The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II (40 page)

The horses snorted and tossed their heads, the fog erupting from their nostrils glittering in the air like diamond dust. They stamped, and the impact of their hooves on the pavement chimed like bells. The horses blazed with reflected streetlamp light: perfect living sculptures of mirrored glass.

Lance points fell in a breaking wave. With a clatter like vast windchimes, the Glass Chevaliers charged.

The protestors broke and fled as best as they could. Those at the sides of the bridge jumped into the water, or else were shoved over by the terrified throng. For most, though, there was simply no time.

The glass cavalry smashed into the crowd with sickening force.

Where the lance points struck flesh, Pen saw blue electricity arc. The victims dropped sharply, spasming onto the ground in the path of the horses. Some of them were churned into a bloody meal of bone and cloth under the weight of the glass hooves, but others …

One of the horses reared up over a fallen Faceless, and Pen hissed in shock.

She could see the cowering protestor reflected in the glass of the horse’s belly, between the straps that held the rider’s saddle in place. His image ran slick through the curved, distorting panes of the Chevalier mount’s flanks. Pen was close enough to make out the seam that divided the prone man’s face.

I can’t
afford
to just go spilling my image into every passing
mirror the way you can
, she remembered Espel saying.
Image is essence, after all …

And that essence, Pen realised, was being ripped from the prone man by the mirror-mount’s skin. It was a thief of images: a reflection-vampire.

The man shrieked like his heart was being torn out of his chest, his screams so loud that even with all the other cries that plagued the night air, his was the only voice Pen heard. His hood sagged horribly over his left cheek, like it was caving in. Flesh-coloured vapour boiled over his bandana towards the rearing horse.

Then, as sharply as if they’d been switched off, his screams cut out and he slumped back on the tarmac. The gap between his hood and his scarf was half-filled by a plane of tarnished mirror, and half-filled by nothing at all.

The Chevalier wheeled his mount and urged it deeper into the crowd, but the flesh-coloured reflection still spilled through its flanks. In the midst of it, something like a distorted eye blinked.

Pen reeled. She had to cling to the lamppost to keep herself from falling. Desperately, she tried to peer between the running bodies.

What if they’ve fallen?
she thought frantically.
What if he’s dropped her? How will I know?
In their hoods and masks they all looked the same.

But then her eyes found Espel, still spread across Cray’s shoulders like an absurd cloak. The Faceless boss had somehow slipped through the cavalry line and was pounding
along the opposite pavement towards the bridge’s northern end. As Pen watched, a Chevalier wheeled his mount and spurred it after them. Pen leapt down from the balustrade and started to run.

Cray was quick for a big man,
very
quick for a big man with an unconscious teenager draped on his back, but the glass horse was immeasurably faster. Pen had barely made it halfway across the road when blue lightning flashed out from Cray’s spine to the Chevalier’s lance.

Cray’s back arched violently. His toes scraped along the pavement as every muscle in his body tensed. Then he crashed forward onto his face. Espel rolled limply off his back and sprawled in the gutter. The Chevalier yanked hard on his reins and his horse reared, the organic glass of its hide flexing. Lying in its shadow, Cray began to scream.

Pen’s legs burned as she drove them harder. Spittle flew through her gritted teeth. She ran herself between the horse and its prey, her arms spread wide, blocking the line of sight between Cray and the mirror-mount’s lethal hide.

In the curves of the horse’s belly she saw her own reflection begin to flex and ripple. She raised her hand to her eyes. Her fingers guttered like a flesh-hued flame, but there was no pain, just a gentle feeling of heat, a fizzing over her skin. The glass horse’s eye was stretched wide; its blunt teeth ground in effort. Pen’s image flowed through all of its surfaces, but no matter how much she gave it, she still felt no loss.

Infinite reflections
, she thought, awed and sickened. She,
like a mirrorstocrat, was immune. The mirror-mount was a weapon designed for the half-faced alone.

The horse’s front legs crashed back to earth and Pen threw herself flat. She sprawled over Cray’s prone form, just missing its glass hooves. Its rider struggled to position his lance, then hurled it aside and groped instead for the pistol strapped to his thigh.

