The Gutter Prayer, page 43
He staggers back to the edge of the belfry, probing the damage to his chest. The wound oozes thick blood, already matting the coarse hair of his chest, and he guesses any number of his ribs are cracked, but he is alive. He climbs out of the belfry and looks out across the city, gulping in the night air in the hopes of catching the Herald’s scent again.
He doesn’t smell her, but he can sense her, feel the strands of the Herald’s power knotting together. Far away across the city, beyond Castle Hill, the Herald prepares to open the way.
He snarls and climbs down from the belfry, claws digging into stone. She will not escape him again.
The worms wriggle in through cracks in the doorframe, squeezing through then pooling in two piles. In the time it takes Eladora to draw breath, the piles become trunks, the trunks blend into a torso and that torso sprouts arms, ragged woven-worm fingers, and something like a head. Then, as she exhales, a merciful cloak of shadow descends around the Crawling One, hiding its disgusting form from her. It produces a porcelain face mask and settles it into place.
“Follow,” it says. It gestures, and the stone glides aside like a cloud scudding across the sky.
Down they go, down a stair that Eladora remembers from the funeral. Now that her fate is inevitable, she finds she has no fear. All her life, she’s fretted and worried, but there’s no point in doing so now. She’s powerless against even one of these Crawling Ones, and she has no idea how many of them slither through the crypts of the Thay family tomb. As she passes nooks and crypts, she glances at the porcelain masks, wondering if any of them are kin to her. It’s the worms, she reminds herself. The worms eat the brain and consume the knowledge of the deceased. Her family, her uncles and aunts and cousins, they’re all gone. Even if a worm ate the identity of one of them, that fragment of consciousness would be lost, subsumed in the wriggling slimy totality of the Crawling One.
She knows this, but she also knows with a horrible certainty who awaits her at the bottom of the stairs.
He wears a black cloak like the rest, and she can see the worms that make up his legs and feet as he walks towards her. His mask, though, is made of gold, and is a perfect likeness of how he must have looked in life. She remembers it from portraits and photographs that were old when she was young. Her memory of his face is quite different. She recalls papery skin, yellowed teeth, wrinkles, bloodshot eyes, beard gone white and patchy. The mask captures the sneer she remembers, though, catches the cruelty of the man.
Jermas Thay steps forward and takes her by the chin, examining her. He did the same when he was alive, when her mother first presented her child to the patriarch. Roughly jerking her head this way and that, holding her up to the light to appraise her, to assay the purity of her Thay blood.
The touch of his worm-fingers repels her, and she cannot hide her shuddering. He withdraws as if burnt. “Eladora.” His voice, though, is unlike that of the other Crawling Ones. It’s like the voice she remembers, sharp and deep, each word stamped out as if by a machine. It’s stronger than she recalls, but she only knew her grandfather when he was already very old. “Show respect, child.”
“I did,” says Eladora, shivering, “w-w-when we buried you. You’re d-d-dead.”
“You know, you were always one of my favourites. My children’s generation disappointed me, and their children—feh. Spoiled brats, for the most part. You, at least, knew how to curtsey and stay quiet. Tell me, how is your mother?”
“You’re dead!” repeats Eladora.
The gold mask looks at her with hollow eyes. “That’s your father’s coarse stupidity in you. A lack of vision. A failing of the line, I fear. No matter. Obedience is all I require.” Jermas holds up a familiar amulet. Carillon’s amulet, a gift from her unseen mother. In the dim light of the tomb, it looks to Eladora as though the black metal of the amulet is alive, flowing and recoiling in a horrible way that reminds her immediately of Desiderata Street.
“I bought this, and you, for a high price. The last of the family treasure, hidden here until it was needed. I have given everything for this city, child. Family and health, wealth and happiness, even life itself. I had a vision, and it shall come to pass. Guerdon is a city ill-served by its gods. The cruelty of the Black Iron Gods could not be abided, but is the timid divinity of the Keepers preferable? Why should we be held hostage—”
“The Keepers killed you!”
