The Glass God (21 page)

Miles was waiting for her, sitting with his legs crossed on one of a row of plastic chairs. He sprang to his feet, taking in her emergency wardrobe: tatty jeans, random T-shirt and reserve pair of canvas lace-ups.

“Good morning, Ms Li, I hope you’re well today?” She scowled. Miles, though his eyes were shadowed and heavy, still hadn’t so much as a crease on his long black coat and tight-buttoned shirt. “No Rhys?” he asked.

“Druid’s sleeping,” she grumbled. “Or if he isn’t, then he oughtta be.”

“Long night?”

“Kinda. Had a meeting, met the Tribe, found Swift – well, no, didn’t find Swift, it’s complicated – and got shouted at by this mega-sticky guy with serious issues while waiting for a bus. You?”

Miles’s face was all pained concern. “Well, I was feeling rather pleased with myself at having spent all night phoning every mortuary in the city and calling every favour I could with our police contacts. But now I hear about your evening, I must admit, my self-satisfaction diminishes. So, when you say you found Swift…⁠”

“Yeah, about that…⁠”

“I take it our situation has not improved?”

Sharon’s face scrunched up tight. The cold air was helping to keep her awake, but Miles’s look of concern seemed to produce in her a spontaneous ageing effect. “Kinda no, really. I mean, he’s not dead, technically, which I think is a win. But he’s… not all there. Which would be fine, except… someone else is there.”

Miles kept his face from falling, but only just. “The… electric angels?” His voice was the sigh of a man hoping he’s wrong.

“Yeah.”

“They… control his body?”

“I dunno if we should say ‘control’. I mean, ‘control’ implies possession, unless that’s just a social stereotype. It also suggests they don’t shoot blue fire whenever they feel stressed, and their skin isn’t cracking open, and they aren’t screaming all the time. I think maybe the word we’re looking at here is… inhabit?”

“And you learnt this from the Tribe?”

“Yup.”

“May I ask… how?”

She stared at him. “I asked them.” Sensing that his surprise threatened to burst out into astonishment, she added, “I asked them nicely.”

There was a body to examine.

Sharon realised she’d never examined a body before. She’d seen death, up far too close, but that had been in the heat of the moment, a thing which was, and then was not.

This, however, was formalised death.

A body had been laid out on a slab, a pathologist covering it with a sheet. “It” was definitely an “it”, even if it had once been a “she”. “It” was only organs and skin, whereas “she” might once have had a name. It had been found, according to Miles, by the river police, when it washed up with the tide near London Bridge. It had been wrapped up tight in bin bags and masking tape, but a human body was naturally buoyant. Besides, there were gases. Sharon hadn’t asked about the gases and, seeing her face, Miles hadn’t offered to tell.

The bags had protected the body from the worst that the river could do. As the pathologist, a Dr Nikookam, five foot two with stubby, trimmed nails that looked like they’d given up on growing, talked in a professional, nasal voice through the discovery of the body and the process of decay, Sharon stared at the white sheet still covering the corpse. She wondered how long until the pathologist performed his magic trick, whisked away the sheet and revealed nothing underneath but bunny rabbits.

When Dr Nikookam did pull the sheet back, to point out a particularly interesting laceration to the flesh, Sharon was shocked at how unshocked she was. The body was just a thing, which had been a woman, aged somewhere between twenty-five and thirty, with dyed black hair and dead blue lips: a picture of a body, not a real person. Her neck had been incised in several places by something jagged and sharp; but the morgue had washed away the blood, and all that remained were red marks in grey flesh, forming a blast pattern across one side of her body, perhaps from broken glass exploding close at hand, or maybe from a furnace exploding, though no trace of glass or metal had been found in the wounds. The electrical burns running across her body in the same motion, from left to right, had barely formed before the body itself had died, preventing the swellings and expulsions which Sharon had dreaded as an accompaniment to death. The woman’s broken right arm had been carefully laid back in place for the funeral, as soon as anyone came to claim the corpse. This injury was, so Dr Nikookam concluded, the result of the body itself being hurled with considerable force against some sort of solid object – maybe a concrete wall?

In conclusion, he could find many causes of death – trauma, laceration, electrocution – but as all of them appeared to have happened at the same time, and as the body itself had then been removed from the scene of the crime, he could give no hypothesis as to the circumstances surrounding the event. At least, no hypothesis which he, as a professional, would be willing to write down.

