The Glass God (28 page)

“Yeah,” she groaned. “I’m still here. That is good news.” She managed, just in time, to bite off a curse. “Yay for good news.”

It took her forty minutes to get to the offices of Harlun and Phelps.

To her surprise, Rhys was already there, waiting in the lofty foyer.

“Oh, Mr Miles was kind enough to text me with an update, and I thought you’d probably be coming here, and so I thought I should come, too,” he stammered, “because I know how you like your coffee and I thought you might need some coffee and I picked up a menu for a Chinese take-away on the way because that’s something people sometimes do, if they’re working into the night, I mean, they have Chinese take-away with chopsticks out of a cardboard box, but you may not like Chinese, so I also picked up Indian which isn’t as traditional but I don’t think you want tradition, do you, Ms Li, I mean, maybe you do, maybe you hate Indian, and you are sort of Chinese I mean…⁠”

She put her hand over his mouth. His body locked tight enough to send shudders down to his fingertips. “Rhys,” she breathed, “if I wasn’t, like, unbelievably tired, and didn’t have this whole fate of the city thing to do with, I’d snog you right now.” A tiny whimper escaped him. “As it is,” she went on, considering each word, “I never believed as how you should have these work–life entanglements, because it can become sticky and that, and because your professional relationship isn’t the same as your social relationships, but seriously, if you ever wanna give it a go, you, me and a big, soppy snog.”

Numbly, his ears turning the colour of tomatoes, Rhys nodded, and Sharon pried her hand away from his mouth. “Cool,” she said, brushing it down on her trousers in what she hoped was a discreet and non-offensive way. “Let’s add it to the to-do list.”

There was a polite cough from across the foyer. Miles stood by the open door of a lift. He held a fresh cup of coffee, which he offered to Sharon as she approached. She hesitated, then took it. “Cheers, Miles.”

“I’m sorry about the late hour, Ms Li,” he said, his eyes barely turning to Rhys as the druid joined them in the lift, “but, as I’m sure you can understand, time is of the essence.”

They rode up in silence.

The offices of Harlun and Phelps were busier than usual. Black-clad Aldermen sat at screens or around tables, maps were spread out, and, Sharon was alarmed to notice, guns and blades were laid out for cleaning and inspection.

“We going to war?” she asked.

“If there’s someone to war with,” Miles replied.

The “tech boys”, as Miles had put it, were in an office all of their own. It was all of their own, Sharon decided, because no one else could possibly want to inhabit it. Windowless, brown-walled and concrete-floored, it had the feeling of a converted cleaning cupboard, which a crazed engineer had tried to use as an experiment in how much copper one floor could support before it gave way.

The tech boys themselves were two men in their early thirties; one wore a leather jacket, the other a bright blue hoodie which read Release The Mongoose for reasons Sharon dared not guess. Their work surfaces were saggy with the weight of old coffee mugs, obscure DVDs and green slabs of solid-state circuitry ripped from the bowels of a misbehaving machine, and had barely enough room for the gutted remains of the dead woman’s smartphone. One wall was adorned with a thousand pieces of paper offering discount VGA adaptors for the chosen client, pictures of fondly remembered nieces, snapshots of truly embarrassing computers they’d worked on, guides to the easiest way to wire an obscure cable and unread memos lost beneath it all in a moment of well-intentioned efficiency gone horribly wrong.

As the Aldermen entered, one of the two tech boys rose with an expansive smile and held out his hand. The other glanced up, grunted disinterestedly, and went back to his work.

“Ian and Paul,” explained Miles. Sharon smiled as nicely as she could and shook the one hand on offer, from Ian, earning a brief flash of

… tomato stew for lunch…
 

… click of the camera lens across an empty bridge…
 

… fist banging against the wall…
 

“Lovely to see you – sorry about the mess, have a chair – have
my
chair.”

Paul grunted again. “You here for the phone? It’s all there.” He gestured at one of a great stack of screens lined up against the wall. Sharon, looking blankly from screen to screen, turned to Rhys for support.

“Um… that one,” he whispered, pointing at one screen among the many.

“Can we get you coffee?” went on Ian cheerfully. “Oh no, you’ve got some, never mind. I think we have some biscuits here…⁠”

“Bloody mess,” offered Paul, as Sharon shuffled into the chair in front of the screen. “Couldn’t get half of it, but what do you expect really when you give us something like that to work on?”

“Paul and Ian are specialists in digital magic,” whispered Miles.

