Our Lady of the Streets (The Skyscraper Throne)

by Tom Pollock

  Pen recoiled and flung her consciousness outwards from the basement kitchen, sending it leaping and sparking between wire strands like electric current. Her mind raced across miles and miles of desolate city in the fraction of a beat of a heart, to the outskirts of the labyrinth that cradled Canary Wharf, and found what she had left there.

  A pair of steel tendrils exploded up from the thin shale of rubble that had hidden them. They shot into the air like striking snakes, barbed tips pointed straight at Canada Tower.

  PARVA!

  The two wires seared upwards for hundreds of yards, accelerating all the while, and all the while Paul’s silent screams tore through Pen’s head. The Wire Mistress sensed her pain and her urgency and exhorted the wires to even greater speed. The labyrinth blurred away beneath them and she felt the blistering cold air rush over the steel. They slowed as their trajectories levelled out, then they speared downwards.

  Pen saw them through Paul’s terrified eyes as they entered the square, twisting to avoid the tower tops, steel calligraphy against the pale blue sky. They sped towards him, the distance collapsing impossibly fast, and Pen felt, or imagined she felt, the chill tip of the lead wire brushing Paul’s chest.

  She jerked the wire sideways at the last moment, coiling it back on itself. She wove a blurring metal helix around Paul, never touching him but churning the surface of the pool to foam. With a wheezing growl, the Masonry Man reached for Paul, but Pen lashed her consciousness and the wire lashed with it. The clayling’s hand exploded into concrete dust under the barbed tip.

  Pen concentrated, sweat blotching through her headscarf. The vortex of wire shrank around Paul. It was maddeningly slow, but it had to be; if she squeezed too hard she’d cut him in half. The other Masonry Men abandoned the line of gaping humans, flexed their grey spines and dived into the ground. Pen breathed out just once before they breached the earth at the edge of the pool, their thin fingers grasping for Paul’s shivering skin.

  Pen’s second wire flashed in among them like a metal thunderbolt. It slashed one of the claylings from shoulder to hip and the creature collapsed. The other claylings fell back. The wire was still caked in grey blood as Pen dragged it back and lashed at another, then set it coiling and hissing through the air in an impenetrable blur between Paul and their outstretched hands.

  All the while she was focusing on the first wire: the rescue strand. The spinning cocoon finally closed around Paul’s chest and she felt a spark of shock as the two vessels of her mind came into contact like a closing circuit. She remembered at the last second to flip the wire’s barbs outwards so they didn’t break the shivering man’s skin.

  Paul was staring glassily upwards. Above him, Mater Viae’s Sewermanders crackled, spat sparks, and dived.

  ‘Glas!’ Pen’s lips were so dry they split as she shouted, ‘Help!’

  A clamour of wings drowned out the waterfall. Like a storm cloud suddenly coalescing, thousands upon thousands of madly flapping dark bodies rose up from the labyrinth. Pen felt the cold as Gutterglass’ pigeons blotted out the sun. She watched through Paul’s astonished eyes as they flocked into a narrow bank and surged to intercept the Sewermanders. At the head of their formation, she could just make out a pair of tiny white flecks that might have been eggshells.

  The Sewermanders ignored the birds and swooped down. Pen could already feel the fire of them, drying Paul’s skin, heating the wire to just below painful. The pigeon formation stabbed up to meet the gas-drakes. The lead bird was only a few feet from the lead Sewermander’s nose when it broke hard right. The birds behind it followed, a perfectly synchronised flock, as the lead bird, with Glas’ eyes flashing in its claws, led its fellows looping in a fast, tight spiral, around and around the diving Sewermanders. Their wings were loud as a machine-gun battle, and Pen felt the wind of them pummel Paul’s skin.

  Come on, she prayed, even as she lifted him out of the water, come on!

  The Sewermanders’ descent slowed. They struggled and snapped, but the tornado of the pigeons’ wings held them up. Their fiery outlines guttered and warped in the air.

  Come on, Glas.

  The pigeons flew in ever-tighter spirals, bringing their wings closer and closer to the Sewermanders. The gas-drakes screamed quietly, their flames tracking the air currents, stretching too thin, rolling and twisting all out of shape.

  Then, one after another, without a sound, they went out.

  Back in the kitchen, Gutterglass barked, ‘Now, Ms Khan!’

