Our Lady of the Streets

Book 3: Skyscraper Throne

by Tom Pollock

Genres: YA Fantasy; YA Action & Adventure

Synopsis

Ever since Beth Bradley found her way into a hidden London, the presence of its ruthless goddess, Mater Viae, has lurked in the background. Now Mater Viae has returned with deadly consequences. Streets are wracked by convulsions as muscles of wire and pipe go into spasm, bunching the city into a crippled new geography; pavements flare to thousand-degree fevers, incinerating pedestrians; and towers fall, their foundations decayed. As the city sickens, so does Beth-her essence now part of this secret London. But when it is revealed that Mater Viae's plans for dominion stretch far beyond the borders of the city, Beth must make a choice: flee, or sacrifice her city in order to save it.

Release date: August 7, 2014

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 448

Sample

A girl hurried barefoot through the streets of what had once been East London.

She stumbled, clumsy in her haste, and caught herself with the iron railing she carried in her right hand. Her skin was covered in scales of tiny terracotta rooftops. A fringe of rubberised cable fell across her forehead from under the hood of her sweatshirt. The hair-fine streets that crisscrossed her back were flooded with oily sweat. As she ran, her shadow loomed and shambled in front of her, stretched by the dawn.

Beth could barely keep her eyes open. Hunger, exhaustion and week after week of pretending to be fine had hollowed her out. She licked her dry lips. She could sense the pulse of the street under her, but instead of slapping her soles flat to the pavement and replenishing herself from that tantalising thrum of energy, she ran on tiptoes like she was trying to avoid broken glass. She looked up at where the houses had used to be and swallowed fearfully. Hungry as she was, she didn’t dare feed here.

Brick terraces rose on both sides of her, their façades unbroken but for the zigzag of mortar: no windows, no doors. Gravel paths led through the overgrown front gardens to dead-end against the featureless walls. No one knew exactly when Hackney had fallen to the Blank Streets, or how many people had been trapped in their homes when all the entrances and exits had suddenly vanished. Beth had heard rumours of fat beads of blood rolling down the cracks between bricks like marbles through children’s toy mazes, but she’d never witnessed it. All she knew for certain was what everyone knew: the cries for help had fallen silent quickly – far too quickly for those entombed inside to have starved to death.

Oscar, nestled in her hood, growled and curled tighter into her neck.

I hear you, little buddy, she thought. She reached back into her hood and let the little lizard lick her fingertips.

I hear you.

She paused at the end of the street and bent double. Her breath sawed in and out of her lungs, rattling like a troubled engine. Get a grip, she ordered herself. She straightened slowly, feeling the steel hinges in her vertebrae click into place.

She heard a noise and froze.

It was very faint, like a shoe-scuff, but the city was all but silent now and such small sounds carried. She felt a brief impulse to open herself up to the street, to push her consciousness into the asphalt and feel what it felt – but she held back, eyeing the windowless walls. On these streets, she didn’t know what might push back into her. She imagined her eyes, nose, mouth, ears, even her pores, sealing over with the same seamless brick and shuddered.

She inhaled deeply and all the minuscule lights that dotted the city on her skin flared in response to the fresh oxygen.

Thames, she whispered inside her head, please, dear Christ, let me be in time.

She turned the corner – and stared.

If her voice had still belonged to her, she would have laughed, but instead she just stood there in silence, her mouth open, while her chest heaved and her jaw ached.

Garner Street, the road where she’d lived all her life until three months ago, had been spared.

She stumped towards number 18 in a relieved daze. Wilting plants and dead bracken blocked the gate from opening more than a few inches, but she knew that gap well and squeezed through it with ease. Chapped paint surrounded a letterbox with so fierce a spring that when she was a kid she’d imagined it was the snapping jaws of a brass wolf.

She smiled to herself. Back when we had to pretend.

The place looked the same as always, the same as it had the night she’d fled it: the night Mater Viae returned.

*

She relived it between eye-blinks: the blue glare from the blazing Sewermanders reflecting off the walls; the stink of burning methane and wet cement; the terrified faces of London’s Masonry Men pressing out of the brickwork, their mouths silently shaping pleas for help. The walls had rippled as Mater Viae’s clayling soldiers swarmed under them, clamping red hands over those screaming mouths and pulling them back beneath the surface; the Sodiumites had fled their bulbs in bright panic, leaving darkness and silence in their wake when everything passed on.

