by Tom Pollock
She could still undo everything.
You’re the only one who can stop her. But I don’t have to do it alone.
I scream, part warcry, mostly plain terror, as I meet the steel-wrapped girl. Barbed strands fly around me and I manage to shout, just a few words, before they seal up my mouth.
‘Beth, help me!’
Beth looked down the Embankment. That voice, the voice of the streets, spurred her muscles, though dizziness washed over her and she stumbled.
‘Fil!’ she shouted, ‘Fil! Where are you?’
There was no answer, but now she didn’t need one: she could see the seething mass of wire standing on the very edge of the river. Pavement Priests were trying to get close, but wires lashed out like whips, keeping them at bay. They all looked terrified of the thing.
A grey arm bleeding from a thousand little cuts thrust out of the coils, holding an iron railing, but the wire had looped around the wrist and he couldn’t plunge the weapon home.
Beth ran at the tangled, jagged cloud of metal and started tearing at the strands. The wire coils hissed over each other, slashing at her face, making every inch of her skin burn with pain, but she didn’t pull her hands back to protect herself.
Fil, she thought desperately, Filius … hold on!
And she plunged into the heart of the monster.
Two figures waited for her: Fil, on his back, horribly contorted, his torso streaked with blood. His teeth bared, his arm was cocked, spear ready, but the wires held his limbs and he couldn’t uncoil.
‘Beth!’ He forced his voice between the barbs in his lips. ‘Beth, take my spear. Kill the host.’
But Beth barely heard him. She was staring at the wire thicket’s other inhabitant. Its other inhabitant stared right back at her.
Pen looked like one of those cartoons of electrocuted people, except instead of lightning-bolts, there were wires, holding her off the ground and splaying her limbs, forcing her into a X shape.
Some useless part of Beth’s brain registered that she’d lent Pen the jeans she was wearing – they’d looked a bit tatty in the charity shop, but they looked far worse now, all slippery with gore and filth. Pen’s right nostril had been ripped away and her mouth was slit wider: a jagged grin towards her ear.
But the eyes were just as Beth remembered.
Those eyes knew Beth as well as she knew them.
‘Beth! Help me!’ The yell tore his lips and his railing clattered onto the pavement at her feet.
‘Kill. The. Host.’ The breath was being squeezed from him.
Beth wrenched herself forwards, sickened and horrified, and reached for the wires that held Pen’s throat. Her nails gouged Pen’s flesh as she tried desperately to prise the metal away and the barbs tore her own hands. Her palms were slicked with blood.
‘Pen,’ she gabbled absurdly, ‘Pen, are you okay?’ Pen didn’t answer; her lips were stitched gruesomely with wire.
Beth saw Fil out of the corner of her eye as, just for an instant, disbelief etched his face like physical pain. Then the wire-thing’s tendrils dragged him over the balustrade and plunged him into the river.
Wires flashed out and bound Beth’s arms and legs. The barbs bit into her, but the pain seemed distant – everything was distant except her best friend’s mutilated face.
‘Oh G-God, Pen—’ she managed to stammer.
Beth suddenly became aware of orange light: a naked, shining glass girl was forcing her way towards the tangle of wire. The glare seared Beth’s eyes, but she didn’t shut them. She could read the pain written on Pen’s skin. The glass girl drew level with Beth, but she didn’t look at her. Beth was vaguely aware that the glass girl looked familiar, then she realised: she was the first Sodiumite she’d ever seen.
Oh God, Pen, I’m so sorry.
The glass girl extended a hand towards Pen, burning bright with the effort. Fine cracks laced themselves up her arm and she raised the other arm and began to step in a formal circle, a tightly controlled dance.
The glass over her chest fractured and went cloudy. Fragments of her skin peeled off and spun, glittering, trapped in her own magnetism.
The wire slid backwards; inch by grudging inch. Agonisingly, the barbs slid free of Beth’s arms, leaving red pucker-marks. Without them to support her, she fell. The strand that was holding Fil under water was taut now, and looked almost fragile.
Beth, help me!
