by Tom Pollock
Fil dropped to a crouch, pulling Beth down with him. For a moment Beth was certain they’d been busted, and a burning tide of embarrassment went through her, halted abruptly by the chill realisation that it was much more likely they were under attack. She cocked her head, probing with her newly sharpened senses, listening for the enemy.
And then she heard Ezekiel’s voice over the beat of his wings, pealing out again and again with evangelical joy: ‘It’s the Cats! Filius, come quickly, it’s Fleet! The Cats are here!’
Fil stopped rooting through the undergrowth for his clothes long enough to turn to Beth with a sheepish little shrug, but she cut him off before he spoke.
‘Later,’ she said, vibrating with a mix of relief and aching disappointment and a kind of anticipation that made her knees feel like untied knots. ‘I know.’
Four lithe feline shapes threaded their way over the grass, following the indirect and mysterious paths that cats always do. Pavement Priests and Lampfolk and Masonry Men all stood back in awe as the four-footed legends slid through their ranks, imperiously swishing their tails.
Names were whispered, passing through the ragtag army like a breeze through rushes, names from never-quite-forgotten stories:
Cranbourn, the Herald.
Wandle, the Dream-guide.
Tyburn, they whispered fearfully, the Executioner. A black Cat bared its teeth as it passed.
Fleet …
Fleet!
Now and then one of the Cats would stop and stretch and rub itself along the inside of somebody’s leg, and that fortunate soul would immediately collapse in religious ecstasy.
Fil shoved his way through the milling crowds into the clearing where the Cats circled. Beth raced in a fraction of a second behind him, pulling her hoodie over her head, only to find she’d got it on the wrong way. She clawed the hood out of her eyes in time to see him fall to his knees.
The mangy tabby at the head of the group bounded into his scrawny arms.
‘Fleet,’ he whispered, ‘Fleet – dear Thames, we’ve needed you.’ The tabby purred back at him, loud as a motorbike.
The other Cats, one black, one black and white, and a Persian grey with a chunk of her ear missing, rolled on the grass and chased the rippling light spilling from the Blankleit skins. The Persian sat down, put its hind leg behind its head and licked itself clean with long strokes of its bright pink tongue.
‘Um, Fil,’ Beth said, watching the infamous feline war party with growing unease, ‘aren’t they just, you know … cats?’
He didn’t answer, but an indignant voice from inside a bronze of a World-War-Two fighter pilot shouted ‘Blasphemy!’
Beth ignored him; she was following Fil’s gaze. He was looking past Fleet, past the eager soldiers, straining to see into the dark. Beth knew what he was looking for: a shimmer of vast estuary water skirts, a smile of church-spire teeth, hands that had cradled the fabled Great Fire. He was searching for some sign of the One these feline bodyguards ought to be protecting.
But as they stared together into the darkness of Battersea Park, only the darkness looked back.
CHAPTER 34
Paul Bradley stood on the dead tracks and gazed at the walls of the abandoned railway tunnel. His mouth was drier than the brick dust in the air. He’d run from picture to picture, street to street, scouring walls, phone boxes, billboards – anything that Beth might have used as her impromptu canvas. Once he had grown accustomed to her style, he could instantly spot when graffiti was hers.
He’d followed a running ostrich here, a flamenco dancer in a black hat there – there must have been hundreds of them, always half-hidden, coyly poking out from behind bushes or imprisoned behind drain-gratings. Their sheer number shocked him.
He was surprised at the jealous ache that suffused him, for the time his daughter must have spent with the pictures, then sneered at himself, Why? You were hardly clamouring for her attention at the time, were you?
Exhausted and enervated, he’d entered a kind of fugue state, aware of the pattern of every manhole cover, the thin shadows cast by the naked branches of every tree. Beth’s paintings had been hidden in the random jumble of Hackney’s mass of graffiti like code words in a cipher text, but now he knew how to decrypt her. There were places where the pictures were more numerous, places where he’d felt her presence more strongly, and he’d followed those feelings like a pilgrim.
