The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II

by Pollock, Tom

  Why am I not dead?

  Another, louder thud, followed by a shudder, and the sound of splintering wood.

  They were both about to die: Pen at the point of the knife and Espel a few seconds later when the door buckled and the bodyguard raged in. The steeplejill must know she had bare fractions of a second to deliver the coup de grâce before they took her, and yet still the killing blow didn’t come. Her symmetrical face was crumpled, red and tearful.

  Before they take her, Pen thought. In her mind’s eye she saw Harry Blight straining against himself, against the murderous parasite they’d awakened in his body.

  Thud. Splinter. Crack. The shriek of a door turning on abused hinges. Espel jumped in reflex, the pressure on Pen’s throat slackened fractionally and in that frantic heartbeat Pen made a choice.

  She dragged Espel’s knife-hand sideways and down behind the couch, grabbed the hem of her tunic and pulled. There was a flash of tightly screwed-up eyes – Espel wincing in anticipation of a head-butt – then Pen pressed her lips to hers.

  She held her there: steeplejill, lady-in-waiting, friend, assassin. Her pulse thundered through her. The floorboards creaked. She could feel Edward watching them from the doorway.

  ‘Oh – um – I see. I’ll—’

  Pen could almost hear the blood pouring into the bodyguard’s cheeks as he blushed, but she didn’t look, clinging instead to the desperate, farcical kiss. Seven more endless, echoing heartbeats passed, and she pointedly didn’t look, ignoring Edward’s looming presence. She considered making some enamoured noise, then decided against it. Everything was playing out in her ears: the floorboards creaking, more squealing hinges as the door closed, then sheepish splinter-on-splinter scuffles as the bodyguard did his best to make the ruined door latch behind him. Then at last, like oxygen to a drowning girl, came the fading sound of retreating footsteps.

  Pen eased her lips back from her would-be killer’s, but she didn’t release her grip on Espel’s wrist. After a moment, the knife thudded onto the floor.

  Hesitantly, the blonde girl straightened from the back of the sofa. Her yellow fringe clung to her forehead in sweat-sticky tendrils. She blinked at Pen. She was trembling, her eyes so wide Pen almost felt she could read her thoughts through them.

  I’m alive. Mother-fragging-Mirror, I’m alive – what the hell do I do now?

  Pen stood, carefully picked up the knife and sat down again. Part of her was braced for another attack, but the aggression seemed to have leaked out of Espel. She slumped down next to Pen on the sofa, elbows on her knees. Head bowed like a condemned woman who’s been waiting too long for the axe to fall.

  ‘Well.’ Pen’s mouth was dry. ‘That was …’

  ‘Awkward?’ Espel volunteered.

  ‘A little understated, but sure. We’ll go with that.’

  They sat in silence for long moments. Then—

  ‘Why?’

  They’d both said the word at once.

  Pen gave Espel a long look. ‘I think,’ she said, turning the knife over her in her hands, ‘given the circumstances, I’ll let you explain yourself first.’

  The blonde girl looked at her, and then searched the ceiling as though looking for a place to begin. ‘Well … see, I’m a fan—’

  Abruptly, Pen began to laugh, bubbling out of her chest like hiccoughs.

  ‘A fan?’ she said at last. ‘Isn’t there usually some kind of ramp-up to this? You know, flowers, chocolates, threatening letters in the evening and dead pets at breakfast, before we get to the dagger-in-the-ribs bit?’

  ‘No— I mean, I didn’t come here to kill you,’ Espel insisted. ‘Not at first. I came because I …’ She threw up her hands as if she knew how absurd it sounded. ‘I believed in you: the first-ever mirrorborn face of the Lottery. You didn’t grow up here. You weren’t indoctrinated. I thought that if I could get to know you, if I could show you how things really were here, you’d side with us.’

  ‘Us?’ Pen broke in. ‘Who’s us?’

  Espel’s blue eyes appraised her coolly. ‘Who do you think?’

  Pen studied the steeplejill. A memory sparked – Espel looking up at her, drunkenness falling away, intense pride lighting her features as she’d said, ‘Like you said, Countess, it’s my face.’

  ‘You’re Faceless, aren’t you?’ Pen breathed the name like she was afraid for it to touch her lips.

