Our Lady of the Streets

by Tom Pollock

  Rats chittered, beetles buzzed and Gutterglass’ form sprouted a dozen more arms. She was armoured in wrecked car panels and scrap-metal, wielding blades of sheared-off girder.

  A small dark shape flitted from Beth’s hood. The air filled with an acrid scent and then Oscar ignited in a burst of heat so intense that Pen flinched away. Beth flung herself easily onto the Sewermander’s broad neck. A Scaffwolf loped up beside Pen and she dragged herself onto it.

  Ahead of them, the front rank of Masonry Men dived. The road swallowed them like water.

  Go, go! Pen urged the Mistress. Her wolf surged forwards, metal paws ringing, and behind it, its brethren followed. They made it five bounds before the road in front of them began to ripple; six before the Masonry Men struck.

  Dark grey figures burst from the ground a bare inch ahead, their fingers hooked. Pen felt their musty breath on her face and her own breath stalled, but the wire was ready. She was its host, its ally, its only refuge, and she could feel how determined it was to protect her. It whirled through the air, slicing down claylings like they were falling leaves. Her wolf snapped and snarled; its fangs punctured a grey torso. The creature’s scream was all but silent.

  The world was full of grasping limbs, concrete teeth and snapping wire. A hand clamped onto Pen’s arm and she was dragged sideways from her mount. A skeletal grey face gaped to bite her; she screamed, and unloaded a palm full of barbs into its open mouth. The head exploded and blood like hot liquid clay coated her face. Pain tore through her leg. Her head swam and she looked down to see a Masonry Man had his fingers up to the knuckle in her calf. Blood was soaking through her jeans. The thing clung on grimly, bouncing and jerking in time with the wolf’s bounds. She whipped the wire across its back and heard the crack as its spine snapped. It rolled away in the dust.

  Waves of pain from her leg dizzied her. She felt sick. ‘Tour—’ she gasped, then, ‘tourniquet.’

  The wire didn’t need to be told; it was already lashing around her calf, cinching in tightly enough to make Pen hiss with pain. Her toes tingled into numbness. She dragged herself back into the saddle and pressed her face to the cold steel of the wolf’s neck. The wire was a blizzard of metal above her, shielding her. Her lungs burned, her eyes were wide and the rushing air chilled their moist surface. Between the struts she spied Gutterglass, keeping pace on a constantly renewing conveyor belt of wriggling rats. Her trash arms windmilled and blurred, chopping at the grey bodies constantly springing at her.

  Something flickered at the edge of her vision and a Pavement Priest appeared, his punishment skin stained with dark brown blood. His widespread arms took two Masonry Men around the waist and Pen heard the snapping of their bones as he crushed them. He stopped and dropped their bodies. Through a gash in his stone armour, Pen could see his chest heaving as he fought for breath. He sucked down two more lungfuls before clay hands ripped through the floor and dragged him under.

  Don’t stop, Pen thought, terrified, her nostrils full of her own blood, whatever you do, don’t stop.

  A wave of heat passed overhead: Beth swooped low into the mêlée in front of her, Oscar’s wings spread wide in a wall of blue fire. In her wake she left blackened corpses, posed like statues.

  An instant later Pen and the rest of the Scaffpack bounded through them, and they exploded into hot ash that blinded her and seared her skin. She choked and spat, trying to get it out of her mouth.

  The labyrinth gave way around them and they burst out into Canada Square. Above the clatter of metal paws, Pen heard human screams and the roar of falling water. Oscar craned his burning head and shot upwards, Beth hunched forwards on his back, and Pen clawed ash from her eyes, peering after them. In the middle of the sky, four hazy, fiery shapes were beating their wings to intercept. Pen’s heart shrank to a pinpoint in her chest, but she snarled at herself to focus.

  Beth has to look after Beth.

  Her wolf slowed under her: clay hands were clamped onto its steel struts. Grey bodies were using it to pull themselves out of the surface of the road. The other wolves were slowing too. They whirled and snapped, their progress halted, hemmed in by a sea of hands. Pen felt the boom of a shockwave, gaunt figures fell like cornstalks and she knew that somewhere one of the Lampies was still breathing – but still more claylings surged up from the ground between the corpses of their fallen comrades. There was no end to them.

