Our Lady of the Streets (The Skyscraper Throne)

by Tom Pollock

  ‘Pen?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Fuck that.’

  ‘You have a better idea?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Beth winced at the thought of what she was about to try to do. ‘But I’m working on it.’ She reversed her hold on her spear, took a deep breath, closed her eyes and plunged her consciousness into the street beneath her feet.

  It was like swimming in polluted water. She gasped and swallowed the toxins flowing through it and felt nausea bolt through her. She grasped at the substance of the street desperately with her mind, trying to imagine human shapes, to pull the asphalt into them, to fill them with her consciousness, to make them live. With every ounce of her concentration, she fought to summon Masonry Men to aid them, but the beast was too close; its fearful clatter sent waves through the asphalt, breaking Beth’s rudimentary forms, shattering her focus. She tried again and again, but it was hopeless.

  The serpent writhed towards them with inexorable rhythm, each coil thudding against the ground, over and over, just like a—

  Beth snapped her eyes open. She grabbed Pen’s wrist and dragged her, stumbling, back the way they’d come, straight towards the onrushing beast.

  ‘Beth! What are you—?’

  Trust me. Beth thought it, but she didn’t say it. She didn’t want those to be the last words Pen heard if she was wrong.

  The Street-Serpent closed on them, but Beth didn’t look up; she just felt it; she heard its thunder, smelled its smoke. When they got to the viaduct, she snapped, ‘Get on my back.’

  Pen stared at her for a moment, then obeyed, grabbing her shoulders and locking her legs round her waist. Beth grunted and jumped at the wall. She skidded down the bricks for an instant, then her hands found holds, the texture of the masonry locking into the grooves of her palms. She scrambled upwards.

  Beth felt Pen stiffen a fraction of a second before her own head rose above the bricks. The Street-Serpent was on them – she could feel the heat of its fire on her face as it reared in a jagged coil over the viaduct. It opened its zigzag mouth and black smoke boiled out, filling the air above it like a stormcloud. Beth didn’t pause; she barely even looked at it. Something metallic glimmered in the centre of the viaduct – the railway track – and she threw herself down on it.

  Sparks sizzled and hissed as Beth hit the live rail, electricity arced, smoke roiled around them, obscuring everything, but the current didn’t penetrate her concrete skin. The track shuddered, all of Beth’s muscles tensed, but the Street-Serpent hadn’t hit them – it hadn’t even moved. But a thunderous rhythm still shook the ground …

  … thrumclatterclatterthrumclatterclatter …

  On the tiny tracks that ran over her heart, Beth felt a train answer in its own language.

  Full-beam headlights glared through the smoke. Pen was trying to say something, but a scream of steel drowned her voice. The ghostly shape of a train stormed out of the haze towards them.

  The Street-Serpent struck.

  It felt like Beth’s own skeleton was shaking itself apart, like her brain was liquefying inside her skull. She screwed up her eyes and waited for all sensation to cease …

  … but it didn’t. Instead the sound gradually quieted, the motion around her became more even. She could still feel the heave of the breath into her lungs. She opened her eyes.

  She was sprawled face-down over a control panel, Pen still clinging to her back. Indicator hands whipped round dials next to her eyes. She pushed herself up and Pen slid to the floor. They were inside a train.

  The front of the train was misty, insubstantial; when it wavered, Beth could see trees and the edges of the viaduct rushing past. She made her way to a bit of the wall of the carriage where the ghostly chassis looked firmer, gripped it where it became the most solid and leaned out.

  The train parted around her like fog and she looked above to see Oscar flying overhead, easily keeping pace. The track curved away behind them, and there, already dwindling into the distance, she could see the collapsed ruin of the viaduct. The Street-Serpent emerged from it in a bunched ruck of rooftops, its smoke slowly dissipating in the breeze.

  A steam-whistle cry rose into the air, the Railwraith crowing victoriously, and a grin split Beth’s face. She’d heard that cry before. She recognised the graffiti looping along on the outside of the carriages too. Without her even thinking about it, a matching whistle emerged from the railway tracks in her body.

  ‘You’re alive.’ The words emerged exultantly. ‘Thank Christ and Thames you made it.’

