The City's son

CHAPTER 49

A rough rectangle of light, the door to Reach’s court, stood open before Beth. Something intensely and inconveniently bright was shining directly through her exit, hitting her retinas like a battering ram.

Blood-and-stonepiss-in-the-river, she swore silently. She was already deafened by the noise from beyond the doorway; even the panicked thud of her heartbeat had dissolved under the din. Apparently, she was going to have to go out there blind as well.

She hesitated. Outside, the King of Cranes, London’s nemesis, was waiting: the beast in the city’s skin.

He’s killing everything.

She crouched there, wiped the oily sweat from her palm and gripped the spear. Voices flitted in and out of her head.

You might need this. Drive it into the Crane King’s throat.

Come on, B Do more than just run.

Reach will tear you asunder.

Come on, B An ending is all you’ll find…

Do more than just She climbed to her feet and opened her ears to the full clamour of the building site.

— run.

She pelted out into the day.

At first she saw nothing but eye-scouring light as she ran headlong, clutching the spear, not daring to stop. His voice flew in from all around her, echoing in the churn and tear of steel and concrete: I am Reach I am Reach I will be I will be. And there were other sounds, too: the pounding of iron paws on rubble, the slaver and snap of Scaffwolves, horribly close.

Gradually her eyes began to cope: the light was the sun, bouncing off a pair of half-built skyscrapers. Reach had surrounded himself with mirrors. She shielded her eyes and looked from side to side. She sprang from one chunk of rubble to the next, sure-footed as a cat on the treacherous ground.

Cranes soared overhead, but they were just cranes, not fingers. They weren’t linked to hand or arm or body. Where was he? What was he? Her fingers were painfully tight on the spear.

Drive it into the Crane King’s throat.

I would, she thought desperately, if I could find his throat!

The edge of the building site reared up ahead, an impenetrable wreckage of concrete and broken wood and twisted metal, piled up against the hoardings. A growl ripped through the air behind her. She skidded, kicked up dust and turned.

Three Scaffwolves the size of horses prowled up over a mound of broken stone. Through the gaps in their steel skeletons Beth spied the far skyscraper, and reflected in its windows was her own terrified face.

The wolves advanced, heads slung low, ears back. Beth gave ground. She cast about helplessly, arm cocked back, the railing spear ready to throw, but she had no target. She could see diggers, cranes, but no vast construction God. All her pent-up courage was fizzing inside her, but she had no way to release it.

Rough stone bumped into her back. She had nowhere left to run.

She eyed the wolves, wondering if she could move fast enough to take them all. Bravado bubbled in her throat, tasting like blood, and she snarled at them, defiant.

But yet more dormant scaffolding sheathed the half-built tower blocks. Beth knew that if even she could cut down the metal monsters advancing on her, others would immediately take their place.

The wolves stopped. They growled their hollow growls and began to patrol a perimeter, marking a semi-circle around her. Beth growled back. She hawked and spat at them, and they grinned at her with their jagged teeth, begging her to commit to an attack.

And all around them, the storm of construction thundered on: the cranes cranked up their loads and the diggers hacked at the earth, though the cabs were all empty. There was no sign of the force which controlled them.

Beth’s blood hammered through her.

What are you waiting for?

Something slammed into her right shoulder from behind. She staggered forward, and then felt herself being hauled bodily back. Pain burnt up and down her right side — the bones were grinding together wrongly. Her spear-arm went limp.

Beth looked down at her shoulder. Pain made her dizzy, made her sick, made everything slow.

A metal point was protruding from her hoodie. It was smeared with oily red, and if she looked closely, Beth thought she could see tiny white chips of bone caught in the blood. The rest of the hook emerged from the back of her shoulder. A chain was connected to it, linked to that was a cable, a three-inch-thick steel cord, which stretched from her punctured flesh into the sky.

A loud whirring filled her ears and the crane’s winch kicked in.

Beth screamed. The wolves snapped at her heels and she screamed again, short bursts of sound between panicked breaths. Waves of hot-and-cold shuddering pain rippled from her shoulder to the tips of her toes. Acid bubbled into her mouth. Her feet kicked empty air as the crane lifted her.

Her weight, dragging down on the punctured shoulder, was unbearable, and she found herself blabbering incoherently, on the verge of passing out. She could feel her shoulder blade clicking against the steel hook, tendons beginning to tear under the strain. Any moment now, she thought, the hook would rip itself clean out of her.

But it didn’t. That alien substance in her blood was already clotting around the wound, setting like cement, sealing Reach’s grip, and she rose, the wolves baying under her. Her voice gave out before the crane reached the top of its arc.

