The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II

by Pollock, Tom

  ‘Interessting. Sssomething ssingular,’ Johnny said. ‘Ssome-thing of unique sssignificance – obtain that for usss, and we will find the memoriesss we need elsssewhere.’

  Pen nodded hesitantly.

  ‘And sssecurity?’ Johnny whispered. ‘You might run off, after all; you might like it behind the mirror, or you might very well perissssh. How are we to be recompenssed if you do not return?’

  Pen didn’t flinch as she met his rainbow-irised eye. ‘I’ll bring you what you asked for,’ she said. Johnny was right, she needed a way to spare her mum and dad, and this – this awful, gargantuan cataclysm of a way was at least a way. If all went well, she’d be buying her parents’ memories back with mirrored coin. If not …

  You want them to forget me?

  They’d be all right.

  ‘You will have ssseven dayss,’ he said. ‘After that we will put your pawned payment to ussse, and it will be irretrievable.’

  Pen’s lip curled. The words sprang into her mouth automatically, as though she was haggling at Dalston Market. ‘A month,’ she countered.

  ‘Two weekss—’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Twenty-one dayss and nightsss,’ Johnny confirmed. He didn’t sound perturbed; rather, satisfied, and a little impressed, as though some crucial ancient formality had been observed. ‘But Missss Khan? Bring uss sssomething ssspectacular, or they won’t remember you at all.’

  He held out a hand and Pen shook it slowly, feeling the oil ooze from between her fingers, but this time she didn’t dissolve. ‘Thiss way,’ he whispered, and then the synod swept past her and back up the tunnel. Pen put her hand on the bricks as she followed, and, just before the light got too weak to see by, she made out the handprint she’d left: the outline of slim black fingers, shining wetly in the dark.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Three a.m., and in the narrow lanes behind Carnaby Street, the Blankleit market was in full swing.

  The bulbs sat dark in the streetlamps, but the bricks flickered with light and shadow as the glass-skinned, tungstenveined Lampmen bartered in semaphore on the pavements.

  Beth moved casually from doorstep to doorstep, admiring the wares piled high on them: heaps of assorted remote controls, bales of copper and platinum wire, tiny glass birds fluttering in heatproof tungsten cages, glimmering with silent song. Along one wall, injured men queued patiently, some leaning on crutches of broken lamppost, their shoulders, elbows, wrists or knees ending in jags and powdery cracks. At the front of the queue, a heavy-shouldered Blankleit Street Surgeon worked over a brasier, delicately etching knuckles and fingernails into replacement limbs blown from white-hot glass.

  Beth had been here a dozen times in the last few months, but she still felt a little fizz of awe at it, even if tonight that awe was dampened by toothache.

  The pavement skin’ll probably break a needle, and the blood’ll set like cement, she thought, tonguing the offending canine. Explaining that to the dentist’s going to be fun.

  The heat from all the Lampmen’s blazing filaments made her sweat, but still she walked with her hood up, her hands thrust into her pockets, the railing spear strapped into the little harness she’d made for it in her backpack. She paused at a doorway where a young Blankleit was lounging indolently. He was strikingly handsome, with a neon-bright smile. His cheeks and chest were patterned with rosy filter-paint to show off his crystal-clear skin. He flirted easily with the passing crowd in an easy semaphore patter, giving one or two of the more likely-looking glass gents a flirtatious tickle with his fields.

  Beth pulled a torch from her rucksack and rapidly semaphored, Where’s Candleman?

  The painted glass boy started at the light in his face like he’d been yelled at. He swore dimly and snapped back, Who?

  Don’t play dull, Beth signalled. Your line of work might not be exactly illegal, but Lucien dislikes it enough to restrict the number of places you can buy the slap. She indicated the filter-paint on his rapidly darkening cheeks. So, I ask again, where’s Candleman set up shop tonight?

  The massage boy flickered some grumpy directions that Beth just about understood, and then decisively turned his back on her, redoubling the wattage in his blinding smile.

  Beth’s eyes adjusted gradually as she left the glare of the legitimate market stalls behind. She took a complicated series of turnings, vaulted over a back-alley skip and descended some metal steps to a basement-level courtyard. Filthy sleeping bags on heaps of mouldering cardboard occupied the corners. Bass thuds seeped through the walls from the club inside.

