Oda said, “He’s not dead.”

Kemsley lay on the floor of the cab. The driver’s voice drifted in from the intercom, his face lost somewhere in the murky darkness behind the glass shutter. “If he bleeds on my floor, you’ve got to pay for cleaning.”

I said, “Strap him to something.”

She scowled but, grunting and groaning, heaved him into one of the fold-down seats on the backwards-facing side of the cab, and strapped him in. I buckled myself into the seat behind the driver, and added, “Now strap yourself in.” The belt felt hard across my chest, stiff, and a little bit too slippery.

“Why?”

I pointed at a sign. It said, “Passengers Must Wear Seat Belts At All Times”.

“Is this…”

“Do it.”

She looked at us, saw through the dirt and grime and knew better than to argue. She strapped herself in. Kemsley was something from the butcher’s yard that had been left out in the rain and the sun for too many weeks, and by this process acquired a twisted mimicry of life. The driver said, “So where can I take you?”

His voice was a muffled crackle over the intercom, the red LED on the door a little bit too bright, the windows between us and him a little too dark. All I could see was smog in the bright headlights of the cab. I leant forward and said, “The City. Corporation of London. The Thames.”

“That’s three places.”

“Are we caring if the Alderman dies?” asked Oda carefully.

I looked at her, saw a face hacked by stone out of an iceberg, looked at Kemsley. It occurred to us, for a moment, that we didn’t care. Not our problem. I said, “Damn. Damn damn damn. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital for Women, Euston Road.”

“Righto.”

I could see the red lights of the tariff metre in the front of the cab. They were clocking up numbers and letters as we drove, but not by any mathematics I knew.

“You want to go to an abandoned hospital?” asked Oda. She was getting her breath back, wiping dirt from her eyes with hands dirtier than her face: instinct, not practicality.

We turned sharply to her. “If the Order raids it, when this is done, if they attack the hospital, if they dare go after the healers, we swear, we swear we will bring you and them down.”

She just smiled. “Right,” she said. “More magic.”

“Sure, because black cabs just happen to drive into magical war zones on a regular basis,” I snapped.

“I am serene, am I not?”

“Getting used to it?”

Her face darkened, but she said nothing. The head of our driver was just a black outline peeking out from behind the slab of his headrest, lit up only by the reflected glow of his headlights and the dull red illumination from the tariff metre. I looked across at Oda and said, “You carry much cash?”

“No. Why?”

“Cab rides are always expensive.”

Especially this one.

“You’re worried about the fare?”

“I thought you’d be pleased with me. A good, noble, avoiding-whichever-sin-it-is sentiment.”

“He sees your heart, not your smile,” she intoned.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that twenty quid slipped to a cabby can’t redeem your soul.”

“That’s a ‘no’ on the fare, then?”

“Yes, that’s a no.”

“Fine.” I turned away, and our eyes passed over Kemsley. He was leaning forward against his seat belt and wheezing. I could see the veins pumping through the remnants of the skin on his neck, jerking in and out like some obscene production line in a food factory, filling with thick blue blood and then deflating to a bruised tube among the ruined mess of his skin. We looked away. Outside, the smog seemed to be lifting, streetlights flashing between the sickly mist, reflected orange stains moving from back to front across the ceiling of the cab, too fast and too erratic to pick out any shapes or shadows. I thought about Anissina. I slipped my hand into my jacket pocket for Nair’s phone, thumbed through the address file, found her right near the top, dialled.

“Who are you—” began Oda.

“Anissina.”

“Why?”

“She might still be lost.”

“We can’t do anything for her, even if it should be done,” replied Oda primly. “She falls or she fights. That’s how it is.”

A phone rang on the other end of the line, and kept on ringing. There was no reply. It went to answerphone. We hung up. We knew better than to leave our voice floating as electricity in the wire. Outside the window, the smog was almost entirely gone, just a few loose traceries being washed away by falling rain, that slipped sideways like tiny transparent snakes across the taxi’s window. I could see flashes of houses, but that’s all they were—shadows that came and went in some impossible, too-far-off distance, perspective playing tricks, architecture playing tricks as terraced house melted into flashy apartment melted into rickety shed melted into bungalow. It gave us a headache to look at it, would have set an epileptic screaming. Oda had noticed too, a warning was in her voice: “Sorcerer?”

“Don’t look too hard.”

“What is this?”

“It’s the Black Cab. It goes anywhere.”

“Does it take the North Circular?”

“Oda! That almost sounded like desert-dry humour.”

“It wasn’t.”

“It doesn’t take the North Circular. If Einstein had seen how the Black Cab moved, he’d have given up physics and gone back to playing the trombone.”

“Einstein played the trombone?”

“I don’t know. But it would fit the hairstyle.”

I had the sense we were picking up speed. I risked glancing out of the window. Signs drifted by, seemed to hang in gloomy nothing, pointing at nothing, suspended in nothing, just floating by in the darkness outside, lit up by no source I could see. The road was nothing but a black shimmer beneath us, defined only by the painted-on markings that lit up blinding yellow and white as we skimmed over them. In the distance, I could see neon signs drifting by like a lit-up ship far out to sea, promising plays, shopping, films, long hours and cheap prices. A billboard drifted by too slow for the speed our wheels were spinning at, the long eyelashes of a perfume-soaked model blinking at us from the pale paper; a single pedestrian, hat drawn down across his eyes, every inch of him as dark as shadow, without variety in texture or tone, vanished round an unseen corner, not once looking up. We felt suddenly tired, sad and alone. A blazing billboard advertised a car whose engine revved inside the hoarding’s plywood frame; it floated up overhead, drifted above the roof of the taxi and set down on the other side. A great fat rat, larger than any urban fox, looked up from where it was chewing a grey-green soaking hamburger, and blinked a pair of bright red eyes at us as we drove by. A short road of bright pink streetlamps flashed, came, went; a lorry, as tall as a house, driver lost in the soot-black, burnt-black darkness of his roaring vehicle, streaked by outside, horn blazing: a sheet of spray containing more than its fair share of goldfish and flapping river eels slapped over the cab. A pair of headlights flashed for a second, then vanished; a pair of pulsing yellow bulbs declared a zebra crossing, on which a zebra grazed, its skin carved from curved aluminium, its legs glued together out of old toilet rolls. It chewed on spilt chicken tikka with a patient gnaw and watched us as we sped on.

Oda whispered, “Obscene. Damnation. Obscene.”

We replied, “Beautiful. Just beautiful.”

She stared at us in horror. “How can you pretend to be human, and not be afraid?”

“It is beautiful,” we replied. “You’ve just got to look at it right. Of all the things, the frightening and inexplicable things, the terrifying and the chaotic and the uncontrolled, you just had to pick on magic to fear and hate, in that order and in equal measure.”

“Don’t think you know me, sorcerer.”

“Is there anything more to know?”

That seemed to silence her. We were almost surprised, and felt again a thing, strange and hollow, that might have been sadness. The beat of Kemsley’s blood, pushing and falling against the protruding pipe of his veins, was slowing. There was no point pretending it was our imagination; that just made it worse. No point asking the driver to go faster. If Einstein couldn’t work out how the Black Cab moved, we certainly couldn’t; and besides, back-seat drivers just made the fare steeper when the cab stopped.

One problem at a time.

“Oda,” I said carefully, “when we get to where we’re going, we’ll have to pay a fare. It’ll be… more than money. It may be… almost anything. Don’t argue. Don’t shout, don’t haggle. And, for the sake of all that’s merciful, don’t try and shoot anything.”

“Why more than money?”

“The Black Cab can go anywhere. I mean… anywhere. Get your mind outside the boring three-dimensional trivialities of geography and you still haven’t come to terms with it. We’re not going there. Humans can’t abide ‘anywhere’; they… we are built for very specific environments. It is only natural that the fares are steep.”

“Sorcerer?”

I sighed. “Yes?”

“The man in the suit. He’s not human.”

“No.”

“He bleeds paper.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. There are constructs that can bleed things other than blood, but I’ve never seen one looking so ordinary as him. And he’s clearly not ordinary. Not human, not ordinary, mortal. His suit was part of his flesh; he bleeds receipts, old bits of newspaper. A summoning of some sort? But then he shows so much independence: he speaks, he enquires, he demonstrates amusement. Most things summoned from the nether reaches are incapable of much more than slobber and slash.”

“You don’t know how to kill it?”

“No.”

“That seems like quite a major problem.”

“Yes.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“What?”

She tilted her chin up to my face. I felt under my eye, found a tiny, almost imperceptible brownish stain of blood running down from my eyelid, where a paper cut no longer than a child’s toenail had been drawn across my skin. “We be blue-blood burning,” we sighed, wiping it away.

“What does that mean?”

“Mean? It is what we are.” I glanced out of the window, saw the distant windows of a lit-up Underground train fading into the night, the flicker of a traffic light going red, amber, green, green, amber, red, too fast and rhythmic to be real. “He didn’t seem to realise that I’m…” I rubbed my right hand. “He doesn’t seem to know I’m the Midnight…”

“Didn’t do you much good, did it?”

“Kemsley”—drooping flesh with a pair of shaven lips sitting opposite us, couldn’t look—“said something about inauguration. Ghosts and streets and midnight mystic doings.”

“Didn’t do Nair much good, did it?”

“No.” We were silent a while. A thought was pushing at the edge of speech, trying to get out. It was strong, angry, with claws for fingers. We let it out. “But that may have been the reason Nair made us Midnight Mayor.” Oda raised an eyebrow, a perfect half-moon. “The Midnight Mayor is just a human with complications. And we…”

“Aren’t,” she concluded. I said nothing. Thinking too much was always trouble. “What happens now?”

“There was a CCTV camera. In the hallway below, a CCTV camera, and only one really viable way out. CCTV everywhere.”

“So?”

“So even if Mr Pinner—the man in the suit, the death of… even if whatever he is destroys the camera, there’ll be an archive somewhere, records. Better than sharing the memories of pigeons, they couldn’t muster more than a day of recollections. There’ll be something, somewhere. The Aldermen can trace it, they have… they take their work very seriously. We can still find the boy.”

“You think it’s that important?”

“I think that if Kemsley dies, then it’s because Mr Pinner thinks it’s that important. I think that Mr Pinner had Boom Boom abduct the boy from his club; I think that’s interesting. Why keep him alive? He said alive. So yes. Find the boy, find some answers. ‘Give me back my hat’. He might know… he has to know something.”

“What if he doesn’t?”

“Well, I would hope that if I get flayed alive and the city burns, you’ll have the good manners to die an excruciating death with the rest of us.”

“Sorcerer, have you ever wondered why you have never been appointed to a managerial position before?”

“My honest honest face?”

