The Venting of the God

A dying god’s skull offered neither grace nor purchase, only five inches of fever-cracked bone ready to blast the funeral sloop into kindling.

Illyés Gyarmati dropped his knees into the bilge slime beside the gilded berth, holding the circular trepanning brace against his chest with his good right hand. His left arm hung heavy and stiff from radial crest to wrist, wrapped in a chalk-white crust of sea-coral that grated beneath his sodden sleeve. He needed to puncture the right parietal plate before the petrification crawled into his shoulder, yet a man could not seat a drill bit into wet bone without two hands to steady the shaft.

Behind him, iron clicked against iron. Midshipman Bálint Zsolnay stood braced between two trembling carlings, keeping the muzzle of his sea-service pistol level with Hierophant Borbála Cseszneky’s breast. Cseszneky’s black oilcloth cowl had slipped, revealing eyes wild with holy terror as her lead-lined fingers squeezed the hilt of her ceremonial kris.

"You bring iron to the anointed brow, old butcher," Cseszneky whispered, her breath smelling of bitter fumigation leaf. "Touch the sacred seat, and his departing soul will drown this entire channel in stone."

"The channel is already fourteen feet of razor rock, Hierophant," Illyés said without looking back. "And your anointed master has four inches of provincial mortar shard driving straight toward his sagittal sinus. Move, Zsolnay. Knock her down if she raises the blade."

The boy did not lower the flintlock. His knuckles were gray, his jaw set in a hard line that belonged to a veteran rather than an inland squire's son. "I have her covered, Surgeon. Do the work."

The ten-foot titan shuddered on the canvas-and-oak cot. Mátyás’s chest rose in a wet, rattling gasp that rattled the apothecary vials inside Illyés’s apron. From the hairline above the patriarch's right eye, the depressed fracture wept an incandescent yellow froth, boiling against the astral phosphorus shrapnel buried in the wound. Every tremor through the demigod’s jaw sent an echo of brittle white frost creeping across the deck planks, locking oak trenails into chalky mineral.

Illyés clamped his teeth over his lower lip, tasting salt and carbolic wash. His left hand was dead weight, the fingers curved into rigid claws that could neither grip nor spread. But stone did not flinch, and stone did not bleed.

He hauled his dead forearm across the demigod’s temple, jamming the calcified radial bone hard against the ridge of the brow. The white coral crust on his skin bit into the god's gray skin like an iron bracket, wedging Mátyás’s head firmly against the cot’s oak bolster. With his wrist serving as an unyielding wooden jig, Illyés set the steel center-pin of the trephine two inches lateral to the smoking shrapnel.

He rested the breastplate of the brace against his own sternum, took the crank in his scarred right fist, and leaned all twelve stone of his weight into the downward thrust.

The circular saw bit into the outer table of bone.

A shriek like scraping carriage iron filled the hold. Illyés swung the crank in short, violent quarter-turns. Powdered bone puffed up around the crown of the saw, smelling of boiled marrow and ancient tallow. The demigod’s throat produced a low, harmonic groan that made the fillings ache in Illyés’s teeth, and the ship below them bucked violently as another thirty-two-pounder roundshot hammered the larboard counter above.

"Steady the brace!" Zsolnay shouted above the din, his voice cracking.

"The brace is steady," Illyés grunted between clenched teeth. "Mind your priestess."

He felt the teeth bite through the hard outer shell. The resistance altered under his palm, turning spongy and greasy as the steel cut into the vascular diploë. This was where careless sawbones killed their patients: plunge too deep, and the circular teeth would shatter the inner table, driving sharp shards into the dura mater and lacerating the great venous sinus below.

He eased the pressure on his chest, spinning the crank by touch and pitch alone. The grinding note shifted from a hollow rattle to a dense, wet hum.

One turn. Two turns.

He backed the iron bit out with a swift jerk of his wrist. Bone dust showered over his grease-stained breeches. Snatching a goose-quill probe from his lapel with his teeth, he transferred it to his right fingers and swept the circular trench. The groove was uniform, the center core rocking slightly upon its base.