  Hello, Candleman. Beth flashed the torch at one of the sleeping bags. Looking prosperous. Business good?

  The zip of the sleeping bag was tugged down from the inside. The Blankleit voice that glimmered out from inside was dim enough to count as a whisper, but the shade was red with anger. Bradley? In the name of all that’s bright and holy, shut that thing off, or we’ll both be staked out for the next rainstorm.

  Beth sat down cross-legged on the edge of the cardboard and peered into the open zipper. She saw a glass nose, jaw-line and lips, all outlined in the gentle white glow that the sleeping bag was there to cover.

  There is a reason we call this the Dark Market, you know, he flickered huffily.

  Beth glanced at the other sleeping bags. Conversation came in little flickers from gaps in the fabric, deals struck in whispers no brighter than burning matches. Every now and then glowing glass hands would emerge from the bags to exchange small valuable items, or seal deals with a magnetic handshake. The Dark Market – the Blankleit economy’s literal shadow.

  Sorry. Beth shaped the word exaggeratedly with her mouth, letting him read it.

  You will be if Lucien or any of your Statue-wearing chums catches a glimmer of you here talking to me, the glass man strobed grumpily.

  The Pavement Priests? Beth frowned. She couldn’t think of any reason they’d have a problem with Affrit Candleman – after all, it was the repeat business of the stoneand bronze-armoured clerics that had made him the richest stall-runner in the Dark Market. He offered them a service they could get nowhere else.

  ‘I thought they were your biggest customers?’

  ‘Some of them are,’ Candleman glimmered sourly. He shifted inside his sleeping bag and Beth saw one of his eyes burning like a small white coal. But it’s hardly as though everyone with a granite wardrobe thinks alike, is it? My customers are liberals; the more hardcore lot think I’m messing around with divine punishment.’

  Beth wasn’t sure she’d read that right. She strobed a request for clarification.

  ‘When a Pavement Priest dies and gets reborn entombed in a statue, that’s Mater Viae’s will,’ Candleman explained. ‘So if they grow up missing half their memories, well, that must be Mater Viae’s will too – part of the sentence. According to them, my little interventions are sacrilege.

  ‘Mind you,’ he added, considering, ‘The fact that they think a small-time crook like me could do anything to wipe the church-spire smile off their Goddess’ face says maybe their faith in her’s not what it used to be.’

  Beth sat motionless as the last embers of his words died. Eventually she mouthed, ‘It shouldn’t be. She’s dead.’ London’s street goddess had committed suicide before Beth was even born, and she’d used the stolen and distilled deaths of her priesthood to do it, leaving them to pay the price – endlessly reborn into stone. Even now, months after she’d broken the secret, she felt anger hot in her stomach. ‘She’s dead. I proved it to them.’

  ‘Oh, you “proved” it? Really? Oh well then …’ Candleman’s sarcasm was a deadpan white. ‘I can’t imagine why they’ve chosen their faith in a Goddess they’ve spent a dozen lifetimes worshipping over the word of a seventeen-year-old girl.’ He glanced down at the soot-stained scar on her wrist: city tower blocks arranged to form the spokes of a crown. ‘Especially when that girl’s still wearing the Goddess’ mark.’

  He shook his glass head, making shadows dance on the floor. �
��The purists, the gravel-and-thunder lot? They’d grind me back into sand given half a chance, but Gaslamps alone know what they’d do to you. Apostate is about the politest thing they’re calling you. The angel-skinned one in particular, Ezekiel? He’s—’

  Candleman dimmed as he groped for the right word. Beth mouthed a suggestion.

  ‘Pissed off?’

  ‘I’m not familiar with the term, but if it’s anything like “would quite enjoy pulling all of your internal organs one by one out through your throat and squashing them into meaty jam with his bare hands” then it’s close enough.’

  Beth stared at him. A shudder ran through her as she remembered fighting side by side with Ezekiel at Chelsea Bridge, watching his stone gauntlets shred the Scaffwolves’ steel hides.

  ‘It’s close enough,’ she muttered. ‘Do you have it?’

  A glass hand emerged from the zipper, selected a bulging orange plastic bag from the heap and passed it to her. Beth looked inside. It was full of assorted lightbulbs: fairy lights, screw caps, energy savers, all jumbled up together. She hefted it, and it clinked.

