The Gutter Prayer, page 12
And the Godswar—she’s never dared get too close to it, but she’s heard stories. How some gods went mad with bloodlust and terror, and turned their miracles and saints into terrible weapons. There’s no power without price, and she needs to know the true cost of these visions.
“It’s a possibility. Most saints are adherents of one faith or another, but the ways of the gods are strange and unfathomable. You might have attracted the attention of one of them. Like, a lodestone picking up a pebble that happened to be rich in, ah, iron.”
“I do keep dreaming of churches,” she admits. “The Holy Beggar … and some other Keeper place.” The Keepers were the dominant faith in the city before the reforms. A generation ago, they’d have been the ones burning Ongent.
“Quite.” Ongent sits down next to her, uncomfortably close. “Carillon, I won’t lie to you. This gift of yours is dangerous. The city authorities frown on unknown saints and unlicensed sorcery. More importantly, unless you learn to control and channel it correctly, it may even endanger your life, and the safety of those around you. If I continue my research and Eladora keeps taking such diligent notes, I may be able to discover the nature of your gift, to learn what power is trying to speak through you, but it will take time.”
“There’s an ‘or.’” Cari can hear the hesitation in his voice.
“There is an alternative. I myself have some small magical talent. With your permission, we can try a divination together. A ritual to, ah, make manifest any spiritual connections you might unwittingly be party to.”
Every instinct in Cari is to run. Ongent is too close to her, too pressing. She can smell him, dust and old man sweat masked by tobacco smoke. The Cari of a few days ago would have gone for her knife, or for the door, but she can’t run from this, can she?
“All right.”
“Good, good. Bear with me a moment.” Ongent heaves himself off the couch and potters around the room, collecting bits of ritual paraphernalia. A skull, some glass jars, a brass instrument with lots of lenses and levers, a golden pen. “Clear off that table, please?” He gestures at a pile of books and papers next to the couch. Cari lifts one of the books and discovers there is indeed an old battered table underneath. She shoves the papers onto the floor. The surface of the table is polished wood, marked with silver runes.
“One doesn’t like to advertise,” mutters Ongent. “Thaumaturgy is still seen as a questionable field of study, even in these liberal times. Go into alchemy, that’s what they tell the most promising students, neglect the fundamentals and the historical theory and just follow the money. Feh!” He’s talking to himself now, as he sets up his equipment on the table. He cranks a wheel on the brass contraption, and the skull’s eye sockets begin to pulse with a flickering purple light.
“Say you do work out which god’s trying to talk to me. What then? Can you stop it? Do I go to their church and present myself and get them to help me?”
“Excellent questions, my dear, all of which are predicated on this working. Let us take matters one step at a time.” He douses the lamp above his blackboard, plunging the room into darkness apart from the purple glow from the skull. Its light makes Cari’s skin look ghostlike; Ongent is a dim shape. She can hear whispering voices, very quiet and low, but that must be her imagination. Something scuttles through the papers she pushed off the table. The room becomes thronged, numinous, like a temple in the moments before the manifestation of a deity. Cari sits on the edge of the couch and fights the overwhelming urge to kneel.
She is very close to understanding.
She is reminded of some stairs in Aunt Silva’s house, a back stairway that went up to an old suite of rooms built by some previous resident that were now superfluous to the needs of the household. Those rooms were crammed with strange things: old farm tools, old books, old treasures, the scattered bones of thought. Some of the tools were rusty and sharp, and Silva told her not to go exploring. As a child, Cari lay in her bedroom and imagined wonders in the forbidden rooms above, but when she actually climbed and opened the door at the top of the stairs and looked, there was nothing left but dust and junk. As a child, she believed that some power or presence had fled at her approach. The wonder was too fragile to endure, or she had not made the proper preparations or offerings to entice it to stay. She has that same feeling, now: that she is approaching a thing both terrible and fragile and divine.
