When we ran into the first guard, he had a fireman’s axe in one hand, took one look at us, and ran straight for us. I threw a handful of electricity on instinct, and that knocked him back, but, to our surprise, didn’t do anything more. He charged again, mouth open and face twisted with rage – it occurred to me that, for an angry running man, he made almost no sound. So I lowered my hands and waited, while the electricity popped angrily between my fingers. Oda leapt forward to push me aside, but at the last instant, when the axe was an inch from striking, the man stopped, wobbled, and shattered into a thousand spatters of paint, which quickly wiggled their way into the concrete. “Illusions,” I said.

“You seem to be enjoying yourself,” she replied, self-consciously flicking bubbles of paint off the back of her hand.

“I think I understand what’s going on.”

“Perhaps you can explain it to me.”

“I think the whole thing is a bloody inane test.”

“A test?”

“To see if we’re really any use whatsoever.”

“‘Use’?” she echoed with disdain.

“Are you just going to repeat select parts of what I say?”

“I just wish to remove any hint of cryptic mystery you’re attempting to push.”

I sighed. “In the good old days you said, ‘Hello, I’m a sorcerer and this is what I want’ and people bloody listened. But these days … I guess Bakker has given the profession a bad name.”

I relaxed, turning my fingers towards the floor, and slowly let the electricity on my skin make its way to earth, tickling its way down my legs, across my feet and into the concrete.

“If I understand you, is that wise?” she asked, watching the last sparks die.

“Bollocks if I’m going to play their games,” I replied. “We have too much we need to do.” I raised my head and shouted down the corridor, “All right, you’ve had your fun, you’ve seen what we’re up to. Now either you cut this crap right now or I’ll bring the bloody street down on your head, and don’t think I’m not in the mood.”

“Can you do that?” asked Oda quietly.

I dropped my voice again. “Oda, even if I was inclined to tell you the extent of my abilities, do you really think now is the time for an academic exploration of the subject?”

“You were saying?” she asked, lifting her eyebrows and smiling a sickly smile.

“Oh, right, yes.” I raised my voice again. “I mean it! We talk right now or everything goes fucking mythic. Right now!”

From the far end of the corridor a petulant voice said, “Oh, all right, sorcerer, you’ve made your point. Jesus, it’s not like we wanted the sermon on the fucking mount.”

I grinned at Oda. “Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

We ended up back in the room with the round table. She said her name was Vera and she was, she coldly informed us, the mostly properly elected head of the Long White City Clan, and proud of it.

“What’s a mostly properly elected head?” I asked.

“It’s generally accepted that if there was an election, I’d win,” she answered, with a dazzling tight smile. “So I figure – why bother?” She sat down, stretching out a pair of legs clad in more tight leather than it seemed circulation could bear, and said casually, “So, you really are a sorcerer. I wasn’t sure.”

“You could have bloody asked,” I said. “No one these days seems interested in just asking.”

“I thought it’d be more telling to see what you did on your own initiative,” she replied. “And I figured … if you were out to get us we would have been got quicker. Sorry about the sandwiches. Would you like something better?”

“Not hungry,” said Oda, in a voice like icebergs creaking in a high sea.

“I wouldn’t mind,” I answered. “But I would like to know – why the theatrics?”

“We have to be careful; the Clan is under siege. Guy Lee has promised to destroy every trace of us, and is throwing around a lot of money and a lot of threats.”

“So you lock up anyone who comes to say hello?”

“Until we can find out some more information about them. For example, in the day and a half we’ve had you here …”

“Day and a half?” echoed Oda incredulously.

“Yes.” Statement, matter-of-fact; this was not a woman used to remorse or even polite social embarrassments. “I’ve learnt that you” – one long, pointed finger uncurled luxuriously in my direction – “are almost certainly Matthew Swift, sorcerer, ex-corpse, formerly a cleaner for Lambeth Borough Council and …”

“You were a cleaner in Lambeth?”

“I needed the money,” I said.

“You cleaned?” Oda couldn’t have looked more surprised if she’d been told that I’d built the pyramids in my spare time.

“… and the chosen and favoured apprentice of Robert James Bakker,” Vera concluded with an irritated exhalation, her moment of revelation spoilt.

“That’s all true enough,” I admitted. “Although again – you need only have asked.”

“Can’t be too certain.”

“How did you find out?”

“It wasn’t too hard; sorcerer, living and not in a mental home, ostensibly not working for the Tower, grudge against Bakker. Amiltech in pieces, Khay dead, no one to blame and a rumour going round that Bakker’s apprentice is back, with a serious grudge against the master. Just needed to match up some photos and sweet-talk a few filing clerks, to get the proof.”

I shrugged; there didn’t seem much use denying it.

“Heard you were dead.”

I shrugged again.

“Good recovery,” she added, eyeing me up for a reaction.

“Thanks.” I didn’t feel like offering her anything more.

A moment while she waited; it passed, she moved on. “As for you” – another finger uncurled at Oda – “I have no idea who you are or what you want, and that bothers me.”

Oda tilted her chin proudly and said, “You cross me and mine, and you die.”

“Don’t give her any credit for humour,” I agreed quickly. “She really does believe all that.”

“Quaint. Who are you?”

Oda glanced at me. I said, “Give her the bad news.”

“I belong to the Order.”

“Never heard of you.”

Oda smiled thinly. “That’s how good we are.”

Vera hesitated, then a slow, nasty smile spread across her face. “I see.”

“We can help you destroy Bakker.”

“Charming of you. Where’s the catch?”

“I need to make a phone call,” said Oda flatly.

“Tough,” retorted Vera, eyes flashing.

“Please let her make the phone call,” I said wearily, “she’ll be insufferable until she does.”

“Why should I?”

“Because she’s a member of the Order, an evil group of unimaginative people who are holding an acquaintance of mine hostage against my good behaviour, and I’d like him to survive long enough to join you and to join me in helping bring down Bakker and all his works. How does that sound?”

