eight hundred years. If I couldn’t recognise a gangrenous conscience then I ought to abandon the calling altogether and open a florist’s.’
There was a flicker, and suddenly he stood beside her, massive with his limestone wings. ‘Talk.’ It wasn’t a request. ‘You’ll feel better.’
Beth continued to stare. She had no idea where to start.
‘Blood-in-the-river,’ Ezekiel sighed. ‘How does your lot do this again?’ He creaked down beside her. Cracks appeared and resealed instantly in his cassock. ‘I bless you, daughter, for you have sinned, it’s been — well, forever, in all probability, since your last confession, so you’re due. Keep it to the important stuff please; I have neither the time nor the inclination to hear about shoplifting when you were ten. Anyway, confess away. I’m listening.’
Beth opened her mouth, stalled, and then the words came out all in a tumble. ‘It’s too much. People follow me. I ask them… and they follow. Like Fil, and — and Pen, and all these people in their stone and their glass. And I’m trying, really trying to help. But now Electra’s dead, and Fil nearly is… and these priests are just kids, and Pen… oh Christ and Thames, Pen… Oh God-’ She stopped, trying to recover her breath.
The angel’s beautiful carved face watched her. ‘I misjudged you, Miss Bradley,’ he said softly. ‘Guilt is not your problem.’
‘No?’ Beth sniffed back tears. ‘Then what is?’
‘Rampaging egomania.’
Beth jerked her head up, thinking the angel was taking the piss, but he sounded totally serious. ‘“People — huh- follow- huh- me!”’ He mimicked her exactly, even with the little gasps for breath. ‘“ These priests are just kids.” Patronise us to your heart’s content, Miss Bradley, we’re all several hundred years old, but we don’t mind.’
Then he snorted. ‘Honestly! As if we have not eyes to see and minds to think as well as feet and hands to march and fight.’ A stone hand took Beth’s chin. She hadn’t even seen it move. ‘Listen to me. This will be bad for your ego, but good for your heart. Reach is a monster. He and his creatures kill indiscriminately. You know this; so do we. We follow you only because you happen to be right. And if it had not been you, we would have followed someone else. Filius would have fought in the end, with or without you.
‘It is the will of the G oddess.’ His voice rasped with urgency bordering on fanaticism. ‘As the appearance of Fleet and his holy felines shows. You carry the Lady’s aspect, and I respect that, but do not let that fool you into thinking you are more important than you are. We are all vessels for her will.’
He released her chin and retreated from her in a few unclear flickers of motion. Beth rubbed the skin where his fingers had been. The bruises were healing already.
‘Oh, and Miss Bradley? You are about the worst triage nurse I’ve ever seen. Gutterglass’ weevils keep having to unpick your stitches and redo them. It’s embarrassing, and a waste of time. For their sake, if not your own, find something to do that you’re actually good at.’
CHAPTER 39
When Beth found Gutterglass, he was crouched over a Sodiumite girl so badly wounded that she could barely light his face. The trash-spirit’s incarnation was tiny, no bigger than a toddler, and he stroked her fibre-optic hair with soda-straw fingers and whispered to her that Mater Viae loved her.
There was a hissing, cracking noise and half a dozen rats nosed their way from the rubbish-dune, dragging a live electrical cable burrowed from some part of the national grid. Gutterglass slid condoms over his fingers like surgical gloves and set to work.
Beth didn’t disturb him ’til he was done. ‘The compact look suits you,’ she said. She eyed his avatar’s oversized, collapsing-football head. ‘In a creepy, decomposing baby sort of way.’
Gutterglass didn’t look at her. ‘I have five thousand and sixty-three distinct organisms under control at present,’ he said snippily, ‘scavenging, shoring up defences and, in some cases, conducting open-heart surgery. Frankly, I’d like to see you manage half as much and animate a paper bag, let alone a fully functional avatar.’ The little refuse-marionette rummaged around, tugged out a battered pack of cigarettes and lit one between his split- seam lips.
‘You smoke?’ Beth was surprised.
‘Who better to have a filthy habit?’ Gutterglass countered.
Beth watched smoke billow back out through his balsawood ribs. ‘Does it… do anything for you?’ she asked.
‘It used to,’ Gutterglass shut his eggshell-eyes. There was a wistfulness as he spoke. ‘A long time ago.’
When the eggshells opened again, the look Gutterglass gave her was cold, and tinged with hostility. ‘What do you want, Miss Bradley?’
Beth looked at him through the smoke. ‘What do you think I want?’
The Prince of London had no mattress. His back and shoulders were raised off the ground by crushed rubble and chunks of brick. As Beth watched, the colour of the rubble faded and his pallid skin darkened a little, but only a very little.
She crouched and brushed the hair out of his face. His jaw was clenched and his eyes screwed up. ‘He looks better.’
‘Of course he does,’ Gutterglass said flatly. ‘ I’m his doctor. Although, to give him his due, the-little-God- that-could here is very hard to kill.’
Air escaped the football-head in a sigh. ‘However, I have no way of knowing when he’ll wake up,’ he confessed. ‘In the meantime I suppose that leaves you and me in command.’ He spat out the words angrily. ‘I’ll need you to-’
‘I’m going, Glas,’ Beth interrupted. She stood up.
The eggshells blinked. ‘Going? Going where?’
‘St Paul’s. Pen needs me.’
Gutterglass waited a long time before he answered. ‘Do you know what?’ he said at last. ‘I should let you.’ To Beth’s surprise his voice was harsh with anger. ‘I should wish you the best of London Luck and just let you waltz straight into the Scaffwolves’ jaws. After all, you deserve it. I introduced them, did you know that? Filius and Electra? She was brave and powerful and graceful; she was his best friend, and she made him happier than anyone I’ve ever seen.’
He twisted his head and looked at her with frank disgust. ‘Anyone except you. So for the love he bore you, I’ll say this once. Don’t go. You think you can make it better? You can’t. Reach will rip you asunder. Walk into the Demolition Fields looking for a happy ending and an ending is all you’ll find.’
He fell silent. For a long time Beth held his eggshell gaze. ‘You’re still going, then?’ Gutterglass said eventually.
‘What do you think?’
A cockroach in Gutterglass’ mouth clicked in disapproval and something bumped against Beth’s shin. She looked down. It was Fil’s corroded railing-spear, borne on a swarming tide of beetles.
‘You might need this.’
His little face looked exhausted, but in a strange way satisfied. ‘In the unlikely event you get close enough, drive it into the Crane King’s throat.’
Beth’s fingers closed around the spear. The grooves and pits in the metal seemed to fit her hand precisely. She could almost feel the shape of Fil’s handprint on it.
‘It’s not much,’ Gutterglass said, ‘but without Mater Viae’s Great Fire, we must improvise.’
Beth exhaled slowly. ‘I’ll kill him, Glas,’ she swore, tasting every word. ‘For Fil, and Electra, and Pen. And for me.’
Gutterglass’ seam-smile said he didn’t believe her, but he nodded. He disintegrated slowly. His eggshells watched her to the last.
When Gutterglass had gone, she bent down and kissed Fil’s forehead. ‘You brought me home,’ she whispered into his ear. It physically hurt her, deep in her chest, to leave him like this, but he had Gutterglass, and Gutterglass