Jermas hisses. “I was betrayed!” In his anger, he can’t maintain the simulacrum of his human voice, and it breaks into the distorted concerto of the hive. “Some rogue sold me out to the church, and they did not understand my work. They had no idea how the city was changing around them. Kelkin and I broke the dam of dogma and set Guerdon free to change. We unleashed this city’s power! The guilds, the thronged harbour, the envy of the world—we built all that! A second liberation, accomplished without bloodshed on our part. It was out of jealousy as much as fear that they struck me down.”
He gestures down at his robed body. “I had made arrangements, as you can see. I knew that I would not live long enough to see my great work come to fruition. Even as an approximation of my former self, I can oversee the last parts of the plan. But the betrayal cost us time. Everything takes longer than it should, child, and I am sick of it. It took too long, too long, to make a suitable conduit. There were many failures. I made some of them, but when they perished I feared that younger seed was needed, so I called on your father Aridon to serve in my stead.”
“Aridon—Aridon is Cari’s father! I’m Eladora.”
Jermas grabs her and drags her over to a tomb—his tomb, she realises. He shoves the lid aside with ease. The coffin inside is open, but empty apart from a few scraps of wormy velvet. “Lie down,” he commands, and then he continues speaking as if unaware of his own words. “Eladora, yes. Silva’s girl. No, you’re entirely human, child. You weren’t part of the great work. Where was I? Aridon. My son. He was young enough to sire healthy offspring. I paid off enough of his bastards to know he was fertile, too, and the shape we gave the thing was not uncomely.”
He holds up the amulet, and Eladora suppresses a scream as it unmistakably moves.
“See, here she comes now. Behold the mother of my youngest grandchild. A portion of her, anyway, the little we could retain after the conjuring.”
Eladora crawls back in the coffin, huddling away from the wriggling thing. “You—made—Carillon? Bred her from … is that a Raveller?”
“I made a conduit to the Black Iron Gods. Guerdon is ill-served by its gods. Mad, or weak, or absent. But we need them! The Godswar will not spare us for long. I will not see this city conquered by some foreign abomination, or by the dusty Crown of Haith! We shall have civic gods. We shall have the gods I shall forge from the ruins of Black Iron, the gods of my design. Carillon is the conduit through which they shall be made manifest. I never cared for the child, even then. She cried all the time, wailing and weeping so loudly I could hear it in every wing of the mansion. If I could have used her then and there and been done with it, I would have, but I knew it would take years for her to come into her power. I thought I would have to wait another five years. I thought, even, that I could hang on that long. Instead, twenty years, bitter and wormy. I lost myself in the dirt. I was diluted down until there was almost nothing left of me.” He pauses, hanging his head with exhaustion. “I am so far from what I was, child. Sustained only by the plan, and when the plan is done there will be nothing left. I learned … I learned. Look! Look!”
He fumbles in a shelf under the casket and thrusts a ragged piece of parchment at Eladora. Confused, she scans it. The language is incomprehensible, although she recognises it as a sacred document written by Keeper scribes, and the seal at the bottom is the personal seal of the Patros himself. The symbols remind her of the scratchings of ghouls. It’s a letter from the church authorities to the ghoul kingdom below. “You came back,” whispers Jermas, “and they awoke. The plan can still be achieved. The time is now.”
One hand grips Eladora’s shoulder, the worms biting down, a hundred tiny knives, and her body goes numb. She can feel their poison rushing through her, a wave of cold running down her veins like ice water. The other deftly slips the chain of the amulet around her neck. He still holds the amulet itself, suspending it above her as he stares into its inky depths.
“I’m not her!” says Eladora. “If all this, everything you did, was to make Carillon, then she’s the one you want!”
“It would be better,” agrees Jermas. “As I said, you always were my favourite grandchild. But the Black Iron Gods are waking, and the Ravellers are abroad. There is no more time. Even without the amulet, Carillon has made a conduit between the gods and the material world. With the amulet, you are close enough to her to open the way.”
He drops the amulet onto her chest.
