The Gutter Prayer, page 48
“HE STEALS THE TALISMAN,” roars the thief through bloodied lips. “HE HAS BETRAYED US!”
Eladora tries to get down off the bier and half falls to the floor. Her body is still limp, as if her limbs are disconnected from her will. “Cari. He’s bringing it to her. But she—”
“It’s your fucking professor.” Aleena’s face is pale beneath the worm-gore that cakes her features. “Sinter fucking warned me about him, and I didn’t pay attention. Shit.” She draws herself upright, turns to Rat. “All right. All right. Back across the city. We do this—” nodding to the burning pile that used to be Jermas Thay “again.”
The elder ghoul wants to say it’s hopeless. It took them half the night to get from the Wash to Gravehill; by the time they get to the Seamarket, it’ll be too late. It may be too late already. Even the gods agree—he can sense no trace of the Kept Gods around Aleena. Their saint is out of position, a playing piece on entirely the wrong side of the game board. They bolstered her so she could counter one threat, but now that another has arisen they abandon her.
He wants to tell her that all is lost. That they should lie down and die, and let him eat their bodies and carry their souls down into the dark. If he consumes the flesh of a saint—TWO saints, even!—it will do much to strengthen him, give him a chance to survive the apocalypse now set in inevitable motion. But the words catch in his mind, and he cannot put them into the throat of the thief who sprawls before him, twitching.
Rat discovers he doesn’t believe that all is lost.
Instead, he speaks with his own voice, forcing the words out past his warped larynx, his monstrous tongue, his massive fangs. “Spar will stop him,” he whispers, wondering at his own faith in his friend. And then he adds, louder, “Crawling Ones. Outside. A great many.”
The sorcerers they scattered on their wild charge up Gravehill have returned and gathered outside the tomb. Rat can dimly perceive them through the shut stone door of the chamber, their woven shapes like a skein of silvery slime-trails on the edge of his mind.
“Is there another way out?” asks Aleena.
Eladora shakes her head. “I didn’t see one.” Tears roll down her cheeks; she wipes them away as if mostly unaware of them.
Aleena sighs. “Of course there isn’t a shitty back door. All right.” She grabs Eladora by the arm and hoists her up, hands her to Rat. She has to strain to do so—her god-given strength has left her. “Get her out.” She pulls the surviving thieves to their feet, too, like a drill sergeant. “Stay behind the ghoul, you hear me?”
Outside the door, the low susurrus of worm-spells.
“Church business,” says Aleena to herself. “Fuck that.”
Rat senses a swell of power with her, and he watches as she reaches up to heaven and pulls. Like Carillon does, hauling the gods down to her.
The tomb floods with light once more as Saint Aleena rides out to war.
Eladora clings to the ghoul’s back, her face buried in shanks of coarse, foul-smelling hair. She cannot bear to look as they charge out of the tomb. She hears shrieks and screams, explosions of sorcery, the roar of flames and the sizzle of flesh. Despite this, all she can think is it’s going to get worse. She’s seen the Black Iron Gods first-hand now, and she knows that all the stories in the history books don’t even begin to describe the horrors that are coming. A reign of divine terror, where you’re either a slave of the mad gods, or another sacrifice to be devoured by the Ravellers.
Sorcery blazes around her. All she can hear is the air rasping in and out of the ghoul’s huge lungs as he staggers forward, lanky arms raised as a barrier against the Crawling Ones’ spells. She can’t hear Aleena anymore.
One of the thieves screams as something catches him, a spell that swallows him like an invisible mouth. He just snaps out of existence, suddenly no longer there on the stairs out of the tomb.
A hand made of fat, soft, slithering fingers closes on her ankle. She kicks at it, feels the worms burst beneath her heel, but it drags her from Rat’s back. The Crawling One is wounded, dripping dying worms from a burnt hole in its robe. It claws at her, muttering what might be arcane syllables or nonsense, the leavings of a thousand corpse-brains.
