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

Hands grab her, pulling her. Darkness all around. She struggles. Adro, the fucking idiot, her brave moron of a friend, pulls her out of the rift, drags her back towards the surface.

He doesn’t understand. She’s made contact, but she hasn’t got through. The Lord of Waters is an idiot, too, a broken god, spitting out whatever random thoughts and memories he thinks might connect to Cari. He doesn’t understand. She’s got to make him understand, got to find a way to use his power. The Bythos can carry them home. The Bythos can get them to Khebesh.

Her lungs are full of water. Her head’s full of gods.

Adro shoves her roughly out of the water, throwing her on to the raft like a sack of yliaster. He drags himself out, groaning, rolls her over so that she throws up over the edge. He’s bleeding from a fresh wound on his chest. A small bite mark.

“I’ve got. Go back,” she moans between gushes of seawater and vomit. Her puke glimmers with yliaster, and she doesn’t know if that’s some mystical side effect of the vision or just too much exposure to the raw stuff.

“I tugged on the rope,” says Ren, “when I saw them.”

Cari raises her head, and sees the approaching shape of the Ghierdana motorboat, and the armoured sorceress is standing at the prow like a figurehead made from the same gunmetal.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Baston sits in silence as the train rushes under Guerdon. Vyr squirms, nervous at being so far from the safety of the New City. The air down here is hot, full of soot and steam. Flashes of light give unconnected glimpses of the tunnel outside – here a brick wall, water from some buried river beading on its surface, there a graffiti-marked arch. Now darkness, darkness, ghoul eyes, darkness again.

“My cousin… he is not wholly himself,” Vyr begins, keeping his voice low. “You were there when it began. Tell me what you know about the thing that speaks to him.”

“We shouldn’t talk about it,” grunts Baston. “Not here, not now.” They’ve got a job to do.

“Here is exactly where we should talk about it. He cannot eavesdrop on us here.” Vyr shakes his head. “Back home in Lyrix, they lock saints away in madhouses and call them monasteries. It’s for their own protection. Saints have their eyes fixed on heaven and cannot see the mortal world. Cannot see the harm they do. We never use saints.” He mutters to himself in Lyrixian, a quick litany of curses or prayers, then glances back up at Baston. “We walk a dangerous path. He goes too fast, without supervision. He shall bring ruin on us.”

“Not here.” Baston leans forward. “And you’re going to be speaking for your cousin, right? So you’d better fucking swallow that doubt. Just tell Mandel that if he doesn’t take the deal, he’ll end up like Dredger. That’s all you’ve got to say, but you have to show steel. If you’re weak, they’ll never take the ash.”

Vyr scowls. “You’re not even Eshdana. You don’t speak to me like that.”

“And what,” says Baston quietly, “will you do about it?”

The answer, it seems, is nothing. Vyr sits back, pressing himself against the seat to get as far away from Baston as he can. He looks strangled, his body twisting with nervousness and bile. He mutters to himself again, and it’s definitely a curse this time.

The funny thing is, Baston’s instincts agree with Vyr. Baston’s cautious by nature; a good right-hand man has to be. You’re supposed to keep the boss from walking into danger, from getting overextended. To attend to practicalities instead of chasing bold visions. But he did all that, and where did it get him? Lost, left behind in a changed city. Play things too cautiously, and the world leaves you behind.

There’s a certain quality in a great leader. The ability to see the gap between what everyone agrees can be done, and what’s actually possible, to push you into going beyond yourself. A catalyst, they’d call it, enabling things that would otherwise be unthinkable. Of course, go too far and that quality becomes dangerous, becomes explosive.

Baston runs through his own litany – the masters of the Brotherhood. Idge, of course, was a perfect example of a leader who saw what was possible, but went too far. He gave the Brotherhood a dream and a purpose, warned them about the power of the alchemists, about how they would be more callous than any priest or god. But Idge pushed too hard, and the city pushed back. He died on the gallows when Baston was a boy.

After Idge came a quick succession of forgettable men, bosses who just tried to hold the Brotherhood together. Even their names blur together in Baston’s mind – Tomas Whoreson, Starris, Gaern the Shipwright. All cautious by nature. Baston knows that if he’d ever risen to the rank of master, he’d be counted with them.

Then, Heinreil. Even after all these years, Baston still doesn’t quite know what to think of Heinreil. He’d done things that no one else had thought could be done, but they were the wrong things – bringing in sorcerers and other monsters like the Fever Knight, cutting deals with Crawling Ones. Selling out to the alchemists. A twisted vision of the possible. He took the Brotherhood and twisted it. Twisted Baston, too, by apprenticing him to the Fever Knight. No one could deny Heinreil’s cunning – he led the Brotherhood through the candlelight, bargained with the alchemists, made more money than any of his predecessors – but the price was too high.

Spar – Spar, the lost hope. All of Idge’s moral clarity, but tempered with grief, with an understanding of the costs of failure. If Spar had been master, then the Brotherhood might have become more than a band of thieves – a movement, a counterforce, something to grab the wheels of the terrible machinery behind the city and