The Gutter Prayer, page 26
“The Brotherhood’s about more than business.”
“Idge should have gone into parliament—though they’re bigger crooks than any of us. No one’s going to turn on Heinreil out of principle. You’ll need support.”
“That’s why we came to you,” says Cari. “You’re second in the Brotherhood—or should be. You’ve been running things since Idge’s day.”
“Don’t lecture me.” Tammur glares at her. “This isn’t your business.”
Cari sits back down and closes her eyes. She’s looking inward, Rat guesses. Curious, he stares at her, remembering his violent reaction to meeting her earlier. Now, as he watches, he can sense invisible powers moving around her, circling around Cari, reaching for her. Involuntarily, he starts to growl. Tammur glances at him, snorts dismissively.
“Tammur,” says Spar wearily, “can I count on you?”
The older man takes a drink. Washes around his mouth like trying to chase out a bad taste, then swallows. “No,” he says finally. “At least, not yet—and out of loyalty to your father’s memory, I’ll tell you why. You’re trying to put together a coup against an established and secure master in, what, two days? Three? Your name counts for something. You’ve probably got some hotheads on your side, too. It’s not enough.
“You say you want this, but I don’t believe you. You want to be Idge. We had Idge. And they hanged him. We don’t need another one. You want my advice? Leave. Go to the Archipelago or sign up with a mercenary company or go down to Dredger’s yard and ask for work on ships. I’m telling you this for your own good.”
Spar stands up, wincing as he does. There’s an audible crack like someone broke a cobblestone with a hammer. “I didn’t ask for your advice, Tammur. I asked for your help and your loyalty. Heinreil tries to murder me, and betrays the Brotherhood, and your advice is to suck it up and walk away? No.” He points towards the door. “Get out.”
“You think you can order me around, you entitled little shit? I raised you like my own son until you—”
The unseen pressure in the room breaks like a storm, crashing in Rat’s ears. Cari speaks: “You threw a dying man into the harbour at Hook Row nine years ago and watched him drown. Your grandson has a blue blanket, and you hit his mother when she couldn’t keep the babe from crying two nights ago. You nearly hit the child, too, but instead you threw one of his toys across the room and broke it. You’re taking pills for your nerves—your doctor’s cheating you.”
Tammur looks gut-shot.
“You hoped the sea-witch—Myri—would sleep with you,” says Cari, her eyes still shut. “In an upstairs room in a house on Valder, it’s twenty-seven nine thirty-two four—”
“Gods below,” says Tammur. “Shut her up.”
Spar doesn’t move. Rat leans forward and—rips her throat out, letting her blood spurt out across the table—tugs on Cari’s arm. “Cari, come back. Shut them out,” he hisses. She nods, bites her lip, grips his gnarled hand. The psychic pressure around her fades.
“See?” says Cari. Blood wells up from her lip and rolls down her chin. What else did she see, wonders Rat, that she dared not reveal.
“It’s still folly,” says Tammur, but he’s rattled. “Still fucking madness. Give me time to think about it, all right?”
“Don’t think too long,” says Cari, giggling like she’s drunk. “Seventeen.”
Tammur thumps down the stairs, stumbling and crashing. The noise of his passage like the distant thunder of the retreating storm.
“A combination?” asks Rat. He backs away from Cari, watching her closely. His own unnatural bloodlust diminished at the same time as she dropped her connection to whatever gave her the visions. The room’s much too small for him now; he wants to be outside again, in the rain. The room’s so small it feels like a tunnel.
“Yeah, to his safe.” Cari wipes her chin. “I could see it even when the bells aren’t ringing. I need a fucking drink, though.” She grabs Tammur’s wine glass and drains it, then starts on her own. “That actually went well. We get Tammur to bring in everyone who’ll listen. We find that alchemist, trace the poison back to Heinreil. That’s our proof. They give us the numbers we need to win in gutter court.” She raises her glass as if making a toast. “That fucker’s going down.”
“Cari,” says Spar, but she doesn’t listen.
