The City's son

CHAPTER 55

Gutterglass swept the pathways between the rubbish dunes with her stiff-bristle broom, whistling as she went. Her mopstring hair was tied back and her binbag skirts blew in the breeze. She considered it a criminal waste of time to leave spring-cleaning until spring.

The dump was beautiful on clear winter mornings like this. Its scrap-metal peaks shone in the still-rising sun and chunks of broken glass twinkled like embedded jewels. The fragrance of rotblossom and forget-me-all-too-soon lingered headily in her nostrils. Somewhere in the distance garbage trucks groaned as they spilled further trash tributes, adding to the foundations of Gutterglass’ city.

A silhouette high on a ridge caught her eye, a scrawny figure with an iron railing over one shoulder. The pose was so familiar that Glas faltered, the tangled worms in her heart missing a beat.

Then she smiled. ‘I was hoping you’d come,’ she called.

The figure didn’t answer, but it drew back its free hand and threw. A dark speck drifted through the air. Glas stretched out her hand and the thing came to rest, docile as a pigeon, in her palm: an aeroplane, folded carefully from a photocopied sheet of newspaper.

As the skinny figure stalked down the hill towards her, Gutterglass unfolded the page and began to read.

‘The boy who thought his name was Filius Viae,’ Beth said quietly, ‘was no child of a Goddess.’ She was approaching Gutterglass carefully, a hunter’s walk.

The rubbish-sculpted woman gave no sign that she’d heard.

‘When you know that, you have to ask: who in all London would want to convince him that he was?’ She advanced until the spear was a moth’s-wing’s thickness from Gutterglass’ cardboard throat. Her voice was a dead monotone. ‘Maybe the same person who’d want to plant a rumour that that Goddess was coming back? Maybe someone who’d been on the scrapheap ever since her mistress toddled off, but who now was getting listened to again? Someone who was back in charge? Tell me, Glas, is it nice to be grand again?’

Gutterglass studied the article. Eventually the broken eggshells looked up. ‘Michael was his name, was it?’ she said. ‘Hmm. I never knew that.’ She knocked the spear aside with a deft flick of her broom handle. ‘Enough of the drama, Miss Bradley,’ she said briskly. She extended a hand in invitation. ‘Walk with me?’

Beth didn’t take her hand, but she turned anyway and began to hike up the side of the nearby hill. A miniature landslide of broken doorknobs, busted cassettes and rotting banana skins skidded under her feet. ‘There’s something I want you to see.’

For a moment Beth felt an almost overwhelming urge to run up behind her and plunge the spear in between her milk-carton shoulder blades — but that wasn’t what she was there for. Killing the liar won’t kill the lie. Swearing softly, aware that she’d lost the initiative, she followed. She’d have to wait for her chance.

The landfill hospital had yet to discharge its last few patients. Lampie heartbeats glimmered from caves in the rubbish. Rats scurried to and fro with hypodermic needles in their mouths. In front of a full-length mirror, a cloud of flying beetles moved a scalpel with extreme precision. On the other side of the glass a tough-looking girl watched an incision climb up her abdomen.

‘Let me tell you something about Mater Viae,’ Gutterglass said. ‘She didn’t deserve a priesthood like the stoneskins, or a servant like me, or a son like Filius. She was a coward.’ Her words were steeped in hurt, hurt that had fermented into rage. She knelt beside a shivering Pavement Priest, bashed a hole in his punishment skin with a chisel and poured in some analgesic fluid. ‘Rest softly,’ she murmured, her throat humming with the buzz of flies. ‘Rest well. And may the Lady soon grant you your death.’

The young priest calmed visibly at Glas’ words and as they moved on, Beth thought she could hear him start to snore.

‘His death?’ Beth hissed furiously. ‘How can you keep promising them that? Mater Viae has their deaths, and no one knows when she’s coming back!’

Gutterglass raised a pipe-cleaner eyebrow. ‘ I know when,’ she said, ‘and so should you — come, Miss Bradley, did you never ask yourself the obvious question? All those deaths of all those Pavement Priests, all those fragile, precious mortalities, paid to the synod: they were a commodity. Did you never ask yourself what Mater Viae bought with them?’

Beth’s eyes narrowed. She shook her head.

‘She bought her own.’

Beth blinked. It took a moment for the meaning to sink in. ‘ Suicide? ’ she whispered. ‘Why?’

‘You know why,’ Gutterglass said soberly. ‘You saw what Reach was.’

The pudgy, baby face looking curiously out of the rubble swam into Beth’s mind, and with it she heard Fil’s voice. Generation after generation… my mother always took care of Reach.

‘She killed him,’ she murmured, ‘again and again — for hundreds of years: burning the same innocent, the same child.’ Beth was staggered, appalled.

‘ Her child,’ Gutterglass snorted. ‘He was born of the city, after all.’

‘ Thames — God — I can’t imagine- No wonder she couldn’t take it-’

Gutterglass’ retort was as harsh a slap. ‘She was a Goddess. It was her duty to take it!’ Anger shook her control and liberated insects swarmed madly over her paper face.

‘She didn’t die straight away. It took the synod more than three-quarters of a millennium to brew the draught, to blend the petty perishings of mortals into a death strong enough to claim a Goddess. And all that time she lied, blithely.’ Gutterglass spat. ‘When the first generation were reborn into stone she called it punishment. She said they owed her.’

Gutterglass tilted up her chin, and her voice took on a proud calm. ‘And then, one clear winter’s morning like this one, she was gone. And when the Demolition Fields started erupting in the city again, growing like tumours, it fell to me to give London something to believe in.’

