The Gutter Prayer, page 7
Aleena’s sword bursts into flame. That’s handy.
She swings it at the Crawling One, trying to set its robe alight, but the monster recoils out of reach, its knotted body elongating obscenely. She darts forward, sword blazing brighter than her lamp. The Crawling One retreats, momentarily confused. She gives it no time to use its sorcery, no space to work magic. It tears off the encumbering robe and rears up, shying away from the burning brand.
Aleena steps forward, the light of her sword reflected in her eyes. She seems taller now to Rat, growing in stature as she advances until it is she who towers over the Crawling One. “Back, you fucking great pile of willies!” She moves with terrible deliberation, one heavy tread after another, her broad feet picking their spots one after another, always stepping to stable ground. The Crawling One slithers, slops, flows ahead of her. Rat scuttles and darts, dodging between the two combatants. He’s outclassed here. He runs for a hiding place.
Lightning erupts from the Crawling One’s limb. The flash lights up the chamber, driving away the shadows. The force of the bolt disintegrates the Crawling One’s arm, causing it to unknit and fall apart, worms tumbling hither and yon or burning up in the backlash. Aleena gets her flaming sword between her body and the spell-bolt just in time, but she’s still driven to her knees as her miracle contends against the sorcery of a multitudinous, eldritch thing on its home ground.
The flames on her sword gutter and die. The light fades. Now the only illumination comes from her discarded little lamp.
Aleena struggles to her feet and stands at the edge of that circle of light. Blood streams from her nose, her ears. “You think that was clever, do you? My nephews will go fishing with you as bait, you hear me? Come on, stop skulking there!”
From out of the darkness, the Crawling One replies. Without its shattered mask it speaks in a fuliginous chorus of voices, whispering in a thousand other languages beneath its words. “Haste not from the charnel clay, but fat and instruct the very worm that gnaws, subsumed in the totality, ever-birthed ever-consumed by the dead hand that moves the blind eye that sees …”
To Rat’s eyes—but not to Aleena’s—the colour of the darkness changes. He can see shapes in it now, creatures of shadow, gathering around the black tower of the Crawling One. It has more arms now, and they sway and gesture, weaving a greater spell.
Power gathers around it. The darkness falls towards it, drawn in by sorcery. There is no longer any air in the chamber, and Rat struggles to breathe. The dark shapes close on Aleena.
And then Rat finds the brake lever on the train carriage, and pulls it. With grinding solemnity, the train starts to move, slowly at first, then faster and faster down the slope as if it too is drawn in by the Crawling One’s spell. Little sparks of blue leap between the train’s underbelly and the rails on which the Crawling One stands. Rat flings himself out of the side door, landing heavily, scrambling forward on all fours.
The Crawling One collapses before the train rolls over it. It falls into its constituent worms, dropping from a nine-foot-tall figure to a thick writhing carpet in an instant. The sound of some of the worms popping as the train rolls over them is lost in the general clamour and roar.
Rat grabs Aleena. “Run!” she screams in his ear, and he’s not going to argue. Hand in hand, they run down corridors at random, trusting in Rat’s instincts to find ones that slope down.
After an unknown time, they slow by mutual consensus, catch their breath.
“God’s shit,” says Aleena. “That’s your idea of a fucking short cut? Let’s save time by getting sodomised by magic worms?”
“If you hadn’t lit that lamp …” hisses Rat, but he’s still gasping for air and can’t finish.
“Well, aye.” Aleena says ruefully. “I wasn’t expecting a bloody train station down here, now, was I? When you descend into the bloody bowels of the earth to consort with elder fucking horrors from before the dawn of history, you don’t ask if there’s a convenient transport option, do you?”
Rat shrugs. There are stranger things down here. He warned her of that.
“Ah, fuck.” Aleena holds up the tattered remnants of her backpack. The scroll is gone.
Cari doesn’t do reunions. She doesn’t do returns in general.
