In the morning I managed, through much sweet persuasion and a hefty amount of money, to get myself into a small hotel in Merton – a place that I had always regarded as something of a fiction spread by the enemies of London and was surprised to find so real and large.
I had another shower, and scrubbed until my skin was raw and not a trace of ink or dye remained, I rubbed at my scalp until the shampoo sluicing down across my face was no longer tinted blue.
Then, at least, I felt less dirty. I went out and bought new clothes; the old ones I abandoned in a recycling bin. Even wearing my old clothes to the charity shop made me feel unclean again, their smell of rat so strong that the scrupulously polite girl behind the counter cringed at it.
I took my coat to the dry-cleaner, who offered to scrap it for free, but in the end accepted twelve pounds fifty to do a rush job on a repair. When it came back, the colour was faded and still splotched across the shoulders and cuffs – irredeemably so, the manager told me – but when I put it on again the fabric was warm and smelled clean, and for the first time that morning I felt just a bit human.
The day’s headlines blamed the Amiltech stalker for the brutal murder of San Khay, but the papers made no mention of how he’d died, nor of the inks that covered his skin. I didn’t know if that was the police being careful, or the Tower covering its tracks. Perhaps it was arrogant not to care, but at that moment we didn’t want to think about it.
We decided to take the rest of the day off.
We had croissants, hot chocolate, coffee, jam, bread rolls and fruit salad for breakfast, and went to the cinema. We had never been to the cinema before. The plot was something about a genius arms dealer who discovered redemption, cardiac conditions and an interesting and potentially lethal use for spare missile components in a cave. It wasn’t my thing. We were enthralled, and staggered out blinking from the cinema two and a half hours later with our mind full of pounding noise and our eyes aching from the overwhelming brightness, resolved to see more films as often as possible. During school hours we sneaked into an empty playground and rode the swings, so high we thought we’d fall off, then spinning on the roundabout until the world was a blur; sliding down the silver slide while trying not to whoop with glee; letting the sand in the pit trail through our fingers and, finally, resting to catch our breath at the very top of a roped climbing frame, from which we could see across a wide common of mown grass, great trees and dog walkers, all the way to the big old houses beyond the railway line. I hoped no one would see me.
We went to a bookshop, and sat reading graphic novels, fascinated by the style, the strange inhuman faces that were nevertheless so readable, the worlds in those pages made up of strange, twisted things, the buildings all out of proportion, the bright colours too bright, the dark sweeps of shade too deep – and yet, for all their fantastical properties, the pictures that we saw were somehow recognisable, and provoked in us feelings that matched the creatures in those pages.
When we were asked to move on, we took a train into the centre of the city, found a ticket booth and joined the queue. We bought a ticket for the first thing that was available, which turned out to be a musical. Still not really my thing, but we were determined to give it, anything, everything a try – and while we waited for the hour of its performance, we wandered into Chinatown and ate crispy duck with pancakes, and drank green tea and listened to the waiters chattering in Cantonese. We found that, without consciously translating, we could understand what they were saying: an unexpected side effect of our resurrection.
We saw the musical, and even though the lyrics were absurd, we came out burning with the energy of the place. We had not become lost to a spell, but with so many minds around us enthralled by what they saw, we too let our thoughts sink into that illusion. It thrilled us, the intensity of that buzz in the blood, and the light in the eyes of every face that came out from it. For a brief while, we forgot that we were wearing mortal flesh, mortal skin, mortal hurts, and were gods again, watching a world full of stories. As a treat to end our first proper day of life, we bought fish and chips, and ate it, with ketchup, on the bus back to the hotel. For the moment, we could ignore revenge, anger, pain, desire, hunger, want, fright, fear and hope; all we could hear was the gentle heartbeat of the city, and when we walked, we walked in time to its rhythm.
Next day, I went back to work. I checked out of the small hotel in Merton, and wandered up to the nearest supermarket, from one of whose dumpsters I removed a large sheet of cardboard. I also bought a tatty blue jumper, a pair of fingerless black gloves, a woolly hat, soup in a white polystyrene cup and a small packet of child’s coloured chalks. Feeling pretty much equipped, I caught the bus, heading north.
My dilemma was simple. I didn’t know where Bakker was. And even if I did, the knowledge wouldn’t do me much good, since, if Sinclair’s files were right, Amiltech was just one of the many organisations run by the Tower which protected him. While I felt perfectly comfortable tackling the lesser thugs of the institution, it was pure arrogance to assume I could handle more than one thing at a time. San Khay had died before he could tell me what I needed to know about the Tower and Bakker; that meant I would have to ask someone else. I had chosen Amiltech as my initial target because owing to its relatively high profile, I felt it would be an easier target to focus on without too many risks of reprisal than some of the other Tower-affiliated organisations. Now, my attention had been forced to move to an altogether different source of information, and danger: Guy Lee. Master of an underground network of… pick a name and it would be there, accountant through to zealot who worshipped at the altar of Lady Neon and other spirits of the city. San Khay had been arrogant enough to assume that he could handle us alone. It would be unlikely Guy Lee would make the same mistake, now that San was dead. He would be on guard; that meant I would have to change my tactics. I would need help.
I had a vague idea where to start.
The patch I’d chosen for the day’s work was near Paddington station. A medley of worlds joined here – the Arab community from the Edgware Road merging into the giant white terraces and quiet mews of the wealthy, bordered in turn by the council estates and student digs overlooking the railway lines crawling in and out of the station itself, in a deep cutting, as if embarrassed to be taking up so much space and hoping no one would notice their progress.
Like all terminus stations, Paddington attracted a roving population of tourists, travellers, squatters, prostitutes, muggers, racketeers, smugglers and beggars. It was this last that interested me, because, after the pigeons and the rats, it’s the beggars who tend to see the most.
So it was that on a cold, clean morning as winter was beginning to make itself known to autumn, and autumn was looking bashfully towards the door and explaining it had to go and wash its hair, I put my sheet of cardboard down in the service doorway round the side of a restaurant near St Mary’s Hospital, unfolding it as protection against the hard coldness of the pavement. I pulled on my hat and gloves, dragged my coat up tight around my chin and patted my pockets for the coloured chalk. Sitting still on the pavement for hours, if you aren’t properly dressed, lets the cold crawl all the way into the bones, twining itself around the spine with the grip of rooted ivy. I knew this from experience – begging for a day had been one of the things Robert James Bakker had instructed me to do; and back then, without question, I had obeyed; and back then, he’d been right.
In a small fountain outside Paddington station I had rinsed the empty polystyrene cup that had contained my soup and now put it on the ground in front of me. On the pavement I scratched in careful capital letters, HUNGRY PLEASE HELP, and with my coloured chalks, pale smears on the stones, I started to draw. I took my time, ignoring the footsteps of passers-by as they ignored me, using the rectangular shape of one particular paving stone as my frame, and putting in every detail of what I drew: not just in the face and clothes, but in the background, fading it from red to blue, smudging the strong colours where they met into a waving line of purple. I drew a face in profile with a curved yellow beard like some sort of inverted horn, a sharp triangular nose, a beady blue eye, and a smile – a distinctly smug smile. I filled in the tiny black diamonds on the figure’s blue collar, and shaded its shoulders with red sweeps of colour to suggest the richness of its clothes; finally, I gave it a pointy crown. The drawing eventually resembled a king in a pack of playing cards, all odd angles and confusing shapes and colours. I don’t know how many hours it took; but by the time I finished I’d got 57p in my polystyrene cup, and cramp in my arms from too much leaning on my elbows.
With the cup by my side, I curled up on the doorstep behind my chalk picture and my message on the floor, and waited.
There are several kinds of beggars in London. There are the lone aggressive ones, usually with thick beards and big duffle coats, who approach passing strangers with “Please, I just need 80p, please” – and sometimes that works. Perhaps it is a more honest approach; but for the ordinary passer-by, these open appeals can be as frightening as they are direct, and too often the answer no is followed by cursing that only confirms the stranger in their opinion of the beggar as frightening and dangerous.
A subcategory of this class of beggar, who perhaps inspires the greatest fear, is the stranger who comes up to you and asks for money while behind him or her, two friends lurk right in your path. It is not begging as such – there is no appeal to charity or understanding. Instead, it is a psychological mugging.
The majority of beggars are the silent huddled ones sitting alone near an ATM, or in shop doors when the shutters are drawn, or outside an expensive jewellery store until the police are called to move them on, or near the railway stations, or outside a café in the hope that enough money may become a sandwich, or a cup of coffee, or that the stranger will be more inclined to believe the cardboard sign with the words “not on drugs, hungry, poor, please help”, or that the staff, at closing-up time, might give them a packet of something about to pass its best-before date, or let them use the bathroom. Passers-by don’t just not see these people; they go out of their way both to ignore them, and then to forget that they ignored them, to drive away from their shamed recollection the shape of the huddled girl with her pet dog and tatty boots, or the image of the old man with the tangled beard who they didn’t even smile at, not wanting to admit that they failed to take pity. If asked why they did not give charity, the standard reply is “They would only have spent it on drugs”. Unkind as this is, the bastard’s reply is even worse: “It’s their fault they’re here; why should I waste my money on someone who can’t be saved?”
Thus, with a single swoop, the entire population of old, young, black, white, frightened, bold, subdued, cowering, cold, ill, hungry, thirsty, dirty or addicted are classified as self-destructive, and every ignored face, every shadow blotted out of the memory of the stranger on the street, can be classed by a single word – failed.
Perhaps they are worth saving, as people are always worth saving, sigh the compassionate.
But perhaps, whispers the voice of cynicism, lurking just below, just perhaps the beggars cannot or worse, do not want to be saved.
Pity and compassion walk a fine line hand in hand, but one will always be a more welcome guest than the other.
At the time, I didn’t understand why Robert James Bakker made me spend a day of my education begging. By the evening of that lesson, I understood entirely.
I watched the faces of those few people who glanced at me and then quickly walked on. A beggar must be humble; must keep his eyes to the ground so as not to frighten the easily afraid. As so many people went by in shiny shoes and comfortable clothes, with big bags and big coats, concerned with how many hundreds of pounds must go out this month to pay the mortgage, rather than with how many pennies will combine to the next cup of tea, my emotions progressed slowly from chilled self-pity to anger at the faces that from four hundred yards away braced themselves to avoid meeting my eye.
It took a kindly woman wearing a dog collar to stop, squat down opposite me, look at my chalk drawing on the pavement and say, “I haven’t seen you before,” to prevent us from grabbing the nearest passing stranger by the ankle and tripping him nose-first to the floor. She gave me two pound fifty and asked if I’d found God. I told her no, but she still gave me a leaflet informing me that Strength is Faith, and directions to a Tuesday evening soup stand. The leaflet fascinated us – why was Strength Faith, and did it matter what you had faith in? The whole concept seemed bizarre to an unusual extreme, but we folded the paper up and put it in our coat pocket, in order to mull over its implications another time.
From that lady onwards, the anger faded, and a numb gratitude settled in at the flick of even a five-pence coin in my direction. It was no longer a burning desire to hate the majority who ignored me; it was a necessary comfort to be grateful to that minority who bothered to demonstrate kindness.
Boredom was the ignoble theme of the day.
Utter, bone-breaking, cold-biting, toe-tingling boredom.
A guy can only mull on self-pity for so long. Too quickly the needs of the body – discomfort, aches, pains, thirst, hunger – kick in so that any pretence at achieving a higher state of spiritual awareness through a day of sitting quickly succumbs to the overwhelming desire to have a pillow to sit on.
Five minutes took fifteen.
An hour was three.
Horrific, unwatched, uncared for, inescapable boredom.
By sunset, I had thirteen pounds forty-eight pence in various pieces of small change. I abandoned my post for a few minutes to buy myself a bread roll, a packet of wafer-thin turkey, an apple and a very large cup of steaming hot coffee, and when I returned my picture in chalk had been smudged over by someone’s thoughtless boot. I managed to bite down the curse on the tip of our tongue before it could harm them for their carelessness. By the time I’d finished repairing the damage, the street lights were flickering on and the cold was starting to spread out with the shadows. We felt exposed on our piece of card as the darkness settled around the neon splotches on the street, unsure without four walls to protect us that the next pair of footsteps wouldn’t steal our hard-won cup of coins, or scuff our picture, or prove to be a monster looking for our blood.
We had no intention of sleeping, and my bones ached too much to let instinct pull me under. Every twitch was an uncomfortable one, every surface not just hard concrete, but deliberately, overengineered, hard concrete whose sole purpose was to push tighter and tighter against the bones in my body, as if the door space I inhabited was closing in against me, trying to squeeze me into a cramped splotch on the floor.
The streets became quieter, my hands became colder. A man staggered down from the pub on the corner, on the other side of the street, saw me, shouted, “Ey-oi mate!” and threw up in the gutter. In a friendly way. He grinned when he was done and proclaimed to the closed windows of the street that he felt much better.
A small child being dragged to bed peered curiously at me as it passed, then waved. We waved back, not being entirely sure how else to respond to small creatures like that. A black taxi pulled up, disgorged a group of women dressed for commercial combat, in suits so tight you could see the seams warping under pressure, and drove off again while they giggled their way down the street.
I let my mind drift. We listened to the brains of the seagulls as they swept towards the river, drawn by the smell of rubbish and salt; we briefly balanced on a wall between two small gardens with terracottapotted plants, in the mind of a stray cat with one beady yellow eye; and we lounged in the senses of a bored fox watching the bins behind the halal burger bar. But it was through our own ears that we heard the regular, unhurried footsteps approaching us up the street.
I half-opened my eyes, straining with my mundane human ears for the sound of someone nearing. The footsteps, when I eventually picked them up again, had a sharp, nail-in-sole click to them, and a steady, inevitable beat, as if the walker was in no great hurry, but would somehow get somewhere regardless of anything. It sounded a good kind of stride.
The owner of the footsteps stopped by my chalk drawing of the stylised king in his crown, rocking back and forward on the balls of his tattily shod feet. The feet wore a pair of once-comfortable soft loafers, now held together with so much hammering and thread, I felt my toes curl at the sight of them. The owner of the shoes said in a nasal voice, “Could be worse.”
I raised my eyebrows and waited for an explanation.
“Could have rained. You wanting something?”
I looked him up and down. He wore badly patched corduroy trousers, a big puffed jacket with stuffing coming out of a clumsily sewn-up gash in the side, which gave him an inflamed, swollen appearance, a shirt that smelt of sweat and old hamburger, together with a pair of knitted gloves, a big blue scarf, and a large woollen hat with the words Arsenal FC in red and white across the front. His face was long and angular, not merely stretching down top to chin, but out in odd directions too, so that the tip of his grizzled jaw protruded nearly as far as the end of his nose, and his ears stuck out, even inside the hat, like he had half a lemon on either side of his head. He scratched his chin with long, dirty brown nails the texture of old wood, and surveyed me through a pair of intelligent grey eyes.
I found that after a day of silence, the words didn’t come.
“New to this?” he asked.
I managed to stumble an “In a way.”
“You’re not one of us, then?”
“No. Not really.”
“But you know about things, I’m guessing.”
“Things? Yes.”
“And I’m just guessing,” he said, rolling his eyes with melodramatic emphasis, “that you’ve got an agenda.” He spat the word between his wonky front teeth. “Everyone’s got a fucking agenda these days, too easy just to give money on the street, oh no, we’ve got social assets to consider and fucking community spirit. All right. You’ve sat the sitting, drawn the fucking picture, whatever. What do you want, sorcerer?”
He didn’t like the word sorcerer. That was just fine. I was beginning to understand why it might not be popular.
“Well,” I said, pulling myself up one stiff joint at a time and rubbing some of the numbness out of my arms, “ideally I want to destroy the Tower and all its works for the evil it has committed, for its own selfish acts against the magical community of the city among others, and to see the shadows of its making burnt so even the walls can no longer remember their stains. But right now, I’d settle for a cup of tea, a comfy chair and an audience with the Beggar King.”
He led me to a scrapyard underneath the Westway, a great big sprawling bypass that in five minutes of motorway trundling takes the traveller from Paddington to Shepherd’s Bush, above and parallel to the railway line out of the station. In the grey, smelly shadows underneath the motorway some of his flock were clustered: men in torn jackets, clumped round fires burning in old metal canisters, women with pale, lifeless skin, and thick veins standing out on the tops of their hands, eating chips and sharing a single, depressing cigarette.
He lived in an abandoned London Transport maintenance van, whose walls were insulated with more variations on a theme of flearidden blanket than I had ever seen. It boasted at one end a large metal safe, into which he deposited from his pockets two packs of hotel matches, presumably lifted from some expensive side table before he was thrown out, a rusted tin-opener, and some loose change amounting to roughly £27. He said, not really paying me much attention, “I accept donations.”
I gave him all my day’s takings. There are always rules, always prices to be paid. A day sitting in the cold; an offering of pennies and shiny five-pence pieces. These are rules so obvious, they never needed to be written down. Nothing about the Beggar King is ever written down.
He grunted and said, “Seen worse,” turned on a tiny paraffin heater, put a tin of tomato soup onto it, and as it started to bubble in the can he sat down, cross-legged on top of a pile of thick, itchy tartan blankets and old stained trousers, scratched his chin and said, “So… I’m guessing you’ve got issues if you’re looking for a chat with the old miser. That’s the word, isn’t it? We aren’t allowed to say problem these days.”
“‘Issues’ is fine,” I said. “I think the king might even have a few in common with me.”
“Such as?”
“The Tower.”
“Shit, what the hell’s he got to do with it? They don’t bother us much.”
“How little is ‘much’?”
“He can’t protect everyone,” said the man, eyes flashing.
“From what I hear, have read, the Tower takes beggars off the street. San Khay offered me a trip in the senses of an addict on the edge of death. I can think of no better way to get that than from a beggar, alone, unnoticed, dying in the dark.”
“We have… the occasional clash. These things happen.”
“I saw a warehouse,” I replied carefully. “It was run, maintained, by Amiltech, probably on behalf of Guy Lee. In the basement, I found the body of a beggar. Things had been done to it. Everyone knows Guy Lee has an interest in necromancy. It needs tools. Are you going to sit and wait for Guy Lee to catch an unfortunate disease off one of his badly washed bodies until you say, No more?”
“You see what happens to the enemies of the Tower?” he asked, casually scraping a thick nailful of dirt out from under his thumb.
“Yes.”
“And you’re still looking for a fight. Well, shit.”
“I think the Beggar King would understand.”
“Why?”
He wasn’t looking at me, this man with his huge beard. He gave off the air of a man who just didn’t care, who, above all these things, was lost in fascinated study of the dirt under his nails. Perhaps it wasn’t an act. Perhaps these things really were as tiny to him as dust in the street.
I shifted uneasily, licked my lips. “Because, like the Bag Lady and the Boatman, it’s not just a title, is it?” I stared at him, daring him to speak. “Sure, there’s been a lot of beggar kings, a lot of dead bodies left in unmarked graves or thrown into the river. But the Beggar King, the real Beggar King, who comes when you draw the image of his crown on the pavement and sacrifice a day of takings to his throne, lives on, generation after generation. The Beggar King is there when the druggie dies alone in the puke and shit of his last shot, holding a bloodless hand until the last breath is gone. The Beggar King is the shadow across the street who smiles up at the window of the refuge when the homeless girl gets given her own room, and tells her it’s all right, you don’t have to fear the walls. The Beggar King… the real Beggar King… is the one you offer your prayers to when your jacket is too thin and the stones are too hard, and every penny you have has just been taken away by the spite of people who don’t understand. Not just flesh and blood, yes?”
“You should know,” he replied quietly. “They told me, when you went from the telephone lines.”
We went cold, and my jaw felt like it was locked.
He smiled at us.
“Bright blue eyes,” he murmured. “They don’t suit you.”
“We are… we… as… we are…”
“Tongue-tied?”
I stuttered, “Will you help me?”
“Just you? Just the little mortal wearing a dead man’s flesh? Or do you want something more? What, you have to ask yourself, but what do the angels want?”
“We are… we… we want revenge.”
He chuckled. “Join the queue. You get used to that too, on the streets. Gotta be polite. Gotta keep to the rules. Gotta cause no trouble, ’cause the second you’re trouble” – he snapped his fingers – “no one will even try to save you.” Then, “What exactly do you intend?”
“I need to find the Whites.”
“Why?”
“Bakker is at the heart of the Tower, but he’s protected. Guy Lee, Harris Simmons, Dana Mikeda…”
“San Khay?” It was an accusation as well as a question.
“I didn’t kill him.”
“I would have.”
“I didn’t.”
“Nasty way to go, from what I hear; suggests a slightly loopy brain at work and frankly I…”
“We didn’t kill him!”
He smiled, an expression of unamused interest. “Well,” he said, “at least part of you is honest. Which part, though?”
“Guy Lee is master of an underworld army,” we said. “His creatures prey on the ignorant, the innocent; he keeps the clans down under an iron fist, his enemies…”
“All enemies of the Tower disappear, little sorcerer!” he snapped. “You know this, I think? But perhaps such people should be fucking controlled, yes? By concerned citizens, maybe, making sure that those who know the secrets of these things don’t go spilling them too easily to the masses? To the piss-stupid fucking people?”
“Bakker does it for his own ends, not for others.”
“And what ends are those? Does anyone know?”
“I can make a good guess,” I muttered.
“Can you?” He leant forward eagerly. “I’m all ears.”
We met his eyes squarely. “He wants to be like you, your majesty. He wants to be an idea. He wants to outlive his own flesh.”
He drew back, face darkening. “Impossible,” he said. “So shit.”
“You know it’s not. There wasn’t always a Beggar King, there wasn’t always a Bag Lady. These things have to grow out of something, they have to have a vessel, a beginning, and eventually, a conclusion. He will be like you.”
“You know this?”
“I know this.”
“But do you know this?” There was an urgency to his voice, a hungry intensity. “Not you, little sorcerer, but you, do you know this?”
We recoiled, surprised at the force of his gaze, and stammered, “We are not… this world is still strange.”
“You’re just a fucking child, aren’t you?” he laughed.
“I’m not.”
“Sure, sure, whatever,” he said, waving a casual curled, dirty fist in the air. “You’ve lived long enough to die. But them, the other ones with the bright blue eyes – fucking kids! Never seen nothing! Never felt nothing! Christ, and you want my help?”
“Yes,” we replied. “We do.”
He leant back slowly, a look of dissatisfaction on his face. Finally he said, “If I do anything for you, all my people are put at risk. I have a responsibility.”
“The Tower is dangerous,” I repeated.
“And you can stop it?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Because Bakker’s shadow slit your throat and with your dying breath you managed to slip into the blueness that he dreams of achieving?”
I felt the pain of a dozen old aches, weeks old to my mind, a life ago to the world, the burning in my skin. Taste of blood in my mouth. I thought that, with enough fish and chips, hot tea, crispy bacon, with enough new memories to wipe over the old, it would go. But there it was again, still again, the iron bite of it on my lips.
I still needed help.
So, I got down on one knee in front of him, and bowed my head in respect to the Beggar King.
“If you help me,” I said, “if you would honour us,” we added, “we will stop the shadow.”
His eyes flashed up brightly, alert, interested. “The shadow?” he asked quickly.
“It grows out of nothing. It has yellow teeth, dead skin, watery eyes,” I replied, trying not to see too clearly the images in my head. “You’ll have heard of it. It says, ‘Give me life.’ Help us. Join us against the Tower.”
He thought about it, then put his hand on my shoulder, the skin warm through my clothes. “I offer you a thought to consider, little sorcerer. If Bakker thinks he can beat his own death, have you not considered that, now you are out of the wire, it might be your very blue blood that can help him do this?”
We looked up slowly, uncertainly, and were met with an almost fatherly sigh. He patted us on the head, as if we were a young child making innocent remarks that, to a wiser audience, were laced with hidden meaning. “I suggest this, in case you’re wondering who might have brought you back.”
We opened our mouth to speak, but he said abruptly, “Right, can’t have you lolling around here, bugger off!”
The moment passed, our mind still revolving this interesting, frightening idea. Who brought us back? Why? I stood up uncertainly, to occupy the space of my own silence, and said, “Will you…”
“Maybe. I’ll think about it.”
“But if…”
“You’re going to ask the Whites, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“They will help you.”
“I don’t know where they are.”
“Well, shit!” he laughed. “All you gotta do is follow the writing on the wall!”
We left him there, the Beggar King in his court of rags and fleas.
We navigated while my mind drifted, picking our way through the night with our eyes wandering through every flowerpot, lamp-post, fence and street sign, marvelling that however well we thought we knew these streets, when we looked again we could still find something new in them. I thought about Elizabeth Bakker, sitting with just the pigeons for company in her care home. I thought about the Beggar King, the Bag Lady, and my gran, who liked the songs that the rats sung in the night through the hole in the corner of her floor, and always fed the squirrels. Somehow, thinking about it all made me feel tired, cold, the anger of my certainty fading down to just a flat recognition of things that needed to be done, rather than things that I desired.
However, before anything more could be done, there was somewhere we had to go first.
If I was going to get help, I wasn’t going to be picky about where it came from.
Subways at roundabouts and beneath busy streets are, in general, frightening places. It’s not simply the basic London subway with its friendly sign in big blue letters “POLICE PATROLS HERE” to comfort the uneasy traveller; it’s not the strange, translucent stalactites drooping down from the ceiling like warm salt icicles; it’s not even the odd patch of pondlike green mould on the floor to trip the unwary passer-by. It’s the enclosed, hidden nature of the place, which makes human instinct flex its fingertips in uncertainty and distress at the thought of imminent destruction, the utter confidence that whatever happens, in the subways there’s no place you can run.
I arrived early, around 2 a.m. in the maze of tunnels underneath the roundabouts, one-way systems and sprawling circular roads on the edge of Aldgate, where the City becomes simply the city, and the signs point to The North as well as to Bow and Whitechapel. In London, places beyond its boundaries are always called The North or The West, too big, too vague and too Not London to merit any more detailed descriptions.
I huddled down by the specified exit, pulling my coat around me for warmth, and let the hum of the intermittent traffic – lorries full of the next day’s shopping, bras, socks, shoes and a dozen different kinds of apple – travel with a buzz up my fingertips.
I was half-asleep by the time the biker sat down next to me with a loud “Oof!”, stretching out his legs into the narrow concrete width of the passage and dumping a big black sports bag down at his side. “You look shitty,” he said. “Not a morning person?”
“I didn’t notice you,” I said.
“You surprised?”
“Not entirely. No great reprisals got to you, since I saw you last?”
He gave a grunting half-laugh. “You really surprised?” he repeated. “I move too fast for any whacked-out fucker to catch.”
“Not at all,” we sighed.
“I hear you’ve been busy.”
“Really?”
“San Khay.”
“I didn’t kill him; please let’s not go down that line of enquiry.”
“It wasn’t you?”
“No.”
“Jesus. Although – you didn’t seem like the blood-drinking, heart-ripper type.”
“Touching. I don’t suppose you’re up for lending me a hand?”
“That’s why I’m sat in this shit-hole talking to you,” he replied with a shrug. “Anything in particular?”
“I’m looking for help to go up against Guy Lee; are you interested?”
“Why Lee?”
“He might know things about Bakker. And even if he doesn’t, he has a small army at his command. It’d be nice to know that it’s not at his command, before going after the top of the Tower.”
“Why do you need help? You seemed just fine with Amiltech. Swanned off all mysterious for your solo day of judgment, like something out of a fucking Clint Eastwood movie.”
“That’s just it,” I replied, thinking of the shadow rising up from the darkness of Paternoster Square. “This time, they’ll know I’m coming. Guy Lee isn’t going to make the mistake San did.”
“How much help?” he asked carefully. “I ain’t gonna speak for the others.”
“It’s still all in the planning, but I thought the Whites, the beggars, the bikers, the painters, the drifters, the…”
“Dregs of fucking society, right?”
“Guy Lee isn’t renowned for his selectivity, either, when it comes to membership.”
“You think you can beat Lee?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not going to be like pissing around with San Khay. If Lee knows you’re coming, he’s not just going to sit by while you torch the office and curse the staff.”
“Yes,” we said. “We were thinking that.”
“You must have one hell of a beef.”
“It’s the entire bull and the horns, since you ask.”
“What makes you think you can pull this lot together? Shit, no wonder sorcerers have short life expectancies – that’s some cock-arsed arrogance you must have, wobbling around inside the pink stuff in your head.”
“I think they’ll want to help.”
“Why?”
“Because the Tower will probably make the decision for them.”
“You like being a mysterious bastard, don’t you?” he asked with a grin. “Sweet.”
“I learnt a few nasty lessons.”
“Bakker teach you any in-between classes?” he asked in an overly casual voice, and when I looked up, “Oh, yeah, I can do fucking research too, you know.”
I steepled my fingers, took in a long breath of the piss-stained air of the subway tunnels, half-closed my eyes. “And you are called Blackjack, Christ knows why; you’re a member of the biker clan, the men and women who specialise in living off speed, being nowhere and everywhere, who revel in their own freedom; and when they travel, the road is shorter for them than for anyone else. Your leader, if you guys can really be said to have one, was murdered, and your clan attacked. You like being unpredictable, unexpected, everywhere and nowhere, standing up for being a difficult bastard just to see the looks on people’s faces, you think being normal is being shameful… shall we carry on, and see who runs out of trivia first?”
To our surprise, he grinned. “You want to know a secret?”
“Always.”
“My real name is Dave.”
“I see.”
“This doesn’t seem to amuse you.”
“I met Jeremy the troll a few nights ago.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. Also known as the Mighty Raaaarrggh! Although… I can sorta see why you changed the name. ‘Dave’ isn’t known for its mysterious, mystic sexiness.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“‘Matthew the sorcerer’? You weren’t tempted to go for something… well… with more vowel sounds?”
“To tell the truth, the idea didn’t occur to me.”
A footstep at the end of the subway, loud on the wet stairs leading down. Blackjack added casually, fingering his bag, “Like I say, I got a lot of research done on you while I was wandering.”
“Hum?” I asked absently. We eyed the stairwell at the end of the tunnel.
“Uh-huh. But the bird – Oda?… she’s a slippery fish to pin down.”
We tried in vain to decipher the layers of imagery. We opened our mouth to ask a question, and Oda was at the end of the tunnel, and Oda wasn’t alone.
Sometimes, dignity is sacrificed under the weight of sheer, adrenalinrush instinct. Instinct said fight or flight, but there wasn’t anywhere to fly to in that long tiled gloom under the ring road. We stood up hastily, keeping the rumbling of the traffic still in our fingertips to be unleashed at any given moment, and said, very carefully, “We were to meet alone.”
Blackjack was also on his feet, eyeing up the two men who stood flanking Oda. He had a tight, cold look on his face; at his side his fingers gently flexed.
Oda said, “Someone wants to talk to you.”
The men on either side of her reached into their pockets. Their hands weren’t even out before Blackjack was taking something from his bag and his fist was wrapped in a length of chain that seemed to grow at his touch into a writhing, living snake of metal links, lashing into the air and stretching as it moved. I saw guns being pulled out from the bulging jackets of the two men with Oda, and instinctively snuffed out the light, crudely swiping at the strip lights overhead with the rumbling heat still in my fingertips, bursting the bulbs with a loud static pop and a sprinkling of falling glass. I put my hands round my head to protect it from the crystal tinkling as the shards rained down, and turned and ran.
