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

He stands there for a long minute, watching the fires dance. Great-Uncle is coming. Hasn’t Artolo done enough to atone? Hasn’t he done enough to be forgiven? It wasn’t his fault; it was Carillon Thay who ruined everything. His fingers weren’t enough to satisfy the dragon. Carillon Thay – he’ll stake her out like a goat. Roast her. Gut her. Burn her.

There’s a hiss of steam from below as little burning fragments of the deck fall into the waters in the flooded hold underneath. Little ticks and creaks from the heating metal.

“Someone told you she was here.”

“You told us she might know a sailor. And there were stories on the street about the hermit behaving oddly.”

“Why come yourself, on so thin a tale?”

“I was doing what you told me. You want her caught.”

Finding Thay is an irrelevant distraction. His head knows this. His blood, though, roars in his ears. It knows another truth, deeper and more vital.

“I want her dead.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Spar watches Rasce’s triumphant return to the house on Lanthorn Street. Vyr blusters, argues that Rasce should rest, but he cannot deny his cousin’s rapid recovery. Like Cari, Rasce’s vitality is renewed when he enters the New City.

“Baston,” orders Rasce, “tell your allies that they may return, that Vyr misspoke. Tell them the New City was made for them, and they have a place here.” Spar’s lifted by those words – in his dying moments, he dreamed the New City into being as a place of refuge, out of reach of the oppressive guilds and grasping priests that rule Guerdon. His father’s writings made real in stone.

“Vyr,” continues Rasce. “There are those here who require our charity. Open the coffers! We shall not be miserly!”

“That’s not what Great-Uncle sent us to do,” objects Vyr.

“I am Chosen. Do as I say.”

“I’ll handle it,” volunteers Karla. “Just give me the money.”

Spar can follow every coin. He can feel every scratch of Vyr’s pen on the ledger, hear every grumble and complaint. Rumour quickly spreads to the other Ghierdana families – and the other dragons – of Rasce’s odd behaviour, his swift recovery – and Spar hears every whisper. He relays them all to Rasce, who leans his head back in his chair and listens to the song of the city. Spar can sense the man’s soul expanding, intertwining with his own. Even as the city flows into Rasce, so too does he inhabit part of the city.

On a warm evening, three days later, Rasce leaves the house on Lanthorn Street, and walks the ways of the New City again. Baston follows, a wary shadow, still unsure of what to make of this strange hybrid, now that he’s been reborn in the grubby heaven of the New City.

They come to the base of one of the City’s great towers, and Rasce ascends, hurrying up the endless flights of stairs. This tower is among those that burned during the invasion, but Rasce keeps climbing when he comes to the ashen region. Like much of the city, the tower is unfinished – the miracle of its creation ran dry before it was done, and the topmost levels of the building trail off into stalagmites and unformed fingers of stone, like melted white candles.

It’s easier for Spar to think up here. Easier to focus. Rasce is the only living soul at this height.

“So,” says Rasce. “Show me the city.”

He closes his eyes, looks within. Taps into Spar’s own perception from within. When Cari tried this, it overwhelmed her, and she had already experienced similar visions from the Black Iron Gods. It took weeks for her and Spar to find the point of balance, to drip-feed revelation into her mind. Rasce, though, eats the visions hungrily and demands more.

“It’s not so different,” he says, “from seeing the world as my Great-Uncle does.” Rasce points north, down Mercy Street towards Castle Hill and the city beyond. Towards the Fog Yards. “Show me the yliaster dealers yonder.”

I can’t see clearly beyond the New City. Images flicker between their two minds – glimpses of high walls, fortresses mated to factories, great holding tanks – but it’s all fleeting, all strained.

“That’s of little use,” says Rasce. “Mandel & Company must fall – my Great-Uncle has commanded it. But there are lesser prizes closer at hand that can be swept up, while I learn how you can best aid me.” He plucks idly at a piece of scorched stone, marvelling at the experience – he can feel the stone with his fingers, but also experiences the sensation of the fingers brushing the stone, through his communion with Spar. “You burned.”

It was miraculous fire. A saint burned Carillon with a sword of fire, and the injury was transferred to me. It set the stone alight.

“On Glimmerside, you saved my life. Am I now invulnerable to knife and gun?”

It’s not easy. I couldn’t always do it for Cari – and I had to draw on your life force to save you from the Tallowman.

“If I stepped off the edge, would you catch me?”

I’d try. I might be able to take the force of the impact, or give you something to grab on to.

“You can reshape the city.”

A little. It’s an effort.

“I did as you asked me,” says Rasce. “I gave money to the wretches you showed me. They will be helped, you have my word. Tell me, O spirit, what did my coin buy me?”

What do you want?

“An army of stone golems, each one twelve feet tall and armed with poleaxes. I desire a fortress suitable for a prince of the Ghierdana, with a dracodrome for Great-Uncle. Walls thick enough to endure a siege by all the gods of Ishmere. A great juggernaut that rolls across Guerdon to the Fog Yards and crushes my rivals in the yliaster trade. Conjure those for me from the stone of the city.”

I can’t tell if you’re joking or not.

“In Lyrix, the priests of Culdan can put a death-curse on a blade, and every wound