The Glass God (29 page)

Miles gathered more Aldermen. The neat, black-clad magicians stared suspiciously at the Tribesmen, who glowered back. Sharon and Rhys stood between them, smiling until their faces ached. No one wanted to be the first to open the lock on the back of the truck.

“We just need to get him into the building,” said Miles, “and the office’s wards should activate to suppress any dangerous magics.”

“‘Should’?” squeaked Rhys.

“He’s the Midnight Mayor.” The Alderman looked pained. “The wards were designed to protect him, not control him.”

“They,” corrected Sharon, “are the blue electric angels. I’m not sure the Midnight Mayor is getting a look-in.”

A couple of Aldermen stepped forward. They held syringes and wore white-latex-gloved hands. 8ft said, “wats dat?”

“Sedatives,” replied one, her eyes not quite able to fix on the Tribesman’s face. “In case he’s – they’re – violent.”

The Tribesman goggled. “U fink… sedtives gonna b gud nuf?” The incredulity was obvious in 8ft’s voice, even if his features were hard to read. “u is fick!”

“Guys,” sighed Sharon, “if we’re gonna – and I’m kinda sorry to be saying this – but if we’re gonna be containing a screaming, blue-fire-throwing, off-his-head, utterly whacked, totally psycho – stop me when you’re feeling freaked, by the way – totally psycho electric angel, then I’m thinking it’d all be way easier if we worked together. Now, I would suggest a bit of team bonding first, like paintballing or that, but I’m really not sure we’ve got the time. So let’s all try and be united by a mutual fear of spontaneous combustion and oncoming plague, yeah?”

Miles managed to force the thinnest of smiles and even briefly met the eyes of 8ft. 8ft briefly managed to twitch his face into something that wasn’t exactly a glower, but couldn’t be described as much better. Sharon beamed. “There! Isn’t that nice? Now, as no one is rushing in, I’ll just do the honours…⁠”

She marched up to the door, and wondered if anyone else could see how fast her heart was running, or had noticed the flush of terror spreading over her skin. She put her hand on the handle, and it was warm without being hot, and there was magic in it, the great thick swirling magics of the wards inscribed in the grey dirt on the truck. She felt it strain and warp as she clicked the handle back and, with a long step and a shallow breath, pulled the door of the van open.

Swift – or, rather, the body that should have been Swift – lay inside, head resting against the wall, eyes closed, breathing slowly. His skin was solid, his hands were still, and, apart from the slow rising and falling of his chest, there was no indication in him at all of any living thing.

Rhys peered round Sharon, dabbing at his nose in anticipation.

Swift’s eyes opened, and they were blue, brilliant, burning blue, and as they fell on Sharon so his skin split apart. Fracture lines of fire raced along the course of his veins, welling up like lava from inside his flesh. His lips pulled back in an animal snarl and, as Rhys pulled Sharon back, the sorcerer’s hair began to stand on end and his fingertips crackled with ultraviolet-bright electric light.

“Give me back to us!”

The words ripped their way out of the truck, hard enough to slam the doors back on the hinges. The wards on the metal began to smoke, dirt shifting and rearranging as the spell attempted to compensate, moving through memories of a thousand words inscribed by fingers over the years,
wash me… woz ’ere… my other truck… spurs 4evr… s loves b… is also a wolkswagen…

A wave of heat crinkled the ends of Sharon’s eyelashes, and something violent knocked her to the ground. She landed heavily, and looked up to see Rhys on top of her. Overhead, where she’d been a moment before, blue arcs of fire lashed at the air, rocking the van from side to side.

“Give me back!” the figure screamed, and at the sound the tyres of the truck burst with gunshot bangs, the tar melted beneath them, the windows in nearby buildings hummed in response to the noise. What had 8ft said about the electric angels? Somewhere between angel, devil and god.

