by Pollock, Tom
Sounds came to her, muted by the concrete, so quiet that Corbin’s booted footsteps almost drowned them out: low, staccato noises punctuated by sudden pauses. Pen strained to listen. There was something familiar about them.
It was only when she realised the pauses matched the frequency of her own ragged breaths that she knew what she was hearing: voices. Dozens of voices, crying.
Memory burst over her.
Barbed tendrils undulating like insect legs, dragging her through the maze under St Paul’s. Agonised voices crooning to her. The Wire Mistress’ claws in her scalp, in her mind, dripping itself through her like slow poison.
The Wire Mistress.
She slowed, sucked in by the terrible gravity of memory. Every step pulled her deeper into the past.
‘She must attend my mistress.’
At the end of the tunnel, a loud crack stopped her in her tracks.
It had come from behind the closed door, deafeningly loud, but it wasn’t the volume that froze her muscles. It was the fact that she’d heard that sound before, echoing up from the rubbish chute in the kitchen. With a sudden, cold certainty, she knew it wasn’t an incinerator.
On the ground in front of her, the handprints dappled together like ripples on water. A Masonry Man breached from the centre of the distortion, his arms outstretched. Pen jerked back hard, but the intruder wasn’t reaching for her. Instead, he plunged his emaciated hands into the wall and dragged the concrete aside like a curtain.
The crying grew instantly louder as a tiny niche was uncovered in the wall. A man in a dusty brown tweed suit crouched protectively over a young boy in a school uniform. The space was too small for him to stand up fully, and it had no light source. The captive man blinked as the weak glimmer from the tunnel caught his brand-new seam. His child continued to sob, oblivious. His features gave way to empty skin at the halfway point.
Pen stared uncomprehendingly at the little family from Victoria Station.
The father moved fast, trying to put himself between the grinning, skeletal jailor and his son, but the Masonry Man just shoved him contemptuously to the ground. The child screamed once as concrete fingers closed on his wrist, and then fell silent, his eye wide in terror.
‘Wait!’ the man yelped. ‘Please – I’ll—’
But whatever threat or promise he was going to make was lost as the Masonry Man dragged the tunnel wall back into place, sealing him back into darkness.
Without turning its concrete gaze on either Pen or Corbin, the Masonry Man pushed through the metal door at the end of the corridor, yanking the stumbling child after it. Corbin gestured to Pen. The air was like hot clay in her throat as she stepped into the room beyond.
Something crunched underfoot. Pen looked down and saw broken bottles and flasks covering the floor; fragments in all shapes and sizes. The dregs that clung to them glinted like mercury. The sea of shattered glass stretched out into the darkness as far as Pen could see.
The room’s sole source of illumination was a lamp on a desk that sat in a little island of clear space near the door. A solitary figure sat there, bent over a stack of paper as though in study. The lamp was set so that Pen could only see one of the figure’s hands as it flicked absently at the corner of a page. A heavy-based tumbler sat next to it. The Masonry Man dragged its kicking, jerking captive onto a tarpaulin spread in front of the desk.
The child found his voice again and shrieked almightily. The figure behind the desk started and tilted the lamp towards its visitors. It was only when she peered out from behind her paperwork that Pen recognised Margaret Case.
‘For Mago’s sake, can’t you see he’s terrified?’ Case snapped at the grey-skinned man. ‘Let him go. Just … get out of my sight, would you? I’ll deal with it from here.’
The Masonry Man’s grin didn’t diminish, but he let the boy go. He arched like a diver and plunged back into the floor.
‘Case,’ Pen started, but the mirrorstocrat ignored her and dropped to one knee in front of the trembling boy.
‘I know,’ she said softly. ‘I know, I know. They’re scary, I know.’ She looked into his single eye, her wrinkled face open and empathic. ‘But listen to me: I promise he’ll never touch you again. It’s over. You’ve been incredibly brave, all right? Your father’s going to come in here in a moment and it will all be over. You were so, so brave.’
