Our Lady of the Streets (The Skyscraper Throne) (3 page)

In a paradox of topography, the city’s contractions made it feel bigger. The roads and rails were broken, the pavements fractured. There were no longer direct ways to navigate the metropolis. The Railwraith could only manage short jumps between the stretches of track that sustained it, the
Bahngeist
equivalent, Pen supposed, of holding your breath under water.

Beth sat slumped against the train’s dashboard with her legs crossed and her spear across her lap. Pen would have thought she was asleep if not for the green glow from her eyes that lit up the front of her hoodie.

What
’
s wrong?

For the hundredth time she
almost
asked it aloud. She could feel the question pressing urgently against the inside of her. Didn’t she deserve to know?

Let her rest
, she told herself, swallowing her indignation.
Whatever she owes you, you owe her that
.

They plunged into a tunnel and the light disappeared. The ghost train rocked under them in the darkness.

It was mid-afternoon by the time they reached Bond Street station, but the roof of slate-grey clouds over the city made it feel later. Rain speckled Pen’s face as she emerged from the tube station. Drops hissed into vapour on the surface of Oxford Circus, six hundred yards away. The Fever Streets had advanced again in the night.

Pen inhaled deeply. The rain smelled of limestone and for a moment she was back on the rooftops of London-Under-Glass, dodging chunks of brick and tile and concrete as they fell from the clouds.

At least the weather here
’
s still safe
, she thought,
even if nothing else is
.

*

Metal rang off metal behind her as Beth climbed the stationary escalators, swinging her spear jauntily, like a dandy’s walking cane – but that didn’t hide the way she leaned on it every time it hit the floor. Pen offered her an arm, but Beth put on a baffled smile and waved her away.

They crossed the empty expanse of Oxford Street. A statue stood on the steps in front of Selfridges, watching them. Pen didn’t recognise the Pavement Priest, but Beth obviously did. She stiffened, and the city-voice that emerged from her body sounded shocked. ‘
Timon?
’

The air blurred and then the statue was standing on the pavement in front of them. Deep gouges had been dug into the stone of his torso, and Pen thought she could make out fingerprints in the bases of them. Whoever this Timon was, he’d been in a fight. His face had been chipped so badly Pen
couldn’t read an expression, but his body language was pleading. Inked on his right shoulder, faded but still visible, were four wolf-heads.

‘Lady B,’ Timon said. He sounded desperately relieved. Through the crack in the statue’s limestone mouth, Pen glimpsed his flesh lips moving.

‘
When did you get here?
’ Beth asked. She clapped him on the shoulder. ‘
Were you at Abney Park when Mater Viae hit it? Where
’
s Al?
’

Timon’s voice cracked as he answered, ‘Al didn’t make it. He got reborn.’

‘
Oh, Thames. Timon
—’ Beth sounded stricken. ‘
I
’
m sorry
.’

‘I don’t know where he is,’ Timon went on. ‘Been trying to look for him, but the city’s ripped up into so many bad zones and I can’t travel without tangling with
Her
Masonry Men. I can’t – Lady B, I can’t stop thinking about him as a little reborn baby, all alone out there, sealed up inside a statue, without no one to look out for him.’

The eyeholes in Timon’s stone mask were tiny pinpricks, but Pen didn’t have to be able to see his eyes to sense the hope as he looked at Beth.

‘I came to you ’cause I wanted to ask something,’ he said quietly. ‘Lady B, I don’t know how many more times he can do this. You hear about fellas going crazy from the rebirthing, from the dark and the claustrophobia. I came because I wanted to beg, Lady B,
please
: give him his mortality back. Let him die for real – let him rest. He’s earned it.’

Beth’s face set. The light from her gaze refracted through
the rain to speckle his face. ‘
Timon
—’ She kept her lips pressed tightly together, and when she spoke, her voice was the whisper of tyres on a wet street. ‘
Timon, I
’
m so, so sorry, but I can
’
t. I
’
m not Her, you understand? I know I look like Her, but I
’
m not. The goddess who took his death – your death and all your brothers
’
deaths – away from you
, She
is dead herself. She killed herself with the poison She brewed up from your mortality. She used up all your deaths
.’

