Matthew Swift, Midnight Mayor, sorcerer extraordinaire, guardian of the night, etcetera, etcetera, sat on the highest part of Sally the banshee’s home gasometer and ate a cheese and pickle sandwich.
“Wotcha,” he said to a particular place in the empty air.
Sammy grudgingly shimmered into existence beside him.
“I always meant to ask,” the sorcerer said, through a mouthful of grated cheese and heavily spiced onion, “why I can’t see you when you’re invisible, but I can smell you. Surely invisibility should affect all the senses?”
“It does,” grumbled the goblin. “You can’t smell Sharon, yeah? It’s just I’ve got a more magnificent odour than the mind can ignore. Lifetime’s work, smelling like me.”
Swift swung his legs out over the drop and went on eating. In the distance a long freight train snaked into a tunnel; its engine, just audible, throbbed deeper as it picked up speed. The Golden Mile was a stubble of silver-grey towers, Canada Water a more distant clump of spikes in the flatlands of inner London, far out to the east.
Below, Rhys and Sharon wandered back through the overgrown wasteland. They were, Swift realised, picking flowers: fistfuls of bud-dleia, rubbery webs of crawling ivy, the white fluff from seeding thistles; all of it being shoved into a large cloth bag. And more–flakes of rusty iron scraped from old foundations, crumbling shards of mortar, great armfuls of green algae from the nearby canal and finally dirty old water from foul settled puddles.
Swift half-thought he could also hear voices, rising up from far, far below.
“This is very kind of you–atchoo!–Ms Li.”
“Not a problem.”
“I’m sure once we’ve got it in the summoning circle it’ll be–atchoo!–it’ll be all right.”
“Got every confidence, Rhys.”
“Looks like dribbly-nose is making potions,” commented Sammy, who’d also been watching them. “You wouldn’t know about that shit because you’re all about the elemental power and stuff. But some people, some people have to actually study, and work, and pay attention to their craft.”
“Is that what urban druids do? Make potions?”
“Nah, it’s what baby druids do,” replied Sammy. “It’s what druids do what fail their exams because they get sneezing fits during the sacred intonations.”
“An embassy from the Sacred Circle of Muswell Hill tried to explain it to me once. But they’d just accidentally awakened a slumbering ent in Highgate Cemetery who managed to damage Karl Marx’s grave before tripping over a telephone line. So we got a bit disrupted.”
“Lotta amateur pillocks doing crappy magic,” agreed Sammy.
The two sat in silence a while longer, watching the city bustle beneath them.
Swift sighed, his chin sinking deeper into the shapeless stained mass of his coat. “I can’t–and this is a novel experience for me–I can’t fix this alone. We are not used to these ways, to the hidden things. Our strength is only potent against tangible evils, whereas this… this world of spirits and shadows and things unseen, is beyond our… beyond my usual remit. Ever since the business with the Tower, with Bakker, I’ve tried to cut myself off from much of the world. The lessons I learned were that friends leave you, or they die, or they are damaged by the life you lead. I lie to the ones I love to keep them away when, to be honest, I probably need them the most. And now this… It is not our world.”
Sammy considered this for a long while. Then he reached out and patted Swift on the knee. “Can I give you some advice?” he asked, “as a shaman and spiritual guide, and that?”
“Sure.”
The goblin sucked in air through his mighty teeth, considering his next few words.
“Live with it,” he announced at last. “Lump it,” he added. “And deal with it.”
The sorcerer reflected on this advice.
Beneath him he half-thought he heard the druid mumble:
“Now, the secret to being a good druid, Miss Li, is always to have a fresh pack of facial wipes.”
Swift groaned. “Yup,” he admitted, “fair enough.”