The Glass God (30 page)

The blue electric angels followed. She looked back at them, even as they turned upwards to stare at a sky of impossible orange stars. Very carefully, she let go of their hand. The fires began to dim across their skin, shrivelling back into flesh, which closed silently over the wounds. A face, barely recognisable but still, perhaps, human, emerged from the blazing light, and smiled.

“Is this… sleep?” they asked, and before Sharon could answer, their eyes closed, and they sunk down to the ground, fast asleep.

Sharon stood and stared, first at the silently breathing body of Matthew Swift, all trace of blue gone, then up at the busy twisting world of the dream walk. She’d never walked into this place before when fully conscious, but the way back seemed no more and no less than the way by which she’d come. Here, the crimson fire on her hand was almost invisible, and the metal skin on her skin shed and grew in great falling flakes, like confetti off a wedding dress. She watched it fall and melt for a second, then straightened up, took a deep breath, and moved again, quickening her pace to the brisk speed of a spirit walk and shouldering her way back through the heaviness between sleep and waking.

She staggered out into the spirit walk and here the pain in her hand suddenly reasserted itself, hot and sharp, a popping, crinkling, in her palm whenever she flexed her fingers, and the metal that covered her hand was black and scarred, all the way up to her elbow, and, as she turned, she felt something move with her.

A pause.

A second to consider.

She took a deep breath, clenched her less-burnt fist at her side, and turned to look.

It stood above her, behind her, around her, wings of black, great red eyes, claws of steel, back of bone, and it was giant, and it was ancient, and it was, for want of a better word, a dragon. She’d seen it before, with its mad flickering tongue and its spined, raised wings. It was the dragon which held the shield of London between its claws on the site of the old city gates, whose shape adorned old walls and bared its teeth from above the porticoes of the churches. It looked at her, and she looked right back at it, and for a moment neither moved.

Then Sharon raised her hand, the Alderman’s tiny white badge still gleaming in it, and carefully pried it from her smarting palm. As she did, the metal began to retreat across her skin, rolling down like rainwater, her bones slipping silently back into their proper place, the redness drawing back from behind her eyes; and the dragon overhead began to fade. It looked at her quizzically as it started drifting to shadow. She waggled an unburnt finger at it in polite reproach.

“It’s not that I’m not impressed,” she explained. “It’s just that a girl’s gotta prioritise on occasions like this.”

The dragon faded into the night, and Sharon Li slipped back out of the spirit walk, and into reality.

Chapter 50

Doubt Never Helped Anyone

She said, “Ow.”

“I’m sorry, Ms Li, but you have to let me…⁠”

“Ow!”

“⁠… apply it thoroughly otherwise the…⁠”

“That bloody hurts!”

“⁠… the unguent won’t have a chance to work!”

Sulky silence.

Sharon and Rhys sat in Miles’s pristine office while Rhys carefully applied gel from a bottle that had formerly contained sweet chilli sauce all across Sharon’s inflamed right hand. As burns went, it might have been worse. Swelling was definitely to be anticipated, as was blistering: already the skin was shifting loosely over some joints and under several fingers. But there wasn’t any blackness, which had worried her, and the cheese-grater effect over some of her skin was, she decided, more an effect of turning into a form of human-dragon hybrid while chatting with an angel. All things considered, it could have gone much…

“
Ow!
”

Rhys flinched. His pain at causing pain almost exceeded Sharon’s own sensations in its intensity and fervour. “I’m so sorry, Ms Li, I really am, but this is the best way to ensure it heals.” He daubed another dollop of goo under her thumb.

“What’s an unguent anyway?” she demanded. “Why ‘unguent’ and not just Savlon?”

“Oh, druids make all sorts of wonderful remedies and creams. But it’s bad professional practice to say ‘this is like TCP’ or ‘this works as well as Sudocrem’. So we give everything interesting names to make it clear they’re our own patent.”

“Druids… patent their cures?”

“Oh yes!”

“Even the mystic ones?”

“Especially the mystic ones. You don’t want anyone grinding up the tail of a fox without appropriate training.”

Sharon blanched. “Please tell me there’s not…⁠?”

