The Glass God (25 page)
Authors: Kate Griffin
For a second, they glared at each other, Alderman and shaman. Then, her eyes not moving from Crompton’s face, she said, “Rhys. We’re going.”
“Yes, Ms Li.”
“Keep the umbrella,” she snapped, as she and Rhys made their way towards the door. “Looks like it’ll rain later.”
Chapter 40
A Pleasant Walk Clears the Mind
His name is Paul, hers is Ele, and they are in love.
They’ve been in love for seven years, but they still hold hands – that’s how in love they are.
They walk through the graveyard, not because they’re interested in graves, but because it’s an interesting, historical shortcut between
here
and
there
and, moreover, it’s always a pleasure for them to discover these little patches of greenery, places where the streets still stand tall, in the very heart of the city.
Then she stops, abruptly, mouth opening in horror and disgust and says, “What is that smell?”
He tries to smile, to laugh it off, but there is no laughing away this stench; it hits like a battering ram against plywood walls.
“Maybe… they’re doing building works?” he suggests.
She is the indignant one; he quietly takes it. “In a graveyard?!”
“Maybe they broke something?”
Her face contorts in disgust; she begins to turn a little green. With one sleeve over her mouth, and needing no more words, she pushes him towards the nearest bus and they do not hold hands again for the rest of the day.
Chapter 41
Miles said, “Let’s do lunch.”
It was something management types did, Sharon had concluded. Ordinary people, living ordinary lives, simply ate lunch. Busy office workers grabbed a bite to eat – grabbing because they were in a hurry, desperate to get back to their desks – and a bite because they were, presumably, on high intensity diets in accordance with their high intensity lifestyles. But management – management
did
lunch, with all the dedication and panache of a kung fu master doing his exercises.
Lunch, in this case, turned out to be a sushi bar on the busy junction where Clerkenwell met Farringdon; trains ran beneath, buses swept along one side, and bicycle lanes danced through it all, a haphazard afterthought of painted lines and warning signs.
Sharon, Rhys and Miles sat at a conveyor belt of tiny, overpriced dishes of rice and some fish, each waiting for The Perfect One to sweep by, before getting bored of waiting and taking what happened to be within their line of sight.
“I would treat us to somewhere a little less… commercial,” the word slipped from Miles’s tongue like discarded snakeskin, “but, times being what they are, the wining and dining budget can only go so far.”
So saying, he grabbed a dish of wasabi beans, popping the little green bobbles from their shell with the casual expertise of a man who had long since forgone sensory pleasure in aid of sleek, well-nourished physique. Rhys eyed the beans sideways, not at all convinced he could trust in such a creature. Sharon toyed with a couple of dumplings, eyes wandering over the collection of sauces and condiments before her with the expertise of a bomb maker, wondering which would be a sauce too far.
“How did you do with the dead woman’s phone?” she asked, making a plunge for a suspicious tub of green goo.
“The tech boys are having a look at it,” said Miles. “Trying to coax it back to life. They say it’s fifty-fifty, which isn’t bad for them, as usually they just laugh if you ask them to do anything technical at all. I see you no longer have the umbrella, though. Is this a positive development?”
Sharon tried a lick of the suspicious green goo off her finger, and blanched. She reached across Rhys, and swallowed the remaining water from his glass in a great gulp. Miles waited politely, sliding a fingernail into another wasabi shell.
“Uh, the umbrella,’ Sharon wheezed as she recovered from her attack. “Well, I think it was positive, if you ignore the sorta death-plague-doomy overtones.”
“Potential plague-doomy,” added Rhys. “I mean, the plague-doomy overtones are things yet to come, aren’t they? The death isn’t, though; the death is definitely happening. And has happened. And will probably happen again. But I think we’re on top of the plague-doomy, see?”
“You ever heard of Old Man Bone?”
Miles rolled a bean between his fingers, then popped it into his mouth like a pill. Rhys watched, hypnotised, as the Alderman’s Adam’s apple rose and fell. Miles ran his tongue round the inside of his mouth, then said, “Yes, I have. But only as a footnote, as a… a reference to an obscurity too obscure even for magicians to care about. A myth, if you will, one of the few for which I have never seen any evidence in my time in the city. But by the way you phrase the question, I imagine I’m about to have to reassess my position quite radically?”
