The Glass God (47 page)

Arthur stood with his back to the city and said, “I think it’s customary to offer tea under these circumstances. However, the machine hasn’t been put in, but I hoped you’d appreciate the thought.”

Sharon scowled. “Even if there weren’t this mega-deathy vibe going down here, I gotta tell you, we’re probably past the cuppa tea stage of polite chitchat. I mean, here you are…⁠” – she turned back the way she’d come, pacing across the room, the shadow walk close and inviting, promising invisibility at the tiniest step to one side – “⁠… the guy who we went to for information about shit, actually being involved in shit and actually, I’m like, what happened to you being a trusty pint-in-the-pub kinda guy?”

“I didn’t deceive you, Ms Li. My information regarding Old Man Bone was entirely accurate.”

“Apart from failing to mention being part of the guys who stole his blade – hey, you all got a name?”

A flicker of eyebrow, the tiniest quiver of a lash. “A… name?”

“Yeah. Like, we’re Magicals Anonymous, and Kelly out there is with the Aldermen. And you’re clearly part of a secret cult and that, so you got a name?”

“Officially,” murmured Arthur, “we are the Modern Temple of Illuminated Heavenly Mysteries.”

“Does that have an acronym?”

Muscles twitched around Arthur’s mouth, which in other circumstances might eventually have crossed an evolutionary barrier and become a smile. “Most members refer to us as… the Illuminated.”

“That’s cool,” Sharon murmured, still pacing, still listening to the shadows, toes nudging the very edge of invisibility. “It’s like the Illuminati only less European. It kinda gives off this ‘we know shit bet you wish you did too’ vibe without being totally in your face about it. I like it.”

This time, the smile was almost palpable. “And yourself, Ms Li? After your visit to my graveyard, I asked a few questions regarding Magicals Anonymous. I must admit, your ambition is… remarkable.”

“No it’s not,” she replied. “Thanks for the thought, but, seriously, pissing off an ancient undead god, nicking his sacred blade, imprisoning the Midnight Mayor in the telephone wires, sacrificing people to make a new god, killing scyllas, turning the lights out on a striga – I mean, next to all that, I’m just organising a piss-up in a brewery and even then it’s mostly froth, if you get what I’m saying.”

Arthur said nothing. The smile, however, remained, hovering over his lips like a gunship over open ground.

“You
did
do all that shit, right?” Sharon persisted. “You got B-Man to pinch Old Man Bone’s blade; trapped the Midnight Mayor in the telephones, sent your glass guy to kill the scyllas… how’s that holding up doctrinally, by the way? I mean, I get that when we talk about a glass ‘god’ this kinda implies omnipotence, omniscience and theological things, but then Sammy says that your glass guy is nothing more than a glass structure, an elemental composite animated through other means, but, still, ‘god’ has gotta come with some sorta implications, right?”

Arthur sighed the patient sigh of a busy teacher. “Tell me, do you
like
Old Man Bone? Do you enjoy what he is? Once upon a time I’m sure he served a function within the city, when the graveyards burst and the sewage flowed in the street. Once upon a time I’m sure we needed a ghoul come from the pit to carry off the corpses of the dead, to wash away the water swimming in cholera and pry the boots from the swollen, rotten feet of the bodies turned black by the roadside. He was important once. But now? You’re a modern woman, Ms Li, you’ve seen how things are. We have antibiotics now! We have sanitation, industry, local government, recycling centres – and still Old Man Bone will have his sacrifices? He’ll have his blood? Do you think he
deserves
it? Do you really think he’s somehow
better
?”

Sharon kept on walking, as she considered his words. “I dunno,” she said. “I’m not a big fan of Old Man Bone, I give you that. But, thing is, where I’m stood, this chat weren’t never about him and all his shit. It’s about you. You and the things you’ve done, and trying to make it out like you’re somehow… something bigger, to make it sound like you’re doing this cos of Old Man Bone or for the city or any of that shit… that’s a plain, crappy lie, and I ain’t going for it. Don’t matter what you think about Old Man Bone, or what I think about him. What matters is the things you’ve done.”

“You seem to know a great deal about it already, Ms Li. What exactly have I done?”