It was her best reassuring headmistress voice, and against all expectation it worked. As the boy’s cries quietened, Pen wondered if, somewhere in the jumbled half of the memories he retained from the Old City, he’d once had a teacher just like her.
‘Look at you, you’re shaking.’ Case went behind her desk and took something from a drawer. ‘Here, drink this. It’ll help.’
The small bottle caught the light from the desk lamp as she held it out. The liquid inside glinted like mercury.
Pen drew in a breath, to scream, to protest, to try to warn the child, but a black-gauntleted hand clamped under her jaw, holding it shut. She tried to struggle, to elbow Corbin, but he slid his other arm under her shoulder and locked her up with humiliating ease. She made sounds in her throat, but they were too quiet. The boy was too scared, too enraptured by the glimmer of the elixir he’d been offered. He didn’t even look round.
Pen could only watch as the half-faced child tilted the bottle to his mouth. Little gobs of liquid ran out of the imperfect seal of his half-lips. They dribbled over the empty skin of his unreflected side, carving runnels in the dirt that caked it, and splashed onto the tarp with flat plack plack sounds.
He hesitated, uncertain, and Case moved fast, as fast as Pen had with her parents, sliding a gentle hand behind the boy’s head and easing the bottle away. The boy gave way pliantly. He stared into space.
Case sighed. Pity and distaste warred on her face as she looked at the child. As ugly as they come. Espel’s description of the immigrants flashed back to her. Blatantly incomplete.
‘Corbin,’ Case said, ‘let her go.’
The grip on Pen eased and she tore herself free. She spun, hawked savagely, and spat at Corbin’s face, but he didn’t even blink as the spittle hit his eye. She tried to claw at him, to kick him, rage fountaining through her. He fended her off absently, his face ashen.
Pen turned and ran to the little boy; she dropped to her knees in front of him. ‘Hey,’ she said to him urgently. ‘Hey.’
He looked at her, but his single eye showed no recognition, no sign he understood her words. He was like a half-finished doll. Pen felt something heavy drop into the pit of her stomach.
‘What … what did they make you forget?’ she said quietly.
‘Everything,’ Case said softly. She slumped against the edge of her desk. ‘Corbin, could you take this one? I’m tired.’
Corbin’s jaw tightened. He stepped almost respectfully around Pen.
‘Don’t use your own,’ Case told him. She pulled an automatic pistol from another desk drawer and handed it to him. ‘Here. This one doesn’t leave the room.’
The boy didn’t even flinch as Corbin levelled the gun at his head. He couldn’t remember to be afraid.
Pen felt the world lurch around her. Much too late, she tried to move. ‘Wai—’
The shot ripped all sound from the world. Pen was close enough to feel the heat of the bullet, the warmth of the blood. She recoiled, lurching to her feet and staggering backwards. She kicked bottles and heard them clink through the buzzing in her ears.
The glass.
The shot.
That percussive snap of air and explosive—
Now, she knew exactly what the sounds she’d heard echoing up into the kitchen had been. And she knew that there had been a sound like it for every one of the bottles strewn on the floor.
Pen screamed at Case, at Corbin, shrieking at them as senseless as an animal. She dragged in high, hysterical breaths.
It was a long time before she managed words.
‘How— How could you—?’
‘What
else would you like us to do with them?’ Case snapped back. ‘Shelter them? Free them? Turn them loose on the street? They can’t even remember how to eat, Parva. Mother Mirror, pull yourself together, would you? This’ – she shook the bottle – ‘is all of him. You understand? There was nothing left in that body but muscle reflexes.’
Her voice was flat, expressionless, but her eyes were bloodshot and pouched deep. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel it, Pen realised. It was just that the part of her that felt it was screwed down so hard it was dying.
Absolute control.
Corbin knelt and began rolling the body up in the wet tarpaulin.
‘Bring in a fresh tarpaulin, would you?’ Case told him. ‘I thought we were done, but she keeps demanding more. They’re lasting less and less. You—’
Resentment burned in her face as she looked at Pen. ‘Follow me.’