Eventually the trail dead-ended at the fenced-off abandoned railway. He had threaded his fingers through the wire loops and gazed blankly up the length of the tracks, to where they disappeared into the tunnel under the main road, when he had spotted one of the stones between the sleepers had been painted with a tiny, stylised black rabbit, scurrying into its burrow.
Paul had smiled, wedged his toe into the fence and started to climb.
Inside the tunnel he’d found a torch, still working. When he’d switched it on and seen the pictures he’d swayed a little on his feet – so many fragments of Beth’s mind – but none of it meant anything to him. In that moment of panic, an impossible distance seemed to stretch between them …
He remembered fretting when she’d been late learning to talk, lying awake, imagining his daughter grown but still emitting the same baby-gurgles, trying to work out how he’d cope if he couldn’t talk to her. Marianne had laughed at him, but his fear had felt so real.
And now, here in this strange deserted tunnel, there was so much violence in the shapes on the walls, as though Beth had discharged all her anger into the bricks. Here was a black bull charging, there a snake coiled around a clarinet, and skeletons and stars and butterflies danced across mountain-ranges, and—
Marianne.
He exhaled hard, as though he’d been punched. Marianne, his wife, Beth’s mother, appeared over and over again, smudged and pale as a ghost.
The other graffiti was a garden of bright neon dreams, and amongst it, the white chalk lines that brought Marianne to life were so unassuming that he’d almost missed her – he would never have believed that, but he’d missed her.
He looked again at the charging animals and flying planets and soldiers and monsters, and this time he saw the battles Beth had fought, the world she’d escaped into, and the memory, etched in chalk, that haunted it.
He reached into his jacket pocket and his fingers brushed paper. He pulled out a crumpled paperback from his inner pocket. Yes, he understood.
He exhaled hard into the tunnel’s chill. ‘Beth,’ he began, ‘I’m so—’ Then he stopped and bit the apology back. When he said sorry, he promised himself, he’d make sure she heard it. He looked up at one of the chalk sketches of Marianne and swallowed.
‘I’ll find her,’ he said. This time his voice didn’t waver. He knew he wasn’t the first person to have spoken to that image of Beth’s mother, and warmth spread through him. For the first time since she’d disappeared he felt like he understood a little bit of the girl who had drawn her, over and over again, in this dark, safe place.
He turned off the torch and started for the mouth of the tunnel. His wife’s chalk gaze watched him go. Despite the tiredness settling like silt in his limbs, he found he could manage a shambling run. He had a lot of ground to cover in his search for fresh paint.
CHAPTER 35
‘Is this sign of her favour enough to satisfy you, Stonewing?’ Gutterglass’ speech was oddly formal. ‘Our Lady of the Streets has sent her most trusted warriors to herald her arrival.’
They were gathered inside a shuttered ice-cream stall in the middle of the park. Ezekiel had knelt in front of his prince as soon as he’d landed, leaving his stone robe riven with cracks. Beth guessed that the gesture of respect was as much for the threadbare tabby Fil was petting as for the Street-Prince himself.
‘It is. It surely is.’ Ezekiel couldn’t stop staring at Fleet, and his voice was hoarse with awe. ‘And I do heartily repent of my impertinence to you, Highness. My lack of faith – it was a sin.’ He hesitated, then bowed his head again. �
��I will willingly – willingly – undertake any penance your Highness sees fit to—’
‘His Highness’ held up a hand to silence the Pavement Priest. He glanced sideways at the teetering form of Gutterglass, and then at Beth, who shrugged. He looked deeply uncomfortable. ‘Get up,’ he said at last.
Ezekiel creaked to his feet in a shower of stone chips.
‘Get out,’ Fil said.
Ezekiel began to protest, but he was cut off.
‘Get over it.’
When he had clunked from the room, Gutterglass murmured, ‘Well, that was abrupt.’
‘It was embarrassing, is what it was,’ Fil snapped. ‘And I don’t know what he thought he was apologising for; he was right, I was being an idiot. Saying sorry for calling me on it is just bollocks.’
Gutterglass’ eggshell-eyes squeezed shut: a silent prayer for patience. ‘Be that as it may,’ he said then, ‘it was not appropriate of him to show you disrespect. You are the object of his devotion …’
‘I am not – my mother is.’