Illyés tossed the quill aside and grabbed the steel tire-fond. He forced the curved lever into the kerf, braced the fulcrum against his petrified forearm, and snapped his right wrist down.

The round bone button came free with a sound like breaking slate.

A geyser of liquid gold and superheated steam erupted from the hole with the roar of a opened blast furnace. The column of divine pressure shot straight toward the deckhead, catching the charred breach left by the mortar shell and tearing the splintered pine timbers into a shower of white ash. The astral phosphorus splinter, freed from the crushing intracranial hydraulic pressure, hissed loose from the sagittal vein and was spat upward into the chimney of light, vaporizing before it cleared the hatchway.

The blinding glare threw the hold into harsh, moving silhouettes. Cseszneky fell to her knees upon the stones, dropping her wavy kris as she covered her face with her lead sleeves. Zsolnay shielded his eyes with his coat, gasping as the wash of dry, searing heat stripped the breath from the compartment.

Illyés did not move. He kept his stone-locked left arm planted across the demigod’s brow, letting the scalding grease spray across his leather apron and horn spectacles.

Beneath his frozen arm, the demigod’s convulsing skull went utterly still.

The high-pitched hum that had vibrated through the sloop’s oak frames since Sziklafok died away into the rhythmic creak of timber and bilge water. On the deck around Illyés’s knees, the flowering heads of white coral ceased their blooming. The brittle crystals lost their radiant glow, turning into dull, crumbling chalk that cracked beneath the shifting weight of the ballast stones.

Illyés looked down at his left wrist. The pale frost creeping along his veins had stopped an inch short of the joint. The flesh above the wrist remained pink, supple, and his own.

He reached into his side bag with his working hand, hauled out a thick pad of vinegar-soaked lint, and slapped it over the smoking trepan hole, pinning it down with a square of sheet lead. Mátyás let out a long, shuddering sigh—a quiet mortal draft of air that rustled the edges of the gilded shroud.

"Zsolnay," Illyés said.

The boy lowered his sleeve, his face sheet-pale and smeared with charcoal soot. The service pistol dangled loosely in his trembling right hand, the cock still pulled back.

"Surgeon?" Zsolnay stammered.

"Uncock that piece before you put a lead ball through my sound knee," Illyés muttered, letting his spine slip down the carling until he sat flat upon the wet deck. "And bring the stoneware bottle from my sea-chest."

Zsolnay carefully eased the flintlock’s hammer forward with his thumb, his knees wobbling as he crossed the hold to retrieve the unlabelled jug. He uncorked it and handed it down with fingers that rattled against the clay. "Is he... is he dead?"

"Not until he reaches the core star, God curse his stubborn hide," Illyés said. He took a heavy swallow of the raw navy rum, grimacing as the fire tore the taste of burnt marrow from the back of his palate. He spat a mouthful of dark spit into the bilge, then thrust the jug back toward the midshipman. "Drink a finger of it, boy. You make a tolerably decent mutineer, but you look like an atrocious nursemaid. If you faint on my operating deck, I’ll bill your father for the salts."

Zsolnay took the jug, coughed on a mouthful of spirits, and wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve. A faint, crooked smile touched the corner of the boy's mouth before exhaustion smoothed it away. "The guns above have gone quiet, Surgeon."

The speaking tube near the companionway whistled twice, shrill and clear. Commander Vázsonyi’s gravelly voice drifted down the brass horn: Chief Surgeon. Reef is cleared. We have taken the deep current.

Illyés pulled himself up by the rung of the ladderway, the leaden weight of his left arm hanging against his hip like a sheathed cutlass. He mounted the steps until his head cleared the companionway coaming into the cool, salt-laden draft of the weather deck.

The violent emerald surf of the Sziklafok shoals lay three cable-lengths astern, their foaming breakers churning harmlessly against the empty reef shelf. Forward of the bowsprit, the dark, oil-slick brine of the Second Ring stretched out under an indigo sky, silent and vast.

Yet three leagues across the black water, where the imperial signal-towers of the colonial garrison ought to have shone with golden beacon-fires, three pillars of flame burned against the horizon—and every pillar was the bright, mocking green of corsair pitch.