CHAPTER 36
‘I wish the priests would get a bloody move-on. I’d cut them out of that armour if-’
‘Fil!’
He looked up. ‘What?’
‘Does that mean anything to you?
His gaze followed Beth’s pointing finger. ‘It’s some yellow Lampie,’ he muttered. ‘I can’t see who. What’s she do-?’ He paled and reversed his hold on his spear.
‘Get ready,’ he whispered to Beth. Then he arched his back, sticking his ribs out and bellowed in a voice louder than all the city’s din, ‘WE’RE UNDER ATTACK!’
The Scaffwolves came first, baying and slavering, bounding past the empty steel skeletons of their handlers. The weight of their paws tore great rents in the road.
The Sodiumites linked fields, every vein blazing with suppressed static. They stumbled as they danced, struggling to place their feet right as the ground shook. Beth felt her hackles rise at the electricity in the air.
The first shockwave sheared away the lead wolf’s front legs and with a whimper of steel it crashed muzzle- first into the road — but others leaped over it, kicking the bones of their packmate into the river as they charged.
Two hundred yards. One-eighty. One-fifty. Beth gauged the distance. Time slowed and the pack’s headlong rush became a series of freeze-frames. Each jagged tooth and ragged metal claw fixed in her mind. She saw the glass dancers, stepping in another war-waltz — too slow, too slow. Fifty yards.
Beth shut her eyes and tensed herself for the impact.
‘Oi, Bradley!’ a voice yelled out. ‘What the hell do you think I got you those powers for?’
Beth snapped her eyes open. Her view was filled side to side with snapping howling jaws.
In Mater Viae’s name, fuck it! she thought.
She hurled herself forwards and the melee took her.
Beth hears my shout and I’m running, a warcry bleeding from my lips and lost in the wind. My speed smears the streets, turns the river to quicksilver. I can taste the fight in my gullet. Sodiumites vanish behind me in scars of light. Only foes stand before me now; only flashing fangs. Only prey. My lip twists. I am the savage street.
I snarl.
I may be no kind of general, but I can hunt. I fall on the wolves, and they fall to my spear.
Beth’s ears sang as metal teeth sheared past them. It was a tornado of steel and she was in the eye. She sprang from strut to strut, from muzzle to back. Her balance was instinctive. Her sweat slicked her path through the air. The Urchin Prince and his spear were everywhere, as pervasive as grey smoke. And by his side a huge beast, twice the height of a man, like a bear made out of swarming rats and pigeons and the city’s rubbish, tore at the underbellies of the wolves.
Lithe feline shapes darted through the fray: Fleet’s war party. The skinny moggies hissing and scratching at the steel skeletons were almost comical, though Reach’s monsters seemed to take them seriously enough. They chased vainly after the Cats, grasping for them, twisting their legs up and dislocating joints. Their motions looked panicky.
They’re scared of them, Beth thought. They’re scared of the Cats, and that’s screwing them up.
Beth’s army cheered on their champions as metal giant after metal giant collapsed, their limbs confused by the infamous Cats.
But they weren’t the only ones who fell. Glass figures were caught in steel jaws. Bright amber flares reflected off steel: the last shouts of the dying. Beth bunched her legs and fired herself from the hindquarters of one animal right at the face of another. It snapped, but she twisted out of the way. Cold metal struck her palm and she seized it, clinging grimly to the scruff of the wolf’s neck. Terror and exhilaration ran through her. A familiar voice welled up out of her memory: I had arms that could crush steel girders.
She reached forwards and seized the corner of her wolf’s mouth. The beast bucked, mashing its jaws together, but the teeth were too widely spaced to puncture Beth’s hands. Knuckles white, she felt the steel give under the pressure of her fingertips. Gritting her teeth, she gripped harder, and pulled.
The wolf screamed, a shocking animal howl of pain as she fish-hooked it.
The beast’s jaw flapped sideways, connected only by a thin ribbon of scrap-iron tissue. The wolf whimpered and crumpled forwards onto the tarmac.
Beth lay for an instant, blinking stupidly amidst the steel bones.
I did it, I brought a Scaffwolf down.
Iron fangs met in her shoulder, and she screamed.
Beth goes down, and something lurches sickly inside me, but I can’t help her. The space between us blurs with metal. The bear that is Gutterglass roars and crushes one wolf, and then morphs into a giant fist, which smashes another. Fangs tear his side, and he haemorrhages worms.
Under the railway bridge, a ring of Sodiumites is spinning wildly in a devil-dervish. Strange shadows coalesce and divide on the pavement. The air stinks of cordite. An avatar of pure light springs outward from the heart of their circle and grapples a scaffolding giant to the ground. A second later it gutters out, but its work is done. The molten slag that was once the giant is welded to the road, jutting curves of metal like frozen waves.
A claw falls towards me. I parry and strike back. I risk a glance back under the bridge. The five glass women who raised the avatar lie flat, drained of their light. They have no more such devils in them.
Beth’s scream made the air around her vibrate. The wolf shook her, its teeth rending her shoulder, a horrendous, sawing to-and-fro pain. She could feel the consciousness begin to seep out of her. The hand held to her breast was smothered in viscous, oily, black-streaked blood that clotted under her fingernails.
Play dead, play dead. She didn’t know what put the thought in her head. She went limp. Play dead.
In a few seconds, she wouldn’t have to pretend.
The wolf dropped her, the impact jarring her body. It straddled her, metal-pipe muzzle stretched wide…
… and never shut it.
Beth blinked up in astonishment. The hinges at the corners of its makeshift jaw squealed with the effort, but the Scaffwolf couldn’t close its mouth. Clouds of rust gusted from the animal’s nostrils.
‘Da, lads! Da! Very many good!’
Beth winced as she rolled onto her shoulder. Through the waves of sickening pain she saw Victor standing on the pavement a few yards away, greatcoat flapping wide, waving his torch as though conducting an orchestra. All around him eager Blankleits stood, bright as miniature stars.
There was a manic glint in the Russian’s eye. ‘Now boys, my good boys, more,’ he demanded. ‘ More.’
And the glass boys adjusted their peaked caps and bent their backs, perspiring pure light from their brows.
The wolf’s jaws opened wider and wider, the hinges screeching resistance. Beth watched in horrified fascination as the two halves of the animal’s muzzle suddenly inverted, and with ear-splitting protestations Reach’s monster was turned inside-out.
Woozily, Beth stood up. Gusts of vodka-tainted breath washed over her as Victor stooped to inspect her shoulder. She could already feel it healing, the cement in her blood scabbing the wound.
‘What are you, Tsarina?’ he muttered, almost hypnotised by the strangeness of her blood. ‘They no teach this Goddess medicine in Spetsnaz.’
Behind him she could see more wolves prowling, their jaws glinting in the light of their foes. She shoved Victor angrily away. ‘They’re surrounding us!’ she shouted in his face. ‘Come on.’ She ran for the orange glow of the Sodiumite ranks. Heat washed over her neck as the Lampmen jogged in her wake. Pain throbbed through her as her wounded arm swung.
Goddess, she thought, who’s a bloody Goddess?
Reach’s initial wave has faltered. His wolves whirl, gnashing the air, but they are far fewer than they were. Then again, so are we. I break into a run, shattered glass biting my feet. A trash-tiger bounds beside me and a ragged cheer goes up from our side — only two or three audible voices, but a chorus of silent ones, glowing back off the clouds. They think we’re winning.
But now the handlers move, swaying metal skeletons, shambling unsteadily up the road, their footsteps
