Tom Pollock - The City's son

I watch as the bugs work, dragging empty foil tubes, crisp packets and chunks of plywood to the centre of the courtyard. Plastic bags are torn into strips by ferocious, gnashing weevils. Toes form first, and then legs and hips, and a higgledy-piggledy sculpture of rubbish rises uncertainly in front of me.

The eggshell eyes blink. They, and only they, are always the same. Glas is a woman this time, the rusting handlebars of a bike making up her hips, long strands of torn plastic her hair. The head of a worm wriggles unhappily at the end of one hand. I find an ice-lolly stick from the dirt near my feet and hand it to her. The worm coils itself around it and breaks it into knuckle-joints.

‘Thank you,’ she says. Her eggshell-gaze catalogues the burns and black blood-bruises on my chest. Yesterday she’d have tutted or cooed in sympathy, but a lot’s changed since then.

‘Nothing beyond your ability to heal,’ she notes with satisfaction. ‘The wraith’s dead, I take it?’

‘Earthed behind Waterloo,’ I confirm. ‘I got off light. I reckon the extra power was too much for her; it broke her after a few hours. She was confused, already bleeding out. It was a mercy at the end.’

‘That’s something then.’ A little thing. She sighs like she has to be grateful for the little things now. She hesitates, and then says, ‘My pigeons have seen wolf-shapes stalking the building sites. And the Pylon Spiders report feeling a power-surge through the grid at around midnight, night before last. Just when you said the wraith entered Reach’s domain.’

Sympathy edges into her voice. ‘I’m sorry, Filius, I really am, but Reach is gathering his strength. There’s no doubt any more: it is him.’

I feel like I’m trying to swallow a chunk of brick. I hadn’t realised until now just how much I’d been hoping Glas was wrong. ‘I don’t understand,’ I mutter. ‘Why now?’

She turns her head away. The breeze flaps the strands of her binbag hair against her face. ‘Filius,’ she says carefully, ‘there’s something else you need to know. There have been rumours — if Reach is preparing for war, it can only be because he’s been listening to them.’ She wets her lips with a tongue, made from an old sponge.

Unease creeps through me. ‘What rumours?’ I ask.

‘That soon the street-signs will rearrange themselves,’ she speaks very quietly, ‘and feral cats will walk with their tails high in procession through the streets.’

For a long moment I do nothing but stand there, feeling, and no doubt looking, heroically stupid.

‘She’s… she’s… coming back?’ I’m not even sure I said that aloud.

Glas looks at me. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, and I explode, all the tension in my chest multiplying as it unravels. I feel dizzy and scared and elated all at once.

‘ Why didn’t you tell me? ’ I shout at her.

Glas shrugs wretchedly. ‘There was nothing firm. I didn’t want to get your hopes up, and I didn’t-’ She hesitates. ‘I didn’t want you to be scared.’

‘Scared of what?’ I demand. ‘She’s my mother!’

‘She’s also a Goddess,’ Glas says, ‘and Goddesses are not kind.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘War’s coming, Filius. The King of The Cranes and the Lady of the Streets will not share the city. The gables and the gutters and manholes will bleed. Reach has been killing her kingdom, for years, tearing it up and enslaving it to whatever he’s building in St Paul’s, and you didn’t stop him. You’re her son, and you didn’t stop him. That Cathedral was her crown jewel, and you gave it up without a fight.’ Her tone is dreadfully gentle. She’s trying not to make it sound like it’s my fault.

‘I couldn’t have stopped it,’ I protest, bewildered and frightened now. ‘I was never strong enough-’

She shushes me, puts her arms around me. I can feel the warmth as her rubbish decays. ‘I understand,’ she whispers. ‘It was right to wait. It was safer. But if Reach is moving against us, we no longer have that luxury.’

My thoughts are reeling. Glas’ voice turns low, urgent. ‘You need to act, Filius. You’re right, I should have told you sooner. Reach has become strong — too strong — in your Mother’s absence. We need an army,’ she urges. ‘The Pavement Priests, the Mirrorstocracy: the old guard. We need to move, or by the time Mater Viae arrives, the Skyscraper Throne will be occupied, and not by you.’

But I’m barely listening. All I can think is she’s coming back she’s coming back she’s coming back -

‘You should have told me!’ I snap at Gutterglass. She tries to hold onto me, but I tear myself loose and run. I expect her to call after me but when I look back she is just watching me with that desolate gaze: Gutterglass: the spirit of the city’s abandoned, the nursemaid who cared for me in place of She’s coming back.

I watch the body of garbage crumble like ash and fall.

Beth stood at the end of Wendover Road, watching Pen’s familiar shape move behind a window across the street.

People hurried past, jostling her and tutting. The women were dressed in wildly contrasting styles: jeans and crop-tops, hijabs, the occasional full burkha. It was the end of the day and the cheap DVDs and plastic watches were being packed away on the market stalls. Men held intense conversations in glass-fronted restaurants over bowls of biryani, or watched hockey on the muted TV sets. The air was tinged with the smell of curry and spices and overripe fruit.

Everything screamed Pen loudly enough to make Beth gasp. She shifted her weight and changed her mind for the fourth time.

All she had to do was shout — one syllable would probably do it. Pen’s window was cracked open, she’d hear. Just that one syllable and she’d come down and they’d sit with their back against the bricks of the next-door alley and Pen would talk Beth out of this insane thing she was planning to do.

Beth came up on the balls of her feet; she felt that shout rise up inside her — but it stalled again, because there was a taste in her mouth, the same taste as there had been back in Gorecastle’s office, and it made her want to spit; it made Beth not want Parva Khan anywhere near her.

Less than a day ago she would’ve thought Pen would believe her. She would have trusted Pen to trust her. That trust was broken now, and realising that was like chewing tinfoil.

Besides, she didn’t even know if Pen would talk to her.

B, you made everything worse.

The memory of Pen’s stone-dead tone made Beth want to turn and run from the street.

But she couldn’t leave without some sort of goodbye, no matter how much some blistered little part of her wanted to. She slipped her hand into her pocket and rubbed her thumb over the black crayon she kept there.

Dotted around Pen’s doorframe were a series of pictograms: tiny trains with electric bolts under their wheels. Beth had drawn them in a little procession round the corner into the alley, like a trail of crumbs.

And there, on the bricks next to the metal bins, she’d drawn Pen’s face, smiling, lovingly detailed: a parting gift.

Streetlamps flickered on as the daylight faded. Beth struggled to focus on what the boy had said: Look for me in broken light. She’d been puzzling her way around that cryptic phrase all day.

The dance where light itself is the music, where the Railwraith’s rush beats the drums.

She turned his words over in her mind, probing them for meaning. They sounded worryingly like the gibberings of a lunatic, which, she admitted to herself, it was entirely possible he was.

She remembered the shock of him shoving her, and she touched the bruise under her hoodie and winced. Her skin was apparently as determined to retain the memory as her mind was.