Our Lady of the Streets (The Skyscraper Throne) (16 page)

‘It’s worse.’ Pen’s voice sounded like her throat had been scraped raw. She sat slumped forward, her arms over her knees. The wires had spread wide to give Gutterglass room to tend her.

‘B,’ she croaked. Her eyes were hollow above her scars. Beth was shocked by the dread in them. ‘B, we have to get ready. She … She was in my head. When She grabbed the wire. She could see everything. She knows we’re here.

‘They’re coming.’

‘
Glas
,’ Beth snapped, ‘
get Petris, get Zeke. Go and wake the Lampies up and get them moving. Tell them to meet us at the south exit. We need to evacuate
.’

‘Where are we going to go?’ Gutterglass protested, her eggshells lingering forlornly on the diorama of the city in the centre of the room.

‘
Anywhere
’
s better than here. You want to stick around and arm-wrestle a Masonry Man over who gets your lab, go for it – but give everyone else the choice first, okay?
’

Glas gave her a startled look, and then dissolved; flies, beetles, mice and rats all scurried about their tasks. The last beetle to leave the room dropped a sticking plaster into Beth’s dad’s hand. He eyed it unsteadily, then opened it and slapped it over his cut.

‘
Can you walk?
’ Beth asked Pen, who nodded. The wire tightened around her, supporting her like a brace as she got to her feet. ‘
Then let
’
s move
.’

They pounded up the stairs. Beth was knackered after five of them, but she leaned on her spear and swore at
herself to keep going. Pen and her dad both looked exhausted, but they easily kept pace with her.

‘
They just went toe-to-toe with a Goddess and you can
’
t even climb some stairs? Get over yourself, Bradley
,’ she muttered to herself. And then louder, to Pen, ‘
How long do you think we
’
ve got?
’

Pen spread her hands helplessly. She was climbing the steps on the four legs the wire lent her, as well as her own.

Instead, it was Beth’s dad who answered. ‘The speed that thing carried me under the ground? Not long.’

They emerged onto the ground floor. The sun was low outside, making silhouettes of the bronze and stone figures crowding the lobby. The glass-skinned Lampfolk, refracting rainbow shadows on the floor in front of them, were still stifling yawns. As Beth approached, Gutterglass coalesced in front of them, now armoured in panels from a scrapped car. She’d worked fast, and now everyone congregated at the edges of the chamber, not yet knowing whether they should be staring or running.

‘
We
’
re leaving
,’ Beth shouted at them as she ran past, and they flinched from the traffic-thunder of her voice. ‘
I strongly suggest you do likewise
.’

She didn’t break stride, but dropped her voice as she reached Petris. ‘
Glas told you?
’

‘She did.’

‘
Then let
’
s go
.’

She reached the exit and stuck out her hand to push the door open – but her palm sizzled as it touched the brass.
The stench of hot tar filled the air and she recoiled, staring at the door. The metal was glowing like an ember, and it was radiating heat like a stove.

‘
Shit! EVERYONE GET BACK
,’ she yelled.

The crowd behind her obeyed, looking at her uncertainly. She shoved the door open and the air broke over her in a hot wave. It shimmered above the pavement.

‘
Street
’
s burning up
,’ she called back.

‘This one too,’ Pen called from the Duke Street exit. She was holding out a wire-wrapped hand towards the door.

‘
Glas?
’

But pigeons were already fluttering through the building. Glas’ face went strangely blank for a moment, then she confirmed, ‘We’re surrounded. The fevers must just have broken out.’

Beth slammed a fist into the door in frustration. Another bout of dizziness made the room blur in front of her, but when the moment passed, the floor still looked like it was trembling.

‘B …’ Pen said uncertainly.

Everyone was looking at her. She looked around at the frightened, confused faces, human and otherwise. ‘
Down
,’ she gasped. ‘
The car park – one of the walls runs close to the tube station. Maybe we can break through there
.’

They ran for the fire stairs, the Pavement Priests covering the space fastest in their stop-motion way. Winded, Beth looked back over her shoulder. A patch in the centre of the floor was seething like boiling water. The humans cowered
behind the display counters, peeking over them as a slender grey figure burst elegantly upwards.

Beads of liquid tile dripped off its predatory jaw. Its head swayed to and fro on its uncannily long, muscular neck, taking in the frightened gazes fixed on it. It locked eyes with one lanky middle-aged man and began to stalk towards him. The man squeaked, but didn’t run. He was transfixed. He didn’t understand. He had no idea what was about to happen to him.

