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

Cari swims after the glowing lump, snatching at it as it bobs out of reach. The ruined city drops away beneath her – they’re on the edge of the great rift, where the Lord of Waters fell. Looking down, the silt clears, and Cari glimpses strange fish swimming through the waters below.

Not fish – Bythos. She can see their dead human-halves trailing behind the living godfish. The way they swim makes their limbs wave, like they’re signalling to her. Fuck, maybe that’s a way out! The Bythos have helped her before! Hawse said the Lord of Waters had a plan for her, and she’ll take a crazy mostly dead god’s plan over rotting in the camps. If the Bythos can animate a dead body, then maybe they can keep a living one alive!

It’ll be a good thought to share with Spar. How did you save me, Cari? Well, it all started when I stuck my face up the bum of a divine fish and swam all the fucking way to Khebesh with a flounder on my head.

She and Adro swim back up. Dump their sacks. Fill their lungs.

“Eight more!” gasps Adro. “We can do eight.”

They dive again.

This time, Cari heads straight for the rift where the Bythos cluster.

Pressure as she descends – a pressure in her soul, just like she felt on the mountainside. She’s entering into the presence of a god.

She swims down. Leaves Adro far behind.

There’s something else down here, too, moving in the dark. Not a Bythos – somelike else, a congregation of dark shapes. A glimpse of many teeth. It vanishes into the mud as Bythos circle around her protectively.

Think. All godshit is the same shit, right? Self-perpetuating structures in the aetheric field, to quote someone who was at the top of the to-stab list for a while. Cari was made to be a saint of the Black Iron Gods, but ended up channelling Spar. Her cousin Eladora – for all her prissiness, El’s a spiritual slut, touched by the Black Iron Gods and the Kept Gods, too. Once the channel’s opened by one god, it’s sometimes easier for another one to make contact.

Cari opens her mind, tries calling. Recites in her head the prayers she overheard from Hawse. Come on! If you’ve got some divine plan, fucking show yourself. She can’t see the Bythos overhead any more. Can’t see anything apart from the glimmer of yliaster in the dark waters, and she can’t tell if those dim lights are five feet or five hundred feet down.

Then – building in the back of her mind, washing over her like a familiar drug – a vision.

Not like Spar’s crystalline regularity, his architectural mind, his voice guiding her through the images discarded on the streets of the New City.

Not like the screaming, desperate hunger and hatred of the Black Iron Gods, every thought stained dark and cruel, her soul blood-soiled and tattered afterwards, a thing sewn together from carrion birds.

No, this time the knowledge flows into her, fills her, then recedes. A tidal vision, a wave of revelation. It floods her mind completely, then retreats, leaving prophecy behind on her lips, little tide pools of memory left behind by the drowning god.

She sees—

Two men walking through the streets of Ilbarin long, long ago. Both young. One’s dark-skinned, keen-eyed. Dressed in bright robes adorned with the images of colourful birds, a heavy book in his hand. A heavy book, almost identical to the fucking book she haunted all the way from Guerdon. The other’s pale like Cari, black-haired like Cari. Memories of the father she barely knew, a dim shape from her childhood, colour the vision. It’s not him, though. It’s got to be Jermas Thay, like the Crawling Ones said. Jermas, hauled all the way from Guerdon. Hauled all the way from her nightmares.

Jermas looks up at her in the vision. In the memory. Like he knows she’s watching.

The scene ripples. Only the book remains constant, and now it’s being carried into the deeps by a shoal of Bythos. Cari struggles in confusion, unsure if this is another vision or if she’s opened her eyes and spotted the actual book, Ramegos’ grimoire, being carried away into the deeps.

Even as she thinks that, the image breaks, and she’s storm-tossed, hurled from the heavens to the fundament of the world and back again into a different vision. Powers thunder and spit around her, reality cracking. The Lord of Waters rises, and she’s caught in his net. She’s the point of his spear, too, at the same moment. It’s the invasion of Ilbarin, simultaneously years in the past and happening to her, to the Lord of Waters, right now. Cloud Mother breeds monsters in the sky. Kraken steals the seas, and the saints of the Lord of Waters cry out in agony, for the sea is their blood, and they’re transformed into desiccated husks in an instant, a legion of bone-dry corpses standing in a line on the shore. The stolen water draws back, and a host of horrors marches across the suddenly dry seabed, crosses the dry Firesea to lay siege to Ilbarin. At the head of the host is Pesh, Lion Queen, war goddess of Ishmere.

Her eyes are the golden fire of burning cities. Her voice is every battle cry, her roar every explosion, every cataclysm. She is bloody-clawed war, tawny-flanked victory, glory and power.

The churning waters draw back, and Cari spots a tiny speck tossed in the waves. The Rose! Save them, she thinks. She prays. The Lord of Waters reaches down and picks up the Rose.

She’s back in Guerdon. She’s in the ship made from Spar, in the ship that is Spar. They’ve got the last god-bomb, but the Ishmerian invasion is all around them. Pesh stands in the floodwaters of the Wash, her legions advancing into Guerdon. Artillery thunders from the heights, and somewhere in there the city’s last defenders rally along Mercy Street. Cari aims the ship, Rat lights the fuse and the bomb launches,