The Gutter Prayer, page 39
The ground disappears beneath her pounding feet, and for an instant she’s in free-fall. The canal. She twists in the air, but still hits the foul waters badly, knocking the wind out of her. Her lungs burn as she dives into the murk, trying to pull herself so deep that she’ll leave no trace on the surface.
Later, she’ll piece together what happened. Heinreil brought Crawling Ones with him, at least a dozen of the horrors, and each of them a powerful sorcerer. He kept them in reserve, hidden in the crowd or the nearby alleyways, until Rosha broke her word and tried to arrest him. And then the carnage began. The alchemists and Spar’s thieves took the worst of the sorcerous blasts, but Heinreil’s faction suffered, too. His new bodyguard, for example—they found his curved knives afterwards, next to a blackened skeleton with bones so leached of strength by the death-spells that they crumbled to dust when touched.
Later, much later, she’ll walk numbly through the ruins of the tenement, looking at the devastation and knowing that she shares in the blame for this.
She swims underwater for as long as she can, and then another two three four strokes, pushing herself beyond her limits. Her hand closes on the slick stone of the far bank of the canal, and Cari pulls herself out of the water. Otter-quick, she slithers up and runs into the welcoming shadows.
The tenement is an ant-hill that’s been set on fire. Figures running this way and that, outlined against the lurid flames of sorcery. The surviving alchemists, not the Tallowmen but the ones that might be human, are fleeing back towards the Holy Beggar. Whistles and shouts—the watch are coming, battalions marching down from Queen’s Point. Carriages rattling through the streets at speed, fleeing the scene. She can’t tell how many of the thieves made it out or where Spar is, assuming he’s still alive.
Tallowmen move through the darkness, searching for her. She can see the one that used to be Jere Taphson, his balding pate now gaping open and a candle flame burning within. He stands by the canal bank on the far side, bending low to the ground, searching for some sign of Cari. Then he flexes his wax legs and leaps across the canal, clearing it in a single bound.
Cari runs down the slope of the Wash, stumbling and slipping in the darkness. Her lungs, seared with toxic fumes from dying Tallowmen, ache as she gasps for breath. Trash slithers underfoot; wet cobbles betray her and she sprawls, picks herself up again.
Candlelight blazes on the rooftop to her left as a Tallowman—not Jere, a candle that was once a woman—leaps up there. The monster spots her and throws back its head, emitting this inhuman squeal like the sound you get when you quench hot iron. More lights close on her, outlining the shapes of the tenements and shacks around her in a dozen false dawns.
If she can make it into the tangle of buildings around Sumpwater Square, then she might be able to lose her pursuers. She knows those buildings well, Rat used to lair there and they’re still dark: the Tallowmen haven’t got there yet.
Shit. If she continues on this street, she’ll pass close to the Church of St. Storm. There were Tallowmen at the Holy Beggar church, and if there are more at St. Storm she’ll run right into them. She needs to get off this street.
Cari finds a low side wall and scales it. One of the Tallowmen tackles her when she’s on top of the wall, trying to knock her down into the yard beyond. She twists out of the way, catching her foot on the rough bricks of the wall so she can hang upside down for an instant and the Tallowman misses her, cold mushy hands failing to find purchase on her. It lands heavily in the yard beyond, skidding into a chicken coop. The straw catches fire instantly, and the Tallowman shrieks as it finds itself caught in the burning coop. The hens squawk in terror, and the panicked beating of their wings gives Cari just enough time to cross the yard and scramble over the far wall before more Tallowmen arrive.
Darkness is her friend. There aren’t any of the alchemists’ monsters where it’s dark. And right now, it’s still dark over Sumpwater.
She runs down the narrow laneway behind the buildings, an old cattle run dating to when there were farms west of the city. She can hear Ongent’s voice in the back of her mind, lecturing her about the history of the city. The bones of the past stick out, deforming the present.
She’s nearly there when the cattle run floods with light. They’ve found her. Tallowmen race along atop the walls to her left and right, footsteps echoing faster than her pounding heart. A third one is behind her, closing on her.
And then Cari runs straight into what feels like an iron bar. She goes sprawling on her back, winded, stunned. Standing over her is a woman. Middle-aged, hefty, rags over what must be armour. Cari tries to speak, warn her to run, but she has no breath.