Beth spoke gently, but even so, Pen could sense Timon’s frail flesh body shrinking inside the statue with every word.

‘
If I could give you what you
’
re asking for, you know I would. If I had it, it
’
d be yours, like it should be. But I don
’
t
.’

The silence that followed was all but unbearable, so Pen broke it. ‘Timon, right?’ she said, putting a hand on his carved sleeve. ‘Good meeting you. Petris and Ezekiel are inside. What do you say we talk to them, get a search party organised? I’m sure we can find your friend.’

Timon hesitated, considering this, and then nodded, the stone of his neck grinding loudly against itself. Pen gestured for him to follow her inside, but he said, ‘If it’s all right, Lady Khan, I’ll stay out here and smoke for a bit. Can I find you later?’

His hand blurred to his mouth and suddenly there was a lit roll-up jammed between his stone lips. The tip flared as he drew on it.

Lady Khan
. Pen stiffened slightly. ‘Call me Pen,’ she said.

She ushered Beth towards the doors, and this time Beth
did lean on her. As they went inside Pen looked over her shoulder. Smoke streamed slowly out between Timon’s lips. He was breathing deeply, gathering himself to step back onto the long, exhausting path of searching and hoping. As she watched, he turned his hand over and stared at the inside of his right wrist. The stone had flaked away, and on the pallid skin underneath it was a tattoo of a tower-block crown.

*

Funny
, Pen thought to herself as she surveyed the lower lobby,
when I was a kid I would have killed to live in Selfridges
.

The concession stands thronged with figures, glass, stone and flesh. Shouts echoed off the art deco rafters, threats and bids and promises and insults. Lampfolk argued in flash-bulb semaphores, their voices glimmering from the wires in their glass throats and throwing stark shadows on the walls. The display cases once stocked with expensive perfumes and skin-creams and make-up now were loaded up with wires and batteries and chocolate, carrots and cabbages, old family keepsakes, tins of soup and cans of Coke. In the middle, in the densest part of the crowd, two old men were ladling stew from a massive aluminium saucepan balanced on top of four camping stoves. Men and women jostled and elbowed each other as they waited their turn in what was more a small linear scrum than a queue.

Affrit Candleman stood at one stall, his glass skin shabby with soot. The old Blankleit was haranguing a passing
Pavement Priest with hand gestures and semaphores as he pointed to a plastic bag of light bulbs by his foot, but the statue didn’t turn around; he wasn’t interested in Candleman’s particular brand of bespoke nostalgia. Right now, no one needed reminding how good the good times had been.

Selfridges’ ground floor was now part market, part soup kitchen and all chaos. Beth pulled her hood up carefully and, with Pen still supporting her, they entered the ruckus.

It had made sense, when the symptoms first struck the city, for those families displaced from their homes to come here. The fevers hadn’t touched this place, and there was food and shelter – and even an improbably well-stocked wine cellar for the large numbers of men and women who’d felt the apocalypse would be more appealing if they were blind drunk. As stocks dwindled they’d organised. Rough and ready committees had formed and then almost immediately disintegrated, but enterprising foragers brought in just enough extortionately priced carrots and canned tuna to keep the whole thing going. It was noisy and crowded, with plenty of people coming and going, and in those first weeks it was as good a place as any for Beth to hide.

But then Petris had appeared, his stone monk’s habit silhouetted in the doorway. He’d zigzagged across the floor in his stop-motion, Pavement Priest way, growling drunkenly and peering into frightened faces until he’d clapped eyes on Beth.

Even drunk – and he had been
astoundingly
drunk; the vodka sharpness that had risen off him still stung Pen’s nostrils – he’d understood the situation. He’d let his gaze slide off Beth and then he’d blurred away.