Ongent moves through the darkness. She hears a bang as he barks his knee on his desk. “Ouch! Ow, ow ow.” He limps over to the window and throws it open. Light floods in. The mood of wonder vanishes, replaced by something else. She’s exposed, discovered. She blinks, and sees the after-images of strange insects the size of her fist writhing on the table next to her, pinned by bright spears. They’re not real, and neither are the faces that peer in the window behind Ongent. She guesses that the skull’s making her more able to perceive invisible forces.
He sits down heavily on the couch next to her. “Are you ready, Carillon?”
She closes her eyes, screwing them so tightly shut the pressure is painful. When she looks again, the hallucinations are gone, and there’s only Ongent sitting there holding the glowing skull, his face a mask of tender concern.
“Yeah. Let’s try this.”
“Hold this talisman, please. Don’t let go.” He hands her the skull. It’s hot to the touch. Little tendrils of crackling arcane energy crawl from the eye sockets and twine around her fingers.
Ongent mutters some words. Nothing happens. He adjusts the brass instrument, opens a little vial of some caustic unguent and smears it across the skull’s polished pate, and tries again.
Again, nothing.
“Should something …”
“Ssh.”
Ongent gets up, walks back to the window, apparently deep in thought. He stares out at the city. “Keep holding the skull,” he orders her.
She sits there, absurdly, clutching her skull and listening at the sounds of the university quadrangle outside through the window, to Ongent’s heavy breathing. Nothing continues to happen.
Then it hits her, drags her down and up simultaneously. She sees the city from a dozen different angles, overlapping. Tiny many-legged things scuttle around her bones. Water laps at her stomach. Her left hand is on fire, but the right one next to it on the skull is untouched. Voices scream and roar in her ears. And there’s more of her than there should be, like she has limbs or organs that she didn’t know about, a tail that uncoils and reaches into the darkness far below.
Cari’s perspective becomes detached and confused. She’s looking out of the eye sockets of the skull in her hands now, looking up at her own face. She can see her mouth moving, words hatching from it like great maggots, but she has no ears and can only see. She barely recognises herself, with her clean face and brushed hair and the grey student robes. The little scars blaze with an unnatural light. She wants to scream a warning to herself, but this skull doesn’t even have a jawbone. Ongent comes up behind Cari—behind her, an instant out of her body and she’s already forgetting who she is, subsumed in this flood. He lays his hands on her shoulders, whispers something to her or to the thing that’s speaking with her mouth.
She tries to return to her body, but she falls. Everything goes not merely dark, but absent. Eyeless. She descends through Guerdon’s strata, feeling the waves crash on the bulwarks of her spine, the weight of the warehouses, the hallowed temples, the swarming markets, and below them all the underworld, grave-cold and labyrinthine. Then deeper. She has the sensation of falling at terrible, terrible speed into the depths. She tastes mud and dirt, a flash of some metallic, chemical tang, then stone and stone and stone and blood. There’s a rushing in her ears like a million subway cars screaming through tunnels. Worms crawl over her skin, then under it, stripping the flesh from her bones.
And then she’s in a strange hall, a temple, lightless yet she can see through too many eyes. A presence is all around her, like a shadow on her soul. Her skin grows cold and hard as iron. Her mouth—mouths—speak without moving.
COME DOWN, DAUGHTER
It’s her voice, a chorus of her voice, but it’s also oozing and thick and completely inhuman. The presence threatens to overwhelm her. She’s drowning in it. Panicked, she kicks back—
—and there’s a knife at her throat, the cold steel digging into her neck, blood trickling from the wound. Strong young hands grabbing her. Miren drags her off Professor Ongent, who’s lying stunned on the floor of his study. His nose is broken, his face clawed by Cari’s fingernails. Shards of the magic skull crunch underfoot.
Miren pulls her upright, then does something with his leg and knee that sends incredible pain shooting through her lower back, and her own legs go numb. He presses the knife deeper, and snarls—literally, snarls, an animal noise that’s somehow a question—at his father.
“It’s all right, Miren. Let her go. Slowly.” The professor hoists himself into a chair and dabs at his bloody nose with a stained handkerchief. Miren twists Cari again, grabbing her shoulder with one hand and driving his knuckles into her back, and her right arm goes numb and limp. He throws her back down to the couch and stands there between her and Ongent, eyes bright, nostrils flaring with his shallow breaths, a guard dog daring an intruder to cross the threshold.
