by Tom Pollock
—and gasped.
The whole back wall of the building site had collapsed, as though punched through with a vast fist, but that concrete barrier had been replaced by another made of stone: stone bodies. Rank upon rank of war heroes, scientists, suffragettes, leaders, even abstract geometrical shapes, hundreds of them: the Pavement Priests had come. More stoneskins than Beth had ever seen stretched back up the narrow brick alley and out of sight.
She breathed in sharply and a wild hope swelled her chest. ‘It’s Petris,’ she whispered.
The granite monk was in the front rank. When he spoke, his voice was as merciless as winter homelessness. ‘Delenda Reach.’ The command boomed over the shattered wasteland. The Pavement Priest battalion stirred. ‘Sic Gloria Via. Delenda Reach.’
‘Delenda Reach.’ They took up the chant, singing it like a hymn, their voices deep, liquid. ‘Delenda Reach.’
The warrior priests stepped forward as one, the thud of their feet the percussion to their chant. They were the guardians of the old faith, wearing skins in the shapes of London’s heroes from other times. They sang their eulogy for their fallen city.
Metal wolves and metal men and other, stranger shapes clambered from the faces of the tower blocks and stalked over the rubble to meet them. Steel paws clanged on masonry as they picked up speed.
The first rank of Pavement Priests flickered and Beth shrank back, involuntarily, every muscle tensing as the armies of London charged.
Stone and steel crashed together. Beth felt their impact like concussion. The wolves screamed, their rusting fangs rending granite skin like paper, but the Pavement Hymn didn’t waver. Though the song diminished when one of the priesthood fell, it never stopped.
‘They’re—’ Beth began, and then a wide grin broke over her face as she understood. ‘They’re digging.’
One battalion of priests, screened by their fellows, had fallen to their knees and were tearing double handfuls of rock from the earth, great gouges, straight out of Reach’s face.
I am Reach, the diggers screamed in pain.
A wolf tore the head from Winston Churchill. Three other statues pulled the animal down, but then collapsed from exhaustion.
Under Petris’ boomed orders, Mater Viae’s priesthood knelt and prayed, ‘Delenda Reach … Delenda Reach—’, worshipping through fighting, as their steady hands chewed through the bedrock and cement Reach had carved himself from.
One priest looked different from the others. He moved more slowly, and his punishment skin looked more like hardened clay than stone. As he gouged at Reach with a fragment of steel girder, Beth thought there was something familiar about him, although in that moment she didn’t know what.
‘That’s good, lads,’ Petris shouted, knee-deep in the silt of Reach’s throat. ‘Dig the bastard’s heart out, A-bloody-men!’ But around him stone-covered bodies were slumping from exhaustion. The Scaffwolves continued to harry and hamstring them, until they were all oozing their slow, sticky blood. As they fell, they became indistinguishable from the murderous landscape around them.
‘Delenda Reach,’ they called, but their song was waning.
Fil heard the weakness in it. ‘It’s not working,’ he muttered feverishly. ‘We need Mater Viae. We need my Mother. We need the Fire – we need the Great Fire, Oh Thames …’
Beth tried to hold him, but he shook her off wildly. His face was crumpled, and white as waste-paper. ‘I was such an idiot. It was impossible! It was always impossible – how could we ever cleanse the city without the Great Fire?’ He sounded despairing.
Cleanse the city …
Beth went very still. Something in his words hooked a memory and dragged it to the surface of her mind. She tried to concentrate past the fury of the battle. She remembered the crackle of flames on a polluted pool, and a viscous, oily voice: ‘This is a special conflagration, purchased at great expense. It cleanses and coruscates, maims and makes-anew …’
‘Oh God,’ she whispered, ‘what if that’s why she didn’t come?’
Fil looked at her sharply. ‘What is?’
‘The Fire.’ The idea was so simple, so horribly mundane, that Beth hesitated to give voice to it. ‘The Great Fire. Your mum’s greatest power,’ she whispered. ‘What if the reason she’s not here fighting is she doesn’t have it any more? What if, without it, she’s scared?’
‘What are you talking about?’ Bewilderment and fear and outrage were plain on his face.
