The Glass God (42 page)

It was almost too easy, now. Before, when shifting into the shadow walk, she’d had to move physically, matching her pace with that speed at which travellers through the city all seemed to walk, that precise I-know-where-I-am walk of the commuter on a weary journey, the walk that made you invisible to the world, no more and no less than a part of the city as a whole.

But now, in the dead of night, her eyes heavy, her head sinking down, her fingers dry from too much soap to wash off too much blood, it was simple. Just a falling – that was all that was required. A falling without moving into the shadow walk, then a falling without moving into the spirit walk, and then a falling without moving and she was on the edge of the dream walk, still sitting in the chair by her desk and in this place, where all things which were true were finally evident. She looked, without much interest, and saw skin flaking off Mr Roding like snow, revealing the rotting flesh beneath, bound together by muscle fibres and runes; she saw the air ripple around the great umbrella of Sally’s wings where she hung from the rafters; and she heard the rattling on cobbled streets outside of the costermongers who had gone before, and the belching of the cars that would be tomorrow, and the whispering of the walls which had seen so many people come within their grasp to try, and fail, and pass on by, and all of it was…

… largely irrelevant at this stage in the proceedings.

She looked, without rising from her chair, and saw Sammy the Elbow, a tiny figure on the very edge of the dream walk; and in this place, with his back turned to her, she could see the shadows of his life, hovering at his back, swimming beneath his feet, a whole history spread out wide in the shadowlands of Sammy’s past: a great black horde, a whole tribe that flickered and swirled behind him, forming a cone of ghosts that rippled and swayed like a whole, living thing, avoiding his sight. Sammy had always said that a shaman needed a tribe, but had never told her what had happened to his.

Then he turned, and there was something in his hand, and the ghosts of his past shimmered away behind him, blown apart by the smallest movement. Whatever it was the goblin grasped between his tiny fingers, it was whispering, speaking, words without a language, a voice with no mouth, calling, begging, imploring, and as it whispered it dripped black drops of blood onto the ground, and every drop as it fell spread outwards and became a face, twisting its features briefly up from the paving stones, before it was swallowed whole into the earth.

Sharon rose, and walked towards the goblin’s back, until she stood almost beside him. Looking down, she saw that he held the rusted blade of Old Man Bone, its point turned towards the earth, black blood dripping off the cracked orange iron. His eyes were fixed on it – no, not quite – fixed through it, staring down at his own bare feet.

“Sammy?” murmured Sharon. The goblin didn’t stir. “Sammy?”

Nothing. His arms were shaking, which effect seemed to shake his entire body, the thin hairs quivering on the top of his head. “Sammy,” she murmured, “I think you oughtta give me the knife now.”

He turned to stare at her, and there was a look on his face that she had never seen before. If he had been human, she might have called it… sorrow? Then he grabbed her by the sleeve, raised the knife, and, point first, drew it down through the air before him. The greyness of the spirit walk seemed to crack, creating a black tear in the world, through which, before she could protest, he pulled her.

They stepped out into a street – any street in any place in the city – white terraced houses either side, shops below. The greyness of the spirit walk was still on everything they saw, but the streetlights burnt through, sodium-yellow, filling the world with their sickly colour, and lights from within the houses gave off the same dull glow. Sharon turned, taking it in slowly, then followed Sammy’s gaze upwards. Wires criss-crossed the street, where every Christmas the residents had hung fairy lights and coloured banners against the bleakness of short days and long nights. But where their purpose had been festive, now they were hung with something else entirely. Shoes, some laced, some Velcro, the straps pressed together to form a bond, dangled across the street as far as she could see, hundreds – thousands – of them. There, slung overhead, the stiff black leather shoes of an undertaker, their laces joined in a neat bow. Here, the brown loafers of a busy estate agent who never got a chance to sit down, nor ever would sit down again. There, the sensible navy shoes of the old lady who went out to get her shopping and never returned; the white sneakers from a trendy jogger caught out late at night; the fashionable branded trainers of the young man who spat in the street, and vanished. Here, the suede shoes of an off-duty constable on his way to buy milk; there the ankle-high lace-up boots of the partygoer who missed the last bus.