Somewhere in the dark I heard a loud snap, a rattling sound as of a chain scraped along a tiled wall and the crunch of tiles being pulled free from their mortar with the passage of the metal links; I heard running feet, shouting, the click of catches and gears. Perhaps in different circumstances we would have stayed and fought, we would have burnt them all for daring to challenge us – but I feared guns, I didn’t like to try and stop bullets in the dark, it was too unpredictable. I stuck my hands out to feel along the wall and stumbled towards the yellow glow at the other end of the tunnel, away from Oda, Blackjack and the men in black. I heard a gunshot – it wasn’t as I had expected, not a ringing blast in the dark, but a snap, more like the bursting of an air rifle than an explosion of chemicals – but whatever it was, I heard a shout in the gloom that could well have been Blackjack’s voice, and for a moment thought about going back for him, pulling up all the glass pieces on the floor and throwing them down the tunnel in a wave, like a swarm of angry flies; but by now I was at the staircase at the other end and clawing my way up into the open where I could see, stand my ground, fight with more effective tools and…
“Hey, sorcerer?”
The voice came from the pavement above the mouth of the subway stairwell, out of my line of sight. That too was probably the source of the dart that impaled my back like the nose of an angry swordfish, and with it, the quick shrinking down of my world to a pinprick of yellow light that tightened, tightened and, with a sigh, went out, taking me with it.
We woke, didn’t know where we were, and panicked. In our confusion we lashed out at the nearest thing we could find and shattered the front passenger seat window into a hail of safety glass with our fear, before a hot electric snap across our neck sent us lurching back into a painful blackness, from which no amount of violent dreaming could wake us.
When we next woke, we felt a tightness in our chest, an aching in our arms, a terrible pain in our shoulders, and a hot patch of blood in the small of our back, where the dart that had first knocked us into darkness had been pulled out by someone who didn’t care how much it bit into our skin. We jerked on waking, the fear sweeping us; but this time awareness and control were quicker to come and with all my strength I kept my eyes shut, my breathing level, and my face empty.
That first start of surprise when we woke, though, had betrayed us, and over the sound of rushing traffic, through the flashing regular pulse of neon light racing by and the cold breath of wind through the shattered passenger window, we heard Oda’s voice say, disinterestedly, “He’s awake again,” and that was cue enough for someone to send us back to darkness.
The last waking of that outward journey was the slowest of them all. There was no more traffic hum around me, but the pain in my joints was amplified tenfold. I came back to awareness with the slow understanding that the greyness on the edge of my vision was the beginning of sunrise, that the wetness on my face was from dew on the grass, that the cold dampness seeping through my clothes was rising up from the mud I’d been dropped on, that the pain in my shoulders came from the position of my arms, pinned behind my body, which had then fallen back, cutting off any remaining circulation to my fingertips. I felt frazzled and sick, but not entirely afraid. Perhaps the repetition of my wakings and sleepings had inured me to fear; perhaps it was simple relief at being alive, I didn’t know and didn’t care – the stillness of my own mind was a comfort in itself.
The world fascinated us, that I now saw at right-angles from where our head had fallen on the grass. As the pale sunlight started to sneak over the top of a chalky hill, we became aware of the smell of mud, animals, dead leaves, mould, rain, dew, cattle manure and fresh water, mixed with just a hint of burnt tyre. We heard the calls of wrens, sparrows, starlings, magpies, blackbirds, blue tits, and woodpeckers, and saw, crawling an inch from our nose through the mud, tiny flies and other insects, some no more substantial than the lightest drizzle glimpsed falling at night in front of a street lamp. We had never seen so much open nothingness, nor imagined that nothingness could be so busy in the pallid light. We searched for power to drag to our hands, to pick at the tight plastic cuffs that were rapidly causing our fingers to go numb, and though it was there, though we could sense some sort of magic, some lingering essence on the cold air, it was strange to us, like an echo of song, heard far off.
Countryside.
Bloody crappy pollen-drenched, grass-covered, dew-soaked bloody countryside.
Not a neon bulb, not a power line, not a water or gas main within half a mile all around. Nothing to arm myself with, except what little warmth was left inside our blood.
A voice said, “I take it you’re not a country man.”
I croaked, tasting bile in my mouth, “It’s got its charms.”
“But you are an urban magician, Mr Swift. Your disposition lies elsewhere, you find your magic in the cities, not the fields, correct?”
“Just a point of view,” I whispered. “That’s all.”
Hands pulled me up by the elbows and shoulders, and as the world swung back into place I forced down the taste of acid in my throat, and half-closed my eyes against the sensation of spinning. I saw a pair of black leather shoes, topped by smart black trousers, a black jacket and – here was the bad news – a dog collar and a purple scarf. Never underestimate the ridiculous things that have been done in the name of religious-semantic obscurity.
The face that topped these defining features was round and smiling, friendly in the manner of all inviting alligators who only want to talk; it was the colour of rich, dark chocolate, and topped by silvery-grey curly hair, plaited at the back of the neck into dreadlocks of such solidity that I suspected they’d never be undone. The owner of this ensemble appearance spoke in a soft voice, lyrical with a gentle tone, and said, “May I put a suggestion to you, Mr Swift?”
“Where’s the biker?” I asked. “What about Blackjack?”
“He’s fine.”
“Fine what? Finely chopped, with a stick of celery?”
“I think, considering your position, you’ll have to take my word on it, Mr Swift.”
I looked round cautiously. The field in which I’d been dumped was bordered by tall trees on two sides; elsewhere it stretched away into more rolling muddy shapes: a landscape devoid of any kind of help. Around me, in various poses of threatening or sceptical looming intent, were more men and women, of every colour and age; some held guns, and one or two, we noticed with something resembling disgust, were holding swords, or fireman’s axes, with the look of people who not only knew how to use them, but enjoyed doing so. Oda was among them; in one hand she had a curved blade that resembled a samurai’s katana, still in its ornate sheath, while over her shoulder and more to the point, I felt, was slung an automatic rifle with a sturdy wooden butt and the well-oiled look of a weapon properly cared for.
She stared at me, and there was no pity in her gaze.
I stammered, trying to keep our eyes on the silver-haired man, “You want something.”
“I have a question I’d like to ask you. Or at least, I’ve got a question I’ve been asked to ask you. Personally, I find it unlikely you will survive the judgment, but these tests must still be administered, even now and to someone as shrunken as you.”
“You’ve got my attention.”
“Can you control them?”
“What?”
“It’s very simple, Mr Swift. Can you keep control?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Please, let’s not play coy with this. It is the matter on which your whole life currently depends. Should I decide that you are incapable of keeping the creatures currently inside you at bay, should I judge that you are a threat equal or even superior to that which you are attempting to destroy, I will have your head removed from your shoulders, your face shot off, your fingerprints burnt away and the remnants dumped in a variety of rivers feeding a number of fish-infested seas. So please, take me seriously when I say, I will have an answer. Can you keep control?”
I licked my lips and felt the shaking in my bones. “I’m a sorcerer. I’ve been taught how to…”
“This isn’t about your sorcery!” he snapped. “Tell me about them.”
“About who?”
He hit us with the back of his hand, across the face, and his knuckles slammed into our jaw and the pain filled us with shock and astonishment, anger flashing inside us. Hands pulled me back up and he said again,
“Can you keep control?”
“Who are you?”
He hit us on the other side of our head, and when we tried to crawl back up of our own accord he hit us again, knocking us once more to the earth. I bit down the anger turning the silver streaks of sunlight electric blue in my eyes and waited for the people there to pull me up. When they did, he said again, “You must be angry by now, Mr Swift, you must be afraid. You’ve died once before, and your kind can only see the flames of hell when your heart stops, when your soul leaves, so you must be afraid. Can you control them, when they think about dying, when they wonder about losing their newfound existence, can you stop them from lashing out, can you keep them under the calm waters of reason, can you persuade them not to fight, kick, scream defiance, can you stay human? Can you keep control?”
I took too long to think of an answer, tasting blood on my lips, and he hit us again and pressed his foot down across our neck, forcing our face into the mud, and leant close and hissed, “Is your blood on fire yet, can you stop it blazing?”
We snarled at him, twisting under his weight, but he just smiled and kicked us, knocking us flat to one side; and now we were angry, we were ready to take his heart and crush it until it burst, we were ready to boil the blood in its vessels, we were prepared to…
I squeezed my eyes shut against the blueness and pressed my face deeper into the earth, feeling the coldness of it against my skin and breathing rapidly, trying to purge the pain from my muscles, chill the heat away from my blood. Hands pulled me up again, and the silver-haired man came close, pulling my face up so that blood trickled down from my nose into my mouth, and leaning in until his breath tasted of coffee and too many hours without brushing his teeth. He hissed, “What are they saying now, sorcerer? Are they cowering like the children that they are, or do they have a darker purpose, a more aggressive intent? Which is it, Mr Swift?”
“You,” I hissed through the blood on my tongue, “will have to work it out for yourself.”
He tugged my head up until it hurt, staring into our blue eyes, then, with a grunt, pushed me back and stepped away.
I tried calming our anger a little at a time with nice, rational placations, soothing over the fear with the thought that if killing was all he had in mind, we wouldn’t have had a chance to notice. As I did, I carefully rubbed my fingers together in the palm of my hand, feeling the dirt between them, the heavy dark soil, with just a hint, delicate, and so hard to pin down with my city-attuned senses, of rich, active magic. I was no druid, I had no understanding of the lore of natural things; but perhaps, just possibly, there was a little strength to be drawn from here, if you could only look at it from the right point of view. Even in this place, strange and alien to us, there was the beauty that, to our eyes, made magic.
The silver-haired man said sharply, “I want to talk to them.”
“To who?” I mumbled, probing my teeth with my tongue for any new looseness.
“Let’s not waste time with definitions. I want to speak to them.”
“You’re an idiot,” I said. “There’s only me here. Do you think I’ve got an alien in my belly, do you think there’s a Siamese twin attached to my shoulder that never had the chance to grow? You talk to me.”
I half-expected him to hit me again. We almost relished the idea, ready for the fury that explodes with pain; enough, perhaps, just enough to give us the strength and passion to grasp the tiny fragment of elusive power in this place and use it to pop his chest open. To my surprise, though, he didn’t hit me, but squatted down on his haunches in front of me, and said, “Let me tell you what I think.”
I nodded, hypnotised by his gaze, taste of blood in my mouth.
“I’m a man of words, you see? I read, I study, I think, I train myself to think only in words, neat, linear structures, passages with correct punctuation that can define a train of reasoning, understanding – nothing left to chance. I am also a man of faith. At the end of the logical chain, when all knowledge that I have acquired – and the knowledge is significant – when the end of the chain runs out into an infinity of uncertain questions and doubts, I know that there is still an answer. You may object to calling it God, you probably find the term too vague – I understand that, it’s fine. You think of a big man with a beard. I think of force. God is force. God is strength, certainty, movement, motion, direction, power, and he sits at the end of all things, and he will, sorcerer, condemn you. Not because you are a heretic – which, by the way, you are – not because your soul is necessarily so black or so tainted, not because you have killed or fought or stolen; all these sins can be purged in fire. He will condemn you, because you aspire to be like him, and have the arrogance not even to think of the consequences.”
He seemed to expect some kind of response to this statement, so I said, nearly choking on the words, “You’re going to burn me?” We added, “You can try,” and I immediately bit my tongue so hard I could feel the pain in my ears.
He didn’t show any sign of noticing our slip, just gave a dry, humourless chuckle. “Times have moved on. The good must be merciful, even if that mercy to the damned is merely in a quick dispatch.”
“That’s not much of a comfort.”
“The problem is, times are not so simple as in the days of the Book. Utilitarianism, I think; we must choose the lesser of two evils. I take comfort, when I contemplate your evil enduring, in the thought that when the day of judgment comes, when we are all standing naked in front of the Lord, you will be damned and I will not. And in the mean time, I may, perhaps, do some good to the innocent of this life in setting you against another who is more foul even than your taint.”
“Bakker.” I didn’t need to ask.
“Robert James Bakker,” he agreed. He slapped his thighs and straightened with a sudden jovial expression. “Of course, if you were not in your current condition I would just let the two of you tear each other apart – sorcerer against sorcerer. But he is more powerful, I think, than you ever were, even though he chose you, Matthew Swift, to be his apprentice. I could take comfort in the fact that perhaps you could, for a time, weaken him with your attack, and that he, in killing you, had rid the world of one more sorcerer – but it doesn’t solve the initial problem, does it? How do you defeat a man like Robert Bakker? A man surrounded by every kind of protection and ally, a man with powerful friends and powers of his own, a man whose enemies die, and they seem great until they fall. I find that under such circumstances, I am forced to deal with the better kind of devils, to defeat a worse. Am I making sense?”
I nodded.
“Which brings me to my only serious problem. I am more than prepared to let you live, for the moment, Mr Swift, so that you and Bakker can, I hope, destroy each other. But before I let you live, I need to know that you are not a greater threat, that the things which sustain you have not yet consumed all rational restraint. So, Matthew Swift” – he brushed invisible dirt off the black fold of his trousers – “let us talk about the blue electric angels.”
We looked up into his eyes, and held his gaze, and I was happy to see an instant of doubt on his face. We said, “We are hard to kill, if you are thinking of trying. We persist, even if it will not be in this place.”
He let out a satisfied breath, and murmured, “Well, it is nice to finally meet you.”
“It’s not like I went anywhere,” I declared. “Even if you kill us, we will endure, we will find a way back; it is our nature, although I won’t be too happy about it.”
“That’s remarkable!”
“What is?”
“The way you switch without even blinking. One second, monster from beyond the plane of flesh and blood; next second, angry little man, suddenly cut off from all that power he’s used to throwing around. A seamless switch, not even dribbling on the way. Not normal for possession; something more subtle, yes?”
“We are the same,” we said.
“The same what? Same flesh? Doesn’t mean anything, haven’t you seen any 1970s horror films?”
“We are Matthew Swift.”
“However pretentious the man may have been in life, I’m sure he didn’t use the plural pronoun.”
“I am the blue electric angels,” I explained, licking away the taste of salt and iron around the edges of my mouth. “It’s really very simple. We are me and I am us.”
“That doesn’t sound simple at all.”
“You have a limited imagination. I guessed as much.”
His jaw tightened, but he didn’t move. “I am curious, Mr Blue-Eyed Swift, how exactly you found yourself in this predicament.”
“I’m assuming one of your men shot me,” I replied. “It’s all a bit blurred.”
“I was thinking more of how you found yourself bonded to and controlled by…”
“There is nothing to control,” we snapped.
“… controlled by,” he repeated firmly, “creatures as strange as the blue electric angels.”
I said, “I doubt you’d understand.”
“I’m not here to understand, I’m here to assess.”
“That’s not much of a comfort.”
“Don’t you want to buy some time, to see if you can get your senses round the magic of this place, see if you can coax your brain to the magic of leaves and sunlight rather than concrete and neon? I’m sure you must. Tell me.”
I let out a long, shuddering breath that I hadn’t realised was inside me. That seemed to take all the fight out of me, leave my chest empty, so I shook my head and muttered, “All right. All right; it goes something like this:”
“When I was fourteen years old, the phones started talking to me. I dialled the wrong number one day – I was trying to get the local library, but instead I got a bank helpline. It said:
“‘Welcome to telephone banking! To change your credit card details, please press one. To check your current account balance, press two. To dance in fire until the end of your days, please press three. Hi, this is Mara speaking; sorry, I’m out at the moment, but if you could leave your message after the beep, I’ll be sure to get back to you when the shadows have swept down the wall. Thanks! Which service do you require, police, fire, ambulance or exorcist? To cancel a direct debit, please press the star key. To send your soul across the infinite void faster than the blink of the mind dreaming in the moonlight, please press hash now.’ And so on.
“I would wait at the bus stop and the rats would come and look at me; I would run through the streets at night and the freedom of it, the exhilaration of it, nearly killed me. I forgot to eat, to drink, to sleep, grew drunk on the feeling in my bones, on the beauty of the lights around me, on the sounds of the city, on the senses of other creatures.
“When he found me, I weighed eight stone two, had just failed GCSEs, was on tranquillisers and on the verge of being consigned to a care home. He showed me kindness, took me away from my home, where my mother was trying to care for me – and my gran. She didn’t say no when this wealthy, kindly man offered to take me under his wing; but only later did I realise it wasn’t just his smile that had talked her into it. My gran told me always to trust the pigeons, and when I told him I didn’t know what she meant, he just smiled, patted me on the shoulder and said it would be all right, I’d work it out one day. Magic isn’t genetic, it’s not something programmed in your DNA. But it does run in families – in the same way that you can say, these people are morose or these are funny or these have their own, unique turns of phrase. For example, my mum didn’t like the city; but when we went outside to the country she became like I was when I first tasted that magic, glowing, alive with the feel of it, revelling in all its forms in her blood, strengthening her by mere presence. It wasn’t a spell, it was something more than that, a link, a consciousness that here is something special, indescribable, infinitely rich. I learnt from her a relish for life; but for me, it was something to be found in the city; and that, nothing more, is what makes me a sorcerer.
“He said his name was Robert James Bakker, but I was to call him Bobby. I called him Mr Bakker though, like my mum said. He paid for me to retake my GCSEs and hired me a tutor, and I passed – not well, but well enough. He said that you had to understand the minds of others, their learning and their ideas, before you could excel them; that to be a good sorcerer, you had to be a good man first. The day I got my A-levels he took me out into the city and taught me my very first lesson. We walked through the empty arcade of Leadenhall Market, late at night, when the wind was cold off the river, and he taught me to feel the light on my skin, as if it was silk, how to tighten my fingers around it and pull it along like a cloak, drag it down to me away from the walls and ceilings until I was on fire with its brightness and everything else around me was smothered in dark, taught me to wear it inside me, as well as over me, a furious burning in the heart. I learnt how to summon the Beggar King, about the legends of the city – the Midnight Mayor, Fat Rat, the Seven Sisters, the dragon that guards the old London Wall, Domine dirige nos, the old rules and the new magics. He taught me everything I know, was teacher, sponsor, father, friend for nearly ten years. Rich, kind and powerful; things I had never seen or imagined in my childhood.
“Sorcerers don’t have any textbooks, formal lessons, ritual incantations or spells like the magicians do. Magicians use the wisdom of others, gestures of power, words of binding to do their bidding – theirs is a precise, focused magic. Sorcerers bind a different kind of magic: ours is the power of seeing the power in the most ordinary thing, and binding it to our will; it is wild, free, beautiful and dangerous. Teaching control is the most vital lesson, one that is learned at various speeds. Some sorcerers submerge their natures entirely to the rhythms of the city, forget that they do not have wings or that their feet are in Knightsbridge, because their mind is too busy following the route of the number-nine bus up Piccadilly at the same time that their eyes are lost in the senses of a rat somewhere in Enfield. Others establish control ruthlessly, minimise all that they do, everything tight, precise; they revel in what they can do only for themselves, everything for a neat, exacting purpose, rather than the richer enchantments known to some.
“Bakker said I could be whatever I wanted, that every sorcerer was unique to their own nature. I studied under him until I was twenty-four, but I could never have the control he had. He was, then, a middle-aged man, who didn’t show a day of it: his personality – vibrant, powerful, passionate – was stamped all over his magic, in extravagant shows of force that you felt he could never contain, and yet which were always, in the most delicate manner possible, well within his control. I have never seen a more powerful, nor a more talented sorcerer; he could breathe the air off the river and, on its smell alone, run a mile. Perhaps that should have warned me. He was so full of the stuff of life, one day it had to burst.
“When I was twenty-four, he said I was fine, ready; that my life was my own and I could do what I wished. So I did. I travelled – to Bangkok, Beijing, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Madrid, New York; in every place I earned money by teaching English or serving as a cleaner or a kitchen dishwasher for a few months, just so I could experience the different magics of those places. In New York the air is so full of static you almost spark when you move; in Madrid the shadows are waiting at every corner to whisper their histories in your ear when you walk at night. In Berlin the power is clean, silken, like walking through an invisible, body-temperature waterfall in a dark cave; in Beijing the sense of it was a prickling heat on the skin, like the wind had been broken down into a thousand pieces, and each part carried some warmth from another place, and brushed against your skin, like a furry cat calling for your attention.
“It may not sound much of a life to you – travelling, with no real home, no constant friends as such. But for me it was a day-to-day revelation, which Bakker had taught me a sorcerer’s life should be, even if it stood still. A sorcerer, he said, can walk down the same street, twice a day for the rest of his life, and should be able to spot something new about it every time. Relish what you see, what you have: sounds, sight, touch, smell, that’s what keeps you a sorcerer, that’s what lets you understand what magic really is. It took me some time to realise what he meant, but he was right. Whatever has happened to him now, I will always remember then – he was right.
“I will spare you the details of my doings. I was, as you have pointed out, not one of the most interesting sorcerers, I did not seek to change the world, and had no great crusade to fire me. I will jump ahead a little.
“I came back to London. Worked a little, lived a little; nothing extraordinary. Then, about two years ago, I got a phone call from Robert Bakker’s office. He had had a stroke and was in hospital; he wanted to see me. I didn’t understand, at first, how this strong, vibrant man could be a mortal. But everyone gets older, even if it’s only in the flesh. I visited him, of course I did – anyone would have done the same. I was relieved to find his mind was still in one piece – he recognised me, spoke to me reasonably, lucidly, didn’t seem to have any difficulty with the mundane, automatic skills that strokes sometimes kill, as simple as lifting a fork, or putting on a pair of trousers – all that, he remembered well enough. But there had been complications, the doctors weren’t sure how serious, and all the best consultants were called in to offer placating sounds.
“Over the weeks, however, it grew evident how serious it was. He was paralysed from the waist down, and would not walk again.
“At first he laughed and said it was an excuse for the lazy lifestyle he’d always wanted. But the reality of paralysis is more than just being unable to move – it is a loss of dignity. He could not put on his own trousers any more without help, or go to the toilet, or stand in the shower, or climb stairs, or get out of the bath, or reach a book on the shelf, or reach a pot to cook a meal. I think it was the indignity that first started to turn him. I noticed it, in my visits to him, over the weeks at the hospital as he went into physiotherapy, a growing anger at the indignity of it all, the unfairness – he, who had never smoked, drunk to excess, travelled to dangerous places or even had any particularly reckless sexual adventures – still he was stuck in a wheelchair. He said he was getting old, that life was going to pass him by, and for the first time, he sounded angry.
“One evening, his office called me and said I needed to go to the hospital, urgently. I thought something terrible had happened to him; but when I arrived, he was sitting up in bed, quite composed, the phone in his hand. He said,
“‘Matthew, I want to summon the angels.’
“I remember, because he said it so flatly, so calmly, that I could hardly believe my ears. I spluttered confused noises and eventually said something along the lines of ‘Why?’ and ‘It’s dangerous!’ and other empty sounds.
“He said, ‘The doctors tell me that I am dying. I have not had just one stroke, I am at risk of several, they said. They tell me that over the next few days, weeks, months, years, they can’t be sure, I will have more minor strokes, one on the other, perhaps so small I don’t even notice, perhaps large enough to leave me without feeling in my fingers, and that they will eventually eat away my brain, my mind, my memory, and my feelings until I am just a gibbering shell. I want to summon the angels.’
“‘What good will they do?’ I asked.
“‘You’ve heard them, think about it,’ he replied – he was never one for a straight answer, always liked you to work it out for yourself, said if you could understand by yourself why a thing was true, you would believe it more than just having it told to you by a teacher.
“‘Why do you need me? Surely they’re still there, in the dialling tone…’
“‘I can’t hear them.’ He held up the receiver towards me and, for the first time, looked me straight in the eye. ‘I want you to listen, tell me if they’re there.’
“I took the receiver – I was trained not to disobey him; such things when you are a learning sorcerer are dangerous. I listened.
“He hadn’t dialled any particular number, but with the angels you don’t need to; an open line is what they always enjoyed. And eventually, through the dialling tone, I heard them.
“They started with just the beeeeeep of the tone. Then, when you listened, it was more than a beeeeep it was a voice, saying beeeeee at exactly the same pitch and tone as the dialling tone, but still a voice.
“It said, beeeeee meeeeeee…
“And then, when you realised that those were the words it was saying, it said more.
“Beeee meeeee beeeee freeeeee…
“And by increments, aware that they had an audience, the angels came, and they said at the tone of the telephones, We be…
… to see…
set free…
We be light, we be life, we be fire!
We sing electric flame, we rumble underground wind, we dance heaven!
Come be me……
and be free…
… we be blue electric angels…
“Bakker said, ‘Can you hear them?’
“I said yes.
“‘What do they say?’
“‘What they always do.’
“‘Tell me!’
“I told him; I confess, I was hypnotised by their sound. When the angels spoke, it was more than voices, it was with a presence that wormed its way into the mind and filled the senses with burning, fiery blueness. They whispered that they were the creatures of the wire, that their playground was the world, that they danced at the speed of light and rippled faster than sound, spread their wings across every wire, voice, mind, sense, sight in the world and when they had bounced from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back again through every telephone and computer and radio transmitter on earth, they would bounce into the radio waves in the sky, and spin away into space, circle the moon and then fly on, to see what sights they could see. They asked you to come be me, to be free – to let go of life and join them for ever, playing in the wires.
“It was a dangerous song – all sorcerers knew of the angels. They had a reputation, that of a young, reckless power that travelled as interference in the system, unexplained spots of static, moved too fast to catch, stop, or begin to understand. They had grown out from the wires only in recent years, but that shouldn’t really surprise us. Where life is, there is always magic, and over the years we pour so much of ourselves, of our lives, into the phone lines – our hearts, dreams, desires, hopes, friends, enemies, hates and loves, tipped into the wire. The angels started off as just a rogue piece of static but, over the years, fed on all that life being thrown at them – telephone conversations, radio broadcasts, internet, email – that unique magic altered them, made them growinto the form that you currently understand as blue electric angels.
“They relish life, rejoice in it; their whole lives are learning, understanding, a composite of other people’s existences, an idea plucked from Jane merged into a word from Bob and a sigh from Joe; an entire personality can be formed from the throwaway bits of conversation we leave trapped in the wire. They are so proud! So bright and brilliant, the world’s knowledge at their fingertips, the whole of humanity pouring itself into their soul. So beautiful, so bright, they delight in all that is new, feast and feed on it, for it was what made them. They are a child, and a god. All sorcerers love and fear them, for they are very much like the sorcerers are – feasting on all things that they see. Life is magic. And as I have said, too much life … too much of too much… mortals cannot sustain it.
“They are everywhere at once, thinly spread across the world like flurries of snow; but they can, sometimes, coalesce into one place for a special purpose. In that hospital, that strange night that had been like any other night, Bakker wanted to provoke such an event; he wanted to bring the angels together, and force them out of the phone.
“I asked why.
“He didn’t smile, or sigh, or show any sign of emotion when he answered. He simply said, ‘Because they are alive; because they will not die.’
“I wanted to know how he thought he could get them out of the phone lines that had spawned them.
“He just laughed and said he was sure that they, if he had judged their character right, would be all too willing to come, for the right incentive. He knew how I had first fallen into sorcery. He knew that as a child, I had loved to listen to the phones, and they had loved to talk to me.
“What then, I asked? When you have somehow dragged the angels out of the phone line, their natural place, what do you do then?
“‘Life,’ he said. ‘Just life.’
“I only understood slowly. Even when he had explained it, I did not wish to comprehend. His plan was to draw the angels out of their natural territory, force them to take a human, physical form with his spells and, once they had achieved such a state, to steal that which made them alive.
“You must understand – the angels are created from the life that others leave behind in the phones: words thrown out into darkness, ideas left half unsaid. Their whole existence is speed and freedom and wild electric power and magic and life; they feed off humanity’s forgotten thoughts. He said, ‘Their blood is life, Matthew. Their souls are fire.’
“I finally – too slowly – understood. Bakker didn’t just want to summon the angels. He wanted to become the angels, to be like them, no longer physical, restrained by the bonds of his own crippled body. He wanted to feast on their bright burning blood, become pure electricity and fire in human form, burning his way across the planet – a human consciousness in the form of the angels themselves. But he needed my help.
“I asked why.
“He said, ‘I can’t hear them. Things are different, I can’t hear them. I need a sorcerer who can make them come out of the phone lines. I need your help.’
“I said no. I didn’t even know why I said it; I was so appalled, I just spoke on instinct. I said that his plan would make him inhuman, a deity of blue light rather than a sorcerer, that I knew he must be frightened and in pain, but that what he proposed was nothing short of a bond with an electric devil.
“He wanted to know why I said no.
“I couldn’t think of an answer. I couldn’t say what I really thought – that the angels’ whole nature was wild and reckless, and that in his flesh they would only be more so; that I did not trust him with that kind of power.
“We quarrelled. I think that part was well established after my death. I left there too angry to speak. I felt betrayed. As a child, I had put nothing but faith in Mr Bakker, who had come to my mum’s front door and saved me from the nuthouse. I guess these childish things were suddenly going away.
“I walked. When I am angry, I often walk to calm myself, look at the river and let it flow through my mind, washing away the fury and dirt in my head. I walked along the river, but I don’t really remember the route I took and had no clear objective.
“When it came, it was so fast, so sudden that I didn’t even feel its attack. It came out of the pavement at my feet, arms first, claws that lacerated my ankles on their way up as it grew from the darkness around me. It was thinner then, paler, barely more than a shadow itself. I guess it has learnt as the years go by. I didn’t have time to fight: its claws were in my chest, across my back, on my face. It hissed and spat, a breath of rotting teeth, its spit burning my skin where it touched, its movement cloaked in blackness.
“I will not describe particularly what happened there. I do not think I know much myself, the pain and fear of it was so great. The mind can’t remember pain – the flesh won’t bear it. But it remembers the fear. It remembers remembering agony.
“I knew that I was going to die, that with every pump of my heart, rapidly failing, blood was pouring out of me in regular, surging gouts. I call ‘it’ – the thing that attacked me – a ‘he’, since, though a creature of magic should not have a gender in the traditional boring human sense of which organ goes where, the face he wore was nonetheless an imitation of warped humanity, recognisable despite its contortions. He walked around me and whispered, ‘So hungry, so hungry,’ in a wheedling voice like a starved snake might have, and dipped his fingers in my blood and sighed in contentment at the taste, cupping his hand in the pools around me and lapping it up like a cat after milk. I crawled away from him as best I could, crying with the fear and pain of it, utterly helpless. He held my face and stared into my eyes, and said, ‘Give me life!’ I didn’t understand then what he wanted; only later did I realise that he was trying to see what was in me as I died, trying to reach into my mind to follow my senses, see my thoughts and memories.
“But death wasn’t so cooperative in coming quickly. He let me go with an angry hiss, knowing that I couldn’t crawl far and that death was inevitable, and stalked the small concrete perimeter of the killing ground, looking around at it like a confused child in an art gallery, trying to work out what makes the paintings on the wall worth its attention. While he did this I had crawled to a telephone box. I didn’t know who I thought I’d call – strangely, Bakker was the first number that had leapt to mind, although I didn’t dial.
“I lifted the receiver. He saw, but only smiled with a mouth full of my blood, and didn’t even bother to try and stop me.
“I heard the dialling tone and, as I lay there, the phone held to my ear, they came.
“And we said, come be me…
“So easy to die…
“And we said, We be fire, we be light, we be life! We dance electric flame, we skim sense, we be the ocean and the burning and the sunrise and the sunset on the edge of the world, we chase moonlight and sunlight and we do not stop, we cannot be tamed, we be free!