And the cranes …

A spindly shape caught her eye and she looked up. A crane loomed over the tiled roofs at the far end of the street. It was stock-still.

If you’re looking for something to be grateful for, Beth, she told herself, there’s always that.

When Mater Viae first stepped through the mirror, the cranes had started to move. For three days and three nights they’d torn at the flesh of the city, but then, as suddenly as they’d woken, they’d stopped, fallen silent. Not a single crane had moved since. No one knew why, but it was the smallest of small mercies, and Beth wasn’t complaining.

She fumbled in the pocket of her hoodie, but came up empty.

You’ve got to be kidding me. What kind of Street Goddess locks herself out of her own damn house?

Lizard claws pricked their way down her arm and Oscar appeared on her hand, growling at her questioningly. Beth sighed and nodded; the Sewermander rolled an eye and moved towards the lock. There was a faint hiss from inside the house, from the direction of the kitchen. Beth smelled gas.

Oscar’s tongue flicked out. Blue flame flared in the keyhole and with a snap-sizzle the lock vanished and was replaced by smoke, charred wood and a hole two inches across. Beth stroked the back of Oscar’s head and he let out a self-satisfied purr.

Ah, the Sewer Dragon. What self-respecting burglar would be seen without one?

She pushed inside and let her feet settle flat on the carpet. For a moment she swayed in place, stretching her feet, wiggling her toes and relishing the return of her balance as the tension ran out of her insteps. The place smelled of dust and next door’s interloping cat.

The house felt smaller than it had when she’d left it, like a three-quarter-scale mock-up for a film set. She hurried up the stairs, passing photos of her mum and dad and herself as a kid. She trailed her tile-clad fingertips across them as she passed, but she didn’t look at them.

A cobweb stretched across the doorway to her room and she broke it like a finishing-line tape. A sunbeam shone in through the skylight. Old sketches were strewn all over the floor. She accidentally kicked a mug over, and cold, mould-skinned tea crept over a half-finished flamenco dancer with swirling charcoal galaxies for eyes.

She yanked her wardrobe open, shovelled armfuls of clothes out of the way and pulled out a battered Crayola carry-case. Over the years that yellow plastic box had held her diaries, her love letters (both the ones she’d received and the ones she hadn’t had the guts to send; sadly, they were seldom to the same boys), condoms, a handful of razor blades and her first-ever eighth of ganja, still wrapped in cellophane: everything she’d ever been scared of her dad finding.

She snapped the clasps and tipped out the current contents – a round-bottomed chemical flask and a yellowing paperback novel – onto the bed. She picked up the book and turned it over. The cover had fallen off and the pages had the texture of ash. The Iron Condor Mystery: she’d locked it away in her box the day after Dad gave it to her. She remembered her mum leafing through it when she was alive, and her dad obsessively doing the same after her death. She ran her thumb delicately along the spine, then pulled her hand back like she’d been burned.

Even after the cranes and the trains and the metal wolves, even after the chemicals had changed her skin to concrete and her sweat to oil, Beth feared the traces this book had left on her heart. She stuffed it into her back pocket and turned to the flask. The liquid inside it glimmered like mercury and reflected the green light of Beth’s eyes back at her as it clung to the inside of the glass. A label taped to it read: Childhood outlooks, proclivities and memories: traumatic and unusual. Dilute as required.

She pulled the label off and turned it around. The words were written on the back of a sepia photo of a boy with messy hair and a cocky smile.

So here we are, Petrol-Sweat. Beth looked from the photo to the room and back again. With everything we used to be.

She lifted the bottle and peered into her reflection in the glass. And here’s what I am now. What you made me. She felt a dull ache set into her forearm from the simple act of holding up the flask. A drop of sweat fell from her brow and stained the duvet black.

But did you know any way to save me from it?

‘That him?’

Beth looked up sharply. The skylight was open and a girl in a black headscarf was looking in, her chin resting on folded arms. The scars on her brown skin bracketed her mouth as she smiled, a smile Beth returned with an open-mouthed stare.

‘Anyone else, I’d say this was an awkward silence,’ Pen said. ‘But since it’s you, I’ll let it pass.’ She swung her legs in through the window and dropped into the room.

