The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II (17 page)

Hey, Petrol-Sweat
, she thought, then,
that’s not much of an insult any more, is it? Not given my architectural dental work. I’m going to have to come up with a new one for you – not that you can hear me, or that you’d understand me if you could. So basically, I’m talking to myself. Never reassuring, even if I have done crazier things in the last few months.
The humour sounded strained, even in her head.

So anyway, how’s it going? The stoneskinned boys looking after you? They ought to be; after all, you’re one of them now.

Filius Viae had suffered the same fate as the Pavement Priests, his mortality rendered from him by the Chemical Synod, leaving him to be eternally reborn inside London’s statues. The difference was that the stone-robed clergy had had their deaths sold out from under them by their suicidal
goddess, while Fil had bargained his own mortality away. His price had been the very transformation that, if that Burger King mirror was anything to judge by, was still working its way through Beth’s system like a slow drug.

Do you really want to be like me?
Fil’s voice was still crystalline in her mind, even when she was beginning to forget what her own had sounded like.

Yes.
It had been the only answer she could give.

But I’m not like you, am I?
she thought. You
never had church-spire teeth. What did you buy for me, Fil? What in the name of Bloody Thames did you let them turn me into?

She licked her lips, as though she were speaking for real.
And why aren’t you here to help me through it?

Once again her fury at his oh-so-selfish selflessness boiled up inside her like pit-tar.

Memory rose with it: his last request, her incredulity, and his insistence. Setting the railing-spear against his skinny chest, her sweat making her hands slip on the iron. Then the three-second count that, no matter how hard she’d willed it, could never have stretched to encompass the future she was about to destroy.

Three, two …

Her shoulder driving forward; his ribs cracking, heels drumming as City blood leaked from a punctured heart.

I thought I’d killed you – I thought you’d gone forever. I might yet be right
, she thought fervently.

Please,
let me be wrong.

She upended the bag Candleman had given her and shook
it out. Instead of clattering onto the floor, the lightbulbs floated out into the air as though they were in zero gravity. For an instant nothing happened, then one of the tungsten filaments began to glow, bright in the mausoleum gloom as a tiny nova.

The glow spread, rippling through the glass cluster as individual bulbs contracted the viral light.

The cluster briefly resembled a frozen explosion, like the mushroom cloud over Oak Ridge, and then it began to move.

Beth watched, entranced, as the bulb-cloud bloomed in the air, flexing like a living thing, and prowled between Beth and Petris. Its charge lifted the fine hairs on her arms and she felt something like attention on her, but whatever the bulb-cloud was interested in, it wasn’t her. The cloud of lights drifted on into the middle of the chamber, and a change came over it when it came to hover over Fil. It reconfigured itself, spreading and unfolding towards the edges of the room, and individual bulbs took up specific places in the network like stars in a constellation. Its lights began to ripple in a complex semaphore code that Beth couldn’t hope to follow, but just feeling its light wash over her gave her a familiar prickle of recognition, like the presence of an old friend.

It’s not really his mind. It’s a map, a model, nothing more.

Beth thought of all the tiny synaptic sparks inside Fil’s brain, the electrical impulses that had made him who he was. She looked at the dancing lights and wondered if they could really represent them.

There was, it struck her, something
familiar
about the apparatus – something she’d seen that
did
look like this, but writ larger, more complex. She frowned, trying to place it.

The grey-skinned baby was enraptured. He waved his stubby arms delightedly, his dark gaze swallowing up the show.

‘Holy Hell and Riverwater,’ Petris muttered. ‘You went to Candleman?’

Beth nodded.

‘
That
bright spark,’ Petris growled. ‘He’s the bane of my existence. I’d be a fountain of song and sunny disposition if it wasn’t for him. Don’t look at me like that,’ he said when Beth arched an eyebrow at him. ‘He might not be a heretic, but he’s still a parasite. His clients go to him grief-blind and grasping, missing those they’ve lost so badly, wanting them back, wanting them to
remember.
They’re so obsessed with the idea that it
might
be possible, they never stop to think whether or not it’s
kind
.’

