The Gutter Prayer, page 27
On the train, she reviews her notes. She turns to the page where she listed likely candidates for the hidden Black Iron Gods and draws an asterisk next to the Bell Rock lighthouse, matching the one next to the Seamarket. She places question marks next to the three cathedrals on Holyhill and the Beggar’s Church. Her pen pauses next to the Beckanore monastery. It was destroyed more than a year ago, but may still be relevant. She makes an indecisive squiggle.
“What do you have there?” asks Bolind, leaning in.
“Never you mind,” snaps Jere. “As soon as we’re done at Kelkin’s, you’re going back down to the Wash to find Spar. If we don’t have him by tomorrow night, we’re fucked. Nabur’s got a bloody writ for both of them.”
Bolind is unmoved. “I’ll find him.”
The train rattles out of the tunnel mouth, over the Gravehill viaduct. The city’s graveyard is a black void beneath them, a starless gulf between the lights of Castle Hill behind them and Bryn Avane ahead.
Alighting, they take a carriage. Only servants walk in haughty Bryn Avane. The driver frowns at Eladora’s clothing, and she cringes, but Jere just taps his stick on the roof and mentions Kelkin’s name, and they’re off. In the cramped carriage, she’s pressed up against Bolind, and something about his touch makes her flesh recoil. He grins at her, showing a mouthful of alarmingly sharp teeth.
She looks out of the window instead, watching the mansions and walled gardens and galleries. The sigil of the alchemists’ guild marked above half the doors—the new rich in this richest of districts.
“If Kelkin asks,” whispers Jere, mindful that the Bryn Avane coachmen are notorious for eavesdropping, “tell him we know where Spar and your cousin are, and we’re just waiting for an opportunity to pick ’em up. Otherwise, fill your gobs with his food and keep quiet. Let him do the talking. He’s in parliament—he likes that.”
“Mr. Kelkin’s house,” announces the driver.
It’s a big mansion, old and overgrown. Rusty iron railings hold back a thick and ill-kempt hedge. The mansion sprawls blindly; most of the windows are shuttered and haven’t been opened in years. Eladora guesses that three-quarters of it is unused and wonders why a man famed for his penny-pinching would own so many empty rooms.
Jere rings the bell at the front door, making Eladora flinch. It echoes away in the depths of the big old house. Shuffling. An old footman opens the door a crack, just enough for the three of them to squeeze in. A single lamp burns in the immensity of the hallway. Threadbare red carpets, stairways climbing away into the shadows. A ticking clock in the darkness.
The footman clears his throat. “Mr. Kelkin is unavoidably delayed and sends his apologies. If you would follow me …”
He limps down the hall, and they follow after, passing by prints of Guerdon’s skyline, of towers and spires and factories. Even the lithosarium has its pride of place. The pictures seem wrong to Eladora, but it is only when they come to a doorway that she remembers why.
“I’ve been here before! This is the Thay mansion!” The memory of that door has been part of her mental furniture all her life, a keepsake she never understood. It was bright then, and seemed so much bigger, but she remembers toddling through that door, laughing as the nursemaid chased her, then bursting into tears when her grandfather glared at her. Even now, so many years later, Eladora is suddenly nervous about stepping through into the next room.
The footman inclines his head. “Mr. Kelkin purchased the house from the estate of the late Jermas Thay. The servants, too—I served your great-grandfather, Ms. Duttin, and your grandfather after him.”
“Oh!” Eladora wonders if she should curtsey. The ancient servant’s rheumy eyes are hard to read.
“I thought everyone in the house was killed,” remarks Jere, “when the Thays were murdered.”
“Everyone in the main house, yes. On the night in question, I was sleeping in the servants’ quarters that adjoin the main building. The connecting door was locked from the other side. By the time we were able to break it down, it was too late to do anything except fight the fires.”
Jere glances around the hallway, examining it as he would a crime scene. Eladora follows his gaze, imagining the intruders smashing through the front door, sweeping through the house with knifes, butchering everyone they encountered, setting fire to the family wing at the back of the mansion.
