The Gutter Prayer, page 14
“Good night to you.” The watchman nods and passes by.
The thing turns and walks towards Desiderata street, towards Carillon. It looks right at her, and it recognises her.
In that instant, she knows its name, its title: Raveller.
For a moment, she’s outside the city. She’s nothing more than a shadow of a shadow, a residual darkness hiding under a stone. The stones are cracked and worn, part of some old ruin. Frost on the ground—it’s winter, last winter, around the time Carillon arrived back in Guerdon. The darkness writhes, consumes insects, and from them learns to grow legs. It scuttles out of its hiding place, snatches up a bird, takes wings and eyes, knitting a form together from strands of dissolved flesh and spirit. From afar, the Raveller saw her then. It came to the city to find her.
The vision ends, and she’s back entirely in her own form, her consciousness back crammed down into the thief on the windowsill. Looking down to the end of the street, she sees the figure of the priest standing in the shadows, scanning the fronts of the houses. She presses herself against the wall, sliding back into Eladora’s bedroom without being spotted. From the Raveller’s hesitation, she guesses that it can’t sense her now that she’s out of that divine perspective, now that she’s no longer in communion with whatever deity likes to send her sightseeing across Guerdon and tell her stories about long-dead ghouls.
“Carillon?” hisses Eladora from the corridor. “If you’re going to get me up in the dead of—” She comes to the door, sees her ransacked room, and shrieks. “What in the gods’ name have you done to my things?”
Cari slams the window down. “Shut up! The thing from the Holy Beggar’s here. It’s looking for me.”
Eladora’s face clouds in confusion. Clearly, Ongent and Miren don’t share everything with her.
“Get Miren,” she says.
“He’s gone out. On an errand for Professor Ongent.”
“Bolt the doors,” orders Cari. When Eladora doesn’t move fast enough, Cari grabs her by the arm and shoves her in the direction of the stairs. “It’s saint stuff. Something unholy. Move!” Finally obedient, Eladora stumbles downstairs. Clack of the heavy bolts. The door’s double-bolted and reinforced, which struck Cari as suspicious when she first arrived. Now, it seems also prudent.
Cari checks the street outside, peering out of the window from the side, careful not to reveal herself. The priest moves slowly up Desiderata, going door to door, zigzagging from one side of the street to the other and back again. Outside each door, he just pauses for a long moment, pressing against it. He’s doing something, and Cari can’t figure out what that is until he’s closer. The priest-thing comes to the door, covering the keyhole and letterbox with his body, and then shudders. Cari sees shadows moving inside the house, whip-quick, smearing blood against the inside of the windows. She once saw an octopus in a glass tank in the market at Severast, and its tentacles slithering over the glass reminds her of those shadows.
The priest-thing gathers itself, sucking its tentacles back into its form. Cari’s sure that everyone else in that house, and every house along the street from here to the corner, is dead.
The priest turns and starts to cross the street towards Cari. All the bolts in the world aren’t even going to slow the Raveller down.
Run, then. She checks the little window in the hallway that looks out over the back of the house, over yards and alleyways to the distant bulk of Gethis Station. Little lights crawl over the rooftops. The Tallowmen are out in force tonight, knives bright in their hands, looking for criminals to gut and slice, blind to the far worse danger on Cari’s doorstep.
Her decision’s made before she even really knows it. She returns to Eladora’s bedroom, leans out of the window. Eladora’s little pistol has a hell of a kick for its size. The priest’s head explodes in a spray of colour-smeared slime. Translucent tentacles like flowing glass sprout from the ruin of its skull, lashing up blindly at the house. Cari falls back onto the floor of the bedroom, landing awkwardly. She crawls into the hallway and kicks Eladora’s door shut with one foot, then braces it, holding it shut as tentacles scrabble at it. She hears shrieks from downstairs, but it’s the sound of Eladora freaking out in terror, not being sliced to ribbons by the thing outside.
