The Glass God (8 page)

But if Shoreditch was shocked at finding itself accessible by public transport, Deptford was having no such crisis. Set between the royal palaces of Greenwich and the solid, unpretentious housing of Bermondsey, Deptford was an industrial embarrassment. Into its tangle of one-way streets and drive-through burger bars, great splats of aluminium-walled warehouses and grubby-faced offices had been thrown like dirty droppings from the urban paint brush. Century Industrial Complex (“A Legacy Of Success”) hid a cardboard-box company, a sandwich maker and a printer of quirky T-shirts; Cannon Wharf Business Centre (“For All Your Commercial Needs”) contained the offices of a company which supplied ushers for large public events, a coffee importer and three men who hired lights for far too little to people who couldn’t afford to pay a penny more. A potted plant in its reception area assured visitors that no matter how bleak, functional and cold this place might seem, they were, in fact, welcome guests in a dynamic environment.

The white warehouses of Longshore Quay (“Bringing Innovation To Your Working Environment”) were lined up like warriors squaring off for battle in long ranks that ran from the gateway down to the river, in units each consisting of a small metal door for humans, and a far larger metal shutter for lorries to back through when making deliveries and connections. Stepping past a barrier by the abandoned entrance, Sharon could smell diesel and hear the distant long-ago cries of foremen and porters as they juggled their loads in and out in a perpetual flow of cut flowers, fresh eggs, pasteurised milk, clean paper, soft toilet roll and all the unseen essentials of city commerce – now faded to nothing more nor less than echoes that whispered in the shaman’s mind. She looked down and now saw cracked grey tarmac through which grass and sharp-leaved weeds were pushing their way up. The signs that had stood above the lorry bays were gone, leaving no more than outlines on the wall, or odd letters dangling by a single nail from scarred concrete and crumbling brick. Even the nearby waters of the Thames, in an ancient timber-lined inlet where wooden vessels had once offloaded their cargos from the Empire, seemed sullen and dull as they slapped against the quay.

“Why would the Midnight Mayor come here?” Miles spoke in the breathy tone of one who’d hoped his companions would have put the question first, and spared him from betraying his own bewilderment.

Sharon didn’t answer. She walked on, between the shuttered bays and faded signs, and listened. For all that commerce had long since abandoned Longshore Quay, life, with pesky unstoppability, had pushed its way in through the rusting chain fence, and as she walked she heard

     Soft step of the fox padding through the night

Scuttle of the rat hiding from the hunter

          clatter of a saucepan – a family of travellers, thirty to the clan, who rested here for three nights on their way to somewhere better, hate the cops, fuck the state, this is the way to live, this is freedom!

     giggle of the children from the estate

          who came here to try some things that were legal, and several which were not

and loved it

     until the bad trip

          when they got scared

and never came back

She half closed her eyes, trying to hear something more specific. Every part of the city, every corner, was, she knew, infused with a kind of life. Not necessarily sentient, not always something that would come out of the walls and secret places and tell her its secrets face to face, although that, too, could happen, when the situation was right – but a life which left its scars on the very stones and which, if you knew how to use it, could be a kind of magic.

And as Sharon moved, listening, she began, very gently, to turn invisible. It wasn’t a fading. It wasn’t a greying-at-the-edges. It was simply an ever-increasing difficulty in noticing that Sharon was there at all, as by degrees she became so much a part of her environment that there was, to the watching eye, nothing to distinguish her from the background until…

“I say, does Ms Li vanish into thin air on a regular basis?” asked Miles.

“Oh, yes,” Rhys exclaimed. “It’s part of being a shaman, see?”

“Well, yes, I did know that; I just wasn’t aware that shamans disappeared habitually, rather than on, say, special occasions.”

“Isn’t this a special occasion? I mean… investigating?”

“Good God, I suppose it must seem that way to you, yes!” exclaimed the Alderman. “How thoughtless of me!”

In the grey place where shamans walked, and where the truth of what really was slipped out of hiding and did battle with the truth of what was simply perceived, Sharon walked, and looked, and listened. The ghosts of lorries past moved around her; the shadows of faceless men were burnt into the ground in the moment when their colleague was hit by a truck, his blood bright in this shimmering place, leg twisted to one side and he would live, but it would be all that management needed to shut this place down, no longer effective, no longer efficient, goodbye the Longshore Quay. She scratched irritably at the palm of her hand and looked for the Midnight Mayor, for some sign of him, unable to comprehend how someone as inclined for calamity as Matthew Swift could have moved through this place and not left his mark.

