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

The wine’s awful, but that doesn’t matter.

“Look at you!” laughs Adro. He pokes her in the bicep. “You look like a Guerdonese sell-sword! I was counting on you running home to your rich aunt, then taking us all in.”

“I wish I’d done that.” The thought of a crew of smugglers marauding around Aunt Silva’s kitchen in Wheldacre is delicious. “She would have hated you. It would have been glorious.”

“Oh, aunts love me,” says Adro. “But, Cari, if you didn’t go back home, where did you go? What happened to you?”

“Gods below,” says Cari. How to summarise her experiences since leaving the Rose? How to talk about the revelations about her family, the Black Iron Gods, Spar and Rat, everything that happened? The Gutter Miracle. The war. “Magic shit.”

“Say no more.” Adro raises his glass. “We’ve had plenty of that down here, too. We’re better off out of it. I miss the days when we could look across at some city like Ul-Taen,” – he puts on the portentous voice of some epic-taleteller – “lo! with its stepped ziggurats, the fabled underworld of the spectral tomb children, the sorcerers in their jars, and gribbly things in the city, and say ‘fuck it’ and sail off somewhere else.”

He scowls at the taste of the wine. “Remember that time in Jashan, when we got drunk on wine-of-poets?”

“We wrote a play.”

“We thought we wrote a play!” laughs Adro. “We had three scribbled pages of nonsense, and then we broke into a playhouse and held those poor actors hostage! What was it you said?”

“‘Either you spill your heart on the stage, or I will.’” Cari quotes her younger self. “We were idiots back then, Adro. And the captain was so angry.”

“Ah, he should have listened to us and taken the cargo for smuggling. Then we wouldn’t have had to drink the evidence.”

Her memory of Adro and the reality of him swim in and out of focus. He looks pretty much the same, so it’s easy to ignore the intervening years, to slip back into their old camaraderie. But it’s not quite real – they’d both be playing a part, acting the role of their younger selves, pretending nothing’s changed. It’s so tempting, to fall back to that simpler time.

She fights against it. “So why did you stay here? I asked the captain this morning, and he talked about gods without giving a clear answer.”

Adro drains his glass. “It’s not like we made the decision to stay in this shithole. It wasn’t one thing, it was a lot of little things. The captain had a flea in his ear about the Lord of Waters, and you’ve heard him preach. The Rose came through the storm all right, but she still needed a lot of work before you’d trust her in the Middle Sea. And everything else was a mess, too – Ilbarin drowned, and folk crawling all over the Rock, looking for a place to hide. Mad priests telling everyone to throw themselves off cliffs. We all thought the Sacred Realm would come back at any moment.” He’s moving now, unable to sit still. “Prefect’s men came down and seized all the ships, but they didn’t know what to do with them. One day, the plan was to evacuate everyone to the Caliphates. Then the rumour was they need all the ships to bring in food and stuff, or they’re going to invade Serpent’s Mouth. It was bad, Cari. People were cheering in the streets when the Ghierdana showed up and took over.”

He sits down, breathing heavily. Then looks over at her and grins. “And… did the captain tell you about Ren?”

“What’s this?”

“I’m married now, Cari. We’ve a little girl, too. And, gods, I’ve never been so scared. Ren was in Ilbarin, see, when the gods came. We got separated in the invasion, and it took me months to find him, and Ama, but they made it out. They’re both all right. I found them again. Captain calls it a miracle. But by the time I’d found them, the Ghierdana had taken control of the port. You can only leave if you pay their toll, and we couldn’t afford it. Not for Ren and myself and Ama.”

Fuck you, Dol Martaine. If she still had that money, she’d give it to Adro without hesitation.

Adro fills his glass again, fills hers. “I wish you could come see them. You’d like Ren. He’s a good man.”

It’s very tempting.

“I need to get to Khebesh, though. I have to.”

“So the captain said. But more importantly, you should see what the captain has.” He grins. “The last pork in Ilbarin, I’ll wager. Who gives a damn about long-lost friends? I’m here to eat!”

Captain Hawse arrives, puffing up the ladder, laden with packages. “Lazy dogs,” he jokes, “no cooking fire in the galley? No table set? I should whip the pair of you! But the Lord of Waters is merciful. Instead, I shall feed you, and then speed Cari on her journey. I have found a ship to carry her forth.”

There isn’t much food, and it’s not much good, but by the standards of the benighted isle of Ilbarin it’s a feast. It feels like one, too – there’s merriment and song, the warm glow of friendship in her heart and the wine in her belly. A long-delayed reunion, and the farewell she missed when she left the Rose.

They’re in the ship’s common room, seated around the long table. The captain, in his hermitage here, has taken over the space; they had to shove piles of rotten books off into the corner, fold and store the ceremonial vestments salvaged from a temple of the Lord of Waters. Having Adro back makes the space feel more like it used to.

The captain speaks little, save to call for a song or to interject, full of mock gravitas. Still, satisfaction radiates from him like heat from a hearth. He’s put aside the role of