“No mistaking you, Carillon Thay,” says the woman. “We’ve been looking for you. We need to have a talk, you and I.”
The nearest Tallowman hisses and gestures for the woman to depart, now, on penalty of whatever cruelty the Tallowman sees fit. The warrior woman draws her sword, gestures at them to strike.
“Right then. Come on.”
Three Tallowmen leap. Three slashes with her fiery sword, and the cattle run is a mess of sticky yellow wax-gore. Cari catches her breath, tries to run, but a fourth swipe, this time with the flat of the blade, knocks her down again. The woman is terrifyingly fast and strong.
“Now, let’s have that talk. I’m Aleena.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Eladora lies in bed, listening to the noises of the strange house. She hasn’t slept despite her exhaustion. Every time she hears footsteps, she freezes, terrified that one of the men will come into this little attic room where they’ve stowed her.
At some unknown hour of the night—the city’s bells are silent, so she has no idea how long she’s lain here, cold and sleepless—she hears shouting, running feet. Angry voices raised as some other clandestine messenger arrives, another one of Sinter’s seemingly endless network of spies. She strains her ears to hear, but gets only half the conversation. They speak of ghouls, of a war beneath the city streets. There’s been some disaster in the deeps, some terrible defeat. At first, she thinks it must be the death of the elder ghoul in that tunnel under Holyhill, but then she clearly hears the word Ravellers.
Ravellers. Plural. More than one of those formless horrors.
The terror of that thought is enough to drive her from her bed. She crouches down and presses her ear to the floor. A memory of doing the same thing back in Wheldacre, listening for the clink of glasses in the living room that would tell her that her mother’s devotions that night were found in a bottle instead of a holy book.
Sinter’s voice is cold and quiet, speaking in an unfamiliar tone, ragged with fatigue. “What if they’re already here? They steal faces. They could be anyone.”
The whole city, like Desiderata Street.
The unfamiliar voice continues, describing testimony pieced together from the gibberings and yowlings of blood-crazed or wounded ghouls, retreating from the calamity below. Eladora listens to the nightmarish account of how the most secret sanctum of the ghouls was destroyed in a surprise attack by a cabal of sorcerers. The sorcerers killed many of the elder ghouls as they slumbered, then broke open an ancient seal in the depths that was maintained by the psychic vigilance of the elders. That seal, the ghouls say, holds back the formless hordes of the Ravellers, the shapeless host of the Black Iron Gods.
Now the ghouls are in retreat, and the Ravellers are free.
The other spies begin to speculate about who these sorcerers might be, but Sinter cuts them off. What, he asks, is the point of guessing? However it happened, the city is now under siege from below, a siege all the more deadly because it is unseen. The Ravellers may have already crawled up through the sewers and train tunnels and out onto the streets. Stealing form and faces from those unlucky enough to meet the slithering tide, taking shape like they took Bolind’s form.
She still has that copy of Sacred and Secular Architecture. She drags it to a patch of moonlight that streams in through the narrow grimy window, opens it and looks at the too-familiar illustrations. Images of the city as it was in days of myth, when saint-heroes warred with monsters on the streets. The men in the room below are talking of stories, she tells herself, of history that’s dead and buried. She can’t reconcile those tales of sorcery and horror with the city of coffee shops and timetables and newspapers that she’s known for years.
The voices fade away. Footsteps hurry down stairs and vanish in the slamming of doors. She can’t tell if she’s alone in the house, or if her remaining captors are merely very quiet.
The book is comforting, in its way. Reading it puts her in mind of days in the university. She hears Professor Ongent reading it to her, notes of amusement playing in his voice in counterpoint to the text, glossing every sentence with unspoken questions—Are you sure you trust this? Where’s the proof? What assumptions are you making about the past? She loses herself in the book, even though she’s read it hundreds of times. She hides so deep in the book, taking refuge behind the ink drawings of lost churches and the layered foundations of the city, that she doesn’t notice any noises in the house below until it’s too late.
The door creaks open, and the man’s hand closes around her mouth. It’s Lynche—one of Sinter’s thieves—she recognises him as he drags her downstairs. They pass through the carnage of the meeting room, stepping over bodies. Isil lies there, a knife in her heart. Another corpse next to her, its face melted by some alchemical powder. Numb, Eladora can’t muster the courage to struggle or run. The horrors pass over her, like she’s just a glass mirror reflecting them but not containing them.
