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

“Adro found me. He was one of the guards. He’d taken the ash, and that bought him a favour. Me.”

But now Adro’s down with them, another prisoner. On good days, Cari manages to get assigned to the same raft as Adro or Ren, but usually the guards partner her with strangers. Strangers to Cari – but they all know her. All daring her to make a move, to try to escape. Some prisoners do try – they float their rafts to the fringes of the harvesting zone, then make a break for it. But there’s nowhere to go. South and east and west, there’s the ruin of Ilbarin City and the drowned lowlands, a handful of small islands that used to be the southern hills, and then the open ocean. North, there’s the Rock, and Ushket.

To ensure Cari doesn’t escape, the guards shackle her every morning. A collar around her throat, and a long rope tying her to the raft. The rope is long enough that it doesn’t restrict how far she can dive, but it’s a heavy drag, especially when wet, and she has to constantly worry about it getting fouled on some protrusion in the ruins.

They dive almost naked. The hot Ilbarin sun scorches her bare shoulders, and the saltwater and god-brine aggravate any scratches or wounds. Her fingernails are soon raw from scraping at the glimmering slime.

Down, down, into the chill depths. Ilbarin City is almost unrecognisable, a corpse city, but sometimes the rippling blue light catches the outline of some monument or street corner, and it all snaps back in her memory. The strange impression that if she swims deep enough into the darkness she’ll reach the old docks of ten years ago, before the war, with the Rose waiting for her. Captain Hawse on the deck, looking up at her swimming down out of the sky. But she can never go deep enough.

Swim up. Claw back the light. She breaks the water, drags herself over to the raft, and slings another sack of yliaster on to the pile. Then down again. They can only work for two or three hours a day before exhaustion and cold defeat them, and if they don’t have enough yliaster by then they won’t eat.

Adro’s the best of them, his lanky frame and big hands and feet thrashing through the water. Cari’s a powerful swimmer, too, but her injuries and the rope slow her down. Ren has the most experience of the trio when it comes to diving for yliaster, but the drowned city holds many horrors for him. There are more dangers than the cold down there. Ilbarin City was a battlefield for warring gods, a graveyard for broken gods, and miracles still crackle and blaze beneath the waves.

The Kraken of Ishmere touched this land, and spawned horrors. There are places where the Kraken-shape was imposed on everything, a fractal pattern of tentacles and teeth repeated over and over. Tentacled fish warped into tiny Krakens, dust clouds swirling in the water that form into ghost-kraken of mud and slime, rubble that’s sprouted razor-edged tendrils of stone. Swim through those cursed regions, and the Kraken-pattern replicates in your flesh. A doctor in the camp trades her services for chits, and excises Kraken-tumours with a stolen knife. In other places, other gods have left their mark. Ren warns them of traps left over by Smoke Painter: divers have found themselves in lush pleasure gardens under the summer moon, where veiled maidens teased them and fed them wine – only to discover it was all an illusion, and the wine drowned them. Where High Umur smote his lightning, the sea still rages and boils, fierce currents that drag unwary swimmers to their doom.

Cari dives again, looking for the telltale glimmer of the yliaster amid the broken stones. Swim down, scrape, scrape, claw at the rocks until there’s blood, smear the glimmering slime inside the sack. Then the moment of indecision – swim back up, or risk gathering a little more? Each return to the surface takes time, and even though her body craves the relief of fresh air, her soul is a leaden weight, dragging her down.

On the surface, everyone knows her. Her anonymity is gone. The guards know her. The other prisoners know her. The dragon and the Ghierdana know her. Worst of all, Adro and Ren know her, as the woman who ripped them from their safe lives in Ushket. As the woman who took their child away. They don’t say anything, but they don’t need to.

It’s all there in their hollow eyes.

Every time she swims down, she stays a little longer.

Cari reaches the surface again, gulping in great lungfuls of air. She throws a full sack on to the raft, grabs an empty bag and takes another, calmer breath. Adro grabs her by the arm before she can dive again. “You’re blue. We’re going back in.”

She drags the rope around so she can join the other two at the rear of the raft, and they start kicking, pushing the raft in towards the shore. Bits of flotsam bump against their makeshift vessel, and twice it gets caught on unseen obstacles, but soon they reach the shallows. They change to dragging the raft, wading through thigh-deep water. Ghierdana guards stand sentry on rocks like predatory seabirds, watching the rafts come in. Counting them, to make sure there have been no escape attempts.

Cari has tried escaping, of course. The fourth day, when she was partnered with three strangers, she waited until they were all diving down, and then swam for it – but she’d been spotted and dragged back. A gang of ten or twelve men, all grabbing her, pulling her back to the camp. They’d dumped her in front of one of the Eshdana guards. The guard threw a handful of chits into the middle of the mob, and laughed as they’d scrabbled for them, fought for them. After that, they started putting a