The Gutter Prayer, page 3
Then they ate the animals in the streets.
Then they sinned against He Who Begets, and broke into the temple precincts, and killed the sacred beasts, and ate of their holy flesh.
The priests said to the people, how now will the souls of the dead be carried to the god in the waters, but the people replied, what are the dead to us? Unless we eat, we will be dead, too.
And they killed the priests, and ate them, too.
Still the people starved, and many of them died. The dead thronged the streets, for there were no more sacred beasts to carry them away into the deep waters of God.
The dead thronged the streets, but they were houseless and bodiless, for their remains were eaten by the few people who were left.
And the people of the city dwindled, and became the people of the tombs, and they were few in number.
Over the frozen sea came a new people, the people of the ice, and they came upon the city and said: lo, here is a great city, but it is empty. Even its temples are abandoned. We shall dwell here, and shelter from the cold, and raise up shrines to our own gods there.
The people of the ice endured where the people of the city had not, and survived the cold. Many of them died, too, and their bodies were interred in tombs, in accordance with their customs. And the people of the tombs stole those bodies, and ate of them.
And in this way, the people of the ice and the people of the tombs survived the winter.
When the ice melted, the people of the ice became the people of the city, and the people of the tombs became the ghouls. For they were also, in their new way, people of the city.
And that is how the ghouls came to Guerdon.
CHAPTER TWO
Wake up.”
Stone fingers prod her into wakefulness. Cari opens her eyes, looks up at blue sky. The sound of water lapping. She sits up, wincing as her shoulder complains. Someone has dressed and bound the knife wound the Tallowman had given her. Too neat for Spar’s work.
“I got bored waiting for you to wake,” says Spar, and shrugs. He starts to walk in a circle around their little island.
An artificial island, a pillar of stone in the middle of a water tank or cistern; an artificial lake, surrounded by high walls. Open to the sky. The water is stagnant and brown where it isn’t iridescent with alchemical run-off. Green slime stains the rocks. Looking around, she spots a small iron gate in the wall.
“Where are we?”
“No idea. A prison for Stone Men, I guess.”
That makes sense. Spar could break that gate down, but to get to it he’d have to cross the water, and he’s too heavy to swim, and there’s no telling how deep it is. And Stone Men still have to breathe.
“Is this the Isle of Statues?” She’s heard of the island of Stone Men out in the bay, a colony established when the plague first appeared in Guerdon, where sufferers were exiled and left to petrify. She runs her hands over her own body and face, fearing that she too might be infected with the curse. She can’t find any stony growths, but there are dozens of small painful burn marks across her face and hands, like she’s been stung by fiery wasps.
Spar considers the question. “No. I heard the bells of Holy Beggar a few minutes ago, so I guess we’re somewhere in the upper Wash.”
Cari extends her hand. “Help me up?”
Spar doesn’t move, just clucks his tongue disapprovingly.
“Right, right.” Don’t touch a Stone Man. Every city she’s visited had its own customs and rules and taboos, and the faster you internalised them, the better. Though Carillon was born in Guerdon, she grew up in the countryside, far from the plague. She stands up gingerly, careful not to put weight on her injured arm. “How did we get here?”
“Some thief-taker caught me. They threw me on a cart and drugged me.” He stretches, stone scales scraping off each other. “They caught you, too. I don’t know about Rat.”
“Did you tell them we didn’t burn down the hall?”
“Tell who?” asks Spar. “I haven’t seen anyone since I woke up.”
Cari cups her hands over her mouth, and shouts. “Hey! Turnkey! We’re awake and need breakfast!”
Spar considers the position of the sun in the sky. “Bit late for that.”
“And lunch!” shouts Cari. It’s been a long time since she had three square meals a day, or even one, but it’s worth a try.
Over the wall, someone laughs, but there’s no other answer. Cari sinks back onto the least uncomfortable rock.
“Let’s get our story straight,” she suggests. “We tell them we didn’t burn that place down. Hells, Rat and I rescued one of the guards from the fire.”
“Some of them died, though.”
“That wasn’t our fault! You didn’t hurt anyone, did you?”