Beth hesitated in the doorway of the stairwell and felt a bolt of anger at her hesitation. She looked back down the stairs. Her friends were already lost to sight, hurrying down to the bowels of the building, but the Sodiumites’ glass footsteps echoed up to her. They were looking to her to save them;
they
were the ones she was responsible for. They were also, a treacherous little voice reminded her, the only ones with half a chance in this fight.

She bit her lip, and chose. ‘
Oi, Asphalt-Arse!
’ she yelled. ‘
Over here!
’

The Masonry Man froze, and then turned. It looked at her with eyes too deeply shadowed to see, then arched like a dolphin and dived. Beth didn’t wait to watch the floor seal over; she haired off down the stairwell.

It was a harum-scarum tumble, half sprint, half fall. She tripped over steps and bounced off walls. Her balance was shot, her vision doubled, but somehow she managed to keep her feet under her. She was panting, and oily spit dribbled from the corner of her mouth.

Concrete fingers burst from the wall and she slashed at them with her railing-spear, slicing them off at the knuckle. Hot liquid spattered onto her cheeks as she crashed past. Inside Beth’s hood, Oscar hissed and snapped in frustration; the stairwell was too cramped for him to fly.

A head broke through the step beneath her and a mouth full of rubble-teeth snapped at her foot. She stamped as hard as she could on the bridge of the thing’s nose, but a pair of arms breached beside the head and tripped her legs. Acid rose up her throat as she flew headlong down the stairs. She ploughed into the next landing face-first, and the impact juddered her spine. Her face felt hot and puffy, flayed by the friction. She tried to rise, but she was muggy and confused; she couldn’t work out where up was. She twisted, looking out from under her own armpit as another hand burst through the floor just an inch from her, its fingers crooked like claws. Beth’s breath stalled. The tower-block crown on the inside of the thing’s grey wrist filled her whole world.

‘Beth!’

The crown mark exploded from the inside out and dust and blood and fragments of bone sprayed everywhere. A flickering wire, snake-tongue fast, skimmed the water on Beth’s eyeball, then recoiled, lashed around her ankle and dragged her down the stairs.

Three seconds and two flights later she hit the floor amidst a mess of running legs. Hands dragged her bodily to her feet and shoved her onwards.

‘Go!’ It was Pen’s voice, frantic, but somehow Beth couldn’t see her; she couldn’t see anything except a jumble of mossy stone shoulders and the backs of glass heads. Every joint and every muscle was screaming at her, but somehow she managed to shove her way to the front.

She ran.

The light ahead of her dimmed; the walls thronged with too many shadows. Dozens of soft explosions blotted out all other sound as the claylings crawled from the ceiling, the walls, the ground beneath their feet. Grey limbs choked the narrow space like spiderweb strands and they hacked and shoved their way through them. A Sodiumite girl next to Beth slowed slightly, trying to coordinate her feet in a dance, but as she took the second step, a grey hand seized her fibre-optic hair and swung her bodily at the wall. She flared a brief, brilliant, terrified white and then shattered into razor-edged shrapnel.

Beth slashed and head-butted and spat. Wires lashed from behind her in angry tentacles, but missed as much as they hit. Beth glanced back and glimpsed Pen between the bodies, her scarred face haggard. Her dad was supporting her as she ran. A Masonry Man burst full-bodied from the wall ahead, eager hands poised to grab them, but Beth jumped and ploughed right into it, pinning it to the wall. She felt it convulse on her spear, its clay skin hot beside her cheek. Her dad and Pen blew past her, gasping.

She dragged the railing free and tore after them.

The stairwell was a heaving tunnel of grey skin. She felt
the panic build in her chest. They were hopelessly outnumbered. She almost relaxed the muscles in the soles of her feet, to try one last time to summon claylings of her own to even the odds, but the memory of the heat from Oxford Street hit like a hammer and she stopped. These were Fever Streets now, and they’d kill her instantly.

‘Lady!’

A familiar voice, a cry from behind her. An angel-winged statue was the only figure not in motion. He stood with his wings half furled, the stricken shape of his body utterly at odds with his serenely carved face. A dripping grey arm emerged from the wall and plunged seamlessly into Ezekiel’s chest.

