The Gutter Prayer, page 23
Jere wraps his heaviest cloak around him and braves the weather. Takes the high street around the edge of the Wash, the narrow ridge that leads out to Queen’s Point and the watch headquarters out there. He’ll talk to Ongent, see if the professor can drop some more hints about the Raveller-monster and that book. There is a connection between the thieves’ guild, between Spar and Heinreil and what Kelkin actually hired him to do, and all these tales of gods and monsters, and that connection is Carillon Thay.
The cold of wind slips through his cloak like a pickpocket, finding his skin beneath his clothes.
As he approaches the citadel, two guards from the watch spot him. What are their names? Heron and … and … Heron and godsfuck it’s too early, just give me coffee and tell me who to hit. There’s a Tallowman, too, as backup, wearing an absurd glass lantern-helmet to protect its animating flame from the winds. It’s not that easy to snuff out a Tallowman, though—Jere once saw a drunken sailor grab a burning wick to put it out rather than get arrested. The flame burnt through his hand.
“Jere Taphson?” says the nameless guard. “The chief warden of Guerdon requests and obliges you—”
“Boss wants a word, Jere,” interrupts Heron. “They’re just about to send out runners to look for you.”
“I wish my manhunts were so easy. All right, let’s give his grace the time of day.”
Heron and … Aldras! Aldras is the boy’s name. Off a refugee boat from Mattaur a few years ago—fall in beside Jere, obviously glad to have an excuse to come in out of this storm, and escort him up to another side door of the watch fortress. Jere glances down at the prison wing; this could be some sort of ruse by Warden Nabur to waste Jere’s time so he can’t talk to Ongent.
Into the main keep, and up to the warden’s palace. Jere wishes he had his head-breaking staff, instead of having to carry his fancy sword cane. The sword cane is too appropriate here, it’s elegant and refined and much too clean. Jere carries it when he has to deal with quality. The staff’s crude and heavy and leaves satisfying dents in polished wood floors, like these ones. Carrying it in here would piss Nabur off, and that’s one of life’s great pleasures. The cane makes it look like Jere’s dressed up to see his betters.
At least he’s dripping all over the clean floor.
Nabur’s eating breakfast when they show Jere in.
“Did he come quietly?” demands Nabur of Heron.
Heron salutes. “No trouble, sir.”
Nabur’s moustache droops. He brushes a non-existent speck of dust off his pristine uniform in irritation. “I’ve had you brought here, Taphson, as a courtesy.”
“You shouldn’t have. I haven’t got you anything.”
Nabur ignores him. “I have had several complaints from my watchmen about your harassment, and your trespassing at Desiderata Street. It is disgusting that you would, ahem, trifle with a tragedy.”
Jere tenses, wondering if this is a prelude to them blaming him for the message on the wall.
“I tolerate your bounty hunting and mercenary work because I honestly don’t care if one criminal preys on another. Where I become concerned—become intolerant, you understand—is where your little manhunts spill out of the lower city and into the places where actual people live.”
Does the watch not know who’d written it? Nabur had seen its significance at Mercy Street, at the first bombing.
Jere’s mouth moves even as his brain turns over that thought.
“Hey, I was there on personal business, not hunting a thief. Professor Ongent is a friend of mine, and that’s his house that got blown up. For that matter, why the hell is he still in custody? He’s a victim here.”
“His case is still being processed,” snaps Nabur. Kelkin clearly hasn’t worked his magic yet, then, which annoys Jere. The old man is slipping.
Nabur shuffles some papers on his desk. “You claim you were there on personal business—”
“I don’t fucking claim. I was. Or am I under arrest here, oh chief warden?”
“—on personal business,” he repeats. “Were any of your recent quarries there that night?”
Jere chooses his words carefully. “Not that I saw.”
Nabur pushes a sheet of paper across the desk. It’s covered in densely printed legal text and sealed at the bottom with two symbols—Nabur’s own seal as warden of the city, and the golden seal of the head of parliamentary committee on law, Mr. Droupe.
“You took two thieves from the House of Law. We’ve decided we want them instead. That’s a parliamentary writ to hand them over.”