Eladora shoves it off her, feels around for a weapon. Her fingers close on a sword. It’s still hot to the touch, but no longer flaming. The long blade is blackened and scorched, partially melted. Aleena’s sword. She uses it as a club, smashing it into the Crawling One’s head mass over and over until the monster lets her go.
Then running, taking the elder ghoul’s hand and running up the stairs again, out of the tomb, into the night air of Gravehill.
They are, she discovers, the only two to have escaped the tomb.
She turns, looking back into the darkness for some sign of Aleena and the thieves. There’s a flash somewhere deep in the tomb, like a buried thunderstorm, and part of the ceiling collapses. Rat grabs the heavy stone doors of the tomb and slams them shut as dust billows out. The crash echoes out across the silent hillside.
“All dead,” she whispers, and she’s not sure if they’re her words or the ghoul speaking through her mouth. She holds Aleena’s ruined sword gingerly, unwilling to set it down.
She stumbles to the edge of the rocky shelf where the tomb stands, to the vantage point from which half the city can be seen. In the distance she can see the huge dome of the Seamarket, outlined by fires down in the Wash. The sky above the city is scarred by smoke trails from rockets. For a moment—and she’s lost her borrowed sainthood, so she cannot really see, really be sure—she perceives titanic figures standing all around her. Not the hateful Black Iron Gods, but more familiar, comfortable deities. The Holy Beggar, stooped and lame. St. Storm, knight of heaven, with blazing lance and cloak of grey. The Mother of Mercies, crowned in fire, and her face is Aleena’s. The Kept Gods bear witness to the death of their last saint, and there is a new sense of purpose in them, an awareness that Eladora has not sensed before.
And then they are gone. They flee like phantoms as a pallid light blooms over Guerdon, retreating west and north across the hinterlands beyond the old walls. They are falling back to their old temples and village churches, ceding the city to other powers.
Eladora’s stomach lurches as she hears the bells tolling wildly.
She falls to her knees as she watches the end of the city.
Spar’s body blazes with a light that is not a light, so bright it is painful to behold.
The Ravellers are the first to change. They freeze and turn to stone, the plague progressing through them in an instant. Knife-sharp tentacles reach towards their victims, but calcify and shatter before they can draw blood.
Spar’s remains explode in a cascade, an eruption, a hurricane of architecture. Stone rushes outwards and upwards, building on itself, a riot of streets and towers erupting within the dome of the Seamarket, vomiting structure. An earthquake in reverse, a cataclysm that builds. Impossible palaces and rookeries boil out of the ground stained with Spar’s blood.
Ongent’s miracle, a gift of the Black Iron Gods, fails. Screaming, he tumbles into the churning madness of the new city and is crushed between stone walls, ground away to reddish dust. His remains will never be found.
There are few other casualties. Impossibly few. Even those standing next to Spar’s remains are spared. Later, they will speak of how the new buildings grew around them, wrapping them in stone, leaving them standing in corridors or great concourses or small private rooms that had not existed a moment before. There will be tales of beggars who fell asleep in alleyways and awoke in mansions.
The wave of making, of building, does not stop with the Seamarket. It roars out of the doors of the great domed temple in all directions, but the strongest currents are west, east and south-east.
West, into the Wash. Here, the miracle surges down the streets and narrow lands. Towers and theatres, all jumbled up, dance along the gutters with the grace of alley cats. In some places, they merge with existing buildings, or, better yet, complete them, the new flesh of the city fusing with the old as if it was always meant to be that way. In other places, they are weirdly ill-fitting. Hovels jostle for space with palaces.
If there is a plan to this spasm of miraculous creation, it quickly goes awry. Many of the new buildings are beautiful, but weirdly misshapen or twisted. Houses without doors. Body parts writ in stone, only magnified hundreds of times. Explorers of this new urban wilderness will find a heart the size of a warehouse in what was Hook Row; others will find streets shaped like words, as if the city is trying to communicate a message to them. Building piles upon building again and again. Stairs and elevated roads struggle to keep up; new structures spring into being to bridge gaps between others. It’s mad and wonderful, like the gods have handed over the building blocks of creation to an enthusiastic child.