Silence, punctuated by the professor noisily catching his breath, by Cari quietly swearing. Miren is part of the silence, indistinguishable from it. He crosses the room like a ghost and shuts the window, blotting out the outside world. His knife is still in his hand, and Cari watches it warily.
“Well,” says Ongent, “that was illuminating.”
“Was it?” says Cari. “I just saw … I don’t know. Could I have a drink?”
“Certainly.” Ongent grins at her, but the blood caking his face makes it less than reassuring. “Miren, please take Carillon and—wait, no. Go and fetch Eladora and have her take Carillon home. Then come back here immediately. We have work to do.”
Miren slips out, the dagger vanishing beneath his grey robes. Cari’s own robes are covered with blood—mostly the professor’s, some hers. She tries to hide it in the folds. “Sorry about your nose,” she mutters. Apologies have never come easily to her. “And your skull.”
“No matter, no matter. The Ul-Taen Dynasties used to sacrifice a child before each invocation, as a defence against wrathful deities. The Ghost Walls were raised around Khebesh to protect against similar intrusions. In the grand scheme of things, child, considering the forces involved, one used nose and a little thaumaturgy fetch are very small sacrifices indeed.”
“So did it work? Did you figure out which god is …” Cari hesitates, as if asking would complete some incantation and make her fate inescapable.
“Oh, no, I’m afraid not,” says Ongent, “the energies involved were far too potent for my little apparatus here to contain them. I’ll need to repeat the experiment on a larger scale, I fear. But,” he grins again, and it’s even more gruesome, “this does prove my theory! Some divine force speaks through you, Carillon Thay, and I can help you tame it.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Rat, in the walls.
The clubhouse is crowded tonight. The air is thick with the smells of humans, scents clinging to them and marking them. To the ghoul’s heightened senses, each person is shrouded in their past doings. The sailors are easy to spot. Salt-drenched, wind-whipped, and beneath those smells the exotic traces of distant ports. Spices and hashish from Severast. Fish and cheese and sour milk from Old Haith. From Ishmere, from the Godswar, battlefield incense, the tang of sorcery. Locals from Guerdon—dock workers, mainly—have a different smell beneath their sweat, a harsh alchemical stench belched out of the factory chimneys. It’s everywhere in Guerdon these days.
He can spot the thieves, too. They’re the ones that stink of fear.
He skulks around the edges of the big loud room, away from the crowded bar in the middle, away from the ring of wooden tables in the half-light. Heinreil told them to meet here after the House of Law job, but he’s a day late for that appointment, thanks to his unexpected detour into the depths with Aleena.
He’s been antsy ever since he parted company with the Keeper’s saint, after they made it back to the surface. Stepping from another nameless, lightless ghoul tunnel into a familiar subway track, pressing against the walls as a train rumbled by, blue sparks spitting from its alchemical engine. She’d thanked him for his service, muttered that all her money was gone with her torn backpack, and stomped off towards the lights of the nearest platform. And that was that, his duty to the elder ghouls done.
The elder’s invasive thoughts still wriggle like hot threads in his head, as though thinking them scarred Rat’s brain tissues. He wants a strong drink—or better yet a nice hunk of dead meat—to put him right, but they don’t serve ghouls here.
Rat doesn’t like this place. Too many people, too many eyes. And he’s got to look out for worm-eyes, too, thanks to Aleena. What was he thinking, pissing off the Crawling Ones?
He scans the crowd from his hiding place. Spar should be easy to spot if he’s here. Everyone gives the Stone Man plenty of space—some out of respect, most out of fear of contagion. Spar used to come here a lot, when Rat first knew him. A young man, looking for his father’s ghost. Lots of friends here, once. Old family friends, inherited from Idge. So many retellings of tales about Spar’s father, and his sacrifice. Rat grew bored, half slept in the corner, but young Spar was always rapt, always attentive, like he was paying his respects in the only way he could.
