The Gutter Prayer, page 44
Jermas looms over her, worms bulging through the eye sockets of his mask. “You are resisting! Insubordinate child!”
“It’s not working!” shouts Eladora. “It’s killing me! I’m not her.”
“You have the amulet, and you are disguised by the spells of the Crawling Ones. To the Black Iron Gods, you are the Herald. If you continue to resist, you will not survive this, child.”
“Please,” sobs Eladora, “it’s killing me. It’s killing me.” Survive this? No mortal could escape unscathed after such close contact with a god, let alone an entire pantheon of mad, imprisoned deities. Even if she doesn’t lose her life, what remains afterwards will be far from mortal, far from human. As bad as any god-touched abomination spawned in the excesses of the Godswar.
He reaches down. Fat, slimy-soft form-fingers scrabble at her breast and lift the amulet from her skin. It’s left a raised welt on her chest. He removes the amulet’s chain from her neck.
“The spell must be adjusted. A moment, and we shall begin again.”
“Please no! Gods, if there’s anything of my grandfather left, I love you, I love you, I’ve always been good, please, don’t do this to me!” It’s half feigned, half real. Her mind feels like a raft of ice, floating on a sea of tears. She is very close to losing her sanity.
“Compose yourself.” Jermas slithers away to the entrance to the tomb chamber, where two of the other Crawling Ones wait. The three converse wetly. Eladora can’t raise her head to look, but from the way shapes bulge and slither under their cloaks, she can guess how the worm-men communicate among themselves.
She closes her eyes. Bites her lip and tries not to cry. For the first time in many years, Eladora wishes her mother was here to protect her. Silva sheltered the children from the worst of Jermas’ tirades when they visited the big mansion, made sure they were seen briefly and not heard from again. Scuttling up to the room they called a nursery, though it was filled with junk and old books instead of toys.
“Why didn’t you tell my mother you were still alive? Does your daughter mean nothing to you?” she calls out.
“Quiet!” orders Jermas without looking at her.
Or anyone. Aleena, come back to finish the job. Miren, sneaking in like a shadow and whisking her away like some masked hero in an opera, swashbuckling his way through hordes of Crawling Ones. Professor Ongent, his kindly old face illuminated by the flash of sorcery. Anyone. Even Carillon. Even her father, who’s been dead for six years. Hells, if Grandfather Thay can come back from the dead, why not the solid, quiet man who always smelled of sawdust and incense to his loving daughter? Daddy, she thinks, oh kindly gods, send him back to me.
There is only the slithering of the Crawling Ones, crackling and hissing at the edge of hearing. Jermas’ shadow falls across her again. “We must be quick. The Black Iron Gods are very close to breaking through, even without the Herald. They fear the alchemists’ weapons. If my allies lose their grip on the Ravellers, the sacrifices will begin prematurely, and they will try to free the gods in their wasteful, hateful original forms, instead of my design. I must be midwife to the new city as well as father to it. The Black Iron Gods must reincarnate in useful forms. Spirits of commerce and trade. Order and strength. All must be in accord with my plans—and if you hesitate, child, and impede me, I shall be forced to cause you pain. I shall take no pleasure in such discipline. It is necessary. Necessary.” He stares at the amulet in his hands. “Decades of planning, of preparation, and it all comes down to hugger-mugger and haste. Feh.”
If she can stall, if she can resist, then maybe the alchemists can fire their god-killing bomb and stop Jermas, save her life.
She remembers her mother deflecting her grandfather’s anger over some childish mistake by asking him questions about politics. Giving Jermas an opening to expound about his strategies and trades was often the only thing that could distract him.
“The C-C-Crawling Ones—what do they get out of this? What happens to them when you remake the Black Iron Gods?”
“We shall no longer need the filthy ghouls to maintain a watch on the Ravellers. The dead of the city will mostly go to maintaining the civic gods, of course—we shall have need of a great many souls, far more than Guerdon presently produces, but there are efficiencies to be made. The balance of the dead shall go to the Crawling Ones. The best, of course—the scholars, the craftsmen, the artists—their knowledge preserved eternally in the flesh of the grave-worm. It is only foolish superstition and childish squeamishness that prevented such an arrangement in the past.” He taps the amulet, and actually leans in to whisper in her ear. “Such arrangements would be temporary, you understand. My adoptive kin are not trustworthy.”