“What kind of sorcerer are you?” chuckled Vera, doing her best to look unimpressed. “A reasonable one. I know that I can’t fight Lee alone, not now he knows I’m coming; I know that I need your help. Will you help us?” To my surprise, Vera grinned. “When you put it like that, sorcerer, we may have grounds to talk.”

*

Oda got her phone call, and I got a tour of the Kingsway Telephone Exchange.

“It’s built to survive a nuclear attack,” explained Vera as we wandered through the bland, tight tunnels. “Nuclear attack didn’t happen so they used it as a telephone exchange. You could come down here at seven in the morning and go out nine hours later; and in winter it’d still be dark, the entire day gone, poof, just like that. Time loses its meaning away from the sunlight.”

“What are you doing down here?” I asked as we drifted through the endless corridors of psychedelic paint. “Why’s the Clan here?”

“We used to be in White City – that’s where our name came from. Then they demolished our home in order to build this new shopping mall, and by then, Guy Lee had decided we were a pain. Harris Simmons has fifteen million invested in the shopping mall – tell you something? Fingers in every pie. The Clan picks up lost magicians – kids who don’t understand that the things they draw are coming alive, voodoo artists possessed by the spirits, enchanters who can’t control their own creations – we look after our own, make sure that the word doesn’t get out about what we do, keep the authorities out of our hair.”

“What makes you better than Lee?” I asked.

“In the grand scheme, I suppose not much. Our members will still steal, bewitch, bedazzle and charm when they need to, in order to profit or survive. We have a lot of strays to look after; you mustn’t be surprised that some of them bite. Prostitutes who are not afraid of a cantrip for temporary beauty, thieves who sometimes find that it is useful to be more than just a metaphorical shadow – these things happen, you live with it. But we don’t nail people to trees if they break our rules. And we don’t rape the women who don’t obey us when we order them to cast a spell. And we don’t torture the fortune-tellers who refuse to give us money, and we don’t experiment on the plucked-out eyes of the seers to see if we can leech away any of their sight, and we don’t poison beggars with heroin so we can ride their trip without the drugs in our blood, or sacrifice human flesh to the spirits of a place for their good favour, or cast impenetrable glamours enriched with the blood of children to make our whores seem more beautiful, even the pig-ugly ones. And we don’t like to talk with the dead. They tell you things that are sometimes best not heard. Is that what you wanted to hear, sorcerer?”

“I was hoping for something in shining armour, but thanks for the run-down,” I said.

“You’re welcome. So, Lee doesn’t like us. He thinks we’re treading on his toes. He wants things from us.”

“What sort of things?”

“Money. Services. Snitching. We’ve got a lot of contacts and he doesn’t like rivals. And he’s tough – there’s an army out there who’ll follow him, and more just waiting at the Tower to do his word. He likes to have control. Whites don’t like to be controlled. It’s only going to get shittier. Although, with Amiltech kinda fucked …”

“It’ll recover,” I sighed. “Sure, it’s bad, it looks bad, but Amiltech will always recover while the Tower’s around.”

“Even though San Khay is dead?” she asked quickly.

I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t kill him. Let’s get this sorted right here, right now. I didn’t kill him.”

“Pity,” she sighed. “Why not? I would have.”

“Someone else got there first.”

She waited.

I said nothing more.

She shrugged. “Fine. OK. So Amiltech are fucked for now – that’s a good thing. What can you do for me?”

“I can help you against Lee.”

“How?”

“I can get you some help.”

“Warlocks, bikers and religious psycho-bitches? Thanks; I’d rather take my chances.”

“The Beggar King too.”

“And you of course!” Mocking doubt bit acid into her voice. “Our own pet sorcerer, hand-trained by the man sitting at the top of the Tower.”

“Bakker is my enemy too.”

“Yeah. I heard he might be. Why can you get me all this help, when no one’s given a fuck until now?”

I considered the reasons, ticked them off on my fingers. “One: I’m a sorcerer, and I’m told that right now, that’s a bit of a novelty. Two: Sinclair has already laid the groundwork for this, I’m just finishing it off. Three: I was Bakker’s apprentice. His chosen pupil, surrogate brat kid, spoilt adopted fucking son. You’re scared of him? Be scared of me too. Four …”

We hesitated.

“Four?”

I thought about the telephone exchange, looked into the bright knife-edge of Vera’s gaze, bit back our words. “Never mind about four,” I said quickly. “It’s not important, yet.”

She grunted, half-shook her head. “OK. Whatever. There’s something else I need to ask you, though.”

“Ask, then.”

“You heard how so many sorcerers died? About Awan, Akute, Patel …”

I nodded.

“Good. Then you’ll know the basics. A creature that can’t be killed, that delights in the death of its enemies, that kills Bakker’s enemies, that can’t be stopped and …”

“I stopped it. Ask Oda. I held it back.”

“How?”

“It was just temporary, a spell – but it came looking for us, and didn’t succeed. Not this time.”

“You know about this creature? Can you kill it?” She spoke quickly, eager – afraid. “Kill it and you’ll have a bargain.”

She knew about Hunger.

Better – she knew enough about it to be afraid.

That, I could respect.

“I think I can kill it,” I said. “But I need to see Bakker first.”

“Well, that’s a problem, since I’m imagining you’re not his favourite person right now and the guy’s as hard to find as El bloody Dorado.”

“You misunderstand. I think, to kill it, I’ll have to kill him.”

“Why?”

I lowered my voice. “You keep a secret?”

“No,” she replied. “Not unless it’s fucking monumentally important.”

“This one could be. This could be the key to everything, the answer to the question you didn’t know to ask.”

She shrugged. “Hit me; no promises.”

“The shadow, and Bakker?”

“Yeah?”

“I think they might be the same thing.”

She opened her mouth to protest, then hesitated, face shuttering down, blanking off all emotion. “Oh,” she said finally, a long slow sound. “Shit. You got proof?”

“I’ve got … a lot of circumstance.”

“Who else knows – suspects – whatever?”

