The Broken God by Gareth Hanrahan (most life changing books .txt) 📗

vanish into hiding places. A cupboard with a false back swallows the alchemical gear and the ledgers stolen from the yard. Their soot-stained cloaks and gas masks are stuffed into sacks for disposal. Guns get bundled up and hidden up the chimney. Rasce hands over the blunderbore with reluctance. He really wants a chance to fire the thing. He keeps his dragon-tooth knife, of course, and no one dares ask for it.

Karla passes around a damp cloth to wipe the ash from their faces. Her brother Baston hands around a flask of brandy. A hulking sailor with a scarred face hustles them back out through the door, and they leave by a different route, emerging on to the streets of the Wash well inside the boundary of the IOZ.

Cousin Vyr stares up at the temples of the Ishmerian gods.

“We should get back to our zone. Get out of here.” The presence of the gods in those temples – in all but one of those temples – is as palpable as the heat from a furnace.

“The ghouls will still be on the streets,” says Baston.

“Or under them,” adds Karla, looking warily at a sewer inlet at the side of the street.

Rasce takes a deep breath. The air of the IOZ smells of incense and the ozone tang of magic, but his head’s stopped spinning. That strange fit he experienced at Dredger’s has passed. No more bizarre convictions. Whatever touched him on the docks can’t reach him here.

“We’ll wait a few hours.” Rasce claps Baston on the back. “The gods send dragons to scourge the sinner and honest man alike.” An old saying in Lyrix, meaning this is our fate, we just have to live with it. “Find us somewhere profane, eh?”

The restaurant, Baston mutters, was part of a theatre once. They enter by a back door. An old man with a long moustache greets Baston like a long-lost nephew, then smuggles them up some stairs to a back room. Rasce peeks through a door into the main bar. The walls are a deep crimson, smoke-stained; the ceiling overhead is an ornate plasterwork, the details lost in the gloom. The clientele there are Ishmerians. Soldiers in dishevelled uniforms, priests in flowing robes, huddled around hookahs. The priests smoke to find the gods; the soldiers, Rasce guesses, to hide from their memories. The war’s turned against Ishmere in the last half-year.

Rasce follows the others up the stairs. The back room is equally opulent, although there’s a musty smell in the air that tells him this room hasn’t been used in months. Rasce sinks into the welcome embrace of an overstuffed leather chair, and his gang gathers around him. Baston and Karla on either side of a sofa, their men perched on the armrest or pulling up armchairs. The old man returns with a tray of drinks. Brandies and alchemical gins for locals, a bottle of arax for the Lyrixians. The thieves laugh, joke with one another, tell tales of narrow escapes and alchemical monsters. The two groups beginning to mingle. They’ll take the ash soon, thinks Rasce.

Only Cousin Vyr remains standing, shifting awkwardly from one foot to the other.

“Sit down,” orders Rasce.

“We should get back to the New City.”

“Vyr, trust me. We’ll lie low here, have a few drinks, wait until it’s quieter.”

“We’re in the Ishmeric Occupation Zone. This is madness. You’ll provoke—”

Rasce draws his knife, points it at his cousin.

The laughter stops.

“Sit,” he orders again.

The knife’s a sign of Rasce’s rank in the Ghierdana, of his favour with Great-Uncle. Vyr has to back down. He sits.

To break the tension, Rasce slams the knife down on the table, spins it with his fingers. The dragon-tooth blade whirls around and comes to point at Baston.

“Give us a toast, my new friend,” says Rasce.

Baston hesitates, and Karla steps in.

“To Tiske,” she says. She tips out the last of her brandy, then refills her glass with arax. She produces a cigarette lighter and ignites the liquor. She lifts the blazing glass, the flames reflected in her green eyes.

Rasce takes the lighter.

Tiske, he realises, was the first man to die under his command.

The man who carries the knife cannot carry any burdens, any dead weight. He cauterises any regrets.

Rasce sets fire to his own drink. A more fitting toast to doomed Tiske.

“To Tiske.”

More bottles of arax. The Guerdon thieves are drinking it now, faces grimacing at the gritty, ash-flecked taste. Like licking an ashtray, says Karla. Vyr tells them how it used to be made from the seared grapes from vineyards on the Lyrixian mainland that got burned by dragon-fire. These days, the farmers themselves set fire to the fields every season and smuggle it out to the Ghierdana islands. Good arax is expensive.

“You should call it the Wash,” mutters Baston to Vyr, “not the Ishmeric Zone.”

“Call it what you will,” replies Vyr. “It doesn’t change the fact that we’re surrounded by foes.”

“We’re surrounded by friends, Vyr,” says Rasce. “Admittedly, those friends are then surrounded by foes.”

“Why—” Baston coughs, to clear his throat of the smoke. “Why take down Dredger? He was always willing to pay his money to the Brotherhood.”

“Ah, the famous thieves’ guild of Guerdon!”

“Not a guild,” snaps Baston. “We fought the guilds, and stole from ’em, same as you.”

“A revolutionary Brotherhood, yes? Sworn to overthrow corrupt politicians and crooked guildmasters.”

“That’s how it was,” says Baston.

Rasce grins. “Mortal men are easy for the dragon to kill. But the dragon sees further.”

“Everyone knows Dredger,” adds Vyr. “Everyone will pay attention to this message.”

He sips his own arax, throws one leg over the arm of his chair. “Yliaster! Next on the list is Craddock & Sons. Mr Craddock will see sense, or he’ll have fewer sons, and I do not anticipate any difficulty there.”

“I know Craddock’s’,” says Baston, leaning forward. “I used to go there with the old master.” Talking business draws him out. “When?”

“A few days, for Craddock. But my aim is higher still. Bend your thoughts, please, on the problem of the other yliaster