The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II (36 page)

Pen didn’t move.

‘What are you going to do then, just stand there? For how long? There’s only one way out of here, Parva, and when I leave, the lift comes with me. Besides’ – her voice hardened – ‘she wants to meet you.’

She.
And again, Pen felt it: the press of that terrible curiosity. She went reluctantly to Case’s side and together they left the desk’s little island of light behind them, and pressed out into the chamber.

Pen couldn’t tell how big the space was. The walls returned no echoes. The ceiling could have been ten or a hundred feet above. It seemed an endless sea of bottles.

‘They came for
me
, didn’t they?’ she said quietly. ‘Last night, the only person the Chevaliers were there to save was me.’

‘And they killed twelve of our allies.’ Case’s voice tightened a fraction on the word. ‘A pretty little tap dance I had to do down here to explain it. I worried she might not listen, but happily she has an unsentimental attitude to her clayling brood. I was given one more chance to look after you.’

Look after you.
Pen felt another, deeper chill at the phrase. Gradually, she became aware of city sounds, very quiet: the growl of engines and the gurgle of drains, hooting traffic, even something that might have been music. Perhaps the same trick of acoustics that had allowed the gunshots to echo all the way to the kitchen was carrying the noise of London-Under-Glass back to her. In the darkness ahead, she saw two pinpricks of green light.

‘I can’t believe you were so stupid,’ Case snapped under her breath. ‘I told you –
I told you,
we couldn’t afford to have you running off again. I gave you every chance to be her. You could have been
happy.’

—every chance to be her.
‘You knew.’ The shock was draining from Pen. She felt sick and heavy, like she’d swallowed liquid lead and it was setting in her belly. ‘You knew who I was all the time.’

‘Of course I did.’ She sounded nonplussed by Pen’s surprise. ‘I didn’t know how you’d done it, but I knew – of course I knew. Who else could you have been? I
grieved
when your mirror-sister was taken. I did my best for her.’

Pen thought of the difference between Parva, subsisting on a fake set of memories in a school in Kensington, and the boy rolled in the tarp.

‘Well, what a thing it is to have your favour,’ she snarled, but Case didn’t seem to notice the sarcasm.

‘I knew who you were the moment you walked into my garden,’ she said. ‘But still, your face was as perfect as hers and I thought – how could I not think – the Mirror has brought her back to me? You seemed content to play your sister’s part, so I was content to let you. There was a chance … we could have
made
it true.’ Case licked her lips.

‘
She
wanted you, of course. She was
very
curious to know how you’d managed to come here. But I made a deal: I – I bargained with her. I told her that if she gave me just a little time, I could get that secret from you without violence.’ There was an awful pride in her words. ‘I was in control.’

‘
Control.
’

Pen froze. The voice had come out of the dark ahead of them, and it was not human.

It had coalesced from the edges of the sounds of the traffic and the water and the drains and the distant music, carried in waves that filled the hidden expanse of the chamber and reverberated deep inside her skull, closer and more intimate than the sounds of which it was made. In her life, Pen had heard one other voice like it.

Soundlessly, her lips made the words:
I will be.

Glass crunched on the floor. The green pinpricks of light
shifted and drew closer. They were, Pen realised, the right space apart to be eyes.

‘
Control,
’ said the city-voice. ‘
That was our agreement, Margarethe.
’

The eye-lights drew closer, revealing more of the face of which they were part.

The woman was old. Her skin was cracked, scaled in interlocking paving stones. The folds around her mouth were rows of terraced houses. Road markings lined her eyes and cheekbones like makeup. Her irises glowed the luminous green of traffic lights. Her skirts were lost in the darkness, but they rustled like estuary tides.

And then, a fraction of a second after seeing her, Pen
felt
her.

She inhaled sharply as that face rushed outwards to envelop her. Scale and distance dissolved: every road that lined the woman’s intricate face was long enough to walk down; every rooftop was wide and solid enough to shelter her. Pen was immersed in and surrounded by that presence: a sense of place so raw and pure it was like being in love. She was standing in the labyrinthine city of the old woman, feeling the warmth of its streetlight on her face—

—and then it was over, and she was back facing a decrepit woman with cracked skin, in a room full of murder and glass.

