The City's Son (6 page)

‘Where would I look for you?’ Beth asked.

He hesitated, and then said, ‘Your accent says Hackney …’

She nodded.

‘All right, Hackney Girl, look for me at the dance where the light itself is the music, where the Railwraith’s rush beats the drums.’ He eyed her appraisingly. ‘Look for me in the broken light, when this is all over, and maybe then we’ll dance. But for now, go. It’s gonna be bad enough
me
trying stand against what’s coming. I can’t be tripping over you too.’

The dismissal felt like a fist clenching around Beth’s guts. ‘Why not?’ she whispered.

He gave her a lopsided smile. ‘Because
I
saved
your
life,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want to resent the wasted effort.’

‘Look, mate—’ Beth began, but in that same moment the grey-skinned boy sprang up and sprinted away along the tracks.

Beth swore and pushed herself after him. She had never run so fast; her battered muscles squealed in protest as the rails blurred under her. For a second they were side by side, but slowly, agonisingly slowly, he pulled away. Beth’s breath seared her lungs, but he just ran faster and faster. His motion became strangely smooth, sinuous, like a street rat’s. He almost didn’t look human any more.

He jumped up onto the wall of the viaduct and was silhouetted against London. For an instant, the low tumble of the city’s skyline was like an army, backing the scrawny boy. Then he dropped over the edge.

Beth arrived seconds later, wheezing and cursing. She craned her head over the wall. Early morning cars hooted up at her from the street below. But in between their fleeting shapes she saw nothing.

The Thames Barrier breaches the water, glinting like the knuckles of a giant gauntlet. It’s a Saturday, and the industrial estates of North Greenwich are empty: little fenced-off wastelands. Gutterglass can manifest anywhere in London, but there are places where the spirit of rubbish is stronger, where it accretes in every brick and concrete pore.

I’m squatting in a car park, behind a car with two missing hubcaps and a cardboard for-sale sign in the window. Rats skitter past, but I ignore them. They’d get a message to Glas eventually, but I want it to travel faster than that.

I dig my hand into the ground. The soil crumbles between my fingers and tiny black ants teem over my palm.
That’s better
. I pull a small bottle from my pocket, yank the cork out with my teeth, and allow the fumes to waft over an insect’s antennae. It freezes for an instant, then vibrates ecstatically and races away over the back of my hand, down my leg and into the earth. You can’t beat a hive mind for speed of transmission.

Now I wait.

I think of the girl from last night, her broad, flat cheekbones and messy hair.
We can take him
, she said:
we
, even though I’d only met her five minutes before and I could have smelled the terror in her sweat through the Oxford Circus crush on a Saturday afternoon. What kind of person
thinks
like that?
We.

Because I’m alone, because it’s a secret, I let myself smile at that.

Seagulls gyre overhead, cawing. As I watch, one of them drops out of its lazy circle and spirals fast towards the ground, flapping its wings rapidly to break its landing. The gull looks at me with one yellow eye. I can see a lump distending its throat. It jerks its head back and forth and gags.

With a slippery sound, a tangle of worms and woodlice spills from its beak onto the ground, spreading over the concrete. My little ant races away from the pack, its job done. It leaves a sticky trail of bird saliva behind it.

I watch as the bugs work, dragging empty foil tubes, crisp packets and chunks of plywood to the centre of the courtyard. Plastic bags are torn into strips by ferocious, gnashing weevils. Toes form first, and then legs and hips, and a higgledy-piggledy sculpture of rubbish rises uncertainly in front of me.

The eggshell eyes blink. They, and only they, are always the same. Glas is a woman this time, the rusting handlebars of a bike making up her hips, long strands of torn
plastic her hair. The head of a worm wriggles unhappily at the end of one hand. I find an ice-lolly stick from the dirt near my feet and hand it to her. The worm coils itself around it and breaks it into knuckle-joints.

‘Thank you,’ she says. Her eggshell-gaze catalogues the burns and black blood-bruises on my chest. Yesterday she’d have tutted or cooed in sympathy, but a lot’s changed since then.

‘Nothing beyond your ability to heal,’ she notes with satisfaction. ‘The wraith’s dead, I take it?’