Cari doesn’t expect the little pistol to do much to the Raveller. She knows—but doesn’t know how she knows—that it would take a much bigger gun to do any real damage. She knows—instinctively, intuitively, like a childhood memory—that the Raveller borrows shapes because it is inherently shapeless. It doesn’t have bones to break or organs to burst. It doesn’t bleed. In the dark, endless catacombs beneath the world, the Ravellers writhe and slither and feast. It’s a spirit made flesh, the shadow cast by a dark god, a stolen form assembled from dried blood and the leavings of sacrifices. A thing of nightmare.
But this is Desiderata Street. The edge of the University District, bordering on the good part of Glimmerside. This is perilously close to being a quality part of town. Break the peace of the night with a pistol shot down in the Wash or Five Knives and no one cares. Let off a gun here, though, and someone notices.
And these days, somethings.
Light pours in over Cari’s shoulder for an instant, as though someone lit a bonfire right outside the window. Footsteps run across the roof of the house, an inhumanly fast drumbeat. The Tallowmen are here.
Cari races down the stairs. Eladora’s still standing by the front door, frozen like a statue, making this keening screech. She’s right next to the letterbox. “Get back!” shouts Cari, and she runs forward, but it’s too late.
A slim white hand pushes through the letterbox and dissolves into a thousand flailing tentacles, reaching for Cari and Eladora. Some of the tentacles have human eyes, Cari notices in that split second between seeing them and being devoured by them. Others have teeth.
The letterbox suddenly blazes with arcane power.
The door of the house explodes in blue light. Eladora’s wail is drowned out by the Raveller’s inhuman roar of pain from a hundred different mouths. The force of the blast sends Cari sprawling against the end of the bannister. It picks Eladora up and throws her down the hallway like a doll. The door was warded, Cari guesses, some of Ongent’s sorcery. She knows fuck-all about magic, and after tonight really doesn’t want to get any closer to it.
She gets up. Sways. Blood’s pouring from her mouth, her nose, and she feels like she’s been kicked in the stomach, but nothing’s broken. She grabs Eladora’s satchel, then hauls Eladora to her feet. Her cousin’s stunned. Red stains spread across her once white nightdress. She’s still alive, though.
Outside, through the burning wreck of the door, she sees the seething colourless pool of the Raveller writhing in the middle of the street. It’s lost all shape—there’s nothing left of the priest from the Holy Beggar, or the beautiful woman, or any of the other faces it stole before it came to Guerdon. Three Tallowman stand around outside, like copies of each other from the same mould, every one of them with the same manic grin, the same upraised knife. Waiting for something fleshy to stab. The Raveller obliges, taking on the shape of some underworld ogre, a hulking brute with insect eyes. Glassy razor-edged tentacles burst from its arms and flanks, and slice through waxy flesh.
The Tallowman’s wounds seal as quickly as they are opened, just like the alchemical goo on Cari’s dagger.
The waxworks stab back, lightning-fast, a hundred little cuts in the Raveller’s belly. Those too heal almost instantly.
It’s not that they can’t hurt each other. It’s just going to take a great deal of effort.
The Raveller lunges forward, grabs one of the Tallowmen, spreadeagles it, pulling waxy arms out to the left and right. Then it sprouts a bigger tentacle from its chest and cuts the waxwork clean in two, exposing the treated spinal cord of its wick. The Tallowman’s light goes out, and it dies.
The other two go into a frenzy, driving their knives as deep into the mutable substance of the Raveller as their inhuman strength can muster, raking deep gouges into the monster faster than it can heal. All three creatures move faster than the human eye can follow—it’s like a catfight with knives and tentacles.
Cari’s not going that way. Nothing’s going out of that door without being turned into bloody ribbons. She runs down the hallway to the back of the house, pulling the stunned Eladora with her. Out into the little cobbled yard at the back of the house, ducking under a washing line, up over a low wall into the alleyway behind. More lights race across distant rooftops as more and more Tallowmen are drawn by the fray. The two surviving ones in the fight are blazing brightly now, like beacon fires.
The alleyway’s shadows are cool and concealing. Cari half carries Eladora as far as she can, down past the end of the row and across Pilgrim Street to another sheltered yard. It’s safe enough. She unwraps her cousin’s limp arms from around her neck and lays Eladora down in a quiet corner. Eladora’s face is horribly bruised and blood’s oozing from a gash on her forehead, but her colour’s good and she’s breathing steadily. She’s even half conscious.
