CHAPTER 15
Beth followed Fil around the crumbling corners of East London, though he was half-dazed and there was no logic to their path that she could see. They weaved through narrow alleys and doubled back through dead-end mews. Every step carried Beth further from the city she knew.
The architecture grew darker, stranger: a heavily graffiti’d old cinema building, its neon sign long-dead and its doors shuttered; an electricity sub-station half-hidden behind a cloud of razor-wire, and everywhere, the cranes massed on the skyline like cruel sentinels.
By sunset they’d reached Limehouse. Beth slumped down inside a railway arch, exhausted, but her guide was still twitchy. He cocked his head as though listening for something, then he swore and leaped to his feet again. He dragged her away from the railway and finally let her settle in a narrow alleyway behind some bins.
She watched him for a while, resting her chin on her forearms. She was following him unquestioningly, she realised with a jolt; could she really trust him enough for that? This boy who consorted with giant spiders and served a Goddess who entombed people alive for eternity: how could this be her side? And yet she was sticking as loyally by him as Pen always had to her.
Pen. Beth sighed. She would have trusted Pen to know if this was the right side; Pen had always been her compass.
She curled up against the wall, suddenly realising how much she wanted to see her friend again, to say sorry for whatever it was she’d done, to make it all right again.
She slept, and her dreams were full of tiny stone tombs.
When Beth awoke, Fil was gone. Anxiety stung her for a second, but she swallowed it down; she didn’t believe he would have left her. For all his protests, all his strength and strangeness, she thought he wanted her there. She smiled briefly, surprised by how much she enjoyed that thought.
Graffiti tangled over the wall, but there was nothing interesting, only messy, graceless tags. Beth had no time for signatures like that. Bricks were a journal for her, not a megaphone; she didn’t paint to shout about her impact on the city but to show the city’s impact on her.
She dug some chalks out of her backpack.
Hazy yellows brought her sketched-in Lampgirls alive, echoing their coronae of light. Beth smirked a little and added a bit more meat to the lippy one’s backside.
She drew Petris on the opposite wall, installing him in a blurry shadow-garden of gravestones and weeds. Something snagged her attention: she’d drawn an emotion onto the stone face without even meaning to. Anger. The gaze that came back off the bricks was accusatory.
‘You know,’ said a voice behind her, ‘I think he could look a little more pissed off, if you really worked at it. I mean, I know he wants to kill himself, but that’s pretty much an occupational hazard for a Pavement Priest. He’s properly cheerful when you get to know him.’ Fil stood at her shoulder, gazing intently at her picture. His approach had been soundless.
‘Otherwise, it’s not bad. You should do me some time.’ He grinned and struck a pose with his railing, flexing his scrawny arms.
‘I already did once,’ Beth told him.
‘Yeah? Where? How did I look?’
‘Like you were cobbled together from old skin and pipe-cleaners. It was pretty true to life.’
He looked a little crestfallen. ‘Like you were with Electra?’ He pointed at the painting of the Lampgirls. ‘She’d dance a duel with you if she saw that.’
‘At least you can recognise her. This isn’t as easy as it looks, you know. ’sides,’ Beth put a slight edge in her tone, ‘it’s what’s inside that counts.’
Fil’s grin vanished as he recognised the quote. He slumped against a wall. ‘What is it, Beth?‘ he asked plaintively. ‘What it is you’ve been wanting to say?’
Beth sat beside him, feeling the bricks graze her spine. She opened her mouth three times before concluding there was no tactful way to put this. ‘Look, it’s like this… You’re all right — I mean, I like you. I owe you.’ She hesitated. ‘And I trust you, too. But this mum — this Goddess of yours? Her, I’m not so sure about.’
‘What are you talking about?’ he said. ‘Mater Viae’s my blood; we’re the same.’
‘Are you?’ Beth asked. ‘Would you have made Pylon Spiders that had to prey on people? Would you have done that?’ She pointed at her painting of Petris. ‘Really? You would’ve buried them alive?’
‘They are guilty of the crimes they’re being punished for.’
‘That’s not what I asked.’
He was silent.
‘There was a kid there, Filius!’
‘Yeah, well, he’d lived other lives before this one — so has Petris. Neither of them are pure as the rain- washed marble, know what I mean? They know what they’ve done, even if you don’t. Look.’ He twisted to face her, and his gaze was fierce. ‘Reach is a monster. Maybe my mother is too, but at least she kept him in check.’
Beth was about to protest, but he just stared the words right back down her throat.
‘What?’ he demanded, ‘what is it you think you can say to me? You’ve met Mater Viae’s priesthood one time and now you’re some kind of expert? You wanna see the alternative? ’cause Reach has a priestess too: the Wire Mistress, we call her, the Demolition Clergy.’ He snorted. ‘She’s a parasite: a barbed-wire fluke. She kidnaps whole families, for convenience, to use as hosts. She takes them one by one, the oldest first, always saving the ones with the most legs in ’em for later. And so the kids get to see their possessed mums and dads rip their own bodies to shreds.’ Anger tinted his cheeks basalt-black. ‘They’re kids too, Beth. This is war, and there are kids everywhere.’
The anger ran out of him and he slumped down. ‘“Do more than run.” That’s what you told me. This is me trying, all right? So if you trust me like you say you do, if you believe in me, then believe in Mater Viae, like I — like I have to, ’cause for me it’s not faith. It’s family.’
The car-horns and train-rattles and distant shouts that passed for silence outside in the city reigned for a moment.
Beth’s heart clenched, but she had to say it. ‘I do believe in her, Fil, but I don’t know if I like what I believe.’
Fil stared at the ground. She couldn’t tell if he was ashamed or angry. Then he stood up and seized his spear. ‘Come on.’
Beth stuffed her chalks into her backpack. ‘Where are we going now?’
He was already at the mouth of the alley, silhouetted in pizza-shop neon. ‘To show you what we’re up against.’
The street was empty. Black spaces gaped in the terraced houses where windows should have been. A hundred yards back, traffic spilled light and noise down the Woolwich Road, but neither penetrated as far as these pavements. Beth read the sign: Herringbone Way. It felt like a street in exile, like London had forgotten about it.
Fil stalked in front of her. He’d led her on a perilous route, tiptoeing like a night-time acrobat over brick viaducts. In his temper, he’d even crept right through the shadow of one of the cranes which frightened him so much.
He was acting up; it was obvious. She did it, for God’s sake, so she recognised it in him. He was like a little kid sneaking towards a haunted house, everything about him screaming, See? I’m not scared! I’m bloody not, and you can’t prove I am!
Of course, if he was posturing, then what was she doing, shinning awkwardly up rain-slicked drainpipes like the risk of shattering her bones into splinters hadn’t even occurred to her.
‘Oi!’ His voice drifted down from above her. ‘Up here.’ He was squatting in a glassless first-floor window frame, black against slightly paler black. A fast blink earlier, he’d been on the pavement.
‘Coming?’ he enquired. He gave his forelock a mock tug, took a step backwards and dropped out of sight.
