by Pollock, Tom
‘“As much a child of Mater Viae as you can”,’ Johnny repeated. ‘How do you sssupposse we could complete such a complex commisssion?’
With nauseating synchronicity each member of the synod pushed up first one, then the other of his jacket sleeves, waggling their dripping fingers. They pointed up the corridor.
The alcove they indicated had been gouged deeper than the others, and many smaller crevices had been hacked out along the inside of it. Beth walked over to it, picked up the photo lying on its dusty floor and froze.
‘We held nothing back,’ Johnny said quietly in her ear.
Not taking her eyes from the photograph, Beth put her hand to her face. She felt the needle-like spires through the skin over her jaw. She ran her hand up under her hood where her hair was taking on the rubbery viscosity of insulated cable. She glanced at the bottles inside the alcoves. There were many, many, and they were all empty.
As much like Mater Viae as you can.
The Chemical Synod had put every last drop of Mater Viae they had into remaking her.
She stepped back from the wall. She was still staring at the picture of what she was to become, but something familiar in her peripheral vision snagged her attention. She turned to look at it, and as it came into focus she made a shocked little noise and dropped the photograph.
‘I ssuspect that it will quite sssuit you,’ Johnny said as he framed her face with his black hands, ‘once the change isss complete.’
But Beth wasn’t listening. Her heart was clattering against her ribs like a demented railwraith. Unknowingly, she stepped on the photograph of Mater Viae, treading it into the bricks, as she lunged into the next alcove along.
‘Wait—’ Johnny began, but he broke off as she spun to face him, brandishing the little square of celluloid she’d snatched up. She bared her church-spire fangs in an urban snarl, and the synod, their grins suddenly alarmed, took a step back.
The photo Beth now brandished was of a girl in a scorched hijab. She stood in front of the camera looking terrified but determined.
Only the people you really love can scare you witless enough for true courage, Beth thought. She was scared now – really scared – but she would have dug her way out of her own grave to stand beside that girl.
‘Ahhh, yess,’ Johnny hissed diplomatically. ‘We under-sstood you were acquainted with the insssurgent hossst. Alass, our ethicsss dissbar uss from divulging the delicaciess of our dealingsss with othersss—’
But Beth didn’t need them to divulge anything; Pen’s voice was already echoing back to her from their last conversation: ‘Is there a way to go behind the mirrors? To where the Mirrorstocracy live?’
She pulled her phone out of her pocket, thumbed through the sent messages. The words on the neon-lit screen condemned her.
The Chemical Synod might have a way, but the price they’d charge wouldn’t be worth it.
Slowly, her eyes heavy with dread, she turned to read the label on the back of Pen’s picture.
Memories. Parental x 2. (Stolen.)*
And a little further down, an added note said:
*Hold as collateral for 21 days.
Transfer to project Isis in case of client default through failure to return (Est. 85% likelihood.)
Beth lowered the photo slowly. Eighty-five per cent? Pen, what have you got yourself into?
Whatever it was, Beth knew where she needed to be. Her hand shook on the marker, and the words came out spidery on the wall.
WHAT YOU GAVE HER. GIVE ME THE SAME
The synod shook their heads. ‘Quite impossssible.’
I’LL
Beth faltered with her marker tip on the bricks. Fear fluttered in her chest at their eager grins, at the price they might claim in her desperation, but this was Pen, and there was no time to hesitate.
PAY she wrote. WHATEVER YOU ASK
Another symmetrical head-shake.
She blinked at them in confusion.
‘Ass we sssaid, it iss out of the question,’ Johnny Naphtha said. ‘No matter what you ssssupplied, it would not ssuffice to sssecure you what you ssseek.’
With a snap of lighter-lids and a swish of oil-soaked fabric, the synod turned and began to walk away, past the walls riddled through with their treasures.
Wait! In her panic, Beth actually tried to say the word, but though she almost tore her throat with the strain of trying no sound came out. Wait—
She stretched out a hand after them. Please.
