The City's Son

by Tom Pollock

  She started to walk back down into the landfill. There was nothing she could do, but she had to do something.

  Gradually the sky changed from the velvet darkness of late night to the permeable gloom of very early morning. In dribs and drabs, a slow trickle of bodies, the remnants of her army, entered the landfill.

  The Sodiumites carried their wounded on stretchers woven from yellow and black electrical tape: near-shattered bodies missing arms or legs, or desperately reaching into their own chests to pinch together the circuits that kept their hearts beating.

  The Pavement Priests used gateposts as crutches, but there weren’t enough to go around and some had to crawl. One stone-clad figure collapsed under the weight of his armour, gasping, ‘No further …’ until a sleek tabby cat melted from the ranks and rubbed itself, purring, up against the fallen priest and from somewhere deep within he found enough faith to keep going that bit further.

  As the survivors reached the heart of the dump, rats and beetles and cockroaches emerged. With chitters of mandibles and jerkings of sleek brown heads, they directed the wounded to alcoves, excavated from the mounds of rubbish. Those too hurt to do anything else collapsed gratefully down on discarded mattresses. The most able set to work, dressing wounds with torn clothes, patching up flickering Lampfolk with used lightbulbs and bits of cracked champagne flutes and beer glasses.

  A priest inside a one-armed statue was organising the field hospital. He read out a list of injuries to a horde of eager rats while blood dried slowly around a wound in his own marble stomach.

  The priest looked up in surprise as Beth approached him. Her eyes were raw with tears. She rolled up the sleeves of her hoodie. ‘What can I do?’ she asked.

  He appraised her through the peepholes in his marble mask. ‘Hell of a mess to clean up,’ he said. His stone lips were set in a heroic smile. He twitched his marble stump at her. ‘Fancy lending us a hand?’

  So Beth bandaged and stitched and soldered, and wiped blood and pus from sticky wounds. Work, she ordered herself as she pulled on the needle and drew the sides of a young soldier’s gaping thigh together through the gap in his concrete robe. These were her soldiers; she’d called them and they’d followed her, same as Pen had, and she owed them just as much.

  Just work.

  ‘I’m telling you, blud, it was four,’ the young priest was saying in a nasal East End accent.

  The bronze-coated figure on the next mattress over snorted. ‘Four, right. Remind me, son, who taught you to count? There was one by the river, one on the bridge and the other by that brick hospital. Your ass only killed three wolves, Timon; don’ be frontin’ like you can top my score.’

  Timon hissed in exasperation, coating concrete lips in spittle. ‘All that green rust on your face makin’ you blind, Al. I took down that fat rusty bitch down on the beach, too. Snapped its neck, like this—’ He made a sharp twisting gesture with his hands.

  Al sneered, ‘Timon, that bitch bounced back faster than one of your mum’s cheques.’

  ‘Shut up about my mum! You don’t know nothin’ about her.’

  ‘I’ll shut up about your mum when you shut up about my face. It’s the copper – ain’t my fault this stuff corrodes. Anyway you don’t know nothin’ about your mum neither; you been a priest way to long, so don’t be trying to pretend you remember her no more.’

  Timon fell into an uncomfortable silence. Beth looked up from her needle. Something in Timon’s plaintive pride stung her. She knotted the thread and bit it off, and popped the cap off her Magic Marker.

  ‘Hey, what—?’ Timon started to protest, and then fell silent when he saw what she was drawing. Four stylised wolf-heads appeared on his concrete shoulder, angular and snarling: trophies, like kills painted on the side of a fighter-jet.

  ‘There you go, Timon,’ she said. ‘One for each of your prey.’

  Al’s jealousy was forgotten as he admired his friend’s new markings. ‘I want me summa them too,’ he said.

  Timon sucked his teeth. ‘We’re, not dead yet, Al,’ he said. ‘That’s some pretty badass trophy right there.’

  ‘True that.’

  Beth snapped the cap back on her marker and frowned. ‘I thought Pavement Priests couldn’t die,’ she said. ‘Petris said that you wanted your deaths back.’

  Both Timon and Al erupted into hoots of scornful laughter. ‘Yeah, Miss B, we can die,’ Al said. ‘We just get born again. You know what that’s like?’

  Beth shook her head.

