The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II

by Pollock, Tom

  Pen shook her head blankly and Espel whistled. ‘You have forgotten a load, haven’t you? Mago, how to explain this?’ she muttered.

  For a moment she looked completely at a loss, then she set her glass down and put her fingertip behind her own left ear. ‘When I was born,’ she said, ‘I was born with this’ – she drew her fingertip down the length of her jaw – ‘my own, natural face. But it stopped here.’ Her finger halted on the point of her chin, where the silver thread flashed in and out of the skin.

  ‘Everything to the right of there was blank as unused paper, same as my mum and dad, and their mums and dads, and my great-grandprofiles when they were reflected through from the Old City in the thirties. My whole family started their lives in this city with half a face.’

  There was a fractional tightening in her voice. ‘But you can’t just walk around looking like that, can you? People’d lose their lunch looking at you. So the government gives you a prosthetic.’ Espel’s finger crossed the seam and continued its progress up the right hand side of her face. ‘This: it’s bog-standard mass-produced mirrorskin, grafted on when I was a baby. It copies and reverses whatever’s on your natural profile, so it always matches. “Cosmetic, prosthetic, completing your aesthetic”,’ she sang like it was a TV jingle. ‘ It’s my id.’

  ‘It?’ Pen asked

  ‘Id,’ Espel corrected. ‘Eye Dee, for “Inverse Depictor”.’ She touched her left cheek. ‘Face,’ she said. She moved her finger to her right cheek. ‘Fake. Do you get it?’

  Pen nodded slowly. She thought about the way the wounds on Espel’s right cheek had closed when her left was stitched. Reflections of reflections within reflections like a funhouse maze. The idea brought a vertiginous swirl to her stomach. ‘It’s a reflection,’ she murmured. ‘Pure symmetry.’

  At the word symmetry Espel winced and dropped her gaze. ‘All right, all right,’ she mumbled. ‘No need to be so pointed about it. I never said it was pretty. I can’t afford any original features for it, that’s all. A genuine freckle or an eyelash are a fortnight’s wages on a steeplejill’s salary, even on Palace Crew.’

  Espel was blushing furiously and Pen realised she’d been staring at the symmetrical girl the way that people back home had stared at her, the way she hated to be looked at. She hurriedly dropped her eyes. ‘You been a steeplejill long?’ she asked, eager to change the subject.

  ‘Eight years, ma’am,’ Espel said. ‘I’ve been treading tile since the week after my ninth birthday. It’s kind of a local business where I’m from, down in Kenneltown – sorry … I mean, Kensington. We get pretty heavy weather there: slatestorms, monsoon cement, even the odd chimneysquall. Makes for some interesting precipitecture.’

  ‘Chimneysquall?’ Pen muttered. ‘Bloody hell.’ She massaged her eyes. For a second she pictured entire chimneystacks falling fully formed from the clouds.

  ‘Where does it come from?’ She tried to make the unfamiliar word sound like it belonged in her mouth: ‘The … precipitecture?’

  Espel raised her eyebrows. ‘The sky, ma’am.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Pen said, slightly acidly. ‘I mean, before that.’

  ‘The biggest mirror in the city’s the river, and the biggest thing it reflects is the buildings – so loads of reflections of concrete and brick get churned and broken up in the tides, and then evaporated with the water. It condenses into clouds and falls down again.’

  ‘You sound like you’re a real expert.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ Espel said, in the tone of someone who’s often said that. ‘But a jill needs to know a bit of mirror meteorology. Helps with the whole “not-getting-brained-bya-falling-brick” aspect of the job tnat I’ve always been such a big fan of that.’

  Espel knocked back the rest of her drink, looked up at Pen shyly and then burst out in a big sheepish grin. ‘On which subject, by the way,’ she said, ‘thank you.’

  Pen glanced at the cuts on her hand. ‘ Oh, any time,’ she said drily.

  Espel sat forward. Her expression took on something close to awe as she gazed at Pen’s cheeks.

  ‘I’ve got to be honest,’ she murmured, ‘I was one of the ones who thought they tweaked the pictures, but … Mother Mirror! They’re just so intricate – it’s like the details go on forever. You could get lost in those scars.’ Her fingertips twitched, almost as though she wanted to trace the shapes of Pen’s scars but was too shy to raise her hand. ‘Even for mirrorstocracy you’re a cut above.’

