Our Lady of the Streets (The Skyscraper Throne) (26 page)

It was a scream of shearing steel and tumbling brick, of steam searing through pipes and trains crashing into viaduct walls. It was a scream of the grief of a city, pouring from the roof of Canada Tower and filling the sky like smoke, and it all but threw Beth from Oscar’s back.

She clung on grimly, winding her fingers into the rope-like currents of flowing gas in his neck. The wind shoved her hoodie into her mouth and she spat it out. Under and around her, Oscar’s fire guttered as Mater Viae’s Sewermanders hovered around him, hemming him in and flexing flame-etched claws as they strained to strip the methane from his back. ‘
Come on, buddy
,’ she whispered desperately to him. ‘
Come on, buddy, you got this
.’

But he didn’t have it. He flapped his wings like a moth in a hurricane, but the other gas-drakes were too powerful and he couldn’t escape. His wings were losing coherence, streaming away from him in traceries of blue flame, and he reared back, crackling and whispering in panic.

Beth stretched down through the fire and brushed his
muddy-coloured back.
Trust me
, she sent the thought to him.
Now
.

Oscar went out.

They fell together, end over end, graceless as wounded birds, and past her flailing limbs Beth glimpsed the four other Sewermanders blundering into each other as the force that held them apart vanished. They baffled each other with their wings, tangled each other in their thermals. Beth spun in midair. Roaring filled her ears, blotting out even Mater Viae’s shrieking. Oscar whipped his little brown tail in a frantic helix. A sour smell stung Beth’s nostrils, but it was too late. She squeezed her eyes shut as the asphalt stormed up.

With a booming roar, blue flame ignited under her, scorching her clothes, but washing harmlessly over her tiled skin. Oscar swooped, skimming the earth and incinerating the weeds that peeped through the concrete.

She clenched a fist in jubilation.
Attaboy
.

She looked back over her shoulder. The gas dragons had already disentangled themselves and were beating their wings, hot in pursuit.

Fine
, she thought. As long as they were on her, they weren’t on Pen.

Faster now, Ozzie – come on.

They looped and slalomed around the hulks of ruined buildings. Another look back showed her two of the drakes were tracking them, chasing the burnt air they’d left in their wake, but the other two …

Beth’s stomach plunged. The other two had banked off.

Up
, she urged Oscar,
up. I need to see
.

He bent his neck and climbed, careless of the closing angle between him and his pursuers. The shattered city fell away before them. Beth clung to his neck with her hands and knees, desperately scanning the ground for the wire-wrapped girl.

There! A whirling cloud of glinting steel, tiny in the distance. The grey figures teeming around her couldn’t get close, and …

Beth stared. They were bugging out.

Whorls like fingerprints marked the street where the claylings dived into it. Not all of them – Pen and the Scaffwolves bounding around her still had their hands full – but a lot. In the sky above them, two blue shapes were beating their wings frantically, disappearing to the north.

She
’
s dividing Her forces
, Beth thought.
They won
’
t get there in time – they won
’
t. They can
’
t …
It was more hope than certainty. Reach had a few minutes at best; it would have to be enough.

A Sewermander scorched through the sky almost on top of them and Oscar wrenched himself into a spiral. Beth shot out an arm as the rival drake overshot and her outstretched fingers
just
tickled scaly skin.

In that instant she felt the little lizard’s mind, muddied with methane and velocity and the hunt-and-kill instincts Mater Viae had instilled in it. She had less than half a second.

Go!
She shoved the thought at it – and then it was past her and her fingers were smoking and trailing in empty air. The Sewermander beat its wings and surged onwards. She looked after it as it dwindled into the distance. It didn’t try to turn.

One left.

She let Oscar bank and turn under her again as Canada Tower loomed into view, bright against the dark red clouds. The final Sewermander swooped down into their line of sight, burning jaws stretched wide, claws spread, heading right for them.

Oscar
, Beth thought nervously,
you might want to turn … You might …

Oscar smashed straight into the middle of his rival. Beth felt its fire blossom around her – an instant’s furious heat – and then it went out. A dark shape that might have been a lizard shot out of view below them. Oscar crowed victoriously and Beth grinned wildly, even while she tried to beat out the flames guttering in her hoodie.

