What's the Name of That Book??? discussion

When: Skimmed the first few pages of this in a book bin 2008/2009, next to R Scott Bakker's The Thousandfold Thought. They seemed to be of a similarly "modern" style, particularly in terms of book printing and prose.

ChatGPT/Claude/Google have failed over the years to dispel the mists of time and reveal the name of the book, so any help will be much appreciated! I swear it's not a figment of my imagination! :)

Details as remembered below.

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The gods, who are generally siblings (or at least have a sibling-like relationship), rely on directly consuming human souls for power/life. It may be that the number of worshippers they have might have been the old measure/source of power for them, but now they have to directly consume souls, or maybe it still is a factor, albeit reduced (faulty memory, sorry).

The main character is a large man, slow-seeming, but with a strongly implied capacity for violence. He is implicitly trusted by his god, for whom he might be the only follower. Unusually as well, his god has pretty much delegated all soul consumption to him, to empower him for some as-yet unrevealed grand plan/purpose. He also has his god's ship (with his weakened god in it) connected to a large chain around his torso, and he pulls it around everywhere he goes. It is implied to be mystically floating in the air (at least that's how I imagined it), but I could be wrong on that. I seem to recall the main character's name as John (or something similarly prosaic and macho, but I could be wrong).

There might be a male god who is semi-friendly with his god (at least to the point of visiting him on the ship), and who might be (sorry, faulty memory) a god of flowers and swords.

It read like a "dark" / "adult" fantasy, but not quite grimdark, though.

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Thanks again!

Your post on another site had a response. I'll include it here. Please update both this post and your other sites with a response.

The suggestion:

The God Engines by John Scalzi

Thank you. Alas, that's not it. I've also read The God Engines and remember it separately.

BUT I just randomly (after years of probing ChatGPT, Claude AI, Perplexity, Google, Bing -- you name it) stumbled upon the [Deepgate Codex Series](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Ca...) featuring a character John Anchor who hauls his weakened god Cospinol on a skyship. Google just apparently got tired of my tireless queries and spat out the right answer, finally.

How do I mark this as solved?

To be more specific: it appears the book that I skimmed was the second in the series, Iron Angel by Alan Campbell.