The Gutter Prayer, page 36
BLOOD OF MY BLOOD HERALD OF OUR RETURN SIBLING CHILDSELF
“Go away,” she screams, or tries to. Hot vomit in her mouth, skull in a vice. An overwhelming sense of panic—flash-vision of men with pickaxes, hacking at stone. The Holy Beggar church surrounded by a cage of scaffolding. The bell—the god—being lowered to the ground below.
Flash again. A circle in the darkness. A gate. And beyond it, a churning sea of chaos. The Raveller host, thousands of them, reaching out for her.
“Go the fuck away!”
The hour turns. The hammering in her head replaced by hammering at her door.
“Cari?” Rat’s voice. “Open the door, now.”
“Wait a moment.”
“Spar needs you. We’ve got to go now.”
Tammur, speaking to her in low, urgent tones, warning her how much they need Spar—how precarious their situation is. How he’s risked everything for this bid against Heinreil. The way he talks, you’d think Spar was a racehorse that had suddenly fallen lame. Or a ship, a thing that had to be repaired. They found Spar when they noticed he was missing from the revels. He’d collapsed in his own room and was scarcely breathing. They thought him dead when they first found him, until Rat arrived and heard the faint grind of one working lung. There’s no time to waste.
Ongent, pottering around with wires and paintbrushes, drawing binding circles and warding runes on the floor of the washroom they’ve annexed for what he refers to as a second experiment. Absurdly cheery, as though they’re still in his office back in the seminary, and all the chaos of the last five days hasn’t happened at all. Miren in the corner, ignoring Cari, giving no indication that he’s shared her bed for the last two nights, almost invisible in the shadows. She guesses he’s told his father, though, from some comments Ongent makes, innuendos.
Rat, pacing nervously. Fighting the urge to flee, she guesses, but sometimes he moves his head in this heavy way that’s most un-Rat-like, his gaze becoming old and ponderous, and there’s a light in his eyes that scares Cari. Before long, he slips out of the room, unwilling to stay for the actual invocation.
And Spar, lying on the floor, choking. His right lung has entirely calcified, and his left is partly stone. She can hear it—every time he inhales, there’s a crackling, scraping sound; a paper bag of pebbles being dragged over rocks. Talking’s hard, but he manages a Stone Man’s smile for Cari when she kneels by him. She clasps his hand, leans down and whispers in his ear.
“Trust me, okay? Not the gods, not the professor. It’s me. I’m running this show.” His hand tightens on hers, careful despite the pain not to crush her bones. She straightens up, turns to Ongent. “Ready?”
The professor gestures to a spot on the floor in the middle of the diagram he’s drawn. Cari asks, “Should I kneel, or sit, or …?”
“Kneeling would be, ah, a little too like supplication. We come to the Black Iron Gods not as worshippers, but as thieves, to steal their power and use it for our own ends, yes? I think standing right there would be best. Unless you feel faint, in which case—ah, thank you, my boy.” Miren’s moved over to stand next to her, ready to catch her, his feet nimbly picking a safe path across the runes. Cari scowls, but doesn’t argue. Miren, for his part, is expressionless.
“All right. Carillon, this invocation is really the same as the experiment we tried last week. Do you recall?”
“Yeah. You had a skull thing. It exploded.”
“In this revised experiment, I am both invoker and channeler. The spell will make it easier for you to access the accumulated arcane power of the slumbering Black Iron Gods, and open a connection to me as well. I can then channel that power through you into my own sorcerous constructs—in this case, a spell of healing. Curative spells are extremely inefficient and rarely provide lasting benefits, but in this case we should have access to a source of power immeasurably greater than anything I could channel myself.”
“And if it’s too much?”
The professor taps his own forehead. “Again, a skull thing will explode.” He rolls back his sleeves. “Let us begin.”
“Wait.” Spar whispers. “Cari.”
She kneels down next to him again. Speaking is immensely hard for him. He has to inhale for every word, force it out past frozen lips and throat. “Just cure … poison. Not … stone. Don’t … too far.”
“But if we can make you whole …”
“I’m … Stone Man. Just … don’t want … to die … undone.” The last effort is too much for him. His left eye flutters closed; she can’t see his right beneath the pall of stone.
