Our Lady of the Streets (The Skyscraper Throne) (25 page)

‘Lady Bradley, Miss Khan’ – he beamed from molten candlewax ear to molten candlewax ear – ‘I have actual,
genuine
good news.’

‘
What is it with you and maps?
’ Beth demanded.

Gutterglass didn’t reply; he just stood there, arms folded, his eggshells set on a pair of pigeons wheeling overhead against the blue.

Beth looked down at the model; it was similar to the one they’d left behind at Selfridges, with cardboard streets and coathanger bridges over a silver-foil river. A single intact water bottle stood in the centre, surrounded by rat-runs of shredded plastic. Only the new districts were different: a few tendrils of housing snaked out to the west and the southeast, and most strikingly, the long sharp spike that stretched northwest into the grass, many times the length of the original city, as though London were a pendulum and this new bit of city its chain.

On the far side, a long column of people was already trailing down the hill. They carried their still warm saucepans and the unfinished supplies in the sacks over their shoulders. The head of the line was already lost to sight behind the curve of the hill. They were following one of
Glas’ rats. Three Scaffwolves slouched beside them, drawing shrieks from time to time when they snuffled the people in line. If all went well, the wolves would deliver the humans to the St Paul’s Demolition Field, and guard them there alongside Reach himself.

If all didn’t go well …

Beth tried not to think about that.

‘Glas?’ Pen said. ‘What do you want to tell us? We don’t have a lot of time here.’ She sounded pained, and the wires were twisting disquietedly in the air above her head.

Gutterglass craned his head upwards and held up a Biro index finger. The pigeons dropped like stones towards him, but he didn’t flinch; ten feet from his head they flared their wings and slowed before alighting, one on each of his sharp cardboard shoulders. Beth half expected them to perch there like piratical parrots, but instead they each lifted a juice-carton from Glas’ body and fluttered off to drop the little boxes on the map at the tip of the city’s new northern spur.

Gutterglass gestured grandly. ‘See?’

Beth and Pen looked at each other.

‘Er … no,’ Pen said.

Gutterglass looked a little crestfallen, but he rallied fast. ‘Only the new districts are growing,’ he said, his chewing-gum vocal chords twanging visibly through a tear in his newspaper throat. ‘Chelsea, Camberwell, Tower Hamlets – they’re all still the same size they always were, don’t you see?’

Pen shook her head slowly. ‘I’m not sure I—’

But Beth did. ‘
She doesn
’
t have enough
.’

Gutterglass nodded vigorously.

‘
The growth she
’
s stolen – it
’
s not enough for the whole city, so she
’
s concentrating it on the outskirts. That
’
s why the new spur out towards Birmingham
’
s so narrow
.’

‘I would surmise that she’s trying to reach the next big population centre, so she can obtain more of the … the material that fuels the city’s expansion.’ Gutterglass couldn’t suppress a smile, and his bottle-cap teeth glinted in his mouth. ‘Which, admittedly, is moderately terrible news for the people of Birmingham – apologies, Miss Khan – but it’s good news for us, because—’

‘—
we don
’
t have to kill off the whole city
,’ Beth finished for him.

Glas’ smile became a full-fledged grin. He pulled a fistful of drinking straws from his coat, planted them on the inner edges of the new districts and bent them over like cranes.

‘Best of all, the Crane King is already in place. We can cut the new substance from the city like a tumour from a patient—’

‘—and Reach will be the knife,’ Pen finished. She looked thoughtful.

‘
Is that possible, Pen?
’ Beth asked. ‘
Can you persuade Reach to limit himself to shredding the bits of London we tell him to?
’

Pen spread her hands. ‘I don’t know,’ she said honestly. ‘I can tell him our help is conditional on it, but once he gets going I don’t know if that’ll stop him.’ She tilted her head
at the wires crisscrossing her shoulder. ‘I can probably persuade him to start there, at least.’

Gutterglass’ smile shrank slightly, but he nodded. He’d take it.

‘I hate to be the one to shit in your icing,’ Petris grunted, ‘but there’s a hole in this plan you could run a Railwraith through.’

‘What?’