Spar and Carillon. Neither of whom I actually have in custody.
“This is godshit, Nabur. You’re running roughshod over my licence, and for what? Two sneaks who don’t know a thing about the bombing.”
“That is not your judgement to make. The city watch wishes to interrogate those prisoners, and you will transfer them into our custody.”
“What if I’ve collected a bounty on ’em?”
Nabur sniffs. “Neither has come before the courts. If some client paid a bounty on them and didn’t bring charges, well, that’s highly irregular and should be reported. So, where are they?”
“I’ll fight this. Appeal to the magistrates.”
“Really?” Nabur seems genuinely surprised, then smiles. “You only have two days left before you have to charge them or release them anyway. Are you really going to put this before the magistrates—put your thief-taker’s licence in jeopardy—for two days more time with two burglars who, so you say, don’t know anything?”
My licence is gone anyway if they find out I sold one prisoner, who then fucked over me and Ongent and broke the other prisoner out of my own fucking jail.
Jere forces himself to grin. “I’m making a stand on principle.” He shoves the letter back across the table. “Keep it. I’ll appeal.”
“If it turns out that those two know anything about the House of Law bombing, I shall hold you responsible for everything after that.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
A knock at the door. Enter a young officer in a crisp naval uniform.
“Sir, there’s been an accident out in the harbour. A freighter broke its moorings and ran aground on Bell Rock.” The officer swallows. “Sir, she must have been carrying weapons. The rock’s on fire, and the fumes are blowing onshore.”
“Gods.” Nabur stands up, wobbles, sits down again. “Send a runner to the alchemists’ guild, and ask for their aid. We’ll need to … to clear the harbour, won’t we? And how far onshore? And … have there been any messages?”
“Messages, sir?”
THIS IS NOT THE LAST, that’s what you’re worried about, thinks Jere. The watch definitely don’t know what’s going on.
“Anything else?” asks Jere.
Nabur looks at him as if he can’t remember who he is. “No. No. Get out.”
Jere doesn’t linger. Pushes his way past the sudden swarms of watch officers and messengers, past the crowd watching the storm-whirled harbour. The black of the storm clouds mixed with a fetid mustard-yellow stain spreading out from Bell Rock. If those clouds reach the shore, who knows how many will die?
He wonders how long it’ll be before the city is warned that this disaster is not the last.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Rain drums on the warehouse roof like fingers on a coffin lid. The world’s buried alive by clouds.
Rat unfurls from his sleeping nook between two crates and slips towards the side door of the warehouse. He is drawn by the rain. He desires to feel it on his skin, to have it run in secret rivers down the channels of his rot-wrinkled skin, wash away the grime and sewer-stink from his hide. Rain is a thing of the surface world, unknown in the deep places of the ghouls.
His fellow sentries are mostly still asleep—all except old Cafstan, who hasn’t slept since his sons died. He sits, staring blind at his bloodied fists. The old man beat one would-be looter half to death when the riots reached Hook Row. Rat has no words for the man, just a quiet discomfort. He feels a loss at the deaths of the Cafstan boys, but for a ghoul it is closer to hunger than sorrow. I would have eaten them, he wants to say to the father, and been satisfied. They looked like good meat. But he’s been on the surface long enough to know that sometimes it’s best to keep silent.
Myri the sorceress is gone, and good riddance. The containers from the Ammonite went with her, early this morning. Ghouls do not brood; brooding is a function of mourning, and they do not mourn either. They cannot. As soon as the tattooed woman carried the satchel out of the warehouse, Rat put the containers from his mind. Mari didn’t stick around for the work of moving goods out of the damaged warehouses. Ghoul muscle and sinew don’t tire easily, but after a day of hauling boxes and crates, even Rat’s limbs feel sore, and Silkpurse is curled up in a hammock somewhere in the rafters. A few other humans sit around, half snoozing, listening to the rain, glad to be inside. At some point, Tammur’s going to call round and whip them into work again. More boxes to be moved. The shit end of Brotherhood.
