The Gutter Prayer, page 5
He pauses, looks at her for a moment. “If you confessed to that crime, you’d definitely be worth my while.”
“I was four,” she says. She scarcely recalls most of her old family, other than her Aunt Silva. Her memories of her stern-voiced grandfather Jermas are stronger than those of her father, who she remembers only as a pale, distant presence.
Jere continues. “Not much in the way of an inheritance either—turns out the Thays were in debt up to their eyeballs, although that only came out afterwards. But you’re off at sea. Off in Severast, and Firesea, and the Twin Caliphates, according to some tales I heard down the docks today. I’d have called you a beggar and petty thief, but because you’re quality, we’ve got to say adventuress, haven’t we?”
He closes the book, gently, keeping the page marked.
“So, four months ago, you come back here.”
“Not by choice. There was a storm and the captain took shelter here. Then they wouldn’t let me back on board.”
“Because you were a stowaway.”
“I offered to work my passage.”
“Why so eager to leave?” Jere asks. She doesn’t have a good answer. She never felt comfortable in Guerdon, or anywhere near it. The whole city feels like it’s pressing in on top of her, burying her beneath its mountains of masonry, its history, its crowds. She doesn’t like it.
When she doesn’t answer, he continues. “Now, here’s where I take notice. You fall in with that ghoul boy. He introduces you to the Stone Man, Spar. And Spar is one of Heinreil’s brutes. So, you know Heinreil.”
She keeps quiet, as Spar told her, but it’s hard to swallow her venom. Heinreil stole from her, but, more than that, he humiliated Spar, and she hates him for that. It rankles to see her clever friend treated like a filthy dog, and rankles even more to watch Spar enduring it, taking Heinreil’s lashes and cruelties without complaint, out of loyalty to his dead father. Family has never meant much to Cari, and dead family even less.
“He sent you to rob the House of Law,” says Jere.
She forces herself to shrug noncommittally, but she knows she isn’t fooling anyone.
“He set you up.”
She bites her lip.
“So give him to me.”
She wishes she could. She’s do it in a heartbeat—but she doesn’t know enough. She’s not Brotherhood, so she’s not privy to those secrets. And Spar would never forgive her. She shakes her head.
“All right,” says Jere, “who arranged it all? Spar? Was it Spar?”
It was Spar, but she doesn’t want to let him take the fall. It’s clear from the way the thief-taker’s acting that something else is going on, that she’s in much less trouble than she should be. She’s got lucky, but can’t see how. Maybe she can carry Spar with her.
“It was Rat,” she lies, “he knows Heinreil. Spar was just there in case we got spotted and had to fight our way out.”
Jere clicks his tongue. “Pity about that ghoul boy, then.”
“What happened to him?” She had assumed that Rat had got away across the city, made it back to the Brotherhood safe house.
“Ask the Tallowman.” Jere picks up her dagger and slips it into a sheath. Then he pulls a sticky black cord of some kind from a drawer, and knots it tightly around the dagger and sheath, binding it in place. “Clever stuff, this. The alchemists make it. You can only cut it with a special blade, or dissolve it with chemicals. We use it on prisoners, these days.” He hands her the bound knife. The black cord is springy and slightly damp to the touch.
“Miss Thay, you’re guilty as sin, but I’m neither judge nor jury so I don’t care. Your bounty’s been paid, so you’re free to go.”
“What about Spar?”
“His bounty hasn’t been paid. He’s not free to go.” Jere raises his voice. “Come and take her, if you really want her.”
Cari’s trick to appearing calm is to make herself hollow. She swallows herself, pushing all her nervousness and fear deep down inside and pretends she’s a metal statue, a model of a girl. Then, when the time comes to bolt, she lets it all out and it’s like the whip of a line under tension, this elastic explosion of speed that gets her out of trouble. She’s run away from strange men and monsters in a dozen cities and ports across the seas. She moves too fast for trouble to catch up with her.
This time, though, she can’t judge the right moment to bolt. This situation isn’t like all the rest.
