The City's Son

by Tom Pollock

  Pen’s heart lodged somewhere near her carotid artery. She opened her eyes and craned her neck to see.

  CHAPTER 49

  A rough rectangle of light, the door to Reach’s court, stood open before Beth. Something intensely and inconveniently bright was shining directly through her exit, hitting her retinas like a battering ram.

  Blood-and-stonepiss-in-the-river, she swore silently. She was already deafened by the noise from beyond the doorway; even the panicked thud of her heartbeat had dissolved under the din. Apparently, she was going to have to go out there blind as well.

  She hesitated. Outside, the King of Cranes, London’s nemesis, was waiting: the beast in the city’s skin.

  He’s killing everything.

  She crouched there, wiped the oily sweat from her palm and gripped the spear. Voices flitted in and out of her head.

  You might need this. Drive it into the Crane King’s throat.

  Come on, B—

  Do more than just run.

  Reach will tear you asunder.

  Come on, B—

  An ending is all you’ll find …

  Do more than just—

  She climbed to her feet and opened her ears to the full clamour of the building site.

  —run.

  She pelted out into the day.

  At first she saw nothing but eye-scouring light as she ran headlong, clutching the spear, not daring to stop. His voice flew in from all around her, echoing in the churn and tear of steel and concrete: I am Reach I am Reach I will be I will be. And there were other sounds, too: the pounding of iron paws on rubble, the slaver and snap of Scaffwolves, horribly close.

  Gradually her eyes began to cope: the light was the sun, bouncing off a pair of half-built skyscrapers. Reach had surrounded himself with mirrors. She shielded her eyes and looked from side to side. She sprang from one chunk of rubble to the next, sure-footed as a cat on the treacherous ground.

  Cranes soared overhead, but they were just cranes, not fingers. They weren’t linked to hand or arm or body. Where was he? What was he? Her fingers were painfully tight on the spear.

  Drive it into the Crane King’s throat.

  I would, she thought desperately, if I could find his throat!

  The edge of the building site reared up ahead, an impenetrable wreckage of concrete and broken wood and twisted metal, piled up against the hoardings. A growl ripped through the air behind her. She skidded, kicked up dust and turned.

  Three Scaffwolves the size of horses prowled up over a mound of broken stone. Through the gaps in their steel skeletons Beth spied the far skyscraper, and reflected in its windows was her own terrified face.

  The wolves advanced, heads slung low, ears back. Beth gave ground. She cast about helplessly, arm cocked back, the railing spear ready to throw, but she had no target. She could see diggers, cranes, but no vast construction God. All her pent-up courage was fizzing inside her, but she had no way to release it.

  Rough stone bumped into her back. She had nowhere left to run.

  She eyed the wolves, wondering if she could move fast enough to take them all. Bravado bubbled in her throat, tasting like blood, and she snarled at them, defiant.

  But yet more dormant scaffolding sheathed the half-built tower blocks. Beth knew that if even she could cut down the metal monsters advancing on her, others would immediately take their place.

  The wolves stopped. They growled their hollow growls and began to patrol a perimeter, marking a semi-circle around her. Beth growled back. She hawked and spat at them, and they grinned at her with their jagged teeth, begging her to commit to an attack.

  And all around them, the storm of construction thundered on: the cranes cranked up their loads and the diggers hacked at the earth, though the cabs were all empty. There was no sign of the force which controlled them.

  Beth’s blood hammered through her.

  What are you waiting for?

  Something slammed into her right shoulder from behind. She staggered forward, and then felt herself being hauled bodily back. Pain burnt up and down her right side – the bones were grinding together wrongly. Her spear-arm went limp.

  Beth looked down at her shoulder. Pain made her dizzy, made her sick, made everything slow.

  A metal point was protruding from her hoodie. It was smeared with oily red, and if she looked closely, Beth thought she could see tiny white chips of bone caught in the blood. The rest of the hook emerged from the back of her shoulder. A chain was connected to it, linked to that was a cable, a three-inch-thick steel cord, which stretched from her punctured flesh into the sky.

  A loud whirring filled her ears and the crane’s winch kicked in.

