The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II (14 page)

‘Fellow citizens, I come before you today burdened with a conviction that I know many of you share. I speak to articulate that feeling, but I wish to do more than give it a voice; I wish to give it form and flesh. I wish to give it a face.

The conviction I speak of is this: that those less fortunate in our fair city should not be doomed without hope by the circumstances of their reflection, nor their father’s reflection before them. Mirrorborn or naturalborn, none of us chose how we came into this world, but we have taken this strange, miraculous city into our hearts and hands and made of it what we chose. Now we must do the same with ourselves.

‘On behalf of the Silver Senate of London-Under-Glass, and with the full authority of the Simularchy, I hereby inaugurate a citywide lottery. On the anniversary of this day, one person from amongst the city’s Plebeian class shall be raised
to the Mirrorstocracy. One fortunate unfortunate – one lucky lesser-reflected man or woman – will have their aesthetics perfected by the State.

From that point on, they will be granted deed and title according to their newly attained beauty, and that beauty shall be theirs to pass on to their naturalborn children and from them to their children, for all time until the mirrors crack and the cloud-wrought towers crumble into dust.

This is London-Under-Glass, where we have always made our own choices. Now we shall make our own chances as well. I urge you, make yours well.

Good night, my friends.

May Mago bless you and bring you beauty.’

Pen finished reading and clicked back. She was just about to see what the ‘Ceremony’ link would reveal when an immense concussion rolled through the room.

Pen jumped to her feet, imagining the tower crumpling under the force of some powerful explosive, burning and crumbling beneath her.

Fourth attack in two months. No survivors.

The cold blue eyes of Faceless stared out from her memory.

The tyranny of the Looking-Glass Lottery will end.

The sound boomed again, Pen’s teeth clattered together. A crystal paperweight was shaken off the desk and a tiny starburst fractured across its surface. The tremors subsided, and she tested the floor nervously. It still felt solid.

At the third echoing roar, Pen finally managed to place the sound: not explosives, but thunder, deafeningly near.

‘Weatherturn!’ the cry was outside, but it came clearly through the glass.

A myriad other voices took up the cry: Weatherturn!’

‘Weatherturn!’

‘
Weatherturn!
’

Pen went to the window. This high up, the clouds were impossibly close, looming taller and fatter than she’d ever seen them on her side of the Mirror, and they looked
jagged
somehow, pixelated like a digital photo in ultra-close up. As she stared at them, she realised the redness she’d seen on them wasn’t reflected sunlight – it was the colour of the cloud vapour itself.

A scar of lightning flashed in the sky. With a final savage roar, the weird clouds opened.

Swollen drops began to streak past the windowpane in strange colours, red and black and silvery-grey.
The water here must be filthy
, Pen thought.

A dull reddish fragment of something thunked into the window and skittered away. Pen stared at the trail of dusty mortar it left, and then realised it wasn’t raining water …

It was raining
masonry.

Tiny chunks of brick and stone and concrete and glittering slivers of glass rattled down from the sky like a convocation of meteorites. They hammered the window relentlessly. Pen flinched, but the pane didn’t take so much as a scratch. Marvelling, she straightened from her cowering and pressed her face to the glass, peering between the stone raindrops. The finer-ground bits of architecture clung to the roofs, piling
up like epic dust. Thick dunes suddenly scores of feet high coated the gables.

Gradually the storm slackened. The drops grew finer, drifting on the breeze like brick snowflakes. The air cleared, leaving the roofscape covered in rubble. It looked like pictures she’d seen of London in the Blitz.

‘Abatement!’ a voice called from somewhere hidden.

‘Abatement!’ another voice cried.

‘Abatement.’

Across the skyline, top floor windows opened. Hatches hidden under slates popped upwards, cunningly spring-loaded to propel the mounds of rubble lying on them down into the street below.