“I tried to hit the thief-taker.”
“You were running for your life from a burning building,” says Cari. “And will you stop walking in circles?”
“No,” says Spar.
“The point is, we didn’t burn the place down. There was some sort of explosion, maybe an alchemical bomb.” She’s seen the weapons of war that the alchemists can make in other places—fires that never stop burning, animals warped into huge monsters, knife-smoke, ice contagions. Alchemical weapons are Guerdon’s biggest export.
“We were robbing it, though.” Spar shrugs. “No sense denying that.”
“They’ll hang me for that,” says Cari. “I don’t know what they do to Stone Men.”
They can’t hang Spar—his neck is armoured in stone—but doing nothing would be punishment enough. Deny him alkahest for long enough and he’ll petrify, and that’ll be worse than hanging. Dying of thirst, locked in the stone shell of his own living tomb. It’s all ahead of him.
“Let me do the talking,” he tells her. “You just stay quiet. The Brotherhood will get us out of this.”
“I don’t owe Heinreil my neck.”
“It won’t come to that. You have to trust him. Trust us.” Us, he says. Trust the Brotherhood that his father founded, and died to protect. And he’s right—there’s a good chance the Brotherhood can buy their freedom with bribery. But that means she’ll owe Heinreil even more, be beholden to the man for the rest of her life.
“Sod that,” Cari throws an arm out, gesturing at the mucky lake and blank walls that make up their open-air prison. “I’m not risking everything for that slimy cock-faced goblin.” She says that loudly enough to be overheard, and whoever’s on the other side of the wall finds it absolutely hilarious. Cari turns to face the laughter and screams. “I want to talk to someone! Come on!”
“Don’t tell them anything,” insists Spar.
There’s no answer anyway. The water laps against their little island, depositing a dead bird on the shore. Spar nudges it back into the lake with one stone-toed foot, and it slowly sinks into the mire. Cari sits fuming on the rock. She scratches at her neck, irritated by the absence of the necklace she usually wears. Throws pebbles into the slime, watches them sink. Patience is not Cari’s strongest virtue.
“You were talking in your sleep again,” he says after a few minutes.
“I don’t talk in my sleep,” Cari snaps.
“You were. Some story about ghouls and beasts. It didn’t sound like you at all.”
“I don’t remember,” she replies, but she does. Like a dream, all caught up in the bell tower collapsing around her and this strange, out-of-place vertiginous memory, like she’d fallen into the sky. Her head hurts. She rubs her temples, but it only replaces one pain with another as her fingers touch the scorched spots on her skin. Molten metal, Cari realises. That’s what made these burns on her hands and face. Like a blacksmith’s arms, gobbets of hot metal from the forge. She leans over the foul water, trying to see how badly she’s been burnt. The water’s more mud than mirror. She pokes at the larger burns with a finger.
“You’ll live,” says Spar.
“Until they hang me.”
“They won’t,” he insists, but he can’t be sure, and she can hear the lack of conviction in his voice. In Spar’s father’s time, the Brotherhood had enough sway to ensure that a case like theirs would never go to the gallows. But under Heinreil it’s a different matter. Heinreil won’t spend the money on bribes and lawyers until the return’s worth it.
Cari looks at the distant gate. She could swim over—she’s a strong swimmer, half her life spent around boats—but the gate looks sturdy and rust-free despite its surroundings. She checks for her knife and lock picks, but they’ve taken everything except for her shirt and trousers and, oddly, one shoe.
“Hell with it,” she says, half to herself, and steps into the water. Her wounded shoulder means she can’t swim easily, and all her little scars and cuts sting as if she’s floating in lemon juice, and she’s regretting the idea by the time she’s swum ten feet, but her legs still work and she kicks forward through the slime. She twists awkwardly to keep her shoulder out of the water as much as she can.
“Cari!” hisses Spar, keeping his voice low to avoid being heard. “Come back!”
Halfway across, one of her her legs scrapes against some obstacle, like a reef. She stops, treads slime for a moment.
“What is it?” asks Spar.
