pealing like bells. They crouch amongst the wreckage of the wolfpack, sorting the scrap with fingers too small and clever for their massive hands. Instead of fingernails they have wrenches and sledgehammers and shears, and quickly, cunningly, they reconnect the joints. Shoulders rise on haunches, supporting half-reconstructed skulls.
The fallen wolves shake themselves and drag themselves snarling from the tarmac while our dead remain as dust on the ground.
A rebuilt wolf rears in front of me, still groggily shaking its head. I spring off its shoulder and slash a handler through the kneecap. He falls, but his fellows are already rebuilding him. It’s Metal-Medicine, and we have no answer to it.
‘ZEKE!’ I manage to bellow, just before the animal I used as a springboard takes me in the stomach. ‘WHERE ARE YOU?’
The air moved against Beth’s skin, stirred by heavy wings. All along the riverfront, hands clapped over the stone embankment, water droplets glimmering on their fingers. In all manner of shapes, dressed from a dozen centuries, stone figures pulled themselves jerkily into view.
They had trudged, slowly, to get here; the mud on the riverbed still clung to their feet. But now a regiment of statuary stood on the Embankment. Through the gaps eroded by time and the elements in their armour Beth could see bared teeth and throats pulsing as they sucked down air.
The Pavement Priests were building up to something.
Beth looked in through the eyeholes of one. His eyes were stretched wide with effort.
Then, as one, the Pavement Priests vanished.
What-? Where-?
A screeching clang answered her. Across the road, a scaffolding giant had fallen to its knees, gripped by a nude bronze and a stone scholar. Their hands blurred, tearing metal like paper, and Beth found herself gaping as the slim bronze woman in front of her twisted her hips and ripped the metal skull from the giant’s shoulders.
The pair of statues vanished again, and reappeared to scythe the knees from another Handler.
A crazy hope filled Beth like warmth.
How come you never see statues move? she thought in wonder. Is it because they move too slowly, or is it because they’re much, much too fast?
The riverbank was a battlefield. The Pavement Priests flickered, vanished and rematerialised on top of their enemies, their sheer weight dragging the metal monsters down. The air was alive with panting, praying and screaming.
The priests took casualties. Real blood ran from their wounds, black and sticky with lack of water. She surveyed the battle, a terrified elation burning in her throat. She dared to hope the Pavement Priests might be turning the tide.
It isn’t happening. The priests aren’t turning the tide.
As I fight I can only glimpse the carnage. The poor stoneskins are running out of steam, slowing down like toys with their clockwork spent, and all over the road the wolves are tearing them down. Statues litter the battlefield, close-fitting tombs.
Perhaps a quarter of the wolfpack remains, and a small huddle of their handlers. It will be enough: already those clever fingers are reworking the scaffolding joints.
Where’s Beth? I can’t see Beth anywhere.
My spear feels heavier than I remember, and it’s only then I notice the flesh of my right arm is torn. Pain pours through my shoulder, almost as if it’s been waiting for me to notice the wound so it can jump out and surprise me. The scaffolding giants shake the streets with their footsteps.
Already the wolves are circling. Raw fear swills around my stomach. There’s only one thing left to do.
‘Fall back,’ I shout, ‘fall back to the river!’
For a second, Glas stares at me. Then he nods and reforms as a giant rubbish head, shrieking in the voice of a hundred rats, ‘FALL BACK! FALL BACK!’
My soldiers, glass and flesh and stone alike, waver, then they’re all sprinting as fast as they can towards the water. Pavement Priests with severed limbs are dragged by Sodiumites, fields wrapped around them like fishing nets. I stand, urging them on until the last Lampie has passed me, and as I turn myself and hare off on its tail the Scaffwolves howl joyously and race in pursuit.
It’s less than a hundred paces to the riverbank. The distance dissolves. I can feel the chill breath of the wolves on my back. As the first of my army reach the water’s edge they mill about in confusion. Some look back my way with perplexed, betrayed expressions. I know what they’re thinking: if the wolfpack traps them against the river, they’ll all be slaughtered.
I catch Gutterglass’ eye. We’ve only got one chance at this.
‘BREAK RIGHT!’ I bawl as Glas shouts, ‘BREAK LEFT!’ and I bound into my army’s ranks and start almost throwing glass bodies westwards up the riverbank. Glas is more efficient, morphing into a giant hand that sweeps scores of Pavement Priests in the opposite direction.
Glass girls and boys are screaming, pale yellow light flashing haphazardly. A priest is crushed to bloody gravel under his fellows. But a gap opens up in the middle of our ranks. The wolves try to check their charge, but their momentum is too great and as they barrel past they twist to snap at our ankles. Their metal paws pulverise the concrete barrier and they splash into the glittering river beyond.
Ragged breath tears through me. I give Glas a smile.
The wolfpack stirs, swishing ankle-deep in the water, turning, making ready to pursue us. But then they stop.
One of the handlers looks down at the surface of the river, and I know what he sees: the reflections of Metal Men and Scaffwolves are surrounded by other reflections, hundreds of them, some besuited, others dungareed, or wearing battered camouflage. They are reflections without originals, reflections that smile grimly as the welding torches they’re wielding spit and flare into life.
I jump onto an empty pedestal on the Embankment just in time to see a Mirrorstocrat touch his torch to a wolf’s reflection. As he does so the real wolf shrieks horribly and its muzzle glows first white-hot and then begins to melt.
My ears are still ringing when a heavy stone hand claps me on the shoulder. I look up into Ezekiel’s face; he’s congratulating me on the feint. I nod absently. Below me the wolves are trying to back out of the river, but their reflections have been chained and muzzled, and though they strain at them they might as well be trying to tear away from their own shadows.
Feeling a little sick at what I’ve got the Mirrorstocracy to do, I turn away — and what I see freezes me in shock.
In the dim light on the other side of the road, a Scaffwolf stands alone. A girl mounted on the beast’s back is watching me. Her hair is bound in a silk scarf. Her face is streaked with metal and dried blood. Somehow she projects pure loathing; implacable hatred emanates from her shape. Almost lazily, she extends an arm towards our ranks.
‘No!’ I mean to shout it, but I don’t even know if I make any sound.
Tendrils of barbed wire, hundreds of snakelike strands, are unfurling at ferocious speed. A Sodiumite girl younger than me barely has time to flinch before wire crunches her neck apart.
Oh no. Oh Thames, no: the Wire Mistress More tendrils, more broken bodies, more death. Reach has sent his high priestess to see us wiped out.
I shove myself towards her, but my legs are reluctant. ‘You’re the only one who can stop her!’ I shout at myself, although frankly, that’s optimism gone barking bloody mad. She’s got a host, so she’ll be at least as strong as me.
The Mistress’s host springs from the back of her wolf and runs towards us. A buzzing cloud of gleaming metal surrounds her and I imagine those tendrils dipping into the river, stirring up the water into foam and obliterating the Mirrorfolk and the wolves’ reflections.
She could still undo everything.
You’re the only one who can stop her. But I don’t have to do it alone.
I scream, part warcry, mostly plain terror, as I meet the steel-wrapped girl. Barbed strands fly around me and I manage to shout, just a few words, before they seal up my mouth.
‘ Beth, help me! ’