“And we said, We be the singing in the wire, the whisper of the friend, the static on the line, our dance never begins and never ends, our voices be always heard, invisible silk in the ear, never feared, never alone, we be in every mind and every soul and every mind and every soul be we! Come be we and be free…
“And I closed my eyes, held the phone to my lips, and with the angels in my ears, allowed myself to die.
“We caught my dying breath as it entered the phone and held on to it with all our strength. From the tip of the breath we pulled the warmth in the lungs, then the electricity in the nerves, the buzz in the muscles, the movement in the blood, the water in the skin, the colour in the hair, the strength in the bones; we pulled the dying embers of my thoughts, the expiring rhythm of my heart and, dragging me in by my last breath, we dissolved the sorcerer, and made me electric, melting away my original form to nothing more than blue sparks wriggling into the earth. We have always loved life.
“We have no need for time, in the wire. We were everywhere, everyone, everything; we knew all that we could want to know, and at every instant learnt something new, forgetting nothing. You spray out your ideas and your thoughts and your feelings and your knowledge so fast, every infinity there was something new to explore, an eternally growing world of first-time callers and last-call goodbyes, new papers on new subjects posted on new pages, new feelings towards a new lover whispered down an old line, new links from New York to London, Paris to Berlin, new paths to explore, new sights to see, new worlds to bathe in. There is never an instant in the wire that is not changing, alive; and together we danced in that world, in the richness of the life that others leave behind. You will call it two years that we danced together in the wire, splitting our thoughts to spread out across the face of the earth, pure energy, pure fire. We will not bother with such distinctions. Petty human tongues cannot describe our glory.
“When the spell came, we were entirely unprepared. At one moment we were riding a billion dollars through Switzerland, and sweeping through the radios of a NASA shuttle about to launch. The next, we were coming into one place, our thoughts becoming one, our senses becoming one; and I was there too, the scattered, formless substance of my nature dragged, with the angels, back into one collective piece. I realised this wasn’t just some nightmare, some horrible reassertion of reality – it was a summoning. Someone was summoning us, and I was being dragged along with it.
“My presence disrupted the spell. Whoever called us back called only the angels, not me. My influence meant we did not appear where we should have; my mind took us to the place that I regard as home, and piece by piece, as we fell out of the phone like water off a leaf, the blue sparks of our existence formed a shape, a consciousness, a human form, and that form was me. Not how it should have been. We should have been summoned as gods. I should have died. Instead, you see us now as we are. Half-flesh. Human and angel for ever tangled into one soul, inextricable, mortal, eternal, us and I.
“And your world is terrible as well as beautiful. We are grateful to be me, to have my memories and thoughts and heart and mind; it keeps us from madness. How can you live in this place? How can humans endure it? It is so bright and loud; with each moment, every sense is overwhelmed: colours and noise and the feel of the air in our fingers, the smell of people, and the street and cars and vents and fans and animals and water and weather? How does it not overwhelm you, such endless existence all around you, always changing? We thought we understood life, we thought that we had seen everything that could be known, that our dance across the face of the earth had encompassed all of human being. But sight, and sound; or the simple act of feeling your own heart, knowing that somewhere inside you there’s this fat red organ of lumpy muscle going gu-dunk, gu-dunk, gu-dunk; or tasting food, feeling it burn in the mouth or tingle on the teeth. This world of yours, a world of flesh, is the most amazing, frightening thing we have ever known. We delight in it! The joy of everything, of sense… had we but time or means, we would eat for ever for the wonder of the taste, play for ever in the child’s playground, spend our lives listening to the stories on the stage or screen, devour every book in the library, smell every flower and bin. I have seen this world once before… now we see it again.
“How can you bear to understand that you will get old and lose this feeling, will die and wither and encounter nothing but dark? How can you bear it? Since we came here, we have been entirely fearful, snatched from our safe, comforting bliss of scattered feeling. But we would not die and leave this amazing place for any price. It is the closest thing to sacred we have ever seen.
“So, here I am. We were resurrected as one individual, brought back into life fused into a single form. There’s no untangling that knot. True, you can shoot me – I die. But my consciousness is now tied up with ours; and if you have a phone, or a passing radio wave should happen to be overhead, we will crawl back into the wire, and still be me, and still be the blue electric angels. We would have it no other way.”
I had finished speaking.
The man scratched at his chin, his nails making a harsh Velcro sound against his skin. He said, “Not entirely what I expected to hear.”
“And you’re a man of learning.”
“I don’t know whether it changes my opinion of you. Or, indeed, if it should.”
“What did you think had happened?”
“Oh,” he waved his hands. “You quarrelled with Bakker, doubtless over one of his Satanic schemes, walked away, faked your own death, went travelling, discovered some evil mystic art, bonded your soul to a devil for power, glory, et cetera; returned to wreak havoc and revenge… you get the idea?”
“You don’t have much of an imagination, do you?”
He smiled tightly. “I don’t know that your story is better than anything I imagined.”
“Doesn’t innocence help salve my soul?”
“Technically, you don’t have a soul. You’re a creature of other creatures, a compound of other people’s lives.”
“And in what way are you more than the flesh you are in and the memories that rule you?” we asked sharply. “Are you not who you are because experience makes you this way? Are we not the same?”
“I don’t bleed blue blood.”
“It’s all about oxygen bonding,” I retorted, glancing at Oda, who tilted her chin defiantly back at me, “and we saved Sinclair’s life.”
“You needed him,” replied the man. “Besides, he is useful but obscene.”
“He’s long-winded. I don’t see why that makes him obscene. We had his documents, his information. So do you really think that need is what made us do it? I don’t go around killing random people, and I’m sure as hell not a fan of letting others die.”
He sucked in a breath between his teeth. “Tell me,” he said, “just this, honestly. If you thought a thing looked prettier in flames, would you really not set it alight?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“I wasn’t asking you.”
“Oh, get a bloody sense of perspective.”
He hit me, again. I thought we’d been doing quite well, so the shock and surprise of it, more than the pain, injured me, sent me recoiling back inside my shell. After a moment lying curled around our own unhappiness, we picked ourself up and glared at him.
He said, “You… blue electric angels… you are children with the power to kill, destroy and burn. You know nothing about life, its rules, norms, laws and understandings, and probably care less. Why should you not set the field on fire for the prettiness of its burning; why should you not kill wherever you go, simply because you can; why should you understand anything that the rest of humanity can?”
“Because I’m here,” I growled.
“You are just one man,” he retorted. “The angels are the sum of millions, billions, more than that; although before you start, I do appreciate that your relationship is complicated.”
“We do not need to… to change anything. This life of yours is wonder enough without us setting it on fire.”
He smiled, shoulders jerking as if a laugh was brewing, hijacked halfway up his throat. “You really are just a child, aren’t you? A poor little bumbling power, crawling out of the nice safe confines of its telephone line. Utterly ignorant and totally confused. You must be going mad inside that good disguise of yours. But perhaps all you’ll do is drool and gibber, when reality finally takes you down.”
He paused and sucked in his breath. Overdramatically, I thought. Enjoying his power, perhaps, a bit too much. I felt the dirt between my fingers, the tiny heat of it. Not enough to do anything spectacular. But enough, maybe, to burn out something vital under his skin, before we died.
“I’ll have to think about it,” he said, with an unsympathetic face, and nodded at one of his henchmen. “Good night, angels, good night!”
We pinched that fragment of magic between our fingers, ready to slip it into the blood of anyone who dared to touch us. “You will be a shadow on the wall,” we snarled. “A remnant of the night. You will fade, and your darkness will blend into the memories of the city and be forgotten, lost inside all the better things that happen around you.”
Oda stepped towards me. Her hand went into a jacket pocket, her eyes meeting ours; and I hesitated. The grey-haired man leant down until his face was almost level with mine and whispered, “You have no idea who you’re dealing with.”
I grinned, and leant forward sharply, banging my head against his. Not hard, but it was contact I needed; just that moment of touching was enough. I let that morsel of power slide into his skin, a maggot of blue, burrowing down in an instant, seen out of the corner of the eye, and gone. Where our heads had banged, blood from my battered skin slid a thin red slide over his own. Some magics never change. Blood is one of them.
He blinked and recoiled, then slapped me, open-palmed. This time I didn’t even bother to get up, but lay curled on the ground and said nothing. My blood on his hands; even better.
“We are the Order!” he snapped. “We watch you people all the time, we are everywhere! Can you begin to imagine our power?”
I laughed despite myself. “So powerful,” I exclaimed through hysterical bursts of breath, “you can’t even kill Bakker by yourself. You need to get us to do your work for you. We know you. We heard your voice inside our mind, when you whispered into the phone. You are an infestation in our skin, a worm in our flesh. You’re part of us. Think about that next time you shoot us!”
He rubbed his head, a nervous gesture. Could he sense our magic, the tiniest curse, working through his body? Probably not. It was out of our hands. “Maybe I will,” he said.
He nodded at Oda, who stepped up to me, pulled my head back with a quick gesture, and stuck something into my neck that filled my throat with oil and my head with the sickly blanket of darkness.
I woke and had never been more grateful to find myself uncomfortable. Everything ached, throbbed or stung; and it was bliss, simply because there was too much of it to be a dream. Nor, I suspected, was it anything resembling an afterlife. I was on a small, bare wooden floor in a small, bare room with rough plastered walls that had once been painted blue and were now a theme of faded and chipped. The room sported a plastic panel of flashing green lights that circled the head of Jesus Christ like fairy lights on a Christmas tree, while he looked on benevolently. There was one door, one window, and a smell of dust. It was also, very much, in the city. The smell of fumes hit immediately, and I heard the rumble of traffic, the screech of brakes on a bus; I was back in my home, alive.
I risked getting up on all fours, and looked round the room. By the door, fiddling with her rifle in the casual manner of someone accustomed to bullets, Oda said, “Hi.”
“Hi,” I replied, pulling myself into a sitting position and feeling around the inside of my mouth for any more loose teeth. There was blood on my shirt and face; I hadn’t considered how quickly a vendetta, and prolonged magical confrontation, could eat through my wardrobe. We said, as reasonably as we could, “Why are you here?”
“Got to keep an eye on you,” she said. “I’m not happy about it either, if you’re wondering.”
“You are – not afraid?”
“Afraid?” she echoed, raising one surprised eyebrow.
“Pissed off doesn’t really cover it,” I said. “We would kill you for what you did. And I want you to be impressed, by the way, at the fact that I’m not spontaneously combusting, because I promise, it’s just two nerve endings and a snappy word away.”
“The blue electric angels are much quicker to go around killing than the little sorcerer, aren’t they? Or at least, much quicker to talk about it,” she said, not bothering to look at me. “If you’re going to throw up, there’s a toilet next door.”
“Why would I throw up?”
“It’s a standard reaction to the drugs.”
“What have you done?” we barked.
Perhaps the anger in our voice jerked her from her complacency. “Just to make you sleep for the trip,” she said in a defensive tone. “We want you alive – for now.”
“I’m not happy about this arrangement.”
“And I am under orders to shoot you at the first sign of overly Satanic inclinations.”
“What are those?” I asked, my genuine curiosity briefly overriding our fury.
“My remit is to use my own judgement to determine when the harm that you might do outweighs the necessary evil of using you against a worse danger. Or in order words, if you look like you’re going to shape up to be a son of a bitch worse than Bakker, I pop two in your skull and three in your chest and make sure the phones are switched off.”
“You’re not making much of a case for my liking you,” I said, flexing my fingers for that familiar crackle of electricity. There was a little, running through the walls only a few feet away, and a plug quite close to her feet from which I could snatch some power, if it became necessary.
“Well, there are a few things you can consider,” she said, patting the barrel of her rifle with a gesture more motherly than threatening. “For a start, I can be immensely useful to you.”
“How?”
“I can kill anyone who gets in your way,” she explained, smiling hopefully, “so long, of course, as I deem them to be worthy of the death. And I know a very good dentist.”
“I’m thinking that perhaps you’re something of a breakaway cult.”
“Cult?”
“References to God, damnation, dentistry, Satan, mixed with a violent tendency and samurai swords.”
“We take all sorts. Those who believe are, naturally, those best equipped for our mission.”
“And what, exactly, is your mission?”
She shrugged. “Ultimately, the complete obliteration of all magic on this earth, although right now we’re dealing with priorities, and will settle for the obliteration of all actively malign and threatening magic on this earth, starting with Bakker.”
“And progressing to me?” I asked, guessing the answer.
Her eyes flashed, stayed for a second on mine; then looked away. “We’ll have to reassess our priorities when the time is right.”
“Religion has got corporate-speak?”
She smiled, just for a moment. “We find it easier to mention ‘issues’ than talk about the advancing horde of the evil masses.”
“And I’m currently not sending two hundred and forty standard mains volts into you for what reason?”
She ticked them off on her fingers. “One: you’re inquisitive. Two: I know you need allies and we” – a grin – “are very good at what we do. Three: any second now you’re going to wonder where your biker friend is and whether he’s all right, and I’m going to give you an answer that’s not entirely satisfactory from your point of view, yet really dead predictable. Four: there is still a part of you, Matthew Swift, that is human enough to give a damn, I think, about the entire killing thing in general. You didn’t kill San Khay.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“You wouldn’t have had the guts,” she replied. “The blue electric angels might have, but at the end of the day, you’re still in there being a coward. Did I miss anything?”
I shook my head, feeling small. “No,” I said. “I guess you didn’t.” With a sigh, “Where is Blackjack?”
“Is that his name?”
“It’s Dave really.”
“I see why he changed it.”
“Really? I don’t.”
“Should you ever get into the world of online fantasy gaming, Mr Swift, you will find, to your surprise, that Bob the Master of Arcane and Mystic Arts is a rare creature, and that Gary the Sacred Warrior of Eternal Might doesn’t buy so many potions of smiting when he goes shopping for his battle gear. You have no sense of style; your friend does.”
“You have him?” I asked. “And he’s not really a friend.”
“Yes.”
“Hurt him?”
“No.”
“Going to?”
“Perhaps. Do you care?”
We thought about it. I knew the answer, though I couldn’t find a reason for it. “Yes,” I sighed. “What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to kill Bakker,” she said with a bright, sucrose smile. “And I’m going to be there at every step, until you do.”
“And if I do?” I asked wearily. “What then?”
She stretched, slinging the rifle casually over her shoulder. “I’m sure we’ll work something out.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why bother? What’s your reason?”
“Did you miss the mission statement?”
“I think I understand what’s going on with the Order. You’re The X-Files meets the Jesuits meets the SAS, yes?”
She shrugged.
“What about you, Oda? Why are you the one standing there with the big sword, the nasty gun and the attitude?”
She thought about it for a moment, then looked me in the eye and said, “My brother is a murderer. He kills with magic. Is that enough, or shall I tell you of the light of God and the Truth of his Word?”
I shook my head. “No thank you. I think I’ve got the picture.”
“Excellent!” she exclaimed. “So! Did you have a plan?”
The bathroom was chipped and brown, the white tiles filled in with old crumbling cement where they’d cracked, the floor warping with thin plastic sounds of distress, the sink too small, the tap too low. I washed as best I could, and in the kitchen found a small tray of ice in a freezer containing nothing else but fish fingers and suspicious tubs of home-made dripping. I wrapped the ice cubes in a tea towel stained with tabasco, sat down on the floor and tried my very best to relax.
Oda was packing a small arsenal of weapons into a sports bag, utterly uninterested in my self-pitying looks as I moved the ice around various ugly, swollen areas of bruising on my face. I hadn’t been this hurt since I was fifteen and got into a fight at school; and that had ended by my accidentally sending fifty volts into the fist of my attacker, back when I hadn’t understood why the squirrels brought me nuts in the winter, or why the local fox didn’t run away when I found it digging through the bins.
I said, “The plan’s simple.”
“Well?”
“I intend to destroy the Tower.”
“We’re with you on that one; any bigger plans?”
“There were four people Sinclair identified as important in sustaining the Tower – San Khay, Guy Lee, Harris Simmons and…”
“Dana Mikeda, yes, I know.”
“Sinclair thought that by targeting those four you could undermine the Tower itself. San Khay is… Amiltech is a wreck. They won’t be able to provide proper security any more. Now I’m on to Guy Lee.”
“One down, three to go. Sure, I get that.”
“Oda?” I bit my lip. “There’s something I need to make clear now. If the Order or you so much as touch Dana Mikeda, I will show you just how Satanically inclined I can be.”
“I thought you might say that.” She shrugged. “No promises, not that vows mean anything to you. We’ll have to see how things play.”
I grimaced and tried not to think about large quantities of electricity. “So,” she said, with a thin smile, “Let’s talk about Guy Lee.”
Sinclair’s files were thorough, but not nearly as useful as they had been for San Khay. For a start, Guy Lee was not a man of nice, predictable habit. He had no fixed address, no family, no real friends and no consistent lovers. Even his driver, shepherding him across town night after night, was changed on a frequent but unpredictable basis. Khay had offered to provide Lee with personal security; rumour went that Lee just laughed and said he was better off dealing with his own affairs. Certainly, he was a man with many minions, and his interests spread from Enfield to Croydon across the whole sweep of the city – brothels in Soho, beggars in Holborn, street cleaners in Moorgate, thugs in Dagenham and racketeers in Acton.
He walked a fine line between reward and punishment – those who openly crossed him tended to be discovered nailed to a tree on Hampstead Heath, or a remnant of their bloated flesh would be picked out of the water at the Thames Barrier; those who served him faithfully might acquire a penthouse suite overlooking the river at Putney, or a town house in Knightsbridge, and were driven in cars with tinted, bulletproof windows, and doors that closed with a thump so heavy they might have been weighted with gold. You did not take the charity of Lee for granted, and more than a few lieutenants had found themselves hung upside down by parts of their own internal anatomy for crossing Lee’s will, his favour taken away as quickly as it had come.
Sinclair was a precise man who clearly disapproved of presenting things as fact when they were merely supposition. But as a best guess a marginal note in his file read: Lee can summon for his needs at least 143 men and women from within his own adherents to any place at any time.
Further down it added: Amiltech can provide support.
And last, scrawled in minute pencilled handwriting: He summons monsters.
I thought about the litterbug I’d run into on my first hour of reliving, and the craft and power that had gone into its creation.
All that Sinclair would say with certainty of Lee’s personal activities was that his day began at sunset and finished around sunrise. All night he would not stop moving for more than an hour, inspecting his investments, making sure that the right enchantments were being cast to ensnare the appropriate MP or CEO, punishing those who did not appreciate his power, and paying visits to those families honoured by his good graces, like a royal prince shaking hands with a foreign dignitary before flying on to the next negotiation. Sinclair loathed the boundary that Lee crossed: he was one of the few in the city cocky enough to use magic to achieve mundane political ends, and his minions could be found lurking around the edges of a dozen government committees and corporate boards. Magic didn’t change the scope of human ambition; just the means it used.
Outside his work, he didn’t seem to pursue any special pleasures – certainly, he might demand a meal of such a quality, or a woman for his bed, or such and such a drug – but the delivery of each thing was given out as a test of abilities, or loyalty. Rumour was that he would deliberately sup at the house of a man he did not trust and, despite the fear of poison, would eat every last morsel, while his host quaked with the dread of failing to satisfy.
One last rumour, unsubstantiated but interesting, related to Lee’s magical interests. In sum, the man was a magician – competent, no doubt, but a man who shaped the forces he controlled through learning, gesture, words – the traditional components of spells and spell-casting, rather than the less traditional arts such as sorcery. His magic was precise, neat, and highly competent. But a question arose over where he’d acquired these skills, since the forms taken by a lot of his magics were decidedly unwholesome. Enemies cursed by him were consumed from the inside out; those foolhardy enough to attack him tended to die choking on their own blood. There were even reports that some of his more unusual servants, as they moved around on their business, were never hotter nor colder than room temperature.
I didn’t like to say necromancy. It’s a messy art, not entirely without its uses but not for those with a weak stomach or who particularly care about personal hygiene. I could imagine Lee doing it.
“So your plan is…”
I foresaw Oda fast becoming even more of a pain.
“Allies. Khay was different, he was in the public eye. Lee is entirely below board; and this time, he’ll know I’m after him. Allies. Help.”
“You’ve got the Order.”
“I wasn’t about to call you an ally, as such.”
“Get used to the idea.”
“Whites.”
“Who are the Whites?”
“The Long White City Clan.”
“What are they?”
I smiled and stretched, getting up to put the remnants of my ice pack in the sink. “Artists.”
When I asked the Beggar King how to find the Whites, his answer had been short and to the point: the writing is on the wall.
“So what does that mean?” snapped Oda.
“Oda, has it ever occurred to you that if in the good old days ladies with bad skin and big hair drew mystic pentagrams and pointed stars on the walls with bits of old chalk, then the invention of spray-paint would only have enhanced this tendency?”
That evening, we found the first one sprayed onto the local launderette’s closed shutters in bold white and black: a frog with a huge snout and long, bulbous fingers. With one hand it stroked its beard, while the other pointed a curling finger towards the bus stop. On its head was a big top hat with the price still in it, $1.41, and in its mouth a fat, smoking cigar.
We followed the curved finger to the bus stop, Oda’s sports bag clanking with its weight of weaponry. When the 141 bus came, we rode it till we came to a rectangular, railed-in area of grass beneath huge plane trees floodlit in bright green, blue and purple. Oda snapped, “There!”, and we hurried to get off.
What she’d seen was a picture of a small girl with angel wings. It was painted on the side of a Unitarian chapel, beneath a dredge of less artful efforts making statements like DaN iS gAy! and C4D 4ever. The girl’s face was turned up, studying a large red balloon drifting upwards towards the shiny aluminium venting funnels of a patisserie next door; one small painted white hand reached up in vain for the trailing string.
Oda said, “Well?”
“Angel,” I replied, trying to sound more confident than I felt.
We took the first bus to the Angel. Outside the underground station we looked around for a few minutes, until I spotted a small black-and-white rat, painted below an ATM by the Bank of Scotland offices. It wore a long scarf, carried a suitcase and a bunch of rosemary wrapped in paper like it was a bouquet of roses; and its long black nose was twitching towards the south.
We followed the nose of the rat down to Rosebery Avenue, where we found a mock ATM painted in a walled-up window; from its money dispenser there emerged a huge mechanical arm, clutching in its claws a child. She was almost the image of the little angel-winged girl who’d lost her balloon, and held her hands to her mouth in a gesture of surprise.
The arm was gesturing towards Farringdon Road, so we walked down that wide, dull artery of traffic, until the yellow brick walls of a railway line grew up on one side and Oda said, “Swift.”
She was pointing at a hoarding covered with posters advertising bands, albums, low-budget films and desperate struggling magazines. In one corner was a small stencilled image of a train, forever looping in on itself, round and round until it swallowed its own tail, the carriages blending into each other.
Oda, who’d said almost nothing all evening, now asked, “Where does it want us to go?”
I groaned. “Circle line.”
“Circle line where?”
“Where isn’t the important part.”
“What does that mean?”
“Come on,” I said. “We need to buy a few things.”
I’d bought a book of sudoku, a biro, a packet of chewing gum and a small trashy romantic novel, placing them all with loving care in a single plastic shopping bag. At the local pub, I was now trying to convince the girl behind the bar that she wanted to serve me coffee, not beer, before Oda’s patience snapped.
“What are you doing?” Oda demanded, indicating the bag.
“Sacrifices.” I was secretly pleased that she’d asked before I’d been obliged to tell her, and felt determined to make her suffer for her curiosity.
“Sacrifices for what? Why aren’t we taking the Circle line and finding the Whites?”
“We’ve got to wait,” I replied.
“Why?”
“For the last train.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what the symbol means. It’s not just the Circle line; it’s the train that swallows itself again, travelling round and round forever, no stations, no stops – it’s not just ‘Go take the Circle line.’ It’s much more complicated. Sacrifices.” I waved the bag with the sudoku book.
“You are deliberately being cryptic,” she exclaimed. “Why?”
“Because I don’t like you.”
“On my word your friend’s life hangs. And yours,” she added, eyes narrowing.
“So you tell us,” we said. “It must frighten you, not being entirely sure what we will do next.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” she retorted, her voice cold and level. “You are a dead nothing, whatever forces you’ve made bargains with.”
“That’s not the point,” I said in my gentlest, most placating tone. “You are afraid of not being certain.”
“No.”
“If you say so.”
“You know nothing,” she added vehemently.
“I know that I want a coffee, and that beer would be a bad idea, all things considered.”
“Why? What’s so important about catching the last train?”
“I’d much rather let you work that out for yourself,” I said, and resumed trying to order coffee.
At 11.45 p.m. Oda and I walked down towards Farringdon station. The last train of the evening was written up on the board for six minutes past midnight, in blue marker pen. There weren’t many people waiting on the platform. Some late-night theatregoers lingered, in their pearls and smart suits, at a distance from a group of girls whose feet ached from having got lost hereabouts in the wrong kind of shoes. At the opposite end of the platform, pushed into a brick alcove by their passion, a couple of men soaked in sweat and hormones were engaged in the longest, loudest kiss we’d ever seen. I tried not to stare. We were fascinated.
A Metropolitan line train came, heading towards Baker Street, where, selfishly, it had decided to terminate; the girls got on it anyway, as did the theatregoers in their silk scarves. A Hammersmith and City line train didn’t do much better, giving up the ghost at Edgware Road, but that was clearly far enough for the two men, who, to the surprise of the polite Arab-looking couple sitting in the carriage amid piles of free daily newspapers strewn across the floor, resumed where they’d left off.
The indicator cleared itself of all but one more train – on the westbound Circle line, its destination picked out in bright orange dots. A group of young men and women ran onto the platform, giggling with the adrenalin of their own having-nearly-missed, until one of the girls, dressed almost entirely in cold pink skin and bra strap, was sick behind one of the benches. Oda scowled and looked away. The girl’s friends clustered around her, patting her, soothing, stroking her hair, and dabbing at the remnants of bile around her mouth until with a final heave she was empty, and sat down on the bench and started to cry. We felt a sudden burning in our face at the sight of it, which we could not understand or control, and it was only Oda’s cold expression that stopped us from sharing the girl’s distress.
At 12.09 a.m. precisely, the Circle line train rattled and wheezed into the station. Oda stood up quickly, slinging her bag onto her shoulder; but I caught her arm, pulling her back down. She said, “But the…”
“No. Not this one. The last train.”
“This is the…”
“Trust me.”
She hesitated, then reluctantly sat back down. The girls and boys staggered onto the train, which with a clunk and a beeping of door alarms slammed its carriages shut and, engine whirring with a rising pitch, rattled its way out of the station. It passed the graffiti on the opposite wall: long, incomprehensible names made entirely of angles, and doodles in green paint. By a board showing you where to go for trains to Luton, someone had drawn a pair of closed black-and-white eyes, each eyelash ending in a long Egyptian curve.
After a moment Oda said, “You’ve got a plan, sorcerer?”
I nodded as, above us, the indicator board swept itself clean with a single orange asterisk, and didn’t display any more messages. I stood up, and walked down the platform past signs for
“Sensational!!!”
Bollywood Romance – a Love Story for Our Time!
“The Most Amazing Thing I’ve Ever Seen!!” – News of the World
“Astonishing!” – Time Out
and further down.-.-.
The new voice of now! – Love and Lost – a heart-breaking album to inspire a generation.
When I reached the end of the platform, I pushed back the swinging “Danger! Do not cross!” sign, ducked past the array of mirrors to show the parked train driver the platform’s length, and followed the narrowing, dirty concrete slope of the platform down towards the ballast and electric spice of the line. I could taste the thick, smoky dirt of the tunnel on the end of my tongue, the dryness of it in the air; I could feel the buzz of thousands of volts in the track beside me, feel the cold wind of the last train’s passage still being pumped through the tunnel, fading into the heavy heat of the motionless underground. With my back pressed against the rough, black wall bursting with coils of cabling that hummed even through their once-coloured plastic sheaths, I slipped down onto the narrow remainder of the platform’s edge, into the darkness.
Oda stared at me from the light of the platform itself with undisguised surprise and distaste. “What are you doing?”
“Oda,” I said, “when Hunger came looking for us at Bond Street station, do you really think he would have left you alive? Do you honestly believe he would not have drunk your blood as well, just to see if it tasted the same as the sweat on your skin as you died? Trust me. Please.” I held out a hand to her. Scowling, she pushed past the “Danger!” sign, picking her way down until she squatted next to me. She was straining, I noticed, to avoid the bulky snake of cables locked into the wall, even as her eyes swerved uneasily to the electric rail. In that darkness, we had no space, and we could feel the heat of her proximity on our skin, a strange, living warmth in the stale gloom of the tunnel’s edge. We stared at her, curious and unashamed, until, glancing up, she saw our eyes on her and quickly looked away, muttering, “Jesu preserve us.”
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“I can see them in the dark.”
“What?”
“Your eyes. Like a cat’s – they reflect blue.”
“It was an almost perfect resurrection,” we hazarded.
She spat into the dark. Her spit fizzed off the live rail.
I said, “I can’t help… it’s not… sorry.”
She glanced up again, then away before I could see anything but the question in her face. “What are we doing here, exactly?”
“Waiting for the guard to inspect the platform.”
She only grunted in response, and we felt the heat of her breath tickle our skin again, like the brush of dying sparks.
We didn’t have to wait long. The guard came, muttering into his radio, a few minutes after the last train had left. He walked briskly along the platform’s edge, picking up bits of litter with a prong on the end of a plastic stick, opened up the vending machine, took the day’s coins and filled it with tomorrow’s old, overpriced chocolate and cans of drink. That took us nearly ten minutes of sitting, huddled in the darkness at the edge of the platform, trying to limit the sound of our own breaths.
When he finished, he turned the lights down, so that the entire place was washed with a low pinkish-orange neon glow rising up from behind the benches, reflecting strangely off the glass panels of the advertising boards. I heard the clattering of the iron gate at the front of the station being drawn shut. At my side Oda whispered, “Enough?”
I nodded.
She scrambled back up the platform, hastily moving away from me and self-consciously brushing the dirt off her clothes. I looked up at the dead indicator board and said, “We just have to wait now.”
“Wait for what?” she groaned.
“You wanted to be part of this so badly you had to attack me and kidnap a man,” I said, surprised at how calm I sounded. “Now you just watch and learn.”
I sat down on a bench, wrapping my dirty coat around me against the cold and sudden stillness of the place, and waited. Oda paced, jaw set in a tight, angry line. I tried to judge the minutes by the length of her walk – four progressions back and forth seemed to equal roughly a minute. My eyes felt heavy, my skin hot and tired, my hair dirty and my stomach full of lead. I let my head hang down, although we stayed on edge, ears more alert even as our eyelids fell, and drifted. We heard the drip of a water pipe and the distant rumble of a bus somewhere overhead. Our senses drifted without thinking into those of a mouse scuttling along by the electrified rail, sniffing out discarded food. We enjoyed the sensitivity of its nose, twitching it and feeling our entire face change shape slightly with that movement, and the sensitivity of our whiskers as they picked up on the reverberation of Oda’s walking, like each footstep was the last hum of a ringing bell left in the air.
“Sorcerer!”
Her voice frightened the mouse, so I let its mind go and quickly looked up. Oda’s face was a garish pinky-orange in the light of the platform, and her eyes were turned up towards the indicator board. In large orange letters, it read:
“1) Circle line via KingsX – 2 mins”
And nothing more.
For a moment we both looked at it, then Oda said, “Is this a spell of yours?”
“No.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s the last train,” I explained gently. “The real last train. It’s… like the Beggar King, or the Bag Lady.”
