The Glass God (37 page)

Sharon’s smile grew a little wider, and a lot thinner. “Is that all sorta… okay by you?”

“What… are you?” His words were a bare hiss on the air, a rattle of thin tongue across bony jaw.

“Me? I’m a community support officer.”

“You dare to…⁠”

Sharon raised a finger, and waggled it. “I’m also deputy Midnight Mayor,” she added. “Which I only mention because sometimes you gotta throw these things out there, even though, personally, I think you should respect me for me, rather than for what I do. And I’m not saying it in a kinda ‘I’m deputy Midnight Mayor so don’t fuck with me’ kinda way, because you’re like a raging undead monster thingy, and I’m, like… you know… not… which isn’t to say I judge, but I just mention it so you get that when I say please don’t fuck around with this plague thing for just a little while longer, I’m asking you on behalf of lotsa seriously concerned dudes who’ve got access to the bigger picture and that, rather than just as some random shaman who thought she’d stop by for a chat, because that’d be kinda weird, really, even though I know I said you should respect the individual, but, seriously, there’s conventions, you know?” She sighed again, shoulders sagging a little under the burden of society and all its foibles. “So, yeah. Basically, if you could gimme a bit more time to get the real Midnight Mayor back, and sort out all this crap, that’d be, like, amazing, and I’d really appreciate it, I mean, me
and
the city and that, if you see what I’m saying?”

Was it possible to surprise a god into submission?

Old Man Bone stood on the torn earth of the graveyard, his rags swirling around him, fingers curled up in rage, ready to strike, and then, at once, seemed to sink. His head sunk down, his shoulders sagged, his knees bent, and the earth opened up beneath him, beginning to suck him down again into its bone-latticed depths. His voice drifted up, though his eyes did not, as he descended.

“You have two days. Then I’ll have your shoes.”

The ground closed over him, and swallowed him down.

Chapter 65

Make Sure You’re on the Same Page

Three hours, one shower and two doughnuts later, and Sharon sat with her feet up on Miles’s perfect desk, drinking coffee and proclaiming, “You know, this would all be so much easier if we could just convince the primal forces of nature to get over their cryptic ego stuff and talk to people using reasonable language that everyone could understand.”

“Yes, Ms Li.”

“I mean, I get that if you’re, like, thousands of years old, you’ve probably earned the right to say what you want, how you want to, but this automatic resorting to threat and unleashing the pits of hell upon the earth is just such an overreaction. Whatever happened to the middle ground? Start with a stiff letter of complaint, then build up to the dead walking, that’s all I’m saying.”

“Yes, Ms Li.”

Sharon glanced over the rim of her coffee mug, to where Rhys was sitting on the floor, methodically going through reams of paperwork shipped over from the Scylla Workshops, with all the furrowed-brow determination of a mole in a wet field.

“Rhys,” she said. “How long have you been looking at the scyllas’ receipts?”

“Um… I don’t know, Ms Li.”

“But it’s been a while, right?”

“I think so, Ms Li.”

“You know there’s… Aldermen who are professionally trained in this stuff? I mean, who are all, like, ‘we’re qualified and tough and brave’ and that.”

“Y-yes, Ms Li. But… you’re management, and I’m only IT support. Besides,” he insisted, “the fate of the city is at stake, and I really feel that sort of thing is important.”

Sharon deflated, back into her chair. “Yeah,” she muttered. “But you can’t be saving the city all the time, can you?”

“You can try,” he replied with the firm tone of the righteous.

Sharon scowled. As a senior management figure, she was entirely in favour of striving for the good of all. However, she couldn’t but feel that when it came to project “save the city”, there was a serious need for diversification of roles.

On the floor, Rhys kept on patiently going through the scyllas’ receipts. Being a scylla, he concluded, wasn’t just socially challenging, it was also practically demanding. Tailoring, for example, was a significant cost, as was the electricity bill for refrigerating an intimidating amount of raw meat. Professionally, the workshop also seemed to involve a lot of wining and dining for customers; champagne and canapés for visiting important guests, and a rolling series of receptionists who didn’t mind an eclectic clientele and unusual hours. Enchantment materials were carefully registered and the receipts for their purchase logged for VAT purposes; letters from the local bank informing the sisters that an ISA was due to mature had been marked with “check the allowance” while another from the council reporting that a new parking regime was about to come into force had been annotated neatly with “what about client vehicles?” The sisters were, in short, running a business like any other; it was merely that their business involved the manufacturing and, possibly, replication of mystic artefacts.