“Obviously,” he explained, “her death was the result of serious impact from a high-level expulsion of electro-magical forces.”

Sharon’s eyes flashed up to the doctor’s face, and there was Dr Nikookam quietly rolling the sheet back up over the woman’s naked form.

“I’d say that she was no more than two metres from the centre of the blast. The burn patterns suggest an exothermic spell, probably an uncontrolled expulsion of pent-up energies. The lacerations to the skin, naturally indicative of a defensive ward being broken from the inside out. Or, to put it crudely,” he added, seeing the look on Sharon’s face, “something which she wanted kept inside a ward, got out. Stomach contents – she drank far too much Coca-cola and her last meal was a sandwich. Body moved post-mortem, presumably to be disposed of in the river, and analysis of her bone density indicates that she’s been a frequent user of wand-fuelled incantations, cast primarily through the right hand. The wand method, you see…⁠” – a tiny smile from an expert doing a thorough job and hoping to impress – “⁠… can often affect the calcium levels on the limbs used in greatest proximity to the casting node.”

Sharon realised her mouth was hanging open.

“Thank you.” Miles filled the gap. “This is all very helpful.”

A polite nod from Dr Nikookam, who began peeling off his white latex gloves.

Sharon stared at the corpse, and wondered what she’d see if she touched it.

Perhaps nothing.

Life was magic, Sammy said. And death was only death. You didn’t get much truer than that.

“Anything on the body itself?” asked Miles, one dispassionate professional to another. “Personal items?”

“Clothes, no wallet, but a phone.”

A clear plastic bag was handed to Miles. And here it was; this was where the blood had gone, a great brown stain which had soaked through every fibre of clothing on the body, diluted and spread by the river water seeping into the bin bags that had held her corpse.

“I suspect” – Dr Nikookam disliked suspecting anything without proof, but for Miles he’d make an exception – “that the perpetrators removed anything which could identify the woman, but failed to notice her mobile phone. It was kept in her bra, you see. No pockets in her skirt. We can’t turn it on – the river – but maybe you’ll have more luck.”

Miles smiled wanly, and wrapped his fingers tighter round the plastic bag. “Your report…⁠?”

“I’ll send it to the relevant authorities,” said Dr Nikookam. “I know how this works… And if you find the individual responsible for this young woman’s death,” warned the pathologist, as they turned to go, “do be careful. The injuries are indicative of… shall we say, an unstable character.”

The Alderman nodded in thanks, and hurried Sharon out of the door.

The blood-soaked clothes were of no interest to Miles.

“We’ll give them to the scryers, see if they get anything,” he said, hiding them deep in a blue shopping bag to avoid unwelcome questions. “But after two days in the river…⁠?”

Sharon kept her eyes forward and her feet moving, down the cold, grey corridor, and tried not to inhale through her nose. “What about the mobile phone?” she asked. “Any use?”

Miles pulled it from its plastic bag and tried to turn it on. Nothing. It was a smartphone – smart enough, Sharon felt, that its owner probably didn’t need her own brains for much of the time – and, beneath its clear surface and delicate touch-screen, a whole life could be contained in tiny electronic bits. “We could give it to the techie boys,” he conceded. “Let them work their magic.”

“I don’t suppose they’ve got a spell entitled ‘fix everything and make it better’? Or even just a spell for drying out mobile phones?”

“Sorry,” he grinned. “Although I don’t see why the latter should be hard to create.” He thought, then added, “Ms Li… about the Midnight Mayor…⁠”

“What? Oh, yes. What about him?”

“We really do have to talk about what we’re going to do if he’s… incapacitated.”

“Not dead.”

“What?”

“Not dead – if he’s incapacitated, not dead. It’s something Rhys pointed out,” she murmured, as they wound their way upstairs towards the exit, through corridors of samey wheelchairs stacked like shopping trolleys, doctors with busy walks and important clipboards, and porters with the shamble of the not-at-all-bothered. “Why wouldn’t you just kill him? I mean, in a nice way, but he’s a bit of a tit, isn’t he? So why not just kill Matthew Swift?”