Later, while the rest of the building slept, he’d met them on the roof. He’d been scared and angry, swigging constantly from an unmarked bottle.
The cemetery had been hit
, he’d said.

‘Goddamn clayling popped right out of Stoke Newington High Street,’ he’d growled. ‘Asked if we would serve
Her
. I told him to fuck off.’ Another swig. ‘I hadn’t even closed my mouth and then there were a thousand of them, all identical, all staring at me with those empty fucking eyes. We didn’t stand a chance.’

He had fifty stoneskins, he’d said, in sore need of a stiff drink, a place to regroup and something to believe in. ‘We can find the first two somewhere else,’ he’d grunted at Beth, ‘but right now, you’re the only candidate for the third I don’t want to put my fist through.’

So, with Pen praying she wouldn’t, Beth had let them stay. And then, as Pen had known they would, more stone and bronze figures had appeared at Selfridges’ doors. Ezekiel and Bracchion and Templar and Churchill had all limped in at the head of their own decimated bands. Then came little glowing clusters that were the remnants of Sodiumite war-families, their glass skins cracked and their limbs shattered; then the Blankleits had come after them.

It took constant, frantic work to keep Beth’s presence
quiet. All anyone knew when they arrived was that this was where the others had come. One by one, newcomers were vetted and vouched for before being let in on the secret. Others – whom no one knew or no one trusted – were frozen out until they left to look for another home. For those whom remained, Beth’s was the name that lurked unspoken in every room, that hovered dangerously on the lips of sleepers as they mumbled in their dreams.

Beth looked increasingly alarmed as their numbers swelled. Pen knew what she was thinking: these people were all looking for her to lead them against the power of the Mirrored Goddess, but she had not the faintest idea how. More and more, Beth said less and less. She’d withdrawn, losing herself amongst the department store’s human population, where her roof-tile scales and street-laced skin were unremarkable: just one more oddity in a world gone insane.

Pen wondered, as she wondered almost every day now, whether it was time to go.

*

Beth kept her head down and pressed through the crowd, Oscar chirruping quietly under her hood. A thickset man blundered into her and she would have fallen if Pen hadn’t caught her.

They called the lift and Beth pressed five. A few seconds later they arrived at the Beds and Bedlinen department. The wooden bedsteads had long since been smashed up and used for firewood, but they’d designated this floor the
dormitory regardless, and mattresses were lined up all over the floor, even made up with store stock, thanks to a cheery, middle-aged man from Dalston called Henry. Henry believed in the power of little luxuries like clean sheets to lift people’s moods, and he spent most of his time whistling show tunes and hand-washing duvet covers while he waited for the government rescue he was convinced was coming any day now.

Beth dropped onto an unoccupied bed and arched a road-marked eyebrow at Pen. ‘
What?
’

‘What do you mean, what?’ Pen countered.

‘
You look like you have something on your mind
.’

Pen shrugged. She really wanted to have it out with Beth, but not while she was exhausted. She gestured at the duvet cover, and the beaming cartoon panda dyed on it. ‘It’s just I’ve been your best friend for almost four years now and I never would have you pegged for a panda girl.’

Beth smiled thinly. She looked back towards the front of the building where, for all Pen knew, Timon was still smoking and brooding.

‘
Well
,’ she said, ‘
I do move in mysterious ways
.’ She shuffled down under the duvet. ‘
You know what? At times like this, I miss the cats. I mean, I know Mater Viae wants to kill me and all, and She
’
s smashing up the city I live in, but did She have to lure away all my sodding cats as well?
’

‘That was harsh,’ Pen agreed. She remembered the morning they’d awakened to find all the stray moggies that’d been following Beth around had slunk away in the
night.
Bet they
’
ve gone to Her
, Beth had grumbled.
She
’
s probably got a stronger divine musk
.

‘Beth?’ Pen said.

‘
Yes, Pen?
’ Beth’s eyes were already shut, her voice groggy.

Pen hesitated. ‘Sleep well.’

Pen had expected the smell: overripe bananas and rotting meat, sump oil and thick dust: a miasma of decay. What she hadn’t expected was the music.

