The Glass God (48 page)

There was chaos among the congregation.

The sounds of battle in the room next door had produced, at first, an awkward shuffling, as each person looked at their neighbour to double-check that their impression of things going wrong was, in fact, correct. No one wanted to be the first to start throwing spells, or bullets, or talons, or heavy fragments of local architecture, but at the same time, if that was the direction things were going in, no one really wanted to be left behind. As much as anything, it would have been bad teamwork.

In the end, it fell to Kelly to take charge, which she did with a rousing cry of “All right, team, now, I know that this doesn’t seem good…⁠”

Someone in the congregation threw a spell at her.

It wasn’t a particularly good spell, it wasn’t particularly well crafted. It was a stinky ball of blue-green flame, which, scientifically assessed, would probably have been rated at gas mark five on the oven scale. Even so, it was almost certainly hot enough to melt flesh, which made it all the more remarkable that Kelly, seeing its approach, reached out with one hand and, like a baseball player catching an easy feed, grabbed the fireball between her fingers, her arm recoiling as she did so. She held it there for a moment, staring at the fire dancing in the palm of her hand, before snuffing it out. Then she looked up at the congregation. She said, “The city of London shall have all the old Liberties and Customs which it hath been used to have. Moreover we will and grant, that all other cities, boroughs, towns…⁠”

Someone in the congregation laughed. Someone else – someone who knew far better, shouted – “Bewitchment!”

This was roughly the moment that chaos broke out.

Sharon fell through the wall, Sammy in front of her, as the room where she’d left Magicals Anonymous exploded into madness. She stumbled onto the floor and looked up to see Gretel calmly hit a member of the congregation hard enough to send the bare-footed man flying backwards into two of his peers, and knocking all three to the floor. Mr Roding’s hands were moving through the air, trailing crimson sparks even as his hair began to thin on his head and his skin shrivelled around his mouth from the effort of his enchantments. Someone was summoning great wheels of metal wire up from the floor, cracking through the concrete and the freshly laid carpet, while another person was directing huge gouts of steam towards the Aldermen, dragged out of the air in hot prickly bursts. Kevin was holding a surgical mask over his mouth with one hand, while with the other hand, in a white latex glove, he grabbed a still-incanting witch by the throat.

The air burst with hot and cold as spells fired and misfired; the floor was heaving, the ceiling sagging, the glass walls singing and warping under the rapidly changing air pressure in the room. Sharon’s ears popped as she staggered to her feet and looked round. There stood the glass god, still inactive, with his back to the city. The girl with the pale skin, who’d reached for Arthur’s arm as he’d passed, was squatting by the glass being’s feet, her arms wrapped round her thin body, rocking back and forth from heels to toes. And as Sharon looked, a fist, skin thickened by concrete, speed enhanced to piston-pump, slammed by her face, nearly taking her ear off. She ducked, dropping back into the protection of the shadow walk even as Rhys leapt past her, hands blazing, crying out an incoherent sound which might, once upon a time, have been considered a battle roar. She felt the floor shake, a great rhythmic thump, and, glancing back, saw the wall through which she’d just passed buckle, fresh white mortar dust spreading from a dozen hairline cracks. Then Hacq was there, right in front of her, his face wild, his hands raised, electricity writhing between them as he drew back his fingers for another spell. His eyes were fixed on Kelly, who stood aloof at one side of the room, calmly chanting,

“⁠… No freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be deprived of his freehold, or liberties, or free customs…⁠”

The words cut through the great gaseous roar of an enchantment that burst black smog from the shrieking mouth of a witch. There was a weight to them, a density; shadows twisted around Kelly, the echoes of things gathering and listening as the words tumbled from her lips, building a spell in the air around her, thick and ancient and mighty. Hacq drew his hands back to strike and Sharon threw her bag at him, catching him across the head and neck, knocking him to one side, the spell fizzing out between his fingertips. He staggered and she hit him again, slipping in and out of visibility as she struck and, around her, magics burst and opened and flared and died; and there it was again, the red burning in the palm of her hand, the shadow of the Midnight Mayor’s mark, and something watching, something black and ancient, drawn in by the sound of Kelly’s spell, by the twin crosses on Sharon’s palm, by the stench of magic and, Sharon thought, simply by the view.

