The City's son

CHAPTER 38

‘I have to go back!’ she yelled, but the pigeons ignored her. The wind from their wings buffeted her face. London flashed past below. She writhed and kicked, but their claws only gripped her tighter.

‘I have to go back!’ She sounded deranged in her own ears. A single thought filled her to bursting and seized control of her voice. ‘That was Pen! That was Pen! I have to go back!’

A plastic clown mask dangled from a pigeon-claw. It twisted to face her. ‘Shut up.’

‘She’s my friend.’

‘She’s its host.’ Worms contorted the mask’s lips into a grimace. The empty eggshells stuck into its eyesockets looked past her to where a frail, skinny young man hung from the heart of a flock of pigeons, trailing flecks of blood into the empty air. ‘Do you really think she’d treat you any differently?’

They passed over a crosshatch of roof tiles washed yellow by the light of ordinary, dumb lamps. Tower block windows glimmered for a moment then were gone. They skimmed in low over a landfill site: hillsides of broken TV sets and microwaves and scrap metal. Snared plastic billowed like foliage. Streams of industrial solvent and rainwater carved up the landscape.

The instant the pigeons set her down, Beth was running, slipping and stumbling over the filth towards Fil, who was lying on the ground, curled away from her. The wire had flayed half his skin off and a flap of it was hanging open, like a grotesque curtain.

She skidded down on her knees beside him. His face was slack, unconscious. She drew breath sharply, remembering the look of horror, of outright betrayal, before the wire-creature had plunged him into the river.

Kill the host, he’d cried.

But she couldn’t. It was Pen. She couldn’t Could she?

Pigeons flocked around her, beating her backwards with wings and talons.

‘Glas!’ she protested.

‘Get away from him.’ She couldn’t see a face, but the voice was flat and angry. Bugs were swarming, building legs from the surrounding rubbish.

‘But I have to help…’

Suddenly the clown-mask jutted through the storm of pigeon wings. ‘If you distract me and he dies I will tear the eyes out of your skull. Understand, little girl? The best thing you can do for him is get away, now.’

Beth stiffened. She stared at Gutterglass with gritted teeth, then turned and stumbled back down the hill.

For what felt like a long time, she trudged in darkness through the shifting murk. Pen! The thought filled her head like a screaming siren. Panic fired her muscles and she sprinted up the side of a rubbish-dune towards the glowing City, towards Pen, arms pumping. All she could see was her best friend, bound and bloodied by barbed wire.

But then Beth’s fingertips brushed over one another and she felt the texture of the thin rough scabs those barbs had left. She stumbled to a stop. She’d had her chance to help Pen, her chance to free her, and she’d failed. What if she failed again? What if all that happened was that Pen was forced to watch while the Wire Mistress used her own hands to crush Beth’s throat?

Gutterglass’ voice seeped into her mind. Do you really think she’d treat you any differently?

Beth looked back across the landfill to where Fil was lying, bleeding and shuddering and barely breathing, amidst the filth and junk. Where she’d led him.

‘ Is that your plan? Run? ’ Her scorn rang so hollow now; she wished she could suck those words back into her. She wished she’d let him save himself.

She’d bullied and mocked and lured him here, just as she had with Pen by leaving that smug riddle about ‘fractured harmony’ on the bricks by her house.

That’s me: a siren call to self-destruction.

A sensation filled her like warm, slow concrete in her stomach and limbs. She sank into the rubbish. She couldn’t fix it. She’d broken everything and she couldn’t fix it. She didn’t even feel the tears running down her cheeks.

All she’d done — all she had the power to do — was to make everything worse.

God, Fil, please don’t die.

The little scraps of paper and cardboard and egg cartons and beer-bottle labels littered the ground under her like photographs, old pictures of someone lost.

This is how you felt, Dad, she thought as she stared at them, like there was nothing you could do.

The helplessness boiled up her, hot and black and poisonous, like it must have in him. And she’d hated him for it.

There’s nothing I can do.

She bent over and cried, hard. It was a wrench to get each tear out, like they were pulling her insides with them.

There’s nothing I can do.

She cried until she was empty, then she just sat. But the image of her father in his chair with his book was fixed in her mind and she couldn’t shake it. She couldn’t settle into the strangling fingers of her despair. She couldn’t just sit there like he had: because she’d seen him do it.

She rocked slowly back onto her feet and looked down at the dent she’d made, a little alcove in the muck. If it wasn’t for him I probably never would have got up. It was a gift, she thought suddenly, one he’d given without even meaning to. She thanked him quietly, and wished he could hear her.