It was very faint, a classical piece: strings and flutes and deep, brassy horns. Pen thought she’d heard it before, but it was off somehow. All the notes were in tune, but there was something indefinably odd about how they sounded. Pen hurried down the steps to the basement, something between eagerness and anxiety pinching at her throat.

In her pocket, she rolled a cold glass marble between her fingers.

A pair of overstuffed bin bags flanked the doors to the kitchen like squat guard towers. As Pen approached, a stinking fountain of garbage erupted and an arm articulated from bits of an old bike frame emerged from the top of the bag on the right. The arm ended in a hammer-head made from old paint cans. It waved threateningly over Pen’s head.

The second bin bag split slowly up the middle and a tiny
makeshift crossbow crept from the gap on matchstick spider’s legs. Pen didn’t have to look at the pinkie-sized bolt to know the nail on the end of it was poisoned. She sucked her teeth. It was like being faced down by the Heavy Armaments division of
Blue Peter
.

‘Glas,’ she protested, keeping her voice as mild as she could manage, but never taking her eye from the nail, ‘it’s only me.’

With apparent reluctance both the hammer and the crossbow returned to their black-plastic posts, and Pen pushed through the smoked glass double doors. The music swelled and enveloped her. She stared, open-mouthed despite the stench.

Selfridges’ kitchen was teeming with hands.

Hands made of old Biros, hands made of sucked lolly-sticks, hands made of broken scissors and bent umbrella spines and used syringes and de-pronged forks, all scrambled hither and thither across the stainless-steel work surfaces born by teams of beetles lashed to their wrists with garden wire. Their improvised fingers held flasks and bottles and cardboard boxes. Yet more hands extended in a chain down the kitchen’s rubbish chute, passing hunks of brick and concrete and tea cups of shimmering sewer water from one to the next. The last hand in the line sealed each sample in a plastic pouch and carefully wrote out a label with an expensive-looking fountain pen. Other hands selected previously prepared pouches, dumped their contents into Pyrex beakers and held them over the gas rings of the great
industrial cookers until the chemicals inside changed colour to dark blues and bloody reds.

The orchestra occupied the far corner: yet more hands, drawing bows over the strings of violins hammered from broken bed-frames. Punctured footballs sealed with condom lips blew air into flutes carefully fashioned from old curtain rails, producing pure, sweet notes. The music swirled and dipped in the air, making Pen giddy. She put out a hand to steady herself, only to have another passing hand take it in a genteel shake; she couldn’t stop herself recoiling from the worms that articulated its braided pipe-cleaner fingers.

A three-dimensional model of the city took up most of the kitchen floor. Juice cartons and ripped-up cardboard boxes stood in for houses, blackened bananas for bridges. Hands spider-picked their way over narrow streets, shifting them into new configurations based on the information from the latest samples, pushing over loo-roll tower blocks or flooding avenues with filthy water, continually mapping the city’s transformation. In the centre a mineral water bottle stood stubbornly upright, emerging from a nest of shredded plastic: Canary Wharf.

Wings fluttered by her ear and she ducked instinctively as a petrol-grey pigeon flew past. It circled the room, a pair of broken eggshells clutched in its claws. The pigeon’s gyre grew tighter, the music swelled, the hands disintegrated into their component parts and the beetles under them took flight. The air filled with a fever of wings. The pigeon
wheeled tighter still, and Pen shied as something buzzed past her ear. As she watched, a cloud of insects, each clasping a fragment of rubbish, whirled into formation under the pigeon and spun faster and faster: a black tornado dancing over the kitchen tiles. Pen squinted as the buzzing mass slowly morphed into a vague human shape.

The pigeon cawed once, then dived into the heart of the cloud. The music crescendoed, then cut out. Every beetle flipped sharply over in the air, dragging their garbage over them. The wings felt silent.

Pen blinked. With a sudden sleight of eye, Gutterglass had a skin.