“Don’t flatter yourself.” She paused, sharp eyes fixed steadily on Kemsley. “You really think finding the boy will make this better? Stop what happened to Nair happening to you?”

“Yes.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not.”

“Why?”

“I think you’re doing it for this woman—Loren. I don’t think there’s enough proof for any of it. Mo, Mr Pinner, the club, the shoes, the ravens, the Mayor. A lot of circumstance, but nothing else. I think you want the boy to be involved. Then you can help her while helping yourself.”

I thought about this a while.

Lights turned and drifted outside, a thousand miles away, as tall as a skyscraper pressed up to the eye of the window.

“OK,” I said. “All right. Yes. She’s lonely. She’s scared. And we are… we have never had a friend. Just strangers out to get something done. Acquaintances with an agenda. Never this thing, ‘friend’. I want something ordinary. It was nice. It was unremarkable. Just a friend. That’s what they say, isn’t it? We’re ‘just’ friends.”

“Matthew?”

“Yes?”

Silence. Just the rumbling of the taxi’s engine.

A moment that might have been something different.

“We’re slowing down.”

Just a moment.

I looked out of the window. I could see the reflective black slab of Euston station, the slow flickering lights of Euston Road, crawling into existence in the darkness. “Yeah,” I said. “We are.”

My satchel was on the floor. I picked it up, rummaged through for my wallet. I had £40 left. It wouldn’t be enough, but it’d be a start.

The streets were becoming more solid, pavements growing out of the gloom, shopfronts edging closer and closer towards us, growing bricks and settling their way into solid reality. The driver’s voice came in over the intercom.

“Anywhere round here in particular?”

“If you could just drop us off outside the main entrance…”

“No problem.”

We turned, actually turned, something I couldn’t remember the cab doing in our whole journey, down a side street off from Euston, round the back of a grey office block and a Gothic fire station, towards a red, turreted building with broken windows and bright blue hoarding all around its walls, stuck with signs saying, “DANGER KEEP OUT” and posters for dubious gigs and, of course, scrawled in white paint over the blue hoarding by the door:

GIVE ME BACK MY HAT

The Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Hospital for Women. Abandoned by almost everyone and left to rot. Almost being the important part.

The taxi slid to a stop outside the padlocked dark entrance, covered over with plywood. There wasn’t any traffic on the street, not at this hour, not even night buses turning onto Euston Road towards King’s Cross. Even the lights in the hotels ahead were out, even the receptions just distant dim puddles. I had to remember to breathe, watching the dark shadow of the driver’s hands reach up to check the tariff, to stop the clock, watching a hand push back the Plexiglas between him and us, waiting for the damage.

“It’s thirty quid,” he said, just a voice drifting in from the driver’s compartment.

“What?”

“Thirty quid,” he repeated.

“OK. Great. Thanks.”

I fumbled in my wallet for the money.

“And her gun.”

I glanced at Oda, whose lips pursed. I mouthed, please, and she reluctantly pulled a gun from a pocket, all black metal and power, and pushed it through the gap between passenger and driver compartments. As her fingers slid in, a hand moved in the front, locked down on her wrist and dragged her forward so sharp and hard I heard the seat belt lock around her chest and saw her face wrinkle in pain.

“Her hand,” said the driver. “You seen her hand?”

I realised he was talking to me. “Um… yes?” I hazarded.

“You seen the blood?”

I glanced instinctively at her fingers, grasped in his, stretched across the panel separating front from back. I couldn’t see any blood, not a shimmer of darkness on that deep chocolate skin, dry and thick.

“No?” I mumbled.

“Hey, now, I just drive cabs you know, but I gotta tell you, I’ve noticed, and it wasn’t like that a few years ago. Fucking government!”

“Um…”

“Immigrants! I mean, I’m no racist, some of my best friends are foreign, but no one can deny it’s a problem and now look at this.” He dragged her hand forward and Oda cried out as her chest strained against the seat belt, which seemed to refuse to budge. “Look at this! A disgrace!”

I couldn’t see his face, couldn’t see if he was smiling, joking. There was just a dark oval where features should have been. “Here’s your thirty quid,” I mumbled, leaning forwards against the line of my seat belt, forty pounds in hand. “Keep the change.”

“£30, her gun, her hands.”

“What?”

“What?!” Oda didn’t do shrill, but she was close.

“You see the blood?” asked the driver. “Look at it! Dead wizards, dead magicians, dead witches, dead warlocks, dead, dead, dead—and you know, none of my business, but the smell! It’s just been rotting down under the skin for like, you know, like years. Little brother and little sister and little sister and all dead and rotting and you know, sure, you know she buried them back home but they’re still rotting, can’t stop the air, you know? It’s like the fucking taxman, gets everywhere and you’d be surprised how long it takes the eyes to decay until they’re no longer staring, it’s the casing, you see, once the outer muscle’s gone then the jelly just sorta evaporates. Nah, trust me. Better this way.”

He pulled at her hand, so hard that Oda now cried out, face bunching in pain, dragging her forward against the tightness of her belt. “Wait!”

He meant it, he actually meant it, the silhouetted black oval shape of the driver: he was going to pull the hand from her arm, pop it out of the bones and just pull until the muscle tore and it was snapped away from her flesh, just like that.

“Wait!”

I tried to lean forward, but the belt held me back. I fumbled at the catch, but it wouldn’t open, wouldn’t unlock. I tried to duck my head beneath the diagonal strap, and it just tightened, so sudden and so hard I was pressed back against the seat barely able to breathe, choking and wheezing. Oda wasn’t a screamer, wasn’t a moaner, but every part of her shook with pain; I could see the skin around her wrist turning strange beige-white, hear every terrified breath.

“Wait!” I shouted. “For God’s sake, wait! Look at my hand before you take hers!”

The dragging stopped. The pressure on Oda’s arm seemed to relax for a second. The strain of the seat belt against my chest relaxed a little; in the tiny extra space it allowed, I gasped for breath.

“Let’s take a gander,” said the driver.

The belt let me lean forward just far enough. I got the glove off my right hand, slipped it through the narrow gap in the dividing glass, unfolded my fingers. The twin red crosses were still burnt on my skin, glaring in the gloom. I felt a pair of hands, metal-cold, steel-hard, take my palm and turn it this way and that, dragging me further towards the driver’s compartment. The belt was cutting into my throat, a dull knife against my windpipe.

This close, I could see more of the driver’s face.

Nothing to see.

The black, face-shaped, featureless thing that I had glimpsed from the back of the cab was, close to, the same. Empty, a pair of carved eyes around a carved nose and a pair of carved, slightly parted lips, drawn out of ebony darkness. Taxi drivers are among that great mass of people in the city who you go out of your way not to notice—just extensions of the machine. This one had taken it literally. His back melted into the chair he sat in, his feet were the pedals. His fingers clackered like the click on the fare indicator when he moved them over the palm of my hand, tracing with one metal fingertip the twin crosses.

“So,” he said finally, “you’re like, you know, Midnight Mayor, yeah?”

“I guess so.”

“What happened to the last guy?”

“Killed.”

“Shit. See? Didn’t I tell you? I mean the radio talks about it plenty but no one listens—times are getting hard. Fucking politicians. Corrupt, the whole lot. Need a clean sweep, if you ask me.”

The pressure around my hand released. I drew it back, rubbing at the fingermarks in my skin. Then Oda’s hand was released as well, and her gun handed back.

“Keep the thirty quid.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Midnight Mayor’s got an account. Direct debit. I’ll send the bill to the Aldermen. Receipt?”

“The Midnight Mayor has an account?”

“Yeah. Jeez, didn’t they fucking tell you?”

“I’m new.”

“You should get your act sorted, I mean, seriously! The perks, man, the perks of a cushy job like that—if I had the damn perks you think I’d ever walk anywhere? Hell no. Bureaucrat fat cats—hey, but all respect, like.”

Oda had undone her seat belt, so I undid mine. It snapped free in a perfectly ordinary, respectable way. A piece of paper was handed back to me. I took it carefully. It was a receipt. It said:

Thank you for using Black Cab Ltd. Your account will be billed at a later date. Have a pleasant onward journey.

And a serial number.

One problem at a time.

Keep moving. Don’t stop to think. Thinking only led to trouble. Keep moving. Your body is smarter than your mind. It gets hurt easier.

Oda and I unloaded Kemsley from the cab. There was no gentleness in what we did; there didn’t seem any point. Nothing we could do could possibly make it worse than it was. The taxi rumbled away behind us; Oda dragged Kemsley by the armpit. I hammered on the plywood door of the hospital, slashed at the padlock, which was smart enough to know when not to argue, unlocked the door, barrelled Oda and Kemsley inside.

“Hello?! We need help!”

Dead, dark corridors. Buddleia was growing out of the walls, water dripping down into stagnant, green-drifting pools, walls of faded drained colour, floors of broken forgotten trolleys and shattered old glass. I dragged neon out of my skin, tired, we were so tired now, wanted to sleep, hadn’t slept for too long; too many days, too many nights, it seemed longer than it was, too long; by the pinkish glow I managed to drag into my hands I spread light across the corridor, called out again, my voice inhumanly loud, “Help! We need help!”

A voice from the darkness said, “Well, don’t stand there fussing, come on!”

I dragged the light across the shadows cast from the shattered, badly boarded-up windows, to where a nurse stood, wearing an old-fashioned blue and white uniform, complete with peaked hat, hands folded neatly in front of her apron, watch hanging off its silver chain by her breast, a pair of sensible shoes turned slightly outwards, toes towards the distant walls. Her steel-grey eyes fell on Kemsley. She tutted. “Well,” she said, “hardly nothing, is it?”

Oda looked at me in surprise and unspoken question. We didn’t answer, but helped her drag Kemsley down the rotting hall, following the nurse to where a chipboard blue door had been pushed back into a room full of yellow foam. It had been dribbled along the cracks of the walls and floor, along even the ceiling, in an attempt to stop the cracks spreading, and keep out the wind; but it had expanded too much, and now the room looked like a great yellow fungus had come up from the bowels of the earth to colonise with sticky alien threads this friendly, dripping, rotting warm planet for itself.

There was a trolley in the middle of the room, all metal slat and thin white covering, and a single lamp. The lamp wasn’t connected to any power source, but hummed and glowed with white electricity despite itself. The nurse clapped importantly, and we lowered Kemsley onto the trolley. She waved us back, barking, “Are you friends or family?”

“Neither.”

“Then you cannot remain for the procedure!”

“But we…”

“How was this done?” she asked, examining the shattered skin.

“By a creature who bleeds paper and calls himself the death of cities,” I replied with a sigh.

“Have you given him anything?”

“No.”

“Not for the pain?”

“We didn’t have anything.”

“Does he have any allergies?”

“I don’t know.”

