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

outside. Surely the dragon won’t smash up his own refinery. The workers and guards mill around beneath her, but none of them can climb up here. None of them dare shoot at her, either, for fear of damaging their precious machinery. Cari laughs again as they come to the same realisation and lower their weapons.

A door below bursts open, and Artolo rushes in, red-faced and furious, carrying a long-barrelled rifle. He raises the weapon, and she can tell that the risk to the yliaster isn’t going to dissuade him. Shit. She climbs higher, trying to keep the athanor between her and that gun.

Artolo roars in frustration and races to the side, trying to get a clean shot. She dodges back the other way, trying to guess his intention. She wishes that she had Spar’s sight to back her up, instead of having to peer through the tangle of struts and pipes that sprout from the upper section of the furnace.

He fires. The section of pipe she was clinging to explodes in a burst of fire and shrapnel. Cari leaps awkwardly at the last second and manages to catch on to a dangling loop of chain, but there’s nowhere else to go, and she’s left hanging thirty feet above the ground, ears ringing from the blast. The world sways and spins around her.

Artolo takes aim.

“ENOUGH!” roars the dragon. “Artolo, put the rifle down. Now!”

Artolo’s face contorts in fury, but he drops the gun.

“You, Thay, enough of this folly. There is no escape. There are only degrees of suffering. Yield.”

All Cari can do is hang there. The only defiance she can muster is spitting in the dragon’s face, and he’s too far away for the little gobbet of phlegm to get anywhere near him. It splashes in a yliaster trough, far below.

“Your courage is noted,” continues the dragon, squeezing in through the loading dock. Its folded wings scrape against the sides of the massive door. Workers scurry out of the way, and the liquid in the yliaster troughs jumps and ripples with every thunderous footfall. Gods, the thing is gigantic. It fixes its fiery eyes on Cari, and she’s frozen – not by magic, but by sheer animal terror, a little mouse facing off against a lion. She tries to clamber around the athanor again, get the furnace between her and that thing, but, fast as a striking serpent, the dragon’s head darts forward. The jaws close around Cari, and she lets go of the chain in shock. She shrieks as it whips her around. The dragon holds her in his mouth without biting down – he could devour her in an instant, the slightest pressure from those mighty jaws would crush her, drive those huge teeth through her, she can feel them digging into her, and for a terrifying instant she thinks that he’s going to eat her – and then spits her out, dropping her on to the hard ground.

He leans down, his hot drool dripping on her skin. Flames lick the air when he speaks. “Your cousin Eladora Duttin came to my lair. She offered me tribute. A share of Guerdon’s wealth. A territory on the mainland. The fate of two empires, at my command. She bargained with gods to reach me. Praised my magnificence. She bowed before me and begged for my aid. She understood her place.” The dragon stares down at her, eyes blazing.

“You will, too.”

They dress Cari’s wounds before returning her to the prison camp. The dragon’s teeth have torn a dozen ugly cuts in her thighs, her side, her shoulders. None too deep, but they all have to be washed out with stinging antiseptic. While the Eshdana healer treats her, she glances up, spots Vorz sitting on a walkway above the factory floor, another doctor fussing over the alchemist’s bandaged nose.

“Worth it,” she mutters.

She expected them to punish her. To beat her. Feed her to the dragon. Instead, they feed her. It’s better than camp food – she guesses it’s Eshdana rations. There’s even something pinkish that might conceivably have once been introduced to meat, and she wolfs it down. It doesn’t even cost her any chits. Somehow, it’s more sinister to have her special status underlined. They want something from her.

Back in the camp, the guards thrust Cari through the gate and close it behind her. Other guards watch her from the gantries as she makes her way through the ruins to the house she shares with Ren and Adro. The other prisoners watch her, too, but she can feel a barrier between her and them. She’s tainted, made toxic by her mysterious association with the Ghierdana. It’s like having the Stone Plague back in Guerdon.

Adro’s lying on the floor. They’re always exhausted after diving, falling asleep where they drop, so she thinks nothing of it until she sees Ren’s face.

“Oh fuck. What happened?”

“He got sick after they took you. Something in the water struck him. Maybe poisoned him.” Ren presses a rag to Adro’s brow. His big body shakes with the effort of breathing. His skin’s clammy, his hands limp, sprawled across his heaving chest like jellyfish. The wound’s small, but the flesh around it is swollen and raw. Little droplets of liquid pus ooze from it and run down Adro’s flanks.

“You’re hurt, too,” says Ren, seeing Cari’s bandages.

“It’s nothing.” She kneels down on the other side of Adro, takes his other hand in hers. “We’ve got to find him a healer.”

“I tried,” says Ren quietly, in his matter-of-fact way. “They won’t come. We need to be here for him.”

Cari sits. Waits. Holds her friend’s hand, as shudders run through him. She doesn’t know what to do. Her instincts tell her to run. She hates to stay and watch, to sit and wait for the inevitable.

Don’t stay in Aunt Silva’s house, waiting for the nightmares to come. Leave. Run away in the night.

Don’t sit and quarrel with Captain Hawse day after day. Leave. Run away in the night.

And Spar – Spar was