Melvin Burgess - Bloodtide

He laughed. He sounded happy about that. Very gently, very, very gently, he touched my ears and face with his fingers and kissed my neck and slid the tips of his fingers down my neck and the tops of my breasts, and then stroked right down the whole length of me, pressing his hand down into me and I thought I'd burst. And then I started to undo my buttons for him.

He didn't want to do the whole thing – to put it in me. He just wanted to touch but quite a lot later on I made him. It hurt but it was OK – I mean, it'd be OK later on. I knew it'd be OK. The thing is, everything sort of just took off. Suddenly it was all so easy! We sat and talked and talked and did things and talked all night. He was… he was so like me! I felt so close, even closer than I had to Siggy because of course I never could do things like that with Sigs.

I told him all about me and Sigs and the things we did, and he told me about his father, who sounds as if he was a complete bastard. I told him all about mine and he said he was jealous about Val, who seemed such a good man.

We were talking and talking, and then doing things again. That's when I made him put it in me. You should have seen his face… he looked like his head was about to fall off! I thought, this must be falling in love. That must be what I'm doing.

I said, 'Conor, are we falling in love?'

He said, 'I think we must be, but it hasn't happened to me before…'

I said, 'Well, we'll have to wait and see, then.' That was funny, and we started laughing and laughing… it was so funny! Here we were, married and having sex and we were having to wait and see if we were falling in love!

'That must be what sex does for you,' I declared.

'But not before. Not for me. Do you think you'd be like this with anyone, then?' he asked, and he looked so hurt I had to smack him, hard on the leg, for being so stupid.

There were fireworks and music, there was dancing in the streets. The party went on all day and in the morning it started again. There were fairs and shows, carnivals and festivals. Trestle tables were set up throughout London and for these days at least, there was food for everyone. In the evening came the grand finale – a great feast, where Conor was to be guest of honour, and the treaty was to be signed. An end to one war, and the beginning of new ones as the lords of London would now begin to try to move out into the halfman lands, and beyond.

The great hall of the Galaxy Building was the natural venue for such a feast This vast internal space, hung with cobwebs, open to the winds in its upper reaches, where pigeons, jackdaws and swifts nested, was still a wonder of the world. The air conditioning had been broken this hundred years since and mists and haze formed up by the ceiling, half a kilometre overhead. Out of sight, the plastic panels peeled away, polystyrene stuffing flaked little snowfalls down, mortar crumbled, surfaces grew thick with dead spiders and flies and dust and plain old dirt; but somehow the squalor only added to its glory.

In the centre of it all, the lift shaft, like a thread of spider's silk, spun into the mist and out of sight.

The lift shaft ran from the deep basements below, where Val's ludicrous wealth was hoarded, right up to the building's broken tip. It was so long, glass-like and brittle-looking that first-time visitors often lifted their hands involuntarily above their heads and ducked, certain that it was in the act of snapping and that a million razor-sharp shards were about to rain down upon them. But the old builders had made it from the strongest stuff on heaven and earth. No one had ever even managed to scratch it.

The lift hadn't worked for generations, but the shaft had a new use. Val used the impossible gleaming thread as a kind of temple. In here he hung his human sacrifices. They dangled like fruit among the wires and cables until they rotted and fell to pieces and their bones gathered in heaps at the bottom. There were new ones up today, glaring down at the diners with one heel nailed to a beam, their hands tied behind their backs and one leg crossed behind the other. The glass had been polished until it shone.

Ben once reckoned he could get the lift working again, given a few days and a box of tricks. He wired a generator up to it and got huge yellow sparks and leaps of blue flashing up and down the silvery glass and crackling among the cables and the sizzling dead. Some of the bodies began twitching and burning. There were strange noises; some people heard singing. Val ordered Ben to turn it off.

'The dead don't need to go anywhere, and they have nothing to say,' he said. 'Nothing that I want to hear, anyhow, he added. Later, Ben wondered if making the dead dance and sing hadn't offended the gods who were slowly coming back to life. But Val wouldn't have thought like that He'd have said, 'If you kill you'd better expect to die, but you'd better die well.'

There had never been so many people under that roof – and what people! Gangmen, smugglers, security chiefs, traders, all the rich and powerful. Outside on the streets, when you saw the poverty you wouldn't believe that such wealth could exist But the rich are always with us. These were the most fortunate, the cleverest, the most cunning and unscrupulous men and women of two nations, the Volsons and the Conors. People who had done their best to slaughter each outer for generations now sat down to eat the same food.

On a raised platform just before the lift shaft sat the two families themselves, the Volsons and the Conors. Symbolically, Signy was sitting between Val and Conor. Siggy, who had sat next to her for every other meal they had ever shared, was ten places away. Events had put this gap between them, but things had changed deep inside their hearts as well. Each twin avoided the other's eye. As he sat waiting for the proceedings to begin, Siggy kept himself busy by watching the sacrifices swaying in their glass showcase.

Siggy

The women had thick tights on, and the men wore trousers. When you've hung poor folk upside down a few times, you soon find out that rags that look decent one way up let it all hang out upside down.

They were all criminals, poor ones. Yeah, well, the rich are more useful alive. There was a woman who had sold children as slaves to rival gangmen – to Conor, perhaps, or to the halfmen. Halfmen like human slaves. Her face had turned purple. Then there was an old man who'd been making fake money, a murderer, a rapist. The usual mix.

And there was the big man, the spy. He'd died there alone sometime in the night Now he hung upside down with the rest of them, his wide-brimmed hat still on his head, tied up under his chin, the tatty patched cloak hanging below his shoulders like wings, his arms tight behind him, his face black.

Ben nudged me in the ribs and whispered, 'Val should have hung them up with nothing on.'

We did that occasionally, as a sort of insult. But never to the poor, only to traitors, and you have to be rich to be a traitor. Why waste a decent insult on the poor?

I said, 'What for?'

He said, 'Well, it's a wedding feast, isn't it?'

There was a pause while it sank in and then we both started giggling. Bastard! We bent our heads down like we were praying and hissed and spluttered. I waited until we'd almost recovered and then I hissed back, 'All stiff, too…' and we were off again. It was so sick! People were looking at us. Had was nudging us to be quiet. Some of Conor's people were scowling at us so we had to bite our cheeks and shut up quick. Then I looked across and Signy was scowling at me too – as if she was one of them. And the awful thing was, she was one of them, too. One night with Conor and she was all his. Kapow! Gone to the other side… Although I know that isn't quite fair.