The Glass God (5 page)

“We can but try our best.”

“So, Ms Li.” Kelly stood up briskly, the chair coasting out on its wheels behind her. “I hope you have a marvellous day and, please, do keep the doughnuts, and the umbrella, and we’ll…⁠”

“Wait,” groaned Sharon. Kelly waited, eyebrows raised. Sharon looked from Alderman to Alderman, then gave another, louder groan and let her head bang once more against the top of her desk. Soon there would be a groove in the paperwork where her forehead had carved out a path. “Fine,” she grumbled, looking back up, chin first. “And don’t think I’m doing this just because of your manipulation, because I’m not and because I don’t believe in falling for cheap tricks. I’m just… taking an interest because of my civic spirit, and…⁠” She snatched up the doughnuts. “I’m keeping these. Rhys!”

Rhys stuck his head out from behind the computer with the innocence of a man who has absolutely not been eavesdropping. “Yes, Ms Li?”

“Get your coat!”

The day outside was cold and bright, dazzling through the falling leaves, with the Aldermen incongruously dark beneath a baby-blue sky. Sharon juggled the blue umbrella and the bag containing sandwiches and doughnuts, and Kelly, indicating the noise of traffic from Theobalds Road, said, “I hope no one minds if we get a bus?”

“A bus?” echoed Sharon, scampering after the two Aldermen. They were heading south, past tall terraced houses of coal-grey brick with bone-white window frames. “What happened to swanning around in chauffeur-driven cars?”

“Financial consequences,” sighed Kelly. “When Mr Swift and yourself did that marvellous job removing the wendigo from Burns and Stoke, and freeing the imprisoned spirits of the city from their lair, of course it was fabulous for the welfare of London as a whole. It was, however, a teensy bit detrimental to the fiscal stability of the brokerages market, and Harlun and Phelps suffered some not inconsiderable financial losses as a result. Alas, as Harlun and Phelps is the prime employer and supplier for the Aldermen, this means we’ve had to make a few cutbacks in one or two administrative areas. Do you have your own travel cards?”

Sharon looked at Rhys. “I cycle to work,” he offered.

“That’s excellent, absolutely what people should do! Well, if you have to take public transport in the course of this investigation, please do keep the receipt.”

“Is this an investigation?” queried the druid. “Only I’ve got the boiler man coming round tomorrow at eight, see, and it’s been very hard to arrange…⁠” Sharon glared at Rhys, who dissolved into “⁠… but I suppose that’s not very important in the scheme of things, is it?”

They walked on past expensive cars parked outside expensive houses. Commemorative plaques occurred in this part of town with mocking regularity, assuring passers-by that, while their own lives up to this point may have been futile, great works had nevertheless distinguished these streets, even in an age when most people were lucky to have butter with their bread. Sharon was uncharacteristically silent, and, Rhys thought, slightly thin around the edges, her brisk walk taking her close to where shamans began to disappear from sight: that precise speed where the brain seemed to say, ‘oh look, a native’ before disregarding anything further including, for example, whether that native was solid all the way through.

They turned onto Theobalds Road, a busy place of sandwich bars, expensive hairdressers and lawyers. The bus, to Rhys’s surprise, came quickly. If asked to define who or what he was, he would usually explain that he was the man who had to wait fourteen minutes for every train which ran on a fifteen-minute interval, and so could only attribute the miraculous appearance of transport to the luck of the company he now kept. People stared at the Aldermen, but not at him. Even with a shock of straight ginger hair, and dressed in a thick tartan-pattern shirt and slightly too short jeans, Rhys had never been an object of interest even to those who specialised in spotting style calamities. In a way, that gave him comfort. If he didn’t look like much, at least small children didn’t cry at the sight of him.

They sat at the very back of the top deck, in the seats Rhys had marked out in his imagination as the naughty seats for naughty schoolchildren. Sharon at once had her boots up on the plastic back of the seats in front, and was reaching for her cheese and pickle sandwich.

“Okay,” she said. “Tell me about the ‘vanished’ thing.”

Kelly looked round the bus with what was either the shrewd look of a woman careful about eavesdroppers, or the brilliant face of all urban tourists enjoying an unfamiliar experience, or possibly both. She leant back in her seat and said, “It’s been two days. Or has it, hard to say… I suppose it depends when he vanished, as compared to when I saw him last… but I saw him last two days ago, so that’s probably the best we’ve got to go on.”