  A cut above. It was a nasty, jagged burr of a phrase, and it snagged something in Pen’s mind. ‘That doctor wouldn’t really have cut you, would she?’ she asked. ‘To look like me? Not … just because I said so?’

  Espel peered at her, bemused. ‘Why wouldn’t she?’

  ‘But it’s your face.’

  The curl of the girl’s lip suggested Pen was being naïve at best and at worst disingenuous. ‘Oh, technically, she’d need my consent. But honestly, ma’am, think about it. Who’d listen if I said I didn’t give it? Everyone wants to look like Parva Khan, and everyone knows it. No one’d believe me if I said I was any different. They’d think I was just making trouble.’

  The sharpness in her voice struck Pen. ‘You are though, aren’t you?’ she asked. ‘Different, I mean.’ She remembered the way Espel had eyed the doctor’s scalpel: the fear in her face, and the hatred of the blade as it hovered over her.

  ‘Espel?’

  ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘Why don’t you want to look like me?’

  Espel’s blue eyes rolled to look into Pen’s. The drunken giggliness had gone and just for an instant her expression was fierce and proud. ‘Like you said, milady: it’s my face.’

  *

  A little while later, Espel began to slur, and her eyelids started to droop. Remembering that the steeplejill was on her fifth shot, Pen sniffed her own glass. The fumes alone were like a chisel to the prefrontal cortex. Was it even safe to drink this stuff neat? The gaps between Espel’s words grew longer and longer and she groped after them in the air in front of her face as though they were evasive butterflies.

  Eventually she asked to be excused. She put her hands on her knees decisively and braced herself to rise. Five minutes later she still hadn’t got up. Her eyes weren’t focused on anything in particular.

  Pen gently pushed her shoulder and she toppled onto the sofa like a domino. Pen lifted her head and pushed a cushion under it so her neck wouldn’t crick. The steeplejill stretched languorously as a cat, then curled up, hugging her thin arms around herself as if she were cold.

  Pen shut her eyes, but the space behind her eyelids flickered with billboards and bloodied floors and faceless men. She sighed. ‘Sod it. It’s not like I’m going to be getting any sleep tonight anyway.’ She jogged up into the bedroom and returned dragging the duvet behind her. She slung it over her new lady-in-waiting and eyed her for a moment, trying to work her out: Espel was brave enough to run over rooftops through curtains of wicked slatedrops, but utterly tongue-tied when confronted by the humble personage of Parva Khan.

  And the way you stiffened when I looked at you, Pen thought, like a little hunted animal, like you didn’t want me to see you at all. Pen knew exactly how that felt – so much so that she wondered if she was just projecting.

  She went to the window. The towers and spires outside were lit up against the night, and the city burned back at her like a mirror to the stars. Across the river, the Lottery billboard was doused in yellow floodlight, as though London-Under-Glass itself were refusing to let darkness claim that face. Pen eyed her missing sister’s image, unease creeping over her.

  You’re the most beautiful woman in the world.

  Where could you hide that face in a city where it was displayed on every street corner? A city whose inhabitants knew it even better than they knew their own?

  In a coffin, a poisonous little voice inside her mind volunteered. In the ground. In a sack at the bottom of the river, if the Faceless have taken her. Or
maybe they’ve got rid of it entirely. She shuddered at the memory of the empty expanse of skin in the propaganda video.

  But isn’t that the point? she thought. If the terrorist group really had claimed the face of the Looking-Glass Lottery, wouldn’t they want to broadcast it? Where was the video of them crowing over Parva while they stripped her features away?

  Somehow those terrorists as abductors didn’t quite fit. There was something else – something she was missing. She tried to concentrate, to think it all through, but she was exhausted, and the thoughts dangled like lures on a stick, just out of reach.

  It’s easy, a voice in her head told her with brittle cheeriness. You see this all the time in the movies. Reconstruct her movements. Find the bathroom with the bloody handprint. Track her down from there. Only you have to do it without asking anyone any questions that might give away the fact that you aren’t really her.

