The Gutter Prayer, page 15
From next door he hears the steady footsteps of the Stone Man, still circling endlessly around his island prison. Shit, thinks Jere, he does owe Pulchar. Jere hurries over to a chest and pulls out a vial of alkahest. It’s his last one—he’ll have to get more, maybe get Kelkin to pay for it. He weighs in it in his hand in one of those moments of exhausted philosophical reverie one gets just after waking, when you’re still half wandering the paths of sleep. He imagines the city as a Stone Man, fear freezing it, locking it down, entombing its living crowds within the dead stone of the buildings. Is he the alkahest or the weapon that wounds?
He moves next door, shoves his little boat onto the water and punts across on the heads of dead men. For the first time, he’s unsettled by the thought that he sleeps thirty feet away from a mass grave. It’s hard to remember that those eerie statues were once human.
The Stone Man—the still-living Stone Man—pauses when he sees Jere.
“What’s happening?” asks Spar.
“More of your friend Heinreil’s devilry. Feel like talking about it?”
“No.”
“Have some more time to think about it. I may be gone for a good while, maybe all of tomorrow.” Jere throws the alkahest vial to Spar. “That’s the last one I have. You may want to hold off using it. Maybe you don’t really need that leg. Maybe you can get by with only one arm. I don’t know—how much more are you willing to give that man?”
“Not him,” said Spar thickly. “The Brotherhood.”
“Like there’s a difference.” Jere leaves the Stone Man with his thoughts; maybe this will be the night when he finally cracks, but it’s looking less and less likely. Jere’s learned to read Spar’s body language, and the Stone Man seethes whenever Heinreil’s name comes up, but he won’t speak. He’s Idge’s boy through and through beneath that stony shell. His father protected the Brotherhood from Kelkin by refusing to talk, refusing to deal after his arrest. If Spar does the same, THIS IS NOT THE LAST. If Heinreil’s behind the bombing, THIS IS NOT THE LAST.
From the streets, he’s got a better view of the carnage up at Glimmerside. Half the city’s woken up to look at the fireworks. The flashes of light are less frequent now, but there’s a ring of burning buildings. The city map, traced in red flames across the dark face of the hillside: Pilgrim Street, Desiderata, Redoubt.
He hails a cab. The raptequine—the horse-derived thing in harness—snarls at him. Alchemists brew them up in vats, same as the Gullheads. Faster and stronger than horses and, more importantly for city work, they shit less. Have to be fed on meat, though. Jere’s pulled belongings of more than a few murder victims out of the feeding troughs. Nothing of the bodies remained, not even bone.
He pays the cabbie double to get up there quickly. The beast hisses and roars as it thunders through the streets, snapping jaws clearing the path of drunks and gawkers. Jere rechecks his pistol, slides the blade from the cane to make sure it doesn’t stick. He’s girding himself for war, he realises, like he used to do before a battle. He can almost hear Marlo snoring beside him, the old mercenary’s battle cry.
Up the high street and into Glimmerside. Distant bells of fire engines, answered by the frantic ringing of church bells on Holyhill. Streets more thickly crowded here, the cab slowing to a crawl despite the raptequine’s growling. The cabbie shouts at people to clear the road, but they’ve nowhere to go. Up ahead, there’s a cordon of city watch blocking the roads, with a few prowling Tallowmen to back them up.
Jere dismounts and pays the cabbies, then shoulders his way through the crowd, using his size and strength to force his way up to the guards. One of them recognises him, and lets him past, waving off the Tallowmen who flicker towards him, murder in their unblinking waxwork eyes. The street beyond the cordon is thick with ash, sticky with lumps of white-red slime that Jere recognises finally as chunks of Tallowman flesh, chopped from the bodies of the destroyed wax men by some tremendous force. The lumps soften when the heat from the burning buildings touches them. Some of the remains twitch and seem to move away from the fires, but he can’t tell—and doesn’t want to know—if they’re just sliding downhill as they melt, or if there’s still some ghastly approximation of life in those dismembered bits.
Desiderata Street is a battleground.
