Our Lady of the Streets

by Tom Pollock

  She blinked her one good eye. Tears and blue skies filled her vision again. She bared her church-spire teeth and scrabbled at Mater Viae’s guts, trying to retaliate in kind, to concentrate on them, to change them. She didn’t even care what to.

  Mater Viae slapped her hand out of the way. ‘Godhood is power,’ She said contemptuously. ‘And you are a fake.’

  She grabbed Beth’s hoodie in both fists and tore it. Beth kicked and flailed, but nothing could move the iron weight of the Goddess’ knee in her guts.

  A burning-hot palm and five splayed fingers pressed themselves to her stomach and Beth gritted her teeth and hissed as Mater Viae’s power rippled through her again. Her abdominal muscles spasmed and she lurched up, vomiting oil. Everything seen through her one clear eye was close up and flat. Before she fell back, she glimpsed a handprint on her stomach the exact shape of Mater Viae’s splayed fingers. There the architecture skin was blackened and ridged like a burn scar. There were no lights in the windows, no cars on the roads. It was dead.

  Mater Viae laid Her hand on a neighbouring patch of skin. She was precise; Her fingers were tight against the edge of the wound She’d just made. Beth twisted and bucked and spat and made no difference as the skin there changed too.

  Mater Viae was killing her from the skin inwards. The Goddess’ face was set with a surgeon’s grim concentration. Her accusatory voice echoed in Beth’s head: ‘Fake.’ With a dizzy horror, Beth understood why. In Mater Viae’s eyes, her city-skin was a mockery, a lie, and She was venting Her fury on it.

  Streets stretched like lifelines on Mater Viae’s palm as She laid it over Beth’s belly button, and she felt the energy humming into her skin as her enemy imposed Her will.

  Pain flared, savage and electric: bone-deep, vein-deep, sub-basement deep. Beth could feel the voltage the Street Goddess had pumped into her body like knives. She panicked. She scraped up power from the joints of her knuckles and her toes, from the train-tracks in the whorls of her fingerprints and the air pressure inside her brick-cellar sinuses and anywhere she could find a spare scrap of energy. She channelled it instinctively, flexing a thousand tiny internal muscles, and hurled it at Mater Viae’s palm where it touched her.

  Beth jolted hard as the two forces met in her flesh. Mater Viae’s energy broke in her like an electric shock and zigzagged, diverted from its purpose, racing through her streets and diffusing out into the ground beneath her.

  Her head slammed back into the shale.

  The storm whipped between the towers. Beth was sprawled face-down, the gravel grazing the soft skin below her eye socket. Rain hammered the back of her head. Fil lay next to her. She tried to look up. The world came slowly into focus, but there was an after-image burned on her retinas: an image of jibs and chains and metal arms. She blinked it clear and was left staring at a motionless horizon. The five cranes that had dominated the skyline of her dream for the past three days were gone.

  Something invisible pushed down hard on her throat.

  Her fingers flew to it, but couldn’t get purchase …

  She opened her eye. Mater Viae had her pinned to the ground by her neck. Beth thrashed and gurgled and blinked her intact eye, frantically trying to clear it as it watered. Her struggling shifted her half an inch to the left and for the first time she could see past Mater Viae’s shoulder. She stopped suddenly, going limp and staring in incomprehension.

  Five cranes loomed in silhouette against the dazzlingly blue sky. They were exactly as she’d dreamed them.

  They were the ones she’d imagined, she was sure of it.

  How? What had just happened? A millisecond earlier those cranes had been in her dreams – now they were out here in the real, broken, world.

  Godhood is power, she thought, and you are a fake.

  The idea that hit her then both appalled and elated her, a crazy hope born of pain and panic. She thought of all the times she’d tried to change the city, all the Masonry Men she’d tried and failed to raise that had afterwards lurked in the alleyways of her dreams. She’d made the shapes in her mind, but she hadn’t had the power to make them real. She remembered Gutterglass’ concerned face looking down at her in the Selfridges kitchen: Pulling the claylings out of your mind requires considerable energy …

  Sick as Beth was, she hadn’t been able to summon that energy for months – but Mater Viae had.

