In which the beginning of a plan unfolds, revenge is plotted, and a lot of rats decide to congregate.
At dawn, we parted company. Oda went – where, she would not say – and the biker’s only contribution was that he was going to “hit the road” for a while. We agreed a time and a place to meet again, and I, with the sum effect of Sinclair’s research on the Tower in my bag, went to find a safe place to sleep, and read, and think.
When the first shops opened at 8.30 a.m., I bought myself a heavy-duty box of plasters to cover the cut on my left hand, a new shirt to replace the bloody remnants of my current one, and a packet of aspirin, just in case. At 9.30 a.m. I checked myself into a small but friendly enough hotel off the Cromwell Road, in that strange, transient part of town where the mansions of the rich compete with the squalor of endless bed-and-breakfasts and their constantly migrating population. In the tiny, windowless space next to my room, I had a bath. The experience was bliss, a sudden sinking into warmth and contentment that we had not imagined possible, a moment when our fears and senses began to relax, letting go of the night’s tension which, we realised, had clenched every muscle to the edge of rupture. We lowered our head underwater and stayed there until we thought we would burst, lungs burning, and emerged again with a sense of being more alive and powerful than ever before, risking death and coming away unharmed, clean, safe. Blood and dirt turned the water pinkish-grey as it floated off our skin like mist rising in the morning sun. We then wrapped ourself in towels and stood behind the net curtain in the window to watch the bright morning light cast the shadows of the trees across the street below, and felt, at last, content.
Clean and dry, I bandaged my cut hand, brushed my hair with my fingers, having forgotten to buy a comb, and examined myself in the cracked mirror above the sink. In my new shirt and stolen trousers, I looked almost dignified. An almost perfect resurrection, then, just like we’d thought, just like we’d hoped – at least physically.
My eyes were still too blue. I leant in close to the bathroom mirror and saw that the iris was tinted, as human eyes should be, with flecks of other colour, a hint of brown, a suggestion of green, a darker rim. But the overall prevalence was the colour of a summer sky. It didn’t particularly suit me, and gave a disconcerting albino appearance; but I supposed, like a new haircut or a shave after a week of neglect, I would grow used to my current appearance, and forget the old. I considered being frightened, curling up at the base of my bed and whimpering in fear at what consequence this change in my appearance might bring. The mood wasn’t on us, so I didn’t.
I felt less than confident about painting a ward onto the door of the hotel room, so settled for a compromise and, with a biro, drew a swift protective symbol onto five pieces of hotel-headed notepad paper and left each sheet around the bed in a vague semicircle as the closest I could come to a magical defence without causing criminal damage. Then I lay down and slept. This time, we did not try to resist, and could not remember our dreams.
I woke in the mid-afternoon. Sitting on the floor at the foot of my bed, I spread out the bloodstained remnants of Sinclair’s documents in front of me.
I did not care why Sinclair really wanted Bakker dead. I did not care particularly why the rest of them were involved, although I suspected Oda’s reasons went beyond mere personal motives and into a more dangerous realm. We chose not to be concerned with this now, however, until we knew if it threatened our own interests.
What did I want?
What did we want?
I wanted … I wanted …
… come be we …
… to find and …
… we be fire, we be light …
… stop …
… we dance electric flame …
… “hello Matthew’s fire!” …
… stop …
… we want …
… stop NOW.
…
Done?
…
Good.
I wanted to kill Hunger.
If that meant ploughing through more mortal creatures on the way, then so be it.
I wanted to kill the shadow.
We found it ugly, and dangerous.
I picked up Bakker’s photo and studied the face. There was a bloody fingerprint, probably Sinclair’s, in the top corner. If you aged the face, gave it a tropical disease, starved it of food and drink, took the fire out of its eyes and the smile away from its lips, if you looked at it with all that in mind, just out of the corner of your vision, then Bakker’s face could just, perhaps, be fitted onto another creature’s shoulders. For that alone, I suspected Bakker might have to die.
However, these things were easier said than done. And revenge, we decided, should be more than about dying.
I turned my attention to San Khay.
An impression of the daily life and routine of San Khay.
At 6.30 a.m. his alarm goes in his penthouse flat on the river by Victoria. If he has had romance the night before, he does not wake his sleeping partner, but walks across his white-carpeted floor to the bathroom, a thing all of mirrors and silver taps, so that, standing at any point in the room, he can see his own reflection, muscles and polished almond skin, reflected back at him. The tattoos that cover his entire body are done in deep black ink, and every six months he returns to a very special tattooist in Hong Kong, to make sure that any faded areas, around his buttocks or across his chest where they may have experienced strain, are kept up in full, ebony-coloured glory. The swirls of ink crawl around his ankles and across his toes, run round the back of his knees, spiral up his hips, curl lovingly around his belly button, sinking inside like some sort of strange root burrowing into earth, lash themselves across his back and chest, bend luxuriously down his arms and, at the wrist and neck, just below the collar line, fade gently, into nothing.
The men he takes home with him on Tuesdays and Fridays (his days for such affairs) often regard such extensive swirls of ink as kinky, but not unattractive. To the more considerate magician, such an embedding of symbols of magic into skin is as much dangerous as it is potentially rewarding. For this reason, San Khay usually keeps the ink hidden, studying his flesh all over only in the morning when he is sure he is alone in his bathroom.
In other men this relentless examination of themselves every morning would be vanity. For San Khay, the studying of his own naked form is the perusal of an investment: nine months of pain for his mother, twenty-three years of school fees at the best institutions in America, Asia and Europe for his father, and a subsequent fifteen-odd years of gym sessions, martial arts classes, dance lessons, organic food detox diets and nearly forty-eight hours of intense pain under that tattooist’s needle, every six months, for himself. San Khay wishes to be assured that his investment is being well maintained, since presumably he will be reliant on its dividends for the rest of his life.
He showers in the 360-degree power shower installed by his Spanish plumber Enrico to his special request, at the highest temperature allowable, until his skin is lit up red like the end of Rudolf’s nose on Christmas Eve. He then turns the shower down to its coldest temperature for a few seconds, and dries himself off with a neat white towel, fluffy as a bunny’s tail, before going into the kitchen to prepare breakfast.
Although he has three staff serving his needs – a chauffeur, a maid and a personal assistant, who live in the building and are on call at any hour of the day – San Khay makes his own breakfast, a bowl of nuts and fruit that all but clatter on their way through the gut, they are so unpleasantly healthy. He dresses in his wardrobe room, itself lined with mirrors, and again it is not vanity that leaves his reflection stretched out to infinity around him, but the monitoring of an impression. When San Khay goes to work, he is not merely selling his product, he is selling himself. He wears a black suit with polished black shoes and does up every button of his smart pink shirt, his only flash of colour, to hide every trace of ink on his skin. He combs his dark hair slicked back, but shaves only on Wednesday and Monday, since his beard grows at a
snail’s pace anyway and he has very sensitive skin.
All this takes him no more than half an hour.
At 7 a.m. he leaves the penthouse. His chauffeur has his car – a long, black but otherwise anonymous Mercedes – waiting down in the car park. He seems to prefer it if his lover of the night does not wake before his departure, as that saves embarrassing goodbyes, but instead leaves orders with the maid, Sally, to make sure his companion has everything he wishes and is treated with the utmost courtesy, before he is shown out.
By 7.30 a.m. San Khay is at his desk, having beaten the early-morning traffic and everyone else in his office. New members of his company often attempt to beat San and turn up before he does, but find that more than a few weeks of working 7.30 a.m. to 8.30 p.m. in order to impress their boss, and be in before and out after his working hours, is beyond human endurance. The more courageous ask how he does it, but he merely smiles and assures them that he drinks a lot of water.
His office is in the heart of the City, in that area just off Bishopsgate where the giant glass towers of the megacorporations loom over the traditional guildhalls and converted old mansions of their lawyers and clerical providers. Certain names appear on every street corner as regularly as the Corporation of London bollards – Merrill Lynch, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Morgan Stanley, the National Westminster, Saudi Arabia, Credit Suisse – the bankers of the City and their lawyers, compressed into a space no more than a mile wide, within easy walking distance of each other and their favourite sandwich bars for lunch.
The firm he works for is called Amiltech, and it is based on the 24th floor of a tower. Not “the Tower”, as Sinclair would probably hasten to point out were he not in critical condition with three bullets in his chest – this was not “the Tower”, merely a corporate subsidiary, a security firm that had floated its very special assets and been bought, absorbed into the ever-growing conglomeration of companies and interests headed by Robert James Bakker. During San’s average day, he will hold three meetings in his office, and perhaps another three outside, in locations as diverse as the café on the corner, or Pentonville Prison, depending on what he is looking for. On his official payroll are secretaries, lawyers, administrators, accountants, press secretaries, drivers, assistants and managers. On his unofficial payroll are fortune-tellers, prophets, seers, magicians, witches, wizards, voodoo-artists, murderers, thieves, criminals, a few judges, policemen, politicians and, so Sinclair recorded with “a rumour?” written in the margin, a member of the royal family.
When asked his job description, San Khay is very vague – but usually just ends up saying “securities”. Not merely insurance, he adds, but actual security. After all, he says, he is far more likely to make a profit from insurance premiums if he can absolutely guarantee that no harm will come to the client.
Needless to say, among his clients are other names that interest me:
Guy Lee, officially unemployed, wizard, benefactor of the arts, suspected of dabbling unhealthily in necromancy, vampirism and all the other much hyped, vaguely defined “dark arts”. He’s Bakker’s enforcer in the magical community and, after San Khay, next on my list of people to have a conversation with. Amiltech provided personal security for Mr Lee, at a very reasonable rate.
Harris Simmons, Bakker’s chief financial adviser. A poor and clumsy magician, from what Sinclair’s files suggested of him, whose chief talent in that area lay in his vast collection of magical artefacts and other items, including, so the rumours went, Nostradamus’s ashes (overrated), at least three contenders for the name of Excalibur, plus over seventeen possible candidates for the skull of King Arthur (pointless), several vials of fairy dust, and a tub of dragon blood (extracted from a pet lizard). He had also accumulated numerous protective items and enchantments whose precise nature was unclear to me, as it was to Sinclair, but which seemed to have Sinclair greatly concerned as to how easy it might or might not be to eliminate Harris Simmons. Amiltech provided security for Simmons’s personal vault, and Simmons churned out money for the Tower.
Dana Mikeda. Here, I was not prepared to speculate.
San Khay has little or no contact with these others, except for occasional brief meetings with Lee in the City, or the odd telephone conversation with Harris Simmons. Dana Mikeda, as far as he and most of the rest of the corporation are concerned, doesn’t exist, and probably for good reason.
At 12.30 precisely San leaves his office and goes to the gym. He works out until 1.30 to build appetite, then returns to his office, and has lunch at his desk. His lunch is a salad, sushi, and a bottle of green sludge that Sinclair swears is a kind of organic vegetable drink, and which we find interesting, in much the same way we are fascinated by the play of light across the shimmering shell of a dung beetle. All things we do not know interest us.
At 6 p.m. he has a one-hour dinner with members of his staff, in his office. The food is prepared by the catering unit three floors below. Rumour is he likes pine nuts, but I am not convinced that this isn’t detail gone mad in Sinclair’s notes. On Monday he dines with the finance department, on Tuesday with the executive managers, on Wednesday with the press office, on Thursday with the secretarial administrators and on Friday with the lawyers. They all turn up exactly on time, every week, without fail and without question.
Between 7 p.m. and 8.30 p.m., he either works at his desk or, if need be, travels around the city to inspect his various interests and ensure the smooth managing of business. This business can be as diverse as double-checking the vault codes on a door, or commissioning an assassin and delivering the target details. Partially for this reason, I am almost entirely certain that San Khay took the pre-emptive step of sending a litterbug after me that first night in Dulwich, perhaps with the philosophical attitude of “if you want it done, do it hard and fast”. Perhaps for his arrogance, he is at the top of our list of people to see.
At 8.30 p.m. he stops work, unless there are unusual circumstances, and when his schedule does not require anything more he goes into the city, to one of the exclusive underground clubs where only the very rich dare enter, where he will buy champagne just for himself, and talk politely with the many young men and women of the City who desire his patronage. If it is a Tuesday or a Friday, he will find a man of a similar sexual inclination, and take him home. His preferred type, according to Sinclair, is broad, and dark, and probably rather shallow.
At 11.30 p.m. he goes home, and he will be asleep by 1 a.m. If he has company he will do as company does – if not, he reads until it is
time to turn the light out.
Five and a half hours later, his day begins again.
I resolved to disrupt this routine.
I started relatively small.
The International Investment Bank of Tokyo had its central London office behind Paternoster Street, in a gloomy enclosure ironically known as Angel Court, where in the last century a bomb or two had clearly fallen, and the debris been replaced with architecture that was less than inspired. I went down there for 10.30 p.m., coat buttoned up as well as might be, satchel over my shoulder, well fed, well slept and ready for the fight. Riding the train to Moorgate, I let the unique taste of the underground’s magic wash over me. Back on the street I shuddered with every swish of passing traffic, as with its passing, it spun the latent magic drifting through the air into eddies. In Telegraph Passage I ran my hands down the old, narrow house wedged in between two shiny new office buildings, feeling its sluggish, heavy history tingle against my fingers, its own unique power. By the time I reached Angel Court I was almost giddy on my own prepared spells and gathered forces. As I walked, I directed the CCTV cameras away from me, guiding them with the twisting of my fingers to point this way, not that, so that I might slip unobserved past the lowered traffic barrier into the lurking buildings beyond.
There was a single sleepy security guard on the front desk of the International Investment Bank of Tokyo’s office. I pulled my coat and my spells tighter around myself and walked by him without stopping – he didn’t even look up. I called a lift to the fourth floor, and rode up in the polished brass interior, fighting the urge to whistle.
At the fourth floor I politely asked the CCTV camera to look the other way, and stepped carefully over the ankle-height laser alarm by the front door. I walked up to the burglar alarm fitted by the first bulletproof glass door into the office there, and considered it. It required a combination that I guessed wouldn’t stop at the tenth digit, and after so much effort in coaxing the CCTV cameras to look elsewhere, I doubted if I had the patience to send my thoughts into its intestines and wheedle the code out of it. Besides, we weren’t there to be discreet.
So, wanting to laugh with the exhilaration of it, we pressed our palms to the glass exterior of the first door into the office, opened our mouth and hummed. We started low and quiet, then built up the hum from the back of our throat to its full strength, pushing it out of our lungs like it was water and we were drowning in it. We then took the sound, and pulled it back, into us, through us, sending the power of it down our arms so that it tickled our nerves, made our skin tremble until we were buzzing with it, let it build up just behind our wrists and kept the sound going from the very back of our mouth, until we thought we would burst. Then, with a pinch of our lips to cut off the movement of air, we let go the built-up power in our hands.