“Oh no!” said Rhys, anxious to dispel this fear. “No foxes were harmed to make this, I promise! In fact, you can find most of the ingredients in a well-supplied deep-freeze store. All you do is take one fresh tube of…⁠”

Sharon raised her less-burned hand. “You know what, Rhys, just this once I’ll let you keep your trade secrets, okay?”

“Oh, my God!” A voice came through the door on a wave of excitement and caffeinated products. The owner followed in a flurry of brown skirt and black jacket, grabbed Sharon’s hand by the wrist and held it up to the light. “Is that… unguent? Wow, that is so totally druidic I could put it on a pizza!”

Rhys gaped as the diminutive figure of Dr Seah, NHS physician to the gravely cursed and deeply magical, four-foot-nothing of black bobbed hair and epic long stethoscope, sniffed deeply at Sharon’s fingers. “Wow,” she said. “That is like… serious wow. You know, I haven’t seen unguent like that since that thing with the seer and the effrit and the kettle lead down in the Brunswick casino.”

“Hello, Dr Seah,” intoned Sharon.

“Hi, chicken!” called out the merry medic, treating the room to a dazzling display of neat white teeth in a cheery round face. “And, hi, druid!” she added. “How’ve you been keeping? Not messing around with any wendigos, I hope?”

“Um, no, Dr Seah…⁠” A sneeze welled up, all at once.

“Oh, lambkins,” sighed the medic. “Are you still on the antihistamines?”

“Yes, Dr Seah.”

“Sweetheart, you want to be careful there. If the usual course of treatment isn’t working, I’d really suggest seeing a specialist. Have you tried acupuncture? Sticking needles in people: always therapeutic, even if not strictly necessary” – Rhys failed to dodge an affectionate pat on the shoulder – “and you are like, screaming ‘therapute me’.”

“Dr Seah.” Sharon’s voice was beginning to show her fatigue. “It’s not that we’re not really pleased to see you – because we are, aren’t we, Rhys?”

Rhys snuffled in reply.

“But it’s, like, way past NHS callout hours, and while my hands are a bit blistered, I’m guessing you’re not just here for that?”

“Burns are serious,” intoned Dr Seah. “But druidic unguent is, like, so the way to go. If you can’t get any cling film, I mean, and – how’d you burn them?”

“Uh, the raging electric fire off a furious angel, experienced through the dream walk while wearing the skin of a dragon?”

Even Dr Seah paused. “Okay,” she said at length. “Did you run your hands under the cold tap for ten minutes after?”

“Oh yes! Because I remember, that’s something you’re supposed to do!”

“Fantastic – good call! But I gotta admit, while I’m just tickled to see you all,” another brilliant smile, “I was mostly called in by Kelly – you’ve met Kelly, right. She’s so awesome it’s, like, I want to be her, you know? – to have a look at the Midnight Mayor.” At this, Dr Seah gave a malicious cackle. “Because that’s totally new!”

They went downstairs.

Then down a bit more.

There was a basement beneath the basement, a place where the walls were grey, the pipes were thick, and mysterious machinery chugged. Then the walls became less grey. Paint had been sprayed on, some of it still drying: swirling figures and creatures, symbols and runes in the shape of old transport signs, and red triangles declaring STOP. A monkey’s head leered out from above a body of spider’s claws; a cackling hyena smoked a cigar and, as it puffed, the orange-painted end of the tube flared and shimmered, and black smoke drifted across the wall. Everyone became careful not to let their clothes touch the warm, writhing images and, as they headed down, the stench of magic and chemical fumes became almost overwhelming.

At the deepest part of the darkest corner was a heavy door. Once, meat might have been frozen behind it, or slabs of ice kept for a difficult and expensive social emergency. But now the great door was locked. Outside, 8ft, Miles and the unmistakable cheerfulness that was Kelly Shiring, Swift’s PA, stood to something resembling attention.

“Sharon!” exclaimed Kelly, opening her arms almost as wide as her smile. “So lovely to see you! How were the doughnuts?”

Sharon did her best not to gape at the beaming Alderman. “They were… lovely, cheers.”

“And the umbrella?”

“It was mega-mystic, actually.”

“Was it? I thought it might be, though it’s so hard to tell. But I knew I could count on you to work it out. ‘Kelly,’ I thought, ‘Matthew has left this umbrella here for a reason, and just because you and the combined forces of the Aldermen’s office lack the ability to reason why, doesn’t mean that Sharon won’t solve it in an instant.’ And you did!”

