Our Lady of the Streets (The Skyscraper Throne)

by Tom Pollock

  ‘With that? Nothing,’ Johnny Naphtha said. ‘That isss our contribution.’

  ‘Contribution to what?’

  ‘The whissspering giant we sseek to ssummon hass languished for sso long in itss chainsss, we fear itss sssentience may have eroded,’ Johnny replied. ‘Thisss iss a replacement. Our enterprissse will avail usss nothing if we cannot talk to our client.’

  ‘Client? Whispering giant?’ Beth started. ‘Chains? I thought we didn’t have time for riddles. What are you …?’

  She tailed off. The surging sound at the base of the chasm swelled again and her ears finally placed it: it was the slow hushing of the tide.

  She had no idea whether it was her memory of Fil’s voice or the voice of Fil’s memories talking to her, but she heard it as clearly as she had that first night she’d sought him out behind the old railway footbridge, while Electra and her sisters sheltered from the rain.

  My name is Filius Viae; it means the Son of the Streets. My Mother is their Goddess. She laid the foundations of the streets you walk on, and the bones of the roads buried under them. She stoked the Steamwraiths’ engines and gave the lamps their first sparks …

  … She forged the chains that hold old Father Thames in place.

  ‘London’sss burning,’ Johnny Naphtha hissed quietly in her ear. ‘London’sss burning.’

  ‘Pour on water,’ Beth finished, as she finally understood. She looked at him. ‘How am I supposed to do this?’

  The synod spread their immaculate black hands. ‘That isss what we are employing you to disscover – and we ssuggesst you disscover fasst, Misss Bradley, or there will be no one left to ssave. Father Thamesss’ resstraintss lie directly below usss. There iss very little time.’

  She turned back to the drop, looking down at the abyss below her in consternation. She had no idea where to start.

  ‘Ssstill,’ Johnny murmured in her ear, ‘I ssuppose we can at leassst give you a pusssh in the right direction.’

  A cold hand shoved Beth hard in the back; her stomach tipped over a fraction of a second before she did, and then she was plummeting through empty space.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Beth fell for six heartbeats, seared by rushing air, and then water hit her like a full-body punch. She shuddered hard with the impact, but though her descent slowed, it didn’t stop. She thrashed, flailing her arms, trying and failing to kick her useless legs, but she just kept falling through the blackness, the beams of her eyes lighting two narrow green cones of nothing in front of her.

  Stop flailing around, Fil told her. You’ll knacker yourself.

  Fil, I’m sinking!

  Of course you’re bloody sinking! What are you made of?

  Her arm drifted in front of her eyes. Green light glinted off slate.

  But … I can’t breathe! The vacuum in her lungs felt like it was burning a hole in her. Her lips were pressed tight against the chill water that was trying to prise them open.

  What makes you think you need to breathe?

  I—

  Open your mouth.

  Beth hesitated, but that was enough; the water pressure levered at her jaw and suddenly freezing liquid was pouring past her teeth. She gagged and choked on it; a few desultory air bubbles ripped up out of her, and then …

  Nothing.

  Her lungs were swollen with water. She waited as she sank, but under her iron ribs the engine of her heart kept beating.

  I don’t need to breathe? Even after everything, she couldn’t help but be astonished.

  Last time you looked in a mirror, Fil asked, did what looked back at you seem like it ran on oxygen?

  Beth’s heels scudded through something soft, then her legs folded under her and she collapsed in a tangle of limbs. Black silt clogged the streets and pores on her arms, legs and chest; it slipped into her mouth and filled the gaps between her teeth. She tried to spit it out, but without air, it was hopeless.

  Great, she thought. I’m a human bloody anchor.

  Human? Fil’s voice queried drily.

  You’re one to talk, Petrol-Sweat. The sarcasm was a reflex, driven by some reptilian part of her mind that was trying to just carry on as normal. When the sun finally gutters out, she thought, snark will be the last thing to go.

  You’re a lot less human than I ever was, Fil countered.

  You’re actually having fun, aren’t you?