Glass shattered beneath our fingertips and we wanted to laugh, dance, as it rained down around us like diamond snowflakes. Above us, the alarm wailed, shrieking indignation, and we laughed again, letting the sound pummel us, loving the sudden change in the air as downstairs the guard woke from his reverie in a panic, as in the streets outside people jumped, the whole texture of life around shifting up a key, and through that change the magic that we fed on becoming sharper, the feel of it in our head clearer, solid, like the knives of glass falling around us.
I struggled to control our euphoria, and crunched over the glass to the next door. This one was heavy and wooden, with locks of more ordinary design. Fumbling in my satchel, I took out the blank keys on their ring, and caressed one with the tip of my index finger until its form wobbled, taking on an almost liquid quality. Seizing that moment of uncertainty, I pushed the key into the lock, felt it assume the shape of the barrel within, and twisted. The lock came undone. I repeated the procedure with two more blank keys and stepped into the office.
It was a depressing place, the weight of it heavy on my senses: dull plywood tables, grey standard-issue chairs, neat pencil pots, polished stainless-steel flat-screened computers which clearly in my two years of absence had become the fashionable thing – and strip lighting, left on every day and night of every working week and holiday, including Christmas. Regardless of my aesthetic reaction, I felt no need to burn it all to the ground nor even rearrange the furniture; a breach of security was enough to achieve what I wanted. I pulled out a black can of spray-paint, shook it vigorously, and with extreme care and caution, started to draw.
The white strip lighting had cast a faint stretched shadow from my body up the white wall; I now filled in its features with the black paint, until my shadow was a thick, dripping void plastered almost as high as the ceiling. As curses went, it wasn’t the most powerful. But it was enough to make the pipes in the ceiling start to drip even before I was done, and, according to the local newspaper, the fuses in the box downstairs shorted on alternate Thursdays for six months after. Our power still seemed unpredictable, the feel of it across our fingers, something we had to remember anew, as if tasting its heady sweetness for the very first time.
I left by the fire escape, sauntering out onto Moorgate just as the first police vans started to arrive.
The bus shelters in London are, more often than not, badly designed. Roofed with thin plastic sheets that sag under any weight, curving downwards to form a slight bowl, they collect pools of rainwater on their tops, which can remain there for days. Most of these shelters are below tree height, so that fallen leaves can rot down in these pools, creating the odd muddy pond with its own fungal subculture that nothing can erase, short of a burning August drought.
The flatness of these shelters allows other things to be left on top of them. A single, decomposing sock is a common feature, or a laceless left-foot plimsoll. Half a shopping trolley has been known, or a bicycle handlebar, as have Ikea catalogues and plastic bags full of broken bananas. However, above everything else, on the top of every other bus shelter in London there is almost invariably a rotting copy of the Yellow Pages.
People tend not to ask what a copy of the Yellow Pages is doing on the roof of a bus shelter, nor how it got there, and this is probably a good thing – a poor reflection on the curiosity of the human spirit, perhaps, but an excessively useful defect for the struggling sorcerer, for inside every Yellow Pages left on the top of the shelter, and those pages only, are the exclusive listings.
I found my own copy of the fat book, with its thin, mouldering pages, on top of a shelter opposite Liverpool Street station, and sat down on the bench beneath to flick through its unique content. I ignored Witches-for-hire, Alchemists, Abjurers, Seers, Prophets, Fortune-Tellers, Magical Suppliers, Hunters, Questing Adventurers, Crusaders, Mages, Mediums, Mystic Scholars and all the other members of the magical community who sell their often suspect wares to each other through the adverts and listings in the bus-stop pages, and eventually found my way to Exorcists. I picked the biggest advert – “Evil at work? Being sent curses to your inbox? Haunted by the spirits of the deceased? Call Exorminator, guaranteed 100% success in cleansing your local magical environment!!!” – wrote the number down on my hand, tossed the Pages back onto the top of the bus stop for the next magician who might be passing, and went to find a phone box.
The man who answered sounded very cheerful for the time of night and greeted me with, “Exorminator, how can we help?”
“Hi, I’m phoning about an exorcism.”
“Can I take your name?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“Sure, fine, we understand. May I ask as to the nature of your problem?”
“There’s a curse going round.”
“Uh-huh, sure, no problem, we can handle that. Do you have any details on what kind of curse?”
“A shadow on the wall.”
“Nasty. Anything more?”
“A curse of the stones of a building, of the bricks in its walls, of the earth that shelters it, the water that feeds it and the sky that guards it.”
“That’s a pretty solid curse, man. Haven’t seen shit like that for a while. You sure of it?”
“I wrote it, I’m fairly sure of it.”
“OK, you wrote it?” The exorcist had a slightly Australian tinge to his voice, and the laid-back, whatever-comes-next attitude of a man who had suddenly realised two degrees short of sunstroke that exorcism was the perfect career choice he’d never been offered at school.
“Yes.”
“OK … uh … not usual we get people writing their own curses and then getting them exorcised. Some kinda accident with the spray-
paint?”
“No.”
“No. Uh … OK. But I’m guessing you want it removed.”
“Oh, no, not at all,” I said quickly. “I’m phoning to tell you that probably tomorrow morning, you or one of your associates will get a call from someone else wanting it removed, and I’m asking you not to.”
“I see. Look, sorry to say this, but it’s our job. We exorcise things. You know. Exorminator … no exorcism too big? Gotta pay the rent, man.”
“Yes, but you’ll have difficulty exorcising this one.”
“Uh … we will?”
“You have to understand – this is a fundamental curse inscribed for revenge. It’s more than just a bit of spray-paint. When I drew the curse, I thought of every second of pain and suffering that I’d endured and of my undying thirst for vengeance. We’re way out of the holy water and garlic league. Sorry about that, by the way, it’s nothing personal against you, it’s just how it had to be done.”
“Look, Mr …”
“Also,” we added quietly, “if you undo the curse, then we’ll come after you next.”
Silence from the end of the line. “Uh …” said the man at last, “you know, mate, I’d love to help you with this, but it sounds like you’ve got some serious issues …”
“I’m just giving you a heads-up,” I burst in. “These things are going to appear all over town, and Amiltech is going to come to exorcists to clear it up. And I’m asking you nicely not to.”
“Because …”
“Amiltech is going to burn,” we replied cordially. “We are going to shred them from top to toes and leave nothing but a shadow on the wall behind. And I figured … it’d be a shame for you guys to get hurt on the way.”
“Are you for real?”
“Good night, Mr Exorminator.”
“Jeez, whatever.”
I hung up and walked away, feeling, all in all, that things were going rather well.
*
Between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon, I broke into a total of six offices, one penthouse suite and a small bank, and cursed them all. I cursed the stones they were built on, the bricks in their walls, the paint on their ceilings, the carpets on their floors. I cursed the nylon chairs to give their owners little electric shocks, I cursed the markers to squeak on the whiteboard, the hinges to rust, the glass to run, the windows to stick, the fans to whir, the chairs to break, the computers to crash, the paper to crease, the pens to smear; I cursed the pipes to leak, the cooler to drip, the pictures to sag, the phones to crackle and the wires to spark. And we enjoyed it. We enjoyed all the magic, the shaping of it at our fingers, the tiniest cantrip up to the most profound curse; we enjoyed the edge of danger. It made us feel alive.
Not that this was a random venting of my general dissatisfaction with life, fate and all the things it had done wrong in the last few days, months, years. I chose my targets very carefully, from Sinclair’s immaculately maintained and only slightly blood-spattered list of Amiltech’s favourite clients.
On Monday morning I dialled the Financial Times from a telephone near the Blackwall Tunnel, and politely told the receptionist to have someone check up on a spate of break-ins and look for an Amiltech connection. It was not the subtle kind of call from which journalistic myths were made, but it had its use. On Tuesday morning the Financial Times ran with a headline on page three reporting a damaging series of attacks on offices and properties either owned by, insured by or protected by various divisions of Amiltech Securities. By Tuesday evening the headline in much smaller form was hitting the freebie City rags, and by Wednesday morning the broadsheets had picked up on it too. Amiltech responded that it was being victimised by a systematic campaign of hatred, and that it would bring the perpetrators to justice. On the unusual painted signs left behind at all the scenes of crime, they made no comment.
On Monday afternoon I moved out of my small hotel room on the Cromwell Road, and migrated under a new name to a larger, more expensive hotel off the Strand. It seemed only a matter of time before reprisals headed my way, if they were not already en route, and I wanted to stem any more significant encounters until I felt sure of my abilities, and our readiness. We were not yet certain that we could stop Hunger, should he come for us again; and we knew that he desired our blood. Not only was Hunger an ugly creature, offensive to all our senses; he was, perhaps, equal to all that we could be.
That frightened us.
On the Monday evening that I called the Financial Times, I also hit two more companies and a storage facility. The latter turned out to be housing organs in vacuum-packed bags. Some were human; some were not. In the deepest darkest corner of the basement, behind a false wall I found while looking for something to burn the place to the ground, I discovered a vault containing the relatively recently dead body of a man whose foul nails, pin-pricked veins and overgrown beard proclaimed him to be a stolen soul from the street. His skin was white and splotchy grey, not a drop of blood left in his body. Someone had cracked open his ribcage, pulled out his heart and tried to replace it with a replica of carved London clay. An experiment in necromancy; one that had gone wrong.
This time I took a waste-paper basket from upstairs, a cigarette lighter out of a desk drawer, and a bundle of old newspaper, and set the place on fire. It took three hours for the flames to catch properly and start gouting black clouds through the building’s broken windows. We stood in the crowd with the other onlookers as the firemen scuttled to contain the blaze, and felt its warmth on our face and the burning intensity of it in our eyes, and that too, was beautiful.
On Thursday evening my efforts made Watchdog on BBC1, where the sincere, if overly groomed and sexy, presenter made an appeal in a husky, seductive voice for the unknown arsonist to come forward. I almost felt a stir of guilt as the programme unfolded, particularly for the well-meaning sergeant in his white shirt and constabulary tie who sat uncomfortably on the studio’s low stool and announced, “We believe this individual could be a threat to society, and himself …” Hearing the comforting tones of his voice, I could imagine the police counsellor waiting for me down at the station, with a cup of tea and the soft-spoken phrase “So tell me about this sorcery of yours …”
On Friday, riding through the City on the 23 bus, I picked up a dropped copy of City A.M., the guide to all things going on in the bankers’ district, and flicked through it to see how Amiltech was doing.
Surprisingly well, was the answer. Too many people whose wealth should have taught them better were too afraid of Amiltech to kick up the ruckus I had been hoping for.
That night I went to Amiltech’s office. There were three security guards in the front foyer, a towering glass thing full of potted plants and some full-grown trees, as well as a waterfall cascading down from the first-floor platform into a pool of artfully arranged pebbles. One of the guards had a whiff of magic about him, despite the identical nature of his straight black suit. He sat with nonchalant confidence by the entrance to the lift bank, one leg hooked over the other, and had the look of a man not about to be fooled by the simple cantrips I habitually spun into my coat.
Since my usual enchantments of anonymity didn’t look likely to work, I adopted a different tack. At 9.30 p.m. I walked into the Amiltech foyer, went up to the reception desk and with a flick of my wrist flashed my Oyster card at the receptionist. I did this just fast enough for him to see a card being waved but too quickly for his brain to register anything but the most officious-looking credentials he’d seen in his life.
He blinked up at me, and hesitated. I jumped in before the tangles of gentle, sleepy magic woven around his head could be shaken away by full alertness, and said, “I’m here to see Adam Reiley.”
“What?”
“Adam Reiley, Amiltech? He’s expecting me – you should have my name.”
“Uh … give me a moment.”
The man tapped away at his computer. The human mind, when it works, is a marvellous thing. With all its attention diverted onto the task at hand, it becomes an abstract other, performing beyond the usual realms of self-awareness. When humans work, they frequently become unaware of their own body, their own senses, are surprised to find that their wrists ache or their backs are sore or their friend has left the building. It’s as close to an out-of-body experience as can be achieved short of fifty volts, a circle of warding, a pigeon’s claw cut from an albino female of purest white feathers, or a lot of mushrooms. In such a state, not only does the process of their thoughts play across their face, but the observant listener can also trace the sense of their feeling in their mind. More than just the flicker of an eye, the mind, usually such an insensitive object, opens itself, drifts, even while the conscious, controlled aspect – a tiny part of the human brain at any moment – is focused.
So it was with the receptionist, tapping through his computer; and so it was that we could almost hear the buzz of his thoughts, their deepest undercurrents, see the rich purple veins of his suppressed desires, feel the heat of his passions, locked away beneath the professionalism of the day, taste the sharp edge of his envy, a drop of vinegar on the tip of our tongue, resentments and jealousies that he himself probably didn’t know he had, but which drifted in his unconsciousness, shaping how he spoke even while he didn’t know why he said the words he did. The mind, so exposed, fascinated us, as we perceived the thick longing strains of his thoughts, the black oily surface of his disdain for the job, and glimpsed, just for a second, the fiery images of his dreams.
So I pulled just a little, just a tiny sliver, of magic across his eyes, blurring his vision for a moment, spinning the fatigue of his day into his nerves, so that for a second he didn’t care that he had to check all people coming in and out, didn’t care that his boss was insistent on security, didn’t care that he hadn’t really seen this guy’s credentials, not really, not properly – for a moment, all he cared about was that he was in a shit job and just wanted to be left alone.
He said, “Uh … sure, right, yeah, whatever. You know the way?”
“Uh-huh. Thanks.”
“No problem.”
He gave me a paper badge in a plastic holder. I took it with a grateful smile, pinned it to the front of my coat, and walked towards the lift.
The man on guard whose merest magical presence twisted the otherwise cool, calm, pale blue sense of that place into himself, like a small moon warping the space around it, glanced up at me as I passed, and at my badge, and the edge of his consciousness scraped along my own. I kept him out instinctively, throwing up a rough wall in his mental path, focusing clearly on that one image to fill my entire consciousness and keep him from penetrating my intent. He was a crude magician – potentially powerful, I felt, but, unlike sorcerers, unlike those who can taste the magic of the city, who revel in it, his power was one of spells, incantations and gestures, a thing tamed, rather than a thing natural. We had no fear of him, so nodded coldly in his direction as we went by, and walked on.
I rode up to the 24th floor. The lift was clear glass, on the outer wall of the building, so I could see the city drop away beneath me. As on the London Eye that night, I was astounded by the beauty of its multicoloured spectrum: not just the sodium orange of the suburban sprawl, but the white interiors of office blocks, green traffic lights, red aircraft beacons on the taller towers, purple floodlights washing over high walls, pooling beams of silver on enclosed courtyards, shimmering blues on fountains, or in the doors of clubs, the moving snakes of traffic, defined only by headlights, brakes, or indicators flashing on and off like an endless slithering column of eyes, and the reflected pinkish glare across the ceiling of the sky, except for where an aircraft’s guiding lights sent out a cone of brightness, through the black scudding clouds heavy with rain as the wind carried them towards the sea.