He says his name is Professor Ongent, this man who bought her bounty from the thief-taker. He’s old but not frail, with a round belly, beard like an unkempt hedge and little owlish glasses that she’s not sure if he really needs, the way he peers at her over their rims. Like her, he’s wearing a shapeless grey robe, although he’s got a woven belt of gold-and-blue threads and a silver chain around his neck. He smiles warmly at her.
“I’m afraid you’ll have to leave the name of Carillon Thay here, child,” he says, “it would draw attention to you—and to me, and I’ve just invested quite a lot of money in you.”
The last time anyone did that, it was to sell her to slavers in Ulbishe. “I don’t use it anyway.” Her robe doesn’t have pockets, so she fumbles around for a place to put her peace-bonded knife. It keeps slipping out of the belt.
“Shall I keep that for you?” offers Ongent.
“S’fine.” She manages to roll the sleeve of the baggy robe back over itself to make a sort of pocket for her knife. It’s not like she can use it anyway, with Jere’s clever alchemical rope holding it in its sheath, but the familiar weight is comforting.
Ongent and Jere have a brief, whispered conversation—they obviously know one another. Cari can’t quite figure out who’s in charge, or if they’re friends or just have a common interest.
Jere growls at Cari. “You’d best not make trouble, girl.”
She nods, pretending to be cowed. She doesn’t make trouble, it finds her.
“I’ve arranged accommodation for you at the university,” says Ongent, “and a position as a research assistant.”
The sheer weirdness of that is enough to make her follow Ongent out onto the street. It’s twilight, so he produces a little alchemical glow lamp from his bag and shakes it. It sheds a bubble of greenish light that throngs the deserted street with eerie half-shadows. He leads her up a steep flight of stairs out of the Wash towards Phaeton Street. Dark alleyways and lanes lead off the stairs, into a maze of small houses and tenements, and she tenses as they pass each entrance. Ongent just keeps huffing and puffing up the steps, as if he’s out for an afternoon constitutional and his only worry is getting to the top of this little hill, not getting robbed and left in a ditch.
She contemplates robbing him and leaving him in a ditch.
“We’ll take a look at that wound on your arm tomorrow,” says Ongent. She flexes her shoulder, and it aches.
“I’ll be fine,” she says, “I just need to wash it out and bind it again. It’s not a deep cut.”
“It wouldn’t be, no. They like to play with their victims.”
She wonders why an academic would know so much about how the Tallowmen behave, or maybe it’s common knowledge these days in Guerdon. They pass one at the arched entrance to a subway on Phaeton Street. This Tallowman is made from a young girl, younger than Cari, but grotesquely stretched to fill the six-foot-six mould used to make the monsters. The wick’s light shines through her fang-like teeth as she examines Ongent’s pass. Cari gives the creature a wide berth—the monsters turn violent when they feel trapped.
“And the wounds on your face?”
She’d almost forgotten the constellation of little burns, where the molten metal from the burning tower struck her. She brushes her fingers over them. “It’s nothing.”
The professor clucks his tongue as if disappointed. He pauses halfway down the stairs. She can hear the rattle of the trains below, the hiss of steam. The walls of the stairwell are covered in posters and bills, thickly plastered one on top of the other. Advertisements for sovereign cures and fortune tellers, recruiting posters for mercenary companies, notices of city ordinances and curfews. He peels them away, burrowing through the papery shell to the stone wall beneath.
“Can you read?” he asks.
“Yes.” One legacy of living with her Aunt Silva, that country house was full of books. Her cousin Eladora always had her nose in a book. Only a year or two older than Cari, but always giving the impression of having been born middle-aged and dully dependable. At times they’d been close, allies against Silva or the neighbour who rented the land when Eladora’s father got sick. Mostly, they’d quarrelled.
Ongent pulls down the last scab of parchment, revealing the wall of the stairwell. It’s made from a greenish stone that looks wet to the touch. It’s carved with symbols.
“Can you read these?”
She peers at them, then shakes her head. “No.”