  Who, me? His response was acid. No, I’m only remembering fun. Completely different.

  She fought to get her hands under her. Without buoyancy, the water above and around her was just cold tonnage pressing her down. Her fingers slipped and sank into the silt. For a horrible instant she had an image of being swallowed by the mud underneath her, entombing her in the riverbed. Wrist-deep, though, she found a denser layer of mud beneath the surface. Her grip held.

  Now what?

  Well, you can’t swim, and you can’t walk, so I guess you’d better crawl.

  Her muscles protested shrilly, but she managed to drag her right arm out of the mud and plant it a few inches further ahead of her, and then did the same with her left. Gradually, she began to make progress through the shifting murk.

  Only forward, huh? A nervous note crept into Fil’s voice. He was picking up on Beth’s own anxiety. You sure this is the right way?

  Nope.

  Then how—?

  It’s easier than turning around. I’m lost in the dark, Fil, and no one’s coming to get me. I have no way of knowing which way I should go, but I’ve got something I need to find. Do you expect me to just sit here paralysed by too many choices, or pick a direction? What would you do?

  He hesitated, but then said, I’d do this.

  I know you would.

  Johnny said the chains were right below them, and that meant they couldn’t be too far away. Of course, it was possible that they were behind her and that every painful elbow-drag through the mud was taking her further and further away, but she tried not to think about that. Every time she put a hand forward, she stretched out her fingertips, groping for the feel of rusting iron. She cast about her with her eyes, all the while praying that their weak beams would reveal fat links of chain. But she saw only darkness and she felt only the tugging of the tide at her hair. She half expected to start hallucinating, to see Pen and her dad drifting down to her, pale white ghosts in the black. But her brain had no need of the oxygen it was starved of and she saw nothing that wasn’t there. She was alone.

  She pushed onwards, with no idea of how much time was passing.

  Something slimy tickled the back of her neck and she jerked hard.

  For Thames’ sake, Beth! It’s probably just a tadpole or seaweed or something.

  She brushed her fingertips to the back of her neck. It wasn’t a tadpole or seaweed; it was the slick, rubberised cable of her own hair, and something was pulling it, not back and forth with the tide, but off to the right, and now sharply upwards, yanking at the roots, almost to the point of pain.

  Beth stopped. She was suddenly very aware of her heart thumping stolidly in her chest. She twisted to look in the direction her hair was floating, but her gaze just revealed more green water.

  An idea struck her. She curled her fingers around a handful of silt and flung it upwards. Instead of drifting back down, the black particles ripped and twisted up through the water. They shot beyond the light of her gaze in an instant, but an instant was all she needed to see the shapes their paths marked out:

  Chain links.

  The chains are made of currents, Beth thought. Of course – what else could a chain holding down a river be made of? She remembered the flood of Mater Viae’s skirts. Yes, the Street Goddess certainly had the power – the puissance, as Johnny had called it – to do this. She felt a little chill down the back of her neck at the implacability of the Goddess. The river had been Her rival so She’d tied it down with knots of its own substance.

  How do I break them? she wondered.

  Johnny said it required ‘the t
ouch of a Goddess’, Fil said. So maybe you just touch them?

  You think She would have made it that easy?

  Why would She have made it hard? As far as She knew, She was the only one who’d ever be able to do it.

  Beth started to reach up through the murk to where she’d seen the chain, then she paused, stalled. The tide was slow and steady: the river’s slumbering breath – a giant’s breath – and she was right in the core of it. When she woke it, she had no idea what it would do.

  But London was burning, and people were burning with it – people Pen had tried to save.

  The current was strong; she could barely force her fingers into it, it was so fast. But she managed to slide her hand in sideways, and she felt the water ripple through all the streets on the back of her hand, racing through their corners and junctions, reading their topography.

  The force of the current slacked suddenly – it was still flowing, but it was much weaker now. A lock had been sprung, but the bolt was still in place. Beth set her jaw and then twisted her wrist, blocking the flow of the water with her palm, and a moment later, the current subsided altogether.