Cari straightens, takes her place in the diagram, wishes Rat would come back in. She takes a deep breath. “All right. Do it.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Eladora can’t tell if the house is small or large, or if it’s a house at all. The door on the street below was modest, but the building seems to go on forever. Rooms open onto other rooms; corridors turn off at unexpected angles. She guesses that they’ve connected several houses to make this secret warren.
One of the women brings Eladora to a kitchen and makes her help assemble plates of food. Eladora’s hands shake as she piles hunks of black bread and fruit onto a tray. The woman—“call me Isil” she said, in a way that makes Eladora sure that whatever her real name is, it isn’t that—counts the knives before and after. Eladora feels like she’s made an embarrassing faux pas; should she have tried to steal a knife, to arm herself? Carillon certainly would have grabbed one.
“Please, I’m terribly tired,” says Eladora, “where am I to sleep?” It’s true—she’s exhausted and filthy from a day traipsing around tunnels with Aleena, and the night before she spent dozing in the back room of a tavern—but, really, Eladora wants to know if she’s a prisoner. If they show her to a cell or a room with no way out, she’ll know.
The woman just shrugs. “Bring those bottles, too,” she says, pointing at three bottles of some amber-coloured liquid on a high shelf. They’re too high for Eladora to reach, so she grabs a small stool to stand on. The stool wobbles and she slips to the ground, twisting her ankle. One of the bottles smashes to the ground and shatters.
“Fuck,” says Eladora. Something inside her breaks, too. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck.” She’s sobbing now, tears pouring out of her like she’s a cracked vessel. Crying for her old life in the university, for Ongent and Miren and the life she’s lost, crying for being dragged around the city like unwanted luggage, crying out of sheer terror and exhaustion. Liquid from the broken bottle crawls out of the cracked glass and crawls across the floor towards her, like the Raveller in the tunnel, a black tide ripping Jere and the Patros apart in the tunnels under Holyhill. The terror of the gods catches her, and she shakes uncontrollably.
“Stop that!” snaps Isil. “Be quiet.” She stands over Eladora, unsure of what to do. “Stop that!” she says again. “Stop or I’ll hurt you.”
“Try-try-try,” moans Eladora—trying even to say “trying” is beyond her in this flood of terror. Isil grabs a wooden spoon and raises it, then reconsiders and drops it back down. She grabs one of the trays and marches out of the kitchen, leaving Eladora alone.
Try to escape, part of her urges. Get up and run! But she has no idea how to get out of this part of the rambling house, let alone escape onto the streets. She has nowhere to go, anyway. Even the safe places like the seminary are corrupt now. Sinter and his spies watched her there.
She has nowhere to go, and no one is coming for her, and there’s no point in crying. She gets up and composes herself. Takes the surviving bottles off the top shelf and carries the second tray into the other room.
There’s another stranger there when she returns, a pock-faced man with reddish hair who Sinter introduces as Lynche. He stinks of chemicals, like he’s been swimming in the polluted waters of the bay, and the only free seat in the room is next to him. Eladora instead sidles up to Aleena and stands behind her.
“All right?” mutters Aleena to her.
“No.”
“Fucking true, that.”
Sinter rises, a note in his bandaged hand. “Word from our masters. Bishop Albe’s the acting Patros, and he doesn’t have the balls to act. He’s permitted the alchemists to put Tallowman guards on all the cathedrals in Holyhill.”
“They’ve surrounded the Holy Beggar and St. Storm, too,” adds a thin woman with one eye.
“How many … how many other bells are there?” asks Eladora. “How many Black Iron Gods?”
Sinter chuckles. “If you’d asked that a week ago, I’d have had to kill you. Still might.” He looks at the letter in his hand in bemused disgust, then crumples it up and throws it aside. “Thirteen, altogether. Eight here in the city, now that the Tower of Law and the Bell Rock are gone. The seven old churches, plus the Seamarket. And that means the alchemists can make lots more of those bombs.”
Isil raises her hand. “Boss—is that the worst thing? The Patros is dead. Parliament’s in the alchemists’ pocket. Why fight it? Is it that bad if the alchemists use the Black Iron Gods—the gods of our enemies—to kill a bunch of insane foreign gods? We’ve all seen the war—no one’s going to weep if it ends.”
