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

Artolo snatches his hand back and punches the old hag in the face. Sends her sprawling into the dirt, blood spraying from her broken cheek. How dare she touch him! How dare she remind him of his wounds!

“That’s what I think of your gods and their prophecies. Fuck your gods.”

“You have blasphemed against the Sacred Realm,” says the priestess, clutching her cheek. “And there shall be a price. But it changes nothing. Your fate is ours.”

He could kill her. Fuck her prophecy – it’s her life that’s in his hands.

“Strip her,” he orders. One of the Eshdana hesitates, unwilling to lay hands on a priestess, but the others fall on the old woman eagerly. They tear off Damala’s rich robes, grab her staff, rip the rings from her fingers. Her treasures are piled at his feet.

“All this,” says Artolo, “belongs to the dragon.”

Damala drags herself back up. “The gods sent me.”

“Throw her out.”

Somehow – stripped of her finery, bloodied, mud-soiled – Damala retains that infuriating serenity even as the guards fling her back on to the muddy streets. A confidence born of the knowledge that greater forces watch over her.

He had that once, when he was Chosen.

He’ll have it again, he swears.

The captain goes off again, trudging across the mud, towards the town. The Bythos crowd around him, pulling at his coat, and he waits patiently until their curiosity is exhausted before continuing on. Cari spends the day assembling her gear, repacking her bag. That fucker Martaine took her money and the gun, and the fucking book is still in the captain’s hiding place. It only takes her a few minutes to put the rest together.

So, she does it again.

And again.

She’s well enough to travel. She can’t wait any longer, can’t stay patient with Hawse’s slow and careful approach. As soon as the captain’s back to fetch the book for her, she’ll go. Sneak into Ushket by dark, stow away on one of the Ghierdana ships. Screw it, maybe she’ll have to backtrack a bit, but she’ll soon be on her way to Khebesh again. Hawse will be safer when she’s gone.

She picks up her mother’s amulet. Holds it in her hands. She remembers an afternoon, long long ago, back in Guerdon. She’d have been five years old, six maybe. A few months after the Thay family were murdered, their mansion attacked by unknown assailants. She knows now that it was the Church of the Keepers who executed her hateful family, but, back then, she wasn’t even really aware anything had gone wrong. It was just a visit to the countryside, to her aunt’s house that went on forever.

Aunt Silva brought Cari and her cousin Eladora back to Guerdon. She had business in the city, meetings with lawyers and the watch, talk of wills and inheritances, so she left Eladora and Cari playing in the Meredyke Park, under the supervision of Silva’s husband, Wern. It was easy to slip away from Wern, and Cari went running off into the tangled trees on the north side of the park, with Eladora following her, slow-footed and indecisive, looking back to her heedless father but still trying to keep Cari in sight.

There was a tree, a gnarled oak, perfect for climbing. In her memory, it’s tall as a church spire. She’d scaled it, laughing, intoxicated by the immediacy of the challenge, risk transmuting to certainty as her fingers closed around the next branch, her bare feet finding purchase. She remembers pushing her head through a gap in the leaves, seeing the city – and then sudden, unreasoning, directionless terror, and the confused impression that the tree was trying to eat her. She’d fallen, screaming, tearing at herself, as great invisible forces reached out of the sky, reached out of the darkness, reached out from inside her to seize her and carry her away.

And even after Aunt Silva was done with her business, even when they were in the carriage and the city dwindled behind them, Cari could still feel invisible hands at her throat, at the base of her skull. Claiming her.

She opens the clasp of the amulet and puts it around her neck without fastening it.

Spar, are you—

Drops it like it’s poisoned.

She’s being foolish. Spar’s half the world away, and he can’t help her. He can’t reach her.

She’s got to get to Khebesh. He’s the one who needs saving.

The captain’s late. He misses the slack-tide prayers. The stars come out above the Rock, and he’s still not back.

Cari goes down to the lightless shrine, just in case she somehow didn’t spot him returning across the muddy slope, but the hold’s empty. There’s that feeling again, a faint, distant feeling of pressure, which reminds her of a dog growling when another animal trespasses in its territory. A god growling – but nothing happens when she brushes her hand across the blue stone of the altar.

The stairs in the forward hold creak.

It’s not the captain.

She moves through the waters as silently as she can and climbs through from the aft hold to the forward. She can barely see the intruder, a darker shape in the shadows. He’s big, but he moves quietly. A heavy sack slung over his back as he crosses to the ladder.

Shit, she doesn’t have her knife, but there’s an old crowbar to hand. She sneaks up and—

—the intruder bangs his head on a low beam, just like he always did.

“Adro!” she squeals, and hugs him.

They sit down in the forward cabin, and Cari lights the lamp so she can get a better look at her old friend. Adro was the heart of the crew when she sailed with them, her closest friend. They’d been a pair of laughing rogues, treating smuggling and thievery as a great game, running off and exploring every port. The gods watch over fools, the captain always said of them.

“The captain’ll be here soon,” says Adro. “It’s better we arrived separately, in case