Figures swarmed out onto the roofs. They looked like polar explorers, clawing their way across the newly settled masonry with pickaxes and barbed boots. Most were armoured, some in snug dark Kevlar and fibreglass, others in a cheap-looking hodgepodge: scuffed leather and battered metal, helmets that might have been hammered from saucepans. A few went barefoot in vests and shorts, obviously relying on only their muscles for grip. No one covered their faces. There were sinewy old men and women, there were kids with dust in their hair. Some frowned and swore at handheld computer screens, or tapped the dials of the barometers they wore around their necks like oversized medallions. Only a very few had tied themselves off with ropes. Shouts rose above a burble of muted conversation.

‘Voleskull Crew to me!’

‘Shovelwights rally!’

‘Clinging to a line now, Espel? When did you become such a pussy?’

Catcalls and laughter echoed from the roofs. Pen opened the window a crack and more words became distinguishable from the background hubbub. She heard bets being made.

‘Three eyelashes says we build ours taller!’

‘Chickenshit!’ A coarse voice hollered down from the roof above her. ‘Bet properly if you’re gonna, or don’t waste my time.’

‘An eyebrow then!’

‘Cocky, much?’ a braying, raucous laugh. ‘Done!

They unslung shovels and sledgehammers and trowels and went to work, shoving the rained rubble in localised avalanches to the pavements below. A boy began to sing. His voice was high enough that he could barely have been into his teens. Another voice joined in, then another, then another, until the entire city thrummed to the rough and ready choir.

A raucous cheer greeted the last line, and they started again. They scampered over the broken roof-terrain agile as
squirrels. The burliest amongst them cleared rubble. The slightest and quickest figures scrambled over the moraine just before it fell, palming certain specific fragments and passing them back to the waiting chisels of their fellows, who smoothed them off. Yet more stood ready with quick-setting mortar, adding them to the existing architecture. Pen began to see how the buildings here had got so tall and so strange.

Astonishingly quickly, the towers grew.

But even as the steeplejacks and steeplejills worked, the sky grew dim. Another thick band of cloud blotted out the sun and the snow of brickflakes grew denser and darker. It began to fall straight until Pen realised it was no longer brick but wickedly sharp shards of roof-tile, lashing down as fast as hail.

‘
Slate!
’ cried a steeplejack in dismay as the slateshower started rattling into the towers. Jacks and jills danced as best they could between the lethal precipitation. Splinters of it shrieked over windows. Cuts opened on exposed skin, suddenly and shockingly red. Blood ran over the roofs. A lithe woman leapt from the head of a gargoyle to a balcony railing, but just as her toes touched metal a slate fragment caught her in the cheek. She flinched despite herself. Pen watched, her stomach clenching, as for a dreadful second the woman’s arms windmilled, fighting vainly for balance. Then with a single choked out ‘N—’ she tumbled from sight between the buildings.

‘Steady now!’ the voice from above Pen’s head roared. ‘Show ’em what it means to be Palace Crew!’

Pen stared in horrified incredulity. They were still
working.

On and on they laboured, pausing only to wipe the blood and the sweat from their brows before they heaved their hammers again. There was no singing now; they needed all their concentration to dodge the most dagger-like pieces of slate as they fell. The towers rose, slower now but still climbing. There were no cheers. By a chimneystack just across the river, a man sagged under a hail of slate as though exhausted, his cheap tin helmet cut to ribbons, blood running freely from the gashes. The slate fell harder and he bled more freely, but he didn’t move again.

Get inside
, Pen thought furiously.
Take cover, you idiots!

Something caught her eye: a billboard for the Lottery across the river, Parva’s beaming face plastered across it. An idea struck her.
You’re Countess Parva Khan. They might listen to you.

She’d call out to them, order them to stop. She groped for the window latch, to open it wider, but knife-like shards rattled against the reinforced pane. She flinched, the remembered pain of metal thorns searing her skin.

‘Stop!’ she yelled, swallowing against thick fear. ‘Get inside!’ but no one heard her.

Again she reached for the window latch, but as she did, a shrill whistle echoed across the roofscape and a voice boomed out, ‘That’s enough! Get in.’

The sky opened on a seam of lightning. The slatestorm redoubled in ferocity. The jacks and jills stowed their tools and, cowering behind what was left of their armour, they
turned back towards their hatches.