“True enough,” says Sinter, “but I’m not going to hand over all power in this city to Rosha. The church of the Keepers made this city, and it’s our job to protect it.”
“And how long will it take ’em to make more of those bombs, eh?” The speaker is a little man with the accent of the Archipelago and blue tattoos crawling around his wrists. The smell of his cigarettes burns Eladora’s eyes. “Soon as the gods find out who struck the Valley of Grena, they’ll be coming for us. Fuck, Ishmere already knows, I’ll bet, if they were paying any attention in Beckanore. Our neutrality is fucked worse than a temple dancer.”
“We need leverage,” says Sinter. “Suggestions?”
“We attack,” says Isil. “Get the navy on our side—they’ll follow the banner of the church if we fly it high enough. The alchemists don’t have that many Tallowmen, not if they’re rounding up every crippled beggar and footpad in the Wash to turn into more candles. Take the Alchemists’ Quarter and the remains of the bells.”
“The thieves got in,” says a big man sitting next to Sinter. He’s very soft-spoken. “But not very far.”
Aleena perks up. “What thieves?”
“Ones from the Wash. They tried breaking in to the Alchemists’ Quarter. Freed a passel of prisoners earlier this evening.”
“Since when is Heinreil fighting with the alchemists? He’s Rosha’s man,” says Isil.
“’Twasn’t Heinreil,” insists Lynche, almost angrily, “it’s Idgeson’s lot, from out of the Wash.”
Sinter shakes his head. “The alchemists showed they were willing to use alchemical weapons within Guerdon when they blew up the Bell Rock. Why’d they hold back when the thieves hit them? Why just use Tallowmen when they could have broken out withering dust or a flash ghost or—”
Eladora speaks up, reluctantly, “Idgeson and Cari are f-f-friends. If she was there—”
“Carillon Thay,” says Aleena, and Sinter nods. “She was there. And Rosha needs her.”
“She’s the linchpin. She’s our leverage.” Sinter turns to Eladora. “Tell me everything you know about Carillon Thay.”
Cari’s outside herself, seeing things in the same detached, fly-on-every-wall perspective as before. This time, instead of her consciousness being smeared over a whole cathedral, or dragged wide enough to perceive the whole city, it’s pulled out only a little, to encompass half this basement room under the tenement. She is, in this timeless moment, the totality of the diagram drawn on the washroom floor and everything inside it. Ongent, Spar, Miren, Cari—she sees all of them from every possible angle. She tries to look at herself, but feels that she’s falling back into her own body—truncating herself down to fit inside her little skull, as the Black Iron Gods were hammered down and squeezed inside little bells. She looks elsewhere.
Miren’s dimmer because he’s technically outside the spell. She can see him, inside and out. She can see him as he is, see him naked, see the muscles and veins beneath his skin. See his bones, make him a skeleton standing behind her like a vision of death. Go deeper, even, follow the silver filigree of nerves and brain until it exposes what must be his soul. Impression of burn marks, branding. Scar marks, sutures.
He knows she’s watching. He moves, and her vision’s blocked. She registers surprise, but it’s Cari’s surprise, and somehow that’s harder to hold onto.
Ongent, in her vision, is wreathed in colourless fire. Words scuttle from his mouth, his brain, like seething scorpions. Shapes boil around him, echoing—no, defining—the framework that now houses her consciousness. I’m seeing magic, she thinks, and that thought visibly ripples across the field of her mind. I am magic might be more accurate. Here, within the diagram, her soul blends into the elemental chaos of the arcane field. The soul is an epiphenomenon, she thinks, and it’s not her thought at all.
Spar. A leaden lump. Ongent and Miren are pillars of flame, but Spar’s a blackened ember. There’s more life in the walls of the building than there is in parts of Spar’s body. She can see his mind there, his soul, and it’s much more contained than Ongent’s or Miren’s—or her own, she guesses. It reminds her of what she sees when she flies over Guerdon in her dreams, only it’s more beautiful, more complex and harmonious. Spar’s thoughts are palaces and boulevards, shining marble and lush green trees in parkland.