Cari probes with her feet, rubbing against whatever’s down there, trying to discern its shape. Four—no five spiky protrusions from a column, another one next to it, and something round between them.
A statue, arms upraised. She tries to swim around it, bumps into another one, and another, and another, too; a graveyard of Stone Men.
“You don’t want to know.” She swims on, using the dead men for support when the pain gets too much for her. She gets a mouthful of slime, chokes on it, spits it out. This was a mistake, she thinks, but there’s no turning back now. All the marks on her face are afire now, a constellation of agony that almost eclipses the dull ache in her shoulder.
She glances back, sees Spar shuffling nervously on the shore. He’s too far away to help. If he steps off the island, he’ll sink and drown.
She’s not keen on drowning either. She takes one last breather, balancing on the head of the last Stone Man, then swims the final stretch.
She makes it to the gate and pulls herself up onto the narrow lip. Spar exhales, his lungs rattling like a bag of pebbles. Cari pushes at the gate, rattles it, then starts to climb it. Maybe, if she balances on the top of the gate, she can reach the top of the wall around and climb up, even with one arm bound.
She can hear the sounds of the city now, muffled and distant but there nonetheless, the murmur of crowds, shouts and barks, the rattling hiss of train engines, the tolling of the bells of the Holy Beggar—
The Tallowman is burning low now. Guttering. It makes it hard to concentrate. It leaps to another rooftop and misjudges the distance, landing badly, sprawling on the roof tiles and slipping towards the street far below, but it’s so light, so much waxy flesh burned away, that it can easily catch itself. Like a spider skipping across the surface of a pond. I’m a spider, it thinks, with some part of its brain grown soft enough for whimsy.
It laughs and leers at the meat people down below. They look away, or cower, or hasten their pace. They fear the Tallowman, and that’s good. It could go down there, have fun down there. Be faster than them, stronger, better—brighter.
The smell of blood reminds it of the mission. It cut the ghoul, so there’s a blood trail to follow. Its nose, though, is drooping, melting, and blocked with its own wax. It jams two fingers up its nostrils (remembering to put the axe down first; wouldn’t want to chop its own head off) and wiggles them about, opening channels from the outside to its hollow inside where its flame-self burns. It adjusts the nose, remoulding it so it’s more dignified. In a rare moment of self-reflection, the Tallowman acknowledges that it’s burnt for too long and needs a good long soak in a tallow vat. Needs a new wick threaded through its body, for this one’s nearly gone. The Tallowman must buy each new life with the good deeds of the previous one. If it doesn’t catch the ghoul, maybe the alchemists won’t remake it. Naughty candle, reduced to a puddle with an axe.
Focus.
The Tallowman inhales sharply. The candle flame in his head flares with the rush of air. Bread-baking, cattle shit and blood from the slaughterhouses, soot from a thousand thousand chimneys and smokestacks, salt and oil engine oil, fruit smells and melting sugar that might make it hungry if it still had a stomach—and ghoul blood, slow and thick and sweetly rotten. The ghoul came this way, and the trail’s pointing straight to Gravehill. The boy’s going to earth.
Gravehill, the old city quarter of the dead, is on the far side of Castle Hill. It’s a long climb for a ghoul, especially in the daylight. Especially a wounded one. Castle Hill is like a wall, dividing the portside districts and the old city from the newer suburbs beyond. Not that Gravehill is new; it’s old, but, as Guerdon expanded, people built houses in and atop the tombs of their ancestors, and now the living and dead crowd together in that slum. Ghouls are common there, unlike the rest of the city.
If the Tallowman were fresh, it would spring up the long zigzagging rows of steps that ascend the south face of Castle Hill. Take them at a run, six or eight at a time, flashing past the red-flushed faces of servants and clerks climbing towards the homes of their betters, past living guards and watchmen. It might even dare to scamper up the cliff face itself; some previous iteration of city folk carved into the sides of Castle Hill, excavating tunnels and halls in the hard rock, so the climb is steep but not impossible for a mere human, and easy for a fresh Tallowman. But it’s not fresh, so he looks elsewhere.