I could almost drink the magic of what I saw, almost lie back suspended on nothing but its intensity and float above the ground with the force of it, the sudden, overwhelming sense of it – and that, we knew, was all that sorcery was; all, perhaps, that we were. An awareness, an understanding, a point of view. Take away that sense of the city’s wonder and we were no more than insects, grey figures on a grey landscape scuttling along, unable to see the daily extraordinary things. Though it was a strange emotion, we almost felt pity.
The door to the Amiltech office was more than locked – it was warded. Not the first that I’d seen on my arsonist’s/burglar’s progress around Amiltech’s client base, but the strongest. My blank keys would not change shape to fit the lock, nor, I felt, would mere force – a bombardment with the electricity in the wires above, nor the use of sound – settle it satisfactorily until the ward itself was broken. For a ludicrous moment I wondered if there were any air ducts I could crawl through to get inside the office; but life was not like the movies. The door was pretty much immovable, not even breakable without a considerable expenditure of time and energy. So, with this in mind, I went up, to the offices of the company on the floor above – Verity – which, according to the brochure by the door, specialised in proving insurance claims wrong even if, so the small print suggested, they weren’t. They appreciated a challenge. Its door was not warded, and my keys, after the usual coaxing, fitted perfectly.
I walked through Verity’s office until pretty much dead-centre, got out my all-purpose Swiss Army knife, and started cutting a square in the thin nylon and lino carpet on the floor. I pulled up a piece of flooring roughly big enough to let me step through, put it to one side and went in search of the office kitchen. I found it eventually, next to the ladies’ toilets, a small space dominated by a coffee machine. I filled the kettle and set it to boil. Under the sink I found a bottle of bleach. When the kettle was done, I took it, full and steaming, back to my square of exposed floor, and poured the boiling water over the small area of concrete underneath. I dribbled a few drops of bleach onto the wet floor, at the four points of the compass, then stood back and tried to find the right spell.
Transmutation is not a strong point of mine – even if you can convince the substance in question to become what you want it to be, it tends not to be a permanent process (at least, not without ending in an explosion), and it requires a lot of time and effort to get it right.
I wasn’t after perfection, and I hoped that after I’d raised the temperature of the water and mixed in one of the nastiest substances I could find in the kitchen, the liquid spilt on the floor was already halfway to a change of state. Magicians tend to have pre-written incantations and spells for these kind of things, usually calling on various dire or implausible powers (of which my favourite was “Upney, Grey Lord of Tar”, who I’d heard mentioned by amateurs and who we knew to be real) to achieve their temporary wills. Sorcerers rely on will power and raw magic, and I now deployed both, snatching heat and power out of the air around me until my breath condensed with the sudden cold, and the lights above me whined and flickered. I stretched my arms out, fingers turned towards the floor, and pushed every inch of power I could get from that room, every trace of snatched breath left lingering in the air, every hum of electricity, every remnant of warmth from human skin, every smell of sweat, every half-forgotten lingering sound of shouting, all the detritus of left-over life that makes magic what it is, for life is magic, magic is life, the left-over life we don’t even notice we’re living; I drew it into me, and pushed it into the floor.
The water–bleach mixture started to bubble. Then it started to smoke, a thin, acrid white billow that made my eyes water and reminded me of the taste of hot solder. It hissed, it boiled, and for a moment – just a moment, because I couldn’t sustain this intensity of concentration for long – the water on the floor became acid strong enough to eat through lead.
It ate through the exposed area of the floorin no more than sixty seconds, reducing its substance like it was made of half-baked flour. The hole in the floor spread out across the entire area where the liquid had spilt, eating into the carpet around. When I felt it was wide enough, I let the power go, jerking with the pressure of it running away between my fingers. At my feet, the hole was now human-sized, looking straight down onto floor 24.
I waited a few seconds for the acid to revert back to its watery, bleach-spotted state, then poured the rest of the kettle over it for good measure. When that had stopped dripping too much, I sat on the edge of the hole, and lowered myself down. I still got a soggy bottom and wasn’t happy about the drop, but managed a survivable, if not a dignified, flop into Amiltech’s London headquarters.
In cursing them, I inscribed the black shadows not just on the wall, but on the floor and across the doors. We found San Khay’s office, with its wide windows looking out across the city, and, in big blue letters, wrote across the glass for all the world to see:
Come be me and be free!
Then, because I wasn’t entirely sure why I had written this, I added a caveat with a biro on one of the neatly laid-out pads of papers on a conference table.
Make me a shadow on the wall.
How long until he comes for you?
Feeling that this made more sense, I wandered round the office, flicking through desk drawers and rummaging under piles of paper with no real concept of what I might be looking for, but a feeling that it was the right thing to do. It was all depressingly mundane. Lists of stationery acquisitions, tax details for the accountants, scribbled notes to remind X to talk to Y about Z and how it might affect the pension plan – not at all what I’d hoped for from an organisation that dabbled in mystic forces beyond our ken.
The most promising object, I found in the broom cupboard. Behind a pile of mops was a small security pad, clearly designed for a numerical code. It had been scribbled over with a number of protective wards in permanent red ink; but on looking closer I saw that these only covered the pad itself, and with my knife I was able to undo the screws that held it to the wall, and pull the entire thing away from the surface it rested on. Behind was a fat cable running into a small hole in the wall. I unplugged the pad from the cable, put it to one side, and snatched a small handful of static out of the nearest sleeping computer screen on an office desk, twisting it between my fingers like a cat’s cradle as I contemplated how best to make it work. I tried touching my electric fingertips to the cable, then tried sending it down the wires in short bursts, and eventually – though how I did not pretend to understand – something went very quietly, click.
I looked round for the source of the sound, and found it in a small panel that had slid back behind the bottles of cream cleaner, with a lever in it. Never the kind of man who didn’t press the button, I pulled the lever and, with a hiss of tortured hydraulics, one wall of the broom cupboard swung back. This, I felt, was much more like it; this was how things should be.
The room beyond filled with a dull bluish-white light as I stepped inside it, illuminating some extraordinarily interesting objects. One of them said, “You’re not a regular fucker, are you?”
I walked up to the chin-high blue jar that suspended the thing inside it and said, “What are you then?”
The creature belched a small cloud of car fumes, which were quickly sucked up through the ventilation tube at the top of its thick jar. “Could ask you the same bloody thing,” it said through the glass, which gave its voice an odd, almost mechanical resonance.
It was short, approximately four feet nothing, its skin a pale grey colour, and rough, like old tarmac on a road. Its eyes were big and round, reflective and multifaceted, and from its nose and mouth dribbled a pale brown liquid that looked for all the world like engine oil. I reached the obvious diagnosis.
“You’re a troll,” I said.
“Well, give the man a prize.”
“What the hell are you doing in a jar?”
“I got fucking caught; what the hell do you think I’m doing in a jar?!” it wailed.
I considered the creature from every possible angle. Back in the distant dark ages, its ancestors had probably eaten the bones of men slain in anger, and bathed in the local swamp. But evolution had done its thing with trolls, like most other creatures of magic, and now the little thing probably enjoyed nothing more than a leftover hamburger and a bath in crude oil. I squatted down until my eyes were level with its own, and managed to hold its gaze despite the initial moment of revulsion as I saw the thin sheen of ethyl alcohol secreted by its tear glands to keep the black surface of its lenses clean.
“You got a name?” I said.
“Mighty Raaaarrrgghh!” it replied.
“I was thinking of something shorter and less guttural.”
It shrugged and said in an embarrassed voice, “Jeremy.”
“Jeremy?”
“I have endured every fucking indecency, wart-face, don’t think you’re getting me high with Jeremy.”
“Jeremy the troll,” I repeated, just to make absolutely certain I’d got it right.
“The Mighty Raaaarrrgghh!” it added for good measure. “And when I get out of here I’ll suck the jelly from your eyes!”
“Why?”
“Because I’m a fucking troll!”
“I was under the impression trolls these days liked nothing more for supper than a used tea bag with a few days’ mould on it.”
“For you, I make an exception.”
“Why? I haven’t done you any harm. Surely it’s Amiltech that you have the beef with.”
“You have an ugly face,” it replied with a leer that revealed a set of sharpened steel teeth. I do not attempt to understand evolution in the age of urban magic.
“Let me put it this way,” I said patiently. “You’ve been trapped in a jar for I don’t know how long by Amiltech and all its works, you probably want out, and I’m willing to let you out, and you’re going to eat the jelly from my eyes?”
“Uh … right.”
“You see where I’m going with all this?”
“I’m waiting for the catch, there’s always a catch with fucking magicians, isn’t there?”
“I just want to piss Amiltech off.”
“Is that it?”
“Yes.”
“Why? What’s your grind?”
“You would not begin to understand,” I sighed. “So, you want to be let out?”
“You’re not going to ensorcel me, are you?”
“No.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“You know, I find that really hard to believe.”
“You can just stay there …”
It waved its spindly grey arms as wildly as was possible inside a jar and said, “Hey, hey, I was just asking … release away, human!”
I undid the various nuts and bolts that secured the top of the jar and with a pop of trapped pressurised air, the thing came free. The troll sprang out of its container with a single leap, and perched on the lid, grinning hugely, a whiff of car fumes trailing down from the end of its nose. “Human?” it said, the grin stretching as far as its tiny, circular ears.
“Almost.”
“I get paid to stay in the jar.” It leapt, fingers outstretched, teeth shining, in a perfect descending line from its perch straight towards my throat. I staggered back, raising my hands instinctively, and snatched magic into them, twisting the air around us into a wall, a whirlwind, spinning thick sheets of it across our path so that they picked up the little creature as it leapt and slammed it back against the wall of the room. Then, before it had a moment to recover, we flung our hands out and reached for the nearest amenable resource, found the cold, hard sense of iron rods running through the building, leading all the way to the foundations, and, with a twist of our fingers, made them grow.
The troll wailed, but the sound was choked off as a sharp splinter of worked iron spat itself through the wall and wound round its throat, pulling it up by the neck until it twitched and wheezed. Then another wrapped itself across the creature’s convulsing legs, and a third growth of iron lodged itself under the troll’s armpit, dragging it up on one side while on the other the weight of its body dragged it down, until it looked like a misshapen accident, all lopsided and moaning.
I dragged my hands down to my side with a shudder of effort and waited for the blue rage to go out of my vision, and for the blue buzzing in my skull to subside. We were angry, we were so angry, and it had been a moment of choice, just a second, that had stopped us from asking the iron growing out of the wall to grow straight through that creature’s heart.
Around the room, there was a low, animal chitter of caged monsters, punctuated by the low, self-pitying whimper of the troll. We stabbed an accusing finger at it and spat, “If you want to live, you will be silent!”
Wisely, the troll bit its own lip until the oily black blood rolled, and made not a sound.
We looked round the room again. In various pots and jars were creatures from across the magical spectrum, fairies with their fine aluminium wings, tiny trapped elves with their burning hair, neon fireflies that sparked orange and pink as they banged angrily against the side of their jar, moths of purest moonlight, kept in a dark corner so that their strange beauty might be better admired, visible for a second only in the flap of a wing. In other jars were merely the remnants of some creatures – the concrete skull of a shambler, the steel bone of a banshee, the still-beating heart of some monster, which spat electric sparks with every pulsation across the floor of the pot it rested in. We said, for the benefit of those creatures that could understand, “You all know us. You know our dance.”
There was a chitter of animal motion, a flash of wing, a blink of sullen reflective eyes.
I went first to the cage containing the three trapped fairies, their delicate foil wings glinting silvery in the dull light, their long, pale faces crowned with wreaths of woven fuse wire. I leant down so my face was level with them and pointed accusingly. “You be good fairies, capisce?”
There was a tiny squeaking, like the sound of a rusted wheel on an old trolley. I opened up the door to the cage, and with a sigh, they flapped out, and hovered uncertainly round my head. I considered my options, and said, “Amiltech imprisoned you. If you want revenge, now is the time.”
Little smiles, no wider than the curved nail on my little toe, passed across the fairies’ faces and, with a flap, they were out of the room.
I released every other creature in that room and listened with content to the sound of banging as they, each in their own fashion, tore through the office, ripping up computers and smashing glass, spinning their spells or simply tearing with tiny fists against the institution that had trapped them.
I nearly missed the last trapped creature in all the commotion, but my attention was drawn to it by a small squeaking sound near my foot, and looking down, I saw a single, fat black rat, its coat slimy and the end of its tail an ugly stump, looking up at me with a pair of dark, beady eyes. I knelt down next to the cage that contained it and said, “Hello.”
It blinked at me, unimpressed, and unafraid. I opened the cage door and it scuttled out, crawling up my extended arm to sit happily on my shoulder, where I petted it vaguely, the slime of its coat sticking to my fingers in a thin, dirty goo. I then let it run down my arm to the floor again, where it looked up at me, squeaked once, and waddled off into the office. I followed it without too much concern, to find the floor covered with torn paper, broken glass, overturned furniture, shattered desks; the computer screens were in pieces, the hard drives of the computers spitting sparks, the light fittings spread across the floor and in some cases embedded in the walls, and everywhere chaos as the imprisoned creatures of Amiltech let go the full vent of their anger. I cleared my throat and said loudly, “No one gets hurt, understand!”
There was an audible sigh of disappointment from one or two of the monsters I’d released, but I felt that in this, at least, I could be obeyed. I looked across the floor for the rat, and saw it scuttling into San Khay’s office. Suddenly curious, I followed – rats rarely do anything without good reason.
In San’s office, it went straight to the desk and raised itself up on its hind legs, resting its forelegs against the lower drawer. I knelt next to it and pulled the lower drawer open a few inches – but there was nothing inside that I hadn’t already seen. I closed it and the rat repeated this exercise, rearing itself up to press against the drawer and then collapsing again, then rearing, and collapsing, and after longer than I care to admit, it occurred to me that the creature wasn’t trying to get into the drawer, but was, in fact, trying to move the desk. I heaved against it until it moved, and when it finally went I saw beneath it a small hole dug into the floor, leading into what looked like a series of pipes. The rat squeaked once, and vanished down the hole, probably never to be seen again.
There was, however, something more about the hole. Resting in one corner, wrapped up tight in a plastic bag to protect it, was a small, unaddressed envelope. I picked it up, and opened it.
Inside, inscribed in thin biro, was the outline of an angel on a sheet of paper. It had a crude triangular body, a circular head, and sweeping wings. All of it had been shaded in blue.
We dropped the envelope and scrambled back, shocked to our core. We knew of Bakker’s interest in such things, of course; but to find that San Khay also had the image of the angel in his possession, and that perhaps he knew of its significance, disturbed us. It was too late, however – our fingers had brushed the image as we pulled it from the envelope and now, as we watched, the angel shimmered on the page, the thin blueness of its form thickening to the texture of liquid paint, and then without a sound, it caught fire, a bright blue flame that leapt up from the dropped paper and burnt ice-cold in the air until the image had been entirely scoured out of the sheet on which it was drawn. We shredded what was left of the paper, and, disturbed to think that our secrets might already be known, we left that place as fast as we could, while behind us the fairies tore it all to pieces.
