The Glass God (33 page)

Sharon moved forward, the metal stair ringing loudly beneath her feet, the first gantry swaying ever so slightly as she stepped onto it. The shadows of this place were full of echoes, almost strong enough to be visible. The flash of a crowbar as it struck the floor, discharging the spell which had run out of all control within the tortured metal. The smash of glass as a beaker exploded, spilling out still-burning oil which rippled into the grinning features of a petrol elemental who leered and spat before worming his way into freedom. The slither of great bloated bodies, supported on huge tentacles that sucked and clung to the chains strung between the room, as three scylla sisters cracked jokes about cracking bones, and cackled together as they worked.

Something else, too.

Half listen and there it is, the tiny, almost imperceptible
chink, chink, chink
, as of glass still falling. Not then, not even in the near future, but
now
.

Sharon rounded the table and there she lay, a scylla, tentacle-legs spilt around her like the shawl of a skirt, great bloated belly and chest flattened by their own weight as they lay across the floor, grey skin of scales encrusted with mineral growths and fungal crustations, dull and matt in the dim light. She’d fallen on her side, eyes open, jaw apart, her hairless head resting on the metal floor, but her face, tiny above the swollen mounds of her body, was human, old, lined with frowns and laughter, and her blood, where it dripped through the grating beneath her, was crimson-black.

Miles, Sharon noticed, was growing talons at his fingers’ ends; she herself felt a sudden chill from the white and red badge in her pocket, and the burns still smarting on her bandaged hand. Rhys was turning his packet of antihistamines over and over, his feet tapping with sudden nervous energy. Sharon stepped between the splayed tentacles of the scylla, and peered closer at her flesh. Somewhere overhead, glass tinkled in the gloom; a chain swayed from side to side.

Something glimmered in the scylla’s neck. Sharon reached down and eased it out. A shard of glass shimmered in her palm, the blood still bright and wet; and as her fingers ran along the cold surface there was,

FATHER!!!
 

The scream came so loud and suddenly in her mind that she dropped the piece of glass. It tumbled through the grate beneath her feet, bouncing and spinning its way down until, several floors below, it hit a metal table and shattered into dust.

Metal still swayed in the gloom. There were shadows overhead, above the bulbs that illuminated the workshops. Deep shadows that ran into jagged lines across the ceiling, among gantries where the lights hadn’t been turned on. Or couldn’t be turned on. Sharon stared up at them, looking for a shimmer of something, a hint of…

“Ms Li!” Rhys’s voice, sharp and urgent. He was at the foot of the stairs down from the gantry where she stood, pointing. Two floors below, just visible through the grating, two more bodies lay, one on its back, the blood from its sister above dripping onto its belly; beside was another, face-down.

One of the sisters was still moving.

They clattered downstairs, Miles’s skin casting a silver gleam. The two scyllas between them occupied nearly all the gantry, a mess of tentacles and swollen, crusted flesh. They had managed to twine their tiny stunted fingers into each other’s hand, and lay there side by side, the barely living and the dead. Blood was everywhere, and on the back of the sister who had died, Sharon saw, through the welling blood and lacerated flesh, the glimmer of more glass. She tried to focus on the faces, saw a far younger sister, the mirror of her deceased siblings, staring up at her. Glass was lodged in the scylla’s chest, in her throat; tiny embedded fragments glinted in her cheeks. Her breath came in great shudders which rolled through all her body. Sharon knelt beside her and whispered, “It’s okay, we’re here, we’ll help. Miles!”

Miles was already fumbling for his mobile phone. “I’m calling Dr Seah.”

The scylla’s eyes were wide, her nostrils flaring. She tried to speak, and blood burst around the wound in her neck. Sharon looked desperately along the scylla’s body, searching for somewhere obvious to begin, some wound that was worse than the others which she could treat. To her surprise, she found Rhys kneeling beside her. He reached out, and took the scylla’s hand. “Hi,” he whispered. “I’m almost a druid of the first circle. May I take away your pain?”

The scylla gave a slight nod, and even that caused her face to contract, her breath to heave, her body to ripple with exertion. Rhys half closed his eyes, and breathed out slowly. As he did, it seemed that the creature herself also began to exhale, to deflate, just a bit more than the requirements of normal breath. Sharon glanced down at the druid’s hands and saw the tiny white plastic of the antihistamines packet between his fingers. Two pills were missing.

