The Gutter Prayer, page 31
As Spar approaches, the second man jumps to the shore and throws something small into the boat behind him. A flare. The houseboat catches fire in an instant, burning bright, flames of green and blue as the blaze eats at the coloured paint of the cabin, sickly blueish lights dancing across the polluted surface of the canal. Bleak keens like a boiling kettle.
The Fever Knight hisses when he sees Spar. Armour clanking, life-support tubes bubbling as he inhales. His skull-faced helmet swivelling to stare at Spar, lenses in the eye sockets dancing with reflected flames. Stories of the Knight’s atrocities run through Spar’s mind. They say that the Knight made a man eat his own wife, force-feeding him chunks of her raw flesh until the man paid his debts. That the Knight’s articulated armour conceals any number of blades and weapons, illegal ones—flash ghosts and worse—and he chooses the means of execution that you fear the most. That the Knight is so wracked with disease and acidic humours that he’ll explode when he dies, that if he bleeds on you you’ll die on the spot from the poisons in his blood, and that’s why no one dares fight him.
Unless you’re already dead, thinks Spar. He puts the bag down on a capstan, like a wreathe on a grave.
“Idgeson,” hisses the Knight, “come quietly, and we won’t need to gut the old woman.” Mother Bleak’s eyes are tightly closed, and she’s shaking. She’s pitifully thin in the brute’s grasp, limbs like old sticks.
Spar takes a step forward, feeling the unaccustomed strength in his own limbs. The Stone Plague’s ironic curse—the closer you are to petrification, the stronger you become. He’s slower than he likes to be, clumsier, but so very strong this night.
He looks up. Faces stare down at him from the surrounding buildings, from behind twitching curtains and from distant balconies. No one breathes a word, or wants to admit they’re there, but there are many witnesses to what’s about to happen.
“Go back to Heinreil,” says Spar, advancing towards the Fever Knight, trapping the warrior between himself and the waters of the canal. “Tell him I’ll see him in gutter court, in front of the whole Brotherhood. Tell him that we won’t stand for bully-boys like you treating people like that.”
“Bleed her,” orders the Fever Knight.
Spar takes another step, driving his foot into the ground, making it tremor. Ripples in the canal make little waves, splashing against the banks, the hull of the houseboat. “Hurt her,” says Spar, keeping his tone light, almost mocking, “and I’ll pull your arms off.”
The thief’s hand shakes. He looks to the Fever Knight for reassurance, for strength. Irritated, the Knight half turns towards his henchman—
—and that’s Spar’s opening. The Stone Man breaks into a lumbering sprint, covering the short distance between them in a heartbeat. The Knight grunts and brings his sword around, his armour hissing as syringes automatically plunge into his skin, disgorging some other drug. Spar adjusts his charge minutely to put one of the toughest of his hide’s stony plates between his still-vulnerable living flesh and the point of the blade. He slams into the sword, deflecting it, feeling it skitter across his body, finding no purchase. An instant later, he smashes into the Fever Knight, and they both go toppling backwards.
Falling into the wreck of the burning houseboat, breaking through it, down into the cold.
Most of the canal isn’t that deep. Even when it was dug, it was only eight feet deep, and these days it’s silted up and filled with rubbish, so there’s only two or three feet of stagnant water in most places. Here, though, it’s close to where the canal meets the waters of the harbour, so it’s deeper, and the combined weight of Spar and the steel-clad Fever Knight are enough to sink deep into the mud.
The Fever Knight claws at him, like an animal, thrashing in terror. Spar endures, keeping his arms locked around his enemy. He remembers the submerged statues in the lithosarium, their arms up stretched towards the surface, drowned where they froze. He’ll be as remorseless as stone.
He imagines he can feel the heat of the Knight’s diseased body through the armour, through the water.
He can’t see a thing, but he can tell that he’s on top of the Fever Knight, a dead weight, pushing the other man down into the cool mud.