‘La—’

The tendons flexed beneath the grey skin like piano wires and Ezekiel’s voice choked off.

Beth’s heart clenched, but she didn’t stop. To stop was to die.

She choked on clayling dust and fragments of bone. She tried to close her ears and her nose to the sounds and the smells in that charnel trench, and she ran, down and down. An eternity of seconds passed until a sign with a green running man above it materialised like a miracle on her right.

She barrelled through the exit shoulder-first, stumbled and fell, pushed herself up off the floor and staggered onwards. In the dim light of the sub-basement she could make out a handful of stone and bronze figures flickering as they threw themselves against the far wall. The impact
of their bodies thudded through the space. Beth searched frantically, and relief surged through her as she caught sight of wire coiling in the air. She rounded a corner and there they were, Pen and her dad, almost hidden by the dust cloud the Pavement Priests were raising. Her dad had his hand clapped to his head and he was squinting at her like he couldn’t see properly. Something glistened on his neck.

‘Beth?’ he yelped. ‘Beth!’

‘
Dad
—’

A sound like a chainsaw made her look back in time to see Gutterglass bursting through from the stairwell amidst a buzzing cloud of beetles. She’d sprouted six extra pairs of arms and was using them to shelter the two glass figures who ran, hunched over, beside her. Beth kept looking as the seconds stretched out long and lonely around her, but no matter how hard she stared at the doorway, no one else came through it.

‘My Lady. Gutterglass.’ Petris’ rough bark emerged from the cluster of labouring stoneskins. ‘A little help would be
fantastic
right now.’

Beth turned and ran over to him, Glas on her heels. The Pavement Priests were attacking a section of wall between a blue car and a graffiti’d emergency phone. Their stone shoulders had succeeded in buckling the wall, hammering a six-foot crater, but there was no hole into the tube tunnels – no way out. Gutterglass swarmed and morphed into a giant garbage fist and began to punch into the wall again and again. Beth threw herself forward too, gouging with
her spear. She looked to her left, and then to her right, disbelief making her nauseous. Eight Pavement Priests, two Lampfolk, Glas, Pen, her dad – was that all? Could that really be
everyone
?

‘
Zeke
,’ she gasped as she worked, but Petris didn’t reply; it was obvious in every inch of the heavyset stone monk that he already knew.

The floor below them began to tremble. Beth seized the Sodiumite girl and the Blankleit boy by their glass shoulders and spun them around to face her. She blinked frantically at them, semaphoring with the lights in her eyes. They didn’t waste time nodding their understanding; they just took each other’s arms and began to dance, turning faster and faster, whirling each other with total abandon. They blazed as they orbited one another, bright as quasar stars.

The tiny cable hairs on the back of Beth’s neck pricked up.

As they finished the last steps of their dance and collapsed onto the floor, Beth could feel the charge they’d built up shudder through the ground beneath them. With a sound like a building being torn in half, a crack opened up in the concrete: a twelve-foot-wide trench that ran from wall to wall, bisecting the car park. On the side where Beth and the others stood, the tremor subsided.

Spindly figures burst up from the ground on the far side, casting long shadows in the low light. Beth gazed, appalled by their numbers, as more and more emerged, rank upon rank of them. Oscar chittered and Beth could feel him
straining to attack. Desperately, she tried to calm him – the ceiling was still too low, the front rank of claylings already too close. If the little Sewermander panicked and ignited in here, the explosion would swallow them all.

Clayling figures toed the trench, but it seemed to baffle them. Then, to Beth’s utter horror, one of them just stepped over the edge.

She glimpsed its grin an instant before it passed into shadow. For long seconds there was no sound, then she heard the smack of its impact echoing up from below. Another clayling jumped, then another, each one utterly silent. Beth could trace their progress by the muffled thuds as their falls broke, and by the way those thuds drew
closer
. For every grey figure that jumped, another clawed its way out of the earth on the far side of the trench to replace him. Beth watched the concrete dripping off their tower-block-crown scars, then she gazed at the one on her own wrist. She thought of the face of the Goddess that sign belonged to and her heart shrank.

Dear Thames – dear God … how powerful are You?

Wire strands whined like flies through the air, slashing down clayling after clayling. They slipped and slid on the cement blood of their fellows, but there were always more. The two Lampfolk were on their knees beside Beth, exhausted, their filaments dull.