The Gutter Prayer, page 45
“Did you know when you paid my ransom?” demands Cari. “You knew I was a Thay. Did my grandfather do something to me? Is that why I’m a fucking saint? Did you know when you came for me?”
Ongent raises his hands. “I suspected, yes. But I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know what you were. Jermas studied the beliefs of the Safidist sect, the god-aligners, who try through prayer and self-abrogation to humble themselves before the will of the divine, with decidedly mixed success. Jermas—he was always a proponent of efficiencies and the direct approach, you understand—he believed that it would be better to create an entity that was, shall we say, spiritually receptive. I was certain, when I visited Jere Taphson, that you were entangled with a spiritual being of some sort. I feared that it might be the Black Iron Gods, but I wasn’t sure. Our initial test indicated that it wasn’t some lesser elemental or ghost that had visited upon you, but you, ah, left in haste before I could confirm that you were indeed connected to the thirsty ones.” He smiles, but his eyes are dull and tired. “You were an initiate of the Dancer, for one thing, and you were dreaming of the Keeper’s churches. There were other possibilities then—there are none now.”
“What did this Jermas do to Cari?” asks Spar.
“I have no idea. Jermas himself was only a dabbler in sorcery, but he recruited some brilliant minds. He spent a fortune on his work, but all that research was lost when the Thay family were murdered. Whatever she is, though, she is unique.”
“If she’s unique,” says Spar, “then how is her cousin Eladora involved? And the amulet?”
“Before the Black Iron Gods were cast down by the Keepers and reforged into bells, they were iron statues. These statues echoed and reiterated the spiritual patterns that make up the gods’ essential structure in the elemental realm. Reforging them disrupted those patterns and paths, making it impossible for the gods to exert their power.”
Aleena frowns. “Aye. We couldn’t kill the bastards, but they’d conveniently locked themselves into big ugly lumps of iron, so we just fucked them up by casting ’em as bells. So what changed? Cari?”
“Yes. Her presence agitates the vestigial, damaged structures that were once gods. She is like a candle for them, guiding them back to what passes for consciousness among deities. Now, I fear, Eladora is close enough to Carillon for the Black Iron Gods to use her as a beacon instead—when augmented by the amulet. The amulet, I would surmise, is a relic of great significance to the Black Iron Gods. A holy talisman, marking the wearer as their high priest and herald.” He sounds cheery about the whole prospect, as if the end of the world is a riddle he’s just solved.
“Why the fuck would grandfather—would anyone—want the Black Iron Gods back?” asks Cari. Unbidden, the memory of what she saw, what she was offered in the Holy Beggar comes to mind: a vision of Carillon as high priestess, an immortal saint-queen ruling the city. Her enemies gutted at her feet. She stamps on the thought, tells herself that she rejects it all—but you used their power to kill Heinreil, part of her whispers, why stop there?
“Not back as they were. He intended to bring them back in a form he designed. Remade gods, engineered for his purposes. Hubris and folly, I fear, but marvellously ambitious, one must acknowledge. Alternatively, Eladora might be in the hands of someone using Jermas’ research, perhaps those who—”
“It doesn’t matter who,” says Spar. “If we don’t stop the Black Iron Gods, then we don’t have the amulet. If we don’t have the amulet, then we can’t stop the Ravellers, and then the alchemists will launch their god bombs to save the city. That will kill the Kept Gods, too, along with the Black Iron Gods and probably Aleena and Cari. All that matters now is getting through the night. All other concerns must be put aside. How do we stop them?”
“The fucking Ravellers have half the Wash corralled down in the Seamarket. There must be thousands of people there,” says Aleena. “It’s going to be mass slaughter.”
“Cari, you think you can command the Ravellers if you have the amulet?”
She opens her mouth to speak, feels the back of her throat burning with vomit, closes it again. She nods weakly. Outside, thunder or some spell crashes across the clouds, and she flinches. Her heart’s racing with panic.
