The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II

by Pollock, Tom

  Pen felt her jaw loosen. ‘When it gets out I’ve done what?’ she said, but Edward was still talking.

  ‘She’ll get hate mail, death threats probably, and if you two are going to insist on spending any time in public together, then there’s a chance some nut-job delusional fanboy will try to blow her head off to prove his love to you, and wind up catching yours instead.’ He sighed. ‘So you can see why my professional instincts are telling me to stuff the girl in the nearest bin. It’s got nothing to do with how ugly she is—’

  ‘She’s not ugly,’ Pen snapped.

  ‘She’s pretty damned symmetrical—’

  ‘So are you,’ Pen countered.

  Edward flinched. His fingers brushed the two scars on his chin as though reassuring himself they were there. He exhaled slowly. ‘Countess,’ he said at last, ‘sleep with who you want, but please, for my sake, be a little more subtle. Letting her spend the night in your apartments, lending her your clothes – the tabloids will be all over it in about four minutes flat, and after that, the rumours won’t ever, ever die.’

  Pen was ready to laugh, to flat-out contradict him, but she hesitated. It dawned on her that she didn’t have a better explanation. She wasn’t sure there was a better explanation. You’re a celebrity. People are going to gossip.

  And that gossip would give her the perfect cover to keep her lady-in-waiting as close as she liked.

  She looked Edward in the eye. ‘I don’t know if I like you any more,’ she said, her tone one of grudging concession.

  He shrugged apologetically. ‘Technically, being liked isn’t in the job description either, Countess.’

  Pen turned on her heel and stalked off without another word.

  *

  Espel was waiting in front of a pair of silver-inlaid mahogany doors, guarded by a pair of armed, black-uniformed men.

  ‘Are they ready for us?’ Pen asked.

  The steeplejill didn’t look at her.

  ‘Espel?’

  ‘What—? Oh! Yes, ma’am. I think so, all set up, the guards say. Only we were late, so Driyard and his team have nipped off for a quick photo-op with Senator Case. There’s no one in there right now.’

  ‘A photo-op with a photographer?’ Pen asked. ‘Isn’t that a little—?’

  ‘A little what, ma’am?’

  ‘Meta?’

  Espel looked nonplussed. ‘It’s Beau Driyard. He’s the most celebrated photographer in the city – his pictures can make or break how you’re seen,’ she said. ‘Case wants him on side. He’s dead famous.’

  Pen smoothed the front of her top. ‘Okay, point him out to me when they get back. They tell me I’ve met him before, but I’ve got no idea what he looks like.’

  Espel smirked at that. ‘I don’t reckon you’ll have any trouble recognising him. Driyard’s done well for himself. He sticks out in a crowd.’

  The steeplejill went back to looking at the door. She adjusted her cuffs, smoothed her blonde hair down, then adjusted her cuffs again. She was even twitchier than Pen felt.

  ‘What is it?’ Pen demanded.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing it’s just …’ Espel broke out into a sheepish grin. ‘It’s just … I’m about to be in the same room as the Goutierre Device.’ She leaned on the name reverently. ‘The machine that makes the whole Lottery tick. I mean, I watch the Draw on TV every year, and I read about it in school, but I never thought I’d actually see it in person. When you said they were having the shoot in the Hall of Beauty, and that I could come … Well, this is kind of a big thing for me.’

  She looked so excited, so nervous and so outright happy that Pen felt her own fears subside a little. There was something unguarded in the emotion that reminded her of Beth.

  An idea occurred to her. ‘There’s no one in there right now?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘Fancy sneaking in a private viewing then, before they come?’

  Espel’s eyes stretched into tiny blue oceans at the thought. ‘By ourselves? The guards’d never let us do that.’

  Pen looked past her shoulder. The black-uniformed sentries were staring straight ahead, but their eyes kept flicking towards her. She smiled and waved at them. Star-struck grins blossomed on their faces and they waved guiltily back.

  ‘Do you know,’ Pen said, ‘I think we might be able to persuade them.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Hall of Beauty was built on a scale Beth would have called ludicrous. Rich purple drapes hung open over forty-foot windows, dwarfing the lights and reflectors already set up for the shoot. Brushed-steel beams arched overhead like metal ribs, making Pen feel like she was in a vast chest cavity – that the palace was a beast that had inhaled her.