‘You never knew what the synod charged her, did you? What if The Great Fire was their price? A special conflagration, purchased at great expense. What if she gave it up in payment?’ Beth asked, levelling a finger to point at the crippled young God. ‘Payment for you.’
He shut his eyes and the last of the colour drained from his face. He looked more than scared. He looked dead. But when the ground shuddered again, his eyes opened, and now there was an air of tense, concentrated discipline about him. ‘Beth,’ he said quietly, ‘I need you to do something for me.’
‘Okay, sure. Anything. What?’
‘Pick up my spear.’
Beth bent and grasped the weapon. The black iron was tacky where she’d bled on it. ‘Okay,’ she said, uncertainly.
‘I’m going to count to three,’ he said, and swallowed. His grey eyes looked directly into hers. ‘Then I need you to stab me in the heart.’
Beth almost dropped the spear. ‘What!’ she shouted. ‘Are you mental? Did your brains bleed out of your guts?’
But his grey eyes were as clear and sane and sad as she’d ever seen them. She knew he meant it. ‘Why?’ she whispered.
His smile was frail. ‘’cause making bad deals with the Chemical Synod runs in the family.’
For a second Beth stared at him, wondering if the pain and disappointment and blood-loss had finally driven him mad. ‘What are you talk—?’
Then understanding slammed into her like an avalanche. ‘You lied,’ she snarled at him. ‘I asked you straight up what you promised them: “Some poxy ingredient, Long as I live, not something I’m goin’ to use.” That’s what you told me.’
‘Technically that was true.’ Fil tried to shrug. ‘Since I promised them my death.’
Beth gazed at him, horrified by her complicity, by her willing gullibility. She looked at her pavement-grey skin. How could she possibly have believed that some poxy little ingredient had bought her that speed, that strength?
Fil spoke urgently. ‘We need Johnny Naphtha’s boys here, Beth, now, Thames knows we do. If they have the Fire—’ He jerked his head towards the battlefield. ‘While that bedlam’s still raging, there’s a chance. They’ll come for me, to collect their debt. Get ’em right in, right in the heart of it understand? Reach won’t tolerate ’em, just like he wouldn’t tolerate me. Make them get involved.’
‘If,’ Beth snapped back, ‘if they come – if they even have the Fire. If. If. If. It’s all bloody guesses. Christ, Fil, what if you’re wrong? What if I’m wrong?’ She prayed she was – she desperately wanted to be. She wanted to grab the treacherous words she’d spoken from the air and shove them back into her mouth.
The grey-skinned boy looked at her. ‘Then we’re wrong,’ he said, ‘but that’s our city, dying out there, and I’m all out of ideas.’
Beth raised the spear. She tensed her shoulder and gritted her teeth, but she couldn’t drive the weapon home. Tears blurred her sight as all her half-formed, desperate, unspoken love for this boy flooded through her. She turned away, unable to bear his gaze.
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘It’s too much.’
His voice hardened. ‘It’s not your call, Beth.’
His eyes, the colour of the city she was refusing to try and save, bore into her, but she couldn’t do this. It was too high a price.
When he spoke again, his voice was a whisper. ‘Remember what Petris said: “The outlines, the very definition of a life.”? This is my definition, Beth. I’m choosing it now – I’m choosing the chance that you’re righ
t. If you take that away from me, you’re no better than my mother.’
Beth swallowed hard, a choking mix of salty tears and air, and tried frantically to think of something else, some other explanation, something they had missed. Think, Bradley, think, she swore at herself, but nothing came.
In that moment, she hated Filius Viae more than she’d ever hated anyone. She wanted to throw away his vile spear and walk back down the tunnel, to leave him paralysed in the darkness. She wanted to abandon him the way he was about to abandon her. But she couldn’t, because she knew that years from now she’d still see Masonry Men and brick-born babies lying murdered. She couldn’t, because however child-like Reach was, he wasn’t innocent. Her people were dying on his claws.
And she couldn’t, because although she hated him, she could never walk away from that skinny, wretched kid.
She set the spear between his ribs. He smiled encouragingly. The spear scratched a lopsided red-black star against his flesh as she shook.