The Knight’s thrashings grow more violent. His head smashes into Spar’s cheek, cracking the rock of Spar’s flesh. Kicks hurt his already lame right leg. Spar endures, like his father endured, even though the whole city saw Idge’s grand refusal and no one can see Spar’s martyrdom in the murk of the canal.
Something splashes in the water nearby. Then another thing, and another, like rain.
The Fever Knight makes one final effort to throw Spar off. Maybe he finds purchase against the solid bottom of the old canal, lost for centuries in the murk and mire. He nearly succeeds, forcing them both back into the light from the fires above.
Spar glimpses a face like a bleached skull, mottled in purple, eyes bulging. The Fever Knight’s fingers claw at Spar’s flanks, his shoulders. The waters of the canal must be turning blood-red, he thinks, as they wash away all the blood on the Knight’s hands.
Spar’s own lungs start to burn and freeze at the same time. He knows what that means—he can’t breathe, and soon he won’t have lungs to breathe with even if he could, just two hollows in the stone of his chest. Sorry, Cari, he thinks, I won’t be around to be what you want me to be.
The Fever Knight stops moving. Spar lets go, tries to get his feet under him, but he slips in the mud and sinks like, well, a stone, falling again. The canal muck must be like a soft bed.
Something else splashes nearby. The end of a hooked pole. Jere’s staff, the one Cari stole, salvaged from the ruin of the boat. It catches on his arm and pulls him towards the edge. Hands, grabbing him, lifting him up. His face breaks the surface of the water, and he gulps air. A crowd has appeared on the banks of the canal, a host of saints. The people from the tenements, dragging Spar from the water.
Two more splashes as they throw the other two thieves into the water. Unlike their leader, they float instead of sinking, but the hail of stones and refuse thrown at them must make them wish they could. One of them’s driven into the blazing wreck and screams as he burns.
They get Spar to the edge, where he can hang onto the bank and eventually drag himself out. They cheer as he stands up.
A gang of mudlarks—the children of the canals, who search the slime for coins and scrap and other treasures—grab the hooked staff and go fishing for the corpse of the Fever Knight. They drag the horrific carcass to the bank, nimble fingers pulling at his armour. One of them yanks the Knight’s helmet from his ghastly head and gives it to Spar as a trophy.
He lifts it, and the crowd chants his name, just like they chanted Idge’s name twenty years before.
It’s not like falling or flying. It’s being squeezed.
The pressure on Cari’s head expands, intensifies, until her whole body is crushed to a point. She can’t see the office room in the seminary, can’t see the two attackers anymore, because—she assumes—her eyeballs have exploded like ripe grapes being squished. She feels the whole weight of the city on top of her.
Miren’s there, too. She’s aware of him, knows she’s not alone as the whole city spins and crushes her.
She should panic. She should scream. She doesn’t have the ability to do either.
Spin. Lurch. And then vomited back into reality. Cari stumbles as she falls into existence, barking her knees against a wooden locker. The smell of dust. Low ceilings, junk—the attic of some big house, maybe. A little aetheric light burning next to a bed.
Miren lets go of her hand, backs away from her. His face is flushed. More animated than she’s ever seen it before. She’s breathing heavily, too. She feels unsteady. Half wonders if she was put back together properly, like she left something back in the university, or got mixed in with Miren as they …
“What the fuck was that?” she manages to ask.
“It’s a trick my father taught me,” says Miren, watching her warily. “It doesn’t always work. Sometimes, I can sort of step in and out, but only when the city lets me.”
Cari’s no expert on thaumaturgy, but she knows that teleportation isn’t something that can be done easily. She saw fakirs in the markets who pretended to be able to walk through walls or jump into one basket and fall out of another, but that was just sleight-of-hand. Actually jumping in and out of reality is more the realm of saints and gods than mortal sorcery, as far as she’s aware.
Her clothes feel uncomfortably tight, like she’s come back slightly wrong. She adjusts her shirt, catches Miren staring at her breasts like he’s never seen a pair before.
“Where are we?”