“Carillon?”
“Sssh, ssh. Just lie there, all right. Everything’ll be fine.”
“That’s my bag …” Eladora paws at the leather satchel on Cari’s shoulder.
“I just need to borrow it.”
“You’ll ruin it,” mutters Eladora dreamily. “You ruin everything nice.”
Charming, thinks Cari.
“It’s your mother in you. Silva always said so … up from the dark, and whispering …” Eladora slips back into unconsciousness. Cari straightens up. Glances right, back up Desiderata, just in time to see a white flash of light like a thunderbolt, and then another and another. Screaming, and glass shattering. So many Tallowmen it looks like the whole city’s on fire.
Not her problem.
Not her city.
She vanishes into the night. Down, down towards the docks and the sea and escape.
CHAPTER TEN
You learn to sleep anywhere on campaign. When you don’t know when you’ll next get a chance to rest, you make the most of every opportunity. There was this one guy in Jere’s old company, a little Severastian named Marlo, who claimed that he’d slept through most of the Battle of the White Forest while on the front lines. The Bloody-Handed Saint came crashing through the trees, swinging his holy death sword that slays twenty men with every blow, and twenty-one fell down. It takes a special dedication to lie down and fall asleep while surrounded by the god-blasted corpses of your comrades, but Marlo managed it.
Jere learned the trick from him, but he’s lost it in the last few years. A soldier has it easy—there’s someone to tell you where to go, what to do, and you can just put your head down and follow orders. Thief-taking is a different business. Jere is bone-tired after a day traipsing around the city, but he can’t quieten his mind.
The morning, checking into the Beckanore case—talking to contacts in the army, visiting the people from Old Haith that lived in the city. The Old Haithers wanted to build a sea fort on the island of Beckanore, and claimed that the city of Guerdon had ceded the island to them in some ancient treaty. Parliament had told them to go shove their claims up the Crown of Haith’s necrotic arsehole, only in more diplomatic language, and now Old Haith was making all sorts of threats. Sabre-rattling, warships sailing suspiciously close to Guerdon’s trade routes, the “mysterious” burning of the mostly abandoned monastery on Beckanore. Most of them would come to nothing—Old Haith had bigger problems elsewhere. They wanted the sea fort to defend against the Ishmere or whoever they were fighting this month in the war; against saint-blessed armadas of wave and storm. The last thing Old Haith wanted to do was piss off the neutral city of Guerdon, and the last thing Guerdon wanted to do was have to give up its immensely profitable weapon-selling neutrality and get involved.
Blowing up the whole House of Law to make the dispute go away, though—however satisfying—didn’t seem likely.
Dredger was looking into the alchemical bomb, so Jere tried to push that out of his head for the moment. Large-scale alchemical weapons … worse than the fucking gods, thought Jere. At least when a saint or sorcerer or even a bloody actual living manifestation on the battlefield takes a shot at you, you can see it coming. They mean to kill you. It’s honest. Alchemy kills indiscriminately and invisibly. No swords or bullets, no blasting spells, just a little pinch of dust in the air that gets into your lungs and strangles you, or rain that seeps through your skin and turns your guts into sticking black rotten mush.
Marlo, Jere suddenly recalls, died in his sleep. Took a nap on ground tainted by some alchemy bomb, and never woke up. When they poked him, their fingers punched right through his ribcage. The poison in the ground had leeched all the strength from him, turned him into something with the consistency of wet paper.
THIS IS NOT THE LAST on walls around him, or in his mind’s eye.
Alchemy bombs going off in the city. He turns that thought over in his mind. Even Kelkin, worst-case Kelkin, never suggested that idea in their conversation yesterday. The House of Law bombing as a trial run, a pre-emptive strike for some other city or country attacking the fat prize of Guerdon. The whole city like Marlo, going to sleep and never waking up again, poisoned in their beds. Invisible dust in the air, poison in the water. Unseen horrors.
