The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II (31 page)

Pen squinted critically. ‘Be better without the cracks.’

‘Well, I’ll go back in time immediately and tell my ten-year-old self to be more careful, shall I?’ Espel said tartly. She dropped herself onto the edge of the bed and eyed the
closed door. ‘So what did Case say to you?’ she asked. She drew her knees up under her chin and hugged them.

‘Same as she said to you, I expect,’ Pen said. ‘“You weren’t there, you didn’t see anything. Any resemblance last night may have born to anything except another Faceless terrorist attack is purely coincidental, and likely the product of my overstressed mind this close to Draw Night.” Oh, and she told me to give you a raise.’ Pen looked up from picking the skin off her scarred cuticles, a cheap little self-demolition she hadn’t indulged for months. ‘Am I even paying you?’

Espel managed a smile. ‘Not as such, no. Been meaning to talk to you about it, but things kept coming up.’

‘Things like killing me with knives?’

‘And saving your arse from a brick storm.’

‘Well, if you will let trifles distract you …’ Pen mocked an indifferent shrug.

Espel’s smile staggered over the line into a laugh. For a moment it felt like they could have been anywhere, they could have been home. Two friends, sitting on a bed in the middle of the night and laughing.

Except it was different, Pen thought, watching the way Espel’s face broke into symmetrical dimples. She’d never looked at anyone like that, not even Beth. Beth was safety. Beth
was
home, Pen knew her better than anyone. Being with Espel was different, charting the lines and shapes of her felt like discovery, it made something nameless and exciting swell inside Pen’s chest.

Eventually, Espel’s smile faded. ‘Those … things, last night …’ she said, and trailed off. Her eyes were glassy.

Pen recognised that expression. She’d worn it herself: the look of someone’s whose world was breached. The reality she’d always accepted was leaking out of it like air pressure from a crashing plane. The masonry-skinned man who’d come so close to taking her was as alien to Espel as Espel had once been to Pen. She’d been stolen, if only for a few seconds, by something
other
.

Pen threaded her fingers between the steeplejill’s. The scars on the back of her hand stood out as she squeezed sympathetically. ‘People,’ she said quietly, ‘not things.’

Espel looked up. ‘You
know
them?’

‘Not them, exactly, but their like. Yes.’

‘Tell me,’ Espel demanded.

The hunger in her voice startled Pen, but she knew where it had come from: these things had almost killed her and now she was determined to understand them. Pen flinched a little from the intensity of her stare, but started, ‘I saw them once in the Old City, at St Paul’s. There was digging and I – I saw them die. Those ones were just people – civilians, I suppose – but I think the ones that attacked last night were soldiers. They were disciplined; when they swam under the floor they held
formation.
I think they had a mission – they were very specific about what they took.’

‘The immigrants,’ Espel said.

‘Whatever they were after, the new arrivals had it,’ Pen agreed. ‘They snatched them, but they didn’t kill them – you
noticed that too, right? The Chevaliers, the doctors, them they killed, but they carried the immigrants away alive and whole, back under the – under the …’ She tailed off, staring at the raised lesions on the back of her hand. She exhaled a little ‘oh’ of realisation and rocked back hard on the bed.

‘What is it?’ Espel asked in alarm.

‘The floor,’ Pen said softly. ‘When they dived back into it, it didn’t seal properly. It rippled’ – she turned her hand in front of her – ‘it
scarred
. I couldn’t see it on the news reports about the other stations’ attacks because their floors had been wrecked by explosives, but last night—’

‘So the floor rippled,’ Espel said. ‘So what?’

‘So … I saw the bathroom where Parva was snatched – the floor was scarred just like that.’ She exhaled hard, as though that could push off the weight she suddenly felt on her chest.

‘That’s why they took her – they were looking for new arrivals. Those things have got my sister.’

And suddenly her mind was with Parva, being dragged under the floor of the reflected bathroom, concrete flowing close over her skin like thick water. Pen shuddered at the terror she must have felt.

‘Grenades,’ Espel said.

‘What?’