‘Fil,’ Beth said.

‘He was the first child young enough my rats could find. They carried him on their backs through a carelessly open window. But it was when I drew him out of the synod’s pool that Filius Viae was truly born.’ She smiled at the memory.

‘Mater Viae’s substance was still in there, the synod’s fee for their intervention, enough to give a child a shimmer of her aspect.’

The eggshells took in Beth’s granite-grey skin. ‘Enough to give it to more than one, it appears,’ she said, and her smile grew wider.

Beth went to speak, but Gutterglass put a ballpoint-finger to her lips. ‘Hush now. This is what I wanted you to see.’ They were approaching a low alcove, rusting railway sleepers supporting a corrugated tin-roof. Beth ducked her head and peered inside.

Two glass bodies lay tangled in the sleepy embrace of post-coital lovers. One glowed a sooty orange, the other a pure white. Their light mixed and washed over the crushed cans and old springs in the wall. Beth thought she recognised the Sodiumite whose life Gutterglass had saved.

‘See what a little faith can do?’ Gutterglass whispered. ‘They’ve been taught from birth to hate one another on sight, and yet here they are. They fought side by side for their Goddess, and now they lie side by side for themselves. Who knows, we might even have a glitter-litter of tiny bulbs soon.’ A broad smile conquered her features; all the anger seemed forgotten. She motioned to Beth to come away.

Together they crested the top of another ridge and stood on a discarded sofa. London lay below them, an ocean of rooftops glowing in the sunrise.

Beth stared out over the city, suspecting and dreading what Gutterglass was about to ask.

‘They’ll need someone to believe in when they wake, someone who can finish what Filius began,’ Gutterglass said. ‘They’ll need a story to understand and accept. So will the priests and the Masonry Men, even the Mirrorfolk.’ Her voice cracked a little. ‘Even me,’ she said.

She turned and looked at Beth. ‘ Be that something, Beth. You bear the aspect, you carry the spear. It was you who brought the Great Fire down on the Crane King. Please- ’ There was a keening hunger in the rubbish-spirit’s face. ‘Give us a Goddess we deserve.’

Beth held the eggshell gaze. She saw Glas’ sincerity, heard the hope, weak but still audible, in her voice, like a lost child who never stops believing that her mother will come get her.

Beth gritted her teeth. Sympathy flared hot as a match and died just as fast in her chest. ‘You’re wrong,’ she said, ‘it wasn’t the Lady of the Streets they fought for, it was the streets themselves. These people don’t want a God no more.’

Gutterglass began to protest, stuttering and spitting rubbish juice, but Beth raised a hand to silence her. ‘You know, something’s been bugging me. Why, after fifteen years of ignoring him, would Reach suddenly attack Fil — and why use a Railwraith to do it? After all, he had a whole wolfpack at the tip of his cranes.’

She gazed at Gutterglass with utter loathing. ‘Then I realised: it was all you. It was your rats that got into the grid’s cables. You couldn’t control a Scaffwolf so you used a wraith and laid the blame oh-so-carefully at the front door of St Paul’s. Reach wouldn’t take any interest in Fil, not unless he was a threat, so you made him one.’

Beth’s lip curled. She thought of what he had told her the first night they met: Something that big and angry comes at you, your first instinct’s to stick it with something sharp. Gutterglass had known her ward well.

‘You manipulated everyone I cared about. That lie your Goddess told? You told it again, and again, and you kept telling it, letting the hurt sink in.’ The words tasted bitter in her mouth. ‘The lie’s over, Glas. People need to hear the truth.’

She turned and began to stump down the landfill towards the city. A hand made of ballpoint pens clamped onto her shoulder.

‘You really think they’ll believe you?’ Gutterglass hissed. ‘You spread this pathetic excuse for a myth and I’ll bury you. I’ll make you a changeling: the girl who killed their God. The very streets you walk on will hunt you.’

Beth seized Gutterglass’ wrist and ripped the hand off her shoulder. She squeezed, and felt the bugs flee in panic under her fingers. She bent it back slowly, turning around. She stared into those shells, and saw the hope was gone. Only blank white hatred remained.

‘I’m not going to tell ’em,’ Beth said. ‘You are.’ She pulled her hoodie to one side to reveal the tiny spider, glittering like fibreglass in the hollow of her throat. ‘In fact, you already did.’

Gutterglass uttered a strangled cry and swiped at the tiny creature, but in a flicker of light and static it was gone, its message replicating and copying at the speed of radio waves. Gutterglass’ voice, the voice that had for so long spoken falsely for London’s Goddess, would utter its confession on every street corner. Beth felt a tiny surge of triumph. Her city would know the truth tonight.

‘Come back!’ Gutterglass called after it. ‘Come back, please! I’ll pay!’ But it was pointless. Beth and the spider already had a deal.

For a long moment Gutterglass just stood there, her paper face smooth with shock, then she exhaled. She began to pat herself, searching for something. She popped a cigarette between her lips, but couldn’t find any matches. She looked utterly lost.

Moved by a strange pity, Beth picked a half-empty plastic lighter from amidst the rubbish and lit Gutterglass’ Lucky Strike. She turned to go, but then paused. ‘What was their price for you, Glas?’ she asked quietly. ‘When you made Fil what he was? What did the synod make you pay?’

She looked over her shoulder at the decaying woman.

‘What did you use to be?’

Through the smoke that twisted between them, Beth saw the sour-milk tears stain the paper face. And below them a smile that remembered happier times.

‘Beautiful,’ Gutterglass said.