He wore a tailcoat patched together from dozens of carpet sample squares. His skeletal face was built of split Biro pens. His hands, one also made of Biros, the other of long screws, rested on a mop he held in front of him like a cane. A third – disembodied – hand, the last remaining on its beetle conveyor, scuttled over his shoulder, planted a cigarette between his lips and lit it with a taper before scuttling away again.

Gutterglass drew slowly on the cigarette, and the smoke billowed from the gaps in the plastic frame of his skull. ‘Miss Khan.’ His voice still carried the notes of the music. ‘Always a pleasure.’

‘Dr Goutierre.’ Pen inclined her head respectfully.

‘Gutterglass is fine.’ The trash-spirit waved away the title. ‘It may be a name She gave me, but I’ve lived with it for long enough that I think I can call it mine.’

There was a wistfulness to the way he said
She
that twisted Pen’s heart. ‘I know exactly what you mean,’ she said.

Glas smiled. His mouth was full of penny-sweet milk-bottle teeth.

‘What’s with the arts-and-crafts artillery?’ Pen jerked her head at the door and the garbage guard towers.

Gutterglass made an indelicate sound. ‘In spite of the amnesty very kindly extended to me by Lady Bradley, there still appears to be a certain amount of resentment towards me among the Pavement Priests,’ he said. ‘What with our Lady having been a little distracted lately with affairs of incipient Godhood, I thought it only prudent to make arrangements for my own security.’

You were their Goddess’ closest advisor. You told them She
’
d flounced off and it was their fault, when She
’
d actually conned them and killed Herself. When they rumbled you, they were always going to be pretty pissed off
, Pen thought, but she didn’t say it. She was here for a favour, after all.

‘So how goes the diagnosis?’

Gutterglass turned to face the map, the beetles under his skin chittering as they reoriented him.

‘Well, analysing the samples and judging by what my pigeons and rats have seen, the last twenty-four hours have brought us five new Tideways.’ He pointed to a tangle of streets flooded with an inky-grey liquid. ‘There’s a muscle spasm under Victoria’ – he indicated a large box with Queen Victoria’s head inked on it, now rucked up on a patch of old carpet – ‘and
eighteen miles
of new Fever Streets.’

The spidery hand on his shoulder dropped its taper onto the model. Blue flame licked out along the roadways, tracing the afflicted roadways.

‘In my unparallelled medical opinion,’ Gutterglass said drily, ‘the city is sick.’

‘Still no idea what’s causing it?’ Pen asked.

‘Well, since it started the same night that Mater Viae’s deranged twin arrived in town, one rather assumes
She
is. But as to
how
She’s causing it, on a medical level? I confess I am stumped.’

‘And we stop it by … ?’ Pen couldn’t hide the hope in her voice.

‘If it even can be stopped,’ Gutterglass murmured, his eggshell eyes intent on the map. ‘To be honest, I have no idea.’

Pen snorted. ‘Well, aren’t you just made of optimism?’

Glas pursed his balloon lips speculatively. ‘At the present moment? Eighty-seven discarded writing implements, two rusting jerry cans, a pair of football bladders and eleven feet of rubber hose – but no, no optimism, since you ask.’

Pen shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable. ‘I’m just saying, you know, keep a little faith.’

Glas rounded on Pen. His tone hardened. ‘Oh,
faith
, is it? Faith is something I’m all out of, and not freshly, I’m afraid. I am a physician and a scientist, Miss Khan: a realist. Faith was never in the job description. In a hospital, all faith yields is false hope and broken hearts.’

Pen was shocked: Gutterglass
never
raised his voice. He
controlled himself almost immediately, but Pen still caught the eggshell gaze flickering towards the Evian tower in the centre of the map.

‘You weren’t any less of a scientist when you believed,’ she said quietly.

Glas didn’t meet her gaze. ‘My apologies,’ he said at last. ‘Working conditions aren’t ideal.’

‘It’s all right.’ Pen hesitated, then put a hand on his mouldering carpet arm. ‘How’s the … um … the
other
project going?’