Sharon shifted uncomfortably, pushing the blue umbrella into a corner and spraying her lap with crumbs. If she cared, she didn’t show it.

“He came into my office, gave me the umbrella, said, ‘Kelly, if anything happens to me, get this to Sharon’ and walked out. Then he walked back in again and said, ‘buy her doughnuts’ and then walked out again; he does that a lot, you see, always thinks of the important things when he’s halfway to the lift. I’ve tried to convince him to buy a smartphone but he refuses, which I think is ironic considering…⁠”

“That was the last time you saw him?” demanded Sharon.

“Yes.”

“And why do you think he’s vanished, instead of just done a bunk?”

“Well,” murmured Kelly, fixing her eyes on some point at the opposite end of the bus as it rattled its way down Clerkenwell Road. “I do occasionally keep tabs on Mr Swift, just for his own sake, of course, and when he didn’t answer his phone yesterday we did a little bit of a scry, and got nothing. Nothing at all. And of course – of course! – a good sorcerer can shield himself from these things, but then he really isn’t answering his phone and there are so many things about Mr Swift that we can scry for. There’s the blue electric angels, of course, embedded in his soul, or the power of the Midnight Mayor, branded into his hand – frankly he usually stands out like a kangaroo in a coal mine – so the fact that we’ve got nothing is a little concerning. Then of course there’s that,” Kelly inclined her head towards the umbrella. “It may be nothing at all, of course, but Mr Swift isn’t widely regarded for his consideration of the weather, or indeed of others who may experience it, so quite why he’d be so specific that you receive both the umbrella and the doughnuts, I cannot say.”

Sharon’s hand, which had been groping for a doughnut, drew back sharply. “Jesus! You don’t think the doughnuts could be mystic, do you?”

Kelly looked thoughtful. “No,” she concluded. “At least, I find it very unlikely, as I bought them from Londis half an hour ago.”

“Okay,” Sharon muttered, settling for another cheese and pickle sandwich. “Well, I guess that’s something.”

“Also, I hate to say it, but there have been other signs that Mr Swift may have thought he was heading for trouble.”

“What… signs?”

“Well…⁠” Kelly’s face was a picture of organisational distress. “⁠… He sent his apprentice to New York.”

“Wait there a moment! Swift’s got an apprentice?”

“Oh, yes. Ms Ngwenya. Charming woman – we go to a book group together on the first Friday of the month. This month we’re reading
Little Dorrit
and I must admit I am struggling, but then… I can see you’re not interested in this.”

Sharon tried to fix her expression in the polite, open look she used for obsessive vampires and outraged necromancers, and hoped it would do for Kelly Shiring, too. “And this apprentice… she gets to go to New York? As part of her teaching?” She just about managed to keep the acid from her voice.

“Absolutely!” exclaimed Kelly, oblivious to most things which might dampen the day. “Mr Swift says it’s very important that sorcerers experience all sorts of urban magic, not just the peculiarities of London; however, he also says that when the shit hits the fan the last thing he wants is his apprentice in town, as he can neither guarantee that she won’t get hurt nor that she won’t hurt others recklessly, and so you see…⁠”

“You think he sent her away to keep her safe?”

Kelly flinched. “The possibility must be considered, distressing though it is.”

Sharon drummed her fingers on the window of the bus. Outside, the terraced houses of Clerkenwell were giving way to the glass offices and imperial facades of the City, the Golden Mile. Without looking at Kelly she murmured, “So, I don’t wanna ask this, but I guess I gotta, seeing as how I’m now involved and that… how’d you know he isn’t just dead?”

Rhys swallowed, and wrestled his expression into one of concerned astonishment. Kelly twiddled her thumbs nervously. “I don’t think so,” she said. “Not to dismiss the notion, of course, but he
is
the Midnight Mayor. And while Mr Swift might die – which would be terrible! – the power of the Midnight Mayor, the essence of what
it
is, well, that’s as old as the city, and will last as long as its stones themselves. So if he were dead, I do feel that the power would have been transferred to a successor. Someone like you, perhaps!”

Sharon choked on her sandwich, sending a spray of crumbs and cheese across the seat in front of her. Kelly waited for the shaman to stop suffocating before she added, “You haven’t developed any unusual scars lately, have you? Or found yourself communing with dragons, for example?”

