The City's son

CHAPTER 3

Maybe it was one of his worms that found me, nosing through the thick sludge at the edge of the river, or perhaps a pigeon, wheeling overhead, from one of the flocks that nest on top of the towers. All I know is that when I wake, Gutterglass is crouched over me.

‘My, my, you’re quite the mess, aren’t you?’ the old monster says gravely. ‘Good morning, Highness.’

He — Glas is a ‘he’ this time — looks down at me with his broken eggshell eyes. Old chow mein cakes his chin in a slimy beard. His rubbish-sack coat bulges as the rats beneath it scramble about.

‘Morn-’ I begin to say, then the pain of the burns washes over me, choking off the words. I inhale sharply and wave him back. I need air. He’s nabbed a tyre from somewhere and his waist dissolves into a single wheel instead of his usual legs. Lithe brown rodents race around the inside, rolling him backwards.

I grit my teeth until I reach a manageable plateau of agony, then, groggily, I take in my surroundings. I’m on a silt strand under a bridge on the south side of the river — Vauxhall, judging by the bronze statues lining the sides. The sun shimmers high in the sky. ‘How long?’ My throat feels as tight as a rusted lock.

‘Too long, frankly,’ Glas replies. ‘Even the foxes came in before you did. Do I need to remind you that you are my responsibility? Assuming, of course, that responsibility is a word that your grubby little Highness comprehends? If anything happens to you, I’m the one who’ll have to answer to Mater Viae.’

I shut my eyes against the harsh light, biting back the obvious retort. Mater Viae, Our Lady of the Streets, my mother — left more than a decade and a half ago. I hate how Gutterglass still bloody nearly genuflects whenever he says her name.

‘If she ever comes back,’ I say, ‘do you really think she’ll care which particular pile of London crap I sleep on?’

‘ When she comes back,’ Glas corrects me gently.

I don’t argue with him, because it’s not nice to call a man’s faith ridiculous.

Most mornings you can find him (or her, if that’s the body Glas makes that day) at the edge of the dump, looking towards the sunrise over Mile End, waiting for the day when stray cats march in procession down the pavements and the street signs rearrange themselves to spell Mater Viae’s true name: the day their Goddess returns.

Air sighs out of his tyre and he sinks down beside me. He opens the black plastic of his coat and chooses one of the syringes strapped there. He’s been raiding hospital bins again. He slides the tip into my arm, depresses the plunger and almost immediately the pain ebbs.

‘What a mess,’ he mutters again. ‘Sit up. Let’s take a look at the damage.’

I creak gradually into a sort of shell-shaped hunch, which is the best I can manage. Neat cross-stitches lace my cuts together; the needle that made them has been thrust back in Glas’ arm and the left-over thread is waving gently in the wind.

‘Wow,’ I croak, fingering the stitches, ‘I really must have been out cold to not feel those.’

‘Dead to the world,’ Gutterglass agrees. ‘Not literally, though, thanks in no small part to yours truly, and in no part at all to you.’

I have to use my spear as a lever to stand up. I can still feel the electric buzz in the iron where I stabbed the wraith. Glas dusts me down, wiping at my cheek with split penlid fingers. Glas is oddly fastidious — I guess having to make himself a new body out of the city’s rubbish every day means he knows where it’s all been.

‘I was hunting-’ I start to tell him about last night, but he isn’t listening.

‘Look at you, you’re filthy — ’

‘Glas, this Railwraith-’

‘Doing these stitches has destroyed my fingers,’ he moans. ‘Have you no heart at all for a poor old rubbish-spi-’

‘Glas!’ I snap, a little harder than I mean to, and he recoils and shuts up, staring at me reproachfully. I exhale hard and then just say it. ‘The wraith got loose from the tracks. It got free.’

For a long moment the only sound is the patter of the breeze on the surface of the river. When Glas finally speaks, his voice is flat. ‘That’s not possible.’

‘Glas, I’m telling you-’

‘It’s not,’ he insists. ‘Railwraiths are electricity: its memory, its dreams. The rails are their conductors. They can’t survive away from them for more than a few minutes.’

‘Well, take it from the son of a Goddess whose bony arse it kicked around the block, three miles from the nearest stretch of track: this one can!’ My shout echoes off the bridge’s foundations. I squat down, trying to work the tension out of my temples with my fingertips.

