The City's son

CHAPTER 15

Beth followed Fil around the crumbling corners of East London, though he was half-dazed and there was no logic to their path that she could see. They weaved through narrow alleys and doubled back through dead-end mews. Every step carried Beth further from the city she knew.

The architecture grew darker, stranger: a heavily graffiti’d old cinema building, its neon sign long-dead and its doors shuttered; an electricity sub-station half-hidden behind a cloud of razor-wire, and everywhere, the cranes massed on the skyline like cruel sentinels.

By sunset they’d reached Limehouse. Beth slumped down inside a railway arch, exhausted, but her guide was still twitchy. He cocked his head as though listening for something, then he swore and leaped to his feet again. He dragged her away from the railway and finally let her settle in a narrow alleyway behind some bins.

She watched him for a while, resting her chin on her forearms. She was following him unquestioningly, she realised with a jolt; could she really trust him enough for that? This boy who consorted with giant spiders and served a Goddess who entombed people alive for eternity: how could this be her side? And yet she was sticking as loyally by him as Pen always had to her.

Pen. Beth sighed. She would have trusted Pen to know if this was the right side; Pen had always been her compass.

She curled up against the wall, suddenly realising how much she wanted to see her friend again, to say sorry for whatever it was she’d done, to make it all right again.

She slept, and her dreams were full of tiny stone tombs.

When Beth awoke, Fil was gone. Anxiety stung her for a second, but she swallowed it down; she didn’t believe he would have left her. For all his protests, all his strength and strangeness, she thought he wanted her there. She smiled briefly, surprised by how much she enjoyed that thought.

Graffiti tangled over the wall, but there was nothing interesting, only messy, graceless tags. Beth had no time for signatures like that. Bricks were a journal for her, not a megaphone; she didn’t paint to shout about her impact on the city but to show the city’s impact on her.

She dug some chalks out of her backpack.

Hazy yellows brought her sketched-in Lampgirls alive, echoing their coronae of light. Beth smirked a little and added a bit more meat to the lippy one’s backside.

She drew Petris on the opposite wall, installing him in a blurry shadow-garden of gravestones and weeds. Something snagged her attention: she’d drawn an emotion onto the stone face without even meaning to. Anger. The gaze that came back off the bricks was accusatory.

‘You know,’ said a voice behind her, ‘I think he could look a little more pissed off, if you really worked at it. I mean, I know he wants to kill himself, but that’s pretty much an occupational hazard for a Pavement Priest. He’s properly cheerful when you get to know him.’ Fil stood at her shoulder, gazing intently at her picture. His approach had been soundless.

‘Otherwise, it’s not bad. You should do me some time.’ He grinned and struck a pose with his railing, flexing his scrawny arms.

‘I already did once,’ Beth told him.

‘Yeah? Where? How did I look?’

‘Like you were cobbled together from old skin and pipe-cleaners. It was pretty true to life.’

He looked a little crestfallen. ‘Like you were with Electra?’ He pointed at the painting of the Lampgirls. ‘She’d dance a duel with you if she saw that.’

‘At least you can recognise her. This isn’t as easy as it looks, you know. ’sides,’ Beth put a slight edge in her tone, ‘it’s what’s inside that counts.’

Fil’s grin vanished as he recognised the quote. He slumped against a wall. ‘What is it, Beth?‘ he asked plaintively. ‘What it is you’ve been wanting to say?’

Beth sat beside him, feeling the bricks graze her spine. She opened her mouth three times before concluding there was no tactful way to put this. ‘Look, it’s like this… You’re all right — I mean, I like you. I owe you.’ She hesitated. ‘And I trust you, too. But this mum — this Goddess of yours? Her, I’m not so sure about.’

‘What are you talking about?’ he said. ‘Mater Viae’s my blood; we’re the same.’

‘Are you?’ Beth asked. ‘Would you have made Pylon Spiders that had to prey on people? Would you have done that?’ She pointed at her painting of Petris. ‘Really? You would’ve buried them alive?’

‘They are guilty of the crimes they’re being punished for.’

‘That’s not what I asked.’

He was silent.

‘There was a kid there, Filius!’

‘Yeah, well, he’d lived other lives before this one — so has Petris. Neither of them are pure as the rain-washed marble, know what I mean? They know what they’ve done, even if you don’t. Look.’ He twisted to face her, and his gaze was fierce. ‘Reach is a monster. Maybe my mother is too, but at least she kept him in check.’

Beth was about to protest, but he just stared the words right back down her throat.

‘What?’ he demanded, ‘what is it you think you can say to me? You’ve met Mater Viae’s priesthood one time and now you’re some kind of expert? You wanna see the alternative? ’cause Reach has a priestess too: the Wire Mistress, we call her, the Demolition Clergy.’ He snorted. ‘She’s a parasite: a barbed-wire fluke. She kidnaps whole families, for convenience, to use as hosts. She takes them one by one, the oldest first, always saving the ones with the most legs in ’em for later. And so the kids get to see their possessed mums and dads rip their own bodies to shreds.’ Anger tinted his cheeks basalt-black. ‘They’re kids too, Beth. This is war, and there are kids everywhere.’