  If the hall was a chest cavity, then the sprawling metal-and-glass machine which dominated it was its beating heart. Pen felt her own breath shorten as she looked at it.

  The Goutierre Device, a huge circular array of curved lenses arranged in concentric layers and suspended from the hall’s distant ceiling, shone in the early morning light. It looked as though someone had blown up a glass planet and then frozen it just at the moment the tectonic plates had begun to fly apart. In the centre lay the padded leather bench where the Looking-Glass Lottery’s fortunate winner would lie to receive their prize, all the lights and all the attention of the city focused on them. For one night, they would be the centre of this reflected world.

  Next to her, Espel was utterly awestruck. She turned slowly through a full three hundred and sixty degrees, her arms spread, taking it all in. ‘I can’t believe I’m actually here,’ she whispered. ‘Do you have any idea how much I want to just jump on that couch right now?’

  ‘I’m guessing that would be frowned upon?’ Pen said.

  ‘It’d get me very, very shot by your gun-toting fan club over there.’ She jerked her head to where the blackuniformed Chevaliers stood in the doorway. ‘You know what? It might almost be worth it, to know what it was like,’ she muttered wistfully. ‘Just for a few seconds, to have a proper complete aesthetic. Not this’ – she brushed her prosthetic right cheek with familiar distaste – ‘but a full, real face.’

  ‘Where would it come from?’ Pen asked. ‘I mean, the new face would have to match yours perfectly, but not be a copy of it. That’s the whole point right? Where would you get something like that? I mean if you were born with only’ – she gestured at Espel’s left side – ‘then would the other half even exist?’

  Espel looked at her. ‘Impressive.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘No, I mean impressively tactless use of “only” there, Countess.’

  ‘Oh.’ Pen looked down. ‘Sorry.’

  Espel snorted. ‘I’ve heard worse. In answer to your question, “Where” is easy – the weather takes care of the “Where”.’

  ‘The weather?’ Pen was nonplussed.

  ‘Sure – you didn’t think brick and slate were the only cloud-cargo, did you?’ She wrinkled her forehead. ‘Everything the river reflects in the Old City gets caught up in the cycle.’ She spoke with enthusiasm, and also slight impatience, as though this was a kindergarten digest of her pet topic.

  ‘Architecture mostly, sure, ’cause that’s what the river mostly reflects anyway, but also boat hulls, motorbikes, post-boxes, stray cats, starlight – always spectacular, when that rains.’ She smiled at the memory. ‘And faces. The facerains freak you out the first time you see them – the individual drops are too small and quick to notice, but then whole expressions come together in the puddles, or try and talk to you from the gutters before they run down the drain.’ She shivered.

  ‘There are more than enough little broken-up features in the water, in the river or in puddles and sinks around the city, to complete any aesthetic. The tricky part is how – how to find the right ones, the ones that match. And that is where that little miracle comes in.’

  Pen followed Espel’s pointing finger. Suspended in a tiny steel cage in the very centre of the apparatus, right over
the padded leather headrest of the bench, was what looked like an ordinary glass marble, a dark swirl like a storm cloud occluding its heart.

  ‘Goutierre’s Eye.’ Espel breathed the word reverently. ‘Our one and only mirrormap. Folded into that ball are facets in sympathy with every reflective surface in the city, from the river itself to a bathroom window. It sees what they see, reflects what they reflect: a perfect map of London-Under-Glass, in miniature, in real time.’

  Pen stepped a little hesitantly up to the marble, and when no one yelled at her to stop, stepped again. She peered into the marble’s depths. Seen close-to, the tiny storm-cloud heart was a dense churn and rush of tiny images, each too small and fleeting to properly make out. It was hypnotic.

  ‘Without that little wonder,’ Espel was saying, ‘they could have everyone in the city panning the river and still they wouldn’t find a match. The device just scans the winner, then scans the eye. It’s done in seconds.’

  The steeplejill’s enthusiasm for the machine was infectious, like when Beth spoke about the city.

