The City's son

CHAPTER 36

‘I wish the priests would get a bloody move-on. I’d cut them out of that armour if-’

‘Fil!’

He looked up. ‘What?’

‘Does that mean anything to you?

His gaze followed Beth’s pointing finger. ‘It’s some yellow Lampie,’ he muttered. ‘I can’t see who. What’s she do-?’ He paled and reversed his hold on his spear.

‘Get ready,’ he whispered to Beth. Then he arched his back, sticking his ribs out and bellowed in a voice louder than all the city’s din, ‘WE’RE UNDER ATTACK!’

The Scaffwolves came first, baying and slavering, bounding past the empty steel skeletons of their handlers. The weight of their paws tore great rents in the road.

The Sodiumites linked fields, every vein blazing with suppressed static. They stumbled as they danced, struggling to place their feet right as the ground shook. Beth felt her hackles rise at the electricity in the air.

The first shockwave sheared away the lead wolf’s front legs and with a whimper of steel it crashed muzzle-first into the road — but others leaped over it, kicking the bones of their packmate into the river as they charged.

Two hundred yards. One-eighty. One-fifty. Beth gauged the distance. Time slowed and the pack’s headlong rush became a series of freeze-frames. Each jagged tooth and ragged metal claw fixed in her mind. She saw the glass dancers, stepping in another war-waltz — too slow, too slow. Fifty yards.

Beth shut her eyes and tensed herself for the impact.

‘Oi, Bradley!’ a voice yelled out. ‘What the hell do you think I got you those powers for?’

Beth snapped her eyes open. Her view was filled side to side with snapping howling jaws.

In Mater Viae’s name, fuck it! she thought.

She hurled herself forwards and the melee took her.

Beth hears my shout and I’m running, a warcry bleeding from my lips and lost in the wind. My speed smears the streets, turns the river to quicksilver. I can taste the fight in my gullet. Sodiumites vanish behind me in scars of light. Only foes stand before me now; only flashing fangs. Only prey. My lip twists. I am the savage street.

I snarl.

I may be no kind of general, but I can hunt. I fall on the wolves, and they fall to my spear.

Beth’s ears sang as metal teeth sheared past them. It was a tornado of steel and she was in the eye. She sprang from strut to strut, from muzzle to back. Her balance was instinctive. Her sweat slicked her path through the air. The Urchin Prince and his spear were everywhere, as pervasive as grey smoke. And by his side a huge beast, twice the height of a man, like a bear made out of swarming rats and pigeons and the city’s rubbish, tore at the underbellies of the wolves.

Lithe feline shapes darted through the fray: Fleet’s war party. The skinny moggies hissing and scratching at the steel skeletons were almost comical, though Reach’s monsters seemed to take them seriously enough. They chased vainly after the Cats, grasping for them, twisting their legs up and dislocating joints. Their motions looked panicky.

They’re scared of them, Beth thought. They’re scared of the Cats, and that’s screwing them up.

Beth’s army cheered on their champions as metal giant after metal giant collapsed, their limbs confused by the infamous Cats.

But they weren’t the only ones who fell. Glass figures were caught in steel jaws. Bright amber flares reflected off steel: the last shouts of the dying. Beth bunched her legs and fired herself from the hindquarters of one animal right at the face of another. It snapped, but she twisted out of the way. Cold metal struck her palm and she seized it, clinging grimly to the scruff of the wolf’s neck. Terror and exhilaration ran through her. A familiar voice welled up out of her memory: I had arms that could crush steel girders.

She reached forwards and seized the corner of her wolf’s mouth. The beast bucked, mashing its jaws together, but the teeth were too widely spaced to puncture Beth’s hands. Knuckles white, she felt the steel give under the pressure of her fingertips. Gritting her teeth, she gripped harder, and pulled.

The wolf screamed, a shocking animal howl of pain as she fish-hooked it.

The beast’s jaw flapped sideways, connected only by a thin ribbon of scrap-iron tissue. The wolf whimpered and crumpled forwards onto the tarmac.

Beth lay for an instant, blinking stupidly amidst the steel bones.

I did it, I brought a Scaffwolf down.

Iron fangs met in her shoulder, and she screamed.

Beth goes down, and something lurches sickly inside me, but I can’t help her. The space between us blurs with metal. The bear that is Gutterglass roars and crushes one wolf, and then morphs into a giant fist, which smashes another. Fangs tear his side, and he haemorrhages worms.

