The City's son

CHAPTER 35

‘Is this sign of her favour enough to satisfy you, Stonewing?’ Gutterglass’ speech was oddly formal. ‘Our Lady of the Streets has sent her most trusted warriors to herald her arrival.’

They were gathered inside a shuttered ice-cream stall in the middle of the park. Ezekiel had knelt in front of his prince as soon as he’d landed, leaving his stone robe riven with cracks. Beth guessed that the gesture of respect was as much for the threadbare tabby Fil was petting as for the Street-Prince himself.

‘It is. It surely is.’ Ezekiel couldn’t stop staring at Fleet, and his voice was hoarse with awe. ‘And I do heartily repent of my impertinence to you, Highness. My lack of faith — it was a sin.’ He hesitated, then bowed his head again. ‘I will willingly — willingly — undertake any penance your Highness sees fit to-’

‘His Highness’ held up a hand to silence the Pavement Priest. He glanced sideways at the teetering form of Gutterglass, and then at Beth, who shrugged. He looked deeply uncomfortable. ‘Get up,’ he said at last.

Ezekiel creaked to his feet in a shower of stone chips.

‘Get out,’ Fil said.

Ezekiel began to protest, but he was cut off.

‘Get over it.’

When he had clunked from the room, Gutterglass murmured, ‘Well, that was abrupt.’

‘It was embarrassing, is what it was,’ Fil snapped. ‘And I don’t know what he thought he was apologising for; he was right, I was being an idiot. Saying sorry for calling me on it is just bollocks.’

Gutterglass’ eggshell-eyes squeezed shut: a silent prayer for patience. ‘Be that as it may,’ he said then, ‘it was not appropriate of him to show you disrespect. You are the object of his devotion…’

‘ I am not — my mother is.’

Gutterglass gazed at him dispassionately. ‘You bear her name. You bear her blood. You bear her worshippers.’

A frustrated breath streamed from Fil’s nostrils. ‘Right.’

Rats’ tails poked out from under Gutterglass’ shoulder blades as he leaned to peer out of the door after Ezekiel. ‘Are you sure you can’t be persuaded to dole out at least some token punishment to Stonewing?’ he asked. ‘After all, he is a zealot. Without chastisement he’ll probably feel cheated.’

Fil shook his head firmly and Gutterglass sighed and bowed. A dozen chittering bodies bore him from the room like a kind of furry conveyor belt.

‘Thames’ sake!’ He slid to the floor and dropped his head into his hands. Fleet coiled into his lap and began to mewl comfortingly. Beth sat beside him and slid an arm around him. She still felt a little jumpy at the proximity of his skin.

‘You okay?’ she asked.

‘I’m a God. Doesn’t that mean I have to be?’ His lips curled upwards, but it wasn’t a smile.

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

‘Nothing to talk about,’ he said, ‘but — this — something’s not right, whatever Glas says. “Herald her arrival”? You never see the Cats without their Mistress — it’s never been heard of, not since Fleet disappeared after her decades ago. This is not how it’s supposed to go, know what I mean?’

Beth looked at him. He wore an expression she recognised: he’d never admit it, but he was scared. He was struggling to thread together a story, to make some excuse for why he was facing this all alone without a parent to shield him.

Not for the first time, Beth felt a surge of anger towards the absent Goddess. She took a deep breath and gave him the only answer that had ever made her feel better. ‘You don’t need her,’ she said. ‘We’ll do better without her.’

He rubbed his eyes, and then looked around. ‘Thames and rotting riverfish and bugger it,’ he declared. As he stood up and squared his shoulders, Fleet bounded from his lap. ‘Let’s get on with it, then.’

‘Get on with what?’ she asked.

‘Getting this damn circus on the move. If they want a God, I’ll show ’em one, but I don’t think they’re goin’ to like it much.’