“No one that I know of. Although I guess the Beggar King will have it figured out, and if there’s any sorcerers still left alive, not hiding or mad, they’ll have guessed. But they’ll be afraid.”

“What makes you so sure of this?”

I thought about it, licking my lips, remembering the taste of blood. “The people who are attacked. The nature of the attacks and the creature – hungry, longing for life that it can’t have, a shadow. Something Bakker’s sister said; he wanted her to summon some creatures, voices in the wire, he thought they would keep him alive. ‘Make me a shadow on the wall’. It attacked her and let her live – why? And lastly …”

“Lastly?” she asked, sharp, when I hesitated.

“I’ve seen the creature’s face. It has his face, withered and pale, but still his face. The shadow is related to Bakker – I don’t quite know how, but I’m almost convinced of it. I think that if you stop Bakker, you stop the shadow. Chicken and egg.”

She drew in a long breath. “Yeah. Right. OK. Let’s say I’m running with this for a moment. But to kill Bakker you’re going to have to eliminate his security: Guy Lee, maybe a few others – Dana Mikeda, almost certainly. To do that, you risk drawing the attention of this shadow. You’re also going to have a problem with Mikeda.”

I looked up sharply and saw her eyes fixed, intelligent and bright, on my face. “It’ll be fine,” I said.

“She was your apprentice,” she said mildly. “I hear that sorcerers get quite attached to their apprentices.”

“It’s complicated.”

“I bet it is.”

“I’ll deal with it,” I said, harsher than I’d meant.

“I hope you do. You’re going to have to anyway. Were you and Elizabeth Bakker …?” I didn’t answer the lilting question in her voice. She added, “Probably not important.”

“No,” I said sharply. “Not to you.”

Her smile lurked for a second; a moment of cruelty, verging on laughter. “All right, Mr Matthew Swift,” she said finally. “I think it’s fair to say that you have got our attention. What exactly do you want to do?”

I sagged, unable to hide the sudden relief. “It’s very simple. I need to eliminate Guy Lee and his underworld army, and I need help to do it.”

“I don’t trust that girl you’re with.”

“Neither do I. You ought to know that she won’t be your friend, when this is over.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Have you brought me trouble?”

“I’m sorry. I had no choice.”

“No choice? In what?”

“I need people to help me against Lee. I’m willing to pay as high a price as need be.”

Her jaw tightened. “I see. Sorcerers.”

“What does that mean?”

“You are usually so high on your own power that you forget the other bastards in your way. You say things like ‘necessary sacrifice’ or ‘needful losses’, because you have to be the fucking hero.” She rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Bloody sorcerers.”

“You’re leaping to conclusions,” I said mildly.

Her eyes flashed. “It’s how Bakker began,” she said. “Things are necessary.” I said nothing.

“You’ve got some way of beating Lee without getting my people killed?”

“Does he know you’re here?” I gestured at the paint-encrusted walls. “I mean, down here, in the Exchange?”

“No. Perhaps. No.”

“I imagine it’s a secret you like to keep well.”

“Very,” she said. “Why?”

I looked down the long, splotched corridor. “Nuclear bunker?” I asked.

She nodded.

“That could come in handy.”

The doors were painted green, were thick and made of iron, and clanked, with solid locks. The walls between each room were half a foot thick, the fire notices thirty years old, the ventilation system chugging and clogged with the thick dirt that drifts down eventually on all things in the city, turning even white marble foggy black. There were a lot of doors; they at least had been well maintained. There were miles of dipping and winding tunnel, slowly sloping upwards, their gradients almost imperceptible. Signs had been painted onto the occasional wall with an arrow pointing towards their destination – Chancery Lane – High Holborn – Lincoln’s Inn – Aldwych. As we walked I could feel the rattling of the Piccadilly line in the walls beside us. Vera said, “There used to be other trains too.”

“Which ones?”

“The Post Office ran trains between its depots. The government always had something being moved about down here. The markets – they’d bring meat to Smithfield in subterranean trucks. Some of the lines never went above ground. You can’t say that about many trains in the city. But it’s different now. People forget about the things underground.”

I thought about the spirit I’d spoken with in Camden, guardian of the old railway line, and the empty magical circle that I’d intended for Khay. Perhaps, I thought, it might still have its use.

When I emerged, up a hooked ladder embedded in a concrete wall stained with flaking rust, it was to one side of Lincoln’s Inn, in a shaft full of the roar of sucked-in wind and heavy machinery. For a moment I thought it might be daybreak; but the clock on Holborn tube station left no room for doubt. Time moved differently underground. It was a drizzling, overcast evening, with the thin London rain and thick London clouds that never quite do their stuff, but constantly threaten.

Vera left me there. She said she didn’t like to be seen above ground, and didn’t offer to shake my hand goodbye.

Oda was standing outside Holborn station, her bag of weaponry slung over her shoulder, mobile phone in her hand. The big stone-built blocks of Kingsway and the wide, blank slabs of High Holborn’s offices met in a medley of traffic lights, bright corporate signs, and crowding pedestrians jostling for space while the bendy buses hogged the middle of the road.

“Well?” I said, blinking as my eyes adjusted to the grey, monochrome evening outside after the glaring bulbs and sinking shadows of underground.

“They cut off a couple of the biker’s fingers,” she replied briskly, folding the phone up and slipping it into her pocket.

“They what?”

“That’s the last time you call me humourless,” she said with a smile as welcoming as the open jaw of a shrieking bat. “Are the Whites going to help?”

“Yes.”

“What exactly can they do?”

“They can stay exactly where they are,” I replied with forced brightness. “And with any luck, that should be enough. Now, I need you to do me a favour.”

“A favour?” The word sounded dirty in her mouth.

“Yes. I need you to call your pissy bastard friends and tell them to let Blackjack go.”

“Why?”