Mater Viae gave her a smile filled with church spires. ‘
If you can’t control her
’ – though her lips did not move, her voice carried – ‘
you can’t keep her
.’

Case didn’t look at her as she offered up the bottle of distilled memory. Mater Viae grasped at it eagerly and Pen shuddered when she saw her fingers. Pressing skeletally against the inside of her skin were the outlines of cranes.

The City Goddess gulped at the silvery liquid in the bottle. When she’d drained it, she briefly closed her eyes in bliss. Case and Pen were plunged into a darkness that eased when the lights lit up in the windows of that city face.

‘Please—’ Pen recognised Case’s expression as she spoke to the goddess. It was the same look she saw in the mirror every day, when she put makeup on her scars: the look of someone bound to something they hated. Case’s city
was
concrete and glass and brick – everything she loved lay in the palm of that crane-boned hand – and Mater Viae could turn it against her with the sparest thought.

‘Please,’ she begged. ‘Just a little more time.’

‘
Time
,’ Mater Viae echoed. She turned the green wash of her eyes on Pen.

‘
I remember. In the flood and chaos of my new memories, I remember.

‘
I remember believing in you when I was taken. When the grey men dragged me through the floor and the earth filled my mouth and yet somehow I still breathed. When I was so, so scared, I remember believing you would come for me.
’

The voice changed, became familiar; not in tone, but in rhythm and inflection. Pen stiffened against the sickness she felt as she realised the Goddess was speaking from Parva’s memories.

‘
Even when they made me drink. Even though I thought it was poison. Even though I believed I was going to die. Even though I knew there was no way you could, to the end, I still believed you’d come.
’

There was a note of delight as she said, ‘
And you did.
’

And then, abruptly, the sense of Parva slid away.

‘
There is no more time, Margarethe. I remember her. I remember being her, and being one who knew her better than anyone else in the world. I remember gazing back through at her through the mirror from this prison. She doesn’t want your lottery. She doesn’t want your fame. She has what she came for, and she has no more reason to stay.
’

Her expression became one of desperate need. Streetlights burned in the cracks of her face, lighting her like a Hallowe’en lantern. ‘
I will not risk letting her slip. She will leave for good, and I will lose my chance. I must have her secret. I must. I must.
’ The words were an eager shriek of wheels on a road somewhere inside her.

‘
I must know how you came here. I must know—

‘
—is there a way back, to my child?
’

My child.
Pen’s heart lurched as suddenly
everything
– the bottles, the Masonry Men attacks, the kidnapping of the immigrants – finally, it all made sense.

Johnny Naphtha’s words slithered greasily back to her:
Nothing you possess is so potent as a parent’s memories of those they have borne. They are the wellsprings of hope and obsessions of even the sanest of men.

How much more intense might that obsession be for a
Goddess? A Goddess whose
name
meant mother, who had been trapped between two mirrors and then awakened to find herself stranded in another world, cut off from the child she loved – a child who was her home and her very nature.

How long had it taken her to realise what had happened? That the place she so cherished was somewhere she’d never been, somewhere she could never go, that her memories of that place belonged to another. What might she be willing to do to keep those memories from fading?

Pen felt a pang like a broken rib. She looked at the shattered bottles, the evidence of a homesick Goddess’ addiction.

‘How long?’ Pen breathed. ‘How long since you were caught between the mirrors?’

The highways that were the Mirror-Mater Viae’s lips curled as if in contempt, but she did not answer.

‘
Where is the pathway?
’ her city-voice demanded. ‘
Where is the fissure that leads between cities? I do not remember it, so your sister did not know. Tell me, how can I go home again?
’

Pen’s mouth was arid. She thought of Parva and gritted her teeth. ‘You can’t,’ she said.

Mater Viae sighed. ‘
I must know. I must. I must remember it for myself.
’ The light of her eyes made Case’s skin sickly as she turned to her. ‘
Bring another dose, Margarethe.
’

‘Please—’

With a little jolt, Pen realised Case was speaking not to Mater Viae, but to
her
.