She watched their retreating backs, her mouth bitter with resentment and desperation and fury. She was shaking. Everything inside her felt heavy and red. She hated them. She hated them so much. For a giddy instant she thought, I wish every single one of you smug, spiteful fucks was dead.
Oscar flew from her hood.
The whip of his gaseous tail smacked her back against the wall as he dragged it behind him. He shot like a dun arrow straight at Johnny Naphtha’s unprotected back. He lashed his flint-like tongue on the bricks and blue fire exploded in the tunnel.
Johnny spun on his heel and lashed out contemptuously with the edge of his hand. Oscar crashed into the wall and went out.
But the fire remained: flames danced over Johnny’s immaculate cuffs, but did not consume them. His gasoline-drenched tie was a brand. He grinned out from the heart of a raging fireball as his four colleagues turned slowly beside him. They extended their arms back towards Beth, a nightmare blossoming of burning limbs.
The fire remained. The Great Fire.
Beth scrabbled backwards as images of the last time she’d seen that terrible weapon deployed flashed before her: the Demolition Fields at St Paul’s, the synod’s burning hands melting through the steel of Reach’s cranes.
The five burning men adjusted their cuffs. They took synchronised steps, bearing down on her with stately malice.
‘Ssilly girl.’ Johnny’s voice was cold. ‘Foolissh deity. Did you seriously suppose that your sssorry puisssance would prevail againsst ussss?’
All too quickly they were standing over her. Five burning hands reached for her as though in greeting. Beth felt their fire like a weight on her chest, dragging the air from her lungs. She shrieked silently as Johnny Naphtha’s fingers curled around her wrist, waiting for the pain and the bubbling hiss of evaporating flesh.
It was only when she opened her eyes that she realised she’d closed them. She recoiled from the glare as Johnny grinned stupidly at her wrist where he was holding it. The flames washed over Beth’s skin, but would not take. Beth stared at his oily fingers and the flames bobbed and ducked under her gaze as though they were bowing.
The Great Fire, she thought. Mater Viae’s greatest weapon.
Mater Viae’s—
Her lip curled as she watched the synod realise their mistake. Whatever properties of Mater Viae’s they’d poured into her, they’d made her proof against the Street Goddess’ flame.
She snarled silently and wrenched her wrist free. She planted her bare feet and drew everything she could from the deep London bricks. She sucked up the power of church walls as they strained under vaulted roofs, and the power of water torrents crashing through treatment plants, of car tyres accelerating on tarmac, of voltage coursing through cables. She drew it all deep into the core of her. Then, just when she felt like she would burst under the pressure of it, she shoved Johnny Naphtha in the chest.
He flew backwards, his jacket and tie flapping and spraying gouts of burning oil. His fellows, bound to him by invisible bonds of symmetry, sprawled like wind-flattened grass. Their sinuous grace lost, they grubbed about on the floor, trying to stand.
Beth knelt and scooped up Oscar. The little lizard squeaked pathetically, twisting against her palm. His tail was broken. She could feel the little eddies of gas on her skin where he tried and failed to summon his exo-self.
There was still enough energy in her to make her chest ache. She stared at the oil-drenched men who killed through consent and stole through barter. She could feel her l
oathing for them pounding through her with every beat of her heart. So much fury it seemed impossible to contain, she could feel it overflowing into the floor through her feet. She was shaking, and the world seemed to shake along with her as she reached for her spear—
—which juddered and bounced away from her hand.
Beth hesitated. The world didn’t seem to shake, she realised; it really was shaking. The tunnel was convulsing beneath her, like an earthquake.
The synod were staring at the walls of their storeroom, and Beth followed their gaze. In the space between two alcoves the surface of the bricks was bubbling up, stretching to translucency. Beth could see an organic shape underneath it, squirming and pushing.
With a loud snap and a spray of brickdust the caul broke. Dark-red fingers emerged from the wall as through thick mud. A series of snapping sounds told Beth that similar eruptions had taken place around the walls, but she couldn’t tear her eyes from this one uncanny birth.
Above the hand, something shoved itself out of the wall: a man’s face, hollow-eyed and gaping-mouthed. A brick-red leg emerged suddenly and violently and placed itself uncertainly on the floor. Dark red veins bulged against dark-red skin and then, with an enormous effort, the man dragged himself free of the wall. The brick resealed behind him like putty.