East, the stone storm engulfs the army of the Tallowmen. Here, there are casualties. The Tallowmen are caught in empty rooms, rooms without windows or doors. Airtight rooms. All across the battlefield, the lights go out. The alchemist’s wagon with its precious, lethal cargo sinks into the marble tumult, vanishing into the new streets like a founding ship slipping beneath the waves. The stone seems enraptured—or offended—by the empty side of Venture Square, because here it rises, higher and higher, building in a wild impossible spiral. It leaves a tower taller than the spires of Holyhill, a cryptic monument to this miracle.
It’s not done yet. South-east it rushes, along the docks and cliffs. The stone wave is like a running man, now, a sprinter climbing the rocks along the edge of the Alchemists’ Quarter. It strikes the wall of the Quarter, but it’s not enough to break the wave—it washes over and into the factories. Furnaces explode, towers topple and shatter.
Later witnesses will describe it as being like a stone giant. They will say that, in its last moments, the wave resembled a titanic figure, hundreds of feet tall, falling on the alchemists’ factories and storerooms and engulfing them within its being. More than half the alchemical works are consumed or destroyed by this eucatastrophe, this miracle of the gutters.
Finally, the wave rushes over the far edge of the cliff, tumbling down into the sea in the direction of the Isle of Statues. As it falls, new buildings and streets spring fully-formed on the cliff-side. The last creation of the miracle is a shimmering white dock in a sheltered cove, a welcoming place for a ship that crosses the sea.
At the last, stillness over the new city.
EPILOGUE
You stand on a rise, overlooking the new city.
From this vantage, you can see the confusion of the miraculous streets. Magic conjured them into being, and magic has no truck with urban planning. It’s a thief’s city, a city full of byways and concealed passages, of stairs and tunnels. Hiding places and secret rooms everywhere. In places, you somehow intuit that you are looking at some unspoken memory, where the stone wave froze in unexpected organic forms like coral or petrified wood.
You watch a woman make her way, hesitant and nervous, through the strange streets. Her clothing marks her as a stranger to the new city. She walks with a cane despite her youth. You watch her path with disinterest. Her route will take her through a tunnel that resembles the skull of a horse, carved from the same marbled stone as the rest. Another building, over there, looks like a boat on a canal. If she goes that way, you know she will be ambushed by thieves.
The new city is more crowded every day. In the last month, refugee ships have arrived from Severast and Mattaur and a dozen other lands, an armada fleeing the war. There is safety and a place to live in Guerdon, say the rumours, a city safe from mad gods.
There is a gun in the woman’s pocket. She touches it, a talisman against unseen danger.
Street names are still a confusion. There’s a parliamentary committee that’s supposed to produce an official map of the new city, but the people who actually live here have their own names for the bizarre streets that sprang up overnight three months ago. According to her informants, the woman’s looking for the place called Sevenshell Street.
She finds it, with some effort. It’s a small row of houses. All the houses in the new city are remarkably—miraculously—warm and dry in the winter. This particular house, though, already shows signs of poor maintenance. There are thick curtains on the grimy windows.
She raps on the door with her cane.
She waits patiently. Two minutes. Three. Another woman opens it.
“Fuck you,” says Carillon Thay.
“We know most of what happened in the Seamarket,” sniffs Eladora, “from the accounts of the survivors, and from forensic theology. And, obviously, my own experiences. I won’t ask you to relieve what must have been … well.” She sniffs again, dabs at her nose with a scented handkerchief to block the smell from the hovel. “Witnesses said Professor Ongent died in the ruins. He fell from a height.”
“I let the gods in. Into Spar. I thought—I don’t know, that it’d kill them, waste their power. Like emptying a bottle into the dirt. But it just all came rushing out …” Cari shudders. “Ongent—he was flying. He was their High Priest. Said he was immortal. But then when the gods went through me, he was cut off and he just went.” She spits on the floor. “Like that.”