And more: they stretched back further, and as they zigzagged across the street, they grew older, relics of another time, hanging off ancient pieces of rope and bent branches pulled across the street. There, the shoes of the Inns of Court solicitor, disappeared in 1896, may he rest in peace; the tall boots of a highwayman, the buckles strapped one to the other; the rough, laced sandals of the night-watchman who rattled his staff to declare the hour – the shoes stretched off into the night beyond the reach of sight, a thousand years and more of empty, silent remnants left by people gone.

Sharon looked up at them, hanging like washing from a line, then down at the silent street. She expected ghosts, echoes, the shadows of those who had once inhabited them, but there was…

… nothing.

Silence.

The absolute, perpetual silence of the vanished.

Nothing but shoes remained.

Neither shaman spoke.

Then Sammy said, “I didn’t… it weren’t meant to be this many.”

Silence.

“Weren’t… meant?” Sharon’s voice was loud, painfully so, in the dead silence of the dead street. “Weren’t…
meant
?”

“The city is alive,” muttered the goblin, eyes fixed upwards at the shoes strung across the street. “It has to feed.”

He turned the blade slowly in his hands, and, yes, it was still there, the tiniest whisper, a voice that came through to the mind without bothering with the ears, which whispered,

     give me

          give me

               give me

                    give me

                         what I’m owed!

Sharon looked away. “I don’t think I want this any more,” she murmured. “I don’t think… I want to know.”

Sammy grunted. “Tough. Coward’s way that is, not knowing. You know, and it’s proper that you know, because knowing is… is what’s left. Someone’s gotta know, someone’s gotta care, no damn reason why that ain’t you. Gotta be done. Gotta be a truth, and it’s gotta be known. You’re a shaman. Deal with it.”

“How? How’d you deal with it and be…?⁠” She hesitated. Then, “I killed a striga.”

“She gonna hurt you?”

“Yes…⁠”

“Then you did what you had to do.”

“She was… nice. She was… like me.”

“You mean to kill her?”

“No – no. I swear, I didn’t, I didn’t mean…⁠”

“Deal with it.”

“I don’t think I know what that means.”

“Cos it means nothing. Ain’t an easy way to deal with it, ain’t no map or nice book or any of that shit that tells you what you gotta do. You just gotta do it. Whatever it is.”

Silence.

Then, “There are a thousand ghosts at your back, Sammy.”

“Better at me back than in my face.”

“Is that how you deal with it?”

The goblin’s head snapped round. His eyes locked onto Sharon’s. For a moment they stared at each other, in that dead street beneath the shoes of the vanished. Then he looked away. “Everyone’s gotta find their own way. Knower of the path, that’s our job. Seer of the truth and knower of the path. No one said it were ever easy.”

They stood there, beneath the shoes, and stared at nothing, and said nothing.

Then Sammy turned and, with a muttered, “Come on”, started to walk away.

Sharon hesitated, even as the goblin began to vanish back into the spirit walk, her gaze playing involuntarily over the shoes hung across the telephone lines. Then she, too, began to walk away.

Something flashed in the corner of her eye, bright and blue. She paused, looking back. A flicker of blue rippled along a wire overhead, dancing between the tied laces of the shoes suspended there. It vanished into the wall of the house on the opposite side of the street, flickered again, then bounced back and forth before earthing itself down a pair of laces and into a pair of brown walking boots suspended by a double bow. More flashes of blue rippled across the lines overhead, dancing round each other, thickening and spinning like courting insects, writhing over and under each other, dripping in great sparks, an electrical rain falling down from above, coalescing on the ground and forming a convulsing pool of electricity that spun, thickened, grew, stretched, thickened again and that, slowly, cautiously, the corners still sparking and rippling over each other as the whole settled, became a man. His body was misshapen, many parts not placed quite right, and his eyes blazed with an inhuman light; but if you looked through these things, through a skin trying to disintegrate into electric nothing about his face, beneath a head of dark hair writhing in a perpetual blue flame, the man was human, and the features were familiar.