  She felt a hand on her shoulder and with a touch of reluctance she pulled herself back inside the Railwraith.

  ‘Can you speak to it?’ Pen asked her. She was still breathing a little heavily, but otherwise she’d recovered her composure remarkably quickly. ‘Did you summon it here?’

  Beth nodded slowly. ‘I called to it. It’s … a friend of mine.’

  Pen started to laugh. ‘Just saying,’ she said, ‘your friends are pretty cool. You reckon it knows a way to Bond Street?’

  ‘Only one way to find out,’ Beth said, and the trains rattling over the railways grooved deep into her body clattered out the instruction. The Railwraith brayed in response. It shuddered with pleasure at having passengers aboard as it steamed into the day.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In a paradox of topography, the city’s contractions made it feel bigger. The roads and rails were broken, the pavements fractured. There were no longer direct ways to navigate the metropolis. The Railwraith could only manage short jumps between the stretches of track that sustained it, the Bahngeist equivalent, Pen supposed, of holding your breath under water.

  Beth sat slumped against the train’s dashboard with her legs crossed and her spear across her lap. Pen would have thought she was asleep if not for the green glow from her eyes that lit up the front of her hoodie.

  What’s wrong?

  For the hundredth time she almost asked it aloud. She could feel the question pressing urgently against the inside of her. Didn’t she deserve to know?

  Let her rest, she told herself, swallowing her indignation. Whatever she owes you, you owe her that.

  They plunged into a tunnel and the light disappeared. The ghost train rocked under them in the darkness.

  It was mid-afternoon by the time they reached Bond Street station, but the roof of slate-grey clouds over the city made it feel later. Rain speckled Pen’s face as she emerged from the tube station. Drops hissed into vapour on the surface of Oxford Circus, six hundred yards away. The Fever Streets had advanced again in the night.

  Pen inhaled deeply. The rain smelled of limestone and for a moment she was back on the rooftops of London-Under-Glass, dodging chunks of brick and tile and concrete as they fell from the clouds.

  At least the weather here’s still safe, she thought, even if nothing else is.

  *

  Metal rang off metal behind her as Beth climbed the stationary escalators, swinging her spear jauntily, like a dandy’s walking cane – but that didn’t hide the way she leaned on it every time it hit the floor. Pen offered her an arm, but Beth put on a baffled smile and waved her away.

  They crossed the empty expanse of Oxford Street. A statue stood on the steps in front of Selfridges, watching them. Pen didn’t recognise the Pavement Priest, but Beth obviously did. She stiffened, and the city-voice that emerged from her body sounded shocked. ‘Timon?’

  The air blurred and then the statue was standing on the pavement in front of them. Deep gouges had been dug into the stone of his torso, and Pen thought she could make out fingerprints in the bases of them. Whoever this Timon was, he’d been in a fight. His face had been chipped so badly Pen couldn’t read an expression, but his body language was pleading. Inked on his right shoulder, faded but still visible, were four wolf-heads.

  ‘Lady B,’ Timon said. He sounded desperately relieved. Through the crack in the statue’s limestone mouth, Pen glimpsed his flesh lips moving.

  ‘When did you get h
ere?’ Beth asked. She clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Were you at Abney Park when Mater Viae hit it? Where’s Al?’

  Timon’s voice cracked as he answered, ‘Al didn’t make it. He got reborn.’

  ‘Oh, Thames. Timon—’ Beth sounded stricken. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I don’t know where he is,’ Timon went on. ‘Been trying to look for him, but the city’s ripped up into so many bad zones and I can’t travel without tangling with Her Masonry Men. I can’t – Lady B, I can’t stop thinking about him as a little reborn baby, all alone out there, sealed up inside a statue, without no one to look out for him.’

  The eyeholes in Timon’s stone mask were tiny pinpricks, but Pen didn’t have to be able to see his eyes to sense the hope as he looked at Beth.

  ‘I came to you ’cause I wanted to ask something,’ he said quietly. ‘Lady B, I don’t know how many more times he can do this. You hear about fellas going crazy from the rebirthing, from the dark and the claustrophobia. I came because I wanted to beg, Lady B, please: give him his mortality back. Let him die for real – let him rest. He’s earned it.’