And there he was, a brief flicker. He stood directly in front of her, right hand raised, a hand wearing fingerless black gloves which hid the scars of his office; he was staring her in the eye and his face was set in an expression which was almost inhuman in its emptiness, its cold impassivity. He was gone as quickly as he was there, a shadow swept up in the rest of the spinning mass that swirled around this place; but it was good enough. Sharon stepped forward, the movement snapping her back into visibility and the world into colour, and she heard the slight grunt of recognition – for he was not one to be outright surprised – from Miles as she reappeared.

“He was here,” she declared. “Swift came here, just like the email told him to.”

“Um… the email from the man who sent a binary hex into the computer system?” queried Rhys. “Which isn’t to say I’m not excited by the detective work, Ms Li, I am, but it’s just that binary hexes take a lot of effort, see, and I’m not very good at…⁠”

“I’ll handle any unpleasantries,” interrupted Miles. “You can just hang back, and leave that sort of thing to me.”

He was already marching after Sharon as she moved on between the abandoned lorry bays, which was why he didn’t see the glare the druid shot at his back.

They made their way down one row of parking bays, then back past another. The shutters were nearly all down and locked in place by rusting padlocks, the keys long since lost, but one or two had been broken open in recent years, and gaps left for the wind to explore. Now and then Sharon paused to peer into one of the darkened bays, looking for, at best, a sign declaring “Swift was ’ere” and, at the very least, a drop of blood, an abandoned gun or perhaps a smoking umbrella. Rhys carried the big blue umbrella under one arm. The shaman herself hadn’t wanted to go near it, but he was already wondering whether having an umbrella didn’t give him a distinguished look which his tendency towards oversized shirts and saggy jeans had never quite achieved.

At the end of the quay, the river was hidden beneath the sharp drop of a concrete embankment. Its waters slapped muddily at low tide. Ships drifted by as though floating on air: the little police boat bouncing on its way to another call; a sleek catamaran powering round the Isle of Dogs in a roar of speed; a tug dragging three floating pallets of metal boxes and rubber pipes. The world slid by, busy and uninterested.

Then Sharon stopped, and stared.

A unit like any other, the metal shutter pulled down and locked tight. There were no graffiti, no blood pooled on the ground, not even a helpful note pinned up and explaining everything, though Sharon had lived in hope. What there was, however, was a very shiny, very new, padlock holding the shutter down.

“So,” she said, “call me, like, Sherlock friggin’ Holmes, but how many new padlocks have you guys seen in this place?”

Miles seized the padlock, testing it. “Ah,” he declared. “Now, I have just the spell for this sort of occasion…⁠”

But Sharon had already walked straight through the nearest wall.

Darkness, reduced a little by two high, narrow windows so dirty it was a miracle any daylight made it through the grime. There was a strong smell of bleach. The walls were white-painted breeze blocks; and a notice by the door warned employees not to smoke.

Sharon peered at the cement floor. Great pale streaks had been washed across its settled dirt, and recently, too: cloud-like patterns of grubby and clean had been made by the rubbing of a cloth, the swirling of a mop, the scrubbing of a brush.

A moment later, light flooded in as Miles unlocked the shutter and rolled it up, letting in daytime and the smell of the river. As Rhys stepped inside, his nose crinkled in distaste at the raw smell of chemical detergents.

“Cleaned recently?” mused Miles.

“Recently scrubbed bare,” corrected Sharon. “Which sucks for the investigation thing, but is kinda cool in the at-least-there’s-a-cover-up sorta sense.”

Rhys raised a hand in enquiry. “Are we pleased there’s a cover-up?” he asked.

“Well, it’s better than there being
nothing
. Positive thinking!” Sharon beamed to hear herself speak such reassuring words. “Positive thinking is the way to… to do stuff. Positively.”

Rhys’s smile was strained. “What we need,” she persisted, “are
clues
. Maybe a mystic anorak, that’d be kinda in the zone, or a letter beginning ‘dear reader’ and ending with ‘so I confess to everything’ – I mean, we’d get fewer brownie points for investigative coolness, but it’d save a lot of time.”