“You might wanna.”
“Is… this Old Man Bone a factor?”
“When you say ‘factor’…?” began Sharon “… do you mean like, ‘is he going to come screaming out of the earth beneath our feet, bringing plague and doom?’…?”
“
Potentially
bringing plague and doom,” corrected Rhys.
“Potentially bringing plague and doom, upon the city and all within it? I mean, I wouldn’t want to stake my career on it, because I don’t really have the training in this area, and I get that I’ve got responsibility, but sometimes the responsible thing is to hand it over to an expert,
but…”
– she dabbed a rice roll into a pool of brown soy sauce – “… if you under-budget and then fail, then that’s so much worse than over-budgeting and having a surplus. Except in some areas of local government, where I’ve heard it’s okay, but I never really got how that worked. So I’d say yes… plague and doom and all that. Get your footnotes prepped.”
Miles ate another wasabi bean. It was, Rhys had to admit, a fascinating performance, a master class given the minimum exertion for each bean followed by the maximum effect as they dropped, one at a time, down Miles’s throat. It also, he realised, bought the Alderman time to think up a dazzling reply, instead of falling back on the default allergic reaction that was Rhys’s instinctive response to new and upsetting information.
At length Miles said, “I’m trusting, Ms Li, that you and your… your friend…” – Rhys nearly spat soy sauce across the table, which Miles pointedly chose not to notice – “… have a plan to deal with the situation?”
“Well, I… I guess… we get back Old Man Bone’s rusty dagger. And before you give me that look,” she added, stabbing a dumpling towards Miles’s politely neutral face, “it’s not like I’m a fan of ancient mystic items and all the stuff they do, it’s just that I can’t think of anything better to do right now that’ll help, so even if this isn’t the greatest idea ever, at least it’s progress.”
“And how do you propose to find this… item?”
Sharon fidgeted uneasily on her high, padded seat. “Well, we… we follow the leads, don’t we? Did you find B-Man?”
“Ah, yes, now…” Miles pulled from his pocket a slim, well-tended smartphone, unlocking it with a faint click of shifting data. “A patient was admitted to UCH three Thursdays back, suffering from high fever and swollen lymph nodes. He had no identification and his face was heavily scarred. The doctors failed to make an initial diagnosis, but a specialist in tropical diseases confirmed bubonic plague. By the time they confirmed the diagnosis, he was in critical care. The patient was then put on antibiotics, and showed signs of recovery, until he died.”
“He… got better and then died?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“He
was
cursed, Ms Li,” Rhys pointed out.
“Actually, the cause of death did not appear to be bubonic plague,” mused the Alderman, thumbing through the notes on his phone. “But, rather, respiratory arrest. Not associated with the disease itself.”
Sharon was fumbling in her bag, digging through several days’ accumulation of old sandwich and half-consumed doughnuts, before producing the much-fingered remains of Swift’s red-marked map. She tried to unfold it, and, discovering that the table wasn’t big enough, gestured at Rhys. With a patient sigh, the druid turned his back so Sharon could lean the map on him, the top drooping down across the crown of his head like a widow’s shawl.
“Three Thursdays ago, yeah?”
“That’s correct – although he only died a few nights ago.”
“And Swift’s first little red dot is… two weeks last Monday.” She ran her finger from mark to mark, squinting at the tiny, messy handwriting. “So let’s just get this straight. Someone pinches Old Man Bone’s blade… hell, in fact, let’s make that incisive leap and say that B-Man pinches the blade… gets struck down with plague, which I think is one hell of a reaction, and is admitted to hospital. While he’s in hospital, lotsa shoes start appearing all over the city, which I’m guessing we can say is a sign that someone else other than B-Man is doing the sacrificial thing. Except he’s not sacrificing to Old Man Bone, which is kinda a problem, but we’ll get to that. Crompton goes to the Midnight Mayor, demanding to get his umbrella back, and Swift goes to the hospital, finds B-Man already dead, even though he’s been in hospital now for a few weeks and was recovering. Swift is pissed off, gets spotted by Gold Mnkey and Hobo Grlz, who’re there to visit their mate, he storms off to the office, gets the email from… from…”
“Hacq,” offered Rhys from under his wall of map. “That was the email which got him to go to Deptford, then also the address which sent the hex.”