  Beth’s face set. The light from her gaze refracted through the rain to speckle his face. ‘Timon—’ She kept her lips pressed tightly together, and when she spoke, her voice was the whisper of tyres on a wet street. ‘Timon, I’m so, so sorry, but I can’t. I’m not Her, you understand? I know I look like Her, but I’m not. The goddess who took his death – your death and all your brothers’ deaths – away from you, She is dead herself. She killed herself with the poison She brewed up from your mortality. She used up all your deaths.’

  Beth spoke gently, but even so, Pen could sense Timon’s frail flesh body shrinking inside the statue with every word.

  ‘If I could give you what you’re asking for, you know I would. If I had it, it’d be yours, like it should be. But I don’t.’

  The silence that followed was all but unbearable, so Pen broke it. ‘Timon, right?’ she said, putting a hand on his carved sleeve. ‘Good meeting you. Petris and Ezekiel are inside. What do you say we talk to them, get a search party organised? I’m sure we can find your friend.’

  Timon hesitated, considering this, and then nodded, the stone of his neck grinding loudly against itself. Pen gestured for him to follow her inside, but he said, ‘If it’s all right, Lady Khan, I’ll stay out here and smoke for a bit. Can I find you later?’

  His hand blurred to his mouth and suddenly there was a lit roll-up jammed between his stone lips. The tip flared as he drew on it.

  Lady Khan. Pen stiffened slightly. ‘Call me Pen,’ she said.

  She ushered Beth towards the doors, and this time Beth did lean on her. As they went inside Pen looked over her shoulder. Smoke streamed slowly out between Timon’s lips. He was breathing deeply, gathering himself to step back onto the long, exhausting path of searching and hoping. As she watched, he turned his hand over and stared at the inside of his right wrist. The stone had flaked away, and on the pallid skin underneath it was a tattoo of a tower-block crown.

  *

  Funny, Pen thought to herself as she surveyed the lower lobby, when I was a kid I would have killed to live in Selfridges.

  The concession stands thronged with figures, glass, stone and flesh. Shouts echoed off the art deco rafters, threats and bids and promises and insults. Lampfolk argued in flash-bulb semaphores, their voices glimmering from the wires in their glass throats and throwing stark shadows on the walls. The display cases once stocked with expensive perfumes and skin-creams and make-up now were loaded up with wires and batteries and chocolate, carrots and cabbages, old family keepsakes, tins of soup and cans of Coke. In the middle, in the densest part of the crowd, two old men were ladling stew from a massive aluminium saucepan balanced on top of four camping stoves. Men and women jostled and elbowed each other as they waited their turn in what was more a small linear scrum than a queue.

  Affrit Candleman stood at one stall, his glass skin shabby with soot. The old Blankleit was haranguing a passing Pavement Priest with hand gestures and semaphores as he pointed to a plastic bag of light bulbs by his foot, but the statue didn’t turn around; he wasn’t interested in Candleman’s particular brand of bespoke nostalgia. Right now, no one needed reminding how good the good times had been.

  Selfridges’ ground floor was now part market, part soup kitchen and all chaos. Beth pulled her hood up carefully and, with Pen still supporting her, they entered the ruckus.

  It had made sense, when the symptoms first struck the city, for those families displaced from their homes to come here. The fevers hadn’t touched this place, and there was food and shelter – and even an improbably well-stocked wine cellar for the large numbers of men and women who’d felt the apocalypse would be more appealing if they were blind drunk. As stocks dwindled they’d organised. Rough and ready committees had formed and then almost immediately disintegrated, but enterprising foragers brought in just enough extortionately priced carrots and canned tuna to keep the whole thing going. It was noisy and crowded, with plenty of people coming and going, and in those first weeks it was as good a place as any for Beth to hide.

  But then Petris had appeared, his stone monk’s habit silhouetted in the doorway. He’d zigzagged across the floor in his stop-motion, Pavement Priest way, growling drunkenly and peering into frightened faces until he’d clapped eyes on Beth.