Miren scrambles away from her, losing his customary grace in his haste to get out of proximity to her. Stumbles over to the bed and opens a locker next to it. Bandages, healing salves, neatly arranged and labelled bottles of pills. Most of the attic is crammed with junk, strewn haphazardly around the big low room, but Miren’s little island is organised with military discipline. Hospital corners on the bedsheets, medicines lined up like soldiers on one shelf, knives on the other.
“I’m not sure,” he answers with his back to her. “I’ve never seen it from the outside. I think it’s one of the older houses in Newtown, up off Store Street. No one ever comes up here. I found it by accident. I don’t always control where I go. Usually, I go where I want, but sometimes it’s like a wave washes in and carries me with it.”
It’s the longest speech he’s ever made in Cari’s presence.
“I’ve never been able to carry anyone before,” he adds, still looking at her strangely, as if seeing her for the first time. He bites his lip, and Cari tastes something unfamiliar in her mouth, like she can taste his blood. “I … I just knew it would work with you.”
“How’d you find me?” she asks. Aunt Silva always told her not to question the blessings of the gods, but Cari feels that if the gods send her a gift horse, then the gods are probably running a horse-trading scam.
“I was watching you,” answers Miren.
That’s not reassuring.
“Why?”
“My father told me to find you after you ran off. I didn’t find your trail until last night, and followed you back to that houseboat.”
“Where’s Eladora?”
Miren shrugs. “I don’t know. I was looking for you.”
“Couldn’t you get your father out of prison?” She needs to talk to Ongent; in fact, this revelation about Miren makes it even more urgent. Maybe sorcery can cure Spar; the professor’s clearly more of an expert than he pretends to be, and Cari’s got access to enough magical power to—
—actually, she doesn’t know how much is locked away inside the bells. That’s another thing she wants to talk to Ongent about. Her head’s swimming, her skin’s crawling. She strips off her jacket and boots, feeling the welcome chill of the night air on her skin.
Miren shakes his head. “I tried! Like I said, I can’t carry other people with me normally—and, anyway, he wouldn’t leave the watch prison. He’s done nothing wrong, and wanted to, to, to wait until they let him go.” He pulls off his cloak, takes out a pair of knives and lines them up with the others on the shelf. Refuses to meet Cari’s gaze, but shoots her wary glances as she comes closer, like a nervous animal. Licks his lips.
Incorporating unexpected factors into her plans gets easier with experience. Everything’s a weapon if you’re willing to use it, she tells herself. “The alchemists have him now,” says Cari, following him over to the bed. “I’m getting better at controlling the visions. Maybe I can work out exactly where he is, enough for you to teleport in. Or teleport us both in. Or …” She’s not really interested in talking anymore. She’s tired of making plans, of trying to keep her head together under the pressure of worrying about Spar, about the future, about the weird turn her life’s taken. She’s always been more comfortable acting on impulse, and the impulse running through her now—through both of them—is much too strong, too primal, to resist. She jumps him, carrying him down onto the bed with her. Breaking apart only enough to wriggle out of their clothes, grappling with each other, like they’re trying to get back to that point of unity. The bed creaks under their weight, and at the back of her mind she really hopes that there’s no one awake in the house below, because she’s about to make a lot of noise.
Miren is fumbling, inexperienced, but she guides him in and out, finding their rhythm in time with the ringing of distant bells.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
For as long as she lives, Eladora will never remember the intervening time between the moment when the thing in the tunnel lunged at her, and when Aleena found her and carried her, effortlessly, into the back room of a ghastly tavern somewhere in lower Glimmerside. The saint thumps two tin mugs of something brown and foul-smelling in front of Eladora.
“Drink,” Aleena orders, and follows her own advice, draining her cup in one swallow. She grimaces at the taste. “Get it down you. It’ll bring your stomach into balance with head and heart. They’ll all be equally fucked.”
Absently, the saint pulls her cup to pieces, ripping the metal with her fingers like Eladora might pluck petals from a flower.
“It’s dead,” says Aleena. “The Raveller.”
Eladora tries to say something, but all that comes out is a sob. She tries again. “That’s what … before …” Desiderata Street.
