The Gutter Prayer, page 24
The last cruel trick the disease plays on them is giving them strength. Stone Men get stronger and stronger as they turn to stone. Spar’s seen dying men topple buildings, smash through walls. All that strength, but blind and deaf and crippled and unable to use it. Dredger, the owner of the yards here, puts them to work as dray horses, dragging huge loads of scrap metal around the docks. Cheaper than alchemy engines or raptequines.
One grey-face stumbles out of the shed right into Spar’s path. Fumbling blindly, pawing at him, moaning something. He can’t make out a word, it’s like stones grinding when the other Stone Man—or Woman, he can’t tell—tries to speak. The gesture is clear enough, though. The Stone Man extends his arm as far as it will go, and turns over its flipper-like palm. The fingers have fused together. A deep groove cut into the stone of the palm marks where this Stone Man grips the metal chains of the scrap trucks. Clutched in that groove is a vial of alkahest.
The crippled Stone Man proffers it to Spar.
“You want me to inject you?” asks Spar. His own fingers are stiff and slow, his leg suddenly numb. He needs a shot, too, sooner than he’d hoped. Injury hastens the disease, and that poison is still burning in his veins.
The Stone Man grunts helplessly, angrily. Moans again. Spar realises that the Stone Man is completely blind, that his eyes have scabbed over. Spar takes the alkahest shot and puts it in his pocket, in case one of the other workers tries to steal a precious second dose. He could walk off with it himself—the thought has crossed his mind—but it’s not the Brotherhood way. Don’t take from those in need, help them instead, we’re all in this together—and the latter is certainly true. For all his sickness, Spar isn’t the worst case in this yard.
He grabs the blind man’s head in one hand, and—as carefully as he can—pinches the stone over one eye, peeling it away. It’s not solid yet, more a sort of rubbery scab with rocky scales embedded in it. Exposed, an eye peers back at Spar from the rock face. It widens in horror as the Stone Man doesn’t recognise him, and suddenly fears that Spar will take the alkahest.
“It’s all right.” Spar takes out the vial again, careful to make sure it’s the full syringe of alkahest and not the sample of poison. “I’ll fix you.” He twists the Stone Man’s neck to the side, finds the deepest crack he can, and then drives the needle home. Spar’s strong enough to bend iron bars, but he has to struggle to push the point through the other man’s skin.
The rush of alkahest, from the other side. Spar’s hand shakes as he gives back the empty vial. He’ll need another shot today, he decides.
The other Stone Man grinds out a word that might be a thankyou, but then an air horn blares, announcing a shift change. The Stone Men stagger and scrape and limp out, a cave floor of stalagmites on the march through the grey curtain of the rain.
Bleak’s grandson works in the labs at the far end of the yard, right by the sea. Spar trudges through the mud towards the long, low building.
The sky beyond it is stained yellow, despite the storm. A mustard cloud rises from a small island in the middle of the harbour. The Bell Rock. There’s an old lighthouse there, he remembers. The lighthouse is invisible at this distance, and the island itself is a dark blur, but the plume of yellow gas is coming from there. A small crowd gathers on the pier behind the labs, masked alchemists in leather overalls alongside stony longshoremen and sailors, looking out at the bizarre cloud.
Commotion. From one of the buildings behind Spar two men emerge. One is squat and wears a rubbery suit with a brass helmet that hides all his features. For a moment, Spar wonders if it’s a monster like the Fever Knight, Heinreil’s notorious thug, but then he remembers stories about Dredger. A very different sort of monster. The other is tall and bearded and—godshit it’s Jere the thief-taker!
Spar freezes, gives thanks to whatever gods are listening that he left that distinctive staff back on Bleak’s boat. There are other Stone Men here, many of them, and visibility is down to nothing in this rain. He stands, still as a statue, just another one watching the storm break over Guerdon.
Jere and Dredger hurry over to the pier and vanish down a stairway. The roar of a boat’s engine over the storm, and they’re off, heading into the teeth of the wind and waves.
Spar uses the distraction to slip in the back door of the labs. Bleak’s grandson, Yon, pale and stringy, a mouthful of stained teeth from sucking on the rubber hose of his breathing mask.