Under the railway bridge, a ring of Sodiumites is spinning wildly in a devil-dervish. Strange shadows coalesce and divide on the pavement. The air stinks of cordite. An avatar of pure light springs outward from the heart of their circle and grapples a scaffolding giant to the ground. A second later it gutters out, but its work is done. The molten slag that was once the giant is welded to the road, jutting curves of metal like frozen waves.

A claw falls towards me. I parry and strike back. I risk a glance back under the bridge. The five glass women who raised the avatar lie flat, drained of their light. They have no more such devils in them.

Beth’s scream made the air around her vibrate. The wolf shook her, its teeth rending her shoulder, a horrendous, sawing to-and-fro pain. She could feel the consciousness begin to seep out of her. The hand held to her breast was smothered in viscous, oily, black-streaked blood that clotted under her fingernails.

Play dead, play dead. She didn’t know what put the thought in her head. She went limp. Play dead.

In a few seconds, she wouldn’t have to pretend.

The wolf dropped her, the impact jarring her body. It straddled her, metal-pipe muzzle stretched wide…

… and never shut it.

Beth blinked up in astonishment. The hinges at the corners of its makeshift jaw squealed with the effort, but the Scaffwolf couldn’t close its mouth. Clouds of rust gusted from the animal’s nostrils.

‘Da, lads! Da! Very many good!’

Beth winced as she rolled onto her shoulder. Through the waves of sickening pain she saw Victor standing on the pavement a few yards away, greatcoat flapping wide, waving his torch as though conducting an orchestra. All around him eager Blankleits stood, bright as miniature stars.

There was a manic glint in the Russian’s eye. ‘Now boys, my good boys, more,’ he demanded. ‘ More.’

And the glass boys adjusted their peaked caps and bent their backs, perspiring pure light from their brows.

The wolf’s jaws opened wider and wider, the hinges screeching resistance. Beth watched in horrified fascination as the two halves of the animal’s muzzle suddenly inverted, and with ear-splitting protestations Reach’s monster was turned inside-out.

Woozily, Beth stood up. Gusts of vodka-tainted breath washed over her as Victor stooped to inspect her shoulder. She could already feel it healing, the cement in her blood scabbing the wound.

‘What are you, Tsarina?’ he muttered, almost hypnotised by the strangeness of her blood. ‘They no teach this Goddess medicine in Spetsnaz.’

Behind him she could see more wolves prowling, their jaws glinting in the light of their foes. She shoved Victor angrily away. ‘They’re surrounding us!’ she shouted in his face. ‘Come on.’ She ran for the orange glow of the Sodiumite ranks. Heat washed over her neck as the Lampmen jogged in her wake. Pain throbbed through her as her wounded arm swung.

Goddess, she thought, who’s a bloody Goddess?

Reach’s initial wave has faltered. His wolves whirl, gnashing the air, but they are far fewer than they were. Then again, so are we. I break into a run, shattered glass biting my feet. A trash-tiger bounds beside me and a ragged cheer goes up from our side — only two or three audible voices, but a chorus of silent ones, glowing back off the clouds. They think we’re winning.

But now the handlers move, swaying metal skeletons, shambling unsteadily up the road, their footsteps pealing like bells. They crouch amongst the wreckage of the wolfpack, sorting the scrap with fingers too small and clever for their massive hands. Instead of fingernails they have wrenches and sledgehammers and shears, and quickly, cunningly, they reconnect the joints. Shoulders rise on haunches, supporting half-reconstructed skulls.

The fallen wolves shake themselves and drag themselves snarling from the tarmac while our dead remain as dust on the ground.

A rebuilt wolf rears in front of me, still groggily shaking its head. I spring off its shoulder and slash a handler through the kneecap. He falls, but his fellows are already rebuilding him. It’s Metal-Medicine, and we have no answer to it.

‘ZEKE!’ I manage to bellow, just before the animal I used as a springboard takes me in the stomach. ‘WHERE ARE YOU?’

The air moved against Beth’s skin, stirred by heavy wings. All along the riverfront, hands clapped over the stone embankment, water droplets glimmering on their fingers. In all manner of shapes, dressed from a dozen centuries, stone figures pulled themselves jerkily into view.

They had trudged, slowly, to get here; the mud on the riverbed still clung to their feet. But now a regiment of statuary stood on the Embankment. Through the gaps eroded by time and the elements in their armour Beth could see bared teeth and throats pulsing as they sucked down air.

The Pavement Priests were building up to something.