Gutterglass gazed at him dispassionately. ‘You bear her name. You bear her blood. You bear her worshippers.’
A frustrated breath streamed from Fil’s nostrils. ‘Right.’
Rats’ tails poked out from under Gutterglass’ shoulder blades as he leaned to peer out of the door after Ezekiel. ‘Are you sure you can’t be persuaded to dole out at least some token punishment to Stonewing?’ he asked. ‘After all, he is a zealot. Without chastisement he’ll probably feel cheated.’
Fil shook his head firmly and Gutterglass sighed and bowed. A dozen chittering bodies bore him from the room like a kind of furry conveyor belt.
‘Thames’ sake!’ He slid to the floor and dropped his head into his hands. Fleet coiled into his lap and began to mewl comfortingly. Beth sat beside him and slid an arm around him. She still felt a little jumpy at the proximity of his skin.
‘You okay?’ she asked.
‘I’m a God. Doesn’t that mean I have to be?’ His lips curled upwards, but it wasn’t a smile.
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
‘Nothing to talk about,’ he said, ‘but – this – something’s not right, whatever Glas says. “Herald her arrival”? You never see the Cats without their Mistress – it’s never been heard of, not since Fleet disappeared after her decades ago. This is not how it’s supposed to go, know what I mean?’
Beth looked at him. He wore an expression she recognised: he’d never admit it, but he was scared. He was struggling to thread together a story, to make some excuse for why he was facing this all alone without a parent to shield him.
Not for the first time, Beth felt a surge of anger towards the absent Goddess. She took a deep breath and gave him the only answer that had ever made her feel better. ‘You don’t need her,’ she said. ‘We’ll do better without her.’
He rubbed his eyes, and then looked around. ‘Thames and rotting riverfish and bugger it,’ he declared. As he stood up and squared his shoulders, Fleet bounded from his lap. ‘Let’s get on with it, then.’
‘Get on with what?’ she asked.
‘Getting this damn circus on the move. If they want a God, I’ll show ’em one, but I don’t think they’re goin’ to like it much.’
The Lampfolk hadn’t even set foot on the bridge when the first fight broke out. A full-hipped Sodiumite girl moved towards the Thames. Rather than walk, she floated ostentatiously an inch off the ground on her fields, fibre-optic hair streaming, a show of strength to the Whities she thought so contemptible. Behind her, white and yellow lights stood in separate groups on the pavement. Her kindred jabbered, nervous of the river, but this girl had a spark of pride in her and she would not be cowed.
The incessant flashing bickering dimmed for a moment and there was a sense of held breath as Blankleits and Sodiumites alike watched her in silence. The bridge’s vast suspension cables stretched in taut triangles before them like the outline of a ship’s sails.
The Amberglow girl’s courage lasted until she was a good ten feet out onto the bridge. But then she looked down at the rippling, lethal water below her, jumped three feet into the air and came down, shrieking incandescently, accusing the nearest Whitey of shoving her.
Whether the accused Blankleit was guilty or not, he didn’t expend voltage denying it. Instead he launched himself at her, and an instant later they were grappling together, an inch apart, over the concrete, their fields interlocked. The roar that went up from the crowd was like the muzzle-flashes of a cannon battery. The yellow girl took the upper hand, arching forward, her arms scissoring. The young Whitey was almost doubled over backwards in midair, glass teeth gritted behind his transparent jaw. Tiny hairline cracks spread from the small of his back and every wire in his body burnt hot with pain.
Something darted between them, a smear of grey too fast to see, and the two glass figures flew apart. The white one cracked his head on a post.
The blur resolved itself into a grey-skinned boy balanced lightly on the balls of his feet, standing in the middle of the road, railing-spear held ready. Filius Viae’s eyes were flat and hard.
Both Lampfolk turned as one and attacked, coming at him from opposite sides. His spear wavered as their fields tried to grip it, but he was too fast, too slippery. He uncoiled in a burst of savage motion, swept the knees from under the Amberglow girl with his spear-shaft, pirouetted on his heel in the follow-through and slammed the butt into the Whitey’s chest and sent him sprawling.
He came to an instant stop, no motion wasted.