“In here, in here,” he urges, gesturing towards a small storeroom. He follows Spar in, careful to avoid physical contact despite the close quarters. “Nan said you’ve got a sample you want tested?”
“Yeah.” Spar hands over the battered syringe. A little of his blood and grit still clings to the end of the needle. The alchemist wipes it clean, then squeezes the last few drops into a glass beaker. The liquid is the pale milky-blue of alkahest, the same pungent smell.
“Well, then,” says Yon, holding the beaker up to the light, “that’s not good.”
“Why so?”
“Most compounds, you mix them with alkahest, they get broken down. Universal solvent, innit? Inject it, and you might get a bit sick, but you’d scarcely notice on top of the usual shit you get with alk.” Yon looks at Spar warily. “Did you …”
“It hurt like fire used to.”
“Right.” Yon puts the beaker on a shelf and produces a handful of vials of liquid from his pocket. “There aren’t many things you can mix with alkahest that would still work afterwards—and most of those would just kill you outright.”
Heinreil wanted Spar to suffer.
Yon pours one of the reagents into the beaker, and the blue liquid turns dark and rancid. He lets out a low whistle.
“What is it?” asks Spar.
Yon looks at the floor rather than meet Spar’s gaze.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Somewhere, fifty fathoms or more beneath Dredger’s boat, lie the remains of Jere’s Great-uncle Pal. He was a fisherman, in the days before the harbour of Guerdon wasn’t so poisoned with run-off from the alchemists’ factories that they have to import fish from fifty miles down the coast. He went out one night to check lobster pots with his friend Otho, who told Jere this story. A fog blew up, so thick they couldn’t see the light from the lighthouse. But they could hear its bell, ringing in the murk. All they needed to do was tack so the sound of the bell grew fainter, telling them they were sailing away from the Rock and all its reefs, but there was some devilment in the air that night. No matter which way Pal turned, he thought the bell was getting louder and louder. He dragged the tiller left and right and left again, each time losing his nerve and turning again as that cursed bell tolled closer. In the end, Otho claimed, Pal went suddenly mad and hurled himself over the rail to drown. The fog lifted straight away and Otho brought the boat to shore, but Pal was never seen again.
Today, at noon, the murk is thicker than any natural fog, and they can’t hear the bell.
Dredger, hunched over the controls of the launch, roars something at him. Jere can’t make out the words through the rubbery breathing mask he’s wearing, so he clambers closer, climbing over coiled ropes and chunks of piping and other debris that litters the deck.
“Goggles, in the box there!” shouts Dredger, waving a gloved hand at a locker. It’s just out of his arm’s reach, but in these seas he dare not leave the wheel for an instant.
Inside the locker are two pairs of heavy goggles with a complicated assembly of lenses. One of them has an even more complicated pair of attachments on the rear, designed for eyes that have more in common with light-bulb sockets than anything human. Jere hands those to Dredger, who clips them onto his helmet and adjusts them. Light flickers in the glass.
“That’s better,” he shouts over the wind, “maybe we won’t die right this minute.”
Jere puts on the other pair, sliding them over the eyepieces of his own mask. The yellow murk of the waves and fog turns to a sickly transparent green, scarred with thousands of little sparkling snowflakes. He can see rocks both above and below the surface, although the goggles make the churning sea into an even more chaotic whirl that hurts his head. He still can’t make out the Bell Rock, but if they keep heading into the densest part of the cloud, they’ll find it there.
“There’s a reason, Jere,” mutters Dredger, “that I collect salvage after the battle, not during it.”
“This isn’t a battle,” says Jere, but he’s not so sure. He came rushing down from Queen’s Point and demanded that Dredger take him out to Bell Rock, into the heart of the gas cloud. This is the third catastrophe to strike Guerdon in a week. THIS IS NOT THE LAST, left scrawled after the two previous ones. If there was a single intent behind all three events, then Jere wanted to get to the site of the latest one before the watch, before the Tallowmen, before anyone except the perpetrators.
At least, half an hour ago he wanted that.
