Tom Pollock - The City's son

Was this how Fil had felt, all those times he’d told her to leave? This vertigo of affection and gratitude and the terrible knowledge that if this person you cared about got hurt, it would be your fault?

‘I’m not owing another one like that,’ she muttered. ‘I can’t. Go back, Victor.’

The friendly grin retreated into Victor’s beard and Beth jumped back in shock as he spat at her feet. ‘ Not my fight? ’ he snarled. ‘Who are you, to say what is and not my fight? Kabul was my fight, and Tashkent, and Ossetia. You talk of owing? I owe!’ He thumped his chest. ‘I lost boys, shining boys, shattered to little pieces by the monster you hunt. I owe them all.’ He looked at her, his eyes full of a gutting disappointment. ‘And you too, remember? I said, “I make sure you no get too horribly killed.” Was no lie. I never lie.’

Beth exhaled hard, ‘You don’t understand. People who follow me, they get hurt — hurt bad. They die.’

Victor nodded solemnly. ‘I know. They die because you are bad general.’ He ignored the look Beth gave him and went on, ‘Is not to be shamed of. I am pretty bad general too, but even I can tell you, charging headlong into face of superior enemy is stupider than poking adder with your own nose.’ He looked pointedly at the ramp Beth had been about to run up. ‘Frontal assault: very bad strategy. We try in Afghanistan, only mujaheddin have landmines.’ He mimed an explosion with his hands. ‘Arms, legs, heads, kneecaps, blood everywhere, like whores on a vor.’

He clapped an arm around Beth’s shoulders, expelling a cloud of dust from his coat. His anger had evaporated. Now his voice had a fatherly tone. ‘If, on other hand, we make reconnaissance, like good little Spetsnaz, if we arrive early and do camouflage, then we might see interesting things.’

He squatted a couple of feet from the hoardings and gripped a slab of concrete. With a stream of heavily accented invective he dragged it aside, revealing a jagged hole in the ground leading down into darkness. ‘Like private back door, where wire zmeya drags bodies from; that kind of interesting.’ He sat and dangled his legs into the hole, kicking his feet like a small boy. The edges of his vast moustache twitched upwards as he regarded Beth fondly. ‘You are like granddaughter to me, so I tell you secret,’ he said. ‘I am scared of dark — no, really, do not laugh. Dark and small places, since little boy. Back then I think Kobolds squat in the little places, to eat my little flesh.’

His grin widened. ‘Who knows, maybe they still do.’ He gave himself a tiny push and dropped out of sight below the streets.

Beth kissed her teeth. ‘Only a bloody Russian could think their fairy-tales were reassuring,’ she muttered, then seized the spear and dived into the darkness.

‘Pass the smokes, Timon.’

Timon sighed. It was Al’s turn to sort out cigarettes, but the bronze gangster was so busy making a pathetic fuss over the wound in his arm — Blud, I think it’s infected. Blud, I think the tendon’s snapped. Blud, I think there’s some fang left in it — that it wasn’t worth arguing. There was nothing else to do in this drain of a street but smoke. Gutterglass had sent them here, to Bethnal Green, for ‘recuperation’, which just meant that there were more urgent claims on their mattresses in the landfill. Neither of them cared about that, but the inaction was embarrassing. They wanted back in the fight.

Timon checked up and down the narrow lane to make sure no one was coming, then groaned and twisted, shedding limestone powder as he bent down to retrieve the half-smoked cigarettes a couple of kids had stamped out earlier. He tore a couple of small squares out of a discarded newspaper and poured the leftover tobacco out of the dog-ends into them, then furled the paper up tight: nicotine necromancy.

Al dragged his bronze arm over Timon’s forehead and sparks flew. The reanimated cigarettes guttered and smouldered.

‘Cheers, blud.’

As they smoked, Al regarded the wolf heads the Filia Viae had drawn on his friend’s skin. ‘We need to get you some more of those, son,’ he said after a while.

Timon had turned away from the mouth of the alley when he’d bent down for the dog-ends, so the sweaty man who shoved his face right up to his limestone mask took him by surprise.

‘I know you’re in there!’ the man cried. ‘Where’s my daughter?’

Timon eyed Al; there was a flicker of bronze and the fat man flew at the wall. Air sighed out of his lungs as he crumpled to the ground.

‘What’s yer problem, boy?’ Al demanded. ‘You lookin’ to a couple of statues for a beatin’?’

The man croaked a couple of times before his voice came back, but when he spoke, he didn’t sound cowed. ‘Those pictures on you — a girl drew them, didn’t she? I need you to take me to her.’ His cheeks were hollow and grey bags hung under his wild eyes. ‘Please.

‘She’s my daughter.’

It looked like someone had taken the contents of several statue gardens and dumped them in an industrial car park in Dalston. The air was vivid with London accents as the Pavement Priests chattered away their nerves.

Timon and Al had taken pity on Paul. To make sure he could keep pace they covered just a few yards at time in their here-now-suddenly-there stop-motion-animation way of moving; they entertained themselves by striking poses with V-signs as they waited for him to catch up.

Their trajectory through the nest of city streets curved east in response to rumour, like electrons bending around a magnet. The Filia Viae was no longer at Gutterglass’ landfill hospital, the gargoyles whispered. Stoneskins were massing, drainpipes gurgled, all of them, and some said that this was the surest sign yet that Mater Viae was returning. But there were other mutterings, from under manhole covers and around corners, that the Lady of the Streets’ honour guard had abandoned their absent mistress and rallied to their own purposes.

‘The stubborn little trollop’s not here,’ the granite-hooded monk said when they led Paul over to him. His hands flickered between a basin of dark red clay and back to the deep cracks in his stone armour as he sealed them. A bronze statue of a seventeenth-century nobleman complete with wig and doublet hardened off the ceramic with a blowtorch.

‘She asked me to sing the Treaty Song, then she buggered off — went to St Paul’s alone. Your daughter’s dead by now, I expect.’

Paul returned the monk’s stare flatly. He wouldn’t accept that. It was an article of his faith now that his daughter was still alive: his doctrine of salvation. There had to be some way for him to make amends.

Perhaps the old Pavement Priest recognised that in his eyes, because he snorted gently through stone nostrils. ‘I’m sorry, kid, I really am. I know where she went, and we’re going there too, but this is an all-out attack, not a rescue mission.’

He paused, then added, ‘If it helps, that’s the way she wanted it.’ He blurred for an instant and then he was facing the other way, engaged in other business.

‘Then I want to fight,’ Paul said to his mica-threaded back.

The monk released a startled laugh. ‘With what? You’ll be butchered like a ten-week calf.’

‘Do you care?’ Paul asked bluntly.

‘You know what? Now I can hear the family resemblance.’ Petris sounded amused for a moment, then the humour dropped out of his gravel voice. ‘Who am I, of all men, to stand between a man and his suicide?’ he muttered. He sounded deadly serious. ‘Obadiah!’ he called.

Paul shuddered as the bronze nobleman slapped a handful of red clay onto his neck.

‘No soldier of mine goes into battle without a uniform,’ the monk said. ‘We march in thirty minutes. Keep up.’