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

nothing to her, back in Guerdon. He wasn’t the only crime boss or foreign spy she destroyed when she was the Saint of Knives. How many others are out there? How many enemies has she made in her heedless course? “It doesn’t matter anyway. Hawse said to go to the Street of Blue Glass – where’s that? Show me where to go, and I’ll go. You’ll never see me again.”

She knows she should leave him behind. She’s the source of the danger. He’ll be safe if she goes, right?

Until Dol Martaine finds out he was there. Until the witch finds him. Until her friend ends up as one of those poor starving slaves she saw working the hillside farms. There’s no “safe” on Ilbarin. Only degrees of suffering.

Cari grabs his hand. “Or come with me. We’ll get out. We’ll get Ren and your kid. We’ll come back for the captain, and we’ll all get out.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Guerdon was like the open ocean. Cari could easily lose herself in the sea of people, the flow of life in the streets. The choppy waters of the Wash, the fast-flowing river of Mercy Street emptying into the whirlpool of Venture Square.

By comparison, Ushket’s a small pond, and full of sharks. It’s not the first time Cari and Adro have run through the streets of a city, evading the Ghierdana, but back then they risked nothing but their own lives, and weighed the risk lightly. Tonight, they’re both conscious of their burdens, of how much they have to lose.

Cari’s got a better feel for Ushket, now. She almost feels like she knows the town, thanks to Hawse telling her about his excursions. Half the town’s been abandoned to the rising seas; the new harbour near the prefect’s fortress marks the dividing line. Downslope of that harbour, it’s all tidal ruins, inhabited only by the most desperate. The only way out of there is through the Ghierdana. Work in the labour camps, or the yliaster refinery. Or, if you want to get out faster, try jumping the fence that divides the town and take a Ghierdana bullet. Cari was very lucky, that first night. If the Monkfish hadn’t found her, she’d likely have ended up on the wrong side of the line.

Upslope of the harbour, life in Ushket is almost normal. People still have jobs there, still go to the market to shop, meet their friends for a drink. Oh, the lower levels flood when the tide’s high, and the temples are all ashes, but you could close your eyes and imagine that the Godswar never came.

But you’re still the dragon’s property, there. Cross the Ghierdana, and you lose everything. You go downslope, beyond the chain link fences and the barricades. Ushket isn’t a place where humans live, not any more. It’s a machine for enforcing compliance, for grinding every scrap of service out of a captive population.

The Street of Blue Glass, Adro tells her, is as far downslope as you can go without drowning. So, they go down, through alleyways choked with mud and driftwood, along walkways over flooded streets. She’d be lost without Adro as a guide, but when it comes to sneaking and slipping through the fences, she takes the lead, drawing on skills she learned in Guerdon. She and Adro make a good team, even after all these years.

It gets easier once they’re past the rotten heart of town – the prefect’s fortress. Cari glances up at the towers, wondering if Artolo’s behind one of those lighted windows. She tries again to recall her first clash with the Ghierdana boss, back in the New City – there were so many bastards to destroy in those glorious months of power. Slavers, rapists, murderers, arms dealers, god-touched – anyone who threatened the people under Spar’s protection, she broke. She looks up at those windows and tightens her fist, imagining the stone obeying her, blotting out the light.

The Street of Blue Glass looks to be entirely abandoned. Floodwaters surge in and out of the ruined buildings, like the street’s breathing.

“I can’t figure out the seas here at all,” mutters Cari. “Did the whole island sink? The sea level around the rest of the Firesea hasn’t changed, far as I could tell.”

“It’s all fucked.” Adro sounds shaken. “Kraken piled the seas up on Ilbarin – they’re not level any more. The Ghierdana have to use motor-tugs to pull ships up the slope. And it’s worse on the far side.”

The buildings that line the street were once physicians, artists’ studios, solariums. Most have shattered panes of blue glass in their upper storeys. There was a belief in Ilbarin that light filtered through such windows had healthful properties, and rich folk from the city used to travel to Ushket in the winter to bask in the blue-tinged sunlight. Now it’s all filtered through a murky soup of silt and broken glass.

“Do you know who we’re meeting?”

Adro shakes his head. “I’ve heard there are evil sorcerers living down this way – I’ve seen a black ship sailing through the ruins. Moving against the wind.” He probes the water with the captain’s sword. “The rumour is that they’ve got an arrangement with the Ghierdana, so no one dares come here.”

Something slithers past Carillon’s ankle, something sinuous and slimy. The waters around her churn with sudden animation. It’s dark, and the faint moonlight dances on the leaping water without revealing what’s beneath. Adro ineffectively slashes at the water with his sword. It’s not one creature down there, it’s hundreds of them. It’s thousands.

It’s worms.

The worms boil out of the water, piling on one another, a pillar of writhing slimy bodies rising above Cari like a putrid wave. Two long fronds emerge obscenely from that central mass, growing in length and thickness. They shrug on a cloak of darkness, pulling the night sky around them as a garment. A worm-fingered hand passes over what approximates the entity’s face, and suddenly it’s got a white porcelain mask for a face.