The Gutter Prayer, page 41
Heinreil grabs her arm and pushes her ahead of him, towards the tomb. The doors open as they approach, and Eladora shrieks at the two masked faces waiting in the darkness. Crawling Ones. Worms slither from the eye sockets of their white masks, and crawl from under their cowls.
“I’ve got business here,” insists Heinreil. His grip on Eladora’s arm is painfully tight; this close to the man, she can hear him breathing shallowly, feel his heart beating wildly. He’s as scared as she is. His other hand creeps inside his jacket, closes on the amulet around his neck. Behind him, Myri sways back and forth muttering, the smell of sulphur filling the air as she engages in some sort of unseen magical contest with the Crawling Ones.
“You are expected,” says one of the worm-men. She can’t tell which one spoke, or if it was both of them in unison, or maybe there’s only one creature here, divided into two roughly humanoid piles of worms. The Crawling Ones withdraw into the darkness.
“Don’t want to be late for this appointment.” Heinreil pushes her over the threshold, into the murk of the tomb. It’s much colder in here. Her footing slides on the slimy floor. “Keep going, straight ahead,” orders Heinreil. “I can see, I’ll guide you.”
Eladora walks blindly forwards into the impenetrable gloom, her free hand held out in front of her. She brushes against a corner, finds her way down the central corridor. She came this way as a child, after the death of the Thays—after Aleena and the other saints murdered them, she now knows—but she can’t remember the layout of the tomb. She had to mind Cari, she recalls, a child tending a toddler amid the graves.
“This wasn’t supposed to be how it went down,” whispers Heinreil in her ear. “If you want to blame someone for you being here, blame the alchemists. Blame Rosha. We had it all worked out, she and I, and then she turned on me. You can’t bloody trust a sorcerer, that’s what I should have remembered. They’ve all got heads full of gods and magic; can’t trust them to act sensibly, see. Can’t rely on ’em for business. Not even Myri, I fear.”
“Are you going to bury me here?” asks Eladora. At some point, Heinreil’s grip on her arm shifted, and now they’re holding hands, like she held her mother’s hand the last time she was here. She can almost smell her mother, and Myri’s arcane mutterings behind them meld into half-remembered impressions of chanted prayers of mourning.
“Bury you? Where’s the profit in that? I’m selling you, I’m afraid; you—and this amulet—command a high price tonight. Seller’s market, although the other potential buyer has removed herself from contention on the grounds of attempting to turn me into a fucking candle. There are steps here—there we go.”
She remembers the steps. They go down into the crypt, to the monument to the murdered Thays, empty of all those butchered and blasted corpses.
“Of course, it’s young Carillon who’s supposed to be here,” continues Heinreil. “I thought she was just a cutpurse when she first showed up; I took her amulet to teach her a lesson about guild law. You don’t steal from me, see? The amulet, though, she said she didn’t steal it, that she got it from her mother. I did some digging, some divinations, even went to the House of Law and looked up the civic records—all those watchmen and magistrates, not to mention Jere Taphson, running around, and not a one of them recognised me. I didn’t really know what I had, though, not until Nine Moons tried to steal the amulet from me over cards. That brought me here.”
He stops without warning and shoves her to the left. She stumbles into darkness. A door shuts behind her, and Eladora’s all alone in the pitch blackness. She flings herself back at the door, finds it closed and locked. Her fingers scrabble at it, at the stones around it. The room she’s in is small, barely big enough for her and a small plinth bearing a little casket. Gods below, they’ve locked her in a child’s tomb, some ancient anteroom to the main crypt.
She doesn’t scream. She’s too numb. She stumbles back to the door, presses her ear against it. She can dimly hear Heinreil’s voice, but can’t make out the words.
An eternity passes in the darkness; a hundred heartbeats. Then she hears footsteps outside again, muffled grunts of effort. Heinreil and Myri, carrying something heavy between them, labouring under the burden. Heinreil pauses outside the door, knocks on it with one knee.
“For what it’s worth, miss, you have my apologies.”