  Al’s green eyes stared mercilessly out through the copper. ‘You’s a little baby,’ he said quietly, ‘stuck in a stone crib. No food, no water, no light, and no fucking idea why not. You don’t get all your memories back right away, see?

  ‘Some of us don’t never remember,’ he added quietly. ‘What the synod did: it’s no precise art, y’know? You get memories coming back from your old lives all ragged, but stuff’s missing, and other stuff contradicts. They say Johnny Naphtha has a room somewhere full of memories, bottles of copies he made of us ’fore he took us the first time. Don’t know if I believe that. But I do know I don’t remember committin’ no crime to get me damned.’

  There was silence. Beth could feel Timon’s gaze on the back of her neck.

  Al hawked and spat through the tiny crack between his bronze lips. ‘Can’t whine too loud though. Least last time I got reborn, it was in the graveyard, with another priest close enough to hear me cryin’. A lot of us isn’t that lucky. A lot are never found … There’ll be new babies stranded in statues all over London tonight after that ruckus, believe that.’ His voice was a bitter sneer. ‘Their wounds’re only the first o’ their problems. Your Goddess seen to that. That’s why we want our deaths back.’

  Beth put the cap back on her marker and stood up. The hand that held the marker was trembling. All those bodies, crushed and dying … Your Goddess— ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry, I … I need—. I have to—’ She turned and bolted from the alcove.

  ‘Hey, Miss B!’ Al lifted a bronze arm slightly. ‘What about me?’

  When Ezekiel found Beth, she was crouched amidst old crisp packets and cardboard, hugging her knees; a nowhere place in this nowhere dump. The stone angel clucked his tongue disapprovingly. ‘Guilt weighing you down?’ he said.

  She said nothing, and he ignored her glare. ‘Come now young lady,’ he said, ‘I’ve been a priest for almost eight hundred years. If I couldn’t recognise a gangrenous conscience then I ought to abandon the calling altogether and open a florist’s.’

  There was a flicker, and suddenly he stood beside her, massive with his limestone wings. ‘Talk.’ It wasn’t a request. ‘You’ll feel better.’

  Beth continued to stare. She had no idea where to start.

  ‘Blood-in-the-river,’ Ezekiel sighed. ‘How does your lot do this again?’ He creaked down beside her. Cracks appeared and resealed instantly in his cassock. ‘I bless you, daughter, for you have sinned, it’s been – well, forever, in all probability, since your last confession, so you’re due. Keep it to the important stuff please; I have neither the time nor the inclination to hear about shoplifting when you were ten. Anyway, confess away. I’m listening.’

  Beth opened her mouth, stalled, and then the words came out all in a tumble. ‘It’s too much. People follow me. I ask them … and they follow. Like Fil, and – and Pen, and all these people in their stone and their glass. And I’m trying, really trying to help. But now Electra’s dead, and Fil nearly is … and these priests are just kids, and Pen … oh Christ and Thames, Pen… Oh God—’ She stopped, trying to recover her breath.

  The angel’s beautiful carved face watched her. ‘I misjudged you, Miss Bradley,’ he said softly. ‘Guilt is not your problem.’

  ‘No?’ Beth sniffed back tears. ‘Then what is?’

  ‘Rampaging egomania.’

  Beth jerked her head up, thinking the angel was taking the piss, but he sounded totally serious. ‘“People-huh-follow-huh- me!”’ He mimicked
her exactly, even with the little gasps for breath. ‘“These priests are just kids.” Patronise us to your heart’s content, Miss Bradley, we’re all several hundred years old, but we don’t mind.’

  Then he snorted. ‘Honestly! As if we have not eyes to see and minds to think as well as feet and hands to march and fight.’ A stone hand took Beth’s chin. She hadn’t even seen it move. ‘Listen to me. This will be bad for your ego, but good for your heart. Reach is a monster. He and his creatures kill indiscriminately. You know this; so do we. We follow you only because you happen to be right. And if it had not been you, we would have followed someone else. Filius would have fought in the end, with or without you.

  ‘It is the will of the Goddess.’ His voice rasped with urgency bordering on fanaticism. ‘As the appearance of Fleet and his holy felines shows. You carry the Lady’s aspect, and I respect that, but do not let that fool you into thinking you are more important than you are. We are all vessels for her will.’