  Even drunk – and he had been astoundingly drunk; the vodka sharpness that had risen off him still stung Pen’s nostrils – he’d understood the situation. He’d let his gaze slide off Beth and then he’d blurred away.

  Later, while the rest of the building slept, he’d met them on the roof. He’d been scared and angry, swigging constantly from an unmarked bottle. The cemetery had been hit, he’d said.

  ‘Goddamn clayling popped right out of Stoke Newington High Street,’ he’d growled. ‘Asked if we would serve Her. I told him to fuck off.’ Another swig. ‘I hadn’t even closed my mouth and then there were a thousand of them, all identical, all staring at me with those empty fucking eyes. We didn’t stand a chance.’

  He had fifty stoneskins, he’d said, in sore need of a stiff drink, a place to regroup and something to believe in. ‘We can find the first two somewhere else,’ he’d grunted at Beth, ‘but right now, you’re the only candidate for the third I don’t want to put my fist through.’

  So, with Pen praying she wouldn’t, Beth had let them stay. And then, as Pen had known they would, more stone and bronze figures had appeared at Selfridges’ doors. Ezekiel and Bracchion and Templar and Churchill had all limped in at the head of their own decimated bands. Then came little glowing clusters that were the remnants of Sodiumite war-families, their glass skins cracked and their limbs shattered; then the Blankleits had come after them.

  It took constant, frantic work to keep Beth’s presence quiet. All anyone knew when they arrived was that this was where the others had come. One by one, newcomers were vetted and vouched for before being let in on the secret. Others – whom no one knew or no one trusted – were frozen out until they left to look for another home. For those whom remained, Beth’s was the name that lurked unspoken in every room, that hovered dangerously on the lips of sleepers as they mumbled in their dreams.

  Beth looked increasingly alarmed as their numbers swelled. Pen knew what she was thinking: these people were all looking for her to lead them against the power of the Mirrored Goddess, but she had not the faintest idea how. More and more, Beth said less and less. She’d withdrawn, losing herself amongst the department store’s human population, where her roof-tile scales and street-laced skin were unremarkable: just one more oddity in a world gone insane.

  Pen wondered, as she wondered almost every day now, whether it was time to go.

  *

  Beth kept her head down and pressed through the crowd, Oscar chirruping quietly under her hood. A thickset man blundered into her and she would have fallen if Pen hadn’t caught her.

  They called the lift and Beth press
ed five. A few seconds later they arrived at the Beds and Bedlinen department. The wooden bedsteads had long since been smashed up and used for firewood, but they’d designated this floor the dormitory regardless, and mattresses were lined up all over the floor, even made up with store stock, thanks to a cheery, middle-aged man from Dalston called Henry. Henry believed in the power of little luxuries like clean sheets to lift people’s moods, and he spent most of his time whistling show tunes and hand-washing duvet covers while he waited for the government rescue he was convinced was coming any day now.

  Beth dropped onto an unoccupied bed and arched a road-marked eyebrow at Pen. ‘What?’

  ‘What do you mean, what?’ Pen countered.

  ‘You look like you have something on your mind.’

  Pen shrugged. She really wanted to have it out with Beth, but not while she was exhausted. She gestured at the duvet cover, and the beaming cartoon panda dyed on it. ‘It’s just I’ve been your best friend for almost four years now and I never would have you pegged for a panda girl.’

  Beth smiled thinly. She looked back towards the front of the building where, for all Pen knew, Timon was still smoking and brooding.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I do move in mysterious ways.’ She shuffled down under the duvet. ‘You know what? At times like this, I miss the cats. I mean, I know Mater Viae wants to kill me and all, and She’s smashing up the city I live in, but did She have to lure away all my sodding cats as well?’

  ‘That was harsh,’ Pen agreed. She remembered the morning they’d awakened to find all the stray moggies that’d been following Beth around had slunk away in the night. Bet they’ve gone to Her, Beth had grumbled. She’s probably got a stronger divine musk.

  ‘Beth?’ Pen said.

  ‘Yes, Pen?’ Beth’s eyes were already shut, her voice groggy.

  Pen hesitated. ‘Sleep well.’

  CHAPTER FIVE