‘Grenades. You said the other stations on the news were wrecked by explosives. Last night, when the reinforcements showed up, the Chevs were packing these launcher-things, grenades. When they fired them they kind of …
burrowed
into the ground before they went off. Don’t you see? They came prepared. They knew what they were fighting – they’d done it before. Mirror-
fuck,
’ she swore. ‘Have we just found ourselves in the middle of some kind of secret war?’

A secret war.
Pen thought.
That’s a bad habit
.

Espel was already digging in her pocket for her mobile phone ‘I have to warn Garrison,’ she said. ‘We’ve got people looking for your sister right now. What if one of them finds her, and those things along with her? Goutierre’s Eye or no, it won’t be worth them getting buried alive for.’

Espel went to stand up, but found she couldn’t because Pen’s fingers were clamped hard around her wrist. In Pen’s other hand the replica marble glimmered as she turned it in the light of the table lamp.

‘What did you say?’

‘I said, Eye or no Eye, Garrison has to call off the—’

‘Eye, or no eye,’ Pen echoed her. ‘
I
.’ She exhaled hard and released Espel’s wrist. ‘I am so bloody stupid – no, scratch that,
you
are so bloody stupid.’ She levelled a finger at Espel. ‘I’d never heard of Goutierre’s bleeding Eye until three days ago. You’re the one who’s been collecting souvenirs since you were
ten
—’

‘What are you talking about?’ Espel demanded.

‘The Device, the Lottery Device. Think about it. How does it work?’

‘It scans the winner, and then the Eye checks every mirror in the city for matching—’ She broke off and stared at Pen.

‘Can you operate it?’ Pen asked. The steeplejill nodded hesitantly, and then with more certainty.

‘They show it close up on TV every Draw Night – I’ve watched them do it every year.’

Anticipation was a layer of thin ice just below Pen’s skin. ‘Then we know how to find her,’ she said. ‘The girl who shares my face.

Beth’s efforts at being inconspicuous were a little hampered by the cats.

They’d started following her just after she passed Finsbury Park tube, hopping over garden fences and slinking out from behind bins. So far as she could tell, they were just ordinary London strays, not Fleet or Wandle or any other member of Mater Viae’s feline honour guard, but they trailed in her wake in Hamelinesque procession, single file with their tails held daintily high. By the time she passed a Turkish bakery on Green Lanes and cut through a business park, she couldn’t see the end of the line.

Luckily, it was the middle of the night and there was just a handful of people on the street, a reasonable percentage of whom were drunk and wearing T-shirts and so would be most likely to put the sight of her feline entourage down to hallucinations caused by alcohol or hypothermia or both. She still drew some stares and pointed fingers, but she kept her hood up and her head down and hustled onwards. The insulated cable of her hair felt slick on the back of her neck.

The synod’s photo was still curled in her fist. She didn’t know why she’d taken it from their stores; it wasn’t like she needed a reminder. The image was branded on her mind.

Pen
, she said to herself, over and over, filling the space between her other conscious thoughts:
Pen.

She’d heard rumours, but she only knew she was close when she noticed the backstreet she was walking down was better lit than its neighbours. The streetlamps sprouted more densely from these pavements. Close to, she could see the cement caking the bases of many of them was fresh. She peered into the bulbs, and in the midst of the orange glow she saw oscillations of light and shadow that might have been fingers.

She smiled and pressed on, her retinue of cats padding silently after her. Soon they began to pass statues standing incongruously outside newsagents and next to flyer-plastered phone boxes. They were all facing the same way, and she followed their stone gazes with her own.

Rising beside the railway was a squat concrete tower. Its architecture was rough, a brutality of cheapness rather than design, but two things set it apart from the other tower blocks that rose above the skyline. First, every single one of its windows was dark, and second, the concrete yard that surrounded it was dotted with stone bodies. A surrounding army hemmed in the tower.

A change in the wind brought the rich, sour scent of garbage to Beth’s nostrils. Gutterglass was under siege.

She hefted her spear in one hand, curled Pen’s photo in
the other and set off at a run. Shouts of alarm and anger followed her across the yard. Some of the stone bodies blurred towards her, but none of them could touch her. Her bare feet slapped on the concrete, growing faster as she drew the essence of London into her body. The synod’s divine toxins continued to work in her; she could feel her physiology changing moment by moment.