I ticked the reasons off on my fingers, just like she’d ticked them off on hers. “One: it’s nice. Two: you don’t need to hold anyone hostage to get me fighting the Tower; that’ll happen anyway. Three: we need the bikers as allies and Blackjack is the only man I know of who can conveniently find them, and perhaps get a message to the warlocks in Birmingham as well. Four: I’ve cursed the head of your Order – right now he’ll think it’s flu and soon he’ll realise that it’s not, and I’m not going to uncurse him until you people stop playing silly buggers – how does all that sound to you?”

She thought hard about it; then said, without any change in expression, “When we are away from this place and these people, I will kill you, sorcerer.”

“That,” I replied, “would be what the corporate consultants call ‘unproductive’. Make the phone call – I’m sure we’ll have plenty to talk about.” I was beginning to feel better.

*

I waited in a café on Kingsway, drinking overpriced coffee with some kind of foul-tasting syrup in it, while Oda paced in the street outside and talked and talked into her phone. By the looks of things, she was having one hell of an argument. When she’d been talking for half an hour, I tried as casually as possible to move further into the recesses of the shop, away from the windows, just in case she was serious about shooting me.

I wondered what form my curse on the head of the Order had taken while I was gone, how deeply it had burrowed into his flesh, how far the worm of blue maggot magic had feasted on the heat of his blood. He’d had our blood on his hands, by the time we’d finished our conversation – such proximity to our blood, we hoped, could only make the passage of our spell more deadly and swift.

When Oda eventually finished on the phone she stomped into the café, face glowing with anger, sat down on the sofa in the alcove opposite me, threw her bag down on the floor, reached into her jacket pocket and surreptitiously pulled out a gun. It lay under the table in her grasp, pointed vaguely at me – but in such a small space, accuracy of aim didn’t matter. Though our heart skipped faster at the thought of it there, I struggled to keep my face calm, a smile half in place against impending disaster.

She said through gritted teeth, “What have you done?”

“Are you planning on using that?” I asked, nodding down at the thing under the table.

“I have orders to shoot you as soon as you’ve reversed your spell.”

“Thank you for your honesty at least, but you’re going to have trouble there.”

“Why?”

“I’m not going to reverse it, and you’re not making much of a case for me trying.”

“What did you do to our leader?”

“He had our blood on his hands,” we snapped. “You should have known that our blood is potent. Am I going to have a conversation with your boss or not?”

“I knew you couldn’t be trusted.”

“Of course you did. But the fact is, you kidnapped me and my friend, and did a lot of shouting and hitting in the mean time; and really I’m only” – I considered the choice of words – “evening up the balance sheet?”

For a moment she looked pained, small, almost childish, but then the mask was back on. “He’ll talk to you by phone.”

“He’ll see me in bloody person,” I said, “and without his damned armoured bodyguard, thanking you kindly.”

“Impossible. You’ll kill him.”

“Oda” – I struggled to keep the anger out of my voice – “I have done nothing to harm you. I have told you the truth. You didn’t need to try and hurt me to get my attention – I was willing to help. I still am.”

She said nothing.

“Are you going to shoot me?” I asked, forcing a smile onto my face. “It’s more of a test of faith, really, shooting someone and getting caught for it, rather than dying in a heroic bloodbath. If you die in the act, you become a martyr, you get nothing but glory or at the worst, unanswered questions – your motives remain entirely your own. If you get caught, alive, you’ll have to take responsibility, explain why, answer all the world’s questions and I bet, I just bet that the Order won’t bother to bail you out when the police come asking, ‘So, Oda, why are you armed to the teeth and why did you shoot that utterly harmless Mr Swift?’ They’ll call you insane and lock you up and you’ll never have the glory or the thanks or the innocence that dying in the attempt might, in its own twisted way, have given you.”

“Sorcerer?”

“Um?”

“I will kill you – maybe not now, maybe not in the eyes of men, but I promise, I will kill you.”

“Good!” I said brightly. “Then I look forward to our meeting. I’m sure you can work something out.”

I left her in the café. It was a risk, but it had to be done.

I thought about how I’d feel with Blackjack’s blood on my hands. I hardly knew the man, had little reason to trust him, and nothing more between us than a common enemy. I wanted no responsibility for the man’s welfare; but the obligation had been given to me anyway. If he died, it would be my fault.

And if he died, we knew with absolute certainty that we would not stop until we had destroyed the Order, washed away our guilt with their blood. Another enemy on the list, and one we were happy to oblige.

But I want …

                           … we feel …

                                    come be me

and be free

but I

and we

but I AM

… and we be … we be …

I bit my lip until it bled, and until my thoughts were nothing but the grey wash of the early evening street, filling with the gently pattering rain.

We met in a place and at a time of my choosing: 10.30 a.m. at Stansted Airport. There were a lot of reasons; for a start, Stansted Airport is my least disliked of all the airports ringing London, not as packed and confusing as the heaving mass at Gatwick, or as clinically airless as Heathrow; not as isolated and battered as Luton, not as small as City, which sat in the middle of a disused wharf, surrounded by housing and old patches of neglected concrete, and didn’t even have the good grace to be at the end of a railway line. I liked Stansted because its roof was high and clear, letting in white morning sunshine, because the train service left Liverpool Street on time, was fast, clean and, as express services went, relatively cheap; most of all I liked it because in every corner and on every wall, coffee shop booth and behind every door there was a CCTV camera, and because the police were everywhere, and always suspicious. Even outside the technical limits of the city, the air in the airport hummed with its own slick, fast, silvery-shimmered power.

We met by the security checkpoint leading to international soil, where the travellers of the day queued in bored, neat lines to have their baggage scanned and their passports swiped. He arrived alone – at least, he walked up to me alone, although there were plenty of suspects for an entourage – and we were shocked at how ill he looked already. Fat blue veins bulged on his hands and face, their colour visible even through the thick pigment of his skin; his eyes looked sunken, his hair more bedraggled. His expression was no longer one of triumph but cold, determined hate; his walk was uneven and when he raised his hands they trembled, the fingers convulsing in little bursts, like the nerves wanted to exercise themselves without permission from the brain. He walked up to me, stopped a metre away, looked me straight in the eye and said, “You have become a liability already, Mr Swift.”