‘Earthed behind Waterloo,’ I confirm. ‘I got off light. I reckon the extra power was too much for her; it broke her after a few hours. She was confused, already bleeding out. It was a mercy at the end.’

‘That’s something then.’ A little thing. She sighs like she has to be grateful for the little things now. She hesitates, and then says, ‘My pigeons have seen wolf-shapes stalking the building sites. And the Pylon Spiders report feeling a power-surge through the grid at around midnight, night before last. Just when you said the wraith entered Reach’s domain.’

Sympathy edges into her voice. ‘I’m sorry, Filius, I really am, but Reach is gathering his strength. There’s no doubt any more: it
is
him.’

I feel like I’m trying to swallow a chunk of brick. I hadn’t realised until now just how much I’d been hoping Glas was wrong. ‘I don’t understand,’ I mutter. ‘Why
now
?’

She turns her head away. The breeze flaps the strands of her binbag hair against her face. ‘Filius,’ she says carefully,
‘there’s something else you need to know. There have been rumours – if Reach is preparing for war, it can only be because he’s been listening to them.’ She wets her lips with a tongue, made from an old sponge.

Unease creeps through me. ‘What rumours?’ I ask.

‘That soon the street-signs will rearrange themselves,’ she speaks very quietly, ‘and feral cats will walk with their tails high in procession through the streets.’

For a long moment I do nothing but stand there, feeling, and no doubt looking, heroically stupid.

‘She’s … she’s … coming
back
?’ I’m not even sure I said that aloud.

Glas looks at me. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, and I explode, all the tension in my chest multiplying as it unravels. I feel dizzy and scared and elated all at once.

‘
Why didn’t you tell me?
’ I shout at her.

Glas shrugs wretchedly. ‘There was nothing firm. I didn’t want to get your hopes up, and I didn’t—’ She hesitates. ‘I didn’t want you to be scared.’

‘Scared of
what
?’ I demand. ‘She’s my
mother
!’

‘She’s also a Goddess,’ Glas says, ‘and Goddesses are not kind.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘War’s coming, Filius. The King of The Cranes and the Lady of the Streets will not share the city. The gables and the gutters and manholes will bleed. Reach has been killing her kingdom, for years, tearing it up and enslaving it to whatever he’s building in St Paul’s, and you didn’t stop
him. You’re her son, and you didn’t stop him. That Cathedral was her crown jewel, and you gave it up without a fight.’ Her tone is dreadfully gentle. She’s trying not to make it sound like it’s my fault.

‘I
couldn’t
have stopped it,’ I protest, bewildered and frightened now. ‘I was never strong enough—’

She shushes me, puts her arms around me. I can feel the warmth as her rubbish decays. ‘I understand,’ she whispers. ‘It was right to wait. It was safer. But if Reach is moving against us, we no longer have that luxury.’

My thoughts are reeling. Glas’ voice turns low, urgent. ‘You need to act, Filius. You’re right, I should have told you sooner. Reach has become strong – too strong – in your Mother’s absence. We need an army,’ she urges. ‘The Pavement Priests, the Mirrorstocracy: the old guard. We need to
move
, or by the time Mater Viae arrives, the Skyscraper Throne will be occupied, and not by you.’

But I’m barely listening. All I can think is
she’s coming back she’s coming back she’s coming back
—

‘You should have told me!’ I snap at Gutterglass. She tries to hold onto me, but I tear myself loose and run. I expect her to call after me but when I look back she is just watching me with that desolate gaze: Gutterglass: the spirit of the city’s abandoned, the nursemaid who cared for me in place of—

She’s coming back.

I watch the body of garbage crumble like ash and fall.

Beth stood at the end of Wendover Road, watching Pen’s familiar shape move behind a window across the street.

People hurried past, jostling her and tutting. The women were dressed in wildly contrasting styles: jeans and crop-tops, hijabs, the occasional full burkha. It was the end of the day and the cheap DVDs and plastic watches were being packed away on the market stalls. Men held intense conversations in glass-fronted restaurants over bowls of biryani, or watched hockey on the muted TV sets. The air was tinged with the smell of curry and spices and overripe fruit.

