The Glass God (35 page)

Gretel the gourmet troll, for whom the diet of old cheeseburgers and undercooked rat was no longer quite good enough, sat on a chair which could barely accommodate her bulk, held cutlery between her fingers like a toothpick in a titan’s hand, and tried her very best not to splatter fresh yoghurt up the walls as she ate. Sharon was, to her mild embarrassment, the last to arrive at the breakfast table, which, besides the troll and the goblin, consisted of Rhys, Kelly and two other Aldermen she didn’t recognise, but who seemed determined to minute everything that was said and quite possibly every cup of coffee that was drunk, on little laptops balanced on their knees.

“Hi, there!”

Kelly Shiring gleamed with hearty good-morning vibes as Sharon took her place at table. “Good morning, good morning,” she added, impaling a piece of watermelon on her fork, and waving it in greeting. “Please, tuck in!”

Sharon cautiously did so. Rhys was already on his second dish of scrambled eggs, and showed no sign of slowing for the corners. Sammy had managed to steal three tubes of toothpaste since arriving in the hotel, and was now carefully sampling each one on the end of his tongue. Gretel was seeing if green grapes and bacon worked together as a combination, and, by the expression on her face, was making as thorough a mental note of the outcome as the two Aldermen with their laptops.

“You’ll be thrilled to know,” Kelly explained as Sharon hungrily speared a sausage, “that we’ve sent a team to seal off Scylla Workshops and, on inspection, there have been no sightings of… how did you describe it, Rhys?”

“A great big glowing glass monster?” suggested the druid.

“Exactly! Of a great big glowing glass monster.”

“It’s gone?” queried Sharon, wondering if it was okay for senior management to talk and eat at the same time.

“It’s gone!” concurred Kelly. “Although when I say ‘gone’ I have no doubt that it will reappear in suitably frustrated and furious form at some point yet to come. But for now, I think we can all feel very satisfied.”

“But… it
killed
the scylla sisters.”

“Yes, that is very sad. We do have a team arranging a suitable burial and flowers, don’t we?” she added, turning to the two Aldermen with their laptops. A brisk nod was all the reply she received.

“How’s Miles?”

Kelly’s smile didn’t alter, so much as lock into place. “He’s fine,” she said. “He’s going to be in a cast for a while, and I don’t think he’s going to be helping with the investigation for a little, but he’s fine. He’ll be… fine.”

She added, “I’m sure everyone will be delighted to hear that Mr Swift – or what’s left of him – hasn’t destroyed anything organic in the last few hours, although we have had a few complaints about noise pollution. So all that’s left is the decontamination of the workshop facility and a consideration of our next plan of action.”

There was a silence. It was the busy silence of people chewing their food in the hope that this would be contribution enough. Then Rhys raised a hand. “Um, excuse me?”

“Of course!”

“I know I’m only an IT manager,” he said, “but there’s something about people all in black saying decontamination, see, which really makes my nose itch.”

“Actually,” mumbled Sharon, through a mouthful of toast, “I’m kinda with Rhys on this one. It’s like when people say ‘terminated’ and they mean ‘dead’, or ‘on leave’ and they mean ‘fired’, and that.”

“Oh no!” exclaimed Kelly. “Absolutely not! I mean, there’s a whole volume, isn’t there, on the value or otherwise of these politically correct phrases – I, for example, would far rather discuss vampires
passing on
instead of being staked through the heart with a sharpened stick, as it just gives such a negative spin on proceedings. But when I say decontaminate in this context, what I mean is that the workshops are such a den of mystic afterglow, we’ll be lucky if there aren’t twelve-foot-long sewer worms evolving beneath it as we speak!”

Sharon whimpered, “Twelve-foot-long sewer worms?”

Sammy kicked her under the table. “Don’t be thick! Obviously, twelve-foot-long sewer worms! Don’t show me up by being a pink squishy ignorant nit!”

Sharon’s expression of disgust dissolved into one of displeasure. “If I don’t know important stuff,” she said, “it’s because you haven’t taught it to me yet! Don’t go round blaming
me
for being ignorant!”

“I hadn’t heard of sewer worms either,” offered Rhys. “But I’m sure they’re quite rare, aren’t they?”

“Oh yes!” exclaimed Kelly. “Well, quite! Well, in some places!”

In the silence that followed, the goblin glared at Sharon, Sharon glared at Sammy, Rhys kept his head down and Gretel politely paused in eating. Kelly cleared her throat, and added, “Let’s think of the decontamination as merely an aside, shall we? Perhaps if we focus on…⁠”

“Actually,” said Sammy, smearing toothpaste onto the palm of his hand, ready to be licked clean by his great grey tongue, “I think decontaminating the workshops is really thick. Just saying.”