“The Black Iron Gods are gone, we think. The ones still imprisoned in the bells. You didn’t just channel the energy from those sacrificed that night, but also all their accumulated power.” Eladora consults her notebook. “There are theological engineers who are still trying to calculate how much divine power you, ah, disposed of.”
“Didn’t bring him back, though, did it?”
“I never met Mr. Idgeson, Cari,” says Eladora, as gently as she can. “But I understand he was a remarkably … moral man. For a thief.”
“I should have known. I shouldn’t have trusted him. The professor. I fucking didn’t trust him, and still.”
“I knew O-O-On—the professor, a lot longer than you did, and I never suspected either. The church had files on him, extensive files, but he was able to outmanoeuvre them. He fooled many people, Carillon, and under the circumstances you can’t blame yourself.”
“Watch me.”
Eladora crosses to the window, opens the curtains a crack. Cari hisses and moves out of the spring sunlight. She looks many years older, you think.
“Have you seen any sign of Miren?” asks Eladora.
“He’s alive?”
“I take that as a ‘no.’ Yes, he’s still alive. He must have been able to t-teleport out before the Black Iron Gods were destroyed. He’s been seen since and implicated in several m-m-—crimes. I wondered if he would make contact.” Eladora stares out of the window, carefully controlling her expression.
“Because we were fucking?” Cari laughs. “That was the Black Iron Gods trying to cram their two Heralds together. If his skinny ass shows up, he’s dead.”
“He was always fastidious about cleanliness, so you’re certainly safe here in this filth fortress.”
“Found your tongue in the tomb, did you?” Cari rubs her eyes, looks up at Eladora. Her cousin’s dressed like a guildmistress, but the sharp cut of her jacket can’t hide the shape of the gun in her pocket. “What do you want, anyway?”
“I’m working with Effro Kelkin, on the emergency committee. And your friend Rat, too.”
“Did you tell him where I was?”
“No,” says Eladora. “I guessed that since you haven’t made contact with him, you’d prefer to remain in hiding. I think he assumes you left the city—I did, too, for a while. I won’t mention this meeting, not unless you want me to.”
“Thanks.”
Eladora continues. “Part of our remit is dealing with the aftermath of … the Gutter Miracle, and ensuring that the instability caused by the new city and related upheavals don’t impact the security of Guerdon. It’s not going well,” she admits. “But we must try—especially in light of all the new refugees. We’re maybe the best refuge from the Godswar now.”
She reaches into her jacket and removes a small envelope, marked with warding runes. “We found this in the Seamarket afterwards. It’s magically inert now, as far as we can tell, and harmless. I thought it might have some sentimental value to you, though.” She tips the contents of the envelope, and the amulet glitters in the sun.
“You know Heinreil went to trial, don’t you?” asks Eladora, when Carillon makes no move to pick up the jewel.
“I heard. Prison! Fucker should be dead. Or turned into a candlestick.”
“The tallow vats were destroyed in the Miracle, and the new guildmaster has promised not to rebuild them.”
“Make an exception for him,” mutters Cari. She looks at the amulet, then closes her eyes. “Shit. You sure it’s broken?”
Again with the notebook. “‘Magically inert.’ I think that’s the same thing.”
“Right.”
A long, awkward silence follows, and Eladora is the first to break it. She stands, carefully brushes herself off, and says: “You saved everyone, Cari. You stopped the Black Iron Gods from—”
“No, I didn’t! Or if I did, it’s just balancing the scale. If I hadn’t been there, if I’d never been born, then they’d never have been able to get back in at all! Or if I’d just fucked off again instead of staying, then Spar would still be alive along with everyone else. And Rat—don’t use his name for that thing on your committee. I broke everything, El. I broke …”
Eladora embraces her cousin. Tears soak into her sleeve. After a moment, Cari shoves Eladora away, wipes her face. “Just go.” Eladora leaves a calling card on the table, pristine white against the dust, and departs without a word. She’s already late for another appointment.
Cari circles her little house, looking for anything else to do, but finally returns to the amulet on the table. She holds it for a moment, remembering what she thought she knew about her mother. Remembering what she did to get it back.