He snorted. ‘Growing up inside a punishment skin’s hard enough without knowing you’ve done it sixteen times before. You—’

A commotion from outside cut him off. Shouts and curses from desiccated throats. Stone crashed against stone with a screech that made Beth’s bones vibrate. Then a familiar voice called, ‘Bring her out, Petris!’

Before the old High Priest could react, Beth ducked under his arm and shoved the door open.

The scene outside looked a bit like a game of oversized
chess: statues faced each other on the frosted grass, drawn up in battle lines, stone teeth bared, stone fingers hooked like claws. Some overeager pair had already clashed, for a marble scholar stood hunched, his arms still locked around the elbow of the sprawling Victorian bronze he’d just thrown over his shoulder. Both were motionless, but she could hear the rasping breath being dragged into their lungs.

In the midst of it, Ezekiel stood, hands and wings outstretched, his stone face beatific, as though he were calling for calm.

The words that came from his mouth however, were hardly conciliatory. ‘Give her to me, Petris, or I’ll pull the arms off your punishment skin and use them to beat you into bloody shale and take her anyway.’

‘Why?’ The stone monk kept his voice mild as he emerged behind Beth. ‘Whatever are you going to do with her?’

‘Well, first I’m going to make her a nice cup of tea,’ Ezekiel said acidly. ‘Then I’m going to rip that blasphemous lie of a face off the front of her skull and make her eat it, and then I’m going to kill her. Depending on time constraints, I might have to skip the tea.’

Well
, Beth thought, her stomach pitching,
good to know you’ve made up your mind, then.

‘Careful ’Zeke,’ Petris said. ‘By the Scriptures you claim to hold to, it’s
that
that sounds like blasphemy. You’re sworn to protect her, after all.’ His tone was insultingly offhand, a deliberate provocation, and it stripped the last vestiges of warmth from Beth’s skin.

‘
She. Is. Not. Mater. Viae
,’ Ezekiel hissed. The priests that flanked him tensed: they didn’t move, but there were suddenly lines carved in their stone muscles, as if they were ready to spring.

‘I’m not giving her up, Stonewing,’ Petris said. ‘She’s our friend. She set us free from a lie.’

‘She’s
bound
you in one!’ Ezekiel shouted back, saliva spraying from his mask. ‘But then, you were so quick to believe her propaganda, I wonder if it wasn’t what you were secretly hoping for anyway. Reach himself could’ve shrieked it to you and you would have bought it.’

‘
Reach!
’ Petris laughed incredulously. ‘The Crane King fell
because
of her.’

‘Just like you will,’ Ezekiel said, ‘if you don’t get out of our way.’

Beth swallowed hard.
If this was a movie
, she thought,
this is the bit where I give myself up to avoid bloodshed.

Somehow, though, taking the noble route was harder when you couldn’t see any way you’d go on breathing for more than twenty second afterwards.

She gripped her spear, wondering if she could fight her way out. She eyed the statues in front of her, trying to memorise them. When the stone ranks broke, there’d be precious few ways to tell friend from foe in the blur of the mêlée.

The ranks flickered closer together until the carved jut of Petris’ cowl was almost touching Ezekiel’s angelic face.

Beth’s mouth was dry with the anticipation of violence.

Petris snorted derisively, dust puffed from under his hood. ‘You’re hopelessly overmatched,’ he said.

‘The Masonry Men will fight for us, and the Blankleits too,’ Ezekiel boasted.

‘Will they? And if they do, who do you think their Amber cousins will fall in behind?’

‘My faith gives me my courage.’

‘That’s wonderful. My three-to-one superiority in numbers gives me mine.’

‘Mater Viae will decide.’

‘Mater Viae is
dead
!’ Petris shouted.

Both clerics fell silent then, possibly in surprise at the razor-sharp railing spear that had been thrust between them. The gap from stone belly to stone belly was so small that the spear’s blade was caked in dust, granite on one edge, marble on the other, where it had sliced fine channels in their armour.

Beth gripped the weapon in shaky fingers. Absurdly, her mind flashed to a classroom years ago: Mr Billings was choking on marker-pen fumes. The date
28 June 1914
was inked in the corner of a whiteboard. In the centre, ARCHDUKE FERDINAND was printed in capitals and ringed in red, and around that name, a web of wonkily drawn lines linked the names of countries, standing for the web of distrust, paranoia and blind loyalty that had dragged the world into war. She pictured that spider diagram superimposed on a map of her own city.

