I Read Stories: Not A Fish by Andrew Dykstal

 

Not A Fish by Andrew Dyskel in Beneath Ceaseless Skies

Tek was a soldier, though soldiering was an easy task as the priests could formulate a prayer and their god would blast the enemy. Then there was an error. The prayers had to be precise. But the king liked flowery titles; in Lüm the prayer named him as the Golden Hand but the enemy had shields with a Golden hand on.

The second prayer, under the new monarch, smashed the city flat. And Tek was now an observer of the priests. So when a priest is thrown high off the ziggurat, he must discover what is going wrong. A story of power, and language, and disaster.

Read This: Fantasy about dealing with dangerous power, and the necessity of precision, and vengeance, and differing scripts
Don’t Read This: Lot of things going on, with one rather silly secret at the centre