Pen felt Cray’s arm shift under her. The Chevalier was still fumbling with the straps on his holster when Cray, screaming obscenities, leaned out from behind Pen and fired.

The Chevalier’s visor exploded inwards. He slid sideways from his saddle and hung, his legs tangled in his stirrups. Pen stared, utterly frozen. The man’s face, framed by the jagged plastic of his shattered helmet, was a bloody crater.

The horse whinnied against the sudden weight on its right flank and wheeled away, dragging its rider with it.

Pen felt like a firework had gone off inside her head. The gun was still loud in her ears. She felt like she should be yelling herself hoarse, but all she could do was stare. Everything felt distant and muffled.

Cray got his feet under him and crouched in front of her. She gazed at him incuriously. He said something, and it took her a moment for her to make sense of the words.

‘Thank you,’ he said again, and Pen nodded numbly. Reflexively she shook his hands off her.

The skin crinkled around his eyes in a way that might have been a smile. ‘Come on.’

Pen helped him lift Espel’s unconscious form out of the
gutter. Now she wasn’t struggling, it was easy; the steeplejill was almost frighteningly light.

An engine growl became audible over the sound of the carnage further up the bridge and headlights washed over them as a battered saloon pulled up onto the bridge. Pen stiffened, ready to fight, but Cray held up a hand.

‘It’s okay.’

The car’s brakes squealed. The driver’s door was open before it had stopped moving. A familiar gangly figure emerged.

‘When I say I need you
now
, Jack,’ Cray said testily, ‘it’s normally safe to assume I mean
before
the fragging riot cops show up.’

‘Oh
goody
,’ Jack Wingborough snapped back. He jerked his head at the mêlée still churning further up the bridge. ‘Do let’s discuss this now. I can’t think of
anything
better we could be doing …’

His sarcasm faltered as he watched Pen and Cray hoist Espel onto the back seat. Pen scrambled in beside her, while Cray jumped in the front.

‘What happened to Es?’ Jack demanded as he slid back behind the wheel.

‘I put her out,’ Cray said shortly.

‘Why?’ Jack asked, but his voice was hoarse, and the pallor of the skin visible in the rear-view mirror said he already knew.

Jack threw the car squealing into reverse, spun it into a 180-degree turn and stamped on the accelerator. The battered
saloon leapt forward like a startled cat. The shouts and sounds of gunshots and the light of burning petrol faded behind them.

Pen watched as Cray looked back. She saw him take in all the ordinary people who’d adopted his image, who, just for one night had become him. He pulled his bandana slowly aside. His makeshift mouth was anguished. She knew he would always believe he’d betrayed them.

‘Where am I going?’ Jack demanded. ‘Garrison, give me some bloody pointers.’

‘St Janus,’ Cray said. His voice was flat.

‘You bloody fractured?’ Jack sounded incredulous. ‘You want me to take a girl with a woken id to a
military hospital
? What are we supposed to do, just give ourselves up?’

Cray didn’t answer.

‘Garrison,
please
,’ Jack said. ‘I’d walk under a mirror-mount for her – you know I would – but there’s no way they’d treat her. They’d take one look at her, cut the cuffs off her and let her throttle herself. There’s no way for her to have been split that isn’t an official punishment. She’s
marked.
’

Marked
, Pen thought. On the seat next to her, Espel’s symmetrical features were still at rest. Streetlamps painted tiger stripes over her through the car’s windows as they drove. Red blotches marked her skin where the muscles under it had contorted, where they would again when she woke.
Branded. Scarred.

Pen slumped into her seat. Tears surged up in her throat and she swallowed them back. She sought inside herself for
something, anything that could galvanise her against the despair that was welling out from the core of her. She felt a flicker of anger and she concentrated on it, cradling and stoking it like an ember.

She remembered the bullet wound in Corbin’s chest; she remembered his desperate, trembling failure to speak. A shiver passed over her as she realised she’d probably never know if he’d died there.

She battened herself down as she started to tremble.
I will not pity you
, she told herself. She fixed the little half-faced boy in her mind, the blank look in his single eye before Corbin shot him.
I am not sorry
, she said inside her head, over and over again, hating the way it made her feel like a liar.
I am not sorry.