  The pigeons scattered, and Pen yanked Paul’s body into a suddenly clear sky. He was alive, she knew that much. She could feel his heartbeat coursing through him, hammering against the metal cocoon that held him. He rose fifty feet, a hundred, a hundred and fifty. Pen could feel the air pushing his skin as he accelerated. The Masonry Men watched him go, helpless behind the arc woven by the lashing second wire. A breath Pen didn’t know she was holding burst up from her chest. Finally, truly, she started to believe.

  It was only a flicker of movement – a blur within a blur, glimpsed from the corner of Paul’s eye as he shot upwards. It took Pen an instant to make sense of it—

  Mater Viae had jumped from the tower top.

  Paul’s head turned to track Her. Pen watched Her dark shape plummet through the waterfall, and all the pent-up hope turned to ice in her chest. Her reflexes felt horribly sluggish as she tried to reel in the second tendril of wire, still lagging behind them.

  Mater Viae breached the surface of the pool like a hunting shark. Lights glittered on Her street-riddled hand as it closed around the wire.

  Pen panicked. She tried desperately to tug the strand free, but the Goddess’ grasp was like steel girders, like stone foundations, like gravity itself. As the Lady of the Streets tightened Her grip, Pen felt most of the barbs bend under Her architecture-skin, but one found a soil-filled crevice at the edge of the Goddess’ palm and forced its way in.

  Mater Viae’s consciousness surged back up the wire.

  The scream made Pen’s teeth vibrate. Everything shuddered and lost definition. In a fuddled, hazy moment of pain, she recognised the scream as her own. She screwed up her eyes; behind them she was spinning, tumbling down through a vertical warren of streets. She was racked by the electricity of rail-tracks; the horrendous discord of factory pistons filled her skull. It felt like her head would burst. The city was too complex. She couldn’t parse its systems. She couldn’t cope. She couldn’t think. She felt the vast remorseless weight of the city poised over her own mind, ready to crush it.

  Something sparked at the base of Pen’s skull and the metal strand went limp in Mater Viae’s hand. The Wire Mistress had let it go.

  Pen gasped, shaking, as she found herself on her hands and knees. The weight was gone from her mind, but there was a sour smell in the room and her throat was burning: she’d puked onto the kitchen floor and never even realised it. Her eyes were open, but they were watering badly. Blurrily she saw Beth, crouching in front of her, asking her if she was all right. Pen didn’t answer; she looked past Beth and through to what Paul was seeing: Canada Square was vanishing into the distance below his feet. Mater Viae was tiny, toy-like, the wire strand still slack in Her fist.

  As Pen watched, the Lady of the Streets dragged the wire back over Her shoulder and cracked it like a vast steel whip.

  The wire bent back on itself and then snapped forward, fast. A sine-wave ripped through its length, faster and faster as it shot through the air, its barbs lashing straight at Paul’s face.

  Pen shrieked and yanked Paul hard sideways. The wire flashed next to his eye. Pen felt hot blood on her face, but when she put her hand to it, her fingers came up dry. The room around her flexed; the lights were suddenly too bright. She could feel Paul’s pulse thundering through him.

  The world slipped away.

  *

  ‘Pen! PEN!’ Beth hollered as loud as she could. Even her lungs were straining, though her vocal chords could add nothing to the booming city-voice.

>   But when the echoes of the pistons and car-horns had faded from the kitchen walls, Pen remained on the floor, very still.

  ‘Glas?’ Beth swept around to face Gutterglass. ‘Help her!’

  The trash-spirit shook her eyeless head. ‘I can’t do anything until I can see.’

  ‘Glas!’

  ‘I’ve got some beetles bringing some spare eyes to me,’ Glas said. ‘They’ll be here in a few minutes. Put her on her side – is she breathing?’

  Beth pulled Pen over onto her right shoulder and tilted her head back gently. She’d practised this with Pen, she realised, just this way, in the first-aid lessons at school, what felt like a hundred lifetimes ago.

  Pen’s eyes were closed. Her chest rose and fell slowly, the wire flexing gently around it.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s something at least, but—’ Gutterglass broke off.

  ‘But what? Spit it out, Glas!’