“This means nothing,” she snapped, and the anger meant there was fear too – fear of magic in general, or the train itself; I couldn’t be sure.
I struggled with the words. “Some ideas are more than just random moments of good inspiration. Some ideas become real whether you mean them or not.”
“So what… idea is it that’s due here in two minutes?”
“The train that doesn’t ever stop travelling,” I said. “That goes round and round the Circle line forever.”
A cold wind on my face, from the end of the tunnel, a smell of dirty deep underground. We breathed it in, deeply.
“That’s absurd.”
“For a woman who has dedicated her life to the eradication of mystic forces, you have a very limited comprehension of what you’re dealing with.” A distant growing te-dum, te-dum, te-dum. The hairs on my scalp twitched with the coldness rising up and tickling my skin; the track itself gave a creak of added strain. I got to my feet, picking up my small plastic bag of sudoku, biro and chewing gum.
“And this train…” she said, struggling to keep the fear out of her voice, “this will take us to the Whites?”
“The Whites should already know we’re coming,” I said.
“How?”
I pointed across the other side of the platform. By the board telling you how to get a train to Luton, the pair of painted-on black-and-white Egyptian eyes, with their long curves and deep, stylised quality, were now open. Their black pupils and grey-flecked irises stared right at us.
Oda followed my gaze. She stammered, “It’s not a trick of the mind.”
“No.”
“Is what you do always like this, sorcerer?”
“No. But if it was, life would be perfection,” we said. We walked towards the edge of the platform, toes peeking over the edge of the yellow “Do Not Cross” line. In the tunnel at the other end of the station, a pair of dull white lights appeared, like the eyes of a hunting cat, glowing bigger and bigger out of the darkness. As they emerged, so did the dim light of a driver’s compartment, empty except for a black shadow of no definable features. Growing with the sound of the rattling, hissing, spitting wheels as they threw up fat blue sparks across the ballast of the track and with the shrieking of brakes like the final breath of a dying banshee, the last train pulled up onto the platform of Farringdon station, and opened its doors.
The last train had once been white, but its paintwork was stained off-grey with neglect and age, and its surface scratched and tainted with brown bubbling rust. Its windows were almost impossible to see through, they were so scratched and criss-crossed with messages scoured into them. The doors, when they opened, did so with a scrape like fingernails down a blackboard, as rust edged over rust. Looking into the dim yellow glow of the carriages, I saw no passengers, just a slatted floor stained black by trodden-in chewing gum, and scattered with the remnants of old newspapers that drifted like feathers in a breeze. The seat covers were so thin, you could see the stuffing beneath, where it hadn’t already spilled out; the glass on the emergency alarm was cracked and looked like it might fall out of its holder at any moment; and the fabric straps hanging from the support poles in the ceiling swayed gently by themselves after the train had stopped. At either end of the carriage the windows were open wide, and the place hummed with ventilation rising from behind the battered seats.
Oda said, “This is what I think they meant by Satanic inclination.”
“You haven’t even given it a go,” I said. “Think of how small the human race would be if people didn’t give such inclinings a chance.”
I stepped cautiously up into the carriage, and when nothing happened, I turned and faced her, still standing uncertainly on the platform. “You trusted me at Bond Street,” I said, holding out my hand. “Trust me now.”
“Is it… necessary?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She took my hand; she stepped up into the carriage. Almost immediately, the doors started to wail, a high-pitched, shrilling, too-loud sound that made me wince away, as with a heavy, final bang, they slammed shut. The train jerked sharply, and started to move. I wrapped my hand into one of the fabric loops drooping down from the ceiling and said, “I have a confession.”
“What?” she asked, as the train slowly picked up speed with a low whine.
“I’ve never taken the last train before.”
“Why not?”
“It’s easy to get lost.”
She grunted, then nearly lost her footing as with another jerk, the train accelerated more sharply, the warm glow of the platform vanishing as we hit the tunnel. She dropped her bag and wrapped her hands quickly round a pole in the middle of the carriage, pressing herself against it for support as we picked up speed. The wind from the open window at the far end of the carriage tore past us and away as we ploughed into the darkness, pulling at hair and clothes until my coat snapped like a flag in a gale. I saw the pale red and yellow shades of the dirty cabling outside the window draw apart as tracks joined, split, widened; then saw the cables disappear entirely, the light from inside the carriage falling on, as far as I could tell, nothing at all, no texture outside, not even the curve of a black wall, just blackness itself. The lights flickered in the ceiling and for a moment, in each intermittent flash, the carriage wasn’t empty, but I was standing pressed in shoulder-to-shoulder with a hundred grey faces, featureless, with perhaps the hint of a hat here or the suggestion of a baby’s buggy there, blocking up the doorway, pressed in so tight that for that moment I could barely breathe and the heat of it burnt down to my bones, before the lights shuddered again and the carriage was cold and empty, the wind driving at our faces like each particle held microscopic knives, and a grudge to make it worse.
Oda screamed over the roar, “Do you have any idea what you’re doing?”
“Give it a minute!” I shouted back.
A flash of light outside, and for a second I saw the walls of Kings Cross St Pancras underground station – but only a second, and we made no attempt to stop; the entire length of the platform was gone by in the time it took to draw a breath. Newspapers billowed around my knees, old crunched-up drinks cans and hamburger packets rolled down the carriage as we picked up yet more speed, and when I tried to lift my foot, the chewing gum glooped and tugged my ankle back down, so only with a great physical wrench could I get free of its hold.
When the stop came, it came so fast and so hard that it threw me to the floor, and tossed Oda hard against the cracked glass panel dividing a row of seats from the door space. I picked myself up onto my knees, ancient black gum clinging to my palms, and looked round. We were still moving, I realised; I could feel the hum of the engines through the floor and hear the high-pitched whine of the ventilation and the electric belly of the train pushing power into the wheels, but it was no longer the heady drive of our first acceleration. Now, with the lights steady and low, the carriage was no longer empty.
Shadows, semi-transparent forms, filled every seat and every corner of the carriage. A grey, faceless woman rocked a silent grey sleeping baby; a grey, faceless man bopped to his silent music, its thin grey wires flapping around his head as he moved. A man in a bowler hat made way for an old woman with a walking stick; a family with big touristlike bags on wheels shuffled deeper into the carriage as a woman struggled to position a ’cello against the far wall. They weren’t ghosts – ghosts have faces, expressions, sounds, reasons – these were utterly silent, anonymous, forgettable faces that had been forgotten, their features melted into each other to leave nothing but a blank shadow. I looked out of the window and saw only the glowing straight lines of railway tracks, dozens of them, hundreds, on either side, stretching away in parallel, polished steel glowing on the top, black rusted metal beneath, spread out on either side of us like lanes on a motorway, as far as the eye could see before they faded into the inevitable darkness.
Oda crawled up painfully from where she’d fallen, shaking her head when I offered her a hand, and whispered, “What is this?”
“The train needs passengers,” I replied, turning to let a shadow of a man in a baggy jacket with a prominent beard push by me towards the carriage door, where he grabbed a fabric handle with fingers no thicker than mist, swaying gently with the quiet, steady rhythm of the train, te-dum. Te-dum. Te-dum.
“Are they… alive?”
“In a sense. They go everywhere in the underground, all the time, forever; they’re part of it, like its memory.”
“That doesn’t sound alive to me.”
“They are like us,” we said. “They are what comes when you put so much life into one place. They are everywhere and nowhere, they came into existence when the first people gasped at the wonder of this new way of travelling, and marvelled at it, and they will only die when the last train closes its doors, and no one remembers that there ever was a railway underground. That is to say, not for a very long time. We are the same.”
“Wonderful,” she hissed between her teeth.
I grinned. “Not even slightly afraid?” I asked.
She glared.
I opened up my bag of goodies and pulled out the sudoku book. All heads turned in the carriage; dozens of empty eyes fixed on us. I waited until I was sure I had their attention, then, still kneeling down, I put it on the floor of the carriage. I laid the biro on top of it, the romantic novel next to it, unwrapped the chewing gum package so the top button of white gum was visible, and stepped back. The shadows drifted towards us, the shape of a fat lady in a big dress rising up from her seat, the image of a girl with a heavy rucksack moving down towards us, the ghostlike form of an old bent man. They huddled towards the pile, reaching out for it. As they advanced I pushed Oda gently back, until we were both pressed into the doorway. The shadows grew thicker and thicker around the sacrificed goods on the carriage floor, flooding in; and still more came, until there were at least two dozen figures occupying barely a square foot between them, their forms blending into a dark, opaque mass. The books, biro and gum became obscured by a churning mass of almost-solid-looking shapes, from which the occasional ghostly head or shadow arm would emerge, before sinking back into the mêlée.
When the shadows emerged again, pulling themselves clear, each drifted back to where they’d been without a sound or a backward look. Where they had congregated, there was nothing left on the floor but a scrap of chewing gum wrapper, and a torn page of a sudoku book, all the numbers filled in with neat blue biro.
Oda opened her mouth to speak, and the train jerked, nearly sending us flying again. She clung on to a handle and shouted over the roar of the accelerating engine, “What happened there?”
“It’s a sacrifice,” I yelled back as we began to sway and bounce along the tracks. “You sacrifice what they most desire!”
“A sudoku book?”
“Something anonymous, occupying, something to do so you don’t have to look at the rest of the train – yes, a sudoku book and a trashy novel! That’s what you do on the underground!”
Another wrench as we built up speed. For a moment, as we rounded a corner, I could see the other carriages curving away for ever into the darkness, before the line straightened again and they vanished. Sparks flew up from the wheels and flashed across the windows; the lights in the carriage faltered and one or two burst, with a pop and a puff of smoke. The rising and falling darkness raised and banished the shadow figures, so that one second the carriage was full, the next empty, with each dimming of the lights. Outside, for a second, another train rushed by, with a roar and a scream and the thumpthumpthumpthump of air trapped and pounded by the passage of so much metal – I saw a man reading a newspaper, a woman doing her knitting – before the image of the train was snatched away from us again and there was just the darkness and the reflection of our own faces in the scratched glass. We laughed out loud as the sparks splashing up from the wheels rose up around the windows in a blinding backwards waterfall, filling the darkness with electric pops that made the carriage burn with whiteness and the air hum with electricity, obscuring our view and rising up so high and so bright that we had to turn our eyes away and squeeze them shut against their radiance.
The sparks drifted down with the tone of the engine as we began another sharp deceleration. The shock of it knocked me sideways, banging into Oda as her grip slipped from the handle. I caught her instinctively as she staggered across the carriage with the declining movement of the train, and held her tightly by the arm while the sheet of fire outside our window faded, and the lights became dull and normal, the shadows receded down to nothing and, once again, outside I saw the flash of dirt-covered cabling.
Then came a dimly lit platform: neglected concrete and old beige tiles. We came to a halt and, clunking, the carriage doors opened. I stepped out into the cold air of the platform; Oda picked up her sports bag and, with an unsteady step, followed me. Behind us, the carriage doors slammed shut, and the train rattled away.
I looked around for a sign, and saw one: Aldwych.
I laughed. Oda said, “I’m glad you found that funny.”
“Live a little,” I replied. “Welcome to Aldwych station.”
“I’ve never heard of Aldwych station.”
“It’s a closed station. It used to be on the Piccadilly line.”
“Then how did we get here?”
“Are you really going to ask such inane questions all the time? Mystic bloody forces; just accept them and cope!”
There was a polite cough from the other end of the platform. Oda’s hand flew to her bag. I said, “Hello.”
There were three of them, a man and two women. They stood in the entrance to the platform, underneath an old-fashioned sign of a black metal hand with an outstretched finger, below which was the word “Exit”. They had guns. They weren’t smiling. “Evening,” said one of the women, stepping forward. “Were you wanting to see us?”
They took Oda’s bag. That made her angry but at least she coped without shouting. They took my satchel. I said nothing, and wished I had deeper pockets.
Then they blindfolded us and, with a hand on our arm, took us walking. By the gentle rumbling through my feet and the hot, heavy nature of the air, we didn’t go above ground. Besides, our senses were tingling, picking up a low, familiar buzz, a texture to the air between our fingers that seemed… enticing, and which grew with every passing second.
We walked, I estimated, for nearly ten minutes. At one point the smell of the sewers – congealed fat and diluted waste – hit my senses; at another I walked in the company of the rats, watching through their eyes as they scuttled in the dark ten paces behind us, until one of the people escorting us heard the pattering of their claws, and shooed them away with a violent shout in their case, and a clip across the back of the head in mine – not painful nor particularly threatening, but a warning enough that they guessed why the rats were so interested. Our footsteps echoed, and the air grew thicker. So did the taste of magic in that place, a heavy texture as if the breeze passing through my fingers when I moved were liquid, not gas, and as if the floor were covered with treacle, which clung to my feet when I moved.
As we walked, I heard the opening and shutting of several heavy metal doors or gates, and the clicking of many locks. The overall trend seemed level – what few steps up we took were counteracted by a similar number leading back down, so that I imagined we couldn’t be much higher than the Piccadilly line itself by the time we reached our destination. When we arrived, we knew the place at once, familiar to us even from the outside, and I had to struggle not to laugh.
The place where they took off our blindfolds was close, gloomy, made of concrete – concrete walls, floor, ceiling, once a uniform pale beige, now inclining to grey – and full of giant, silent old pieces of machinery. There were banks and banks of it, cables drooping from the monoliths of their bulk, wires sagging and exposed, bulbs off and rust beginning to creep onto the exposed circuit boards inside their slotted structures. But still you could see these were, undeniably, the remnants of a telephone exchange. We could sense, even now, the humming of the place, the clatter of its underground workings – though, by the look of it, many years had passed since the place had been put to its original use.
What had been put to use, however, were the floors, walls and even parts of the ceiling, which were vividly covered with paint. Swirls of colour, messages in orange, blue, purple, pink, images of watching eyes, scampering rats, elves in fancy clothes, creatures fictional and real and some who walked the fine line in between, caricatures of politicians, images of images done in mock-graffito style – here a Rembrandt, reproduced with all the characters playing poker rather than watching the potatoes boil, there a Monet where all the faces were reproduced as beady-eyed ferrets jostling each other in their frilly dresses – if there was any space at all, someone had filled it with paint. The floors glowed with it, the ceiling dripped it, the walls ran with it. The place looked like a psychedelic nightmare, an LSD trip gone wrong, down in the remnants of the Kingsway Telephone Exchange.
They took us into a room whose walls were variations on a theme of purple – purple tower blocks melting into violet flowers that curled around maroon caterpillars squirming their way around lavender bushes that themselves melted into tower blocks again, whose lights described little faces peering out from the rectangular frames of their windows. A heavy iron door, with the words “Committee Room” in old-fashioned lettering, was slammed behind us, and locked. At the far end of the room, someone had left an old mattress stained a suspicious brown, and a bucket.
Oda said, “Is this part of your plan, sorcerer?”
I sat down – not on the mattress – yawned and said, “It’s fine for now.”
“In what way is this ‘fine’?”
“You’re not dead, I’m not dead, they haven’t killed us, we haven’t killed them, it’s fine,” I replied. “If I was a White being pursued by the Tower for nonconformity and antsiness, I’d be iffy about strangers too. I suggest you get a bit of sleep and try not to worry.”
“I won’t sleep in this place,” she answered, pacing across the room and scowling.
“Why not?”
“It’s horrific.”
I stared at her in surprise. “Why?”
“They’ve painted enchantments into the walls, sorcerer! How can you sleep, knowing that?”
I looked round the room at the swirling landscape. “We think it’s beautiful,” we said. “Tire yourself out if you must; I’m going to sleep.”
With that I pulled my coat up around my shoulders, tucked my knees into my chest, rolled onto my side, closed my eyes, and was quickly asleep. My dreams were all purple.
They woke us – there was no way to tell when: day, night, we had nothing to go on – and took us down the corridors, past a reinforced iron door and into a room with a large round table and a single suspended light. A woman was seated there with her red-booted feet up on the table, examining her nails. Her hair was black, and heavy quantities of make-up made her eyelashes seem to stretch on for ever; the corners of her eyes were painted with the long curving lines I’d seen in the Egyptian eyes at Farringdon station. Her lips were black, her skin was pale, her nails were painted bright blue and her clothes were all leather, studs and chains. She said, not looking up as we entered, “I haven’t got much time, so let’s get it over with.”
Oda’s bag of weapons stood in the corner, opened and rummaged; at the sight of such disdain for her equipment, Oda’s face darkened.
“OK,” I said, sitting down where indicated by one of the people who’d brought us here. “Briefly – I’m a sorcerer, and this lady here represents a truly vile and unimaginative group of idiots who may prove useful. I’ve got a grudge against the Tower; I was responsible for the campaign against Amiltech, although not for Khay’s death; Dudley Sinclair recruited me to an alliance of people cooperating against the Tower, including bikers, warlocks, fortune-tellers and bag ladies; the Beggar King told me how to find you; I’m told that you and Guy Lee are locked in a bitter and losing battle. Would you like my help, and will you help me?”
The woman flicked the end of one of her nails and didn’t look at me. “I’ll think about it,” she said. “Thanks for asking.”
She nodded airily at the wall, and our guards pulled us back up by the elbows and led us from the room, back to our purple prison.
With the door locked again, Oda stared at me in horror. “What was that?” she asked, in a voice too calm to be what it seemed.
I sat back down in my corner. “Personally, I thought it went rather well.”
More meaningless time.
No one had told me that vengeance could be so boring.
They fed us sandwiches – spam and stale bread, with tea in chipped mugs. We ate, curious to see if spam was as bad as I remembered it, and were satisfied to find that it was. Oda ate nothing; so, just to make sure, we ate hers.
Oda started doing push-ups in a corner.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I have to stay fit,” she replied.
“For what?”
She glared at me. When she’d done fifty push-ups, she switched, and did fifty sit-ups. I felt tired just watching her.
When there had been what I guessed was a whole no-night and a long no-day, Oda said, “You know, if I don’t make regular calls, they start cutting bits off the biker, Blackjack.”
I groaned and stood up from my corner. “Right!” I snapped. “Fine. Everyone’s expecting this so why don’t I just bloody get on with it?”
“Bored?” she asked, raising one cocky eyebrow.
I glared, marched up to the iron door and hammered on it. “You talk to me right now!” I shouted. “Or I swear I will fry everything in bloody sight and lots of stuff besides!”
When there was no answer, I gave them a count of thirty seconds, then stood back. “Right,” I muttered. I pressed my ear against the door, half-closed my eyes, and started murmuring the guiding, meaningless sounds of an opening spell, whispering imploring noises into the iron, coaxing the touch of my breath all the way down to the lock, stroking it with my fingertips like you might caress a frightened kitten, wishing I had my set of blank keys from my satchel to make life easier. Purple paint bubbled and hissed on the walls; the tower blocks swayed, the lavender bushes whispered in the wind, little faces of office lights blinked uneasily at us from the surface of the walls; until, eventually, with a reluctant snap, the lock came open.
I pushed the door back. There was no one in the long, gloomy corridor, but also no rats I could hijack for a little scouting. There was, however, a lot of electricity around. I said to Oda, “If I ask you to keep out of my way, you’ll just make a hollow laughing sound, am I right?”
“You give me more credit for humour than I deserve,” she replied. I wasn’t entirely surprised.
I held up my fingers and started dragging the electricity out of the walls, wrapping it round my hand, my wrists, wreathing it up my arms and around my neck like a scarf, letting it drape down my back in a mass of angry worms of lightning, feeling it wriggle across my chest and make my hair stand on end. When I had enough of it in my grasp that my blood ached with the pressure of it, and my eyes stung from the closeness of its heat to my face, I started marching down the corridor. Oda followed at a tactful distance. As we walked, the paintings very gently turned to watch us.
I chuckled.
“What’s so funny?”
“They’re watching,” I said.
“Who’s watching?”
“The Whites.”
“Why?”
“I’m not entirely sure. Come on. This way.”
“How do you know?”
“We know this place from the inside, from the old days.”
“What do you mean?”
“It used to be a telephone exchange. We would come and play here, when the lines weren’t so busy. Remember – trust me!”
“You try, one day,” she retorted. I grinned and kept walking.
When we ran into the first guard, he had a fireman’s axe in one hand, took one look at us, and ran straight for us. I threw a handful of electricity on instinct, and that knocked him back, but, to our surprise, didn’t do anything more. He charged again, mouth open and face twisted with rage – it occurred to me that, for an angry running man, he made almost no sound. So I lowered my hands and waited, while the electricity popped angrily between my fingers. Oda leapt forward to push me aside, but at the last instant, when the axe was an inch from striking, the man stopped, wobbled, and shattered into a thousand spatters of paint, which quickly wiggled their way into the concrete. “Illusions,” I said.
“You seem to be enjoying yourself,” she replied, self-consciously flicking bubbles of paint off the back of her hand.
“I think I understand what’s going on.”
“Perhaps you can explain it to me.”
“I think the whole thing is a bloody inane test.”
“A test?”
“To see if we’re really any use whatsoever.”
“‘Use’?” she echoed with disdain.
“Are you just going to repeat select parts of what I say?”
“I just wish to remove any hint of cryptic mystery you’re attempting to push.”
I sighed. “In the good old days you said, ‘Hello, I’m a sorcerer and this is what I want’ and people bloody listened. But these days… I guess Bakker has given the profession a bad name.”
I relaxed, turning my fingers towards the floor, and slowly let the electricity on my skin make its way to earth, tickling its way down my legs, across my feet and into the concrete.
“If I understand you, is that wise?” she asked, watching the last sparks die.
“Bollocks if I’m going to play their games,” I replied. “We have too much we need to do.” I raised my head and shouted down the corridor, “All right, you’ve had your fun, you’ve seen what we’re up to. Now either you cut this crap right now or I’ll bring the bloody street down on your head, and don’t think I’m not in the mood.”
“Can you do that?” asked Oda quietly.
I dropped my voice again. “Oda, even if I was inclined to tell you the extent of my abilities, do you really think now is the time for an academic exploration of the subject?”
“You were saying?” she asked, lifting her eyebrows and smiling a sickly smile.
“Oh, right, yes.” I raised my voice again. “I mean it! We talk right now or everything goes fucking mythic. Right now!”
From the far end of the corridor a petulant voice said, “Oh, all right, sorcerer, you’ve made your point. Jesus, it’s not like we wanted the sermon on the fucking mount.”
I grinned at Oda. “Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”
We ended up back in the room with the round table. She said her name was Vera and she was, she coldly informed us, the mostly properly elected head of the Long White City Clan, and proud of it.
“What’s a mostly properly elected head?” I asked.
“It’s generally accepted that if there was an election, I’d win,” she answered, with a dazzling tight smile. “So I figure – why bother?” She sat down, stretching out a pair of legs clad in more tight leather than it seemed circulation could bear, and said casually, “So, you really are a sorcerer. I wasn’t sure.”
“You could have bloody asked,” I said. “No one these days seems interested in just asking.”
“I thought it’d be more telling to see what you did on your own initiative,” she replied. “And I figured… if you were out to get us we would have been got quicker. Sorry about the sandwiches. Would you like something better?”
“Not hungry,” said Oda, in a voice like icebergs creaking in a high sea.
“I wouldn’t mind,” I answered. “But I would like to know – why the theatrics?”
“We have to be careful; the Clan is under siege. Guy Lee has promised to destroy every trace of us, and is throwing around a lot of money and a lot of threats.”
“So you lock up anyone who comes to say hello?”
“Until we can find out some more information about them. For example, in the day and a half we’ve had you here…”
“Day and a half?” echoed Oda incredulously.
“Yes.” Statement, matter-of-fact; this was not a woman used to remorse or even polite social embarrassments. “I’ve learnt that you” – one long, pointed finger uncurled luxuriously in my direction – “are almost certainly Matthew Swift, sorcerer, ex-corpse, formerly a cleaner for Lambeth Borough Council and…”
“You were a cleaner in Lambeth?”
“I needed the money,” I said.
“You cleaned?” Oda couldn’t have looked more surprised if she’d been told that I’d built the pyramids in my spare time.
“… and the chosen and favoured apprentice of Robert James Bakker,” Vera concluded with an irritated exhalation, her moment of revelation spoilt.
“That’s all true enough,” I admitted. “Although again – you need only have asked.”
“Can’t be too certain.”
“How did you find out?”
“It wasn’t too hard; sorcerer, living and not in a mental home, ostensibly not working for the Tower, grudge against Bakker. Amiltech in pieces, Khay dead, no one to blame and a rumour going round that Bakker’s apprentice is back, with a serious grudge against the master. Just needed to match up some photos and sweet-talk a few filing clerks, to get the proof.”
I shrugged; there didn’t seem much use denying it.
“Heard you were dead.”
I shrugged again.
“Good recovery,” she added, eyeing me up for a reaction.
“Thanks.” I didn’t feel like offering her anything more.
A moment while she waited; it passed, she moved on. “As for you” – another finger uncurled at Oda – “I have no idea who you are or what you want, and that bothers me.”
Oda tilted her chin proudly and said, “You cross me and mine, and you die.”
“Don’t give her any credit for humour,” I agreed quickly. “She really does believe all that.”
“Quaint. Who are you?”
Oda glanced at me. I said, “Give her the bad news.”
“I belong to the Order.”
“Never heard of you.”
Oda smiled thinly. “That’s how good we are.”
Vera hesitated, then a slow, nasty smile spread across her face. “I see.”
“We can help you destroy Bakker.”
“Charming of you. Where’s the catch?”
“I need to make a phone call,” said Oda flatly.
“Tough,” retorted Vera, eyes flashing.
“Please let her make the phone call,” I said wearily, “she’ll be insufferable until she does.”
“Why should I?”
“Because she’s a member of the Order, an evil group of unimaginative people who are holding an acquaintance of mine hostage against my good behaviour, and I’d like him to survive long enough to join you and to join me in helping bring down Bakker and all his works. How does that sound?”
“What kind of sorcerer are you?” chuckled Vera, doing her best to look unimpressed. “A reasonable one. I know that I can’t fight Lee alone, not now he knows I’m coming; I know that I need your help. Will you help us?” To my surprise, Vera grinned. “When you put it like that, sorcerer, we may have grounds to talk.”
Oda got her phone call, and I got a tour of the Kingsway Telephone Exchange.
“It’s built to survive a nuclear attack,” explained Vera as we wandered through the bland, tight tunnels. “Nuclear attack didn’t happen so they used it as a telephone exchange. You could come down here at seven in the morning and go out nine hours later; and in winter it’d still be dark, the entire day gone, poof, just like that. Time loses its meaning away from the sunlight.”
“What are you doing down here?” I asked as we drifted through the endless corridors of psychedelic paint. “Why’s the Clan here?”
“We used to be in White City – that’s where our name came from. Then they demolished our home in order to build this new shopping mall, and by then, Guy Lee had decided we were a pain. Harris Simmons has fifteen million invested in the shopping mall – tell you something? Fingers in every pie. The Clan picks up lost magicians – kids who don’t understand that the things they draw are coming alive, voodoo artists possessed by the spirits, enchanters who can’t control their own creations – we look after our own, make sure that the word doesn’t get out about what we do, keep the authorities out of our hair.”
“What makes you better than Lee?” I asked.
“In the grand scheme, I suppose not much. Our members will still steal, bewitch, bedazzle and charm when they need to, in order to profit or survive. We have a lot of strays to look after; you mustn’t be surprised that some of them bite. Prostitutes who are not afraid of a cantrip for temporary beauty, thieves who sometimes find that it is useful to be more than just a metaphorical shadow – these things happen, you live with it. But we don’t nail people to trees if they break our rules. And we don’t rape the women who don’t obey us when we order them to cast a spell. And we don’t torture the fortune-tellers who refuse to give us money, and we don’t experiment on the plucked-out eyes of the seers to see if we can leech away any of their sight, and we don’t poison beggars with heroin so we can ride their trip without the drugs in our blood, or sacrifice human flesh to the spirits of a place for their good favour, or cast impenetrable glamours enriched with the blood of children to make our whores seem more beautiful, even the pig-ugly ones. And we don’t like to talk with the dead. They tell you things that are sometimes best not heard. Is that what you wanted to hear, sorcerer?”
“I was hoping for something in shining armour, but thanks for the run-down,” I said.
“You’re welcome. So, Lee doesn’t like us. He thinks we’re treading on his toes. He wants things from us.”
“What sort of things?”
“Money. Services. Snitching. We’ve got a lot of contacts and he doesn’t like rivals. And he’s tough – there’s an army out there who’ll follow him, and more just waiting at the Tower to do his word. He likes to have control. Whites don’t like to be controlled. It’s only going to get shittier. Although, with Amiltech kinda fucked…”
“It’ll recover,” I sighed. “Sure, it’s bad, it looks bad, but Amiltech will always recover while the Tower’s around.”
“Even though San Khay is dead?” she asked quickly.
I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t kill him. Let’s get this sorted right here, right now. I didn’t kill him.”
“Pity,” she sighed. “Why not? I would have.”
“Someone else got there first.”
She waited.
I said nothing more.
She shrugged. “Fine. OK. So Amiltech are fucked for now – that’s a good thing. What can you do for me?”
“I can help you against Lee.”
“How?”
“I can get you some help.”
“Warlocks, bikers and religious psycho-bitches? Thanks; I’d rather take my chances.”
“The Beggar King too.”
“And you of course!” Mocking doubt bit acid into her voice. “Our own pet sorcerer, hand-trained by the man sitting at the top of the Tower.”
“Bakker is my enemy too.”
“Yeah. I heard he might be. Why can you get me all this help, when no one’s given a fuck until now?”
I considered the reasons, ticked them off on my fingers. “One: I’m a sorcerer, and I’m told that right now, that’s a bit of a novelty. Two: Sinclair has already laid the groundwork for this, I’m just finishing it off. Three: I was Bakker’s apprentice. His chosen pupil, surrogate brat kid, spoilt adopted fucking son. You’re scared of him? Be scared of me too. Four…”
We hesitated.
“Four?”
I thought about the telephone exchange, looked into the bright knife-edge of Vera’s gaze, bit back our words. “Never mind about four,” I said quickly. “It’s not important, yet.”
She grunted, half-shook her head. “OK. Whatever. There’s something else I need to ask you, though.”
“Ask, then.”
“You heard how so many sorcerers died? About Awan, Akute, Patel…”
I nodded.
“Good. Then you’ll know the basics. A creature that can’t be killed, that delights in the death of its enemies, that kills Bakker’s enemies, that can’t be stopped and…”
“I stopped it. Ask Oda. I held it back.”
“How?”
“It was just temporary, a spell – but it came looking for us, and didn’t succeed. Not this time.”
“You know about this creature? Can you kill it?” She spoke quickly, eager – afraid. “Kill it and you’ll have a bargain.”
She knew about Hunger.
Better – she knew enough about it to be afraid.
That, I could respect.
“I think I can kill it,” I said. “But I need to see Bakker first.”
“Well, that’s a problem, since I’m imagining you’re not his favourite person right now and the guy’s as hard to find as El bloody Dorado.”
“You misunderstand. I think, to kill it, I’ll have to kill him.”
“Why?”
I lowered my voice. “You keep a secret?”
“No,” she replied. “Not unless it’s fucking monumentally important.”
“This one could be. This could be the key to everything, the answer to the question you didn’t know to ask.”
She shrugged. “Hit me; no promises.”
“The shadow, and Bakker?”
“Yeah?”
“I think they might be the same thing.”
She opened her mouth to protest, then hesitated, face shuttering down, blanking off all emotion. “Oh,” she said finally, a long slow sound. “Shit. You got proof?”