Here, now, he’s not so sure. The protective mask Dredger loaned him is ill-fitting and reminds him of his last days in the army, before he decided that the Godswar was no longer a place for mere mortals to fight. Dredger’s launch seems tiny compared to the swell of the waves, and the stench of the clouds is overpowering.
He strains his ears, listening for the sound of the bell over the howling of the wind, but he can’t hear it. He starts to wonder if they’ve overshot the mark and gone right past Bell Rock and out into the open ocean, and at the same time Dredger turns hard to port.
“Over there?”
The goggles, whatever they are, seem to show metal objects better than anything else. Dredger’s solid as ever in Jere’s vision, but his own hands are ghostly, and it’s hard to tell stone from sea. There’s another boat in the distance, a bigger one, keeping station or maybe run aground, Jere can’t tell. And is that another vessel there, on the island’s shore?
“Get me closer!” he shouts to Dredger.
“I can’t see the—”
Their launch suddenly lurches and scrapes off some submerged obstacle. Jere holds his breath, but another wave lifts them off and throws them down in open water instead of slamming and shattering their hull on the rocks.
“Rocks,” finishes Dredger. “This is madness.”
For a moment, though, through the goggles, Jere spots the distinct edge of the Bell Rock, and the little jetty used to service the lighthouse.
“Come back for me after the storm,” shouts Jere, and before Dredger can argue he jumps into the sea.
Shocking cold, and his mask fills with seawater almost instantly. He pulls it off and grabs the strap with his teeth. Powerful strokes bring him closer to the shore. Here, in the lee of the island, the waters are slightly calmer but he’s still half drowned by the time he reaches the shore, bleeding and bruised after being dashed against the rocks.
Struggling out of the water, he takes a deep breath that nearly kills him. His chest burns with poison. He struggles to get the mask back on. If it weren’t for the winds, he suspects that would have been a lethal lungful. A dunk in seawater hasn’t improved the state of the mask, and the breathing apparatus gurgles whenever he inhales.
The goggles’ eyepieces rapidly become covered with a paste of yellow dust and seawater, so he has to make his way across the island half blind through the poisonous murk.
The Bell Rock is a mostly flat shelf of rock, barely above the surface of the ocean on a calm day. Right now, with the storm dashing it, it vanishes beneath the waves with every breath. If Jere were on the far side of the island, facing the brunt of the storm and lower down, there’s no way he’d be able to avoid being sucked down into the depths or smashed against the stones. Certain death, as opposed to merely risking death with every footstep on this sheltered side.
There’s a walkway of sorts, a narrow spit of concrete with iron railings, running between the supply cove where he landed and the lighthouse. He finds it, more by touch than sight, and drags himself along the railings. The fog gets thicker, a yellow haze that quickly turns to mustard mud in the rain. The higher parts of the exposed rocks are leopard-dappled, their yellow coat dotted with the marks of wild sea spray. His boots slip through a sludge of dying seaweed and yellow-brown slime.
This was a fucking terrible idea.
A giant shape looms. The lighthouse. Thank the gods. Rather than going for it, though, rather than hurrying forward to the shelter of the doorway, he crouches down and watches. Waves rush over him. Icy cold water shocking against his chest, hammering the breath from his lungs. Harder to breathe through the mask now.
He can see figures moving through the fog. Insect-headed, with bulbous eyes—masked, like him. Hurrying away from the lighthouse, moving east in the direction of the second boat that Jere glimpsed. Suddenly, they disappear behind rocks.
And then the lighthouse explodes.
Chunks of rubble cascade through the yellow fog like meteors. The island seems to tip to one side, and Jere’s caught by the waves, falling, drowning. Then the thunderclap hits, and he’s deafened.
He’s back on the battlefield, in the Godswar. The wrath of a warrior saint. Divine vengeance raining down all around him.
He thinks he might be screaming as the waves grab him again, pull him further across the rocks, tearing his flesh to ribbons. His mask threatens to slip, he grabs at it, and then a third wave finds him while his hands are fumbling with the straps. He can’t grab on, and the wave carries him
Over the edge.
