Our Lady of the Streets (The Skyscraper Throne)

by Tom Pollock

  I WILL BE!

  ‘Only if you help – only if you stop the sickened city in its tracks. Only if you do what we tell you. We will help you. We will protect you from Her.’

  The next sentence made Beth flinch before she repeated it, but Pen spoke it clearly and without hesitation, ‘Your Mother has moved beyond you, Son of the Streets. Have you moved beyond Her?’

  Abruptly, every machine in the site stopped dead. Beth looked around frantically as the echoes faded, but there was no sign that Reach was even still alive.

  ‘Well?’ Pen’s voice sounded suddenly very lonely in the silence. ‘What is your answer?’

  What is your answer, brother? Fil whispered.

  With a squeal and a spray of rust, a scaffolding strut on the nearest tower started to spin. It slid back from its socket and the joints holding it rotated. All over the site, the steel bars started rearticulated themselves, sliding from their buildings like a controlled metal avalanche.

  Beth stiffened as struts slotted together to form steel paws and steel haunches and socketed hinges lined up along a low s-curved spine. A skeletal metal muzzle formed, with hackles of rusting chains running from the head. Foot-long brass screws protruded like fangs from the jaw. Beth tightened her grip on her spear, even though, right then, she felt barely strong enough to lift it.

  The Scaffwolf watched them with blank-socket eyes. It was bigger than a horse. Dozens more of its kind assembled themselves behind it, then prowled towards them. Beth felt herself shrink slightly. She’d never seen so many of them in one place.

  The lead wolf dipped its head and folded its forelegs under it. It bent its neck in front of Pen.

  Pen’s jaw was locked tight as she opened her hand. Coils of barbed wire lashed themselves to the wolf’s neck like barbed reins.

  Stiffly, like she was calling on some long-buried muscle memory, Pen stepped onto one of the struts in the wolf’s flank and threw her leg over its back. She tugged at her reins and the wolf padded obediently aside. Another of the beasts approached and crouched in front of Beth. Her green gaze flashed off its teeth. She steeled herself and dragged her aching body up and onto its back. Oscar was up on all fours on her shoulder, hissing around his forked tongue, and Beth stroked a finger along his spine to calm him. Gutterglass’ trash-tiger scattered and reformed in a man’s shape, but he could not disguise the look of distaste as he clambered astride a third Scaffwolf.

  ‘Petris?’ Pen asked.

  ‘Fuck. And indeed, no.’ Petris’ voice was measured as he eyed the steel animals. ‘The day I can’t keep up with a Scaffpack is the day I become dinner for one.’

  Pen tugged at her reins and her wolf bounded agilely up the rubble that closed in the building site. Gutterglass’ and Beth’s mounts followed suit, their hollow feet ringing off the shattered concrete. Behind them, the woken cranes and diggers and drills laboured and sang on.

  I am Reach.

  I am Reach.

  Ahead of them, Pen looked back. It might have been exhaustion clouding her eyes, but Beth could have sworn she saw her friend’s lips move in time to the Crane King’s words:

  I Will Be.

  III

  WIELDING THE KNIFE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  They returned to Crystal Palace just after nightfall.

  The statues were crouched around a brazier, the grooves of their knife-whittled tattoos catching the light from the flames. They muttered in low voices and smoked cigarettes they’d scrounged from God only knew where. Ixia and Astral were missing, but flickering orange and white light from the woods suggested they were having fun. Despite herself, Pen smiled a little. It felt good after the nervous grimace she’d worn the whole way here, shuddering at every clanking paw-fall as they threaded their way on wolf-back through the deserted streets. She’d stared at the bare pavement around them until her eyes ached, watching for the telltale tremor of a Masonry Man, but none emerged.

  She let herself relax a little as they climbed up the hill. A knot between her shoulders loosened and she no longer felt like she was liable to throw up at any second. After the chaos and noise of the demolition field, she felt … safer. She looked down at the metal wolf under her and then back at the warped and twisted city behind them and laughed.

  Glas and Beth looked sharply at her, and she smiled.

  Everything’s relative, I guess.