Too little time to look; Hacq fell to the floor and Sharon was on top of him, swinging her bag wildly into his face. He shielded himself with his arms, but she just batted them aside even as Kelly’s voice rose to proclaim,

“⁠… nor condemn him, but by lawful judgement of his peers, or the law of the land…⁠”, and as Kelly spoke, the fires of spells in the room flickered and dimmed, crushed by the greater, weightier spell starting to press down upon them, and Hacq’s arms were battered aside beneath Sharon and his nose cracked as she slammed her bag against him one more time, and there it was: the great black dragon with its wild red eyes, looking down at her from the deepest places of the spirit walk, and Sharon looked down at herself, too, and saw that her skin was silver and her nails were black and the world she perceived was crimson-red and Kelly’s voice didn’t have words to it any more, it was pure roaring, a dragon’s roar, the spell swelling to a pitch as she proclaimed, “⁠… we will not deny to any man either justice or right…⁠!”

And it occurred to Sharon that, though she wore the dragon-skin of an Alderman, she’d somehow left the Alderman’s badge, stolen from Crompton, in her
other
pair of trousers.

Then the wall behind her burst.

Dust and moving air and torn-up breeze blocks and steel blasted through the air with the force of a jet plane coming into land. It knocked all before it to the ground, tore up skin and shattered bone. Those nearest the wall were smashed down before it; those furthest away dived to the ground, covering their heads as the dust slammed through the room. The windows, pushed already to the point of tolerance, cracked. Snapped. Twisted. Balanced for a second, the panes of glass were held together by their own internal friction more than any chemical force, then finally shattered, exploding outwards in a silver storm, falling away, and cascading down and down into the night.

Sharon peeked out from the shelter of her arms, spitting out dust, her head spinning, the silver skin that covered her own creaking from stress. Her stomach felt sideways, as if her whole body had been pushed but only some parts had managed to catch up. The ground was strewn with bodies; some moving, several not. Kevin lay a few feet away, blood on his face, on his chest, his mask knocked to one side. Rhys coughed and tried to pick himself up, but someone else had fallen across him, pinning him down, hard to tell if it was a man, a woman, dead or alive – merely a soft shape covered in dust. The wind rushed in from the outside, thin and shrieking, lifting up giddy vortexes of mortar dust and pulling clouds of beige-white out into the void below.

In the place where a wall had been stood a man; or, rather, not a man. A had-been-man, until his skin was glazed over with glass, burning itself into the flesh; until his hair dissolved into solid, pulsing silicon, until his arms crackled as they moved, until his breath was sealed within glassy lips, the condensation of his gasps puffing in and out over the plug across his mouth. He should, by rights, have been dead, but instead Arthur Huntley blazed before them, the air burning, his body blazing, his hunched back pushed erect by the new skin which had grown over it, and, in a moment of realisation, Sharon knew what the glass blade had really been for, and who had used it, and why.

Then Arthur spoke, his voice both muffled and amplified by the glass around his lips, and he exclaimed, “YOU
MORONS
!”

Sharon saw Kelly, over by the door, struggling to pick herself up, and looked for Sammy, but couldn’t see him amongst the spinning dust and raging winds of the otherwise still, shattered room.

“YOU
IDIOTS
!” roared Arthur, and with every word the room shook again, the sound of his voice fracturing amidst the wreckage. “WHY DOES NO ONE EVER LISTEN TO ME?!”

Someone – an Alderman, if his dust-covered clothes were indeed black – tried getting up. With a single swat of his arm Arthur knocked the man off his feet and threw him against the nearest wall like a scrunched-up bill into a wastepaper bin. Something soft stirred next to Sharon. Hacq, sometime high priest of the Illuminated, groaned; blood was rolling in streaks down his face, muddied by mortar dust. Sharon looked at him, then looked again. As he’d fallen, he’d landed on one side, disturbing something lodged in his pocket. A screen had lit up electronic white, and through the thin stuff of his pocket a little message declared,

1 New Message
 

Carefully, looking around her and hardly daring to move, Sharon slipped her hand into Hacq’s pocket and pulled out his mobile phone, then clambered to her feet. As her finger brushed the screen of the phone, the image changed.