“I’ve got… a lot of circumstance.”
“Who else knows – suspects – whatever?”
“No one that I know of. Although I guess the Beggar King will have it figured out, and if there’s any sorcerers still left alive, not hiding or mad, they’ll have guessed. But they’ll be afraid.”
“What makes you so sure of this?”
I thought about it, licking my lips, remembering the taste of blood. “The people who are attacked. The nature of the attacks and the creature – hungry, longing for life that it can’t have, a shadow. Something Bakker’s sister said; he wanted her to summon some creatures, voices in the wire, he thought they would keep him alive. ‘Make me a shadow on the wall’. It attacked her and let her live – why? And lastly…”
“Lastly?” she asked, sharp, when I hesitated.
“I’ve seen the creature’s face. It has his face, withered and pale, but still his face. The shadow is related to Bakker – I don’t quite know how, but I’m almost convinced of it. I think that if you stop Bakker, you stop the shadow. Chicken and egg.”
She drew in a long breath. “Yeah. Right. OK. Let’s say I’m running with this for a moment. But to kill Bakker you’re going to have to eliminate his security: Guy Lee, maybe a few others – Dana Mikeda, almost certainly. To do that, you risk drawing the attention of this shadow. You’re also going to have a problem with Mikeda.”
I looked up sharply and saw her eyes fixed, intelligent and bright, on my face. “It’ll be fine,” I said.
“She was your apprentice,” she said mildly. “I hear that sorcerers get quite attached to their apprentices.”
“It’s complicated.”
“I bet it is.”
“I’ll deal with it,” I said, harsher than I’d meant.
“I hope you do. You’re going to have to anyway. Were you and Elizabeth Bakker…?” I didn’t answer the lilting question in her voice. She added, “Probably not important.”
“No,” I said sharply. “Not to you.”
Her smile lurked for a second; a moment of cruelty, verging on laughter. “All right, Mr Matthew Swift,” she said finally. “I think it’s fair to say that you have got our attention. What exactly do you want to do?”
I sagged, unable to hide the sudden relief. “It’s very simple. I need to eliminate Guy Lee and his underworld army, and I need help to do it.”
“I don’t trust that girl you’re with.”
“Neither do I. You ought to know that she won’t be your friend, when this is over.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Have you brought me trouble?”
“I’m sorry. I had no choice.”
“No choice? In what?”
“I need people to help me against Lee. I’m willing to pay as high a price as need be.”
Her jaw tightened. “I see. Sorcerers.”
“What does that mean?”
“You are usually so high on your own power that you forget the other bastards in your way. You say things like ‘necessary sacrifice’ or ‘needful losses’, because you have to be the fucking hero.” She rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Bloody sorcerers.”
“You’re leaping to conclusions,” I said mildly.
Her eyes flashed. “It’s how Bakker began,” she said. “Things are necessary.” I said nothing.
“You’ve got some way of beating Lee without getting my people killed?”
“Does he know you’re here?” I gestured at the paint-encrusted walls. “I mean, down here, in the Exchange?”
“No. Perhaps. No.”
“I imagine it’s a secret you like to keep well.”
“Very,” she said. “Why?”
I looked down the long, splotched corridor. “Nuclear bunker?” I asked.
She nodded.
“That could come in handy.”
The doors were painted green, were thick and made of iron, and clanked, with solid locks. The walls between each room were half a foot thick, the fire notices thirty years old, the ventilation system chugging and clogged with the thick dirt that drifts down eventually on all things in the city, turning even white marble foggy black. There were a lot of doors; they at least had been well maintained. There were miles of dipping and winding tunnel, slowly sloping upwards, their gradients almost imperceptible. Signs had been painted onto the occasional wall with an arrow pointing towards their destination – Chancery Lane – High Holborn – Lincoln’s Inn – Aldwych. As we walked I could feel the rattling of the Piccadilly line in the walls beside us. Vera said, “There used to be other trains too.”
“Which ones?”
“The Post Office ran trains between its depots. The government always had something being moved about down here. The markets – they’d bring meat to Smithfield in subterranean trucks. Some of the lines never went above ground. You can’t say that about many trains in the city. But it’s different now. People forget about the things underground.”
I thought about the spirit I’d spoken with in Camden, guardian of the old railway line, and the empty magical circle that I’d intended for Khay. Perhaps, I thought, it might still have its use.
When I emerged, up a hooked ladder embedded in a concrete wall stained with flaking rust, it was to one side of Lincoln’s Inn, in a shaft full of the roar of sucked-in wind and heavy machinery. For a moment I thought it might be daybreak; but the clock on Holborn tube station left no room for doubt. Time moved differently underground. It was a drizzling, overcast evening, with the thin London rain and thick London clouds that never quite do their stuff, but constantly threaten.
Vera left me there. She said she didn’t like to be seen above ground, and didn’t offer to shake my hand goodbye.
Oda was standing outside Holborn station, her bag of weaponry slung over her shoulder, mobile phone in her hand. The big stone-built blocks of Kingsway and the wide, blank slabs of High Holborn’s offices met in a medley of traffic lights, bright corporate signs, and crowding pedestrians jostling for space while the bendy buses hogged the middle of the road.
“Well?” I said, blinking as my eyes adjusted to the grey, monochrome evening outside after the glaring bulbs and sinking shadows of underground.
“They cut off a couple of the biker’s fingers,” she replied briskly, folding the phone up and slipping it into her pocket.
“They what?”
“That’s the last time you call me humourless,” she said with a smile as welcoming as the open jaw of a shrieking bat. “Are the Whites going to help?”
“Yes.”
“What exactly can they do?”
“They can stay exactly where they are,” I replied with forced brightness. “And with any luck, that should be enough. Now, I need you to do me a favour.”
“A favour?” The word sounded dirty in her mouth.
“Yes. I need you to call your pissy bastard friends and tell them to let Blackjack go.”
“Why?”
I ticked the reasons off on my fingers, just like she’d ticked them off on hers. “One: it’s nice. Two: you don’t need to hold anyone hostage to get me fighting the Tower; that’ll happen anyway. Three: we need the bikers as allies and Blackjack is the only man I know of who can conveniently find them, and perhaps get a message to the warlocks in Birmingham as well. Four: I’ve cursed the head of your Order – right now he’ll think it’s flu and soon he’ll realise that it’s not, and I’m not going to uncurse him until you people stop playing silly buggers – how does all that sound to you?”
She thought hard about it; then said, without any change in expression, “When we are away from this place and these people, I will kill you, sorcerer.”
“That,” I replied, “would be what the corporate consultants call ‘unproductive’. Make the phone call – I’m sure we’ll have plenty to talk about.” I was beginning to feel better.
I waited in a café on Kingsway, drinking overpriced coffee with some kind of foul-tasting syrup in it, while Oda paced in the street outside and talked and talked into her phone. By the looks of things, she was having one hell of an argument. When she’d been talking for half an hour, I tried as casually as possible to move further into the recesses of the shop, away from the windows, just in case she was serious about shooting me.
I wondered what form my curse on the head of the Order had taken while I was gone, how deeply it had burrowed into his flesh, how far the worm of blue maggot magic had feasted on the heat of his blood. He’d had our blood on his hands, by the time we’d finished our conversation – such proximity to our blood, we hoped, could only make the passage of our spell more deadly and swift.
When Oda eventually finished on the phone she stomped into the café, face glowing with anger, sat down on the sofa in the alcove opposite me, threw her bag down on the floor, reached into her jacket pocket and surreptitiously pulled out a gun. It lay under the table in her grasp, pointed vaguely at me – but in such a small space, accuracy of aim didn’t matter. Though our heart skipped faster at the thought of it there, I struggled to keep my face calm, a smile half in place against impending disaster.
She said through gritted teeth, “What have you done?”
“Are you planning on using that?” I asked, nodding down at the thing under the table.
“I have orders to shoot you as soon as you’ve reversed your spell.”
“Thank you for your honesty at least, but you’re going to have trouble there.”
“Why?”
“I’m not going to reverse it, and you’re not making much of a case for me trying.”
“What did you do to our leader?”
“He had our blood on his hands,” we snapped. “You should have known that our blood is potent. Am I going to have a conversation with your boss or not?”
“I knew you couldn’t be trusted.”
“Of course you did. But the fact is, you kidnapped me and my friend, and did a lot of shouting and hitting in the mean time; and really I’m only” – I considered the choice of words – “evening up the balance sheet?”
For a moment she looked pained, small, almost childish, but then the mask was back on. “He’ll talk to you by phone.”
“He’ll see me in bloody person,” I said, “and without his damned armoured bodyguard, thanking you kindly.”
“Impossible. You’ll kill him.”
“Oda” – I struggled to keep the anger out of my voice – “I have done nothing to harm you. I have told you the truth. You didn’t need to try and hurt me to get my attention – I was willing to help. I still am.”
She said nothing.
“Are you going to shoot me?” I asked, forcing a smile onto my face. “It’s more of a test of faith, really, shooting someone and getting caught for it, rather than dying in a heroic bloodbath. If you die in the act, you become a martyr, you get nothing but glory or at the worst, unanswered questions – your motives remain entirely your own. If you get caught, alive, you’ll have to take responsibility, explain why, answer all the world’s questions and I bet, I just bet that the Order won’t bother to bail you out when the police come asking, ‘So, Oda, why are you armed to the teeth and why did you shoot that utterly harmless Mr Swift?’ They’ll call you insane and lock you up and you’ll never have the glory or the thanks or the innocence that dying in the attempt might, in its own twisted way, have given you.”
“Sorcerer?”
“Um?”
“I will kill you – maybe not now, maybe not in the eyes of men, but I promise, I will kill you.”
“Good!” I said brightly. “Then I look forward to our meeting. I’m sure you can work something out.”
I left her in the café. It was a risk, but it had to be done.
I thought about how I’d feel with Blackjack’s blood on my hands. I hardly knew the man, had little reason to trust him, and nothing more between us than a common enemy. I wanted no responsibility for the man’s welfare; but the obligation had been given to me anyway. If he died, it would be my fault.
And if he died, we knew with absolute certainty that we would not stop until we had destroyed the Order, washed away our guilt with their blood. Another enemy on the list, and one we were happy to oblige.
But I want…
… we feel…
come be me
and be free
but I
and we
but I AM
… and we be… we be…
I bit my lip until it bled, and until my thoughts were nothing but the grey wash of the early evening street, filling with the gently pattering rain.
We met in a place and at a time of my choosing: 10.30 a.m. at Stansted Airport. There were a lot of reasons; for a start, Stansted Airport is my least disliked of all the airports ringing London, not as packed and confusing as the heaving mass at Gatwick, or as clinically airless as Heathrow; not as isolated and battered as Luton, not as small as City, which sat in the middle of a disused wharf, surrounded by housing and old patches of neglected concrete, and didn’t even have the good grace to be at the end of a railway line. I liked Stansted because its roof was high and clear, letting in white morning sunshine, because the train service left Liverpool Street on time, was fast, clean and, as express services went, relatively cheap; most of all I liked it because in every corner and on every wall, coffee shop booth and behind every door there was a CCTV camera, and because the police were everywhere, and always suspicious. Even outside the technical limits of the city, the air in the airport hummed with its own slick, fast, silvery-shimmered power.
We met by the security checkpoint leading to international soil, where the travellers of the day queued in bored, neat lines to have their baggage scanned and their passports swiped. He arrived alone – at least, he walked up to me alone, although there were plenty of suspects for an entourage – and we were shocked at how ill he looked already. Fat blue veins bulged on his hands and face, their colour visible even through the thick pigment of his skin; his eyes looked sunken, his hair more bedraggled. His expression was no longer one of triumph but cold, determined hate; his walk was uneven and when he raised his hands they trembled, the fingers convulsing in little bursts, like the nerves wanted to exercise themselves without permission from the brain. He walked up to me, stopped a metre away, looked me straight in the eye and said, “You have become a liability already, Mr Swift.”
“So shoot me!” I said.
“Don’t tempt fate.”
“I wasn’t tempting fate, I was asking you,” I replied. “I’m sure that all these lovely gentlemen with the guns” – I gestured round the court at the security guards patting down the passengers as they passed through the endless rows of metal detectors – “would be only too happy to testify the case.”
“You want the biker freed – we can do that.”
“It’s not just my personal pissed-off mood,” I retorted. “I need Blackjack.”
“Why?”
“To convince the rest of his gang to join the Whites; to stir up a few allies against Lee.”
“The Whites – Oda told me of your plan.”
“And I’m sure that when you’re done with the Tower you’ll be turning your attention to them,” I sighed, “but right now, you need them, and you still bloody need me – more than ever, by the looks of things.”
“You did this,” he snarled, eyes flashing dully in the folds of his diseased skin.
“Yes. If you’d just talked to me politely, we could have avoided this entire situation.”
“I am willing to die for my faith,” he declared, edging a step closer. “What makes you think that this curse of yours will change my mind about you?”
“Nothing at all,” I said. “You hate me and I hate you, end of story. But you need me, and I may just bloody well end up needing you and all your pig-stupid moronic cultist followers. So. I’ll lift the curse when I know that Blackjack is free. And you’ll still help me even though you don’t have a hostage against me, because you still need me against Bakker. And I won’t do anything against you because I still might need you to help against him. And when this whole thing is over we’ll do a tally list of who hurt who the more. And if it doesn’t come out even, we can fight it out till doomsday, what do you say?”
“What… help…” he spat the word, “do you need?”
“Men with weapons,” I replied. “Everyone you have available, in the Kingsway Exchange by midnight tomorrow, ready to fight it out with Guy Lee.”
“In the Exchange? Why there?”
“Because that’s where Guy is going to attack.”
“You’re sure of this?”
“Not yet. But if you give me a few more hours, I will be.”
“You’re… luring him into a trap?” suggested the man weakly. “How? Why will he attack?”
“He’ll be ordered to from above,” I replied. “Do you really want the quibbling details, or will you just help me?”
“Undo what you’ve done,” he said.
“Your word pretty please on a plate.”
“I will help you in this.”
“Your word pretty please on the Bible.”
A flicker of anger around his eyes, just for a second; but then he raised one shaking hand and said in a clear, precise voice, “I swear before God. Until the Tower is defeated and Bakker is dead, if you do not harm mine, we will do nothing to harm yours. We will support and help each other against this… greater… evil. Before God I swear.”
I grinned. “Good. I’m glad that one is sorted.”
I spoke to Blackjack on the phone before I undid the curse, just to make sure. He sounded tired, but alive, and promised that he had all his fingers intact. I asked him to find allies. When he’d heard the details, eventually, he said yes, and hung up briskly without another sound.
In the men’s bathroom, I put my hand on the priest’s forehead and slowly, shivering as it wormed its unfamiliar presence back into my skin, drew the curse out of his flesh, the sliver of blue magic trickling across my fingers and melting back into my skin.
The man said, “Is that it?”
“Yes. You’ll recover soon enough. Plenty of bedrest.”
“I do not understand how you managed to cause me harm. You were defenceless.”
“Prayer,” I replied cheerfully, washing my hands clean in the basin. “Prayer and a soul soaked in positive karma.” I glanced at him in the mirror, to find his expression not so much angry any more as curious. “And I am a sorcerer. Magic is just… a point of view. We don’t know your name.”
His eyes flashed up to mine, met them in the mirror; then he looked away. “Names give power.”
“You know that I’m Matthew Swift. I’m assuming you’re ex-directory – secret cultists tend to be – so you might as well tell me.”
“Anton Chaigneau.”
“French?”
“My mother was from the Congo. My father was from whatever Satanic pit spawns such creatures.” He was rubbing his forehead where I’d pulled the curse out, head on one side, a look of discomfort in his eyes.
I said, watching him, forcing myself to sound disinterested, “You’ve come a long way.”
“The Order is good to those who adhere to it,” he insisted. “They are kind.”
“You’re not in charge?”
“I am a servant of the Order, I bring their will…”
“Who’s in charge?”
He shook his head. “Is there anything else I can indulge you with, sorcerer?”
“Who did Oda’s brother kill?”
His face became stone for a moment, then widened out again into a tight grimace. “She told you?”
“Yes.”
“Did she tell you that her brother was a witch doctor?”
“She implied it.”
“Did she tell you that when he first discovered his magic, he tried to help the family, heal others and use his craft for goodness? Did she tell you that the power of it tainted him, corrupted him, as such power always does, and that he swore he could only do the best by creating things of such evil as, I think, will never leave her dreams?”
“Again, it was implied.”
He met my eyes and said, utterly flat, “He killed her two little sisters, and tried to kill her. He said it was a necessary sacrifice to summon creatures of knowledge, spirits. He said that nothing else would do but the blood of kin, and apologised and wept but said it was the necessary thing. Oda was fourteen at the time – her sisters were nine and eleven. She escaped, and didn’t speak for three years after. Her brother was killed by the local police when he refused to surrender himself, but not before his arts had burnt Oda’s family home, and everything she possessed, to the ground. The Order loves her. We will be a better family than any formed of kin. What do you do that’s ‘necessary’, Mr Swift?”
“Necessary?” We tried the word a few times, rolling it around our tongue and lips. “We work with you, Mr Chaigneau. Only because it is necessary. I hope to be seeing your men armed and ready for battle by tomorrow night; in the mean time, I wish you a speedy and successful recovery. Good day to you, Mr Chaigneau.”
I turned and walked away, and to my relief, no one tried to stop me. On the train, my hands were shaking. I had never played such games before; no degree of magical inclination can teach you the character skills necessary for cloak-and-dagger dealing; never before, however bad things had got, had I felt that my life was in danger. At least, not while I was technically alive, last time, and living it.
After lunch, I went back to University College Hospital.
Sinclair was still sleeping a sleep that was too close to death for our taste, and Charlie was still on the door.
“Did you visit her?” he asked, slipping into the room as I looked down at Sinclair’s sickbed and listened to the puff of his machines.
“What?”
“Elizabeth Bakker. Did you visit her?”
“Yes.” I wrenched my gaze from Sinclair and forced myself to meet Charlie’s ever so slightly feral gaze. “I saw her.”
“Did you kill Khay?”
“No.”
“But… he is dead,” said Charlie, in the strained voice of a clever man trying to work out something obvious.
“I didn’t kill him… I need to ask you a question.”
“OK. What do you want to know?”
“Two things. First – I’m mustering allies in the old Kingsway Exchange. We’re going to fight Guy Lee.”
He laughed. “Perhaps Harris Simmons will invest in the coffin-making market today and make a huge profit tomorrow?”
“I mean it.”
The humour faded from his face. “Lee has an army of paid and bought troops at his command. And those are just the ones whose breath still condenses in cold winter air.”
“He can’t get support from Amiltech.”
“He doesn’t need support from Amiltech!”
“I’m raising allies against him. I can’t go it solo, not now. I was wondering if you had any friends who might be interested in joining?”
“Friends?” He didn’t understand for a moment; then he let out a long breath and drew his shoulders back. “I see.”
“This is our best chance to break Lee’s monopoly on power in the underworld,” I murmured, studying his face for any kind of reaction. “The Whites are willing to cooperate, the bikers, perhaps the beggars…”
“You want to see if any of my kind will help?”
“It’d be useful.”
“Lee doesn’t bother us. He employs us, most of my kin – most others simply spit at the thought of what we are, unclean.”
“Employs to spy, to cheat, to steal, to kill…”
“We have to survive.”
“This is what Sinclair would want,” I said gently. “This is what he was trying to achieve. I’m just finishing the job.”
His face tightened for a moment in uncertainty, then relaxed. He nodded slowly, fingers loose at his side.
“Second thing,” I said. “You were the closest to Sinclair…”
“Am the closest to Sinclair,” he insisted. “He’s not dead.”
“I apologise – are the closest to Sinclair. That gives you a certain something when it comes to this question.”
“Well?”
“Of all those people Sinclair gathered together to fight against the Tower – the warlocks, bikers, fortune-tellers, religious nutters, mad old women and me – who do you think is most likely to have betrayed us to Bakker? Who do you think told them where to shoot the night Sinclair was hurt?”
His eyes went instinctively to the slumbering form of the big old man, then back; and they were hard and certain. “The woman. Oda.”
“Why?”
“I know nothing really about her. Ignorance might mean there is something to hide.”
“What if it’s not Oda?”
“You know something?” he asked quickly.
“I know something more than I did,” I replied. “Although it didn’t make me happy to find out. Who would be next on the list?”
He thought about it long and hard. Then, “The biker. Blackjack.”
His answer caught me by surprise, but I tried not to show it. “Why the biker?”
“His smell, when we were attacked.”
“His smell?”
“Yes.” Charlie’s eyes flashed up to mine, daring me to disagree. I raised my hands and shook my head defensively. His mouth twitched in triumph.
“All right,” I said. “What did he smell of?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“When the first bullets started hitting,” said Charlie, “I could smell the fear on you, the sweat on the warlock, the terror on the fortune-teller, the blood on the hurt men, but on him – on the biker – there was nothing. His skin did not perspire.”
“I see.”
“You do not believe?” he demanded, fingers tightening.
“I believe you,” I said hastily. “I just don’t know what to make of it.”
“Why do you ask now?”
“I’m getting allies together against Lee, just like Sinclair tried to get allies together against the Tower…”
He was nodding already. “You think one of them might betray you.”
“It’s possible.”
“What will you do if they do?”
I thought about it, then smiled. “Absolutely nothing,” I replied. “At least, for the moment. Nothing at all.”
It took nearly thirty-six hours for the first emissaries to arrive. The bikers sent messages out to Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, all the cities frightened of being next hit by the Tower. The Whites sent whispers through the tunnels of the city; the Order cleaned its guns, the beggars skulked and the skies turned. Among so many people, so much preparation, someone would, sooner or later, say something stupid. Sooner or later, Lee would hear of Sinclair’s plans. That was just fine by me.
Necessary things.
They assembled at the My Old Dutch pancake house at suppertime, around a table booked for eight, although we weren’t sure how many would arrive.
The My Old Dutch served massive plates covered with batter, covered in turn with almost anything imaginable. Chicken, ham, bacon, egg, cheese, tomato, salad, chocolate, coconut, cream, lemon, sugar, honey, syrup, treacle – ask, and it would be delivered. I sat with my back to the wall, head away from the window next to Vera and ordered the most sugary, exotic-sounding dish we could find. Vera ordered tap water and a Caesar salad, and flinched at the prices. She wasn’t used to daylight; she especially wasn’t used to being seen through glass.
Oda and Anton Chaigneau arrived together; slipping in behind them came their bodyguards in the guise of an amorous courting couple. Outside, a pair of badly disguised traffic wardens each tried to hide their gun under their bulky black jacket and reflective vest. Neither Oda nor Anton looked happy; but they both sat, and both ordered very dull, very vegetarian salads. His face didn’t bulge as it had at Stansted airport, his hands didn’t tremble; nonetheless he didn’t grace me with so much as a nod of acknowledgement, but sat, when not eating, with his hands folded and his face immovable.
The small talk was not extensive. There were séances with livelier chatter. Oda glared suspiciously at Vera; Vera glared suspiciously at her. I ate pancakes.
“I don’t like having armed men eat in the same place as me,” Vera offered at last.
“I don’t like your manner of dress, your soul, your duplicity or you,” replied Chaigneau. “But that is besides the point.”
Vera made an indignant snorting noise.
I said, through a particularly rich bite of coconut, cream and hot chocolate sauce, “What has our religious nut friend here upset is the two men at the back of the restaurant with the tattoos running across every inch of their skin and the rich purple glow of embedded power emanating from their flesh – although it is ironic that someone that insensitive actually noticed them. Are you going to be civil or do I have to bang heads together?”
Vera simply grunted and ordered more water.
I was settling into my second pancake when the two shapeshifters arrived. I could tell by a number of things what they were: by the emanation of slippery, unstable deep brown magic crawling off their skins like oil off a puddle of water, by the flash of yellow in their eyes when they turned their heads quickly round the restaurant, looking for the table, but most of all, by the old man’s sandals they wore over their neatly socked feet, which, while being in appalling taste, left room for the shape of their toes to change. I waved at them, and they, sniffing cautiously, drifted over to our table.
“We’re looking for Mr Swift,” said one.
“And what do you do?” asked Vera. “Write fortunes on the back of cigarette packets?”
“We bite,” replied the woman coldly. “Among other things.”
“Have a pancake,” I said, waving my fork in cheerless welcome. “I’m Matthew Swift. I’m guessing a nice young man with a pair of stylish whiskers called Charlie sent you?”
They sat down carefully, eyeing up the table. “There are… those who do not like… anything,” said the woman at last, pretending to scan the menu as she spoke. “We’re committing to nothing.”
“Sure thing,” I said with a shrug. “Welcome to the pack.”
The last to come was the biker, and he certainly wasn’t alone. He came with two others, one of whom could have been three men. When he turned sideways he just about managed to fit through the door, and when he sat down, the chair, creaking and moaning, just about managed to support his weight. It wasn’t that he was fat – not in the traditional saggy-belly, drooping-chin sense of fat. He was pure and simple big: his thighs bulged in their black leather trousers, his shoulders strained the edges of his studded, extra-large black jacket, his chest threatened to burst through his black T-shirt, his beard ruptured off his face like curling smoke from a volcano, his hands were the size of the plate from which Vera ate her salad, his fingers were thick and raw, his every breath was like the rising and falling of a glassmaker’s bellows, his expressions stretched from ear to ear and twitched over the end of his expansive Roman nose. I had never seen such a man – and more, there was a slippery power about him, more than just the bulk of his presence, a flash of orange and golden fire on the senses, visible out of the corner of the eye, impossible to pin down. He smelt of dirt and car oil and the road, and uncontrolled, risky power. He looked at us and said, “Fucking hell. Who hit you lot with a fucking haddock and hung you out to dry?”
Behind him, Blackjack said, “I don’t think they’re really looking for love.”
“Hello, Dave,” I murmured at Blackjack.
“Hello, sorcerer. Hello, bastard pig priest and your bitch consort slut of a minion,” said Blackjack, nodding at Chaigneau and Oda. He sank himself onto a chair next to me with an expression of polite goodwill on his face. Then to me, “Hear you got into trouble.”
“It’s fine.”
“Yeah? How fine?”
“Chocolate pancake with cream fine,” I answered. “It’s not going to be civil; but there are people here, aren’t there?”
“Oh, it’s going to be another massive fuck-up,” murmured the third arrival. I looked again, and recognised him.
“Survived, then?” I asked.
The warlock was still dressed to the nines in what I could only politely call “ethnic dress”, although by English standards he looked as ethnic as mushy peas. He grunted. “Got the old gang back together? A little talk, a little chat, a little sniper fire through the window at night?” he asked. He helped himself to a fingerful of hot chocolate sauce still in its pot, licking his digit clean with a loud slurping noise. “You know, I really hoped it was you who fucking got done at Sinclair’s place.”
“How did you survive?” asked Oda incredulously. Then, only a little quieter, “Why you?”
“Psycho-bitch,” sneered the warlock, “there are gods watching over me older than the furry fucking mammoths.”
“This is going to be hilarious,” sighed Blackjack.
“Is this it?” asked Vera incredulously through a slurp of thick pink milkshake. “The best that Sinclair and Swift could muster – a bickering pack of badly dressed drones?”
“I’m a fucking warlock!” he retorted. “Master of mystic fucking arts!”
“He’s a sorcerer,” she replied, indicating me, “and I’m told that means he could like, totally pop your eyes out of your skull with a thought. Doesn’t stop him looking like a starving pigeon, does it?”
“Thank you,” I muttered, snatching the hot chocolate sauce away from the warlock’s dabbling fingers. “I’m glad we’re all getting on so well. Sit down, warlock, no one’s going to get shot here.”
“You sure of that?” he replied.
“This is a public space. Besides, too many people have brought far too many reinforcements. It’d be a bloodbath and if anyone here is planning on shooting us” – my gaze moved round the table – “they sure as hell wouldn’t get out of it alive.”
“There are always car bombs,” said Chaigneau with a bright, white smile. “Guy Lee is renowned for his flexibility in these matters.”
The big biker said, “You think you can park anything round here without it getting done? Traffic wardens would have it in thirty seconds. ’Sides, Guy Lee isn’t going to kill us in the pancake house, because, talking straight, us being here is one big fucking joke. Are we going to do any introductions?”
“I’m Matthew,” I replied.
“Halfburn,” said the biker, neck bulging in what might have been a nod. “Although if we’re going to be real friendly about this, you can call me Leslie.”
“Leslie?”
He met my eyes full on, and his gaze was the colour of burnt tar on a night-time road. “Yeah,” he said. “You got something to add?”
“No.”
“Good. This is Blackjack,” jerking his chin at Blackjack, “and the guy in the skirt,” indicating the warlock, “goes by the online chatroom name of Mighty Magician 1572, and his real name’s Martin.”
“Hello, Martin,” I said, nodding at the warlock, who grunted.
Halfburn grinned, leant forward so his saucepan-sized fists rested heavily on the table, looked round until he had every gaze fixed on his face, and said, “So – is there anything other than fucking pancakes to eat in this dive?”
There have been alliances before, within the magical community. Magicians and all their subspecies come in every shape and size, faith, creed, sex, colour and political inclining. This naturally leads to affiliations, groupings, clans of like-minded individuals with similar buttons to be pressed. Sometimes, even these pig-headed bickering clans can agree on a common cause. Back in the Dark Ages they agreed to fight a couple of faerie hordes, although myths and records for those times are blended. In the Renaissance, rumours leaked of epic battles with demon spawn crawling out from their caves, and alliances of alchemists in the cities swapping intelligence with the last hiding druids cowering in the countryside on where the necromancers were hunting for their dead. In the 1800s there were stories that one of the very earliest urban magicians, among the first to taste power in the machines and smoke and bricks of the city, rather than the older sources of magic, created an alliance of beggars and aristocrats, to further the study of this new wonder together. Stories also tell that the magician in question died impaled on the end of an enchanted rapier thrust through his chest by one of his erstwhile allies; but, again, records and myth tend to blur into each other.
The last alliance of its sort that I knew of came in 1973, when a sorcerer by the name of Terry Woods went out of control and started hurling his magic across the city streets with all the delicacy of an angry gorilla throwing coconuts at startled monkeys. It took the lives of seven wizards and a sorceress called Lucinda to stop him, and the alliance afterwards remained until the last of its members died in the late 1990s, again the victim of unpleasant circumstances. Become too involved in these kinds of battle, and sooner or later, circumstances will become unpleasant.
Our own alliance, made in the pancake house on High Holborn, was very simple, and in many ways carried on the traditions of the past. For a start, none of us liked each other. No one trusted anyone else either. But that was fine. I was perfectly happy to let them bicker; the more they argued, the more the chances were Guy Lee would hear of all that was happening. And with the subtlety of a hand grenade in an oil refinery, he would try and stop it. And that, like all good stories where fear is the theme, should be enough to make an alliance real.
Necessary things.
It helped that we didn’t like them either.
At 7.30 p.m., I looked up from my examination of the bottom of my third milkshake and said over the bickering, “Have you heard of the shadow?”
Silence settled over the table.
