Authors: Kate Griffin
The Glass God (36 page)
Anything and everything which hissed, glowed, tinkled or seethed with magical potential, the sisters had collected over the years, snatching traces of one thing to create another, piling their shelves high with the tools of their trade and creating in the process a veritable Manhattan Project of mystic goods. And there, at the centre of it all, wrapped up carefully in oilskin and with a paper label hanging off it, a very thin, rusted blade. A neat hand had written of it:
Handle With Care
Sharon’s eyes fell on it instantly – even in this place, it hummed with power, almost audible to her. The thing was barely a blade at all, but had over the years been honed down and down to a sharp point, which could have fitted perfectly into the end of an umbrella.
No one seemed to want to touch it.
“Okay,” said Sharon. “Sammy?”
The goblin spluttered. “What with me being so sensitive to the basic forces of the universe, you’ll understand if I don’t go around handling mystically charged objects!”
She turned to Rhys. “Rhys?”
“Oh, um, well, if you want me to touch the sacred blade of the god of the plague pits which has been used for sacrificing living people for thousands of years, then I suppose I will because someone should, but, um, if that’s what you want…”
Sharon threw her hands up in despair. “You guys are so…”
Gretel picked up the blade. For a second, the world held its breath, waiting for the troll to vanish, combust, explode or anything else which would have seemed mystically appropriate. Gretel considered the thing in her hands then said, “Is this what all the confusion has been about?”
Rhys sneezed.
“Uh… yeah, basically,” muttered Sharon. “You’re not… feeling the urge to take your shoes off, are you, Gretel?”
Gretel stared at Sharon, struggling to comprehend this new and unexpected enquiry. Then, just to confirm her own opinion, she looked down at her feet, then back up at Sharon. “But I’m not wearing any shoes, Ms Li.”
“Good point.”
“Would you like…?” She held out the blade, and the room recoiled in horror.
“No, no!” cried Sharon. “I think… I think you should definitely hold on to it! I mean, where better, in fact? Just… um. Just don’t cut yourself. Or anyone else with it, will you?”
“All right, Ms Li,” replied the troll amiably. “I wasn’t intending to anyway.”
“Shouldn’t we give it back to Crompton?” hissed Rhys in Sharon’s ear, as Gretel turned to examine the rest of the shelves. “I mean, if it
is
the blade of Old Man Bone…”
“What, so he can go around sacrificing people again?” Sharon demanded. “That kinda sounds wank.”
“But the plague pits… the foul odours… the death…?”
“I’m not saying I’ve got a better idea,” she replied. “I’m just saying we shouldn’t go rushing in with a cry of ‘whoopee human sacrifice’. Besides, we still don’t know what the fuck the blade is doing here, with the scylla sisters.”
“Maybe they stole it?”
“Yeah, because there’s nothing like three dead scyllas in Chelsea to make you think ‘case closed’.”
Rhys looked dismayed. “Oh dear. Does this mean we can’t go home yet?”
Sharon patted him on the shoulder. “I think you’ve been, like, really good, so far.”
He beamed with delight. “Thank you, Ms Li. I mean, I’m only trying to fulfil my job obligations, and of course, I’m immensely satisfied to be contributing to the wider community…”
“Oi oi, dribble-nose.”
Sammy stood in the door, holding up a small plaster slab.
“Soggy-brains!” shrilled the goblin, and this time it was a command, as much as an accusation. Sharon peered closer. The plaster slab, larger almost than the goblin’s hands, contained an indent which was, unmistakably, the same size and shape as the rusted blade now in Gretel’s hand.
Chapter 63
“Absolutely not!”
Arthur Huntley, ex-wizard and part-time scholar, stood in the doorway of the small warden’s hut in Bunhill Fields, and lectured. He lectured three people who he could see – Rhys, Sharon and Kelly, and perhaps he sensed, or at the very least smelt, the fourth and fifth, Sammy and Gretel, lurking just below perception in the shadowlands where the shaman walks.
“The idea is ridiculous!” he exploded. “Talk to Crompton; he’ll tell you!”
“Yeah, the guy who sacrifices people for an undead god?” muttered Sharon. Her nose wrinkled as she contemplated the gathering clouds overhead. They threatened rain, proper downpour rain which turned the streets into bubbling waterways and sent sheets of water pouring over the sides of bus shelters. Perhaps, she thought, it would at least help wash away the smell, which in Bunhill Fields was growing so intense it threatened to wipe away even the prevailing stench of unwashed goblin. Rotting flesh, it turned out, trumped poor bodily hygiene.
