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

to bribe and who to intimidate, Baston who knows when to fall back to the inviolate fortress of the New City. No streets were ever so friendly to thieves and rebels as those changing alleyways of Spar’s mind.

Listening to Rasce’s quick heartbeat, Spar no longer finds himself losing track of time. He’s anchored to the present now, no longer falling into regretful labyrinths of the past or fragmenting into confusion. Time proceeds in an orderly fashion for him. Days passing into weeks. He still feels fragile, still dares not work any miracles, but he’s himself again.

In the dark of the night, while the New City sleeps, Spar’s mind scans the southern horizon, listening for a whisper.

Hearing nothing except the mutterings and yowling of ghouls, deep underground.

“What do you have for me?” asks Rasce. He flings himself down on a couch, closes his eyes, and Spar relays the day’s stolen secrets.

The last shipment of Craddock’s yliaster has arrived; henceforth, he’s to buy only from the Ghierdana. Rasce orders Baston to pay a visit to Craddock, remind him of the oath he swore, of the ash he wears.

More thieves out of the Wash; three are trustworthy, but the fourth is sworn to Fate Spider, a spy for the Sacred Realm. Rasce marks the woman’s face.

Gossip from the Lyrixian quarter, rumours about places and people Spar’s never heard of. Rasce drinks it all in, his mind bloating on the flow of secrets. His appetite for this hidden knowledge is insatiable, and he consumes it very differently from how Cari did. A creature of instinct, she would seize on one image, one fragment, and go haring off after that secret. Spar might show her, say, a single act of injustice in the New City, some rape or murder or cruelty, and she’d spend the next week hunting the perpetrator. Rasce, by contrast, treats Spar’s revelations like a glimpse of some wide terrain. He looks at the city spread out beneath him like a great map and spots connections Spar does not.

Always, in the back of Rasce’s mind, Spar can dimly perceive the remembered presence of the dragon. Even this ragged sort of sainthood with all its attendant miracles is nothing compared to the joy and glory of being Chosen of the Dragon.

“Show me the Fog Yards,” says Rasce. He sips arax, and Spar finds he can taste the burning alcohol.

They’re far away. Spar does his best to comply, drawing up an image from his tallest towers. The industrial district is on the far side of Guerdon, blocked by the cathedral-spangled shoulder of Holyhill and the eponymous smog. It’s hard to focus at that distance, hard for him even to think about a place so far from the New City. City-dredged visions jostle with memory-fragments of the few times he visited the Fog Yards in life. As supernatural visions go, it’s blurred and confused.

Sorry.

“Ach! It’s like having a broken spyglass shoved into your eye socket. Enough!” Rasce waves his hand, and the vision vanishes. “I couldn’t see a single thing about Mandel & Company. They control the bulk of the remaining trade in yliaster. Great-Uncle demands I bring them to heel.” Outside the room, Karla approaches. Spar sees her through the stone, and thus so does Rasce. The Ghierdana prince drains the arax. “Come in,” he shouts.

Karla slips in, shuts the door behind her. She peers curiously around the room. “I heard you talking to someone. Is… is he here?” she whispers in awe.

Tell her I’m here.

“He’s here. He says hello.” Rasce moves over on the couch to make space for her, pours her a glass of arax. “And he will leave, now, I think”.

I’m omnipresent. I exist throughout the New City.

“Exist elsewhere, please.”

“It’s all right,” says Karla. “This is business.”

Rasce pouts. “Just business?”

“What did you expect?”

“Back home, the peasant families would happily send their comeliest daughters into my bed, in the hopes of winning the dragon’s favour.”

Karla rolls her eyes. “Well, I’m not some cow-eyed doxy, here only to warm your bed.” She dances away from him, leaving him alone on the couch. She crosses the room, and toys with the box of ash. “It’s about Mandel & Company, actually. I asked around a bit. Talked to some of Dad’s old cronies. Turns out you’re not the first to contemplate making a move against old Mandel.”

“And?”

“There’s a secret way in.”

“Where is this secret way?”

“It wouldn’t be very secret if I told you, would it? I don’t know it, but I know who knows it.” She grins, then dips her finger in the ash. “There’s a price.”

“The dragon,” says Rasce, “does not bargain.”

Karla brushes the ash across his lips. “But the dragon,” she says, “could favour some of his servants above others. The dragon could lift up those who have been cast down.”

He kisses her forehead, leaving the trace of ash on her brow. Claiming her.

“Who knows this secret way?” he asks again.

She speaks a name, and a shudder runs through the New City.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Twelve Suns Bleeding offers to go across town and collect Adro’s family, but they decide the best thing to do is for them all to go. The Crawling Ones are exempt from the Ghierdana curfew – or so Twelve Suns Bleeding says, anyway. Cari pities the poor Eshdana guard who tries to tell a Crawling One to stay off the streets.

Cari and Adro fall into their old habits, keeping to the shadows. The Bythos have departed with the falling tide, although Cari hears the occasional distant bellow. The streets are mostly empty.

Mostly. Ahead, a trio of Eshdana. She ducks into a doorway, clutching her little knife, but Twelve Suns Bleeding just glides up the street towards them, its worm-voices chanting. The three men freeze, caught in a spell.

“You may pass freely,” says the Crawling One. “They cannot see or hear you. I have their attention.” Like it’s something you can seize in your hand. The three men stare unseeing into the night. Cari wonders what Twelve Suns