Down there, off to the right, there’s a tunnel cutting, a place where the subterranean train lines that run beneath the city come to the surface. The Tallowman leaps from rooftop to rooftop, skittering across tiles. It might be a rat, or a bird, or a ghost to those below, whose sleep is disturbed by strange noises from above. One last scramble, then a spring, and the Tallowman clings to the side of a stone tunnel mouth that swallows the train line.
There it waits, inhaling the smell of the ghoul’s blood so it’ll be able to follow the trail on the far side. Each inhalation makes the Tallowman’s wick flare brighter, melting more of its body.
The train thunders by, and the Tallowman leaps onto the roof as it passes. Stumbling now—one side’s a little softer than the other—but still lightning-quick, it swings over the edge of the carriage roof and through a narrow window. The carriage is half full of sailors and night workers on their way home, but no one dares question the Tallowman’s sudden entrance. Hands muffle shrieks of alarm; shouts are swallowed. It’s guild business, always guild business—best not to cross their path.
It takes a seat between a tattooed sailor and a grey-robed student, who pretends not to notice the grinning, glowing wax effigy that sits next to her. It crosses its legs, resting its long knife across its knees. It trims the worst of the melted wax off its fingers to keep them nimble.
The train rattles and screams under Castle Hill. It smiles politely at his fellow passengers and doesn’t cut any of their throats. The brakes squeal as they come to Gravesend Station. Passageways lead off deeper underground, for those commuters whose business brings them down below here. A branch line, the Mortuary Line, to one of the big churches and its corpse shaft. Instead, the Tallowman takes the stairs, leaping up them in two bounds, past the shocked face of the ticket inspector in his booth and out into the cold morning air of Gravehill.
It takes too long, too long to catch the ghoul’s scent, too many minutes scuttling along drainpipes on Leavetaking Square, too long poking amid the coffin-pocked dirt piles near the new Last Days mausoleum. The smell’s coming from the oldest, deepest part of Gravehill, the catacombs and warrens of the ghouls. The Tallowman can’t be afraid—it’s not capable of such an emotion—but it can fret, and flicker at the thought of taking on many ghouls at once. Ghouls are tough, like old leather instead of the soft juicy gushing meat of humans. Still, a blunt knife offers its own amusements, too.
As it turns out, it needn’t have worried. The ghoul didn’t take refuge in the main warren, where the majority of the city’s ghouls live. The rat’s hole is down in another crypt. The Tallowman laughs. Find the ghoul, kill him, then go back to the alchemists, beg for another turn in the mould, a fresh body. It dares to hope.
It stalks down dusty marble stairs into the crypt. The blood smell is strong here. Soon, it’ll get even stronger.
The Tallowman turns a corner into another chamber, and there’s a woman there. Human, not a ghoul, her features illuminated only by the light that shines through the Tallowman’s thin shell. Skin like cracked leather, close-cropped hair, eyes of brilliant blue.
It leers at her with its misshapen face, brings the knife up to threaten her, but she doesn’t flinch.
“Are you the fuckwit that scared off all the bloody ghouls?” she asks. “Place is quieter than—”
Flicker-quick, the Tallowman is at her side, knife at her throat.
“Just don’t,” she says, and there’s not a trace of fear in her voice. It doesn’t have the energy left to be curious about this strange woman. She’s not its quarry. It tries to speak, to question her about what she saw, but its vocal cords melted hours ago and it can only gurgle. Instead, it points at the blood trail, gesturing angrily.
“Leave the ghoul alone and sod off, please.”
Infuriated, the Tallowman releases the woman and ducks around her. Moving on all fours now, nose-hole pressed to the ground, following the blood trail. It leads through a stone door that’s slightly ajar, and the Tallowman wriggles through, leaving the edges smeared with soft wax. Beyond, a short passage that ends at another stone door. Heavy, but even in its diminished state the Tallowman should be able to force it open quickly. It throws itself against the stone, feels the door give very slightly. It can smell the ghoul on the other side, so close it can almost taste the blood. The ghoul pushes back, trying to hold the door closed, but even stringy ghoul muscle cannot compete against the strength and speed of a Tallowman for long.