  Pen’s stomach lurched sickeningly: her wolf was sinking. It howled its metal howl and snapped and struggled, but its legs were trapped in strong grey hands and the asphalt was seeping up its limbs like quick-mud.

  Pen shoved herself from the wolf’s back and hit the concrete hard. Wires hissed and struck like snakes as the Mistress shielded her. Her wolf was torso-deep in the ground. It bent its steel head back and bayed. Pen lashed wires to it and strained, desperately trying to pull it free, but it was stuck fast. Clayling arms grabbed its neck and twisted with obscene strength. Its howl cut off. Pen laid desperately about herself with the wire. Grey bodies filled her view from edge to edge.

  ‘Pen!’ Beth’s voice echoed down, loud as a collapsing building. ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘Like’ – she gasped for breath – ‘like a rotten apple in a maggot farm!’

  She had no idea how Beth heard her over the noise, but the answer came back sharp. ‘Then I think it’s time, don’t you?’

  Pen bent her head, and a single wire leapt straight upwards from the back of her neck. It unwound fast, fifty, a hundred feet into the air, straight as an antenna. From the edge of the labyrinth, a dark line split the air as a second wire whipped in to meet it.

  Pen shuddered as the two strands touched. The Wire Mistress’ consciousness rippled through her body like an electric shock and then shot outwards. She raced with it, down the metal, leaping from wire to wire, across walls and fences and under foundations: all in a fraction of an eye-blink: a vast steel synapse firing.

  In her mind’s eye, she saw cranes rearing over building sites in the outskirts of the city like the skeletons of extinct giants. She felt the wire stretch for them, eager with news, and felt their battle cry, just as eager, humming back down the metal strand into her heart:

  I will be.

  I will be.

  I WILL BE!

  On a distant battlefield, the Crane King tore joyously into his work, and Pen was the first to know.

  The first, but not by much.

  Four seconds later, on Her throne on the top of Canada Tower, Mater Viae screamed.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  It was a scream of shearing steel and tumbling brick, of steam searing through pipes and trains crashing into viaduct walls. It was a scream of the grief of a city, pouring from the roof of Canada Tower and filling the sky like smoke, and it all but threw Beth from Oscar’s back.

  She clung on grimly, winding her fingers into the rope-like currents of flowing gas in his neck. The wind shoved her hoodie into her mouth and she spat it out. Under and around her, Oscar’s fire guttered as Mater Viae’s Sewermanders hovered around him, hemming him in and flexing flame-etched claws as they strained to strip the methane from his back. ‘Come on, buddy,’ she whispered desperately to him. ‘Come on, buddy, you got this.’

  But he didn’t have it. He flapped his wings like a moth in a hurricane, but the other gas-drakes were too powerful and he couldn’t escape. His wings were losing coherence, streaming away from him in traceries of blue flame, and he reared back, crackling and whispering in panic.

  Beth stretched down through the fire and brushed his muddy-coloured back. Trust me, she sent the thought to him. Now.

  Oscar went out.

  They fell together, end over end, graceless as wounded birds, and past her flailing limbs Beth glimpsed the four other Sewermanders blundering into each other as the force that held them apart vanished. They baffled each other with their wings, tangled each other in their thermals. Beth spun in midair. Roaring filled her ears, blotting out even Mater Viae’s shrieking. Osc
ar whipped his little brown tail in a frantic helix. A sour smell stung Beth’s nostrils, but it was too late. She squeezed her eyes shut as the asphalt stormed up.

  With a booming roar, blue flame ignited under her, scorching her clothes, but washing harmlessly over her tiled skin. Oscar swooped, skimming the earth and incinerating the weeds that peeped through the concrete.

  She clenched a fist in jubilation. Attaboy.

  She looked back over her shoulder. The gas dragons had already disentangled themselves and were beating their wings, hot in pursuit.

  Fine, she thought. As long as they were on her, they weren’t on Pen.

  Faster now, Ozzie – come on.

  They looped and slalomed around the hulks of ruined buildings. Another look back showed her two of the drakes were tracking them, chasing the burnt air they’d left in their wake, but the other two …

  Beth’s stomach plunged. The other two had banked off.

