The Gutter Prayer

CHAPTER ONE

Carillon crouches in the shadow, eyes fixed on the door. Her knife is in her hand, a gesture of bravado to herself more than a deadly weapon. She’s fought before, cut people with it, but never killed with it. Cut and run, that’s her way.

In this crowded city, that’s not necessarily an option.

If one guard comes through the door, she’ll wait until he goes past her hiding place, then creep after him and cut his throat. She tries to envisage herself doing it, but can’t manage it. Maybe she can get away with just scaring him, or shanking him in the leg so he can’t chase them.

If it’s two, then she’ll wait until they’re about to find the others, hiss a warning and leap on one of them. Surely, between herself, Spar and Rat, they’ll be able to take out two guards without giving themselves away.

Surely.

If it’s three, same plan, only riskier.

She doesn’t let her mind dwell on the other possibility—that it won’t be humans like her who can be cut with her little knife, but something worse like the Tallowmen or Gullheads. The city has bred horrors all its own.

Every instinct in her tells her to run, to flee with her friends, to risk Heinreil’s wrath for returning empty-handed. Better yet, to not return at all, but take the Dowager Gate or the River Gate out of the city tonight, be a dozen miles away before dawn.

Six. The door opens and it’s six guards, all human, one two three big men, in padded leathers, maces in hand, and three more with pistols. She freezes for an instant in terror, unable to act, unable to run, caught against the cold stone of the old walls.

And then—she feels the shock through the wall before she hears the roar, the crash. She feels the whole House of Law shatter. She was in Severast when there was an earth tremor once, but it’s not like that—it’s more like a lightning strike and thunderclap right on top of her. She springs forward without thinking, as if the explosion had physically struck her, too, jumping through the scattered confusion of the guards.

One of them fires his pistol, point blank, so close she feels the sparks, the rush of air past her head, hot splinters of metal or stone showering down across her back, but the pain doesn’t blossom and she knows she’s not hit even as she runs.

Follow me, she prays as she runs blindly down the passageway, ducking into one random room and another, bouncing off locked doors. From the shouts behind her, she knows that some of them are after her. It’s like stealing fruit in the market—one of you makes a big show of running, distracts the fruitseller, and the others grab an apple each and one more for the runner. Only, if she gets caught, she won’t be let off with a thrashing. Still, she’s got a better chance of escaping than Spar has.

She runs up a short stairway and sees an orange glow beneath the door. Tallowmen, she thinks, imagining their blazing wicks on the far side, before she realises that the whole north wing of the square House is ablaze. The guards are close behind her, so she opens the door anyway, ducking low to avoid the thick black smoke that pours through.

She skirts along the edge of the burning room. It is a library, with long rows of shelves packed with rows of cloth-bound books, journals of civic institutions, proceedings of parliament. At least, half of it is a library; the other half was a library. Old books burn quickly. She clings to the wall, finding her way through the smoke by touch, trailing her right hand along the stone blocks while groping ahead with her left.

One of the guards has the courage to follow her in, but, from the sound of his shouts, she guesses he went straight forward, thinking she’d run towards the fires. There’s a creak, and a crash, and a shower of sparks as one of the burning bookcases topples. The guard’s shouts to his fellows become a scream of pain, but she can do nothing for him. She can’t see, can scarcely breathe. She fights down panic and keeps going until she comes to the side wall.

The House of Law is a quadrangle of buildings around a central green. They hang thieves there, and hanging seems like a better fate than burning right now. But there was a row of windows, wasn’t there? On the inside face of the building, looking out onto that green. She’s sure there is, there must be, because the fires have closed in behind her and there’s no turning back.

The outstretched fingers of her left hand touch warm stone. The side wall. She scrabbles and sweeps her fingers over it, looking for the windows. They’re higher than she remembers, and she can barely reach the sill even when stretching, standing on tiptoes. The windows are thick, leaded glass, and, while the fires have blown some of them out, this one is intact. She grabs a book off a shelf and flings it at the glass, to no avail. It bounces back. There’s nothing she can do to break the glass from down here.

On this side, the sill’s less than an inch wide, but if she can get up there, maybe she can lever one of the panes out, make an opening. She takes a step back to make a running jump up, and a hand closes around her ankle.

“Help me!”

It’s the guard who followed her in. The burning bookcase must have fallen on him. He’s crawling, dragging a limp and twisted leg, and he’s horribly burnt down his left side. Weeping white-red blisters and blackened flesh on his face.

“I can’t.”