And Eladora sees.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The thieves do not cheer when Spar enters the warehouse. They hail him, say that it’s good that he made it out alive, and a few even clasp him on the hand or shoulder, heedless or uncaring about the risk of infection. But they don’t cheer. They look haggard, their voices reduced to scratchy whispers and low tones. There are very, very few left. Spar spots a Cafstan, a few of the younger thieves from the docks, some older men run to fat, pale beneath the red blotches of their cheeks. Hedan, sitting on a barrel, staring at rats as they dart in and out of a hole in the wall.
The camp of a defeated army. They’ve set up a makeshift hospital that will soon become a makeshift mortuary along one wall. He spots Mother Bleak there, lying on a pallet. Her lifeless eyes stare up at him. Her grandson, exhausted and half asleep, still holding her hand, unaware that she’s passed on. A wave of despair hammers Spar, but he has to keep moving. This place will destroy his spirit as surely as the plague destroyed his body.
He scans the crowd; no sign of Carillon or Rat. He finds the stairs and goes up to the small office once used by Tammur.
Miren appears out of the shadows at the top of the stairs, knife in hand. When he recognises Spar, he fades back into his hiding place. Like a sea anemone that Cari once described to Spar, a predator that waits in cracks in coral reefs and bursts out to ambush fish.
“Master Spar! Come in, come in. I was just taking a moment to rest before heading back down. Coffee?” Professor Ongent’s voice is perversely merry considering the disaster all around them.
“Back down?” echoes Spar dully.
“I have some skill as a doctor. It may be wasted effort, though—we don’t have long before the Ravellers get here. What news from the street? Have you found Carillon? I’ve sent Miren off to look for her, but he insisted on escorting me here safely first.”
“No sign. And Rat … I found him eating all the dead back at the tenement. He’s changed.” Spar briefly describes his conversation with his friend.
“The ghouls are moving. That may be a factor in our favour. They’ve fought against the Ravellers before, after all, in the last war. History repeats itself. In the last siege of Guerdon, during the battle of Mercy Street, the elder ghouls fought against the temple guards of the Black King not half a mile away from this very spot. The city was much smaller, then, of course, and the old city walls ran—ah, never mind.”
Spar shuffles through Tammur’s papers, finds a map of the city.
“From what I could see outside, those Raveller things are running riot all through the Wash.”
“They’ll kill everyone, won’t they?” he asks.
“Oh, not immediately. They want souls. Think of them as ambulatory sacrificial knives. Again, history is our guide.” Ongent clears his throat and declaims. “‘The people of the city were driven like cattle to the slaughterhouse, and gathered in great numbers in the hall of the thirsty. And the Ravellers drove them, and harried them, and walked among them as knives, so that ten thousand were offered up to the Black King.’ Mondolin’s translation; Pilgrin’s is a little, ah, bloodless, pardon the pun.”
Spar stares at the old man, wondering if one or the other of them has gone mad. “They’ll corral the people and bring them to be sacrificed.”
“Yes, I assume so. Kill them according to the old rites, and feed the gods—assuming they can be fed in their current forms, which may not be true. In either case, they’ll need a conduit—that is to say, they’ll need Carillon to open the way.”
“She could be anywhere. She knows about this warehouse, though, so if she’s free she’ll make her way here.” Spar clings to that thought as the only thing keeping him afloat in the black tide. “If they find her first … what will they do?”
Ongent coughs lightly. “I’m a historian and a dabbler, my boy, hardly an expert. I’d assume they’d bring her to one of the bell towers where the Keepers hid the Black Iron Gods. Free one, and that one can free the rest. The bells are the key to all this, as is Carillon.”
Spar’s breath catches in his lungs. He can’t tell if the tightness in his chest is panic or calcification. Outside in the streets, shape-shifting monsters out of children’s stories are marching people into death camps. The Wash is surrounded by waxwork assassins made from the corpses of his thieves, commanded by mad tyrants who now run the city and are building bombs to murder gods. One of his best friends is the herald of armageddon; the other has mutated into something ancient and alien. And he still doesn’t know what the Crawling Ones were doing when they attacked the guild. He knows next to nothing about the worm-men, and can’t even formulate questions for the professor. He clenches his fists, feeling the impossible strength of the Stone Man but not knowing how it can be applied to any of these horrors.
