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

dying from the moment she met him. And she nearly did flee, when he needed her most. When he was in a prison – a prison like this one – and Heinreil poisoned him, Cari fled down to Guerdon’s harbour, went looking for a ship to carry her away. It was the fucking Black Iron Gods that convinced her to turn around, to stay.

How shit a person is she, to need moral guidance from tyrannical carrion gods?

Is Khebesh another way to avoid hanging around, waiting for a friend to die? She told herself that Khebesh was a destination, not an excuse, but it got her out of Guerdon. Should she have stayed, born witness as Spar slowly faded into nothingness? Maybe it’s all her fault – she used so much of him during the invasion…

Adro groans, and it floods her stomach with sick guilt. She’s supposed to be here for Adro, and instead she’s thinking about Spar. Focus on one sick friend at a time.

She searches for something to say. “Your little girl – Dol Martaine has her. She’s safe. I mean, Martaine’s a fucker and I’ll kill him if he touches her – no, we’ll kill him – but she’s staying with him.”

“Hear that? Ama is safe. You don’t need to worry,” echoes Ren, talking to Adro. He even manages a thin smile. “We’ll find her again, like before. You brought us out of this camp, remember? You saved us.”

Adro groans, but doesn’t say anything that might be intelligible speech. He coughs, blood-flecked spittle bursting from his lips. His eyes open, but they don’t focus on anything. Ren dribbles a little water into his mouth.

“He’s not going to make it,” whispers Cari, and Ren’s eyes flash with anger.

“He’s strong. You know how strong he is. He’ll bury us all – won’t you, Adro?”

The sun vanishes behind the Rock of Ilbarin. The stars come out. They’ve changed again, Cari notes distantly. The Godswar fucks up the heavens, rewrites the celestial sphere. The tide comes up the slope, waves breaking against the ruins of the city. It’s beautiful in the darkness – the yliaster deposits make the whole sea shimmer like liquid moonlight. She describes it to Adro. Talks about old times, telling the same old stories Adro recounted at that last dinner on the Rose. She doesn’t tell the tales as well as Adro, but she tries. She even adds a new one to the rotation – remember that time we nearly escaped Ilbarin on a boat made of worms? Wasn’t that crazy? Wasn’t that a lark?

When she can no longer talk, Ren takes over. He reminds Adro of their shared history, how Adro got him out of the camp. Talks about the fragile little life they built in Ushket. He speaks with a courtier’s eloquence, and a diplomat’s evasion: he never mentions that Adro was ash-marked, a prison guard for the Ghierdana. Ren never mentions his own job in Ushket directly either, but Cari guesses it was something to do with the Ghierdana, too. Either you serve the dragon, or you die. There is no escape. Only degrees of suffering. Ren describes a little island of tranquillity, a fiercely defended bubble of normality in a dying land. He talks about teaching Ama to read, about friends they can stay with in Paravos when they finally leave Ilbarin, about his idea to keep roaming Bythos out of a little vegetable garden at the back of their home.

Her own dragon-inflicted wounds begin to ache. Her shoulders, especially, as she hunches over Adro’s body. At some point in the night he begins to shiver, his whole body shaking convulsively. They pile their thin blankets on top of him after the heat leeches from the air.

Sometime close to dawn, Ren comes around to sit next to Cari.

“I want to tell you something,” he says, not looking at her. “Adro asked me to remain silent, but I owe you honesty. That night, when Adro visited Captain Hawse and dined with you – he told me where he was going, and who he was going to see. I told the Ghierdana that you were at the wreck of the Rose. That’s how they found you.”

“I- I thought it was Martaine—”

“No. It was I. They were offering passage off Ilbarin.” Ren adjusts Adro’s blanket. “Adro didn’t know. He was furious when I told him. And I don’t suppose it’s worth anything, but I am sorry. I don’t bear any malice towards you. There’s no space for such things, now.” A thin smile. “It’s always easier to deal with abstracts, isn’t it? In the prefect’s court, one of my duties was overseeing the paperwork regarding executions. We always had to excise all the names – it was always Prisoner Number such-and-such.”

“It’s all right,” mutters Cari. Once, she’d have been filled with wonderful righteous anger at this confession. She’d have leaped up, shouted fuck you at Ren, stormed off. Knifed him, maybe. Plotted revenge, or just run. Another city marked off the list. Sailing off, never to return.

Strangely, though, she feels it is all right. Self-sacrifice has never been in Cari’s nature – all her life, maybe from the moment she was conceived in Jermas Thay’s fucking laboratory-slash-Black Iron Cult sanctum, she’s had to fight to have a self, to be something more than a tool of the gods. Somehow, the fact that it all went wrong for Ren, too, makes it easier to forgive. Ilbarin’s run of cursed luck extends to him, too.

Also, later that night, when she burst into his carefully built little fortress of normality with a Crawling One and a mad plan, he hadn’t said no. That willingness to take a chance counts for a lot with Cari.

She peels back the blanket, takes a look at Adro’s injury. It’s bad. It’s very bad.

Spar, what should I do? she thinks, but there’s no answer. Two dying friends to save, but one’s right here.

“Back in a while,” she lies.

Cari walks the streets of the camp,