  When Gutterglass answered, her voice was carefully, self-consciously calm. ‘Miss Khan got your father clear, I saw that much before he left my field of vision, but if she’s unconscious now, then either he fell, or …’

  ‘Or the wire has him.’ Beth finished the sentence for her.

  Another host, weakened by whatever that pool had done to him, at the Wire Mistress’ mercy. Beth closed her eyes, but when she opened them again she was still in that neon-lit kitchen, facing the same dreadful fact. Dizziness swept over her and she almost lost her balance. She caught herself on the countertop. On reflex she looked outwards towards the city, but the direction was a guess; the wire could have him anywhere by now.

  Insect wings buzzed in the doorway and a pair of beetles flew in, each carrying a cracked half-eggshell clamped between their mandibles. They deposited them on Glas’ face, the trash-spirit blinked like she’d just put in new contact lenses and then dropped immediately to her bin-bag covered knees beside Pen. She put a pair of Biro-fingers to Pen’s neck.

  ‘How is she?’ Beth asked.

  ‘Her pulse is steady, her breathing strong. I think she just fainted. I suppose one can’t blame her.’ Glas opened her carpet-coat and pulled out a test tube, which she held under Pen’s nose. Almost immediately, Pen started to splutter and wheeze.

  Beth started pacing, her feet scraping on the tiles. The coils of her hair felt greasy as she ran her hand through them. ‘When she wakes,’ she murmured, almost feverishly, ‘we’ll ask her – maybe she can contact it – maybe she knows where it …’ She tailed off, knowing that was a hope born of pure desperation. She sucked in a deep breath, ready to vent all her anger and guilt in one axel-shearing, glass-shattering scream—

  But the scream never left her. There was a sound outside on the stair – a tap-tap-tapping like the cane of a blind man.

  Both Beth and Gutterglass looked at the door as it opened. A slender wire leg crossed the threshold, then another, steel-tipped feet tapping daintily on the tiles. They bore a man-sized, wire-wrapped bundle into the kitchen. Beth’s mouth slipped open. She watched her father’s face enter the green light of her gaze. His eyes were open.

  The wire set the bundle feet-first on the ground and carefully unwrapped him, then fell to the floor and slithered over to Pen’s side. Beth’s dad swayed, but kept his feet. He blinked slowly, then he spread his arms.

  Beth ran to him and wrapped him up tight in a hug. ‘I thought you were gone,’ she whispered. ‘I thought you were gone. I thought …’

  There was something wet on his cheek where it touched her forehead. She wiped it off him and her fingers came away red. ‘You’re bleeding,’ she said in alarm.

  ‘It’s only a scratch …’ His voice was hoarse. To Beth’s surprise a huge, genuine smile broke over his face. ‘Thanks to Parva’s expert steering.’ He looked over Beth’s shoulder and saw Pen for the first time. ‘Good lord – is she all right?’

  It was Gutterglass who answered, ‘She’s perfectly fine, but for the fussing. She just needs air.’

  With her hands still on his shoulders, Beth bowed her head and breathed out. She looked back into her father’s eyes. ‘Did you get what you went for?’

  He pursed his lips, then shook his head regretfully. ‘I don’t know what that pool was. I just—It felt so wrong, being in it.’

  ‘Like it was poisoned?’ Beth asked, suddenly alarmed.

  ‘No – it’s difficult to put into words. More like something coming out than going in.’ He shook his head again, helplessly, looked at his hands and barked a short laugh. ‘Two arms, ten fingers. Could have been a lot worse. It’s not a total loss on the reconnaissance front either,’ he ventured. ‘At least we know Johnny Naphtha and his crew are there, even if we don’t know exactly what for.’

  ‘Yeah.’ She stood on tiptoes and kissed his cheek. ‘Thanks, Dad.’ She could taste the sweat and the grime and the blood from his cheek. ‘You’re right: it could be a lot worse.’

  ‘It’s worse.’ Pen’s voice sounded like her throat had been scraped raw. She sat slumped forward, her arms over her knees. The wires had spread wide to give Gutterglass room to tend her.

  ‘B,’ she croaked. Her eyes were hollow above her scars. Beth was shocked by the dread in them. ‘B, we have to get ready. She … She was in my head. When She grabbed the wire. She could see everything. She knows we’re here.