“Disabilities, is he diabetic, asthmatic, cursed, bane-spawn, epileptic, any long-term medical conditions?”

“None that I know of.”

“He’s an Alderman, isn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. Kindly call the office of the Aldermen and request full medical information is sent here as soon as possible.”

“Can you do anything for him?”

“I can always do something, but that may simply be the relieving of pain. This is not a place for miracles! This is merely an A and E ward that happens to have a subspeciality in magical injuries! That does not mean we can perform magic beyond the laws of nature!”

“Is he going to die?”

“Everyone is going to die,” she replied. “And when, is a question no one, not even the NHS, can predict with any accuracy. Now if you will excuse me, I have work to do and you are not going to be able to assist me. Shoo!”

In the corridor, Oda turned her gaze upwards and murmured, “What kind of place is this?”

“It’s what it says on the cover,” I said. “An A and E ward that happens to have an unusual speciality.”

“And is there a fee here?”

“It’s NHS.”

She shrugged, waiting for my meaning.

“Free.”

“The NHS runs a unit specialising in magical injuries?” It was a question that maybe wanted desperately to be a shout.

“Yes.”

“Taxpayers’ money is going to…”

“Magicians pay tax.”

“You don’t.”

“I did. I know the thrill of a rebate and all. And look on the bright side—the Order kills so many magicians so efficiently so much of the time that we are rarely a burden on the NHS in our old age. That, or we feast on newborn babe’s blood by moonlight and thus spare ourselves the indignity of the nursing home.”

Her face darkened. “In the taxi…”

“Let’s not talk about it.”

“What he said…”

“Is true. We’ll only fight if we have this conversation. You want to keep me useful, I want to keep you useful. We don’t want to get hung up on the details. Let’s not talk about it.”

She shrugged. “OK.”

We were silent a while. Then, “What now?”

“I guess we should do what the nice lady said.”

“The nice…”

“The nurse. Let’s talk to the Aldermen.”

Just a thought.

Anissina?

Dead meat in assault gear.

Smog and biting cables dragged from the floor.

Anissina?

Just a thought.

Too much thinking is trouble.

Someone had to call Earle.

It was always going to be me.

“H-H-Harlun and Phelps.”

The boy with the stutter was on duty on Earle’s number, even in the little hours of the morning.

“It’s Matthew Swift. You might remember me. I want to talk to Earle.”

“M-M-Mister Earle is a-asleep.”

“Does he sleep in the office?”

“I’m his p-personal assistant.”

“You should get another job.”

“C-can I…”

“Tell Mr Earle that Kemsley is in hospital, probably going to die; that Anissina might be dead already, along with a number of your pet mercenaries; and that the death of cities is in London and wearing a pinstripe suit, please. He’ll know how to contact me.”

He did.

He contacted me in under two minutes, and didn’t sound like a man who’d been asleep.

“Swift? What in God’s name is going on?”

“Nothing in God’s name, unless you want to discuss theology with Oda. But enough to go around for the rest of us.”

“What is this about Kemsley? And Anissina?”

“He’s dying, Mr Earle. His skin has been peeled from his flesh—most of it, from what I can see. Anissina is… I don’t know where. She isn’t answering her phone. She vanished into smog and that’s the last I saw of her. We were attacked by a Mr Pinner. He bleeds paper, bullets won’t stop him, magic won’t stop him, his suit is sewn into his flesh. And… no, no I think that’s about it. I don’t want to rush to conclusion, but I think we’re buggered. Oh, and the nurse wants to know Kemsley’s medical history.”

“What nurse?”

“We’re at Elizabeth Anderson Hospital.”

“Have you been followed? Is this Mr Pinner there?”

“We took the Black Cab.”

“I wish you hadn’t. The bill will be…”

“We were being flayed alive by a man with a smug smile, Mr Earle. I’m sure you don’t want to go through the trouble of having to find another Midnight Mayor so soon after the previous incumbent died that particular death.”

“Christ. Jesus fucking Christ,” muttered Earle. “Don’t move. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

*   *   *

He was there in fifteen.

What kind of man wore a suit to bed?

He brought minions. Aldermen: nameless, stone-faced men and women. How we loathed Aldermen.

“Where’s Kemsley?”

I jerked my head at the door. I’d had to let the light go out in my fingers, too tired to hold it. I’d found a bit of wall that didn’t look like it was going to collapse immediately, and made it my friend. The Aldermen had torches. They hurt our eyes.

“In there. There’s a nurse looking after him. You’d better not be too rude. The NHS has a policy on rude visitors.”

Earle gestured at the chipboard door, and one of the black-coated silent Aldermen detached himself and drifted through it, pulling it shut behind him.

“What about Anissina?”

“I told you. I don’t know.”

“What about my—”

“I don’t know. One is dead, at least. We got separated. Mr Pinner was waiting. I guess he must have known we’d go looking again after Nair died there. I guess he didn’t mind, until we got too close to the flat where the kid stayed. Then he did his thing.”

“What about this kid?”

“Not there.”

“So at least one of my men is dead for nothing?”

“No. At least one of your men is dead for confirmation that Mr Pinner is a mean son of a bitch who would probably have a bit of a giggle at a strategic nuclear strike. Also for confirmation that Nair was killed by this… thing. And to prove that the kid is connected; to conclude that this whole bloody thing has been tied up in a way that gives me a migraine just to think of; and to find that there was a CCTV camera in the stairwell. I know it’s not like dying to save puppies and children, but I’d go to the funeral and we’d honour their memory with true gratitude.”

“You’re gabbling, Swift,” snapped Earle.

“I’m a little fried.”

“How did you survive?”

“It was all a bit of a blur.”

Earle glanced quickly at Oda, who turned her head away. It meant something, that movement—I just didn’t know what. Add it to the list.

“This CCTV camera”—the guy could prioritise—“It was working?”

“When I last checked. You people have a thing for this, right? I mean you’ve done the assault rifles and stuff”—we wanted to laugh, or possibly cry, or some hysterical thing in between, a madness on the edge of my voice—“so you’ve gotta be up there with the whole spy surveillance shit, right?”

“We can probably manage something.”

“Good. You should probably do it soon. I’m guessing Mr Pinner is kinda pissed that anyone survived. He’ll probably come looking. And we’re not in any condition to fight, not against a guy who can’t die.”

“There are scratches on your face.”

“Paper cuts.”

“He…”

“Yes.”

“What is he?”

“You’re asking me?”

“Yes. You were Bakker’s apprentice, and whatever he was in life, there is no denying that he was an expert in these matters. Do you have any idea what this Mr Pinner is?”

I thought about it long and hard. “No.”

“No?”

“Not a clue. Not a finch’s fart. He’s going to kill us, isn’t he?”

“From the sounds of it, yes,” murmured Earle thoughtfully.

So we laughed. And realising that what we really wanted to do was cry, we laughed just that bit harder, so no one would see the truth.

Safe places.

Strange how these things get redefined. A guy walks behind you in an empty street and safety is the home. A couple of kids burgle your house and safety is with Mum and Dad’s home. A bomb goes off at the end of the street and safety is in the countryside. A guy comes looking for you who bleeds paper and shredded the last bloke with your job title like an unwanted telephone bill, and safety is…

Thinking is trouble.

The Aldermen found me a place to stay. They didn’t want me in the office, and I didn’t want to be there. I had no home of my own, hadn’t had one since my death certificate had been put on file. So, grumbling all the way, they found me a hotel to spend the night.

I wanted to sleep.

I wanted to feel safe.

And as safe goes, it wasn’t bad. It ticked the mundane choices—twenty-four-hour security staff, police station practically across the road, busy streets outside, CCTV surveillance up the kazoo and Aldermen stationed on the corridors and doors at all times. It also met some mystical choices—the River Thames only a few yards away in one direction, the lights of the West End only a few yards the other way; and, just down the road, Charing Cross station, generally accepted as the heart of the city. There was power in that, even if it wasn’t true. Ideas are power, and the constant burning of the lights gave the place a magic that we could practically float on, an electric-orange lick in the air. Look out of any window, and whether you saw reflected lights on the water or the flashing signs of the Strand, it was beautiful. Even we could sleep, safe in so much busy, beautiful life around us, trusting to strangers and their ways to keep us from danger.

And whaddayaknow?

It even had room service.

As a rule, I dislike hotels. Too much money, too little soul. Plus the bed had ten layers of sheet and blanket that needed a hydraulic pump to pry them away from the mattress, and the radiators were turned up too high. But it was peaceful, and it was safe.

So we curled up beneath the sheets, and we slept.

Sorcerers are supposed to have prophetically insightful dreams.

I guess I wasn’t in the zone.

My dreams were drenched in terror. They woke me every half-hour, gasping for breath, face burning and arms goosebumped, without being able to name the dread that hunted me across the synaptic snooze of my mind. When I went back to sleep, turning in the wrecked mess of blanket, it would come back, beating against the edge of my skull the chant:

GIVE ME BACK MY HAT

GIVE ME BACK MY HAT

GIVE ME BACK MY HAT!

GIVE ME BACK MY HAT!!

GIVE ME BACK MY HAT!!!!

Another thing to add to the list of things that needed to be thought about, and about which I did not want to think.

We slept.

Morning began at three in the afternoon.

Still here.

Still not dead.

Surprise!

Our heart missed a beat as we opened the bathroom door, but no, no flayed victims or vengeful pinstriped… things waiting for us.

Surprise!!

I didn’t get up in a hurry, reasoning that if Earle had anything heartbreakingly important to tell me, he would. It occurred to me that, it now being three in the afternoon, Earle might already be dead along with the rest of the Aldermen and for all I knew the remainder of the city, and we were all alone in the ruined remains of London—but the water ran hot from the shower and the slippers were too fluffy for this to be Armageddon quite yet.

Besides, there was a phone call I had to make before the end of everything, the death of the city. I made no conscious decision to do it. But I knew, with the certainty that comes over you in a hot shower after a long day, that it had to be done.

While I slept, someone had cleaned my clothes, even my coat. Polishing my shoes had been out of the question, but the worst of the dirt seemed to have been scraped off with a hard brush, my trousers folded and my “What Would Jesus Do?” T-shirt, for which we were starting to develop a strange and uncomfortable fondness, smelt of fabric softener. They’d even managed to shift the worst of the blood from the cuffs of my coat. I was impressed. Suspicious, but impressed.

There was an Alderman on the door, when I opened it. He had a face that had been polished in olive oil. He glanced at me, I stared at him. He didn’t smile. I guessed he was one of the ones who’d voted to have me shot. I guessed he wasn’t currently a fan of the democratic process. I said, “Have we met?”

“No.”

“I’m Matthew.”

“I know who you are.”