“Aren’t you one of them? You’re made of w-w-worms!”
“But my legacy shall be writ in gods. Prepare yourself, child. Do not resist.”
Prepare yourself. The thought is so absurd it makes her want to scream. How can any preparation make this nightmare any less horrible? She prays again for anyone to come through the door and rescue her, anyone at all.
The wormy horror that was her grandfather pushes her back down on the slab, drapes the dreadful amulet around her neck again. Chants the words that will tear the soul from her body and make her a channel, a vessel for some crazed rebirth of the Black Iron Gods. In response, she chants her own prayer, a Safidist prayer, one of the many, many devotions that her mother made Eladora practise every day for years until she left for university.
The Safidists believe that by faith, diligent study, and mental and physical acts of self-discipline and abrogation, one can make of oneself an empty vessel for the Kept Gods to fill with their shining light. Eladora knows too much about the true state of the Kept Gods now to think of their light as shining, but even their faltering, wan candlelight is better than Black Iron darkness. Eladora prays to the Kept Gods with a purposeful fervour that would impress even her mother.
Jermas realises what she’s doing even as the spell takes hold. As she rises to that divine perspective, she can see the Crawling One clawing at her insensate mortal body. Jermas slams her head against the metal of his own burial casket in a fury, but he’s too late. She whispers her message to the Kept Gods just before the Black Iron Gods descend in an uproar and claim her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Cari and Miren tumble bodiless across the city, hurled this way and that by invisible storm clouds that rise like angry plumes from the bells of Guerdon. They skip across rooftops, their passage marked by claps of thunder without lightning, by window glass that suddenly cracks for no apparent reason, by a sudden wave of heat.
They fall back into reality in Miren’s attic hideaway in Newtown. As her soul is once again sheathed in flesh and bone and she breaks away from that dizzying divine viewpoint from on high, Cari is again consumed by desire. She desperately wants to be naked with Miren, to press against him skin to skin, to fill the sudden absence of divinity with carnal pleasure. His tongue probes against her lips, his fingers tear at the ties of her shirt, her trousers, tugging at them. The heat of his bare skin against her belly as he pushes her down onto the bed.
And oh, how she wishes she could run away from the world outside and just fuck him until they both forgot who they were, but that’s not going to happen. The world outside is burning.
“Get off me!” cries Cari.
Miren ignores her. He’s pulling at his own clothing now, his skin fever-hot and perspiring. Cari’s lust turns to a sick fear; Miren has the look of an animal about him, his face is eerily blank and ugly despite everything. She gets an arm free and elbows him in the jaw, and the shock knocks him to the floor. Cari rolls to the other side of the bed and clasps her shirt closed with one hand. Her knife is in the other.
“Not now, all right? All right?” Miren scrambles into a crouch, making him look even more like an animal. His face contorts, and he lets out an anguished squeal, then bites his own arm as hard as he can, drawing blood. Cari stares at him in horror as he sucks at his own blood, nuzzling at his forearm like it’s one of her breasts.
And then, like a wave falling back into the ocean, it passes. He stands up, his features returning to their familiar look of sullen boredom, arms held loosely by his side as blood drips from his wound. He scoops up his own discarded clothing and starts to dress. Cari shakes her head, resists the impulse to flee out of the door and never look back.
“Sorry,” mutters Miren, staring at the floor. A child’s rote apology. Cari’s reminded that he’s, what, two years younger than she is? More?
Cari turns her back on him, runs through the supplies Miren has lined up like toy soldiers on the shelves. She grabs anything that looks like it might be useful—alchemical cure-alls and painkillers, guns, some money—and stuffs it into a satchel. “How did you find me?” she asks without looking at him. He responds with a shrug, dismissing the question. Kneeling down, he opens a chest by the bed and pulls out a heavy cloak that glistens like lizard scales in the dim light. He throws it around his shoulders.