Ahead of her, a Pavement Priest in a pitted iron punishment skin launched himself at one of the tower’s ground-floor windows. The glass exploded as a giant fist made of rusting radiators burst outwards. The metal statue took the punch full in the chest and stopped cold. The clang as he hit the concrete echoed over the city.

The fist retreated back into the tower.

Beth altered her trajectory, sprinting for the empty window frame.
Have to hope that I’m harder than a Pavement Priest
, she thought.
Or that Glas is happy to see me …

Given how she’d left things with Mater Viae’s former sene-schal, she didn’t think
that
was very likely.

She leapt, and sailed through the window like a circus performer. She landed inside with much less of a bump than she’d expected, the ground releasing a rich stink of decay as it shifted and squashed under her.

She rose to her feet. The room was waist-high in rubbish: orange peel, bits of white plastic, smashed furniture, circuit boards, stacks of mouldering paper, shoes decayed to the point where only the soles were left. Beth crouched, her spear high, waiting for the attack: any of these rubbish-dunes
might be hiding a blade made from a broken car door, or reshape itself into an eggshell-eyed face that would spit rusting nails at her with bullet-like velocity.

Minutes came and went, and there was no attack. The sea of garbage remained quiescent. Beth drew in a shuddering breath and waded towards the door.

The corridors were equally filled with trash. Beth couldn’t force her way through it and instead had to clamber over it. She was painfully aware that every second out of contact with the masonry weakened her, but Pen’s name just kept spinning round her mind, goading her onwards. She reached the emergency stairwell and began to scale the trashslide that covered it like a mountaineer.

She was impressed; she’d heard the rumours that Gutterglass, under attack on all sides, had found the landfill fastness north of Euston too vast to defend and had relocated south, towards the city’s centre – but she hadn’t realised the trash-spirit had brought the dump
with
it.

Beth guessed that for Glas, this was the equivalent of some aristocrat moving out of their stately home and trying to fit all their old posh furniture in a one-bedroom flat.

Must feel cramped
, she thought.

She rose through storey after storey, reaching down through the chaotic mulch of rotting meat and crushed lightbulbs and Thames knew what else to brush the concrete floor with her fingertips. She could sense a spark of consciousness through her outstretched fingertips, but it was diffuse: Glas was obviously here – and equally obviously in
no hurry to manifest. One other thing was certain too: the old spirit knew she was here.

She kept climbing.

The top floor was a little less choked with rubbish, and Beth was able to walk upright. Wide windows opened onto a million sparks of the city night.

Perched on the stripped casing of an old washing machine, knees tucked under chin, apparently admiring the view, was a figure cowled in black plastic. Beth heard the cheep and chitter of rats.

‘Here comes the source of all my joy, who brought me all my woe.’ The voice, reedy and sing-song, was squeezed from washing-up-bottle lungs and rubber-band vocal chords, belying the power of its owner. ‘But what she doth intend with me, only the seas and the streets do know.

‘Well’ – the voice became wry – ‘perhaps the seas, the streets and the occasional attentive trash-spirit …’

Gutterglass turned and regarded Beth with eggshell eyes set in an almost featureless papier-mâché head. Fingers made of empty cigarette lighters held up a phial of transparent liquid. ‘Looking for this? No need to look so surprised, My Lady. The synod’s pigeons may be soaked in their chemicals, but they are still
pigeons.
’ The seneschal nodded towards the roof, and somewhere in the shadows something cooed. ‘They still talk. Unlike some people I could mention.’ There was a bitter twist to the trash-spirit’s tone. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

Beth eyed Glas uneasily.
My Lady?
she thought. She scanned
the rubbish until she found a discarded door from a bathroom cabinet. She turned its mirrored front towards Glas and raised her eyebrows questioningly.

Gutterglass snorted. ‘Yes, that used to be home.’ The eggshell eyes peered into the glass and stubby fingers smoothed nonexistent eyebrows. ‘I was a doctor, and then a scientist. I wanted to know what lay under the surface of things.’ There was a chittering commotion under the black plastic sack. ‘So I did what scientists do: I theorised and I conducted experiments, and one of them brought me here.’ Glas looked at the phial. ‘This one, to be precise. It’s a compound of three common, overlooked waste chemicals. I’ve always been good at making things from what other people throw away.