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

now. It’s only his own stubborn pride that keeps him from swearing the oath. Rasce’s eyes are still closed, but Baston can somehow tell that he’s watching very, very closely. All the walls here are eyes.

“Boss, there’s something. Something you should know.” His tongue feels like it’s turned to stone in his mouth. He stumbles over the words, uncertain of the path forward.

He’s interrupted by Karla’s return. She enters, towelling her wet hair. Baston looks from her to Rasce, all thoughts of confessions and conspiracies falling out of his mind for a moment. “I thought I heard you. How did it go?”

“Heinreil’s still alive, at any rate.”

Karla gives him a furtive smile. It’s clear that she used him to smuggle that grub past the prison guards – the Ghierdana’s money ensured he wasn’t searched. Using him like that is the sort of trick Heinreil used to play, and it rankles.

“What about the alchemists, my friend? What did your old master say?” asks Rasce.

Give him nothing, they told Baston. Fuck that. “Heinreil said there used to be a tunnel or something under Mandel’s place. An old one. The Brotherhood thought it was too dicey to risk.”

“And what do you think?” asks Rasce, quietly.

“I don’t know. I’d need to take a look at the place, and I don’t know how we’d manage that. And I don’t trust Heinreil. But… I think we go for it,” says Baston.

Rasce’s eyes flick open. “Karla, my sweet,” he says, “hand me my knife.”

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

It’s waiting that hurts the most. It’s lying here, hollow in belly and soul, knowing there’s nothing to be done. No escape route that hasn’t been tried by a hundred others, no appeal to be made, no hope of rescue, no clever plan. No divine revelation. Just the sound of the gulls, the clink of the metal fences shifting in the wind, the breaking of the waves on the shore. The sucking noise of garbage-clogged alleyways draining as the tide retreats.

Everything tastes of salt, but no one weeps here any more. An ocean of tears has already been shed in this camp, to no avail.

So – wait. Wait and rot.

A small part of Ilbarin City that escaped the flooding has been turned into a work camp. The Ghierdana have cordoned off the streets, turned the ruins into an open-air cage. Fences, guard towers, heavy locked gates. Walkways overhead like in Ushket, gantries for the guards to move between rooftops. The stairs up to walkway level blocked or collapsed. People staring blankly, watchful but too exhausted and hungry to do anything except stay on guard, a hollow place on the far side of fear. It all barely registers on Carillon – these places are the same the world over. She was locked away in one back in Guerdon, on Hark Island. Anywhere humans draw a line and declare that everyone on the other side has to be contained, it’s the same. They start out as prisoners, as refugees, as victims of illness, and the fence works its alchemy, turns them into problems to be overcome or caged animals to be tamed instead of people.

Cari’s a special case. An especially dangerous animal. She still gets thrown in the camp with everyone else, but the guards all know who she is. They give them a room to sleep in, but the roof’s missing, so the guards can watch Cari. There’s nothing between her and the pitiless stars. Twice now, she’s seen the armoured sorceress watching her from the gantry, werelight flooding the cell, but both times the woman left without speaking.

Each day, the prisoners are sent out to gather yliaster. They gather at the main gate, and the Eshdana split them into work teams. Each team gets a raft and a bunch of sacks, and then wade out into the flooded city. If they come back with sacks full of yliaster, they get a chit, stamped in some bureaucratic joke with a seal from the provisional government of Ilbarin. Trade chits for food. Trade enough chits for passage out, or so the sign in the commissary claims. In the camp you can trade chits for food, for medicine, for sex. Trade chits so the gangs leave you alone.

But, fucking hooray, she’s a special case. She knows the guards won’t let the gangs murder her. But she’s also damn sure they won’t step in for anything short of murder, so she stays on her guard. They’ve taken everything from her, not that she had much left. They took the captain’s sword, her amulet. They even took her clothes and gave her a grey shift to wear.

Yliaster, Ren tells her, is a precipitate of clashing miracles. Two gods hammer the shit out of each other, and you get yliaster. Here, it mixes with seawater to form this phosphorescent gunk, like a wet scab. They process it in the refinery near the camp, to get the glowing brine that they’re shipping out from Ushket. There are still a few patches in the shallows where yliaster can be found. The prisoners gather it with their bare hands, scraping it off the rubble and smearing it into the sacks. It stings, and Cari quickly learns to recognise the prisoners who’ve been here the longest. The god-brine’s in their bloodstream, dissolving them from the inside. Mottled patches on their skin, like Ren.

They have to dive for the yliaster deposits, swimming down to the drowned city below. Ren tells her that it clusters around the temples, around the sunken battlefields where saints and monsters clashed. Sometimes, it looks to her like the yliaster collected around the bodies of the slain. The remains are mostly gone, eaten by scavengers or washed away, so only the outline remains – humanoid figures sketched in glimmering slime, bodies huddled in doorways or fallen in the streets.

The biggest deposits are in the lightless chasm where the Lord of Waters perished, but Ren cautioned her against diving down there.

“You’ve been here before.”

“Yes.”

“How did you get out?