The Gutter Prayer, page 37
Herald of our return, they keep shouting at her.
This time, she heeds the professor’s warning and just watches. Without moving, Ongent builds these paths of glowing light, rune-warded channels, running between him and Cari, and then another one between him and Spar. They’re frail, ethereal and empty. No power flows through them.
Next, he conjures a complicated shape. It reminds Carillon of a big clockwork from Old Haith, or maybe an architect’s model of a cathedral. It hovers in the middle of the diagram, over Spar. Hovers might be the wrong word—somehow, it’s more real and solid here than anything else, than Spar or Cari or the building around them. This isn’t an illusion, she reminds herself, or a dream. It’s another perspective on what’s real.
Power flares in the channels between her and Ongent. The professor’s trying again, invoking the gods again.
The storm’s closer now. The Black Iron Gods stir, their terrible attention probes the city as they search for this irritation, this theft. Flash-images of shapes like sharks, like lions, moving across the sky. Cari freezes, tells herself not to move, not to run, no matter how much she wants to.
The flow of power becomes a torrent as the gods whirl around her. Light, intolerably bright, flares around Spar, as though Ongent is using an alchemical cutting torch. She laughs at that thought, or would if she had lungs or a mouth—that he’d have set up this whole mystic ritual, only for Miren to sneak in and cure Spar with a cutting torch and a pair of pliers while she was high on sorcery.
The building shakes. The wind becomes the roaring of angry gods. How can the others be so calm? Can’t they hear the storm? It’s all Cari can do not to fling herself to the ground, to hide or prostrate herself before the Black Iron Gods. The whirlwind tears at her vision—now she can only see the diagram, the aetheric fields and constructs of magic. The physical world is lost to her. She’s suddenly terrified that her body’s gone entirely, ripped away by the fierce winds, and she’s left disembodied as a ghost, an eternally conscious bodiless perspective. She wants to look over to check where her physical form should be, but any change might disrupt the healing spell, or let the gods in.
She has to stay still.
It should be easy. She’s disconnected from her body, unaware of any physical sensations. Seeing without blinking, without eyes. Existing without breathing. Increasingly, though, she has to fight to stay in the ritual space.
The metaphor shifts—she’s not a ship anymore, she’s just a sail, a square of cloth hung on a mast of bones, straining to contain the howling force of the Black Iron Gods. She’s hauling Ongent’s ship forward, and its anchor is skipping along the seabed, catching and tearing up rocks. Every time the anchor catches, the pressure on her becomes agonising, intolerable.
Her soul’s fit to rip and burst.
She can’t see Spar anymore. Somehow the light’s so bright it’s become all-encompassing darkness.
The winds howl through her. She feels something rip inside her, but she can’t tell if it’s in her body or her soul. Panic rises, and that’s definitely physical, a desperate fluttering inside her chest and throat like a flock of trapped birds, her heart pounding.
She tries to ask the professor if they’re done, if they’ve stopped the poison, but she can’t find her way back to her mouth to speak it. How could she be heard over the wind, anyway, or the booming brass voices that ride on it, whooping and roaring and shouting as loud as earthquakes. There’s more ripping.
“Hold steady,” says the professor’s voice, weirdly distorted. Cari feels Miren’s arms around her, keeping her in place. His hands locking around her arms, gripping so tightly she guesses it would hurt if she could find her way back fully to her body. She tries to flinch away, but he won’t let her move. He’s screaming something in her ear, but she can’t make out the words.
He’s drawn her attention back to her physical form, though, reminded her where she is. She clambers down towards her skull—that’s the only way to describe it—towards the shell that no longer quite fits whatever her soul’s become. She sees herself, for a moment, caught by Miren, and it reminds her instantly of that gate far underground, the one that imprisons all the defeated Ravellers. Horror held back on the far side.
She finds her throat, her mouth. “Stop,” she shouts. Miren twists to hold her tighter, and she struggles against him.