“Properly dead. When I fucking stab something, it stays stabbed. And burnt.” Aleena throws another piece of metal onto the table from her cup. “The big ghoul’s dead, too.”
Clink.
“So is his holiness, the Forty-Second Patros of Guerdon, Master Keeper of the True and Merciful Gods, Almech the Well-Beloved.”
Clink.
“So’s Taphson. I’m sorry.”
Eladora feels too hollow to cry. True, she barely knew Jere, but he was kind to her when she felt abandoned and he’d listened when she’d begged him to help the professor. It wasn’t right that he should be snuffed out like that.
“I don’t know about Bishop Ashur, or Kelkin. I think they’re still alive, maybe. The tunnel partially collapsed. They might have been on the far side of that. Or else they were under it, in which case …”
Clink. Clink. “Are you going to finish that?” She points at Eladora’s untouched drink.
Eladora slides it across the table. “Why did you come after me?”
Aleena takes a drink. “They kept hawks near where I grew up. There were these woods full of game, and nobles would come and go hawking there. When I was a girl, I used to think they were magical animals. I’d watch them from the hedge—we weren’t allowed into the field—and see them soar. Like they were going to catch the sun and bring it down. Strong and fast, yeah, but also wise and beautiful.” She glances at Eladora, who’s too confused and exhausted to interrupt. “When I was … oh, fifteen? Younger than you are, anyway—the gods of the Keepers chose me. Storm Knight leaned down out of the highest heaven and anointed me with fire and lightning. Saint Aleena, the invincible. I don’t know why they chose me. Safidists—”
“I’m not a Safidist,” mutters Eladora, instinctively.
“Safidists talk about faith and good works and aligning the soul with the will of the gods. I didn’t do any of that. It just happened. Blessed be their divine wisdom.
“Anyway, I became a fabled fucking heroine, right? Invited to all the fanciest parties, got to go hawking with all the lords and ladies.” Aleena sighs. “It turns out hawks are fucking thick. Filthy mouse-shitters who’ll peck your eye out if you get too close.
“The gods are like that. From a distance, you think they’re wise and strong, but … our gods, the Kept Gods, they’re fucking dumb as hawks. All instinct, all reflex, no forethought.
“Or maybe like cows. Beautiful cows made of spun sunlight and silver wire and crystal made of souls …” Aleena’s voice chokes. “You can’t see them like I do. They’re so fucking beautiful, it breaks my heart, and so fucking stupid, I want to smash them. And we made them that way, kept ’em dumb and weak and dependent on us. It’s the right thing to do, I know, I know. Better a Kept God than a wild one, right? But …” Aleena trails off. Takes a gulp of Eladora’s drink, then adds. “Fuck it all.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“No, it doesn’t. I just wanted to dispel any illusions you might have that I’m, I don’t know, blessed with a special wisdom or insight or anything. I can kick the tenebrous shit out of Ravellers, but the gods aren’t telling me what to do. I’m making this shit up as I go along, just like the rest of you.”
“So why did you come after me?”
“Three reasons,” Aleena holds up her left hand, extends her index finger. There could only be three reasons, thinks Eladora, or she’d need another hand to go along with her maimed one. “Reason one. You know what the fuck is going on here as much as anyone else. Bells and alchemists and Black Iron Gods, yeah? I don’t have the full picture. Neither do you, I guess, but you’ve got bits I don’t.”
Aleena finishes the second drink.
“Which brings us to two. I got out of there because the place was crawling with watch and candlefuckers, not church guards. And from what I hear the watch is in bed with the alchemists. That means that we’re going to have to go above their heads. Committee for public safety, right?”
“Aren’t there—I mean, isn’t this what the church is supposed to fight?”
Aleena catches the bartender’s eye and two more drinks appear. She picks one up and swirls it around speculatively. “The church guard has seen as much action in the last thirty years as the Patros’ holy cock. And, yeah, I’m the chosen one of the Kept Gods, but look at me—I’m just one woman. What am I going to do, march down to the alchemists’ guild, kick the doors open and storm the place single-handed?” There’s a light in Aleena’s eyes that unsettles Eladora.