Her mother Silva was gone by that point, married beneath her station to a country farmer. The love match strained relations with the rest of the family. That visit to the city that Eladora remembered was a mostly happy memory to the toddling child, apart from that brief meeting with her terrifying grandfather. But when her mother Silva recalled the evening—usually when she was drunk—she recounted the humiliation of going to beg Jermas for money. Silva hadn’t known it then, thinks Eladora, but by then Jermas was deep in debt, the family fortune squandered on bad investments and ships that sank. The Godswar ruined them from afar, as trade gods gone mad turned to war and hammered coins and scales into swords.
“Please, sit down.” The footman opens the door into a well-appointed drawing room. “I am sure Mr. Kelkin will be home promptly. I shall inform you when he arrives.”
“Mr. Kelkin,” says Jere, “keeps a bottle of good brandy in that cabinet there.”
“Quite so,” says the footman. Glasses clink. He places one in front of Eladora first. She never drinks, it makes her sick, but that was the Eladora of a week ago, and she lets the footman pour a measure into her glass. The liquor is both slick and sticky, running down her throat and leaving warm fire behind in its wake.
Jere stretches out his legs, wincing as he does so, shifting to get comfortable. He gulps his drink. To dull the pain, she guesses, and sips her own again. She wonders what Miren would say if he saw her now, so unlike the prim postgraduate student he knew. Of course he wouldn’t say anything, not him, but maybe he’d look at her differently.
Bells chime in the distance. Kelkin’s late.
The bells make her think of Carillon. She was three or four when the rest of the family were murdered. She had been sick, some complaint of the lungs, and the doctor had recommended fresh country air, so they’d sent her to stay with Silva. A child coughs, Eladora reflects as she stares into the warm amber of her half-finished drink, and everything turns out one way. It’s not that she’d prefer it if Carillon had stayed here and died along with the rest of the Thays, but if there was no Carillon there’d have been no attack by the Raveller and the professor wouldn’t have been arrested, Miren wouldn’t have vanished and she wouldn’t be here.
Wait, no. The Raveller was already at large, wasn’t it? She’d eavesdropped at the professor’s door when he was talking with Miren and Cari, and heard that it was eating people in the Holy Beggar before the attack. They learned about it through Cari, and it followed her or Miren back to Desiderata Street.
Still, though. She finds her glass empty and reaches for the bottle to refill it. Jere catches her hand.
“That’s enough for you. This is work, remember?”
“Not my work,” she says.
“You’re here at my sufferance, and you’re sleeping under my roof tonight. It’s close enough.”
“You might think that,” retorts Eladora, and pours another splash into her glass. Jere snatches it from in front of her and drains it.
“Thank me later,” he says, mockingly. Eladora doesn’t know how to respond, and just stares at him.
“He’s here,” mutters Bolind, rising. The sound of hooves on cobbles, rattling wheels slowing to a halt. Eladora stands and tries to look presentable, despite being dressed as a common cut-throat. She’s glad that Kelkin changed all the paintings on the walls. She could not bear the feeling of being watched by judgemental ancestors, staring down at her from their gilt frames.
Outside, an argument. Kelkin berating the old footman. A storm crashing against an old weathered rock.
The parliamentarian throws open the door. “Who is that?” he demands, looking at Bolind. Beside Kelkin is a small dog on a leash, straining and snarling at the intruders. The little ball of fur and teeth struggles to get close to Bolind.
“One of my men,” replies Jere mildly.
“You’ll vouch for him?”
“He’s been with me for years.”
Bolind steps aside and gestures to the seat he’s just vacated, and the untouched drink on the table beside it. Kelkin hands the dog’s leash to the footman, who—with some effort—hauls the little beast out through the door. They can still hear it scraping and snarling from outside.
Kelkin sits down and Bolind melts back into the shadows like the city’s best servant. Kelkin empties the glass in one swallow and refills it.