Beth looked in through the eyeholes of one. His eyes were stretched wide with effort.

Then, as one, the Pavement Priests vanished.

What-? Where-?

A screeching clang answered her. Across the road, a scaffolding giant had fallen to its knees, gripped by a nude bronze and a stone scholar. Their hands blurred, tearing metal like paper, and Beth found herself gaping as the slim bronze woman in front of her twisted her hips and ripped the metal skull from the giant’s shoulders.

The pair of statues vanished again, and reappeared to scythe the knees from another Handler.

A crazy hope filled Beth like warmth.

How come you never see statues move? she thought in wonder. Is it because they move too slowly, or is it because they’re much, much too fast?

The riverbank was a battlefield. The Pavement Priests flickered, vanished and rematerialised on top of their enemies, their sheer weight dragging the metal monsters down. The air was alive with panting, praying and screaming.

The priests took casualties. Real blood ran from their wounds, black and sticky with lack of water. She surveyed the battle, a terrified elation burning in her throat. She dared to hope the Pavement Priests might be turning the tide.

It isn’t happening. The priests aren’t turning the tide.

As I fight I can only glimpse the carnage. The poor stoneskins are running out of steam, slowing down like toys with their clockwork spent, and all over the road the wolves are tearing them down. Statues litter the battlefield, close-fitting tombs.

Perhaps a quarter of the wolfpack remains, and a small huddle of their handlers. It will be enough: already those clever fingers are reworking the scaffolding joints.

Where’s Beth? I can’t see Beth anywhere.

My spear feels heavier than I remember, and it’s only then I notice the flesh of my right arm is torn. Pain pours through my shoulder, almost as if it’s been waiting for me to notice the wound so it can jump out and surprise me. The scaffolding giants shake the streets with their footsteps.

Already the wolves are circling. Raw fear swills around my stomach. There’s only one thing left to do.

‘Fall back,’ I shout, ‘fall back to the river!’

For a second, Glas stares at me. Then he nods and reforms as a giant rubbish head, shrieking in the voice of a hundred rats, ‘FALL BACK! FALL BACK!’

My soldiers, glass and flesh and stone alike, waver, then they’re all sprinting as fast as they can towards the water. Pavement Priests with severed limbs are dragged by Sodiumites, fields wrapped around them like fishing nets. I stand, urging them on until the last Lampie has passed me, and as I turn myself and hare off on its tail the Scaffwolves howl joyously and race in pursuit.

It’s less than a hundred paces to the riverbank. The distance dissolves. I can feel the chill breath of the wolves on my back. As the first of my army reach the water’s edge they mill about in confusion. Some look back my way with perplexed, betrayed expressions. I know what they’re thinking: if the wolfpack traps them against the river, they’ll all be slaughtered.

I catch Gutterglass’ eye. We’ve only got one chance at this.

‘BREAK RIGHT!’ I bawl as Glas shouts, ‘BREAK LEFT!’ and I bound into my army’s ranks and start almost throwing glass bodies westwards up the riverbank. Glas is more efficient, morphing into a giant hand that sweeps scores of Pavement Priests in the opposite direction.

Glass girls and boys are screaming, pale yellow light flashing haphazardly. A priest is crushed to bloody gravel under his fellows. But a gap opens up in the middle of our ranks. The wolves try to check their charge, but their momentum is too great and as they barrel past they twist to snap at our ankles. Their metal paws pulverise the concrete barrier and they splash into the glittering river beyond.

Ragged breath tears through me. I give Glas a smile.

The wolfpack stirs, swishing ankle-deep in the water, turning, making ready to pursue us. But then they stop.

One of the handlers looks down at the surface of the river, and I know what he sees: the reflections of Metal Men and Scaffwolves are surrounded by other reflections, hundreds of them, some besuited, others dungareed, or wearing battered camouflage. They are reflections without originals, reflections that smile grimly as the welding torches they’re wielding spit and flare into life.

I jump onto an empty pedestal on the Embankment just in time to see a Mirrorstocrat touch his torch to a wolf’s reflection. As he does so the real wolf shrieks horribly and its muzzle glows first white-hot and then begins to melt.

My ears are still ringing when a heavy stone hand claps me on the shoulder. I look up into Ezekiel’s face; he’s congratulating me on the feint. I nod absently. Below me the wolves are trying to back out of the river, but their reflections have been chained and muzzled, and though they strain at them they might as well be trying to tear away from their own shadows.