Aren
’
t you the little badass?

He cackled in his quiet fire-crackle voice in response.

Movement snagged her eye: a figure in a bright green T-shirt was racing through the mêlée, dodging wolf and clayling alike. He made it less than a hundred yards before he fell – but no one had hit him. He was clutching at one bare foot. Beth traced his path backwards: bloody footprints led from a building on the east side of the square; broken glass was scattered in constellations on the asphalt outside
it. She remembered her dad and the cut on his forehead that wouldn’t close.

Beth hunkered down, hanging on to Oscar’s neck, and flames guttered past her face as she urged him down. The building rushed up to meet them, and she saw shocked, pale faces through its broken windows: thousands of them. Beth glanced over her shoulder. The tower on the far side of the square looked empty.

Been busy, haven
’
t you, Your Ladyship?
she thought grimly.

Ten feet from the pavement she yanked Oscar back and he beat his wings furiously; the backdraught sent the shattered glass skittering and tinkling away up the street.

‘
Run!
’ she yelled, but they just gaped at her, smudgy and hollow-eyed, in the shadows of the building. ‘
There
’
s a path: now get out!
’

The boy who moved first couldn’t have been older than eight. He wore a Yankees cap on its smallest setting with his afro sticking out underneath it. He scrambled out through the doorway, dancing his naked toes into the spots between the remaining shards of glass, and then bolted headlong round the corner. A second later, everyone was surging for the exit; they boiled out of the gap frantically, eyeing the carnage in front of them with panicked eyes. One girl stumbled in the rush and fell, her hands jerked out instinctively to catch herself—

‘
Don
’
t
—’ Beth started, but it was too late. Both the girl’s hands grazed harshly over the concrete, and when she held them up they were shining, red with blood.

She scrambled to her feet, all the while gaping at her hands in horror.
She knows
, Beth realised with sickening certainty. They all knew – that was what had kept them quiescent in the dark. Beth slid off Oscar’s back and all but collapsed. Her legs were jelly, but she stumbled forward, leaning heavily on her spear. She tore strips off the sleeve of her hoodie with her church-spire teeth, and the girl didn’t resist when Beth took her hands and bound tight tourniquets around each wrist.

‘
That should slow it …
’ she murmured.

The girl was pale and trembling. Her lips moved like she was trying to speak, but she never made a noise; she just stared at Beth.

‘
I … I can … I can try to
—’ Beth’s city-voice died away. She tried again. ‘
I can … We could
—’

Once again her voice failed her. She blinked and shook her head. She had nothing left. The girl looked baffled. She tottered away, her treacherous hands held out in front of her like they were poisonous.

‘Greetingssss,
thief
.’

The voice was heavy with sibilants. It sounded close in her ear. Beth felt a weight settle into her stomach as she turned.

Canada Square was chaos, a flickering storm of steel-pipe jaws and dripping grey limbs, backed by the constant torrent of Estuary water down Canada Tower. Through the tempest, as calmly as if they were out for a Sunday afternoon stroll, walked five oil-soaked men.

Iron rang off concrete. Beth barely had time to hear the low metallic growl before the Scaffwolf raced out of the mêlée, jaws bared.

Johnny Naphtha didn’t break step. A slick of crude oil flooded out from under his feet, like they were bleeding it. It spread in a wide puddle, right into the path of the wolf.

The Scaffwolf sank through the oil without a sound, barely disturbing the surface, but Johnny walked over the slick like it was solid ground, his grin still in place, his brothers flanking him. They paused at the pavement, their oil slick lapping the kerb. They straightened their ties and cricked their necks, moving as one.

Oscar circled and roared at them; as one they looked up. There were five synchronised snaps as each popped the cap of a Zippo lighter.

‘Pleassse,’ Johnny Naphtha said dismissively.

The Chemical Synod lowered their gaze back to Beth and, despite herself, she fell back a step. She clung to her spear; it was all that was keeping her upright.

