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

too. She’s to bring the yliaster to Guerdon.” He shakes his head. “Maybe I’d be on her if it weren’t for you.”

Cari half rises for a better view of the distant vessel, but Martaine hauls her down. “Sit still and shut up for once in your bloody life,” he hisses, and there’s terror in his eyes. “I won’t end up like Hawse.”

She sits still. She shuts up. She pulls the grey shift around herself, like her touch is tainted.

The refinery reminds Cari of the Alchemists’ Quarter in Guerdon, but only a little. In the district, the pipes were polished mirror-bright and ornamented with astrological sigils. The factories were palaces of industry, temples to transmutation. The Ghierdana refinery, though, looks like a distillery for making rot-gut booze. All ramshackle, dripping with grease and oil, barely holding together, and built from whatever salvage they could find in the ruined city.

There are a few sections, though, that look new-made. The innermost components – reaction vessels, industrial athanors – are clearly imported from beyond Ilbarin, incongruous as a hat on a Bythos. Guerdon-made, she guesses, although they look somehow off to her. Fanciful, brass and steel decorated with serpents and flowers. Admittedly, her expertise on alchemical factories is limited to one burglary and two near-apocalypses.

Below, she can see the loading docks where they bring in the sacks of yliaster; on the right, a queue of carts, laden with casks bound for Ushket’s docks, then Moonchild. And then far-off Guerdon.

And above it all, perched on the roof of the refinery, is the dragon.

Martaine and other guards drag her, kicking and biting, through the refinery. She knows it’s a waste of energy, but she gets a really satisfying elbow into the ribs of one of the guards. If she managed a bite, too, it would have been a better meal than she’s had in days, but they don’t give her the opportunity.

They wrestle her across the main floor, past rows of troughs filled with yliaster, being washed by miserable workers who don’t dare look up. Past the huge main athanor, an alchemical furnace. They bring her to a narrow metal staircase that leads to a gantry. There’s a room up here overlooking the main factory floor, and they shove her through the door.

It’s a laboratory – there’s a mask and robe of woven silver hanging from a hook, rows of bottles and jars, aetheric instruments, things in tanks. Windows so he can monitor the athanors. Another window, looking out over the ruins and the sea and the muddy shore. The room’s all cold and clinical, all scrubbed clean. A room for dissections.

The alchemist’s there. The Dentist. Vorz. Cari’s seen him before, sort of – through Spar, in the last days before she fled Guerdon. A black crow of a man, stalking through her streets in the New City. Another alchemist, grubbing in the dirt for poison.

The guards troop out, but the armoured sorceress remains. “I’ll paralyse her,” she says, raising a gloved hand limned in purple light.

Vorz clicks his tongue in irritation. “An active incantation would affect my instruments. Restrain her only if necessary.”

Cari nods meekly. Lets her shoulders drop, her hands go limp. No point in fighting a sorcerer.

From a shelf, he takes down an object she recognises – it’s a gilded skull. Once Professor Ongent used a skull like that one to determine her connection to the Black Iron Gods. She recalls the horror of that early contact with the deities, how it drove her into a frenzy of terror. She’d ended up breaking Ongent’s nose with a headbutt.

“First, I shall ascertain what thaumic anchors remain,” murmurs Vorz. He’s talking to the sorceress, not Cari. He hasn’t even looked at her – she’s a specimen to him, an experiment. His voice is a solemn whisper. “At this distance, I doubt there’s active congruency to any Guerdonese powers, but there may be spiritual pollution from the local aether. I may require you to conduct an exorcism.”

He bends over to put the skull in Cari’s hands, just like Ongent did.

Cari skips the frenzy of terror, and just head-butts the Dentist straight off. His nose breaks with a very satisfying crunch. She flings the skull at the sorceress – purple light flares, but it catches the skull, not her. More bone shatters. Cari springs across the room, grabbing jars of alchemical shit and smashing them down, throwing them at the sorceress – fuck, please, would SOMETHING just explode! – then running. There’s a door across the room. She darts to it, grabbing a scalpel as she flees, broken glass bloodying her feet.

Out of the door on to the gantry. Refinery floor below her. Above her, the whole building shakes with a furious animal roar. Oh yeah, there’s a dragon on the roof.

Suddenly, there’s no ceiling above her, as a massive claw rips a hunk of it away. A furious dragon’s eye peers through the hole, boggling at her insolence, so she adds injury to insult by flinging the scalpel straight into it. She runs down the metal gantry, charging headlong. No fucking idea where she’s going, but at least it’s not waiting around to die.

She hears shouts from the factory below. Eshdana guards below spot her, start stomping up the metal stairs towards her, so she jumps from the gantry, grabbing on to the metal bars that support the tin roof. She swings across, bar to bar, until she reaches the outer housing of the main athanor, the big bell-shaped tank in the middle of the room. It’s hot to the touch, like climbing on a stove, but after a morning diving in the chilly depths it’s almost pleasant. Easily the best part of a doomed attempt to escape from a gang of crazed dragon-pirates and their alchemical freak show. She sways, deliriously, from the top of the machine. She doesn’t have a plan, but maybe something will happen. And, if not, then at least, for a brief moment, she’s free. She laughs wildly.

Roars from