Five words were four too many to prove that this line of enquiry would get nowhere. I gave up on good manners and snapped, “Where’s Earle?”

“Mr Earle is working.”

“At what?”

“At the current situation.”

“Where can I find him?”

“His office is Harlun and Phelps. Overlooking Aldermanbury Square. We’re under orders to keep you safe.”

“Whose orders?”

“The majority’s orders.”

“What’s Harlun and Phelps?”

“Trust fund managers.”

“The Aldermen are trust fund managers?”

“It pays to be paid.”

Couldn’t argue with his reasoning. “Has he found the boy, Mo?”

“I would inform you if he had.”

“Has he found Anissina?”

“No. But then, he hasn’t found her body. Unlike those of four others of our employees.”

I thought of the mercenaries skidding down the cable into the smog of Kilburn. “I’m sorry.”

“They were just employees.”

The Alderman intoned it like a bored priest too indifferent to care that he’d lost his faith. He didn’t look at me, but focused his attention on a part of the wall just above my left ear. He had a ring on his left hand; it carried the twin crosses.

“Where’s Oda?”

“She had to consult with her employers.”

“Why?”

“We need a coordinated strategy if we are to tackle the current situation.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Everyone.”

“You don’t like me, do you?”

“I would not presume to question your judgement,” he replied.

I took a deep breath. “Fine. I want to talk to Loren.”

*   *   *

Loren wasn’t in her flat.

The Aldermen had moved her.

Sure, they’d moved her to a reasonably comfortable B & B just north of Mornington Crescent and made sure her boss didn’t mind; but they’d still plucked her out of her home and dragged her, strangers, to a strange place, and not bothered to explain themselves.

Which explained why, when I rang the number that the Aldermen had given me, she said: “WHO THE FUCK IS THIS?!! I SWEAR I WILL GODDAMN KILL YOU, I’LL KILL YOU I’LL…”

“Loren?”

The shouting stopped. There was a long pause, full of a rapid and distant drawing of breath. Then, “Who’s this?”

“It’s Matthew.”

“Jesus, shit.”

“Are you all right?”

“No. I am very much not all right. I am the least all right I think I have ever been in my whole life, and it’s been pretty shit so far anyway. Where’s Mo? Have you found him? I’m in this place in Camden, these men turned up and they… they said they were the police then I asked for ID and they said they weren’t but that I’d have to come and… have you found Mo?”

“Not yet. No. I’m sorry.”

“God. But you haven’t… I mean, you haven’t not found him because he’s… I mean, you haven’t not found him and you’re just not telling me because you think I can’t… look, I want to know, OK, I need to know whatever way it is if you’ve…”

“I haven’t found him. In any sense, I swear. I’m trying. I’m… getting there.”

“But if you can’t, then why…”

“Loren, I need to know some more things about him.”

“Matthew, what’s going on? Anything, but…”

“The guys who took you to Camden did it, for all their screwed-up reasoning, to keep you safe. You’ll be safe.”

“What’s not to be safe from?”

“There are things happening. Different things; I mean, different. But I’m looking, they’re looking all the time. I promise.”

“This is… there’s mystic stuff, right? Bad?”

“Maybe.”

“Involving Mo?”

“Perhaps. Yes. Probably.”

“Tell me.”

“It’s…”

“You told me the truth, Matthew. When that thing came up from under the street you turned and said, sorcerer, magic, monster, just straight out. And I thought ‘hell, this guy is either so whacked off his own head that he just can’t tell the difference any more so might as well run with it or, shit, this stuff is real, deal with the madness’. That’s the only way, do you see? I thought about it. If I don’t know then I’ll just imagine, all the things I might not know, all the terrible things that are out there, without limits, without reason, I need to know that it makes some sort of sense!”

There was no reason not to tell her.

No sensible reason.

We couldn’t.

Good sense had nothing to do with it.

We couldn’t, and didn’t know why.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” I said. “Not yet. Not all of it. I promise, when I know, when it’s finished, I’ll tell you it all. But anything I tell you now would just be a white lie or a bad lie or a half-truth with nothing to sit on and that might be OK for a time, but when it’s done, if I got it wrong… I’m sorry. I am looking. Please. I just need to know a few more things about Mo.”

“Is that it?”

“Yes. For the moment.”

“I see.” Her voice was the flat distant fall of the criminal who’s been caught, who knows it’s the chair, who knows the lawyer is just making noise, who knows there’s no way out, no point left in crying. “What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

And, as much as she could, she told me.

Mums and sons.

We struggled to understand. It was something people seemed to think would be instinctive. Flesh of my flesh. We found the idea distasteful.

There was more. Of course there was. Problem about asking questions is that most of the time, you only know what the question is once you have the answer.

He’d met some friends.

At the city farm, of all places. It was part of being young in the city; you got shipped off to do healthy, hearty things in order to make you a better person, until that day comes around the age of thirteen when you suddenly realise that goats are horrid, and the city is clean.

She didn’t really know them. They were from the Wembley area. Sometimes he’d come back late at night with them, but they never came in. Always polite—sort of—but never came inside, as if they were embarrassed or afraid of her. And in time, that’s how he seemed to be. Embarrassed.

And then he kept on not coming home.

And the school complained.

And she’d send him to school but what could she do? Her job didn’t let her stand at the school gate all day to watch him, a job meant no time; no job, no money. She knew the others weren’t going either, just knew, without having to be told—what’s there for a kid on his own to do, when the rest are in the classroom? He’d disappear and not say where he’d been. He’d come back stinking of beer and sweat—when he came back. He’d talk about being “down the club”. She didn’t know what club, or where.

Then the police had called.

He’d stolen a bike.

The whole gang had been involved, and he was the youngest, so he got a caution, because they couldn’t really nail anything bigger onto him.

Then they called again.

ASBO, they said. She’d thought it was just a phrase journalists used on the TV. Riotous behaviour, drinking, shouting, threatening behaviour. They’d grabbed an old guy’s shopping and thrown it into the street—not because they wanted anything in it, but just because they could. Just for something to do. You should keep an eye on Mo, they said, this is the start of a downhill path that ends in a very thorny thicket.

Not that the police were big on metaphor.

And then one day, a few weeks ago, he’d come home, and he was hiding something. Something in his bag, something he didn’t want her to see, and he banned her from his room and didn’t talk to her and just spoke to his friends and there was something… shameful. Something shameful had happened, had been done, he had done it, something shameful. And then he went away and didn’t come back, his friends didn’t come back, and she’d spoken to the police and it wasn’t just Mo. The patrols up in Willesden, where they used to hang, had noticed it, an absence. The whole gang, however many there were, had just stopped. No more hanging outside the pub, no more skating beneath the overpass, no more spitting in the off-licence, no more stealing old guys’ shopping, no more doing, just because it could be done. All at once, they had just vanished.

They’d done something shameful.

A gang of kids, bored, arrogant, cocksure, cock-up kids, who liked to go to a club in Willesden, just vanished.

I could have told her I thought they were still alive.

It would have been a lie, and one that she would probably have come to hate.

So I just told her nothing, just the same tune as before.

I’ll look, I promise. I’ll find Mo.

We went to see Earle.

Harlun and Phelps were trust fund managers.

I wasn’t entirely sure what this meant. I associated it with suits, shiny shoes, gleaming teeth, polished hair, questionable moralities and big glass foyers. I wasn’t disappointed.

The sunlight falling on Aldermanbury Square was promising a glorious spring and a scorching golden summer, just as soon as this part of the planet could get on and lean closer to the sun. The sky was the glorious blue, with clouds of fluffy whiteness, that you find in a child’s drawing. Trees, spindly half-grown afterthoughts, lined the space between the buildings of the square; and the old guildhouses nearby competed with the giant glass growths of modern offices. Overhead, concrete walkways from the heady 1960s, when everyone believed the Future To Be Today, jutted across the slim gaps between constructions.

The foyer of Harlun and Phelps was three storeys high of itself, a great swimming-pool expanse of slippery white marble in which a small forest of potted plants and trees had been installed. Water ran down one wall behind reception, into a small pond of zen pebbles designed to create an impression of serene, expensive tranquillity; and even the receptionists, sitting behind desks adorned with artfully twisted metals including labels (to assure you that they really were art), had the most expensive, modern headsets plugged into their ears. The future is here, and it wears pinstripe.

“The majority of employees here are civilians,” explained my Alderman guide/protector/companion/would-be-executioner as we strode without a word to the security guards through the foyer towards the lifts. “They conduct themselves within perfectly standard financial services and regulations. There is one specialist sub-operational department catering to the financing of more… unusual extra-capital ventures, and the executive assets who operate it have to undergo a rigorous level of training, psyche evaluation, personality assessment and team operational analyses.”

We stared at him, and said, “We barely understood the little words.”

“No,” he replied. “I didn’t think you would.”

The lift was all in green glass, even the floor. It crawled up the side of the building, faced outwards to the falling city below. Aldermanbury Square became just a blob within a maze of streets, alleys, bus-clogged roads, cranes, building works, Victorian offices and gleaming new towers, and then lost amid the snake of the river and the sprawl of the city, the familiar floodlit landmarks of London, the sun fading into evening towards Richmond, the early winter gloom spreading in from the estuary.

Earle’s office was on the very top floor. From there, presumably, he could stare down and survey all his little people toiling below, from his nest of triumphant endeavour.

The office itself was in the same stylised, soulless vein as the rest of the building. It took ten seconds to walk from his door to his desk. Ten seconds is an eternity, when it’s just you and another guy in a room that could have hosted the Olympic curling championship.

He wasn’t dressed like an Alderman. His black coat was hung on a deliberately old-fashioned coat stand behind his black marble desk. He wore a suit, dark, dark blue with a matching navy-blue tie, and cufflinks on which were engraved a pair of ebony keys on a background of pearl. As I approached across the endless floor, he smiled. It was done for good manners’ sake, not that that was a cause for which he had much time.

“Mr Mayor.” He waved me at a chair designed to give you good posture and a bad temper.

“Mr Earle.”

“Have you slept well?”

“I slept. What news?”

“We have been working on finding the boy, Mo.”

“And?”

“There is some progress. CCTV cameras in the Kilburn area saw the boy being removed two nights ago from Raleigh Court and loaded into a van. He appeared to be unconscious but alive. We are attempting to trace the men who moved him, but most likely they were just hired help.”

“Was Mr Pinner there?”

“No. We do, however, have his face on CCTV from your encounter, and are circulating it to all relevant areas. We were unable to find further information on Anissina. The smog obscured all imaging.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It isn’t immediately relevant,” he replied with a shrug. “The focus of our investigation must be on the boy, as he appears to be the strongest link we have to this Mr Pinner, this death of cities. So far we have tracked the vehicle entering and leaving the congestion charge zone on the same night. It appeared to be heading in a southwards direction, leaving the congestion charge zone after crossing Waterloo Bridge.”

