Tom Pollock - The City's son

The grey-skinned boy looked at her. ‘Then we’re wrong,’ he said, ‘but that’s our city, dying out there, and I’m all out of ideas.’

Beth raised the spear. She tensed her shoulder and gritted her teeth, but she couldn’t drive the weapon home. Tears blurred her sight as all her half-formed, desperate, unspoken love for this boy flooded through her. She turned away, unable to bear his gaze.

‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘It’s too much.’

His voice hardened. ‘It’s not your call, Beth.’

His eyes, the colour of the city she was refusing to try and save, bore into her, but she couldn’t do this. It was too high a price.

When he spoke again, his voice was a whisper. ‘Remember what Petris said: “The outlines, the very definition of a life.”? This is my definition, Beth. I’m choosing it now — I’m choosing the chance that you’re right. If you take that away from me, you’re no better than my mother.’

Beth swallowed hard, a choking mix of salty tears and air, and tried frantically to think of something else, some other explanation, something they had missed. Think, Bradley, think, she swore at herself, but nothing came.

In that moment, she hated Filius Viae more than she’d ever hated anyone. She wanted to throw away his vile spear and walk back down the tunnel, to leave him paralysed in the darkness. She wanted to abandon him the way he was about to abandon her. But she couldn’t, because she knew that years from now she’d still see Masonry Men and brick-born babies lying murdered. She couldn’t, because however child-like Reach was, he wasn’t innocent. Her people were dying on his claws.

And she couldn’t, because although she hated him, she could never walk away from that skinny, wretched kid.

She set the spear between his ribs. He smiled encouragingly. The spear scratched a lopsided red-black star against his flesh as she shook.

‘Christ, Fil- I-’

‘It’s okay, Beth.’ He held her gaze. ‘Do I scare you witless enough to make you brave?’ he asked her.

‘Yes,’ she whispered.

‘One,’ he said. ‘Two…’

Beth rammed the spear forward.

He gasped and his eyes stretched. She felt a crunch as his ribs gave way. She gritted her teeth and twisted the shaft. His bare heels drummed the ground for an awful moment, and then stopped.

Five seconds, she counted them carefully. That was how long she looked into his vacant eyes. Then she snarled, ‘I’m not shutting your eyes for you, liar. You can watch what you made me do.’ She bent and picked him up. He sagged over her good shoulder, infinitely heavier in death. She ducked under the lintel and ran.

Noise exploded over her as Beth burst from the labyrinth. She weaved right and then left, ducking iron jaws and fallen bodies. A stone sword slipped from a Pavement Priest’s hand and whistled past her, grazing her knee. She raced between the legs of a metal giant, deep into the very heart of the battle.

‘ Delenda Reach,’ the ragged choir croaked. The Pavement Priests were pitifully few now, but still they tore at the earth with their stone hands. Beth ignored their horrified stares as she dumped the limp body of their prince into their midst. There was no time — no time for grief; no time for fear; no time for anything resembling a human emotion, or else this would all to be for nothing.

‘Here he is,’ she shouted into the din. ‘Here’s your price!’

She cast around desperately, but all she could see were bodies and carnage. Despair scratched deep in her chest — and then a petrol smell stung her nostrils.

Six black figures walked unhurriedly through the chaos of battle. Their movements were perfectly synchronised; their oil-soaked suits were untouched by the flying muck.

‘Over here!’ Beth’s scream tore her throat. ‘Over here! Here’s what you’re owed.’

The Chemical Synod always collected on their debts. Deals were sacred.

As they strode over the rubble two priests moved to confront them, but Petris’ command boomed out. ‘Let them come.’

Reach issued no such instruction. As these fresh, powerful interlopers stalked over his scarred face, towards his very throat, amid the noise and stink of the attack against him, Reach panicked. Beth could feel it. The whole of the building site seemed to tense around her.

‘ I will be! ’ Reach shrieked, and a crane-born hook shot through the air to impale the rightmost black-slicked man.

The synod’s expressions became grim. They didn’t break step, but the five remaining men spread out to repair their symmetry. As one, each produced a cigarette lighter, flipped the lid and ran the spark-wheel up the leg of their trousers.

Heat punched into Beth’s face as the synod caught fire. She shielded her eyes. They kept on at the same calm pace, burning like Guys on Bonfire Night. Where their feet fell, the ground — Reach’s body — bubbled, hissed and melted.

‘ I will be! ’ Reach shrieked.

Two of the fiery men peeled off from either side and strolled over to the cranes. A Scaffwolf snapped at one, but he didn’t even break stride. The corona of heat around him melted through the beast’s jaw and hot slag ran into the contours of the rubble.

Johnny Naphtha approached one crane and extended a burning hand towards its cab, almost as though in greeting. The metal glowed and warped and buckled as he touched it, and as she looked around she saw the other members of the synod, stationed all around the building site, doing exactly the same thing, in precise time, with other cranes.

Beth expected Reach to cry out, but no cry came: the engines which produced his voice were silenced. The child-king of the cranes died not with a scream, but with a slow hiss of metal like an exhausted breath.

The Scaffwolves creaked on their hinges, the iron giants groaned. Jaws slid sideways over one another. Knees bent the wrong way and the monsters subsided into the dust.

Beth sat down hard in the rubble. She gazed vacantly at Fil’s body. The wound in her shoulder had reopened, and her hoodie was clammy with fresh blood.

Johnny Naphtha approached. His flames, the flames that had ignited the Great Fire of London, guttered out. His suit and skin were now the crisp grey-black of charcoal. ‘How pleasant of you to prepare him for us.’ He looked down at the grey body, lying sprawled across Reach’s throat. A touch of sarcasm entered his voice. ‘And how precisely placed.’

He crouched, picked up the body and without ceremony slung it over his shoulder. Gracefully, he rose to his feet, turned on his heel and walked away. The rest of his coven converged on him. One of them had their fallen brother in a fireman’s lift, dripping oil down his burnt back.

Beth sagged sideways. She felt voided, utterly empty. She’d forgotten how to feel, forgotten how to stand up. The boy The boy with the city in his skin was dead.

Pavement Priests clustered around her. Their stone faces looked grim, accusing.

‘I had to kill him,’ she croaked. ‘I had to bring the Chemical Synod.’

‘We know.’ The voice belonged to Petris. ‘We know better than most the prices of their services.’ His stone mask contorted painfully into a smile.

Beth stared up at him. That expression looked so out of place in this bloody tangle that she didn’t trust it.

‘Beth, there’s someone here who wants to see you.’

‘Beth? Beth!’ The clay-caked figure she’d seen in the battle shouldered his way between the statues. He was limping. Up close, she could see patches of pale skin showing where the crust of ceramic had been chipped away. Bright red blood — human blood — ran from a gash on the man’s forehead, dripping down a face she knew.