“It will be dangerous,” admits Ongent. “Carillon will become what Jermas Thay intended her to be—the Herald of the Black Iron Gods, their conduit to the material plane. The temptation to abuse that power might be overwhelming—and even if you resist that, you’ll still be in danger. The Ravellers may obey you, but their first loyalty is to their trapped gods. They might turn on you and make you open the way for the gods.” The professor sighs, then claps his hands. “I may be of some little service. I was able to wound a Raveller with my spells before.”
She nods again and walks across the room to stand next to Spar. The rough floor of the warehouse heaves like the deck of a storm-tossed ship beneath her feet. Ongent keeps talking about protective spells and countermeasures—the same lecture he gave in the tenement after they healed Spar—but she’s not listening.
“I’ll go and get the amulet then, and young Eladora. She was under my protection,” says Aleena, “and I know the tomb.”
“Miren,” says Ongent, “go with Aleena. Once you’ve rescued poor Eladora, take the amulet and come to us. My son,” he says with a note of pride, “has the gift of teleportation. He can get us the amulet faster than any other method.”
“I should stay with Cari,” says Miren, eyes fixed on the floor. “I can guard her.”
“No. Go with Aleena. Get the amulet,” snaps Ongent. “Do you understand?” Miren grunts.
“I’ll go with Cari and your father,” says Spar. “You’ll get to Gravehill faster without a Stone Man tagging along. I’ll get some of the thieves to back you up.” She takes a deep breath. The thought that Spar will be with her in this madness is heartening. One hand closes around the knife in her pocket, drawing strength from the cold weight of the blade. It’s still sticky with her own blood and the ichor of the Raveller. The things can die.
“We have a plan, then,” says Ongent.
“We’re thieves,” says Cari, “call it a heist.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Spar wonders if it is close to dawn.
He’s counted time in alkahest for the last few years, and that gave him a remarkably accurate internal chronometer. If his finger joints and neck stopped aching, he’d know that at least a week had elapsed since his last injection. Other symptoms gave him even more precise measurements. A particular plate in his back locked solid around six days after an injection; his good knee started getting stiff three days and six hours after a dose.
After Cari’s healing spell, his sense of time is gone. It makes him feel adrift, like he’s spinning out of control into some dark future. The city shares the feeling. Everything’s uncertain tonight.
He stands at the door of the Hook Row warehouse, waiting for Professor Ongent to finish some sorcerous preparations. The professor’s strange son Miren left a few hours, with Aleena and a half-dozen thieves that Spar’s almost certain he can trust. Even if there are still some of Heinreil’s men in the remains of the Brotherhood, their loyalty is to a dead man. Heinreil is gone. Tonight, Spar is the master of Guerdon’s thieves, just like his father. Whatever else, he has tonight.
By now, Aleena and her followers should be nearly at Gravehill. It’s not far as the crow flies or as the train runs, but the trains are shut down and the Wash is a war zone. The streets are impassable, and—without a ghoul guide—so are the deep tunnels which are the most direct route to Gravehill. So, Spar sent along two ex-linesmen who’d turned thief, Harper and Gladstone, to lead Aleena’s party through the city’s suddenly empty train tunnels all the way to Gravesend. If they haven’t run into Tallowmen, they’ll be at the Thay tomb soon. They’ll grab the amulet, and then Miren will carry it back to Cari, and she’ll be able to work another miracle.
Spar’s watchers on the street report (when they do report back, instead of going abruptly silent) that the Ravellers are still gathering prisoners in the big Seamarket near Venture Square. There must be thousands of people inside the market by now. Thousands of souls to be filleted by the Ravellers and fed to the Black Iron Gods.
The scale of the tragedy is unthinkable.
So, he suspects, is the scale of the victory. Say Carillon is able to command those monsters—what does command mean? She can tell them to stop, and just doing that will be enough to save all those lives. They can go farther, though. The Ravellers are unstoppable by any weapon short of divine magic or alchemical weapons. Divine magic is in short supply in Guerdon, and if the alchemists had a god bomb ready, they’d have used it already. There’s a chance, he thinks, that he and Cari might end up at the head of an unholy army.