  I am Reach. I am Reach. I will be. I will be. The words were a constant song inside her head; the Crane King’s only two thoughts thrummed over and over through the wire lashed to the wolf’s neck. The scaffolding was as much a part of Reach as the cranes were, and she was plugged in. She could feel his longing. He wanted to pour through the city’s foundations like a flood, to possess the cranes and drills that hung silent in forgotten Demolition Fields and once again tear at London, reshaping it to his blueprint as he had before.

  Soon, she begged him, her thoughts shivering down the wire. Soon – but not yet.

  Reach was a child; his mind could grasp only two thoughts, but he understood instinctively what it took to keep him alive.

  I will be.

  Everything hinged on persuading him that his survival depended on holding back.

  ‘Petris?’ A Pavement Priest flickered towards them as they reached the foot of the radio mast. His eyes were wide inside his weathered onyx armour. ‘What the hell, man?’

  ‘I know,’ the Stone Monk growled, ‘believe me, Billy. I know. We’ll just have to trust Lady Bradley knows what she’s doing, because I sure as shit don’t.’

  But Beth wasn’t exactly a sight to inspire confidence. She was sagging halfway out of her saddle and her left foot trembled where it hung beside the wolf’s metal flank. She slipped suddenly, alarmingly, but Gutterglass dismounted in a flap of rubbish and between them he and Beth managed to turn her fall into something approximating an orderly dismount. Even so, the trash-spirit had to surreptitiously support Beth every step of the way to the far side of the tower, where they’d thrown a couple of beds together from scavenged tarpaulins and cardboard boxes. The priests stared after their limping Goddess, then turned their nervous gazes on the wolves she’d brought with her. The iron animals sniffed the air and then prowled into the gathering shade, taking up defensive positions around the tower.

  Pen swung herself down from her mount.

  Please wait, she urged Reach once more. The Mistress snarled a sing-song doggerel in her mind:

  The one who reigns over the cranes

  Doesn’t take orders from human brains.

  Pen tightened her grip on the wire, feeling the barbs bite.

  He will if it will keep him alive, which, if I’m not very much mistaken, is what you want too. So tell him.

  The wire shivered as it obeyed, then uncoiled itself from under the wolf’s rusted hackles and wound around her wrist.

  A gust of garbage-smell touched her nostrils and she felt a presence behind her. ‘What is it, Glas?’ she said without looking.

  ‘Her Ladyship is … not herself,’ the trash-spirit whispered through mouldy-hose lips, so that only Pen could hear. As casually as she could she walked away from the campfire, putting as much distance as she could between them and the Pavement Priests.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘She called me a worm-riddled tower of uh, excrement – which is far from accurate, let me assure you – and told me to get her hands off her.’

  ‘Sounds like her so far. Then what happened?’

  ‘I obeyed. She fell down. When I picked her back up off the floor she didn’t say anything else. But her scabs have opened again and …’

  He stopped and glanced back to check they really were alone. ‘I’m fairly sure the reason she didn’t want me touching her was that she didn’t want me to feel how high her fever’s climbed.’ He looked down at his fingers and Pen looked with him: the tips of the twisted pipe-cleaners were singed.

  ‘She’s very ill, Miss Khan.’

  Pen crossed her arms and bent her hea
d forward as though she were walking into a stubborn wind. ‘Glas,’ she said, ‘have I done something recently to make you think I’m blind?’

  ‘No—’

  ‘Or stupid?’ She spoke with a cold, brittle brightness.

  ‘No—’

  ‘So why are you telling me things I already know? How about telling me something useful, like what can we bloody well do about it?’

  Gutterglass spread his hands. ‘At this point? We can wait, and we can hope.’ His tone hardened slightly. ‘And put the gift she gave us to best possible use, because I have to tell you, Miss Khan, I really do think that little exercise back at St Paul’s cost her more than she could afford to give.’

  Pen stopped walking and turned to face him. She flinched instinctively; she hadn’t realised how tall his new avatar was.

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  A pipe-cleaner index finger pointed upwards and Pen’s gaze followed it to where a black dot wheeled against the clouds.