It’s equally awkward for Eladora. Cari quickly works out that Ongent hasn’t told her cousin anything about Cari’s life since leaving the house they shared as children, or about her strange condition. Eladora seems to think that the professor took Cari in out of charity, that he’s a soft-hearted old duffer who’s lying to the university to put a roof over Cari’s head. He just plucked Cari out of prison, and dropped her here, in this quiet house of books and closed doors and neatly folded clothes, and then toddled off home up the hill towards the university, leaving her alone with Eladora.
Almost alone—there’s someone else in the house, in an attic room. She can hear footsteps, the creak of movement, but this housemate remains unseen.
Eladora uses politeness like a caulker uses pitch, slathering hot shovelfuls of it over every crack in the conversation. She starts off babbling about mutual relatives, and people they knew in childhood. Cari didn’t care much for any of them at the time, and the intervening years haven’t made her grow any fonder. There’s also the conversational reef of the Thay murders, which Eladora has been trained not to mention and Cari doesn’t want to talk about, so any discussion of family requires careful navigation.
The university starts off as a safer topic. Eladora’s one of Ongent’s students in the department of history. Professor Ongent’s a wonderful teacher. Isn’t it wonderful to be here in the great city of Guerdon, with all its sights and strangeness? Why, it’s even a little bit wild—sometimes, Eladora and her friends go slumming down in Glimmerside.
It becomes clear that they have lived in very different Guerdons. Eladora’s polite smile freezes in place as she listens to Cari casually describe bits of the city she never knew existed. At one point, Cari mentions how the Tallowman stabbed her, and Eladora drops her teacup. It smashes on the floor, though Eladora’s expression doesn’t change in the slightest.
It’s too much fun. Cari starts telling her dear cousin more stories about her travels overseas. Some are true, some aren’t, but Eladora has no way of telling which. Eladora mentions the fighting pits in tones of horror; Cari was once chased by a death worm in the swamps. Eladora has a blue jade bracelet; Cari remembers helping a steal a cargo of blue jade off the coast of Mattaur. There’s a boy in her class that Eladora likes; Cari was a temple dancer in Severast for a while, and so on.
The pièce de résistance is when Eladora asks where Cari was staying in the city before Ongent brought her here, and Cari replies that she was sharing a small flat with a Stone Man. Eladora suddenly remembers something urgent she has to do, and retreats to the bathroom. There’s the sound of frantic scrubbing, and Eladora doesn’t come back for half an hour. (The next morning, when Cari gets up, she discovers that the kitchen has been scrubbed with a chemical cleaner, and the teacups they used have been hurled into the fireplace, crushed and burnt.)
Eladora shows Cari up to her room. First floor, next to Eladora’s. There’s another room on the floor above, up a narrow staircase. There are new locks on the door, but no key. No books on the shelves. Sheets freshly laundered, and another three robes like the ones she’s wearing folded on a chair.
“It’s almost like we were back in mother’s house in Wheldacre,” says Eladora, even though it’s nothing like that. “It’s so good to see you again, Carillon,” even though it clearly isn’t, “but you must be exhausted.”
The last one’s true.
Cari’s bed is larger and softer than any she’s had in years. Her belly’s full for the first time in months. She’s warm and dry and safe, but sleep is still hard to find. She worries about Spar, about Rat. Every time she nearly falls asleep, she hears voices at the edge of her consciousness, whispering to one another, calling out across the rooftops. Sometimes, it’s like they’re right outside her window.
Finally, she gives up. Gathering her blankets, she goes downstairs into the cellar and makes a bed for herself in a dark corner.
Finally, she sleeps, and does not dream.
CHAPTER FIVE
Jere watches the Stone Man sleep. Stone Men have to be restless sleepers, changing position every few minutes to ensure they don’t calcify through stillness. Jere’s known sufferers who employ elaborate solutions—servants who prod them awake every hour, slanted beds they slowly roll down, clocks and time-candles and other aids to wakefulness. Others just train themselves to snatch sleep in brief naps throughout the day, never staying still for more than half an hour at a time.
Most sleep standing up, in case they can’t get up again. Nothing kills a Stone Man quicker than getting stuck lying down.
