The City's son

CHAPTER 47

Nothing to see but darkness, nothing to breathe but dust. Nothing to be but patient as the iron-eating rust.

Huh, I should remember that. It’s the kind of thing Pen might like.

Stone grazed Beth’s skin as she crawled through the tunnel. She kept colliding with the walls in the pitch-darkness, even though she was groping ahead with her fingertips. She’d insisted on being in the lead. Victor had grumbled but eventually deferred with a muttered ‘Ladies first’.

In some places the walls were tight on her, tighter than a coffin, tight as a birth canal, and she had to thrust her arms ahead of her, wedge her elbows and undulate forward. The spear was strapped to her back, the metal so cold against her neck it almost blistered.

Beth hated the close quarters, but more than that, the sheer deadness of the place troubled her: there was no energy, no life flowing where her bare skin touched the masonry. This neighbourhood had been broken, its vitality leached out. Cold fingers of panic crept up Beth’s throat, and she fought to keep calm. After so long immersed in the living city, being trapped in here felt like suffocating.

In places the walls of the tunnel felt smooth, like glass, or — the idea came to her suddenly — burnt skin.

Without the Great Fire, Gutterglass had said, we must improvise.

She was touching Reach’s wounds from that first great immolation, ripped up and buried beneath later incarnations. These scars were more permanent than rock. She shivered at the intimacy.

The darkness made everything closer, louder and sharper. The engines clattered on the surface above and Beth jumped as gravel sifted down from the ceiling. She swore at herself to keep calm.

Judging by the constant stream of inventive obscenity floating up the tunnel from behind her, though, she was doing better than Victor. ‘By Virgin’s first missed period,’ he muttered, ‘is been seven years since I even sleep under roof. What in hell I am doing here?’ He fell silent for a moment, and then said, ‘Tsarina not judge me too harshly, niet? I am not normally so cowardish.’

Beth reached behind her and felt a worn, gnarly hand grasp hers. ‘I know, Victor. I know. If it makes you feel any better, I have a friend who hates little spaces too.’ Beth swallowed hard and looked ahead into the darkness. ‘And she’s as brave as they come.’

The minutes faded away. The only way Beth could mark the time was her heartbeat, and that was too quick to be much use. She felt an urgent desire to talk, to blabber, What if we’re lost? What if we miss a turning in the dark? What if we’re trapped down here?

She bit her lip so hard she tasted petrol and blood, determined not to speak, Giving voice to her own fears would only make Victor’s worse — but then she reached forward, and this time she couldn’t stop herself crying out.

‘Tsarina?’ Victor said uncertainly.

‘It’s okay,’ she whispered. She’d felt something in the rubble, a warmth and a thrum, like a pulse. It was alive. Now as she wormed her way forward, she could feel the kiss of the living concrete on her arms and neck and her belly, charging her skin with the city again. She laughed, shockingly loud in the dark: the pulse coming through the ground was faint, but to her it was like fresh air after drowning. She laid her head on the ground. She heard something, and froze.

Was that crying?

It was very faint, the vibrations carried through the stone from deeper underground. She strained to listen.

There it was again: quiet crying, as though with pain, the kind of pain that you had endured for a long time but you still couldn’t get used to. There was another sound, too, the creaking of rock under terrible strain. The sounds were synchronised, and each groan of the rock drew a gasp and a whimper from the voice, as though someone was drawing painful breath against stone.

Women in the Walls. Masonry Men.

Unbidden, the image of the mangled human shapes at the Woolwich Demolition Fields sprang into her mind and her stomach lurched. She suddenly knew where the life she was sensing was coming from.

She scrabbled at the unseen ground with her fingers, looking for a seam, slipping her nails into cracks until finally she found what she was looking for. She heaved, and a concrete slab jarred the tunnel as she cast it aside.

‘Tsarina! Stop!’ Victor shouted.

Beth ignored him. There was someone alive down there. She dug into the hole she’d made, until the smell of stale piss and sweat and raw spirits enveloped her and thick, muscular arms seized her own.

‘Tsarina, stop,’ Victor whispered in her ear.

She strained, but he wouldn’t let go. ‘There’s someone alive down there!’ She braced herself, preparing to wrench herself free, even if it meant breaking his arms.

‘ Niet, no some one,’ Victor hissed, ‘some many.’

Beth fell still, panting for breath. She felt a gentle pressure on the side of her head and she let Victor push her to the wall.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I begin to hear them a way back.’

For a second Beth could hear nothing but the thud of her own pulse, then voices began to filter through the rock: women’s voices, and men’s; age-clotted voices, and shrill, unbroken ones. They echoed backwards and forwards, sometimes answering each other with a few garbled words in bereft tones. But most of them just cried: weak, but inconsolable.

‘Wherever you dig,’ Victor said, ‘you will only bury others deeper.’

After a moment, Beth understood what he was telling her She’d only ever seen the dead before now; what she was listening to were the wounded, crushed under the weight of the Crane King’s court.

‘Come, Tsarina. Let’s find your friend. There is nothing else to do.’

But as Beth made to take her ear from the wall, a change infected the voices. The crying stopped, and in its place came a whisper: one word. It spread through the voices with the virulence of rumour: Mistress

Mistress Mistress Mistress Mistress Mistress MistressMistressMistressMistressMistressMistressMistressMistress

And then as one, the voices fell silent.