He steps out into the alley beside Hook Row, takes in a deep breath. There’s something strange on the air, an acrid stinging smell blowing in with the storm. It stinks of alchemy. He slinks around the end of the warehouse, sees the yellow stain across the black sky.
“Hey.”
A tremendous sense of relief bubbles up in him, lifting a weight he’d carried since Gravehill. The chemical stink in the air masked her scent. The clothes are different. Her face is different, marked with a constellation like freckles, and older than it should be. Even her voice is a little different, like there’s a very distant echo, but still he recognises Carillon.
And something else.
In his eyes, Cari’s stained by darkness, like dried blood. He feels his fingers stiffen, readying his claws. His mouth feels odd, his tongue running over unfamiliar teeth. Her presence is disconcerting, literally; Rat feels jumbled and confused by the magical whirlpool around Cari.
“What are you?” he demands, trying to make sense of the conflicting impulses. “I can see …” Human words fail him, and he hisses a word that even he doesn’t know in the secret tongue of the ghouls. A new fear settles on him—he’s no longer worried that Carillon might be dead. Instead, some part of him is alarmed at the knowledge that she’s still alive.
“Shit. You can tell?” She looks down at herself, as if trying to tell what changed. “When the Tower of Law fell, it marked me.” She touches one of the small marks on her face, a slowly healing burn. “It’s some sort of sainthood. I don’t know exactly. No one does. I’ve been getting these visions. It’s how I found you.”
Rat tries to speak, but he still can’t form human words for some reason. Cari takes his hisses as a request to go on. She lowers her voice, so her whisper can barely be heard above the storm.
“I’ll explain more when I can, but listen: Heinreil tried to kill Spar. He poisoned him, tried to make it look like bad alkahest, but it was a hit. Spar’s going to do what he should have done years ago and take back the Brotherhood.”
“How …?” His tongue rebels, and he chokes on human speech. Somehow, Cari realises what he was trying to ask, and speaks for him.
“How’s Spar?” she says. Rat nods, unwilling to trust his words.
She frowns, rubs her neck. “He’s in a bad way. Really bad. I’ve given him two good shots, but it’s not enough. We’re going to find out what poison it was, find the antidote, but we need to hit back, too. Spar’s going to talk to friends of his father, get them on our side. We need your help—are you in?”
Cari has never been part of the Brotherhood. She’s only been in Guerdon for a few weeks. She’s not a sworn member. Neither, technically, is Rat, but he’s hung around them for years and knows their ways. He knows that Carillon’s proposal is, on the face of it, madness. Heinreil took over the Brotherhood smoothly, from within, after carefully demolishing any opposition. It took years, but Heinreil had patience. He didn’t need to cut throats.
Spar’s starting from next to nothing, and Cari doesn’t have patience. There’s no way this ends without blood on the streets.
But they’re his friends. He fights that fear, cracks its bones and shoves it down his throat.
“What do you need?” he says thickly.
“Get a message to Tammur. Tell him that Spar wants to talk him. Tell him we’ll meet him in the back room of the Bull of Ashur tonight. The thing is, Heinreil has someone keeping an eye on Tammur. One of the dock workers, dark hair, big ears with a chunk taken out of one of them. Smells of onions, wears a key on a chain around his neck.”
The description matches one of the other guards. Rat doesn’t know the man’s name, hasn’t exchanged two words with him. He wonders how Cari knows that this man is Heinreil’s spy, or how she has such a detailed description but lacks a name.
“Bull of Ashur tonight. All right. I’ll tell him.”
Cari impulsively hugs him. The ghoul flinches; he doesn’t like to be trapped, but, more, he is suddenly terribly aware of the strength in his limbs. One squeeze, and he could snap the girl’s spine. One twist of his head, one snap of his jaws, and her throat’s open, heart’s blood gushing over the alleyway, mixing with the rain that pours down off the warehouse roof. And with these alien thoughts, the sudden and overwhelming urge to descend into the depth of the world, to submerge in the oblivion of darkness and warren and pack, to taste the fleeting souls of the dead and grow strong on them.
“You come, too,” she whispers, “I’ll let you in a back door.”