“Fuck,” mutters Cari, thinking about the layout of the city. From her visions, Newtown’s behind the cordon of Tallowmen. To get back into the Wash, they’ll need to sneak past them, and then get past all the Ravellers and whatever else is loose on the streets tonight, and then they’ve got to cross the entire width of the district to get up to Hook Row on the far side. On a normal day, the walk from Newtown to Hook Row would take forty minutes or more. With the city in uproar, it’s going to take a lot longer.
“Can you teleport again?” asks Cari, expecting—hoping, even—the answer to be no. Miren closes his eyes for a moment, takes a deep breath, and then for an instant he flickers like a candle flame, darting in and out of existence.
“Yes. Tonight, they’ll let me.”
They, she wonders, but the time it’ll take to drag an explanation out of Miren is almost as long as it’d take them to walk across the city. She crosses to him and grabs hold of his shoulder. “Take me back to Hook Row.” He takes her elbows, leaving an awkward space between their bodies, and together they step out of the world again.
Hook Row.
The professor somehow senses their arrival before they materialise; they fall back into reality in the upstairs office just as he enters the room. He welcomes them with a wide smile.
“Well done, boy,” he says to Miren, ruffling his hair. Then, to Carillon. “Are you all right, my girl? We have much to do, but if you need a moment …”
“Where’s Spar?” she asks, just as the big stony bulk of the man heaves into view behind the professor. Cari twists out of Miren’s grasp and runs over to give Spar a rare hug. “It’s all gone wrong!” she whispers in his ear, half choking on unexpected tears. “With the guild, and Rat, and everything.” Spar’s presence makes her feel safe, and that makes everything worse—as soon as she lowers her guard, even a fraction, the terror of the situation sneaks in and freezes her heart. The impulse to ask Spar to kill her flares in the back of her mind. If she’s gone, then the Ravellers have no way to open a conduit to the Black Iron Gods. Spar might do it, too. There’s no one stronger.
“I know,” says Spar, “but Cari, we need to fix this. We need to find a way to stop the Ravellers.”
Cari steps back. Ongent and Miren are whispering to one another on the far side of the room. She catches Miren scowling jealously at Spar, and she rolls her eyes. Her attraction to Miren feels right in the moment after teleporting, but after that he makes her skin crawl. She clears her throat.
“I ran into a Keeper saint. Aleena. She said I should be able to command, to control the Ravellers. I tried, but … it didn’t work.” Cari pauses, rubs her back, bruised purple when Rat flung her into the bell at St. Storm’s. Takes a breath. “I had an amulet that I got from my mother. It’s the one Heinreil took from me.” Spar nods. “I think it’s to do with my sainthood, and the Black Iron Gods. Aleena said that if I had that, maybe I could command them. I don’t know.”
Ongent smiles encouragingly at Miren, then says, “Many saints use relics to bolster their connection to the gods. It’s certainly plausible. How did this Keeper—ah, never mind. Where is the amulet now?”
“Heinreil had it, and when he was wearing it I couldn’t see him in the visions.”
“Of course you couldn’t, any more than you can see your own eye. He had it, though. Now it’s …”
“Gravehill. I saw him leaving Gravehill, when I rang the bell at St. Storm. He must have left it up there with the Crawling Ones. The graveyard’s full of them.” Cari pauses. The memory is so incongruous, it’s hard for her to believe what she sensed, but there’s no reason to hold anything back now. She has to trust the professor. “And I … Eladora was there. I didn’t see her in the vision, but she was there. Out of her body, like me. I guess in the gods’ realm.”
“What happened to Heinreil?” asks Spar.
“Tallowmen got him. I think he’s dead.”
“Good.”
The professor is interrupted by a shout from below, followed by Hedan stumbling through the door, clutching a broken nose. “Spar, there’s some woman here who—”
“Who can speak for her bloody self,” huffs Aleena, stomping in. She’s flushed and breathless; she ran up from St. Storm’s church, sprinting across the Wash nearly as fast as Miren was able to step across the city. Her eyes narrow when she sees Miren, and the naked sword in her hand glimmers with fire. “Don’t you move, lad. Sinter warned me about your tricks. Carillon, are you all right? That fucking ghoul near broke my neck.”
