The Gutter Prayer, page 16
First, it’s a lithosarium. The days of panic over the Stone Plague may be in the past, and the curse of the Stone Men is now just another hazard, another fact of life, but people still fear the contagion. The alchemists have their cure, yes, but alkahest is expensive. A jar of cautic paste, applied to the skin, guards against contagion but even that jar costs a month’s wages for a labourer. The lithosarium’s empty of Stone Men now, all save one, but people might still fear invisible motes of sickness ingrained into the rough stone walls.
If that were the case, though, there wouldn’t be graffiti on the walls, and the inner corridors of the building would have been choked with rot and fruiting bodies and spreading slime from the pools. There were people sheltering there, she guesses, only a few homeless vagrants with nowhere else to go. Like she was, when she arrived in Guerdon. It’s the Wash; anywhere dry is all right on cold nights.
There’s no one there now, though, which implies the second possibility—that the building’s guarded. She never saw anyone except Jere the thief-taker there during her brief incarceration, but he’s been holding Spar for several days now. He must have help.
She watches the closed front door of the lithosarium from across the street, with its little viewing slit and speaking grill so people could visit their afflicted relatives without risking touching them. The bust of a stern-faced man stares out from its place above the door. Another sort of stone man, this one made beautiful and perfectly smooth, but someone has smashed out his eyes and tried to scrape away the name beneath the bust. She can read only the first letter, a K. It’s not something Cari would have noticed before, but she’s clearly absorbed something of the professor’s lectures because she notes that there’s no religious symbology around the bust. It’s a civic response to the horrors of the plague, built thirty years ago at its height.
There are no windows on the ground level of the lithosarium, and all the second-storey ones are bricked up. The place could hold an army of guards.
Cari circles around the building. This part of the Wash is quiet now. There are still fires burning up on Glimmerside, but they’re under control. The streets and alleyways nearby are mostly empty. This is the thieving hour, when honest people sleep.
A moment of doubt—what if Spar’s not there? She’s basing all this on a vision. They’ve checked out so far, but she still fears to rely on them. Jere’s a thief-taker, a bounty hunter, not part of the city watch. He hunts wanted criminals and sells them to the watch. As a member of the Brotherhood—a real member, not Cari’s loose association—there’s a price on Spar’s head. If Jere’s cashed him in, then Spar will be down at Queen’s Point. Unreachable behind the towering walls.
She completes her circuit of the lithosarium. It’s bigger than she expected, a sprawling warren of rooms. One section’s been reclaimed by the city and turned into a tenement, but it’s still a large warren of wards and cells, chapels and assembly halls. Feeding rooms, where they used to crack open the frozen jaws of plague victims to pump them full of onion soup and keep them alive once they’d lost the use of their limbs, their mouths. There are several other entrances on the ground floor, but they’re all bricked up, all except one, which is securely locked. The door is new and sturdy. She’s not getting in that way. This is taking too long. There are too many suspicious eyes in the Wash. At least if she gets caught by Jere there’s a chance he’ll hand her back to Ongent. If it’s the watch, she might get away with a beating. A Tallowman, or Heinreil’s lot, and she’s dead in a gutter.
She creeps back around to the tenement, worry fluttering in her stomach. The tenement has no front door, just an archway into an unlit stairwell. She slips in; she knows that the way to avoid being noticed is to act like you belong. Walk like you own the place, but the people who live here don’t walk with pride either. Like her, they slip and hunch and hide. The stairwell smells of piss. Obscene graffiti on the walls mixed with religious ravings. This place is better than where she stayed when she first arrived in the city, worse than the little flat she stayed in with Spar. Up three turns of the staircase, and she finds a boarded-up window that should look out onto the roof of the lithosarium. No doubt they boarded it up to avoid the reminder of the plague hospital next door.
Voices echo up the stairwell from down below. Drunks out on the street, arguing. She freezes until their voices fade as they pass by the archway. In one of the tenement rooms, someone stirs, shouts a groggy curse down at the revellers, then goes back to sleep.