Feeling a little sick at what I’ve got the Mirrorstocracy to do, I turn away — and what I see freezes me in shock.

In the dim light on the other side of the road, a Scaffwolf stands alone. A girl mounted on the beast’s back is watching me. Her hair is bound in a silk scarf. Her face is streaked with metal and dried blood. Somehow she projects pure loathing; implacable hatred emanates from her shape. Almost lazily, she extends an arm towards our ranks.

‘No!’ I mean to shout it, but I don’t even know if I make any sound.

Tendrils of barbed wire, hundreds of snakelike strands, are unfurling at ferocious speed. A Sodiumite girl younger than me barely has time to flinch before wire crunches her neck apart.

Oh no. Oh Thames, no: the Wire Mistress More tendrils, more broken bodies, more death. Reach has sent his high priestess to see us wiped out.

I shove myself towards her, but my legs are reluctant. ‘You’re the only one who can stop her!’ I shout at myself, although frankly, that’s optimism gone barking bloody mad. She’s got a host, so she’ll be at least as strong as me.

The Mistress’s host springs from the back of her wolf and runs towards us. A buzzing cloud of gleaming metal surrounds her and I imagine those tendrils dipping into the river, stirring up the water into foam and obliterating the Mirrorfolk and the wolves’ reflections.

She could still undo everything.

You’re the only one who can stop her. But I don’t have to do it alone.

I scream, part warcry, mostly plain terror, as I meet the steel-wrapped girl. Barbed strands fly around me and I manage to shout, just a few words, before they seal up my mouth.

‘ Beth, help me! ’

Beth looked down the Embankment. That voice, the voice of the streets, spurred her muscles, though dizziness washed over her and she stumbled.

‘Fil!’ she shouted, ‘ Fil! Where are you?’

There was no answer, but now she didn’t need one: she could see the seething mass of wire standing on the very edge of the river. Pavement Priests were trying to get close, but wires lashed out like whips, keeping them at bay. They all looked terrified of the thing.

A grey arm bleeding from a thousand little cuts thrust out of the coils, holding an iron railing, but the wire had looped around the wrist and he couldn’t plunge the weapon home.

Beth ran at the tangled, jagged cloud of metal and started tearing at the strands. The wire coils hissed over each other, slashing at her face, making every inch of her skin burn with pain, but she didn’t pull her hands back to protect herself.

Fil, she thought desperately, Filius… hold on!

And she plunged into the heart of the monster.

Two figures waited for her: Fil, on his back, horribly contorted, his torso streaked with blood. His teeth bared, his arm was cocked, spear ready, but the wires held his limbs and he couldn’t uncoil.

‘Beth!’ He forced his voice between the barbs in his lips. ‘Beth, take my spear. Kill the host.’

But Beth barely heard him. She was staring at the wire thicket’s other inhabitant. Its other inhabitant stared right back at her.

Pen looked like one of those cartoons of electrocuted people, except instead of lightning-bolts, there were wires, holding her off the ground and splaying her limbs, forcing her into a X shape.

Some useless part of Beth’s brain registered that she’d lent Pen the jeans she was wearing — they’d looked a bit tatty in the charity shop, but they looked far worse now, all slippery with gore and filth. Pen’s right nostril had been ripped away and her mouth was slit wider: a jagged grin towards her ear.

But the eyes were just as Beth remembered.

Those eyes knew Beth as well as she knew them.

‘Beth! Help me!’ The yell tore his lips and his railing clattered onto the pavement at her feet.

‘ Kill. The. Host.’ The breath was being squeezed from him.

Beth wrenched herself forwards, sickened and horrified, and reached for the wires that held Pen’s throat. Her nails gouged Pen’s flesh as she tried desperately to prise the metal away and the barbs tore her own hands. Her palms were slicked with blood.

‘Pen,’ she gabbled absurdly, ‘Pen, are you okay?’ Pen didn’t answer; her lips were stitched gruesomely with wire.

Beth saw Fil out of the corner of her eye as, just for an instant, disbelief etched his face like physical pain. Then the wire-thing’s tendrils dragged him over the balustrade and plunged him into the river.

Wires flashed out and bound Beth’s arms and legs. The barbs bit into her, but the pain seemed distant — everything was distant except her best friend’s mutilated face.

‘Oh G-God, Pen-’ she managed to stammer.