  ‘That’s as close as I could get from what you told me,’ Candleman strobed. ‘And that wasn’t easy. Most of my clients have known the person they want ReMinded for multiple lifetimes, not just a couple of weeks. That boy must have made quite the impression.’

  Beth pictured ‘that boy’ – pavement-skinned like her, so scrawny that you could count every one of his ribs. Smiling grey eyes under a fringe of soot and brickdust-coated hair.

  ‘He did,’ she mouthed.

  ‘Remember,’ Candleman’s words darkened to a more serious shade, ‘I make no promises. Those lights aren’t really his mind, any more than an A-to-Z is something you could actually drive a bus down. They’re a map, a model, nothing more. But like all representations, they hold something of the essence of the thing itself. Growing up with that map, looking at it every night for years, it should help him remember who he was.’

  Beth pursed her lips. It felt like such a fragile hope. ‘I understand.’

  ‘Do you have payment?’ Candleman’s voice grew brighter in his excitement.

  Beth nodded.

  ‘I don’t see it.’

  ‘I don’t see your arse, but I trust that it’s there without you talking out of it,’ Beth mouthed, but she slipped her hood back anyway. The sewermander’s little claws pricked her skin as it ran over her neck. It perched on her shoulder, blinking at Candleman with black, liquid eyes.

  With a startled flash, the Blankleit jerked backwards. His glass body chimed loudly off the drainpipe behind him. The sleeping bag slipped down to show curly fibre-optic hair and a disreputable face, both burning bright in desperate panic.

  ‘What?’ Beth mouthed, alarmed.

  ‘It’s not caged!’ Candleman strobed desperately. ‘What happened to the jar I gave you?’

  ‘It broke,’ Beth mouthed with a puzzled shrug. ‘I didn’t need it in the end. Long as I’m touching it, it just sort of does what I want.’

  ‘It just sort of—’ Candleman’s glass jaw slackened. ‘The Gaslight gatherer – the reptile herald of our ancestors – it does your bidding?’

  Beth shrugged again.

  Candleman’s eyes stretched. ‘That’s im—’

  ‘Over there!’

  Beth jerked her head up. The voice that had shattered the silence was familiar, and more sounds followed it: footsteps, and the grind of stone-on-stone as heavy wings churned the air.

  The Blankleit read her expression in perplexity. ‘What is it?’

  As Beth opened her mouth to answer the air blurred and the courtyard was suddenly crowded with statues, their stone bodies crouched for combat, their faces etched in rage.

  She stood slowly and unslung her spear. She had no voice, so she let her gaze speak for her, letting it travel slowly over the Pavement Priests as though her heart wasn’t suddenly slamming. She got ready to spring.

  The sound of beating wings grew louder and a life-sized angel carved from granite descended at a stately pace into the courtyard. Ezekiel’s neck churned against itself as he looked at her. Beth looked into the pinprick apertures in his hosanna-singing mask and imagined his pupils contracting in hate.

  ‘The blasphemer and the black marketeer.’ Ezekiel’s voice was as dry as dust. ‘Both at once. That’s … almost disappointing. Take them.’

  The statues blurred into motion, impossibly fast. Beth felt stone fingers grasping at her arm. She twisted from its grip and lashed out with her spear. Rock cracked and a dusty voice groaned. She spun around and swept legs from another. They were too quick for the eye, but she felt them through the street, moving on instinct. Her bare feet sucked up the rank energy of the city and she matched their speed, sliding between their unseen hands as though the air itself was oiled. She struck out for knees and elbows, only using the spear butt, but using it viciously. They fell around her with a sound like collapsing buildings, and for a fraction of a heartbeat she was back in the Demolition Fields, under the gaunt shadows of Reach’s cranes.

  A stone wing flickered into being, crunching into her jaw. Her head snapped back and something sharp pierced her tongue. Blood filled her mouth with a taste like hot asphalt.

  She stumbled and fell back. Statues hemmed her in, almost blotting out the glare of the terrified Candleman, who was sweating bullets of pure light as he pushed at the closing Pavement Priests with his fields. The statues parted and Ezekiel stood over her, wings extended in thin silhouette: Ezekiel the fanatic, Ezekiel who had followed her and counselled her and comforted her. Ezekiel whose faith she’d shattered when she pronounced his Goddess dead.