Cari’s knife is still useless as a weapon while bound with the alchemical cord, but she’s got the little kitchen knife she borrowed from Eladora’s. She manages to prise one of the boards off the window before the cheap blade snaps. She lowers the board carefully to the ground once she loosens it, then pulls another plank free. She wriggles out through the gap, twists around and lower herself onto the mossy roof of the lithosarium.
Scrambling on hands and knees. The green sliming her fingers, her palms, the cassock of her stupid grey scholar’s robe. Her shoulder aches where the Tallowman stabbed her, but the bandages that Ongent gave her hold and she doesn’t think the wound’s reopened.
She wonders how she’s going to get Spar out of this place even if she rescues him from the island prison. It’s not like a Stone Man can climb out over the roofs like this. His weight would smash right through these rotten old tiles, even if she somehow got him up here. Going out on ground level may be the only option. Spar can deal with a few guards, no problem, those great rocky fists could smash a Gullhead into paste with one blow, but they’ll make a lot of noise. Bring a lot more attention, a lot more trouble.
Maybe the Tallowmen are all dead. Maybe every waxwork in the city converged on Desiderata Street and got chopped up by the Raveller. Maybe she and Spar can just walk out of the door.
Distracted, she puts her weight on the wrong tile.
Slip-slide, falling, slithering towards a sheer drop. Three storeys down to splatter on the cobbles of the Wash. She catches herself as she hits the old gutter, arm now caked in more slime and pigeon shit. Cari pulls herself back onto the roof, moves more carefully this time.
The roof is a wilderness of angles and old chimneys. She was unconscious when Jere carried her out of the water cell. Hell, she was unconscious when they put her in there, too, both times struck down by her visions. If she’d been awake, she might have noticed the route that Jere took, been able to work out where the open ceiling of the flooded chamber is relative to the front door. Shit shit shit. She can’t even be sure that Spar’s in this lithosarium at all. Jere could have brought her from some other prison to his office when he sold her to Ongent.
Far away across the city, the bells chime. Three in the morning.
The Holy Beggar isn’t ringing. It’s the closest church. She should be able to hear its bells clearest of all, but it’s silent. The last time she heard those bells was just before her vision of the Raveller consuming the fat priest.
The answer hits her like one of the visions, but there’s no pain, no disjunction, just recognition.
The bells. It’s the bells. The bells are somehow giving her the visions. The other churches, like the three up on Holyhill and the ones beyond, they’re too far away to hit her like they did before. She can feel them, the chill night air crackling with their unwanted power, their painful inhuman sight, but it’s not hammering into her head this time.
Carefully, she stands up. The slimy tiles make for unsteady footing, but she cannot bring herself to kneel or prostrate herself for this. Not now.
Then she listens to the bells. Opens herself to their vision. Trying to control it this time, now that their cacophony is diminished.
She’s looking at herself from across the city. She can see herself as if looking through a telescope, despite the distance, despite the darkness. It’s like the building she stands on, all its brick and stone and wood and frankly shoddy roof tiles are just phantoms, and she’s the only real and living thing there. She has no eyes, but her attention shifts fractionally. There, across the roof, behind that ridge, is a square open to the sky. And there, surrounded by water that appears cloudy and pale in her vision, is Spar.
She’s too late.
Her perspective snaps back to her own body. She’s Cari again. Somehow, the distant chiming of the bells sounds to her like a frustrated snarl.
She races across the rooftop, scrambles over the ridge, and stands on the lip of the water cell. It’s too dark to see, though lingering after-images from the vision superimposed on the blackness show her the outline of the little island. She can hear him, his stifled whimpers of agony through frozen lips.
