The Gutter Prayer, page 21
Cari finds a stew-stained funnel next to the pot. The narrow end is bright with the blood of recent scrapes. They must have had to force it between Spar’s locked jaws. She fills her own bowl with the thin fish stew and sits down at the table, suddenly ravenous. “We have money,” she remembers to say between mouthfuls. “For the clothes, and for letting us stay here.”
Mother Bleak waves a hand dismissively. “Idge’s son is always welcome here.”
Spar pulls himself upright, causing the boat to rock violently. Hot stew spills onto Cari’s hand. She licks it up, unwilling to lose a drop. Spar leans against the stove, testing his ability to stand. He flexes both feet, then starts pacing back and forth. The cabin of the houseboat is only three of his big paces long, and he has to duck almost double, but he’s moving again.
“Idge’s son doesn’t fit here,” he mutters.
“Is it the watch you’re hiding from?” asks Mother Bleak. “Or the candles?”
“Both,” admits Spar, “but also the Brotherhood. For the moment.”
Cari glances at Spar. She met Mother Bleak less than ten hours ago, and while the old woman has given them every possible shelter, she doesn’t know her or trust her. If Bleak betrays them to Heinreil before they’re ready …
“Ah, Spar? Are you sure you know what you’re doing? Seven or eight years ago, when everything was uncertain, that was the time. Back when they were casting around for a leader after old Bill the Skinner died. You were the prince-in-waiting, but you didn’t do anything.” Bleak clucks in disappointment and worry. She scrapes at a spot of dried fish stew with a yellowed fingernail.
“I was sick,” said Spar. “And, anyway, now I don’t have a choice. Heinreil tried to kill me.”
“The Tower of Law?” For an old washerwoman, Bleak’s remarkably well informed, thinks Cari.
“Not just that. He smuggled poison into the thief-taker’s place. That’s what nearly finished me off last night. Show her, Cari.”
Cari produces the poisoned syringe. Bleak doesn’t even bother examining it. “I’ve never heard of a poison that mixes with alkahest. All that’s worth maybe two coppers,” she snaps. “He’ll just say it was the thief-taker, or that the alkahest was a bad batch, or something. Can you prove it was him?”
Cari holds her breath. Right now, all their proof hangs on her supernatural visions. Her unwanted, uncertain sainthood.
“Not yet,” says Spar, “but I can’t back down from this.” There’s a doleful sense of duty in the way he says it that Cari doesn’t like. She’s spoiling for this fight, eager to bring Heinreil down. Spar has a much greater reason to hate the leader, and much more to gain from the conflict, but he’s dragging his feet. Cari knows there’s a spark of anger somewhere behind that grey face, but it’s smothered by stone.
“Well,” says Bleak, “I suppose it’s none of my business.” To Cari, conversationally, like they were two old friends nattering away, “I’m not Brotherhood, dear, you see, not really. After the plague, though, we owed Idge, not that he’d demand it, mind; no, he was a generous man. Saw the Brotherhood’s thieving as balance. Taking from them that had everything.”
Cari sorts idly through the pile of old clothes as Mother Bleak and Spar talk. Gossip, mostly, about people Cari doesn’t know with undertones of business. Listing Brotherhood members and thieves who aren’t happy with Heinreil, or don’t trust him, or still have stronger loyalties to Idge. Setting up meetings, but Bleak’s right, it’s all hollow until they have proof.
Cari’s visions, assuming she can get them under control, aren’t enough on their own. She’s not a Brotherhood member, so her voice carries no weight with the other thieves, and, anyway, what’s she going to say? That the recast remnant of a dead god whispered unseen truths straight into her brain? They need proof everyone can see.
“Where did you get those gloves?” asks Cari. The clothes in the pile are old and threadbare, passed down many times. The rubber gloves on the counter look brand new.
“One of my daughter’s boys works down at Dredger’s yard.”
“Does he know any alchemists?” asks Cari. The poison, she thinks. There must be a cure.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It takes Eladora Duttin two days to solve a mystery that’s haunted Guerdon for centuries.