  Beth screamed. The wolves snapped at her heels and she screamed again, short bursts of sound between panicked breaths. Waves of hot-and-cold shuddering pain rippled from her shoulder to the tips of her toes. Acid bubbled into her mouth. Her feet kicked empty air as the crane lifted her.

  Her weight, dragging down on the punctured shoulder, was unbearable, and she found herself blabbering incoherently, on the verge of passing out. She could feel her shoulder blade clicking against the steel hook, tendons beginning to tear under the strain. Any moment now, she thought, the hook would rip itself clean out of her.

  But it didn’t. That alien substance in her blood was already clotting around the wound, setting like cement, sealing Reach’s grip, and she rose, the wolves baying under her. Her voice gave out before the crane reached the top of its arc.

  Some hundred and fifty feet above the building site, the crane whirred to a halt and Beth jerked on the hook like a fish.

  The Scaffwolves prowled over the building site, pawing and sniffing at its craters; diggers rumbled past on their caterpillar tracks as they moved busily to and fro. One lowered its metal jaws to a ridge of stone that looked almost exactly like the bridge of a nose.

  And suddenly, Beth saw Reach.

  From up here, the contours in the earthworks made sense in a new way. That crevice was the hollow of a cheek; this crack in the concrete, a parting of lips. A pitted ball of stone was an eye.

  It was rough, not yet even half-finished, but it was definite. The King of Cranes had a face. Beth had run all the way across his forehead.

  ‘I am Reach,’ his voice screeched in the gears of his machines. ‘I will be.’

  She gaped, numb with awe, as two diggers beetled towards one of the massive stone eyes. They lowered their drills and together ground a pupil-like hole in it. Then they altered position and began to dig again. Great chunks of rock flew in all directions in a cloud of dust and noise. The change was subtle but clear: the eye was now staring directly at Beth.

  Beth sagged from her trapped shoulder. A fuzzy blanket of shock muffled her pain.

  ‘What are you?’ she whispered.

  ‘I am Reach,’ Reach said, but Beth didn’t think it was in answer to her question.

  ‘Why—?’

  ‘I will be.’ There was no malice on the Crane God’s hewn face, no hatred for her in its voice. Here was a girl wearing the aspect of his greatest enemy and carrying her son’s weapon, and yet there was no mistaking the expression on Reach’s face—

  Curiosity

  Childlike curiosity: like a toddler who’s found an interesting bug under the climbing frame. Even the way his features were only half-defined was reminiscent of baby-fat.

  ‘I will be, I will be.’

  Christ and Thames. The idea came to Beth through a fug of pain. He’s a child. Beth didn’t want to believe it, but the conviction settled in her gut and wouldn’t shift. He’s a young child, too, not yet fully born. The diggers and drills were still birthing him from the rock.

  Fil had told her once: this is war, there are children everywhere. He hadn’t known how right he was.

  ‘I will be.’

  What if that was all Reach wanted – all he was sophisticated enough to want? He wasn’t a God; his wolves and their handlers weren’t his worshippers, they didn’t foll
ow his orders. He wasn’t able to give orders. All he could say was I am Reach, and I will be.

  The wolves must be part of him, Beth realised, like antibodies, eliminating threats to him.

  A breeze caught Beth and she began to creak back and forth like some absurd pendulum weight on her cable. As the world spun slowly beneath her feet she noticed things peeking out from under the rubble: a severed leg of a statue; a twisted bar of iron that might once have been a streetlamp, the shattered glass scattered over the ground. She thought she saw fragments of a reflected face, once haughty, now screaming. She saw the price of Reach’s life.

  ‘He doesn’t know it,’ Pen had said, ‘but he’s killing everything.’

  Reach was just a baby, trying to get born; he wasn’t capable of knowing or caring how many deaths that birth was causing.

  A screech of steel broke Beth’s reverie. The Scaffwolves howled and wheeled around, bounding eagerly past. Frantically, she threw her weight from side to side, trying to see what they were chasing.

  ‘Beth!’ a familiar voice cried out, and her heart lurched.

  ‘Fil?’

  ‘What in the name of my mother’s iron underwear are you doing up there?’