“I think your error, if I may be so bold,” replied Miles, dodging an oncoming gurney, “is in thinking that this is about Matthew Swift. He’s just a person, if you’ll pardon me saying so, and can be killed. But the Midnight Mayor… that’s a power. That’s a force, a thing that is a part of the city. If you kill the current Midnight Mayor, a new one will arise, and as a new one has not arisen… how’s your hand?”

Sharon stopped so suddenly he nearly walked into her.

“My what?”

“Your hand. If you were to become Midnight Mayor, your hand would…⁠”

“Me?!”

Miles’s smile scintillated with infinite patience. “You
are
Swift’s deputy,” he pointed out. “And while the job comes with no appreciable power of its own, it is if nothing else a useful indication of where he thinks the succession should lie, were the worst to happen. And I for one can understand his reasoning.”

Sharon stared down at her hand, remembering the ghostly set of crosses that had floated above her skin the night before.

Nothing. By the cold light of a hospital corridor, there was nothing on her palm except the lingering scent of bubble bath. She breathed out slowly, then in, counting silently to ten, and waited for her heart rate to drift back down into double figures.

“Okay,” she replied. “Let’s say Swift isn’t dead, and, even if he was, there’s no reason to think he’d be so bloody stupid as to make
me
his successor.”

“Why would it be stupid? It’s clear that you’re highly qualified.”

Sharon threw up her hands in despair. “I’m a barista!” she shrieked. Heads turned in the bustling halls. She swallowed hard, her knuckles white where they gripped the umbrella. “I’m a community support worker,” she corrected angrily. “I tell people that it’s okay for them to be weird, so long as they don’t hurt anyone;
that’s
my job. I can’t be doing this… Midnight Mayor, fate of the city crap, I just can’t! I’ve got meetings to chair, I’ve got minutes to take, biscuits to buy and a bingo night to arrange! That’s what I do, that’s my job, and this…⁠” – she gestured feebly round the hall – “⁠… this is just someone else’s idea of a bad day at the office!”

Miles waited for the worst of her fury to drain away.

“But, Ms Li… you
are
here, aren’t you? You
are
part of this, and that, more than anything else, counts.”

Sharon drooped, leaning on the umbrella. “They killed the woman. The blue electric angels did it.”

Miles drew back. “Are you…⁠?”

“Yes. I’m pretty sure it was self-defence, or they were scared, or she was trying to hurt them somehow, but I still think they did it. And now Swift’s gone, but he’s not dead, or at least, I don’t think he was dead – but that’s the point, isn’t it? If you can’t kill a power, if you can’t kill the Midnight Mayor, then what’s the next best thing? You remove it, get rid of it somehow, but you don’t kill. Swift’s gone, but he’s not dead, and last night this dude with the worst breath you’ve ever smelt came out of the mist and said ‘give me what I’m owed’ and it was really disgusting and I thought, me and Rhys, I thought… this isn’t what I signed up for, you know?”

Miles hesitated, then laid a hand on her shoulder. When she didn’t pull away, he said, “And in light of all that, Ms Li, may I say how well you seem to be doing?”

Sharon gave a tired, hollow smile. “Cheers, Miles. You know, for a guy who wears nothing but black, you’re okay.”

“Thank you, Ms Li.”

“I mean, I personally think it gives out all the wrong vibes.” She straightened, warming to her theme. “It’s all very well having this ‘fuck with me and you’re dead’ vibe. But if you think about it, I bet at least half the people you meet are just ordinary guys having a difficult day, and maybe even less than fifty per cent are actually blood-sucking monsters, and if they are, do you think that black, as a style choice, is going to put them off? Pastel colours,” she concluded. “You can’t go wrong with a judicious mix of pastels.”

“I’ll take your word for it, Ms Li.”

Sharon’s smile widened. “Right then!” she exclaimed. “Let’s go sort this crap out – hey…⁠” A thought struck, and she spun, levelling the tip of the umbrella at Miles. “What do you know about the Black Death?”

Chapter 36

In My Friends I Find Myself

Rhys woke at 1 p.m. to the sound of his phone.

As he scrambled towards it, it stopped, just as his finger hit receive.

He checked the number.

Sharon Li x3
 

He rolled out of bed, and stepped onto yesterday’s clothes. He groaned as smell and memory hit, just as his knee bumped against the portable can of gas that fuelled his tiny stove.

Rhys lived in a studio apartment.