Beth watched him. The silence of the Lampfolk made it seem dark, but she could see his chest swelling as he angrily sucked in breath. Then he was moving again. He coiled his fingers into the Sodiumite’s glittering hair and dragged her, kicking and flashing, to the balustrade.
Beth gaped in horror as he flung the Amberglow girl over the side. The Lampgirl flared out a brilliant scream, and then went dark.
Beth felt her heart almost stop. Around her the Lampfolk gazed on in frightened, angry shock. He didn’t just—?
No, there she was, almost invisible in her mute terror, hanging limply in midair.
‘The next light-person, white or yellow, to hit a fellow soldier takes a bath,’ Fil called out. He let an inch of fibre-optic hair slip through his knuckles. The only light Beth could see was the flash of Victor’s torch as he spread the word.
‘If you really want to fight somebody so bad you can’t wait for the cranes, come and tap me on the shoulder,’ he continued. ‘I’ve got some aggression to work out.’
‘No kidding,’ Beth muttered. She tingled with fear as she watched the girl hanging from his fingers.
He held the Sodiumite over the river for a full silent minute, and then dumped her in a shuddering, barely flickering heap on the roadway. He picked up his railing and stalked across the river, a furious silhouette, leading the way north.
Beth shouldered her backpack and sprinted to catch him up. Their army, stunned by the sudden outburst of violence, began to shuffle dumbly after him. Beth saw a couple of rebellious flashes behind her, but before she could react, Victor had hauled the young Blankleit boy to his feet, flashed his light in his face, cuffed him and pushed him back over to his parents.
Beth found Fil leaning on his spear. He must have heard her coming but he didn’t turn around.
‘Jesus!’ Beth shook her head. ‘Knocking heads and taking names? If that girl had slipped you’d have had a full-blown mutiny on your hands.’
His anger had evaporated and now his grey eyes were anxious. ‘Yeah,’ he murmured, ‘but if they’d mutinied together at least that’d be something.’
Beth stared at him incredulously. ‘You were waiting for this?’
He smiled wryly. ‘If they think I’m biased they’d blow up faster than the Walthamstow Fireworks Factory. But now the Blankleits have seen me beat up an Amberglow, and the Sodiumites have seen me take a Whitey to the dust.’
‘Your idea?’
‘Glas. She said if I could get ’em pissed off at me it’d bring ’em together … for a little while at least.’
‘And after a little while?’ Beth asked.
His smile faded. ‘Hopefully by then we’ll have my mother on hand,’ he said, ‘’cause the word of their Goddess is about the only thing that’ll keep them from grinding each other back into the sand they’re made of.’
Electra pressed her back to the scum-caked wall of the sewer and tried not to breathe. The smallest glimmer could give her away.
The metal wolves were prowling not five feet from the mouth of the tiny access tunnel where she was hiding, padding through the filthy ankle-deep water. The only light was the vague glow of decomposing leaf mould, but Reach’s scaffolding army was unaffected by darkness. The only guide they needed was the hissing scratch of wire on brick: the signal of their mistress.
Like all young Sodiumites, Electra knew the sewers like the wiring in the back of her hand. The tunnels were the only way to get around the city during the day without being blinded by the daylamp. Lec had groped her way to one Hackney manhole cover hundreds of times so she could sneak off to meet Filius while her grandmother was too sleepy to snap at her about it. When the wolves and their scaffolding handlers had descended into the roadworks gouged into Tinker’s Gate, it had been a simple matter to follow them into London’s guts.
Electra kept to the narrow maintenance tunnels running parallel to the main sewers, well clear of the deadly water. She peeked around the corner: the Wire Mistress was mounted in the centre of the file of wolves. The dark-skinned girl bound in its coils, looking as shrivelled-up as the meat of an old nut, was the core of its strength.
Lec imagined lashing out and crushing the girl’s windpipe with her fields; she imagined the Wire Mistress, furious but weakened, unspooling from its dead slave, just as she hit with all the power she could dance up.
Fight it. Kill it. She craved it so badly her filaments ached, but instead she bowed her head and stifled the light from her thundering pulse as she let the thing walk past the end of the access tunnel.