“… he goes off to Deptford, wham, bam, great big mystic cock-up happens, the woman with the phone ends up dead and in the river, Swift ends up with the Tribe – only Swift doesn’t end up with the Tribe, the angels end up with the Tribe, and Swift is… God knows where Swift is, but let’s say he’s not dead yet because the Midnight Mayor’s power hasn’t yet moved on and no one really wants it to, do they? Meanwhile, Old Man Bone is getting pissed off because he’s not getting his sacrifices, and someone is cleaning up the place where the woman died and throwing bodies into the water and that because they’ve got malign intentions, and B-Man is dead even though he was recovering, which usually I’d say is just bad luck, but hell, let’s face it, it’s gonna be murder, and so here we are and there it goes, any questions?”
Nobody spoke.
“Great!” she declared. “I’ll take it, then, you guys are totally on board with all this. Way I see it, there’s only two things left to be answered: who has the blade now, and where the hell is Swift?”
If either man had the immediate answer to these questions, he didn’t have a chance to give it, for Miles’s phone, already in his hand, rang.
Chapter 42
Where the hell is Swift?
A phone rings.
A maisonette – no one calls it a “flat” – in Hoxton.
Close, but not quite close enough. The one you want, caller, is two doors down, and even if you could reach it, they don’t have a land line. Can we redirect your call?
The neighbour, Mrs Phang, answers. She is seventy-eight, and likes to deep-fry her own prawn crackers.
“Hello? Hello? Hello? Hello?” By the fourth hello, most people would have given up, but Mrs Phang is old, and Mrs Phang is lonely, and Mrs Phang doesn’t want to be trouble for anyone at all.
“Hello, is anyone there?”
Silence on the end of the line.
“Hello? Can anyone hear me?”
And here it is, a welling up, a bursting out, a screaming up from the darkness; it breaks like surf over the shingle, a sudden roar of foam from a peaceful sea, and it roars:
“
GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE!
”
Chapter 43
His name is Mr Roding, and he is a necromancer.
He is also, just in case you’re concerned that “necromancer” is the only term by which he defines himself, a keen backgammon player, active in his local Neighbourhood Watch association, member of the Labour Party even though it’s all gone to pot these last fifteen years, and regular contributor of letters to the local magazine on the theme of erratic recycling services from the local council and why undertakers weren’t doing it right.
There were, it could not be denied, certain downsides to being a necromancer, one of the greatest of which was body odour.
“I can’t smell anything!” he exclaimed. They stood in Bunhill Fields – druid, shaman, Alderman and necromancer, while Mr Roding flicked irritably at the yellowing end of a flaking fingernail and sniffed the air and added, “Is this some sort of joke?”
Sharon smiled feebly from behind the protection of her sleeve. When Miles’s phone had rang in the sushi bar, she’d hoped for many things. Insight, explanation, enlightenment, or, at the very least, confirmation that the dead woman’s river-drenched phone was actually up for use. What she had not hoped for, or even conceived of, was a phone call requiring her presence in Bunhill Fields, a small cemetery lodged between the high offices of Moorgate and the traffic-clogged squalor of City Road: an island of leafy trees, peaceful benches and ancient stones amid the turbulence of EC1. Framed by its tall iron railings, its central path laid with flagstones commemorating the dead, it was a place, she felt, where men and women should sit of a balmy afternoon and drink tea in quiet contemplation, a reminder of life and death encircled by the prowling roar of mundane existence.
That was what it should have been.
What it was, was stinking.
“R-rotting flesh, Mr Roding, sir,” stammered Rhys through the jumper he’d put over his mouth to protect against the smell. “Definitely rotting flesh.”
Mr Roding seethed, his thin grey arms wrapping round his skeletal frame, his jaundiced cheeks puffing out in indignation. Necromancy was not the healthiest of disciplines, Sharon concluded. Certainly, its practitioners could survive far longer than most wizards of the city, if they were careful about what they did; but when every major spell required the sacrifice of a bit of bone mass or the loss of a kidney in order to fuel it, the art tended to induce a conservatism that reduced the practical activities of its users, as well as narrowing their minds.