Pen could barely feel her legs. When she tried to walk, she almost fell. Corbin left off rolling up the corpse to support her, but she hissed like a cat and raked her fingernails across his face. Three bright red scratches appeared on each of his cheeks. He fell back, staring at her.
Case looked at them both, snorted in disgust and stalked away.
‘I’m surprised you’ve got the guts to do all this yourself,’ Pen called after her.
‘You think it’s got anything to do with guts? How many people do you think I can afford to have find out about this?’ Case looked despairingly about her. She kicked bottles out of her path with her expensive shoes. ‘Such a fucking mess,’ she muttered.
She looked back over her shoulder. ‘Are you coming or not?’
Pen didn’t move.
‘What are you going to do then, just stand there? For how long? There’s only one way out of here, Parva, and when I leave, the lift comes with me. Besides’ – her voice hardened – ‘she wants to meet you.’
She. And again, Pen felt it: the press of that terrible curiosity. She went reluctantly to Case’s side and together they left the desk’s little island of light behind them, and pressed out into the chamber.
Pen couldn’t tell how big the space was. The walls returned no echoes. The ceiling could have been ten or a hundred feet above. It seemed an endless sea of bottles.
‘They came for me, didn’t they?’ she said quietly. ‘Last night, the only person the Chevaliers were there to save was me.’
‘And they killed twelve of our allies.’ Case’s voice tightened a fraction on the word. ‘A pretty little tap dance I had to do down here to explain it. I worried she might not listen, but happily she has an unsentimental attitude to her clayling brood. I was given one more chance to look after you.’
Look after you. Pen felt another, deeper chill at the phrase. Gradually, she became aware of city sounds, very quiet: the growl of engines and the gurgle of drains, hooting traffic, even something that might have been music. Perhaps the same trick of acoustics that had allowed the gunshots to echo all the way to the kitchen was carrying the noise of London-Under-Glass back to her. In the darkness ahead, she saw two pinpricks of green light.
‘I can’t believe you were so stupid,’ Case snapped under her breath. ‘I told you – I told you, we couldn’t afford to have you running off again. I gave you every chance to be her. You could have been happy.’
—every chance to be her. ‘You knew.’ The shock was draining from Pen. She felt sick and heavy, like she’d swallowed liquid lead and it was setting in her belly. ‘You knew who I was all the time.’
‘Of course I did.’ She sounded nonplussed by Pen’s surprise. ‘I didn’t know how you’d done it, but I knew – of course I knew. Who else could you have been? I grieved when your mirror-sister was taken. I did my best for her.’
Pen thought of the difference between Parva, subsisting on a fake set of memories in a school in Kensington, and the boy rolled in the tarp.
‘Well, what a thing it is to have your favour,’ she snarled, but Case didn’t seem to notice the sarcasm.
‘I knew who you were the moment you walked into my garden,’ she said. ‘But still, your face was as perfect as hers and I thought – how could I not think – the Mirror has brought her back to me? You seemed content to play your sister’s part, so I was content to let you. There was a chance … we could have made it true.’ Case licked her lips.
‘She wanted you, of course. She was very curious to know how you’d managed to come here. But I made a deal: I – I bargained with her. I told her that if she gave me just a little time, I could get that secret from you without violence.’ There was an awful pride in her words. ‘I was in control.’
‘Control.’
Pen froze. The voice had come out of the dark ahead of them, and it was not human.
It had coalesced from the edges of the sounds of the traffic and the water and the drains and the distant music, carried in waves that filled the hidden expanse of the chamber and reverberated deep inside her skull, closer and more intimate than the sounds of which it was made. In her life, Pen had heard one other voice like it.
Soundlessly, her lips made the words: I will be.
Glass crunched on the floor. The green pinpricks of light shifted and drew closer. They were, Pen realised, the right space apart to be eyes.
‘Control,’ said the city-voice. ‘That was our agreement, Margarethe.’