Beth’s teeth were chattering with shock, but she groped around and found the railing-spear by her feet. With a snarl of effort she lifted it, and slashed the wire tendril in two.
The wire monster recoiled in pain at the touch of the spear, and Pen’s face blurred as the barbs contracted around her, as though it were clutching Pen to its heart. Then, like some vast insect, it rose up on hundreds of spindly legs, bore her up onto the bridge and skittered away.
Pen …
‘Fil!’ Beth was bewildered, drained. She tried to follow, but she found she couldn’t walk. She collapsed to her knees and crawled to the balustrade. There was no movement on the water. Warmth on her skin told her the glass girl was there.
‘Filius,’ she gasped, ‘he’s down there. He’s— I have to—’ She tried to push herself up, but she was too weak. The wire’s barbs had leached the strength from her.
A metal parasite, he had called it. Oh my God, Pen—
She slid backwards, cracking her jaw on the stone.
Electra shot Beth a pitying look. She closed her eyes.
Beth saw fear through the transparent lids for only a second.
Then Electra drew herself up and threw her fractured body head-first into the Thames.
For an instant Beth could see her glow, shining up from the depths. Then the water began to seethe and boil, and stale-smelling gas wafted up and filled the air.
Beth watched, helpless, but she couldn’t make out what was happening until two bodies broke the surface. Fil was screaming weakly, barely conscious. The skin where Electra was holding him bubbled red, then turned black. Electra’s head was arched back, her bones flaring white and fizzing away. Her jaw was clenched tight, and her filaments had started to disappear like burning fuses, but she managed to drag the boy onto a sandbank.
The dirt clung to the weeping flesh of his burns and he coiled up, foetus-like to protect himself. ‘Lec.’ It was only a whisper, but Beth heard it clearly from the Embankment above. ‘Lec.’ He groped behind him, grasping the glass girl’s hand. His own skin smoked where he touched her.
Electra smiled. She glimmered something in her own language that Beth didn’t understand.
With a grunt of pain the Son of the Streets reached out to touch her cheek, but the reaction reached Electra’s face and it burnt away under his hand.
‘Fil!’ Beth slipped down the side of the Embankment onto the sandbar. She staggered to his side. ‘Fil! What can I do? What can I do?’ she shouted at him desperately, idiotically. ‘What can I do?’
She fell to the ground beside him and cradled his head. Cuts covered his skin, and a burn on his wrist had all but obliterated his tower block tattoo. River water bubbled out of his throat when he tried to answer.
‘What can I do?’ she whispered into his hair.
‘You know what she said?’ he gasped after hacking up a gallon of muddy water. There was a kind of wonder in his face. ‘She said, “If you’re going to bring the White bastards in, you’d better teach ’em to dance.”’ His head fell back onto her lap, his eyes closed. But his chest was still rising and falling. He was unconscious, but alive.
Beth became aware of a fluttering sound, like pigeon wings.
‘Come on, girl,’ a voice gusted on rubbish-scented breath. ‘There are more wolves on the way, and we’re in no state to fight them. Give him to me.’
Fat grey pigeons flocked all over his body, and Beth felt dozens of pigeon-claws seize her jeans, her hoodie and her hair.
‘Come,’ Gutterglass whispered, his voice hoarse with the strain.
; As she was borne into the air Beth could see glimmering bodies below her, and flashing lights: Ezekiel and Victor marshalling the retreat. A scaffolding muzzle slipped below the water. But Beth knew what she would remember most, the image that would haunt her quiet moments …
… the fragments: the tiny, tiny pieces of the men and women and children that she’d led here. Ground glass, and gravel, and blood.
CHAPTER 37
Moonlight bleached the statues where they stood amongst the gravestones. The deep shadows made the stone figures look tired. A sound carried on the breeze: slow regular breathing, the odd snore. Slumped inside their punishment skins, the Pavement Priests slept.
It was very early in the morning. They’d worked all of the preceding night.