‘We mussst have wordssss, little Goddesss, about your lack of ressspect for property rightsss.’ Johnny’s voice never rose above a courteous hiss, but Beth heard it over the fracas like he was whispering right in her ear.

‘
What …?
’ Beth started, but Fil’s voice rang in her mind, clear and cold.

He means me
.

‘If there isss one thing above all othersss,’ Johnny said, ‘that we mussst not tolerate, it iss larssceny.’

They stepped up onto the pavement, their oil slick flooding out before them, slow but inexorable. Beth backed away from it, terror pulling at her heart. She didn’t know where she’d go if she fell through the shiny black surface, but she knew in her gut she’d never see the light again. Desperately, she opened her pores to the pavement, trying to summon
something
to fight them with, but the fever that bolted back up through the soles of her feet made her gag and she collapsed onto her knees, coughing. The oil swept around her in a circle, but it didn’t touch her.

The synod advanced, hemming her in against the side of the building.

‘Now,
Misssss
Bradley …’ Johnny said as they craned forward.

‘BETH!’

The shout was so loud and so anguished that even the synod looked around. Beth struggled to see between their glistening black forms.

Pen was running towards them across the square, her face set in a grimace, blood running down it where the barbs bit. Wires slashed threateningly from her back. Two steps brought her to the edge of the oil slick; wire limbs planted themselves in the asphalt, coiled, ready to spring—

—and then went out from under her. Pen crumpled to her knees on the road. Her eyes wide in shock, she pressed her palms to her temples.

‘I couldn’t …’ Beth was reading her lips more than hearing her. ‘I couldn’t hold him … He’s—’

Fil’s voice sounded loud in her head.
He
’
s coming
.

Engines growled; metal clanked on metal. Beth turned, and the Chemical Synod turned, and from the top of her skyscraper waterfall, Beth knew the Lady of the Streets was looking as well.

In the ruin at the edge of the labyrinth, the rubble was starting to move. Jagged slabs of concrete reared up on end, and then toppled over with a sound like the world collapsing. From beneath, slender, metal-strutted limbs reached up.

Beth gaped at the cranes as they unfolded as elegantly as mantis-legs against the sky. The wolves yipped and bounded towards their master. The wire coiled and snapped over Pen’s form. Mater Viae’s concrete-skinned soldiers just stood and stared.

A motor whirred into motion, a crane spun on its base and a hook shot out, burying itself with a splintering crunch into the windows on the front of Canada Tower. A second crane lashed out at the building behind Beth and she cowered as fragments of it fell around them. Jackhammers reared up and began to pound the pavement. A bulldozer smashed through the wall of the labyrinth. Through its windscreen, Beth could see that it was driverless.

The voice carried in the engines of destruction was shatteringly loud.

I AM REACH
.

Beth felt dizzy, buffeted by the noise. Her knees slid out from under her and her chin smacked into the floor, but
the pain momentarily cleared her head. There was something she should have …

She pushed herself up onto her elbows and looked across the square. Reach’s hook was still buried in the front of Canada Tower. The
front
, Beth thought muzzily.
I can see the front. When did the waterfall stop?

A figure stepped out of the pool at the tower’s foot. Water sluiced down the streets that armoured Her limbs and glinted on the towers that rose above Her brow. Her eyes were the green of traffic lights, and they blazed with fury and panic.

For an instant, Beth looked full into the eyes of the Goddess who had killed her father.

Mater Viae’s mouth didn’t move, but Beth heard Her city-voice, so like her own that they could have been sisters, as She said, ‘
No
.’

The Lady of the Streets extended her arms and her Estuary-water skirts became a torrent of orange flame. Fire raced across the surface of the square. Scaffwolves screamed as it caught them, their metal voices jarring the air. Masonry Men burned like effigies as the flame spread in a flawless circle around Mater Viae and went zigzagging up the floors of the broken tower blocks, leaving only Canada Tower itself untouched. Beth hastily scrambled back as it neared the oil slick in front of her. The crude caught with a muted
whoomph
and the synod vanished, swallowed by billowing flames that reached thirty feet into the air. The heat was like a wall.
Squinting through the smoke, Beth could just make out Oscar, flailing in the updraught.