  Pen felt her own lips twitching up at the corners with borrowed awe. ‘You’re properly into this, aren’t you?’ she said.

  Espel’s grin grew wider. She performed a shrug-cum-head-bob of pleased acknowledgment. ‘All precipitecture is basically mirror meteorology, and this is by miles the coolest thing that’s ever been done with our science. Best of all, it’s one of a kind. Goutierre disappeared without leaving any notes on how it was made. Watt-Stevens tried to reverse-engineer it back in the thirties and literally went mad – he threw himself off the top of St Paul’s—’ She whispered the macabre legend of Goutierre’s Eye with ghoulish relish.

  ‘THERE SHE IS!’

  The words boomed off the metal rafters and rattled the windowpanes. Startled, Pen and Espel turned as one.

  The figure in the doorway was built like a praying mantis. He wore pointed shoes of identical shape, but while one was black patent leather, the other was bright red suede. His suit looked like he’d donned it while it was still half made: the left-hand side was an immaculate grey pinstripe, but the right, despite fitting his narrow form perfectly, was cobbled together from scraps of different materials – velvet, leather, even something that looked like tinfoil. His kipper tie glinted at his throat like it was actual fish-scales.

  Pen looked at the face above that tie, and started.

  ‘Told you he stuck out in a crowd,’ Espel whispered.

  Beau Driyard, superstar photographer to the mirrorstocracy, was a dexter – he must have been, because on the right side of his silver seam were the features of an ordinary, middle-aged white man. Unlike Espel though, his prosthetic face didn’t mirror his real one at all: it was a patchwork, a stitched-together-quilt of light and dark skin. The lips – which Pen was quite certain had started out life on a woman, even before they’d been coated in glossy red lipstick – parted as he beamed at Pen from across the room.

  ‘There’s my muse,’ he boomed, and crossed the floor in a series of graceful, stick-insecty paces, took Pen’s hand, bowed and kissed it.

  ‘My Lady,’ he said, ‘an honour, as always.’

  ‘Mr Driyard,’ Pen managed. ‘Likewise. I—’ She floundered.

  ‘I know, I know: I’ve had a make-over. You must barely recognise me!’ He grinned like a delighted child and turned his head from side to side for her to see.

  ‘Do you like it? It’s not a patch on yours, obviously. Patch, get it?’ He chuckled. ‘But those of us without your natural advantages must make do. Cost me a bloody fortune, especially the ear – apparently they’re hard to source at the moment. Still, people are good enough to tell me it was worth it.’

  ‘It’s … breathtaking,’ Pen managed to say. She felt dizzy, queasy. She was sure they’d be able to hear it in her voice, but Beau Driyard seemed not to notice.

  ‘Too kind, too kind, far too kind.’ Where the skin was light enough to show it, a blush crept into his cheeks at the compliment. ‘Now, we really must get going, so much to do, what with your abduction and return. The drama! I promise you, ma’am, the art you and I will make together today will be extraordinary. The people of London-Under-Glass will love you as never before when they see it.’

  He grew briefly sombre and took her face in both his gloved hands. ‘I was so relieved to hear you had been returned to us,’ he said. ‘I had feared that this face, one of our greatest treasures, had been vandalised.’

  Pen did her best not to squirm under his gaze. ‘Um … thanks?’ she said. ‘The rest of me is fine too, by the way.’

  ‘Fine? Oh no. No no, that won’t do at all. Brave is good. Brave works, but nonchalant is too far. I’m sure it must have been dreadfully traumatic: ugly symmetrical eyes peering out from hidden faces, hands grasping you in the night—’ He shuddered theatrically. ‘Terrible.’

  ‘To be honest, I don’t remember too much—’

  ‘Amnesia,’ Driyard mused, as though weighing the merits of the idea. ‘A trauma so dreadful that it has ripped the memory from your mind. Your very consciousness voids itself and curls inwards like terrified a child. Hmmm. It has potential. It’s abstract, but perhaps I can structure a shot that hints at it.’ He brightened. ‘A challenge! Very well, we shall attempt it.’

  He shook her hand warmly. ‘You see why I love working with you. Right, now, where’s Juliet with that confounded dress? Ah!’