“Help me!” Sparks dribbled from his lips like undigested food as he spoke, and he was looking straight at her, and he was the sometime Midnight Mayor, the human mind whose body the blue electric angels precariously inhabited, and he was Matthew Swift.

“Help me,” he whispered again, and at his feet blue electricity rippled and sparked, grounding off him as he tried to stagger forward. Even that small movement nearly collapsed him, back into electric nothing as he moved, contained with a gasp that seemed to draw his being back together again in crude, changing shapes.

“0781273…⁠!” The sound was nearly a shriek, pushed out between lips that could barely hold their human form.

“07812…⁠” he tried again, and his legs dissolved with the effort, collapsing beneath him into swirling blue sparks.

Sharon moved towards him even as his flesh parted and coalesced again, skin breaking into flame, flame thickening into skin, each motion now happening almost too fast to see.

“Matthew?” she murmured.

He tried to pull himself out of the pool of blue electricity which was all that remained of his legs, leaning on his arms, which themselves threatened to crumble into sparks under their own weight. “Help me?”

“Matthew Swift?”

He looked up, and for a moment, even through the unnatural blue of his eyes, there was something real, human and desperate, staring up at her. “Sharon?”

Cautiously, she knelt down by him. The sparks of blue fire leapt up to run over her skin, play around her hands, her wrists, and flow in little eddies around her knees, but they weren’t hot, and they didn’t bite, but carried with them instead the thousand cries of…

          hello, hello?

I’m trying to reach…

               the voicemail of

lols xx

               r u comin 2nite?

and she said but I said and then he said

               hello!!

A hand, or what was left of a hand, the fingers crumbled into whispering flame, brushed her own. Its touch, warm and human, surprised her. She unfolded her own hand and saw, floating on her palm, the ghostly twin crosses of the Midnight Mayor, a reminder of the job promotion she’d never wanted. Then the hand that touched hers opened in surprise, and there were the real marks of the Midnight Mayor, two vivid red scars, defiantly crimson in a dissolving palm.

She took the hand, and held it tight, even as the skin gave way beneath her grasp. “Domine dirige nos,” she breathed. “Domine dirige nos.”

The grip within hers increased. She looked into Matthew Swift’s face and saw a smile, so brief as to be barely brighter than the sparks into which it was dissolving. Then it faded. “07812732… 732…⁠”

The hand crumpled in her own, dissolving into sparks which wormed and writhed away. The face dripped away, taking the words with it, dissolving into blue flame that splashed harmlessly across the floor. “I’ll find you,” she breathed. “It’s okay. I’ll bring you back.”

The last features dissolved into nothing, and sunk down, into the earth.

Chapter 72

Sharon

My name is Sharon Li.

I am a shaman.

I am one who sees the truth of things, and the truth is that there are no absolutes any more. There is no absolute right and absolute wrong, there is nothing for which a reason cannot be found, a cause observed. For every murder there is a story, for every birth there is a consequence, and nothing – nothing at all – is simple, especially the truth.

I am a knower of the path. I chose the way I look at the world, but, in choosing, I know all the other paths I could have taken, all the other choices I could have made. That is what it means, that is what shamans have to do.

I am deputy Midnight Mayor. Protector of the city, guardian of the night. I didn’t know what this means, but now I do. I’m the one who makes the choices, because someone has to.

And that’s fine.

Don’t think, just because I am all of these things, that I can’t be me.

Chapter 73

Seize the Day

Sharon sat on a beanbag in a corner of Magicals Anonymous furthest from the window, nursing a cup of coffee. She said:

“I think it’s like this. Someone – probably some guy called Hacq – thought it’d be, like, a mega-cool idea to make his own god. He got together a bunch of guys to help him, including Brid, the witch we picked up from the river, and… and Zhanyi. He probably said something like ‘this’ll be really cool, come on, guys, let’s make a god’ and instead of saying ‘that sounds like a bloody stupid idea’ they seemed to go with it and they’re dead now so I guess it’s too late to ask them what the fuck they were thinking but I guess it was… I guess they were scared. And they wanted something more. Needed something more. So they went with it.