“Spar Idgeson, master of the Brotherhood. Carillon, the saint of thieves. And Rat, we’ll come up with a title for—”
“Cari,” says Spar again. “I can’t move.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
INTERROGATION OF PRISONER #9313.
I: State your name for the record.
P: Aloysius Ongent.
I: Address?
P: The old seminary.
I: But you are also the lessee of number eight, Desiderata Street?
P: Yes.
I: Occupation?
P: I hold the Derling Chair in History at the University of Guerdon.
I: Do you practise sorcery, professor?
P: I dabble, a little. I have a licence, of course, and all the paperwork should be in order.
I: You dabble. You would not consider yourself a powerful adept.
P: I wouldn’t consider any human a powerful adept, these days. Sorcery has moved on. The work done on reification in the last two centuries means that it is vastly safer and more convenient to approach sorcery through physical means—alchemy, fetishes, aetheric engines, proxiates, vat-grown adepts and the like—than it is to attempt spells using old-fashioned methods. The average journeyman in the alchemists’ guild, for example, can command sorceries that dwarf almost anything attempted in—
I: You would not consider yourself a powerful adept, then?
P: No.
I: Three nights ago, you were on Desiderata Street. Tell me what happened that night.
P: How many more times must I go over this? This is, by my count, the sixth time I’ve been asked that question. Seventh, actually. Twice by the watch, once by Jere then by some little fellow from parliament, then another time by the watch, then by Magistrate Qurix yesterday morning—and she said that I’d be free to go after that. Why am I still here? Are you from the watch, or …?
I: Seventeen people vanished on Desiderata Street, Professor. Twelve Tallowmen were damaged beyond repair, and twice as many were maimed. You will be answering these questions for a long time to come, either here or elsewhere. Tell me what happened that night.
P: Oh, for heaven’s sake. I was dining in the staff common room at the seminary, when my son Miren arrived and warned me of a disturbance—
I: Why did he go for you, and not call the watch?
P: The Tallowmen were already there. He assumed I would be needed in the aftermath, not that I would have to actually, well, intercede.
I: What did he tell you?
P: That there was a brawl going on in the street outside between the Tallowmen and an intruder.
I: Did he tell you what the intruder was?
P: No. He didn’t know what it was.
I: You are the professor of history at the university.
P: Yes.
I: Do you know what it was?
P: No. Should I?
I: “For there hastened from the deep places the unmaking, and they swallowed the hosts of the living, and took from them the hame of form, and offered up their souls to the Black Iron Gods.”
P: Pilgrin’s translation, isn’t it? I’ve always preferred Mondolin’s, myself. “And from the deeps they called the Ravellers, eaters of form, who fell upon the armies of the blessed and caused great confusion, for those who fell rose again in semblance, for they were hollow shells.” Do you mean to say that the creature was one of the fabled servants of the Black Iron Gods?
I: You tell me.
P: According to the histories, they were all destroyed—gods and monsters alike. That said—have you read my paper on post-Ashen cloacal architecture? Our ancestors in the period immediately after the war were very, very concerned about the security of underground places. There are gates and fortresses of tremendous size deep beneath the city. Why do you think the old castle was abandoned as a defensive structure, and they built this new citadel out on a narrow peninsula? It wasn’t just to control the harbour, now, was it? It was because Castle Hill was compromised, worm-riddled with tunnels. But I think you know all this.
I: Did you recognise the creature when you arrived?
P: Dear fellow, I barely saw it. It was fighting all those Tallowmen. All I could see were knives and dancing flames. I wasn’t going to stop to examine it.
I: What did you do then?
P: As I said, I dabble. I know a few, ah, vigorous invocations. Sound and fury, really, more than anything else. I’d never cast any of them before, but my home and my wards were at risk, so I—
I: Your wards? Your home was magically warded? What did you expect?
P: [sighs] Wards, as in young students in my care. Eladora Duttin, for example.
I: No one else?
P: My son, Miren, also lives there. Other students, from time to time. Undergraduates, flitting in and out like mayflies.
I: Was there anyone else present that night?
