The Glass Republic: The Skyscraper Throne: Book II by Pollock Tom

Author:Pollock, Tom [Pollock, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jo Fletcher Books
Published: 2013-07-31T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Borne on wings of blue fire, Beth burst from the tunnel into the synod’s storerooms. She straddled the complex skeins of thermals that interwove like muscle fibres in the sewer-mander’s back, her railing couched under her arm like a lance. Her jaw was set: pugnacious and determined.

She had chosen to come this way as a statement of intent, winding her way through the sewers and sub-basements, rather than presenting herself at the old dye-works. She was using the workmen’s entrance, the back door, aggressively casual, if you could ever call a girl riding an eighteen-foot incandescent gas dragon casual. She was proving to herself as much as to them that this feared place was somewhere she could belong.

She looked at the cracks that veined her pavement-skinned hands. In a flash of memory, she returned to the synod’s burning pool, hundreds of yards above on the surface, its chemicals coruscating her, changing her, making her this, whatever this was.

In a weird way, she was their child.

Get ready, boys. She swallowed hard. The prodigal daughter’s coming home.

To her left, the wall reared up endlessly. Oil-drenched pigeons flapped to and from the glowing alcoves, tending the precise constellations of light. As she banked Oscar in towards the wall she tilted her head, trying to take them all in. They extended far beyond the corona that the sewermander’s wings cast, above and below, flickering like sputtering candles in the dark.

It was far vaster and more complex than the cloud of semaphoring bulbs Candleman had built to model Fil’s consciousness, but Beth could see the relationship: it was like a satellite photograph compared to a hand-scrawled map.

Her breath caught, and she almost laughed at the sheer ambition of it. Now she knew what she was looking at.

The Chemical Synod had bargained and bartered and built themselves the impossible from the scraps sold to them. They had built themselves a mind: a mind of a scale and complexity that awed Beth. Candleman’s had been a reminder, a simplification. This was the real thing.

Closer, she thought to Oscar, reaching down through the fire to stroke his inner reptilian hide. He dipped his head in acknowledgement. Pigeons squawked and flapped angrily at them, but they had the sense or the instinct not to risk their oily feathers near Oscar’s flame.

He brought them in close, hovering next to a shallow alcove about as high and wide as her torso. Inside, nestled like a relic in a shrine, was an intricately sculpted glass bottle. The liquid inside it glowed a queasy yellow; it roiled and scrabbled against the glass as though panicked.

There was a square of paper snagged under the base of the bottle, inscribed with three words in neat copperplate handwriting:

Fear – spiders. Irrational.

Beth took the paper and turned it over. On the reverse side was a stained black-and-white photo of a grumpy-looking kid in a denim jacket. She wondered if this was a ‘before’ snap, if the kid had looked any less mardy when she’d received whatever the Synod had paid her for her arachnophobia.

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