‘The enemy,’ Petris said sourly. ‘Always a pisser when they get involved, I know, but can’t be helped. The second old Rubble-Face gets stuck into Mirror Mater’s precious new architecture, She’ll bury him in claylings. We were relying on the Demolition Fields being spread through the city so She couldn’t get to all of them. If Reach concentrates his attacks like this, he won’t stand a chance.’

Beth looked at the map and with a little inward shudder remembered the raw speed the Masonry Men showed under the earth. Petris was right. She ran her tongue over the church spires in her mouth, testing their sharpness.

‘
What if Mater Viae was busy?
’ she asked.

They all looked at her, Petris spraying granite dust as his neck ground around, but the only gaze Beth returned was Pen’s.

‘
You
’
ve read
Lord of the Rings,
right?
’ she asked her.

‘Nope.’

‘
Seriously? I watched you read the whole of
Anna-
bloody
-Karenina,
and you haven
’
t read
The Lord of the Rings?’

‘Couldn’t get past the singing.’

‘
All these years, I thought I knew you
.’ Beth shook her head in mock astonishment, and then began laying out her idea. As she spoke, she could feel the excitement building in her: this was a direction. After so long in hiding, this was action.

‘
All through this, there
’
s been one constant in the way Mater Viae
’
s acted, and that
’
s
over-
reaction. Sending a whole plague into the city just to come after me, the sheer number of Masonry Men She threw down on us at Selfridges: that all tells us something: She
’
s smart and She
’
s strong, but She doesn
’
t do subtle. She over-commits. If we went for Her, right where She lives …
’

She reached out and toppled the upright water bottle. ‘
I think She
’
d hit us with everything She
’
s got
.’

There was a long silence.

‘Yay?’ Pen said, nonplussed, but Petris got it.

‘We keep Her busy horribly murdering us in Canary Wharf,’ he murmured thoughtfully. ‘Reach gets a free hand further north.’ He snorted. ‘It’s simple, at least.’

For five full seconds, Pen just stared at him. ‘You cannot possibly be considering this,’ she said at last.

‘Diversion is a time-honoured military tactic, Miss Khan.’

‘If you’re a hobbit! She’s nicked this off a bloody fantasy novel.’

‘
I don
’
t have a whole lot of field experience, Pen
,’ Beth said drily. ‘
This is what I
’
ve got. If any of the actual soldiers here have anything better, I would be over-bloody-joyed to hear it
.’

She looked at Petris. The Pavement Priest stood silent for
a minute before uttering the single syllable she’d both expected and dreaded. ‘No.’

‘Really?’ Pen sounded incredulous. ‘
Really?
We’re going with the strategy from the end of
The Return of the King
?’

‘
I thought you hadn
’
t read it
.’

‘I’ve seen the films,’ she muttered.

‘
I bet Glas has read the books
,’ Beth said, pointing at the map, but Pen only glared at her.

‘Fine,’ she said at last. ‘But if we’re going to be this stupid, we’d better be this stupid fast. I don’t know how much longer I can get Reach to hold off.’

Beth shrugged. ‘
We
’
re ready if you are
.’

Pen was still looking at her, and with an unpleasant prickle, Beth realised she recognised the expression on Pen’s face. It was the way Beth had looked at Pen in the kitchen at Selfridges, just before she’d cast her out.

‘
What?
’

‘I don’t think you should come, B.’

‘
What are you talking about?
’

‘Glas?’

‘You are
very
unwell, My Lady,’ Gutterglass said diplomatically.

‘
And that means I can
’
t help? Sod that. I don
’
t want to sit this one out
.’

‘You want us to win, though, right?’ Pen asked.

‘
Sure
.’

‘Choose.’

‘
Ouch, Pen
.’

‘Sorry.’

‘
It
’
s okay, I
’
d rather have it straight
.’

Beth looked at them, and the sheer worry on their faces pushed her wounded pride back down into her chest. She thought about the ache in her muscles and the swelling in her joints; she thought about the prickling fever racing under her skin, and the way that the world blurred when she turned her head too fast. She thought about the slow, hollow ache in her stomach. She hissed in frustration. She was tempted, but her body wouldn’t allow anything else.

And then she thought about her dad, dying, staring into space, on his back.