‘Glas, it was so strong,’ I say quietly. The memory of the fierce white voltage of its teeth is seared into my skin. I shiver. ‘I wounded it, but- It must have left me for dead. I’ve never met a wraith like it. It didn’t even try to run, just came right at me…’

‘… as though it was it that was hunting you?’ Glas asks, and I look up sharply.

Because that’s exactly what it was like.

Gutterglass’ voice is very quiet. All of the rats and worms and ants that animate him go still and for a moment he looks dead. ‘Filius,’ he says softly. And he doesn’t sound confused any more. He sounds very, very frightened. ‘Did anyone see you hunting that wraith?’

‘What? No. Why?’

‘Filius-’

‘No one saw me, Glas, I was just hunting. I was-’ Then I falter, because that isn’t quite true: somebody did see. A sick feeling swells in my stomach as I realise what he’s asking.

‘It went through St Paul’s,’ I whisper.

‘The Railwraith entered Reach’s domain,’ Glas says.

I nod as I feel the cold seep through me, like my bones are blistering with ice.

‘… and emerged on the other side,’ he continues, his voice grim, ‘loose from the rails, more angry and more powerful than it had any rightful way of being, and coming after you.’ I can hear the strain of forced calm on his borrowed vocal chords. ‘Filius,’ Glas says, ‘there’s an ugly possibility here you need to face up to.’ He sinks down until his shells are level with my eyes. ‘What if that wraith didn’t “ get loose ”? What if it was set free-?’

The question hangs in the air unfinished. I complete it in my head: What if it was set free by Reach?

Across the river, the boom and clang of construction drifts from the St Paul’s sites. His cranes grasp at the Cathedral like it’s an orb of office.

Reach: the Crane King. My mother’s greatest enemy. His claws have been part of my nightmares for as long as I’ve been dreaming.

He could do it. It dawns on me now, as it must have done on Glas, that Reach is an electric expert. His cranes and diggers, his pneumatic weaponry, they’re all powered by it — so he could have found a way to channel that power into a wraith, to set it, frenzied and burning, on my tail: an opportunistic attack.

‘What if it’s finally happening, Filius?’ Gutterglass whispers, half to himself. ‘What if Reach is coming for you?’

I grip my spear so tightly it feels like the skin on my knuckles could split

‘We have to get you home — now,’ Glas says. He’s wheeling himself round and round in circles, suddenly all urgency. ‘I need you back at the landfill where it’s safe, until I can find out what’s going on. If this is Reach, he won’t stop with a Railwraith.

‘Soon there will be wolves and — Lady save us,’ he murmurs fervently, ‘ wire.’ He begins rolling towards the edge of the bridge, yanking me by the arm, and I have to drag my feet in the sand to wrench myself free.

What if Reach is coming for you?

… Reach is coming…

The mantra goes around and around in my head, dizzying me, but it makes no sense: why now? I’ve been here for sixteen years without my mother’s protection. What’s he been waiting for?

But the longer I think about it, the more horribly easy it gets to believe. Reach has been the monster in every fairy-tale I’ve ever been told. My mother hated him, and Glas hates him, and I hate him too. I can feel that hatred clotting around my heart.

Reach is coming… and deep down, I always knew he would.

‘Filius?’ Glas beckons impatiently. ‘We need to move.’

I straighten up, wincing at a fresh wave of pain from my burns, and shake my head.

Glas arches a dust-drawn eyebrow. ‘This is no time to be stubborn, Filius. In case you’ve forgotten, that wraith is still out there. It almost killed you last night.’

‘So imagine what it’ll do to the rest of the city,’ I say slowly. In my mind’s eye I’m seeing the blackened corpse of the boy from last night, multiplied: one for every gutter. That impossibly powerful wraith is wild and indiscriminate and free.

What if Reach is coming for you?

The thought is too big; I can’t grasp it. But if I let fear freeze me, then tonight it’ll be me, lying charred by the roadside. Reach is still a ‘what-if’, the wraith’s a certainty: the immediate threat. I seize on it, almost gratefully. I can focus on that.

‘I have to finish the hunt.’