“There,” murmured Rhys. “Nothing to be worried about.”

“Dr Seah is on her way.” Miles’s voice overhead was hard and worried. Something tinkled onto metal in the roof. The scylla’s eyes snapped upwards at the sound.

“A doctor’s coming,” breathed Sharon. “You’ll be okay.”

A tiny twist of the neck, a tightening of the fingers held in Rhys’s hands. “No… Life…⁠” Her voice was soft, warm; surprisingly light, coming from such a giant creature.

“Don’t be daft, of course you’ll live.”

“No… life! Without my sisters.”

“What happened here? Who attacked you?”

“We made…⁠”

“Yes?”

“We made him.”

“You made who?”

The scylla’s face tightened. Her breath was a high-pitched wheeze. “We kept!” she managed. “Kept it! Lied to them, kept it!”

“What did you make?” breathed Sharon.

“We made…
him
.”

A swaying of chain, a tinkling of glass, closer now, it seemed; a breath of a breeze that should not have been.

“We made… god.”

Something overhead went,
ting
!

The note was high and clear. It hummed away through the metalwork of the cavern. Sharon looked up, and something was looking back down at her. Something translucent, that shimmered in the night. Something which twisted, and turned, and had two bottle-green eyes, and fingers that clattered over each other as they flexed. Something alive.

For a second, she looked at it, and it looked at her, and neither moved. Then it turned its head, raised its back and burst into brilliant light.

“Run!” yelled Sharon. Leaping up, she dived straight into the grey embraces of the shadow walk. Miles was already turning silver-grey, the metal skin spilling across his body, black talons growing at his fingers’ ends, ears drawing back, carbon smoke beginning to twist from his nostrils as, overhead, the creature raised itself on all fours, curved its back like a cat, and dropped.

It dropped down, straight through the grating, its body shattering into a thousand parts to fit through the holes, then coalescing back together as it landed, almost too fast to see. And its body was glass, and its head was glass, and its fingers were three pieces of curved crystal glass that slotted over each other like the armour of a knight’s gauntlet, and its heart was blazing light and its eyes were green and shimmering like emeralds, and as it reassembled itself on the gantry before them, it opened its arms wide, like a welcoming mother, and roared.

Sharon dived down beneath the nearest table top as a torrent of shattered crystal glass erupted from the creature’s belly and burst from its parted lips. It tore through the air above her, slamming thousands of bright splinters into the wall at her back. She raised her head and saw the light churn and twist in its middle as it opened its mouth again, and it occurred to her that invisibility wasn’t the same as invulnerability.

Then something hot and metal leapt onto the creature’s back, and tore at its face and neck with black talons and teeth, legs wrapped around its midriff as it bit and slashed and screamed. Somewhere beneath the spell, Sharon thought she saw the shape of Miles as he clung to the creature’s back, but for all that he scratched and pounded and tore, the glass bones of the creature remained smooth, polished and bright, its attacker’s claws sliding off like a sponge over stainless steel.

The creature turned on the spot a few times, bewildered by this half-dragon assailant on its back, then seemed to grow bored, and shrugged. The shrug sent Miles backwards, with his legs and arms flailing. Slamming shoulders-first into the opposite wall, he tumbled head downwards, onto the floor below. He landed with a crack, and stayed there, motionless.

The creature turned to Sharon. Though she was still in the shadows, it saw her, as clearly as she saw it. She gasped and dived deeper, scrambling away into the depths of the spirit walk, where the ghosts of the dead scyllas writhed and twitched around her, where the shadows of enchantments made and spells gone awry burst and popped in the air like myriad fireworks and here –

– here the glass creature blazed all the brighter, a lighthouse pushing back the dark, too bright to look at; as bright, perhaps, as the blue electric angels, except –

except
here, when she looked, the body, which was evidently that of a man, here seemed to be that of a woman. And the light that consumed it wasn’t so much light, as fire.

Then the creature opened its mouth, and the light in its belly twisted and rose upwards into a cloud of glass. Sharon gasped, and seeing nothing to hide behind, dropped.