“What have you done?” She paused, and looked at Arthur in disbelief. “You take that patronising tone, asking me what you’ve done? Because, like, the only reason we’re having this chat is so we can find some way to deal with this without the Aldermen going all sub-machine gun out there. I don’t tell you stuff; you tell me stuff. And you do it, if you don’t mind me saying, in a really ‘shit I’m so sorry we’ve killed at least four people and nearly killed you and turned the lights out’ – turned the fucking lights out on one of your fucking own, and Zhanyi was nice, you know? I really fucking liked her, she was… she was trying and she cared and you turned the fucking lights out on her and I had to… so you don’t get to fucking smile!”

She was shouting, and hadn’t noticed; the blood throbbed in her face. If anything, Arthur’s smile widened. “You really are out of your depth, aren’t you, deputy Midnight Mayor?” he breathed, and there was something about him, Sharon noticed, an edge of something that clung to him as he moved, a shadow beneath the shadow, which turned beneath his feet, barely visible except to a shaman’s eyes.

“I mean, I heard that the real Midnight Mayor was something, a real firecracker, and when we stripped his mind from his body I thought, that’s it, we’ve done it, we’ve sorted the problem. But you know what? His body kept on going, even though he wasn’t in it any more; it tore Brid apart like that.” He snapped his fingers so loud Sharon jumped.

“The
real
Midnight Mayor was something – but even though he kept fighting, even though he ripped Brid to pieces, I knew that this was the best the city had to offer, and we’d already beaten it. And then you turn up, sent by Crompton –
Crompton
– the blithering idiot servant of an ancient, outdated god, and you’re the deputy Midnight Mayor, and, well!” He chuckled, the smile spreading, pushing against his ears, crinkling up beneath his eyes. “Look at you. A little girl with a grown man’s job. All… empty words and bingo nights. I am impressed by Magicals Anonymous, whether you realise it or not. All those damaged lives, all those heartfelt, aching problems, and you know what it is? You know what you made? It’s a really good place for all the little people to go and be small together. Take your people and go,
sweetheart. You’re out of your league.”

Silence. Sharon stood still, eyes fixed on some point far behind Arthur’s shoulder.

“Did you just call me…
sweetheart
?”

Arthur rolled his eyes.

“No, but seriously, I just wanna get this clear,” she said. “I’m not saying that I object to the term necessarily; I can see how it might be endearing in, like, the same way I might call a bloke ‘mate’ or ‘pal’ or an endearing personal nickname or something. But I’m just saying, it’s about the context, yeah, and in the context where you’re, like, ‘you’re so weak and pathetic so fuck right off’, ending the sentence with ‘sweetheart’ is
exactly
the kinda attitude that gets you into trouble. I mean,” she added, before Arthur could interrupt, “would you call a raging male sorcerer ‘cupcake’? Would you walk up to an angry djinn and say ‘how’s it going, duckling?’ Course you wouldn’t, and I gotta say I think that the way we use language is actually half the problem here so why the hell…⁠?”

She vanished. Arthur blinked, his mind struggling to reconcile what
had
been with what suddenly was very much
not
. A second later something slammed into the side of his head, hard enough to knock him to the floor – something fast, heavy and possibly bag-shaped. He crumpled, his arm automatically covering his head. Above him, Sharon reappeared. “It’s not about political correctness!” she exploded, swinging the bag by its strap round her wrist. “It’s about – respecting – the other guy’s – point of view!”

Arthur looked up, as blood seeped through his fingers and made dark rat’s tails of his hair. The shaman stared at the gravekeeper, and for a moment neither moved.

His eyes narrowed. A second before it happened, Sharon saw the impending change, and dived back into the invisibility and cold embrace of the shadow walk. Then Arthur threw his hand up, still red with his own blood, and the air was thrown with it, thickening and twisting, condensing round his fingers and bursting outwards with the force of a tidal wave breaching a dam. Even in the shadow walk the blast knocked Sharon off her feet, slamming her face first into the floor, and back into full visibility.

She hauled down a breath and, scrambling on all fours, she tried to regain the safety of the shadow walk, even as Arthur, grunting with the effort, pulled himself to his feet. She saw the air shaking around him, twisting and spiralling.