The sound of stone wings had filled the cemetery, and one after another they’d looked up. Ezekiel delivered the first body in silence: a boy, swaddled in the statue of a Victorian scientist. He’d dropped the boy at Petris’ feet as if it was nothing at all. Petris nodded as he accepted the burden. He gazed at the clawmarks in Ezekiel’s stone armour with a kind of jealousy.
Is that all I am now? he wondered. An undertaker? Is this how quickly the sword passes to another fist?
After that first body (Lasulo, Petris thought, careful to recall his name) others came. Their surviving battle-mates brought them, balanced stiffly on shoulders or pulled through the dew-wet grass on makeshift sleds. The priests of the graveyard moved to help. Nobody spoke. Brother faced brother; hard-eyed husbands salved their wives’ battle wounds in silence. The last words they’d exchanged had been ugly ones, words like slave and whore and heretic, but this wasn’t the time to rehash those arguments, not with dead to count and bury.
No one had to speak. Everyone knew what needed to be done.
They grunted and muttered curses as they lifted the dead onto the empty pedestals. They mixed mortar and melted bronze according to each of the fallen’s materials and poured it around their feet to set them in place. A few paused to gape at the sheer number of the entombed. It was the largest mass funeral in decades.
And then, at four o’clock, the hour of stone, the true witching hour, the Pavement Priests began to sing. Petris led, and every other brother and sister joined in, even Ezekiel, wheeling overhead at a disdainful distance.
The hymn of the Pavement Priests rang out across London, as pure as bell chimes and as deep as a midwinter night, carrying over the growl of London engines, and everyone who heard it stopped and listened. Without knowing it, the people on the streets observed a moment’s silence for the fallen.
The words of the song were simple enough: Under the skin gifted by the quarry and washed away by the rain, a fragment of the human remains. The song was a prayer that those fragments become whole again, that the most human of virtues be restored to their fallen siblings, the virtue that allowed them to die. They prayed that their statues would cease to be punishment skins and become simple graves.
The prayer’s target, of course, was Mater Viae herself. Only she could consider her debt paid and buy the priests’ deaths back from the oil-soaked traders she’d sold them to.
The irony of praying to a Goddess they’d rejected even as they stood in the ruins of her temple almost made Petris smile. But this was a funeral, and she was the only Goddess they had. Who else could they pray to? As Johnny Naphtha had once lisped in that stupid way of his, Weddingss and funeralss force the faithlesss to fake it.
The song finished and Petris ended the ceremony with a scattering of brickdust at the feet of the dead. The soldiers took their scars back into the night. Ezekiel beat his way laboriously north. They had wounded to care for, and a war with Reach to gloriously lose.
But the majority remained. Like Petris, they’d turned their backs on the Goddess who’d enslaved them. As he turned and walked away from the tombs, Petris hoped that none of them felt as much a coward as he did. Most of them had only managed a few steps before collapsing into an exhausted slumber inside their armour, but Petris couldn’t sleep. He was kept awake by a pain in his chest, a sharp longing to be with the army, to fight, to feel the pores in his stone soak up blood. It was what he had been reborn for, to be a soldier. It was so long since there had been a war to fight.
But to fight would be to fight for her, and the men and women he spoke for were too angry to accept that. He scratched at his thumbs, flaking away stone: a casual rebellion.
The Carven Doctrines taught that there was no pain in a death in Mater Viae’s service: such a death paid their debt and bought release. Petris grieved not for the dead but for himself, though he’d never in a thousand years admit it. The deaths of his flock only made his own imprisonment lonelier.
So he did what all religious men do when they’re lonely. Quietly, so as not to disturb the others, he began to pray.
CHAPTER 38
‘I have to go back!’ she yelled, but the pigeons ignored her. The wind from their wings buffeted her face. London flashed past below. She writhed and kicked, but their claws only gripped her tighter.
‘I have to go back!’ She sounded deranged in her own ears. A single thought filled her to bursting and seized control of her voice. ‘That was Pen! That was Pen! I have to go back!’
A plastic clown mask dangled from a pigeon-claw. It twisted to face her. ‘Shut up.’
‘She’s my friend.’