Ankle-deep in wax. The whole east side gutted by fire, houses stripped to black skeletons. The firefighters’ alchemical slime drips, pungent and caustic, from the smouldering ruins to pool and puddle with the rivers of melted wax. All the alchemists’ works mingling together as they pour down a storm drain. A few figures in the alchemists’ livery move through the ruins like wading birds, carrying handheld slime thuribles, looking for lingering hotspots. They’re not using Stone Men, thinks Jere absently—is this less dangerous in the aftermath than the Tower of Law, or do they just not want to bring the plague up to this part of the city?
Halfway along the street there’s a big hole or crater. It doesn’t look like a bomb blast. More like something broke through the street and clawed its way frantically down towards the sewers below. Smoke rises from the still-hot edges of the hole; slime bubbles on the scorched and broken cobblestones. Through an open doorway, Jere can see into one of the houses near the hole. A guardsman kneels by a red mess on the floor, and pokes through it with his truncheon, retches when he finds a face. Jere can’t be sure in the dim light, but he’d lay odds that those remains are the butchered giblets of the people who lived there, chopped up by the same thrashing blades that dismembered all those Tallowmen.
He moves on. He hears the sound of weeping coming from an alleyway. At the end, seated on a step, two people. A young woman in a nightdress, a guard’s cloak draped around her shoulders. She’s weeping and clinging to her companion, a slight young man in dark clothes. When he sees Jere, he detaches himself from the girl, slipping out of her grasp. She sniffles, wipes her nose and tries to compose herself when she realises that they’re no longer alone. She takes her hands away from her eyes and Jere spots a huge welt on her forehead, like she’s been smashed with a mace.
Miren. The professor’s son. No wonder the girl’s weeping, if she’s looking for comfort from that cold boy.
“What happened?” asks Jere.
“My father’s been arrested.” Miren says it matter-of-factly; no trace of worry. “He told me to look out for you. He wants to see you.”
“Who’s arrested him? The watch, or …?” The Tallowmen don’t have the authority to arrest anyone, not officially. They’re backup for the watch, made to prevent crimes and keep the peace, nothing more. But half the Tallowmen in the city must be clustered around these few streets, or in pieces underfoot.
“The watch.”
“Right. What happened? Do you know?”
The girl on the doorstep rises, but Miren’s back by her side before she can speak, abruptly solicitous and soothing, pressing her back down and quietening her. Miren looks up at Jere and shakes his head. “I wasn’t here when it started. Some sort of monster, like a tide of black slime.”
Whatever the fuck that is, thinks Jere. For obscure supernatural threats, Ongent is his go-to informant, but the professor’s in custody. He makes a mental note to check with Dredger when he gets a chance.
“What about the thief girl?” He nearly says Thay, but Ongent asked that he not mention that bit of her history, and Tallowmen have ears like bats.
“Sh-she ran off,” stammers Eladora, shivering. “I don’t know where. She stole my bag,” she adds petulantly.
“I’ll keep an eye out for her,” mutters Jere. The Thay girl is a small problem compared to the devastation on the street outside, but it’s an annoying one. He released her into the professor’s keeping; both he and Ongent are liable for her future misdeeds. She’ll probably crawl back to Heinreil and beg for another job, or else fuck off again with the morning tide.
Back up to the main street. The fires are mostly under control, and the Tallowmen—both the dead and the quick—have melted away, one set into the gutters and the other into the shadows. There are only a few nervous watch standing around. Black robes gathering the dead, and firefighters washing the slime away.
The watch won’t let him into the professor’s house. It’s empty anyway. The professor’s been taken down to the watch’s keep, over on Queen’s Point. Jere hitches a ride with one of the departing watch-wagons. The crowds have mostly dispersed, too, but there’s still a sick energy in the air, sour adrenaline running through the streets. The city’s sleep has been disturbed; like some giant animal with stone sinews and nerves made of living people, Guerdon paces back and forth, testing the limits of its cage. There’s going to be more trouble tonight. Fighting down in the docks, maybe. Tavern brawls and looting, especially if most of the city’s Tallowmen seem to be running around rooftops in Glimmerside. Worse, if people think that whatever happened at Desiderata was another bombing.