In the early hours of Saturday morning, someone scried for me, and they were formidable.
I became aware of their scrying when the protective pieces of paper I’d put around the edge of my bed, warding me against harm, caught fire. The fire alarm then woke me up, and that in itself was a shock – that they’d not only scried, but had had the will to suppress my ward and suppress my own instinct, to keep me asleep while they tried to tune in to my location. I felt them the instant I was awake, a burning, crushing pressure, almost a physical weight on my back as the sheer volume of their will slammed against my senses – a sorcerer without any doubt, and there were only two sorcerers I could think of who might be even remotely interested, who might be even remotely not dead. I had grabbed my belongings and was out of the door even as the hotel manager and a porter with a fire extinguisher burst in; I was hopping down the stairs, struggling to get my shoes on, by the time the fire alarm went out, and staggering, breathless, covered in a cold sweat, into the street even before half the lights in the hotel had been turned on and the first angry voices raised.
And still that will remained, fixed straight on me, trying to push me to the ground, see through my eyes, determine through my own senses what I might have seen. Such a scrying could only be using something of my own to track me – there was no way that a spell like this could be achieved without it – but there were plenty of things, I reasoned, which could serve the purpose. My mind went to my old coat, sitting on Hunger’s emaciated shoulders, and I ran, gasping for breath, into the night, searching for an underground station or, at the least, a crowded and well-lit place where I might be safe. All the while I could see my own shadow contract and increase, contract and increase like the motion of a heartbeat, as I moved from pool into pool of light. The laws of physics did not suspend themselves – the steady movement of my shadow continued without change, and no smell of litter or other magical intent tingled on my nose, despite my constant imaginings. We wanted to strike out at the sense following us, to strike out randomly into the dark and see what banged; we wanted to burn the consciousness that dared intrude on us – but it had something of ours on which to focus, and we had nothing.
The scrying broke about twenty minutes after I became first aware of it – truly, a formidable act of will on the part of my unseen enemy, considering how hard I was running and how determined I was to shake it off – and I ran for another ten minutes until I found a night bus which might as well have been going anywhere, and which I rode to the end of the route, just for good measure.
That event had scared me, and perhaps threw into a different light my disruptive antics at Amiltech. I had clearly got someone’s attention, and that someone was more of a danger than I had considered – we were not ready to fight this kind of battle, and were shaken by the revelation of our own weakness. I did not sleep for the rest of that night, but rode in silence, contemplating all that had happened. And, perhaps for the first time, all that could.
In the morning I went to University College Hospital. Perhaps it was guilt.
I found Sinclair by drifting along the endless corridors of various intensive-care units and in-patient wards, glancing in through every door for a hint of plumpness. It occurred to me that I didn’t even know if Sinclair had survived his operation, just like I didn’t know if my gran still talked to the pigeons or if any of my friends – from back then – remembered my name, those who were still alive. Or indeed if any of them lived. Maybe it wasn’t guilt that had brought me here after all – loneliness, perhaps, although we found it hard to understand how, in this city, anyone could be lonely.
Sinclair was alive. That merest fact brought a salve to my conscience, a moment of relief as a tension lifted that I hadn’t even realised was there. I found him by the plain-clothes policeman sitting, half asleep in the first silvery early-morning light, outside Sinclair’s room. The door was locked, but the policeman wasn’t paying any attention to me or my antics, so I took a key and unlocked it, letting myself inside with a quiet click.
The room had the orangey-brown quality of light filtered through the curtains of almost all sickrooms – a warm colour that made the eyes instantly feel sleepy and relaxed, as if the walls themselves could be hypnotic. The fat man was not so fat; even in a few days his bulk had been reduced to nothing more than a distortion under the sheets, and his skin had an unhealthy pallor, visible even in the softening gloom of the room. Various devices beeped and whined around him, monitoring things I couldn’t begin to guess at, while wires and tubes ran in and out of his skin. Every breath condensed a cloud onto the mask on his face; but other than that and the steady beeping of the machines around him, there was nothing to suggest that he was alive at all. The sight of him in this state horrified us: to show only the tiniest symptoms of life and yet be, somehow, still alive, trapped, motionless, unaware – the thought made us recoil. I sat down on a chair by his side, careful to stay out of the sight of the door, and said, feeling foolish but that it was also, somehow, necessary, “Hello.”
The little cloud of condensation appeared and faded, appeared and faded on his mask.
“The shit’s hitting the fan,” I added, and watched the stillness of his eyes, not even movement beneath his lids, and the drooping utter immobility of his face. I didn’t know what I was doing there or why; we just wanted to leave, to get away. This non-life frightened us, it wasn’t what we were here for.
I stood quickly, and said, “Sorry,” the word slipping out unconsciously before I realised I meant it. “You probably expected more.”
I turned to the door, and walked straight into Charlie’s fist.
Charlie. I knew his name was Charlie because that was how Sinclair had addressed him, when asking his loyal shadow to do something, and that was the name that Charlie, silently, immovably, had reacted to. I knew that he had dark eyes and black hair and wore a black suit that seemed to blur into itself; I also found that when he moved, he left a taste of thick treacle in the air, a sludgy afterglow that twined into my senses.
In the small hospital room next to Dudley Sinclair’s motionless body, I learnt two more things about him. The first was that he had a fist made of reinforced steel woven into a block of concrete, disguised as four protruding, callused knuckles; the second was that he was an unstable wereman, a fact I discovered when I noticed, on my way to the floor, the silvery rat claws and pinkish withered toes, warped and stretched mimics of their previous human form, curling out beyond where they’d burst through the end of his shoes.
He clearly understood a key fact about sorcerers – while in theory we should be able to harness the primal forces of magic to our very will, it’s hard to concentrate on building up a really good, three-hundred-volt smack when someone’s hitting you. After the initial pain came the realisation that it wasn’t about to stop. We curled in on ourselves, shivering away to the back of our senses, tucking our head into our hands and cowering, hoping to blank out the impact of a fist knocking us to the ground, a boot in the belly, a smack across the back, each one rendered with the force of a boulder hitting a wall, each one a shudder through our flesh, but unable to block out the sensations that we thought would overwhelm us, drown us in a big black pit. Only instinct remained as I slid down the wall, and it was instinct that, somewhere between the shock and the pain, grabbed his foot as it came up from the floor for another swing and, with my fingers scraping across the rat-edged claws that protruded from his feet, twisted. In an ordinary person, even under the best of circumstances, this would have broken their ankle. But Charlie was not ordinary. From the savage twist I gave his ankle, he seemed to transmit its spinning movement throughout his whole form, turning his body through three hundred and sixty degrees with a leap and landing on all fours, like a cat jumping from a tree. He crouched, shoulders hunched, eyes burning yellow, the beginning of whiskers protruding around the animal bulge of his mouth. He snarled, and it was the snarl of the fox cornered in his den, and his fingernails were claws, and the hair sprouting on the backs of his hands was tatty and grey. Slumped against the wall, I fumbled for support and in doing so, one hand fell on a mains plug: a blessed relief. I snatched the first dribble of voltage I could get out of the system and as he raised himself up on his oddly bent knees to strike, I threw my hand up, the electricity burning between my fingers, and shouted, “Pax!”
He saw the sparks running down my arm, and that, more than my speaking, made him hesitate. He crawled back on all fours, nose twitching, the corners of his mouth turned up in a bestial snarl, but there was still a glimmer of human consciousness there, watching, listening.
I licked my lips, wondering how best to keep his attention, and tasted blood. My nose felt like someone had set off a small bomb just behind the solid front of cartilage, and was streaming copiously. My back felt like it was made of jelly, my stomach like any movement would cause me to throw up: every breath was one breath away from the sick bowl. In a voice made unnatural by stress and pain, I said, “Listen to me. Just listen.”
He made a little sound between his teeth, but didn’t attempt to rip my throat out, which I took to be a good sign. “I tried to protect Sinclair,” I began. But all this seemed to provoke was a snarl, and a shudder across his flesh as ginger fox fur and slimy grey tufts of rat hair squeezed their way up through the human softness of his skin. Weremen were not as uncommon in the city as I personally wished; and behind the human exterior he seemed to have a bad case of the condition, a mingling of rat and fox, and perhaps just a hint of crow, boiling somewhere in his veins. Though their forest-dwelling descents, the werewolves, didn’t exactly have a good reputation for personal hygiene, this latest twist on the species always upset me – unpredictable, unstable, highly territorial, and often clever in the unhealthy way of a child who devises ingenious methods of torturing a fly.
I tried to think through the now relentless aching of my bones. Being in a hospital helped a little; as with the underground, it had its own unique magics tingling on the edges of sense, and I tried to dabble my fingers in it as much as I could, while continuing to pay attention to the electricity still bound up in my right hand. “If you’re thinking I sold Sinclair out,” I tried again, “you’re wrong, and if you give me half a chance, I’ll prove it. If you’re thinking I’m here to cause him harm, you’re wrong, and frankly you should have worked it out by yourself. If you’re thinking I abandoned him, you’re wrong and again, I can prove it. And if you think we will let you harm us further or raise one more finger against us, then we will have to kill you. So … I suggest you try and get control over your more unusual nature, see if you can’t coax those claws away, and I’ll try very, very hard not to throw up over what’s left of your shoes. How does that sound?”
He hesitated, head twisting to one side like an inquisitive pigeon. Perhaps he had some of that blood in his system as well. His mouth wrinkled like a wave was passing along it; but he didn’t growl, and very slowly the hunched shoulders and odd curvature of his back relaxed a little, although the claws at his fingers showed no sign of going away.
He hissed in a voice that was a good 70 per cent human, “I was meant to protect him.”
“Well, there’s not much anyone can do against machine guns in the dark,” I pointed out. I was pulling myself up the wall, every inch a triumph of will, every moment a conquest worthy of climbing Everest, until I was sitting nearly upright. “We were all befuddled by that.”
“I have no reason to trust you.”
“I’m not rosy about things myself. But put it like this – if I were your enemy, don’t you think I would have fried you by now? Or Sinclair for that matter?”
“That’s hardly an argument for one who looks as you do.”
“Then you’ll just have to make a decision on your lonesome, won’t you?”
We sat on the steps of UCL’s main building, a strange thing pretending to be a Greek temple behind a pair of tall wrought-iron gates, and drank cheap, thin coffee from the union shop. No one bothered with us; torn shoes were probably a question of style for the UCL students, and a blackened eye or so could be a badge of honour within the university athletics club.
I felt that it should have been drizzling, perhaps with a thundercloud or two overhead; it would have suited my mood. As it was, the day was crisp and clean, a thing of bright light and cold, empty blue skies, big and pale. I sat with my arms curled around as much of my aching body as I could comfortably achieve, and tried not to wobble a newly loosened tooth. There was probably, I knew, some spell or other that could repair the damage, but I wasn’t about to try mystical dentistry and somehow felt as if the entire thing was beneath me. James Bond never had to go for emergency dental treatment; Jackie Chan never smiled a smile of gold crowns; Bruce Lee didn’t spend the final credits of any kung fu film sitting with his arms wrapped round his belly like he had food poisoning, feeling sorry for himself – therefore, neither should I. Besides, from what little we knew and what we could guess, dentists were a species we wished to avoid.
Charlie said, rolling the cardboard coffee cup between the open palms of his hands, “He found me on the streets. As a child I was fascinated by the creatures in the city. They live around us all the time – foxes, pigeons, rats, crows, gulls, cats, dogs, mice – plus some you wouldn’t expect. I saw a wolf once in Hyde Park; it just sat and stared at me, not the least bit scared. All those creatures that live off the rubbish we leave behind – and we leave a feast. You understand? I was fascinated by them. This whole animal world going on around us and we just ignore it. Choose not to notice.
“It wasn’t all just childish curiosity, though. Some of it, somehow, got into the blood. My brother always said a rat bit me when I was a baby. I would go wandering in the night, and when I hit puberty, biology lessons weren’t warning enough.”
“You’re not alone in that,” I sighed. “Tell me about Sinclair.”
“He … watches. That’s his job.”
“X-Files?”
“No. ‘Concerned citizens’.”
“He said that before; it sounded like a euphemism then and does now.”
“It’s how things work. Someone in government realises their wife has been putting a curse on their baby daughter; a rich businessman discovers that his number two prays to the neon; a patron of the arts sees an illusion come to life in the spray-paint drawing of a child. Concerned citizens with mutual interests. Sooner or later, they come together. They have influence, power; they want to make sure that these things don’t get out of hand. Sinclair helps.”
“And now they’re concerned about Bakker?”
“Yes. The Tower has grown too big, Sinclair said. It’s not just what Bakker is – and Sinclair thought he was a monster – it’s what the Tower is. So big, so fast; so powerful. Its enemies die. Anyone who opposes it dies. There are concerned interests on every side. Sinclair’s sponsors wished to ensure the containment of magic. There are equally those who wish to exploit it; and, perhaps, those who wish to destroy it. You can understand.”
“Yes. I think I can. All right. Tell me about the others. The warlock, the fortune-teller, the biker …”
“Sinclair knew Khan. Khan helped him, saw things. When Khan died …”
“… Sinclair had the fortune-teller moved in?”
“Yes.”
“Could she have betrayed us? Told Bakker where we were meeting, organised the shoot-out?”
“I doubt it.”
“Why?”
“Because she was Khan’s lover,” he said, in a voice of surprised simplicity. “She wants Bakker dead. That’s why she told Sinclair about you.”
“What did she tell him?”
“That either Matthew Swift was alive, or something that was powerful enough to mimic his flesh lived in his place. Either way, Sinclair saw a possibility.”
“Because he thought I wanted revenge on Bakker?”
“Don’t you?” he asked sharply, eyes flashing up as he sipped from the paper cup. I didn’t answer. “Sinclair wondered what you might have quarrelled about. He had a few theories. It takes a lot to abandon your teacher, I hear, when you’re a sorcerer.”
“You know nothing about it,” I snapped. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“I think I do,” he replied. “Sinclair taught me how to control what I am, cared for me. Isn’t that what sorcerers do for each other? You are more than other magicians, you lose yourselves in the city, your minds and thoughts are so much a part of it that at rush hour you must walk because the city is moving, and at end of office hours you cannot help but feel a rush of relief and the desire to look at the sky, because that is how the city works. There are sorcerers who have lost themselves entirely to the power of it, their minds submerged for ever in the rhythms of the city, identities stripped down to nothing more than the pulsing of the traffic through the streets. You see? I understand how these things are. I can hear the creatures of this place wherever I go, all the time, and when I dream, my dreams are in the eyes of the pigeons and I wish I could never wake, and fly with them for ever. Sinclair told me, when I told him my dream, that that was sorcery.”