  Espel tongued the inside of her mouth where Pen had hit her. ‘You say that like we’re a bad thing.’

  ‘You attack immigrants in train stations; I think “bad” is pretty mild.’

  ‘Oh get a grip. We do not.’ Pen was startled by the contempt in Espel’s voice. ‘What in Mago’s name would be the point?’

  ‘Case said you strip the faces off them and sell them on the black market.’

  ‘Case,’ Espel countered, ‘is a lying scumbag who has an election in six months and needs someone to blame. What’s your excuse?’

  ‘My excuse for what?’

  ‘For not thinking it through,’ Espel said. ‘I mean, come on, the immigrants caught in those attacks were all half-faces. Offhand, I can’t think of a better way to alienate our own fragging constituency – besides, stealing from the city’s poorest at the only time in their lives they’re under heavy guard? Oh yeah, that’s every successful terrorist leader’s idea of sustainable fucking financing.’ She sneered in disgust.

  ‘If anyone in the mirrorstocracy paid any damn attention to what’s happening on the street, they’d know that half-faced immigrants have been going missing for years. And we’ve got sod-all to do with it.’

  Some of the heat left her voice. ‘The Faceless aren’t ghouls who come in the night to rip people’s faces off, Countess. Convincing you of that’s what I was sent here for.’

  ‘Wait—’ Pen hesitated, appalled as her brain finally caught up with her ears. ‘—sent? You weren’t sent – I rescued you … the slatestorm … the rope—’

  Espel at least had the grace to look embarrassed. ‘Like I said, I believed in you,’ she said. ‘That pretty much had to include believing you wouldn’t let me be cut into some very symmetrical confetti by falling tile.’ She shook her head at her luck. ‘I just hoped for a connection, the start of a conversation. I had no idea you’d put me on staff.’

  The hot-coals sensation of lost control burned in the pit of Pen’s stomach. She felt humiliatingly stupid. She eyed Espel, and lifted the knife. ‘So if your plan was to win me over,’ she said coldly, ‘how exactly does the “gut me like a fish in the market” bit fit into that strategy?’

  ‘That was Harry Blight,’ Espel said.

  ‘Was it?’ Pen looked sarcastically around the apartment, as though there was somewhere the dead man could be hiding. ‘That’s funny, it looked a lot like you.’

  ‘I mean,’ Espel said with exaggerated patience, ‘Blight was what changed my mission. After that—’ She hesitated, her voice still filled with disbelief. ‘After that little demonstration, Garrison said we had to strike back, and I was the girl on the spot. You’re the Face of the Lottery. It wasn’t personal.’

  Pen snorted. ‘Ever heard the saying. “The personal is political”?’

  ‘No. Why, you believe that?’

  She tested the edge of the blade on her thumb. It was sharp, almost insinuating itself into her skin with the slightest pressure. She remembered it hovering over her throat.

  ‘When the political is a knife severing my windpipe, I really do.’

  Espel eyed the blade, but when she spoke again she sounded neither scared nor especially apologetic. ‘London-Under-Glass doesn’t even have a death penalty, did you know that?’ she said. ‘Legally, they can’t kill you. They have to make you kill yourself, and only half-faces have ids to wake. What they did to Harry Blight,’ she said bitterly, ‘is a punishment they keep just for the poor.’

  ‘That was the first time they’ve ever broadcast an Excitation. Before that they were always done behind closed doors, but the fact tha
t the supposed crime was against you –that made them brazen. That minute of film was their way of telling every single half-faced man and woman in London-Under-Glass, “You don’t matter. You don’t count.” That’s how their power works, by convincing people they can’t do anything about it.’

  Pen glared at her, ‘And killing me helps how, exactly?’

  ‘Killing you would have proven them wrong,’ Espel replied simply. ‘Symbols matter, Countess; you’re proof of it. There are good reasons you ought to be dead.’

  ‘So why aren’t I?’ Pen asked quietly. ‘I could have been. You just had to lean in. Why not kill me, if it meant that much to you? You could have been merrily martyred by now.’

  Espel didn’t answer.