‘She’s its host.’ Worms contorted the mask’s lips into a grimace. The empty eggshells stuck into its eyesockets looked past her to where a frail, skinny young man hung from the heart of a flock of pigeons, trailing flecks of blood into the empty air. ‘Do you really think she’d treat you any differently?’
They passed over a crosshatch of roof tiles washed yellow by the light of ordinary, dumb lamps. Tower block windows glimmered for a moment then were gone. They skimmed in low over a landfill site: hillsides of broken TV sets and microwaves and scrap metal. Snared plastic billowed like foliage. Streams of industrial solvent and rainwater carved up the landscape.
The instant the pigeons set her down, Beth was running, slipping and stumbling over the filth towards Fil, who was lying on the ground, curled away from her. The wire had flayed half his skin off and a flap of it was hanging open, like a grotesque curtain.
She skidded down on her knees beside him. His face was slack, unconscious. She drew breath sharply, remembering the look of horror, of outright betrayal, before the wire-creature had plunged him into the river.
Kill the host, he’d cried.
But she couldn’t. It was Pen. She couldn’t—
Could she?
Pigeons flocked around her, beating her backwards with wings and talons.
‘Glas!’ she protested.
‘Get away from him.’ She couldn’t see a face, but the voice was flat and angry. Bugs were swarming, building legs from the surrounding rubbish.
‘But I have to help …’
Suddenly the clown-mask jutted through the storm of pigeon wings. ‘If you distract me and he dies I will tear the eyes out of your skull. Understand, little girl? The best thing you can do for him is get away, now.’
Beth stiffened. She stared at Gutterglass with gritted teeth, then turned and stumbled back down the hill.
For what felt like a long time, she trudged in darkness through the shifting murk. Pen! The thought filled her head like a screaming siren. Panic fired her muscles and she sprinted up the side of a rubbish-dune towards the glowing City, towards Pen, arms pumping. All she could see was her best friend, bound and bloodied by barbed wire.
But then Beth’s fingertips brushed over one another and she felt the texture of the thin rough scabs those barbs had left. She stumbled to a stop. She’d had her chance to help Pen, her chance to free her, and she’d failed. What if she failed again? What if all that happened was that Pen was forced to watch while the Wire Mistress used her own hands to crush Beth’s throat?
Gutterglass’ voice seeped into her mind. Do you really think she’d treat you any d
ifferently?
Beth looked back across the landfill to where Fil was lying, bleeding and shuddering and barely breathing, amidst the filth and junk. Where she’d led him.
‘Is that your plan? Run?’ Her scorn rang so hollow now; she wished she could suck those words back into her. She wished she’d let him save himself.
She’d bullied and mocked and lured him here, just as she had with Pen by leaving that smug riddle about ‘fractured harmony’ on the bricks by her house.
That’s me: a siren call to self-destruction.
A sensation filled her like warm, slow concrete in her stomach and limbs. She sank into the rubbish. She couldn’t fix it. She’d broken everything and she couldn’t fix it. She didn’t even feel the tears running down her cheeks.
All she’d done – all she had the power to do – was to make everything worse.
God, Fil, please don’t die.
The little scraps of paper and cardboard and egg cartons and beer-bottle labels littered the ground under her like photographs, old pictures of someone lost.
This is how you felt, Dad, she thought as she stared at them, like there was nothing you could do.
The helplessness boiled up her, hot and black and poisonous, like it must have in him. And she’d hated him for it.
There’s nothing I can do.
She bent over and cried, hard. It was a wrench to get each tear out, like they were pulling her insides with them.
There’s nothing I can do.
She cried until she was empty, then she just sat. But the image of her father in his chair with his book was fixed in her mind and she couldn’t shake it. She couldn’t settle into the strangling fingers of her despair. She couldn’t just sit there like he had: because she’d seen him do it.
She rocked slowly back onto her feet and looked down at the dent she’d made, a little alcove in the muck. If it wasn’t for him I probably never would have got up. It was a gift, she thought suddenly, one he’d given without even meaning to. She thanked him quietly, and wished he could hear her.