The anger ran out of him and he slumped down. ‘“Do more than run.” That’s what you told me. This is me trying, all right? So if you trust me like you say you do, if you believe in me, then believe in Mater Viae, like I — like I have to, ’cause for me it’s not faith. It’s family.’

The car-horns and train-rattles and distant shouts that passed for silence outside in the city reigned for a moment.

Beth’s heart clenched, but she had to say it. ‘I do believe in her, Fil, but I don’t know if I like what I believe.’

Fil stared at the ground. She couldn’t tell if he was ashamed or angry. Then he stood up and seized his spear. ‘Come on.’

Beth stuffed her chalks into her backpack. ‘Where are we going now?’

He was already at the mouth of the alley, silhouetted in pizza-shop neon. ‘To show you what we’re up against.’

The street was empty. Black spaces gaped in the terraced houses where windows should have been. A hundred yards back, traffic spilled light and noise down the Woolwich Road, but neither penetrated as far as these pavements. Beth read the sign: Herringbone Way. It felt like a street in exile, like London had forgotten about it.

Fil stalked in front of her. He’d led her on a perilous route, tiptoeing like a night-time acrobat over brick viaducts. In his temper, he’d even crept right through the shadow of one of the cranes which frightened him so much.

He was acting up; it was obvious. She did it, for God’s sake, so she recognised it in him. He was like a little kid sneaking towards a haunted house, everything about him screaming, See? I’m not scared! I’m bloody not, and you can’t prove I am!

Of course, if he was posturing, then what was she doing, shinning awkwardly up rain-slicked drainpipes like the risk of shattering her bones into splinters hadn’t even occurred to her.

‘Oi!’ His voice drifted down from above her. ‘Up here.’ He was squatting in a glassless first-floor window frame, black against slightly paler black. A fast blink earlier, he’d been on the pavement.

‘Coming?’ he enquired. He gave his forelock a mock tug, took a step backwards and dropped out of sight.

Beth couldn’t help but smile. ‘Show off,’ she muttered.

Two grazed elbows and a lot of choice curses later, she hit the ground on the other side. ‘Damn it, Phyllis, why can’t you use a front door? Ow!’

She straightened slowly, taking it all in.

The terrace was a facade. The street-facing wall still stood, but it was a brick veil concealing the ugliness of the demolition site behind, where everything had been torn down.

Dominating the space was a corkscrew-drill, rising fifty feet into the air, and collapsed at the drill’s caterpillar-tracked base: rust-eaten and magnificent…

… was a crane.

An uncomfortable tension pricked under Beth’s ribs as she walked towards it. The crane exuded a kind of dormant menace, like an unexploded bomb. Fil sat on a slab on the far side of the waste ground, watching her carefully.

‘I don’t get it,’ Beth said. She laid a hand on the crane’s pitted metal. ‘These must have cost a fuck-load, but they look like they’ve been here for decades. Why didn’t the owner take them back?’

Fil’s voice echoed back off the derelict house-fronts. ‘The owner was in kind of a hurry to go. A crusading army whose one and only commandment is to rip your guts out will have that effect, know what I’m saying?’

‘Not even remotely.’

‘You’ll see,’ he promised her. His tone was oddly solemn. ‘Look, Beth: look around you and you’ll see.’

Dutifully Beth looked, but in the darkness the heaps and valleys of rubble were just so much crenellated shadow. She frowned and rummaged in her bag for her torch.

‘No!’ His shout froze her. His eyes were pale in the night. ‘We don’t bring light here, Beth. Not ever. Out of respect.’

Beth muttered imprecations under her breath but she dropped her torch back into the bag. She squatted and brushed the dirt off a jagged hunk of brickwork. She thought she could see some kind shape on it, but it was vague in the darkness, just a shadow of a shadow. She strained her eyes, trying to see it better, until, bit by bit, it became more defined.

What are-? she wondered. And then she realised what she was looking at. And her shocked cry pierced the night.

Staring vacantly out at her was a face, rippling the surface of the masonry like a brickwork fossil. Through busted mortar teeth it screamed silently back.

Beth recoiled and turned away, but it was too late: her eyes had adjusted and the bodies The bodies were everywhere.

They were withered like mummies, with stark ribs protruding from the surfaces of the broken brickwork. She could even see the outlines of blood vessels where limbs had been sheared away.

She cupped her hands over her mouth as if trying to catch the tiny noises of distress coming out of it. Her eye was drawn to one figure hunched over, hugging its knees. Eyes and mouth gaped wide between its legs. Its neck was utterly broken.

