Tom Pollock - The City's son

‘ Please,’ he whispered, a dim flicker, ‘ please, not me. I can tell you things — there are threats, threats to your master. The Viae Child, he’s raising an army against him, against Reach. I saw him — I hid and read his very lips- ’

But the thing kept coiling lovingly around him, tighter and tighter. Metal thorns clasped hungrily at his scalp, seeking a way in, as though they could plunder straight from his mind the information he was trying to bargain with.

Cracks started to spread through him and he shrieked brightly as the barbs pierced his glass skull and let the water in.

Beth sat on the bus to Bethnal Green. She looked around, but she couldn’t see a wet dog so she was forced to conclude that the smell was coming from her. Strange blots were dancing at the edges of her eyes and it felt like a gnome in lead boots was tap-dancing in the back of her head.

She managed to doze off between ringing the bell and the bus hissing to a stop. Jerking awake, she leaped to her feet and shouldered her way through the closing door. A thunderclap echoed somewhere to the west and the rain redoubled, greeting her with soaking enthusiasm, plastering her hair flat against her skull.

Beth sighed and squelched onwards.

At first she thought he was a hallucination, just sitting there cross-legged, despondently getting drenched. The streetlamps were flickering on and off in some sort of sequence, making his shadow jump in a weird staccato dance.

‘Hey!’ she yelled. Relief and excitement fizzed through her. ‘Hey, you! Guy!’ She didn’t know what to call him. ‘Urchin!’

He looked up and his grey eyes widened as Beth came down the steps of the bridge three at a time. He scrambled to his feet. ‘What are you doing here?’ he demanded.

Beth grinned. ‘You told me to look for you under broken light.’

She was buzzing: to have found him again, to have him be real. The tower blocks reared vastly against the sodium-soaked clouds and the way they dwarfed her was suddenly thrilling. ‘Is this your home?’ she asked.

A grin to match hers sneaked onto his face. ‘Home? Well, part of it, I guess — I could bed down in any square inch of London town. Welcome to my parlour.’ He stretched his arms out as though to take in the entire city. ‘Make yourself comfy.’ He laughed, and then seemed to remember who he was talking to.

He folded his arms and looked at her suspiciously. ‘Who are you? Why are you following me?’

Beth crossed her arms too. Her stance was pugnacious but she could feel herself trembling with the adrenalin racing through her. ‘Who are you?’ she countered. ‘Why did you save me?’

‘My name is Filius Viae,’ he said. ‘It means the Son of the Streets. My mother is their Goddess.’ He took a step towards her, his shadow slipping over her face. ‘She laid the foundations of the streets you walk on, and the bones of the roads buried under them. She stoked the Steam-wraiths’ engines and gave the lamps their first sparks. She forged the chains that hold old Father Thames in place.’ He smirked at her.

‘And I saved you ’cause anyone mental enough to ride one Railwraith and stand in the way of another shouting needs all the help they can get.’

‘O- kay,’ Beth muttered. She drew a deep breath. ‘My name is Beth Bradley,’ she said. ‘It means — well, it means Beth Bradley. My dad’s a journalist — a redundant one. I got kicked out of school and he didn’t care. My best friend was the one who grassed me up. I suppose the reason I’m following you is because — I like your answer better.’ She tried a smile and added, ‘’cept for the name, obviously. I didn’t realise you were called “Phyllis”. I don’t blame you for not telling me that before.’

This time the boy laughed. ‘I wouldn’t be so sure my answer’s better; right now it mostly boils down to my arse being hunted all over The Smoke.’

‘Someone’s trying to kill you,’ Beth said. ‘I remember.’

‘Oh, that’s good of you,’ he said, sarcastically tugging a forelock. ‘Ta.’ He settled himself back down onto the wet tarmac.

Beth’s jeans were drenched anyway, so she slumped down next to him. The wind sculpted half-seen bodies in the rain. ‘But if you’re the son of this kick-arse goddess,’ she said, ‘what are you scared of? Surely she could take whoever’s trying to mess with you?’

His smile never reached his eyes. ‘She’s not here,’ he said. ‘I’ve never met her.’ Beth made to apologise but he waved it away. ‘I was raised by her seneschal, Gutterglass. I ran in the shells of her temples on the river and played with the fossilised entrails of the sacrifices the Green Witches made to her.’

‘There are actual Green Witches in Greenwich?’ Beth was astonished.

‘Nah, Sutton — what, you think there’s a sea of eggs and flour in Battersea?’ His face was deadpan; she couldn’t tell if he was joking. Then his voice took on a hard, brittle edge. ‘I learnt no ritual, no doctrine — nothing to prepare me, not for Reach.’ The fingers of his left hand crooked into a claw.

‘ Reach. Is that what’s hunting you?’

He nodded unhappily.

‘So what is it?’

‘He’s urban sickness,’ he said in a dead tone, ‘and greed, and cannibal hunger and-And I don’t know what else. I’ve never seen him up close, but I’ve seen the aftermath of him. He is the Crane King; and the cranes are his fingers and his weapons. He uses them to carve himself deep into the city and when he does, everything around him dies.’ He snorted. ‘He’s vain, too; he keeps building glass towers to look at himself in. My mother was his only rival; every generation he appeared, and she beat him back, over and over again… but then she disappeared, and ever since then he’s been growing in that black pit of his under the Cathedral.’

He looked up at Beth. ‘But now she’s coming back, to reclaim the Skyscraper Throne, and Reach can’t wait any more. He wants to weaken her, wants anyone who could fight for her dead. Starting with me.’ He looked down and muttered, ‘She’s nearly here, but I might never meet her.’

He looked so lost that, on impulse, Beth reached out and pulled him close. After a second’s hesitation, he yielded. It was frightening and thrilling to hold this hunted boy against her. As though the very act of it put her under the eye of a monster.

‘Look, we’ll sort him,’ she whispered: comforting, nonsensical bravado. The rain turned the dust in his hair to mortar that clung to her cheek. ‘He won’t know what’s hit him.’

He pulled away from her, brushing rainwater off his face. ‘You’re very free with that “we”,’ he said, ‘and that’s kind and all, but what makes you so sure? I saw how you were with the Railwraith — I don’t mean to be rude, but you were crappin’ yourself.’

‘I was not!’ Beth protested. ‘I was-’ but there was no point denying it. ‘Well, yeah, okay, I was: I was terrified. Happy? But you know what? I’d rather be that scared, every bloody day of my life, than go back to the way I felt before I met you.’

A silence followed, long enough and deep enough for Beth to begin to truly appreciate the extent to which that statement made her sound like a stalker.

‘But not in a creepy way or nothing,’ she added, far too late. He was staring at her like she was a different species.

Embarrassed, Beth looked away, and her eyes fell on the nearest streetlight. The rain had started to let up, and now individual drips were slowly becoming distinct. As she watched the sodium light flared and guttered, then started flashing more violently.

‘Oh, Thames, here we go,’ the boy muttered under his breath.