And then he’s gone. She wants to scream after him, to beg him to take her with him, but she’s not going to break like that. She doesn’t know why she’s here, but she suddenly guesses who’s really to blame her for her being here. Eladora Thay stands up straight, with good posture. She can’t see herself, but she runs her fingers through her tangled hair, wipes her face as best she can. The scholar’s robes she’s wearing are not the most appropriate attire for such a reunion, but this is a tomb, not the mansion in Bryn Avane.
She’s not being sold, she’s being ransomed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
The square outside St. Storm is crowded. Three Tallowmen, heads blazing, stand in a line across the steps of the church, blocking the entrance. Cari spots the beginnings of a scaffolding at one side of the building, and overhead workmen have knocked a hasty hole in the centuries-old stone of the bell tower. Fear of damaging the imprisoned deity in the bell, maybe, or fear of inciting the already terrified crowd.
“More inside,” whispers Cari to Aleena, pointing at a stained-glass window that’s illuminated from behind. St. Storm, his protective hands guarding the fleets of Guerdon. There’s another Tallowman inside the church, maybe more than one.
“Over here.” Aleena leads Cari around the crowd, towards a townhouse just off the square. Technically, St. Storm’s part of the Wash, but this is a gentrified neighbourhood, where the quality live. Lower Queen’s Point. The one time Cari was here before, she was just off the boat, sick as a dog and reduced to begging and pickpocketing. She thinks she might have asked for alms at the very house that Aleena brings her to.
Aleena hammers at the door. “Hunnic, open up.”
A bolt’s drawn back, then another. The door opens a crack—a priest, soft features hidden behind a beard that doesn’t sit well on his face. A palsy in his hand, which shakes with more than fear. “Aleena, is that you? Thank the gods! Come in, quick, before they see you.”
Hunnic, Cari quickly gathers, is one of the priests of St. Storm. He babbles, a flood of irrelevant questions about Patros Almech and the Tallowmen and the city watch, but Aleena cuts him short. “We need to get into the church. Up to the bell tower.”
“Those damnable alchemists and their Tallowmen—they’re vandals. They’ve smashed up the spire! What’s hidden up there?”
“A god,” says Cari. No sense in lying to the man now.
“Never mind that,” snaps Aleena. “We need to get up there, and I’m too fucking tired to take on all those waxworks at once. Can we take them by surprise?”
“There’s another entrance to the crypts,” says Hunnic. “It comes out right at the base of the bell tower.” Cari figured as much. The city’s crisscrossed with old tunnels and ghoul-runs, a smuggler’s paradise, although many of them are bricked up or warded. She used to think that the watch did it, to stop the thieves’ guild using the underways. Now, she knows what they were trying to keep out, and that it’s much too late. The Ravellers are already in the city.
Hunnic shows them to the crypt entrance. After opening it, he gestures down the alleyway towards the crowd. “What should I do? They keep asking me to make the alchemists open the church. They’re terrified. But I don’t—I mean, those Tallowmen won’t listen to me.”
“Honestly,” says Aleena. “Lead ’em down to the harbour. There’s every chance that everyone in Guerdon will be dead by dawn. Get out while you still can. Someone may as well make it out alive.”
As promised, the passage leads through the crypt to a trapdoor below the bell tower. Cari peeks up, sees one Tallowman patrolling the inside of the church, smells another up the stairs. Aleena pulls her back down.
“Stay here.” And with that she’s gone, moving quietly for all her size and armour. Fuck her, thinks Cari. Aleena may say she’s tired, but she’s got divine blessings keeping her going. Strength and speed and stamina and a fiery sword—proper sainthood, a taste of divinity, unlike Cari’s blessings of migraines and unwanted visions.
She could have all that, though, if she let the Black Iron Gods in. They’d exalt her if she let them; she’s seen it in visions. Somewhere, up above in the city, there’s a whole army of horrors slithering through the streets looking for her, eager to make her their queen. She toys with the idea of letting them do it, the same way she used to stare into the ocean and thing about jumping overboard in a storm. All the people who want to control or kill her—Heinreil, the alchemists, even Ongent—all swept away in the hurricane of her wrath. The tyrant queen of Guerdon, terrible and beautiful. Make the streets run red with the blood of her enemies. Cast down the Kept Gods, and let the Black Iron Gods rule once more.