The door smashes open, splintering. It’s Rat, eyes blazing with murderous rage. He leaps straight towards Professor Ongent. Quick as a snake, Miren drops Cari and tackles the ghoul in mid-air. The pair roll across the floor. More people come in, Tammur and more thieves, grabbing at Rat, at Miren.
Ongent sways, unsteady, face flushed, contorted with rage. It’s the first time she’s ever seen him angry, and it’s terrifying. He raises his hand, and lightning dances around it. He aims it at Rat.
Cari steps—stumbles, really—forward, positioning herself between the professor and the ghoul. “It’s all right! We’re done! We’re done!”
And they are. Spar’s sitting up, groaning, but breathing easily now. Hauling himself upright without wincing or too much stiffness. Better than she’s ever seen him.
“We are not finished,” hisses Ongent.
“I’m not doing that again,” says Cari.
As if to underscore her words, a peal of thunder breaks right above the tenement, so loud it shakes the walls. It’s the Black Iron Gods, Cari knows. Shaken into awareness by the spell, as surely as if they’d rung the bells with wild abandon. That awareness, that ability to act, fading now, expending its strength with terrible force above the Wash. There’s a series of lesser thumps on the roof far above, that she knows are dead birds falling to earth, casualties of the wrath of blind gods. There will, she fears, be more deaths on the upper storeys, on the heights, caught when the gods reached down from the bell towers and spires of Holyhill to fumble around the rooftops of the Wash.
She’s very, very glad they performed this ritual in the basement.
Miren shakes himself free from the crowd. Snarls at Rat, then rushes to his father’s side. The fight and fire goes out of Ongent, and he flinches at the sound of thunder. Miren helps him stumble out.
The thieves crowd around Spar, cheering his resurrection. Tammur puffed out, like all this was his idea. They had to blackmail him to help, but now he’s telling everyone that Spar’s his protégé, his adopted son in all but name. He had to step in after Idge’s sacrifice, you know.
Everyone stays clear of Carillon. The diagram at her feet is dead now, the runes and channels no longer afire with stolen divinity, but none of them are willing to cross it, none except Rat. He hovers nearby, studying Carillon for a moment, then makes this familiar, sharp-toothed grin and nods.
“Still you?” he asks.
“Not doing that again,” she echoes to herself.
The trains have stopped in the city of Guerdon for the duration of the emergency. Tallowmen stand watch at all the stations to ensure no one enters. In the quality parts of the city, people lie sleepless in bed and listen for the sounds of riot and explosion. In the lower quarters, Tallowmen sweep the streets. Arresting gatherings of more than two, arresting anyone they deem suspicious or dangerous. They cordon off the refugee tenements and shanty towns, drag men out of tents and flophouses, march them off to the Alchemists’ Quarter. They work with terrible industry, going section by section, building by building. Ensuring that one neighbourhood is processed without warning spreading to the next.
It works passably well for their first few sweeps, but there are other ways to move around the city. Sewer lines and tunnels, secret streets and secret doors, rooftops and walkways, crawls and wynds. Rumour trickles, then floods down these hidden channels: that the Tallowmen are taking refugees, taking known thieves, taking anyone they can to build their numbers. That they’re looking for someone in particular—for Idge’s son, some whisper. Others talk of a seer who prophesies ruin for the city, who knows everything the alchemists and parliament want to keep hidden.
They organise through these secret channels, crystallise around catalytic incidents. When the Tallowmen swarm around the much-beloved Holy Beggar and workmen demolish its spire, it becomes an assault on the people’s faith. Even the newcomers, who worship a hundred other gods or none at all, know that if the new regime can attack one house of worship—a church of the Keepers!—their own temples must also be in danger. When one woman refuses to go with the Tallowmen and they murder her with knives, she is transmuted into a martyr and inspires a hundred others to resist.
The stopped trains, too, are a symbol of the alchemists’ attempt to take control of the city. To break down and analyse Guerdon as they would any other compound, to dissect the city like a specimen sedated and bound on an operating table.
All the trains are stopped—except one line.