  Chain broken, she thought.

  Nothing happened.

  Okay, that’s disappointing. She peered around her. The water was just as quiescent and cold as before; nothing had changed. Maybe the synod miscalculated, she thought. Maybe the damn thing’s dead, and it’s a corpse that’s been flowing through the middle of London for the last two thousand years. But Beth’s gut rejected that idea: she’d felt that tide, and heard it. It had been so very like the rhythm of a living thing.

  Her head began to hurt, a squeezing ache in her temples. Fil, she thought, I thought you said I didn’t need to breathe.

  I don’t think you do.

  Well, this headache feels a lot like oxygen deprivation to me, she snapped irritably.

  Only it wasn’t just her head, she realised: her fingers and her arms and her chest hurt too. It was like they were being pressed from all sides, like the water was becoming denser, harder, more concentrated. As if it could hear her thoughts, the water squeezed her harder still; she could feel her metal bones creaking under the pressure. She forgot herself and opened her mouth to cry out, but nothing happened. The fluid in her lungs was pushing outwards, she realised, and without it, they’d collapse.

  The world was quieter now – silent, in fact. She wondered if her eardrums had burst under the pressure – only there’d been no pain. And then she twigged: something had changed. The tide had stopped.

  Like a half-drowned man drawing breath, the River shuddered. It started to rise.

  Beth was flung upwards, and her stomach went plunging. Gritty mud sluiced between her fingers. Every beat of her heart felt like it would crack her open. She craned her head up and saw that she – they – were rising towards light. At last she spied the glowing alcoves, lit up like galaxies on a brick wall, rushing up to meet her; it felt like she was rocketing into space.

  The water reached the first alcove and flooded into it. There was a soft explosion as the glass bottle inside shattered under the pressure; the light inside blossomed in the water like glowing ink and then faded as the substrate carrying it dissolved. There were more soft explosions, more swirling, more inky fireworks as the River raged through the synod’s cavern, sucking it dry. There was a shift in the water and Beth felt it pause, like it was considering something. Purpose entered it where before there had been only instinct. It rippled over her, testing her shape.

  After the first explosive shock of waking, old Father Thames was gathering himself.

  Kicking helplessly, she was pulled above the level of the access tunnel. The Chemical Synod grinned at her from the other side of a wall of water. They were standing on dry land; the river hadn’t entered their tunnel but was drawing itself up, holding itself back. Five pairs of oily hands were raised in identical, placating gestures and Beth could see Johnny’s mouth moving as he made his pitch. Was Father Thames listening to them, considering their offer?

  And then something changed: the eagerness left the synod’s bodies. Their extended palms were no longer calming; now they were pleading, raised as hopeless shields. For the first time since Beth had known them, their smiles flickered.

  The water hit them like a battering ram, and Beth flowed with it. Her head was ringing furiously as she surged up the tunnel like a bullet through a gun barrel. In front of her, the synod tumbled through the water. The invisible bonds of symmetry still held them and they whirled around Johnny in the centre, their fingers splayed, eyes and mouths stretched in panic. Bricks and glowing alcoves whipped past; more bottles shattered, more colours erupted and then dissolved in the water as the Thames gathered the synod’s stores into itself. A low roar was building deep in the water; Beth could feel it rather than hear it. It jarred her bones.

  Her skin began to itch, maddeningly. The water had changed: it felt like acid now, or some other fierce solvent. Tiles flaked off her and drifted away like sloughed scales. She glimpsed the dark figures as they whipped around her: the synod were dissipating, dissolving, threads of oil bleeding out from their bodies to be lost in the acidic wash. The outermost two figures were already skeletal and they grew longer and thinner, impossibly attenuated, more like midday shadows than men, before vanishing into the swirling River. Beth tasted oil and burning water in her mouth. The pain in her head was a searing white light, blanking the world out between pulses.

  There was a loud pop, and sound rushed back into her ears. She could hear flames crackling, and for a moment she was back in Canada Square, watching wires recoil helplessly above her …

  Then pain wrenched her back to the present.