  ‘They’re coming.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ‘Glas,’ Beth snapped, ‘get Petris, get Zeke. Go and wake the Lampies up and get them moving. Tell them to meet us at the south exit. We need to evacuate.’

  ‘Where are we going to go?’ Gutterglass protested, her eggshells lingering forlornly on the diorama of the city in the centre of the room.

  ‘Anywhere’s better than here. You want to stick around and arm-wrestle a Masonry Man over who gets your lab, go for it – but give everyone else the choice first, okay?’

  Glas gave her a startled look, and then dissolved; flies, beetles, mice and rats all scurried about their tasks. The last beetle to leave the room dropped a sticking plaster into Beth’s dad’s hand. He eyed it unsteadily, then opened it and slapped it over his cut.

  ‘Can you walk?’ Beth asked Pen, who nodded. The wire tightened around her, supporting her like a brace as she got to her feet. ‘Then let’s move.’

  They pounded up the stairs. Beth was knackered after five of them, but she leaned on her spear and swore at herself to keep going. Pen and her dad both looked exhausted, but they easily kept pace with her.

  ‘They just went toe-to-toe with a Goddess and you can’t even climb some stairs? Get over yourself, Bradley,’ she muttered to herself. And then louder, to Pen, ‘How long do you think we’ve got?’

  Pen spread her hands helplessly. She was climbing the steps on the four legs the wire lent her, as well as her own.

  Instead, it was Beth’s dad who answered. ‘The speed that thing carried me under the ground? Not long.’

  They emerged onto the ground floor. The sun was low outside, making silhouettes of the bronze and stone figures crowding the lobby. The glass-skinned Lampfolk, refracting rainbow shadows on the floor in front of them, were still stifling yawns. As Beth approached, Gutterglass coalesced in front of them, now armoured in panels from a scrapped car. She’d worked fast, and now everyone congregated at the edges of the chamber, not yet knowing whether they should be staring or running.

  ‘We’re leaving,’ Beth shouted at them as she ran past, and they flinched from the traffic-thunder of her voice. ‘I strongly suggest you do likewise.’

  She didn’t break stride, but dropped her voice as she reached Petris. ‘Glas told you?’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘Then let’s go.’

  She reached the exit and stuck out her hand to push the door open – but her palm sizzled as it touched the brass. The stench of hot tar filled the air and she recoiled, staring at the door. The metal was glowing like an ember, and it was radiating heat like a stove.

  ‘Shit! EVERYONE GET BACK,’ she yell
ed.

  The crowd behind her obeyed, looking at her uncertainly. She shoved the door open and the air broke over her in a hot wave. It shimmered above the pavement.

  ‘Street’s burning up,’ she called back.

  ‘This one too,’ Pen called from the Duke Street exit. She was holding out a wire-wrapped hand towards the door.

  ‘Glas?’

  But pigeons were already fluttering through the building. Glas’ face went strangely blank for a moment, then she confirmed, ‘We’re surrounded. The fevers must just have broken out.’

  Beth slammed a fist into the door in frustration. Another bout of dizziness made the room blur in front of her, but when the moment passed, the floor still looked like it was trembling.

  ‘B …’ Pen said uncertainly.

  Everyone was looking at her. She looked around at the frightened, confused faces, human and otherwise. ‘Down,’ she gasped. ‘The car park – one of the walls runs close to the tube station. Maybe we can break through there.’

  They ran for the fire stairs, the Pavement Priests covering the space fastest in their stop-motion way. Winded, Beth looked back over her shoulder. A patch in the centre of the floor was seething like boiling water. The humans cowered behind the display counters, peeking over them as a slender grey figure burst elegantly upwards.

  Beads of liquid tile dripped off its predatory jaw. Its head swayed to and fro on its uncannily long, muscular neck, taking in the frightened gazes fixed on it. It locked eyes with one lanky middle-aged man and began to stalk towards him. The man squeaked, but didn’t run. He was transfixed. He didn’t understand. He had no idea what was about to happen to him.

  Beth hesitated in the doorway of the stairwell and felt a bolt of anger at her hesitation. She looked back down the stairs. Her friends were already lost to sight, hurrying down to the bowels of the building, but the Sodiumites’ glass footsteps echoed up to her. They were looking to her to save them; they were the ones she was responsible for. They were also, a treacherous little voice reminded her, the only ones with half a chance in this fight.