“So shoot me!” I said.

“Don’t tempt fate.”

“I wasn’t tempting fate, I was asking you,” I replied. “I’m sure that all these lovely gentlemen with the guns” – I gestured round the court at the security guards patting down the passengers as they passed through the endless rows of metal detectors – “would be only too happy to testify the case.”

“You want the biker freed – we can do that.”

“It’s not just my personal pissed-off mood,” I retorted. “I need Blackjack.”

“Why?”

“To convince the rest of his gang to join the Whites; to stir up a few allies against Lee.”

“The Whites – Oda told me of your plan.”

“And I’m sure that when you’re done with the Tower you’ll be turning your attention to them,” I sighed, “but right now, you need them, and you still bloody need me – more than ever, by the looks of things.”

“You did this,” he snarled, eyes flashing dully in the folds of his diseased skin.

“Yes. If you’d just talked to me politely, we could have avoided this entire situation.”

“I am willing to die for my faith,” he declared, edging a step closer. “What makes you think that this curse of yours will change my mind about you?”

“Nothing at all,” I said. “You hate me and I hate you, end of story. But you need me, and I may just bloody well end up needing you and all your pig-stupid moronic cultist followers. So. I’ll lift the curse when I know that Blackjack is free. And you’ll still help me even though you don’t have a hostage against me, because you still need me against Bakker. And I won’t do anything against you because I still might need you to help against him. And when this whole thing is over we’ll do a tally list of who hurt who the more. And if it doesn’t come out even, we can fight it out till doomsday, what do you say?”

“What … help …” he spat the word, “do you need?”

“Men with weapons,” I replied. “Everyone you have available, in the Kingsway Exchange by midnight tomorrow, ready to fight it out with Guy Lee.”

“In the Exchange? Why there?”

“Because that’s where Guy is going to attack.”

“You’re sure of this?”

“Not yet. But if you give me a few more hours, I will be.”

“You’re … luring him into a trap?” suggested the man weakly. “How? Why will he attack?”

“He’ll be ordered to from above,” I replied. “Do you really want the quibbling details, or will you just help me?”

“Undo what you’ve done,” he said.

“Your word pretty please on a plate.”

“I will help you in this.”

“Your word pretty please on the Bible.”

A flicker of anger around his eyes, just for a second; but then he raised one shaking hand and said in a clear, precise voice, “I swear before God. Until the Tower is defeated and Bakker is dead, if you do not harm mine, we will do nothing to harm yours. We will support and help each other against this … greater … evil. Before God I swear.”

I grinned. “Good. I’m glad that one is sorted.”

I spoke to Blackjack on the phone before I undid the curse, just to make sure. He sounded tired, but alive, and promised that he had all his fingers intact. I asked him to find allies. When he’d heard the details, eventually, he said yes, and hung up briskly without another sound.

In the men’s bathroom, I put my hand on the priest’s forehead and slowly, shivering as it wormed its unfamiliar presence back into my skin, drew the curse out of his flesh, the sliver of blue magic trickling across my fingers and melting back into my skin.

The man said, “Is that it?”

“Yes. You’ll recover soon enough. Plenty of bedrest.”

“I do not understand how you managed to cause me harm. You were defenceless.”

“Prayer,” I replied cheerfully, washing my hands clean in the basin. “Prayer and a soul soaked in positive karma.” I glanced at him in the mirror, to find his expression not so much angry any more as curious. “And I am a sorcerer. Magic is just … a point of view. We don’t know your name.”

His eyes flashed up to mine, met them in the mirror; then he looked away. “Names give power.”

“You know that I’m Matthew Swift. I’m assuming you’re ex-directory – secret cultists tend to be – so you might as well tell me.”

“Anton Chaigneau.”

“French?”

“My mother was from the Congo. My father was from whatever Satanic pit spawns such creatures.” He was rubbing his forehead where I’d pulled the curse out, head on one side, a look of discomfort in his eyes.

I said, watching him, forcing myself to sound disinterested, “You’ve come a long way.”

“The Order is good to those who adhere to it,” he insisted. “They are kind.”

“You’re not in charge?”

“I am a servant of the Order, I bring their will …”

“Who’s in charge?”

He shook his head. “Is there anything else I can indulge you with, sorcerer?”

“Who did Oda’s brother kill?”

His face became stone for a moment, then widened out again into a tight grimace. “She told you?”

“Yes.”

“Did she tell you that her brother was a witch doctor?”

“She implied it.”

“Did she tell you that when he first discovered his magic, he tried to help the family, heal others and use his craft for goodness? Did she tell you that the power of it tainted him, corrupted him, as such power always does, and that he swore he could only do the best by creating things of such evil as, I think, will never leave her dreams?”

“Again, it was implied.”

He met my eyes and said, utterly flat, “He killed her two little sisters, and tried to kill her. He said it was a necessary sacrifice to summon creatures of knowledge, spirits. He said that nothing else would do but the blood of kin, and apologised and wept but said it was the necessary thing. Oda was fourteen at the time – her sisters were nine and eleven. She escaped, and didn’t speak for three years after. Her brother was killed by the local police when he refused to surrender himself, but not before his arts had burnt Oda’s family home, and everything she possessed, to the ground. The Order loves her. We will be a better family than any formed of kin. What do you do that’s ‘necessary’, Mr Swift?”

“Necessary?” We tried the word a few times, rolling it around our tongue and lips. “We work with you, Mr Chaigneau. Only because it is necessary. I hope to be seeing your men armed and ready for battle by tomorrow night; in the mean time, I wish you a speedy and successful recovery. Good day to you, Mr Chaigneau.”

I turned and walked away, and to my relief, no one tried to stop me. On the train, my hands were shaking. I had never played such games before; no degree of magical inclination can teach you the character skills necessary for cloak-and-dagger dealing; never before, however bad things had got, had I felt that my life was in danger. At least, not while I was technically alive, last time, and living it.