“The majority consensus of the public order committee, as reflected in their recommendations to the city chamber, is that we’re all going to be murdered in our beds by a mob of bloodthirsty scum led by spies and assassins from Old Haith. Some of the younger, stupider members actually proposed locking us all in Parliament and surrounding the building with soldiers ‘until the crisis abates.’”
Kelkin spits in the vague direction of the fireplace, and the gobbet of thick whitish phlegm lands next to Eladora’s foot. It looks like Holyhill to her, a white mound rising from a red sea.
“They found more of that graffiti near the mooring for the freighter that crashed onto the Bell Rock. I didn’t see you there,” says Kelkin to Jere.
“I was on the Bell Rock.”
That shuts Kelkin up. He sits back and gestures to Jere to continue.
Eladora notices how Jere lingers over his descriptions of the physical peril he’d put himself in, and how Kelkin’s probing questions push through to the facts of the matter. It reminds her of Professor Ongent skewering some unprepared undergraduate.
Halfway through, the footman enters and reminds Kelkin that dinner is waiting. The sound of the dog whining through the open door. Kelkin declares that he isn’t moving, and that dinner can come to him. Now, the small side tables and even the floor around the four of them are crowded with plates and dishes, mostly untouched.
Jere reaches the part of the tale where he describes how the intruders removed the bell of the Bell Rock and carried it away.
“The bell?” snaps Kelkin. “What the devil do they want with a bell?”
Eladora can’t stop herself. “I-I-I’ve been doing some research on that matter.”
Kelkin raises a finger. “One moment. Jere, anything else of note?”
“They blew up the rest of the lighthouse to cover their tracks. I was nearly blown to bits; I was as close to the blast as I am to your front door, so—”
“So you survived and came here. Very good. Next. Duttin, what did you discover?”
Jere tries to interrupt, to complain about the head of the watch and some legal harassment, but Kelkin ignores him. “Facts first.”
“I’m not sure if these are f-f-facts,” says Eladora, “but the evidence is compelling.” She lifts her bundle of papers, fumbles for the marked page in Sacred and Secular. Shows them the illustration of the Black Iron statues, the hungry gods given physical form. Embodied hatred.
She begins as she would a university lecture. “The q-question of the eventual disposition of the captured a-a-avatars of the Black Iron pantheon is a vexed one. I began by looking at the works of Rix and Pilgrin, but found them to be primarily concerned with the mystical and theological implications of mass conversion to the faith of the Keepers after the war. Pilgrin, for instance—”
“What does this have to do with the bell at Bell Rock?” asks Kelkin. His hand shakes as he asks the question.
“My thesis is that the Black Iron Gods were reforged into bells and concealed—in plain sight—around the city.”
“The Tower of Law? The Bell Rock?”
“Both were constructed within ten years of the defeat of the Black Iron Gods.”
“What could you do,” asked Kelkin, “with one of those bells?”
“What could I do?” Eladora wavers. “N-n-nothing.”
“Not you, then. A sorcerer. A worshipper of the gods.”
“I don’t know. I’m not an expert in thaumaturgy. Professor Ongent—he’s done some work in the field, and he might—if you got him out of prison …”
“Ha. His name came up in the public safety meeting. Your professor associated with a very questionable crowd in his youth. Unlicensed thaumaturgists, relic-hawkers, archaeotheologists. He’s under suspicion of being an agent of foreign powers.”
“That’s absurd,” protests Eladora.
Kelkin refills his glass again. He ruffles his moustache, smooths it out again. A nervous gesture. Then he says:
“There’s another matter that may be connected. This is military intelligence, mind you, although no doubt it’ll be all over the newspapers in a day or two. Old Haith has taken the Grena Valley.”
The name means nothing to Eladora, but from the way Jere sucks in his breath she guesses it’s a significant move in the Godswar.
“They can’t hold it. They’ve tried before. The local goddess is a vicious bitch. She’s—”
“Dead,” says Kelkin. “Completely dead. No fallout, no skyquakes. Just snuffed it.”
