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

by an earthquake. Broken glass from a hundred shattered windows crunches under Rasce’s steel boots. He marches down Seamarket Way, Mercy Street, the thoroughfare emptying as the crowds flee from his mob of thieves.

“Secure the inn,” he orders. In his mind’s eye, he sees the building, sees every way out. Watches his mob of thieves and pirates swarm in, smashing through the door of viridian glass that gives the place its name, forcing their way through the side doors, the back. Even scaling the walls to climb in the upper windows.

Rasce enters through the wreckage of the front door. The inn’s customers – rich merchants, speculators, lawyers, alchemists – are all frozen in their seats, staring in confusion as the place is suddenly overrun with thieves. Rasce ignores them, ignores the whistles of the city watch sounding in the streets. He climbs the stairs, enters Vyr’s room.

He shuts the door behind him, plunging the room into a stilled silence, as if the chaos of the world outside is suddenly paused. He watches himself through the window. It seems safer, somehow, to think of himself as something remote. To imagine his body as a tool.

Rasce watches himself cross to Vyr’s side. His cousin is quite, quite dead. Vyr’s face is purple, his tongue bitten and bloodied. His fingers are scraped raw, too. A strange apparatus is clamped around his neck, and it’s clear that this machine strangled him. Carefully, Rasce prises the machine away with his knife, and it’s only when it falls away that he recognises what is it. The prosthetic hands that Vyr commissioned for his father Artolo, like a jewelled crab cunningly wrought of brass and steel. Patches of skin from Vyr’s neck caught in the gears.

I’m sorry. Spar’s presence in Rasce’s mind is awkward, uncertain. Shuffling around the edges of perception, trying not to intrude. Still, it’s impossible for some of Spar’s thoughts to avoid leaking into Rasce; when he looks down at Vyr, he sees, from certain angles, the face of Spar’s father Idge. The faces of strangled men have a grisly commonality. They hanged Idge slowly, as a warning to the Brotherhood, and his face had the same cast to it. The same desperate air-hunger, the panic reducing the features to something animalistic and primitive and scared.

“I didn’t even like the boy,” says Rasce quietly. Gently, he lifts Vyr’s body from the floor, lays it on the bed. Draws a sheet over the contorted face. “But he was family. He belonged to Great-Uncle. This insult cannot go unavenged.”

What was Vyr doing in this room when he was attacked? Not sleeping. No sign of a woman. Rasce finds a heavy case of dark wood, lined in velvet, that must have contained the mechanical hand. Inside, a letter from the shop on Glimmerside, a certificate of authenticity, heavy with the wax seals of various craftsmen who worked on the prosthetic. The eye-and-flask design of the alchemists repeated on each seal.

Including the last – a stern and stately capital M, a fortress flanked by two towers. The “&co” almost an afterthought. Aetheric enchantment services. Rasce imagines his cousin opening the box, and the hands coming to life, scuttling towards him, strangling him. An alchemist’s assassin. He imagines it as clearly as any of Spar’s visions, sees the hands throttling the life from Vyr.

This insult cannot go unavenged.

Trouble, warns Spar, and, moments later, Karla hammers on the door. “Boss! City watch! Lots of them!”

Rasce ignores them both. He lets himself drift from his body again, shares Spar’s perspective. Sees the little specks moving in the streets, a stain of blue-cloaked city watch surrounding the inn. A little spurt of red, a puff of smoke as some thief panics and lets off a pistol, but the line of the watch holds. Rasce can see the house on Lanthorn Street in the New City; he can see the Inn of the Green Door only a short distance away. He’s aware of the underground line below, like he’s aware of the bones beneath his skin. Why did Vyr come here to open the box, instead of continuing on a short distance into the safety of the New City? Such a treasure as these hands would doubtless be sent by Ghierdana messenger, maybe even by dragon, to the distant land of Ilbarin where Uncle Artolo serves.

There must be something else here. Rasce prowls around the room, ignoring the shouts from outside. The nightstand on the far side of the bed has toppled to lie against the wardrobe – and the wardrobe has been ransacked by the attacker, all except one compartment. Rasce tries the drawer, but it does not budge. He pulls on it with all his might, and it still doesn’t move, even though the whole heavy wardrobe rocks slightly. He kneels down and examines the drawer.

“Rasce! Are you all right? Let me in!” Karla shouts from outside, a note of mounting panic in her voice.

A carriage is coming, intones Spar, many guards, and parliament livery on the doors.

“Shut up, both of you,” snaps Rasce. The drawer’s not locked. It’s got to be magic. A spell-ward is one of the easier sorcerous enchantments, but Vyr’s no sorcerer – someone else sealed the drawer. Another trap? Or did Vyr want to keep something safe? Wards can only be opened with the right token. Blood’s the most common key, but it might be something else – and, for all he knows, Vyr’s murderer has already stolen the token. Rasce draws his dragon-tooth blade, presses the tip into the wood like he’s picking a lock. The magic in the blade reacts against the magic of the ward, giving the illusion of physicality, and he gingerly cuts the threads of the spell until they give way.

Inside – papers, handwritten notes in Lyrixian. Vyr’s handwriting. By the Scourge! Notes about the yliaster trade, about all their crimes outside the occupation zone. Names, dates – the burning of Dredger’s yard, the brawl in the Haithi zone, Craddock’s, all