Somewhere upstairs in the house, she hears shouts, gunshots, a scream. Lynche hurries her out, glancing back as if expecting pursuit, but no rescuers appear. Out into the night air, and there’s a carriage waiting for them, drawn by a pair of raptequines in harness. Lynche shoves her in. There are two other people in the carriage. One is a tattooed woman; her face is smeared with blood that’s caked around her nose and mouth. Her head lolls back and forth, her eyes are vacant. The other is a small man who takes Eladora’s hand and apologises to her.
“Now, girl, you don’t want to do anything foolish like running, understand? The streets aren’t safe tonight, of all nights.”
He leans out and speaks to Lynche. “Make sure they’re all dead. No one on our trail, aye? Good lad.” Lynche bows his head, draws a gun, and walks back into Sinter’s labyrinthine house.
The smaller man bangs on the roof, and the carriage takes off with a jolt. The woman wakes up, too. She licks her stained teeth and gestures at the windows with outstretched fingers. Unseen forces crackle against the glass. A warding spell.
“I’ll miss this city,” says the man to himself, peering into the darkened streets outside. Eladora glimpses fires, sees dark shapes moving that could be running figures and could be other things. More gunshots in the distance behind them, and she guesses that Sinter is dead, or Lynche is, or maybe both of them.
“It’s not … your fault,” says the woman. The strain of maintaining the spell is evident; purple motes of light blaze inside her eyes, leaving little burn marks across the sclera, and her nose has begun to ooze blood again.
“Ach, I tried, Myri. I did try.”
The man reaches into his shabby jacket and takes out an amulet on a silver chain. He dangles it from his finger for a moment, holding it like a dowsing crystal, then slips it back into his pocket.
“There we are,” says Heinreil, “one last stop, and all’s done.”
Rat is the only living thing in the tenement.
How he knows this, he cannot articulate. But he is certain of it. He knows the sorcery unleashed by the Crawling Ones in their rescue of Heinreil killed dozens of people, that his namesake vermin lie cold and contorted behind the walls and floorboards, destroyed by the psychic shock wave of the spells. He knows everyone else has fled, leaving behind a charnel field.
He picks his way between the bodies on hoofed feet, stepping over puddles of molten wax. There, on the wall, a message written in chalk. THIS IS THE LAST. He sniffs. Heinreil’s scent, although the smell no longer stirs anything in him. He is beyond petty grudges now.
He pauses at one broken waxwork and picks up the shattered, melted face of Guildmistress Rosha. With his new senses, he can feel a fading thread of sympathy, a cord of magic that connects this alchemical avatar to whatever remains of the woman who made it. Like him, she has changed under the oblique pressure of the divine, becoming something new.
He discards Rosha’s face. The abstract thought sits awkwardly in his mind. A hunger, a literally spiritual hunger, takes precedence.
It is time to eat.
He cracks open the skull of one corpse. The ribcage of another. Sniffing around the third—the body of a pickpocket—he settles on eating only the hands, stripping the flesh from them like a chicken wing. The girl’s hands were beautiful beneath the dirt and calluses, she lived on her deft movements. Even as the Crawling One’s spell struck her and killed her, Rat knows that she curled to protect her precious hands.
The greatest portion of her soul was in her hands. Now it is in Rat.
Change begets change, like a tunnel collapse. One falling rock becomes a dirt rain, which becomes an avalanche that buries a whole subterranean city. The more he eats, the hungrier he grows. Changes that usually take centuries for a ghoul pass over him in minutes as he gorges himself on soul-stuff. He stops occasionally to vomit up a torrent of meat and bone, filling and purging his stomach more times than he can count. His hunger is not for flesh, but for soul-stuff, and the meat can be discarded. Still, he retains more than he disgorges. He passes through the feral stage of ghouldom in one grotesque feast of fresh carrion.
His skull cracks and reshapes. His body swells. Now the whole building shakes with his hoof steps, and his horns brush against the ceiling. A corpse-light builds in his yellowed eyes.
His ears itch. Irritated, he brushes against one of them, and it flakes off and falls to the ground.