Rhys gasped at where he was and what he’d done, and hurriedly rolled off her. “I’m so sorry, Ms Li, I didn’t…⁠” Before he could say any more, Sharon scrambled to her feet, even as the Tribesmen and Aldermen scattered for cover. She looked up, and there he was – no, there
they
were, the blue electric angels, stepping out of the back of the truck, skin blazing, blood burning in their veins, eyes wild, hands outstretched. With every step they took, fire danced in sympathy along the wires and cables of the street, burning above, below, sparking from every mains socket and telephone wire. Sharon briefly wondered whether the Aldermen had insurance for this kind of situation, and if it was going to reflect badly on her own role, before the blue electric angels raised their arms again and screamed.

This time, she dived for cover on her own initiative, ducking down behind a bin whose contents began to smoulder and crackle with flame. Windows up and down the street shimmered with reflected rolling blue, casting giddy shapes and shadows, while beneath the angels’ feet the road itself began to crack, shooting geysers of water upwards; where spreading pools now rushed for the gutter, maggot-sparks writhed over the surface.

There was a buzzing in Sharon’s pocket. It was, she reflected, a bad time for her mother to call. The buzzing kept going even as the Aldermen cowered behind whatever surface they could find. One or two rash members tried raising shields of their own; a woman, her skin shifting to metal as the power of her office imposed itself, dared to raise her head from behind a parked Mini, only for a fist of white lightning to slam into her chest and hurl her back against the nearest glass wall, hard enough to crack it like eggshell.

Sharon saw Rhys, hands over his head, knees tucked up to his chin, huddled into almost the same space as 8ft, druid and Tribesman briefly reconciled by the bursts of flame spinning out of control from the blazing man in the middle of the street. Her phone was still ringing. She prised it from her pocket and looked down. The number was unknown. Her fingers moved without her willing them. She answered.

A voice stammered, “D-d-d-d-domine! D-d-d-domine…⁠”

“Swift?” she breathed.

“Help me!”

“Hear that screaming?” she hissed, waving the phone towards the street. “That’s totally your voice doing that, which makes this phone call kinda tricky to classify.”

“D-d-d-domine…⁠”

“Any time now.”

“Domine dir-dirige nos!”

It came as a gasp, then seemed the only sound the voice could manage; the phone fell silent in her hand. In the middle of the street, Swift’s body was nine parts fire to only one part skin, his features half lost behind the waves of electric blue light and the distortion of heat rolling off him. When he raised his arms, the geysers of water building at his feet burst upwards, cracks rushed up through the glass buildings either side of him, and even the clouds overhead seemed to spiral a bit faster across the sky. Sharon glanced over at 8ft, and saw his eyes wide, his mouth hanging open, and knew he was right. Angel, devil, god, pick whichever one happens to be in the best mood at the time. Unconsciously, she slipped the phone back into her pocket, and, as she did so, her fingers brushed something small and metal, lying unregarded in the mess of fabric and old receipts. She pulled it out. Tiny, white, a pair of red crosses, one in the top corner of the other. The badge of an Alderman, stolen from Crompton the undertaker, who hadn’t seemed to want it any more.

Her fingers tightened around it. As they did, she felt a silver-metal sheen begin to spread. The sensation was cold at first, stiff, awkward, but as it rushed upwards, curling round her arm, her elbow, her back, she found she could still move, even as her spine began to press back against her skin, vertebrae growing out to sharpened points, even as her lips solidified and her teeth began to stretch, as her vision filled with red and her breath began to stink of the smoke she was exhaling. She shuddered, not so much with fear, but as a cat shakes under tension, as the metal skin sealed itself round her body, and looked down to see claws of black at her fingers’ ends, and knew that it was natural, and it was fine, and it was right.

She stood up, and her knees bent awkwardly, but with a strength and a springiness in them that her body did not normally possess. For a moment, just a moment, she thought she saw something move in the corner of her eye, in the shadow place of a shaman’s seeing, and it was black, and ancient, and it had wings.

