The Glass God (34 page)
Authors: Kate Griffin
“Breathing?”
“Yes.”
“That’ll have to do. Now… where the bloody hell are we?”
Rhys looked up and down the tunnel. “Maybe it’s disused?”
“Yeah, because that’s all this evening needs to get better. You, me, an unconscious Alderman and a disused tunnel God knows where under the city. Your phone working?”
Rhys checked it. “No signal, Ms Li.”
“Great.”
“What do you want to do? I don’t think we should move Miles. But if that thing…”
Sharon glanced back at the thick wall through which they’d passed. “I gotta say, if it can come through that, then it deserves to get us.”
“Does it?” whimpered Rhys. “Ethically, I mean?”
To his surprise, Sharon grinned. She pressed her back to the wall, and slid down to the ground, tucking up her knees. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ve got a plan.”
“Do you, Ms Li? I mean, I don’t doubt that you do, it wasn’t a ‘do you’ as in I can’t believe it, it was more of an enquiry…” Rhys’s words dissolved into another yawn.
Sharon’s smile widened. “It’s a great plan,” she replied. “It involves sleeping.”
Chapter 57
We are
the scylla sisters.
We love
each other
so much
though sometimes it hurts
and sometimes it is joy
and always
together.
We love each other.
Because no one else will.
Chapter 58
It Will Come to You in Your Sleep
Sammy the Elbow was careful about what he dreamt. Dreams, after all, were dangerous bloody things, liable to get you into trouble if you didn’t keep an eye on them. People could learn all sorts of shit from your dreams, but, most importantly, people could think they’d learnt all sorts of shit from your dreams. And then get it wrong. And then tell you you had a problem when, really, dreaming about fire-breathing hamsters had a perfectly rational explanation, if only they weren’t so hung up on everything being complicated and…
Point was, if you were a shaman, and into the truth of things, you just had to set a few standards. And dreams, the undigested stuff of the subconscious mind, were about as true as true could be, even if no one quite knew what to make of that truth.
He was, therefore, rather surprised when, dreaming a particularly sagely dream about waiting for the 17 bus at Archway station with a chinchilla in a top hat and a woman who kept on saying ‘“blueberry!” at the top of her lungs, he felt someone tap him on the shoulder.
Sammy turned, and looked up into the smiling, grimy face of Sharon Li. Why his apprentice’s face was grimy when she dream walked he had never really gone into, save that sometimes the unconscious mind manifested certain truths which even the sageliest of sages found it polite to ignore.
“Oi oi,” he blurted. “What you want?”
Sharon beamed. It occurred to him that, even for someone in the full throes of a dream walk, she had a particularly otherworldly quality.
“Sammy,” she said, “how’d you like to be a hero?”
Chapter 59
There was a light at the end of the tunnel.
The light bounced up and down a while, and finally exclaimed,
“Oi oi, soggy-brains!”
Sharon blearily opened her eyes. Somehow she’d fallen asleep against the wall of the tunnel, her head resting on Rhys’s shoulder. Miles still lay unconscious on the track beside them, and as she struggled towards consciousness, an awareness suggested, through the cold in her fingers and numbness in her toes, that time had passed, and she had slept, and both these things had been fine. No – more than fine. Something more, something… safe. She sat up. Rhys smiled wanly, his shoulder bearing a Sharon-shaped indent.
“Oi!” The shrill voice of Sammy the Elbow, second greatest shaman to walk the earth, echoed down the tracks. “I do not make it a habit to rescue any apprentice what is too bloody thick to rescue themselves!”
For a moment, Sharon wondered if it would be all right to go straight back to sleep, right there.
“Soggy-brains!”
She crawled to her feet, bones grinding and limbs aching as blood returned to her extremities. “Sammy!” Her voice bounced away down the tunnel. “Miles is hurt!”
More lights burst up behind the torch which Sammy was carrying. By their relative height about the goblin’s light, the bearers were most likely human. Mostly. Then something great and grey and shambling briefly eclipsed the torches, and it was huge, and it was familiar, and it was…
“Gretel?”
Gretel, seven-foot-nothing of gourmet troll, her skin a lightly spined leather across flesh of pure muscle, each component of which had taken on the expectations of the universe and challenged them to get massive.