Then they sinned against He Who Begets, and broke into the temple precincts, and killed the sacred beasts, and ate of their holy flesh.
The priests said to the people, how now will the souls of the dead be carried to the god in the waters, but the people replied, what are the dead to us? Unless we eat, we will be dead, too.
And they killed the priests, and ate them, too.
Still the people starved, and many of them died. The dead thronged the streets, for there were no more sacred beasts to carry them away into the deep waters of God.
The dead thronged the streets, but they were houseless and bodiless, for their remains were eaten by the few people who were left.
And the people of the city dwindled, and became the people of the tombs, and they were few in number.
Over the frozen sea came a new people, the people of the ice, and they came upon the city and said: lo, here is a great city, but it is empty. Even its temples are abandoned. We shall dwell here, and shelter from the cold, and raise up shrines to our own gods there.
The people of the ice endured where the people of the city had not, and survived the cold. Many of them died, too, and their bodies were interred in tombs, in accordance with their customs. And the people of the tombs stole those bodies, and ate of them.
And in this way, the people of the ice and the people of the tombs survived the winter.
When the ice melted, the people of the ice became the people of the city, and the people of the tombs became the ghouls. For they were also, in their new way, people of the city.
And that is how the ghouls came to Guerdon.
CHAPTER TWO
Wake up.”
Stone fingers prod her into wakefulness. Cari opens her eyes, looks up at blue sky. The sound of water lapping. She sits up, wincing as her shoulder complains. Someone has dressed and bound the knife wound the Tallowman had given her. Too neat for Spar’s work.
“I got bored waiting for you to wake,” says Spar, and shrugs. He starts to walk in a circle around their little island.
An artificial island, a pillar of stone in the middle of a water tank or cistern; an artificial lake, surrounded by high walls. Open to the sky. The water is stagnant and brown where it isn’t iridescent with alchemical run-off. Green slime stains the rocks. Looking around, she spots a small iron gate in the wall.
“Where are we?”
“No idea. A prison for Stone Men, I guess.”
That makes sense. Spar could break that gate down, but to get to it he’d have to cross the water, and he’s too heavy to swim, and there’s no telling how deep it is. And Stone Men still have to breathe.
“Is this the Isle of Statues?” She’s heard of the island of Stone Men out in the bay, a colony established when the plague first appeared in Guerdon, where sufferers were exiled and left to petrify. She runs her hands over her own body and face, fearing that she too might be infected with the curse. She can’t find any stony growths, but there are dozens of small painful burn marks across her face and hands, like she’s been stung by fiery wasps.
Spar considers the question. “No. I heard the bells of Holy Beggar a few minutes ago, so I guess we’re somewhere in the upper Wash.”
Cari extends her hand. “Help me up?”
Spar doesn’t move, just clucks his tongue disapprovingly.
“Right, right.” Don’t touch a Stone Man. Every city she’s visited had its own customs and rules and taboos, and the faster you internalised them, the better. Though Carillon was born in Guerdon, she grew up in the countryside, far from the plague. She stands up gingerly, careful not to put weight on her injured arm. “How did we get here?”
“Some thief-taker caught me. They threw me on a cart and drugged me.” He stretches, stone scales scraping off each other. “They caught you, too. I don’t know about Rat.”
“Did you tell them we didn’t burn down the hall?”
“Tell who?” asks Spar. “I haven’t seen anyone since I woke up.”
Cari cups her hands over her mouth, and shouts. “Hey! Turnkey! We’re awake and need breakfast!”
Spar considers the position of the sun in the sky. “Bit late for that.”
“And lunch!” shouts Cari. It’s been a long time since she had three square meals a day, or even one, but it’s worth a try.
Over the wall, someone laughs, but there’s no other answer. Cari sinks back onto the least uncomfortable rock.
“Let’s get our story straight,” she suggests. “We tell them we didn’t burn that place down. Hells, Rat and I rescued one of the guards from the fire.”
“Some of them died, though.”
“That wasn’t our fault! You didn’t hurt anyone, did you?”