  ‘I have a pigeon up there now. When she lands, I suspect she’ll report that Reach has somehow not spread into the Demolition Fields of the city and is not now wreaking his merry havoc on the mirror-creature, as Lady Bradley had intended he do. Instead, I suspect she’ll tell me he is restraining himself for some mysterious reason.’

  The eggshell gaze was direct. ‘Some mysterious reason which, given the slightly tortuous way in which we are compelled to communicate with the Crane King, I suspect has rather a lot to do with you.’

  Pen bit her lip. ‘Glas—’ she began.

  ‘It was her will.’ Gutterglass all but snarled the words. ‘It was her express will, and she all but died to make it happen. How dare you countermand it?’ His paper nostrils were flared, his pipe-cleaner fingers twitching angrily.

  Pen remembered Beth’s words. ‘It looks like her faith is in me now.’ She stifled an urge to fall back a step. ‘It’ll be a bloodbath,’ she said at last, in as clear and confident a voice as she could manage. ‘There are still thousands of people, holed up all over the city. If we don’t get them somewhere safe before the fighting starts, it’ll be a total massacre—’

  Glas tried to interject, but Pen raised her voice and spoke over him. ‘I know in the past you haven’t been that averse to causing massacres, Glas, and maybe you still aren’t, but I am. And’ – She held up a hand to stop him interrupting – ‘and so is the Goddess whose will you’re apparently so concerned about. If Beth was well enough and together enough to think about it, she’d be telling me to do exactly what I’m doing. Trust me. I’ve known her a lot longer than you have.’ Pen’s voice was measured, and she felt an icy satisfaction as the trash-spirit withered before it.

  Gutterglass’ expression soured and he started to turn away, but Pen wasn’t done with him yet. ‘She still hates you, by the way,’ she said. ‘Beth holds grudges, and lying to her boyfriend and getting him killed? That’s a keeper. If you want her to forgive you, you’d better go and tend to your patient, and you had better do it damn well.’

  The eggshell eyes dropped, and Pen felt a faint ripple of surprise. She couldn’t remember the proud trash-spirit ever not being able to keep eye contact with anyone.

  ‘We are still badly overmatched,’ he muttered. ‘The only element in our favour is surprise, and the longer we wait, the more at risk we place it.’

  ‘Again I’m forced to ask why you think I’m stupid.’

  ‘I don’t, Miss Khan,’ Gutterglass spat the words out with droplets of spoiled milk. ‘I do, however, think you are exhausted, under acute stress, and carrying around a parasitic barbed-wire demon that, lest we forget, got pretty spectacularly away from you back there.’

  Pen flinched, and regretted it instantly when Gutterglass’ lip curled. ‘Oh, you didn’t think we’d noticed? Have I done something to make you think I’m blind?’ He matched her brittle sarcasm exactly. ‘Now I’m no medical expert, but – oh no, wait, I am a medical expert, so forgive me if I observe that the condition you’re in is not exactly ideal for optimal decision-making.’

  Pen lifted her chin obstinately. She didn’t say anything.

  ‘Do I have to remind you that the longer we wait, the closer the fever gets to Birmingham?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Pen said flatly, ‘that’s what you need to remind me of.’ She felt a tremor run through her, but she stilled it. The thrash and hammer of Reach’s machines was echoing loudly in her mind. She imagined the bloody chaos that would ensue when Mater Viae’s forces engaged. She pictured the stocky man in the turban they’d left in Selfridges, and the two girls whispering over their fire in Clapham Junction, and the boy snatched from the Chemical Synod’s factory and carried off to Canary Wharf. She pictured them one by one, fixing on their faces and their voices in their mind. She couldn’t just let them be collateral damage. She had to try.

  The faces of her parents swam into her mind and she forced them back out again.

  There’s time. She willed that to be true. There’s time.

  ‘Very well, then,’ Gutterglass muttered. ‘If you must go, then go quickly, go quietly and go now.’

  ‘No kidding,’ Pen said drily. ‘The people – I’ll need to tell them somewhere to go.’

  ‘Oh, for Thames’ sake,’ Gutterglass snapped. ‘Send them here. I’ll scavenge up something for them to eat, but it won’t be pretty.’