Trapped on his little island, Spar has nothing to lean against, nothing to wake him up if he sleeps too long—nothing except his own terrors. He jerks awake every few minutes, dragging himself painfully upright to shake out his stony limbs and check to make sure no joints have locked in his slumber.
The boy jerks awake again, and spots Jere sitting offshore in the little rowing boat.
“Breakfast,” shouts Jere, and throws a parcel of food. Spar tries to catch it, but he’s still dull and slow with exhaustion, and he fumbles it. The parcel lands in the water with a splash. It sinks in the shallows at the edge of the island. Jere could paddle around and pull it out, but he has no intention of getting that close to his prisoner. He has too much respect for the Stone Man’s strength.
Anyway, hunger might push the boy into giving up Heinreil.
Spar drags himself over to the water’s edge, fearful of slipping on the slimy rocks and sliding into the depths. He fishes the soaked package out of the water. The wet paper separates under his grasp, and chunks of bread float out across the green sea.
“Feel like talking?” asks Jere.
Spar sits down with his great granite back to the thief-taker and starts to eat what remains of the already paltry meal.
“I’ll be back this evening,” calls Jere, and paddles back to shore. He checks the box of alkahest syringes in his office before leaving. Just one left. He’ll need to find more. Jere prides himself on being able to break the will of the toughest prisoner, but this is Idge’s son. Idge, who defied the city and the watch and took the noose to protect the Brotherhood he founded.
The Thay girl’s file is still on his desk. He picks it up and leafs through it in irritation. A day wasted on a spoiled runaway who doesn’t know the first thing about the Brotherhood. Still, the professor owes him a favour, so it’s not a total loss. He shoves the file into a cubbyhole and takes the ledger of births and deaths from the ruined hall of records with him. He’s not sure what to do with it—officially speaking, he shouldn’t have removed it in the first place, but he’s learned to trust his luck. Finding the relevant records intact, instead of incinerated with all the rest—it has to mean something, even if he can’t discern what that is yet.
Jere’s next appointment is at a coffee house on Venture Square. It’s an upmarket place, so he pulls his good coat on over his leathers. He leaves the hook staff hanging on the coat stand, and instead takes a sturdy walking cane with a hidden blade. The coat has nice big pockets, big enough to hide a small gun, big enough to hide Jere’s own hands, with all their scars and calloused knuckles. He shaved this morning, another concession to the quality. It pays to look respectable when mixing with members of parliament.
He sticks his head into Bolind’s room. The big man is slumped on the cot-bed like a beached whale, reading a newspaper.
“I’m off. Keep an eye on Idgeson in there.”
“Right you are, boss. Bring me back one of them little sweet rolls, would you?”
“Do I look like a waiter?”
The newspaper twitches aside as Bolind appraises him. “Naw, more like an ape dressed up as a man-whore.”
The coffee shop has been Effro Kelkin’s de facto office for more than forty years. Every morning, the old man still stomps through the market, glad-handing his supporters and glowering at rivals, checking prices and the cargo listings of ships the same way a beggar counts the coins in his bowl. Then, he goes to his table in the back room of the Vulcan, where, the legend insists, he’s still nursing the same cup of coffee, endlessly refilled.
Jere knows more about Kelkin from Professor Ongent’s habit of spouting lectures on political history than he does from the man himself. Kelkin can be famously charming when he wants to be, but Jere is an employee, not a potential supporter, so he gets the other side of the man, sour as bad vinegar.
A generation ago, Kelkin was the most powerful politician in the city. He was the architect of the industrial-liberal coalition that broke the theocratic hold on parliament, the champion of the merchants and investors whose fortunes ebbed and flowed through Guerdon’s docks. Once in power, he led a crusade against “crime, corruption and dissent.” As Ongent put it, instead of trying to heal the wounds of the Strife, he cauterised them with fire. The Keepers still hate him for that, and there are always rumours that Kelkin’s secretly a member of some underground sect or cult. After observing his employer of nearly four years, Jere the Thief-taker suspects that Kelkin’s only gods are Money, mated to the holy bride Trade, and their twin sons Order and Power.