Beth reeled. She tripped and sprawled, her hands clutching dead things, and she yanked them away and curled them into fists. She shrank into a foetal ball and lay there amongst the brick corpses, gasping for breath.

And then he was there, hugging her, as she whispered, ‘ Who-? ’ She could barely speak. The dust of the rubble sat in her lungs like blood. ‘Who are they?’

‘Women in the Walls and Masonry Men,’ he said sadly. ‘They’re just people, Beth: people who made their homes here.’

Women in the Walls. Beth couldn’t help but imagine the huddled figure trying to flee, turning and turning and turning in panic as the wrecking balls crushed it and crushed it again, into an ever-smaller fragment of brick.

Slowly her body unclenched and she made herself look. A fat bore-hole blossomed from a boy’s chest, the ribs splintered around the edges. She looked at the drill and knew it was the murder weapon.

‘ What is this place? ’

When he answered, the shakiness in Fil’s voice told Beth that he’d been here many times, and that it never got any easier. ‘We call them the Demolition Fields. In the last war, this was the furthest Reach got from St Paul’s. It’s…’ He hesitated. ‘It’s also the smallest. There are others, closer to where we started, but… I brought you here because it’s the easiest one to take.’

Beth turned on him, her eyes gritty in her skull. ‘ Why? ’

‘You needed to understand,’ he said sadly. ‘You needed to get it. He is murderous, Beth: he’s the city’s own greed, killing itself in its haste to grow. He’s reborn, generation after generation, and every time he comes back stronger and we get weaker, like a cancer. I needed you to realise that all those pretty little towers he builds out of glass and steel’ — he spread his arms over the mass grave — ‘it’s all built on that.’ His gaze was open, his voice pleading.

And then Beth understood why he kept coming back here: it reminded him of who he was. Despite his hunts and his streetlamp dances and his scrambling runs across the night-city, he knew this was what he’d have to face in the end.

And he needs your help to face it, Bradley, so get up off your arse.

Beth stood up unsteadily, shrugging off his attempts to help her. Horror made her giddy — she felt like a ghost, drifting over the broken dead. There was nowhere to step that was not on them. Something cowardly in her wanted them to recede into the rubble, to disappear; she wanted to close her eyes and forget she’d ever seen this. She shoved the impulse angrily aside and instead, forced herself look at the bodies curled around their children, because inadequate though it was, it was both the least, and all she could do.

‘How did you do it before?’ she demanded harshly. Her anger was mounting; there was a corrosive feeling in her gut. ‘How did you kill Reach before?’

He barked a short laugh. ‘ Kill him? Mostly we try and make sure he kills us a little slower.’

Beth glared at him and his forced humour fell away. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘so once, my mother almost snuffed Reach for good: she burned him with a fire hotter than — well, than anything. The Great Fire, we called it.’

There was a moment while Beth took this in, then, ‘ The Great Fire?’ she asked incredulously. ‘Of London? That was your mother? That was-? Jesus Christ, that was a weapon?’

Fil’s answer was a sing-song nursery rhyme: ‘London’s burning, London’s burning; pour on water, pour on water. Fire, fire; fire, fire: wash the blood of the streets from Pudding Lane.’ He smiled bleakly. ‘September, sixteen sixty-six: the baker’s shop was her tinderbox, but the fuel was all hers. Yeah, Beth, it was a weapon — her greatest weapon; some’d say her greatest power, because sometimes it’s the power to destroy that keeps all the other powers safe.’

He raised his chin proudly. ‘The city burned for three days and nights, but not one hair on a human child was harmed. Remember that, next time you call my mother a monster.

‘Gutterglass said that for the longest time they thought Reach had gone, but deep underground, some germ of him must’ve remained.’

The anger was in Beth’s mouth now, making her want to spit it, but where did it come from? She didn’t know these people; she hadn’t even known there were people like this, so why was she trembling with an urge to avenge them?

The answer came to her fast, borne on a wave of fury: these were her streets, London was her place, and if it had a people, then they were her people. The city was alive, and she’d always known that inside.

She hadn’t run away from home. This was her home: her home, her people.

Her people, her fight.

She looked at Fil. His face reflected the same anger back to her.

‘We should go,’ Beth said quietly. ‘We’ve got an army to rally.’

He looked at her gratefully, then the gratitude on his face gave way to an expression Beth recognised, though it looked out of place on his cocky face. It was the same look Pen used to have before she followed Beth on some stupid stunt: an appeal for courage. Please, it said, make me brave enough for this.

Then he was off, scrambling hand over hand up the length of the dead drill until he was standing precariously on the hydraulics at its summit: a skinny shadow swaying against the clouds.

‘Reach!’ he yelled, wild and inarticulate. He shouted his defiance across the sleeping city, to the cranes on the dark horizon, repeating, over and over, ‘Reach! Reach! ’

At last he climbed down and staggered over to her, his eyes wide, and she folded him up in her arms and held him tight until he stopped shaking.