At the keep they refuse to let Jere see the professor. He wheedles, calls in favours, threatens, all to no avail. Even old friends of his won’t help. Frustrated, he goes out into the courtyard to clear his head—and there’s the answer. A carriage, bearing the arms of the noble house of Droupe. Droupe, member of parliament; Droupe, in the pocket of the alchemists. From talking to Kelkin, Jere knows that the only thing that would get Droupe down to the low city after midnight is a command from the alchemists’ guild. The alchemists want to talk to Ongent before anyone else.
Jere heads back inside, finds a quiet bench in the waiting room and lies down. Sleep comes easily. He’s still got a thousand questions running through his mind, but now he’s got a battle to focus on. A battle to win.
Not even the host of guards and prisoners tromping through the keep in the aftermath of the dock riots wakes him.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Slip-sliding on rain-slick cobbles down the hills towards the harbour. Cari keeps to the back alleyways, the thief’s paths, staying off the main streets. Tallowmen run past every few minutes, leaping from rooftop to rooftop on their way to Glimmerside. The monsters’ lights are burning bright with alarm, and they burn the shadows away as they pass and force Cari to crouch low or press herself into a wall to avoid being seen. The Tallowmen have other business tonight, though.
Thunder rolls across the city.
The Raveller isn’t following her. It’s still fighting the Tallowmen. She prays to every god she knows that the two horrors will cancel each other out, black slime versus fleshy wax, shapeless shapes cutting and slicing each other until the rain washes them away. It’s not her problem. It’s not her city. Every step takes her closer to the sea and escape. There are always ships coming and going from Guerdon. Refugees come on ships from the lands wracked by the Godswar, and the ships go back laden with mercenaries and war-chymists plying their trade. Grain haulers from Severast and its sunny plains, ships carrying furs and amber from Varinth, traders from Paravos and the Sunset Lands.
Any one will do. The satchel she stole from Eladora is reassuringly heavy, enough to buy passage. The city sticks to Cari’s skin. The grit burrows into her pores and poisons her blood. She wants to wash it off, to slough free of Guerdon and her unwanted sainthood. The open ocean will cure her. She will be anonymous again, forgotten, able to be whoever she wants to be. West, she decides. She’ll sail west, away from Guerdon and away from the eldritch terrors of the Godswar, off to the new lands of the Archipelago. She clutches her knife for reassurance, and her hand brushes against the texture of the rubbery cord. She can get another knife, she reminds herself.
She skirts around the edge of the New Docks. The ships that moor here are big freighters, run by the guilds. She might be able to stow away on one, but she’s not willing to risk it, not when there are better options. The dockland taverns and flophouses have vomited their contents onto the street, as people come out to look at the pyrotechnics up in Glimmerside. Flashes of light, and flames. Bells ringing in the distance to sound the alarm. With luck, Eladora’s out of the line of fire. Ongent will have to find another fascinating prodigy to experiment on; if Cari’s curse goes away as mysteriously as it manifested when she leaves the city, she’ll be happy never to come back to Guerdon.
Cold tendrils slither across her brain, freezing the inside of her skull. Her skin crawls. This time, she recognises the onset of the vision, and can prepare for it. She skids to a halt, crouches in the shadows of a door and wraps her arms around her head as some forgotten god reaches down from heaven and breaks into her mind with a sledgehammer. This one’s not a vision, it’s a plea, a blast of raw emotion, of longing and loneliness and terror. Cari is in the belly of a ship a thousand miles from anyone she’s ever known, in a strange and terrifying land. She has no friends, no money, nothing to fall back on. She’s going to starve on the streets, get raped and murdered in an alleyway, going to die cold and alone. Cari is young again, in the darkness of the Thay mansion. Her father, pale and nervous, refuses to look at her, talks to her as he’d soothe a wild dog. She is alone. Cari is sick, feverish, huddled in sweat-soaked blankets in the stinking hold of a ship. Through the thudding pain in her head, through the thick fog, she hears two crewmen talking about whether they should throw her overboard before or after she dies. She’s weak, friendless, alone.
Come back, the visions say. Come back to us. You’re nothing without us.
The howling in her ears must be a hallucination, she tells herself as she staggers down the hill. No one else can hear the howling. A few people laugh at the drunk girl, or the mad girl, stumbling blindly towards the sea.