“That’s part of it,” I admitted. “But just a part. What about the others? Who was the man with the horse’s face?”
“The …”
“He was shot in the room. A sniper killed him as I walked in front of the window.”
“His name was Edward Seaward. He was a wizard, a representative of the Long White City Clan. They’re an underground movement. We usually just call them the Whites. They oppose the Tower.”
“Why?”
“Because the Tower attempts to control people, to use them for its own end. The Whites protect their own people from the Tower and, unlike the Tower’s protection, they don’t demand services in return. They say they’re ‘the good guys’. I think they’re just out for kicks. Don’t like being told anything, get stubborn for the sake of being stubborn.”
“Why haven’t I heard of them?”
“They’re still weak. Their last leader was murdered – betrayed from within. They vie in their own small way for influence within the community – they find individuals like me, who need their help and who keep order in their ranks, stop too many demons being summoned by people who should know better. They can cause some irritation to Guy Lee – they break his spells, disrupt his activities; but they are weak.”
“What activities?”
“Glamours, illusions, enchantments, bedazzlements – these are the tricks he uses on behalf of the Tower, to bring in basic resources. He runs brothels in the city, whose walls are covered with enchantments, makes them an addiction, charges for every second of glamour-washed magic; brings back illusions of dead ghosts, runs fortune-telling parlours where the minds of the victims are ransacked for information, the better to relieve them of their wealth. The Whites find this offensive, dangerous. So do plenty of others, but they won’t risk offending the Tower’s agent.”
“What about the warlock?”
“He was sent to us from Birmingham, where the Tower has also been attempting to move in. A pre-emptive strike, I think, was what the warlock desired. He’s also been working to get the Scottish wizards on side; there’s a lot of people running angry in Edinburgh and Glasgow at Bakker’s ambitions.”
“How about the biker?”
“His clan resents the Tower. It demanded the services of the bikers, carrying messages, goods, passengers. No one can get anywhere as fast as a biker; to them, distance, space, is simply a matter of perception. They bring the road to them when they travel.”
“What went wrong?”
“The money offered wasn’t much, and some of the things they were being asked to carry were … disturbing.”
“Such as?”
“The crisis came when they were asked to transport a piece of flesh around the country perpetually. The flesh belonged to a man who had been caught in a brothel, one of Guy Lee’s honey traps. They sliced off a piece of his skin from the base of his skull while he slept and kept it so that at any given moment they could curse him with his own flesh, or blind his senses with pain, or paralyse him from the neck downwards, or send dreams to his eyes. This man was an enemy of Bakker, an accountant who had somehow offended the Tower. The bikers were ordered to keep the man’s flesh constantly moving, lest someone broke the Tower’s hold on him. The bikers said no and burnt the flesh to break the spell – their leader was killed. It was not a pleasant death. Since then, the bikers have been moving too, never stopping, outrunning Bakker’s revenge on them.”
“And the biker at the meeting?”
“He calls himself Blackjack. He was sent as envoy to Sinclair to discuss the possibility of an alliance against the Tower. Don’t underestimate him. To your eyes he may just look like a man in black, but I have seen what the bikers can do. Their magic is a wild, dangerous thing, it never stops moving. They can find anything, anywhere, and lose themselves at any moment, and you will never catch them.”
“What about Oda?”
“I do not know anything about her. Sinclair seemed afraid of her.”
“But she’s not a magician.”
“Perhaps … not her, then; but the people behind her … I do not know.”
In honesty, I hadn’t expected much more. “How about Dorie?”
“I think he may have feared her above all others. She is old, sorcerer. Sinclair says she was old when he first knew her, and he was younger then. She has been old for a very long time.”
“Could she have betrayed us? Why was she there?”
“I don’t know. Sinclair said … to understand Dorie, you have to know about the city. He called her the Bag Lady, as if that was a good thing.”
“The Bag Lady? With a definite article and a strong emphasis?”
“I suppose so. Is it important?”
“Yes – could be.” I tried a stretch and immediately regretted it, nausea filling my belly, and the taste of bile rising in my mouth. “What are you going to do?” I asked.
“I protect Sinclair.”
“Has anyone come looking?”
“The police. I hid. They can’t find out much from the sleeping body of a patient with no medical record, so they leave a man on the door. When he is awake, I hide as a rat and crawl through the water pipes. When he sleeps, I move like the fox so he doesn’t hear me pass. I make sure that if they should return for Sinclair, they will fail. Will you kill
Bakker?”
The question came so suddenly, I almost didn’t hear it. “What?”
“Will you kill him? I read that Amiltech is suffering – that is, San Khay; he is loyal to Bakker. You wish harm to the Tower, but you haven’t said if you’ll kill him. I want you to. Kill him and destroy everything he’s made. Can you?”
“We can kill Bakker,” we said thoughtfully, “but it is not him who we fear.”
“Then who? Who if not Bakker?”
I didn’t answer.
“Kill him.”
“Why?”
“He is a monster.”
“Is he? I haven’t seen any claws.”
He flinched, but said, “If you want to know what Bakker has done, visit Carlisle.”
“The city?”
“No. The care centre.”
“Why? What’s there?”
“If you go, you’ll want to kill him.”
I stood up, and that was an achievement. “If I need you, you’ll be …”
“With Sinclair,” he said firmly. “I’ll see you. Although,” he grinned, and the teeth were yellow and ratty, “you may not see me. Goodbye, sorcerer. Bring me some of his blood on your hands, when you make up your mind.”
“You’re a funny guy,” I replied, and walked away.
I don’t know why I let myself in for these things.
I went to Carlisle.
The care home was on the southern edge of Croydon, in a converted red-brick house with a big driveway, near a park rolling down towards the green belt and its countryside. Even here the taste of the air was different, not as sharp and strong as in the city, but hinting at that other magic, the strange magic that so few people understood these days – that of places beyond the city, the slower, sluggish, calm magic of the trees and the fields, that had, once upon a time, burnt as brightly as the neon power through which I now wandered. There were still some left who could harness it as it had once been used – druids and the odd magician out in the countryside who summoned vines instead of barbed wire from the earth – but they were few in number and generally didn’t talk to their urban counterparts, whose magic they regarded as a corruption rather than an evolution of the natural order of things. It was a debate I kept well out of.
I didn’t exactly know who I was there to see when I arrived at the Carlisle care home. But the question was quickly answered when I got a glimpse of the residents’ book in reception. One name leapt out at me – Elizabeth Jane Bakker.
I signed myself in as Robert James Bakker, and went to meet her. They didn’t question who I was, but the nurse informed me that she was delighted I had finally come to the home and that Elizabeth was showing good signs of improvement, though she still screamed at the sight of mirrors.
Elizabeth Jane Bakker sat in a wheelchair at one end of a living room full of beige furniture. She wore a white veil over her face and a bandage of white around what was left of her hands, as well as the obligatory, shameful blue pyjamas of the other residents. On her lap was a tray of untouched food – mashed potato, carrot and some kind of sausage meat in suspiciously fluorescent gravy. I sat down on a stool opposite her and said, “Hello, Elizabeth.”
The veil twitched. Between its hem and the top of the pyjamas, I could see the scrambled, scarlet remnants of the burnt skin on her neck. When she spoke, her voice was distorted by the effort of shaping words with the twisted remains of her mouth, and came out almost inaudible at first, so I had to lean right in to catch it.
“I see … to be free … they say … be me …” she whispered.
“How are you?” I asked, and immediately felt stupid.
“The rats keep singing when I try to sleep. All the time, singing singing singing. But the voice in the phone went away.”
“Aren’t you hungry?” I tried.
Her glance moved down to the plate. With a deep grunt from the back of her throat, she seized the tray with the remnants of her hands, throwing it across the room. Mash flew out from the little plastic indents as it smashed against the far wall. The nurse hurried in from the corridor, saw the mess, and merely rolled her eyes, as if this was something regular and understandable, before cleaning it up.
Elizabeth lapsed into sullen silence. Unsure what else I could say that wouldn’t be either dangerous or mad, so did I.
We stayed sitting in silence for almost ten minutes before she looked up slowly and said, “Is it free, where you are?”
I hesitated. “It’s all right,” I said, hoping this was a safe answer.
“Come be me,” she sang, in a faint, distant voice of one remembering a nursery rhyme. “Come be me and be free!”
We felt a shudder run all the way down from the hairs on our skull to the tips of our toes. “Where did you hear that?” we asked.
“They used to burn in the telephones. I danced with them before they went away. Did you lie?”
“Did your brother hear them sing too?” we asked.
She shook her head, slowly, uncertainly, then added in a more cheerful voice, “Have your pudding and eat it, that’s what they said, save the best for last, meat and two veg, do you see?”
“Did he hurt you?” I asked, as gently as possible.
“Said to dance, said to burn and we’ve always loved the city …”
“Did he do this to you?”
“He just sits in the chair that’s all, nothing bad, just sits and likes to eat, watches, gets on with things, although the water doesn’t taste so good any more, vodka, vodka and lick the lamp post …” Her shoulders were starting to shake – with a shock, we realised that she was starting to cry.
Uncertainly, I leant forward, and put my arms round her shoulders, although she was so limp that it was hard to tell what good it did. We put our mouth near her ear, and so close now we could see through the veil, the burnt, sunk flesh, the remnants of a nose, the unevenness of burnt-off lips, and murmured as quietly as we could, like a mother singing her lullaby, “We be fire, we be light, we be life, we sing electric flame, we slither underground wind, we dance heaven – come be we and be free. Come be me.”
Her shaking slowly stopped. She pulled away from our hold and looked through the veil straight into our eyes. The bandaged stub of a hand brushed our cheek, sending a shudder through our skin. “So blue,” she whispered. “No wonder you went away.”
“Why did Bakker do this to you?” I asked quietly. “Why would he do this thing?”
“He wanted to hear the angels,” she whispered. “He wanted to find them, to see the blue, but he couldn’t, he couldn’t, he tried and they wouldn’t answer, he was too far, too quiet, they didn’t come for him, he couldn’t understand and he said … he said …” The bandage pressed against my cheek. “He asked you,” she hissed. “To find them, he asked you. And you said no – why did you have to say no? I would have kissed you and you said no, and he needed another sorcerer, he needed someone to give their senses and their blood and you said no so he asked me. He tried to bring them back and when I couldn’t do it, when I couldn’t do it, he said it was all right, he was sorry, he said he loved me, he forgave me and … and …”
And Elizabeth Jane Bakker, just like her brother, was a sorcerer, and her skin burnt my cheek to the touch, even through the bandage, and the lights spat and fizzed around her and the floor hummed like a train was passing beneath us. I grabbed her arm and whispered, “Listen to me, listen to me … what did Bakker want you to do?”
“He is so hungry!” she whispered. “So hungry …”
“Did he bring us back?” we demanded. “Does he still want the angels, did he bring us back?”
“Make me a shadow on the wall.” She nearly wailed it, clung to my face like she wanted to press it into some new, better shape. “I said I was sorry, so sorry, that I wouldn’t say no again and it just kept on, kept on burning, kept saying that I didn’t understand, so sorry, so sorry, make me a shadow on the wall …”
“Bakker did this to you, because you wouldn’t help him?”
“So sorry …”
She was shaking again. I ran my hand over the top of her head, across the white fabric of her veil and felt the odd stubble of patchy hair underneath it, and whispered soothing noises as she pressed her face into my shoulder and the humming in the floor gently started to die down and the rats scuttling in the walls began to breathe again. “It’s all right,” I whispered. “It’s all right. We’re here now.”
“He wouldn’t kill me, he wouldn’t. He said I should feel what it’s like, know how it felt, understand …”
“It’s all right,” we repeated, not sure what else we could say. “Shush, it’ll be all right.”
“So hungry,” she whispered. “I’m so hungry.” We leant away slowly, staring into the vague shadow of her eyes. She stared straight back, lips twitching under the veil. “He said I should live and that I would always be hungry, always be thirsty, always be ugly, always be in pain, because I didn’t help. Matthew?”
“I’m here,” I murmured.
“Why didn’t you do what he asked you to? Why didn’t you help him?”
I thought about it. “Because it was obscene,” I said finally. “What he wanted was obscene.”
“Missed you,” she whispered. “Just like the song said. They always said the world was bigger than the current could flow, and when you’d touched every corner, you could drift away into the stars … did it hurt, your death? He said you were dead. I screamed at him and called him names. I screamed and screamed until they burnt my tongue, make me a shadow on the wall, I said, make me a shadow … I would have helped if you weren’t dead. I called him murderer. He said I couldn’t understand, that it wasn’t … that you weren’t … but they kept on and he said … they were always there and then it just stopped!”
“Shush, shush,” I whispered, stroking the odd, coarse tufts of her hair. “I’m here now. We’ll see you safe.”
She leant up and with the rough, uneven edges of her mouth, through the veil, kissed my lips, once, gently, and put her head into my shoulder. “My angels,” she whispered. “My electric angels.”
I stayed with her for the rest of the day, and she didn’t say anything more, and neither did I. And that, too, was sorcery.
Shortly after dusk, we left her sleeping, kissing the whisper of our voice into her tiny, lobeless ear, and went to finish San Khay.
The newspapers reported pretty much what I knew. The Amiltech office was in ruins, the staff had been sent home. It wasn’t safe any more, they said, and those who stayed too long thought they saw the glimmering of aluminium wings in the fan vents, and heard the chittering of the fairies.
Clients, while sympathising greatly with the clear campaign of hate that had been taken up against Amiltech, were making tactful enquiries about switching security firms for the simple reason that Amiltech was plainly unable, in its current state, to fulfil obligations.
There was more I could do, and I knew it. A little arson, a bit of trashing – this was not enough to bring down a company permanently, this was something insurance could still cover. I could be methodical, thorough, find every blood bank and illicit financial record, burn them all, expose them all, tear Amiltech apart.
But now, we were not in the mood to wait. We wanted San Khay, we wanted to pull down the king at the top of this particular house of cards, and with him gone, we knew that even the Tower would feel the blow.
What we didn’t know was whether we wanted to kill him, or if he was simply a pawn on the way to the ace in the sky – Bakker.
We knew now that we wanted to kill Bakker.
I thought about the blue drawing of a burning angel I’d found under San Khay’s desk.
I remembered the taste of blood.
I remembered …
… give me life … .
… be free …
… my electric angels …
Bakker had to die. And if that meant going through San Khay, so be it.
I needed equipment.