She started to walk back down into the landfill. There was nothing she could do, but she had to do something.

Gradually the sky changed from the velvet darkness of late night to the permeable gloom of very early morning. In dribs and drabs, a slow trickle of bodies, the remnants of her army, entered the landfill.

The Sodiumites carried their wounded on stretchers woven from yellow and black electrical tape: near-shattered bodies missing arms or legs, or desperately reaching into their own chests to pinch together the circuits that kept their hearts beating.

The Pavement Priests used gateposts as crutches, but there weren’t enough to go around and some had to crawl. One stone-clad figure collapsed under the weight of his armour, gasping, ‘No further…’ until a sleek tabby cat melted from the ranks and rubbed itself, purring, up against the fallen priest and from somewhere deep within he found enough faith to keep going that bit further.

As the survivors reached the heart of the dump, rats and beetles and cockroaches emerged. With chitters of mandibles and jerkings of sleek brown heads, they directed the wounded to alcoves, excavated from the mounds of rubbish. Those too hurt to do anything else collapsed gratefully down on discarded mattresses. The most able set to work, dressing wounds with torn clothes, patching up flickering Lampfolk with used lightbulbs and bits of cracked champagne flutes and beer glasses.

A priest inside a one-armed statue was organising the field hospital. He read out a list of injuries to a horde of eager rats while blood dried slowly around a wound in his own marble stomach.

The priest looked up in surprise as Beth approached him. Her eyes were raw with tears. She rolled up the sleeves of her hoodie. ‘What can I do?’ she asked.

He appraised her through the peepholes in his marble mask. ‘Hell of a mess to clean up,’ he said. His stone lips were set in a heroic smile. He twitched his marble stump at her. ‘Fancy lending us a hand?’

So Beth bandaged and stitched and soldered, and wiped blood and pus from sticky wounds. Work, she ordered herself as she pulled on the needle and drew the sides of a young soldier’s gaping thigh together through the gap in his concrete robe. These were her soldiers; she’d called them and they’d followed her, same as Pen had, and she owed them just as much.

Just work.

‘I’m telling you, blud, it was four,’ the young priest was saying in a nasal East End accent.

The bronze-coated figure on the next mattress over snorted. ‘Four, right. Remind me, son, who taught you to count? There was one by the river, one on the bridge and the other by that brick hospital. Your ass only killed three wolves, Timon; don’ be frontin’ like you can top my score.’

Timon hissed in exasperation, coating concrete lips in spittle. ‘All that green rust on your face makin’ you blind, Al. I took down that fat rusty bitch down on the beach, too. Snapped its neck, like this-’ He made a sharp twisting gesture with his hands.

Al sneered, ‘Timon, that bitch bounced back faster than one of your mum’s cheques.’

‘Shut up about my mum! You don’t know nothin’ about her.’

‘I’ll shut up about your mum when you shut up about my face. It’s the copper — ain’t my fault this stuff corrodes. Anyway you don’t know nothin’ about your mum neither; you been a priest way to long, so don’t be trying to pretend you remember her no more.’

Timon fell into an uncomfortable silence. Beth looked up from her needle. Something in Timon’s plaintive pride stung her. She knotted the thread and bit it off, and popped the cap off her Magic Marker.

‘Hey, what-?’ Timon started to protest, and then fell silent when he saw what she was drawing. Four stylised wolf-heads appeared on his concrete shoulder, angular and snarling: trophies, like kills painted on the side of a fighter-jet.

‘There you go, Timon,’ she said. ‘One for each of your prey.’

Al’s jealousy was forgotten as he admired his friend’s new markings. ‘I want me summa them too,’ he said.

Timon sucked his teeth. ‘We’re, not dead yet, Al,’ he said. ‘That’s some pretty badass trophy right there.’

‘True that.’

Beth snapped the cap back on her marker and frowned. ‘I thought Pavement Priests couldn’t die,’ she said. ‘Petris said that you wanted your deaths back.’

Both Timon and Al erupted into hoots of scornful laughter. ‘Yeah, Miss B, we can die,’ Al said. ‘We just get born again. You know what that’s like?’

Beth shook her head.

Al’s green eyes stared mercilessly out through the copper. ‘You’s a little baby,’ he said quietly, ‘stuck in a stone crib. No food, no water, no light, and no fucking idea why not. You don’t get all your memories back right away, see?