“I bloody well have not! Why would any arsehole make
me
Midnight Mayor?”

“Ms Li,” chided Kelly, “did we not already establish what a truly marvellous person you are? Miles, back me up here!”

Sharon swung round to glower at the man called Miles. The tube-like shape of his Alderman’s black coat only seemed to increase his impressive height; his carefully trimmed blond hair completed the appearance of royalty in mourning. Unwavering grey eyes, flecked with blue, met Sharon’s glare full-on. “I must admit, Ms Li,” he murmured, “based only on having read your file, of course, I think you would be an excellent choice of Midnight Mayor. You have admirable civic spirit, and I feel that your management style could infuse a great deal of thought innovation into our working environment.”

Sharon’s mouth dropped open.

So, for that matter, did Rhys’s.

“Of course, if you
were
Midnight Mayor, it would suggest that Mr Swift is, in fact, deceased, and I’m sure no one here wants that.”

“Well, quite!” exclaimed Kelly, rising to her feet with the purposefulness of a woman who saw a bus stop coming up. “And I’m sure the sooner we find him, the easier it will be to prevent that from happening!”

She trotted down the stairs and Sharon followed, still trying to recompose her expression into something suitably shamanesque, as the four of them stepped out onto Cheapside.

Once a place of dubious repute, the Cheapside of recent times had undergone a series of face-lifts, whereby the frontage of Victorian offices, and former guilds still bearing Latin mottoes of yore as a reminder of the time when you did not mess with the candle-makers of London, had been replaced with glass facades. Nowadays passers-by had access to window displays of mobile phones and greetings cards for every occasion, and banks accessible to the public from five minutes after the start of normal office hours to five minutes before their end, please don’t try and visit during lunch breaks. The assumption on Cheapside was that nobody much would pay for anything with cash.

Kelly strode north, down a road barely wide enough for the sandwich delivery man to pedal his bicycle and trolley between its black bollards embossed with the crimson cross of the City of London. She led the way past the fire exits of great financial firms, where smokers huddled on their breaks to pass on the gossip of the day; past the wine and sushi bar where each night men in suits greeted old friends to compete over various triumphs; and around the square tower of a church whose nave was long gone, but which nonetheless remained, defiant and alone.

Harlun and Phelps was situated on Aldermansbury Square, a crooked open space framed by modern sheet glass and the white stone walls of the ancient Guildhall, which squatted like an angry badger at a pedigree dog show. Inside the foyer, the theme of the month appeared to be great stalks of bamboo, seemingly taller than the block of flats where Sharon lived.

“Enjoy this place while you can!” exclaimed Kelly as the lift pinged in greeting. “With things as they are, we won’t be able to afford the rent for much longer.”

Harlun and Phelps itself was, to Sharon’s surprise, a fully functional office. Desks were divided from each other by low partitions, behind which men and women in suits sat hunched over computers with the look of people determined not to be caught playing solitaire. Coffee machines hummed in closets off the open floors, and harsh fluorescent light flooded the place, even in the middle of the day. Sharon looked for some sign of mystic inclinings, and, seeing none, looked again, as only a shaman can. The office was…

… ordinary. There in the shadows, the ghost of a manager who’d stood on a table and screamed at his workers, three days before he lost his job; there, hovering just behind the back of a man scrabbling away at a keyboard, head bowed and shoulders hunched, a woman with a mouth opened so her chin nearly bumped her collar, whispering
harder, harder, harder, don’t you realise there’s a family to feed?
From behind the closed door of the cleaning cupboard, the sound of whispered promises broken,
anything you want babes, anything you want, just a kiss, that’s all, just a kiss…

Sharon looked away, before the walls in that particular corner could tell much more of their tale.

“I’m not getting much magic,” she murmured, as Kelly swept through the office with the imperious stride of one who belonged and, to a degree, ruled.

“Of course not, Ms Li! The majority of Harlun and Phelps is a strictly for-profit corporation. Bonds, futures, all that stuff – really, it goes far over my head,” confessed the PA. “While the Aldermen are often employed in the company, and while we do prefer to hire members of the magical community, if only to keep them out of trouble, one must concede that not every macroeconomics graduate of the London School of Economics is going to know how to banish a ghoul. It was our more… mundane… which is to say the more financially profitable… departments which were so heavily invested in Burns and Stoke, and we all saw how poorly that worked out. Here we are!”