“Don’t!” he roared, and the air roared with him, slapping Sharon back down to the floor like a scarecrow in a storm.

“Talk to me!” he added and the glass windows of the Shard hummed and creaked, warping under the pressure of his voice as it filled the room.

“Like!” One step, and the floor groaned beneath him, the cityscape misshaping at his back as every glass surface flexed and bent.

“I’m!”

Sharon briefly struggled up onto her hands and knees, crawled a few paces into the comforting embrace of invisibility, felt the shadows twist and thicken around her, the pressure of Arthur’s voice recede; but he threw his hands up and the room seemed to lurch like a freefalling lift, picking her up and throwing her back down.

“A fucking!”

He was almost on top of her, and his eyes blazed, his skin shimmered with the haze of magic tumbling off it.

“
Child!
”

She looked up and Arthur Huntley, ex-wizard, sometime gravekeeper, former member of the Westminster Coven, stripped of his powers, so Mr Roding had said, for deeds unknown, was brilliant with power, enough to sizzle the air, to twist the wires, to make the glass in the windows sing. He reached down and caught Sharon by her shirt, hauling her up, twisting her clothes hard enough to cut into her spine, slice across her neck, and his eyes were bright and furious. “The young never listen,” he hissed, drawing his other hand back, the fingers filling with fire, the knuckles clenching into the shape of a spell.

“Too bloody right,” said a voice at his back.

The voice was nasal, small, shrill without being feminine, smug without being pleased, and carried with it, not just sound, but an unmistakable aroma of… rotting rubbish? Arthur half turned and there he was, Sammy the Elbow, four-foot-nothing of goblin in a dirty green hoodie, and at his back there were…

Shadows was too loose a term. Shadows implied merely the absence of light. These weren’t that. These were echoes, dragging out of the shadow walk and given solid shape, living memories, shadows in that they had been cast by something else, but the things which had cast them had been life itself, and now they twisted and writhed and they were…

                    the purple-green spirit who nested in the lights that burnt off the old NatWest Tower in the city below

zephyr of stolen wind who was trapped one day during the building of the Shard. It came in to have a look, and when it tried to go out again, it found the windows had been sealed

                         angry rush of the engine wind from the planes that whooshed overhead

     echo of a spanner which was dropped and fell seventy-two floors before it hit the ground hard enough to shatter paving stones

                              slither of the eel-like ghosts that nestled in the turning tide of the river below

multifaceted gaze of the staring spirits who perched with the pigeons to study the patterns of the night-time cities, reading their fortunes in the runes cast by the changing traffic lights

                    shadow of a dragon, wings black, eyes red, raging mad, watching, always watching from the city streets

They stood behind him now, all the shades that dwelt in the shadow walk, all the hidden truths that only the shamans were meant to see, they writhed and twisted and scattered the light around them, and they were visible even to Arthur’s eye, and they were real, as they always had been, and they were angry.

“Yo,” said Sammy as Arthur’s eyes widened in revelation. “Squishy-brains.”

He didn’t point, didn’t say anything, make any sign, but with a silent shriek of delight, the spirits at his back leapt forward, blacker than the reflective black on the rain-washed tarmac, brighter than the heart of the sodium lamp burning alone against the darkness, hotter than the pipe at the back of the overheating bus, colder than the depths of the damp water pipes below the city streets. They threw themselves at Arthur, wrapping themselves around him and some had claws, and some had fingers, and they gashed and tore and screamed.

Arthur dropped Sharon, who sagged to the floor, slipping into the shadow walk; and now she saw them all, perfectly, all the spirits that Sammy had summoned, clinging to Arthur, who staggered beneath the weight of them. Staggered – but did not fall. His skin blazed with a burst of something bright, white flecked with gold, and, as she looked, something thin and translucent began to spread across his face. At first she thought it was water; then oil; but as it thickened and grew stiff she recognised the perfect smoothness of crafted glass, sliding over every part of him. She looked round, and saw Sammy, right above her. The goblin grabbed her by the hand. “Scarper!” he called out with a merry, gap-toothed grin, and before she could protest, he pulled her to her feet, and straight through the nearest wall.

Chapter 83

Chaos Is Nature’s Solution