  A wolf snapped and then whined, and Beth smiled. Even unarmed, the Son of the Streets was formidable.

  ‘Beth! I’m comin’ up under you. I need my spear – drop my spear.’

  Beth tried, but her fingers wouldn’t respond. All the muscles in her right side had gone into spasm, and she was gripping the spear as though it were a vital organ.

  She glared at her hand. He’s down there tangling with three pony-sized metal wolves and I can’t even drop a railing? Unacceptably embarrassing. Let. Bloody. Go. Fighting her own muscles, she peeled back one finger, then another, then another until the spear was pointing downwards, clenched between finger and thumb.

  A grey blur shot over the rubble below and into her field of vision: a dark streak across the plain.

  ‘Beth!’

  Fil overshot and came up hard on the edge of the site. He kicked off the wall, launching himself back towards her.

  Her index finger straightened and the spear fell.

  The wolves snarled, racing towards it. The pavement-skinned boy ran, his hand outstretched for the weapon, intense concentration on his face. The wolves bounded closer, the rusty smell of their breath washing up over Beth.

  Fil jumped for it, and a wolf snapped its jaws shut on empty air as he closed his concrete-grey fingers around the spear’s iron shaft.

  CHAPTER 50

  I manage a half-arsed swipe at the closest wolf on my way down, but I don’t know if I connect. The ground jolts through me as I push hard off the stone and I can feel fangs cleaving the air near my neck, but I don’t dare risk stopping to fight.

  Faster, faster, I will myself. If I could run even half as fast as my heart’s drumming they’d never catch me. The rubble of Reach’s killing fields is dead; there’s no help for me here, no power to lend speed to my feet. The lifeless stone makes my skin crawl.

  My chest is tight with excitement: I am armed and ready, and inches away from my mother’s foe.

  I stumble over deeply grooved ground: the furrows make up Reach’s ferociously ugly forehead. A ramp rises before me, the bridge of his nose. As I race along it I can hear steel ringing off stone behind me. I can taste the metal stink of the wolves.

  I look down as I jump off the end of the ramp. A pair of massive lips, cracked like hot pavement, pass underneath me. I land awkwardly on the fat bastard’s overly round chin, my feet slipping over the smooth surface. A sharp pain rips up through my ankle and I fall, smacking my face on a random lump of stone that protrudes from the earth apparently for the sole purpose of spreading my nose over my face.

  ‘Bugger!’ I yell, pain and frustration flooding through me. The wolves’ bounds shake the ground. Sweat greases my palms as I try to push myself up and I fall back. My wounds have reopened; I can see blood oozing down my arm.

  Drive your spear into his throat.

  If I was just on Reach’s chin, then that lump of rock I’ve headbutted is exactly where his Adam’s apple would be.

  The pain in my ankle changes, becomes deeper, bloodier. There’s something sharp punching through the bone. I scream, shove myself up with one arm, raise the iron spear in the other and plunge it down into the rock.

  Everything stops.

  I know this because suddenly my scream is the only sound and it cuts through the air with shocking clarity. I hear no cranes, no diggers, no construction; even the wolves behind me have stopped growling (although for the one that’s got its chops wrapped around my ankle that’s not surprising; I am quite a mouthful).

  My heart almost stops.

  For an ecstatic, terrified moment I think, I’ve done it. I’ve killed the Crane King.

  ‘FIL!’

  Beth’s shout rips my head around. Gears whir. A metal lanyard rotates. Suddenly all I can see is a hook on a cable, swinging in fast and low over the broken ground towards me. I try to get up, but the wolf has my ankle and anyway it’s too late.

  The hook slams into my gut.

  CHAPTER 51

  Beth hung uselessly from the crane arm. Her warning curdled in the air, souring to a horrified, useless cry. Far below, Fil crumpled to his knees, then forward onto his elbows. The point of the hook emerged from the small of his back for an instant and then flashed out as Reach withdrew it. Blood welled at the base of his spine, gleaming wetly in the morning sun.

  ‘Fil,’ she echoed herself softly. ‘Filius.’

  As if answering her call, he began to pull himself arm over arm through the rubble, his legs dragging clumsily behind him, like an anchor. His spine must be severed, Beth thought. Nausea and pity welled up in her. All his nimbleness and city grace was gone. He looked as frail as a broken bird.