1 New Message
 

From: Unknown
 

Message: Found Me
 

She looked up, and her eyes met Arthur’s, and he recognised the look in her eye, and she recognised the recognition in his. He roared, threw back a hand that blazed with electric fire, even as Sharon threw the phone across the room towards Kelly and yelled, “Get it to…⁠”

Something hot and blazing struck her full in the chest and knocked her backwards. Pain burst behind her eyes, hot and popping, and she rolled back across the floor, wheezing for breath. Arthur’s gaze turned to follow the phone, now in Kelly’s hands, even as the Alderman staggered to her feet and lunged for the door. Arthur reached out again and a great burst of electricity snarled across the room, only for a pasty white hand to reach out and grab it, pulling it like so much string into its grasp.

Mr Roding had staggered to his feet. His skin was rumpled, flaking away around his chin, neck, fingers, revealing raw red muscle beneath. His eyes were shot with bloody capillaries, and he swayed where he stood, but he held steady nonetheless and looked Arthur in the eye. “Wizard,” he hissed, “make your good luck happen.”

Arthur snarled and hurled a fistful of crackling flame popping with static and hissing with radio-trapped fury. The necromancer threw his hands up and deflected the spell in a burst of hair-prickling electromagnetism that wriggled and writhed through the floor. Kelly, with the phone in her hand, burst out through the door, and Arthur shrieked with fury, sending another spell after her which, again, Mr Roding intercepted.

“YOU CAN’T STOP ME!” Arthur roared. “I AM A LIVING GOD, I AM…⁠”

Something bright orange and liquid burst against his side, spilling to the floor. He stared at it in surprise, and then recoiled as a thin coat of rust began to spread across him, expanding like lichen over stone. Rhys stumbled upright next to Mr Roding, an empty packet of antihistamines falling to the floor and another potion bottle ready in his hand. “Go, Ms Li!” he shouted. “Get the phone out of here!”

Sharon staggered into the spirit walk. The rust on Arthur’s skin continued to thicken and grow, smothering him, covering his face, his hands, locking his arms in place, a stiff, solid coating – but one which couldn’t hold. Even as it grew, it cracked, and the light from Arthur’s glass skin was breaking through. As Sharon stumbled towards the door, out of the corner of her eye she saw something else move; and there was the pale-faced girl, right in front of her, staring
at
her, chin up, face defiant. Behind the girl was the glass god, raising his heavy, heavy head; and he, too, was looking at Sharon now, his serene, crafted features mimicking the girl’s own. As Sharon swerved to avoid him the girl turned to follow her, and shrieked,

“Don’t you hurt my daddy!”

And it seemed to Sharon that the glass god opened his mouth to scream these words, too, his body twisting as the girl’s did; and here, in the place where all things were real, even if they were not perceived, she looked again at the glass god as he came to life, and he was a she, and always had been, and he was opening his mouth to scream and he was screaming broken glass.

“Get the phone!” roared Arthur, and the girl – and the god – seemed to agree with each other.

Sharon tumbled through the wall even as it thudded with the impact of glass behind her; then she raised her head and ran.

Chapter 84

Take Your Life into Your Hands

Kelly was at the bottom of the hall, clutching Hacq’s mobile phone. She was waiting for the lift.

Seeing this, Sharon shrieked, “You’re kidding me!”

“You want to take the stairs all the way down?” suggested Kelly.

A thud behind them, then a roar, suggested that even the stairs might be one of their least harmful downward options. Sharon looked back the way she’d come. “Got any spells for making lifts appear?”

“No, but we really should develop some,” sang out the Alderman with a cheerfulness that was starting to sound strained.

A glowing yellow light cut through the gloom of the unlit corridor, coming nearer. There were footsteps, heavy, sluggish, but growing lighter, as of a creature coming to life.

“Um…⁠” began Kelly, even as Sharon grabbed her by the sleeve and pushed open the door to the emergency stairs.

“Glass god woke up!”

“Why’d he do that?” exclaimed Kelly as they bounded down the stairs two at a time.

“I think he’s being powered and controlled by Arthur’s daughter. I mean, ‘don’t hurt my daddy’ isn’t something I was geared up for hearing, you know?” They spun round another corner even as the door they’d just come through burst open, and the glow of the glass god’s body filled the stairwell.