“Few can. These are ghoul tunnels. There are thousands of them beneath the city. Many are flooded or abandoned. Others are used only by the ghouls. Others, like this one, have been reclaimed for civic purposes, their origins forgotten except by those who study the history of the city.” He touches the symbols, almost reverently. “That’s my vocation, my field of study. I lecture in the history and archaeology of Guerdon.”
He starts down the stairs, expecting her to follow. She looks at the symbols again. There is something familiar about them, but she can’t place it.
“Come along, please,” he calls. Her instincts tell her to run—she could dart back up the stairs and vanish on Phaeton Street, maybe follow it down to the docks and stow away on board a ship bound for distant lands. Be gone by dawn. But she owes Rat, and Spar, and maybe even this strange professor. Owes Heinreil something else, even though her knife’s wrapped in that alchemical bond. And, anyway, there’s a Tallowman right there at the top of the stairs.
“One of your friends is a ghoul, I believe,” says Ongent. He keeps his voice low, pitched for her ears alone, even though the station’s nearly deserted. “I had Jere do a little investigating today,” he adds apologetically.
She shrugs.
“Did he ever discuss history with you?”
She scoffs.
“Have you ever discussed topics like the ghoul anarchy or the Varithian Kings with him or anyone else?”
“I don’t even know who they are.”
“I take it you haven’t read, say, De Reis’ A Critical Assessment of the Pre-Reclamation Era. I wrote the preface for the second edition you know,” he adds, blushing slightly.
“No.”
“Then we have a mystery,” he says. “When Jere found you in the ruins of the House of Law, you were talking in your sleep. Specifically, you were reciting the tale of ‘How The Ghouls Came To The City.’ That’s a story known only to the ghouls—and the few scholars who bother to study their culture, of course.”
Before she can answer, the station fills with clouds of acrid chemical steam and the train rolls in. They step on board into a nearly empty carriage. Cari flinches; she’s never been on an underground train like this before, and it unsettles her. The thought of being trapped deep below a city, carried forward against her will, getting further and further from the open air … it’s like a nightmare of being buried alive.
“Maybe I heard it somewhere before,” she offers as explanation, more to herself than to him.
“Possible,” admits Ongent, “if unlikely. Tell me, Cari, have you … heard any other stories?”
“I had … I blacked out in the prison, before I fell in the water. I saw something then, too.”
“Saw something?” asks Ongent. “Did you also see things before, when you told the ghoul story?”
“I can’t remember. I think so, but I don’t know what.” Green stone tunnels, like this one. The taste of corpse meat. Freezing cold. Huge figures, squatting on gigantic stones.
“And what about the second time? What did you see then? Another story?”
“No—it was like I was seeing some young priest in an old church. There was a woman in the crowd, and he wanted her—but she … she sort of fell apart and ate him, and became him.”
“Well then, that’s a task for another day.” The train huffs and groans as it drags itself out of the low-lying Wash, climbing some steep subterranean incline.
“What is?”
“Finding that old church, and seeing if the young priest is really dead.”
He says it like it’s a perfectly sensible, normal thing to do.
“What if it was just a dream?” she asks. Though it didn’t feel like a dream, and dreams don’t make you black out at the worst possible moment.
“Then perhaps, in time, you can be Carillon Thay again. I have friends in many places in Guerdon, including parliament, and they can be your friends, too. Or, if you prefer, we will part on good terms, and you can leave the city again and never return.” He smiles at her. She doesn’t like it. “But I don’t think it was a dream. I think you contacted something—or, rather, the reverse. It contacted you.”
“Like what?”
“I have no idea,” he says happily, as if glad to have a mystery.
“Have you heard of anything like this happening before?”
“Oh, there are certainly all manner of gifts and curses. Psychical prodigies, saints, sorcerers, wild talents, god-touched and the like. I’m sure that, with study, we can learn more about your … condition. Be thankful that I found you before the alchemists did—that would not have been pleasant for you, believe me.”