He glistened in the light from the still-burning synod as if he was covered in blood.
The tunnel felt suddenly close and cramped. Beth turned and found herself hemmed in on all sides by the crimson men.
Did I summon you? Beth thought incredulously. Had she somehow called Masonry Men from across the city to her aid?
But they didn’t even acknowledge her; their brick gazes were fixed on the Chemical Synod.
Beth took a sharp little breath: she could feel them, she realised; she could sense them the same way she sensed Oscar – that little electric thrill beneath the forehead. Using an instinct she didn’t even know she possessed, she tensed her mind and then threw herself into them – and found herself running through their minds like they were interconnected attic spaces along a terrace, looking out of their eyes as if they were windows. Her perspective on the startled synod shifted with every pair of eyes. She encountered no resistance, no foreign thoughts, no new impulses or old memories, nothing but her own rage, choking the space like red dust.
The Masonry Men were empty.
She looked down at them from inside themselves and saw the liquid mortar still clinging to them like afterbirth.
I made them. They’re part of me, she thought giddily. They’re part of the City.
Victory and anger swelled inside her. She poured herself back into her little army and attacked.
The front wave of clay soldiers hurled themselves onto the burning men. Johnny Naphtha and his brothers flailed at them in panic and fury, but Beth felt heat but no pain as their hands incinerated brick limbs. She hurled her mindless borrowed bodies at them. Every time she blinked, the sepia photo of Pen was waiting behind her eyelids, behind all of their eyelids. The synod stumbled, fell back lashing out at the press of bipedal masonry. Beth advanced on them with her little zombie force, herding them until they toed the brink of their own abyss.
Beth snarled around her church-spire teeth – but stumbled with her next step as her leg gave out under her. She crumpled to one knee. and suddenly realised she was trembling with exhaustion: these few seconds of animating the city had sapped her. Ahead of her, the front rank of brick men began to sink back into the floor as though into quicksand.
Johnny Naphtha’s grin widened, a black hole in his burning face, and he sprang forward. Clay bodies smouldered and blackened and burned away under his touch, their brick flesh incinerated where they tried to grapple him. Johnny’s brothers fountained outwards in a complex symmetry of flame. When they reached the tunnel walls, they groped into the alcoves.
Beth’s stomach plunged. They’d learned fast from their earlier error. There would be weapons they could use against her somewhere in these stores.
Their stores.
The thought went through her head like a lightning bolt and with the last of her energy, she pulled her warriors back from the burning synod and threw them at the walls. They barely disturbed the surface as they sank in.
Beth collapsed forward onto her hands.
The synod hesitated a moment, then, as one, they smoothed their burning hair. They almost strutted as they approached.
Beth was so tired she could barely raise her hand. They grinned wider at the gesture; she supposed they thought it was begging, or supplication. She extended her index finger and jerked it to either side.
The synod looked where she was pointing – and froze.
Emerging from the back wall of every alcove, hovering over every twisted glass bottle, every precious, hoarded chemical, was a brick fist.
Beth clenched her fingers and slowly turned her hand to vertical. When her fist fell, the gesture promised, so would all the others.
The synod guttered out. Their suits and eyes and grins were charcoal-grey.
‘Desssissst.’ Johnny Naphtha sprayed ash from his mouth. His voice was as even as ever, but Beth thought she could detect something pleading in it. ‘Our storesss are irreplaceable.’
Beth stared at them. In a few seconds, she wouldn’t have the energy to hold her own hand up, let alone five dozen others made of sewer brick.
You know what I want, she thought.
‘We cannot sssupply you with the ssubstance your friend requisssitioned’ – their own hands were raised, palms held outwards in desperate calming gestures – ‘ssimply becausse we do not posssesss it. We had a ssseverely limited ssupply. We ssstrove to analysse it, but the sskill to ssynthesise it remainss beyond usss.’