“I tried to hit the thief-taker.”
“You were running for your life from a burning building,” says Cari. “And will you stop walking in circles?”
“No,” says Spar.
“The point is, we didn’t burn the place down. There was some sort of explosion, maybe an alchemical bomb.” She’s seen the weapons of war that the alchemists can make in other places—fires that never stop burning, animals warped into huge monsters, knife-smoke, ice contagions. Alchemical weapons are Guerdon’s biggest export.
“We were robbing it, though.” Spar shrugs. “No sense denying that.”
“They’ll hang me for that,” says Cari. “I don’t know what they do to Stone Men.”
They can’t hang Spar—his neck is armoured in stone—but doing nothing would be punishment enough. Deny him alkahest for long enough and he’ll petrify, and that’ll be worse than hanging. Dying of thirst, locked in the stone shell of his own living tomb. It’s all ahead of him.
“Let me do the talking,” he tells her. “You just stay quiet. The Brotherhood will get us out of this.”
“I don’t owe Heinreil my neck.”
“It won’t come to that. You have to trust him. Trust us.” Us, he says. Trust the Brotherhood that his father founded, and died to protect. And he’s right—there’s a good chance the Brotherhood can buy their freedom with bribery. But that means she’ll owe Heinreil even more, be beholden to the man for the rest of her life.
“Sod that,” Cari throws an arm out, gesturing at the mucky lake and blank walls that make up their open-air prison. “I’m not risking everything for that slimy cock-faced goblin.” She says that loudly enough to be overheard, and whoever’s on the other side of the wall finds it absolutely hilarious. Cari turns to face the laughter and screams. “I want to talk to someone! Come on!”
“Don’t tell them anything,” insists Spar.
There’s no answer anyway. The water laps against their little island, depositing a dead bird on the shore. Spar nudges it back into the lake with one stone-toed foot, and it slowly sinks into the mire. Cari sits fuming on the rock. She scratches at her neck, irritated by the absence of the necklace she usually wears. Throws pebbles into the slime, watches them sink. Patience is not Cari’s strongest virtue.
“You were talking in your sleep again,” he says after a few minutes.
“I don’t talk in my sleep,” Cari snaps.
“You were. Some story about ghouls and beasts. It didn’t sound like you at all.”
“I don’t remember,” she replies, but she does. Like a dream, all caught up in the bell tower collapsing around her and this strange, out-of-place vertiginous memory, like she’d fallen into the sky. Her head hurts. She rubs her temples, but it only replaces one pain with another as her fingers touch the scorched spots on her skin. Molten metal, Cari realises. That’s what made these burns on her hands and face. Like a blacksmith’s arms, gobbets of hot metal from the forge. She leans over the foul water, trying to see how badly she’s been burnt. The water’s more mud than mirror. She pokes at the larger burns with a finger.
“You’ll live,” says Spar.
“Until they hang me.”
“They won’t,” he insists, but he can’t be sure, and she can hear the lack of conviction in his voice. In Spar’s father’s time, the Brotherhood had enough sway to ensure that a case like theirs would never go to the gallows. But under Heinreil it’s a different matter. Heinreil won’t spend the money on bribes and lawyers until the return’s worth it.
Cari looks at the distant gate. She could swim over—she’s a strong swimmer, half her life spent around boats—but the gate looks sturdy and rust-free despite its surroundings. She checks for her knife and lock picks, but they’ve taken everything except for her shirt and trousers and, oddly, one shoe.
“Hell with it,” she says, half to herself, and steps into the water. Her wounded shoulder means she can’t swim easily, and all her little scars and cuts sting as if she’s floating in lemon juice, and she’s regretting the idea by the time she’s swum ten feet, but her legs still work and she kicks forward through the slime. She twists awkwardly to keep her shoulder out of the water as much as she can.
“Cari!” hisses Spar, keeping his voice low to avoid being heard. “Come back!”
Halfway across, one of her her legs scrapes against some obstacle, like a reef. She stops, treads slime for a moment.
“What is it?” asks Spar.