Pen let out a shuddering, relieved breath.

Something black smacked into the windowpane and Pen shrieked and leapt backwards.

It was a girl, boxed up in cheap tin and leather armour. She hung upside down, arms splayed, her left leg tangled in a rope umbilical. Blood and wet hair streaked her face. She wasn’t moving.

She wasn’t moving. Slate fell. She wasn’t moving. For horrible long moments Pen watched fragments of the wicked rain erode her skin. Then she lurched for the latch, yanked the window open and let the storm into the room.

Needles of hot pain erupted on her cheeks, the backs of her hands, her forehead, but she ignored them and reached for the girl with one hand, trying to shield her eyes with the other. Tiny quills of slate embedded themselves in her skin. The girl was slight, fragile as a bird.

Pen shoved her face into the shredded leather jacket, away from the weather. A hot fug of blood and sweat and dust engulfed her as she wrapped her arms around the girl, taking her weight while she fumbled with the rope.

It wouldn’t come – the snarl was too tight. There was a wide-bladed knife strapped to the girl’s belt. Pen grabbed it and sawed dementedly at the nylon until it began to fray.

All at once, the fibres slithered apart and the girl’s weight unbalanced her. Teetering backwards, she just managed to reach out and slam the window closed before she tipped over and smacked her head into the hardwood floor.

She lay there for a moment, simply breathing, the warmth and stink of the girl sitting on her like a blanket. Then through the skin of the girl’s neck, pressed up against her cheek where they had fallen together, she felt a pulse.

‘Are you okay?’ she yelped, louder than she’d meant to. She scrambled out from under the girl and bent over her. ‘Are you – bloody hell, are you
alive
?’

The leather-swaddled mass flopped over sideways. The girl’s eyelids flickered in her red-smeared face and she drew in a shuddering breath. Her eyes opened, slowly focused on Pen and stretched in horrified recognition, then they went to the knife Pen still held.

Pen jumped like she was holding a live snake and dropped it onto the table. The girl’s eyes rolled back.

‘Oh, splintered fragging Mago,’ the girl murmured. ‘Not for much longer I’m not
.’

‘These are very shallow,’ the doctor said, peering through her wire-framed spectacles.

The girl, the
steeplejill,
lay back on one of the white sofas, her hair fanning back over Edward’s jacket, which had been laid down to catch the blood. The gore and grit and rooftop grime had been sponged away and her forehead and cheeks had been swabbed with a disinfectant that smelled like it stung.

The face that had been revealed was utterly symmetrical, split by a silver seam that ran from hairline to chin. The girl was strikingly pretty, but she’d gone out of her way to customise herself: dark roots and eyebrows showed beneath hair bleached white-blonde. A small tattoo of a thunderbolt sat just above each cheekbone. A row of studs stretched all the way up her left ear, and a ring punctured her left nostril. Unsettlingly, her
right
ear and nostril were dotted with small holes too, as though she regularly switched her piercings from one side to the other.

Strangest of all were the cuts. The slate shards had
opened a myriad tiny wounds in her face, and they mirrored each other perfectly, either side of the silver stitching. If the doctor found anything odd in this she didn’t remark upon it; she just squinted into the lamp and threaded a needle.

Something Pen couldn’t quite define kept compelling her eyes back to the girl’s face. Maybe it
was
those cuts, and the knowledge that if she hadn’t acted, they would’ve swallowed that face whole. She’d barely thought about it at the time, but now …

I saved your life.
She tried the words out in her head and shied away from them, from the massive commitment they implied. One decision – a few brief seconds … It scared her that a connection that important could appear so
fast
.

‘They’ll need stitching, but they shouldn’t scar,’ the doctor was saying. Her needle hovered casually over the girl’s left eye. ‘Unless of course you want them to?’

The question didn’t shock Pen as much as it would have done the day before – the memory of the queue snaking from the knife-parlour door was still vivid in her mind. What did shock her was that the question hadn’t been addressed to the blonde girl on the sofa, but to
her.