She leaves the coffee shop, clutching the precious library copy of Sacred and Secular Architecture in one hand and her purse in the other. She won’t get paid by the university for another ten days, but she spends two of her few coins—borrowed coins, she won’t take charity from a thief-taker—on a train ticket back up to Pilgrim Station. Eladora prefers to think of the city as a few islands of safety linked by train lines and brightly lit thoroughfares. She never goes down alleyways or backstreets if she can help it.
Desiderata Street is still closed off. From the corner, she can see her bedroom window, see the blasted wreckage of the front door—and the still-smouldering crater in the road outside. No city watch here, just Tallowmen with their translucent skins and permanent leers. The closest one is partially melted and looks like it’s slouching. Uncouth even in undeath, or half-death or whatever horrific state they exist in.
She can’t go home.
She instinctively heads towards Professor Ongent’s office, but then remembers Jere’s warning that the seminary is being watched. He told her to look for signs that some intruder had broken in and searched the office, but the thought of opening the door and finding someone there terrifies her. In her imagination it’s a Gullhead, filthy and shrieking, beak drooling with bloody spittle, little eyes black and mad as it hacks her to pieces.
No, she’s not going back there.
She wanders through mid-morning crowds. Shopowners brushing debris from the pavements outside their stores, cursing the riots of last night. Students, disappointed that lectures aren’t cancelled after the battle on Desiderata Street. She imagines Miren appearing out of the crowd, sliding up to her like a lithe shadow, never speaking but saying so much with his … well, perhaps not saying, but implying with the absence of …
She just wants Miren there, as some vestige of her nicely ordered world of academia. She misses the days when she and the professor would talk for hours about the history of the city, or about news from abroad, or college gossip—Ongent has a wicked appetite for scandal and rumour—and Miren would sit there in the corner, lost in his own thoughts. At times, Eladora even envisages a day when Miren comes out of that dark introspective labyrinth and sees her waiting there for him. No doubt the professor was much like his son at that age—brooding, with the weight of the world on his slim shoulders. It probably takes time and wisdom to cultivate the professor’s jovial lightness. She just needs to be patient and understanding.
It would be so much easier if Miren was here, to protect her from the crowds. Five—no, six years she’s lived in Guerdon, and she still finds the city nerve-wracking. Even here, just down the road from the university, she feels like an intruder. She wants to go back to the college, to hide among familiar rooms and places, but that safe cocoon’s gone, too.
Footsore and thirsty, she stops at a coffee shop. Another few coins gone. Eladora came to the city with enough money to see her through her first few years, although she had to be frugal. She started tutoring other students before the money ran out, and then Professor Ongent recruited her as an assistant. She’s never had to worry about running out of money. Now, she’s adrift. Invisibly shipwrecked. Penniless, apart from a few borrowed coins.
She realises, as she sits down, that this is the same coffee shop where they took Carillon after she had her strange attack at noon. At the time, her pride at being initiated into some deeper level of Ongent’s research outweighed her irritation at her cousin’s return. Now, she wishes Carillon had never come back. Why couldn’t she have drowned at sea as a punishment from the gods, as Eladora’s mother claimed had happened to her?
Carillon, a saint. That’s the strangest joke of all.
After Carillon left, Eladora’s mother Silva grew more fervent in her beliefs. Silva believed that sainthood was a blessing from the gods, a reward for the pious. She fasted, and prayed, and sometimes even hurt herself in her devotions, and she made sure her daughter did, too. From the ages of fourteen to seventeen, Eladora cried every night in shame at not being chosen by the gods of the Keepers, as though it was her own fault that her soul was not ablaze with divine light.
She started reading books other than the Testament of the Keepers. Modern books, books that talked about the gods as another mode of being instead of being ineffable and eternal, books that assigned numbers and statistics to the divine. Works on reification, on thaumaturgy. Books that argued that sainthood was the result of spiritual congruency or aetheric permeability or simply the blind, groping attention of the unthinking gods, that it was no more a blessing than being struck by a thunderbolt.
The noon bells ring out again in chorus from the triple crown of spires atop Holyhill, and Eladora has an idea. It’s so obvious, so simple, that she mistrusts it. She reads Sacred and Secular Architecture, rereads certain passages, consults the notes she prepared for Ongent. She searches for a flaw in her idea, probes it with every tool she possesses, but she can find nothing to disprove it.
