The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II (23 page)

‘So why aren’t I?’ Pen asked quietly. ‘I could have been. You just had to lean in. Why
not
kill me, if it meant that much to you? You could have been merrily martyred by now.’

Espel didn’t answer.

‘You couldn’t do it,’ Pen said, ‘could you? Even though you had nothing to lose. Even though you knew you were going to die anyway, just for trying, when it came down to it, you couldn’t.’

It was a long time before Espel answered, and when she did Pen barely heard her. ‘I said I was the girl on the spot,’ she whispered. ‘I didn’t say I was good at it.’ She lapsed into silence, staring at the hands that had failed her.

After a long time she asked, ‘What about me? Why am I still alive?’

Pen didn’t answer. Espel’s voice wavered a little as she asked, ‘What are you going to do?’

Pen looked into the knife and her reflection stared back. It wasn’t really her image she saw in it at all, she realised; it was her face inverted:
Parva
’s face. The bloody handprint goaded her. She was nowhere and she needed help. Parva needed help and she needed allies who knew the inverted city.

The obvious choice was the mirrorstocracy – confess all, and bid them redouble their efforts. But the horror of Harry Blight sprawled on the courtroom floor went through her skin like wire barbs and stopped her.

She thought of something Espel had said:
If the mirrorstocracy paid any damn attention to what happened on the streets
…

In her memory, between a pulled-down hood and a tugged-up bandana, a pair of eyes stared out at her.
We’re everywhere.
Hadn’t Espel just proven exactly that?

She thought of a red handprint on concrete, and then a black handprint on brick.

‘
I thought,
’ Espel had said, ‘
if I could get to know you, you’d side with us.
’

For a long time Pen sat listening to the roar and creak of the wind in the steel struts of the tower, remembering a tower in another city, walled only by air and the gaze of cranes’ floodlights.

‘The Faceless want me on side?’ she said at last. ‘Then take me to them.’

She could almost hear the sibilants stretch in her mouth as she said, ‘I have a proposition for them.’

Borne on wings of blue fire, Beth burst from the tunnel into the synod’s storerooms. She straddled the complex skeins of thermals that interwove like muscle fibres in the sewer-mander’s back, her railing couched under her arm like a lance. Her jaw was set: pugnacious and determined.

She had chosen to come this way as a statement of intent, winding her way through the sewers and sub-basements, rather than presenting herself at the old dye-works. She was using the workmen’s entrance, the back door, aggressively casual, if you could ever call a girl riding an eighteen-foot incandescent gas dragon
casual
. She was proving to herself as much as to them that this feared place was somewhere she could belong.

She looked at the cracks that veined her pavement-skinned hands. In a flash of memory, she returned to the synod’s burning pool, hundreds of yards above on the surface, its chemicals coruscating her, changing her, making her this, whatever
this
was.

In a weird way, she was their child.

Get ready, boys
. She swallowed hard.
The prodigal daughter’s coming home.

To her left, the wall reared up endlessly. Oil-drenched pigeons flapped to and from the glowing alcoves, tending the precise constellations of light. As she banked Oscar in towards the wall she tilted her head, trying to take them all in. They extended far beyond the corona that the sewermander’s wings cast, above and below, flickering like sputtering candles in the dark.

It was far vaster and more complex than the cloud of semaphoring bulbs Candleman had built to model Fil’s consciousness, but Beth could see the relationship: it was like a satellite photograph compared to a hand-scrawled map.

Her breath caught, and she almost laughed at the sheer ambition of it. Now she knew what she was looking at.

The Chemical Synod had bargained and bartered and built themselves the impossible from the scraps sold to them. They had built themselves a
mind
: a mind of a scale and complexity that awed Beth. Candleman’s had been a reminder, a simplification. This was the real thing.

Closer
, she thought to Oscar, reaching down through the fire to stroke his inner reptilian hide. He dipped his head in acknowledgement. Pigeons squawked and flapped angrily at them, but they had the sense or the instinct not to risk their oily feathers near Oscar’s flame.

He brought them in close, hovering next to a shallow alcove about as high and wide as her torso. Inside, nestled like a relic in a shrine, was an intricately sculpted glass
bottle. The liquid inside it glowed a queasy yellow; it roiled and scrabbled against the glass as though panicked.