Recovering herself, Beth rummaged in her pocket for her marker pen and grabbed a scrap of paper from the floor.

Told you to wait back at Withersham, she scrawled on the back of it. Her surprise made the words jagged. Blank Streets, fever Streets. Not safe here.

Pen lifted her scarred chin the way she always did when Beth implied she couldn’t take care of herself. ‘Chill, B. I came over the rooftops. The tiles aren’t deadly yet, far as we know, anyway. Besides, you were taking so long – I got worried.’ She frowned, puzzled. ‘What gives? I covered the distance here in forty-five minutes, which means you could have run it less than five. But you’ve been gone more than an hour. What happened?’

Beth swallowed, her rough tongue sticking to the roof of her mouth as she wrote her reply. Being careful. Masonry Men at junction with Shakespeare Ave. Didn’t know whose side they were on.

She passed the note over, watching Pen carefully. One advantage of losing your voice, she thought to herself. Lies go over easier on paper.

Pen’s frown deepened. She sat on the end of Beth’s bed, crossed her legs under her and started drumming her palms against her kneecaps. ‘Weird being back in this room after all the nights we spent sitting up in it,’ she said. ‘You remember the very first time? When we were bitching about Gwen Hardy? I was so worried you’d tell her I could barely get the words out.’ She laughed and showed the scarred back of her hand to Beth. ‘It felt like the riskiest thing I’d ever do.’

Beth smiled carefully, keeping her church-spire teeth hidden behind her lips. She went to sit beside Pen.

‘You miss it?’ Pen asked. ‘Talking like that?’ She paused, but Beth made no move towards her paper. Pen started to pick at the cuticles on her hands, peeling the skin back from around her nails like pencil shavings.

Quickly, Beth put a hand over hers to stop that little self-demolition. She mouthed, What is it?

Pen looked right into her eyes. Beth could see the green glow from her own gaze fill her friend’s eye sockets. ‘Could you use your other voice, B?’ Pen asked quietly. ‘Your new one? I miss hearing you talk back.’

Beth hesitated, but then she opened her hands in front of her. The lines in her palms were streets, dark canyons between miniature rooftops. As she concentrated, tiny lights began to traverse them: the wash of headlights from invisible cars. She heard the growl of their engines and the faint protest of their horns. Water gurgled through turbines on her shoulder. A train rattled over tracks near her heart.

The sounds were faint, but if you knew how to listen, you could hear words in the edges of them where they blended into one another: a precise and literal body language.

‘What’s wrong, Pen?’ Beth asked.

Pen sighed. ‘Glas sent a pigeon,’ she said. ‘She found my parents.’

Beth started forward in concern. ‘Thames! Are they okay? Are they—?’

‘They’re alive,’ Pen said. ‘They’re not hurt. They made it to the evacuation helicopter when Dalston fell – they manage to dodge the Sewermanders and get out. They’re staying in Birmingham right now—’

‘Pen! That’s grea—’

‘—with Aunt Soraya.’

Beth sat back. ‘Oh.’

‘Yes.’

‘Your favourite Aunt Soraya? The one whose house I stayed at?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘The one with pictures of you up all along her hall? The one who named her cat after you?’

‘Yeah. Can’t imagine that was awkward when my folks turned up, what with them not even remembering I exist.’

‘Pen, I—’

‘I did that to them, B,’ Pen cut her off, her voice still quiet but stony, matter-of-fact, brooking no argument. She kept her eye on the shred of skin she was flicking on her thumb. ‘I was the most important thing in their lives and I stole myself from them.’ Her gaze fell on the bottle of Fil’s memories. ‘Just like that. I thought that what they couldn’t remember couldn’t hurt them, but damn, it’s hurting them now.

‘Glas had her bird sit right on the window ledge. It listened in to a whole conversation. You’d be amazed how many words that trash-spirit has to use to say, “You’ve made your parents think they’re crazy.” when she’s trying to be nice about it.’ She sniffed like she’d been crying, though no tears had fallen, and rubbed the sleeve of her jacket across her eyes.

After a moment she continued, ‘Anyway, Glas just told me, and since we were here anyway, it felt kind of appropriate to tell you here, for old time’s sake, you know?’

