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

the metal cask. The mouth of the cask is narrower than her shoulders, but Cari’s lithe enough to wriggle down. Inside, she folds up as best she can, a foetal position inside the jar. Like one of the alchemical creatures on the shelves of Vorz’s lab, only a few feet away. Myri hastily closes the lid of the cask, plunging Cari into darkness.

Outside, the sounds of uproar. An explosion, breaking glass, shouting. There’s a clank of metal as someone attaches a metal hook on to the outside of the cask, and she’s lifted, painfully rolled as the cask is hoisted off the platform and lowered to the refinery floor below. Cari manages to keep herself from crying out in pain as the cask slams into the ground. It’s lifted again, roughly, and thrown to the side so Cari’s now lying horizontally, her spine crushed against the metal.

Movement. She’s on a cart from the sounds, from the rattle of the wheels on the stony road. The sounds of the chaos at the refinery die away.

Now all she can hear is the creak of the cart’s axle. The laboured breathing of the mules. Her own breathing inside this fucking coffin.

Her skin stings from where Vorz stole her blood. Her back aches from her contorted position inside the cask. How long should she wait? Is this the sort of escape attempt she might have devised herself – badly thought through and desperate, right Spar? – or is there a plan? Is Myri out there, or has she been handed off to some accomplice? Should she call out? She’s literally in the dark about what to do next.

Hell, for all she knows there’s no one out there – maybe the mule ran off while still hitched, and she’s technically its prisoner. From Dol Martaine to Twelve Suns Bleeding to the fucking Ghierdana to Myri, and now a mule – her captors are getting worse. She giggles, and realises that there isn’t much air in the oven-hot casket, so waiting for the right moment might not be an option.

Still, she waits. After all, every minute spent in the cask gets her further away from the camp.

Cari’s had too much experience with gods to pray to them, but still she hopes that Adro’s still alive. The dragon promised to send a healer, and while she knows that the promise of a dragon means nothing, it’s all she can offer.

She rubs the needle wounds, wondering what Vorz was doing to her. Something to do with her sainthood – Professor Ongent did the same experiment with a skull, back when she had no idea what she was. Sometimes, Cari wishes she could find some alchemist or sorcerer she could really trust, get some answers.

The confinement and darkness of the cask are familiar to her on some deep, atavistic level, familiar to some part of her she prefers to flee from. Fuck. The damn thing is like a bell, isn’t it? She’s inside a bell-shaped steel vessel. Or maybe it’s the resemblance to an alchemical jar. Jermas Thay made her, bred her from his son’s seed and a Raveller – a shapeshifting horror from the underworld, a living sacrificial knife for the Black Iron Gods. Ravellers can steal human forms, human faces, but they’re not human. Malign emanations, the hunger of the gods oozing into the material world.

Cari doesn’t know if she was even born. Did the Raveller keep its shape long enough to give birth to her, dissolving back into its amorphous slimy form even as she came into the world? Or did Jermas grow her in a jar like this one? When she broke into the Alchemists’ Quarter back in Guerdon, she saw other embryos growing in tanks. Was she cultivated the same way?

Is she even really human? Is her soul her own, or is she an emanation, too, a little tendril of god-stuff in the physical plane? At least she’s replaced the Black Iron God with something better. Human or not, mortal or not, at least she’s got Spar.

From outside, there’s a thump, and the cart slows. Swerves slightly in the manner of a mule halting at the roadside verge for a snack, then stops.

It’s as right a moment as she’s going to get – and Cari feels that there’s nothing out there that can be as bad as spending any more time with her own thoughts in the dark. Cari presses her fingers to the lid and turns it as best she can. It moves a finger’s breadth, but it moves. She twists it over and over, pain shooting through her wrists, until finally it pops off and she can crawl out into the glare of the sun.

The mule is munching contentedly on some thorny plant that sprouts in unlikely profusion along the side of the road. Two more casks of yliaster on the wagon. And behind her, lying face down in the dust, a crumpled human figure wearing a hooded cloak.

It’s Myri.

Cari considers leaving the sorceress to die in the dirt. Even considers speeding her along. The woman served Heinreil back in Guerdon, serves the Ghierdana here. She’s an enemy – but she got Cari out of that lab, and clearly has some plan in mind. So, fuck it, Myri gets to live a little longer.

The woman is disturbingly light, like she’s burned herself hollow. Unconscious, from some combination of the scorching heat and whatever sorcery she’s performed. Something big, from the state of her. Soot cakes Myri’s mouth and nose, and bloodless wounds have opened on her wrists. Cari looks around for some shelter, spots signs of a landslide, a patch of green on the mountain, and then realises she’s been here before. Up the slope is that little shrine to the goddess of the mountain. Also the Goddess of Kicking the Shit out of Cari – but she’s heard the Ghierdana attacked the goddess, disrupted her. They can’t permanently kill her, but it takes time for a deity to re-form.