I spent a night and a morning in bed recovering from my encounter with Charlie. I spent the afternoon purchasing from every general store, haberdasher and art shop I could find, as much dye of every kind as I could find. Bottles of ink, capsules of fabric dye, in every conceivable colour; I purchased everything I could get my hands on and which could fit into my bag. I also went round the junk stores until I found the shattered remains of a large grandfather clock, from whose face I stole the minute and hour hands, and acquired a small bell, a set of six six-sided dice, a blanket and a very large, heavy-duty permanent marker. From the supermarket I bought a week’s supply of egg and cress sandwiches, a bunch of bananas, a pair of buckets and six litres of bottled mineral water. Lastly, I went to the second-hand bookshops on Charing Cross Road and trawled up and down through their shelves until I found a copy of The Train Journey’s Companion, published in 1934, its dusty cover red and heavy, smelling of crushed insects and dry leaves.
Then, I hired a van. The man who let it to me was willing, for £400, to ignore my lack of valid driver’s licence and ID. The van stank of cabbage and cornered like a drunken elephant. It would do.
The next day I spent looking for just the right kind of place. In the newspapers, San Khay vowed to take revenge on the enemy of his company and his employees, and bring them to justice for their crimes. His share price fell by sixteen pence on the London market, and everyone expressed immense sympathy. The vice-president of the company moved his family to Cornwall, after all the walls of his house were scratched by dozens of very, very tiny aluminium fingernails. San’s personal secretary complained that she couldn’t sleep because the shadows kept moving on her walls, and there were voices in her head, and as a result, she’d have to take a holiday in Corfu as soon as possible while the company repaired itself.
I found what I needed eventually in a for-let garage space underneath a railway line in Camden, with solid metal doors and a single light high in the roof. I cleared out a dead fridge and half a bicycle from inside the garage, and then set to, creating my magic circle.
Circles are a very traditional form of magic; mine was no exception. With my permanent marker pen (do not be deceived by those who favour chalk – an unreliable, amateur substance) I drew a big, slightly wonky circle on the floor. Inside this I placed the buckets, and next to them I put the pile of preservative-heavy sandwiches, the six litres of water, the bananas, and the blanket, neatly folded.
Around the edge of the circle on the outside I placed the six dice, going clockwise in ascending order with the top side showing one to six as they went round, at equal distance from each other. At the top of the circle I put the salvaged hour hand, pointing inwards, and at the bottom, nearest the door, I put the minute hand, also pointing inwards, directly towards its counterpart in the north.
This done, I then did something that I do very rarely, and got down on my knees at the bottom of the circle, and prayed.
It was a summoning as much as a prayer, an invocation, that passed my lips. I knelt on that spot for the best part of an hour whispering my hopes and aspirations to the spirits of that place. The floor was hard, and my knees ached, but once embarked on such an incantation, you do not break out of it lightly. I summoned all the powers that might watch over that small garage under the railway line, begged them, cajoled them, enticed them with every inch of will and magic I had available, and half-thought that they weren’t going to come – until the vibration of the train passing over my head became too long, rattling on and on and on so that I thought perhaps the train wasn’t one, but a whole herd of the things, all going home for the evening, rushing along the same track.
It took a while to equate that pounding noise, the regular cuthunkcut-hunkcuthunk of the wheels over the joins in the silvery track, to the cold breeze growing on the back of my neck, and the way my breath condensed in the air, even though it was not so cold outside. When the spirit of that place began to appear, it did so gradually, a shimmer of navy blue that flickered in and out of existence – flash and then gone – bringing with it the distant mournful whistle of a train heard in the night through a locked bedroom window. I kept on with the summoning, feeling at my side for the copy of The Train Journey’s Companion to reassure myself, the only warm thing in the place, while I waited for the spirit of that place to come fully into being.
It appeared on the other side of the circle a bit at a time, like the Cheshire Cat, not entirely sure if it was coming or it was going, and when it was definitely there, even then bits of it kept focusing in and out with the faint rushing of wheels that defined it, its left arm suddenly snatched away by a cold breeze, only to be replaced a moment later by another copy, its face suddenly twisted into a fading patch of dark brown fog before it snapped back into place, its hat fading on and off its head, sometimes changing styles, at one moment big and broad and dark blue, the next tight and black, the next with a silver badge on the front, quaint and old-fashioned. Around its neck hung a small grey plastic machine with a slot for a credit card, in its hand was a book of pinkish paper tickets, in its breast pocket a multiplicity of pens and pencils, on its feet, the only thing that seemed constant about its shifting form, a pair of black leather loafers.
It was, in short, the spirit of the railway conductor, guardian of that place, and its expression, as it looked at me, was decidedly unimpressed. When it spoke, its voice was like the rushing of wind through a dark tunnel, and it said,
“All tickets, all tickets please!”
I held up The Train Journey’s Companion and said respectfully, “Sir, I have a gift?”
The book opened itself in my hands, the pages rustling like leaves on the line, blurring the words and pictures. Then, as ethereal as the creature standing in the garage in front of me, it too began to shift, move, fade away, leaving just a cold breeze on my fingertips.
“So much is changing,” the figure whispered sadly. “We are not what we were. All change, please, all change.”
“Martin Mill, Hither Green, Three Bridges, Woolwich Arsenal, Mudchute, Bounds Green, Gospel Oak …” I replied, rattling off the names of the train stations as they came to mind.
Its form shifted, a hint of a big leather belt, seen and then gone, the flash of brass buttons, the gleam of a corporate badge. It seemed to smile. “They would rather just leave and arrive, leave and arrive, than take a journey. This place will fade with the rattling of the train.”
“In the names of Thameslink, First Capital Connect, Southern Railway, South Western, GNER, National Express, Great Western, Chiltern Railways …”
It raised its head and said, “It is always nice to be remembered, even by little sorcerers who would rather fly. Where do you want to go today?”
“I need to keep someone here. I need to make sure they are safe and well, but cannot leave, and cannot be found by others who may come looking. Will you help me?”
“It is nice to be remembered,” the figure repeated. “We will keep your magic circle, and think of you, when we pass by.”
With that, it started to fade, taking with it the touch of the cold breeze from a train rushing by the platform edge, and the taste of mechanical steam.
I stayed a while longer, until the next train passed overhead, and stood up, my place now secure, my magic circle now guaranteed, and went to find San Khay.
Say what you will for San, even in times of crisis his routine was fixed. I found him on the roof of a building on the edge of the City of London, where its boundary merged with that of the City of Westminster. He was sipping champagne. The roof comprised a wide balcony, warmed by tall heaters with hatlike tops, which blasted away with the intensity of gas cookers, and a large glass conservatory. All this had been added as an afterthought onto a grand 1930s art deco building whose clean lines and simple silver curves housed grand offices beneath its exclusive roof garden. The conservatory was full of trickling fountains, ornamental trees, floodlighting and, this evening, women in little black dresses, and the hubbub of tipsy chatter. I watched it through the eyes of a pigeon circling overhead, the patterns of people’s movement as they bounced from group to group; the more wealthy and senior members of the club seated at tables where their drinks were brought to them along with small dishes of olives and oil, while the aspirant and younger members circulated from table to table, easing themselves in, networking, and moving on.
San sat at his own table, flanked by two bodyguards, and politely, as always, talked to those who came to see him, and was reasonable and calm with them all. He was also shrewd; and as the evening wore on, his eyes would dart more and more to my pigeons circling above his table until at last, at 11.30 p.m., as the gossip was hotting up and the champagne was flowing yet more freely, he looked up, straight at the creatures in whose brains I was nestled, and raised one hand, as if in invitation, or as a toast. Then he leant over to one of his bodyguards, who nodded and left.
I withdrew my mind from the pigeons’ and abandoned the bench on the street corner where I had been sitting while my mind drifted in their thoughts. Putting down the handful of feathers I’d collected from the street, which had given me the connection, I turned towards the doors of the building in which San waited.
In due course, the bodyguard San had spoken to appeared in the doorway. I walked up to him. He wasn’t actively waving the gun wedged under his right armpit, and didn’t seem up to throwing much magic, so I said, “Are you looking for me?”
“Mr Khay would like to know if you would join him,” he replied politely.
“Guns such as yours make me nervous.”
“He was most insistent that I didn’t use it, despite, naturally, my skill in such matters,” said the bodyguard smoothly. His smile dazzled.
“Was he?”
“Indeed, sir. He said, sir, that should I attempt in any way to threaten you, you would most likely explode my heart in my chest before I had a chance to remove the safety; and that, therefore, he would deal with you in person, if sir would be willing to settle this matter that way.”
I thought about this, shifting the hefty weight of my satchel on my shoulder. “You hold that thought,” I said. “And I’ll have a drink with Mr Khay.”
In real life, San Khay was taller than I expected, but that might have been the good posture with which he sat, even at eleven thirty at night, on a low bench that wasn’t comfortable, but was probably art. He nodded courteously at me as I sat down opposite him on the balcony. “Drink?”
“I’m fine, thank you.”
“I hope my assistant was tactful.”
“Very. Didn’t start shooting or anything.”
“I explained to him the likely consequences. You are, after all, a man of significant power, yes?”
I hesitated. The question in his voice threw me – not necessarily in an egotistical way, since the definition of “power” was one that had been up for debate ever since my unlikely return to the waking world over a week before. It did suggest, however, that he didn’t know the extent of what I could do, beyond the proof he’d seen on his walls.
I said, “You’ve seen what I do.”
“Of course. I am, naturally, curious as to why you do it and to what end – and would be happy to hear your views on both.”
He spoke in neat, clipped tones and the hint of an American accent, probably from too many years getting an expensive education. His only motion was the tiniest tapping of his little finger against the stem
of his champagne glass.
“I’m afraid it’s complicated,” I replied.
“You are a warlock, perhaps?”
“No, no, not really.”
“You are clearly a man of means.”
I laughed, despite myself. “No,” I said with a smile, “not that either.”
“May we conclude ‘capable’ then, as a suitable epithet?”
“‘Capable’ may have to cover it.”
“You understand, I cannot permit your current campaign against my business to continue. While trivial enough in itself, it is disruptive, and worst of all, bad for my reputation. Reputation, you see, in an industry such as mine, where so much has not been legislated for, is worth a hundred lawyers and all their gold watches.”
“I see.”
“With which in mind I will offer you a simple enough choice.”
“Which is?”
“Either I employ you, or I kill you.”
Surprise barely covered it. “Come again?”
“A man of your ability would be far more useful on my team than operating against me, and it would be a shame to bury your abilities entirely. If you have desires, now would be the time to name them.”
“Desires?”
“I can offer you wealth, property, money – these are, though, the simple things of a corporate role. I can offer more. Magic. Secrets. Revenge. Have you ever wished for a place by the river, the lights on the water at night, or for sharing the dreams of a child, sensing the skin of another sex, hearing all with the ears of a bat, seeing with the eyes of a hawk, smelling with the nose of a dog, your thoughts in unimagined brilliant colour, or dabbling in the visions of a heroin addict on the edge of death and seeing what he sees as he passes beyond, a glimpse of something more? We can put you on the same eyeline as God. I can offer you these things: visions, wonders, comfort, security. Whatever you desire.”
“Is this the standard employee package?” I asked.
“We are good to our people at Amiltech.”
“Health insurance?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“And who pays?”
“The company.”
“I meant who pays for the other things? Whose senses must I steal to have these powers, whose mind must I violate, whose house will I inhabit, whose wealth will I profit by, whose dreams will I dabble in, whose ideas will I skim for gold, who will I have to kill, who will I have to control?”
“Does it matter?”
I thought about it. “Yes,” I said. “It matters to me.”
“Is this your reason for coming here tonight?”
“It’s part of it.”
He sighed impatiently, ran one delicate finger round the rim of his champagne glass. It whined like a suffocating bat. “I think you are not interested in an amicable solution, no?”
“Not really,” I admitted. “But I appreciate the offer.”
“Well then, I offer you the alternative. Run, hide, magician. I’ve seen your face, I can recognise you now; wherever you go and whatever you do, my men can find you, follow you, track you by the prints from your fingers, and we will kill you, I will kill you and show your corpse to my clients and say, ‘These are the dead bones you were afraid of, and look how they died. I will do this to your enemies if you name them.’ I shall have your skull on my desk as a paperweight, and wish that you still had eyes to see my victory.”
I waited. There wasn’t any more so I said, “Tell you what, you come find me tonight, and we’ll sort out this whole shebang. Sound reasonable?”
He sipped his champagne. “Very reasonable.”
“Good!” I stood up, smiled at him, nodded at the two bodyguards, who also stood, and said, “I’ll just get running, then. See you later, Mr Khay.”
“Good evening, magician,” he replied, and sipped again, and didn’t move.
I smiled one last time, turned, and walked into the crowd. My heart was racing but it wasn’t fear – the crowd protected me, even San wouldn’t risk shooting me among that lot – it was excitement. The sense of a battle coming and, more to the point, a battle we knew we could win. I summoned the lift. When it came, I rode it to the bottom, stuck my foot into the door, and pressed every single button between the ground floor and the roof. I reasoned that while they either waited for the lift or used the stairs, I’d have the time I needed.
This done, I ran into the night, and the pigeons followed.
The place I had chosen for the night’s work was Paternoster Square. It was an unusual place: the new buildings, with their clean walls and big tinted windows, wouldn’t be out of place in a utopian science fiction movie; but like the best of such places, it had a darker bite to it. CCTV cameras were angled on every wall and, during the daytime at least, there were always security guards. Their presence made me suspect the existence of spies or gangsters in an office somewhere nearby, since I couldn’t think why else they’d be patrolling what was ostensibly just one more London square.
What took the square out of the realm of futuristic fantasy was its neighbour: St Paul’s Cathedral, half of it white from cleaning, the other still a sooty grey as the council tried to polish it up faster than the dirt could accumulate. It loomed over the mismatched shape of Paternoster Square (which had too many sides to deserve its name) like the last laugh of the past, mocking its descendants who still couldn’t build grander than the dome or the figures on the cathedral roof whose eroded features gazed down Ludgate Hill. It was a strange meeting point of past and present, and at this hour of the night, almost deserted. My footsteps were too loud, the pigeons too quiet, the lights too bright in the dark – huge white floodlights smiting the cathedral walls and every angle of Paternoster Square together with the smooth marble pillar at its centre – a baby version of the Monument, complete with golden ball of flame at its top, raised in memory of the Blitz.
In that place, that strange place where the sharp bite of racing magic met with the ponderous stones of the cathedral, sluggish with its own history, every shadow contained a ghost; and that night, with no one else around and the clouds busy overhead, the ghosts watched us. We brushed a toe along the bottom step of the cathedral’s west front, and we could hear the low murmuring of the priests’ incantations, the high singing of the choirboys in their red and white cassocks, the footsteps of heavy heels on the marble floor, the whispers of so many thousands, millions, of people around the gallery in the cathedral’s dome, feel the burning of the fire that had led to its reconstruction, taste the dust of its stones being slid into place, sense the bombs falling around it, hear the rattle of carts and carriages fade into the roar of car engines, the tones of the tourist guides in brisk Japanese, silken Italian, every language of the earth, see the shadows of so many people who’d passed through that place; you couldn’t be a magician, even a concussed idiot of a magician, and not know that those stones were buzzing with time, magic. We hadn’t seen any sign of a God in this world, but we could understand it if people went to that place to pray, if only to do honour to a past so magnificent.