Beth nodded, but she couldn’t hold her friend’s gaze so she studied the swallow pattern on her duvet cover instead.

‘B?’

Beth didn’t look up.

‘Is there anything you want to talk about?’

Beth stilled her shaking right hand by making a fist.

For old time’s sake, she thought. Her old backpack was tucked under her desk, stuffed with aerosol cans and stencils and markers. The smile she gave Pen was almost shy. ‘You feeling inspired, Pen?’

Pen returned the smile, stood up and stretched. ‘I think I might have some game, sure.’

Beth gave Pen a boost back out of the skylight, and then dragged herself out after her with a showy chin-up she immediately regretted. She straightened stiffly, all the while feeling Pen’s gaze on her. She walked to the edge of the roof and looked out over the eaves.

A blast of hot air hit her in the face and she recoiled. Swearing inwardly, she covered her face with a forearm and edged back over the gable. In the early-morning light she could see little dots glinting on the bricks of the street below: beads of oily sweat. There was a heat distortion in the air over the tarmac, making it shimmer and warp.

‘Pen?’ she called.

‘What?’

‘Don’t get too close to the edge.’

‘Why not?’

‘We’re backed onto a Fever Street.’

Behind her, Pen instinctively gripped the edge of the skylight. ‘I thought these were Blank Streets,’ she protested, ‘not Fever Streets.’

‘Except for the one behind us, looks like. By the feel of it, it’s running at about four hundred degrees. Losing your footing would be—’

‘—uncomfortable?’ Pen proposed.

‘I was going to go with crispy.’

A tearing sound echoed through the morning air, and on a hillside a few miles away a twelve-storey tower block erupted through the pavement like a compound fracture breaking skin. There were many more hills in London these days, where muscles of cable and piping and earth had gone into spasm under its surface, rucking the city up on top of it. In some places the buildings leaned at crazy angles; in others, they toppled from decayed roots like rotten teeth.

Ever since Mater Viae had stepped through from London-Under-Glass the city had been sickening. It was racked with fevers and sweats and the strange brick cataracts they called Blank Streets, but the convulsions were the worst. London was twisting like a tortured man away from a knife, putting Ealing in the east and Norwood in the north and splitting the river into oxbow lakes and pipework waterfalls.

Beth folded her arms and eyed her city’s new skyline.

Canary Wharf reared up from what was now London’s very heart, the only tower still standing true. The Square Mile’s skyscrapers had crashed down around it creating a labyrinth of shattered steel and glass. At night, the aircraft-warning beacon still blinked on and off, and Mater Viae’s Sewermanders went flapping around it like moths at a light bulb.

‘Think she’s at home?’ Pen asked, following Beth’s gaze.

‘Bitch has just got back from a lifetime’s exile,’ Beth replied. ‘I don’t reckon she’s ever planning on leaving home again.’

‘Well, she’d better,’ Pen said, edging cautiously to stand at Beth’s shoulder. ‘I need things back to normal. I’ll be damned if I’m going to put up with Primrose Hill right next door to me – no decent clothes shops and everyone’s got a bloody baby.’

Beth grinned. ‘Well, maybe you should explain it to her, just that way.’ She unslung her rucksack and pulled out some chalks and some spray-paints, then knelt and began to sketch on the bricks of the chimneystack. Pen peered over her shoulder, watching the picture emerge. When Beth glanced up, she could see her friend’s scarred lips moving as she tried out lines in her head.

The sun climbed steadily behind Beth as she worked. Eventually, she paused and stood back, stretching out the stiffness in her calves. The partially shaded outlines of herself, Pen and her dad stood out on the bricks. There was a fourth outline too, vaguer than the others: a skinny, barechested boy holding the same railing that was now thrust under Beth’s bag strap. All of them were smiling.

‘Those are good, B – bit tame for you, though, no?’

Beth shrugged. ‘I’d draw you a couple of monsters, but my stuff can’t compete with the real thing.’

Pen laughed.

‘But your picture of me can? Thanks.’

‘No, ’course not … but it’s not supposed to be a portrait so much as a …’ The city-sounds from her body went silent for a second as she searched for the right words. At last she said, ‘It’s like a coin in a wishing-well, you know?’

