God of Broken Things

Chapter 25

Looming above me was another ravak daemon, but easily twice the size of any I had ever seen or heard of before – almost as tall as the sodding walls of Setharis itself! Its armoured coils and barbed tail belonged on a monstrous siege engine rather than a living creature. Above shining slitted golden eyes, all staring down at me, the black crown was a forest of spikes, eldritch purple energy crackling between them. In one long six-clawed hand it wielded a wicked black barbed blade identical to my own destroyed spirit-bound weapon grown to gigantic proportions.

I was beyond fucked. My stomach dropped away as I wrenched at the melting ice pinning my arms and legs. It was useless, I was stuck fast. All I could do was lash out with my mind, panic driving me to attempt to kill it if I could, or stun it until I could free myself.

My magic slammed into it. The huge daemon let me in with a warm welcome.

What are you doing, you odious little cretin? Its hissing voice came from the back of my own mind, not from its great maw with fangs like swords. In my shock I stopped the attack on… on myself!

I knew that disdainful voice only too well. My tainted right hand burned with the need to rejoin its progenitor.

“Dissever?” I gasped. This was the monster that had been bound inside my enchanted blade before Nathair shattered it?

The huge blade stabbed deep into the ground beside me. Enormous armoured coils gathered under it as it settled down next to me, lowering its crowned head until it was level with me, golden eyes sliding this way and that across black iron scales. Several long forked tongues flicked out to stroke and taste my naked body.

“You wear a magically constructed body instead of true flesh. Disappointing and disgusting,” it said, not in its own tongue or in Old Escharric, but in modern Setharii with a guttural hint of Docklands an exact match to my own; not surprising since it learned it from me. Then it laughed, a hissing mockery of human mirth. “You are even smaller than I had thought from inside my cramped prison.” Did I not say a great war was coming?

I grimaced as I finally worked my arms free and started on my legs. “Bloody spirits and scum-sucking Scarrabus! Every fucker out there seems to want to try and own a piece of me.” And yet, in this huge daemon’s presence my terror was swiftly draining to be replaced with its own fury and bloodlust. I should have been terrified of the daemon but it was a part of me, linked by the taint consuming my arm. Which should have been worrying in its own right. Meddling with spirits and daemons and blood sorcery was an abomination… except when I did it. I wasn’t like all the rest, but then I supposed that’s what all the bad and the mad told themselves, and I had never been entirely stable in the first place.

“They cannot have you, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood,” it said, repeating the words and feelings of the original pact we’d made when I had been a mere pup in the ossified depths of the Boneyards below Setharis. “I require more sustenance.”

I kicked off the last remnants of ice and got to my feet. “Your concern warms my heart, you vile old thing. That spirit, you killed her?”

“The frozen spirit–” the word dripped with the daemon’s derision of all things ephemeral, things it could not devour, “–circles this realm even now, and this time it returns with more of itself. It will prove a far more difficult foe, especially for your breed of magic, but you must fight. You cannot run from that which lies within.”

I swallowed and looked down at my breast, where a crude handprint had been cold-burned into the skin. That bitch Angharad had pierced my flesh with a solidified part of the Queen.

No wonder she had found my mind as it tumbled between realms.

“I came here instead of the Queen of Winter’s domain,” I said, realisation dawning. “Because I already had an existing pact with you? It was your fault the ritual went to shite both times?”

“Yes,” Dissever replied. “This realm belongs to ravak. Ravak belonged to me before the Scarrabus came to enslave us.”

I studied its eyes, unable to fathom just how unutterably old this being was. “They belong to you?”

“All ravak are spawned from my flesh. We are not divided as absurd, fleeting humans and insipid ogarim. Once there were many ravak that were not of me. I devoured them all.”

I stared at it, feeling its bottomless hunger and lust for bloodshed. It lived to fight and eat, and in the end it had devoured all on this realm that could possibly oppose it. “And then the Scarrabus came.”

Its rage ignited. “They did not fight to prove themselves fierce and strong. They are a disease, and when I discovered how many of my spawn had been taken and turned against me even I could not prevail. They buried my body and bound my essence into a weapon. Me! A slave used in their infection of the ogarim.”