  The trash-spirit turned away and began to stump back towards the tower and the flickering firelight. A gust of wind rippled his mouldy carpet-coat and blew a smell like rotting carrots into Pen’s nostrils.

  He paused. ‘Oh, Miss Khan? That wire demon – she is back under control now, isn’t she?’

  Pen rubbed her thumb over her palm. It was sticky with drying blood. ‘Sure,’ she said, her throat dry. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To tend my patient.’ Gutterglass’ tone softened a little as he echoed Pen, and Pen even smiled a little.

  ‘Do it damn well,’ she said softly.

  ‘I always do, Miss Khan. I can probably even keep her alive until you get back – but do hurry, eh?’

  Pen waited until she’d disappeared out of sight before she slumped, and then sat down hard on the grass. Tendrils of wire uncoiled and thrashed in a buzzing cloud around her. The chaos of it filled her mind, making her feel blurry at the edges.

  Now! Now! Now! Attack! Attack!

  she snarled.

  Tighten the coil and take the slack,

  Pluck the Mother’s church-spire teeth

  And kill Her human-poisoned streets.

  ‘Not yet.’

  A wire strand snaked back towards the wolves, eager to bring Reach the news that it was time; that he could strike. Pen gritted her teeth and concentrated on bringing the strand lashing and snapping to heel.

  ‘You can’t do anything without me,’ she muttered under her breath, comforted by how much louder and more solid her words sounded compared to what the Mistress was whispering inside her head. ‘And I won’t go until I’m ready, so calm down. I wasn’t kidding back there at St Paul’s: you want to keep me as host, we do this my way.’

  She thought back to the bite of the barbed-wire thorns at the building site. The pain had flared just the way it did in her memories, and for a second Pen had panicked. The Mistress’ loyalty to her God had surged back and Pen had felt helpless before her certainty. Her pulse tripped at the memory, knowing that for a second she’d come close to surrendering to the wire. As her toes had skidded through the rubble, she’d almost lost control.

  It was only in the final heartbeat that she’d regained her grip, when she’d remembered the weakness Beth’s spear had cut into the wire.

  ‘You can’t force me,’ she whispered. ‘You can’t force anyone, not any more. That’s why you came back to me when I passed out, wasn’t it? That’s why you brought Paul back, even though you had him in your grip? Because I am willing, and you need that. You can’t force me, for all your strength. You can only kill me, and if you do that you’ll go back to
being a scattering of metal maggots in the dust.’

  The wire bridled and shivered her barbs an inch from Pen’s eye, but she didn’t blink.

  ‘You want to give your old boss the all-clear, and I want to get as many people as possible out from under his claws first. The two needs are compatible, so what do you say we work together? Either that or you squeeze me into purée right now – but good luck finding another human host willing to carry you.’

  She felt her heart drumming as she waited for either a rhyming retort or the cinching of steel coils as the Mistress rejected her pitch. Instead, she felt her feet leave the ground as the wire extended steel stilts under her and turned her towards the north.

  One more night, the Mistress hissed to her, suddenly meek and eager as a child, and then we fight?

  ‘Yes.’ Pen swallowed, her throat parched. Finally she let the faces of her parents into her mind. ‘Then we fight.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  The cranes hooked the clouds on the horizon: stiff and lifeless as the legs of a dead insect, the same shape and pose as Beth had imagined them at the building site. Was he a permanent fixture now, she wondered, this God of Demolition, stillborn against the grey sky of her mind?

  The scrawny boy leaned on the brick parapet next to her, his head turned towards her, resting on his folded arms.

  ‘No point staring at them now,’ he said. The concrete dust in his hair had got wet somehow and his fringe was matted against his forehead. ‘It’s done.’

  ‘I know it’s done,’ Beth said. Her human voice sounded strange to her now, even in her dreams. Was she remembering it right? she wondered. What if she’d never really sounded like this? ‘I did it.’

  The grey boy didn’t answer, but his silence suggested he wasn’t impressed.

  She exhaled slowly and a gust of wind howled down the street below. She stretched, and the bones in her spine popped. ‘Look,’ she tried, ‘there could be something … Pen can talk to Reach – maybe she can rein him in.’