Cari probes with her feet, rubbing against whatever’s down there, trying to discern its shape. Four—no five spiky protrusions from a column, another one next to it, and something round between them.
A statue, arms upraised. She tries to swim around it, bumps into another one, and another, and another, too; a graveyard of Stone Men.
“You don’t want to know.” She swims on, using the dead men for support when the pain gets too much for her. She gets a mouthful of slime, chokes on it, spits it out. This was a mistake, she thinks, but there’s no turning back now. All the marks on her face are afire now, a constellation of agony that almost eclipses the dull ache in her shoulder.
She glances back, sees Spar shuffling nervously on the shore. He’s too far away to help. If he steps off the island, he’ll sink and drown.
She’s not keen on drowning either. She takes one last breather, balancing on the head of the last Stone Man, then swims the final stretch.
She makes it to the gate and pulls herself up onto the narrow lip. Spar exhales, his lungs rattling like a bag of pebbles. Cari pushes at the gate, rattles it, then starts to climb it. Maybe, if she balances on the top of the gate, she can reach the top of the wall around and climb up, even with one arm bound.
She can hear the sounds of the city now, muffled and distant but there nonetheless, the murmur of crowds, shouts and barks, the rattling hiss of train engines, the tolling of the bells of the Holy Beggar—
The Tallowman is burning low now. Guttering. It makes it hard to concentrate. It leaps to another rooftop and misjudges the distance, landing badly, sprawling on the roof tiles and slipping towards the street far below, but it’s so light, so much waxy flesh burned away, that it can easily catch itself. Like a spider skipping across the surface of a pond. I’m a spider, it thinks, with some part of its brain grown soft enough for whimsy.
It laughs and leers at the meat people down below. They look away, or cower, or hasten their pace. They fear the Tallowman, and that’s good. It could go down there, have fun down there. Be faster than them, stronger, better—brighter.
The smell of blood reminds it of the mission. It cut the ghoul, so there’s a blood trail to follow. Its nose, though, is drooping, melting, and blocked with its own wax. It jams two fingers up its nostrils (remembering to put the axe down first; wouldn’t want to chop its own head off) and wiggles them about, opening channels from the outside to its hollow inside where its flame-self burns. It adjusts the nose, remoulding it so it’s more dignified. In a rare moment of self-reflection, the Tallowman acknowledges that it’s burnt for too long and needs a good long soak in a tallow vat. Needs a new wick threaded through its body, for this one’s nearly gone. The Tallowman must buy each new life with the good deeds of the previous one. If it doesn’t catch the ghoul, maybe the alchemists won’t remake it. Naughty candle, reduced to a puddle with an axe.
Focus.
The Tallowman inhales sharply. The candle flame in his head flares with the rush of air. Bread-baking, cattle shit and blood from the slaughterhouses, soot from a thousand thousand chimneys and smokestacks, salt and oil engine oil, fruit smells and melting sugar that might make it hungry if it still had a stomach—and ghoul blood, slow and thick and sweetly rotten. The ghoul came this way, and the trail’s pointing straight to Gravehill. The boy’s going to earth.
Gravehill, the old city quarter of the dead, is on the far side of Castle Hill. It’s a long climb for a ghoul, especially in the daylight. Especially a wounded one. Castle Hill is like a wall, dividing the portside districts and the old city from the newer suburbs beyond. Not that Gravehill is new; it’s old, but, as Guerdon expanded, people built houses in and atop the tombs of their ancestors, and now the living and dead crowd together in that slum. Ghouls are common there, unlike the rest of the city.
If the Tallowman were fresh, it would spring up the long zigzagging rows of steps that ascend the south face of Castle Hill. Take them at a run, six or eight at a time, flashing past the red-flushed faces of servants and clerks climbing towards the homes of their betters, past living guards and watchmen. It might even dare to scamper up the cliff face itself; some previous iteration of city folk carved into the sides of Castle Hill, excavating tunnels and halls in the hard rock, so the climb is steep but not impossible for a mere human, and easy for a fresh Tallowman. But it’s not fresh, so he looks elsewhere.