But Idge endured, and so can he.
“All right. You’re saying that as long as the Ravellers don’t have Carillon, they won’t kill everyone.”
“Not immediately. Don’t think of them as conscious beings—they’re emanations, technically, shells thrown off by the gods that have seeped down to the lowest energy state of base matter. But, yes, I think we have a little time.”
“Professor, you’re our only sorcerer. Cari told me that your house in Desiderata Street was warded, and those wards stopped the Ravellers from entering. Can you redraw the wards here to protect us?”
“They’ll be rather slapdash, I fear, but they might help. I’ll need … oh.” Ongent hurries over to a window and opens it. “Listen!” A bell is ringing wildly, down by the harbour. “The tide turns, my boy. The hour approaches!”
And the city, and the city, and the city.
Tumbling hillsides of history, building upon building, culture upon culture. Scars and calluses of the flesh of place grow in marble and sealstone. People as ants, as droplets forming lakes and rivers, flowing in channels. As above, so below—she can see through the ground, through foundations and cellars and tunnels, to the sewers and pipes beneath, and below them the subway tunnels and the ghoul runs, the subterranean catacombs of the Varithian Kings, the ghoul tunnels, deeper still, past the black seal to the lightless void where the Ravellers dwelt.
And above, above, the bells revealed in terrible glory. She can see them now. The Black Iron Gods aren’t black or iron, Eladora realises, they are blood and fire. They unfold as she approaches, shambling, misshapen angels crawling across the face of the heavens. They fumble blindly for the material world, looking for her eyes, her vision to guide them.
One of them flails towards her, and the pain is beyond all measure. She is all disembodied awareness, soaring over the city, but she is still connected to the living body that writhes in the Thay family tomb behind her. Looking down, she sees her own cells with the same omniscience with which she sees the city. And, like the city, her body is on fire, beset by an invasion of Ravellers. The blind swipe of the god is killing her.
“It’s not working!” she screams. Bodiless, her cry manifests in the material world as signs and portents. Rain sweeps across Castle Hill, and her agony echoes in the rattling of rainwater in the gutters. Windows break along Orison, and their cracks are the wave pattern of her voice. Dogs howl in response—but no one in the city below can hear here.
Tonight, there’s enough screaming in the Wash that one more would go unnoticed anyway.
Carillon. This is Carillon’s destiny, or Carillon’s fault. Her cousin was made for this—this is the bitter cup of her sainthood, not Eladora’s. But Carillon is the only one who might be able to hear her.
Her vision sweeps across the city, hurtling south towards the sea. Over the Wash, over Jere’s lithosarium, towards the Church of St. Storm.
She sees Carillon standing in the ruined belfry. Nearby, another presence—Aleena! The thought of the Keeper saint cheers Eladora for a moment, before she remembers that Aleena killed the Thay family to prevent exactly what’s happening to her right now. The Keepers were too late—Carillon had already been smuggled away to Eladora’s mother’s house in the country, to be sheltered like a cuckoo. If only Carillon had stayed in the right place for once in her life!
No. She’s being unworthy. She can judge her cousin for many, many things, but Carillon’s just as much a victim of Jermas Thay’s mad designs as Eladora is. To be made with this intent in mind, to be bred for a singular and terrible purpose, is appalling. She has to warn Carillon of what’s going on, of Jermas’ plan.
Just then, Carillon rings the bell. The god’s metal prison swings back and forth, and when the bell sounds the heavens shake. For as long as that terrible note echoes across the city, the Black Iron God is manifest in the skies above Guerdon, and Eladora is caught right in the middle of the god.
Eladora snaps back to her body, back to the tomb. The smell of burning skin and cloth. She can’t tell how bad her injuries are—her body is still mostly numb from the venom that Jermas injected into her. The fact that she feels such pain despite that terrifies her.