Business called.
I blew the fuses without too much effort in every camera I could see. Then I walked round Paternoster Square, laying out my provisions. I opened all my bottles of ink and laid them out at intervals across the pavement. I cracked open the tubs of powdered dye, careful to keep my fingers out of their contents, which I sprinkled across the paving stones in long sweeps of scarlet, black, green and blue. This done, all I had to do was pace around to keep warm, coat buttoned up and hands buried in my pockets, and wait.
The bells of St Paul’s announced midnight – quarter past – half past. So much for San Khay’s efficiency. We nervously collected a fallen pigeon feather from the foot of a statue of Queen Anne, who looked frighteningly far too large under the fierce artificial lights, and shared the bird’s gaze for a few minutes, sweeping over the rooftops and through the alleys and the streets around the square, just to make sure that San hadn’t already found us, and wasn’t putting snipers into place as we waited like a fool. He would have been wise to do so; but we somehow felt it wasn’t right for what he wanted, and indeed, as we drifted on the air beneath us, and enjoyed the weight of our wings and the strength in our bones as we dove and swept up again on our own momentum, like a child’s acrobatic kite snapping in the breeze, we saw no sign of him.
Back on the ground, we waited.
I blew into my hands to keep them warm while my thoughts followed the numb progression of absent consciousness that every ten minutes jerks into your awareness with a conclusion that you cannot trace or understand, and which fades from memory almost as soon as you’ve reached it. As the bell tolled quarter to one, the conclusion that seemed to have emerged most prominently from my idling brain was the desire for fish and chips, so intense we could almost smell it, the tang of the vinegar in our nose, the feeling of heat through greasy wrapping paper, the crumbling of fish on the end of little wooden forks …
San Khay was at one moment very much absent, and the next very much there. He was about thirty feet away, coming through the small, fake-Stuart barbican archway at the southern end of the square, and headed straight for me. He wore no shoes: I could see the swirl of inky stain that wound even around his toes like the roots of some leafless tree. He’d also removed his shirt, revealing the shiny black whorls of colour on his chest which moved as he did, rippling ever so slightly black to red with the beating of his heart, never brightening much beyond dark ebony, but still with that hint of magic in the ink. His feet should have been bleeding, his heart racing and his breath heaving – none of these were so; and he moved fast, far too fast, like a sprinter leaning at an angle for a bend in the track, moving in a long, rapid curve towards me that threw my perceptions off kilter and made it hard to judge where he might strike.
In either hand he had a knife; both were clearly designed by someone with an overactive imagination who probably enjoyed zen gardening and clean kills – curved, long, polished and so sharp I could hear their tearing of the air as he moved. The sound was louder than his shockingly, unnaturally light, quick footstep. I hadn’t expected such weapons; knives complicate things, and I couldn’t hope to outrun him or outfight him in close quarters. So I did the only thing that seemed appropriate, and turned out the lights.
I snuffed the lights on the pillar in the centre of the square, on shuttered restaurants and boutiques around its edges, in the tall, glass-walled offices above, in the streets around, the floodlights on the cathedral, in the shop windows, in the phone boxes, even in the few passing cars. I pressed them down to nothing with a swish of my hand through the air and grabbed the surplus light and heat they left behind, pulling it into me, around me, so that even the orange glow of the city sky was muted; and in my palm, held tightly so he couldn’t see, was the tiniest speck of their brightness, compressed into a space no larger than a banana seed.
Even then, he was fast, and single-minded; still he kept coming straight for me, even though his eyes must have been confused as they struggled to adapt. I could feel the force of his moving through the air as he left the ground a few feet away and headed, knife-edge first, directly for me.
I threw myself to one side. He landed on his feet, easily as a cat, in the space I’d just left. I picked myself up gracelessly and threw a handful of the stolen heat from the lamps into his face. The force of it in the air rippled even the darkness and threw him back, making him shield his face with his hands. Anyone else would have been, at the least, temporarily blinded, and at the most, incinerated. But San had magic in his skin and, all it did was make him stagger with a grunt, the ink flaring bright across his forearms where the brunt of the heat had struck. I ran for where the dark was thickest, in an arcade of pillars on the other side of the square, aware of how loud my footsteps and breathing were compared to the easy, light and confident lope of San. In the dark I found the nearest pillar with my fingers and memory, and pressed my back into it, comforted by its solidity, and waited.
From there we heard the gentle footfall of San’s movement, as he prowled like a carnivorous animal, searching, feeling his way, listening for the tiniest sound that might reveal our presence, the creak of a shoe, the rush of a breath. We could taste him more than anything else, the sharp, painful edge of his magic, a prickling across our skin, a dark rushing through our senses. We pressed our fingers into the cold stone and half-closed our eyes, and there was a whisper of …
… cart on cobbles …
diesel engine rattling in a big red bus
bells at sunset …
a smell of
… smoke from burning timber
coffee
river at low tide
at high tide
carrying salt water in …
… sewage out …
a taste of
… fresh-baked bread in a clay oven …
sparks on a hay-covered floor …
… explosives in the sky …
burning skin
mortar dust …
And San’s voice. “Magician? You can’t hide in this dark for long.”
We opened our eyes, and the shadows looked back. Faceless remnants of the past, drifting pieces of memory and time left behind, trapped in the stones, the statues, the trees, the streets. They rippled out of the dark into the still square, crawled up from the ground and writhed their way out of the walls, shadows stretching back beyond the Fire of London, beyond the building of the cathedral, some so old they were little more than grey shimmers across the stones, some still dark and new. I pulled my coat up around my face and stepped out from behind the pillar, still hiding the light from the lamps in the palm of my hand. Seen only by the reflective orange glow of the clouds overhead, the shadows were everywhere, they filled each inch of space in a blurred mass of greyness, sometimes with a snatch of face or clothes, but more often just a glimmering form, as if they were made of pale water. I moved like one of them, circling, as they did, the pillar in the heart of the square, the golden flame on its summit the only thing that caught what light there was and gave enough reflective glow to cast a shadow.
In the middle of the ghosts stood San Khay, pushing through them, brushing them aside like they were cobwebs that disintegrated at his touch, shimmering out of existence at his movement. He scanned the mass of faceless shadows with narrowed eyes, and an intensity against which, I suspected, the simple enchantments of my coat would offer no protection. I moved faster through the silent crowds, feeling a coldness every time I passed through one of them, like the wind just before rain. I placed myself as far as possible from the turning shape of San Khay, his skin shockingly bright among the moving shadows, and waited for him to face me directly.
When he did, he was strong enough, smart enough, to see me instantly – or perhaps he simply heard my breath. He lunged for me, ignoring the shadows in his path that broke down to nothing as he moved. I didn’t wait for him to get closer, but released in an instant the bundle of light trapped in the palm of my hand.
And closed my eyes.
Every lamp, lantern, bulb, floodlight, street light, car light, shop illumination, uplight and downlight came on in an instant, explosively bright in the darkness of the square, their touch melting the shadows down to nothing like they were butter thrust into the sun. He staggered back for a second; but a second was all I gained and he was moving again – again directly for me.
I turned my palms skywards, and raised my hands – and with them, the water beneath my feet.
It responded quickly – there was a lot of power in that place. The tops blew off the drains: the circular metal lids above the sewers, the rectangular slabs covering the fireman’s water taps; each blasted upwards in a geyser of cold water. The basin around the foot of the pillar glinted as the fountain inside it flowed, then gushed, splashing out over the rim in a torrent. Around it, dark lines of water crawled between the paving stones, then spilled out and over. Where the water met my coloured swirls of dye, it mingled with them and started to change.
None of this seemed to bother San Khay, so with a swat of my hand I directed the nearest geyser of water to turn and knock him to one side with its force. He rolled through it, falling where it pushed him, then out of its reach. As he did, he rolled into a bottle of black ink, spilling its contents across the paving stones and spattering the top of his left arm with dots of darkness.
It was a start, but not enough – he kept on coming, and now there was anger in his face. Hastily I stepped away from him and started snatching at the power in the air, ravelling it between my fingertips and heaving it skywards in a bundle so fat and uncontrolled it almost boomed on its way up, like a plane passing overhead. As it rose, so did the water: geysers gushing up from the pipes, puddles forming between the paving stones, even the dazzling spatter from the fountain. It wasn’t just water: where it had mingled with the dyes it was blue, red, black, green, dragging up vivid hues along with sheets of clean liquid, filling the square with the effect of backwards rain, rising away from the ground in a cloudburst of cleanliness and colour.
The effort of that took the breath out of me for a moment – long enough for San Khay, dripping with the water spiralling up around us, to reach me. I didn’t even see him coming. But we felt the movement of his arm through the air, and instinctively ducked under the first blow, which would have torn our throat in two. He swung next with his right arm, fast, powerful, jabbing towards our heart. We had no choice but to retreat, back-stepping as our shoes started to soak through and turn black as we stepped into a pool of half-diluted dye. And still he kept coming, right, left, an unrelenting rhythm that didn’t even give us time to throw another spell, we had to turn and duck and move so fast. He didn’t just advance in a straight line, but spun round the axis of his own shoulder so that at any moment death might come from left or right or above or below. We had never been so unsure of our own abilities nor, as we danced in front of his knives, so thrilled with ourselves that, second from second, we survived. We kept retreating through the upwards rain, feeling the water crawling up our chin, leaving streaks of black and red across our face as it curled up into our hair; we felt it shiver along our fingertips, running between the curves of our knuckles, staining our skin a motley bruised colour as the inky water ran across our flesh.
And little by little, San Khay started to falter.
As he advanced through them, the melded dyes and water rising from the ground now settled in the empty spaces between the lines of his tattoos. They blurred their edges, disguised their swirls with other, uglier stains of black and blue, and marred the otherwise elegant curves of ink across his skin. As they did, the magic in his flesh began to leach. I could see it, smell it: the enchantments bound into his flesh sparked into the water, flashed with motes of blackness into the rising rain around us, melting away as the patterns that defined the enchantment became distorted. He could still fight, and better than me, but he was so used to that strength in his skin that as it started to fail he began to make mistakes, not understanding his own limitations. So with one swipe he overreached, staggering right past me, and with another his fingers, shining with the water running over us both, nearly opened and dropped the knife, as if it were suddenly too heavy to hold. This was a man who hadn’t used his muscles, really used them as themselves, for years, so that like an astronaut returning to gravity he felt his legs become weak, his breathing difficult, his skin turning to the colour of an industrial accident.
I moved back and, when he followed, he staggered, barely picking himself up. He stabbed, and I caught his wrist, the strength in his arm suddenly resistible, the speed of his movement now visible as more than just a blur. We twisted his arm back on itself, and his fingers opened automatically, dropping the blade. We pushed him back hard, and his bare feet slipped on the soaking pavement, his toes almost black from the puddles of colour we waded through. We blinked green drops of water out of our eyes and scooped up the knife in passing, moving towards him, wary that he still might have a trick to play but increasingly confident, tasting no more in his movements now than just the ordinary heat of a human passing by. He lunged at us poorly with his other blade, but his arm was an image of worm-thin wriggling splotches of colour flowing up to his shoulder and then away, skywards. We sidestepped easily, kicking down towards the back of his leg as he passed at us, and pushing his knee towards the ground. As he swung his arm back, we stepped round behind him, caught it at the elbow and wrenched it backwards, further than it wanted to bend, hard. He let out a sound between his teeth like his breath had become trapped behind his tongue, and as we put the knife against his throat, his inky face expressed nothing but pain.
Around us, the water began to fall back down from the sky in bright droplets as the spell ran out, splashing red, green, blue, black in thin swirls across the pavement, dripping off the golden flame on the top of the monument, running down windows, and plopping with a clear, regular drip drip drip onto the twisted metal coverings of the pipes below ground. We felt the rain soak our skin, cold and shocking.
San Khay’s flesh was the colour of an infected bruise, the outline of his tattoos now marred. He hissed, “If you have sense, you will let me go!”
We leant forward sharply, pressing the tip of the knife into the hollow at the base of his throat. “If you had sense, you would not have come looking for us,” we hissed. “Did you really not see what you were contending with? Could you not taste it, did you not have the wit to understand?”
“I serve the Tower,” he snarled. “They will come for me and they will tear your flesh from your bones!”
“They tried that before and still we live, our blood, our skin, so alive, you cannot understand!”
He half-turned his head to look at us, and gave a forced laugh. “He will eat your heart,” he whispered. “He likes to keep something to honour his friends.”
We drew the blade back to cut his throat, the blue anger across our eyes, ready to finish this ignorant, arrogant thing. At the last moment I held back, forced my fingers to stop shaking, and tightened my grip, breathing slowly and steadily until our screaming, our fury at this creature too small to even see his own place in the city, too small to know his own smallness, had abated. I dropped to one knee behind him, thrusting his head back towards mine with the tip of the blade, and whispered, “Tell me what you know of the shadow.”
“He will eat your heart,” he repeated, voice trembling with victory, fear, rage – I couldn’t tell which. San Khay was not a man used to losing.
“How long has he lived? How long has the shadow been out there?”
“Why should you care?”
“Just tell me what you know.”
“No. I know what he does to his enemies.”
“Whose? Hunger’s – the shadow? Or to Bakker’s?”
A flicker on his face. Perhaps, for a moment, he was beginning to understand. “Who are you?” he asked.
“My name is Matthew Swift.”
“The name … seems familiar.”
“I’m sure it does, and if things had been otherwise, you might have been the one they asked to hide the body.”
“What body?”
“That,” I said, “is the question they really should have explored. Can Bakker control it? The shadow?”
“It kills his enemies. It’ll kill you eventually.”
“Doesn’t mean he’s in charge. How do I kill it?” He didn’t answer. We dug the blade into his throat until it drew a thin line of beady blood. “How do we kill it?!”
“You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“It is a shadow. You can never kill it.”
“Then how does Bakker control it?”
“You said yourself, maybe he can’t.”
“How does he control Dana Mikeda?”
“How do you know Dana Mikeda?”
We pressed the knife closer until his breath wheezed. “We can rip out your thoughts,” we hissed, “as you yourself would see the mind of the dying man. We can dance in your senses, as you would have played with others; we can put maggots of blue fire into your blood and feel through their eyes as they roam around your heart, your blood, your thoughts, your soul. And we will do it, we will do it and so much more in order to live, to be free in this world, not hunted, not lost, not afraid to be free. So … tell us. How does he control Dana Mikeda?”
“He doesn’t. She controls herself.”
“She wouldn’t help him of her own will.”
He gave a snort that was somewhere between laughter and a croak of pain. “She can’t, but she would.”
“Why?”
“You’re not a magician, are you?” he hissed. “Not just a magician. I think you’re more.”
“Where is Dana Mikeda?”
