The City That Would Eat the World Preview Chapter #1

So I've got good news and I've got better news.

The good news? The City That Would Eat the World, Book 1 of More Gods Than Stars, is available for preorder now in ebook and audio, and will be out on February 11th!

Better news? Well, that's in the title of the post! You get to read Chapter 1 right now!

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Chapter 1: The Murdered God

Thea was chiseling a particularly bitey mimic off the side of a bakery when the gods began to scream.

She’d tried to get the little brick skeuomorph off the brickwork gently, at first— tried luring it off with food, forcing it off with tuning forks, and even sprinkling it with noxious powders— but the creature was gods-cursed stubborn. It had nipped the fingers of at least three or four passersby, so it clearly couldn’t stay where it was, but Thea would have been happy to transplant it away from the street. Its species never got bigger than a few inches, so it’s not like it could seriously hurt anyone.

But the mimic refused to give up its grasp on the brickwork, jabbing at her with its cnidocytes while flailing its chromatophoric membranes and skeletal lattices until regulations demanded Thea kill it. It wasn’t hard— just took a quick stab with her belt knife the next time she tricked it into opening up with her tuning fork.

Thea was justifiably proud of her high success rate at transplanting mimics, so she couldn’t help but be angry at herself for not being able to handle a finger-length brick skeuomorph.

She’d just sheathed her knife, and that sense of failure— hardly the only one, of course— was lingering over her when the gods began screaming.

The screams traveled through the Firmament and weren’t audible to the human ear, but every single person on the bustling street with godgifts— so everyone except small children— clutched at their ears anyway.

It was easy to tell who had indwelling gods inside their souls because every one of them staggered, often falling to the ground. Thea crashed to her knees as Seno, the God of Counting Flagstones, screamed wordlessly inside her head.

And then the tiny god started screaming a second time simultaneously when Thea stepped on a crack between flagstones as she climbed back to her feet.

Thea had no idea how Seno could scream twice at once, but moving her foot off the crack was automatic, the second scream ending instantly when she did so. She didn’t even need to look— one of the blessings he offered her was extrasensory awareness of all flagstones near her.

That blessing was so close to solidifying into a proper boon— she expected it to do so any week now. It would be only her second boon, after her old trajectory-calculation boon. Of course, the only real difference between blessings and boons was permanence— blessings could only be used a single time, or for a limited period of time, unless actively sustained by a god. What a huge difference that was, though.

Both godgifts were pressed into use as Thea took off sprinting in the direction of the screams— the blessing to guide her feet, the boon to guide her through the crowd.

She realized she was still holding the tuning fork she’d used on the little mimic and quickly tucked it into her bandolier with the others as she ran.

“What’s going on?” a man demanded of her, but she just shook her head and ran past.

It was easy enough to track the god-screams, given how oppressively they cascaded from the west. Before Thea had run more than a few dozen spans, she got another solid clue about the source of the screams, in the form of an explosion.

Thea picked up the pace.

“And now you’re running towards the explosion,” she muttered to herself. “Not your job, but you’re doing it anyway.”

Even with her two sensory godgifts active, Thea found herself slowing as the confused crowd panicked and fled from the explosion. Not far ahead, a knot of people was approaching rapidly, and Thea’s trajectory boon couldn’t see a single path through them.

“You ready, Seno?” she asked.

The little god burbled excitedly back at her— while still screaming with his other voice.

Thea rolled her eyes, jumped, and performed a miracle.

Just as she began to descend, there was a flash of yellow wires in the air below her foot. By the time her foot slammed down onto it, the construct framework had filled in with godstuff, and she landed on a perfectly normal-looking flagstone.

Save, of course, for the fact that the flagstone was hovering in midair.

Thea didn’t slow or stop, launching herself forward and up once more. The hovering flagstone began to dissolve the instant her weight left it, while a new one took shape under her next step.

Within a dozen steps, she was high enough to jump to the rooftop of the nearby warehouse. Behind her, a trail of flagstones dissolved into yellow motes of light before vanishing entirely.

She only took a moment to orient herself, then ascended once more, climbing an ephemeral staircase to the top of a nearby tenement.

She ducked past hanging laundry on its roof, then hurled herself up once more, barely making it to the top of a long, narrow office building. The last couple of flagstones hadn’t even fully woven themselves out of godstuff, and they’d shaken alarmingly under Thea’s feet.

Seno chirped in happiness and fatigue from the back of her mind, and Thea felt her own soul gasping desperately for raw magic from the Firmament to metabolize into soulstuff.

Her physical lungs, however, weren’t even struggling yet, and Thea picked up the pace again as she sprinted along the rooftop.

There wasn’t much on this rooftop— just sturdy clay tiles at a gradual slant away from the street. It was tall enough for Thea to get a good view around her, though.