She dropped straight through the gantry beneath her, as if it wasn’t there, and landed one floor below, flopping clumsily onto her hands and knees while reality wobbled around her, trying to work out if it was really up for all of this. She looked to one side and saw Miles sprawled at the bottom of the staircase, the dragon-skin retracted from his bones, eyes shut, a leg splayed out at the wrong angle.

Rhys was there, too, by the Alderman’s side, having scrambled down a floor during the melee. He looked straight through Sharon, unable to perceive her, and then up, to where he very much could perceive the monster as its body split again into a thousand parts which rained down through the grating. It reassembled into its perfect, smooth glass body on the floor below, and straightened up to glare at Sharon.

She turned, looking for a way out, a wall to run through, and, as she did, Rhys straightened up, a confused look on his face. “Rhys!” she shouted, and for the first time, he too could see her.

“Ms Li?”

Then the glass creature opened its mouth and the air filled with razored raindrops, and there was no way to hide, and no time to hide, and no place, and there was…

“Um, now, this is rather awkward.”

Sharon turned. Rhys stood between her and the creature, his hands raised, and he wasn’t sneezing, wasn’t coughing, wasn’t snotty, but had before him a thin grey wall of liquid writhing concrete which had sprung from his fingers like a shield, deflecting the blizzard of glass to either side.

“The thing is, Ms Li,” he explained, as the creature snarled and drew itself back for another blast, “antihistamines are wonderful things, but they do make me drowsy…⁠”

This time, the force of glass against his concrete shield was hard enough to send him staggering back, his feet scrambling for purchase on the floor. Sharon slipped into visibility behind him, hissed, “Move towards Miles!”

“I’ll certainly try, Ms Li.” The glass creature hissed in frustration, and raised its hands in a gesture that, Sharon felt, could only result in bad news. The temperature in the room began to drop, and ripples ran through the monster’s skin as the solid glass of its flesh began to liquefy, now bound together only by its own viscous weight. Shards of glass began to detach from it and rise, spiralling upwards to form a cocoon whose motion grew faster, and faster. Sharon grabbed the unconscious Miles by the arm, and Rhys by the sleeve.

The spinning mass of glass had grown so dense, she couldn’t even see the figure behind it, could barely hear above its furious gnat-jangle of noise.

“Deep breath!” she exclaimed, and with a desperate gulp of air she pulled the two others through the nearest wall.

Chapter 56

Be Grateful for the Luck You’re Given

Thickness.

Weight.

Depth.

A moment – a brief, eternal moment, as the air began to run out and the weight of reality closed in – when Sharon wondered if this was it, this was the wall too far, a wall that was in fact nothing more and nothing less than a sidestep into the earth’s crust itself, where they would be crushed and buried, lost and out of sight for the rest of time.

Release.

It came, cold and sudden. She fell forward onto the damp ground, gasping for air as Rhys and Miles flopped down beside her. They were in darkness, black and unbroken. But the sound of her breath was hollow and the air was damp and frozen. She felt stones beneath her feet, thick and dirty, smelt ancient black dust, and, as she reached out tentatively to either side, her fingers brushed something metal. Smooth on top, rusted beneath. She ran her palm over the shape of it, and jerked her hand back with a gasp.

“Bloody hell!”

Her voice whispered back at her,
bloody hell, bloody hell, bloody hell
, as it raced away down the tunnel.

A flicker of tungsten-yellow light burst from Rhys’s palm, faint and unsure of itself. He laid it to the surface of the metal thing, which burst with dull yellow light along its length, describing a straight bright line, off in either direction into the dark. Then he yawned, and gasped, “I’m so sorry, Ms Li!”

Sharon climbed to her feet, and stared down the tunnel. Contrary to her fears, there was no live rail on which she might have put her fingers, but, rather, a single track running between ancient, crusty brickwork. “It’s okay, Rhys,” she murmured. “You can’t help it, if you’ve had your antihistamines.”

He yawned again, managing both to expand his jaw and collapse his face in shame.

“How’s Miles?” she asked.

Rhys crawled over to the unconscious Alderman. “Um… I think his leg is broken, Ms Li.”