  Up, she urged Oscar, up. I need to see.

  He bent his neck and climbed, careless of the closing angle between him and his pursuers. The shattered city fell away before them. Beth clung to his neck with her hands and knees, desperately scanning the ground for the wire-wrapped girl.

  There! A whirling cloud of glinting steel, tiny in the distance. The grey figures teeming around her couldn’t get close, and …

  Beth stared. They were bugging out.

  Whorls like fingerprints marked the street where the claylings dived into it. Not all of them – Pen and the Scaffwolves bounding around her still had their hands full – but a lot. In the sky above them, two blue shapes were beating their wings frantically, disappearing to the north.

  She’s dividing Her forces, Beth thought. They won’t get there in time – they won’t. They can’t … It was more hope than certainty. Reach had a few minutes at best; it would have to be enough.

  A Sewermander scorched through the sky almost on top of them and Oscar wrenched himself into a spiral. Beth shot out an arm as the rival drake overshot and her outstretched fingers just tickled scaly skin.

  In that instant she felt the little lizard’s mind, muddied with methane and velocity and the hunt-and-kill instincts Mater Viae had instilled in it. She had less than half a second.

  Go! She shoved the thought at it – and then it was past her and her fingers were smoking and trailing in empty air. The Sewermander beat its wings and surged onwards. She looked after it as it dwindled into the distance. It didn’t try to turn.

  One left.

  She let Oscar bank and turn under her again as Canada Tower loomed into view, bright against the dark red clouds. The final Sewermander swooped down into their line of sight, burning jaws stretched wide, claws spread, heading right for them.

  Oscar, Beth thought nervously, you might want to turn … You might …

  Oscar smashed straight into the middle of his rival. Beth felt its fire blossom around her – an instant’s furious heat – and then it went out. A dark shape that might have been a lizard shot out of view below them. Oscar crowed victoriously and Beth grinned wildly, even while she tried to beat out the flames guttering in her hoodie.

  Aren’t you the little badass?

  He cackled in his quiet fire-crackle voice in response.

  Movement snagged her eye: a figure in a bright green T-shirt was racing through the mêlée, dodging wolf and clayling alike. He made it less than a hundred yards before he fell – but no one had hit him. He was clutching at one bare foot. Beth traced his path backwards: bloody footprints led from a building on the east side of the square; broken glass was scattered in constellations on the asphalt outside it. She remembered her dad and the cut on his forehead that wouldn’t close.

  Beth hunkered down, hanging on to Oscar’s neck, and flames guttered past her face as she urged him down. The building rushed up to meet them, and she saw shocked, pale faces through its broken windows: thousands of them. Beth glanced over her shoulder. The tower on the far side of the square looked empty.

  Been busy, haven’t you, Your Ladyship? she thought grimly.

  Ten feet from the pavement she yanked Oscar back and he beat his wings furiously; the backdraught sent the shattered glass skittering and tinkling away up the street.

  ‘Run!’ she yelled, but they just gaped at her, smudgy and hollow-eyed, in the shadows of the building. ‘There’s a path: now get out!’

  The boy who moved first couldn’t have been older than eight. He wore a Yankees cap on its smallest setting with his afro sticking out underneath it. He scrambled out through the doorway, dancing his naked toes into the spots between the remaining shards of glass, and then bolted headlong round the corner. A second later, everyone was surging for the exit; they boiled out of the gap frantically, eyeing the carnage in front of them with panicked eyes. One girl stumbled in the rush and fell, her hands jerked out instinctively to catch herself—

  ‘Don’t—’ Beth started, but it was too late. Both the girl’s hands grazed harshly over the concrete, and when she held them up they were shining, red with blood.

  She scrambled to her feet, all the while gaping at her hands in horror. She knows, Beth realised with sickening certainty. They all knew – that was what had kept them quiescent in the dark. Beth slid off Oscar’s back and all but collapsed. Her legs were jelly, but she stumbled forward, leaning heavily on her spear. She tore strips off the sleeve of her hoodie with her church-spire teeth, and the girl didn’t resist when Beth took her hands and bound tight tourniquets around each wrist.