The Lampfolk hadn’t even set foot on the bridge when the first fight broke out. A full-hipped Sodiumite girl moved towards the Thames. Rather than walk, she floated ostentatiously an inch off the ground on her fields, fibre-optic hair streaming, a show of strength to the Whities she thought so contemptible. Behind her, white and yellow lights stood in separate groups on the pavement. Her kindred jabbered, nervous of the river, but this girl had a spark of pride in her and she would not be cowed.

The incessant flashing bickering dimmed for a moment and there was a sense of held breath as Blankleits and Sodiumites alike watched her in silence. The bridge’s vast suspension cables stretched in taut triangles before them like the outline of a ship’s sails.

The Amberglow girl’s courage lasted until she was a good ten feet out onto the bridge. But then she looked down at the rippling, lethal water below her, jumped three feet into the air and came down, shrieking incandescently, accusing the nearest Whitey of shoving her.

Whether the accused Blankleit was guilty or not, he didn’t expend voltage denying it. Instead he launched himself at her, and an instant later they were grappling together, an inch apart, over the concrete, their fields interlocked. The roar that went up from the crowd was like the muzzle-flashes of a cannon battery. The yellow girl took the upper hand, arching forward, her arms scissoring. The young Whitey was almost doubled over backwards in midair, glass teeth gritted behind his transparent jaw. Tiny hairline cracks spread from the small of his back and every wire in his body burnt hot with pain.

Something darted between them, a smear of grey too fast to see, and the two glass figures flew apart. The white one cracked his head on a post.

The blur resolved itself into a grey-skinned boy balanced lightly on the balls of his feet, standing in the middle of the road, railing-spear held ready. Filius Viae’s eyes were flat and hard.

Both Lampfolk turned as one and attacked, coming at him from opposite sides. His spear wavered as their fields tried to grip it, but he was too fast, too slippery. He uncoiled in a burst of savage motion, swept the knees from under the Amberglow girl with his spear-shaft, pirouetted on his heel in the follow-through and slammed the butt into the Whitey’s chest and sent him sprawling.

He came to an instant stop, no motion wasted.

Beth watched him. The silence of the Lampfolk made it seem dark, but she could see his chest swelling as he angrily sucked in breath. Then he was moving again. He coiled his fingers into the Sodiumite’s glittering hair and dragged her, kicking and flashing, to the balustrade.

Beth gaped in horror as he flung the Amberglow girl over the side. The Lampgirl flared out a brilliant scream, and then went dark.

Beth felt her heart almost stop. Around her the Lampfolk gazed on in frightened, angry shock. He didn’t just-?

No, there she was, almost invisible in her mute terror, hanging limply in midair.

‘The next light-person, white or yellow, to hit a fellow soldier takes a bath,’ Fil called out. He let an inch of fibre-optic hair slip through his knuckles. The only light Beth could see was the flash of Victor’s torch as he spread the word.

‘If you really want to fight somebody so bad you can’t wait for the cranes, come and tap me on the shoulder,’ he continued. ‘I’ve got some aggression to work out.’

‘No kidding,’ Beth muttered. She tingled with fear as she watched the girl hanging from his fingers.

He held the Sodiumite over the river for a full silent minute, and then dumped her in a shuddering, barely flickering heap on the roadway. He picked up his railing and stalked across the river, a furious silhouette, leading the way north.

Beth shouldered her backpack and sprinted to catch him up. Their army, stunned by the sudden outburst of violence, began to shuffle dumbly after him. Beth saw a couple of rebellious flashes behind her, but before she could react, Victor had hauled the young Blankleit boy to his feet, flashed his light in his face, cuffed him and pushed him back over to his parents.

Beth found Fil leaning on his spear. He must have heard her coming but he didn’t turn around.

‘Jesus!’ Beth shook her head. ‘Knocking heads and taking names? If that girl had slipped you’d have had a full-blown mutiny on your hands.’

His anger had evaporated and now his grey eyes were anxious. ‘Yeah,’ he murmured, ‘but if they’d mutinied together at least that’d be something.’

Beth stared at him incredulously. ‘You were waiting for this?’