“You can access the congestion charge database?”

“Of course.”

“And where is the vehicle now?”

“There are teams working on it.”

“Teams?”

“Human Resources allocated us some appropriate assistance.”

“When will you have an answer?”

“Mr Swift,” he said, fingers whitening on the edge of the table, “do you know why Big Brother isn’t watching you?”

“Because he has my death certificate on file and a literal mind?”

“Because, Mr Swift, because, in this city there are anywhere between eight and nine million other people to watch. In a single day, tens of thousands of people will pass through one Underground station alone; in a single week, hundreds of thousands, all moving, all turning. Millions of vehicles every month will pass in and out of the congestion charge zone, millions, and at any given moment you can be certain a train is breaking down or a pipe is bursting under the strain or a police car has been called to clean up the blood or a window has been smashed or a bomb threat has been issued or a fire alarm has been sounded or an ambulance has been caught up in traffic behind a stalled pair of traffic lights and a confused learner driver. Big Brother isn’t watching you, Mr Swift, because there’s just too much for Big Brother to keep an eye on. You are… not important.”

“You’re breaking my heart.”

“Do you understand what I mean?”

“Yes. I understand. You mean that I should be patient a little while longer and let you people find Mo in your own time, right?”

“Essentially. Yes.”

“You want us to wait.”

“Yes. Besides, there are other matters.”

“What other matters?”

“Inauguration.”

I sighed. “Oh, yes. This pineappleless, cocktail sausageless party of an inauguration.”

“There’s more to it than you think.”

“There usually is.”

“All the Midnight Mayors have to do it.”

“Of course.”

“It can be dangerous.”

“I was waiting with baited breath for you to say that.”

“You were?”

“It seemed like you were building up to something—‘dangerous’ made a certain inevitable sense. What do I need to know to live—you do want me to live, don’t you?”

He took just a moment, just a moment, too long to answer. “Of course. We’ve made the investment in you now. We need to see it come to maturity.”

“Then tell me.”

He sighed, swivelled slightly in his chair. “Do you know,” he said at last, “how the Aldermen are chosen?”

“Nepotism. And the old boys’ club.”

“You might be thinking of our more mundane counterparts…”

“Perhaps. I don’t know much about them.”

“It is not nepotism,” he said. “It is about dedication. To an idea; to a cause bigger than any individual. To become an Alderman requires a lifetime of study, work and commitment, and most of all, it requires an understanding of the smallness of man within this great machine of the city. London is an antheap, Mr Swift. It is a great, sprawling, beautiful nest, built by two thousand years of man, so deep and so dark that its people can never see or know it all, but live their lives rather in this or that complex of the city, burrowing deeper and deeper into their little caves, because to know the full extent of the nest is to realise that you are nothing. An insect crawling down tunnels which only exist because two thousand years ago, a thousand, thousand other insects also crawled this way, each one as unimportant as you, each one a stranger. There is nothing that binds these ants together, that stops them from ripping each other apart, save that they share the same structure, the same city, the same physical structure that only exists because, for two thousand years, the ants have carved. We are tiny, Mr Swift. We are insignificant, living in a world of life and wonder and miraculous existence and excitement, not because of who we are, or whom we know, but because the construction around us, the bricks and stones of London, shapes and guides us, and gives unity to the millions of strangers who inhabit its caves, so we can all say, ‘I live in the city’. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Then this is what the Aldermen are. We are the ants who climbed to the top of their hill, who looked down from the highest tower of the maze and saw the darkness and the time and the caverns, and realised the smallness of man within this heaving world. We are the ones who saw this, and were not afraid. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“I have been told that for sorcerers, magic is life, that to live is to be magical. The same is true for Aldermen. We find our magic in being nothing. Ants on top of a heap. Do you understand?”

I smiled. I tangled my fingers together between my knees. “Yes,” I said. “I understand what the Aldermen are.”

“Then you understand why the Midnight Mayor has always—usually—come from the Aldermen’s ranks.”

“Maybe.”

“It is the city, Swift. The city is so old, now. So many millions of dead men and dead women buried beneath it. They all scuttled through the streets and made the city what it is, and now they are forgotten. Millions of wandering forgotten ghosts; but the city! It is so alive. The Midnight Mayor must protect the city. Do you understand what this means?”

“I understand what you think it means.”

“Swift…”

“I have a theory as to why Nair made us Midnight Mayor.”

“Well?”

“I think he knew the Midnight Mayor couldn’t fight Mr Pinner. Of course he knew it, he was dying as he made the phone call. But I think it was something more, something earlier.”

“Go on.”

“I think Nair understood that cities change.”

Earle was silent as he contemplated this. Then he shook his head, almost sadly. “Would you like to hear my theory?” he asked. “I’ve been thinking about it too, of course. We all have, all the Aldermen, all the ones who seemed more qualified.”

I shrugged.

“I think…” He took a deep breath, as if perhaps this was too important to bungle. “I think that Nair made you Midnight Mayor in order to eliminate a threat.”

“Mr Pinner?”

“No. Well—Mr Pinner too. But another threat, possibly one even worse.”

“Which is?”

“You.”

“I’m confused.”

“You. I think Nair made you Midnight Mayor in order to force you to take responsibility, to make you become involved, to drive you to take a side and fight for it. I think he did it to control you, to bind you, to curse you with this office. I think he did it to eliminate the threat of the blue electric angels.”

We stared at him long and hard, too surprised to say anything. He let us stare, then smiled a real smile, cruel and dry. “If you can’t beat them…”

“We don’t believe that.”

“That doesn’t matter, does it? What matters, is whether Nair believed it. And there, I fear, is something we’ll never know.”

We didn’t speak. He let out a great, tummy-clenching sigh, and stood up sharply, his leather shoes snapping against the polished floor. “Still, none of this is really to the point, is it? You want to know about the inauguration, how to survive? The answer is I can’t really tell you. It’s always different for each new Mayor. Being, as they are, just a man with a brand on the hand. I know it has to be done, in order for the transfer of office to be complete. And if you are going to survive any more encounters with Mr Pinner, I suggest you take every advantage presented to you.”

“What do I need to do?” A voice that might have been ours, somewhere a long way off.

“You have to walk the old city walls, seal the gates against evil.”

“That’s not just unhelpful, it’s pretentiously vague.”

“It’s what it says on the cards.”

“And how do I do that?”

“I don’t entirely know. Not being, myself, Midnight Mayor.”

“I’m a sorcerer, not a Jedi.”

“Is that something you tell yourself in times of doubt?”

“It’s something a religious nutcase pointed out to me in a moment of prophetic insight.”

He shrugged. “I can only hold your hand so far. You’ll work it out.”

“You’re really not much use, are you?”

He treated me to the crocodile smile. “May the Force be with you,” he said, and gave me a Vulcan V for good luck. And then his smile almost became a chuckle. “No one else is.”

Afternoon melted into evening.

Evening asked night if it was free for a coffee.

Night sheepishly went in search of its dancing shoes, having left them somewhere behind the spotlights.

The orange glow of urban darkness slithered over the sky.

We ate Thai fish cakes with sweet and sour sauce.

We felt a bit better.

We ordered more food.

Pad Thai noodles with chicken, lemon and crushed peanuts.

We felt a lot better.

The smiling waitress at the restaurant, a small place shimmering in soft candlelit cleanliness on Exmouth Market, asked us if we wanted anything more.

We thought about it, and said yes. Anything with a theme of coconut.

The evening passed on by nicely.

We almost managed to forget.

That special, subtle “almost”, that drives the fear out of the stomach, leaves only a few claws scratching away at the junction of small and large intestine.

We went to the toilet more often than was our inclination.

We had no reason to believe that there was a God, but if he/she/it existed, it had a sick sense of the silly.

Time passed.

Can time take its time?

It did tonight.

Then, just when I was getting used to its saunter, it started to jog, and my Alderman watcher/carer/guardian/assassin said, “We have to go.”

They took me by car to the base of London Bridge. They unloaded me in the bus lane on the south side, and sped off, citing traffic regulations. The tin shed of London Bridge station squatted behind, the yellow towers of Southwark Cathedral across the other side of the street. It was midnight in London, and the city was taking its time, or maybe time was taking it. The wind carried the sound of the bells of St Paul’s as they banged out the hour. Behind HMS Belfast, Tower Bridge was lit up in dangling red and green lights. The Tower of London sat squat and orange, like an angry garden gnome in the family too long to care that it was now cracked and ugly. The black lampposts along the river, stretching out past Butler’s Wharf, were hung with shining white bulbs; the grey concrete of London Bridge was lit up with shimmering pinks and purples the entire span of its length.

I took a deep breath of clear Thames air.

It made me feel cooler inside, sharper on the edges, drove the weariness out of my eyes and the lead from my brain. They say yogis can live a whole day on just one breath. If it was the breath of the river of the city they loved, then I can see how it might work.

Earle had said: magic is life.

He’d got it only slightly wrong.

The rest of what he’d said seemed, to our mind, utter bollocks.

I started walking.

Or maybe, we should call it processing.

Whatever that walk was that the Midnight Mayor did, I did it that night.

*   *   *

Second Interlude: The Inauguration of Matthew Swift

In which various dead things make their point, the ethics of urban planning come under scrutiny, and a new Midnight Mayor learns some important lessons about some old ideas.

The Lord Mayor, when he gets inaugurated on that cold, drizzling November evening, doesn’t just get cocktail sausages—he gets champagne, pineapple, cheese on sticks and someone to hold the umbrella.

So much for perks of office.

I wondered, as I walked across London Bridge, trailing my fingers along the railing and watching the water gush and slide beneath me, if Earle was just holding out on the cocktail sausages as a matter of principle. The life of Midnight Mayor seemed a precarious one, obtained for the most part after years of questionable service. And to be Midnight Mayor and face various unnatural and, in my case, unkillable dangers, all of which seemed out to get you, thank you kindly, without even a piece of pineapple on a stick as a reward, seemed…

… unnatural.

Which was probably the point.

So much for the ruthless application of reason.

I walked.

Earle had said I had to follow the old route of the city wall. All but a few pieces had been demolished years ago, and those I’d seen were nestled away.

GIVE ME BACK MY HAT

Lock the gates against evil, whatever that meant. If I took “evil” in the traditional Christian meaning, 90 per cent of the city’s inhabitants wouldn’t be able to get to work in the morning, ourself included. Even limiting the definition to things actively out to kill and maim, it still presented semantic as well as practical problems.

You’ll work it out, he’d said.

Assuming he even wanted us to live.