“How about a burnt telephone line?”

Miles was squatting to look at something by the back wall. There were two electrical sockets, and a single, scorched-looking telephone line, with no wires attached but a great scar of soot still curling from its interior. The Alderman sniffed, and beamed. “I love the smell of fried circuitry in the morning.”

The others hurried over to look. Sharon brushed her fingers against the edge of the outlet, and there was

WE TOLD YOU SO!
 

a shout, gone as quickly as it had come, in a voice that was strange, unnatural, furious. “So,” she murmured, straightening up and looking round the bare unit. “Matthew Swift… he’s not
just
human, is he? I mean, there’s the blue electric angels, too, and they’re big on phones, yeah?”

“They are, in fact, a composite life form created from the magic of the telephones.” Miles spoke in the prim voice of a man who’s read a textbook and hopes everyone else will appreciate the same. “If we take the old adage that life is magic, then wherever life goes, so magic will spring, and of course the telephones are just screaming with life…⁠”

“And boom, blue electric angels?”

“Exactly so – boom. I hadn’t thought of saying ‘boom’ before; but yes, that’s highly apt, where these creatures are concerned.”

“And they’re part of Swift?”

“Or he’s part of them. No one is really sure of the distinction, any more. What are you thinking, Ms Li?”

Sharon shrugged. “Stinky commercial unit in Deptford, mystic umbrella, missing sorcerer, crispy telephone line… dunno. Am I supposed to know already? I mean, I get that it’s a big responsibility, investigating a missing Midnight Mayor and that, but I kinda assumed that there was a difference between brilliant, incisive leaps and rushing into things like a pillock.” She looked to Rhys for assurance, but he merely widened his helpless smile.

Sharon looked around once more, then bent down until her nose almost brushed the floor, examining the swirls left in the dirt by a wet cloth. She stood up, walked towards a wall and pressed her shoulder blades against it, then got back down on her hands and knees and turned her head this way and that, scrutinising the floor.

“It’s okay,” said Rhys, seeing Miles’s frown of speculation. “I’m sure this is a shaman thing.”

“You seeing this?” asked Sharon, still on all fours.

“Um… seeing what, Ms Li?”

“Someone’s cleaned this place up, right? I mean, really scrubbed it.”

“Yes…⁠”

“But they didn’t bother with cleaning everything, only the stuff they’d made dirty.”

“Um…⁠”

Sharon sprang back up and grabbed Rhys by the elbow, pulling him back until he could see nearly all the floor. “They cleaned up their mess,” she exclaimed, “so now the things what were dirty are much cleaner than everything else! Look at where the floor is clean, and what do you see?”

Rhys looked. He saw great sweeps of floor made pale by scrubbing, splashes where water had sloshed from a bucket, a mess of tide marks in one corner where someone had scrubbed so hard they’d almost peeled the sand out of the concrete itself. And, if he looked in just the right way, then perhaps, in all the ebbs and flows of dirt, he saw…

“A circle.”

Rhys bit his lip as Miles spoke, then managed a manly nod of assent.

The Alderman walked along the edge of a stretch of cleaned floor, marking out with his black polished toe the course of a cleaner stretch of clean that did indeed make, quite distinctly, a circle.

“Too small to be a summoning circle,” he mused. “You need more room, just to ensure enough oxygen content in the atmosphere. Maybe an enchanting or binding circle? Hard to tell now they’ve washed it away. Not meant to be used again, otherwise they’d have used paint to draw it. Chalk, maybe? Bit old-fashioned, but all right as a temporary solution.”

Sharon opened her mouth, then closed it. Then, very slowly, she said, “So, will it undermine my super-cool investigative vibe if I admit that we haven’t done magic circles in class yet?”

“Oh no, Ms Li!” blurted Rhys.

“Do shamans use magic circles?” asked Miles.

“Dunno. Maybe we don’t. Maybe that’s why we haven’t covered them in class. You know what it’s like being taught by a goblin – he’s great on things to do with carved wyvern bone, but not so hot when it comes to syllabus breakdowns. Then again,” Sharon brightened, “you gotta know your limitations and trust your friends, so that’s why you guys are here, and pride
is
the failing of great men.”