He’s still clutching his pistol, and he tries to aim it at her while still grabbing her ankle, but she’s faster. She grabs his arm and lifts it, pulls the trigger for him. The report, that close to her ear, is deafening, but the shot smashes part of the window behind her. More panes and panels fall, leaving a gap in the stained glass large enough to crawl through if she can climb up to it.

A face appears in the gap. Yellow eyes, brown teeth, pitted flesh—a grin of wickedly sharp teeth. Rat extends his rag-wrapped hand through the window. Cari’s heart leaps. She’s going to live. In that moment, her friend’s monstrous, misshapen face seems as beautiful as the flawless features of a saint she once knew. She runs towards Rat—and stops.

Burning’s a terrible way to die. She’s never thought so before, but now that it’s a distinct possibility it seems worse than anything. Her head feels weird, and she knows she’s not thinking straight, but between the smoke and the heat and terror, weird seems wholly reasonable. She kneels down, slips an arm beneath the guard’s shoulders, helps him stand on his good leg, to limp towards Rat.

“What are you doing?” hisses the ghoul, but he doesn’t hesitate either. He grabs the guard by the shoulders when the wounded man is within reach of the window, and pulls him through the gap. Then he comes back for her, pulling her up, too. Rat’s sinewy limbs aren’t as tough or as strong as Spar’s stone-cursed muscles, but he’s more than strong enough to lift Carillon out of the burning building with one hand and pull her through into the blessed coolness of the open courtyard.

The guard moans and crawls away across the grass. They’ve done enough for him, Carillon decides; a half-act of mercy is all they can afford.

“Did you do this?” Rat asks in horror and wonder, flinching as part of the burning buildings collapses in on itself. The flames twine around the base of the huge bell tower that looms over the north side of the quadrangle.

Carillon shakes her head. “No, there was some sort of … boom. Where’s Spar?”

“This way.” Rat scurries off, and she runs after him. South, along the edge of the garden, past the empty old gibbets, away from the fire, towards the courts. There’s no way now to get what they came for, even if the documents that Heinreil wants still exist and aren’t falling around her as a blizzard of white ash, but maybe they can get away if they can get out onto the streets again. They just need to find Spar, find that big slow limping lump of rock, and get out.

She could leave him behind, just like Rat could abandon her. The ghoul could make it over the wall in a flash; ghouls are prodigous climbers. But they’re friends—the first true friends she’s had in a long time. Rat found her on the streets after she was stranded in this city, and he introduced her to Spar, who gave her a place to sleep safely.

The two also introduced her to Heinreil, but that wasn’t their fault—Guerdon’s underworld is dominated by the thieves’ brotherhood, just like its trade and industry is run by the guild cartels. If they’re caught, it’s Heinreil’s fault. Another reason to hate him.

There’s a side door ahead, and if she hasn’t been turned around it’ll open up near where they came in, and that’s where they’ll find Spar.

Before they can get to it, the door opens and out comes a Tallowman.

Blazing eyes in a pale, waxy face. He’s an old one, worn so thin he’s translucent in places, and the fire inside him shines through holes in his chest. He’s got a huge axe, bigger than Cari could lift, but he swings it easily with one hand. He laughs when he sees her and Rat outlined against the fire.

They turn and run, splitting up. Rat breaks left, scaling the wall of the burning library. She turns right, hoping to vanish into the darkness of the garden. Maybe she can hide behind a gibbet or some monument, she thinks, but the Tallowman’s faster than she can imagine. He flickers forward, a blur of motion, and he’s right in front of her. The axe swings, she throws herself down and to the side and it whistles right past her.

Again the laugh. He’s toying with her.

She finds her courage. Finds she hasn’t dropped her knife. She drives it right into the Tallowman’s soft waxy chest. His clothes and his flesh are the same substance, yielding and mushy as warm candle wax, and the blade goes in easily. He just laughs again, the wound closing almost as fast as it opened, and now her knife’s in his other hand. He reverses it, stabs it down, and her right shoulder’s suddenly black and slick with blood.

She doesn’t feel the pain yet, but she knows its coming.

She runs again, half stumbling towards the flames. The Tallowman hesitates, unwilling to follow, but it stalks her, herding her, cackling as it goes. It offers her a choice of deaths—run headlong into the fire and burn to death, bleed out here on the grass where so many other thieves met their fates, or turn back and let it dismember her with her own knife.

She wishes she had never come back to this city.

The heat from the blaze ahead of her scorches her face. The air’s so hot it hurts to breathe, and she knows the smell of soot and burning paper will never, ever leave her. The Tallowman keeps pace with her, flickering back and forth, always blocking her from making a break.