  ‘That should slow it …’ she murmured.

  The girl was pale and trembling. Her lips moved like she was trying to speak, but she never made a noise; she just stared at Beth.

  ‘I … I can … I can try to—’ Beth’s city-voice died away. She tried again. ‘I can … We could—’

  Once again her voice failed her. She blinked and shook her head. She had nothing left. The girl looked baffled. She tottered away, her treacherous hands held out in front of her like they were poisonous.

  ‘Greetingssss, thief.’

  The voice was heavy with sibilants. It sounded close in her ear. Beth felt a weight settle into her stomach as she turned.

  Canada Square was chaos, a flickering storm of steel-pipe jaws and dripping grey limbs, backed by the constant torrent of Estuary water down Canada Tower. Through the tempest, as calmly as if they were out for a Sunday afternoon stroll, walked five oil-soaked men.

  Iron rang off concrete. Beth barely had time to hear the low metallic growl before the Scaffwolf raced out of the mêlée, jaws bared.

  Johnny Naphtha didn’t break step. A slick of crude oil flooded out from under his feet, like they were bleeding it. It spread in a wide puddle, right into the path of the wolf.

  The Scaffwolf sank through the oil without a sound, barely disturbing the surface, but Johnny walked over the slick like it was solid ground, his grin still in place, his brothers flanking him. They paused at the pavement, their oil slick lapping the kerb. They straightened their ties and cricked their necks, moving as one.

  Oscar circled and roared at them; as one they looked up. There were five synchronised snaps as each popped the cap of a Zippo lighter.

  ‘Pleassse,’ Johnny Naphtha said dismissively.

  The Chemical Synod lowered their gaze back to Beth and, despite herself, she fell back a step. She clung to her spear; it was all that was keeping her upright.

  ‘We mussst have wordssss, little Goddesss, about your lack of ressspect for property rightsss.’ Johnny’s voice never rose above a courteous hiss, but Beth heard it over the fracas like he was whispering right in her ear.

  ‘What …?’ Beth started, but Fil’s voice rang in her mind, clear and cold.

  He means me.

  ‘If there isss one thing above all othersss,’ Johnny said, ‘that we mussst not tolerate, it iss larssceny.’

  They stepped up onto the pavement, their oil slick flooding out before them, slow but inexorable. Beth backed away from it,
terror pulling at her heart. She didn’t know where she’d go if she fell through the shiny black surface, but she knew in her gut she’d never see the light again. Desperately, she opened her pores to the pavement, trying to summon something to fight them with, but the fever that bolted back up through the soles of her feet made her gag and she collapsed onto her knees, coughing. The oil swept around her in a circle, but it didn’t touch her.

  The synod advanced, hemming her in against the side of the building.

  ‘Now, Misssss Bradley …’ Johnny said as they craned forward.

  ‘BETH!’

  The shout was so loud and so anguished that even the synod looked around. Beth struggled to see between their glistening black forms.

  Pen was running towards them across the square, her face set in a grimace, blood running down it where the barbs bit. Wires slashed threateningly from her back. Two steps brought her to the edge of the oil slick; wire limbs planted themselves in the asphalt, coiled, ready to spring—

  —and then went out from under her. Pen crumpled to her knees on the road. Her eyes wide in shock, she pressed her palms to her temples.

  ‘I couldn’t …’ Beth was reading her lips more than hearing her. ‘I couldn’t hold him … He’s—’

  Fil’s voice sounded loud in her head. He’s coming.

  Engines growled; metal clanked on metal. Beth turned, and the Chemical Synod turned, and from the top of her skyscraper waterfall, Beth knew the Lady of the Streets was looking as well.

  In the ruin at the edge of the labyrinth, the rubble was starting to move. Jagged slabs of concrete reared up on end, and then toppled over with a sound like the world collapsing. From beneath, slender, metal-strutted limbs reached up.

  Beth gaped at the cranes as they unfolded as elegantly as mantis-legs against the sky. The wolves yipped and bounded towards their master. The wire coiled and snapped over Pen’s form. Mater Viae’s concrete-skinned soldiers just stood and stared.