“I call it Hunger,” I explained. “It describes what it is: pure hunger, lust, without control or restraint. It resembles a man. His teeth are yellow, his eyes watery blue. His skin is the colour of wet tofu, and on his back he wears a coat stained with blood. My blood, but let’s not split hairs on this. His hair is a thin straggle of nothing; when he leaps, the darkness bends with him. When he stalks you in the night, you can see nothing, touch nothing, but you will know he is coming for you by the bending of your shadows. He kills Bakker’s enemies. His fingers are claws that tear through flesh and bone like they were parting a silk curtain. He runs his tongue over hands soaked in blood, smells the sweat on your skin as you die, looks into your eyes, so close that all you can taste is the rotten stench of his breath. He says, ‘Give me life.’ He is not Bakker. He destroys all that Bakker wishes destroyed, but would not kill Bakker’s sister. Would burn her, send her mad, curse her for not giving Bakker the thing that he desired. Sorcerers are dead. Seers are dead. A prophet who saw his own end ran and could not run far enough. He is not Bakker. He is not human. How long until he comes for you?”
At 7.45 p.m., Vera proposed the final agreement, and all agreed.
She proposed a blood oath.
Some magics never change.
I was quietly opposed to it, but my position wasn’t one where I could say so. Any show of dissent after so long arguing would destroy a day of work. So it was done.
The warlock, the bikers, the Order, the Whites, the weremen and I: over pancakes, milkshakes and beer we swore to help each other until we had destroyed the Tower; and because somethings never change, I pulled my penknife from my bag, a napkin from the pile underneath the ketchup bottles, very carefully cut the top of my thumb, and swore on my blood.
So did everyone else, letting a few drops fall onto the napkin, where it spread into the whiteness and merged with everyone else’s blood in a thickening scarlet stain. When we were done, I burnt the napkin in the flame from a cigarette lighter, spilling the ashes into the empty bottom of a coffee cup. Then, when no one was looking, I tipped the ashes of our blood oath, along with several cigarette stubs, into my jacket pocket, just to be on the safe side.
I did not go to the tunnels that night. Nor did Oda insist on following me when I started walking. Perhaps she’d been warned off, perhaps learnt tact; I didn’t care which, so long as I could be alone.
We walked, without direction, through Covent Garden, feeding off the tingling sparks of magic in the air, feeling it dance across our skin like physical illumination. We wandered through Leicester Square, past Piccadilly Circus, stared up at the endless moving lights and sat on the steps of the statue of Eros, until we felt that any more saturation would make our skin start to glow. We wandered down to St James’s Park, and through the palatial back streets near by: grand offices, old red-brick mansions, high-walled royal palaces, densely hidden mews and the occasional sly, cobbled lane. Shop windows selling bespoke leather spats and cigars. We watched the late-night tourists baiting the guards outside Buckingham Palace while the traffic roared around it, lingered in the maze of fumes and subways and lights and grand hotels of Victoria, wandered through the station and listened to the last trains of the evening chug away towards obscure destinations with improbable names – Tattenham Corner, St Martin’s Heron, Epsom, Sutton, Carshalton Beeches.
When we were finally calm, our mind soothed by drifting down the silver flashing rails of the lines along with the dozing commuters and sleepy lights of the trains, and lulled by their regular rhythm, we left Victoria station, and wandered back onto the streets. Outside a domed Catholic cathedral that could have been transported from the streets of Rome, hiding in a plaza that burst out between the local launderette and a cobbler’s shop, we found a telephone box.
I dialled the number from memory, and waited.
The number was disconnected.
I swore and tried some others. Two more were disconnected, and one was a XXX video store in Soho whose assistant introduced herself with a silky voice and the words, “Hey hon, looking for something special?”
In desperation, I tried one last number. The phone rang. A voice said, “You’re through to KSP reception, how may I help you?”
“I’d like to speak to Robert Bakker.”
“I’m sorry, we have no one of that name…”
“But you know where to find him. Please. It’s very important.”
“I’m sorry, but…”
“My name is Matthew Swift.”
After a while, a voice said, “Please hold.”
The phone started playing the remnants of Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony on a xylophone. I endured the pain and waited.
Fifty pence later, a new, bored, woman’s voice said, “Hi, you’re through to reception, how may I help?”
My heart rattled at the speed of a train, my mind scuddered along endless silver tracks; but my voice, strengthened by all that buzzing life in one place, was steady. Just like he’d taught me. Forget you are afraid, he’d said. In a place like this, when you step out into the road you could be run down, when you turn a corner you could be knifed, when you come home you could die from a short circuit in the mains, or eat a curry poisoned with badly cooked cat meat and in somewhere this big, and this busy, you will never know what hit you. Forget you are afraid – there is too much worth living to just hide behind your own uncertainties.
I said, “Hi, I’d like to put in a call to Mr Robert Bakker.”
“Mr Bakker is busy at the moment…”
“He’ll want to talk to me; please, it’s very important.”
“May I ask who’s calling?”
“My name is Matthew Swift. Please – tell him.”
“If you will hold the line…”
“I’ll hold.”
I held for another 70p and almost half a movement of xylophone Beethoven. I began to understand the power of tinned telephone music – it gave me something else to get angry about, to marvel at, instead of letting my thoughts dwell on what I was doing.
The woman’s voice came back. “Mr Swift?”
“Yes?”
“Mr Bakker would like to know if there’s a number he can call you back on.”
“Miss?” I answered in my sweetest, gentlest voice.
“Mr Swift?”
“I want you to call Mr Bakker back and tell him that, as well he knows, my body was never found and that this should tell him something about the urgency of my call. Please tell him those exact words.”
“Uh, Mr Swift…”
“Please, miss,” I said nicely. “If that doesn’t get him to the phone, I’ll go away; I promise.”
“I’ll be right back, Mr Swift.”
Vivaldi was the next composer, murdered by someone on a harmonica. Thirty pence later the woman’s voice was back.
“Mr Swift?”
“Still here.”
“I’m transferring you now.”
“Thank you.”
A beep. A long silence. A sigh of distant breath. I found I couldn’t speak. After ten trips of my shuddering heart he said, in that familiar, rich voice, “Matthew?”
“Mr Bakker, sir,” I stumbled, tongue tangling over the automatic, familiar words, feeling like a fifteen-year-old boy again, about to be prescribed tranquillisers.
“Matthew! My God!” Nothing but surprise; no anger, fear, just marvelling wonder, tinged with an odd flavour of almost laughter – perhaps delight. “I heard you were… there was a funeral!”
“Yes. I wasn’t.”
“Clearly, clearly. My God. God. But where are you? I must see you at once!”
Panic was beginning to make my skin burn; whatever I’d been expecting, this was not it. “I don’t think that would be a good idea,” I said.
“Matthew! Are you all right?”
“Fine.”
“I must see you! You must tell me everything – they said you were dead!”
“They were pretty much right.”
“What’s happened to you? My God…”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m staying with some friends.”
“Well you must come round, at once! We have to talk!”
“No, thank you.”
“Why not?” Again, hurt, almost fatherly pain in his voice – whatever I had expected, it was not this, nothing like this, and for a moment, just a moment, I almost said yes. Then we shuddered in fear and turned our face away from the receiver. His voice came, tinny and small, through the phone in our hand. “Matthew? Are you there? Matthew!”
My teacher, Mr Bakker, who came and knocked on my mum’s front door when I was just a kid, voice full of worry and concern.
Give me life, the shadow had said.
And if you gave him a tropical disease, starved him for a month, fed him on nothing but darkness and fear, then Hunger’s face was Bakker’s.
I could taste the blood in my mouth again.
“Make me a shadow on the wall,” I said, leaning my head against the cold of the glass. “Mr Bakker? A shadow on the wall.”
“What’s happened? Tell me what’s happened! Matthew…”
I slammed the phone down on the hook, turned, and ran from that place into the dark, spreading my mind into the wings of the pigeons and the claws of the rats and the honking of the cars and the spinning of the wheels and the drifting of the dust until I forgot that I was running and forgot from what it was I ran.
I did not notice myself sleep, and my dreams flowed like the river.
I woke huddled in a corner underneath Battersea Bridge, brought awake by the sniffing of a dog at the hem of my coat, out for its early-morning run with its well-exercised owner. I smelt of river mud and cement dust; and my legs, when I tried to stand, burned. I had no idea where I’d gone or what I’d seen or done. Although perhaps if we wished…
… we see…
… we were…
so free
Couldn’t remember.
Didn’t want to remember.
I picked up my few possessions and went to find a shower.
At midday, I found Oda sitting by herself on a bench overlooking the river, outside the white palatial mass of Somerset House, a strange building of stately, many-paned windows, massive stonework, pedimented roofs, and dignified statues surveying its spacious courtyards. It held within its walls a museum, a university, part of a tax office and more besides; a place as confused as the streets compressed around it.
“Where’ve you been?” she asked as I sat down.
“Went wandering.”
“At a time like this?”
“Needed to sort out a few things.” She grunted in reply. I glanced up at her, raising my eyebrows, and said, “Worried?”
“You’ve got us all together – for now – are you going to bail now?”
“I’m staying,” I answered.
“And you’ve made an alliance, sworn on blood – well done. Congratulations. Happy for you. What next? Pitched battle with Guy Lee, blood in the streets and so on?”
“No.”
“You’ve got a plan,” she groaned. “Naturally.”
“It’d be nice to just deal with Lee on his own.”
“Not going to happen,” she said sharply. “Not now San Khay is dead.”
“There’ve been battles before; but they have to be done quietly.”
“A quiet magical battle,” she said with a scowl. “That must be interesting. What do you do – poke each other with your pointy hats?”
“We’ve already got the perfect location.”
She stared at me, understanding. If anything, her expression of dismay deepened. “The Exchange?” she murmured.
“Yes.”
“You’re seriously going to try and get Guy Lee down there?”
“Yes.”
“And what makes you think he’ll be even halfway inclined to do what you want?”
“Because we’re going to be betrayed. Someone’s going to leave the back door open, knock out a few guards, turn off a few alarms and when we’re not looking, poof, Lee is going to sneak right on in there and execute the perfect, self-contained massacre.”
She was on her feet. “You are expecting the people in the tunnels to die?”
“I didn’t say that,” I replied. “I said I’m expecting us to be betrayed.”
“Why?”
“Because we were at Sinclair’s house. Because you know, like I do, that the Tower has contacts everywhere. Because no matter how powerful and important an alliance like this one might seem, it will also look like the number-one opportunity to wipe out the leaders of all those pockets of resistance that Lee has been fussing over for all these years. Someone’s going to tell Lee where we are and what’s going on. Might even be you.”
“Me?” she echoed incredulously.
“Yes.”
“You think that I would…”
“You’ve made your feelings towards me and mine very clear,” I replied sharply, “I’m sure the idea of wiping us all out at a go doesn’t entirely upset you.”
“I don’t just… it’s not…” For a moment, just a moment, there was something in her eyes, a flicker across her face; but it passed, and the mask was there, harder than I’d ever seen it. She swept up her bag and stalked past me, without a sound, without a look. Just for a moment, I felt almost sorry for her.
I met Vera that afternoon outside the local library. She was smoking, with every sign of enjoying it; when I approached, she huffed a cloud in my direction and said, “Have a fag.”
We coughed and recoiled from the stench, from the idea of it, of black tar drifting in our breath. I mumbled, “Thanks, no.”
“Feeling pleased with yourself?”
“Should I?”
“Got an alliance, haven’t you?”
“It wasn’t too hard.”
“It’ll end in blood.”
“I know.”
“And you think it wasn’t too hard? It hasn’t even fucking begun.”
I said, “Sinclair laid the groundwork. I’m just here for Lee, then for Bakker.”
“And you knew the biker, and the warlock, and the Order, and at the end of the day…”
“Yes?”
“… you were Bakker’s apprentice.”
“Is that it?”
“Yes.”
“Does it matter?”
She sucked a long cloud of smoke into her mouth, then puffed it out between her teeth. “Yes,” she said, rolling the cigarette between her fingers. “People want to see if the sorcerers can be redeemed. They’re curious about you – an investment, you might say.”
“Is that it?”
“Don’t you want to be redeemed?” she asked quickly.
“I haven’t done anything wrong to be redeemed.”
“Yes, but what you are, your buddies who like to play with the artificial forces of nature; all horribly gone wrong with the Tower, hasn’t it?”
“This is revenge,” we snapped. “There’s nothing more to it.”
“Fine,” she said, her voice too light. “Sure. Whatever. What was it you were wanting to chat about?”
“I’m looking for a traitor.”
Her eyes flashed. “There’s a traitor?”
“Almost certainly.”
“The Order?”
“Perhaps.”
“How do you know there’s a traitor? Everyone swore on blood…”
“That’s not the point,” I replied. “Besides, a blood oath doesn’t stop you breaking your vow, it simply makes life difficult once you have, and even spells like that can be broken. Redeemed, I think you’d say.”
“Then who’s the traitor?”
“I have no idea.”
“You have no idea, yet you’re certain that there’s a traitor?”
“There’s got to be!” I said brightly. “All those disparate groups of unlikely people working together, all those busy little people with the big ears who suddenly are ordered to go and hide in the tunnels and prepare for a battle – there’s got to be someone in their numbers who will betray us. Sinclair was gunned down in his room, we did run into the night, the shadow did follow us. Ergo – traitor.”
“This is something you’ve already considered.” Not a question.
“Yes.”
“You want… what? To go around trying to read minds? Shouldn’t the good guys in any heroic battle desist from such tactics?”
“On the contrary,” I said, “we need someone to betray us. We just need to make sure we know what they’re saying when they do it. Need to make them come to us, need to make Guy Lee think it’s important enough to make a stupid move. Take a risk. Come out into the open.”
“And you look like a guy with a plan,” she sighed. “Well, thanks shit.”
“You know you have to fight Lee eventually. Why not now, when everyone is still – sort of – on your side?”
“You’re a real bastard, sorcerer. You’re going to let that many people die, to have your revenge?”
I hesitated, licked dry lips. “Necessary things,” I replied at last. “If… there are greater evils than… there are… Bakker will… it will never stop, Vera? Do you understand that? It will never stop. We have to make it stop, and we have to do it now. If not like this… then how?”
She sucked in a long lungful of smoke, then blew it out between the thin jut of her lips into my face. I coughed, she smiled. “OK,” she said at last. “So we’re gonna be fucking betrayed. Whatever. Lee is going to know of us; he’s going to try and stop us before we can stop him. I get it. You want him to do something stupid. The question is – how stupid do you think stupid can get?”
I shrugged, not really understanding the question.
Her smile widened to a grin, turned nasty. She said, “Matthew Swift – how would you like to meet Mr Guy Lee?”
Oddly enough, she meant it for real.
We went to a club in Soho. It was in a basement and smelt of hot breath compressed into a tiny space, and sweat, and spilt alcohol, and testosterone. The floor was sticky with dried beer splashed across its grey lino surface, the ceiling was low and made lower still by the revolving lights, and the shaking speakers pounding out drumbeats with the rhythm and resonance of a racing heart; and when we saw the dancing, we didn’t know whether to crawl away and cry at the thought of such a hollow, graceless thing, or to stare for ever, hungry to learn. The scent of that place was burning wet heat on our tongue, the sound of it buzzing whispers in our mind, the desire and appetite of it so overwhelming that we didn’t even have to try to hear it; but the feeling of it forced its way into our brain, demanding that we look and be amazed.
Vera looked completely at home. As she trailed through the crowd, myself in tow, men and the odd woman reached out for her and here she’d trail her fingers through there, and press her hips to the waist of some stranger, and even, when an especially tall man with hair spiky from gently melting gel grabbed her round the middle, kissed him, until he let her go and moved on to the next woman to walk across his path. We stared, enthralled, until I forced my eyes away and stared at the floor until my head ached, trying to paste its greyness across my thoughts to keep out the pounding assault on the senses.
We found a corner of black leather sofas underneath a dull red lamp. Vera bought cocktails, strange bluish things in tall elegant clear glasses that were the coldest things in that place. She sat down with her shoulder pressed right into ours and said, “Not your kind of place?”
We took a cautious sip, recoiling at first at the cocktail’s bitter taste, then relaxing as it heated our throat all the way down to the belly with an oddly pleasant sensation of burning. “Different,” I said. “Why are we here?”
“I want you to meet someone.”
“Who?”
“Guy Lee.”
We felt our stomach tighten. “Lee’s here?”
“He will be this evening.”
“This is… his place?”
“No, it’s run by a man called McGrangham; he pays protection money to Lee, and Lee leaves him alone, except for when he occasionally sends some of his men here, to learn how things are done. But that’s not the point. McGrangham also pays money to the Neon Court.”
I nodded slowly, running my finger round the top of the wide cocktail glass. If the Tower made the mafia look polite, then the Neon Court made those members of the mafia locked away for ever gibbering at the back of the asylum look like fluffy teddy bears. It wasn’t a case of punishment and reward; you crossed the Neon Court, you died, pure, quick, simple. The only redeeming feature of the place was that it had only a few very special interests, and never messed with you unless you were stupid enough to mess with it first. And like all the best mafia families, once you were in, you never, ever got out again.
“OK,” I said, “I get it. Neutral territory. No one makes a move in this place without getting a knife in the back. Sure. Why’s Lee here?”
“There’s a pit.”
“A pit?”
“I’m sure you’ve heard of them.”
“Only by reputation and the occasional coroner’s report,” I declared, trying to contain our rising anger.
“Good,” she said, unflustered. “There’s a lot of things going down here,” she added, waving casually around the room. “Trade, sport, knowledge, games – you know how it is. Lee sends his bully dogs here to learn how to fight. And Lee likes to fight.”
“I don’t see how this will help us.”
“Know thine enemy. And…” She let out a long breath. “If you’re gonna fuck with me and mine, sorcerer, I’m gonna fuck with you and yours.”
“I guessed that much; I don’t suppose you can go into specifics.”
“You want Lee to come after us? You want it now?”
“Yes.”
“Then how do you think he’ll feel if he knows, knows that the Whites have allied themselves with Bakker’s fucking apprentice?”
I took a slow, careful slurp of cocktail, smaller than I pretended. “It’s dangerous,” I said at last, “what you’re trying to pull.”
She grinned, stretched like a black leather cat. “Sure,” she said. “It’s the right place, the right time. I’m guessing Lee will know Matthew Swift is alive. I’m guessing he’ll recognise you, tonight. And if he tells his boss – and he’ll have to tell his boss – I’m guessing Bakker will order Lee to do something a little bit stupid. How much does Bakker want you back, Mr Swift?”
I shrugged.
“Mr Swift?”
As casual as a fly creeping down the side of a cream-covered bowl.
“Vera, mostly properly elected White?” I replied, staring into the depths of my glass.
“Mr Swift, how long have your eyes been blue?”
I smiled. I felt old, tired, too big for my skin.
“Bakker will want you back, won’t he, Matthew Swift?”
“Yes.”
“He’ll want Lee to find you. Bring you in. Alive?”
“Perhaps.”
“He’ll know you’re working with us, he’ll know it’s a bad idea. But you don’t argue with Robert Bakker and live. So let’s remind Guy Lee of that. Let’s show him how alive you are. Let’s make him do something stupid.”
“This doesn’t seem like a world-beater of an idea,” I said.
“Necessary things,” she replied.
It was a pit. Very much according to the traditional definition of the word. It lay beneath the club, down deep spiralling stairs where the-boomboomboom of the disco music faded under the sound of the ventilation hum, behind thick metal doors and metal-faced doormen; and when you finally got down there, you stepped into a room plastered with enchantments. They were painted across the walls in black swirls, ran across the floor with yellow road-marking thickness; the air was oppressive with them, so dense they almost crushed the gestures of incantation beneath them, made the casting of the-lightest spells tantamount to lifting a heavy weight, or to speaking underwater.
That was the observers’ platform.
The pit itself lay beneath, with high black concrete walls and fierce uplighting, its floor also black, and covered with sawdust. We stood among the observers, hundreds strong, from everywhere and dressed in every way, men and women and wizards and people who had no sense of magic at all but could smell the hidden blood waiting to be spilt below. They roared and cheered and screamed with delight as a lurching demon, all bound up in chains, its skin formed from the slimy fat that congealed in the sewers, its eyes burning with blue paraffin flame, lashed and lunged at a group of three men dressed in all kinds of strange armour – shields welded from broken car doors, spears made from torn aerials sharpened to a point – who with every stab got a shriek of pleasure from the crowd, while the demon dripped bleach for blood from the tears in its warping, wobbling skin.
I knew such things existed.
Mankind has always loved its blood sports, and with magic there was an infinite variety of ways to draw fresh, exciting blood.
The smell and the sight of it nearly overwhelmed us. We struggled to control it, keep it out, shocked by the depravity, the sickness, the blackness pouring out of every wall, the bloodshot delight in the eyes of every viewer, the pain in the creatures as they suffered and died; life corrupted, twisted. It horrified us, that all these people seemed to wish to do with life was seek its end; it appalled us that any gift so great could be so easily disregarded, as if they had grown bored with ordinary living and needed to seek out this new thrill to make up for the mundanities of existence. And very quietly, on the edge of the screams and the shouts and the stench of rotting magic, was an excitement and a thrill that threatened to blanket out all sense and leave us howling like the rest.
“We can’t stay here,” we whispered.
“Why not?” asked Vera.
“It is… compelling,” we said.
She looked at us for a long moment, then muttered, “Shit, sorcerer, you’d better not go bang. Come on.”
She dragged me by the sleeve through the crowd, to where two men stood by a locked metal door, and moved to block her way. “McGrangham,” she snapped. “I’m here to see McGrangham.”
“He’s busy.”
“I want to place a really big bet; and he might want to think about doing the same.”
McGrangham’s office was soundproof and looked down on the pit. But it didn’t block out the power of that place, and we pressed our head against the glass and trembled to keep it from filling our senses with its presence.
McGrangham himself was a short man with dark hair and a big moustache, who lolled behind a desk counting crumpled banknotes and wore a mildly amused expression. “You’re telling me,” he said in an accent full of rolling rs and thick, weighted vowels, “that johnno here,” nodding at me, “is a fucking sorcerer?”
“Yes,” said Vera.
“The man’s a mess! Christ!”
“Guy Lee,” she snapped. “Guy Lee comes here to see the fights. I want you to arrange an introduction, on neutral territory, underneath the Neon Court’s eye. I don’t want anything flash; just prod Mr Swift and Mr Lee in each other’s direction. There will be payment for your time.”
“I give money to Lee, girl,” snapped McGrangham. “Why the hell would I deal with the Whites anyway?”
Vera could act the mostly properly elected head of the Whites when she wanted to; she exuded it from every pore, a dangerous, rich charisma that hinted, below the surface, at something more. “Things are going to change,” she snapped. “Bakker is going to tell Lee to do something stupid. Lee is going to obey. He, and everything about him, will be destroyed. Now I know you get your protection from the Neon Court, but you still need customers. You still need goods, trades, deals, money. Lee is going to lose all these things, and the Whites are going to get them. You seriously want to fuck around with the next big thing?”
McGrangham stared long and hard at us. “I heard Matthew Swift was dead,” he said at last.
“Imagine people’s surprise,” I growled.
“Lee’s got a pit bull down there tonight. A girl who thinks that kinky is the same thing as confidence, and confidence is the same thing as strength. He’s going to be watching her. She’s going to do great things. He’s not going to talk to any old corpse.”
“So?” snapped Vera.
“If this guy is a fucking sorcerer” – a fat red finger stabbed in my direction – “there’s one great way to get Lee’s attention.”
Two pairs of eyes turned to look at me. I said through gritted teeth, “I don’t have time for this.”
“Kinky, huh?” asked Vera.
“You wanna get Lee’s attention? Wanna let him know oh-so-kindly that your whacked-out sorcerer isn’t dead? Wanna make a profit on a game?” There was a sparkle in McGrangham’s eye; he could smell money a mile off, was already thinking about a big, bright, treachery-filled future full of booze, blood and wealth. Eyeing us up, studying, thinking of the best way to make more profit from our flesh.
Vera’s eyes had the same glow, for a different cause.
“OK,” she said, “I’m listening.”
“Take down Lee’s pit dog,” McGrangham proposed. “He’ll be interested then. Hell – he might even have a conversation with you before he uses your skin for wallpaper.”
I had to wait almost four hours for my turn – into the small hours of the morning – and the crowd at the edge of the pit simply grew bigger. We waited outside in the cold of the street, but now that we were sensitive to its presence, aware of what was going on beneath us, we could feel the fire of every roar and the shuddering of every hit rise up through our body like the rumble of a train beneath the tarmac.
I had never fought in a pit.
It was a thing for either the desperate, or the insane. Those with nothing to lose, or those who believed that they could never fall. A man who had fought and failed was thrown out of the front door, and told to make it to the end of the street before calling an ambulance. They didn’t want the police to investigate. He made it halfway to the end, and collapsed in a puddle of blood, skin and bile. I dragged him to the end of the street by his armpits, and dialled 999 from the nearest call box, skulking in the shadows to watch as the paramedics came and went, glancing into the darkness of this Soho street with the weary faces of men who knew enough not to ask, had seen enough to no longer care to know.
Vera came to fetch me, when it was time.
The “kinky pit dog” of Lee’s was a woman who called herself Inferno. You can’t be Dave the biker, Bob the master of mystic arts. X-Men had seen to that. She was roared into the pit with a friendly clamour of familiarity, and posed, hands on hips, chin thrust out, wearing as scant a mixture of leather and hooked chain as I had ever seen, every part of her bulging and gleaming like it would at any second explode from the thin patches of clothing that held it in place. She was armed with a whip, wore purple contact lenses to disguise the colour of her eyes, and had dyed her hair pure black. There was nothing sensuous in her, I decided, nothing particularly sexy – the costume was intended to be something that a fantasy hero might have worn, but it just looked ridiculous and childish. I skulked by the door that Vera had pushed me through into the pit, ashamed and foolish at what had to be done.
Above the ring, to one side of McGrangham’s office, was a window of reflective black glass.
I tried to imagine Guy Lee standing behind it. Wondered if he was leaning forward, watching my face, trying to see why I was so familiar.
I would remind him.
When the horn went for the battle to start, she slashed her whip a few times up and down through the air, just to make her point, and grinned with pure white teeth as the end of her rope wound and curled by itself, the end lifting off the ground and wriggling towards me like a snake, defying gravity and the laws of physics while it lashed across the empty air between us, searching for a way to bite. This part was a performance, we realised, designed to raise the crowd’s blood as they saw the intricacies of her art. It was also, in terms of pure and simple combat magic, an immensely stupid thing to do, and in that instant our respect for her hit absolute bottom.
In the pit, the crushing weight of the spells that suppressed magic upstairs was less. We watched her snarl and hiss and her whip wriggle and worm its way through the air, straining to reach us, growing at its base as it writhed its way in our direction; and we considered the tools at our disposal. I didn’t want to expose yet what I was capable of, nor did I feel particularly inclined to indulge the crowd with any sort of performance. So I waited, until, with a scream of attack, she hurled the tip of the whip towards me and it grew, convulsing through the air towards my throat. Patiently we watched it fly towards us, then stepped aside with the speed of the electricity in our blood and grabbed the end of it just before the tip, squeezing down on it like a zookeeper pressing down on the jaws of a snake. We shook it once, hard, sending a ripple flying back through the stretched-out rope that jerked the handle from her grasp.
Without her power sustaining it, the whip held in my hand became a lifeless thing of twine and leather. I let it drop to the floor. She spat and hissed like a feral animal and brought her hands together in the opening gestures of a spell I recognised, lips shaping traditional words of invocation. I wasn’t sure how far I wanted the onlookers to realise my capabilities, so raised my hands and roughly mimicked her gestures, twisting my fingers in familiar, half-hearted forms of magical gesture, and moving my lips in a silent whisper. The sounds of magic came to me instinctively, slipping onto my tongue – not merely words, but the whisper of tyres through a thick puddle on a lonely street, the sound of wings beating in an empty sky, the snap of a door slamming in the dark – these were the new sounds of urban magic.
I dragged my hands through the air, feeling its particles thicken around my fingers as it congealed at my command. My ears popped, sensing the pressure decline around my head, and the wall of controlled air in my hands became thick enough to be almost visible. Moisture condensed around it as I exhaled, billowing out of its heart as I compressed more and more into that fistful of contained wind.
She finished her spell almost without me noticing and with a shriek sent it my way; the shriek became a roar in the air between us; the roar filled with the sounds of traffic – cars, wheels, exhaust, rattling engines, the smell of diesel, unleaded petrol, engine oil, tar, burnt rubber. For a moment, I saw, about to impact, the shadow of a hundred vehicles heading towards me, carrying with them the sounds of screeching brakes and the pressure of bending air, all of it thrown out of her throat. It was not the world’s most dangerous spell, but it looked good and I did not want to cause myself any more harm than had already befallen me; so, in old-fashioned style, I threw myself out of its way. The crowd on the observers’ platform upstairs roared its disappointment at such a mundane tactic, and started stamping, a regular growing boom boom boom like the heartbeat sound of the disco drum upstairs. I picked myself up and, by now thoroughly irritated, let my spell go.
The wall of rapidly decompressing pressure I threw at the woman called Inferno picked her up, threw her backwards three feet across the room, slammed her against the wall and, at the pinch of my finger and thumb, held her there, writhing and slapping her fists furiously against the black concrete, screaming amplified and deepened indignities through the thick wind that held her in place.
The booming of the audience continued. I waited. I was happy to wait, ten, twenty seconds, let those who were smart enough to see, or perhaps simply not-stupid enough to care, that this was something more than a cheap spell.
Let Lee watch my face, see the blueness in our eyes.
I waited, holding her trapped there in my spell for nearly twenty seconds until the horn finally went to end the combat, at which point I dropped her. Feeling oddly unclean with my victory, I went to sit down on the cold floor in my corner of the pit, hugging my knees to my chin, while Inferno, face inflamed an appropriate colour for her name, was dragged off screaming defiance to the walls.
We were surprised that we felt no sense of triumph, only a sick hollowness, as if our stomach was empty but had no sense of gnawing hunger to match.
The Master of Ceremonies announced in a bright, overly cheerful voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, five minutes please while we prepare for a new champion! Drinks are available upstairs and if any of you brave contestants want to try your hand…”
I tuned out the noise, huddled myself in my coat and tried to ignore the staring eyes and the sick swirls of expectation around me like tendrils of smog on a murky evening. Vera stood at one end of the observers’ stands and, through the long, dark shadows that the uplights drew across her eyes, I saw not a glimmer of a smile.
“Oi, you!”
The voice came from a staff member in a T-shirt which bulged around muscles so highly exercised I was amazed there was any room left for bone. With an imperious gesture, he summoned me into the preparation room behind the pit.
Sitting on a rough wooden bench in that grey concrete room, wearing stylish black and drinking from a bottle of mineral water, was Guy Lee.
He looked me over and grunted. “Scrawny bastard, aren’t you?”
I said nothing.
“You’re Swift, yes?”
I nodded.
“What the fuck do you think you’re playing at here, Swift?”
I put my head on one side and examined his face. He looked middle-aged, but that could simply have been the passage of many events, rather than much time. His nose was crooked and a long-healed scar ran across it; his skin was worn and dry and tanned, and he was clean-shaven. His hair hinted at grey peeking out at its roots, although through the defining clinginess of his black shirt and trousers he looked as well-built and hale as any man of twenty. He sat with his elbows on his knees, leaning forwards, like a boxer between bouts, and his fists were big and meaty, with signs of scarring across the back of his left hand, badly healed; his feet were set wide apart, legs tense like at any moment he might uncoil like a spring.
There was something very wrong with the entire picture.
We leant forward, peering, trying to work out what it was.
“You want to lose those fucking eyes?” asked Lee, glaring up at us. “I told Robert I’d have them for him on a plate.”
We said, “There is… no magic about you.”