She runs towards the north-east corner. That part of the House of Law is on fire, too, but the flames seem less intense there. Maybe she can make it there without the Tallowman following her. Maybe she can even make it before it takes her head off with its axe. She runs, cradling her bleeding arm, bracing herself all the while for the axe to come chopping through her back.

The Tallowman laughs and comes up behind her.

And then there’s a clang, the ringing of a tremendous bell, and the sound lifts Carillon up, up out of herself, up out of the courtyard and the burning building. She flies high over the city, rising like a phoenix out of the wreckage. Behind her, below her, the bell tower topples down, and the Tallowman shrieks as burning rubble crushes it.

She sees Rat scrambling over rooftops, vanishing into the shadows across Mercy Street.

She sees Spar lumbering across the burning grass, towards the blazing rubble. She sees her own body, lying there amid the wreckage, pelted with burning debris, eyes wide but unseeing. She sees—

Stillness is death to a Stone Man. You have to keep moving, keep the blood flowing, the muscles moving. If you don’t, those veins and arteries will become carved channels through hard stone, the muscles will turn to useless inert rocks. Spar is never motionless, even when he’s standing still. He flexes, twitches, rocks—yes, rocks, very funny—from foot to foot. Works his jaw, his tongue, flicks his eyes back and forth. He has a special fear of his lips and tongue calcifying. Other Stone Men have their own secret language of taps and cracks, a code that works even when their mouths are forever frozen in place, but few people in the city speak it.

So when they hear the thunderclap or whatever-it-was, Spar’s already moving. Rat’s faster than he is, so Spar follows as best he can. His right leg drags behind him. His knee is numb and stiff behind its stony shell. Alkahest might cure it, if he gets some in time. The drug’s expensive, but it slows the progress of the disease, keeps flesh from turning to stone. It has to be injected subcutaneously, though, and more and more he’s finding it hard to drill through his own hide and hit living flesh.

He barely feels the heat from the blazing courtyard, although he guesses that if he had more skin on his face it’d be burnt by contact with the air. He scans the scene, trying to make sense of the dance of the flames and the fast-moving silhouettes. Rat vanishes across a rooftop, pursued by a Tallowman. Cari … Cari’s there, down in the wreckage of the tower. He stumbles across the yard, praying to the Keepers that she’s still alive, expecting to find her beheaded by a Tallowman’s axe.

She’s alive. Stunned. Eyes wide but unseeing, muttering to herself. Nearby, a pool of liquid and a burning wick, twisting like an angry cobra. Spar stamps down on the wick, killing it, then scoops Cari up, careful not to touch her skin. She weighs next to nothing, so he can easily carry her over one shoulder. He turns and runs back the way he came.

Lumbering down the corridor, not caring about the noise now. Maybe they’ve got lucky; maybe the fire drove the Tallowmen away. Few dare face a Stone Man in a fight, and Spar knows how to use his strength and size to best advantage. Still, he doesn’t want to try his luck against Tallowmen. Luck is what it would be—one hit from his stone fists might splatter the waxy creations of the alchemists’ guild, but they’re so fast he’d be lucky to land that one hit.

He marches past the first door out onto the street. Too obvious.

He stumbles to a huge pair of ornate internal doors and smashes them to flinders. Beyond is a courtroom. He’s been here before, he realises, long ago. He was up there in the viewer’s gallery when they sentenced his father to hang. Vague memories of being dragged down a passageway by his mother, him hanging off her arm like a dead weight, desperate to stay behind but unable to name his fear. Heinreil and the others, clustering around his mother as an invisible honour guard, keeping the press of the crowd away from them. Old men who smelled of drink and dust despite their rich clothes, whispering that his father had paid his dues, that the Brotherhood would take care of them, no matter what.

These days, that means alkahest. Spar’s leg starts to hurt as he drags it across the court. Never a good sign—means it’s starting to calcify.

“Hold it there.”

A man steps into view, blocking the far exit. He’s dressed in leathers and a grubby green half-cloak. Sword and pistol at his belt, and he’s holding a big iron-shod staff with a sharp hook at one end. The broken nose of a boxer. His hair seems to be migrating south, fleeing his balding pate to colonise the rich forest of his thick black beard. He’s a big man, but he’s only flesh and bone.

Spar charges, breaking into a Stone Man’s approximation of a sprint. It’s more like an avalanche, but the man jumps aside and the iron-shod staff comes down hard, right on the back of Spar’s right knee. Spar stumbles, crashes into the doorframe, smashing it beneath his weight. He avoids falling only by digging his hand into the wall, crumbling the plaster like dry leaves. He lets Cari tumble to the ground.

