The City's son

CHAPTER 37

Moonlight bleached the statues where they stood amongst the gravestones. The deep shadows made the stone figures look tired. A sound carried on the breeze: slow regular breathing, the odd snore. Slumped inside their punishment skins, the Pavement Priests slept.

It was very early in the morning. They’d worked all of the preceding night.

The sound of stone wings had filled the cemetery, and one after another they’d looked up. Ezekiel delivered the first body in silence: a boy, swaddled in the statue of a Victorian scientist. He’d dropped the boy at Petris’ feet as if it was nothing at all. Petris nodded as he accepted the burden. He gazed at the clawmarks in Ezekiel’s stone armour with a kind of jealousy.

Is that all I am now? he wondered. An undertaker? Is this how quickly the sword passes to another fist?

After that first body (Lasulo, Petris thought, careful to recall his name) others came. Their surviving battle-mates brought them, balanced stiffly on shoulders or pulled through the dew-wet grass on makeshift sleds. The priests of the graveyard moved to help. Nobody spoke. Brother faced brother; hard-eyed husbands salved their wives’ battle wounds in silence. The last words they’d exchanged had been ugly ones, words like slave and whore and heretic, but this wasn’t the time to rehash those arguments, not with dead to count and bury.

No one had to speak. Everyone knew what needed to be done.

They grunted and muttered curses as they lifted the dead onto the empty pedestals. They mixed mortar and melted bronze according to each of the fallen’s materials and poured it around their feet to set them in place. A few paused to gape at the sheer number of the entombed. It was the largest mass funeral in decades.

And then, at four o’clock, the hour of stone, the true witching hour, the Pavement Priests began to sing. Petris led, and every other brother and sister joined in, even Ezekiel, wheeling overhead at a disdainful distance.

The hymn of the Pavement Priests rang out across London, as pure as bell chimes and as deep as a midwinter night, carrying over the growl of London engines, and everyone who heard it stopped and listened. Without knowing it, the people on the streets observed a moment’s silence for the fallen.

The words of the song were simple enough: Under the skin gifted by the quarry and washed away by the rain, a fragment of the human remains. The song was a prayer that those fragments become whole again, that the most human of virtues be restored to their fallen siblings, the virtue that allowed them to die. They prayed that their statues would cease to be punishment skins and become simple graves.

The prayer’s target, of course, was Mater Viae herself. Only she could consider her debt paid and buy the priests’ deaths back from the oil-soaked traders she’d sold them to.

The irony of praying to a Goddess they’d rejected even as they stood in the ruins of her temple almost made Petris smile. But this was a funeral, and she was the only Goddess they had. Who else could they pray to? As Johnny Naphtha had once lisped in that stupid way of his, Weddingss and funeralss force the faithlesss to fake it.

The song finished and Petris ended the ceremony with a scattering of brickdust at the feet of the dead. The soldiers took their scars back into the night. Ezekiel beat his way laboriously north. They had wounded to care for, and a war with Reach to gloriously lose.

But the majority remained. Like Petris, they’d turned their backs on the Goddess who’d enslaved them. As he turned and walked away from the tombs, Petris hoped that none of them felt as much a coward as he did. Most of them had only managed a few steps before collapsing into an exhausted slumber inside their armour, but Petris couldn’t sleep. He was kept awake by a pain in his chest, a sharp longing to be with the army, to fight, to feel the pores in his stone soak up blood. It was what he had been re born for, to be a soldier. It was so long since there had been a war to fight.

But to fight would be to fight for her, and the men and women he spoke for were too angry to accept that. He scratched at his thumbs, flaking away stone: a casual rebellion.

The Carven Doctrines taught that there was no pain in a death in Mater Viae’s service: such a death paid their debt and bought release. Petris grieved not for the dead but for himself, though he’d never in a thousand years admit it. The deaths of his flock only made his own imprisonment lonelier.

So he did what all religious men do when they’re lonely. Quietly, so as not to disturb the others, he began to pray.