There are furnaces in the alchemists’ guild that maybe could burn a Raveller. They could order the Ravellers to turn on each other, kill each other until there’s nothing left. They could tell them to march into the ocean and keep going, or just go back underground. Put the genie back in the bottle, have the Ravellers slither down to that gate beyond the ghouls’ realm and reseal it.
Or they could use them. Desiderata Street proved that the Tallowmen are no match for the Ravellers. Spar could have Cari take down Rosha’s monsters with her own. March an army of Ravellers up to the alchemists’ guild, and up to the cathedrals on Holyhill, and up to Parliament and demand reform. Put a noose of darkness around the city, and see if they’ve got a fraction of Idge’s strength.
He lumbers back inside. The warehouse is eerily quiet despite being crowded with people who took shelter here. Everyone’s afraid to speak above a whisper, as though too much noise would attract the Ravellers.
He passes Professor Ongent, lying stretched out on a pallet. The professor is napping, soundly asleep in the midst of apocalypse, a child-like expression of contentment on his face. Cari’s upstairs in the office.
Spar’s heavy footsteps sound like gunshots as he crosses the floor and ascends the stairs. He finds Cari rifling through the desk.
“Look at this!” she insists and shoves a ledger across at him. “It’s Tammur’s accounts. The bastard—look, the fucker bought a consignment of poison from Ulbishe. That’s the shit that Yon identified—the stuff that they dosed you with. Tammur was the one who poisoned you!”
Spar laughs.
“What’s fucking funny?” Cari’s face is almost comically furious and appalled.
“It doesn’t matter. It just doesn’t. I mean, maybe Tammur poisoned me. Maybe he bought it on Heinreil’s orders. Maybe Heinreil planted that ledger, and he was planning on using it to screw Tammur when it came to light. I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. They’re all dead.”
“Of course it matters,” she insists, “we have to know.”
Spar settles into a heavy chair, testing its strength. “Even with your visions,” he says, “we don’t know everything. Everyone’s in the grip of these tremendous unseen forces, thrown this way and that. Not just gods—they’re in there, yes, but they’re part of it. Fate, circumstance … fuck, money and power and family, too. Economics and politics and history. Necessity, maybe. Like the world’s on railway tracks. Things happen even though no one sane wants them to happen, when no one involved wants them to happen, but everyone’s caught by circumstance. Actually, if we’re going to have this conversation, hand me that bottle.”
“I don’t know what the fuck kind of conversation we’re having.” Cari pours some of the remaining drink into a cup, hands him the rest. “Should we be getting drunk before we go and save the city?”
“That’s the crux of the matter, maybe. Think of it this way—the head of the Brotherhood was always going to try to kill me. There’s no choice in the matter. My father’s name, my history, that’s one force acting on them. Acting on me, too—even if I hated people and didn’t want anything to do with them, I’d still be seen as a champion of the poor. Because of Idge.”
“Oh gods. I know this kind of conversation. This is the reason you have no friends, you know, not the Stone Plague.”
“Idge says—”
She takes a sip of her drink and sticks her tongue out at him.
“Idge says—”
“‘Finish the bottle if he reads the whole page at you,’” quotes Cari. It’s a drinking game that Rat invented, mocking Spar’s devotion to his father’s unfinished philosophy.
“Idge says that there are moments when revolution is possible. Most of the time, we’re all—everyone, from the poorest beggar out there to the Patros on his golden throne—caught in the gears, controlled by these invisible forces, and if we act against them we’re crushed. But there are moments when things can change, when the forces balance and it’s possible for people—individual people—to make a big difference. To—realign things. Remake the world.”
She scowls. “Who wants to do that? You get it wrong, and then the whole world is your fault. Every bad thing that happens after that moment is on you. How do you live with that?”
“Cari—when you get the amulet and command the Ravellers, what are you going to make them do?”
“Stop.” She looks pale.
“And then?”