Gutterglass raised his head slowly. The white insides of the eggshells looked at her. He reached inside his carpet tailcoat and produced a phial of clear liquid. ‘I made up the latest batch last night, but I haven’t had a chance to test it yet.’

Pen eyed the phial. She felt her heart swell in her chest until it threatened to cut off the air to her lungs. ‘Then let’s test it now.’

*

The highly polished side of the stainless-steel oven range made an only-slightly-distorted mirror. Pen looked past her own reflection into London-Under-Glass. She was breathing fast, she realised, anticipating. She braced herself and finally focused on her own scarred face. She remembered cold tiles under her palms and her hands curled. She remembered a dusty mirror in an abandoned bathroom in a school. She remembered her image reflected back at her as the mirror-glass sealed the doorway and shut Espel’s face out.

Espel
. The memory was a tiny piece of shrapnel, embedded close to her heart, flaring painfully at every beat.

‘Ready?’ Gutterglass asked softly.

Pen nodded.

The trash-spirit spun the lid off the phial and flung the contents against the side of the oven.

The liquid spattered across the stainless steel and Pen stared into the spreading distortion, willing the metal to disappear and leave only the reflection – willing the doorway to the inverted world to open – but as the chemical dribbled to the floor, the steel stayed as solid as ever.

Pen let out a shuddering breath.

‘I’m sorry,’ Gutterglass murmured. He stood awkwardly for a second, then reversed his grip on his mop and began to prod at the pooling concoction. He mumbled, embarrassed, ‘I really don’t understand what’s wrong. The city’s sickness – it’s denaturing the reactants somehow. I can’t get untainted ingredients. I’m trying to work around it, but …’ He gestured helplessly at the puddle.

Pen nodded. Sudden tiredness weighed down her limbs and her eyelids. Gutterglass was turning back to the model of the city when she asked, ‘Why are you here?’

The trash-spirit looked around. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘Why are you here,’ Pen repeated, ‘with us? Why aren’t you with Mater Viae?’

‘
Mirror Mater
,’ he insisted, a little primly. ‘I am serving the will of my Goddess.’

‘No, you aren’t.’ Pen contradicted him. ‘Your Goddess is
dead – She has been for decades. She killed herself. You’re serving the will of Beth Bradley, who – much as I love her – is an imitation patched up from the scraps your Goddess left behind.

‘But
her
?’ She jerked her head at the Evian-bottle Canary Wharf. ‘She’s the real deal: an exact copy – just as powerful, just as implacable. Tell me, Glas, with Her around, why
are
you working for the knock-off version I just put to bed under a panda duvet?’

Gutterglass sighed out a fug of sweetly corrupted rubbish. ‘Well, I guess I’m just a knock-off, patched-up kind of guy.’ He smiled tightly and affected an accent, but neither accent nor smile held against Pen’s gaze.

‘I thought She
could
be,’ he said at last. ‘I thought the reflected Goddess could be the one. When I heard She’d come through the mirror, I hurried to the Shard, my plastic skirts clutched in both hands, my heart bubbling over with the promise of it, but then I … I
saw
Her. I looked into those green eyes …’

The piping in his neck flexed as he swallowed. ‘The first time I met my true mistress, it was like falling in love, and like falling in love, I just
knew. This
was who I wanted to spend my life serving,
this
was what I wanted to define me.’ He licked his lips nervously. ‘But that night, when I looked at Her mirror-sister, well – you tell me, you’ve met her – is She a thing to love?’

Pen looked into the eggshell eyes and slowly shook her head.

Gutterglass matched the motion with his skeletal plastic face. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘Fear – fear is all you can do: fear Her jealousy, fear Her anger, fear Her pain … but not love.’ He shrugged, but his indifference was unconvincing. He went back to mopping the floor. ‘You just know,’ he repeated.

Pen stared at the reflection on the side of oven and thought of a blonde girl with a silver seam dividing her perfectly symmetrical face. ‘You just know,’ she echoed.