Everything screamed
Pen
loudly enough to make Beth gasp. She shifted her weight and changed her mind for the fourth time.

All she had to do was shout – one syllable would probably do it. Pen’s window was cracked open, she’d hear. Just that one syllable and she’d come down and they’d sit with their back against the bricks of the next-door alley and Pen would talk Beth out of this insane thing she was planning to do.

Beth came up on the balls of her feet; she felt that shout rise up inside her—

—but it stalled again, because there was a taste in her mouth, the same taste as there had been back in Gorecastle’s office, and it made her want to spit; it made Beth not want Parva Khan anywhere near her.

Less than a day ago she would’ve thought Pen would believe her. She would have trusted Pen to
trust
her. That trust was broken now, and realising that was like chewing tinfoil.

Besides, she didn’t even know if Pen would talk to
her
.

B, you made everything worse.

The memory of Pen’s stone-dead tone made Beth want to turn and run from the street.

But she couldn’t leave without some sort of goodbye, no matter how much some blistered little part of her wanted to. She slipped her hand into her pocket and rubbed her thumb over the black crayon she kept there.

Dotted around Pen’s doorframe were a series of pictograms: tiny trains with electric bolts under their wheels. Beth had drawn them in a little procession round the corner into the alley, like a trail of crumbs.

And there, on the bricks next to the metal bins, she’d drawn Pen’s face, smiling, lovingly detailed: a parting gift.

Streetlamps flickered on as the daylight faded. Beth struggled to focus on what the boy had said:
Look for me in broken light.
She’d been puzzling her way around that cryptic phrase all day.

The dance where light itself is the music, where the Railwraith’s rush beats the drums.

She turned his words over in her mind, probing them for meaning. They sounded worryingly like the gibberings of a lunatic, which, she admitted to herself, it was entirely possible he was.

She remembered the shock of him shoving her, and she touched the bruise under her hoodie and winced. Her skin was apparently as determined to retain the memory as her mind was.

Think, Beth: what do you know about him? Well, he runs around London’s railway tracks in the middle of the night without a shirt or shoes but with a bloody great iron railing, jabbering incomprehensible cryptic bollocks about light and music and monsters, and he risked getting flattened by five hundred tons of angry freight train just to save you. You’ve got to admit, these are not the characteristics of someone overburdened with sanity.

She slumped, but then a thought struck her: what if the directions weren’t cryptic at all? He hadn’t just looked like he slept in the streets, but like he
always
had done. It dawned on Beth that street names and house numbers might be a meaningless code to someone who’d never lived in one.

What if he’d told Beth where to find him as clearly and simply as he could?

Beth licked her lips. She wracked her memory for a place that fit.
Where the Railwraith’s rush …
It had to be near a train line. He’d checked that she was from Hackney, so that narrowed it down. Beth’s excitement mounted as she
worked it through – but where was
the light itself music
, though?

A memory surfaced: a railway footbridge overgrown with brambles, the boards armoured in chewing gum harder than concrete. It was a meeting place she’d shared with Pen, where they’d traded sweets and whispered secrets. When the trains shot past underneath, the sound of their wheels on the tracks was like drums.

There were four streetlamps in the cul-de-sac below. Their light had flickered as they lit up in what Pen described as a ‘fractured harmony’. Beth had always thought that was kind of beautiful; there had been a definite rhythm to their flashes. And wasn’t rhythm all you really needed to dance?

If nothing else, it was as good a place as any to start.

Beth looked back up at Pen’s window and all her excitement drained away, replaced with queasy dread. Sure enough, when she turned away, there it was: a sharp white pain, hard up against her ribs.
It’s like that phantom-limb thing you hear about
, she told herself sternly,
like soldiers get
. She tried to make herself believe that the hurt was coming from an empty space, a love already gone.

She made it all of three steps before she ducked back into the alley.

‘You’re a soft idiot, Bradley,’ she muttered as, despite herself, she rough-sketched another figure on the bricks: a skinny boy holding a railing like a spear.

Gone hunting
, she scribbled under the picture of her quarry.
Look for me in broken light.