She imagines herself delivering a lecture on her idea. At first she imagines that she’s giving the lecture to Miren, but he feigns disinterest even in this. Instead, it’s the professor listening to her, clapping his hands with enthusiasm as his pupil takes flight. She can almost hear his voice, asking her:
“What is the greatest unsolved mystery of the Ashen Period?”
Guerdon fell under the sway of the terrible Black Iron Gods—so named because these deities were incarnated—inferated, perhaps—as statues made of metal. By taking physical form, they were able to feast on the souls of those sacrificed to them and grow more powerful. Carrion gods, so hungry they could not abide the slightest gap between mouth and meat. Wallowing in murder.
They grew hungry. They demanded more and more sacrifices, until the people of the city rose up against them. The gods of the Keepers—until then minor rustic gods of the hinterlands—rose up and blessed the land with many saints, whose flaming swords and divine wrath drove back the worshippers of the Black Iron Gods and their hideous servitors, the shapeless Ravellers. And thus the city was delivered from the tyranny of the carrion gods. By the standards of the modern day, it was a civilised, sane little war. Worshippers and saints fought and died, but there was little direct divine intervention, none of the contagious madness that marks the Godswar across the seas.
But what happened to the Black Iron Gods? The Testament says they were destroyed, and that was accepted as truth for centuries, but modern theomantic theory suggests that’s impossible. The Godswar proves it—look at the devastation of Khenth and Jadan. Their belligerent deities destroyed one another, but gods are immortal. They kept coming back, each time becoming more twisted and diminished in stature, both pantheons tearing at one another until the gods were shambling horrors and all their worshippers were ruined beyond the point of resurrection. Gods do not die easily, their death throes are the stuff of nightmare, but the defeat of the Black Iron Gods was marked by a period of prosperity, rebuilding and expansion.
“But,” scoffs her imaginary Ongent, “where then are the Black Iron Gods? If they were never destroyed, where did they go?”
She thinks of Carillon stumbling at noon, as the bells rang out from the cathedrals up on Holyhill. Her cousin buckling under the sound, the visions crashing through her. A stab of jealousy at the thought that the Kept Gods, the gentle and wise gods of Eladora’s youth, had chosen Cari as their vessel—and then an equally unworthy feeling of smug superiority when it became clear that Cari’s gods were something savage and wild and sordid.
These gods of hers must be close at hand here in Guerdon, but hidden.
The vision as the noon-bell rang.
The bells. Eladora remembers feast days at the village church. Her mother and the other Safidist fanatics took over the church at times, gathering there and praying in frantic devotion, as if whole days of prayer and flagellation could call down sainthood. Once, Silva made Eladora ring the bells for hours, hauling on the rough rope until her hands bled. That village church was small, but even so she remembers the terrible weight and size of its bells.
How large must the bells of Guerdon be? Made, she is now certain, from some black metal. The Black Iron Gods were imprisoned within their own bodies. In the same way one of Ongent’s simple thaumaturgical circuits wouldn’t work if you scribbled over the magical runes, so too must an embodied deity be rendered insensate by being remade into another form. The Black Iron Gods have lost nothing of their power—they still hold the soul-energy of tens of thousands of sacrifices—but they cannot express it, cannot move or think. Can’t even cry out in agony except once every hour.
Her mother’s shade accuses Eladora of blasphemy, of contradicting holy writ. Very well, mother, thinks Eladora. I’ll match my textbooks to your sacred scrolls, and we’ll see who wins out.
To the library, her hunger and exhaustion forgotten along with her fear. If the mysterious watcher who was spying on Ongent’s office is there, she doesn’t see him. She’s so eager to prove her theory that she reaches the double oak doors of the library before she remembers the potential danger.
You faithless wretch, how dare you! You must kneel before the gods, not question them! Her mother’s voice echoes from a very great distance in Eladora’s memory, but, for once, it doesn’t make her flinch.
How many churches were built in the Reconstruction? A hundred? More? Did the victorious Keepers re-forge all the Black Iron Gods at once, or was it a slower process? Did they only re-forge the gods into the simple mould of a bell, or is any large metal object from that era a potential prison for an evil deity? Did they only use churches, or did they hide the gods elsewhere? She guesses that all the Black Iron Gods must have been concealed in high places, towers, spires, not underground. Not with the Ravellers still lurking in the depths.