Pen pursed her lips and stepped up to the picture. Her fingers traced Fil’s outline and then drifted wider and sketched a fifth, invisible, figure on the brick.

She snapped the lid off her marker and wrote:

Out of sight, but not of mind: the shapes of those we’ve left behind

The floors and flaws beneath our feet. The storeys here on our home street.

Beth appraised it slowly. ‘Nice.’

‘You too, B. You been practising? The one of Fil’s pretty much perfect.’ It was too. So was the one of Pen. The only one that was a little off, a little hazy, was Beth’s own.

‘You know me, Pen. It’s how I vent a little—’

She’d been about to say ‘pressure’ but she was cut off by a human scream.

It came from behind them. It was close, maybe two streets away, and Pen was already running before Beth had even turned around, slipping and sliding on the tiles, throwing out her arms for balance. Beth’s heart clamped up in her chest as she tore off after Pen. They crossed the end of a narrow alley, a cul-de-sac where the roofs had a steep rake. Ahead, Pen dropped to all fours and scuttled along the ridge, grasping at it with her hands and feet. It was only then that Beth noticed Pen had shed her shoes and socks for better grip.

Did you learn that trick from your steeplejill? Beth wondered with a pang of mixed jealousy and pride as she followed.

The screaming grew clearer as they crested the peak of the next roof. While Pen scrambled down a drainpipe to the street Beth followed her instinct and jumped – but she landed badly and had to roll. She levered herself up with the spear, careful to avoid putting her hand flat to the pavement. She breathed in as shallowly as she could; the air was burning in her lungs and all her joints felt rusted.

This street was Blank. The walls were unbroken, the houses delineated only by striations of white paint and bare brick. The screaming stopped briefly, breaking into shuddering gasps, and then it began again: high-pitched and young, a girl’s voice, coming from the last house in the terrace.

Beth and Pen looked at each other uncertainly. This was the first human sound to emerge from a Blank Street in months. Pen went to the wall and pressed her hands to the bricks.

‘It’s okay,’ she called into a crack in the mortar like it was an intercom, ‘we’re here. We’ll help you.’

If the screamer heard Pen, she gave no sign of it. This wasn’t a cry in hope of help, not any more. Now it was just sheer animal terror.

Pen looked back over her shoulder at Beth.

Beth knew what she needed to do. She braced herself and approached the wall, clenching the tiny muscles in her feet to close her pores, to keep the street out of her. Yet again she felt the urge to reach out with her consciousness, to probe for what awaited her there, but she couldn’t risk it: she couldn’t trust these pavements. She reversed her grip on her spear.

‘If you can, get back from the wall.’ Beth’s turbine-growl made the bricks vibrate, but the girl trapped inside the terrace didn’t respond.

The first blow almost crippled her. She sucked up the last dregs of energy from her muscles and slammed the base of her spear against the bricks, hard enough to make the whole wall shudder. A hacking cough ripped out of her. Under her feet, the pulse of the street thrummed, enticing her, but she shook her head. She would not feed.

‘Beth?’ Pen asked in alarm, but Beth had already raised the spear and rammed it down again, spraying mortar and dust everywhere. This time the brick shifted inwards and she hurriedly spun the railing around and jammed its point into the gap, worrying at the mortar, wiggling and scraping, digging and hacking. The scream came louder, then multiplied, becoming a dozen screams from a dozen directions. Beth’s arms burned as she levered bits from the wall and smashed at the edges of the hole she’d made to widen it. She felt a breeze as fresh air rushed into the wound in the wall. Next to her, Pen coughed in the dust.

Beth stepped forward, the green wash from her eyes illuminating the darkness inside.

‘Shit.’ Her head swam. The inside of the house was a labyrinth. Passageways opened at bizarre angles onto dusty corridors that stretched for miles into the distance. Stairways looped in mad, tangled curls, climbing beyond the light cast by Beth’s eyes, far above where the roof of the terrace should have bounded them. Doors hung open on hinges set into nothingness; windows lay on the floor, their sashes jammed open onto limitless depths. It looked like every exit stolen from this terrace was here, and the same little girl’s scream came from every one of them.

Pen came to Beth’s shoulder. Beth heard her breath hiss out, then she said, ‘Beth.’ She pointed.