“The notion,” exclaimed Arthur, “of anyone making a
copy
of Old Man Bone’s blade is absurd.”
“Why?”
This question seemed to appal Arthur, mostly because he didn’t have an answer. He floundered for a moment, before exclaiming, “Because what would it achieve? If you copy over the enchantments from Old Man Bone’s blade to another vessel, then all you’ll do when you use it is feed more souls to Old Man Bone. So what’s the point?”
“Maybe there’s something wrong with the original blade?” offered Rhys.
“Then why was Crompton all worked up about it?” mused Sharon. “What if they altered it somehow, I mean like… what if they used the enchantment on the original blade, and copied it to a new blade, but adapted it.”
“Absurd,” insisted Arthur. “Ridiculous. Dangerous.”
“But what would it achieve? If it could be done?”
He hesitated, as the first drizzle began to slide in feathery silence from the skies. It was still early in Bunhill Fields, the traffic rushing by outside, men and women heading to work. Finally, “I don’t like to speculate.”
Sharon sighed. Magicians, she was beginning to suspect, were as petty and prideful as university scholars when it came to their academic reputations. “Fine,” she grumbled. “We’ll ask Crompton, and maybe get Mr Roding to have a look at it.”
“It?” There was a sharpness in Arthur’s voice, an alertness that cut through the rising tap dance of the rain. “So you have the original blade?”
“Pretty much.”
“Excellent! Please, give it to Crompton at once – the stink here is becoming overwhelming.”
Sharon smiled thinly. “Yeah,” she muttered. “Kinda noticed that.”
As the rain became heavier, they huddled in a downwind doorway from Bunhill Fields. Sammy and Gretel slipped back into brief visibility, before Kelly cried, “Oh, but think of the neighbours!” at which point they vanished again, to nothing more than voices on the breeze.
“Should’ve kept the umbrella,” Sharon grumbled, as the rain began to drum on the paving stones and burst from the mouths of downpipes.
“Do you really think the sisters copied the blade?” asked Rhys. “I mean, it doesn’t seem very wise…”
“Rhys, I swear I’m working on a worst-case scenario kinda vibe here, since it seems that’s all we’re good for.”
“Ms Li.” Kelly’s voice was forthright without being overkeen; determined without being stressed. “What do you propose now?”
Sharon thought about it. “Okay, so I think it’s probably best if Gretel hangs on to the blade for now, just cos she’s got no shoes to throw over things, and she’s a seven-foot troll, and I kinda think this makes her seriously qualified. Sammy? Can you stay with Gretel, please? Just to keep an eye on the unseen stuff?”
“I am not,” grunted Sammy, “an errand goblin!”
“Yeah.” Sharon fixed her best smile on the empty space where she felt Sammy’s face most likely to be. “You’re a wise, brilliant, clever, generally groovy goblin, and I’d only trust someone as amazing as you are to keep an eye on this mega-mystic artefact with Gretel, so if you don’t mind…?”
Sammy’s silence was expressive in both its sulkiness, and consent.
“Are we going to talk to C-C-Crompton?” asked Rhys.
“Not yet. Can you get in touch with Mr Roding? Ask him to have a look at the blade, and maybe also the workshops, see if he can pick up on something we’ve missed? And maybe drop Kevin and Sally a line.”
“The… vampire?” enquired Kelly. “I mean, I don’t want to judge, of course, but perhaps…?”
“I’m just thinking ahead, which is like… managerial and that,” Sharon replied. “I’m thinking we nearly got ourselves kicked to shit last night in the workshops, and someone’s summoned a glass elemental, and maybe copied a mega-mystic blade from a mega-mystic umbrella, and this is exactly the kinda time when you wanna have a vampire, a banshee and a necromancer all on standby with a packet of digestive biscuits, a cuppa tea and a bazooka.”
“Oh!” Kelly brightened with satisfaction. “I can provide both tea and bazookas, in liberal quantities!”
Sharon’s smile didn’t falter. She had the exhausted look, Rhys mused, of a woman who was standing up only by an accident of gravitational neglect. “Well,” she said, “I’m thinking we might need lotsa both. Also, if the Aldermen can, like, go through the scylla sisters’ records and see if they can find anything which says ‘massive commission to replicate mystic artefact here’ or something, that’d be, like, totally helpful.”