  He clapped his mismatched gloved hands and a young half-faced woman appeared at Pen’s elbow. She had hair done up in a bun with pins sticking out of it. She proffered a bulging garment-bag with a curtsey.

  Pen gave the girl the smile she was starting to think of as the ‘Parva Khan special number two’ and pulled down the zip on the bag—

  —and froze as something familiar glinted at her from the darkness inside. The dress was beautifully, intricately and asymmetrically woven from polished strands of barbed wire.

  Pen’s heart lurched. Instinctively she jerked her hands away, as if away from handcuffs.

  Someone had found her out; this dress was their sick way of telling her they knew that she wasn’t who she said she was.

  Senator Case’s words echoed through her mind: I’ve seen the dress they want to put you in. Stunning.

  Was it Case? Did Case know? Had she known all this time?

  She looked around, certain she’d see black-armoured figures coming for her with machine-guns ready, but there was only Driyard and his assistant looking at her with expectant expressions.

  ‘Well? What do you think?’ The patchwork photographer seemed almost breathless. ‘It’s Sterling and Goddard, naturellement. We’d never use anyone else for you, but they’ve excelled themselves this time. I don’t know why we never thought of it before! After all, the story you told, when you were first asked how you received your scars – well, it is almost as famous as the scars themselves …’

  ‘It is?’

  He knuckled her shoulder fondly. ‘Oh, you know it is. “The barbed wire?” – inspired mythmaking, ma’am. Obviously no one believes it literally, but it’s a lesson, and a fine one: the pain we must endure to be beautiful. It’s the best kind of fable, frankly. You’re a genuine inspiration!’

  Under his mismatched, expectant gaze, Pen reached into the garment bag and lifted the wire dress out. Her fingers felt lumpen, clumsy. She flinched at the touch of the metal.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Driyard reassured her, ‘all the barbs are fake.’ He reached over and pushed one. It had the same colour and shine as the metal around it, but it bent under his fingertip with the pliancy of soft plastic.

  ‘We wouldn’t want any accidents. We mustn’t tamper with a classic, must we?’

  Pen held the dress between finger and thumb, as if it were poisoned. Sweat pricked her skin, and she hoped those around her would put that down to the heat of the lights. She concentrated on the last time she’d seen the Wire Mistress, slashed into ragged lengths in the dust below St Pauls, her sentience fleeing the metal c
oils, defeated, broken.

  She felt a flicker of movement in the wire between her fingers and stifled a yelp.

  Driyard and his assistant were looking at her strangely.

  The thing’s dead, she told herself firmly. Get a grip, Pen.‘I think,’ she managed to stammer, ‘I think I’m going to need a hand with this.’

  Driyard wrinkled his nose. He gestured impatiently at Espel, who was back gawping at the Goutierre Device.

  ‘Half-girl!’ He snapped his fingers. ‘You’re supposed to be the countess’ lady-in-waiting, yes? Then damn well wait on!’

  Pen recoiled at his tone; she wanted to defend Espel, but she was too shaken by the wire dress and she couldn’t summon the words. And then the moment had passed and she was shuffling down the short corridor off the hall Driyard’s assistant had indicated. She pushed through a door with a cardboard sign on it marked Dressing Room. Espel followed.

  Pen turned her back and began to struggle out of her clothes. As she reached for her bra clasp her hands grazed the barb-scars on her back and she hesitated. She could feel Espel’s eyes on her, two fiery points on her skin that seemed to spread until every inch of her was burning with the steeplejill’s attention.

  Pen was abruptly and vividly aware that she’d never taken her clothes off in front of anyone before. She swallowed hard.

  Really, Pen? Really? After everything that’s happened in the last four months you’re going to get hung up on this?

  Still blushing furiously, she snapped the clasp open, dropped the bra and held her arms up over her head.

  And waited.

  And waited. ‘Espel!’

  ‘What? Oh – yes … sorry!’

  ‘Were you staring?’

  ‘No! I was … I was … just …’ But Espel didn’t finish the sentence and Pen could almost feel the heat of the girl’s blush behind her. Pen felt she ought to have been mortified, but instead she felt a completely inappropriate smile tug at her lips. She bit her lip to hide it and coughed.