He doesn’t do these things. She’s his friend. He returns the embrace, gently, anchoring himself to the surface world.
The storm howls on. Cari shivers, and whispers, “I’ve got to go. Before the bells ring. I need to be ready.”
Rainy days belong to Stone Men. No matter how cold the rain or biting the wind, Spar scarcely feels it. There are Hordinger whaling ships that are crewed almost completely by Stone Men. When Spar first contracted the disease, he considered going away to sea with them, living out the few years of mobility left to him amid the ice and snow. Perhaps, he thinks, he might have met Cari out there in the wide world instead of here in Guerdon.
After days walking in endless circles around the perimeter of the little island in the lithosarium, the freedom to stretch his legs is strange, unreal. He feels adrift and uncertain. He had his plan—a terrible plan, a doleful plan, but a plan nonetheless. He was going to die in custody, to hold his tongue against all the tricks and tortures that the thief-taker or the watch could muster. He was going to hold his tongue until it too petrified. Dying stony and silent like Idge, like his father. Spar, the living monument to Idge’s famous refusal.
If he has to die of this disease, he wanted it to be on his own terms. To do it with dignity and a certain amount of poetry.
Now his plan’s gone, dissolved in the caustic poison of Heinreil’s murder attempt, and he’s running on Carillon’s plan. He has no idea if it can work. Does his father’s name still carry as much prestige as it did? Everyone in the Brotherhood pays lip service to Idge’s great sacrifice, but will loyalty to Idge count for anything more? Spar knows he doesn’t look much like his father any more, not with this mask of half-formed stone over what was once his face.
The storm has emptied the streets of the Wash, so it’s easy to avoid people who might recognise him as he goes about his errands.
All night he’s been tilling the dirt, as Cari put it. Visiting houses, bars, shops, smoke-dens, bookmakers, whorehouses. In each place, a variation of the same speech that Spar’s been practising since he was twelve. I am Idge’s son. You remember the good days when my father was in charge, when the Brotherhood meant something, when we kept the industrial guilds and the parliament from grinding the poor folk into the ground. When the Brotherhood provided for many instead of enriching a few. And then, depending on who he was talking to, he’d reminisce about his father, or condemn Heinreil’s assassination attempt, or talk about the future. When he faltered, he’d hint that he had some secret advantage, a new angle that was going to change everything.
It might even be true, all of it.
He cautions everyone he speaks to say and do nothing for the moment, that he’s just sounding them out, but he knows that word will get back to Heinreil. Some will let it slip, others offer it up in the hopes of future reward. Still, there’s a lot of dissatisfaction with Heinreil’s leadership, and over and over they grasp Spar’s hand—his stone-warty hand, his diseased hand—and shake it and tell him that they’ve been waiting for someone to have the courage to stand up to Heinreil.
Pride and ambition are fire. Feed them, and they grow. Spar spent the last few years of his life, ever since he got sick, stamping down those fires, trying to smother them beneath stone and doubt. The disease had eaten his flesh, so he’d allowed it, even encouraged it, to eat his ambitions, too, until he was cold and hollow.
For the first time in as long as he can remember, Spar allows himself to dream.
His next stop is Dredger’s yard. Mother Bleak’s grandson, the apprentice alchemist, will meet him there. There are lots of other Stone Men working at the yard, and one more can blend into the hobbling grey crowd without drawing attention. He passes by a small break-yard between two outbuildings, shielded from the rain by a canvas awning, where Stone Men in ones or twos inject themselves with the morning’s ration of alkahest.
Some of those working here are relatively healthy, despite their plague. They have the protective stony hide, second-stage, but beneath it they’re almost wholly flesh, still. Like Spar used to be. One shot of alkahest every month or so is enough to arrest the further progress of the disease. You can last years like that, if you’re lucky.
Others are nearly gone. Third or fourth stage. Shambling statues, the disease eating away at their innards, transmuting guts and lungs and heart to stone. They need alkahest just to stay functional for another day or two, before they seize up completely and must rely wholly on the charity of others or go out to the Isle of Statues.