Still, any advantage, anything against Mr Pinner, seemed worth getting, and it couldn’t take more than an hour, maybe an hour and a half, to walk the course of the old wall. Even if it achieved nothing material, it would calm us down, let us soak up some of the older, quieter magics that slithered across the pavement like low mist, as we fed off the rhythm of the wander.

Magic is life, my old teacher had said.

Turn it round, and you begin to get something.

We walked.

Shops, shut; camera shop, TV in the window showing our face in a dozen screens from a single camera as we passed by; shop selling suits and ties; Monument station, shut; the Monument itself, its golden ball of fire peeking over the top of the surrounding buildings; cobbled streets leading to ancient, low, forgotten churches, smothered in the gross concrete buildings bursting up around. A giant chemist, where you could purchase things to make your skin brighter, darker, tighter, softer, gentler, warmer, hairier, smoother—and who knew, even find some medicines too. Spitalfields off to my right, the streets empty, the city workers long since gone home, the traffic nothing more than a lost 15 bus on its way to Blackwall, before the night buses took over. A wide street, concrete buildings edging against black reflecting windows that stared angrily down on the grand decadence of the older Victorian offices squatting in tight streets with names like Cornhill, Leadenhall, Fenchurch Street, St Helen’s Place, Clark’s Place, Camomile Street, Houndsditch, Liverpool Street, Wormwood Street, and all their little friends and relations scrabbling away into the crowded gloom of the night-time emptied city. A few miles to the north and a few streets to the south, the night would be loud and lively, full of partying, drinking and general wassail. Here, where the offices were, no one lived, and little stirred except myself and the occasional passing dustbin man.

I headed for Aldgate, that strange junction where the run-down old window frames of the East End met the pampered corniced doors of the City, no apology, no excuse; just bang and there it was: humming, buying, selling, smelling, bustling squalor and the death of brand names. A subway beneath a broad roundabout where the narrow city roads began to spread out into the urban-planned highways towards the estuary, the east, and the Blackwall Tunnel; newspaper drifted beneath the dull lamps; shops, built underground as part of a cunning scheme that had never worked, lurked behind abandoned blankets too tatty even for the beggars to take. The writing was on the wall, declaring such mystic statements as:

BHN CCI ABP RULZ!

Or:

I LOVE CALIPER BOY

Or in sad scratched letters:

make me a shadow on the wall

I kept on walking, ignoring the signs that lied about which exit led where with ancient yellow arrows half torn from the walls. The feeling that I was not alone crept up on me with the gentle padding walk of the polite assassin. I let it get close, until I could feel it tickling the back of my neck, then stopped, hands buried in my trouser pockets, and turned.

There was no one there.

I felt like the justifiable fool I was.

I turned back, kept on walking.

I was still not alone.

I reached the ramp up from the subway, and stopped again. This was, I figured, the last chance to check for followers and get it wrong, without making a fool of myself in public.

Still no one there.

There was, however, something on the wall.

I looked at it carefully.

Someone had spray-painted on the image of a woman. She wore blue jeans and a white T-shirt and appeared to be drinking some sort of yoghurt drink from a plastic cup. Her top lip had folded over the pink straw from it to her mouth and the movement had tilted her head down, but her eyes were up, and fixed on me. They were laughing.

They were also blinking. A rhythmic, silent, steady on-off, one-two count, long eyelashes moving over the soft reflected pink of her eyes.

I recognised the painted woman’s face.

I said, “Vera.”

The painted face stopped drinking the painted yoghurt through the painted straw and looked up. Then the two-dimensional flatness said, “Ah, shit.”

Her lips moved; a pink thing wiggled inside the redness of her mouth. No depths to it, just a change in colour to imply an alteration of perspective. A cartoon on the wall, and the wall was speaking. Her voice echoed the length of the subway. I repeated numbly, “Vera?”

She gestured with the plastic cup, which slid silently over the chipped concrete as if paint was nothing more than a sheet of silk to be moved and slid back at will. “You gotta keep walking,” she said. “You don’t walk, and it won’t work.”

I turned, and kept on walking. Never argue with the surreal; there’s no winning against irrationality. The image of Vera slid off the wall behind me and onto the wall by my side. She was walking with me. I could only see her profile, like an ancient Egyptian painting turned sideways in a Pharaoh’s tomb, and her outline was wobbling, uneven, as if the invisible cartoonist sketching her onto the concrete couldn’t keep up with the speed of her swagger. I said, “This is peculiar.”

“You think?!” she chuckled. “Jesus.”

As we neared the top of the ramp, her whole form was gently eaten away by the lack of concrete on which to project itself, until there was nothing more than a pair of knees, a pair of ankles, a pair of feet walking beside me, before even that was erased by the lack of wall onto which to walk. Then there were just a pair of painted footprints walking next to mine, that landed with an audible splat splat splat as they stepped along beside me, drawn in white paint. As we passed by a lamppost she was briefly back again, her image keeping track of her footsteps, painting itself onto the nearest handy surface: postbox, telephone box, as we walked on.

Not having a mouth didn’t stop her talking. Her voice drifted out of the air, somewhere above those painted steps on the floor.

“So, how’s it going, Swift?”

“Not too well,” I answered, watching the street around me for someone with a straitjacket and a literal mind. “I’ve wound up Midnight Mayor, been chased, pursued and misunderstood, and now I’m talking to, with all respect, a dead pair of painted footsteps.”

“Yeah. That must be a bit freaky.”

“It could be worse.”

“Seriously?”

“Someone says ‘inauguration’ in my line of work, and you can just bet there’ll be freaky shit. It’s like quests. You get told ‘go forth and seek the travelcard of destiny’ and you know, I mean, you seriously know that it won’t have just been left down the back of the sofa. You read—seen—Lord of the Rings?”

“Yessss…”

“Ever wondered why they didn’t just get the damn eagles to go drop the One Ring into the volcano, since they seemed so damn nifty at getting into Mordor anyway?”

“Nooo…”

“See? Fucking quests! So talking to a dead pair of footprints. Fine.”

We passed a parked white van, and for a moment Vera was back, her painted form shimmering across its glass and metal sides. She looked worried.

“Something bad is going down, isn’t it?” she said.

“Yup.”

“Seriously bad?”

“Pretty much.”

“I know. I guess what you said about the whole quest thing—it makes sense that I should know, yeah?”

“I guess so. Any useful tips?”

She’d vanished off the side of the van. For a while there was nothing but the splat splat splat of her footsteps, as the only sign she still walked by me. Then, “End of the line.”

“Thanks.”

“Swift?”

“Yeah?”

“You heard of the death of cities?”

“Yeah.”

“You know he’s real? That he’s been real ever since Remus turned to Romulus and said, ‘hey, cool digs, bro’?”

“Yeah.”

“You know he can be summoned? Sometimes he’s called by the volcano, or the thunder, or the war, but always, something summons him.”

“Yeah. I’d heard.”

“Swift?”

Her voice was fading, the painted footsteps on the ground growing fainter.

“Yeah?”

“Am I really dead?”

“You got shot and turned into a puddle of paint.”

“That’s not normal corpselike behaviour.”

“No. It did occur to me that it was a little unusual. You are—were—leader of the Whites, a clan with a big thing for life, paint, graffiti and all the magics in between. But then again, if you’re not dead, what are you doing here?”

“Good bloody point.”

Her footsteps faded to a thin splatter, then a little smear, then died altogether. We didn’t look back. It wouldn’t have been appropriate to the vibe.

Just above Aldgate, I turned west, heading towards Old Street and Clerkenwell Road, watching offices dissolve slowly into a mixture of shops and flats, piled up on top of each other, joining briefly the ring road that was at all hours laden with traffic, and then heading further along, skimming the northern edge of the Barbican to where those painted statues of those mad-eyed dragons holding the shield with the twin crosses stood guard over the city. The white towers of the churches built after the Great Fire were mainly behind me, twenty-six in all, most of their bodies gutted in the Blitz.

A voice said, “Spare some change?”

A beggar with a big beard sat in the doorway of a recruitment firm, dark eyes staring up at us. I fumbled in my pocket, found nothing, dug into my satchel, felt the desire to keep on walking, the rhythm briefly broken, found my wallet, found the £30 I carried inside, handed it over.

“Cheers,” said the beggar.

“Any time,” I replied, and kept on walking.

A few doorways later and a voice said, “So you like to walk?”

It was the same voice.

It was the same beggar.

“Sure,” I replied, and kept on walking.

By the bolted metal door round the back of a photocopy shop, he was still here, knees huddled up to his chin, blanket pulled over his shoulders. “It’s the new thing, you know. Walking,” he said.

“No it’s not. In the old days people used to walk all the time.”

“Yeah… but that was because it was walk or sit behind a shitting horse in a flea-infested coffin smelling of sawdust and widdle.”

“You may have a point, although I imagine that most of the early modern period smelt of sawdust and widdle regardless of your means of transport.”

There was a long brick warehouse ahead, its back turned to the street, no doorways for the beggar to sit in. That bought me a few more moments to gather my thoughts, and sure enough, sat in the next doorway past that, there he was again, lighting a fag.

“You know,” he said, “it’s amazing it took until 1865 for some bright spark to build a proper sewerage system.”

“Antheaps,” I replied. “Or wasps’ nests. With a small nest, you don’t have to worry. It’s got to be big before you wonder if it’ll fall off the tree.”

“Someone’s been using metaphor on you, right?”

I had to wait two more doorways to reply.

“Yup.”

“Sounds to me like a paddle full of shite.”

“You’ve got to admit it has a certain chaotic something. London burnt down in 1666 and everyone went, whoopee, let’s rebuild! A golden city! But look what happened. Chaos and fluster. Everyone was so eager to live in this golden city that they didn’t even have time to build it.”

Goswell Road. Nowhere for a beggar to sit on the junction of the Goswell Road and Clerkenwell Road, just two staring dragons in a traffic island. I waited, leaning against the traffic lights. They changed. I crossed, still heading west. There were very few doorways on this side; a pub ahead, but it was occupied by a group of scruffy trendies in carefully slashed jeans sharing a bottle of wine. I kept walking. An art studio of some kind presented a low, grubby doorway.

The beggar said, “Can I make a suggestion?”

“You’ve got an agenda, right?”

“Sure.”

“OK. Suggest away.”

“Don’t do the walk. Don’t get inaugurated.”

“Why not?”

Art studio to chippy; he was in the door between that and the strip club pretending to be a pub.

“You want to be Midnight Mayor?”

“No.”

“There you go!”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Sure it is. You be free.”

I kept on walking.

He wasn’t in the next doorway.

Or the one after that.

He’d had his say.

We kept on walking.

Keep moving. If you keep moving you might just manage to leave thoughts behind, you might get it done before they catch you.

Keep on walking.

Come be me…

Aching right hand.

