The City's son

CHAPTER 7

The Thames Barrier breaches the water, glinting like the knuckles of a giant gauntlet. It’s a Saturday, and the industrial estates of North Greenwich are empty: little fenced-off wastelands. Gutterglass can manifest anywhere in London, but there are places where the spirit of rubbish is stronger, where it accretes in every brick and concrete pore.

I’m squatting in a car park, behind a car with two missing hubcaps and a cardboard for-sale sign in the window. Rats skitter past, but I ignore them. They’d get a message to Glas eventually, but I want it to travel faster than that.

I dig my hand into the ground. The soil crumbles between my fingers and tiny black ants teem over my palm. That’s better. I pull a small bottle from my pocket, yank the cork out with my teeth, and allow the fumes to waft over an insect’s antennae. It freezes for an instant, then vibrates ecstatically and races away over the back of my hand, down my leg and into the earth. You can’t beat a hive mind for speed of transmission.

Now I wait.

I think of the girl from last night, her broad, flat cheekbones and messy hair. We can take him, she said: we, even though I’d only met her five minutes before and I could have smelled the terror in her sweat through the Oxford Circus crush on a Saturday afternoon. What kind of person thinks like that? We.

Because I’m alone, because it’s a secret, I let myself smile at that.

Seagulls gyre overhead, cawing. As I watch, one of them drops out of its lazy circle and spirals fast towards the ground, flapping its wings rapidly to break its landing. The gull looks at me with one yellow eye. I can see a lump distending its throat. It jerks its head back and forth and gags.

With a slippery sound, a tangle of worms and woodlice spills from its beak onto the ground, spreading over the concrete. My little ant races away from the pack, its job done. It leaves a sticky trail of bird saliva behind it.

I watch as the bugs work, dragging empty foil tubes, crisp packets and chunks of plywood to the centre of the courtyard. Plastic bags are torn into strips by ferocious, gnashing weevils. Toes form first, and then legs and hips, and a higgledy-piggledy sculpture of rubbish rises uncertainly in front of me.

The eggshell eyes blink. They, and only they, are always the same. Glas is a woman this time, the rusting handlebars of a bike making up her hips, long strands of torn plastic her hair. The head of a worm wriggles unhappily at the end of one hand. I find an ice-lolly stick from the dirt near my feet and hand it to her. The worm coils itself around it and breaks it into knuckle-joints.

‘Thank you,’ she says. Her eggshell-gaze catalogues the burns and black blood-bruises on my chest. Yesterday she’d have tutted or cooed in sympathy, but a lot’s changed since then.

‘Nothing beyond your ability to heal,’ she notes with satisfaction. ‘The wraith’s dead, I take it?’

‘Earthed behind Waterloo,’ I confirm. ‘I got off light. I reckon the extra power was too much for her; it broke her after a few hours. She was confused, already bleeding out. It was a mercy at the end.’

‘That’s something then.’ A little thing. She sighs like she has to be grateful for the little things now. She hesitates, and then says, ‘My pigeons have seen wolf-shapes stalking the building sites. And the Pylon Spiders report feeling a power-surge through the grid at around midnight, night before last. Just when you said the wraith entered Reach’s domain.’

Sympathy edges into her voice. ‘I’m sorry, Filius, I really am, but Reach is gathering his strength. There’s no doubt any more: it is him.’

I feel like I’m trying to swallow a chunk of brick. I hadn’t realised until now just how much I’d been hoping Glas was wrong. ‘I don’t understand,’ I mutter. ‘Why now?’

She turns her head away. The breeze flaps the strands of her binbag hair against her face. ‘Filius,’ she says carefully, ‘there’s something else you need to know. There have been rumours — if Reach is preparing for war, it can only be because he’s been listening to them.’ She wets her lips with a tongue, made from an old sponge.

Unease creeps through me. ‘What rumours?’ I ask.

‘That soon the street-signs will rearrange themselves,’ she speaks very quietly, ‘and feral cats will walk with their tails high in procession through the streets.’

For a long moment I do nothing but stand there, feeling, and no doubt looking, heroically stupid.

‘She’s… she’s… coming back?’ I’m not even sure I said that aloud.

Glas looks at me. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, and I explode, all the tension in my chest multiplying as it unravels. I feel dizzy and scared and elated all at once.

‘ Why didn’t you tell me? ’ I shout at her.

Glas shrugs wretchedly. ‘There was nothing firm. I didn’t want to get your hopes up, and I didn’t-’ She hesitates. ‘I didn’t want you to be scared.’

‘Scared of what?’ I demand. ‘She’s my mother!’

‘She’s also a Goddess,’ Glas says, ‘and Goddesses are not kind.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘War’s coming, Filius. The King of The Cranes and the Lady of the Streets will not share the city. The gables and the gutters and manholes will bleed. Reach has been killing her kingdom, for years, tearing it up and enslaving it to whatever he’s building in St Paul’s, and you didn’t stop him. You’re her son, and you didn’t stop him. That Cathedral was her crown jewel, and you gave it up without a fight.’ Her tone is dreadfully gentle. She’s trying not to make it sound like it’s my fault.

‘I couldn’t have stopped it,’ I protest, bewildered and frightened now. ‘I was never strong enough-’

She shushes me, puts her arms around me. I can feel the warmth as her rubbish decays. ‘I understand,’ she whispers. ‘It was right to wait. It was safer. But if Reach is moving against us, we no longer have that luxury.’

My thoughts are reeling. Glas’ voice turns low, urgent. ‘You need to act, Filius. You’re right, I should have told you sooner. Reach has become strong — too strong — in your Mother’s absence. We need an army,’ she urges. ‘The Pavement Priests, the Mirrorstocracy: the old guard. We need to move, or by the time Mater Viae arrives, the Skyscraper Throne will be occupied, and not by you.’

But I’m barely listening. All I can think is she’s coming back she’s coming back she’s coming back -

‘You should have told me!’ I snap at Gutterglass. She tries to hold onto me, but I tear myself loose and run. I expect her to call after me but when I look back she is just watching me with that desolate gaze: Gutterglass: the spirit of the city’s abandoned, the nursemaid who cared for me in place of She’s coming back.

I watch the body of garbage crumble like ash and fall.