  ‘You couldn’t do it,’ Pen said, ‘could you? Even though you had nothing to lose. Even though you knew you were going to die anyway, just for trying, when it came down to it, you couldn’t.’

  It was a long time before Espel answered, and when she did Pen barely heard her. ‘I said I was the girl on the spot,’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t say I was good at it.’ She lapsed into silence, staring at the hands that had failed her.

  After a long time she asked, ‘What about me? Why am I still alive?’

  Pen didn’t answer. Espel’s voice wavered a little as she asked, ‘What are you going to do?’

  Pen looked into the knife and her reflection stared back. It wasn’t really her image she saw in it at all, she realised; it was her face inverted: Parva’s face. The bloody handprint goaded her. She was nowhere and she needed help. Parva needed help and she needed allies who knew the inverted city.

  The obvious choice was the mirrorstocracy – confess all, and bid them redouble their efforts. But the horror of Harry Blight sprawled on the courtroom floor went through her skin like wire barbs and stopped her.

  She thought of something Espel had said: If the mirrorstocracy paid any damn attention to what happened on the streets …

  In her memory, between a pulled-down hood and a tugged-up bandana, a pair of eyes stared out at her. We’re everywhere. Hadn’t Espel just proven exactly that?

  She thought of a red handprint on concrete, and then a black handprint on brick.

  ‘I thought,’ Espel had said, ‘if I could get to know you, you’d side with us.’

  For a long time Pen sat listening to the roar and creak of the wind in the steel struts of the tower, remembering a tower in another city, walled only by air and the gaze of cranes’ floodlights.

  ‘The Faceless want me on side?’ she said at last. ‘Then take me to them.’

  She could almost hear the sibilants stretch in her mouth as she said, ‘I have a proposition for them.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Borne on wings of blue fire, Beth burst from the tunnel into the synod’s storerooms. She straddled the complex skeins of thermals that interwove like muscle fibres in the sewer-mander’s back, her railing couched under her arm like a lance. Her jaw was set: pugnacious and determined.

  She had chosen to come this way as a statement of intent, winding her way through the sewers and sub-basements, rather than presenting herself at the old dye-works. She was using the workmen’s entrance, the back door, aggressively casual, if you could ever call a girl riding an eighteen-foot incandescent gas dragon casual. She was proving to herself as much as to them that this feared place was somewhere she could belong.

  She looked at the cracks that veined her pavement-skinned hands. In a flash of memory, she returned to the synod’s burning pool, hundreds of yards above on the surface, its chemicals coruscating her, changing her, making her this, whatever this was.

  In a weird way, she was their child.

  Get ready, boys. She swallowed hard. The prodigal daughter’s coming home.

  To her left, the wall reared up endlessly. Oil-drenched pigeons flapped to and from the glowing alcoves, tending the precise constellations of light. As she banked Oscar in towards the wall she tilted her head, trying to take them all in. They extended far beyond the corona that the sewermander’s wings cast, above and below, flickering like sputtering candles in the dark.

  It was far vaster and more complex than the cloud of semaphoring bulbs Candleman had built to model Fil’s consciousness, but Beth could see the relationship: it was like a satellite photograph compared to a hand-scrawled map.

  Her breath caught, and she almost laughed at the sheer ambition of it. Now she knew what she was looking at.

  The Chemical Synod had bargained and bartered and built themselves the impossible from the scraps sold to them. They had built themselves a mind: a mind of a scale and complexity that awed Beth. Candleman’s had been a reminder, a simplification. This was the real thing.

  Closer, she thought to Oscar, reaching down through the fire to stroke his inner reptilian hide. He dipped his head in acknowledgement. Pigeons squawked and flapped angrily at them, but they had the sense or the instinct not to risk their oily feathers near Oscar’s flame.

  He brought them in close, hovering next to a shallow alcove about as high and wide as her torso. Inside, nestled like a relic in a shrine, was an intricately sculpted glass bottle. The liquid inside it glowed a queasy yellow; it roiled and scrabbled against the glass as though panicked.

  There was a square of paper snagged under the base of the bottle, inscribed with three words in neat copperplate handwriting:

  Fear – spiders. Irrational.