Pain spread through the back of her left hand and she looked at it. She’d gouged bloody lines across the tangle of scars with her right.

In the front seat, Cray and Jack were still arguing.

‘I know one of the nurses at St Janus—’ Cray’s voice was quiet, almost like he was trying to convince himself. ‘ He could—’

‘One nurse? It would take an army of doctors, round the clock,
for the rest of her life.
And even then … You know I don’t want to say this, Garrison but she’s—’

‘Shut up,’ Cray told him.

‘Mate,
please
.’

‘No, I mean,
shut up
. I’m trying to listen.’

The young mirrorstocrat fell silent. Cray bent his earless
head, and Pen strained to listen too. At first all she could hear was the engine and the hiss of the tyres on the tarmac. Then, very distant but growing louder with alarming speed, came a sound like wind-chimes.

‘Jack,’ Cray said simply, ‘
floor it.
’

Pen looked back through the back windscreen just as six glass horses galloped from a side street and thundered after them.

The battered saloon lurched forward as Jack stamped on the accelerator. Through the rear windscreen, Pen saw the Chevaliers react, goading their horses to greater speed. The chime of their hooves on the road almost blotted out the engine’s roar.

‘They can’t catch us, right?’ she asked. ‘I mean, this is a car. They’re only on
horses
—’

Cray was frantically winding his window down. He had his gun out. ‘WHAT ABOUT THEM LOOKS LIKE NORMAL HORSES TO YOU?’ he yelled over the blast of air. He pulled himself half out of the car, leaning like a windsurfer, and started shooting.

The glass horses seemed to gallop ever faster, eating up the road with their ringing hooves. The beasts burned with reflected streetlight, growing brighter and brighter, until Pen couldn’t look at them straight. The lamps they left in their wake were dark, as though they were leeching the energy they reflected. Their hooves blazed and blurred under them like shooting stars.

They were closing.

At some hidden signal, the Chevaliers bent low over the necks of their steeds. Behind each of them, a second black-clad rider became visible, each holding a long-barrelled rifle. They aimed with practised ease from their jolting mounts.

Pen threw herself flat over Espel as the rear window dissolved. Glass splinters sprayed over her, nicking the back of her neck. The wind screamed in through the gap.

‘New plan,’ Jack shouted to Cray over the roar. ‘No place like home!’

Cray fired off one last, futile shot and slid back inside the car. Jack spun the wheel and the saloon veered left. A rippling column that might have been the reflected Centrepoint appeared and then vanished behind them.

Pen levered herself up. The wind rippled her headscarf against her face and she clawed it back. The architecture blurring past on both sides was growing more clotted as they sped further west. Jack swerved the car around the low brick drifts that stretched into the road, but the mirror-mounts jumped them like fences on a steeplechase without breaking their charge. The passenger-side mirror exploded into fragments as a bullet hit it.

‘
Little close, Jack
,’ Cray grated.

‘Righto!’

Jack jinked the car into a series of tight corners, and stomach acid leaped into Pen’s mouth. They straightened up along a narrow side road. A fraction of a second later, three Chevaliers tore around the corner behind them, but
they’d taken the turn too fast. The horses veered sideways as their riders wrestled with their reins. Hooves scrabbled on concrete as the mirror-mounts fought for traction. Their lips peeled back from their slab-like teeth as their glowing glass legs tangled. The horses screamed strange, crystalline screams as their momentum overcame them.

One of the beasts skidded flank-first into the front wall of a newsagent. A fraction of a second later, its fellows collided with it. With a brittle shriek of glass the horses shattered into fragments.

‘Mother Mirror, Jack – where did you learn to drive?’ Cray shouted.

‘Benefits of a private education,’ Pen heard the grin in the young mirrorstocrat’s voice. ‘I totalled three Porsches before I was fifteen.’

The air howling through the shattered rear window was cold enough to hurt Pen’s face, but she didn’t dare look away. Even as the heap of armoured bodies and broken glass dwindled behind them, she saw the three remaining horses eased around the turn by their riders. One by one, the lights around them flared, stretched to touch their hides and went out. The vampiric steeds blazed as they accelerated up the centre of the road. They were closing the distance with sickening speed.