She imagines what would happen if she gave in; from what she’s gathered, there wouldn’t be much of her left if she opened herself to full sainthood. She’d be hollowed out like a Tallowman, her soul consumed in its union with the Black Iron Gods. She imagines Spar looking at her with horror and disappointment in his eyes. It can’t happen. So, keep fighting.
She shifts uncomfortably; suddenly, she’s thinking of Miren, and a foul-smelling crypt really isn’t the place for such fantasies. He could suddenly appear here, take her away from all this, remind her that she’s got a physical body, reknit flesh and soul. Some part of her mind presses on her, flooding her conscious mind with memories of that night in that attic room. The images drive away the chill of the crypt, help her fend off thoughts of the Black Iron Gods, and of what Aleena said earlier. Everyone will be dead by dawn. Get out while you still can.
Sex and death; sex as a hedge against oblivion. She’d rather lose herself in screwing Miren than go through that terrifying spiritual union again. Ongent’s spell nearly killed her, and now Aleena wants her to try again only without all the magical protections. She can certainly command the Ravellers—by becoming the thing they want her to be. They’ll bow to their idiot goddess-queen, the mindless puppet of the Black Iron Gods. She doesn’t know if she can control them on her own terms.
The amulet protected Heinreil from her visions. Maybe, she hopes, it’ll protect her from the gods. That must be why her mother sent it to her. She wonders where her mother got the amulet. Maybe she too was a thief, robbing some ancient temple, before she got involved with the Thays and their bloody fate. If you could only give your child one gift—and you knew what was going to happen to her, then surely you’d send her protection. The embodiment of a mother’s love, something to shield and anchor her again the darkness. It’s a comforting thought.
Or she could run. Slip out of the crypt, join Hunnic on his way down to the harbour. The only things keeping her in the city were Spar, Rat and her stolen amulet, and the amulet’s already lost to her. For all she knows, Spar and Rat are dead, too, along with her scheme of taking revenge on Heinreil by stealing control of the thieves’ guild. Why not leave? She ran away from Guerdon years ago and never intended to return, even though she sometimes wondered about her family and her origins. Now she knows more than enough, and it’s nothing good. She could leave again.
But you can know, she reminds herself. You can find out if Spar and Rat made it out of that building. You can still find Heinreil.
The trapdoor opens again. Aleena’s standing there. She scrapes wax off the blade of her sword. “Come on, one of the bastard’s screeched before I got to him, so we may only have a few minutes before more come. Or Ravellers, for that matter.”
They climb the narrow spiral staircase that winds steeply around the core of the spire. Cari quickly loses track of the number of steps. This spire is much, much taller than the modest belfry of the Holy Beggar.
Aleena stops when they’re nearly at the top. Readies her sword, swinging it to judge the distance available for head-chopping in these close quarters. “In case we get company,” she mutters, “I’ll keep watch here. You go on. Be fucking quick.”
Cari emerges into the cold air. Wind whistles in through the hole the alchemists have blasted in the side of the spire. They’ve knocked through part of the floor, too, leaving only a narrow wooden beam above a vertiginous drop straight down to the church floor below. The Black Iron Bell is still intact, but they’ve wrapped chains around the bar it hangs from to keep it from moving.
The padlock holding them in place is easy to pick. She lets the chains slither down through a hole, lets them slip into the void and tumble until they clatter like thunder far below. The bell’s free now.
Cari takes one last look at the city spread out before her with her own mortal eyes, then gives the Black Iron God a shove.
The sound from the bell ringing right next to her should be deafening.
Maybe it is. Cari’s not in her body to hear it.