Rhys’s eyes widened. “Oh!” he exclaimed, turning to the two men. “You’re… you’re
Paul and Ian
! It’s such an honour, I’m sorry, I mean, I didn’t realise but now I know it’s an honour, an honour to meet you – meet you both, I mean, I’m Rhys, see, I’m a druid, but I’ve been working on this app for months…⁠”

Paul looked sceptical, but Ian’s face was at least locked in an expression of polite enthusiasm.

Sharon stared at the screen indicated to her.

It was, she supposed, a not-half-bad recovery from the drowned woman’s mobile phone. A series of carefully organised files and folders had been laid out for her scrutiny; and while a lot of the folders were a mesh of empty, skewed-letter jumbles, one or two of them, when examined, still offered up a memory of what had gone before. Part of an address book, the data suddenly turning into gobbledygook around the letter ‘G’; the recollection of a London Underground map; the ghost of memo written to self and entitled ‘Remember milk and eggs!’ A jumble of familiar games to play on long journeys – Sudoku, Scrabble, and one app which attempted to miniaturise golf for a screen four inches by two.

Sharon kept on scrolling. A list of outgoing calls followed – Miles carefully logging the numbers. Then a list of incoming calls, which dissolved halfway down. Sharon looked and suddenly stopped, pointing at one number in particular. “There!”

Miles peered. “What am I looking at?”

“07812 972 2811.” Sharon was already reaching for her phone and dialling it.

“I’m sorry, is that number of particular significance? Someone you know…⁠?”

“Maybe.”

The phone rang in her hand. It was answered, slowly and blearily, by a voice going, “Yeah? Who is it?”

“Hi, my name’s Sharon. You don’t know someone by the name of Swift, do you?”

The voice, male, sleepy, grumpy to be no longer asleep, paused. Then, “No – look, do I know you?”

“Don’t think so. I’m Sharon, I’m the deputy Midnight Mayor, I’m looking for my boss?”

Irritation flared now in the voice on the other end of the line. “Look, I don’t know who you are or what you want, but it’s really late so if it’s important, yeah, it’s just going to have to wait. Bye.”

“No, wait I…⁠” The voice at the other end, had already hung up. “Well, that’s kinda rude,” muttered Sharon.

“Not what you were expecting?” murmured Miles.

“Not what I was hoping,” she admitted. “What do you know about numbers beginning 07812?”

To her surprise, Paul answered. “Uh, it’s a common mobile phone prefix. Millions of people have it.”

From behind her smile, Sharon realised that she was going to like Ian far more than this koala-eyed technician, glowering at her from above his coffee mug. “Okay,” she said, trying not to let her irritation show. “Well, that’s a shame. Still!” She sat up a little straighter. “Maybe send someone over to check this number out? Just in case it’s
not
a coincidence?”

“Ms Li,” Miles moved round next to her to see her face more clearly. “May I ask what the significance of this number is?”

“Not sure yet,” she replied. Then, with a burst of defiance, “Which doesn’t make it any less significant! Just… a bit unhelpful, is all.”

Faced with Miles’s restrained consternation, she turned back to the computer screen, glaring at it as if somehow it could be held responsible for her current frustrations. “Did you get any emails off this thing?” she asked.

“We’re brilliant, but not that brilliant,” replied Paul. “Got her last few internet addresses, though.”

He gestured at a file on the screen. Sharon opened it, and scrolled through the web links. Several were map references. One of them, when opened, brought up directions to the Deptford industrial estate where the woman had met her end, another for Scylla Workshops, World’s End. Miles reached out abruptly, his hand pressing down on Sharon’s, before she could move on.

“Scylla Workshops,” he breathed. “Damn.”

“Why ‘damn’? What are they? How can things get worse?”

“The scylla sisters,” he replied. “Manufacturers and enchantresses of all things mystic and magic.”

“Great,” muttered Sharon. “That’s how things can get worse.”

She scrolled through a few more links, but the water had eaten more than even a decent digital magician could recover. Finally she stood up, just as Rhys turned to her with eyes aglow and said, “All this time I thought D++ would be the right script to enchant in!”

Sharon looked from Rhys’s bright eyes to the patient smile of Ian the digital magician standing at his back, and fell back on her default nod-smile technique. “Yeah, Rhys. That sounds great.”

If her words were hollow, they only served to echo off the infinite boundaries of Rhys’s joy and goodwill. As they were leaving, a thought struck Sharon. She turned to Paul and Ian, already sinking back into the slow growth of paper and coffee that filled their tiny office. “Hey – the woman whose phone this was. Did you get a name?”