Down there, off to the right, there’s a tunnel cutting, a place where the subterranean train lines that run beneath the city come to the surface. The Tallowman leaps from rooftop to rooftop, skittering across tiles. It might be a rat, or a bird, or a ghost to those below, whose sleep is disturbed by strange noises from above. One last scramble, then a spring, and the Tallowman clings to the side of a stone tunnel mouth that swallows the train line.
There it waits, inhaling the smell of the ghoul’s blood so it’ll be able to follow the trail on the far side. Each inhalation makes the Tallowman’s wick flare brighter, melting more of its body.
The train thunders by, and the Tallowman leaps onto the roof as it passes. Stumbling now—one side’s a little softer than the other—but still lightning-quick, it swings over the edge of the carriage roof and through a narrow window. The carriage is half full of sailors and night workers on their way home, but no one dares question the Tallowman’s sudden entrance. Hands muffle shrieks of alarm; shouts are swallowed. It’s guild business, always guild business—best not to cross their path.
It takes a seat between a tattooed sailor and a grey-robed student, who pretends not to notice the grinning, glowing wax effigy that sits next to her. It crosses its legs, resting its long knife across its knees. It trims the worst of the melted wax off its fingers to keep them nimble.
The train rattles and screams under Castle Hill. It smiles politely at his fellow passengers and doesn’t cut any of their throats. The brakes squeal as they come to Gravesend Station. Passageways lead off deeper underground, for those commuters whose business brings them down below here. A branch line, the Mortuary Line, to one of the big churches and its corpse shaft. Instead, the Tallowman takes the stairs, leaping up them in two bounds, past the shocked face of the ticket inspector in his booth and out into the cold morning air of Gravehill.
It takes too long, too long to catch the ghoul’s scent, too many minutes scuttling along drainpipes on Leavetaking Square, too long poking amid the coffin-pocked dirt piles near the new Last Days mausoleum. The smell’s coming from the oldest, deepest part of Gravehill, the catacombs and warrens of the ghouls. The Tallowman can’t be afraid—it’s not capable of such an emotion—but it can fret, and flicker at the thought of taking on many ghouls at once. Ghouls are tough, like old leather instead of the soft juicy gushing meat of humans. Still, a blunt knife offers its own amusements, too.
As it turns out, it needn’t have worried. The ghoul didn’t take refuge in the main warren, where the majority of the city’s ghouls live. The rat’s hole is down in another crypt. The Tallowman laughs. Find the ghoul, kill him, then go back to the alchemists, beg for another turn in the mould, a fresh body. It dares to hope.
It stalks down dusty marble stairs into the crypt. The blood smell is strong here. Soon, it’ll get even stronger.
The Tallowman turns a corner into another chamber, and there’s a woman there. Human, not a ghoul, her features illuminated only by the light that shines through the Tallowman’s thin shell. Skin like cracked leather, close-cropped hair, eyes of brilliant blue.
It leers at her with its misshapen face, brings the knife up to threaten her, but she doesn’t flinch.
“Are you the fuckwit that scared off all the bloody ghouls?” she asks. “Place is quieter than—”
Flicker-quick, the Tallowman is at her side, knife at her throat.
“Just don’t,” she says, and there’s not a trace of fear in her voice. It doesn’t have the energy left to be curious about this strange woman. She’s not its quarry. It tries to speak, to question her about what she saw, but its vocal cords melted hours ago and it can only gurgle. Instead, it points at the blood trail, gesturing angrily.
“Leave the ghoul alone and sod off, please.”
Infuriated, the Tallowman releases the woman and ducks around her. Moving on all fours now, nose-hole pressed to the ground, following the blood trail. It leads through a stone door that’s slightly ajar, and the Tallowman wriggles through, leaving the edges smeared with soft wax. Beyond, a short passage that ends at another stone door. Heavy, but even in its diminished state the Tallowman should be able to force it open quickly. It throws itself against the stone, feels the door give very slightly. It can smell the ghoul on the other side, so close it can almost taste the blood. The ghoul pushes back, trying to hold the door closed, but even stringy ghoul muscle cannot compete against the strength and speed of a Tallowman for long.