Trains rattle down that line that is not on any map. Down and down and down, the line spirals in a tight descent towards the under-city. It terminates at a misplaced, impossible station in the depths, near the ghoul kingdom under Gravehill.
One by one, the trains disgorge their passengers. The Crawling Ones disembark in human form, gliding with sinister grace in their black robes and porcelain face masks, speaking to one another like philosophers or judges, heads bowed as they talk of abstruse matters.
One by one, they come to a pit, a bowl that’s already overflowing with fat white grave-worms. As each Crawling One reaches the lip of the bowl, they let robe and mask and human form fall away, and their woven-worms unravel and join the rest of the swarm. Now, they speak to one another in a more subtle language, a writhing unspeech of chemicals and slime and soul-fragments. Every worm in this vast throng grew fat on the dead of this city, competing with the ghouls for the unburnt dead. They are not psychopomps, carrying the souls down to the elder ghouls or onto some distant god. They have grown fat on soul-stuff, fat and powerful.
Sorcery ripples through the worm-mass.
At last, one more Crawling One arrives. This one does not surrender his human form; he kneels by the bowl and places one hand in the writhing mass. In his other hand, he clasps a scroll. His worm-fingers unknot, joining with the wriggling mass. His will contends with the rest.
For the Crawling Ones, there is no martyrdom. No symbols to accrete around. No higher meaning to be found. Only the cold declension of the memories of the unburied dead, only the chill hunger for more.
The newcomer is victorious. He imposes his will on the rest.
They rise from the bowl. Some return to the trains. Some follow their leader on another errand. But the rest, the great majority of the Crawling Ones, march down the lightless green-stone tunnels, towards the kingdom of the ghouls.
March to war.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Coffee?” offers Tammur.
“Gods below, yes.” Spar hasn’t dared drink coffee in months. If he burnt his throat, it might calcify and throttle him. This morning, though, he feels like a new man. Even the ache in his right leg is gone.
Late morning, he mentally amends. He slept like the dead last night, and woke to find his bed littered with thousands of flakes of stone. He can still feel the trailing edge of the wave of sorcery, its heat sinking deep into his bones. It feels good, like strong alkahest.
Tammur sits down heavily, puffing, and starts pulling apart one of his pastries. “I don’t intend to ask what happened last night. Sorcery is too perilous for my tastes, in general.”
Spar nods and smiles inwardly. Rat mentioned that Tammur had been leching after some southerner woman who turned out to be a sorceress, and one of Heinreil’s creatures to boot. What was her name? Myri? Clearly Tammur’s still smarting from the betrayal. Spar files the name back in his memory in case he needs to bring Tammur down a little. Spar needs the older thief’s reach and contacts—and his money—but he doesn’t want to be Tammur’s puppet either.
“I don’t fully understand it either. I trust Carillon, though, and the healing spell worked.” Spar flexes his arm as proof. The coffee tastes wonderful, and he can smell the fresh pastries, too. He wonders where Tammur got them—there’s nowhere in the Wash that bakes such delicate sweet things, so he must have smuggled them in from elsewhere in town.
“And what about the university professor? Can you trust him?”
“I don’t need to. We broke him out of the alchemists’ gaol—he’s not going to go back to them.”
“He might buy a pardon by turning us in.”
“He wants Cari and her gift.” Spar doesn’t mention the Black Iron Gods. “And the alchemists’ price for forgiveness would be too high.”
“The alchemists are going to be a problem,” mutters Tammur. “I’d trade one Tallowman for six of Nabur’s guards. We’ll be lying low for years. Maybe move operations to the Silver Coast for a while.”
“We’re not going to abandon Guerdon. I think the alchemists have overreached themselves. People are scared of the Godswar, but that’s still far away. Tallowmen on their doorstep, that’s something else. The city’s going to turn against the alchemists. We just need to keep our heads above water until it does.”
“They have parliament. There’s no one pushing back against them.”
“Then we will,” says Spar. “Cari!”