There was a square of paper snagged under the base of the bottle, inscribed with three words in neat copperplate handwriting:

Fear – spiders. Irrational.

Beth took the paper and turned it over. On the reverse side was a stained black-and-white photo of a grumpy-looking kid in a denim jacket. She wondered if this was a ‘before’ snap, if the kid had looked any less mardy when she’d received whatever the Synod had paid her for her arachnophobia.

Oscar flitted from alcove to alcove, hovering over each like a hummingbird above a flower. Beth found a flask of pink-misted sentimentality, a box of powdered self-regard, beakers of various deep-rooted opinions, all with their own subtle, individual glow. In the fifth or sixth alcove was a conical, flat-bottomed flask, like one you might find in a school science lab. The fluid inside was viscous and metallic like mercury. It clung to the sides as she shook it.

Childhood outlooks, proclivities and memories
, the label read.
Complete to sixteen
. And written in a smaller, tighter hand underneath:
Traumatic and unusual: dilute as required
.

Wondering, she turned the paper over and felt a little spark of shock jump up her spine.

Gazing out of the picture at her, his hair as chaotic as a riot and his lip caught in that perpetual cocky twist, was Filius Viae.

She hesitated, blinked. She started sweating. Her fingers twitched back towards the flask—

—and she heard the sharp snaps of Zippo lighter lids being opened close behind her.

‘Ahhh, our new voiceless viceroy, come to visssit at lassst.’

She turned, reluctantly leaving the flask where it was. The Chemical Synod watched her from a tunnel-mouth in the opposite wall. As one, they waved to her.

‘We wondered when you might wend your way back,’ Johnny Naphtha hissed cordially from the apex of the perfect arrowhead formation they stood in. ‘What, precisssely purchassess for uss the pleasure of your presssence?’

Beth curled the photo of Fil into her palm and steered Oscar away from the alcove. She urged him over to the synod’s tunnel and hopped down onto the bricked floor. She felt the heat on her back slacken as the sewermander de-ignited and scrambled into her hood. He blinked out at the traders, wrinkling his snout at their acrid smell. Beth could feel the rapid tip-tapping of his reptilian heart.

Me too, mate,
she thought at it.
Me too.

She wondered briefly if the link between her and the sewermander went both ways: if the synod would look past her brave face and read her fear in the quailing form of her lizard.

Willing her own heart to slow, she turned to the wall and popped the cap from her magic marker. In fat black capitals, she scrawled her question.

WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME?

The synod turned to read it as one.

‘Did I ssay viceroy?’ Johnny murmured. ‘Perhapss
vandal
would have had more veracity. Notwithsstanding your indifference to the aesstheticss of our ssstoress, the answer to your quesstion iss sstraightforward.’

They unfolded their hands in a gesture of revelation. ‘We provided the ssservice purchasssed. What we did to you wass sssimply what wass asssked of uss.’

Beth shook her head firmly. With slow deliberation she wrote on the wall,

HE ASKED YOU TO MAKE ME LIKE HIM

She held out the picture of Fil.

Johnny made a small ‘ah’ as he took it. The breath was accompanied by the quiet pop of an oil-bubble bursting in the back of his throat.

‘I think I ssee the sssource of the confussion. Making you “like him” might well have been the matter of the young masster’s mind, but the wordss that left hiss
mouth
were, “
Make her as much a child of Mater Viae as you can
.”’

Beth started as Fil’s voice came, perfectly replicated from between Johnny’s pitch-threaded lips. The Pylon Spider must have traded them that talent; she wondered what they had got for it.

‘And poor Filiusss, whatever he might have believed, wasss not a child of Mater Viae, wasss he?’

Beth could feel a hole opening in the pit of her stomach.

‘There isss another rule, Misss Bradley, that musst alwayss be sssatisfied: the equation musst balance. Our
transssactionss musst alwaysss be
fair
. The ssssubstrate bought must be of equal value to that which iss bargained with, and what Filiusss sssurrendered for you.’ They rubbed their oily fingers and thumbs frictionlessly together. ‘Not jusst commodified mortality but ssecuritissed memory as well? Now, that purchassess a far more dramatic transsformation than the petty pickingss Gutterglassss gave up for him in
hiss
turn.’

The synod leaned forward. The oil that covered them reflected the variegated alcove lights so they looked like they had galaxies inside them – they looked like they’d eaten the universe.

‘“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.’