He can hear clearly now, hear the yowling of his siblings under Gravehill. Their laments speak of terrible suffering. An enemy has brought death to the deathless. The Crawling Ones have made war upon the ghouls and slain the elders.
This conflict has been long in coming. Ghouls and Crawling Ones both feed upon the city’s dead. Ghouls are psychopomps, consuming corpses and carrying the souls within away to the underworld, taking only a fraction of their spiritual energy and giving the rest to their elders. The worms are unquiet dead, consumers, capturing the soul entire. Both factions are parasites on the city above, profiting from its endless bounty of corpses that must not be given to the mad and hostile gods.
But the Crawling Ones have gone further. They have struck not only at the ghouls, but at the jail they guard. The church sends the dead down the corpse shafts as payment for the ghoul’s watch over the prison of the Ravellers. Now that vigil is broken and the enemy is loose.
Rat’s remade brain has no capacity for fear. He acknowledges the threat of the Ravellers with detached amusement.
He picks up another corpse. A man, old and fat, his thin beard scorched to cinders by some spell, his entrails spilled. Tammur, whispers some part of him that still remembers. He draws on that memory, examines it dispassionately, like a mortician laying out a body. The choicest cut of Tammur’s soul, his residuum, will be in the tongue, he decides, and in the liver. He peels away the jaw bone with one hand and licks out the tongue. His claws, sharper than knives, find the liver. He can see it beneath the skin, pulsing and pregnant with accumulated spiritual energy.
He adds it to his own swollen stock and moves on to the next course of the feast.
As he picks apart the carcass of a child, he hears heavy footsteps. The scrape of a half-lame leg. Smells stone dust and the tang of alkahest. And nearby, a chittering, nervous voice. The rustle of fabric.
Silkpurse and Spar.
The Stone Man enters the room, makes a mouth noise. Rat tries to remember how human speech works, but the memories of language are deep in his brain, buried beneath the accumulated soul-stuff of countless dead. His tongue is now long and snake-like, adapted for licking grey matter out of skulls and sucking marrow out of bones, not speaking. The young ghoul—older than he is, he reminds himself—knows the customs of the surface.
She will speak for him, listen for him. He reaches out with his swollen soul and takes hold of her, just as the elder ghoul did to him.
“Rat … is that you?” asks Spar.
“I CONTAIN HIM.” He makes Silkpurse chuckle, even though her face is a mask of horror behind her veils. “HE WAS … VERY SMALL.”
Spar gestures at the stacked bones, at Rat’s transformed body. “Why?”
Rat stretches and stands. He’s taller than Spar now by more than three feet. He stalks towards the wreckage of the doorway.
“I … MY KIND SWORE TO GUARD THE PRISON GATES. NOW THE GATES ARE OPEN, AND THE ENEMY IS ABROAD. THEY COME FOR THEIR MASTERS, FOR THE BLACK IRON GODS.” With an effortless swipe of one heavy claw, he flings the door aside and steps out into the city.
Again, he speaks through Silkpurse. “THEIR HERALD MUST BE DESTROYED. SHE IS THE KEY. WHEN SHE IS DEAD, I SHALL RETURN TO THE KINGDOM BELOW AND AWAIT THE TRIBUTE OF MARROW. TELL WHOMEVER RULES ABOVE, BE THEY PRIEST OR KING OR WIZARD, THAT THE BARGAIN HOLDS AND THE GHOULS SHALL MAKE GOOD ON THEIR PART.”
Silkpurse gasps and adds in a small voice. “Spar—help me! I’m going to kill Cari!”
Confused for a moment by the change, Spar glances at Silkpurse, and, in that instant of distraction, Rat leaps, hoofed legs carrying him to a rooftop in a single bound.
The city is strange to him, bathed in the piercingly bright light of stars, full of alien scents, bellows full of breathing. Hordes of living people instead of stacked corpses, their marrow hot and fresh. The buildings, too, are like living things, an infestation of architecture. His mental map of the city is a jumble, mixing three-hundred-year-old recollections of fighting a war on the streets with Rat’s own more recent experiences, all covered with a patina of consumed memories and emotions. The ghoul lets his Rat-portion take the lead, calling up the boy’s knowledge of the city and of his quarry.