“Of course. We shall go through the receipts with a fine-tooth comb. What about yourself, Ms Li?”
Sharon smiled wanly. “Well, judging by the smell round here, I’m guessing it’s time to go Midnight Mayory on this shit. Rhys?”
“Yes, Ms Li?”
“You’re with me.”
Chapter 64
Sharon stood by the churned-up graves of Bunhill Fields, and tried not to retch. On the edge of the tree-shaded graveyard – on the upwind edge – Rhys was on his mobile phone, calling up every member of Magicals Anonymous who might be useful against a rampaging glass monster, or know something about plague, or who just felt like an interesting evening out of the house/flat/lair/den, and he was trying not to look concerned. He tried not to look concerned even when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sharon crouch beside the gash of mud and broken bones torn up nearby and cautiously run her fingers through the soil, nor when she started to go invisible.
Meanwhile, Sharon whispered, “Righto, chummy, we gotta chat,” and slipped the whole way into invisibility.
The city turned to grey around her, and all things which the eye did not want to perceive were now visible. She looked down at the earth, and the dead stared right back at her. Thousands of them, piled up beneath her feet, grinning their lipless grins, flesh tunnelled by worms, bones woven together to form a pyre beneath her feet; the dead of the city, thousands of years of dead, turned in their graves, and were watching.
The air was heavy with their stench, even here, where usually everything was cold and clear and, as she moved, thin grey-green vapours stirred around her, the stinking smog of Old Man Bone, rising from the ground, imperceptible to the naked eye, but undeniable to a shaman’s gaze.
“Right,” she murmured, as flesh shifted beneath her feet. “Okay.” Then she raised her voice. “Oi! Old Man Bone! We kinda gotta have a talk!”
Her voice fell away.
She cleared her throat, got a pungent whiff of the dead, and regretted it. “Seriously, Old Man Bone, I get that you’re annoyed, but there’s other shit going down here. And I know it’s not fair for you to have to take some of the crap for that, but in these difficult times we all gotta pull together, so if you could, like, hold off on the unleashing of the plague pits and that, it’d be totally amazing of you.”
Beneath her feet, bone creaked, and those few faces of the dead that had eyes left in their sockets stared at her in eyelidless surprise. Sharon sighed. “Oh yeah,” she went on, “I think, like, someone’s copied your sacred blade and is feeding on the power which should sustain you.”
Something moved beneath her feet, the ground shifting. Skulls twisted aside, ancient brown ribcages split like twigs, soil broke and spluttered black clouds upwards, great plumes of stinking fog rose like geysers from the earth and all at once he was there, bursting from the ground like oil from the well, vapours spinning around him, off him out of his ragged clothes, his tendon-tight skin rippling into place over his hunched old bones, his bare toes digging into the grime of rotting flesh and dirt beneath his feet. He burst out right in front of Sharon, splattering her with mud and she dared not think what else, and in the spirit walk he was blazing with fury, rolling clouds of stench and dirt spiralling round him like a whirlwind that lashed and twisted his ragged clothes with every word as he snarled, he roared,
“THEY WOULD NOT DARE!”
Sharon waited for the noise to pass. Then, unable to stop herself, she coughed, the cough of someone whose nose had been assaulted too recently by too much, and who, having no “off” switch for smell, was falling back on mere exhalation. “Sorry,” she spluttered, flapping ineffectually at the vapours wreathing round her head, even as Old Man Bone creaked and twisted before her, the grey boundaries of reality rippling before the might of his indignation. “Totally unprofessional moment here…”
She fumbled for a tissue, and spat into it; then muttered, “Uch. That was, like, totally useless.” Old Man Bone, incredulous, billowed before her, flesh knitting and unknitting in uncertainty as his rage tore at the air. Sharon folded the tissue, put it in her pocket, smiled up wanly at the raging creature and said, “Hi again. So, um, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, what with being… you know… busy and that, but everything’s kinda gone to crap and I really, really would be sooooo grateful if you didn’t unleash plague on the streets for a little bit longer, you know?”
It wasn’t often that a living essence of the buried dead could be surprised, but Old Man Bone now seemed to show symptoms. The clouds of stench which tore the air around him seemed to diminish, and his jaundiced yellow eyes, rolling in his withered skull, twisted from side to side before settling back on Sharon, as if he just needed to check that his own senses weren’t playing some hideous trick.