She rejects them again. She doesn’t need anyone, has never needed anyone. Once she gets to the ships, she can go wherever she wants. Leave Guerdon with all its entanglements and strangeness behind. Seek her fortune in the wide world beyond.
And then, almost as an afterthought, one last vision slithers across her mind.
Spar, in the prison. Still walking around that little island to keep his limbs supple. In the centre of the island, on a little shelf of rock, lies a vial of alkahest, only it isn’t alkahest. To her eyes, it’s stained black, corrosive and poisonous, like a coiled viper. It’s horribly wrong. Even at this remove, even seen through some weird divine revelation from a distance, just looking at it sickens her. She wants to look away, to escape this contagion, but the vision holds her there.
With three thunderous footsteps, Spar crosses the island and picks up the vial. He flexes his blocky fingers, causing little scales of stone to fall from the joints. Those hands are strong enough to break iron, and even though the vial is made of tough brass, he picks it up as gingerly as he can. He rotates it so the steel needle points down, then positions it over a crack in the stone armour of his hip.
Cari screams a warning to her friend, but she’s not there, not then. He doesn’t hear her. One miracle, but not another.
The needle punches through the softer skin beneath the stone, through the hardening encrustation like grey warts that presages petrification. He presses the plunger, and the liquid floods into his veins.
She sees him tense in anticipation of the alkahest. He described it to her once as warm acid, a good pain beneath the skin. It reminded him that he was still alive, still flesh, not all cold stone yet. He welcomed the pain.
Not this time. His back arches. His limbs flail like falling pillars in an earthquake. He topples, smashing into the ground like the Tower of Law falling on Cari. The noises he makes are nothing human. He thrashes, rolling and rumbling around. If he rolls to the edge of the little island, she realises, he won’t be able to stop himself from drowning.
The vision fades.
“Out of the way, idiot!” Four big men, dock workers, carrying heavy boxes, stomp past her. Ahead, smokestacks limned in moonlight, is a ship. Stink of rotting fish and oil, sweat and salt. She’s at the docks.
Her vision’s still doubled. She shakes her head to clear it. All her visions so far have been real. She was right about the death of the priest in the Holy Beggar, about the Raveller coming to find her at Ongent’s house. Ongent claimed that her story about the ghouls was correct, too. The other visions she doesn’t understand, but has no reason to doubt them. Whoever these gods are, they’re playing fair when they invade her brain. They haven’t tried to—or couldn’t—lie to her.
So Spar’s dying. Poisoned. Up in that stinking prison at the back of the Wash. She didn’t see anyone else in that vision. No sign of the thief-taker or his goons. Spar’s dying alone.
He can walk out, she tells herself. All he needs to do is tell the thief-taker how to take down Heinreil. All he needs to do is talk. Buy himself out of jail and destroy that bastard Heinreil at the same time. Spar hates him, too, this should be easy. This shouldn’t be her problem.
She saw the needle punching into his living skin, tasted the poison as it entered his blood. Sensed his stupid, frustrating, misplaced courage. He’s not going to yield.
The dockers deposit the boxes with a pile of their fellows, and join the chain of labourers passing boxes up the gangplank. The ship’s being loaded in the dark so she can catch the early morning tide. From the look of her, bound for the new lands to the west, for the Archipelago, for the Silver Coast and the Hordingers.
She unslings her satchel, digs out the bag of coins. It’s heavy in her hand.
At the end of the gangplank is a man in an oiled rain cloak, barking orders. All she needs to do is walk up to him and hand him the money, and ask for a cabin. She can go on board, curl up on the bed and listen to the creaking of the hull and the waves until she sails out of Guerdon. The visions will fall away the further she gets from the city. She’ll be free.
She doesn’t have to stay. She chooses to do so.
Faster now, not stumbling anymore, walking uphill into the warren of the Wash. Accelerating into trouble.
From the outside, the old lithosarium looks abandoned, but Cari knows from her experiences on the streets, as well as Professor Ongent’s lecture, that the city finds new uses for old shells. Palaces become communes; watchtowers get turned into smokehouses or shanties. When the cold rains sluice down on the city, they wash the people from the streets into whatever shelter they can find. So, there are two reasons why this building might still look abandoned.