  Beth. The memory of Pen’s voice filled her head. You are home.

  Mater Viae leaned over her, Her eyes burning with mad intent. Slate-scaled fingers covered Beth’s mouth and nose; she could taste the sweat on the Goddess’ hand.

  Beth’s face tingled for a moment, and then the pain came; and the power flooded with it. Beth felt her teeth soften even as she clenched them. She had to time this right. Her jaw hung sideways as the nerves died. Her skull fizzed with the urban energy Mater Viae was pouring into her.

  Now! she thought. She scraped up the scraps of that energy and concentrated frantically on the idea of a Masonry Man.

  Nothing happened.

  The pain was too great. She couldn’t focus. The shape and feel of the clayling’s body slipped away from her. She ransacked her thoughts, but she couldn’t find it again. There were too many streets, too many doorways in her mind to look behind. Her lips were dying; the nerves in her teeth and the back of her throat were dying. There was spit in her throat, but she couldn’t swallow.

  She couldn’t hold on to her carefully balled-up energy; it was burning a hole in her. She had to use it or let it go. She could feel her concentration slipping. Random images flashed through her mind: her parents’ faces, old adverts that had stuck with her, pictures she’d painted. The last image was a flamenco dancer, sprayed against a concrete wall, then consciousness slid away.

  The hurricane raged over the rooftops. Beth was pressed flat to the gravel. She felt like the wind would rip the skin off her. Above her, the cloud-city was a horribly detailed ruin: broken metropolis, broken body. That intention was in every raindrop that fell from the sky. The air was charged with it; it prickled in her pores, conducted through her sweat.

  The density of the air changed: a second wind was building. It poured out of manhole covers and windows and doorways and out of the pores in the bricks themselves, Beth could smell diesel on it, and hear the crackle of spiders’ voices. It was hers and it rose up off the surface of the city like it was an ocean, and it howled a challenge to the storm.

  The cloud-city eddied and the wounds in it lost definition, lost focus. Air-flows sheared at one another like continents, edged in heat and friction.

  Lightning lit up the city, not leaping down from the clouds but up from the streets themselves. The bolt struck a tower block with a woman in Spanish flamenco skirts graffiti’d a hundred feet up on the side.

  The shape of the tower and the shape of the woman burned white on Beth’s retinas for a moment, then she blinked and they were gone. Nothing remained, not even dust.

  That could be it, Beth thought frantically. That could be it. I have to wake up. I have to see. She slammed her head back into the gravel and pain flashed through her scalp. Panic clawed its way up her throat, but she remained, stubbornly anchored to her dream. She slammed her head down again, and again, focusing on the pain, and she yelled aloud into the storm, ‘I have to wake up.’

  ‘I have to wake—!’

  ‘—up—!’

  Beach and riverbed and burned factory blurred in front of her. Her chest was washed cold by Estuary waters. Mater Viae was snarling over her, Her palm grinding Beth’s lips into her nerveless teeth. Beth thrashed, desperate to move her head just a fraction of an inch, desperate to see, but Mater Viae’s grip was like an iron nail, pinning her to the dirt. She rolled her one good eye and peered out of the corner of it.

  The last of her breath stalled in her lungs. Her vision was so blurry that she didn’t know if she was seeing it because it was really there or because she really wanted it there.

  Across the river, where momen
ts before there had only been the ash of the synod’s factory, a familiar tower block rose against the brilliant blue sky. A woman in flamenco skirts was picked out on the side of it in aerosol paints, a hundred feet high.

  Beth, you are home. The thought circled deliriously inside her head. She was a city: she was streets and houses and sewers and Railwraiths and water and shelter. She was home.

  All she’d lacked, just as she’d lacked with the stillborn Masonry Men, was the power to make that real.

  Mater Viae slammed an elbow into Beth’s ribs again; she tried to double up, but the knee in her guts held her down. The Goddess’ expression was frantic with rage. Her eyes were unfocused; all concentration had gone from Her face. She started slapping and punching at Beth indiscriminately, determined just to rend and destroy, tearing at her with Her power like an angry wolf.

  Beth closed her eye and let herself drift into the pain.