And then, without any warning, Rhys said, “Oh look. That’s… odd.”

Sharon opened one eye, then the other, and realised she hadn’t noticed when they’d closed. “Uh?”

He held up a card. It was small, yellow, and proclaimed in bright orange lettering –

Get Your Perfect Tan Today – Bring A Friend And Get 20% Off Your Treatment!
 

“Okay,” said Sharon carefully. “So the sisters were big on tanning?”

“I don’t know,” said the druid. “I didn’t think they looked very tanned, did you?”

Sharon took the card from Rhys’s hand, and for a moment there was

can we make this quick?
 

an impression of heat and light and fear,

which passed as her fingers tightened over the cardboard. “I dunno,” she murmured. “As triumphant leads go, I’m not sure if this is really it.”

“But… we followed the lead of an umbrella with no end on, didn’t we?” Rhys ventured. “And that revealed an ancient undead waking god? And we followed a lead of shoes-over-things, and of a map on a mobile phone, and of blood going into a sewer, and that all went very well, I thought. I mean, not well, exactly, but it made progress, didn’t it? And maybe this is something else, I mean, something else we can use, like another… c-c-c-c-clue?” Even as he stuttered over this last word, he recalled just how little he’d enjoyed pursuing all the other clues they’d encountered so far.

Sharon hesitated. Then she shrugged, and reached for Miles’s phone in a corner perfectly squared off on his immaculate desk, and dialled the number on the back of the card.

A voice sang out, “Sunrise Spa and Tanning, how can we help you today?”

It had a professional cheerfulness, a vibrant, eager-to-serve quality that Sharon automatically associated with expense. “Yeah, hi,” she said. “My name’s Sharon. I’m with… the community support service. I was wondering if I could ask you a couple of questions?”

“Is this a professional or a personal call?”

“Uh… professional?”

“Please hold while I transfer you to the manager. Thank you!” The high, upbeat voice was replaced by the sound of water tinkling over doubtless serene rocks beneath a glorious sky.

Sharon glanced over at Rhys. “They’re playing soothing sound effects at me,” she hissed; “it’s kinda getting me down.”

Before Rhys could respond, someone else picked up the line. This voice was male, business-like; concerned to please but in no great hurry to indulge. “Hello, this is Barry, can I help you?”

“Hi there,” she sang out, trying to raise her spirits to something matching the voice on the other end of the line. “My name’s Sharon Li, I’m with the community support service, do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”

“Of course, we’re always happy to help local government.”

“Great. So you, uh… you run a tanning booth, is that right?”

“Sunrise Spa and Tanning,” corrected Barry, in the tone of an artist slightly annoyed at not being recognised as such, “is a relaxation and therapy spa catering to all the needs of its exclusive clientele.”

“Great! And are you, uh… do you cater to a cross-section of the community? Like, diversity and that?”

There was a pause as the manager considered the notion of “diversity and that”. Finally, “We have a wide range of clients with varied needs. If you’re asking whether there is any sort of ethnic or religious discrimination, then of course I’d have to tell you absolutely not – have there been complaints?”

“Complaints? No, no. Just checking up on that sorta thing. So you don’t mind where a client comes from?”

“Not at all.”

“Do you have… any disabled clients?”

“One or two.”

“How about… difficult clients?”

“I suppose it depends what you mean by difficult.”

Sharon gave up. “Look, this is gonna sound a bit out there, just stick with me, okay. You haven’t given tans to three scyllas recently?”

Silence.

Then, “Pardon?”

“Scyllas? You know, great big scyllas, creatures of the blackened deep, rend you limb from limb, raw blood and meat – that sorta thing?”

“I cannot say we have, no…⁠”

“Ah well. Worth a shot. Thanks for your time…⁠” Sharon moved to hang up, but Barry’s voice cut through.

“⁠… are you sure you don’t mean striga?”

Slowly, with a rising sense of doom, Sharon put the phone back to her ear.