‘
My decision?
’ She was asking Pen.

Pen hesitated, but then nodded.

‘
Then I
’
m coming
.’

‘B—’

A little way up the hill, a small crowd had gathered, watching them: the seven remaining Pavement Priests, Ixia and Astral, their lights burning vaguely against the brightness of the day.

She lowered her voice and jerked a thumb in their direction. ‘
What does it say to them if I don
’
t?
’

‘Does it matter?’ Pen said. ‘There are only nine of them.’

Beth said slowly, ‘
And there
’
s only one of me. And if you
’
re going to go and tangle with a Street Goddess and Her concrete army, then that
’
s where I am too. Even if it kills me
.’ She tapped her chest, and then pointed at Pen. ‘
That
’
s what this means, remember
.’

Pen’s lip twisted and she looked down at her feet.

‘
If you
’
re there, I
’
m there
.’

Pen looked up. ‘Okay. Let’s let the Crane King off the leash.’

The jagged wall of the labyrinth reared in front of them. The thirteen of them stood, strung out in a line, eyeing their reflections in the glass.

They hadn’t talked much on their trek through the silent city and now they were here, they didn’t speak at all. Their heads were bowed, their breathing slow. Pen had a sense they were all putting things in order, moving around their minds like they were untidy houses, setting each thought in its right place. She bowed her head too, even though her own thoughts were anything but orderly. It had taken most of the day to walk here, and the wire’s protests had grown fiercer with every step.

Now
, the Mistress whispered eagerly,
now
.

Soon
, Pen begged back,
very soon
.

The low sun burned in the reflection like the end of a giant cigarette. Beside it the Mistress’ strands cast long shadows over Pen’s face. The two Lampfolk raised their heads from whatever prayer they’d been saying and started warming up, their limbs growing brighter and brighter.
When they’d finished, Ixia held her hand out to Astral and he held his palm above hers. There was an inch of clear air between them. White light mingled with orange. It was as close they’d get to holding hands.

Petris and his Pavement Priests, true to their nature, didn’t move at all, but for the flickering of eyelids inside the eyeholes of their masks.

Gutterglass tossed a scalpel end over end, catching it easily in her palm. She’d switched to a female body for the walk without saying why. Now she started to whistle through her plastic lips, and the sound carried starkly in the dry spring air.

And then there was Beth. For once, Pen had no idea what her best friend was thinking. She checked her lead-flashed fingernails and then reversed her grip on the spear. ‘
Pen
,’ she asked, ‘
do you want to pray?
’

Pen shook her head. ‘I prayed Asr back at Crystal Palace.’

‘
Okay, then. Care to knock?
’

Pen felt the twitch at the base of her neck as she passed on the suggestion.

Wires lashed forward, hard. The silence shattered as the glass shrieked and dissolved into a glittering cloud. Everyone but Pen flinched and threw their arms across their eyes, but she just peered through the hail at the wire limbs flickering and darting, slashing the walls to tiny shards and bending back steel joists, taking the already broken buildings and tearing them further down. There
was a hot taste in her mouth: dust and violence and thunderous noise. The Mistress’ glee at the destruction flowed back into her.

And then it was over: the last of the broken glass tinkled as it settled on the ground, and then the silence returned. A path through the labyrinth gaped in front of them, fringed by fractured glass and twisted steel. At the end of it, hazed slightly by the distance, rose Canary Wharf.

Beth shot her a look, one eyebrow raised as if to say,
Yikes, Pen!

Pen’s fractional smile said,
I know
.

As one, they started forwards.

They walked steadily, their eyes fixed on the tower as it drew closer. Stone growled over stone as the Pavement Priests advanced. Pen’s heart was slamming at the base of her throat. She wanted to scream, to run – forwards or back – or do
anything
but keep this maddening pace. But she couldn’t. They had to give their enemy enough time.

The powdered glass crunched underfoot like snow.
Why is it always glass?
Pen asked herself, desperate to distract herself from her own fear. She remembered the cavernous chamber underneath the Shard in the mirror-city, with the broken bottles carpeting the floor and Mater Viae’s green eyes shining through the dark.

She
’
s the monster who burst through the mirror
, she decided.
It kind of makes sense that glass is the trail She leaves in Her wake
.