“Brid,” replied Ian. “There were messages for Brid, but the phone is registered to Bridget Parr.”

Chapter 48

Brid

I only did what needed to be done.

My mother is a witch, my grandmother was a witch, and her mother before then.

We were one of the first families who understood urban magic, one of the first to get rid of the old herbs and cantrips of the trade and learn how to work with this new power, this raw power of the cities. My great, great grandmother blessed the first shovel that dug the dirt of the Metropolitan line, my great grandmother laid a whole chimney of soot devils to rest using nothing more than a bucket of salt water and the shuttle from a weaver’s loom! In 1917, my grandmother did the first ever warding of an automobile against rust and in 1940 my mother was born as Silvertown burnt around her; and she had some of that fire in her blood, my mother, some of that stench of brick and smoke and nitroglycerine, and she gave that to me. The old order changes, giving way to the new. I am a witch, and proud, and I did what needed to be done.

He is coming.

Chapter 49

Bring Goodwill Wherever You Go

There was a stranger waiting in the foyer downstairs.

He was waiting in the foyer, because security hadn’t known what to do with him.

Back straight, shoulders back, head held up high, he was every bit the proud ambassador, and it was perhaps this pride and forcefulness which the security guards could sense and which, along with his lacerated skin, and flesh punched with metal, held them back from approaching him too closely.

8ft stood in the foyer and glared at it all. He glared at the lifts, at the potted plants, at the bright light and the polished floor, because it was,

“ugly,” he explained, as Sharon stepped out of the lift, Miles in tow. The Alderman’s expression, usually a paragon of diplomatic inertia, drifted through surprise and then out into open astonishment as Sharon held out her hand and the Tribesman carefully grasped it. “its ugly,” he added with a grunt. “prty thins 2 disguse slav labor, beatiful wals 2 hid da sin.”

Sharon’s smile, fuelled by coffee and tension, was unwavering, cheerful and bright. “8ft,” she said, “I’m guessing you don’t want to come upstairs for a coffee?” He scowled, eyes flickering round the hall like a rat wondering if he should go down the darkened tunnel towards the sweet-smelling chocolate. “Didn’t think so,” she sighed. “8ft, this is Miles. Miles, this is 8ft.”

The Alderman got together something resembling a smile and, overcoming his brief repulsion, even went so far as to offer a hand. The Tribesman glared at it suspiciously. “wat is Miles?” he asked, glancing at Sharon.

“Miles is my minion.”

“u av minion?”

“Yes – I was kinda worried that the word had derogatory terms; but actually Miles recommended it himself, and I think if you use it with a sorta tongue-in-cheek attitude then it’s almost fond.”

“i fought ur druid woz ur minion.”

Rhys smiled feebly. “Me, too,” he replied.

“is Miles tru?”

“Depends what you mean by true,” Sharon replied, eyeing up the Alderman with a fixed smile. “If you mean is he honest, dedicated, determined and hard-working, then, yeah, I guess he’s all that and probably making a fortune off overtime. If you mean, has he seen the innate falseness of this world, perceived the lies that we spin over the surface of reality to shield ourselves from the pain… then you’re gonna have to ask him that yourself.”

To everyone’s relief, 8ft didn’t. Instead, he gestured towards the door. “did wat u wnted,” he grunted. “tok tim, tok wrk, but he’s ere.”

“Who’s here?” asked Miles quickly.

8ft spared him only the most cursory of glares. “da mdnght mayor.”

The Tribe had put him in the back of a truck.

The numberplate dangled off the front, and the back had no numberplate at all. The blue walls of the vehicle were covered in thick, grey dirt, on which an immortal wit bursting with originality had written, in order to fulfil expectations, WASH ME.

Other, more interesting, fingers had written other things. Wards spiralled and spun across the dirt; drawn with fingertips and palm prints, they swirled in and out of each other in a giddy mess of lines and sweeps, graffiti-style, sharp contours and jagged shapes which might have been a word, or an image, or even a very angry idea, until the necessities of magical binding had disrupted all meaning. Three nervous-looking Tribesmen were huddled round the back doors of the van. One carried a piece of corrugated iron, torn and battered into a crude shield. Burn marks were splashed across its front like wet black paint. Another carried a wand, crafted from a broken handle pulled from the end of a circuit breaker, its tip still smarting with suppressed electrical energy waiting to be unleashed. A third had fresh burns through her shoulder and across her neck, the skin red, raw, swollen and bloody, her face beaming with pride at the injury.