The man shrugs his half-cloak back, and there’s a silver badge pinned to his breast. He’s a licensed thief-taker, a bounty hunter. Recovers lost property, takes sanctioned revenge for the rich. Not regular city watch, more of a bonded freelancer.

“I said, hold it there,” says the thief-taker. The fire’s getting closer—already, the upper gallery’s burning—but there isn’t a trace of concern in the man’s deep voice. “Spar, isn’t it? Idge’s boy? Who’s the girl?”

Spar responds by wrenching the door off its hinges and flinging it, eight feet of heavy oak, right at the man. The man ducks under it, steps forward and drives his staff like a spear into Spar’s leg again. This time, something cracks.

“Who sent you here, boy? Tell me, and maybe I let her live. Maybe even let you keep that leg.”

“Go to the grave.”

“You first, boy.” The thief-taker moves, almost as fast as a Tallowman, and smashes the staff into Spar’s leg for the third time. Pain runs up it like an earthquake, and Spar topples. Before he can try to heave himself back up again, the thief-taker’s on his back, and the stave comes down for a fourth blow, right on Spar’s spine, and his whole body goes numb.

He can’t move. He’s all stone. All stone. A living tomb.

He screams, because his mouth still works, shouts and begs and pleads and cries for them to save him or kill him or do anything but leave him here, locked inside the ruin of his own body. The thief-taker vanishes, and the flames get closer and—he assumes—hotter, but he can’t feel their heat. After a while, more guards arrive. They stick a rag in his mouth, carry him outside, and eight of them heave him into the back of a cart.

He lies there, breathing in the smell of ash and the stench of the slime the alchemists use to fight the fires.

All he can see is the floor of the cart, strewn with dirty straw, but he can still hear voices. Guards running to and fro, crowds jeering and hooting as the High Court of Guerdon burns. Others shouting make way, make way.

Spar finds himself drifting away into darkness.

The thief-taker’s voice again. “One got away over the rooftops. Your candles can have him.”

“The south wing’s lost. All we can do is save the east.”

“Six dead. And a Tallowman. Caught in the fires.”

Other voices, nearby. A woman, coldly furious. An older man.

“This is a blow against order. A declaration of anarchy. Of war.”

“The ruins are still too hot. We won’t know what’s been taken until—”

“A Stone Man, then.”

“What matters is what we do next, not what we can salvage.”

The cart rocks back and forth, and they lie another body down next to Spar. He can’t see her, but he hears Cari’s voice. She’s still mumbling to herself, a constant stream of words. He tries to grunt, to signal to her that she’s not alone, or that he’s still in here in this stone shell, but his jaw has locked around the gag and he can’t make a sound.

“What have we here,” says another voice. He feels pressure on his back—very, very faintly, very far away, like the pressure a mountain must feel when a sparrow alights on it—and then a pinprick of pain, right where the thief-taker struck him. Feeling blazes through nerves once more, and he welcomes the agony of his shoulders unfreezing. Alkahest, a strong dose of blessed, life-giving, stone-denying alkahest.

He will move again. He’s not all stone yet. He’s not all gone.

Spar weeps with gratitude, but he’s too tired to speak or to move. He can feel the alkahest seeping through his veins, pushing back the paralysis. For once, the Stone Man can rest and be still. Easiest, now, is to close eyes that are no longer frozen open, and be lulled into sleep by his friend’s soft babbling …

Before the city was the sea, and in the sea was He Who Begets. And the people of the plains came to the sea, and the first speakers heard the voice of He Who Begets, and told the people of the plains of His glory and taught them to worship Him. They camped by the shore, and built the first temple amid the ruins. And He Who Begets sent His sacred beasts up out of the sea to consume the dead of the plains, so that their souls might be brought down to Him and live with Him in glory below forever. The people of the plains were glad, and gave of their dead to the beasts, and the beasts swam down to Him.

The camp became a village in the ruins, and the village became the city anew, and the people of the plains became the people of the city, and their numbers increased until they could not be counted. The sacred beasts, too, grew fat, for all those who died in the city were given unto them.

Then famine came to the city, and ice choked the bay, and the harvest in the lands around wilted and turned to dust.

The people were hungry, and ate the animals in the fields.

Then they ate the animals in the streets.

Then they sinned against He Who Begets, and broke into the temple precincts, and killed the sacred beasts, and ate of their holy flesh.

The priests said to the people, how now will the souls of the dead be carried to the god in the waters, but the people replied, what are the dead to us? Unless we eat, we will be dead, too.

And they killed the priests, and ate them, too.

Still the people starved, and many of them died. The dead thronged the streets, for there were no more sacred beasts to carry them away into the deep waters of God.

