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

Maybe the shrine is safe – and it’s probably not the sort of place anyone else would willingly go.

She huffs up the mountain, Myri thrown over her shoulder like an evil carpet. Approaching the small shrine does bring on the same prickly tension feeling as before, but it’s much weaker this time. She passes the marble statue of Usharet that adorns the front of the shrine, dumps the unconscious sorceress in the shade and goes around the back. There’s a small room there, entered through a doorless archway. She freezes for an instant, thinking she glimpses someone sprawled in front of the altar, but when her eyes adjust to the shadowed room, it’s just a thorn bush sprouting from a crack between the tiles that just happens to resemble a hunched woman, thorn branches growing across the altar like a drowning swimmer clinging to driftwood.

The walls are decorated with mosaic tiles soiled with dust that’s blown in, and there are little alcoves on either side where attendant priests must once have stayed. And – miraculously – there’s a basin of fresh water, filled by a spring that trickles from one wall. No food, but Cari ate yesterday, so she’s doing well by the standards of this dying rock.

Cari drags Myri into one of the alcoves and sits down on the floor opposite.

That thorn bush really looks like a person, the more she stares at it. She can make out the curve of a spine, the suggestion of legs in that tangle of roots, even a hint of a face.

“She’s coming back.” Myri speaks through cracked lips, a throaty whisper.

“Figured that.”

“Don’t say her name.”

“I know!” snaps Cari.

Myri gestures weakly towards the basin. Cari scoops up some water in her palm and trickles it into the sorceress’s mouth.

“Where’s… the food?”

“There isn’t any.”

“Idiot. In other casks! I brought supplies. Food, medication, money.”

“Oh. Shit. They’re down the hill. I thought they were just full of yliaster.”

“There are waterproof sacks floating in the brine.”

Cari hurries out of the shrine, looks down the slope at the distant ribbon of the empty road. There’s no sign of the mule, or the cart. She doesn’t know if the animal wandered off, or if pursuers from the refinery got it. Or, hell, if the dragon swooped out of the blue sky and grabbed it.

“The cart’s gone.”

Myri taps her head gently against the tiled wall. “Idiot.” Her fingers twitch spasmodically over the hollow of her elbow. An injection site for her suit’s vitalising fluids. “Don’t go outside again. Until nightfall. The dragon will be searching.”

“So,” says Cari, “are you fucked without that stuff? You gonna die?”

“No. But it’ll hurt.”

“I’m sort of fine with that.” Cari grabbed a scalpel as she fled the lab, and she produces it now. “Why’d you pull me out of there?” she demands.

“Don’t.” Purple light crackles around Myri’s fingers, she says, looking at the scalpel. The whites of her eyes aren’t white; they’re mottled brown, a mass of scars. “Khebesh, of course. They wouldn’t let me back in.”

“Back?” echoes Cari. “You’ve been there before.”

“Trained there.” The lightning snakes around her hand again. “They won’t let you in, either. Not unless you’ve got some key, something to trade. What is it?”

“A book. There was this sorceress in Guerdon, Doctor Ramegos. She died in the invasion.”

Myri nods. “She was working on the god-bombs. Her grimoire would be enough to open the gates. So, where’s the book? It wasn’t on the Rose.”

“Captain Hawse hid it. I think I know where.”

“Show me,” orders Myri.

“Fuck off.”

“I—”

“And don’t bother fucking threatening me.” Cari puts on a mocking imitation of Myri’s voice echoing within her helmet. “‘I shall blast you with dread sorcery.’ You want to kill me, the Ghierdana want to kill me, the Ishmerians want to kill me. Heinreil wanted to kill me, back in Guerdon, and you saw this thorn bitch wanted to kill me,” she adds, kicking at the Usharet-tree.

Myri rolls her scarred eyes. “Maybe you should stop provoking… well, everyone. And I was about to say, I have a ship. Well, a sailing boat, but it’ll reach the mainland.”

“You’ve got a sailing boat. They’ve got a fucking dragon.”

“He’ll leave for Ulbishe soon. We just need to stay hidden until he does.” Myri coughs. “Vorz got what he wanted from you.”

Cari rubs her own wounds. “They took my blood. Why?”

“You’re an interesting specimen. A synthetic saint. Breeding saints is commonplace – drooling sacred idiots, inbred to be pleasing to Culden or whoever. But you were made for a singular purpose.” Myri licks her lips, and bits of dead skin flake off. “A freak.”

“You’re one to fucking talk.”

“This?” Myri holds up her scorched hand, as if seeing it for the first time. “I brought this on myself. I chose this, and I live with my choice.” She coughs again. “And, yes, if I don’t get to Khebesh, I’ll die with my choice. But it will be my choice.”

“They can cure you in Khebesh?”

“They can help me.”

“That’s why I’m going there. To find help for Spar.”

Myri laughs, coughs, laughs again. “Who told you the Khebeshi could help with that?”

Cari’s cheeks redden. “Eladora Duttin. My cousin. Was she wrong?”

“Wrong? Not necessarily. The Khebeshi are the greatest sorcerers in the world. But what you did, your Gutter Miracle – that wasn’t sorcery. Facilitated by sorcery, maybe, but it was a botched miracle.” Myri shrugs. “Maybe if you had a few dozen archaeotheologists studying it for months, they could begin to reconstruct the aetheric currents. But from what I understand, the New City wasn’t exactly a conducive environment for research while you were… what was it, the Saint of Knives?”

Cari sits back. Certainly, she drove away anyone that stank of sorcery when she was the Saint of Knives – she and Spar feared they might discover the secret vault under the New City that contained the remaining Black Iron bells, the unfinished god-bombs. And Eladora told her, once: “there are theological engineers trying to calculate how much divine power you disposed of.”

Was Eladora lying