‘Christ, Fil— I—’
‘It’s okay, Beth.’ He held her gaze. ‘Do I scare you witless enough to make you brave?’ he asked her.
‘Yes,’ she whispered.
‘One,’ he said. ‘Two …’
Beth rammed the spear forward.
He gasped and his eyes stretched. She felt a crunch as his ribs gave way. She gritted her teeth and twisted the shaft. His bare heels drummed the ground for an awful moment, and then stopped.
Five seconds, she counted them carefully. That was how long she looked into his vacant eyes. Then she snarled, ‘I’m not shutting your eyes for you, liar. You can watch what you made me do.’ She bent and picked him up. He sagged over her good shoulder, infinitely heavier in death. She ducked under the lintel and ran.
CHAPTER 52
Noise exploded over her as Beth burst from the labyrinth. She weaved right and then left, ducking iron jaws and fallen bodies. A stone sword slipped from a Pavement Priest’s hand and whistled past her, grazing her knee. She raced between the legs of a metal giant, deep into the very heart of the battle.
‘Delenda Reach,’ the ragged choir croaked. The Pavement Priests were pitifully few now, but still they tore at the earth with their stone hands. Beth ignored their horrified stares as she dumped the limp body of their prince into their midst. There was no time – no time for grief; no time for fear; no time for anything resembling a human emotion, or else this would all to be for nothing.
‘Here he is,’ she shouted into the din. ‘Here’s your price!’
She cast around desperately, but all she could see were bodies and carnage. Despair scratched deep in her chest—
—and then a petrol smell stung her nostrils.
Six black figures walked unhurriedly through the chaos of battle. Their movements were perfectly synchronised; their oil-soaked suits were untouched by the flying muck.
‘Over here!’ Beth’s scream tore her throat. ‘Over here! Here’s what you’re owed.’
The Chemical Synod always collected on their debts. Deals were sacred.
As they strode over the rubble two priests moved to confront them, but Petris’ command boomed out. ‘Let them come.’
Reach issued no such instruction. As these fresh, powerful interlopers stalked over his scarred face, towards his very throat, amid the noise and stink of the attack against him, Reach panicked. Beth could feel it. The whole of the building site seemed to tense around her.
‘I will be!’ Reach shrieked, and a crane-born hook shot through the air to impale the rightmost black-slicked man.
The synod’s expressions became grim. They didn’t break step, but the five remaining men spread out to repair their symmetry. As one, each produced a cigarette lighter, flipped the lid and ran the spark-wheel up the leg of their trousers.
Heat punched into Beth’s face as the synod caught fire. She shielded her eyes. They kept on at the same calm pace, burning like Guys on Bonfire Night. Where their feet fell, the ground – Reach’s body – bubbled, hissed and melted.
‘I will be!’ Reach shrieked.
Two of the fiery men peeled off from either side and strolled over to the cranes. A Scaffwolf snapped at one, but he didn’t even break stride. The corona of heat around him melted through the beast’s jaw and hot slag ran into the contours of the rubble.
Johnny Naphtha approached one crane and extended a burning hand towards its cab, almost as though in greeting. The metal glowed and warped and buckled as he touched it, and as she looked around she saw the other members of the synod, stationed all around the building site, doing exactly the same thing, in precise time, with other cranes.
Beth expected Reach to cry out, but no cry came: the engines which produced his voice were silenced. The child-king of the cranes died not with a scream, but with a slow hiss of metal like an exhausted breath.
The Scaffwolves creaked on their hinges, the iron giants groaned. Jaws slid sideways over one another. Knees bent the wrong way and the monsters subsided into the dust.
Beth sat down hard in the rubble. She gazed vacantly at Fil’s body. The wound in her shoulder had reopened, and her hoodie was clammy with fresh blood.
Johnny Naphtha approached. His flames, the flames that had ignited the Great Fire of London, guttered out. His suit and skin were now the crisp grey-black of charcoal. ‘How pleasant of you to prepare him for us.’ He looked down at the grey body, lying sprawled across Reach’s throat. A touch of sarcasm entered his voice. ‘And how precisely placed.’