The train emerges from a tunnel mouth and crosses the Duchess Viaduct, high above Glimmerside, the city’s pleasure garden. Ahead is the University District, sprawling down the east and north sides of Holyhill like run-off from the shining cathedrals. Cari peers out of the window. She’s far from the parts of the city she knows, and wants to get the lie of the land in case she needs to run. The Keepers’ cathedrals catch her eye—three on the crest of the hill, all made from the same white stone and so similar that they could have been made by the same architect—and below and around them, a riotous confusion of other temples and churches. Beyond the temple precincts are the halls and theatres of the university, crammed wherever they’ll fit, driven by immediate necessity instead of some divine plan.
Both Temple Quarter and the university flow into Glimmerside, creating a strange borderland where the theological and spiritual realms mix with the unbridled commerce of the lower city. She looks down on streets of coffee shops, of suppliers of rare goods and curiosities, of backstreet temples and bawdy theatres catering to both the intellectual pretensions and base lusts of the students. On the far side of Glimmer, above the docks, is a haze of multicoloured smoke, marking the edge of the Alchemists’ Quarter.
She catches sight of a temple like a rose, sharp crystals of quartz catching the last rays of the setting sun.
“There’s a temple to the Dancer.” She’s always liked those temples, when she visited them in other cities. The cult of the Dancer sought their divinity in movement, in ecstatic dance, in the ceaseless whirl. Cari was even an initiate of the temple in Severast for a few months.
“Guerdon has had many gods in its day. You were born during the years of the Holy Strife, but when I was young, the only churches in the city were those of the Keepers, and foreign faiths were suppressed. That couldn’t last, of course, not with so many immigrants and foreign traders gaining influence in parliament, and the scandals with the relics. The disestablishmentarian bloc had the votes to push through a reform bill, but the adherents of the Kept Gods fought back on the streets. Riots, civil strife, even assassinations, but underlying the religious debate were tensions between the established wealthy families and the powerful newcomers. It might be …” He trails off when he notices Cari staring at him. “Well, you’ll have to attend my lectures if you’re to pose as my research assistant.”
That, she can predict without any mysterious gifts of foresight, is not going to happen.
The train screeches to a halt, and Ongent pulls himself upright, grunting with the effort. “Come along.”
Leaving Pilgrim Station, they follow a winding street that skirts the edge of the university. It smells of money—still rundown, but they’ve hosed off the cobblestones recently and the buildings are in good repair. Ongent toddles along ahead of her, moving quicker now that he’s on familiar ground. He turns a corner, onto Desiderata Street. He brings her to a townhouse. Small by the standards of the rich folk who can attend the university, of course—the place Cari shares with Spar is a tenth the size of these places, and she only had that much space because no one else risks sharing with a contagious Stone Man.
She wonders how Spar is doing in that flooded prison cell. She wonders if Rat’s alive or dead. She doesn’t trust her own run of luck. It feels like a betrayal.
Ongent raps on the door. Cari hears running footsteps. The sound of two bolts being drawn back, the crackle of a magical ward disarming, then the door opens and a girl peers out at them. Her round face is familiar to Cari, but it takes her a moment to place it.
“Carillon?”
“Don’t use her name,” cautions Ongent as he hustles Cari inside. “Remember, Eladora, no one can know she’s your cousin.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Rat, in a tunnel.
Ghouls can see the dark, see all the colours beyond black. The rich variations of shadow, the subtle shades of empty tunnel, and the yawning, blazing, darkness of the deep places below. There’s more to Guerdon below than above, in cellars and passageways and dungeons and sewers, in the buried forgotten pasts of the city, and all its unseen arteries and bowels, and more below the city than its inhabitants can imagine. The surface folk are insects crawling on skin.
He lingers in the darkness, but he cannot remain here. He needs to get back to the surface. He’s hungry, and he can smell dead flesh down in these tunnels. He should get back up to the sunlight, pay coin for bread and meat in the market, or maybe just catch some of his namesakes and choke them down whole, live and wriggling. Ghouls are corpse eaters by nature. Rat wants to eat dead flesh.