It wasn’t only the disease that drove all those friends away. Heinreil’s star rose, and Spar didn’t fight for his place. His circle dwindled, until there was just a few old men and a ghoul left. Pulchar retired to run a restaurant. Starris, toothless and drooling, sitting on a bench somewhere up on Holyhill. Daj got into a fight with a Gullhead and never woke up.
Cari doesn’t like the place either. A bad first impression—some lecherous sailor grabbed her when Spar first brought her here, and she was quick to go for her knife. Too quick, maybe, thinks Rat. She didn’t need to do that, not with the Stone Man there to guard her. They have few enough friends left as it is without trying to make more enemies.
Cari’s a lot harder to spot than Spar, but he’s sure she’s not here either. Rat called by the little room the two share down in the Wash, but there was no one there, and it didn’t smell like they’d been back since the Tower came down. Where are they?
Some sort of boom, Cari said.
Rat hisses softly through sharp teeth. Did the Tallowmen get his friends? Was he the only one to escape? Is that why they’re not here? No one in the crowd knows anything—and if Idge’s son was arrested and hauled off to Queen’s Point jail, everyone would know. Something else happened to them.
Upstairs, a door opens for a moment, spilling light and laughter into the main room, and Rat hears a familiar voice for a moment. Tammur, one of the old hands with the guild.
Rat sneaks upstairs. By custom, the upper ring of rooms is reserved for important members of the guild, for Heinreil and his cronies. Just like the lowest tunnels, and that giant cave with the hexagonal pillars, are for the elder ghouls, thinks Rat, which would make the taproom the warrens of hungry-eyed feral corpse eaters, and the streets outside the upper crypts of Gravehill. The city consumes and repeats itself.
He opens the door a crack, slides in like a rat, quiet and boneless and impossibly thin.
Inside, old thieves play cards. A casual game to pass the time, the same unremarkable hands going round the table, the pot waxing and waning but no one’s winning big. Their attention is held by the game so most of the players don’t notice Rat.
One of them does. A Crawling One, gloved pseudo-hands of knotted worms pulsing gently as it looks through its cards, holding each one up to its masked face as if that’s the only place it has eyes. From the purple sigils on its robe, its name is Nine Moons Falling. It’s a Brotherhood sorcerer. Worms wriggle free from its sleeves, its collar, and point their blunt heads at Rat as he circles the room. Like ghouls, the Crawling Ones are a nation unto themselves in the city, above and below, not really part of this surface realm of mortals and sunlight and life. Carrion eaters, both of them. Mystics, both of them, in their way, freelance ex-psychopomps grown fat on the spiritual energy of the godless dead.
Of course, no one would hire a ghoul as a sorcerer. Ghouls only get properly mystic when they grow old and weird, like the elders. Crawling Ones are sorcerers, all of them, weaving spells like they weave humanoid shapes out of worms.
Does it know that Rat tried to kill one of its brethren? For all the ghoul knows, it could even be the same Crawling One. They all smell alike, all the same sickly-sweet rot and faint hint of ozone. It doesn’t move, though; it just plays the Six of Knives and scoops the pot. Mimics human laughter so perfectly it’s eerie. Probably the laugh of some dead man that the worms ate. Everything he was, consumed and digested by the Crawling colony.
Rat sidles up to another card player.
“Hey, Tammur.”
Tammur nearly fumbles his cards in surprise. “Gods below. Don’t interrupt me when I’m playing, please.”
Tammur. The last of Idge’s inner circle to remain active in the guild. These days, Tammur’s an adviser, a fixer, almost legitimate. Owns lots of ships and warehouses along the Wash—few of them in his name, of course, and none that could be traced back to the guild. He threw his lot in with Heinreil years ago, but Spar still counts him as a friend.
He throws a coin into the empty space in the middle of the table, then turns to Rat.
“We all thought the Tallowmen had caught you. You were the only one to make it out, you know.”
“Spar?”
“He’s in custody. Jere Taphson, not the watch—for the moment. There’s little that can be done for the boy right now, I fear.”