  … Jags of lightning tore down to the pavement. The storm cloud above was a shapeless grey-black muddle, but still it poured its energy into the city below it. A lightning bolt yawed crazily and slammed into a row of houses, and the whole terrace exploded into nothingness. The wind screamed, its force like a boulder pressing Beth down onto the roof. The dirty gale that rose off the city hammered against it. Electricity crackled between the two air-currents and another lightning bolt arced. Beth felt it light up her agonized grin, even as another skyscraper vanished beneath it. Fil lay spreadeagled, unable to rise, his fingers stretched towards hers.

  ‘Beth!’ he hollered. ‘What are you doing?’

  Beth hissed her reply through gritted teeth because she could feel the pain of her city around her. ‘Un-giving up.’

  *

  Mater Viae’s face twisted with effort. She kept moving Her hands, trying to get a better grip, but Beth’s skin, Beth’s whole body …

  She could feel it receding like burning paper as the energy consumed her.

  New shadows fell across the river shore, as though from towers that hadn’t been there seconds before.

  Beth couldn’t move her neck; it hurt like she imagined electrocution must hurt, with a burning, spasming loss of control. She couldn’t feel her hands. Her spine jumped and smacked into the floor. Her jaw clenched, and her teeth should have scraped together but the bottom row was missing; she probed the space where they should have been with her tongue. On the horizon, a clutch of new church spires reared up over London’s shattered landscape, the brick and metalwork surging out of the ground as though the earth was liquid.

  Mater Viae’s lips peeled back in a snarl; She twisted, grinding Her palm down into Beth’s mouth again.

  Beth felt the energy ripple through her skull. Come on, she thought, desperately, giddily, come on. She raised her right hand in front of her face. All but two of the fingers were missing.

  Her pulse hammered through her head like an express train. The stub of her tongue wagged in her mouth. Darkness encroached her vision, but she fought to stay conscious. She was weakening …

  Come on …

  Mater Viae howled in frustration and shoved at Beth with outstretched hands, like a child pounding on a locked door. Even in its petulance, Her rage was terrifying. She drew herself up, impossibly tall above Beth. Her body tensed, and Beth tensed with it.

  Come on …

  Mater Viae’s green eyes went suddenly black, the power surging into Beth swelled like a tide and Beth gave way before it.

  She didn’t even try to focus the power any more. She couldn’t – there was just too much. All she could do was will it to read the shape of her streets at it raced through them. Her thoughts were splintering under the pain.

  Leaning over her, Mater Viae overbalanced, as if wrong-footed by the loss of resistance. Her power raged uncontrollably through Beth’s streets and cellars and hallways, and Beth felt them dissolve under its force. She was disintegrating, her sewer-capillaries burning out like fuses. Her right shoulder blade vanished and her arm sagged suddenly and agonisingly at her side. More tower-block shadows fell across the riverbank.

  You are home. She muttered it to herself inside her head in the broken moments where she could form a coherent thought. Maybe she was dying; maybe she was being born – she couldn’t tell and she didn’t care. You are home.

  Above her, the fury on the Goddess’ face ebbed to panic. Mater Viae’s hand trembled and Beth felt Her trying to pull away. Beth clamped the stumps of her wrists over it, holding it down. Mater Viae struggled, but She no longer had the strength left to break Beth’s fingerless grip.

  Two words surfaced through the storm in Beth’s mind: She over-commits.

  The Goddess’ free hand shook as She planted it on the earth beside Beth’s head, desperately trying to summon power from the city to replace what she’d lost.

  Now, Beth thought.

  With a snarl in what was left of her throat, Beth opened herself up fully to the street. The poisoned urban energy slammed into her through her spine, her shoulders, her hips. She sucked it up greedily and it ripped through her, overwhelming her urbosynthetic cells: too much to take, too much to control, too much to survive, but Beth was dying anyway. She didn’t want to live, she wanted to win.

  Mater Viae’s hand pattered desperately over the ground, but She was coming up empty; Beth had drained this district dry. Dim green sparks flickered in the Goddess’ eyes, but they didn’t reignite.