  Beth took the paper and turned it over. On the reverse side was a stained black-and-white photo of a grumpy-looking kid in a denim jacket. She wondered if this was a ‘before’ snap, if the kid had looked any less mardy when she’d received whatever the Synod had paid her for her arachnophobia.

  Oscar flitted from alcove to alcove, hovering over each like a hummingbird above a flower. Beth found a flask of pink-misted sentimentality, a box of powdered self-regard, beakers of various deep-rooted opinions, all with their own subtle, individual glow. In the fifth or sixth alcove was a conical, flat-bottomed flask, like one you might find in a school science lab. The fluid inside was viscous and metallic like mercury. It clung to the sides as she shook it.

  Childhood outlooks, proclivities and memories, the label read. Complete to sixteen. And written in a smaller, tighter hand underneath: Traumatic and unusual: dilute as required.

  Wondering, she turned the paper over and felt a little spark of shock jump up her spine.

  Gazing out of the picture at her, his hair as chaotic as a riot and his lip caught in that perpetual cocky twist, was Filius Viae.

  She hesitated, blinked. She started sweating. Her fingers twitched back towards the flask—

  —and she heard the sharp snaps of Zippo lighter lids being opened close behind her.

  ‘Ahhh, our new voiceless viceroy, come to visssit at lassst.’

  She turned, reluctantly leaving the flask where it was. The Chemical Synod watched her from a tunnel-mouth in the opposite wall. As one, they waved to her.

  ‘We wondered when you might wend your way back,’ Johnny Naphtha hissed cordially from the apex of the perfect arrowhead formation they stood in. ‘What, precisssely purchassess for uss the pleasure of your presssence?’

  Beth curled the photo of Fil into her palm and steered Oscar away from the alcove. She urged him over to the synod’s tunnel and hopped down onto the bricked floor. She felt the heat on her back slacken as the sewermander de-ignited and scrambled into her hood. He blinked out at the traders, wrinkling his snout at their acrid smell. Beth could feel the rapid tip-tapping of his reptilian heart.

  Me too, mate, she thought at it. Me too.

  She wondered briefly if the link between her and the sewermander went both ways: if the synod would look past her brave face and read her fear in the quailing form of her lizard.

  Willing her own heart to slow, she turned to the wall and popped the cap from her magic marker. In fat black capitals, she scrawled her question.

  WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME?

  The syn
od turned to read it as one.

  ‘Did I ssay viceroy?’ Johnny murmured. ‘Perhapss vandal would have had more veracity. Notwithsstanding your indifference to the aesstheticss of our ssstoress, the answer to your quesstion iss sstraightforward.’

  They unfolded their hands in a gesture of revelation. ‘We provided the ssservice purchasssed. What we did to you wass sssimply what wass asssked of uss.’

  Beth shook her head firmly. With slow deliberation she wrote on the wall,

  HE ASKED YOU TO MAKE ME LIKE HIM

  She held out the picture of Fil.

  Johnny made a small ‘ah’ as he took it. The breath was accompanied by the quiet pop of an oil-bubble bursting in the back of his throat.

  ‘I think I ssee the sssource of the confussion. Making you “like him” might well have been the matter of the young masster’s mind, but the wordss that left hiss mouth were, “Make her as much a child of Mater Viae as you can.”’

  Beth started as Fil’s voice came, perfectly replicated from between Johnny’s pitch-threaded lips. The Pylon Spider must have traded them that talent; she wondered what they had got for it.

  ‘And poor Filiusss, whatever he might have believed, wasss not a child of Mater Viae, wasss he?’

  Beth could feel a hole opening in the pit of her stomach.

  ‘There isss another rule, Misss Bradley, that musst alwayss be sssatisfied: the equation musst balance. Our transssactionss musst alwaysss be fair. The ssssubstrate bought must be of equal value to that which iss bargained with, and what Filiusss sssurrendered for you.’ They rubbed their oily fingers and thumbs frictionlessly together. ‘Not jusst commodified mortality but ssecuritissed memory as well? Now, that purchassess a far more dramatic transsformation than the petty pickingss Gutterglassss gave up for him in hiss turn.’

  The synod leaned forward. The oil that covered them reflected the variegated alcove lights so they looked like they had galaxies inside them – they looked like they’d eaten the universe.