  Water drained from her face and air rushed into her mouth. She coughed reflexively and vomited water down her chin. She was angled so her head tipped back, gazing straight up. Above her, the clouds glowed with reflected fire. She kicked her legs in empty space and found a column of water was wrapped around her like a fat tentacle, holding her fifty feet in the air. She fought to lower her gaze, to look straight ahead, and despite her pain and her panic, she couldn’t help but stare.

  The Thames had left the riverbed and reared up before her like a molten iceberg, a rushing vertical torrent. Greedy in its freedom, it reached higher than the clouds and gathered their vapour into it.

  An oil-black skeleton was spat out onto the shale bank below her. It was alone. The skeleton struggled to raise itself, its bony arms trembling under it. Its grin – Johnny’s grin – was the same as always, only stripped of the flesh that had made it suave. It shuddered, and collapsed.

  Beth gazed, stricken, into the vast, blank face of the River, and felt it gazing back. It knew her. She could feel its attention – a kind of half-recognition – and its frustration, like it was trying to match her to its memory and she wasn’t quite right. And then she felt a wave of something else ripple through the water that held her: hate.

  That was your mistake, she thought, eyeing the black skeleton below her. Father Thames’ mind hadn’t eroded, not completely. There were still some tattered remnants of memory left; and it remembered the Goddess who had entombed him.

  With a dreadful inexorability, the column of water gripping Beth began to squeeze.

  ‘No, please – I’m not h—’

  But her protests were cut off as the water flooded the roads and railways and turbine halls that carried her voice. The River squeezed her harder, and as her ribs cracked, an iron girder ruptured the skin of her chest. She stared at it dully through the water that rushed around it. Her arms were pinned to her sides and she couldn’t even cradle the wound. She coughed, and liquid filled her mouth; she tasted oil and blood.

  She spat, and pain filled her up, wave upon mounting wave of it, flooding from the compound fracture in her chest into her stomach, her thighs, her throat—

  Her eyes started to dim. Through the refracting wall of the river, she saw her city. The synod hadn’t lied; it really was burning. The
towers rearing up from the skyline were silhouetted by flames, like teeth in a dragon’s mouth. The fire was only in the centre for now, but she could see it was pushing outwards at a frightening speed. Even as Beth watched, it reached the synod’s factory on the far bank and the building ignited like a paraffin-soaked coal, its dark shape augmented by smoke. The Great Fire, the insatiable fire, pressed on. A strand of it licked blindly out towards the riverbank, melting shale as it went.

  There was a faint hiss and a puff of steam as it met the River. The pressure on Beth’s chest slackened slightly and the world came back into focus. That sense of vast attention had left her. Old Father Thames was looking at something else.

  The world blurred and Beth’s stomach plunged as the River dropped her. She crashed into the shale and the water drained away from her. She curled up around her shattered chest, instinctively flinching from the next blow, but it never came. Rivulets of water were racing away from her, towards the factory. The River’s tendrils groped over the burning building, probing its doorways, its windows, its burning lintels, and a roar emanated from the column of water above her, a sound of terrible anger.

  Then the River hurled itself down onto the factory.

  The beach shuddered under the impact, making Beth’s head jump and then smack back down into the rocks under it. Her vision clouded, but she kept looking until it cleared. The factory was rubble, completely crushed by the Thames. The flames died instantly, suffocated, but the water only hugged the wreckage for a moment before surging onwards, restless and eager, back up the path of the flame as though the fire itself was a fuse.

  The River dragged every drop of itself with it, leaving the shattered factory bone-dry in its wake.

  Beth tested her hoodie between numb fingers: it was dry too.

  Impact after impact echoed off the sky and as Beth watched, the River surged across the city in a self-renewing tidal wave, extinguishing the fire and smashing the architecture which fuelled the flames. Dark fingers crept in at the edge of her vision, but she denied them with a shake of her head: she had to see this. She looked at the epicentre of the dwindling fire and something sparked low in her chest.