  Easy, she thought with a pitching queasiness. Fine.

  Of course, just because she couldn’t wander around asking after her mirror-sister’s movements, that didn’t mean no one could. She glanced over at Espel, sleeping on the sofa. The lights from the city outside etched her cheekbones starkly on her endlessly symmetrical face.

  A new lady-in-waiting: inexperienced, nervous and eager to please, wanting to learn her new employer’s habits? Yes, that might work …

  ‘What immortal hand, or eye,’ Pen thought, and chewed her lip, just the way Mum always told her not to—

  —and homesickness hit her then, as sudden and violent as a heart attack. She felt perilously alone. She missed Beth and she missed her mum, and knowing her mum wasn’t missing her back was no comfort at all.

  Pen hesitated. She licked her lips and cleared her throat. Then, before she could lose her nerve, she spoke, just audibly, into the night:

  ‘There once was a girl with scars on her face.

  Only surgeon she needed was an inverted place.

  She’d been turned in on herself, like a leaf, tightly curled

  She opened out: the most beautiful girl in the world.’

  She swallowed hard, eyeing her reflection in the darkened window glass.

  The most beautiful girl in the world, she thought. Tomorrow, Pen, that has to be you.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Beth felt the statues’ gaze on her. Their eyes didn’t move behind their cataracts of moss and birdlime, but still she felt them track her as she picked her way between the gravestones. Winter had stripped the foliage from the trees and the cemetery felt open and naked. Distant figures, hazed by fog, watched through the thin dark branches as Beth kept walking. The lightbulbs clinked together in her plastic bag.

  Beneath the traffic noise from nearby Church Street she could hear the Pavement Priests breathing.

  She’d left their more orthodox brethren in the alley behind the market. She’d scowled at them, showing them her uncanny tooth, and they’d recoiled like threatened cats. Candleman and his colleagues had taken advantage of the their confusion and fled, glimmering dusky oaths of vengeance; he was lucky the stone-robed clerics probably hadn’t understood them.

  Ezekiel had watched her, agonised, caught somewhere between hatred and devotion. Beth hadn’t waited for him to make up his mind; she’d run.

  She’d shoved her way past a goggling drunk into the bathroom of a twenty-four-hour Burger King and looked full into the mirror for the first time in months. The difference from the face she remembered chilled her.

  Under the fluorescent light, she’d seen the way her cheeks were cracked like hot concrete. Tiny paving slabs broke up her skin like lizard-scales. Strands of black hair came loose from her hoodie, rubbery and black like electrical cable.

  Another jolt of pain in her jaw had made her open her mouth: as she’d watched, the enamel on her lower left canine cracked like an eggshell and crumbled away to reveal another spire.

  *

  And so here she’d come, to the Stoke Newington Cemetery where the free-thinkers and reformists of Mater Viae’s former priesthood still gathered: those stoneskins who, in their beating flesh-and-blood hearts hidden deep beneath the granite and stone, had not been all that surprised when Beth had revealed to them the truth of their Goddess’ betrayal.

  She really wished Pen would text her back.

  ‘Well, I’ve got to hand it to you.’ A voice like gravel being churned in a bucket dragged her from her thoughts. ‘This has to be the most comprehensive piss-take in the history of London.’

  Beth jerked her head around. She hadn’t seen the monk statue approach, but there he was anyway, standing by a frost-stippled elm. That was how it was with the more powerful Pavement Priests: the muscles hidden inside their stone punishment skins could move them with uncanny speed, The exertion cost them. though. Beth could hear the strain in Petris’ voice as he continued: ‘First, you show up out of the blue, recruiting for an unwinnable war in the name of an absent goddess. Less than a week later, you broadcast on every street corner that that same goddess really topped herself sixteen years ago and that we’ve been living a lie ever since. And now, after a few months’ absence and oh how we’ve missed you, Miss Bradley,’ – Petris’ sarcasm was as heavy as his robes – ‘you walk in here wearing her face like a carnival mask at Mardi Fucking Gras. I honestly don’t know if you want me to pray to you or punch you, but I do know in which direction I am heavily leaning.’

  Beth looked at him. Even in her shock, she’d known the provocation it would be to come here looking like this. She raised the carrier bag and jingled it at him.