“You just wait and see,” he replied. “Just because I can’t get you here, doesn’t mean I won’t have you out there,” jerking his chin up towards the street. “You bastard – you think we weren’t expecting you after you killed Khay?”
We murmured, “We think we understand.”
Outside, a horn bellowed, three times, a summoning to the pit. Lee stood up, slapping his hands together briskly. “You know how many sorcerers I’ve killed?” he said.
“One,” I answered. “Although you claim six.”
He grinned, but there was unease in his defiance. I felt a moment of gratitude to Sinclair and his excellent files. “Looking to double it soon.”
With that, he strode out into the pit to the roar of a sycophantic crowd.
I followed slowly, surprised. I didn’t understand what he expected to achieve by this gesture, here, where the Neon Court was watching and the spells were thick on the walls. He couldn’t kill me in McGrangham’s, nor could I kill him while the wards were written up on the walls and the crowd looked on. Others would intervene, and this was, after all, neutral territory.
Perhaps it was the arrogance of someone who couldn’t understand the possibility that they might lose.
I followed after him, and the crowd screamed and roared to see us beneath them with sick glee. I moved away to the other side of the pit, and watched him as he shook his fists at the ceiling and grinned and lapped up the applause of those people. They knew who he was; knew when to scream and clap.
I found myself wondering, with a genuine sense of scientific process, how I could go about killing Lee, although that was not, I realised, the exercise for the evening.
The horn blasted and Lee, without even pausing for the echo to die away, turned, opened his mouth and puffed in my direction. His breath rolled out in big, black, billowing clouds that stank of carbon and sulphur and filled the pit in a second with its polluted smog, blinding me. Automatically, I dropped to my knees and sent a random blast of force through the smoke, spinning it backwards towards what I hoped was its source in an eddying of black fumes. I didn’t know if it did any good, but heard it smash into the wall on the other side of the pit a moment later and, in that instant, Lee emerged from the darkness, brought his hands together in two clenched fists, and pulled them apart. Where his fingers touched his wrists, he drew from them, pulling them out of the skin itself, although there was no blood, two long white daggers made of bone.
The crowd roared its appreciation as he flourished the blades. I could not tell whether they failed to recognise cheap necromancy when they saw it, or if they simply didn’t care. He slashed the blades a few times through the air in smooth, careful movements; and where they moved, they trailed red sparks.
Slowly, grinning like an ape, he advanced towards me, bone-blades first.
I backed away, moving at the same speed as his walk to keep him apart from me, until my fingers brushed the concrete wall at my back. His grin widened. I shook my head in response at him, and pressed my fingers into the concrete. It bent like cold butter, slowly easing away under my pressure until my fingertips, buried in it up to the wrist, brushed the iron edge of a foundation support. I wrenched, sending chilling power down to my fingertips as I did, and with a heave and a shudder that made my arms ache and my head throb, dragged a length of twisted hard iron out of the wall itself. The concrete behind me melted back into its place like water filling a wound; I had no interest in keeping it as anything other than what it was, now that I was armed.
The audience screamed its applause as I tested the weight of my weapon, turning it a few times in the air and feeling it swish in my grasp. It was approximately two feet long – a very short staff by the tradition of any wizard.
Lee’s confident face became, for a moment, something else entirely. With a roar, he threw himself at me.
I have little experience of fighting hand-to-hand. But we were fast, and the dance – the dance at least we were used to. We jumped onto our toes and leapt away from the first slash of his bone knife, feeling the twisting in the air as it passed by us, ducked our back beneath the high swipe of his second attack, spun to the side of his next onrush, and rolled past his stumbling feet and landed a kick on his shin as we did. The air burnt with our passage, we were on fire with the blood and stench and brightness and hunger of the place, we loved this dance! We realised almost for the first time that the weight of our my flesh and bone was not just a burden to be borne from sense to sense; it was a living tool. We could feel the movement of every muscle and nerve, the booming of every capillary under our skin and they obeyed, our body obeyed as we caught a slash on the end of our weapon and lashed the longer tip of the iron up until it clipped his elbow and knocked his arm back hard, and we were already away by the time he knew what had happened, marvelling as our arms went up and our feet went back and our head went down and our stomach went in all at once, everything corresponding to the dance, everything, for a moment, completely alive. And for a moment, we couldn’t hear the shouting of the crowd, or their stamping feet, or the cat calls or the cheers or the screams or our own breath; for a moment, we were nothing more than the brilliance of that room, the minds of those people, the life dancing on the knife’s edge, nothing but the dance, and the freedom of it.
Just like we were before…
… come be me and be free…
but I am…
And just for a moment, as we spun away beneath Guy Lee’s blades, we were entirely ourself, and we burnt with blue fire across the air as we passed.
I do not know what happened in that place, that night. I am frightened by the things I cannot remember.
What I do recall was the sounding of the horn and hands pulling me back, someone shouting, “Enough, enough!”
And there was Lee, his bone daggers broken at his side, his arms slashed and bruised from the impact of my weapon’s edge, his nose bleeding a slow, thick blood,
but no magic
and how silent the audience was.
Absolute stillness.
Just the settling of hot air like snow on stone.
I pulled myself free of the arms that held me and dropped my iron weapon. Its tip was bloody, and so were my hands.
but no life
The wards were blazing up the walls, lit up with Lee’s blood. They crushed me like the great fat belly of a woolly bear, pushed my fingers to the earth, stopping this going any further.
It had already gone far enough.
blood on fire
and empty, utterly drained, I turned and walked away from that place.
Outside in the cold air, Vera took me by the arm and said, “And now we need to get you to safety.”
“Why?”
“Lee is going to come after you now with everything he’s got – nothing will stop him.”
“What did I do to him?” I asked. “We just… I don’t… I didn’t…”
She looked up at me, surprised, and said, “You were on fire, Matthew Swift. Your skin was on fire.”
I looked down at myself, half-expecting to see blistered and withered flesh, but my hands looked fine in the cold, pale neon light. “Will he attack the Exchange?” I stuttered as she pulled me down the narrow, sleeping road.
“After that, nothing short of a total annihilation of you and yours will serve,” she replied grimly. “Honour – prestige – they matter. Forget Bakker, that’s nothing now. Fear is just the perception of a threat, sorcerer, and I think you altered a few perceptions tonight.”
“Did I…?” I began, and then decided I didn’t want to know.
“Come on,” she muttered. “Time to get you home.”
A thought struck me. I grabbed her by the shoulder, harder than I’d meant – she pulled back quickly, face opening in an expression of surprise. “Lee,” I stuttered, “Lee is dead.”
“Let’s not get carried away…” she began.
“No, I mean… right now. Right now as we’re talking. That wasn’t Guy Lee down there. His flesh has no warmth, he gave off no scent of magic.”
“Are you fucking kidding? He pulled bloody knives out of his wrists!”
“Life is magic,” I insisted, shaking her by the shoulders. “Life is magic, there is no separating the two. Where there is life, there will be magic; the one generates the other. He has no magic. At least, not of his own – he leeches it from the air, feeds on its use by others, but he, he gives off no scent of it. Life is magic. He has no life. Guy Lee is a walking corpse.”
She pulled herself free with a sharp wrench. “Bollocks,” she muttered. “Bollocks!”
“We saw it!” we shouted, and she flinched back from us, fear in her face, clear now, easy to read. I felt ashamed. “I saw it,” I said. “I’m sorry. Sorry. I… I’m sorry.”
Slowly she relaxed, and patted me half-heartedly on the shoulder. “You’re very screwed, sorcerer.”
“I know.”
“Yeah,” she muttered. “But who can tell? Maybe it’ll be in a good way.”
We slept on the floor of the Kingsway Exchange, in a room packed with other sleeping forms, pressed in shoulder to shoulder, snoring and breathing and warming each other in the darkness, the light wavering through the empty, glassless window of the room, in the concrete corridor outside. I wondered what would have happened if there had been a nuclear war, and people had tried to live down in these tunnels, without time, colour and space. Vera said that all the Whites were coming in, that they’d been warned not to walk alone at night, that Lee would want his revenge.
And Bakker would want his apprentice back.
Guy Lee, a man of no magic. I ran scenarios through my head, twisted spells around, considered the powers that might have, could have, would have stopped Lee’s heart but still sustained him. Or perhaps it wasn’t Lee at all who I’d fought; perhaps something else inhabiting his flesh, mimicking life. He wasn’t any sort of traditional, boring, hollow-eyed, pale-skinned zombie; his movements were fluid, his face healthy, his skin tanned. Not death in the traditional vampiric way; simply an absence of life, as if his body had been frozen at a single moment.
I couldn’t sleep.
Shortly after dawn – I had expected it to still be night – I climbed out of the Kingsway tunnels, and went to find a phone box.
I called the Tower, and this time, when I asked for him, I was put straight through to Bakker. He didn’t sound like he’d been asleep.
“Matthew? Are you all right?”
“Fine.”
“I’ve been hearing rumours. If you want to talk…”
“Guy Lee isn’t alive. He has no magic about him, no spark of life. He’s cold.”
“Matthew, I don’t know what you’ve been doing…”
“Necromancy – the magic of the dead. I want to know… what you did to him.”
“What I did to him?”
“You fear dying, Mr Bakker,” I said to the voice in the phone, “you are so afraid. If his non-life, his frozen existence could offer you the solution to your problem, wouldn’t you have taken it? I have racked my imagination, all the things you taught me, and I can’t think of a single power, magician or enchanted tome which could do the things to Lee that I think must have been done – only you. You’d do it, I think, and not look back.”
A sigh, tired and old, down the phone. I watched the sunlight thicken on the pavement and crawl over the tops of the grand old houses surrounding Lincoln’s Inn. “He told me you attacked him, you went to a pit?”
“Yes.”
“I thought I had taught you better.”
I shrugged, then realised the absurdity of the gesture. “I will undo whatever it is you’ve done, Mr Bakker.”
“Matthew?” His voice had a darker, lilting edge of polite, poison-edged enquiry.
“Mr Bakker?”
“Lee tells me that when you fought, you burnt blue. Your skin was on fire with flames the colour of your new eyes, and the rumour goes…”
“Yes?”
“… the rumour goes that the voices in the telephone stopped talking, when you came back, that the angels suddenly stopped singing their blue songs.”
I said nothing.
“Matthew?”
Nothing.
“What have you done, Matthew?” he whispered. “What did you think you could do?”
“Mr Bakker?”
“Yes?”
“Did you bring us back?”
Now he was silent on the other end of the line. A breath, a slow exhalation transmitted in zeros and ones to our ears. “My God,” he murmured.
“Did you bring us back?” we repeated.
“It’s true!” Not a confession: surprise, horror, perhaps a hint of delight in his voice.
“Mr Bakker?” we said.
“Matthew Swift, what deal did you make? What did you think you could do?!”
“We are coming for you,” we said. “We will not stop.”
We slammed the phone down onto the hook, and walked until we were me again, breathing furious, angry, frightened breaths, and the dawn light was starting to bring some warmth to the streets of the city.
In the Kingsway Exchange, for the whole of a non-day and a non-night, they prepared. The Whites painted every wall, sprayed every inch of glass, every door and every frame with their winding images, and when there was no more space left in the tunnels, they climbed up onto the streets and drew their creatures and their words onto the walls of the university library, and the Starbucks, and the closed shutters of the newsagents, and the pillars of the stations.
Below ground, the delegation of a dozen or so warlocks moved from room to room and blessed them in the names of the spirits from whom they drew their special powers: Harrow, Lord of the Alleyways; the Seven Sisters, Ladies of the Boundaries; Ravenscourt, Master of Scuttling Creatures; and of course, our personal favourite spirit to invoke – Upney, Grey Lord of Tar. Theirs was a borrowed magic of other powers; high priests in the service of skulking city shadows.
The Order kept themselves to themselves, but the street kids under the Whites’ protection, scampering from room to room with wide, marvelling eyes, whispered of enough weaponry to fight a war, and I believed them. I didn’t like to ask what the shapeshifters did, and they didn’t offer to tell. We all knew Lee would come. He would find us. Nothing would stop him now.
Blackjack found me, eventually, sitting with my back against an old, abandoned stack of telephone connectors, standing like an overgrown tombstone of dead wires and slots and metal frames and broken bulbs. Its presence comforted us, reminded us, in a strange small way, of our life before now, when we’d been on the other side of those wires, looking out.
He sat down next to me, considered his words, then said what I think he’d been intent on saying all along. “You look like a piece of rotting road kill.”
“Thanks.”
“Why the long face?”
“We don’t like waiting. Sitting around waiting for them to attack; we want to be outside, looking, exploring.”
“You’re talking in plurals again.”
“What?”
“‘We’,” he explained with an embarrassed expression.
“Sorry.”
He leant back nonchalantly against the bank of forgotten equipment, its edges flecked with rust, and pulled a small whisky flask out of his pocket. He downed a slurp and offered it to me. I took it and we risked a cautious gulp of the stuff; an acquired taste, we decided, although it grew in charm as it sunk deeper into our stomach. “So,” he said finally, in a strained voice that was leading to something more.
I waited.
“I got told I owe you for getting me away from the nutters with the guns.”
“The…”
“The Order.”
“Right. Yes.”
“Nice stunt; how’d you pull it?”
“I cursed the leader of the Order – Chaigneau – with a long and withering death,” I said. “He saw my point of view.”
“Bastard’s going to kill you, Matthew Swift,” he said brightly. “Just in case you hadn’t figured it out.”
“I know.”
“Although, if you need help when push comes to shove…”
“Thanks. I appreciate the offer.”
He gave me a long, sideways glance. “That means ‘no’, doesn’t it?”
“What?”
“You like working alone.”
“I… have nothing here,” I said, struggling to find the right words, caught off guard. “The people I trusted or thought I could trust either can’t be, or are gone. Vanished, dead. Or those who may live I put at risk by my presence – people will get hurt around us. Given those circumstances, wouldn’t you rather work alone?”
“Don’t get me wrong; I get the whole lone rider vibe,” he said, raising his hands in defence. “But I’m just saying: it’ll put you in the scrapyard twenty years earlier than might’ve been.”
“We think… that we are grateful for your concern,” we stumbled. “Thank you.”
“That’s a fucking weird thing you’ve got going there,” he grunted, turning away and half shaking his head, hand going towards the whisky flask again.
“What is?”
“For Christ’s sake, Matthew, this is a fucking telephone exchange! Do you think no one noticed when suddenly poof, the voices in the wire went missing? Do you know how many nerds in basements were watching those rogue pieces of frequency, the bursts of inexplicable interference in the system? One second there’s a semi-demonic power whispering out of the telephone to anyone with half the senses to hear it, and the next second it’s just gone! And there you are, walking around with bright blue eyes and a bewildered crap expression and, you know, it doesn’t take a million brain cells to work it out. That’s what’s so fucking weird, the way you can’t work out if you’re even bloody human any more.”
I looked away, ashamed. We mumbled, “We… meant no harm.”
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered.
We looked up sharply, trying to read his voice, his words. His eyes were fixed on an opposite bank of dead machinery as, with shaky fingers, he unscrewed the top of his whisky flask. “We also have nothing here, except what I remember, and that’s largely gone. We did not mean for any of this to happen; we hope you will understand.”
“This is a new one,” he groaned.
“What is?”
“Me talking to a bloody mystic power no less, disguised as a guy with a face like a soggy sandbag.” Clumsily he touched his forehead with a couple of fingers and smiled. “Nice to meet you, blue bloody electric bloody angels. How you doing?”
We looked him straight in the eye and said, “Things have been better.”
“I bet they bloody have.” He waved the whisky flask at us again; we shook our head.
“Was that Matthew or the angels saying no?” he asked. “Just in case one of you’s teetotal.”
“We are the same,” we said. “The distinction is merely one of presentation and form. To us… all things are new. Humans and the things they do. We were made by them… but had never experienced them before. As for me… I just want to get on with it. When we blaze, when we fight, when we rejoice, then I am all us, for that is all we are. When I am… afraid… we do not understand, do not like these things. We are me. It is… frightening, having to be me.” I caught his expression, somewhere trapped between genuinely bemused and hopefully open. I shrugged. “And I’m not teetotal. Thank you. I’d just like to keep a clear head.”
“Things are very weird,” said Blackjack.
“There,” we said, “we also agree.”
We waited in those tunnels for another two days before it happened. By the time it did, I almost believed that it wasn’t going to, that Lee had got his head screwed back on right, that Bakker wouldn’t order it, that they wouldn’t come. No one said it; but we had begun to think it even after the first night. It was hard to tell whether I felt disappointment or hope when Vera woke me up with a shake in the dark and murmured, “Come. Now.”
I followed her through tunnels lined with sleeping bags below still-damp paint, stepping over the hunched forms of snoozing weremen, the curled-up shapes of slumbering warlocks and around the heavy black, weapon-laden bags of the Order, until we dropped down a narrow flight of grey concrete stairs, illuminated by a single light that sat in the wall like a squid clinging to the side of a sunken ship. The shadows here were almost thick enough to swirl like fog, and at the bottom, by a heavy, shut iron door, there lay a body, almost floating in a puddle of its own accumulated blood.
Holding up an electric lamp to see more clearly, Vera said in a hushed voice, “The door leads down to the Post Office tunnels. Trains used to go through there to the sorting offices. It’s not marked on the map.”
I said nothing and squatted down on the steps just above the body. Repulsed and fascinated, we reached out without thinking, even as our stomach turned, and carefully prodded the side of the broken man. His skin was still warm through the remnants of his clothes, and as we pushed his body over we saw that something had torn open his belly, dragged out a handful of intestines and wrapped them round the man’s middle a few times, like a badly knitted belt. We tasted bile in our throat and felt a physical convulsion through our body as our heart skipped a beat, and stood up quickly, backing a few steps and suddenly not sure what to do with the blood on our fingers, running them over the wall to try and wipe it off.
“Is it Bakker?” hissed Vera. “Are they here? Is it Lee?”
“They’re coming,” I answered. “But it’s not Bakker.”
I snatched the lantern from out of her hands and held it close to myself, sweeping it from side to side in front of me; as the bright light moved around my feet, my shadow, stretching out behind me, did not move with it, but simply grew longer and thinner, like a rubber band being drawn towards breaking point. We felt a laugh grow in our throat, shrill and frightened, and I bit down hard to contain it, so the sound that came out was more like a whimper.
“What is it?” Vera could see how the light didn’t bend the shadows at our feet, and was smart enough to be scared.
“Something much, much worse,” I declared, handing the lantern back to her. “Wake everyone up. Don’t let anyone go around in groups of less than five, or without a strong light. Tell them that Lee’s coming.”
To the best of my knowledge, this is what happened in the Kingsway Exchange; but in such chaos, even with the best of intentions, it is hard to tell.
Guy Lee had an army at his command. It wasn’t a big army, nor was it well disciplined; but when the individual soldiers of the said army can blend their skin to the colour of concrete or burst bubbles of burning hydrogen in the pipes above your head or scream with the roar of the exploding fuel tank on the back of a bus in billows of black fumes, size doesn’t matter. They’d been paid, bribed, threatened, blackmailed, cajoled, promised, and coaxed into working for Lee, and when the survivors were questioned they all whispered that somewhere, behind it all, they knew what Lee was. Not just a man with a will: a servant of the Tower. And those who disobeyed the Tower did not live to regret their mistake for more than a few days of blood loss and pain.
They entered the old, forgotten Post Office train tunnels at the Mount Pleasant sorting office, a truly unpleasant collection of tin roofs and grey walls that sat beside heavy fuming traffic at the junction of Rosebery Avenue and Farringdon Road. They slipped down through the darkness, their way lit up by the witches who coaxed the mould around the leaking pipes to fluoresce into vibrant light and guide the travellers on their way to the Exchange. They didn’t know how Lee had known where to go. They said there was a traitor somewhere within the Whites. It could have been anyone.
The watchman on the Post Office tunnel was called Yixiao, a White from Brixton who specialised in inscribing his spells in towering green letters on the brick cuttings of railway lines, and in his youth had been part of a gang who labelled themselves MORTON BOYZ in big black letters across the wheelie bins of their local estates. That was before Yixiao had discovered, to his surprise, that the crows he drew in the daytime flapped their way across the white walls of the tower blocks at night, squawking the words “caw caw” in squiggly small black letters from their beaks across the paint on the walls, before sunrise forced them to land again across the garage doors where they’d first been painted. In the tunnels behind the big iron doors that he guarded, he’d painted on the encrusted walls, their surface finely textured with layers of solid dirt built up over the years, the images of his coal-coloured crows, who patrolled up and down the corridor every night to see who might be coming in the dark, and shrieked with silent letters their warnings across the concrete walls, for Yixiao’s hearing only.
Doubtless he had seen the advancing troops of Lee’s army as they marched down the forgotten tunnels, and was doubtless on his way to sound the alarm when he’d met his untimely end, claws scratching at his eyes, tearing straight through his cheeks to reveal the teeth inside, ripping out his belly and playing with its contents like a child fascinated by a new toy – had I known that this would be how he’d die? Perhaps. One more thing about which it was best not to think.
However Yixiao had died, Vera had always speculated that they would come through the Post Office tunnels, and whatever she thought of my role in letting the man meet his end, she said nothing about it as she started to sound the alarm. The problem was that Guy Lee didn’t just come up from the tunnels – he came in through the underground, from the ventilation shafts, and from the street, and all at once.
This, more than anything, is why I still do not, to this day, fully know the secrets of the dead of the Kingsway Telephone Exchange. Did some die that day who didn’t need to? Did the Order aim every shot at enemies, or were a few friends caught in the fire? Did the were-men fight their own, did the Whites stand or run?
Sometimes, it is better for the historian to wait until their subjects really are dead and gone, just in case no one wants to hear the truth.
This, then, is what I saw.
I don’t know where I was when I felt the first shudder of the first explosion. The concrete surfaces blended into each other, the endless colours and paintings just one long bad hallucination trip. The shock of the blasts sent shimmers of concrete dust down from the ceiling; it hummed through the exposed pipes and tangled wires that ran across the roof, with a high-pitched ringing note, like the striking of a distant church bell that lingered even after the thud through the air had faded. I knew where I was meant to be – finding Lee and dispatching him before he could hurt us – but as the corridors filled with running bodies and shapes and shouting people pushing and shoving and racing with eyes wild and a scent of the animal about them, I followed my own shadow, let it guide me as it twisted across the floor in front of my footsteps.
Just because you can use magic, that doesn’t mean it’s always the best tool for the job. Guy Lee understood this and had put explosive charges on the sealed-off metal doorways down to the tunnels beneath the street, blasting them in with a cacophony that set the car alarms wailing, along with the burglar alarms of all the lawyers’ chambers and the local university buildings that were now howling into the dark. Then, just to make his point, he started pumping in tear gas through the ventilation shafts. I noticed it first as a puff of white drifting vapour trickling out from a crack in the ceiling, and an odd smell that couldn’t be defined by the nose so much as the stomach, where it burnt its way to the centre of the body’s mass, gripped its tight, sticky hot fingers around my middle, and twisted.
I dropped to my hands and knees instinctively as the vapour started to fill the corridor, and tried to find an appropriate spell, fingers scrabbling on the cold, dry floor for a handful of warm, solid magic to throw up around me, blasting the thicker plumes of white gas away. Before I could do so, a hand fell on my shoulder and another grabbed at the back of my head, pulling me up even as the first dribbles of bile started pouring down from my mouth and nose. Something hot, rubber and heavy was pulled down over my eyes and mouth, and then tightened at the back of my head, and a hand pushed me back against the painted wall as the clouds of impenetrable smoke billowed around us, gushing out of the ceiling like a waterfall on the edge of freezing. I blinked through the condensation-dripping lenses of the mask that had been pulled down over my nose and eyes and saw the dark eyes of Oda blink back at me through the black, nozzle-like thing over her own face. She was trying to speak, but the words were nothing more than a muffled mmmwhhh through the layers of plastic between us and the infected air. She was silenced by another series of short booms that I felt as much as heard, like the sensation of a lift suddenly stopping in mid-descent, all the parts of the air moving too quickly around us in different directions.
Oda hefted a rifle that looked like it hadn’t been manufactured so much as carved out of some primal black void, and tugged at my sleeve. I shook my head and pulled away, trying to find my shadow on the floor through the smoke, and when I couldn’t, I crawled over to a wall, holding up the lamp to see my own shape cast on the concrete. For a moment, just a moment, the shadow that I cast, thick and black against the close brightness of the lantern, looked up, looked straight at me, flexed its fingers into a clawlike spread, and opened its wings.
The lights went out in the tunnels, spitting into nothing on the ceiling and on the walls by the doors. My shadow was suddenly gone, melted into a rising backdrop of blackness, and only my lantern was alight in that place. Oda looked at me and despite the mask, her face, her entire body language, was an open question. I looked around but saw nothing but stretching, rectangular, contained blackness in either direction, until at one end I also saw the movement of torchlight struggling to break through the billows of gas and smoke, and heard distant muffled bangs and tasted the scent of magic. In that darkness we did not want to chase our shadow, regardless of what it might be up to; not yet. So we pulled at Oda’s sleeve and ran towards that light.
The torchlight splitting the gloom of the corridor belonged to the bikers; and it wasn’t torchlight, but firelight, oily orange, dripping off the ends of flaming rags that each one twirled at arm’s length. For all their fire, spitting red droplets onto the floor, the ignited rags didn’t seem to be getting any shorter as the bikers swung them into darkened and empty rooms of endless stained paint and broken machines, which looked more and more like electronic tombs as we hurried through the dark. The bikers all wore helmets – some painted with white angels, or a skull and crossbones, or a spider stretched out in all its furry detail, or a dart heading towards a bullseye, or other such symbols of identification – and all wore goggles and had a scarf over their nose and mouth; implausibly, this seemed protection enough for them as they moved slowly, confidently, through the tunnels. They swung crowbars, lengths of chain, even the odd spanner at the end of their leather-covered arms.
They didn’t run, but their walk was… odd. A subtle shifting of perspective, perhaps, a magic so fleeting and hard to define that all we could say of its nature was that in one step we were by a white door with the words “Storage B08” written on it, and two steps later we were at the end of the corridor and looking back to see at least thirty steps behind, the door that only a moment ago we’d glanced at. Chicken or egg – what moved us more? Us walking, or the world moving beneath us? Perhaps the bikers, at least, knew the answer.
We found a small hall that I imagined had once been used as a canteen by the telecom workers; and there we also found the mercenaries. At first, we didn’t recognise them for what they were, and the whole crowd of us stood uncertainly in the doorway, staring at these men dressed in gas masks and black, wondering if they were part of the Order or not. In that moment of uncertainty, it was they who recognised us as adversaries – and they threw themselves at us with alarming speed. I guessed they were mercenaries by the markings on their skin – in many ways like San Khay’s, swirls of power and magic embedded in their flesh. But unlike San Khay, this wasn’t just a tattoo – the mercenaries had carved their magic into their skin with knives, and each of them wore precisely the same symbols of strength across their flesh as their brothers.
The fight in that hall was a confusion of shadows and black-clad bodies caught in the unsteady light of flames. I saw the bikers slash through the air with their crowbars, and as they did, the gashed air poured out fire from where it was torn. I saw the mercenaries leave the surface of the floor and dance a few paces across the ceiling before dropping, nails-first, towards the eyes of their nearest enemies; I saw bikers hurl their lengths of chain, which ignited with the colour of boiling oil, flying and coiling like living things and following the enemy through every twist and dive like a writhing Chinese dragon. When the bikers screamed, their voices were the roar of an engine firing; when they spun, the air whipped around them like they moved at eighty miles an hour; and when their blood dripped onto the floor – perhaps it was the light – it had the look of engine oil.
Watching the mêlée, I moved my fingers through the air in search of subtler powers that might let me help my allies and harm my enemies, without doing both to each in that confined space. Oda, however, had little patience to see what we might do, and stepped briskly past us, dropping her rifle and pulling instead, from a sheath across her back, a sword.
The likely effect of a sword in that place was ugly, especially when wielded by a faceless figure in a gas mask. When Oda stepped into that fight, she moved the blade like it was a ribbon in her hand; and slowly the horror dawned on us, the realisation, that for Oda as she stepped neatly round each flailing figure and ducked each tattooed swipe from a mercenary’s knife, she was dancing, and as with all good dances, she was enjoying it: each swish of the blade through another person’s flesh, and every turn of her foot to meet some oncoming attack, and every flicker of shadow, and every movement of her arms – she relished it.
And for a distracted moment, we watched her, horrified, delighted. Then a voice whispered in our ear out of the darkness, “Hello, Matthew’s fire.” We spun round, unleashing a fistful of crackling electricity from the wires overhead into the space where the words had come from; but there was nothing there except shadows moving across the wall. I saw one dance away towards the end of the corridor; it wasn’t moving right; its shape was too defined for all that darkness. I grabbed two fistfuls of electricity from the ceiling and ran, racing after it down the corridor, snatching the lamp in one burning blue hand and holding it up to light my way. At the end of the corridor I reached a set of heavy, shut iron doors. I hesitated, then put down my lamp, let the electricity out of my fingers, and pressed my ear to the door. The metal felt oddly warm to the touch, and through it, very faintly I could hear the clink clink clink of machinery, and feel the hum of a growing electric current.
Realisation hit; I was halfway up the corridor and throwing myself face first towards the concrete floor, hands over my head, willing the concrete to open up beneath me and encase me in its hold, feeling it warp obediently to the shape of my body as I fell, when the vaultlike doorway exploded. My ears probably popped, it was hard to tell behind the overwhelming punch dealt straight to the eardrum by the force of that bang. I felt the tips of my hair curl up in indignity at the heat that rushed over them, the pressure and force of it racing across my back, raising hot bloody blisters through my clothes, which smoked on the edge of flame.
I didn’t bother to see who was coming through the hole behind me, but staggered up, crawled a few paces towards the opening of the corridor, then pulled myself round the corner and slumped against the wall while waiting for the static to fade from my eyes. I heard shouting behind me and tasted sickly bright magic, smelt the stench of the sewers, right at the back of my throat; and instantly had a name for the people coming up that corridor. And didn’t want to think about it.
Deep Night Downers. A clan not unlike the Whites – a collection of like-minded magically inclined individuals – a conglomeration of magicians who understood that the city you saw in daylight, and on the surface, was only a lie, an illusion sustained by all the things going on underneath, and at night – the lorries delivering food to the shops between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m., and the men cleaning the congealed fat from the sewers, painting lines onto the roads when all the traffic had stopped, changing the bulbs in the street lamps, checking the rails in the underground, fixing the water pipes when no one was awake to want something to drink, and listening for the wires under the streets – the Downers understood that all these things had to happen for the city to survive, and they drew their power from it, a slick, invisible, pulsing presence of magic, that was almost imperceptible by daylight and became most powerful at 3 a.m., flooding the streets with its subtle, silvery glow.
Sitting raggedly round the corner from where they were slowly advancing up the corridor, I reached a dusty hand towards the ceiling. I let my thoughts tangle up in the mess of wires and piping running through it until I felt I had a good strong grip, then wrenched the whole lot down and spun it across the corridor until it formed a spider’s web-like mesh of metal and sparking electric wire across the tunnel between them and me. It wouldn’t hold them for long, I knew; but I didn’t feel the need to stay there for long – at this time of night, and in this place, I didn’t want to take on Downers single-handedly, when their magic was strongest and they felt that the city, the true city of necessary pulsing daily functions, was most alive.
