CHAPTER 37
Moonlight bleached the statues where they stood amongst the gravestones. The deep shadows made the stone figures look tired. A sound carried on the breeze: slow regular breathing, the odd snore. Slumped inside their punishment skins, the Pavement Priests slept.
It was very early in the morning. They’d worked all of the preceding night.
The sound of stone wings had filled the cemetery, and one after another they’d looked up. Ezekiel delivered the first body in silence: a boy, swaddled in the statue of a Victorian scientist. He’d dropped the boy at Petris’ feet as if it was nothing at all. Petris nodded as he accepted the burden. He gazed at the clawmarks in Ezekiel’s stone armour with a kind of jealousy.
Is that all I am now? he wondered. An undertaker? Is this how quickly the sword passes to another fist?
After that first body (Lasulo, Petris thought, careful to recall his name) others came. Their surviving battle- mates brought them, balanced stiffly on shoulders or pulled through the dew-wet grass on makeshift sleds. The priests of the graveyard moved to help. Nobody spoke. Brother faced brother; hard-eyed husbands salved their wives’ battle wounds in silence. The last words they’d exchanged had been ugly ones, words like slave and whore and heretic, but this wasn’t the time to rehash those arguments, not with dead to count and bury.
No one had to speak. Everyone knew what needed to be done.
They grunted and muttered curses as they lifted the dead onto the empty pedestals. They mixed mortar and melted bronze according to each of the fallen’s materials and poured it around their feet to set them in place. A few paused to gape at the sheer number of the entombed. It was the largest mass funeral in decades.
And then, at four o’clock, the hour of stone, the true witching hour, the Pavement Priests began to sing. Petris led, and every other brother and sister joined in, even Ezekiel, wheeling overhead at a disdainful distance.
The hymn of the Pavement Priests rang out across London, as pure as bell chimes and as deep as a midwinter night, carrying over the growl of London engines, and everyone who heard it stopped and listened. Without knowing it, the people on the streets observed a moment’s silence for the fallen.
The words of the song were simple enough: Under the skin gifted by the quarry and washed away by the rain, a fragment of the human remains. The song was a prayer that those fragments become whole again, that the most human of virtues be restored to their fallen siblings, the virtue that allowed them to die. They prayed that their statues would cease to be punishment skins and become simple graves.
The prayer’s target, of course, was Mater Viae herself. Only she could consider her debt paid and buy the priests’ deaths back from the oil-soaked traders she’d sold them to.
The irony of praying to a Goddess they’d rejected even as they stood in the ruins of her temple almost made Petris smile. But this was a funeral, and she was the only Goddess they had. Who else could they pray to? As Johnny Naphtha had once lisped in that stupid way of his, Weddingss and funeralss force the faithlesss to fake it.
The song finished and Petris ended the ceremony with a scattering of brickdust at the feet of the dead. The soldiers took their scars back into the night. Ezekiel beat his way laboriously north. They had wounded to care for, and a war with Reach to gloriously lose.
But the majority remained. Like Petris, they’d turned their backs on the Goddess who’d enslaved them. As he turned and walked away from the tombs, Petris hoped that none of them felt as much a coward as he did. Most of them had only managed a few steps before collapsing into an exhausted slumber inside their armour, but Petris couldn’t sleep. He was kept awake by a pain in his chest, a sharp longing to be with the army, to fight, to feel the pores in his stone soak up blood. It was what he had been re born for, to be a soldier. It was so long since there had been a war to fight.
But to fight would be to fight for her, and the men and women he spoke for were too angry to accept that. He scratched at his thumbs, flaking away stone: a casual rebellion.
The Carven Doctrines taught that there was no pain in a death in Mater Viae’s service: such a death paid their debt and bought release. Petris grieved not for the dead but for himself, though he’d never in a thousand years admit it. The deaths of his flock only made his own imprisonment lonelier.
So he did what all religious men do when they’re lonely. Quietly, so as not to disturb the others, he began to pray.
CHAPTER 38
‘I have to go back!’ she yelled, but the pigeons ignored her. The wind from their wings buffeted her face. London flashed past below. She writhed and kicked, but their claws only gripped her tighter.
‘I have to go back!’ She sounded deranged in her own ears. A single thought filled her to bursting and seized control of her voice. ‘That was Pen! That was Pen! I have to go back!’
A plastic clown mask dangled from a pigeon-claw. It twisted to face her. ‘Shut up.’
‘She’s my friend.’
‘She’s its host.’ Worms contorted the mask’s lips into a grimace. The empty eggshells stuck into its eyesockets looked past her to where a frail, skinny young man hung from the heart of a flock of pigeons, trailing flecks of blood into the empty air. ‘Do you really think she’d treat you any differently?’
They passed over a crosshatch of roof tiles washed yellow by the light of ordinary, dumb lamps. Tower block windows glimmered for a moment then were gone. They skimmed in low over a landfill site: hillsides of broken TV sets and microwaves and scrap metal. Snared plastic billowed like foliage. Streams of industrial solvent and rainwater carved up the landscape.
The instant the pigeons set her down, Beth was running, slipping and stumbling over the filth towards Fil, who was lying on the ground, curled away from her. The wire had flayed half his skin off and a flap of it was hanging open, like a grotesque curtain.
She skidded down on her knees beside him. His face was slack, unconscious. She drew breath sharply, remembering the look of horror, of outright betrayal, before the wire-creature had plunged him into the river.
Kill the host, he’d cried.
But she couldn’t. It was Pen. She couldn’t Could she?
Pigeons flocked around her, beating her backwards with wings and talons.
‘Glas!’ she protested.
‘Get away from him.’ She couldn’t see a face, but the voice was flat and angry. Bugs were swarming, building legs from the surrounding rubbish.
‘But I have to help…’
Suddenly the clown-mask jutted through the storm of pigeon wings. ‘If you distract me and he dies I will tear the eyes out of your skull. Understand, little girl? The best thing you can do for him is get away, now.’
Beth stiffened. She stared at Gutterglass with gritted teeth, then turned and stumbled back down the hill.
For what felt like a long time, she trudged in darkness through the shifting murk. Pen! The thought filled her head like a screaming siren. Panic fired her muscles and she sprinted up the side of a rubbish-dune towards the glowing City, towards Pen, arms pumping. All she could see was her best friend, bound and bloodied by barbed wire.
But then Beth’s fingertips brushed over one another and she felt the texture of the thin rough scabs those barbs had left. She stumbled to a stop. She’d had her chance to help Pen, her chance to free her, and she’d failed. What if she failed again? What if all that happened was that Pen was forced to watch while the Wire Mistress used her own hands to crush Beth’s throat?
Gutterglass’ voice seeped into her mind. Do you really think she’d treat you any differently?
Beth looked back across the landfill to where Fil was lying, bleeding and shuddering and barely breathing, amidst the filth and junk. Where she’d led him.
‘ Is that your plan? Run? ’ Her scorn rang so hollow now; she wished she could suck those words back into her. She wished she’d let him save himself.