  He released her chin and retreated from her in a few unclear flickers of motion. Beth rubbed the skin where his fingers had been. The bruises were healing already.

  ‘Oh, and Miss Bradley? You are about the worst triage nurse I’ve ever seen. Gutterglass’ weevils keep having to unpick your stitches and redo them. It’s embarrassing, and a waste of time. For their sake, if not your own, find something to do that you’re actually good at.’

  CHAPTER 39

  When Beth found Gutterglass, he was crouched over a Sodiumite girl so badly wounded that she could barely light his face. The trash-spirit’s incarnation was tiny, no bigger than a toddler, and he stroked her fibre-optic hair with soda-straw fingers and whispered to her that Mater Viae loved her.

  There was a hissing, cracking noise and half a dozen rats nosed their way from the rubbish-dune, dragging a live electrical cable burrowed from some part of the national grid. Gutterglass slid condoms over his fingers like surgical gloves and set to work.

  Beth didn’t disturb him ’til he was done. ‘The compact look suits you,’ she said. She eyed his avatar’s oversized, collapsing-football head. ‘In a creepy, decomposing baby sort of way.’

  Gutterglass didn’t look at her. ‘I have five thousand and sixty-three distinct organisms under control at present,’ he said snippily, ‘scavenging, shoring up defences and, in some cases, conducting open-heart surgery. Frankly, I’d like to see you manage half as much and animate a paper bag, let alone a fully functional avatar.’ The little refuse-marionette rummaged around, tugged out a battered pack of cigarettes and lit one between his split-seam lips.

  ‘You smoke?’ Beth was surprised.

  ‘Who better to have a filthy habit?’ Gutterglass countered.

  Beth watched smoke billow back out through his balsawood ribs. ‘Does it … do anything for you?’ she asked.

  ‘It used to,’ Gutterglass shut his eggshell-eyes. There was a wistfulness as he spoke. ‘A long time ago.’

  When the eggshells opened again, the look Gutterglass gave her was cold, and tinged with hostility. ‘What do you want, Miss Bradley?’

  Beth looked at him through the smoke. ‘What do you think I want?’

  The Prince of London had no mattress. His back and shoulders were raised off the ground by crushed rubble and chunks of brick. As Beth watched, the colour of the rubble faded and his pallid skin darkened a little, but only a very little.

  She crouched and brushed the hair out of his face. His jaw was clenched and his eyes screwed up. ‘He looks better.’

  ‘Of course he does,’ Gutterglass said flatly. ‘I’m his doctor. Although, to give him his due, the-little-God-that-could here is very hard to kill.’

  Air escaped the football-head in a sigh. ‘However, I have no way of knowing when he’ll wake up,’ he confessed. ‘In the meantime I suppose that leaves you and me in command.’ He spat out the words angrily. ‘I’ll need you to—’

  ‘I’m going, Glas,’ Beth interrupted. She stood up.

  The eggshells blinked. ‘Going? Going where?’

  ‘St Paul’s. Pen needs me.’

  Gutterglass waited a long time before he answered. ‘Do you know what?’ he said at last. ‘I should let you.’ To Beth’s surprise his voice was harsh with anger. ‘I should wish you the best of London Luck and just let you waltz straight into the Scaffwolves’ jaws. After all, you deserve it. I introduced them, did you know that? Filius and Electra? She was brave and powerful and graceful; she was his best friend, and she made him happier than anyone I’ve ever seen.’

  He twisted his head and looked at her with frank disgust. ‘Anyone except you. So for the love he bore you, I’ll say this once. Don’t go. You think you can make it better? You can’t. Reach will rip you asunder. Walk into the Demolition Fields looking for a happy ending and an ending is all you’ll find.’

  He fell silent. For a long time Beth held his eggshell gaze. ‘You’re still going, then?’ Gutterglass said eventually.

  ‘What do you think?’

  A cockroach in Gutterglass’ mouth clicked in disapproval and something bumped against Beth’s shin. She looked down. It was Fil’s corroded railing-spear, borne on a swarming tide of beetles.

  ‘You might need this.’

  His little face looked exhausted, but in a strange way satisfied. ‘In the unlikely event you get close enough, drive it into the Crane King’s throat.’

  Beth’s fingers closed around the spear. The grooves and pits in the metal seemed to fit her hand precisely. She could almost feel the shape of Fil’s handprint on it.