Carillon slips into the room. She looks exhausted, but brightens when she sees Spar—and the pastries. “Hey, breakfast!” She attacks the food like a starveling cat.
“No ill effects?”
“I had to haul Rat out before he killed Ongent, or Miren killed him, and I don’t have a fucking clue what’s going on there. I’d say that Rat’s been weird since the Tower of Law, but …” She trails off, waves her hand in a gesture that encompasses her scarred face, her visions, the Black Iron Gods, and Spar’s rejuvenation.
“I’ll deal with him,” says Spar. “Cari, I don’t know Professor Ongent or Miren, but if you say that we need them—”
Cari snorts into her coffee. “You’re under the delusion that I have a plan. I had a plan. You’re it. Now it’s all up to you.”
“Thank you for the vote of confidence.”
“Confidence and miraculous resurrection. A whole day or two extra of life, before we get shanked by Heinreil or the Tallowmen.”
“Miss …” begins Tammur, and then hesitates.
“Just call me Cari,” says Carillon, at the same time that Spar says “Thay.” Tammur fails to conceal his surprise at the revelation of Cari’s family name, but he passes over it.
“Miss Thay. As I was telling Spar, I’ve made contact with some members who I suppose we can count on in gutter court. Others are proving harder to find—they’re in hiding from the Tallows, of course, and our normal lines of communication are broken. Can you use your sorcery to find them?”
The mid-morning light blazing in through the windows comes from a cloudless sky, but last night there were angry gods in the sky above the tenement. After the ritual, Ongent warned Cari not to risk drawing the attention of the Black Iron Gods again without his protective spells, to avoid agitiating them. Carillon takes a gulp of coffee.
“Sure. I’ll need descriptions, and we’ll need to wait until the hour changes …” She trails off again, suddenly remembering the silence of the morning. “I didn’t hear the bells this morning.” She had seen scaffolding around the Holy Beggar’s spire, but there are many other churches in Guerdon. They can’t all be silent. She needs them.
“The alchemists have stopped the city bells from ringing. They’re having their Tallowmen announce curfew instead.” Tammur leans towards Carillon, studying her. “You need the bells for your gift, I take it.”
“They make it easier. An awful lot easier.” She takes a pastry and tears it to pieces, scattering the crumbs on her plate, shoving them around as if she can read the entrails. Her stomach has abruptly contracted to a sick knot. “Have you heard if they’re doing anything else?”
“There are Tallowmen surrounding the Holy Beggar church. Some altercation with the church, I believe. The building’s been deemed unsafe.”
“Shit. Spar, they’re taking the Black Iron Gods. They’re going to recast them, use them as bombs. I saw them do it in the Alchemists’ Quarter.”
Spar looks at her quizzically. “Shit, I didn’t tell you. I had a vision last night, before we did the ritual.” Hastily, words tumbling over one another, she describes the sight of the Black Iron bells being reforged into weapons, and her conversation with Rosha.
“You turned her down?” asks Tammur.
“I pushed her off the fucking building.”
“I’ve heard rumours about a battle in the Grena Valley. They’re saying that the Haithi killed a goddess there with some sort of new weapon.”
“God bombs,” says Spar. “They’re making bombs that can kill … gods, that can win the Godswar.”
“And they need the bells to make these? That gives us leverage over the alchemists. They’ve got the Beggar surrounded, but there are other churches. If we get hold of some of the old bells maybe we can cut a deal, or sell them on.”
“I’m more worried about reprisals. If the foreign gods know that Guerdon can kill them, then our neutrality won’t mean a thing. The Godswar will come here. And Cari … what happens to you if they start blowing up the Black Iron Gods?”
“I don’t know. Let’s talk to the professor.” Cari has to grip the side of the table to stand. Spar can tell she’s exhausted beyond all measure. The last time he saw her that pale was when Rat brought her to his doorstep.
“This is not a secure base of operations,” says Tammur. “Too many entrances, too many eyes. We should move to my warehouse on Hook Row. There’s an—”