She starts by rereading familiar books dealing with the Reconstruction, then delves into the church archives. Some of the civic archives were destroyed when the House of Law burnt, but for most of the last three hundred years Guerdon was run by the church of the Keepers.
The House of Law. Originally, she recalls, a church. The alchemists had to take charge of the remains after it burnt. Some lingering taint from the weapons used to destroy the building, or a magical discharge from the destruction of the bell there? The timing fits—the House of Law was originally the Church of Divine Mercy, where repentant servants of the defeated Black Iron Gods were allowed to plead for their lives before a jury of fiery saints. It was constructed sixteen years after the fall of Guerdon—and, she discovers, the bell tower was finished nearly two years ahead of the rest of the structure.
The seven great churches of the Reconstruction—the three Victory Cathedrals on Holyhill, St. Storm down by the harbour, watching over the fishers and sailors, the Holy Smith in the shadow of Castle Hill, the Beggar in the Wash, and the House of Saints, where her mother had brought Eladora so many times. She remembers walking barefoot along the stony path to the entrance of that church, listening to the bells toll high above. Is that, too, one of the hiding places of Black Iron?
Do you see it now, Mother? Not the invisible hands of the gods, reaching down to bless the faithful, but another Godswar, a secret one. Across the sea, living gods use their worshippers as weapons, blessing them with hideous powers and unthinkable sainthood, hurling warped titans at one another. Everyone in Guerdon always says proudly how the Godswar has never reached their shores, how the Keepers are kind and loving and civilised deities, unlike the mad tyrants of other lands. But what, wonders Eladora, if Guerdon already fought and won its lesser Godswar, and for three hundred years they’ve been living in an occupied city?
All the seven great churches date from the first fifty years of the Reconstruction. She dives into the church archives that are stored in labyrinthine vaults beneath the main library, dusty corridors lit only by the occasional flicker of a primitive aetheric lamp. Soot marks on the ceilings trace the paths of long-dead monks and scribes. The records of the Keepers are exceedingly thorough and well-maintained. In her digging, she turns up account books tallying the cost of building materials, of labourers, of the various specialists and craftsmen employed in the building. She finds copies of letters written long ago between master masons and priests, discussing the ornamentation of the houses of the divine. She finds blueprints of the secure capstones for the corpse shafts that fall into the depths below several of the older churches. She finds letters and other documents describing the strife over that bargain with the ghouls, how the faithful wept when the Patros declared an end to cremation for all except ordained priests. She finds copies of Safid’s original sermons.
What she doesn’t find is any reference to the making of the church bells. That absence is her proof.
Seven churches, plus the House of Law. The temples of other faiths might have many bells in a church, but the Keepers usually have only one doleful note. So, she’s accounted for eight bells, eight Black Iron Gods. There were, according to all the tales and testaments, between twelve and twenty monstrous divinities in Guerdon before the fall. That means there must be more out there. Eladora doesn’t hear the porters in the library above ringing their little bells, warning that the building is closing for the day. Surrounded by books and lit by artificial light, she pays no heed when night falls across the city, nor when the sun rises again eleven hours later.
Where else? High places, connected to the church, built in the first years of the Reconstruction. She compiles a list, weighs possibilities against one another, makes educated guesses. Sometimes, the answers are clear—the Bell Rock lighthouse, for example, is such a clear candidate that she feels like she’s being mocked by some long-dead priest. They started building that tower a year after the end of the war, and it has not only a light but a bell for warning ships away from the shoals. Other candidates are more speculative. There’s a chapel in the old fortress on Castle Hill, for example, that dates from the right period but she can’t find any references to it having a bell. The seminary building—the very seminary where Ongent’s office is, where she’s worked every day for the last two years—has an old bell over the archway, but she guesses it’s too small and too low to the ground to be a likely place for a hidden god. The old monastery on Beckanore is even more of a stretch. It was almost entirely abandoned in recent decades, but, back in the early days of the Reconstruction, it was much more important. The fleets of the Keepers marshalled there before they blockaded the port. And before that, it was a fortress of the Black Iron Gods—its fall was one of the first victories of the rebellion. And that monastery did have a bell.