“Do you, Mr Elbow?” Kelly’s look was as earnest as ever. “Of course, your insight is always welcome at this table!”

“Just saying, shamans – even marshmallow-brains over there,” another kick at Sharon’s shins, “aren’t so hot at seeing shit once you’ve gone and decontaminated a thingy. You wanna leave it all messy and raw, then we can go in there, see stuff you’re all too pig-stupid to pick up on, solve everythin’ and bugger off home again, proper professional like.”

Kelly’s eyes drifted from Sammy, to the rather more reassuring face of Sharon. Sharon shrugged. “Look,” she said, “it’s not like I was given many options when it came to picking my mentor, okay? And, I’m not gonna lie here, it would’ve been nice to have someone tall, handsome, maybe just a little bit rugged, who could’ve come and swept me off my feet while saying, ‘Hey there, Sharon, you’re, like, totally a shaman, let’s get it on’ or something. Which isn’t to say… point is… Sammy may be small, and smelly, and have the manners of a verruca, but he is usually right about this magic shit.”

Kelly’s smile could have guided a lost ship home on a stormy night. “Fantastic! Then I guess we hold off on the decontamination, and go for shaman power instead! More melon, anybody?”

Chapter 62

Time Stands Still for No Man

The sun crawls up over London, and in a basement deep beneath an office in the Golden Mile, a no-longer-man lies on the floor and dreams of…

we we we we we we we beeeeeee
 

beeeee
 

beeee weeeee
 

weeeee beeeeeee
 

free?
 

No. Not quite right. Not any more. It had been true once, but now, in this place, suffocating under the weight of painted magics, drowning on the floor, it is something else, it is, it
is…

weeeee beeeeeeeeeeee
 

trapped?

burning?

breaking apart?

Dying.

It is not a fit concept for a god, and so they do not name it. But that is what it is, what will come, if only they had the humanity left inside them to comprehend it.

And on the edge of the old plague pits of Bunhill Fields, Arthur Huntley, sometime wizard, turned gravekeeper, stands with his scarf tied over his nose and mouth and looks down at the freshly turned earth in which the white bones are beginning to pop out from the tattered, stinking soil, and half imagines he can see the thousand writhing microbes of the bubonic plague as it wriggles out from the rotted flesh of its victims, buried so long ago, and wonders, if he was a shaman, and into that thing, whether he would hear the racing heart of Old Man Bone as he stirs beneath the soil and whispers, and roars…

GIVE ME WHAT I’M OWED!!
 

And in a telephone exchange in Zambia, a line clicks and a string of words flickers across a screen, on their way to somewhere else.

help me help me help me help me help me
 

Simultaneously, a lawyer in New York City is surprised to receive a text message which cries out from an unknown number in a far-off land

help me!
 

while a computer server in New Delhi tries, and fails, to block a firewall intrusion that briefly turns all the screens in the office black, then blue, then bursts the glass from the inside out, on its way to somewhere else.

This disruption, this global decay, has been going on for several days now. If anyone had bothered to monitor it, they would have considered it a curious example of the pervasive, global nature of telecommunications and the errors, the rogue signals, which can sometimes be produced. However, owing to the very same global nature of the network, no one does, and so no one did.

If someone had, they might have also been interested to notice that the signal was getting weaker.

And in World’s End, in fact nothing more nor less than an unremarked corner of zone two of the London transport network, Sharon Li stood once more outside Scylla Workshops in the hard light of day, and reminded herself that just because her last encounter with the place had ended in broken glass and blood, that didn’t mean today would go the same way.

The reassuring bulk of Gretel loomed behind her, and Sharon wondered at what point in her career the presence of a troll had become a comfort. She took a deep breath, and strode forward, down into the gloom of the workshop.

Aldermen were everywhere, many of them prominently armed. Sharon wasn’t sure what good their weapons would do, should the glass man choose to return. But then, as Kelly had pointed out…

“If this glass monster is able to destroy
all of us
as well as your good self, Ms Li, then frankly there’s nothing to be done and we may as well not worry about it! Isn’t that a comforting notion?”

At the shaman’s side, Sammy now grumbled and sniffed. “Enchanters. Never tidy their auras up afterwards, amateur wankers.”

Sharon sighed. The bodies of the three scylla sisters had been removed, tidied away to who knew what fate. She hoped it was a good one, nothing medical, maybe a nice plot, or, rather, three plots, all together, with flowers. “All right, Sammy,” she said. “Whatcha see?”

“Enchantment enchantment enchantment wank,” he tutted, knocking against tables and scorning apparatus as they made their way through the bowels of the workshop. “This is interesting, though.” They’d come to a wall, where a blast from the glass man’s lungs had left shards embedded in the very stones. Sammy picked at one, muttering, “Magic magic magic spell spell glass glass glass ow!”