Then she was on her feet, even as Rhys called out for her, words lost behind the roaring of blood in her ears, and Swift was turning and, as he did, the fire snapped out towards her and, without thinking, she shifted into the spirit walk, the ghost of the fire bursting around her into hot greyness that ticked across her metal skin; and she saw them. The blue electric angels, their bodies aflame, their wings of electric fire stretching towards the sky. Around them buzzed the essence of their being, a million, million, billion essences of their beings, the life that had made their magic coalesce from a hundred years of…

     hello, is…

               … hello?

are you there?

          then I said to him

beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeppppppp

                    who’s calling?

can I

               beeeeeeeeeeeeeepppp

     connect you?

          putting you through

and he said

          oh my God you won’t believe

          beeeeeeeeeeee

     operator? Operator?

freeeeeeee

She saw the gods of the telephone line and, in the spirit walk, where all things were true and no one ever dared to look, they stared back at her, and their fires faded.

She stepped towards them, and it seemed to her that something black and heavy moved with her, flexing its muscles in the darkness.

They stared back, but made no move to attack, the flames of their being dancing over their skin. She held out her right hand – talon, perhaps, was the fairer term here – and noted how something moved with it, great and black draping down from her arm – and the twin crosses of the Midnight Mayor were there, blazing scarlet now in the palm of her hand, and she said,

“Domine dirige nos.”

The blue electric angels hissed, sparks flying from their mouth, but they did not move.

“Domine dirige nos,” she repeated. Then, “I’m thinking you’ve got issues.”

Blue fire flashed across the angels’ skin, but still they did not strike. Their eyes moved from Sharon’s hand, to Sharon’s face, and then upwards, to something at her back. She didn’t turn, didn’t dare to look, kept her eyes on the painful brightness of the figure in front of her. “So, Swift rang,” she went on conversationally and, at his name, their eyes darted back to her, fixed on her face. “I think he’s trapped in the telephone wires, which is kinda ironic if you think about it, but then makes sense. Can something make sense and be ironic? I’ll have to think about that one, but point is…⁠” Another step, she was so close now that the heat was palpable, even in the cool of the spirit walk. “⁠… he’s trying to find you, you’re trying to find him, it’s all very upsetting for everyone involved and I sympathise. I mean, I totally sympathise but what I need you guys to understand…⁠” She reached out with her scarlet-burning claw, her fingers reaching into the fires dancing round the angel’s flesh. The heat was a sauna through her metal arm, the voices that rattled and spun from out of the angels’ being, almost deafening.

     beeeeeeee

               hello? Hello?!

connecting you

               BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

“⁠… what I want you to know is that I think we can get through this together.”

She was up to her elbow in the fires now, her hand had almost passed straight through what should have been the angel’s arm. There was nothing there, only fire, nothing human left at all, except…

Her fingers brushed something soft, solid, warm.

A hand lashed up out of nowhere, curling round her hand, grasping it tight. She stared into the brilliant blueness of the angels’ eyes and saw their lips move.

“We… we… we…⁠”

The heat from their grip was turning from a smarting to a smouldering beneath her metal skin.

“We… we cannot… flesh is… we cannot…⁠”

“It’s okay,” she replied. “You’ll be okay.”

“Help us?”

“I am. I shall. You’ll be fine. Can you sleep? Do you know what sleep is?”

“Humans… sleep.”

“You’re in a human body.”

“We… we cannot… we… do not… fear sleep! Fear sleep death sleep death sleep death stopping? Stopping no difference!”

A thought struck Sharon. She tightened her grip on the angel’s hand, felt her skin begin to stick, the pain running down to her elbow, to the nerves in her shoulder and back. “Come with me.” She turned, and began to walk, pulling them slowly after her. She walked, and they followed, the ground smouldering beneath their feet. She walked through the spirit walk, through the place where things were true and everything could be seen, and then walked a little further, pulling them along, into the deepest darkness of the spirit walk where the past reached its fingers up from the city street, bone fingers clutching at their ankles, bone voices whispering of things which had been, and where the cars were parked beside wheelbarrows and two-horse carriages, and the cobbles were swollen with damp river mud welling up from between the gaps, and then she pulled them deeper, shaking with effort and pain, the air pushing back at her, breath condensing even as the fires of the blue electric angels spat and twisted beside her. She half closed her eyes as her lungs began to swell and contract from the lack of air, pushed one foot forward at a time, each step a leaden shuffle against a wall, until, with a final stagger, she pushed through, into the silver-grey chill of the dream walk.