Beth suddenly became aware of orange light: a naked, shining glass girl was forcing her way towards the tangle of wire. The glare seared Beth’s eyes, but she didn’t shut them. She could read the pain written on Pen’s skin. The glass girl drew level with Beth, but she didn’t look at her. Beth was vaguely aware that the glass girl looked familiar, then she realised: she was the first Sodiumite she’d ever seen.

Oh God, Pen, I’m so sorry.

The glass girl extended a hand towards Pen, burning bright with the effort. Fine cracks laced themselves up her arm and she raised the other arm and began to step in a formal circle, a tightly controlled dance.

The glass over her chest fractured and went cloudy. Fragments of her skin peeled off and spun, glittering, trapped in her own magnetism.

The wire slid backwards; inch by grudging inch. Agonisingly, the barbs slid free of Beth’s arms, leaving red pucker-marks. Without them to support her, she fell. The strand that was holding Fil under water was taut now, and looked almost fragile.

Beth, help me!

Beth’s teeth were chattering with shock, but she groped around and found the railing-spear by her feet. With a snarl of effort she lifted it, and slashed the wire tendril in two.

The wire monster recoiled in pain at the touch of the spear, and Pen’s face blurred as the barbs contracted around her, as though it were clutching Pen to its heart. Then, like some vast insect, it rose up on hundreds of spindly legs, bore her up onto the bridge and skittered away.

Pen…

‘ Fil! ’ Beth was bewildered, drained. She tried to follow, but she found she couldn’t walk. She collapsed to her knees and crawled to the balustrade. There was no movement on the water. Warmth on her skin told her the glass girl was there.

‘Filius,’ she gasped, ‘he’s down there. He’s- I have to-’ She tried to push herself up, but she was too weak. The wire’s barbs had leached the strength from her.

A metal parasite, he had called it. Oh my God, Pen She slid backwards, cracking her jaw on the stone.

Electra shot Beth a pitying look. She closed her eyes.

Beth saw fear through the transparent lids for only a second.

Then Electra drew herself up and threw her fractured body head-first into the Thames.

For an instant Beth could see her glow, shining up from the depths. Then the water began to seethe and boil, and stale-smelling gas wafted up and filled the air.

Beth watched, helpless, but she couldn’t make out what was happening until two bodies broke the surface. Fil was screaming weakly, barely conscious. The skin where Electra was holding him bubbled red, then turned black. Electra’s head was arched back, her bones flaring white and fizzing away. Her jaw was clenched tight, and her filaments had started to disappear like burning fuses, but she managed to drag the boy onto a sandbank.

The dirt clung to the weeping flesh of his burns and he coiled up, foetus-like to protect himself. ‘Lec.’ It was only a whisper, but Beth heard it clearly from the Embankment above. ‘Lec.’ He groped behind him, grasping the glass girl’s hand. His own skin smoked where he touched her.

Electra smiled. She glimmered something in her own language that Beth didn’t understand.

With a grunt of pain the Son of the Streets reached out to touch her cheek, but the reaction reached Electra’s face and it burnt away under his hand.

‘Fil!’ Beth slipped down the side of the Embankment onto the sandbar. She staggered to his side. ‘Fil! What can I do? What can I do?’ she shouted at him desperately, idiotically. ‘ What can I do? ’

She fell to the ground beside him and cradled his head. Cuts covered his skin, and a burn on his wrist had all but obliterated his tower block tattoo. River water bubbled out of his throat when he tried to answer.

‘ What can I do?’ she whispered into his hair.

‘You know what she said?’ he gasped after hacking up a gallon of muddy water. There was a kind of wonder in his face. ‘She said, “If you’re going to bring the White bastards in, you’d better teach ’em to dance.”’ His head fell back onto her lap, his eyes closed. But his chest was still rising and falling. He was unconscious, but alive.

Beth became aware of a fluttering sound, like pigeon wings.

‘Come on, girl,’ a voice gusted on rubbish-scented breath. ‘There are more wolves on the way, and we’re in no state to fight them. Give him to me.’

Fat grey pigeons flocked all over his body, and Beth felt dozens of pigeon-claws seize her jeans, her hoodie and her hair.

‘Come,’ Gutterglass whispered, his voice hoarse with the strain.

As she was borne into the air Beth could see glimmering bodies below her, and flashing lights: Ezekiel and Victor marshalling the retreat. A scaffolding muzzle slipped below the water. But Beth knew what she would remember most, the image that would haunt her quiet moments…

… the fragments: the tiny, tiny pieces of the men and women and children that she’d led here. Ground glass, and gravel, and blood.