My hand itched, remembering holding that blade where the daemon had spent uncountable thousands of years imprisoned. During the Black Autumn I had leaned hard on its anger and hunger to prop up my own fear and failings. I held up the useless lump of black iron that was my right hand. “Speaking of disease, what the fuck are you doing to me?”

Membranes slid across its golden eyes and then opened lazily. Rather pretty eyes too I thought, now that I was close to a ravak without soiling myself in terror. I shook my head, aware of its unnatural influence on me.

“I do nothing,” it said. “You do that to yourself.” “Oh piss on that,” I snarled. “Humans don’t tend to come covered in iron plates. I can’t even bend the damn thing. Fix it.” Its pupils widened like a hunting cat’s and its head lifted, bearing its fangs. “Were you not my pet I would devour you.” It reached out and ripped its blade from the ground, leaving a deep cut right through bedrock. The barbed and jagged edges of its blade softened and turned fluid, and the blackness flowed up its hand and merged into its own flesh. “I am not a tool, you brainless bald ape. And I am not an infection.”

I swallowed, feeling the anger and hunger warring in the back of my own mind. I dared not step back. Showing weakness was a stupid idea when faced with a vicious predator, which Dissever most certainly was. But then if the hard black plates were still part of it, a living thing rather than a spiritual taint, then…

The fingers on my right hand trembled, flexed.

The daemon slapped me, a contemptuous blow that sent me sprawling. “Feeble little creature. Your weakness is laughable. You let all those humans die in their hive at Scarrabus hands.”

I shot to my feet, red rage igniting.

Dissever laughed, hissing mockery. “You let your fat little friend be skinned alive.”

I lost it, flinging myself at the huge daemon, roaring, the knife in my hand plunging deep into its armoured hide.

It shifted serpentine coils, knocking me onto my arse with the merest nudge, then rested its crushing weight atop me. Its great head came down to my own until we were nose to nose. Two golden eyes slid across its face to study the knife in my hand. Wait – what knife? I stared at the jagged black knife currently gripped in a bloodied hand of fresh pink and unblemished human flesh.

I gaped first at it and then at Dissever looming above me, utterly unharmed at being attacked with a part of itself.

Your fear of yourself was consuming you, the voice in the back of my head said. True ravak know no such feeling. If we are threatened we fight, we kill, and we devour our foe to grow ever stronger. Be more ravak.

It was all my own fault? That made a twisted kind of sense.

I had been so afraid of myself and focused on resisting my own power that the confused remnant of Dissever buried in my own flesh had seen me as an enemy and had been trying to eat me.

What a fucking idiot! The Arcanum and my old mentor Byzant had twisted my mind in against itself all those years ago and I was still dealing with the aftereffects. One way or another I would have to pay that pain back.

“Get off me you big lump,” I growled, shoving ineffectively at the bulk of daemon atop me. It shifted and I crawled free. I kept glancing at my right hand, at smooth human skin. It had been a while.

A sharp pain stabbed through my breast. The air suddenly chilled and my breath misted. Snow began to fall, dirty orange in the dull red light of this alien realm. The Queen of Winter was returning to claim her prize.

I had come here seeking healing and power to use against the Scarrabus. And I had found it, just not in the way my beloved grandmother wanted. Dissever was right; I needed to fight. “I must wake,” I said. “Don’t suppose you have an idea how I go about doing that?”

Oh yes. It smiled as much as a daemonic serpent can.

I knew enough of what amused Dissever to be afraid, and I screamed as its jaw yawed wide to expose nightmare fangs. It swallowed me whole. A few moments of struggling in darkness against hot wet bone-crunching convulsions and then searing pain.

I stabbed upwards and felt my blade bite, punching hilt-deep through muscle and bone. A woman grunted in shock and hot wetness spilled across my chest. My eyes opened to see Angharad fall to the floor, flesh ripping from Dissever’s black barbs. Blood pished wildly from a gaping wound in her belly.

My chest burned from the cold, but I was alive and free. I slid off the altar dedicated to her septic cunt of a spirit and stood on wobbly legs. I was back in my real body and rediscovering a hundred human aches and pains, from my lacerated back to broken bones that had never healed quite right.

The Eldest ogarim sat motionless, watching this turn of events silently and without visible expression, but emanating emotional turmoil.