P: I don’t know. Possibly. College friends of Eladora, maybe.
I: Professor—dabbling is tolerated. Deception is not. Nor is consorting with forbidden powers.
P: Consorting! What utter bunk! You have no standing here! Go back to your wizened masters in the church and tell them that if they threaten me again I’ll bring them before parliament!
I: You have fewer friends there than you think. It is not the Keepers who threaten you. Tell me, Professor, do you remember Uldina Manix? She remembers you.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The room swims around Jere, spinning and lurching like an eggshell in a drain. He suspects that he must be dead and disembodied. Blown to pieces by the explosion. As though the artillery bombardment that killed so many of his mates in the Godswar had struck again, delayed by ten years and off target by a thousand miles.
He stirs. Everything hurts, but he feels it through a morphine fog. It was someone else’s body that had had the shit kicked out of it. He feels a little sorry for that guy.
There’s a bandage or blindfold over his eyes. He reaches up to pull at it.
“I don’t think you should try to move.” A woman’s voice. Hesitant.
“Where …” he manages. His mouth is dry.
“Where what? Um. Your man Bolind is in the other room. Should I fetch him? Where are you? Back in your office in the”—the distaste in her voice betrays Eladora’s identity to Jere—“lithosarium.”
“Water.”
“Oh! Of course.” A moment later, she presses a cup to his lips.
“I can do it myself.” He grabs the cup, spilling half of it over his chest as his hands shake. He wrenches off the bandage. Gods below, his eyes sting. Yellowish goo mixed with tears rolls down his cheeks. Eladora dabs at his face with a handkerchief, but he shoos her away.
“Don’t fuss over me.”
“Sorry.” She flinches and withdraws to the other side of the room—of his room. He’s back in his bedroom at the office; little cot, travelling chest, greatcoat hanging on a peg by the door, alongside where his sword cane usually hangs. Down in the sea, now.
“How did I get here?”
“This strange man in a helmet—”
“Dredger.”
“—brought you to the door. He had a doctor with him. Well, she said she was a doctor. She left some medicine for you.” Eladora sounds doubtful. “She said you were lucky to be alive. They didn’t say what happened to you.”
“Took a little trip out to Bell Rock to see what the problem was.”
“Oh!” Riffling of papers. “And what did you find there?”
Memory of masked figures in yellow fog. The bell crashing to the ground.
“I’m not sure. The gas leak was cover, but I don’t know who the fuckers were.” He pauses, trying to sort actual memory from some fever-dream. “Have you seen your boy? Miren?”
“No. Did you see him? Is he all right?”
“Never mind.” Jere struggles to sit up. Doing so dislodges something in his lungs, and he chokes, spits up gobbets of gritty yellowed phlegm. Eladora waves her handkerchief from the far side of the room, as if that’s helpful. “Fucking hell.”
“Here, take some of this. The doctor said it would help.” A mouthful of bitter medicine; it dissolves the gritty gunk in his mouth, and probably a layer of tooth enamel, too.
“When you didn’t show up—was it last night?—I figured Miren or the professor had come back. No sign?”
Eladora wrings her hands. “No. The professor—he’s been moved. I don’t know if he’s still under arrest, but he’s not in prison at Queen’s Point anymore. And I haven’t seen Miren. And it wasn’t last night—it was the night before. You’ve been unconscious for nearly fifteen hours.”
“Bolind!” roars Jere.
No response from the other room. Eladora crosses to the door and checks. “He’s not here,” she says.
“Useless lump of lard. What about the others?”
“Others?” echoes Eladora. “There’s no one else here. I haven’t seen anyone except you and Bolind in this horrible place.”
He’d told Bolind to rouse the street crew and send them off to look for Idgeson and the Thay girl. Maybe they’re all out, shaking down informants and looking through the slums for the Stone Boy and the thief. Or maybe Bolind’s an even more useless lump of lard than Jere fears, and still hasn’t done as he was ordered. Has the big man lost his nerve?
“Godshit. Right. Hang on, I’ve lost a night. That means I’m supposed to meet Kelkin this evening at nine.”