All she knew was that she could not let these men lay a gauntlet on each other.

Ezekiel’s head ground slowly around to face her.

‘What’s that face then, a trophy?’ His voice was bitumen-black. ‘Can you actually hear yourself, Petris? How can you tolerate her parading Our Lady’s likeness around like that? I mean, what is she even supposed to
be
?’

Inside his carved open mouth, Beth saw Petris’ real flesh-and-blood lips move to answer and then hesitate as he wondered exactly the same thing.

Beth swallowed against her parched throat. The world shrank.
What
is
she supposed to be?

That was the question that was driving Ezekiel, she realised, the question that was very nearly driving him mad. Whatever he might protest, he wasn’t certain; he didn’t know what to make of her, so reminiscent was she of the Goddess she’d pronounced dead. Part of him wanted to despise her for it; another wanted to grasp at her like a drowning man. He couldn’t bear being torn like that, so he had to destroy her.

Beth did have a choice: she could fight Ezekiel, or she could try to help him understand.

With numb fingers, she let the spear fall and as it clanged off the stones she pulled a black marker pen from her pocket and dropped to one knee. The Pavement Priests watched her uncertainly.

On the pavement beneath them she wrote:

I don’t know. But I know who to ask.

Pen’s attempts to put on her makeup would probably have been going a lot better if she could have stopped her hand shaking.

‘I must say, My Lady,’ the courier who’d turned up at six a.m. that morning had said, ‘I’m really looking forward to seeing today’s shots. I hear they’re going for immediate syndication, so they should be out in time to make the evening papers.’

‘Papers?’ Pen had said hollowly. ‘Lots of people will see them, will they?’

‘Oh, a fair few. About three million, I should think, Countess, plus the folks who’ll look online, of course—’

‘Three …
million
?’ Terror threaded itself through Pen’s throat and pulled it closed.

‘At least.’ The courier had beamed as he’d handed her a large black box tied with a silver ribbon in an elaborate bow, then he ducked his head and backed away down the corridor, delaying looking away until the last possible moment.

The box had been lined in velvet. Pen had emptied it out and found foundation, blusher, lipliners and lipsticks, eyeliners,
mascara, Touche Éclat and eyeshadows in every conceivable shade, along with an exquisite set of bonehandled brushes. The last thing to fall from the box had drifted like a leaf onto the dresser: a glossy photograph of Parva, smiling and made-up to emphasise every single scar. Pen had set her teeth and hissed when she saw it. To her, it was more exposed and traumatic than a skull.

On the corner of the picture, a couple of sentences had been scribbled. Pen had held them up to the mirror to read them.

‘Come like this to start, we’ll amend as we go. BD.’

Three million people
, Pen thought, eyeing the picture,
seeing me like this – no wonder I’m shaking like an earthquake. Parv, how on earth did you ever do this?

*

She’d just about managed the foundation, but when her quaking hand nearly shoved a peacock-blue pencil
through
her eye, she put it down and exhaled hard. It felt like her lungs were packed with barbed wire.

‘Um … Countess?’

Pen started and turned, wondering how long Espel had been watching her. The steeplejill was sitting up on the couch. Sleep had messed up her blonde hair and its random, dandelion strands made the symmetry of her face even more unnerving.

She eyed Pen with a shy curiosity. ‘Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine, I’m just …’ Pen tailed off, because she didn’t really have an end to that sentence.

Espel’s frown said she didn’t believe her. She rose and came to stand beside Pen’s shoulder, clutching the duvet Pen had thrown over her like a child’s security blanket. She hesitated, then picked up a brush and tentatively turned it over in her fingers. ‘I don’t want to step out of line here or anything,’ she said. ‘I mean, you’re a mirrorstocrat, you do your own makeup – that’s your privilege, of course, but it’s
Beau Driyard
waiting downstairs. Do you … do you want some help?’

Pen nodded and handed her a brush – it was all she trusted herself to do.