  The Scaffwolves pawed at the masonry around him. but they didn’t attack. They snuffled at his spear for a few seconds, and then loped away.

  I am Reach …

  With a screech of gears and a growl of engines, the machines in the site returned to work, spewing clods of earth and rock. The motors on the crane holding Beth kicked in and her stomach plunged as she shot towards the ground.

  As she dropped, she saw Reach’s expression had changed. That childish curiosity was gone; now the Crane King looked bored with her.

  Her bare feet touched earth and the hook ripped itself free from her shoulder. The pain drenched her, but she gritted her teeth against it and staggered over the broken world to Fil’s side.

  ‘It didn’t work,’ he gasped as she knelt beside him. He sounded perplexed. His eyes lolled dangerously in his head.

  ‘Glas said – his throat— But it didn’t work.’ He pawed at his spear, still stuck into the ground like an empty flagpole, marking the spot where he’d failed.

  ‘I know,’ Beth said, ‘I know. It’s okay.’ It was nowhere close to okay, but she didn’t know what else to say to him. She pulled the railing-spear free, wormed her good arm behind his shoulders and hoisted him into an almost-standing position. She felt horribly exposed, just standing here in the heart of the site, and she didn’t trust Reach’s sudden indifference to them. The skinny boy was frighteningly light, and his legs hung lifeless under him, like a doll’s. With his arms clasped around her neck, Beth dragged him back the way they’d come. His toes etched tracks over the dusty rubble.

  The wolves prowled, their hollow eyes following the fragile boy and girl, but uninterested in them.

  I am Reach.

  The cacophony of the diggers battered Beth like storm winds. Her arm hung prickling and cold at her side. The sleeve of her hoodie was so saturated that it drizzled blood onto the ground.

  Just inside the entrance to the labyrinth she stopped, dizzy and exhausted from blood-loss. She could go no further. She propped Fil against the wall and gripped the spear in her good hand.

  Why did you let us go?

  She eyed the
doorway mistrustfully. Almost the instant that Fil had driven the spear in, Reach had lost interest. She had seen the bored expression on that huge, infantile face, the way the wolves had snuffled at the spear shoved into their God’s throat and just left it there—

  —because it hadn’t hurt, she realised suddenly: the spear had done nothing at all to Reach. All the Urchin Prince had done was to prove he wasn’t a threat.

  Beth found herself laughing out loud, caught somewhere on the wrong side of hysteria. Reach was a baby, with a baby’s attention span. They had shown themselves to be neither novel nor dangerous, and so they weren’t of any interest.

  ‘Where is she?’ Fil muttered, slumped over like an empty glove puppet, his hands gripping his knees. ‘Where is she?’ He drew down a shuddering breath. ‘Where is she, Beth?’

  ‘Where’s who, mate?’ she asked. She forced lightness she didn’t feel into her voice. She didn’t know what she’d do if he gave in to despair now.

  ‘Where’s my mother?’ His eyes flickered and he stared at the wall, but Beth knew he was really staring east, towards Docklands and the pits of the Chemical Synod where Mater Viae was last seen.

  ‘She should have been here … by now … I thought—’ He was rambling. ‘I was so stupid – I thought I could be her.’ He tried to laugh, but it sputtered out after a few breaths. ‘Where is she?’

  Where’s my mum? The question caught in Beth’s chest. She remembered all the desolate months she’d asked the same question. Now she smothered the question instantly whenever it arose in her mind. Awkwardly, she tried to embrace him. ‘I don’t know – I’m sorry, I really am. I don’t know.’

  He laid the hot weight of his head against her shoulder and she smelled the petrol tang of his blood.

  ‘I wish—’ he began.

  The world shook and a haze of cement dust washed down from the roof. Beth felt him tense against her.

  ‘What in Thames’ name was that?’ he whispered.

  Beth gently released him and propped him against the wall before sidling to the doorway. Her stomach clenched. She was half-expecting to see some new beast of Reach’s clattering towards her. Gripping the spear tight in her good hand, she ducked her head out of cover and looked—