“It’s after seven now,” says Eladora.
An inarticulate roar of frustration and yellow spit. Jere struggles to get up, fails, sinks back down coughing. There’s a bandage on his ribs that’s red and dripping, another on his left hand taping broken fingers together. And his guts feel like a Tallowman’s innards, as if all his organs have partially melted and stuck together.
“Oh gods—” His oath is lost in another bout of vomiting up yellow slime. He takes another swig of the medicine, then reconsiders and downs half the bottle. He manages to sit up on the side of the little cot, weak as a child.
“Would you help me dress?” he asks Eladora.
They find Bolind in the cell occupied until recently by Spar. The big man walks with a surprising grace, climbing nimbly around the slick rocks, hands moving like a diviner.
“What the fuck are you doing?” roars Jere from the doorway.
Bolind lifts his head and swivels it around in a way that reminds Eladora of an animal. A snake, maybe, lazy but dangerous.
“Looking for clues.”
“Thinks he’s a detective now,” mutters Jere to her under his breath. Then, loudly: “Any word from the old crowd?”
Bolind blinks, slowly. “No. They’re still looking. The gas leak made things harder yesterday.”
“I’ve got a meeting with Kelkin. I’ll be back in a few hours.”
“I’ll come with you,” says Bolind. “Got some stuff to talk about.”
“And you smell a free dinner. All right, but keep your mouth shut. And that goes for you, too, Miss Duttin.”
Eladora of the present day wonders what the Eladora of a week ago would think of her. A week ago, she’d never have dared go into the Wash at any time. Now, she’s walking the terrifying dark streets at twilight, hardly flinching at the distant shouts and cries—and, gods, is that gunfire? Little sparks of fire race across the rooftops, Tallowmen drawn to violence. Flames drawn to moths.
The Eladora of a week ago would have frowned at her clothing. She fled Desiderata Street without any of her belongings—Carillon has more of my things, she thinks sourly—and hasn’t risked going back for so much as a change of clothing since. No money to buy clothes either. She’s had to make do with what she could scavenge in the lithosarium, so she’s wearing a leather jerkin and trousers. She wonders who owned them—some criminal caught by the thief-taker, she guesses. They fit well enough, and when she catches a glimpse of herself in the broken glass of a shop window, she’s struck by how much she looks like Carillon.
She looks almost dangerous. If the Eladora of a week ago met her, she’d cross the street to hide from this armed ruffian of an adventuress.
Bolind walks behind her, a silent shadow just like Miren used be. Miren, though, is young and slim and broodingly handsome and smells of rosewater; Bolind is huge, and his astounding ugliness is underlined by a rose-coloured bloom of bruises on his cheek. He smells of stagnant water.
Jere, beside her, is the only one of them who looks like he should be attending dinner in the house of a gentleman. She found a good suit in his wardrobe. A few years out of date, and it needed a good scrubbing to get several unidentifiable stains out of the trousers. Jere called it his court suit. He swaggers as he walks, forging ahead of them. This part of the Wash is crowded, there’s a sort of tent city springing up here, people who fled the poison cloud of the previous day crowding into lean-tos and flophouses. The watch said that the cloud was mostly harmless by the time it reached the shore, and that there’s no reason people can’t return to their dockside homes. Swaying tenements for refugees from the Godswar. Some of them, she knows from her recent studies, were built as divine decontamination centres, where newcomers to Guerdon could be held until they were proved free of dangerous miracles. There’s a theory that the Stone Plague was brought out of the early Godswar. Now, there’s an internment camp out in the bay, on Hark Island.
Jere makes a path through the crowd for her. No one wants to cross the infamous thief-taker. It’s only when they pass the Tallowmen sentries at the entrance to the subway station, when the crowds suddenly melt away and they’re left alone on the stairs, that Jere suddenly slows and coughs, leans on Bolind while he catches his breath. The bottle of medicine he got from Dredger’s doctor is empty, but he refilled it with medicinal liquor, and he takes a hit. He offers her a sip, which she refuses, as does Bolind.