We be light, we be life, we be fire!

What would Jesus do?

We sing electric flame, we rumble underground wind, we dance heaven!

I like walking. Each step is a thought without words, a thought without words is a thought without blame, without retribution, without consequence.

Come be we and be free…

I think he did it to control you, to bind you, to curse you with his office.

… we be blue electric angels!

Mr Mayor.

“Mr Fucking Mayor.”

I looked up.

Kemsley’s face was a badly peeled tomato, grilled at a high heat and left to sag. You couldn’t look like that and be alive, and there was no way the Kemsley I had seen a few hours—maybe a day?—ago was up and walking. No way he’d be here, just to talk to me. I skirted south towards Holborn Viaduct, and he fell into step beside me. Boarded-up butchers’ shops, renovated Victorian ironwork painted green, red, gold, with the little dragons guarding the city wall, the shields, twin red crosses on a white background, one cross smaller than the other, one cross a sword; Domine dirige nos, the motto of the city, everywhere, once you looked, if you stopped to look.

“You want to know what I really think?” he said.

“Not really, but I guess you didn’t go to all this trouble not to tell me.”

“You are a fucking disgrace to the office of Midnight Mayor.”

“Thanks. I really needed a skinned mystical projection to tell me that.”

“You want my advice?”

“No.”

“Lie down and die. Let Mr Pinner do his thing. Let someone better take over the office. That’s the best thing you could do as Mayor, for the Mayor. Just lie down and die.”

“You know, people pay therapists to get this kind of abuse.”

He just grunted, turned his back on me, started walking briskly the other way. We called out after, “Where are you going?”

He looked back.

Just a guy. Just some guy in a black jacket, frightened at a stranger’s voice shouting after him in the night.

I raised my hands in apology, smiled, shook my head, turned and kept on walking the way I’d gone.

With my incisive detective skills, I was beginning to notice a pattern at work.

I could see the golden cross of St Paul’s Cathedral peeping above the nearby offices. As I walked, the streetlamps flickered, flashed unevenly when I passed beneath them, splitting my shadow into a dozen different mes that spread out like a sundial around my feet.

I heard a squeaking.

At first I thought it was some sort of cartoon rat.

It would have made a strange kind of sense.

Then the squeaking grew nearer, and now it was more a sound of metal sliding off metal. I kept on walking, figuring that if it was something important, it would catch up with me.

It did. But it gave us a strange pleasure to make it work for the privilege.

For a moment I thought I smelt curry powder and plastic bags, heard the distant muttering of the mad old lady with her trolley of bags, buggery, buggery, youth today, buggery…

But it wasn’t her. Not tonight.

“Hello, Matthew.”

I looked to the voice, and didn’t stop walking. Our fists curled in anger.

The squeaking came from a pair of big wheels behind two smaller ones. Above the wheels was a black leather chair. Attached to it was a man. Attached to him were two stands on more wheels, trailing along behind. One stand held a bag of some clear liquid, drugs or fluids or whatever; the other held a bag of blood, and I could just guess whose it was.

Pushing the wheelchair was a man dressed all in shadows and my old coat.

Angry.

Don’t look.

Angry.

“Matthew,” said the man in the wheelchair, “how exactly do think this business is going to end?”

“Terminally,” I replied. “But at least it will end. Dead is dead is dead. Especially for you.”

We walked/wheeled on a little further. “Matthew,” said the man in the wheelchair, with a slightly reproving tone in his voice, “do you really understand what it is to be Midnight Mayor?”

“Nope. Totally winging it.”

“You have to serve the city.”

“Sussed that.”

“Not the people, Matthew. The city.”

“I wasn’t signed up to be Robin Hood, if that’s what you mean.”

“Let’s please not be coy about this.”

“This isn’t me being coy, this is me being angry.”

“Why are you angry?”

“Because I didn’t ask for this gig. Because some bastard chose me for it without so much as a cocktail sausage and pineapple on a stick, because Vera was shot and Anissina fell into smog, because Mo is gone and Loren cried, because the spectres stabbed me and Earle sat in his office drinking coffee, because I saw a guy flayed alive and another bastard lumbered in hospital with no skin, and because you”—I stabbed an angry finger at the man in the wheelchair—“you, Mr Bakker, you are dead. We killed you. We killed you and we did it because you… because… We killed you and you should stay dead and so should your bloody fucking shadow!”

I was shouting. My voice echoed off the buildings on the empty street, hummed in the cold water pipes. I turned away, looked down at the paving stones, counting my own steps, how many stones they covered with each stride, how many they’d cover in ten, in twenty, how many strides to a mile.

The wheelchair rattled on peacefully beside me. Mr Bakker sat, his pale, spotted hands folded across his belly, his head tilted up and to one side, being pushed by his shadow. His blood-soaked shadow in the bloodstained remnant of my old coat, the one I’d died in. The one I’d been killed in. That coat.

“What’s the point of all this?” I asked at last, as we swung into the mess of up-down streets between Farringdon Road and Fleet Street. “I get that there’s mystical shit going on and all that, but what exactly is the point? Am I supposed to derive some great moral message from all this, become a better person, a nicer Midnight Mayor? From what I can tell, ‘nice’ isn’t the qualifying term.”

“I think,” said Bakker, drawing in that long, slow, thoughtful breath he’d always used as a teacher, just before the answer “maybe”, “I think that you’re supposed to find out what kind of Mayor you’re meant to be. I don’t know. It’s not really my field of expertise.”

“Great. You know, that implies all sorts of unpleasant things about higher powers.”

“Or a lot about your current state of mind. How is your current state of mind?”

“I see no reason to tell you about it.”

“But isn’t that the point?”

“I don’t know. No one has told me the point. And until someone does, I’m just going to assume there isn’t one and keep on walking for the hell of it.”

I kept on walking.

“Matthew?”

“Still here.”

“On the subject of higher powers…”

“Yup.”

“I’d like to posit one to you, purely, you understand, hypothetically.”

“I’m paying attention only because there’s nothing else to occupy me at the moment.”

He took a deep breath and went, “The city.”

“Yup.”

“As higher power.”

“I’m still only here out of shitty luck.”

“Well, no. If you see what I mean.”

“I don’t.”

“Let me try and explain it.”

“Happy day.”

“A woman gets up for work. Her alarm is powered from the mains, and doesn’t go off this morning because on the other side of the city another woman whose clock was powered by battery missed the wake-up call and didn’t press the right button at the transformer station. She’s running late. She doesn’t have time to make breakfast so she runs to the supermarket where at three a.m. the previous night three students and a disgraced manager loaded freshish sandwiches onto refrigerated shelves so that this woman could run in all a fluster, buy one and get out. She’s still running late. She runs for a bus that doesn’t come. The driver has been caught in traffic because pipes have burst further up the street, and it’s going to take him twenty minutes to get moving past the junction and then five minutes to do double that distance. The bus comes. She gets on. The bus takes her to work. At work, she toils for eight hours without much of a break then has to go and see friends in the evening. They’re going to have a Chinese takeaway. The food is being prepared by a chef, whose cousin runs a Chinese goods import-export on the edge of Enfield. Every day he receives and delivers a whole city’s orders for mandarin duck, chilli sauce and yaki noodles, a fleet of two dozen vans at his command, fifty workers on staff at any time, collecting orders from airports, delivering them to cities within a two-hundred-mile radius. The woman gets her food because the van turned up on time, the driver paid his congestion charge zone fee, the MOT was clean, the engine was full of petrol. She eats her Chinese meal. As she goes home, the streetlamps come on, the rubbish is removed, the buses drive along lines that have been painted, roads that have been laid, the water mains are repaired and it is an easy run back to watch the telly, and so goes her day.”

I waited a moment after he’d finished talking, to see if there was something else.

“Yessss?”

“Matthew—does it not occur to you that even to live in the city as we do, to go day by day and do what is done, see what there is, live surrounded by eight million strangers, dependent on strangers to drive the bus, prepare the food, clean up the rubbish, pipe the water, supply the electrics, answer the—”

“I get the idea.”

“Then you see my point?”

“Not quite…”

“Matthew! I taught you better than this!”

“You killed me better than this too, remember?”

“ ‘You killed me too’—must we be playground infants? Dead is dead is dead.”

“OK. Your point?”

“My point is this: that the city even exists, even lives, so alive! So gloriously, wonderfully, amazingly alive! That for all this to be so, day by day, is a miracle. And since miracles are by definition rare, is it not possible, even reasonable to turn what seems a constancy of miracles into the idea of a higher power, and call it simply, the city?”

“Oh. I get it now. Philosophy 101 for Midnight Mayors.”

“Life is magic, Matthew. You said it yourself. Even the boring, mundane acts, even breathing, seeing, perceiving, being perceived. Life is magic. That is all a sorcerer is.”

“I know,” I sighed. “I remember.”

We were nearing Ludgate. A great joining of places, confused, wriggling in from all sides, monuments to the war dead, supermarkets for the living, and coffee shops for all. The squeaking of Bakker’s wheelchair was growing less. I glanced down at him. His face was sunk, dark, grey, fading into shadow. His chair was fading into shadow, stretching thin and flat across the floor.

I looked away.

We had no need to see such things again.

There was something wrong. It wasn’t that Bakker faded into shadow; it was that he faded into his own shadow, and that shadow faded into my shadow, and my shadow was doing the pencil-thin thing behind me as I walked towards the light, and in front of me, and around me, and it wasn’t so thin as it ought to be and wasn’t so flat on the pavement as the normal laws of optics demanded. If water was nothing more than moonlight on the earth, this is how it would behave.

My hand hurt.

It more than hurt.

I cradled it to my chest. The stitches in my skin hurt. My head hurt. The paper cuts stung across every part of me. We could feel warm blood rolling down from the tiny slice below our eye, feel itching in the palm of our hand. The travelcard of destiny is never behind the sofa, these things are never as easy as a party with pineapples. I opened my hand. The twin crosses were burning, the blood in them turned to warm red flame. I didn’t know if this was a good sign or a bad one. We turned our face away. I walked the southern edge of Gray’s Inn, past shuttered shops and gloomy, lights-out banks, past bus stops declaring on their orange boards:

1. 341—North’land Pk—14 mins.

2. 11—Liverpool St—15 mins.

3. 17—runrunrunrunrunrunENDOFTHELINErunrunrunrun run—Due

4. 11—Liverpool Street—18 mins

Want flexible hours and excellent pay? Be a bus driver! Then you too can become a shadow on the wall! Phone Arriva on 0800 924 7100.