Sharon eyed the locked door behind Kelly, aware of how studiously the others in the passage were
not
eyeing it, as if acknowledging the problem might somehow make things worse. “How about being deputy Midnight Mayor?” said Kelly, radiating satisfaction with the very idea. “Is that working out?”

Sharon looked at Rhys, Rhys studied his feet. She looked up into Miles’s expression of consternation, 8ft’s scarred face and, finally, Kelly’s brilliant smile. “Actually, I gotta tell you, flattered though I am to be given, like, serious responsibility this early into my career, I don’t think this is me being overly humble when I tell you that I’m feeling a bit out of my depth. I mean, I’m not saying never, because one day I’d like to have a decent job with a proper managerial position and a big chair and someone to sort out the taxman for me. But to be honest, at this stage of things, and considering the pressures of the gig, I’m thinking that maybe making me deputy Midnight Mayor was like the most phenomenally stupid thing since… since…⁠” She hesitated, looking for a comparison. “Since making Swift the Midnight Mayor in the first place!”

There was a polite shuffling of feet. Now no one would meet anyone’s eye. Except for Kelly, who, still smiling radiantly, reached out and gently laid her hands on Sharon’s shoulders. There was

          taste of sushi

sound of laughter, glasses chinking

               the flash of a gun firing in the night

walk away, Mr Mayor.

(you can’t save yourself)

Then there was nothing but Kelly’s smile. “But Ms Li,” she exclaimed, eyes wide and bright, “that’s why it makes such perfect sense!”

Chapter 51

Matthew

     Beeeeeeeeeeee…

(says the telephone line)

          Beeeeeeeeeee…

(when you listen to the dialling tone)

               beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

(a waiting signal, asking to be filled, and it says…)

                    beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee mmmmmeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

(Which is not how the song usually goes.)

Chapter 52

Nothing Like a Good Night’s Sleep

They opened the door.

They did so very slowly, very carefully; and once Sharon, Dr Seah, Kelly, Miles and Rhys were on the other side, they closed the door quickly behind them.

The room was cold, a refrigeration unit churning somewhere behind, Sharon’s breath steaming in the air, skin rising up in bumps. Pipes had been cut short and now hung, crusty with icicles, from the ceiling and walls. The square footprints where great refrigerators had stood still scarred the white-tiled floor. All around, paint shifted beneath the frost on the walls, continually swirling and dancing as the graffiti wards spilt in and out of each other.

“It was painted by the Whites,” explained Miles, his breath a thick cloud. “To suppress, contain and control any magics within its walls.”

Sharon looked at the one thing within its walls, and found herself wishing for a little more than paint. The body that had once held Matthew Swift lay in the centre of the floor, head tucked into its arms, knees pulled up to its chest, sleeping deep. It looked entirely human, peaceful, almost innocent. Someone had, in deference to the temperature, given it a woolly hat pulled down across the eyes with a pair of fluffy grey rabbit ears sticking out each side, and a pair of thick blue skiing gloves to protect it against the cold. Sharon wondered if this generous soul expected to get these goods back intact, or if they minded them being returned as cinders.

Dr Seah looked at the body and tutted. “Dear me,” she said. “If it’s not one thing, it’s the other. Sick people suck.”

So saying, she strode forward, bold as a battleship and, before anyone could stop her, parked herself down on the floor next to the sleeping form and pressed her fingers into its neck. Sharon held her breath, waiting for combustion, explosion, catastrophe, death. None came. Dr Seah reached out and raised an eyelid, peered into the blue depths of Swift’s eye, tutted profoundly, pulled out her massive stethoscope, listened to his chest, and then, very carefully, with the end of a drawing pin, pricked the tip of one of his fingers, and observed the blood rise to the surface. A drop swelled up, red and thick, then fell to the ground. As it fell, it changed, bursting into busy, hissing blue fire which hit the floor and scattered, wriggling through the frost like an angry worm, burrowing for the earth. Clucking under her breath, Dr Seah pulled the hat further down over Swift’s face, stood up and said, “Right, who’s been playing silly buggers with the sorcerer’s living consciousness?”

Rhys looked apologetic, Kelly beamed, Miles shrugged. And so, by a process of elimination, it fell to Sharon to say something useful.