She puts her unfinished drink down on the table. “I don’t fucking know. Make them go away. I guessed that maybe Ongent would know something. If it’s up to me … if it’s up to me, Spar, I don’t want it to be up to me. I wanted to run away when all this started, and I still do. I came back to help you, and to fuck over Heinreil, and to get my amulet back.” One finger. “You’re—I don’t know—not cured exactly, but healthier than I’ve ever seen you.” Two. “Everything and everyone in this city is getting fucked over tonight, but at least Heinreil’s dead. And three.” She extends a third finger. “Once I get that amulet back, it’s going in the fucking sea. That’s my answer, Spar. I want out. All that amulet ever meant to me was the idea that I once had a mother who loved me, and that I hadn’t spent my whole life being a fucking inconvenience to someone. Now it turns out that it’s all part of this magical shit, and I don’t want it anymore.”
Suddenly angry, she snatches up the cup and drains it. “Take your invisible forces and shove them. I want out. The open sea, and a place where no one knows who I am.” Her eyes light up. “You could come, too. Saving the city discharges any fucking obligation you can possibly feel to the Brotherhood or anything else here. Gods, Spar, I can show you the world. There’s so much out there beyond Guerdon. The Godswar isn’t everywhere yet. Come with me.”
What about Miren? part of him thinks, but before he can answer, running footsteps. One of the messengers, a girl of no more than eight. She drops a paper on the desk and backs away, unwilling to stay close to a Stone Man. He pushes himself out of the chair, hearing it groan under the strain, and picks up the note.
“Tallowmen are gathering for a push near the Mercy Street cordon, aiming at liberating the Seamarket.”
“What are they waiting for?” asks Cari.
“There’s a carriage or truck of some sort coming down through Glimmerside right now. It must be the god bomb. It looks like they couldn’t fit it to a rocket in time, so they’re carrying it right down into the middle of the city.”
Cari stands. “As soon as the Ravellers spot it, they’ll start killing people. Try to break the gods out before the alchemists blow them up. Fuck, they may have started already. They’re assuming all the Ravellers are obvious monsters, but there could be any number hiding in human form.”
“We’ve got to get down there, so we’re ready the instant Miren brings you the amulet. I’ll wake Ongent.”
“Spar.” Cari runs around the table and embraces her friend, jumping up so he has to catch her. She kisses him on the cheek, then whispers in his ear. “If you ask me, I’ll do it.”
And she’s gone, running to a side room to grab the last of their gear.
The worms pop beneath his teeth, each one releasing a delicious little burst of soul-stuff. He swallows, then hawks up a gobbet of black slime and spits it out, using the ragged remains of a black cloak as a handkerchief. The elder ghoul smells the air; the Herald is very close now. The audacity of his enemy—to choose Gravehill as a final refuge! Gravehill has been the stronghold of the ghouls since they came to the city, and even with the ghoul kingdom in disarray he has power here. Elsewhere in the city, or below, these two Crawling Ones might have been a challenge to him, but not here.
He moves through the familiar graveyard. The ancient willow trees know him, and bend aside for him. He scales the cliff-side rather than take the longer, guarded path. The worm-men are looking for him; he can hear them calling to one another in horrible rattles too soft for any human ear to hear. There will be a reckoning, he promises them silently. There was a time that the ghouls were willing to share the bounty of the dead, but they have broken the rules and there will be war beneath the streets. And fire, too. Fat worms frying, a feast for young ghouls.
A familiar scent, and an even more familiar voice. “Bloody thing.” He pauses in his climb and scans his surroundings. Over there, cut into the hillside, is a passageway that connects with Gravesend Station far below. An access shaft, cut decades ago and mostly forgotten. The surface entrance to the shaft is sealed and chained up.
He watches.
There’s a flash of light from the far side, and the door shakes. It’s sturdy, made of steel, and it holds. Rusted shut.
Aleena’s voice again. “I can fucking open it, but I don’t want to write ‘Hey, intruders here, come blast them’ in sodding fifty-foot letters of fire across the bleeding hillside. Element of surprise, right?”
A muffled response. Harper, the still-Rat part of his mind reminds him, or maybe Gladstone. A fellow thief. Urging Aleena to hurry, that their only alternative is to blow it open with explosives and that will be even more obvious.