“Hello, Ms Li!” Gretel’s voice rumbled down the tunnel, like the sound of trains once gone before. “Mr Elbow invited me to assist him in saving the day. I hope that’s all right?”
Moving behind the goblin and the troll were more figures, Aldermen dressed in black, a couple carrying a stretcher, one marvelling at the fact that he had finally found a corner of the city where he couldn’t get a signal on his mobile phone. “Mr Elbow,” went on Gretel cheerfully, “said that you might be in need of a… a…”
“Great big lumbering wall of physical capability!” Sammy sang out. “That’s what I said, innit?”
“Yes, Mr Elbow,” murmured Gretel, not sure if that was how the goblin
had
phrased it. “Something like that.”
Sharon sighed. Her mentor, despite having experienced, she felt, some really rather damaging prejudice, showed not just undeniable social defects in his daily life, but an attitude of casual contempt towards any other creature so pungent that she was sometimes worried it might rub off onto her.
Aldermen now filled the tunnel. Towards the unconscious Miles, they manifested an extraordinary professionalism and cool, which suggested that among the things they dealt with, injury was hardly novel. Sharon lurked in the dark as one of the Aldermen, a pleasant-faced woman wearing latex gloves, examined her for injury.
She said, “How’s Miles?”
“Broken leg; possibly some fractured ribs. They’re taking him to hospital to have a scan of his skull – just a precaution.” The Alderman added, “I’m sure it’ll be fine. He’s a very strong young man.”
They drifted out of the tunnel. It was a long way, Sharon discovered, particularly in the torch-crossed dark. A rusted metal door, narrow and forgotten, led to a tight, twisted stair which wound up and up through damp, mould-covered walls to another metal door, where the chain had been broken and the padlock torn away to let it open in a brick wall set almost where they had begun: Sloane Square. The lights of the nearby theatre still shone, inviting audiences to enjoy the latest hit; the department stores and designer outlets were illuminated beneath the tall trees; the traffic lights blinked around the crowded one-way system. The sudden brightness, though mostly just from streetlights and their orange glow reflecting off the clouds above, hit almost as hard as the smell, or, rather, the non-smell, the cessation of the tunnels’ damp, sticky stench. The Aldermen had claimed a section of road for their own by the tunnel entrance; on the double red no-parking lines there stood a couple of cars and a small utility truck, complete with kettle and a tiny TV. Four orange cones, and some yellow tape around this scene of illegality, warned any traffic warden to steer clear.
Kelly Shiring stood in front of the truck, ready with a cup of tea. With her was Sammy the Elbow, his head barely reaching her hips, the grubby sleeves of his hoodie trailing at his side. As the others emerged from the darkness, Kelly exclaimed, “Ms Li!” and thrust the tea into Sharon’s hands.
“You must be exhausted, just exhausted, what a terrible night. Now, I’ve arranged rooms in the nearest hotel I could find. It’s only four-star, but they’ve opened the kitchens for you and I’ve asked that they heat the bath.”
Sharon’s mouth was dangling open. So, she noticed, was Sammy’s, with rather more profound effect, as it revealed the dental nightmare of the goblin’s gullet for all the world to see.
“A room… in a hotel? Why does she get a room in a hotel?” he squealed. “I went and bloody found ’em both, didn’t I? I did the whole ‘they’re in this tunnel thing needin’ rescuing’ crap, I’m the teacher, I’m the hero of the frickin’ hour! Why do
they
get a frickin’ hotel room?”
Kelly’s face opened in horror and consternation. “Mr Elbow, sir, you’re so right! I do apologise, I hadn’t even considered – how senseless of me. Would you find a single acceptable, or shall I try for the suite?”
Sammy’s eyes narrowed, searching the Alderman’s earnest face for some symptom of mockery, of sarcasm, of a practical joke being played. Finding none, he mumbled, deflating a little, “No, it’s okay, I wouldn’t want anyone to go to trouble for me, not the hero of the hour, not the second greatest shaman ever, you don’t worry…”
“Oh, but Mr Elbow! I absolutely must, I insist, I feel so guilty about having not even considered it, the best – absolutely, the best. Do just give me a moment…”
So saying, she pulled out her mobile phone and, treating them to one last dazzling smile, turned to find a quiet corner and make the arrangements.