  Beth spat blood. She bared her teeth in a silent snarl and braced herself for the first stone foot to come crashing down on her chest.

  Nothing happened.

  The Pavement Priests stood there as if they were simple statues – as if there was nothing between their bellies and their backs but solid rock.

  Seconds ticked by.

  Uncertainly, Beth rose to her feet. The statues’ expressions were blank now, but she could feel the astonishment radiating from inside them.

  What? she wondered. What is it?

  A jolt of pain from her tooth made her wince and she touched the tender place instinctively with her punctured tongue. She faltered. The tooth felt wrong in her mouth, too thin, needle-like, and sharper than a fang.

  ‘Viae—’ The whispered oath came from a Pavement Priest with the mustachios of a Victorian gentleman. He tapped the stone on his wrist and it crumbled like chalk. On the pale skin beneath was an image in iron-grey ink: the Towerblock Crown. The arm blurred to his mouth as he kissed the tattoo.

  Beth started forward and they parted for her. There was something horrified in Ezekiel’s shape as he melted from her path.

  A bathroom window with a fan in it was set into the wall. With Candleman’s light behind Beth, it became a dim mirror. She peeled her lower lip back with her fingers until she could see the place where it hurt. She stared in astonishment.

  A third of the way along her jaw, her gum had dried out, becoming rough, splitting and cracking – but the cracks were geometric; they turned at sharp right angles, outlining tiny rectangles of coarse flesh.

  No, not flesh, she realised with a shudder, brick.

  Where her canine should have been, the tiny bricks rose into the narrow cone of a church spire. The sharp iron cross that topped it was wet with her blood.

  Candleman’s words flashed again in her mind: wipe the church-spire smile off her face …

  ‘Mater Viae,’ the Pavement Priest breathed again.

  From the depths of her hoodie, the strangely obedient sewermander blinked at her with black, liquid eyes.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Pen went through her house in the middle of the night, erasing herself.

  It was surprisingly tricky. Johnny Naphtha had charmingly assured her that the clear, sharp-smelling liquid he’d supplied would wash her from h
er parents’ minds like ssso much light sssoiling— But since when did people keep their memories solely inside their heads?

  She’d scribbled a list on a bit of paper torn from the fridge-door pad: Books, posters, photos (mantel), photos (stairway), Venka the Velociraptor, home videos, Facebook, Twitter, computer & phone-memory, laptop, school reports, birth certificate … She crept up and down the hallways like a burglar carrying two massive zip-up holdalls, crossing items off as she dumped pieces of her life into them.

  In the small messenger bag over her shoulder, the bottles Johnny Naphtha had given her clinked.

  ‘Thisss potion iss highly proprietary,’ he’d said as he’d placed it into her hand. ‘Itss preparation iss a ssecret we have sssupplied to only one other persssonage. Were it to “accidentally” passs from your posssesssion to another’ss, it would occasssion ssome quite extreme action on our part.’

  Pen had shrugged off the threat as irrelevant. Who could she possibly sell it to?

  She paused in the doorway to the kitchen. A series of pencil lines scored the faded wallpaper, marking the young Parva’s dizzying ascent to and then ultimate surpassing of five foot six inches: a frankly Himalayan height for a Khan woman. Her mum had had to balance on a phone book to see the top of her head.

  She sighed, and set to work with her rubber.

  *

  A high-pitched beeping from her wrist made her jump. The digits on her watch burned green: 6.25 a.m. Mum’s alarm would be going off in five minutes. What was left? Food. She raced into the kitchen, yanked the fridge open, scraped the leftover veggie patties she’d made a couple of nights ago into the bin. She hesitated. Nestled at the back by a couple of old onions were a pair of green-lidded Tupperware boxes. They were interlopers to the Khan family refrigerator, but Pen recognised them from her mum’s cancer scare three years ago, when a legion of aunties, cousins and female friends had descended, filling their Dalston maisonette with home-cooked scents and distracting chatter. When Pen first came out of hospital, the fridge had been crammed with a rainbow of Tupperware, evidence of the same network’s activity. Four months later, the green ones remained, half-full of her Aunt Sarita’s special chickpeas. More than anything else, those green lids told her how much her mum was hurting.