I moved to get up, and run away, but before I could move, something cold splatted onto the top of my head, like the first drop of a rainstorm. I looked up. On the ceiling, someone had painted a spaceship racing towards a series of bright blue and green ringed planets – something that might have been appropriate in a 1960s comic book; and underneath, in large stylish letters, the caption: “CAPTAIN ZOG SAVES THE DAY!!!” As art went, I could see its merit, in a retro way; but now, watching them, I saw something a good deal better as, silently, the big blue and green planets started to revolve across the ceiling.
On the wall opposite me, a figure of huge, bulging muscles, heaving chest and impossibly small waist, picked out in thick blue paint with yellow shiny buckles, stirred. Its fingers flexed. On the wall next to me, a tiger drawn in neon pink and lime-green stripes twitched its bright purple whiskers, its red eyes narrowing. Above it, a flock of jet-black doves flew up onto the ceiling and down the other side on the wall, before doing a complete circle, rippling across the surface of the floor. A single bright blue eye set on a bed of trolley wheels blinked at me with an eyelid of sparkling scarlet paint, then rolled from side to side on its gently turning wheels. A pair of cyclists made entirely out of human ears started peddling with their tiny ear-feet, cruising across the bottom of the opposite wall, and then up onto the ceiling, and doing a quick orbit of a rotating blue planet before descending again.
I stood up slowly, as footsteps in the corridor behind me grew louder; the roar of a chainsaw suggested that the Downers had come equipped for the obstructions I had thrown up in their way. But we were unconcerned, and our face split into a slow grin as, his arms dripping blue paint, Captain Zog stretched across the length of the wall, and reached out. First came yellow-gloved fingers, then a cautious yellow toe, then a bright blue kneecap – tiny and knobbly, far too small to support the bulk of his frame – then the blue hulk of his chest. His face came last of all, stretching behind him as a few residuals of paint clung to the wall, before peeling away from the rest of his dripping form with a few colourful pops. Next to me, the ruby-red nose of the tiger protruded from the wall, then a hint of pink neon stripe; a spider the size of my hand, bright emerald green and completely smooth except for where black brushstrokes picked out a hint of fur, scuttled across my leg, leaving pinprick stains of bright green points across my trousers. On the ceiling, a pointed spaceship sprayed a fine grey paint from its exhaust vent, that settled in a mist on the floor; the craft spun out of the wall and back, then twisted once more into the air and accelerated away again, amid silence except for the dripdrip dripdrip of paint falling in its wake.
I jumped as the tiger brushed affectionately against my legs, leaving a long streak of muddled pink across my trousers. Its feet made a flat splash, splash sound on the concrete, as it padded towards the corridor from which I’d just come running. Then Captain Zog and all the tiny scurrying creatures of the walls – painted butterflies with the mandibles of soldier ants, children with faces longer than the bodies that carried them, and tubby black and yellow bees walking on two legs and carrying carving knives with every limb, with three black fingers to support each dribbling blade – all the monsters of the Exchange marched in silence apart from the running of wet paint, straight towards the corridor where the Downers were. As they went, they flowed in and out of the wall and each other, and, where their features were human enough to read, every face wore a single intent.
“Hello, Matthew’s fire!”
I spun round, but saw nothing in the glow of my lantern but dancing darkness and running colours. I half-closed my eyes, and listened.
A brush of cold across my shoulder…
… smell of sewage
ripple of magic in my ear
taste of salt
bile
blood
silk
… hello Matthew’s fire…
… we be…
fire
light
life
fire
stop
we be
enough
so brightly burning
make me
be free
STOP
…
Thank you.
Better.
“Hello, little sorcerer.”
I lashed out at the whisper of cold in my ear and, for a second, my hand closed around something like fabric-woven ice, a bite of frost that went straight to the bone, then up the wrist, a slither of silk under my skin, malleable, bending to the touch. I opened my eyes as it slipped from my fingers, and saw a tendril of darkness vanishing into the wall and rippling away, and for a moment, just a moment, I thought that perhaps, I could beat him after all.
I picked up my lantern and ran between the heaving masses of living paint, closing my ears to the Downers behind me as the first screams began, before they were choked off by a mouthful of paint.
Dark tunnels lose meaning after a while; I had had no idea how many there were in the Exchange – it takes being lost to give you a true sense of proportion. I didn’t care where I was going, and it was only instinct that made me obey when I heard, through the darkness, a voice shout, “Swift, get down!”
I threw myself flat on basic principle, since the voice hadn’t sounded too threatening, merely urgent, and saw a burst of fire at the end of the corridor, and felt the mechanical snaps of bullets biting overhead, striking something that made a dull thumping noise on each impact. When the firing stopped, I looked up and behind me, to see the body of a woman, dressed in very little indeed, torn apart by the impact of the bullets. I recognised her; when she went out in those clothes, her name had been Inferno. I tasted bile.
Hands pulled me behind a short line of men armed with rifles. With them was Chaigneau; he held a short, heavy mace, inscribed with scratched words in Latin that in the gloom I couldn’t decipher. He glared at me and said, “What are you doing here, sorcerer?”
I staggered away from him, dragging my lantern with me, and ran on into the dark.
“What do you think you’re playing at?” his voice echoed behind me.
Gunshots in the dark.
A taste of magic blooming and dying all around me, we felt… we smelt… sickly black spots of pain bursting behind our eyeballs, we felt… trickles of red agony down the back of our spine and I knew, even if we were too afraid to acknowledge it, that this was what a sorcerer felt near to too much death.
We came to a corridor of bodies. Warlocks and witches and wizards, their flesh burnt half away to reveal carbonised bone, the walls scorched black, all the paint long since bubbled away by the force of magical fire, wires and pipes shattered from the ceiling, and, when we risked pulling off the gas mask to sniff the air, the smell of roast skin.
We put the gas mask back on, the smell of rubber better than the stench of all that, and the limited vision afforded by its goggles a blessing, rather than a disadvantage. We put one foot between the bent arm of a woman whose face had been burnt away to a hollow shell, and the scorched body of a man whose eyes were, mercifully, turned away from us as we advanced. At the end of the corridor the shadows crawled across the wall, roiling despite the steadiness of our lamp. We made it almost halfway down before we spotted a robe of exotic, tasteless colours and knew who was wearing it, and knew that he was dead. We had nothing we could call affection for the warlock, but stopped and pressed our head against the wall and trembled and felt our flesh burn for many minutes before the realisation came that all this fear and sickness made no difference. We had to keep walking regardless, turning our head away from the sight of the bodies and trying to make the exercise a mechanical one, flinching nonetheless when our toe prodded the remnants of some dead magician.
At the end of that corridor was a metal door, rusted crispy brown. The bolt had been twisted out of shape, by what power I didn’t know, and the thing stood ajar, inviting. Like an idiot, I nudged it further open, and ducking under the low top, stepped down the cold staircase beyond it.
The room I came into was too big for me to see anything but its nearest edges, the ceiling lost in darkness, and the walls stretching out in long perspectives. The floor full of telephone servers. They stood like the dead black trunks of some haunted forest, gleaming with the occasional hint of circuit-board green and solder silver when they caught the lamplight, stretching on in neat rows as far as I could see. I picked my way carefully down the nearest aisle, not daring to call any more light than I already had, for fear of who else might be looking. My footsteps were flat, dull and impossibly loud in that still room; the air was heavy, like it hadn’t been disturbed for years; as I moved, puffs of white dust swirled up beneath my feet.
It took me almost five minutes of padding through that empty, dead place, between the straight lines of the telephone servers, before I found another set of footprints. They had been made by a pair of man’s shoes, business wear rather than trainers. I turned and followed the line of their walking, feeling like a counter in a game of snakes and ladders, who might at any moment step on a snake and find myself back where I’d started. The tracks were, however, fairly easy to follow. They led between the endless rows of servers to a junction resembling any other, except that here there was another bubble of light, just like the one I carried. It lit up a hunched shadow dressed in black, wearing a pair of large man’s business shoes, hunched over what I realised were my own footprints.
The figure looked up as my pool of light merged with his own from where I stood some metres away. His face twitched into an expression of surprise, followed by curving contempt. “Sorcerer,” said Lee. “I thought you’d wind up down here. Prophetic powers couldn’t have done a better job.”
“Bugger prophetic powers,” I replied, putting the lantern down and scanning the thick, still darkness around us. “You and I both know, I think, what’s got me down here. Tall guy, wears my coat, bad complexion, essence of living darkness – seen him anywhere?”
“And here I was thinking you and I were about to enter the history books,” he said, straightening up, and brushing dust off his knees. “But all along, you aren’t really interested in me, are you? I don’t think you give a damn about the things I’ve done, or that Khay did, or even about the Whites and the warlocks and all the other cretins I’ve killed to get here. You’re far too busy to care. Am I right?”
“No, but nice try,” I said.
He shrugged. “Do you know what the difference is between a soldier and a murderer, Mr Swift?”
“I haven’t given it much thought.”
“Intent. Whatever I do, I always intend. It keeps me in control. I have an anger, a beast… but control. You cannot imagine. But you – did you even think about all those bodies lying in your way? I think you kill and don’t even have the knowledge of what you’re doing, or why. Useless fucking moron.”
“You know, you’re right.”
“Of course.”
“No, not about everything – but you’re right that I’m not here for you. You are just a dot on my way to something more important. A door that has to be opened, a minor tick on the list before getting to the major, and the fact that you’re a murderer, a rapist, a thief, a coward and a corpse only makes it easier to do what I was always intending all along. So let’s get this whole thing over with so that Hunger can come and take his fill.”
“Get what over?” Lee grinned, and gestured expansively. “Robert wants you alive, Mr Swift, and alive is what I intend to give him.”
A shadow in the darkness behind him. I reached instinctively out for that warm tingle of magic on my fingers. Then a shadow to my left, and my right and, when I dared to glance backwards, a shadow behind me, faces, figures emerging from the gloom. Guy Lee opened up his hands, whose cupped hollow started filling with a thick black smog; and he was grinning, utterly unafraid, as men and women emerged around us from the gloom. As they stepped into the pool of light, I saw the flash of a brightly coloured robe and the remains of the warlock’s face, empty, devoid of life.
I turned to Lee as the dead of the corridor I’d come down from, their bodies still dripping the last of their blood from their open wounds, filed into a circle around me. “Zombies,” we said, with open scorn in our voice. “How 1960s.”
“Not zombies. Zombies are too crude. These are…” Lee searched for the right word “… uniquely empowered.”
My gaze swerved back to the eyes of the warlock. They were not entirely empty, not quite; and his mouth, as it hung open, showed a piece of paper, the white just showing behind his teeth. Life, fuelled by words, shoved down his throat as he died; a spell in paper somewhere inside his chest, rumbling around the remains of his stomach.
“We won’t hesitate to kill them twice,” we said as the last of the bodies from the corridor stepped into the circle closing around us.
“Hard to kill dead things,” said Lee.
“You should know,” we answered, full of immediate purpose. “We set them free.”
And we reached out, grabbed a fistful of heat from the lantern on the floor, cupped it in the palms of our hands, and blew a tiny piece of life into them. The heat bloomed into blue flames between our fingers, rolled out across our hands and arms, billowed around us like a cloak as, with a wrench and a shove, we sent it spilling out between the dead monolith servers. It rolled across the floor and up the walls in a flash of bright blue fire that for a second illuminated the whole stretching expansive dome of the place, burning away every shadow and inch of skin that it touched, boiling the solder in its frames to bubbling, spitting silver bubbles and sweet smoke, blinding out every inch of darkness
except for
just a moment
caught in the flames…
I saw him, fingers outstretched to catch the surge of blue fire, chin tilted up and eyes wide as if trying to breathe my flames, face open and in an expression of absolute delight as the blue light seared around him.
Just for a moment, with the shadows that hid him burnt back and away,
I saw Hunger through the fire.
Then it went out.
Darkness all around.
I was on the floor, eyes running. I couldn’t see through Oda’s gas mask, the inside was steamed up and the outside cracked with heat. I tugged it off and instantly smelt the solder smoke and dead flesh, but no tear gas, not this far down. There was no sign of Lee. I scrambled on all fours across the floor until I found the warlock, lying on his back, blood now soaked through every inch of his clothes. I yanked his twitching jaw open while an arm hanging on by a thread of tendon tried to lift itself up and gouge at my eyes, I dug through the dry hollow of his mouth past his snapping teeth until I found the tip of the piece of paper and carefully, so as not to tear it, pulled it out through his open jaw. The black words written on it in spidery ink were almost illegible with saliva and blood. I saw:
live for
black burnt
fire command
be free
I tore the paper into pieces and threw them away before looking down at the warlock who lay, entirely still, face empty, life utterly gone.
We felt movement behind us, and turned instinctively, snatching a fistful of light up through the air and hurling it at the shape of Guy Lee as he dropped down from on top of a server frame. He staggered back for a moment, throwing his hands up to cover his eyes as the whiteness flared off my fingers; but still he kept coming towards me. A foot staggering forward connected with our side, and we fell back, moving with the pain to try and avoid it, sprawling across the bloody remnants of the warlock. Then Lee’s hands were on the back of our head, pulling it up, an arm going round across our throat and squeezing with an almighty strength that we could only hope was unnatural. There was no breath from his mouth although it was an inch from our ear. With a shudder of horror we realised that he was going to break our neck before we suffocated, even though waves of static darkness were already flashing up and down in front of our vision like the confused black curtain of the final act.
His voice hissed without bothering to exhale, the sound little more than a whisper from the dead air already in his throat. “Robert wants you alive, he says. Bring Swift to me; don’t hurt him more than you must, keep him alive. But you know and I know” – a tug across our neck sent numbness through our limbs – “that of all the people in the world who Robert hates more than any other, he hates you, Matthew Swift, sorcerer, apprentice who betrayed his master. Even if Robert doesn’t know it himself. So what I have to ask is – why does Robert want you alive? What is it in your blue flames and unlikely resurrection that makes him so excited, seems to give him so much life, just in thinking of it? Because whatever it is, I want it for me. It can set me free!”
We tightened our fingers around his arm where he held us, and brought blue burning to our skin, then pushed it down towards his flesh in a wave of searing heat until we could feel the bursting of his skin through his sleeve – even so he didn’t scream, but dug his teeth into the back of my neck hard enough to draw blood and pulled his arm harder across my throat. I whimpered, but we reached up behind ourself until our fingers touched his head and tilted his face up until our fingers brushed his teeth, pushing his jaw open and reaching down inside his mouth. He bit and I felt blood spill across my knuckles but we kept digging, ignoring the pain even as my world grew faint until, at the very back of his throat, past his teeth and the ridged palate of his mouth, into the soft tissues of the windpipe, our fingers touched a slim piece of paper, and pulled.
Now he screamed, and in that act gave us space to tighten our grip inside his mouth and pull the paper, and keep pulling, falling forward even as his grip relaxed, tumbling head over heel but keeping hold of that paper, and it kept coming, rolled up in a tight tube, half a metre of it, a metre unravelling in my hands, with words illegible from blood and spit on both sides in tiny, tiny lines running from edge to edge; a metre and a half of bloody, stained inky paper that I pulled up from the back of his throat. It flopped around me like wet bandaging, rotten in places, stained with what chemicals I didn’t want to know; and as the end came out of Guy Lee’s mouth, he collapsed backwards, face empty, colour gone, eyes lifeless, and twitched no more.
I fell onto my back next to him, letting the endless sprawl of paper fall at my side. There, without further ado, it hissed at the edges, blackened, curled and crumbled to ash. I lay and wheezed while we brushed our hands unconsciously against our side, trying to rub off the spit and blood and ink and feel of his teeth on our skin, and the touch on us of the paper and its black magic. I was too numb even to cry.
I knew now what Sinclair hadn’t known: that Guy Lee was animated by a metre and a half of crabbed written commands made up of ink and paper. He had been kept alive by magic alone, unable to feel, whether emotion or touch, unless it was so inscribed on the paper in his chest. Not quite a zombie; perhaps just… uniquely empowered. Empowered enough to crave life and wonder what was in our blood that could give it.
There was a dull slapping noise in the darkness. After a while I realised it was clapping. I sat up, taking my time about dangerous things like breathing, and looked into the darkness. A darker patch of shadow stood just outside the circle of lamplight, white hands visible only because they moved, beating out a regular applause.
I staggered up and retreated closer to the lantern, keeping my eyes fixed on that shadow. The clapping stopped. A voice said, “Was that Matthew, or Matthew’s fire, that cried? I really couldn’t tell.”
“Didn’t cry,” I rejoined. “You wouldn’t understand.”
The swirl of darkness drifted nearer, acquired a face, withered and white and pale and smiling and indescribably, sickly, his. “Well,” he said, “perhaps it’s all the same now.”
He knelt down by the body of Guy Lee, and scooped up a handful of black papery ash. Smiling at me, watching my reaction, he ate it. Then scooped up another handful, and another, and another, until the ash of the paper was just a thin black stain on the floor, and ate them all down. He stood up with a sigh and a shudder and tilted his head upwards, as if sniffing the air.
“The taste of life… is this it?” he asked, licking black flakes off his lips with a grey tongue.
“No,” I said.
“I’ve tried water, food, fire, blood, flesh, skin, hair, bone, organ, breath – I’ve tasted them all. I was wondering where he hid his life; it was something hard to fathom, or perceive,” prodding Lee with a toe, “but now I’ve tasted it, it seems … unsatisfying. A drop of water on my thirst, a corner filled in my stomach, but my appetite still… desiring. Still hungry.”
“I don’t think you’d like me,” I said. “My diet is unhealthy.”
“It’s not your blood I desire,” whispered Hunger, moving closer to me, sticking a cautious toe into the light. He drew it back quickly, like a swimmer testing water, surprised to find it so cold. “Just your fire.”
“Can I offer a theory?”
The figure of Hunger gestured dismissively.
“I’m going to suggest that Robert James Bakker sent you here.”
“‘Sent’? Do you think you can apply your little ideas to me?”
“Perhaps ‘sent’ was a mistake,” I conceded, rubbing my burning throat. “Maybe… influenced your desire to come here. You do desire, don’t you? Deep down you want more than you can ever say. You don’t know entirely what it is you want, but you want it now. Perhaps it’s not just your inclination for blood and ash that’s got you here; maybe it’s his?”
For a moment, Hunger almost looked confused. Then he shook his head. “No,” he whispered. “A human can’t… a creature of blood and skin and senses… wouldn’t understand.”
“We do.”
A grin of sharp grey teeth. “Yes,” he whispered. “But you aren’t human any more. Is that why you couldn’t cry, little sorcerer? Won’t you burn out your lovely blue eyes?”
“I’m a little confused,” I said, crawling back onto my feet and straightening my back to face him.
“Shall I be the one to give you enlightenment, or do you simply not want to understand?”
“We understand,” we said, opening our fingers at our side, stretching them out to catch the feeling of that place, one last time, pulling in the blue fire ready to burn. “But it doesn’t mean we have to feel sorry for you.”
He opened his fingers, a second before we could – he’d seen the attack coming and he loved it, opened his mouth and breathed in the magic around us, sucked it down like air. He raised his arms, and all the darkness moved up with him, stretching arms across the ceiling, drawing out the length of his form behind him in a wing of blackness; and from his fingers came nothing but dark, was nothing but dark, a living burning fire of it rushing forth and popping out the light of the lantern, swimming towards me in a tide that sucked the colour from the servers, the light from the wires, the heat from the frames, and left nothing but dry grey frost in its wake.
We saw all this and, for a moment, it made perfect sense to us, and we didn’t need a sorcerer’s tricks to match this darkness, just the fire inside that made us bright.
We opened our fingers, and let it blaze. The blue fire burst across our flesh and rippled up our arms, rolled over our face and set our hair blazing, we breathed in and it rushed up through our nose and down our throat, filling our lungs and stomach and passing across them into the blood, setting the arteries under our skin exploding with bright blueness, filling the blood vessels in our eyes with its flame until all we saw was the blue of it; we let the fire run through our clothes and spread out from our fingers and it didn’t burn, that wasn’t what was needed; it simply blazed. We put all our strength, our anger, our fears, our senses into it and pushed the flames out of us in a blue rippling wall of power that slammed into the tide of darkness, like two glaciers made of silk charging into each other, a silent swish of force that nearly sent us off our feet, and for a moment
just a moment
Hunger was afraid.
Then the fire started to burn. There was no controlling it, not once it was locked into opposition with that wall of moving shadows. It started at the edges, where it rippled against the encroaching tide of blackness, solder starting to smoke and boil, plastic beginning to drip and melt, frames glowing an eerie purple as the redness of the metal was lost somewhere behind the blueness of our perceptions. We could feel the rising heat start to run across our skin and the pain of it start up in our blood, but we kept burning
my blood
because to stop was to let that darkness suffocate us, tear us in two, and in its own strange way the burning was beautiful
my blood burning
and we didn’t mind the pain because it was sense, a pounding demand for attention, a physical awareness that was interesting as much in its intensity as its symptoms – what was it about the rising redness of our skin and the smoking of our clothes and the bleeding of our ears that caused this thing we thought of as pain, what about this sense was not in itself amazing
my blood on fire my skin burning my pain and I want…
in itself beautiful?
For a moment
just a moment
I forgot that I was Matthew Swift. And I looked up through my blue eyes and saw the creature that I called Hunger, and recognised in it a power not entirely unlike myself, and I was nothing more than a creature of the wires. We were me, and I was the blue electric angel, and nothing more, and nothing less.
Through the walls of competing power, I met Hunger’s pale, drained eyes, and saw him blink.
The spells broke – his and ours, they snapped almost simultaneously. The tide of darkness rolled back in on itself then broke forward, slamming into the wall of fire we had raised against its progress and in that instant neither of us could control the scale of magic that we’d thrown against each other, nothing could keep it controlled or in that place. The shock of the two spells meeting, tearing, breaking loose, picked us up off our feet and threw us backwards; it illuminated the entire room, every distant wall, and its endless cobweb of trailing dead cable, with a flash of light so blue and so bright that when we closed our eyes all we could see on the back of our eyelids was the dazzling glare of a clean winter sky. The combined, uncontrolled magic ripped through the body of Guy Lee and burnt it down to dust in a second, tore apart every inch of the reanimated paper servants he had summoned down from the stairway, and sent cracks splintering through the roof above. It smashed through every dead, dark server tower, splintering the circuitry and twisting every joint of every frame so that they fell like crooked dominos, tangling in each other in a mess of concrete dust, broken metal and twisted plastic, blocking out every path around on every side and filling the place with the toppling trunks of corkscrewed dead machines. In the streets above, the LSE university shuddered, glass cracking in every old window frame, dust trickling down from the bricks. Car alarms started to wail, the leaves trembled in the trees, the roads, some said, seemed to shudder under their own weight.
Then nothing.
We fell somewhere in the dark as it settled quietly back over that place. We curled in around the pain throughout our whole body, shook
with it, screamed with it until I…
… because it was my pain…
forced control, crawled, with dust filling my nose and throat, blood wetting my lips, a relentless pulsing at the end of every nerve, forced myself to lie flat on my back in the nearest patch of open space. I breathed through the pain as it rolled over my system, while we contorted our mouth and tried to shout or scream or cry through the worst of it; any sound or sight or sense to distract us from the fear and the horror of it. I tried to think about it medically, assess the whirling of my vision and sickness in my stomach, patted the back of my head and felt blood, ran my hands down my side and felt an uneven lump around my ribs, twitched my legs and felt an ankle twisted at the wrong angle, not a pretty picture, I imagined; and managed to get a laugh through our overwhelming desire to scream. That was good, it was a start, better.
We heard a gentle click, click, click in the darkness. Blinded with all the lights gone, I tried to crawl away from it, while a shower of mortar dust filtered down from the ceiling and something creaked in the darkness. I got a few yards before I found my way blocked by some twisted metal remnants, scorching hot, and turned, tried to find enough strength to summon a little light – a flash within my fingers, burning bright neon, but gone too fast – to see my imminent demise, before it occurred to me, despite our terror, that in the dark, Hunger made no sound as he walked.
A single match flared in the darkness. It illuminated rounded shadows and grainy textures, then the end of a cigarette, before it went out. The shadow behind that tiny red glow squatted down next to me and said gruffly, “Cigarette?”
I shook my head.
“Now,” said the beard behind the glow, “I want to offer a few thoughts for you to consider right now.”
I said nothing.
“You see, I figure, here you are – kinda looking like a watermelon after a nasty accident, thinking, ‘Shit, I’ve just blown up half of the Kingsway Exchange in an uncontrolled magical explosion that really I should have stopped before it went mental; and I wonder if the primal force of darkness and shadow that I keep on forgetting to mention to people is going to come back?’ And I figure that this is the prime opportunity for me to impart a few pearls of wisdom that I, in my extensive travels, have gleaned about life.”
He drew a long puff from his cigarette, then blew it sideways and away. “Now, being Beggar King,” he said, “I see things. People don’t see me, in fact they go out of their way not to see, quite deliberately avert their eyes, but I see things. I know that when you were a kid, getting older, you’d give a few pennies to the kids on the street and I liked that, I respect that, you know? Sure, nine out of ten might be pushing drugs and you might have just bought that one last fix they need, but that every tenth penny you give – hell, it might just keep someone alive. Now, a callous person would say, ‘Don’t be so dramatic, they’re not going to die, and besides, you’re just supporting a useless burden on society, encouraging them, not helping, and, hell, you’re only in it for your own ego.’ But as I look at it, you can die a whole number of ways that don’t involve your skin. Death of the soul. Death of the spirit. Death of youth – sure, it’s kinda tied into the death of the flesh, but I reason, you waste away before your time, still alive, still ticking over, but you might as well be bed-bound for all the strength you have left in your bones, and there’s no way twenty pence in a coffee cup will buy you that bed for the night. Getting old before your time with none of the perks of age.
“As for the ego thing – no point thinking you’re good and fluffy inside if you don’t keep up the habit on occasion. You seriously gonna tell me you’re a compassionate bastard and not meet the beggar’s eyes and feel sorrow? But I figure, hell! You’re a good sorcerer, you understand this whole cycle of life crap, you get the fact that when you die, it’s just one set of thoughts snuffing out and that somewhere else there’s six and a half billion other buggers whose minds will tick along just as bright, just as clear, just as loud, just as alive, because that’s what sorcery is, right? That’s why you put the pennies in the cup, because when you’re dead and gone and your thoughts are silent and you are nothing but shadow on the wall, someone will think of you who you forgot, and their thoughts will be richer for it. Am I right?”
I didn’t answer, didn’t move, didn’t know if I could do either.
“Then there’s this whole vendetta thing you’ve got going. Now, that seems strange to me.” Another long, thoughtful puff. “You’d let people die so you can kill Lee. Granted, the guy is already dead, if you’ll excuse the pun – sometimes I astound myself at my own bad taste – but you’re willing to let others die just so you can pin him down so you can pin down Bakker so you can pin down this shadow and for what? The greater good? There’s a lot of shit done for the greater good, sorcerer. When the lady with the swish coat and the expensive shoes doesn’t give the beggar a pound on the street, it’s because she’s giving ten to a charity and sure, that’s the greater good. Sure, of course it is. It’s giving more, probably to be used better. But it isn’t compassion. To look away from someone in pain because you know that your e-account is paying monthly contributions to the ‘greater good’; to walk on by while all those people suffer and die because you’ve got a cause and a big sense of perspective… says something about the soul. Compassion. And that” – he flicked the end of the cigarette at me in the dark – “is the first thing that died in Robert James Bakker.”
He drew another breath, tossed the butt away, ground his heel into it and sighed. “I guess you’ll want a few reassurances. I don’t pretend to be the good guy, that whole moral crap is for someone with a bigger beard; but this is basic survival instinct stuff, yeah? You’ve rattled your shadowy friend. That’s what you’re hoping to hear, isn’t it? Now, the thing I find myself wanting to know is what your lady friend will ask when she comes to rescue you any minute now” – a glimmer of light somewhere in the shadow, the sound of footsteps on metal, and not from his hard-heeled boots. The Beggar King’s teeth flashed white in the dark, although I couldn’t see where the light came from that reflected on them. “Like, are the blue electric angels any better than the shadow? What’d you think?”
He leant down so his ear was a few inches from my mouth. “Go on,” he said brightly. “Just between you and me, seriously, tell me why your lady friend shouldn’t kill you like all those other faceless people who are dead upstairs. Go on. Give me a clue.”
I thought about it, felt the hot, smelly breath of the Beggar King on my face. “Because…” I said, then realised what I’d been about to say was stupid, and tried again. “Because… because we are me.” I saw reflected in his eyes a dull glow, moving through the dark, and heard the sound of falling debris somewhere in the distance. “And I won’t forget,” I said.
The Beggar King straightened up and grinned. “Good!” he said. “Well, fair dos, good luck to you, enjoy, don’t be a stranger and all that so on and so forth; glad, all things considered, that it was you, not Lee who made it through after all – unhygienic, all that paper, a mess – be seeing you!”
He started to retreat into the darkness. I called out as best I could, which wasn’t good at all, “What if I don’t want this?”
“Want what?” his voice drifted back through the darkness.
“To be… me.”
A laugh, fading as he did. “Then you’re kinda stuffed, sorcerer!”
The click, click, click of his heels faded into nothing. A new sound replaced them, a scrabbling of fingers over broken machines, and a voice, rising up in the dark.
“Sorcerer! Swift!”
I recognised it, and tried to call out. “Oda!”
She heard me eventually, and the gentle bubble of dull torchlight swept over my feet, then found the rest of me, a spot of brightness scrambling unevenly out of the dark. Oda slipped clumsily down the side of a fallen bank of servers to where I lay. Her clothes were stained with dust and blood, but by the relative ease of the way she moved, very little of that blood could have been hers. She knelt by me and ran the torchlight in a businesslike manner over the length of me. Clearly I didn’t make a good impression. Professional fingers felt around the back of my head and turned my face this way and that, digging into me in search of injuries with a strength almost as bad as the injuries themselves, whatever they were.
“What happened to you?” she asked.
I coughed dust in answer.
“Head hurt?”
I nodded.
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Three.”
“Know what day it is?”
I thought about it. “No,” I said, surprised to find it was the case. “Not really.”
“Can you walk?”
“Perhaps.”
“Any demonic magic you’ve got useful right now?”
I laughed through the dryness of my throat, and regretted it as the movement of my lungs sent pain racing all the way to my elbows. “Nothing,” I whispered. “Nothing.”
She hesitated, her face draining of all feeling, becoming suddenly cold. She looked suddenly stiff by my side, eyes fixed on mine, mouth hard. Fear wriggled into my belly and started doing the cancan all across my stomach wall. She didn’t move, didn’t speak.
I croaked, “You still…” The words became tangled behind my trembling tongue. “You still – need me.”
No answer; her hands didn’t move, her face didn’t change.
“Not yet,” I whispered. “Please. Not yet.”
Her eyes darkened, then a half-smile flitted across her face. “Maybe not,” she answered. “A conversation for another time.”
I grabbed her wrist as she started to stand, and to my surprise, she didn’t try to pull free. “What about… everything else? What about the Whites?”
“Lee is dead, isn’t he?” she said, sounding surprised. “Half his goons just died with paper in their mouths – isn’t that a sign? What does anything else matter?”
“It matters to me,” I rasped.
There was a look in her eyes, taken aback; but the mask was so finely drawn and so expert, it was down in a second over whatever she felt. She said, “Come on. Let’s get you out of here,” and put an arm under my shoulder and, a bit at a time, and with surprising gentleness, helped me to my feet.