Lost in her thoughts, she almost didn’t react as the wire sprang off her palm towards the ruins. ‘No!’ she hissed,
jerking it frantically back. It snapped and hissed at her disconsolately. ‘Not yet.’

The tower was close now. Pen couldn’t see the tip of its pyramidal roof any more. The throne was on the far side and the growing sound of the waterfall suggested Mater Viae was still sitting atop it, but Pen knew She knew they were there.

The ground shuddered under them. Pen lurched, but recovered her balance.

The glass carpeting the floor sounded like wind chimes as it resettled.

‘Beth,’ Pen said.

‘
I see it
.’

Ahead of them, a single emaciated figure stood at the mouth of the passageway. Pen watched its clay-covered ribcage swell as it breathed. Two more Masonry Men breached behind it, landing in total silence, the liquid street dripping from their limbs.

‘
Steady
,’ Beth ordered.

With every step it became harder not to run. The ground shuddered again and again in waves. More and more grey figures burst from the asphalt ahead of them, rank upon rank of them, erupting from the road like they’d been grown from it. They blocked off all light from the end of the passage.

‘What are they waiting for?’ one of the Pavement Priests muttered.

‘Us,’ Pen said. She was struck by how lonely the thirteen
of them must have looked, delivering themselves up to an army. ‘They want to know what we’re doing.’

A single clayling stepped forward from the front rank. He moved his mouth and his ribs strained against his skin like he was shouting, but Pen heard no words. ‘B—’

‘
Steady
.’

The Mistress raged in her mind. ‘Beth, I don’t know how long I can—’

Motion rippled through the claylings. They arched their backs, put their hands flat forwards like blades.

‘B—’

‘
Now, Pen!
’ Beth cried.

Pen didn’t even feel herself ask the wire; it uncoiled from her hip and shot into a crevice in the ruins. Its barbs shrieked down to metal buried somewhere under the rubble, and then that rubble began to move.

Slabs of broken window slid to the ground as the metal beneath them shifted. Rust sprayed as bolts spun and locked and steel poles slid into place. Growling their hollow growls, Scaffwolves rose from their haunches and prowled forwards.

Rats chittered, beetles buzzed and Gutterglass’ form sprouted a dozen more arms. She was armoured in wrecked car panels and scrap-metal, wielding blades of sheared-off girder.

A small dark shape flitted from Beth’s hood. The air filled with an acrid scent and then Oscar ignited in a burst of heat so intense that Pen flinched away. Beth flung herself easily
onto the Sewermander’s broad neck. A Scaffwolf loped up beside Pen and she dragged herself onto it.

Ahead of them, the front rank of Masonry Men dived. The road swallowed them like water.

Go, go!
Pen urged the Mistress. Her wolf surged forwards, metal paws ringing, and behind it, its brethren followed. They made it five bounds before the road in front of them began to ripple; six before the Masonry Men struck.

Dark grey figures burst from the ground a bare inch ahead, their fingers hooked. Pen felt their musty breath on her face and her own breath stalled, but the wire was ready. She was its host, its ally, its only refuge, and she could feel how determined it was to protect her. It whirled through the air, slicing down claylings like they were falling leaves. Her wolf snapped and snarled; its fangs punctured a grey torso. The creature’s scream was all but silent.

The world was full of grasping limbs, concrete teeth and snapping wire. A hand clamped onto Pen’s arm and she was dragged sideways from her mount. A skeletal grey face gaped to bite her; she screamed, and unloaded a palm full of barbs into its open mouth. The head exploded and blood like hot liquid clay coated her face. Pain tore through her leg. Her head swam and she looked down to see a Masonry Man had his fingers up to the knuckle in her calf. Blood was soaking through her jeans. The thing clung on grimly, bouncing and jerking in time with the wolf’s bounds. She whipped the wire across its back and heard the crack as its spine snapped. It rolled away in the dust.

Waves of pain from her leg dizzied her. She felt sick. ‘Tour—’ she gasped, then, ‘tourniquet.’