  ‘It’s not much,’ Gutterglass said, ‘but without Mater Viae’s Great Fire, we must improvise.’

  Beth exhaled slowly. ‘I’ll kill him, Glas,’ she swore, tasting every word. ‘For Fil, and Electra, and Pen. And for me.’

  Gutterglass’ seam-smile said he didn’t believe her, but he nodded. He disintegrated slowly. His eggshells watched her to the last.

  When Gutterglass had gone, she bent down and kissed Fil’s forehead. ‘You brought me home,’ she whispered into his ear. It physically hurt her, deep in her chest, to leave him like this, but he had Gutterglass, and Gutterglass had his army, and Pen, Pen who she loved more fully and deeply than anyone else, who she’d almost let herself forget, Pen had only her.

  Fil had believed she could be like him, so she owed him that: to do more than just run. ‘I saved your life once, remember,’ she whispered as she turned to go. ‘Don’t let it be wasted effort. I’ll try to do the same.’

  It was only a hundred feet to the landfill’s perimeter fence. The tarmac felt nourishing under her feet as she ran, and London blurred past, all lights and noise and grandeur and stink, the spear pointed due south before her.

  Before long, cranes began to rear up on the horizon, and she turned east. The bulk of St Paul’s emerged like a vast black beetle crouched against the sunrise. The Demolition Fields were drawing closer.

  CHAPTER 40

  ‘I can’t make this add up at all.’

  Parva looked forlornly at her father across the table. She knew how this was going to end. She’d struggled into her green wedding sharara, which had hurt because it was over-ambitiously small and there were cuts under her arms.

  Her dad wouldn’t meet her gaze but remained hunched, scowling over his ledger. ‘Come here and help me, Parva.’

  Obediently she stood and went to his shoulder. Behind her a knife scraped over china as her mother dumped the food into the bin.

  ‘See?’ her father grumbled. He smelled of nuts and dry tobacco. ‘He’ll want a fortune.’

  Parva gazed into her own mutilated face. Her father held the pencil, but it was Beth’s style that characterised the picture.

  Her father slumped forwards and sighed, his breath stirring the white hairs on his brown arms. ‘I can’t afford it. I can’t. It will ruin me. I’ll have to sell the practice.’

  A crash made them both look up. Parva’s mother stood over the shrapnel of a broken plate. Her hand was trembling.
‘Why, Parva? Why couldn’t you take better care of yourself? I taught you how.’ She sounded tearful, and she looked terribly old.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s worse than you think, Mrs K,’ a familiar voice said. Beth ambled in from the front room, her hands thrust into the pockets of her hoodie.

  ‘Do you mind?’ She lifted the pencil from Parva’s dad’s unresisting fingers and began to scribble over his picture, her tongue between her teeth as she worked, her face all concentration. Under her pencil, the true extent of Parva’s injuries became clear. She twirled the pencil in her fingers and used the rubber end to erase one nostril and half an ear. She drew in a ragged scar at the corner of the mouth.

  Pain flared through Parva’s face. She put her hand to her cheek and felt blood. She probed with her fingers and felt the skin where her lips met split and separate as through dragged with an invisible wire.

  When Beth had done, Parva slumped to the ground, her nose and mouth full of the tang of metal.

  Beth dropped the pencil down on the paper. ‘Sorry, Mr K,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’ll find any takers. Not for any price.’ She extended a hand to Parva. ‘Come on, Pen,’ she said.

  Pen reached out with the thumb and three remaining fingers of her right hand. She smeared Beth’s palm red as she grasped it. She followed her best friend from the room.

  *

  Pen woke slowly, the crash of demolition like a call to prayer from mosques in some dawn in her childhood she barely remembered: tower blocks for minarets, wrecking balls for muezzins.

  She opened her eyes cautiously, but it was only the matted web of sleep that held them shut. Her mouth felt parched; it tasted of resentment and old blood. She sighed, expanding her ribs as far as she could against their wire corset.

  Kill the host … That’s what the skinny boy had said as she squeezed him. Pen found herself furious with Beth for not obeying him. In the brief, feverish periods of sleep she managed to snatch she dreamed of Beth: both rescuer and mutilator, cutter and cure. It was an addiction, tenacious as a weed. She had to stop. Neither blaming nor hoping for Beth was going to help her.