She glimpses her mortal form as she soars above the city, borne aloft by the fumbling consciousness of the Black Iron Gods. There, beneath her, she sees the city as a tapestry. Thousands of people, thousands of souls, all linked together by shining threads of life. The Ravellers are there, too, like a black stain, a parasitical mould on the fabric of life. One by one, they will tease out those shining threads and weave them into a new form. They will consume all life in the city and fashion those stolen lives into a shape for the gods. The Ravellers cannot be counted, cannot be numbered as they rise from the depths, slithering out of drains and tunnels and subway stations. They sense Cari’s presence as her awareness passes over the city, but they don’t obey her. They see her as a peer, as another tool for their Black Iron masters.
The Ravellers are—so far—confined to the older parts of the city. She doesn’t see any as she passes over Castle Hill, and Gravehill is mostly clear, too. The north Wash, the slopes of Glimmerside, the central district around Venture Square crawl with the monsters, but they haven’t pushed into the rest of the city yet. They don’t need to—every soul they consume is fuel for the gods, and there are souls enough in this thronged city to sate the thirst of the Black Iron Gods as they rebuild themselves.
Not yet, thinks some fragment of Carillon, even as another part of her—an alien aspect that she is aware of only in this liminal state—looks forward eagerly to that destiny. Part of her wants to be the channel for the Black Iron Gods.
Show me the amulet, she tries to say, but it’s like shouting into a storm and she can’t muster her thoughts against the hurricane of the Black Iron Gods in their panic and eager wrath. She has to snatch images, memory-fragments, as she’s blown hither and yon across the rooftops. Her perceptions are a sickening kaleidoscope of impossible sensations and visions. One moment she feels the cold tendrils of a Raveller stalking across the lead-tile scales of her back as she shares the feelings of the Holy Beggar church; an instant later she’s watching people flee the advancing line of Tallowmen—their waxy skin still soft and unformed, candles fresh from the mould as the alchemists desperately field reinforcements. She’s a bird, an old woman, a drainpipe, she’s a nameless tunnel under Holyhill. Subways tunnels are veins beneath her skin. The slaughter in the Wash is blood pumping through her heart.
She rallies before she’s entirely swept away. Spar. Rat. Her friends. She can find her friends. She seizes onto them as anchors.
There—in the cattle run where Aleena fought the Tallowmen. A ghoul, an old one. Hooves scraping through the wax, horned brow heavy with the weight of sorcery. It’s much too old and big to be Rat, but as her awareness passes over it, it raises its face to the rain clouds above and sees her. Rat’s yellow eyes stare out of the skinned-horse face of an elder ghoul.
Startled, Cari loses her mental grip, and her awareness is blown away again. Suddenly, she’s burning, her flesh melting as her bones glow white-hot. Enclosed spaces, walkways, the crackling of elemental sorcery—but familiar. She’s in the alchemist’s furnaces; she sees them melting her down to make another god bomb. She’s the bell of Bell Rock, screaming a lament for her shattered sibling even as her lungs fill with molten metal. (Cari is distantly aware that her real body—her original body, her mortal form, that little scrap of meat and skin—is lying on the cold stone of a distant belfry. Blessed shock of coolness, pushing back against the intolerable heat.)
Rosha is there, directing the construction of a second god bomb. Cari tastes the fear of the Black Iron Gods. She’s known them in their anger and in their confusion and in their frustration before, but tonight they’re afraid. Until now, the rule was that Gods cannot be killed, only diminished. Death was for mortals. That’s not true anymore.
Detonate a god bomb over Guerdon, and what happens? An invisible explosion. Spiritual annihilation. The Black Iron Gods die—even the ones still locked in bell form. There wouldn’t be any more god bombs after that, not unless the alchemists find another pantheon that’s been trapped in a form that can be easily weaponised. The Ravellers vanish, saving the city. It might be worth it for Rosha but it’d be a huge gamble, especially as she’d risk killing the Kept Gods, too. Guerdon would be spiritually defenceless in the Godswar. Cari doesn’t know what would be left of her if that bomb went off—how much of her soul is divine at this point, and how much is mortal. She strongly doubts she’d survive the blast.
The Bell Rock god succumbs to the fire, and Cari’s off again. Spar—she sees Spar, in the warehouse off Hook Row. He’s still alive. Her emotion makes her buoyant and she soars even higher above the city. She shouts, or wants to shout, but her body is far behind and far away.