He crouched, picked up the body and without ceremony slung it over his shoulder. Gracefully, he rose to his feet, turned on his heel and walked away. The rest of his coven converged on him. One of them had their fallen brother in a fireman’s lift, dripping oil down his burnt back.
Beth sagged sideways. She felt voided, utterly empty. She’d forgotten how to feel, forgotten how to stand up. The boy—
The boy with the city in his skin was dead.
Pavement Priests clustered around her. Their stone faces looked grim, accusing.
‘I had to kill him,’ she croaked. ‘I had to bring the Chemical Synod.’
‘We know.’ The voice belonged to Petris. ‘We know better than most the prices of their services.’ His stone mask contorted painfully into a smile.
Beth stared up at him. That expression looked so out of place in this bloody tangle that she didn’t trust it.
‘Beth, there’s someone here who wants to see you.’
‘Beth? Beth!’ The clay-caked figure she’d seen in the battle shouldered his way between the statues. He was limping. Up close, she could see patches of pale skin showing where the crust of ceramic had been chipped away. Bright red blood – human blood – ran from a gash on the man’s forehead, dripping down a face she knew.
‘Beth.’ Her father dropped to his knees beside her. ‘Come on, Beth. We’ll get you to a hospital. You’ll be okay.’
Beth gazed in wonder into his brown eyes, suddenly sharply aware that hers were no longer that colour, but the mottled grey of London skies. ‘Dad?’ She studied his cuts, stupefied by his presence. Her gaze fell on the girder he was still carrying.
‘You fought?’ she murmured incredulously. ‘Weak and slow and bloody human – and you fought—?’
He nodded, almost shyly. ‘Because it was your fight,’ he said quietly. ‘Because I thought you’d want me to.’
She held out a hand to him, and he grasped it gratefully and pulled her to her feet. Her fingers stayed tight around his for a few moments.
‘We’re not done,’ she said. ‘There’s someone we need to get.’
Pen was lying where Beth had left her, staring at the ceiling of the pyramidal chamber. She showed no sign that she was alive, until she heard Beth coming, then she blinked and a smile spread across her face. ‘I did it, B,’ she whispered.
‘Yeah, you did it Pen,’ Beth agreed, not understanding what she was talking about.
‘I did it – I beat it. It held me, but I held it bac
k.’
‘Uh-huh,’ Beth said, crouching down beside her.
‘I was afraid, but I held it down. I beat it. I chose.’ There was a glassy cast to Pen’s brown eyes. She was rambling, delirious. ‘I’m not afraid any more,’ she whispered. ‘I chose.’
Beth put her hands under Pen’s shoulders and tensed her legs, ready to lift. She was afraid that Pen would cry out in pain, but there was just a whimper, quickly stifled.
‘Come on,’ Beth muttered. ‘We have to get you better. There’s a woman – or a man, or a— I don’t know what it is. Its name’s Gutterglass – if anyone will know how to fix you it will.’
‘No!’ Pen’s cry was shockingly loud in the dark. Her face snapped around, almost scandalised.
Beth swallowed, quailing slightly at the ferocity in her friend’s gaze. ‘No further down the rabbit hole, B,’ Pen said. ‘No more. If you want to take me somewhere, take me home.’ For a second she stared at her, her face mottled in fury and relief and blame, then, to Beth’s shock and utter gratitude, Pen threw her arms around her neck. ‘God, I’ve missed you, B. I could never let you go.’
Beth nodded. There was nothing more to say.
IV
VITAE VIAE
CHAPTER 53
Beth’s overriding impression of the hospital (it was only the second time she’d ever been in one) was that it was squeaky. The wards were filled with high-pitched noises: rubber wheels scraping over lino; children squealing for their parents; machines bleeping all over the place, announcing vital signs at different stages of degradation. It was a little like listening to the birds at sunrise, except the electronic edge made everything threatening.
She paced up and down beside Pen’s bed and then slumped into the vinyl chair and looked at her friend, who resembled a sixth-form art project: a collage of gauze, bandage and plastic wrap. The harsh stink of antiseptic filled the room.