To her left, down the slope of the roof, was the edge of the Wall. If she were to trip, she’d tumble across the narrow roof of the office building, no more than fifteen feet wide, then plummet not just the three stories of the office building but also the nearly eighty feet to the crowded groundling slums down between the wall segments.

To her right, she could see out across this segment of the Wall entirely. It was wide enough for three streets, all of which were filled with crowds desperately fleeing the explosion and god screams.

Hanging low in the western sky ahead of her was Viseas, the gas giant that Ishveos orbited. This far east, there was only a thin band of sky between the red-orange swirls of Viseas and the horizon, giving this region of Wall a brief, half-hour sunset after daily eclipse.

And all around her, she could see the city itself.

The wall segment she was on held a major supply road in its depths, so the architects had raised the height well past the standard fifty feet for an additional internal level. Atop one of the higher buildings on this segment, Thea had a view that stretched for miles.

She could see dozens of wall segments twisting, splitting, connecting, and intersecting, each covered in skinny buildings and narrow streets. She could see spindly guard towers reaching even higher than her, skybridges reaching between the upper stories of buildings, and flocks of bonethieves soaring above the rooftops. To the south, she could see a wall segment packed with the towering, six- and seven-story tall manors of the wealthy. Among and beyond those stood a half-dozen towering statues of various gods— some mere monuments, some hollowed-out towers with windows in their eyes, and several were colossal six-armed semaphore golems that passed messages by changing the positions of their immense arms, longer than tree trunks.

Thea couldn’t help but try to read the messages carried by the golems, each pose standing for a sequence of letters, but her lessons on semaphore code had been years ago, before she’d even considered joining the mimic exterminators.

And, of course, she could see the slums down in the closes, the enclosed spaces surrounded by the Wall. In this neighborhood, they were too small for farmland, and were just filled with crowded shantytowns.

Thea didn’t let herself more than glance at the slums- which was still more attention than most wall-toppers paid. Instead, she focused forward, towards the smoke rising from the explosion, near the epicenter of the god screams.

The smoke and screams came from a small plaza, where this segment’s three narrow streets wove together. Thea wracked her mind to try and remember what was at the intersection— this was a bit outside her usual territory. She vaguely recalled a couple food stands, a printer’s shop, and…

Thea stumbled as she realized what was up ahead, but managed to catch herself and keep running.

There was a jail there. And Thea would bet a week’s pay that the explosion hadn’t been at the food stands or printer’s shop.

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It would have been smart for Thea to wait a few moments longer before launching herself off a roof into the little plaza, if only to get the lay of the land.

Thea didn’t even slow down, though. She had enough time to see that there was a single open space in the middle of a seething melee, and she aimed herself straight for it, leaping from floating flagstone to floating flagstone.

Thea hurtled down into the high-walled plaza, barely controlling the speed of her descent. Below her, dozens of figures brawled in the street with fists and improvised weapons. She could sense at least two or three Saints among the crowd through the Firmament, and she did her best to steer away from them.

Her suspicions proved entirely correct— the front of the jail had been blasted open by some godgift or relic, and dozens of prisoners were climbing up from the spiraling pit inside.

The prisoners that had already escaped were brawling with at least two or three other factions, one of which was the Wall Guard, but Thea didn’t get a chance to figure out who else was fighting before she hit the ground.

Nor was she trying to. As she crashed to the street through the final half-formed flagstone, its godstuff immediately dissolving, her eyes were fixed on the source of the god screams.

A god was dying.

It was a possessor god like Seno, dwelling in a filthy, cruel-faced man— a Saint who Thea vaguely recognized from wanted posters. He was floating a foot off the ground, surrounded by a whirlwind of rusted and stained manifested blades that orbited in wide arcs around his body.

Thea could hear the man’s god slowly being ripped to pieces through the Firmament, its every scream sending its host into uncontrolled convulsions.

He only warranted a glance, though.

The thing killing the god floated just in front of the god’s host, inside the orbit of the knives. It wasn’t much to look at— just a simple clay tablet a little bigger than her hand, inscribed on both sides with glowing cuneiform that Thea didn’t recognize.

She didn’t even have to reach out to the clay tablet through the Firmament to know that it was a reliquary.

Even an ordinary reliquary was worth fighting over— an item carrying a god was far more valuable than a mere relic granted power by a god. A reliquary holding a god capable of killing other gods?

Would be worth dying for.

Was obviously what everyone around them was fighting over.

Would unquestionably draw those far more powerful than even Saints.

And Thea had just crash-landed right in front of it.

“Gods curse it,” Thea snarled, and pulled the five foot-long combat tuning fork off her back. “I’m not paid enough for this.”