“I think you’re like them,” he replied, eyes narrowing. “I think you feel your heart race at rush hour, that on a bank holiday you can hardly raise your head, that in the centre of the city you walk with its rhythms, and only when you are away from it do you remember your own gait, only when you close your eyes from all those lights do you remember who you are. I think you’re one of them, just like Bakker, just like Mikeda. Sorcerer.”
“I’m a sorcerer,” I answered into his ear. We lowered our voice. “But we are the angels.”
He spat. Again we considered slitting his throat, ending him right now for his arrogance and his stupidity. But he was no longer a danger to us, and without the blue rage in front of our eyes, we found the thought repulsive. We could imagine the feel of the skin parting at our strength, the slickness of the blood on our hands. We felt colder now, the water no longer refreshing but bringing out stained goosebumps in the night breeze, and the idea of killing him seemed like murder. That was fine. I had prepared for this event: a magic circle drawn in Camden, with enough sandwiches and water to keep him alive for a week. Long enough to get answers. Murder might have to come eventually; but not yet.
So I pressed my hand across the back of his neck and put darkness over his thoughts until he went loose in my grip, slipping to the pavement like a dead salmon, in a pool of spreading green ink.
I left him there, and went to get the van.
When I got back with the van, approximately thirty seconds later, San Khay’s heart was missing. Part of his ribcage too, although the odd shard of bone spread across the scarlet pool of his blood suggested it hadn’t been taken, merely broken in the process of getting into the chest. His stomach had been split open, and the veins and arteries running down either of his neck slit straight down from ear to collarbone. I had seen death before, but never this death, in such proximity, or with myself so heavily to blame.
We got down on our knees without noticing that we fell, and threw up. Salt in our eyes and acid on our tongue, we emptied out the entire contents of our stomach in the puddles of colour around us and retched until we thought we would throw out our bones. When we were done, we sat in a pool of blue water with our arms across our knees and shook.
I saw the shadows move, but still all we could do was sit and tremble. I saw the way the shadows bent around the lights, twisting across the paving stones, the long arrow of the pillar’s shade turning like the point of a sundial, shrinking and bending slightly in the middle, as if cast by something concave. When he started to rise out of the ground, dragging the darkness up with him like a blanket spread on the earth, all we could do was stare, and shake, and feel tiny.
He solidified a bit at a time, starting with his feet and spreading upwards: the whiteness of his hands, the face becoming brighter and more intense, his features growing out of the darkness into eyes, nose, and eventually, a smile of curved blue lips, and yellow teeth. He opened his arms – in greeting or an apologetic shrug, we couldn’t tell which – and said,
“Hello, Matthew’s fire.”
I got us up off the floor somehow, on hands and knees first, pulling us up a little at a time and feeling hollow inside, as if at any moment we might collapse in on ourself. I said, “He was on your side! One of yours!”
“I would have taken his skin, but it isn’t so beautiful any more,” he murmured, drifting across the soaking ground. The water ran off his feet like droplets from a puddle of oil. “You did that.”
I backed away, mind racing without my being aware of it, a background scream. Unable to think coherent thoughts, we burned with anger, fear, shame, sickness, guilt, hate.
I said, “How did you find me?”
“I heard your dance,” he replied, his voice tipping over his teeth like oil popping in the pan. “I felt the electric burning. I tasted you play with shadows. I knew it was you, even from so far away. I rushed through the dark to get here, I sped across the river in the shadow of the waves blown in the wind. I thought perhaps I would be too late.”
“I wasn’t going to kill him!” I spat, and realised, to my surprise, that it was true. A wave of relief nearly knocked me to the ground, passing as quick as the last breath of the storm. Relief, and something riding the back of the wave: hot sharp anger.
“No,” whispered Hunger. “I had to do that for you, because you were too afraid.”
“You are an abomination!” we snarled.
“Such fire! What shall I call you, deepest blue?”
I bit my lip and snapped, “Do you know why I call you Hunger?”
“Yes,” he said, almost preening, stretching out the unnatural length of his limbs, and uncurling his fingers to admire the black curve of his nails. “It is myself.”
“Do you remember what you said when we first met?”
“No.”
“You said, ‘Give me life.’ You tried to see if my life really did flash before my eyes as I died; you scratched at my face asking, ‘Can you see yet? Can you see?’ Do you remember that?”
“Yes.”
“Learnt anything since then?”
The shadow thought about it. “I’m still hungry,” he replied.
“We thought you might be.” Bending, not taking our eyes off him, we picked up the two curved steel knives that San had carried. My hands were shaking. “And we could kill for fish and chips.” We swiped the blades a few times through the air, testing their weight. “Fish and chips and ketchup.”
The creature looked confused. “I hunger for life! What are your desires to mine?”
“We,” we said firmly, “are living it.”
His face darkened, the shadows spreading out from beneath his eyes, around his mouth. “Give it to me,” he hissed.
“No,” we replied.
He stretched his arms out wide, the darkness spreading around him with the movement. “Give it to me!”
“Get stuffed,” I said, and, because the words made us feel stronger, we added, with a feeling of recklessness that made us almost dizzy, “Arsehole!” We felt like a child caught stealing sweets and wanted to laugh at the terrifying, impossible consequences we faced. Anger was heating up my skin, despite the sodden state of my clothes, and the rage across my eyes was clean, not a hint of blue, entirely mine. I raised the knives towards him, and they dragged fiery sparks through the air as I laced their edges with the heat in my heart.
Hunger grinned, and flexed its fingers. It could kill me, I was pretty confident of this, but in that moment of heady drunkenness, we didn’t care.
There was a rattling.
It sounded like a hundred broken teeth being knocked around inside a metal box.
It took me a moment to realise that it had nothing to do with the shadow. Surprise must have shown on my face; suspicion was on his.
It got closer, an uneven noise of bouncing, of metal clanking. As it approached, so did the smell: a mixture of curry powder, dust, car fumes, petrol, mothballs, wool and old tea bags which was somehow familiar. Hunger’s face was a picture of confusion, the darkness still warping the air around him, as he stood, ready to pounce. The rattling came nearer, the smell got stronger and with it came another sound.
The sound went like this:
“Buggery buggery bugger youth today! Buggery arseholes when I was young but no no no they don’t listen, moving with the phones, jazz, bling, ting, zing! Fucking pigeons! Shit where’s me oranges? Oranges oranges oranges gun oranges two pairs of nylons oranges …”
Hunger whispered, “Sorcery.”
I said, “You have no idea.”
The voice replied, “Show respect you imbecilic nit toad flea insectoid wart!” Rattling along in front of her on three wheels, her trolley heaved with ancient plastic bags as Old Madam Dorie bounced her way into Paternoster Square.
There is a story of the Bag Lady.
She isn’t simply a bag lady – a lady who carries plastic bags full of the strangest scrounged items she can get her hands on – she is The Bag Lady, the queen of all those who scuttle in the night, gibbering to themselves, and the voices only they can hear. She is the mistress of the mad old women in their slippers who ride the buses from terminal to terminal, she is the patron of the scrapyard girls who play with the rats, she is the lady of all dirty puddles. She has been in the city since the first old woman left alone in the dark decided to tell the dark why she was crying, and she is, of course, myth, and no one believes a word of it, including me.
However, when the pigeons were nested for the night, it was to the Bag Lady that my gran would always offer her prayers.
Dorie looked at me, she looked at the shadow, she looked back to me and said, “All right, you stupid bastard, piss off out of here!”
I said, “What the bloody hell are you doing here?”
“Fucking trailing you, fucker!” she shrilled. “You dense like the kids say?”
“We didn’t see you,” we complained.
“That’s because you’ve got all the brains of a concussed cod!” she shrilled, flapping her pink fingerless woollen gloves furiously in the air. “Shit, and you’re supposed to be a saving fucking grace?”
“You smell of … nothing,” hissed Hunger, head twisted on one side, his attention momentarily diverted. “You taste of … nothing.”
“You going to smell shit in the sewer?” she asked, glaring straight into Hunger’s empty eyes without even blinking. “Oi, sorcerer?”
“What, me?”
“You want to be someone else?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Fucking run already, nit!”
I began feebly, turning in Hunger’s direction. “Evil creature, essence of darkness and undying hunger …” Already I felt like I was losing momentum overall.
Dorie’s attention flashed to me in an instant, and for a moment her eyes were the colour of the pigeons’, yellow-orange, intense, bright, alert. She said, in a voice as sane as I had ever heard it from her lips, “I only do this for you once, blue electric sorcerer. Next time, you’ll burn.”
And with that, she leant over her trolley, and opened the plastic bags.
Out of the first came the twitching nose of a rat, climbing up and over the edge of the trolley before landing with a big flop in the middle of its body onto the pavement of the square and looking round with confused, blinking eyes. Then came another rat, and another, and another, half a dozen, a dozen, two dozen; they swarmed out of the battered old Sainsbury’s bag in a writhing mass of black bodies, streaming down the sides of the trolley, flopping onto the ground into a teeming, twitching mass, spreading out from her like a pool of black blood, scuttling and scampering, and still they kept coming, a hundred, two, more than I could count, crawling across the pavement, along the walls, up Dorie’s legs, her middle, until her whole body was covered in rats and there wasn’t a body there at all, just a heaving tower of blackness and there were more rats in the bag than could get out, a hill of rats building up around the half-obscured hub of the trolley, spilling towards me, towards Hunger.
That was one bag.
The second bag released the pigeons. They exploded upwards in a shower of feathers, one, half a dozen, two dozen, the same crowding and swiftness as the rats, and whirled overhead, and level too, the sky somehow not big enough for them, flying across my face, obscuring Dorie from my sight in moments. It snowed feathers, blinding me with the touch, smell, taste of dirt-grease pigeon as their wings beat at me, their claws scraped my shoulders, their feathers brushed my nose; while at my ankles the rats scuttled, flowing round me like I was an island in their black sea.
From the last bag came the other creatures. A swarm of big black bluebottle flies, the skulking ginger bodies of young foxes, a scampering contingent of mice that ran easily across the backs of the ratty mass like pebbles skimming the sea. Sinuous stray cats, missing a tail or half an ear, teeth bared, cruel, fur in tufts; the black feathers of crows, brown sparrows, flashing yellow breasts of a flock of great tits, even the curved necks of a pair of herons, hopping mottled frogs, the swooping shapes of swallows, the coiling gleam of a snake, teeming gleaming shells of the cockroaches, the long, arched back of a deer. They scrambled, flew, writhed, twisted, leapt, lurked or scuttled out of Dorie’s bags, out of the trolley, until the world was so full of moving creatures that it was as if the sky had become a solid mass, or we were trapped in a tornado, lost in a spinning torment of feather, flesh and fur.
Dorie was lost to sight in a matter of seconds; so was Hunger. Instinctively I ducked the whirling mass of birdlife, crawling on all fours while the rats flowed up my back and across my head, and dropped down around my face like beads of fat living sweat. Little tiny pink claws bit into me and released; twitching noses snuffled through my hair, whiskers tickled over my skin, fat hairy bodies pressed down across my back. I was grateful that I had already been sick; there was nothing left inside for any worse horror. We couldn’t …
we couldn’t …
couldn’t …
… so I did. I closed my eyes and felt the creatures around me, on hands and knees following their swirl of life which, all the powers have mercy, parted around me. Where I put my hands down, the creatures moved aside, hurried out of my way, so there was no breaking of tiny mouse bones as I pulled myself along, no squishing of snake’s tail; a path opened up in front of me, its end obscured by the hurricane of creatures, but still distinctly a path. I crawled along it; then pulled back sharply, spilling a snake off my shoulder as a shadow loomed across my path: for a moment a corpse-white hand solidified out of the blackness of the paving stones, its fingers reaching up and becoming flesh, before they were swamped by the scurrying mass of creatures, that bit and scratched at the hand even before it was entirely there, until it collapsed back into whirling obscurity among the animals. I risked raising myself up and realised that, if I did not flinch from the birds swooping around my head, they would not actually hit me. At this, I straightened up and, scattering the odd clinging mouse and dripping with inky water, I ran.
I didn’t know how far, nor where, they led me, until I was actually there: Ludgate Circus, where Fleet Street, Blackfriars Bridge, and Farringdon Road all run into a whirlpool of people, lights, cars, taxis and buses. Blinking, I staggered from the creatures’ embrace into the sudden light of the street. The birds swooped skywards as if they’d only just discovered that up as well as sideways existed, while the land animals were halfway into the bins, drains and gutters, and the narrow places between buildings and under doors before I even realised that my escort was melting away.
I stood, alone and confused, an inky soaking figure, looking somewhere between a woad warrior and a clown; pigeon feathers stuck to my head, and tufts of fur clung to my coat. Self-consciously I picked off the worst and, as I did, felt a stirring in my coat pocket that, to my shame, made me jump. Reaching in with an imagination full of teeth, I found a small white mouse. Contentedly sitting in the palm of my hand, it was the only proof now left – apart from the general state of my appearance and smell – of the tide of vermin that had probably saved me from whatever untimely fate Hunger had had in mind.
Of Dorie, there was no sign; nor did my shadow bend. I got down on one knee and put the mouse down on the pavement. It scampered away, unconcerned, down the street towards a bus stop where, as ordinary, boring and mundane as anything we could have wished to see, a night bus was pulling up.
The driver said, “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I’m paying, aren’t I?”
“You smell like the zoo,” he replied. “And you’re covered in feathers. I can’t let you on this bus.”
We leant forward so he could see into our eyes and said, “We’ve not had our most successful evening. Are you going to make it worse?”
He let us ride his bus and, content in the security of the back seat on the upper deck, we let it carry us wherever it would, and curled up in our wet clothes, and didn’t sleep.
The bus terminated in Streatham, a suburb between nowhere in particular and somewhere less than distinct.
I walked through the sleeping streets of large terraced houses and wide pavements, neat and repetitive, until I found a small office building with a red fire hydrant sticking out of a side wall. I coaxed the end off, and the water on, with a little magic and a lot of hitting, stripped off my coat and shirt and knelt under the force of its pressurised gout of ice-cold water until I thought my skin would turn to stone.
I still looked like I’d been involved in an industrial accident, and was grateful that my hair was dark already so that it hid the streaks of colour running through it, although my face still resembled a tattoo job gone wrong.
I found a small area of scuffed grass with a couple of giant plane trees round the back of a vast, shed-like Homebase, stole a metal dust-bin from a nearby house, emptied out its bulging black bags, put in as much old newspaper as I could carry from the local recycling bin and a few odd twigs from beneath the plane trees, and lit a fire. I huddled by it until it burnt down to nothing just before dawn, feeling the heat dry out my clothes and burn some of the ice out of my flesh. Perhaps we slept; we could not tell.
We had failed San Khay, and we were still no nearer to killing the shadow.
But perhaps we were closer to killing Bakker; and that, I felt, might well become the same thing.
As the sun rose across south London, my thoughts began to turn towards Mr Guy Lee.