She’s too late, but she tries anyway. The wall of the cell is too slick to climb, up here, but she gets as far down as she can, dangles for a moment, thin legs poking out of her lumpy grey robe, then lets herself drop into the water. It’s like slamming into a wall of ice, but it breaks her fall, and she kicks back up to the surface and treads water, hiding amid the frozen crowd of dead Stone Men. Spar moans, a sound like an earth slide, plates in his throat grinding off one another. She can’t make out any words. He tries to roll towards her, but another spasm catches him and slams him back down, as though invisible hands forcibly restrained him. She watches the iron gate for a few moments, wondering if any of Jere’s guards heard the splash of her landing in the water, but the corridors outside are silent. She swims over. The gate’s locked, as before, but there’s a narrow gap between the top of the gate and the bottom of the arch, wide enough for her squeeze through.
Drawn up against the wall is the small wooden boat and an oar, and hanging from a hook above is a key. She lets herself hope it’s going to be that easy.
She punts the boat over to the island.
Spar tries to say something, maybe her name, but he’s convulsing inside his stone shell. His eyes keep rolling back. She glimpses his tongue, and it’s gone scaly, covered with thin plates of stone.
“It’s me,” Cari whispers, “Cari. I came back. I’m breaking you out of here. Hold still, okay?”
She’s not sure how she manages it—it’s more like she wrestles the boat under him than anything else—but she gets him in. Just before she shoves off, she spots the syringe of alkahest from her vision. It looks just like the rest. She picks it up. Still half full of poison. She pulls the plunger back so the needle retreats into its housing, like a snake withdrawing its fangs, and carefully places it in her satchel. It might be important, later. Spar groans when she puts it near him, instinctively trying to roll away from the poison.
Crossing the little lake is nerve-wracking. One convulsion and Spar could smash the boat to flinders, or roll over the edge into the cold black water below. He’s too heavy to float, and there’s no way she could drag him out alone. One convulsion and he drowns.
Reaching the gate raises both their spirits. She gets him out of the boat, like the great invalided boulder he is, and halfway down the corridor before she can’t support his weight any longer. Cari snarls in frustration—to have got so close to rescuing Spar despite everything, and all she’s managed to do is get him twenty feet clear of his cell. And all because he wouldn’t roll over on the fucking thieves’ Brotherhood like he should have.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” says Cari, lowering him to lean against the wall. Her skin tingles where his stone arm was draped across her shoulder, the back of her neck, her cheek. She runs her fingers over it, they come away bloody from tiny abrasive scratches. The burn marks from the Tower of Law sting, too, painful again. A sudden fear of contracting the Stone Plague comes over her, for which she irrationally blames Eladora.
Spar manages to lift his head, grind out some words. “Did you … make … deal?” His voice is horrible, like it’s coming from deep underground, buried alive in sucking mud and weighed down by boulders.
“No,” she spits. “And even if I had, fuck you. I’m trying to save your life.” She darts away, glancing left and right through empty archways into empty rooms. Then she comes to a wooden door set into an old arch. Jere’s office. She presses her ear to it, hears nothing. It’s unlocked.
Papers and books and other junk on the desk. On the wall, two hooks supporting a heavy iron-shod staff that looks perfect as a crutch for Spar. She takes it down and lays it next to the door while she keeps searching. Cabinets with more papers. The desk, next. She remembers Jere consulting a big red ledger, rescued from the ruin of the House of Law. That book contained birth records. Was it those records or her visions that attracted Professor Ongent’s attention?
She checks the desk. The ledger’s gone. There’s a box containing a ball of black gunk there, soft as warm butter, the same alchemical substance that Jere bound her knife with, and a little vial of purple liquid that must be the solvent, which she pockets. A gun. Other tools she doesn’t recognise.
“You’re the Thay girl.”
An unfamiliar voice. Male. His breath smells of booze but he’s not that drunk yet. Her right hand finds the gun.
She turns around. A man, balding, paunchy but with big shoulders, leather stab vest. His hands are raised, arms open, like he’s trying to avoid threatening her.
The reverse isn’t true. Cari’s never fired a gun before, but at this range she can’t miss. She aims the gun at fat man’s fat face.
“I’m here for my friend,” she says. She nods at Jere’s chair beside the desk. “Sit down.” She can use the alchemical stuff to tie him up, she thinks, that’s what it’s for.