Finally, he’d gone back to Pulchar’s, to the alley beside the restaurant, with its bins full of scraps and rats, with its smell of frying meat and onions. Pulchar had been a guild thief once, years ago, before Heinreil took over. He’d come through the purges and the bad nights pretty well. Retiring to run a cookhouse was a lot better than choking on your own blood in an alley. Jere had waited until the old man came out for a smoke. The conversation ran through Jere’s mind over and over.
“What’s the special tonight, Pulchar?”
The old man spat. “Again? Gods below. Go feed a ghoul.”
Jere tapped his iron-shod staff on an overflowing bin. “Maybe I will. Maybe I’ll come back with a few of my lads. Who’s eating here tonight? How many bounties?”
Pulchar closed the door to the kitchen behind him, moved down the alleyway, lowered his voice. “I gave you the House of Law job, didn’t I?”
“The House of Law, yeah. Picked up some street trash girl, the Tallows got another. And, aye, I’ve got Idge’s boy sitting in one of my cells.” Pulchar flinched at that; he’d been part of Idge’s inner circle, back in the day, and still owed some loyalty to Idge’s memory. “Of course, you said it was a break-in. Not that the whole fucking building was going to explode. I nearly got my beard singed, you know.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” hissed Pulchar. “I heard a robbery, not a bloody bombing.”
“Do you reckon it was Heinreil?”
Pulchar glanced back, took a long drag on his cigarette. “I don’t know. What was the score? What were they after?”
“You tell me.”
“Maybe. Maybe. I know Heinreil’s moved alchemical weapons. We never touched the stuff when I was working, but these days, with the war so close …” The cook paused. “Is this the war? Are they going to attack Guerdon?”
“Where’s Heinreil getting the weapons? Where’s he moving them to?”
“I just hear what’s said at dinner. I’m not in the Brotherhood anymore, am I?”
“If you hear anything …”
“I’ll keep it to myself. Fuck it, come back with your bully-boys. Bring the waxworks too for all I care. I’m sick of this!”
Jere tried another tack. “Fair enough. I’ve got Idge’s boy. Let’s see if he can live up to his father. Gods, stone, though. Horrible way to go. Like I told him, all I need is a tongue to speak, and the rest of him can go cold …”
“The alchemist’s cure—”
“Is expensive, and I’ve got to eat same as your customers in here. Give. Me. Something.” Jere’s staff thudded into the ground three times, underlining his demands.
“This is all I have, all right? I don’t want to see you ever again after this.”
“You can’t cook for shit, so I won’t be back here to eat.”
“The word is that Heinreil’s looking for Ven the Goat.”
“And who,” asked Jere, “is Ven the Goat?”
“Call yourself a fucking thief-taker … Ven the Goat, man. He robbed the fucking High Cathedral, didn’t he? Stole all these sacred cups and jewelled robes and the like. Biggest haul in a hundred years.”
“Oh, right.” Long before Jere’s time. “What happened to him?”
Pulchar shrugged. “If I knew that, I’d have told Heinreil, not you. Drank himself to death would be my guess. Although …”
“Go on.”
“Ven used to say that what he stole wasn’t a fraction of the real treasure. Said the biggest prize in Guerdon was in the church, right in front of everyone, but no one ever saw it. Maybe he found religion.”
“Right.” Jere rolled his eyes. “Hear the phrase ‘this is not the last’ recently?”
“Someone wrote it on a wall up near Mercy Street after the Tower came down. Yeah, everyone heard that.” Pulchar flung the end of his cigarette into a corner, startling a mouse. “So, where’s next to burn?”
Shouts outside. The wild ringing of distant bells. Jere rolls out of bed and peers out of the grimy little window. A cluster of fast-moving lights in the distance, and then a bright blue flash and a sound like thunder. Up at the church end of Glimmerside, by the looks of it, by the university. Another bombing? The next to burn?
He groans as he rises. Fuck, he’s old now. His side aches where that stone hit him yesterday. He pulls on his boots, grabs a cloak. Debates taking the staff, but he doesn’t want to aggravate the injury to his ribs hauling that big stick around, so he goes for his trick cane instead. Loads his pistol, and his spare. Knife in his boot, too, ready for a night on the town.