‘Some of us don’t never remember,’ he added quietly. ‘What the synod did: it’s no precise art, y’know? You get memories coming back from your old lives all ragged, but stuff’s missing, and other stuff contradicts. They say Johnny Naphtha has a room somewhere full of memories, bottles of copies he made of us ’fore he took us the first time. Don’t know if I believe that. But I do know I don’t remember committin’ no crime to get me damned.’

There was silence. Beth could feel Timon’s gaze on the back of her neck.

Al hawked and spat through the tiny crack between his bronze lips. ‘Can’t whine too loud though. Least last time I got reborn, it was in the graveyard, with another priest close enough to hear me cryin’. A lot of us isn’t that lucky. A lot are never found… There’ll be new babies stranded in statues all over London tonight after that ruckus, believe that.’ His voice was a bitter sneer. ‘Their wounds’re only the first o’ their problems. Your Goddess seen to that. That’s why we want our deaths back.’

Beth put the cap back on her marker and stood up. The hand that held the marker was trembling. All those bodies, crushed and dying… Your Goddess — ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry, I… I need-. I have to-’ She turned and bolted from the alcove.

‘Hey, Miss B!’ Al lifted a bronze arm slightly. ‘What about me?’

When Ezekiel found Beth, she was crouched amidst old crisp packets and cardboard, hugging her knees; a nowhere place in this nowhere dump. The stone angel clucked his tongue disapprovingly. ‘Guilt weighing you down?’ he said.

She said nothing, and he ignored her glare. ‘Come now young lady,’ he said, ‘I’ve been a priest for almost eight hundred years. If I couldn’t recognise a gangrenous conscience then I ought to abandon the calling altogether and open a florist’s.’

There was a flicker, and suddenly he stood beside her, massive with his limestone wings. ‘Talk.’ It wasn’t a request. ‘You’ll feel better.’

Beth continued to stare. She had no idea where to start.

‘Blood-in-the-river,’ Ezekiel sighed. ‘How does your lot do this again?’ He creaked down beside her. Cracks appeared and resealed instantly in his cassock. ‘I bless you, daughter, for you have sinned, it’s been — well, forever, in all probability, since your last confession, so you’re due. Keep it to the important stuff please; I have neither the time nor the inclination to hear about shoplifting when you were ten. Anyway, confess away. I’m listening.’

Beth opened her mouth, stalled, and then the words came out all in a tumble. ‘It’s too much. People follow me. I ask them… and they follow. Like Fil, and — and Pen, and all these people in their stone and their glass. And I’m trying, really trying to help. But now Electra’s dead, and Fil nearly is… and these priests are just kids, and Pen… oh Christ and Thames, Pen… Oh God-’ She stopped, trying to recover her breath.

The angel’s beautiful carved face watched her. ‘I misjudged you, Miss Bradley,’ he said softly. ‘Guilt is not your problem.’

‘No?’ Beth sniffed back tears. ‘Then what is?’

‘Rampaging egomania.’

Beth jerked her head up, thinking the angel was taking the piss, but he sounded totally serious. ‘“People — huh- follow- huh- me!”’ He mimicked her exactly, even with the little gasps for breath. ‘“ These priests are just kids.” Patronise us to your heart’s content, Miss Bradley, we’re all several hundred years old, but we don’t mind.’

Then he snorted. ‘Honestly! As if we have not eyes to see and minds to think as well as feet and hands to march and fight.’ A stone hand took Beth’s chin. She hadn’t even seen it move. ‘Listen to me. This will be bad for your ego, but good for your heart. Reach is a monster. He and his creatures kill indiscriminately. You know this; so do we. We follow you only because you happen to be right. And if it had not been you, we would have followed someone else. Filius would have fought in the end, with or without you.

‘It is the will of the G oddess.’ His voice rasped with urgency bordering on fanaticism. ‘As the appearance of Fleet and his holy felines shows. You carry the Lady’s aspect, and I respect that, but do not let that fool you into thinking you are more important than you are. We are all vessels for her will.’

He released her chin and retreated from her in a few unclear flickers of motion. Beth rubbed the skin where his fingers had been. The bruises were healing already.

‘Oh, and Miss Bradley? You are about the worst triage nurse I’ve ever seen. Gutterglass’ weevils keep having to unpick your stitches and redo them. It’s embarrassing, and a waste of time. For their sake, if not your own, find something to do that you’re actually good at.’