After lunch, I went back to University College Hospital.

Sinclair was still sleeping a sleep that was too close to death for our taste, and Charlie was still on the door.

“Did you visit her?” he asked, slipping into the room as I looked down at Sinclair’s sickbed and listened to the puff of his machines.

“What?”

“Elizabeth Bakker. Did you visit her?”

“Yes.” I wrenched my gaze from Sinclair and forced myself to meet Charlie’s ever so slightly feral gaze. “I saw her.”

“Did you kill Khay?”

“No.”

“But … he is dead,” said Charlie, in the strained voice of a clever man trying to work out something obvious.

“I didn’t kill him … I need to ask you a question.”

“OK. What do you want to know?”

“Two things. First – I’m mustering allies in the old Kingsway Exchange. We’re going to fight Guy Lee.”

He laughed. “Perhaps Harris Simmons will invest in the coffin-making market today and make a huge profit tomorrow?”

“I mean it.”

The humour faded from his face. “Lee has an army of paid and bought troops at his command. And those are just the ones whose breath still condenses in cold winter air.”

“He can’t get support from Amiltech.”

“He doesn’t need support from Amiltech!”

“I’m raising allies against him. I can’t go it solo, not now. I was wondering if you had any friends who might be interested in joining?”

“Friends?” He didn’t understand for a moment; then he let out a long breath and drew his shoulders back. “I see.”

“This is our best chance to break Lee’s monopoly on power in the underworld,” I murmured, studying his face for any kind of reaction. “The Whites are willing to cooperate, the bikers, perhaps the beggars …”

“You want to see if any of my kind will help?”

“It’d be useful.”

“Lee doesn’t bother us. He employs us, most of my kin – most others simply spit at the thought of what we are, unclean.”

“Employs to spy, to cheat, to steal, to kill …”

“We have to survive.”

“This is what Sinclair would want,” I said gently. “This is what he was trying to achieve. I’m just finishing the job.”

His face tightened for a moment in uncertainty, then relaxed. He nodded slowly, fingers loose at his side.

“Second thing,” I said. “You were the closest to Sinclair …”

“Am the closest to Sinclair,” he insisted. “He’s not dead.”

“I apologise – are the closest to Sinclair. That gives you a certain something when it comes to this question.”

“Well?”

“Of all those people Sinclair gathered together to fight against the Tower – the warlocks, bikers, fortune-tellers, religious nutters, mad old women and me – who do you think is most likely to have betrayed us to Bakker? Who do you think told them where to shoot the night Sinclair was hurt?”

His eyes went instinctively to the slumbering form of the big old man, then back; and they were hard and certain. “The woman. Oda.”

“Why?”

“I know nothing really about her. Ignorance might mean there is something to hide.”

“What if it’s not Oda?”

“You know something?” he asked quickly.

“I know something more than I did,” I replied. “Although it didn’t make me happy to find out. Who would be next on the list?”

He thought about it long and hard. Then, “The biker. Blackjack.”

His answer caught me by surprise, but I tried not to show it. “Why the biker?”

“His smell, when we were attacked.”

“His smell?”

“Yes.” Charlie’s eyes flashed up to mine, daring me to disagree. I raised my hands and shook my head defensively. His mouth twitched in triumph.

“All right,” I said. “What did he smell of?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“When the first bullets started hitting,” said Charlie, “I could smell the fear on you, the sweat on the warlock, the terror on the fortune-teller, the blood on the hurt men, but on him – on the biker – there was nothing. His skin did not perspire.”

“I see.”

“You do not believe?” he demanded, fingers tightening.

“I believe you,” I said hastily. “I just don’t know what to make of it.”

“Why do you ask now?”

“I’m getting allies together against Lee, just like Sinclair tried to get allies together against the Tower …”

He was nodding already. “You think one of them might betray you.”

“It’s possible.”

“What will you do if they do?”

I thought about it, then smiled. “Absolutely nothing,” I replied. “At least, for the moment. Nothing at all.”

It took nearly thirty-six hours for the first emissaries to arrive. The bikers sent messages out to Birmingham, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, all the cities frightened of being next hit by the Tower. The Whites sent whispers through the tunnels of the city; the Order cleaned its guns, the beggars skulked and the skies turned. Among so many people, so much preparation, someone would, sooner or later, say something stupid. Sooner or later, Lee would hear of Sinclair’s plans. That was just fine by me.

Necessary things.

They assembled at the My Old Dutch pancake house at suppertime, around a table booked for eight, although we weren’t sure how many would arrive.

The My Old Dutch served massive plates covered with batter, covered in turn with almost anything imaginable. Chicken, ham, bacon, egg, cheese, tomato, salad, chocolate, coconut, cream, lemon, sugar, honey, syrup, treacle – ask, and it would be delivered. I sat with my back to the wall, head away from the window next to Vera and ordered the most sugary, exotic-sounding dish we could find. Vera ordered tap water and a Caesar salad, and flinched at the prices. She wasn’t used to daylight; she especially wasn’t used to being seen through glass.

Oda and Anton Chaigneau arrived together; slipping in behind them came their bodyguards in the guise of an amorous courting couple. Outside, a pair of badly disguised traffic wardens each tried to hide their gun under their bulky black jacket and reflective vest. Neither Oda nor Anton looked happy; but they both sat, and both ordered very dull, very vegetarian salads. His face didn’t bulge as it had at Stansted airport, his hands didn’t tremble; nonetheless he didn’t grace me with so much as a nod of acknowledgement, but sat, when not eating, with his hands folded and his face immovable.

The small talk was not extensive. There were séances with livelier chatter. Oda glared suspiciously at Vera; Vera glared suspiciously at her. I ate pancakes.

“I don’t like having armed men eat in the same place as me,” Vera offered at last.

“I don’t like your manner of dress, your soul, your duplicity or you,” replied Chaigneau. “But that is besides the point.”

Vera made an indignant snorting noise.