Sharon, Rhys and Sammy stood on the pavement by Sloane Square, as Sharon’s tea grew cold. Sharon said, “Well.” This not quite hacking it, she added, “You know, maybe being deputy Midnight Mayor isn’t so rubbish after all.”
“Hah!” exclaimed Sammy, gesturing with his arms to express the indignation his vocabulary couldn’t muster. “It may be all hotels and tea and stuff now, but just you wait ’till it’s blood and screamin’ and gettin’ stuck down in dirty tunnels beneath the city; then you’ll come runnin’ again, just like you always do.”
“Do I? Have I come running before?”
“Yeah! You came runnin’ with the Tribe, ain’t you?”
“Yes, but then you didn’t come with us.”
“I showed you the way.”
“But we faced the Tribe, and Swift, and Old Man Bone without you.”
“I did the important bit! Facilitating, that’s what I did! Look…” Sammy hopped from foot to foot, nostrils puffing. “… I could’ve just left you down in that tunnel with the squelchy Alderman and the snot-nosed druid…”
“Oh, I don’t know if that’s really…” began Rhys.
“… but I didn’t, did I? Cos even though I’m basically undervalued by all you ignorant nits, I still got class even when no one else got none of their own!”
Sharon considered her options. There was a part, a not insignificant part, which was tempted to argue back, to turn round and say, yes, of course, saving us from being stuck in a tunnel was really good of you but, actually, class would be doing it and not shouting about it afterwards, that’s what class is, a kind of casual brilliance rather than a lot of hard work, which isn’t to say we’re not grateful, of course we’re grateful, it’s just that gratitude is a finite commodity and you’re really…
What she actually said was, “I’ve never been to a four-star hotel before.”
Which, for now, would have to do.
Chapter 60
She wakes and she screams.
She screams and screams and screams until her father holds her and she says, “I’m sorry I’m sorry they fled they fled I didn’t know where they went I couldn’t see they just ran and they were gone and I was scared and so tired so tired and they ran away and I couldn’t I couldn’t make them…”
He strokes her hair and whispers, “It’s all right. You did very well. I’m very proud of you.”
“Daddy?”
“Yes, my love?”
“Are they going to come after us now? Now that I’ve failed?”
“No, my love. They won’t.”
“But they ran. They ran through the wall and I couldn’t, I couldn’t, it wasn’t…”
“They won’t find us. And if they do… I’m ready for them now.”
Chapter 61
It was a four-star hotel.
She could tell it was a four-star hotel, because the bath was bigger than the bed she usually slept in, and from the windows – many windows, no less – in her room she could see the London Eye and Big Ben.
Someone had warmed the bath in advance.
She sunk into it as the sun began to rise over London, and wondered if it was bad form, considering the death, and the torment, and the lingering threat of catastrophe hanging over the city, to go to sleep for a bit. What would
Management for Beginners
suggest? She felt fairly certain that working your team to death wasn’t an efficient use of human resources. Then again, she also felt certain that deadlines had to be met, and achievements achieved, even if this sometimes forced senior management to make hard decisions. Certainly, not getting into the great double bed, warm and soft and turned down in one corner ready for her presence, was going to be a tough decision, possibly the toughest so far. Then again, that was the whole point. That was why she was in charge.
Someone – almost certainly Kelly – had laid out warm, fresh clothes on the end of the bed. She climbed into them, one limb at a time as the sun slipped upwards over the city, and the sound of buses fighting with taxis for space in the streets below drifted up through the trees. She had to sit on the edge of the bed to put her shoes on, and the mattress was soft and deep, a great big soft falling waiting to happen beneath her, an infinite warmth of…
There was a knock on the door. “Good morning, Ms Li!” sang out Kelly’s indefatigable voice. “Meeting in the breakfast room?”
They had a meeting in the breakfast room.
Kelly had arranged for a part of the room itself, a great hall of crystal glass and ivory ceramics, to be separated off from the general dining area with a panelled screen, permitting Sammy the Elbow to shimmer into full and unwashed visibility as he perched on his seat at the end of the table, and for Gretel, usually masked behind the perception-blurring walls of a chameleon spell, to unmask and proclaim, “Is that… pâté?”