Some hundred and fifty feet above the building site, the crane whirred to a halt and Beth jerked on the hook like a fish.

The Scaffwolves prowled over the building site, pawing and sniffing at its craters; diggers rumbled past on their caterpillar tracks as they moved busily to and fro. One lowered its metal jaws to a ridge of stone that looked almost exactly like the bridge of a nose.

And suddenly, Beth saw Reach.

From up here, the contours in the earthworks made sense in a new way. That crevice was the hollow of a cheek; this crack in the concrete, a parting of lips. A pitted ball of stone was an eye.

It was rough, not yet even half-finished, but it was definite. The King of Cranes had a face. Beth had run all the way across his forehead.

‘ I am Reach,’ his voice screeched in the gears of his machines. ‘ I will be.’

She gaped, numb with awe, as two diggers beetled towards one of the massive stone eyes. They lowered their drills and together ground a pupil-like hole in it. Then they altered position and began to dig again. Great chunks of rock flew in all directions in a cloud of dust and noise. The change was subtle but clear: the eye was now staring directly at Beth.

Beth sagged from her trapped shoulder. A fuzzy blanket of shock muffled her pain.

‘What are you?’ she whispered.

‘ I am Reach,’ Reach said, but Beth didn’t think it was in answer to her question.

‘Why-?’

‘ I will be.’ There was no malice on the Crane God’s hewn face, no hatred for her in its voice. Here was a girl wearing the aspect of his greatest enemy and carrying her son’s weapon, and yet there was no mistaking the expression on Reach’s face Curiosity

Childlike curiosity: like a toddler who’s found an interesting bug under the climbing frame. Even the way his features were only half-defined was reminiscent of baby-fat.

‘ I will be, I will be.’

Christ and Thames. The idea came to Beth through a fug of pain. He’s a child. Beth didn’t want to believe it, but the conviction settled in her gut and wouldn’t shift. He’s a young child, too, not yet fully born. The diggers and drills were still birthing him from the rock.

Fil had told her once: this is war, there are children everywhere. He hadn’t known how right he was.

‘ I will be.’

What if that was all Reach wanted — all he was sophisticated enough to want? He wasn’t a God; his wolves and their handlers weren’t his worshippers, they didn’t follow his orders. He wasn’t able to give orders. All he could say was I am Reach, and I will be.

The wolves must be part of him, Beth realised, like antibodies, eliminating threats to him.

A breeze caught Beth and she began to creak back and forth like some absurd pendulum weight on her cable. As the world spun slowly beneath her feet she noticed things peeking out from under the rubble: a severed leg of a statue; a twisted bar of iron that might once have been a streetlamp, the shattered glass scattered over the ground. She thought she saw fragments of a reflected face, once haughty, now screaming. She saw the price of Reach’s life.

‘He doesn’t know it,’ Pen had said, ‘but he’s killing everything.’

Reach was just a baby, trying to get born; he wasn’t capable of knowing or caring how many deaths that birth was causing.

A screech of steel broke Beth’s reverie. The Scaffwolves howled and wheeled around, bounding eagerly past. Frantically, she threw her weight from side to side, trying to see what they were chasing.

‘Beth!’ a familiar voice cried out, and her heart lurched.

‘Fil?’

‘What in the name of my mother’s iron underwear are you doing up there?’

A wolf snapped and then whined, and Beth smiled. Even unarmed, the Son of the Streets was formidable.

‘Beth! I’m comin’ up under you. I need my spear — drop my spear.’

Beth tried, but her fingers wouldn’t respond. All the muscles in her right side had gone into spasm, and she was gripping the spear as though it were a vital organ.

She glared at her hand. He’s down there tangling with three pony-sized metal wolves and I can’t even drop a railing? Unacceptably embarrassing. Let. Bloody. Go. Fighting her own muscles, she peeled back one finger, then another, then another until the spear was pointing downwards, clenched between finger and thumb.

A grey blur shot over the rubble below and into her field of vision: a dark streak across the plain.

‘Beth!’

Fil overshot and came up hard on the edge of the site. He kicked off the wall, launching himself back towards her.

Her index finger straightened and the spear fell.

The wolves snarled, racing towards it. The pavement-skinned boy ran, his hand outstretched for the weapon, intense concentration on his face. The wolves bounded closer, the rusty smell of their breath washing up over Beth.

Fil jumped for it, and a wolf snapped its jaws shut on empty air as he closed his concrete-grey fingers around the spear’s iron shaft.