‘Please, Parva, just tell her. Tell her where you came through – it won’t make any difference. She will have her way.’

But Pen shook her head, tight-lipped. She had only her obstinacy. She could feel barbs in her skin. Her hands were starting to shake. All she could do now was resist.

Case’s face screwed up in fury. ‘PARVA!’ she screamed at Pen.

Pen flinched back half a step, and in her bag two glass objects clinked together. Before she could stop herself, she shot the bag a guilty, desperate glance.

Case read her expression, and in that heartbeat Pen knew her body had betrayed her.

Then Case lunged for the bag.

‘Wait,
wait
—’ Pen scrabbled for the straps, but the mirror-stocrat had already torn it from her. Pen felt her heart beating in her throat as Case rooted inside. Her mouth set in a hard line as she withdrew Goutierre’s Eye, and for a desperate moment Pen thought Case might stop there, but then she reached back in and took out the phial of the doorway drug.

Grey fingers articulated like cranes to take the slender tube. The clear fluid inside glowed green under the Goddess’ scrutiny.

‘Well? Is that it?’ Case asked. She was still staring at the glass sphere in her own palm. ‘Can we take her back?’

Mater Viae’s voice was as soft as rain on rooftops. ‘
Do what you will with her. I no longer care.
’

All the way up through the gloom of the lift shaft out into the brittle light of the lobby and then back into the mirrored seclusion of the main elevators, Pen didn’t say a word. She hugged herself as though her arms were all that were holding her together. Part of her didn’t feel like it had left that nightmare chamber; that part was still deep underground, frozen at the moment when Mater Viae had taken her only way home.

Case stood a little behind her, Corbin’s gun held idly in her hand like it was the most natural thing in the world for a member of the Silver Senate to go armed. Perhaps because of her nonchalance with it, no one challenged her. Pen was only vaguely aware of how fast the broken slave from the basement had slipped back beneath the surface of the reflected city’s chief bureaucrat.

At last, when they reached the door to her apartments, Pen turned to face her captor. ‘All those people,’ she said quietly, ‘didn’t they mean anything to you? Didn’t you ever even
think
about saying no?’

Case gave her the greyest smile. ‘Oh, I said no. Once.’

Pen parted her lips to ask what happened, but then closed it again. She
knew
what had happened. She could see the pain of it in every line of the old woman’s face. Case had been punished.

Parva – the only mirrorstocrat Mater Viae had abducted amongst who knew how many half-faces, her sister, the Face of the Looking-Glass Lottery – had been taken to teach Margaret Case obedience.

The only mirrorstocrat … But that didn’t make any
sense
, Pen realised suddenly. Half-faces had only half the memories of where they came from, so surely the homesick deity in the basement would have needed far more of them to feed her addiction to those memories. There was no reason for her to have preyed so exclusively on them,
unless
…

Shock was an icy hammer-blow as Pen understood exactly what Case’s bargain with Mater Viae had bought her: no victims amongst the mirrorstocracy. Case had sold double the number of her citizens to the predatory Goddess to keep the handful she cared about safe.

The senator regarded her. If she knew what Pen was thinking, she didn’t let it show on her face. ‘Get some sleep.’ she said. ‘You’re needed in makeup in six hours. The cameras roll in eight and I don’t want you looking haggard.’

Pen’s fingers crooked into claws. From somewhere, new fury bubbled up into her heart. ‘I will not perform for you, Senator. Your mistress’ – she saw Case wince slightly at the
word, but she was too angry to even enjoy her discomfort – ‘
drank
your Parva Khan. I won’t replace her for you.’

‘She was—’ Case began to say.

‘SHE WAS MY SISTER!’ Pen screamed.

Case didn’t flinch; she waited patiently, as though pausing for the ringing of Pen’s voice to fade from her ears, and then spoke with a chilly distaste. ‘I think you’re wrong. I think you will go before the cameras, Parva. There are techniques of persuasion that won’t impact how you look.’