He snatched his finger back. A tiny bead of blood welled up at the end. “Bloody monsters and their bloody weapons of destruction! Tossers!”

“When I looked at the glass man in the spirit walk,” explained Sharon, patiently handing the goblin a tissue, “he looked like a girl.”

“Yeah,” sighed Sammy. “Elemental construct like that’d probably take the shape of the thing what feeds it.”

“Elemental construct… and feeding it? I mean, there’s a ‘what the fuck’ at the start of that, but I figured you’d know that.”

Sammy gave a sigh of exasperation. “Don’t talk so loud,” he hissed. “I don’t want everyone else knowing how pig-ignorant my student is;
mine
! People’ll think I’m no good!”

Sharon glanced over her shoulder at where Gretel was doing her best not to look like an overly interested bodyguard. She lowered her voice and her posture to a more convenient level for the goblin and hissed, “Okay. So tell me.”

“Thing what attacked you,” grumbled Sammy. “Made of glass, kinda unstoppable, force of deadly death and that?”

“Yessss…⁠”

“Glass elemental. Summoned thingy, like tossers sometimes summon neon elementals or copper elementals or that shit. Glass is tricky to summon, I mean, to summon it right that is. Needs a lot to fuel it, to keep it moving, keep it ticking over.”

“To feed it?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m guessing we’re not talking lamb bhuna and a coupla poppadoms?”

Sammy glowered. “You ask thick questions because you know the answer, right, but are just hoping you’re wrong, yeah? I mean, you’re not
actually
thick, are you, it’s just this stupid human thing, yeah?”

Sharon’s smile was old and worn out. “You’re the knower of the truth, Sammy.”

He grunted, then said, “The feeding it. Yeah, you gotta feed an elemental to keep it alive. Neon elemental you gotta feed with light; copper you feed with electricity; but glass elemental… glass elemental is kinda tricky. Gotta feed it with something better, something bigger.”

“Like…⁠?”

“Bit of this, bit of that. Touch of blood, years of life, dollop of mortal bodily strength, you know. Depends on the binding, innit. What you’re seein’ – this girl you thought you seen in the spirit walk…⁠”

“I did see her, she was there.”

“Yeah, whatever. You probably saw the bird what’s feedin’ this thing. Givin’ it her life, so as it can live. Nasty wizarding stuff, very shoddy, but I never got the human thing anyway.”

“So the creature’s being controlled?”

“Duh. You’re tired, right, not thick?”

“I am,” she agreed. “Very, very tired.”

“You gotta look out for that. Easy to cock up when knackered.”

“Thank you, Sammy.”

“I’m here to mentor and shit.”

“Ms Li?” The voice came from Rhys, and it came from above. “Ms Li, I think you should look at this!”

Rhys was waiting at the very top of the stairs. A door, which in all the excitement of the night before Sharon hadn’t even noticed, stood ajar in what she supposed had to be called the ceiling of the cavern. “Ms Li,” the druid exclaimed. “You have to see this!”

Sharon followed him through the door. Beyond was an office like any other, but at its far end a pair of enterprising Aldermen had pulled open a heavy door, metal, thicker than her bedroom wall. The wards that had guarded it were still fizzing angrily around the hinges and lock. Beyond the door was what could only be termed a vault.

Shelves lined every wall, ten rows high. On some were ledgers, records, notes of monies received and spent, ranging from commissions for crafting items of great power, through to last week’s receipt from the grocery order delivered to their door; for the scylla sisters were hardly great attendees at the local supermarket. Beyond that, the shelves sagged under the weight of what could only be magical artefacts. There, a jar containing the stolen light snatched from the dying embers of the last gas lamp to go out; here, a pot of living, writhing coal dust seized from the chimney stacks where the flames had fanned the dirt into a living curse. There, a penknife whose blade had been anointed with the blood of the albino pigeon, whose very sight induced terror in its enemies. The gutted remains of an ancient piano, whose strings, bound up carefully in a padded box, still sung the tunes from the old music halls. The collapsed fender of a car which struck the acrylic-painted flank of a unicorn as it crossed the road, and whose driver died from the dehydration induced by his own tears. The black wing of a raven from the Tower, still beating against the glass that held it, though no body was attached. The torn-off claw from a wendigo: Sharon briefly wondered, which wendigo, how fresh the claw? A few fibres from a pinstripe suit once worn by the Death of Cities, before he dissolved into the single parking penalty notice, kept beneath three layers of lead and two of magic at the very back of the very highest shelf. The ground-up grains of devil’s blood, hissing against the white ceramic that held it; the ring that had been pulled from the finger of a dead sorcerer who’d been flung from the top of a tower off Tottenham Court Road; a tiny shimmer of yellow fairy dust, which stirred against the glass and whispered,
alive…