He smiled wryly. ‘If they think I’m biased they’d blow up faster than the Walthamstow Fireworks Factory. But now the Blankleits have seen me beat up an Amberglow, and the Sodiumites have seen me take a Whitey to the dust.’

‘Your idea?’

‘Glas. She said if I could get ’em pissed off at me it’d bring ’em together… for a little while at least.’

‘And after a little while?’ Beth asked.

His smile faded. ‘Hopefully by then we’ll have my mother on hand,’ he said, ‘’cause the word of their Goddess is about the only thing that’ll keep them from grinding each other back into the sand they’re made of.’

Electra pressed her back to the scum-caked wall of the sewer and tried not to breathe. The smallest glimmer could give her away.

The metal wolves were prowling not five feet from the mouth of the tiny access tunnel where she was hiding, padding through the filthy ankle-deep water. The only light was the vague glow of decomposing leaf mould, but Reach’s scaffolding army was unaffected by darkness. The only guide they needed was the hissing scratch of wire on brick: the signal of their mistress.

Like all young Sodiumites, Electra knew the sewers like the wiring in the back of her hand. The tunnels were the only way to get around the city during the day without being blinded by the daylamp. Lec had groped her way to one Hackney manhole cover hundreds of times so she could sneak off to meet Filius while her grandmother was too sleepy to snap at her about it. When the wolves and their scaffolding handlers had descended into the roadworks gouged into Tinker’s Gate, it had been a simple matter to follow them into London’s guts.

Electra kept to the narrow maintenance tunnels running parallel to the main sewers, well clear of the deadly water. She peeked around the corner: the Wire Mistress was mounted in the centre of the file of wolves. The dark-skinned girl bound in its coils, looking as shrivelled-up as the meat of an old nut, was the core of its strength.

Lec imagined lashing out and crushing the girl’s windpipe with her fields; she imagined the Wire Mistress, furious but weakened, unspooling from its dead slave, just as she hit with all the power she could dance up.

Fight it. Kill it. She craved it so badly her filaments ached, but instead she bowed her head and stifled the light from her thundering pulse as she let the thing walk past the end of the access tunnel.

She couldn’t fight it, not down here — down here all the Mistress needed to do was scratch Electra’s glass skin and expose a live wire, and the methane in the tunnels would do the rest.

Waiting felt like being torn slowly in half.

After too many hours the tunnels grew a fraction lighter. Lec could see the dirty shimmer of the night-time city in an opening at the far end, and an unmistakable sound filled the air: the swishing rush of the river.

Lec shrank back up an access way as the wolves pressed on past. She groped with her fields until she found a rusting metal ladder.

Fresh air hit her like hope and she scrambled from the manhole. A monolithic redbrick building reared up in front of her and she tried to get her bearings. There was the river, in all its churning deadliness, and spanning it, a bridge with fat suspension cables, and Lec went utterly dark in shock.

Spilling across the bridge, jostling each other like fire-flies in an updraft, were hundreds of glowing figures. But it wasn’t the figures themselves that shocked her; it was their colours — white and yellow, mingled together so closely that their individual lights were almost indistinguishable.

Together! Lec stared in disbelief. A skinny figure, a mere sliver of shadow amongst all that light, walked before them, waving them onwards with his railing.

And finally Lec realised she was looking at an army. That was why the Wire Mistress was here. Sodiumite and Blankleit weren’t just walking together; they intended to fight together.

A few yards away, the first Scaffwolf bounded up onto the Embankment, landing lightly on its steel paws. Electra dropped back behind a parked car. For a moment she hesitated as a part of her saw the coming battle unfold through her grandmother’s eyes, the wolves pouncing on the unprepared white figures and the ambers who’d sided with them, their fangs rending glass and wire For a second Lec imagined the massacre with satisfaction. Then the second wolf landed, shaking the tarmac, and she made her choice.

She turned and ran up the middle of the road, blazing out the semaphore with every vestige of voltage she could muster.

Filius, you’re under att Her filaments shuddered as the steel wolves overtook her.