“I’m back, o’beloved grandmother of mine.” She was a vicious, heartless beast, so I did what Dissever had taught me. I fought what I feared, my power ravaging her unprepared mind as I stepped forward. “You murderous bitch. You meant me to be a sacrifice to your stinking spirit – well guess what, your vision of the future has come true, except it turns out I already had a pact with something far more powerful than your weakling spirit. Pah, ice and snow and winter winds? What use are they to me? I am blood and fury. Come now, let me show you.”

She clamped hands to the wound that passed right through her body and her three amethyst eyes flared bright with power as her Gift fought to resist my intrusion. She was old and strong but not quite an elder magus, whereas I had bathed in the blood of gods and monsters. I was going to win. Why had I lived so long in dread of this pathetic creature?

“Queen o’ Winter,” she screeched. “Protect me!”

Frost rippled from her, flowing along the walls and floor towards me.

I sneered at her. “You murdered thirty-six of your own children for your mad rituals, and who knows how many others. You are finished.” I turned and hammered Dissever’s point down into the altar. It sank in and I wrenched it out sideways, gouging a deep trench through the stone.

“No!” Angharad cried as her ancient altar cracked and fell in two halves at my feet. The frost stopped, white tendrils writhing blindly and building crystals in unnatural shapes. The spirit could no longer see me here in this place so deep below the earth. My grandmother’s blood kept flowing. Even such a vicious wound wasn’t fatal to her, but it would slow her down.

“Yes!” I snarled, advancing on her with bloodlust burning away the chill she had placed within my heart. I intended to feed my big daemon friend.

I was aware of the ogarim clambering to its feet and backing away. It could feel exactly what I intended as my Gift used a torrent of magic to crack open her mind, and it wanted nothing to do with it.

“Will you fight beside me when the time comes?” I demanded of it. “You are ogarim, and you wield magic potent enough to turn the tide.”

I no longer have the fortitude to endure war. I will not kill a sentient being ever again.

“Your fucking inaction dooms us all,” I said. “That’s right, run away and hide and do nothing. That’s what your kind do best these days! You would have let her destroy me before lifting a finger of your own to help. Hah, and you call humans Broken Ones? Magically that may be true, but you are the real Broken Ones. Once you were the great defenders of the Far Realms – well where are you now when we need you most? Pathetic.”

It bowed its shaggy head and fled through rippling stone walls, consumed by guilt.

It had been through so much, enough to break down anything with a conscience, but I wasn’t inclined to pity it. My disappointment was vast and all-consuming and I was the type that held grudges. I turned to my grandmother, still struggling against my mental power, and forced her mind open. I nodded gravely to the silent skulls of my dead kin lining the walls and then I got to work with my knife.

As I emerged from the hold’s most sacred place and stepped back into the halls of the ancestors, the other druí looked up from their meditations and flinched at the sight of the bloody footsteps I left behind me. They rose unsteadily, having knelt from nightfall until whatever time of the morning it was now.

“Catch,” I said as I passed, tossing them parcels wrapped in strips of white-wolf fur. There was a war on and I had one fully working hand and Dissever again – and no more fear of what I was, or what I was becoming. If it took a monster to save those I cared about then I would be that monster.

The ogarim’s mistake was, ironically, being too human. Had they been human then I had no doubt the Scarrabus would have been wiped from existence, likely along with everything else that stood in their way. We had been built for war but the bugs did their job a little too well to have any hope of controlling us.

I smiled as the screams erupted behind me. I don’t think they appreciated the gift of my grandmother’s hands and feet, but they do say to take pleasure in the giving, and I most certainly had. Her crystal eyes clinked together in my coat pocket, a little souvenir.

“Best keep your spirits busy with the enemy leader,” I shouted. “Or I will be back for yours.”

She had yearned to sacrifice her own flesh and blood to the great spirit she worshipped so that it could walk by her side among humanity. My mother had been only a tool to that evil creature and I was very glad she had the sense to flee her fate. As for me, my grandmother had intended me to be a prisoner in my own body, if any part of me survived at all. I was just returning the favour. No hands or feet or eyes and locked inside the festering darkness of her own mind.

Perhaps I would return some day and end her torment, but let’s be honest, probably not