The wire didn’t need to be told; it was already lashing around her calf, cinching in tightly enough to make Pen hiss with pain. Her toes tingled into numbness. She dragged herself back into the saddle and pressed her face to the cold steel of the wolf’s neck. The wire was a blizzard of metal above her, shielding her. Her lungs burned, her eyes were wide and the rushing air chilled their moist surface. Between the struts she spied Gutterglass, keeping pace on a constantly renewing conveyor belt of wriggling rats. Her trash arms windmilled and blurred, chopping at the grey bodies constantly springing at her.

Something flickered at the edge of her vision and a Pavement Priest appeared, his punishment skin stained with dark brown blood. His widespread arms took two Masonry Men around the waist and Pen heard the snapping of their bones as he crushed them. He stopped and dropped their bodies. Through a gash in his stone armour, Pen could see his chest heaving as he fought for breath. He sucked down two more lungfuls before clay hands ripped through the floor and dragged him under.

Don
’
t stop
, Pen thought, terrified, her nostrils full of her own blood,
whatever you do, don
’
t stop
.

A wave of heat passed overhead: Beth swooped low into the mêlée in front of her, Oscar’s wings spread wide in a wall of blue fire. In her wake she left blackened corpses, posed like statues.

An instant later Pen and the rest of the Scaffpack bounded through them, and they exploded into hot ash that blinded her and seared her skin. She choked and spat, trying to get it out of her mouth.

The labyrinth gave way around them and they burst out into Canada Square. Above the clatter of metal paws, Pen heard human screams and the roar of falling water. Oscar craned his burning head and shot upwards, Beth hunched forwards on his back, and Pen clawed ash from her eyes, peering after them. In the middle of the sky, four hazy, fiery shapes were beating their wings to intercept. Pen’s heart shrank to a pinpoint in her chest, but she snarled at herself to focus.

Beth has to look after Beth
.

Her wolf slowed under her: clay hands were clamped onto its steel struts. Grey bodies were using it to pull themselves out of the surface of the road. The other wolves were slowing too. They whirled and snapped, their progress halted, hemmed in by a sea of hands. Pen felt the boom of a shockwave, gaunt figures fell like cornstalks and she knew that somewhere one of the Lampies was still breathing – but still more claylings surged up from the ground between the corpses of their fallen comrades. There was no end to them.

Pen’s stomach lurched sickeningly: her wolf was sinking. It howled its metal howl and snapped and struggled, but its legs were trapped in strong grey hands and the asphalt was seeping up its limbs like quick-mud.

Pen shoved herself from the wolf’s back and hit the concrete
hard. Wires hissed and struck like snakes as the Mistress shielded her. Her wolf was torso-deep in the ground. It bent its steel head back and bayed. Pen lashed wires to it and strained, desperately trying to pull it free, but it was stuck fast. Clayling arms grabbed its neck and twisted with obscene strength. Its howl cut off. Pen laid desperately about herself with the wire. Grey bodies filled her view from edge to edge.

‘
Pen!
’ Beth’s voice echoed down, loud as a collapsing building. ‘
How are you doing?
’

‘Like’ – she gasped for breath – ‘like a rotten apple in a maggot farm!’

She had no idea how Beth heard her over the noise, but the answer came back sharp. ‘
Then I think it
’
s time, don
’
t you?
’

Pen bent her head, and a single wire leapt straight upwards from the back of her neck. It unwound fast, fifty, a hundred feet into the air, straight as an antenna. From the edge of the labyrinth, a dark line split the air as a second wire whipped in to meet it.

Pen shuddered as the two strands touched. The Wire Mistress’ consciousness rippled through her body like an electric shock and then shot outwards. She raced with it, down the metal, leaping from wire to wire, across walls and fences and under foundations: all in a fraction of an eye-blink: a vast steel synapse firing.

In her mind’s eye, she saw cranes rearing over building sites in the outskirts of the city like the skeletons of extinct giants. She felt the wire stretch for them, eager with news,
and felt their battle cry, just as eager, humming back down the metal strand into her heart:

I will be
.

I will be
.

I WILL BE!

On a distant battlefield, the Crane King tore joyously into his work, and Pen was the first to know.

The first, but not by much.

Four seconds later, on Her throne on the top of Canada Tower, Mater Viae screamed.