The City's son

CHAPTER 39

When Beth found Gutterglass, he was crouched over a Sodiumite girl so badly wounded that she could barely light his face. The trash-spirit’s incarnation was tiny, no bigger than a toddler, and he stroked her fibre-optic hair with soda-straw fingers and whispered to her that Mater Viae loved her.

There was a hissing, cracking noise and half a dozen rats nosed their way from the rubbish-dune, dragging a live electrical cable burrowed from some part of the national grid. Gutterglass slid condoms over his fingers like surgical gloves and set to work.

Beth didn’t disturb him ’til he was done. ‘The compact look suits you,’ she said. She eyed his avatar’s oversized, collapsing-football head. ‘In a creepy, decomposing baby sort of way.’

Gutterglass didn’t look at her. ‘I have five thousand and sixty-three distinct organisms under control at present,’ he said snippily, ‘scavenging, shoring up defences and, in some cases, conducting open-heart surgery. Frankly, I’d like to see you manage half as much and animate a paper bag, let alone a fully functional avatar.’ The little refuse-marionette rummaged around, tugged out a battered pack of cigarettes and lit one between his split-seam lips.

‘You smoke?’ Beth was surprised.

‘Who better to have a filthy habit?’ Gutterglass countered.

Beth watched smoke billow back out through his balsawood ribs. ‘Does it… do anything for you?’ she asked.

‘It used to,’ Gutterglass shut his eggshell-eyes. There was a wistfulness as he spoke. ‘A long time ago.’

When the eggshells opened again, the look Gutterglass gave her was cold, and tinged with hostility. ‘What do you want, Miss Bradley?’

Beth looked at him through the smoke. ‘What do you think I want?’

The Prince of London had no mattress. His back and shoulders were raised off the ground by crushed rubble and chunks of brick. As Beth watched, the colour of the rubble faded and his pallid skin darkened a little, but only a very little.

She crouched and brushed the hair out of his face. His jaw was clenched and his eyes screwed up. ‘He looks better.’

‘Of course he does,’ Gutterglass said flatly. ‘ I’m his doctor. Although, to give him his due, the-little-God-that-could here is very hard to kill.’

Air escaped the football-head in a sigh. ‘However, I have no way of knowing when he’ll wake up,’ he confessed. ‘In the meantime I suppose that leaves you and me in command.’ He spat out the words angrily. ‘I’ll need you to-’

‘I’m going, Glas,’ Beth interrupted. She stood up.

The eggshells blinked. ‘Going? Going where?’

‘St Paul’s. Pen needs me.’

Gutterglass waited a long time before he answered. ‘Do you know what?’ he said at last. ‘I should let you.’ To Beth’s surprise his voice was harsh with anger. ‘I should wish you the best of London Luck and just let you waltz straight into the Scaffwolves’ jaws. After all, you deserve it. I introduced them, did you know that? Filius and Electra? She was brave and powerful and graceful; she was his best friend, and she made him happier than anyone I’ve ever seen.’

He twisted his head and looked at her with frank disgust. ‘Anyone except you. So for the love he bore you, I’ll say this once. Don’t go. You think you can make it better? You can’t. Reach will rip you asunder. Walk into the Demolition Fields looking for a happy ending and an ending is all you’ll find.’

He fell silent. For a long time Beth held his eggshell gaze. ‘You’re still going, then?’ Gutterglass said eventually.

‘What do you think?’

A cockroach in Gutterglass’ mouth clicked in disapproval and something bumped against Beth’s shin. She looked down. It was Fil’s corroded railing-spear, borne on a swarming tide of beetles.

‘You might need this.’

His little face looked exhausted, but in a strange way satisfied. ‘In the unlikely event you get close enough, drive it into the Crane King’s throat.’

Beth’s fingers closed around the spear. The grooves and pits in the metal seemed to fit her hand precisely. She could almost feel the shape of Fil’s handprint on it.

‘It’s not much,’ Gutterglass said, ‘but without Mater Viae’s Great Fire, we must improvise.’

Beth exhaled slowly. ‘I’ll kill him, Glas,’ she swore, tasting every word. ‘For Fil, and Electra, and Pen. And for me.’

Gutterglass’ seam-smile said he didn’t believe her, but he nodded. He disintegrated slowly. His eggshells watched her to the last.

When Gutterglass had gone, she bent down and kissed Fil’s forehead. ‘You brought me home,’ she whispered into his ear. It physically hurt her, deep in her chest, to leave him like this, but he had Gutterglass, and Gutterglass had his army, and Pen, Pen who she loved more fully and deeply than anyone else, who she’d almost let herself forget, Pen had only her.

Fil had believed she could be like him, so she owed him that: to do more than just run. ‘I saved your life once, remember,’ she whispered as she turned to go. ‘Don’t let it be wasted effort. I’ll try to do the same.’

It was only a hundred feet to the landfill’s perimeter fence. The tarmac felt nourishing under her feet as she ran, and London blurred past, all lights and noise and grandeur and stink, the spear pointed due south before her.

Before long, cranes began to rear up on the horizon, and she turned east. The bulk of St Paul’s emerged like a vast black beetle crouched against the sunrise. The Demolition Fields were drawing closer.