“Gods can’t die,” says Eladora. “Not like that.” Ongent described a god as being like a river channel, a course for flowing spiritual energy. The river might grow and diminish, burst its banks and flood the land, or be diverted to power a mill, or dammed to water farmland. People might drink from the river—or drown in it, like saints.
Block the river at its source, somehow stop the rains that feed it, and maybe, over time—over a long time—it’ll diminish down to a trickle, a muddy stream of bitter, aborted divinity.
But a river doesn’t just stop.
“There are reports that there was a gunboat in the bay,” adds Kelkin.
Jere says, “If Old Haith has a gods-bane weapon, then it’s over. They’ve won the war.” The war’s lasted so long because gods are hard to kill—all you can do is grind them down, deform them and diminish them until they’re nothing but ghosts. The other option is to have one god fight another head-on, and that’s arguably worse. A century of grinding, vicious fighting, or a day of hellfire and madness beyond contemplation—pick your poison.
“The committee’s convinced that we’re a month away from a Haithi invasion force showing up on our doorstep. That the attacks on the Tower of Law and the Bell Rock were acts of sabotage and terror by Haithi agents in our midst. I had to fight to stop them ordering the watch to intern every foreigner in the city.” Kelkin swirls his drink, and glares at an etching of Parliament atop Castle Hill on the wall as if he could destroy his political enemies with sheer anger alone. “Forty years of progress, and they try to turn it all back overnight.”
“You don’t think the attacks are from Haith?” asks Jere.
“That’s what I pay you to find out, you dolt!” roars Kelkin. “But no—it doesn’t make sense. The House of Law might be a valid target, and I suppose they might take advantage of an unrelated attack by trying to convince people they too were responsible for Desiderata Street. But stealing the bell from Bell Rock? No, put that together with … ah, Eladora’s research and it points squarely at something to do with the Black Iron Gods.”
“What are you going to do?” Bolind whispers. Eladora had forgotten he was there. So, it seems, had Kelkin.
“I’ve had enough of that from the committee. Asking ‘what is to be done’ and not giving any bloody answers, because it’s not the right question.” Kelkin picks at a cold chicken leg, snapping it to get at the meat. “Jere, was there anything at all that might identify who was on the Bell Rock? I assume any evidence that might have been left got destroyed along with the lighthouse?”
“They had gasmasks and alchemical bombs. Could be sappers from Haith all right. They were human, or something close to it. Maybe Haithi walking dead? I’m guessing those Raveller-things wouldn’t be too bothered by a poison cloud either. We could trace the wrecked freighter back, see who owned it. Maybe something there.”
“I’ve waited nearly two years for you to bring me Heinreil’s head. You’ll forgive me if I lack confidence in that solution.”
Jere ignores the barb. “It still all goes back to the Tower of Law. That’s where it began, and it ties Heinreil to the whole thing.”
“That’s not where it began,” argues Eladora. She flips through her notes, finds her list of likely places where they might have imprisoned a Black Iron God. “Beckanore monastery. There may have been a bell there.”
Kelkin groans. “And that brings Old Haith in again. It would explain why the Haithi took Beckanore, if there was a bell there and they knew about it. Makes more sense than the naval base nonsense. Maybe it is Haithi spies. Gods below, I’m not walking into that bloody committee and telling those runts they were right.”
“It’s giving a lot of credit to Haith, isn’t it? From what I recall, they’re strictly old-school wizardry and a bunch of death gods. Not tactically flexible.”
Eladora turns a page in her book and lays her finger on the robed cultists of the Black Iron Gods. “Could—well, if one of their monsters survived, couldn’t some of their worshippers?”
Kelkin stares at her, then laughs. “I needed to be drunker before I have that conversation with you,” he says. He refills his glass and drinks half of it.
Jere counts on his fingers. “So, the Beckanore bell, assuming there is one—that gets stolen. The monastery fell without a fight, right?” Kelkin nods. “And then they blow up the Tower of Law, destroying that bell. Maybe they made a mistake. Dredger—my expert on military hardware—tells me those bombs are tricky, maybe they got more bang than they expected.”