The spell changes. I’m invoking them now. Hold fast. Is it Ongent who’s speaking to her, or is he speaking to herself? How many of these perceptions are hers, and how many are his—and how many are theirs, because she senses them now, far away. The Black Iron Gods. Like dark wells hanging above the city, impossibly suspended. Vile tesseracts, containing infinitely more malice and suffering than their physical dimensions would suggest. She rejoices that it’s only a few minutes past the hour, and they are still and silent. If they were agitated into half-awareness she knows they would be able to swallow her, swat her away. Ongent’s right—she needs to be a thief for this. To steal their power without them noticing.
She can look at herself now without falling back into the prison of her own body, although there’s still a dragging sensation, a sort of elastic tension that would pull her mind back if she let it. Sees herself from the inside and out simultaneously, watches the play of muscles beneath the skin, sees the cords and tendrils of magic that connect her to the body, or the body to the diagram that’s now housing her soul, or however that works. There’s a tangle of energy around Carillon’s neck, the lines of power are all bunched and distorted. Her vision focuses on this point, just below her throat.
Where her mother’s amulet should be.
She’d already suspected that the amulet was connected to all this, that it’s blocking her ability to spy on Heinreil. Now, though, she has proof. What did he take from her? Was the amulet protecting her from the visions? Is that why she didn’t have them until recently? Anger. Her attention flickers to Spar for an instant, and he grunts in pain. She glares at the crust of stone; soon, they’ll tear it away and cure Spar, and then he’ll bring down Heinreil. That’s what they’re here for.
It’s getting hard to focus. She keeps slipping, floating away. Forgetting who she is. Like a ship, battered by currents. The shallows and reefs of Carillon’s body; the distant, ominous storm clouds of the Black Iron Gods, a hurricane she cannot survive. Whirlpools and hidden rocks. She glimpses, for a moment, the woman’s right shoulder. Wounded and bandaged, but she can see beneath the bandages to the skin, and the wound’s infected. A stain beneath the skin. Well, that’s what they’re all there for, isn’t it? To steal the god’s power for healing magic. She touches the wound—
She’s Cari again, back in her own body. Everyone’s shouting, even Spar’s trying to sit up, reaching for her. The smell of burning, strong hands—Miren—tearing at her clothes, her jacket. His knife cutting at the ties. “I’m all right, I’m all right,” she insists, even though she doesn’t know what might be wrong.
The pain hits her a moment later. Her shoulder feels like it’s on fire—and then Miren shows her the blacked patch on the jacket, a scorch mark right over the wound.
“Did I do that?” she asks.
“Yes,” says Ongent. He’s pale, eyes watering, leaning heavily on the wall.
Cari takes the jacket off Miren and looks at the burnt area. The scorch mark is about twice the size of her palm, but when she touches it five smaller areas flake away. She puts her fingers through the holes, and they match perfectly.
“Gods below,” she says, but then flexes her shoulder, and there’s no pain at all. “Hey, it worked!”
“Carillon,” says Ongent gravely, “do not do that again, or anything like it. You could just have easily set yourself on fire—or destroyed this whole building.”
“The Godswar,” echoes Tammur. “You’re talking about the Godswar. Direct divine intervention, miracles.” He swallows, stares at Cari with terrified eyes. “That was a miracle you did there.”
Ongent nods. “None of us have ever been so close to death as we were a moment ago.”
“But it worked!” protests Carillon. Miren shrugged, as if to say she got lucky.
Tammur makes his excuses and hurries off. Cari wonders how far he’ll go. She’ll worry about that later. “All right, let’s try again,” says Cari. “Anyone else want to leave?”
“Not … an option,” says Spar from the ground. Miren moves back to stand behind her, which really doesn’t reassure Carillon.
Ongent double-checks the protective runes around his feet, then coughs, wipes his eyes and shakes his hands like an actor getting back into character. “Forth rode the faithful, into the formless host.”
Again, the feeling of disconnection. Cari becomes untethered from her body, a ship slipping its moorings. The Black Iron Gods on the horizon, a bank of storm clouds. She can’t make out any distinct features, or tell one from the other. They’re all just roiling, chaotic power and hatred. She should ask Ongent about them, find out what they were before the Keepers captured them and melted them down, but the thought makes her nervous, as though, if she knew their proper form, so would they.