The dead thronged the streets, but they were houseless and bodiless, for their remains were eaten by the few people who were left.

And the people of the city dwindled, and became the people of the tombs, and they were few in number.

Over the frozen sea came a new people, the people of the ice, and they came upon the city and said: lo, here is a great city, but it is empty. Even its temples are abandoned. We shall dwell here, and shelter from the cold, and raise up shrines to our own gods there.

The people of the ice endured where the people of the city had not, and survived the cold. Many of them died, too, and their bodies were interred in tombs, in accordance with their customs. And the people of the tombs stole those bodies, and ate of them.

And in this way, the people of the ice and the people of the tombs survived the winter.

When the ice melted, the people of the ice became the people of the city, and the people of the tombs became the ghouls. For they were also, in their new way, people of the city.

And that is how the ghouls came to Guerdon.

CHAPTER TWO

Wake up.”

Stone fingers prod her into wakefulness. Cari opens her eyes, looks up at blue sky. The sound of water lapping. She sits up, wincing as her shoulder complains. Someone has dressed and bound the knife wound the Tallowman had given her. Too neat for Spar’s work.

“I got bored waiting for you to wake,” says Spar, and shrugs. He starts to walk in a circle around their little island.

An artificial island, a pillar of stone in the middle of a water tank or cistern; an artificial lake, surrounded by high walls. Open to the sky. The water is stagnant and brown where it isn’t iridescent with alchemical run-off. Green slime stains the rocks. Looking around, she spots a small iron gate in the wall.

“Where are we?”

“No idea. A prison for Stone Men, I guess.”

That makes sense. Spar could break that gate down, but to get to it he’d have to cross the water, and he’s too heavy to swim, and there’s no telling how deep it is. And Stone Men still have to breathe.

“Is this the Isle of Statues?” She’s heard of the island of Stone Men out in the bay, a colony established when the plague first appeared in Guerdon, where sufferers were exiled and left to petrify. She runs her hands over her own body and face, fearing that she too might be infected with the curse. She can’t find any stony growths, but there are dozens of small painful burn marks across her face and hands, like she’s been stung by fiery wasps.

Spar considers the question. “No. I heard the bells of Holy Beggar a few minutes ago, so I guess we’re somewhere in the upper Wash.”

Cari extends her hand. “Help me up?”

Spar doesn’t move, just clucks his tongue disapprovingly.

“Right, right.” Don’t touch a Stone Man. Every city she’s visited had its own customs and rules and taboos, and the faster you internalised them, the better. Though Carillon was born in Guerdon, she grew up in the countryside, far from the plague. She stands up gingerly, careful not to put weight on her injured arm. “How did we get here?”

“Some thief-taker caught me. They threw me on a cart and drugged me.” He stretches, stone scales scraping off each other. “They caught you, too. I don’t know about Rat.”

“Did you tell them we didn’t burn down the hall?”

“Tell who?” asks Spar. “I haven’t seen anyone since I woke up.”

Cari cups her hands over her mouth, and shouts. “Hey! Turnkey! We’re awake and need breakfast!”

Spar considers the position of the sun in the sky. “Bit late for that.”

“And lunch!” shouts Cari. It’s been a long time since she had three square meals a day, or even one, but it’s worth a try.

Over the wall, someone laughs, but there’s no other answer. Cari sinks back onto the least uncomfortable rock.

“Let’s get our story straight,” she suggests. “We tell them we didn’t burn that place down. Hells, Rat and I rescued one of the guards from the fire.”

“Some of them died, though.”

“That wasn’t our fault! You didn’t hurt anyone, did you?”

“I tried to hit the thief-taker.”

“You were running for your life from a burning building,” says Cari. “And will you stop walking in circles?”

“No,” says Spar.

“The point is, we didn’t burn the place down. There was some sort of explosion, maybe an alchemical bomb.” She’s seen the weapons of war that the alchemists can make in other places—fires that never stop burning, animals warped into huge monsters, knife-smoke, ice contagions. Alchemical weapons are Guerdon’s biggest export.

“We were robbing it, though.” Spar shrugs. “No sense denying that.”

“They’ll hang me for that,” says Cari. “I don’t know what they do to Stone Men.”

They can’t hang Spar—his neck is armoured in stone—but doing nothing would be punishment enough. Deny him alkahest for long enough and he’ll petrify, and that’ll be worse than hanging. Dying of thirst, locked in the stone shell of his own living tomb. It’s all ahead of him.

“Let me do the talking,” he tells her. “You just stay quiet. The Brotherhood will get us out of this.”

“I don’t owe Heinreil my neck.”

“It won’t come to that. You have to trust him. Trust us.” Us