I said, through a particularly rich bite of coconut, cream and hot chocolate sauce, “What has our religious nut friend here upset is the two men at the back of the restaurant with the tattoos running across every inch of their skin and the rich purple glow of embedded power emanating from their flesh – although it is ironic that someone that insensitive actually noticed them. Are you going to be civil or do I have to bang heads together?”

Vera simply grunted and ordered more water.

I was settling into my second pancake when the two shapeshifters arrived. I could tell by a number of things what they were: by the emanation of slippery, unstable deep brown magic crawling off their skins like oil off a puddle of water, by the flash of yellow in their eyes when they turned their heads quickly round the restaurant, looking for the table, but most of all, by the old man’s sandals they wore over their neatly socked feet, which, while being in appalling taste, left room for the shape of their toes to change. I waved at them, and they, sniffing cautiously, drifted over to our table.

“We’re looking for Mr Swift,” said one.

“And what do you do?” asked Vera. “Write fortunes on the back of cigarette packets?”

“We bite,” replied the woman coldly. “Among other things.”

“Have a pancake,” I said, waving my fork in cheerless welcome. “I’m Matthew Swift. I’m guessing a nice young man with a pair of stylish whiskers called Charlie sent you?”

They sat down carefully, eyeing up the table. “There are … those who do not like … anything,” said the woman at last, pretending to scan the menu as she spoke. “We’re committing to nothing.”

“Sure thing,” I said with a shrug. “Welcome to the pack.”

The last to come was the biker, and he certainly wasn’t alone. He came with two others, one of whom could have been three men. When he turned sideways he just about managed to fit through the door, and when he sat down, the chair, creaking and moaning, just about managed to support his weight. It wasn’t that he was fat – not in the traditional saggy-belly, drooping-chin sense of fat. He was pure and simple big: his thighs bulged in their black leather trousers, his shoulders strained the edges of his studded, extra-large black jacket, his chest threatened to burst through his black T-shirt, his beard ruptured off his face like curling smoke from a volcano, his hands were the size of the plate from which Vera ate her salad, his fingers were thick and raw, his every breath was like the rising and falling of a glassmaker’s bellows, his expressions stretched from ear to ear and twitched over the end of his expansive Roman nose. I had never seen such a man – and more, there was a slippery power about him, more than just the bulk of his presence, a flash of orange and golden fire on the senses, visible out of the corner of the eye, impossible to pin down. He smelt of dirt and car oil and the road, and uncontrolled, risky power. He looked at us and said, “Fucking hell. Who hit you lot with a fucking haddock and hung you out to dry?”

Behind him, Blackjack said, “I don’t think they’re really looking for love.”

“Hello, Dave,” I murmured at Blackjack.

“Hello, sorcerer. Hello, bastard pig priest and your bitch consort slut of a minion,” said Blackjack, nodding at Chaigneau and Oda. He sank himself onto a chair next to me with an expression of polite goodwill on his face. Then to me, “Hear you got into trouble.”

“It’s fine.”

“Yeah? How fine?”

“Chocolate pancake with cream fine,” I answered. “It’s not going to be civil; but there are people here, aren’t there?”

“Oh, it’s going to be another massive fuck-up,” murmured the third arrival. I looked again, and recognised him.

“Survived, then?” I asked.

The warlock was still dressed to the nines in what I could only politely call “ethnic dress”, although by English standards he looked as ethnic as mushy peas. He grunted. “Got the old gang back together? A little talk, a little chat, a little sniper fire through the window at night?” he asked. He helped himself to a fingerful of hot chocolate sauce still in its pot, licking his digit clean with a loud slurping noise. “You know, I really hoped it was you who fucking got done at Sinclair’s place.”

“How did you survive?” asked Oda incredulously. Then, only a little quieter, “Why you?”

“Psycho-bitch,” sneered the warlock, “there are gods watching over me older than the furry fucking mammoths.”

“This is going to be hilarious,” sighed Blackjack.

“Is this it?” asked Vera incredulously through a slurp of thick pink milkshake. “The best that Sinclair and Swift could muster – a bickering pack of badly dressed drones?”

“I’m a fucking warlock!” he retorted. “Master of mystic fucking arts!”

“He’s a sorcerer,” she replied, indicating me, “and I’m told that means he could like, totally pop your eyes out of your skull with a thought. Doesn’t stop him looking like a starving pigeon, does it?”

“Thank you,” I muttered, snatching the hot chocolate sauce away from the warlock’s dabbling fingers. “I’m glad we’re all getting on so well. Sit down, warlock, no one’s going to get shot here.”

“You sure of that?” he replied.

“This is a public space. Besides, too many people have brought far too many reinforcements. It’d be a bloodbath and if anyone here is planning on shooting us” – my gaze moved round the table – “they sure as hell wouldn’t get out of it alive.”

“There are always car bombs,” said Chaigneau with a bright, white smile. “Guy Lee is renowned for his flexibility in these matters.”

The big biker said, “You think you can park anything round here without it getting done? Traffic wardens would have it in thirty seconds.’Sides, Guy Lee isn’t going to kill us in the pancake house, because, talking straight, us being here is one big fucking joke. Are we going to do any introductions?”

“I’m Matthew,” I replied.

“Halfburn,” said the biker, neck bulging in what might have been a nod. “Although if we’re going to be real friendly about this, you can call me Leslie.”

“Leslie?”

He met my eyes full on, and his gaze was the colour of burnt tar on a night-time road. “Yeah,” he said. “You got something to add?”

“No.”

“Good. This is Blackjack,” jerking his chin at Blackjack, “and the guy in the skirt,” indicating the warlock, “goes by the online chatroom

name of Mighty Magician 1572, and his real name’s Martin.”

“Hello, Martin,” I said, nodding at the warlock, who grunted.

Halfburn grinned, leant forward so his saucepan-sized fists rested heavily on the table, looked round until he had every gaze fixed on his face, and said, “So – is there anything other than fucking pancakes to eat in this dive?”