This is the city you made, thinks Jere, a city that overtook you. These days, Kelkin’s old industrial-liberal faction is a neglected minority in parliament—the power’s in the hands of the guildmasters, especially the alchemists, and Kelkin’s feud with Guildmistress Rosha is famously bitter. A few years ago, Kelkin tried to outflank the alchemists on law and order, and in response they brought the Tallowmen out onto the streets, leaving Kelkin struggling to catch up.
Still, it puts Kelkin’s money in Jere’s pocket, as the old politician tries to make any impact he can on the city’s organised crime. Already, there are calls for the Tallowmen to be taken off the leash, to give the waxy horrors more authority to hunt down criminals.
Jere steps into the welcome warmth of the coffee shop, shoulders his way through the press of customers up to Kelkin’s table. Normally, he has to wait in line for an audience, but not today.
“I should have you strung up by your thumbs,” hisses Kelkin. “That was a debacle.”
“I haven’t had breakfast yet, boss,” objects Jere, “so give me a moment before you have your tantrum.”
“I’ll feed you your own fucking entrails. You think it’s funny that the House of Law is still burning?”
“Of course not. Of course that’s a disaster—but it’s on the alchemists more than you. They had candles burning all over the place last night, and they still didn’t stop the attack. If they can’t protect the highest court, then they can hardly argue that the security of the whole city be put in their hands, can they?”
“I’m not paying you for policy advice,” snaps Kelkin. “What about Heinreil?”
Jere catches a waitress’s eye, mouths an order. She nods. Kelkin raps Jere across the knuckles with a spoon. Inwardly, Jere laughs—he appreciates the old man’s insolence. Kelkin has to know that Jere could break his old neck in an instant with his bare hands, not to mention the dozen or so weapons the thief-taker keeps concealed under his greatcoat.
“There were two gangs of Heinreil’s thieves in the House last night. One group, I guess, were trying to break into the treasure vault under the tower. They’re the ones who set the bomb, and it looks like they underestimated how big a blast they made. I haven’t got an alchemist’s report yet—I will—but I’m guessing that first group died in the blast.
“The second lot were supposed to be a distraction, to pull the guards away from the vault. A Stone Man, a sneak-thief and a ghoul. The Tallowmen got the ghoul, but I caught the other two.”
“Who was the thief?” asks Kelkin.
Jere considers his answer carefully. The Thays were part of Kelkin’s coalition at one point, weren’t they, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t his bitter enemies, too, and Kelkin keeps meticulous track of debts and favours and punishment owed. If he mentions the girl’s true identity, it could cause further problems. Anyway, Kelkin is paying him to track down Heinreil, not Carillon Thay. She’s Ongent’s bounty. The champion of free trade can hardly blame Jere for having multiple clients.
“Just some human girl, fresh off the boat from Severast. Not even a Brotherhood initiate. Disposable.”
Kelkin grunts in irritation. “So you have nothing.”
“I have the Stone Man, locked up in the old lithosarium down by the Wash. He was the leader of their group, and he knows Heinreil.”
“Directly, or through an intermediary?”
“Directly, I think. I haven’t cracked him yet, but—”
“But he’ll need alkahest, yes. You know the Keepers are giving it even to criminals in prison now? Charitable dolts. Pennies in the collection plate for the poor going right into Rosha’s pocket, and for what? Another few miserable days of life for the walking dead?” Kelkin snaps his fingers. “I’ll make arrangements with Vang or one of the other magistrates, get a writ so you can keep the Stone Man in custody for another month. If you haven’t broken him by then, he’ll have to go to the regular courts … or are you thinking he won’t testify against Heinreil ever?”
Heinreil isn’t the only person who considers Spar disposable.
“I think I can get to him. He’s stubborn, and loyal to the Broth—the thieves’ guild, but I can work on him, convince him that Heinreil sold him out to distract the guards, that it’s not like the old days.”