He hissed in alarm when Beth jerked her hand and said hurriedly, ‘Sstill, perhapss there iss a way we can asssisst. The compound we gave the ssteel inssurgent came from a cusstomer in part-payment, sssupplementing an aessthetic sssecurity. That cusstomer sstill livess, albeit much transss-formed. We can perhapss’ – the shape the synod made before her was cringingly eager – ‘refer you?’
Slowly, Beth uncurled her fist, extending her hand out flat. It wasn’t until Johnny reached out and shook it, sealing the deal, that she withdrew from the empty minds of the Masonry Men and their brick hands subsided into the walls. Where the bricks resealed, they left ripples on the walls, like scars.
With a flutter of oily wings, a pigeon approached her, a photograph in its beak.
For a second, Beth didn’t recognise the subject. It was human, or it looked like it, but she couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. The person was bundled up in a heavy, high-collared coat. Beth couldn’t see much of the face other than a sharp jutting chin and a fringe of dark hair that covered the eyes, but still there was something indefinably familiar about the image.
She froze.
Much transformed … sssupplementing an aessthetic sssecurity …
A memory surfaced: standing on garbage slopes opposite a woman who wept sour-milk tears from eggshell eyes.
‘What did the synod make you give up?’ she’d asked Gutter-glass, demanding to know the price she’d paid for Fil’s shabby approximation of divinity. ‘What did you used to be?’
She heard the trash-spirit’s voice now, propelled up from her memory by bubblegum and rubber-band vocal chords.
‘Beautiful,’ she’d said.
*
Beth left the Chemical Synod’s store on foot; even as exhausted as she was, her city-steps bore her through the tunnels at an inhuman pace. The synod followed behind her, flowing dark on dark, eager to usher her out.
They gave no sign that they’d noticed when a single red-brick hand had flashed back through the wall behind them and grabbed Filius Viae’s bottled memories in its crimson fist.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Pen leaned out over London-Under-Glass, daring herself, letting her weight hang forward, steadying herself with fingertips and knees on the inside o
f the window frame. She felt fear and giddy courage rush with the blood to her head. She had a bat’s-eye view. The reflected city’s lesser towers rose towards her like stalagmites, lights glittering against the darkness like mica.
She waited, for hours, it seemed. The drone of passing cars grew less and less frequent, until the wind cracking in her ears was the only sound. It was deep night, and the streets were as clear as they were going to get. If the most famous face in London-Under-Glass was ever going to be able to walk her pavements unnoticed, it was now.
‘Ready?’ Espel asked from behind her.
Pen hesitated, then nodded. Before her breath frosted the windowpane, she saw her reflection. Happily, she didn’t look anywhere near as scared as she felt.
Espel eased the door open and they slipped out and crept down the hallways of the sleeping palace with cartoonish care.
‘There’s a service lift at the back,’ Espel whispered. ‘To keep unsightly things like laundry and rubbish and stray servants and you and me out of sight. There’s cameras and sentries on the lobby 24/7 and I for one don’t fancy explaining why we’re trying to sneak you out without any bodyguards in the middle of the night. We can leave through the kitchen. There’s a nice cosy rubbish chute there we can squeeze out of.’
Silence distilled their footsteps, making them echo loudly in Pen’s ears. ‘What do we do if someone comes?’ she whispered nervously.
‘No clue,’ Espel whispered back. ‘You’re the master strategist. This was all your idea.’
‘Oh … yeah.’
‘You could always kiss me again. It worked pretty well last time.’
Pen’s heartbeat quickened. For no reason she could think of she felt a flush in her cheeks. She covered with a snort. ‘Wishful thinking’ll get you nowhere,’ she said.
‘Actually, Countess, wishful thinking’s the only thing that’s ever got me anywhere,’ Espel replied, and smiled beautifully in the dark.
*
The kitchen’s stainless-steel surfaces glowed green in the emergency exit light. In the reflection of a chrome refrigerator door Pen watched a mouse scurry over lino in another kitchen in another city. There was a rustling behind her, and the plack of a lid being prised off Tupperware. Pen turned to see Espel holding a chunk of chocolate brownie with a bite already taken out of it.