A splat of a pub was turning out for the night, customers, mostly drunken students, spilling onto the streets, arms full of stolen ketchup sachets and packets of brown sauce, cackling merrily under the streetlights. A couple of taxis went by. A woman was leaning against the window of an electronics store, arms folded, head turned towards me. I recognised her as I approached, but turned my eyes away from her face. She fell into step with me as I passed, saying nothing. It’s hard to say anything when your throat is half missing. In films it’s always neat, a single cut, one slice and that’s it, just another scarlet smile a bit lower than your first. This wasn’t a neat missing throat. This was a five-fingered yawn torn from muscle and flesh, that gaped and laughed obscenely with each rattle of her jaw.

In life, the woman whom this obscenity mimicked had been called Dana Mikeda. My former apprentice. The half-Russian daughter of a sandwich shop owner in Smithfields. She’d been taken in by Mr Bakker, when I’d died. She’d been the one who cast the spell that brought us back.

She hadn’t died a tidy death.

When she talked, her voice bubbled through crimson blood popping out of the gaps in her neck. She said, “You can still run away.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”

“Seriously. Find another city, find somewhere else. The world is big enough, even for you. What loyalty do you have to this city?”

“I was born here.”

“And what loyalty do you have to this city?”

“We were born here too.”

She smiled, and so did her throat. “Haha. Deep. You should write Christmas crackers. Still, plenty of people stuff their domestic loyalties.”

“Nah. You get born in London, you get raised in London, sooner or later you’ll put ‘Londoner’ on your passport. Hey—I can even give you a bit of Midnight Mayor pep talk, while you’re here, Dana, not being dead. How’s this for Alderman crap: the city defines you. Or even better—I am born in this city and it makes me who I am. The streets, the stones, the strangers, everything, whether I meant it or not, made me me. Ergo, we will not abandon it. You like?”

“Christmas cracker.”

“Yeah. Flawed logic, in my opinion.”

“Then why’d you say it?”

“I think it’s the point. Of the walk, I mean. To get that whole sense of perspective. Get whacked up on the conviction that I’m fighting for something and, most likely, being flayed alive for something.”

“You feeling convinced?”

I looked at her face. We felt… almost pleased… to see it again, talking, moving, even above that shattered throat. A mimicry of life, an abomination, but perhaps, a recollection of something living, whose memory had threatened to die. I remembered, so she lived, just like the poets went and said. Easy to forget, when you want to.

“Sorry,” I said.

“What?”

“For what happened to you.”

“Me? You really think I walk around with this shit in my throat?”

“No, that’s not the point. I fully comprehend that you’re just another metamagical manifestation of whatever crackpot Mayorish madness this particular acid trip is. But you have her face, and I never got to say sorry to the real one. So… sorry. I’m sorry. We’re sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Aw,” she said. “Nice of you to say, bit late.”

Slipping down past Lincoln’s Inn, alone again on the empty streets, following the route of the old wall as best I could, shadows thick at my back. Look out of the corner of our eye and we could see them, bubbling, twisting, rising up the walls, crawling out of the streets, dark faceless masses trying to be heard. Earle had said: so many millions of dead men and dead women buried beneath the city.

Dead is dead is dead.

Dead memories, dead names, dead things.

Dead is dead is dead until someone happens to remember.

And life was, after all, magic.

So here we are, heading towards Fleet Street, and the lights are being smothered in the shadows that follow us. Here we are, wandering past old-fashioned terraced houses of black brick and white facings, of thick wooden doors and cross-sashed windows, of pointed roofs and old, disused chimney stacks, past old forgotten greenery tucked into car-filled streets. And here’s the shadows, the memories that no one bothers to remember: who put down the stones and laid the streets and painted the lines and powered the wires and pumped the water and stacked the sandwiches onto the shelves; and who died and were buried and covered over by the spread of the city, and the bones of the more recently dead, whose families could pay for their lot in a currency that buys more interesting things to smother over the smell of sawdust and widdle. And our hand is bleeding and our head is aching and the dead should just stay dead is dead is dead, just like me.

Now we knew what Vera—the painted cartoon of Vera—had meant. If we stopped walking now, the tidal wave of darkness writhing at our back would fall, tumbling under its own weight, spiral tip-down on top of us and suffocate the life from our chest, press until we couldn’t breathe and that would be it: so long, goodbye, goodnight, farewell. Keep walking and you didn’t have to look, didn’t have to stop and notice the bricks laid by dead hands on a plan drawn by a dead stranger who was commissioned by another stranger who earned his money off the thoughts of strangers who ate the food of strangers who sat huddled kissing-close every day to strangers on a train, armpit-close because that was what you did, that was how you got around, as intimate as a lover and probably more honest too, blood in our hand, shadows at our feet. And here it is, Fleet Street, the mad-eyed dragon guarding its shield with the twin crosses that burnt brighter than the red glow of the traffic lights, watching us with a spinning chaos in its eyes as if it too had seen the endless hole into which the forgotten dead of the city had plummeted and knew how deep the bones went below.

And there was someone leaning against the base of the dragon. I couldn’t stop walking, not now, and he didn’t seem inclined to follow; just watched me calmly from where he stood, drinking a cup of coffee. I walked straight by, heading back towards the river, dragging the darkness and the shadows and the memories and painted footsteps and whispered voices along behind me and he, at last, drained the remainder of his cup, threw the thing into a bin, and followed, hands buried in his pockets. He was wearing a coat I’d seen already in the night. He came level with me as I headed down the side of a newsagent’s towards the river, a tight little street of too few lights held too high up above too little pavement.

I said through gritted teeth, almost too breathless to talk, too busy to slow, “What the hell do you want? This is a walk for the dead.”

Blood dribbled from my closed palm, splattered onto the street at my feet, slipped into the mad gaps in the tarmac.

“Oh—I’m totally dead,” he replied. “I mean, totally.”

“You’re not. Unless we’re talking prophetically.”

“Noooo,” he said carefully. “No, I think we’re dealing with the past here. See, I got gutted by the shadow of my former teacher. He let me die by a phone box near the river. The last breath left my lungs, my heart beat its last, my internal organs decided to give the open air a try and my brain stopped crackling. Medically, dead. You seen Star Trek?”

“Of course I’ve seen Star Trek—do you mind, I’m busy here?”

“You thought about the teleportation stuff?”

“No.”

“You should think about it. A beam comes out of an empty vacuum and dissolves your entire body. I mean literally, everything stops. Your brain stops, your thoughts stop. You are nothing more than a 01010101001 in a computer! Jesus Christ, if that isn’t the definition of so dead you could drop it down a pyramid for a party then I don’t know what is! Sure, you get assembled at the other end, but it’s by a machine that could assemble spare ribs just as easy—it’s piling you back together bit by bit, like some ready-made sausage squeezed from a tube. That’s not life! That’s… cloning, at the very best. A reconstruction, probably a flawed one, of an entity that naturally died when you went and bloody dissolved its entire nature! So you see, and this is really the point, I’m dead. I mean, seriously, totally whacked.”

I could see the river ahead, blue lights on the other side, shimmering reflection of a thousand shattered colours on the black racing water.

“But,” I croaked, as the lights went out behind me and the mad eyes of the dragon spun and sunk down for ever in the streets, “if you’re dead, then what the hell am I?”

The man in my old coat shrugged. “Dunno. If I were you I wouldn’t worry about it too much.”

“Why not? Dead is dead is…”

“Is dead, yeah. But, you feel like Matthew Swift, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And remember like Matthew Swift?”

“Yes.”

“And hate like him, and fear like him, and want like him, and live like him, and marvel like him, and bleed like him?”

“Ticking all these boxes.”

“So I figure, fuck it! Sure, I might be dead,” he said. “But you’re an excellent copy of me.”

I looked at him out of the corner of my eye.

They, whoever They are, say you’d go mad if you ever saw the back of your own head. Or the universe would explode or something; paradox and physics and something along these lines. I didn’t see the back of the man’s head. But he had my face, he was Matthew Swift, right down to the blood soaked through his clothes and the tears across his throat and chest which had killed him. But his eyes were brown, not blue, and there was no scar upon his right hand.

I said, “This is turning from the surreal to the downright sick. I want my money back. I want to reload, reboot, try again without the psycho shit!”

“You think?” he chuckled. “You should see what’s behind you!”

I wouldn’t have looked.

I really wouldn’t.

But if you can’t trust yourself, even when you’re dead, then who are you going to put your faith in?

I looked.

“Ta-da!” said Matthew, the other Matthew, the one who died and didn’t come back, because you couldn’t, dead is dead is…

It was…

… dragon didn’t quite cover it.

Dragon implies something made out of scales, with a nod in the direction of reptilian ancestry: dinosaur meets flamethrower with wings. Sure, it includes anything from fluffy through to ferocious; and we could see a case for this thing fitting into both categories. But it felt impolite to try and tie it to any particular biology. Impolite to impose anything as mundane and boring as up, down, sideways, forwards, back, in, out, here, then, there, now. It would have cocked one black eyebrow bigger than the sky above an eye madder than the tiger, tiger that once upon a time burnt bright in some acid-drenched brain; and looked at you as though to say, “Oh. So you’re that small.”

To say it was made of shadows would be to imply that light or darkness even got a look-in. Sure, it had crawled out of them, in the way that the diplodocus had once crawled out of the amoebae of the sea. And if a comet came from the heavens to smash it, it wouldn’t be squished, just spread so wide and thin across the earth that it would look like night had fallen down, dragging all the stars with it—before, with a good thorough shake to push the stardust off its skin, the creature slid back to its brilliant, angry, maddened shape.

If its wings bothered to do something so mundane as beat, they took a hundred years to do it; if its tongue found anything in the air worth tasting, the lashing spike as it sampled the drizzle would knock down every chimney from Fleet Street to Piccadilly; if it deigned to press a claw into the earth, the Underground trains rumbling beneath would screech to a stop as the clatter of their engines became lost in the roaring of the tunnels that cowered from its touch.

And if it found any reason, and it would have to be one hell of a reason, to bother to look at you, in its gaze were a million ghosts who pressed up against the cornea of its eye and stretched their fingers through the blackness of its pupil to try and suck you down.

And it was looking at us.

We, who were born from the chatter of mankind, from the things that got left behind in the wires, who were bigger than any city or mortal, were nothing: tiny, insignificant, footsteps walking on stones where a thousand million feet a year would walk, nothing more than ants in a heap. A blink, and our lives were over. Our voices and our footsteps and all that we were would sink into its great black belly. And, while not lost, we would be too small to merit interest from anyone other than the insignificantly small librarian interested in the history of the insignificant: little stories to comfort little people who liked to believe that the heroes mattered, because otherwise, they would be nothing but forgotten ghosts before the city could even deign to shake itself free from yesterday.

It looked at us; we looked at it.

I didn’t want to know.

I closed my eyes.

And, without us wanting to attribute a digestive system to the beast, it gobbled us up.