“Come again?” she said.

Chapter 66

A Little Sunshine Will Brighten Your Day

The tanning salon was just off the Edgware Road, in that transitional world where offices with tatty ceilings were scarcely a party wall away from multi-millionaire apartments in the same grand stuccoed terraces; where squares shaded by great plane trees lay next to busy streets with every other shop selling Turkish Delight and shisha pipes, and where the bus was always late, and full when it arrived. It was a part of town where everyone was everything, and always only passing through.

For that tiny proportion of people who did put down roots in this changeable area, there was Sunrise Spa and Tanning. It, like the local NHS dentist and the neighbouring solicitor’s office, had set up shop in a converted apartment block. An unassuming brass plate by the front door was the only indication of commerce at work behind the spiked black railings that lined each neat side street.

Sharon rang the bell, and the door buzzed almost immediately, swinging back a centimetre from its magnetic lock. She looked at Rhys, Rhys shrugged, they went in. A corridor, white tiles on the floor, magnolia paint on the wall, led like any ordinary corridor in any ordinary house, past some closed doors to a flight of narrow stairs. The stairs led up past a closed sash window looking down into a flagstoned courtyard where the rubbish was put out. Round the corner of the stairs, and up again, and another magnolia corridor led to an open white door where there was music of infuriating blandness and the air smelt of eucalyptus, a breath from a celestial temple. Beyond this door stood a woman, guarding it and the sacred odours. She had short, dyed black hair, and wore a white tunic, white trousers and white shoes. She gave a thin-lipped smile as Sharon and Rhys entered, and a half-bob of the head that might, in an older time, have been a bow.

“Welcome,” she intoned, and her voice was as soothing as if gentle chimes drifted onto the scented air from a concealed speaker. “Are you here for a treatment?”

Sharon fixed her most professional smile in place. “Yeah, hi, we’re looking for Barry.”

“Of course.” The woman was somehow able to appear serene and zephyr-like, moving without seeming to lift her feet. She drifted to a desk on which sat a single purple orchid, designed perhaps to reassure the visitor that their feng had been truly shuied; and pressed an invisible button. “Mr Barry will be with you soon. May I get you a herbal tea while you wait?”

Sharon’s nose crinkled at the prospect of herbal. “Uh… thanks, no. We’ll be fine.”

The woman’s smile quivered the barest millimetre. She stayed motionless, like a heron waiting to grab a recalcitrant fish, her gaze locked on Sharon’s own: implacable, irresistible, a force of nature in white-clad form. Then, from the door on the opposite side of the room, a cheerful voice called out, “Lesley! Is that the community woman?!”

For a second, the white-clad woman’s zen faltered. Then her composure recovered, and she drifted over to the door, eased it back and breathed, “Yes, Barry. You were expecting?”

They were sent in. “In” was an office, and it was a mess. In a room barely large enough to accommodate its owner had been crammed bits of old computer, creaky filing cabinets, sagging posters, forgotten wall charts, broken lamps, legless chairs, and even a couple of calendars dating from 1999 to 2001, all stashed away with a cry of “it might come in useful… one day”. At the centre of it all, in a marvellous curvaceous chair, was Barry. His top half wore a vanilla-coloured wool jacket and open-necked blue shirt, while his bottom half was wrapped up in what Sharon supposed had to be a sarong. Pictures of swaying palm trees and still ocean waters blazed out in blues and greens from the folded fabric, while on the desk…

Sharon wanted to say that he’d “put his feet up” but to do so implied that Barry had feet to put up. Instead, where his top half was human, his bottom half was what could only be called a tail. A big, coiling tail, covered in translucent blue-black scales, which protruded out from the bottom of his sarong and wrapped itself, first round the chair, then up onto the desk itself. The end twitched gently from side to side, as a cat’s might do; but, thicker than a human thigh and longer than the length of Sharon’s own body, it was still, unmistakably, the tail of a snake.

“Hi! You must be the community support people!”

Sharon realised her mouth was hanging open and, instinctively, trod on Rhys’s foot. It seemed to that small part of her brain which was still functioning socially, that, if she was looking surprised, Rhys must be looking astonished. She managed a rictus smile.