  Petris sighed and exhaled stony dust. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll take you to him.’

  He crossed the space to a small mausoleum in a series of sudden disand re-appearances. His jerky, here-now-suddenly-there stop motion still unnerved Beth. His fingers busied themselves with the bronze lock in flickers too fast for Beth to see.

  The doorway wasn’t really made for full-sized people, any more than the mausoleum was a full-sized classical temple, and she had to squirm to enter.

  Stone scraped on stone as Petris forced his way through to join her. ‘We brought him in here when the weather turned nasty,’ the Pavement Priest rumbled in the gloom. ‘It’s dark, but it’s a bit warmer and at least it’s dry. It’s …’ The gruffness in his voice faded slightly. ‘It’s what we thought you’d have wanted.’

  In the fine cracks of light admitted by the door’s hinges, she saw a rough-hewn limestone statue lying on its back on the floor, its features effaced by rain and knife-point graffiti. She tapped the stone over its chest with the butt of her spear and watched it crumble like dry plaster. Inside the statue, a grey-skinned baby blinked at her. It wriggled and stretched out a pudgy hand. Tattooed grey on grey on the inside of his wrist was a tower-block crown, a miniature copy of Beth’s own.

  Hey, Petrol-Sweat, she thought, then, that’s not much of an insult any more, is it? Not given my architectural dental work. I’m going to have to come up with a new one for you – not that you can hear me, or that you’d understand me if you could. So basically, I’m talking to myself. Never reassuring, even if I have done crazier things in the last few months. The humour sounded strained, even in her head.

  So anyway, how’s it going? The stoneskinned boys looking after you? They ought to be; after all, you’re one of them now.

  Filius Viae had suffered the same fate as the Pavement Priests, his mortality rendered from him by the Chemical Synod, leaving him to be eternally reborn inside London’s statues. The difference was that the stone-robed clergy had had their deaths sold out from under them by their suicidal goddess, while Fil had bargained his own mortality away. His price had been the very transformation that, if that Burger King mirror was anything to judge by, was still working its way through Beth’s system like a slow drug.

  Do you really want to be like me? Fil’s voice was still crystalline in her mind, even when she was beginning to forget what her own had sounded like.

  Yes. It had bee
n the only answer she could give.

  But I’m not like you, am I? she thought. You never had church-spire teeth. What did you buy for me, Fil? What in the name of Bloody Thames did you let them turn me into?

  She licked her lips, as though she were speaking for real. And why aren’t you here to help me through it?

  Once again her fury at his oh-so-selfish selflessness boiled up inside her like pit-tar.

  Memory rose with it: his last request, her incredulity, and his insistence. Setting the railing-spear against his skinny chest, her sweat making her hands slip on the iron. Then the three-second count that, no matter how hard she’d willed it, could never have stretched to encompass the future she was about to destroy.

  Three, two …

  Her shoulder driving forward; his ribs cracking, heels drumming as City blood leaked from a punctured heart.

  I thought I’d killed you – I thought you’d gone forever. I might yet be right, she thought fervently.

  Please, let me be wrong.

  She upended the bag Candleman had given her and shook it out. Instead of clattering onto the floor, the lightbulbs floated out into the air as though they were in zero gravity. For an instant nothing happened, then one of the tungsten filaments began to glow, bright in the mausoleum gloom as a tiny nova.

  The glow spread, rippling through the glass cluster as individual bulbs contracted the viral light.

  The cluster briefly resembled a frozen explosion, like the mushroom cloud over Oak Ridge, and then it began to move.

  Beth watched, entranced, as the bulb-cloud bloomed in the air, flexing like a living thing, and prowled between Beth and Petris. Its charge lifted the fine hairs on her arms and she felt something like attention on her, but whatever the bulb-cloud was interested in, it wasn’t her. The cloud of lights drifted on into the middle of the chamber, and a change came over it when it came to hover over Fil. It reconfigured itself, spreading and unfolding towards the edges of the room, and individual bulbs took up specific places in the network like stars in a constellation. Its lights began to ripple in a complex semaphore code that Beth couldn’t hope to follow, but just feeling its light wash over her gave her a familiar prickle of recognition, like the presence of an old friend.