Jere’s caught before he hits the sea, grabbed by a strong arm and hauled up on onto a rock. There’s someone else there, pressing him down, dragging him onto a stable foothold. A familiar shape, but almost invisible through the rain and the slime on Jere’s goggles. At first he thinks it’s the thief girl, Carillon Thay, but then he recognises Miren.
Jere stares at the boy in confusion. What is the professor’s son doing on this speck of an island in the middle of a storm, in the middle of a cloud of poison? He can’t have come on the other boat. For that matter, he’s not wearing a mask. He should be vomiting up his lungs.
There’s a crack from the direction of the lighthouse. Jere glances over and sees that the explosion didn’t completely destroy the building, merely tore a hole in its upper stories. Now, something cracks and breaks in there, and comes smashing down, landing with a titanic splash and a clang on the rocks. Dented, misshapen, but still intact: the black bell of the Bell Rock lighthouse.
When he looks back, Miren’s gone.
Lightheaded, wondering if he’s dying or mad, Jere creeps closer to the ruins of the lighthouse once more. The fog’s clearing a bit, as the winds of the storm rip away at the cloud. The masked men cluster around the bell, tie cables to it. They’re stealing it. As Jere suspected, they have another launch, like Dredger’s but bigger, newer, docked at the closest point on the island’s coast to the lighthouse. They drag the bell over the rocks and onto the launch’s deck.
There’s another ship, wrecked and run aground, between Jere and the other launch. She’s a small freighter, dwarfing either launch. She’s the one that broke her moorings in the night. Her timbers are swollen, bloated, and the poisonous yellow cloud belches from her hatches and the rents in her hull. Gas from a rotting corpse.
The launch departs, heading out to sea at high speed, vanishing into the darkness of the storm, the battered prize hidden under a tarpaulin scrawled with wards and warning symbols. Jere is alone on the island.
He staggers towards the ruins of the lighthouse, thinking vaguely he can find shelter there. Maybe Miren went there. Maybe he can find something that the masked intruders left behind, some clue to their identity. Anywhere’s better than out in this storm. The yellow poison cloud diminishing now, blown inland by the winds that tear at his soaked clothing. Nothing between him and the angry black sky.
He gets maybe halfway towards the lighthouse before it explodes again. This blast is even bigger—it levels the place. Jere flings himself behind a rock as the cloud of dust and debris reaches him. He’s hit twice at least, pain in his side, his foot, but he can’t worry about that right now. The explosion keeps burning, like a volcano, shaking the island. Phlogiston bomb, he thinks, just like the one that destroyed the Tower of Law, but this one’s unfettered.
There’s a secondary blast, a wave of fire blazing through the torrential rain. Fires burning lurid green on the surface of the water as the poisonous dust burns. The centre of the island is death, nothing can survive there. Jere retreats to the edge, caught between the roaring rushing seas below and the burning, poisonous alchemical shitstorm that used to be a lighthouse.
Step forward and die like the other lads in the mercenary company, burnt by alchemical weapons and the wrath of the gods. Die screaming in fire.
Step back, and die like Uncle Pal, cold and black and silent.
Or, thinks Jere, to the abyss with all that. Step to the fucking side and climb down to the wrecked freighter. The poison cloud is thickest there, but it’s much diminished from what it was, he’s still holding onto his gas mask, and there might be something he can use.
The explosion erupts again—what the fuck do the alchemists put in their bombs—and there’s a crash as part of the cliff shears off into the ocean. The whole freighter shifts on the reef. She’s going to slip off and sink or break up before the storm blows out. Parts of her slough off, sliding off the rain-slick deck to fall into the sea or crash onto the beach. Jere peers through the murk, trying to make sense of what he’s seeing through the goggles. He can see the freighter’s anchor more clearly than anything else, and close to it—
A rowing boat, more or less intact.
A prayer of thanks to the watchful Keepers comes unbidden to his lips. He dashes across the poisoned beach and clambers onto the dying ship. Holding his breath the whole time—he has to plunge into the thickest part of the poison cloud to get to the rowing boat, and his breathing mask is already depleted—he cuts the boat free, kicks it into the water and rows out.