  And then, with a suddenness and quietness that shocked Beth, the empty Goddess collapsed sideways onto the beach.

  Beth tilted her head forward and looked at herself. Her legs were gone. Her hoodie was a ripped and ragged mess and beneath it skin, bones and wires were all searing away to nothingness. Her body was undone; it was too late to stop it, even if she’d wanted to. The blood dripping from her pipe-veins vanished in midair, dissolving under the power racing through it. As the world dimmed and blurred, Beth lifted her gaze. She looked out across the empty riverbed at the place where London had lain in ruins.

  A new skyline blotted out the horizon: a skyline she knew more intimately than any other city. And it was all there, in the real world. On top of a hill directly ahead of her, sixteen church spires reared up, the iron crosses that capped them glinting in the sun. They were arranged in a rough semicircle as though lining a jaw.

  The muscles in her neck burned away and vanished. Her head fell back.

  The storm raged on, pummelling Beth’s body, dragging at her hair. Freezing rain pounded her skin. With one hand, she clung to her tower, the only building left. All else was flat grey earth and uncanny light.

  Lightning danced around her. Her body was pulled taut by the wind, her toes splayed out over empty air. Her arms burned all along their length. One hand was clamped to the edge of the roof and her fingers and knuckles were numb with the cold. The other was dragged out behind her; the skinny grey boy who clung to it flapped in the wind like a flag.

  ‘Beth—’ She saw her name on his lips, but she couldn’t hear it. ‘Help – I don’t—’

  His fingers slipped and he was lost in an instant, spinning head over heel, weightless as a winter leaf, until he merged with the grey.

  The clouds gathered in close around Beth. Lightning flashed again, scorching the air she breathed. Concrete grazed her fingertips as they slipped an inch. There was nothing left to do. She closed her eyes and thought of home.

  She let go.

  IV

  THE END OF THE DAY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  A steam-whistle echoed gleefully over the rooftops and the Railwraith clattered between the housing terraces, bearing its passengers north.

  Pen watched England whip by through the window. In between the red blocks of houses she glimpsed patches of green. The fabric city was thin here: only a single row of terraced houses on either side separated the tracks from open countryside. Every few miles, holes gaped in the terraces, lined with rubble. Fire-blackened cranes lay at the top of the railway embankment like dug-up animal bone
s: signs that the battle had stretched even this far north.

  On the far side of the carriage, Gutterglass gazed out the opposite window, her Biro-fingers twisting restlessly through the torn plastic of her hair. The proximity of the open fields made her nervous; for Glas, there was only City and un-City. The latter was a desert, barren and impossible to survive. Pen was grateful she was here. Even after everything, she wouldn’t have wanted to be in here with the carriage’s third passenger by herself.

  Dr Salt slumped against a chair three rows away, one wrist tied to the handrail with blue nylon rope. He didn’t struggle. His eyes, shockingly wide and pale above the filthy thatch of his beard, flicked continually from the garbage-built woman to Pen and back again.

  He hadn’t given them any trouble. They’d found him crouched on a bench in a dark alcove at the back of the cathedral. The little two-barb sentinel Pen had set to watch him lay on the wood like a dead insect. When she’d ordered him to get on the train, he’d obeyed without a word. He saw no difference between Pen with the wire and Pen without; he was simply terrified of her. If she’d opened the doors of the carriage and told him to jump down under the wraith’s clattering wheels, he’d probably do it. He was, in a way, her creature now.

  Pen felt a shiver of disgust at that thought. Her fear of him was a small hard thing lodged in her chest and she couldn’t shift it. Anger boiled up in her and she wondered if it would ever leave her. She remembered Beth’s city-voice: ‘You never could have done that to him.’

  ‘You were wrong, B,’ she muttered under her breath. ‘You knew me better than anyone, but you were wrong.’

  She could have killed Salt, and she knew it. On a different day, in a fractionally different frame of mind, if she’d made the decision a minute sooner or a minute later, on one of the million moments when her anger had burned so bright in her that she couldn’t tell the difference between it and her desire to be free of him, then it would have been him and not Paul Bradley that she sent to bleed out on Crystal Palace Hill.