The eye-lights drew closer, revealing more of the face of which they were part.
The woman was old. Her skin was cracked, scaled in interlocking paving stones. The folds around her mouth were rows of terraced houses. Road markings lined her eyes and cheekbones like makeup. Her irises glowed the luminous green of traffic lights. Her skirts were lost in the darkness, but they rustled like estuary tides.
And then, a fraction of a second after seeing her, Pen felt her.
She inhaled sharply as that face rushed outwards to envelop her. Scale and distance dissolved: every road that lined the woman’s intricate face was long enough to walk down; every rooftop was wide and solid enough to shelter her. Pen was immersed in and surrounded by that presence: a sense of place so raw and pure it was like being in love. She was standing in the labyrinthine city of the old woman, feeling the warmth of its streetlight on her face—
—and then it was over, and she was back facing a decrepit woman with cracked skin, in a room full of murder and glass.
Mater Viae gave her a smile filled with church spires. ‘If you can’t control her’ – though her lips did not move, her voice carried – ‘you can’t keep her.’
Case didn’t look at her as she offered up the bottle of distilled memory. Mater Viae grasped at it eagerly and Pen shuddered when she saw her fingers. Pressing skeletally against the inside of her skin were the outlines of cranes.
The City Goddess gulped at the silvery liquid in the bottle. When she’d drained it, she briefly closed her eyes in bliss. Case and Pen were plunged into a darkness that eased when the lights lit up in the windows of that city face.
‘Please—’ Pen recognised Case’s expression as she spoke to the goddess. It was the same look she saw in the mirror every day, when she put makeup on her scars: the look of someone bound to something they hated. Case’s city was concrete and glass and brick – everything she loved lay in the palm of that crane-boned hand – and Mater Viae could turn it against her with the sparest thought.
‘Please,’ she begged. ‘Just a little more time.’
‘Time,’ Mater Viae echoed. She turned the green wash of her eyes on Pen.
‘I remember. In the flood and chaos of my new memories, I remember.
‘I remember believing in you when I was taken. When the grey men dragged me through the floor and the earth filled my mouth and yet somehow I still breathed. When I was so, so scared, I remember believing you would come for me.’
The voice changed, became familiar; not in tone, but in rhythm and inflection. Pen stiffened against the sickness she felt as she realised the Goddess was speaking from Parva’s memories.
&
nbsp; ‘Even when they made me drink. Even though I thought it was poison. Even though I believed I was going to die. Even though I knew there was no way you could, to the end, I still believed you’d come.’
There was a note of delight as she said, ‘And you did.’
And then, abruptly, the sense of Parva slid away.
‘There is no more time, Margarethe. I remember her. I remember being her, and being one who knew her better than anyone else in the world. I remember gazing back through at her through the mirror from this prison. She doesn’t want your lottery. She doesn’t want your fame. She has what she came for, and she has no more reason to stay.’
Her expression became one of desperate need. Streetlights burned in the cracks of her face, lighting her like a Hallowe’en lantern. ‘I will not risk letting her slip. She will leave for good, and I will lose my chance. I must have her secret. I must. I must.’ The words were an eager shriek of wheels on a road somewhere inside her.
‘I must know how you came here. I must know—
‘—is there a way back, to my child?’
My child. Pen’s heart lurched as suddenly everything – the bottles, the Masonry Men attacks, the kidnapping of the immigrants – finally, it all made sense.
Johnny Naphtha’s words slithered greasily back to her: Nothing you possess is so potent as a parent’s memories of those they have borne. They are the wellsprings of hope and obsessions of even the sanest of men.
How much more intense might that obsession be for a Goddess? A Goddess whose name meant mother, who had been trapped between two mirrors and then awakened to find herself stranded in another world, cut off from the child she loved – a child who was her home and her very nature.
How long had it taken her to realise what had happened? That the place she so cherished was somewhere she’d never been, somewhere she could never go, that her memories of that place belonged to another. What might she be willing to do to keep those memories from fading?