he told me a lot about Guerdon, back home. Other things, you showed me. And you aided me in Glimmerside, yes? Tell me, what are you? A ghost? A god?”

Honestly, I don’t know.

“In truth, it matters little. We may be friends, but you will not use me. I am not some empty vessel for you to fill. Understand this – I am a prince of the Ghierdana, Chosen of the Dragon. Cities burn at my command, yes?”

I’ll help you, says Spar, if you help me. A partnership.

Rasce considers. “Among my cousins, only one can be Chosen of the Dragon. Each of us strives alone to win Great-Uncle’s favour. I am Chosen, and so I have no peers. How can I have a partner?”

A friend, then.

“Friends may prove false. I know what Carillon Thay did to my Uncle Artolo – with your help, yes?” Rasce’s grin is visible across the city to Spar. “But the dragons are here now. Soon, my Great-Uncle will return. It is better for us all – for you, for me, for this city – if he is satisfied with my progress when he arrives.”

The Ishmerians are coming. You’re surrounded. Spar can see some of the Ishmerian forces closing on the house – phantasmal spiders skittering over the rooftops, cloud-spawn swimming towards Rasce, saints and soldiers on the streets. Other forces he perceives with senses he has no mortal words for – High Umur’s judgement coalescing, Fate Spider weaving an unseen web to catch the thieves in misfortune. You’ve got to run.

“Well then,” says Rasce, “let us put you to the test. Do for me what you did for Carillon Thay. Shape the stone.”

I had more power then. Spar still feels as weak as gossamer. Merely talking to Rasce at this distance is taxing him. Having Rasce as a focus helps, but it’s still an effort. His mind is scattered across the whole New City, so his thoughts arrive like footsore pilgrims, stumbling as they march. I’ll try.

“Do more than try, spirit, or we are both lost.” Rasce ducks back into the house, calling for Baston. The saints are nearly at the door.

The borders of the New City are not clearly drawn. At the edges, the two cities – New and Old – intertwine. Buildings half made from wood and brick, fused with miracle-spawned stone. Bridges and walkways like marble filigree, leaping above the old streets.

And as above, so below. Under the New City are many miles of tunnels and passageways, and some of those too connect to older ghoul-runs and smugglers’ tunnels under the Wash.

Now, Spar puts what remains of his strength into one of those. The stone softens, like a Stone Man’s sinews under alkahest. It melts, flows, re-forms, remaking itself according to Spar’s will. The tunnel becomes a serpent, burrowing through the earth, questing for the surface. Inside, the floor reshapes itself into a stairwell. The tunnel mouth breaks through, emerging out of the ground