“I’m fine,” says Cari. “How’d you find me?”
“Divine fucking intervention. The Kept Gods are screaming fit to burst me head. Got anything to drink?”
Wordlessly, Spar retrieves a bottle from Tammur’s desk and throws it to her. “I’m Aleena. I should burn half of you fuckers at the stake and hand the other half over to those candle-sucking alchemists in the name of law and sodding order.” She takes a swig, then waves the bottle at Ongent. “You mentioned Eladora. I left her at a church safe house with Sinter, that rancid lump. What happened to her?”
Ongent hasn’t moved a muscle since Aleena entered. He’s frozen like a mouse hiding from a housecat. He has to lick his lips before speaking. “We are hardly allies, you and us. Your spies have harassed me for years. You think of me as a heretic—and I have no doubt that you are under orders to kill Ms. Thay.”
“I trust her,” says Cari, surprising herself. Like her, Aleena’s caught in the grip of unwanted sainthood. Acknowledging the compliment, Aleena hands Cari the bottle. Cari takes a mouthful of the liquor. It burns going down, but makes a welcome warmth as it pools in her stomach. “Aleena, we don’t know what happened to her. I saw her in a vision, but—”
“Yah, well, so did I, twenty shitty minutes ago. Having people shouting in your head is your problem, not mine. I’m divinely exempt from hangovers, but this is fucking worse.” She pokes Hedan with a booted foot. “I’ve half a mind to kill this twerp, just to take the edge off.”
“You had a vision?” asks Spar, obviously trying to make sense of the bizarre intrusion.
“Eladora. Calling for help through the Kept Gods. How she managed that I don’t know. I couldn’t make much fucking sense of it—worms and Gravehill and some shite. But she told me to come here, and here I find you. So, what the fuck is all this about?”
Still moving very warily, like a man trapped in a room with a manticore, Ongent rises and circles towards the window. “Carillon, come here please. A little divination is in order, to make sense of all these competing visions.”
Any clarity would help, thinks Cari, and she joins Ongent at the window. Outside, the city’s lit by fires. It looks like chaos. The professor comes up behind her and places his hands over her eyes. He smears a sticky resin on her eyelids. It feels like stinging jellyfish floating around inside her eyes. Ongent mutters a few words of power, and power surges through him and into her. “Look,” he whispers, and Cari opens her eyes.
It’s not like her visions, but it’s halfway there. She can see the invisible currents of magical potential that run through the city, just as she did back in the basement of the tenement when they healed Spar. She can still see the lingering traces of that spell, the incantation that connected her to Ongent and Spar so she could channel the power of the gods into a healing spell. Beyond, she can see smaller, chaotic threads of magic, slithering like worms through the city. The sky to her right is on fire with sorcery—it’s the glow of the alchemical furnaces reflecting off the clouds. She can dimly see shapes moving beyond the clouds. The Black Iron Gods, perhaps, although none of the bells are ringing. Have the Ravellers begun their sacrifices? Trying to give the gods enough power to manifest even without Cari.
Ongent whispers another word, and the connection between Cari and the professor flares back into existence. Pressure behind her eyes as he looks out of them, too. Her vision blurs as he tries to make her look towards Gravehill. There, rising from the east side of the twisted hill, there’s a pillar of magical energy, blazing bright.
“Jermas,” whispers Ongent right in her ear. “That’s Jermas’ spell. My word.” He dismisses the magic, and Cari snaps back to the mundane world.
“Jermas … you mean my grandfather? Jermas Thay?” Cari steadies herself against the windowsill, trying to recall her long-dead grandfather. All she can summon up are memories of being told to be quiet, of hiding as a tyrannical monster raged through the mansion that was all the world until they sent her to Aunt Silva. The thought that his rage fills the unseen skies over Guerdon makes a sick kind of sense.
“I worked with him briefly, many years ago. He was a visionary man, truly, with some fascinating ideas about sorcery and divinity. I lost touch with him, of course—the early days of liberated thaumaturgical research were a chaotic period, all sorts of groups forming and dissolving, and Thay was very secretive. I knew his theories, though, and I can recognise their application when I see it.”