The fat man doesn’t move. “No, love, you’re not. He’s staying put until he cracks, and that dragon ain’t loaded.”
He grabs for her. She pulls the trigger, but nothing happens, and then his hands clamp around her like manacles. She twists, kicking and biting at him as he lifts her into the air. He wraps one strong arm around her waist, trapping her left arm, turning her away from him, and his right hand is at her right shoulder, fingers probing at her knife wound, ripping open the stitches. The useless gun falls to the ground.
Fat man slams her down on the table, winding her, and then straddles her chest, pinning her down with his bulk. She can’t move, can’t breathe. “Hey now, hey now,” he says, like he’s trying to soothe her. She wriggles, wrestles, but can’t get free. She even turns her mind inward, bargaining with whatever supernatural force sends the visions. What’s the fucking point of being a saint if they won’t help you in times like this?
But she’s not blessed with supernatural strength. She doesn’t conjure hellfire.
“Hey now.” Keeping her pinned, still astride her stomach, he reaches down and scrabbles in the desk. He’s going to tie her up with that alchemical stuff.
The whole building shakes with Spar’s roar. The wooden door is smashed to splinters as the Stone Man staggers into the room. Fat guy is so terrified, he pisses himself right on top of Cari. His weight lifts off her as he goes for the gun on the floor instead, fumbling to slot an alchemical cartridge into the weapon.
Exhausted by the effort of dragging himself along the corridor, Spar topples like a pillar in an earthquake, but even as he falls Cari’s moving. She shoves up, and Fat Man half slides awkwardly off the table, their legs tangled. He’s still going for the gun, but she gets her fingers into the ball of black goo in the drawer first and slams it down, gluing her hand and his hand and the gun to the floor all at the same time.
She twists and rips her hand free as the black slime hardens. She skips over Spar’s form even as he hits the floor with an earthquake crash, and grabs the heavy staff. Her hand, still encrusted with the slime, is now glued to it, but that’s all right. Fat man struggles to rise, but the goo has him tight. Try as he might, he can’t defend himself with one arm glued to the floor. The staff’s unwieldy for someone Cari’s size, but she brings it down as hard as she can across the back of fat man’s head, and he’s down.
“Alk,” groans Spar. Alkahest. He needs alkahest.
There’s a small chest near the door. Locked, but she searches the unconscious fat man and finds a matching key. It’s empty. The poisonous vial was the last one.
“There’s none here. We’ll find some once we’re out of here.” Spar groans again, in wordless agony, but, with her help, he manages to pull himself upright.
A few droplets of the purple liquid dissolve the bonds holding her hand to the staff. She pushes the metal head of the staff under Spar’s armpit, so he can lean on it. It creaks as he puts his full weight on it, but it holds.
“Come on.”
As they stagger towards the door, towards the city, she pours the rest of the purple vial on her dagger. The black slime melts away, revealing the pure sharp steel of the blade beneath.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The sewer mouth is an old one, connecting the deep channel that runs under Castle Hill to the harbour. These days, most of the city’s waste is shunted to newer tunnels that catch the sewage of Guerdon’s millions and carries it away off east, dumping it into the sea beyond the Shad Rocks. This tunnel is mostly dry now. Rat crouches next to a rusted gate and watches the ships. Even with ghoulish night-vision, the cold waters are an all-consuming blackness, pockmarked with flotsam and trash.
Rats—four-legged furry ones—scurry past Rat’s hooves. Rats don’t fear ghouls. It’s the presence of the other thieves that spooks them. He led six of Heinreil’s rogues through the sewers to this place.
Their target is a cargo ship, the Ammonite. She’s moored to a buoy on the edge of the deep-water channel. Wallowing low in the water, fully loaded. Competition for space at Guerdon’s docks is fierce, so the Ammonite’s owners had her moved to this mooring, like a neglected dog chained up in a yard, to wait until they’re ready to depart. With the Godswar in full swing to the east, ships usually travel in convoys for protection against divine wrath and holy sea monsters. Kraken saints, their once-human bodies grossly warped and swollen, bones soft as mush.