Running from the corner of one of the windows, like drool from a mouth, was a trickle of drying blood. Beth gazed around the inside of the blank house: every doorway and window frame had similar obscene markings.

Pen set her hands inside the gap and stiffened, ready to lever herself inside, but Beth stopped her with a hand on the shoulder.

‘No.’

‘We have to help her,’

‘There’s no one to help,’ Beth countered hurriedly. ‘She’s already dead.’

‘Beth, I can hear her screaming.’

‘The scream’s all that’s left. It’s just coming from a really long way away. Wherever she is, she’s gone.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I just do.’

Beth looked at her best friend and prayed that the strange make-up of her voice would hide how uncertain she was; that Pen wouldn’t realise she was only guessing. All she knew for certain was that Pen couldn’t go in there. If she did, she would never find her way out.

Pen shook her head stubbornly. ‘We still have to try.’

‘Pen—’ She broke off. The screaming had ceased.

Something glimmered inside the labyrinth: a light that wasn’t Beth’s own. A smell like burning hair stung her nostrils. She stepped back and looked up. Every single chimney on the terrace had black smoke seeping from it. A roaring sound drew her eyes back to the hole in the wall. Her ears popped as air rushed into the terrace: in every passageway a wall of orange flame stormed up to meet her.

‘Pen—’ Beth said as the ground began to shudder under her, ‘run!’

Beth relaxed the unseen muscles in her feet and let the city’s essence flow up into her. A wave of dizziness struck and she staggered sideways. Bile boiled up into her throat and she gasped past it, but poisoned as it was, it was still energy. Deep under her skin, urbosynthetic cells fired. It took her one step to recover her balance, and then she accelerated hard.

Beth grabbed Pen around the chest, lifted her bodily off the ground and raced back the way they’d come, Oscar screeching angrily inside her hood. The terrace shook, and shuddered. Tiles clattered from gables and cracks zigzagged between Beth’s feet, but she didn’t break stride. Her breath burned like chemicals in her lungs. Her railing-spear was ready in her right hand; Pen, bundled over her shoulder and shouting incomprehensible obscenities, occupied her left. She looked back as they hit the bottom of the hill and felt something heavy drop into the pit of her gut.

With a low groan, the entire terrace of the Blank Street shook itself free of its foundations and reared up, bunching into coils like a vast, blunt-nosed snake. Chimneystacks rose from its back like dorsal spines, gouting foul black smoke. Fire and rolling smog spumed from the wound Beth had made in its side.

Beth tried to summon more power from the street, more speed, but she was drawing in too many toxins and she staggered. Sweat pricked her brow and a shiver raced under her skin.

Pen was hammering on her back. ‘Beth, put me down!’ Beth ignored her; she had to get Pen away. Oscar was still stirring inside her hood, reacting to her fear. The air whipping past her began to twist into strange geometries. A manhole cover leapt into the air and clanged down hard on the pavement as the Sewermander summoned methane from tunnels below.

Beth couldn’t breathe. She felt sick. Every step was sapping her. A long, blunt-nose shadow bled over her and she looked up to see the Street-Serpent rearing in the air above her. Nestled amongst the ripped foundations and pipes and clods of earth that clung to its belly she saw a design: tower blocks arranged into the spokes of a crown.

With an angry hiss, Oscar flew from Beth’s hood, straight at the beast. He banked hard a moment before he hit the Street-Serpent and Beth saw his metal tongue glint.

Blue fire ignited in the air: a vast gas flame in the shape of a dragon. Oscar’s tiny reptilian body was black at the core of the ghostly blue form. The Sewermander beat his methane wings and shot down the length of the Street-Serpent, bathing it in fire. When he reached the end of it, he wheeled around to see his handiwork, but he screeched in dismay: the Serpent was covered in soot, but otherwise Oscar’s heat hadn’t marked it at all.

A crack split the end of the terrace, right under the peak of the snake’s tiled roof. Beth ran and ran, but she couldn’t get out from under it. She looked up as the crack widened, following the line of the bricks as it broke open into a massive, blunt-toothed mouth. Inside, for just an instant, Beth glimpsed banks of rolling flame consuming banisters and wardrobes and still-living bodies: the fuel the Blank Street had been saving up. It was a creature of fire already; it had no cause to fear Oscar’s.

As the maw came crashing down over her, a voice out of h. . .