There have been alliances before, within the magical community. Magicians and all their subspecies come in every shape and size, faith, creed, sex, colour and political inclining. This naturally leads to affiliations, groupings, clans of like-minded individuals with similar buttons to be pressed. Sometimes, even these pig-headed bickering clans can agree on a common cause. Back in the Dark Ages they agreed to fight a couple of faerie hordes, although myths and records for those times are blended. In the Renaissance, rumours leaked of epic battles with demon spawn crawling out from their caves, and alliances of alchemists in the cities swapping intelligence with the last hiding druids cowering in the countryside on where the necromancers were hunting for their dead. In the 1800s there were stories that one of the very earliest urban magicians, among the first to taste power in the machines and smoke and bricks of the city, rather than the older sources of magic, created an alliance of beggars and aristocrats, to further the study of this new wonder together. Stories also tell that the magician in question died impaled on the end of an enchanted rapier thrust through his chest by one of his erstwhile allies; but, again, records and myth tend to blur into each other.

The last alliance of its sort that I knew of came in 1973, when a sorcerer by the name of Terry Woods went out of control and started hurling his magic across the city streets with all the delicacy of an angry gorilla throwing coconuts at startled monkeys. It took the lives of seven wizards and a sorceress called Lucinda to stop him, and the alliance afterwards remained until the last of its members died in the late 1990s, again the victim of unpleasant circumstances. Become too involved in these kinds of battle, and sooner or later, circumstances will become unpleasant.

Our own alliance, made in the pancake house on High Holborn, was very simple, and in many ways carried on the traditions of the past. For a start, none of us liked each other. No one trusted anyone else either. But that was fine. I was perfectly happy to let them bicker; the more they argued, the more the chances were Guy Lee would hear of all that was happening. And with the subtlety of a hand grenade in an oil refinery, he would try and stop it. And that, like all good stories where fear is the theme, should be enough to make an alliance real.

Necessary things.

It helped that we didn’t like them either.

At 7.30 p.m., I looked up from my examination of the bottom of my third milkshake and said over the bickering, “Have you heard of the shadow?”

Silence settled over the table.

“I call it Hunger,” I explained. “It describes what it is: pure hunger, lust, without control or restraint. It resembles a man. His teeth are yellow, his eyes watery blue. His skin is the colour of wet tofu, and on his back he wears a coat stained with blood. My blood, but let’s not split hairs on this. His hair is a thin straggle of nothing; when he leaps, the darkness bends with him. When he stalks you in the night, you can see nothing, touch nothing, but you will know he is coming for you by the bending of your shadows. He kills Bakker’s enemies. His fingers are claws that tear through flesh and bone like they were parting a silk curtain. He runs his tongue over hands soaked in blood, smells the sweat on your skin as you die, looks into your eyes, so close that all you can taste is the rotten stench of his breath. He says, ‘Give me life.’ He is not Bakker. He destroys all that Bakker wishes destroyed, but would not kill Bakker’s sister. Would burn her, send her mad, curse her for not giving Bakker the thing that he desired. Sorcerers are dead. Seers are dead. A prophet who saw his own end ran and could not run far enough. He is not Bakker. He is not human. How long until he comes for you?”

At 7.45 p.m., Vera proposed the final agreement, and all agreed.

She proposed a blood oath.

Some magics never change.

I was quietly opposed to it, but my position wasn’t one where I could say so. Any show of dissent after so long arguing would destroy a day of work. So it was done.

The warlock, the bikers, the Order, the Whites, the weremen and I: over pancakes, milkshakes and beer we swore to help each other until we had destroyed the Tower; and because somethings never change, I pulled my penknife from my bag, a napkin from the pile underneath the ketchup bottles, very carefully cut the top of my thumb, and swore on my blood.

So did everyone else, letting a few drops fall onto the napkin, where it spread into the whiteness and merged with everyone else’s blood in a thickening scarlet stain. When we were done, I burnt the napkin in the flame from a cigarette lighter, spilling the ashes into the empty bottom of a coffee cup. Then, when no one was looking, I tipped the ashes of our blood oath, along with several cigarette stubs, into my jacket pocket, just to be on the safe side.

I did not go to the tunnels that night. Nor did Oda insist on following me when I started walking. Perhaps she’d been warned off, perhaps learnt tact; I didn’t care which, so long as I could be alone.

We walked, without direction, through Covent Garden, feeding off the tingling sparks of magic in the air, feeling it dance across our skin like physical illumination. We wandered through Leicester Square, past Piccadilly Circus, stared up at the endless moving lights and sat on the steps of the statue of Eros, until we felt that any more saturation would make our skin start to glow. We wandered down to St James’s Park, and through the palatial back streets near by: grand offices, old red-brick mansions, high-walled royal palaces, densely hidden mews and the occasional sly, cobbled lane. Shop windows selling bespoke leather spats and cigars. We watched the late-night tourists baiting the guards outside Buckingham Palace while the traffic roared around it, lingered in the maze of fumes and subways and lights and grand hotels of Victoria, wandered through the station and listened to the last trains of the evening chug away towards obscure destinations with improbable names – Tattenham Corner, St Martin’s Heron, Epsom, Sutton, Carshalton Beeches.

When we were finally calm, our mind soothed by drifting down the silver flashing rails of the lines along with the dozing commuters and sleepy lights of the trains, and lulled by their regular rhythm, we left Victoria station, and wandered back onto the streets. Outside a domed Catholic cathedral that could have been transported from the streets of Rome, hiding in a plaza that burst out between the local launderette

and a cobbler’s shop, we found a telephone box.

I dialled the number from memory, and waited.

The number was disconnected.

I swore and tried some others. Two more were disconnected, and one was a XXX video store in Soho whose assistant introduced herself with a silky voice and the words, “Hey hon, looking for something special?”

In desperation, I tried one last number. The phone rang. A voice said, “You’re through to KSP reception, how may I help you?”

“I’d like to speak to Robert Bakker.”

“I’m sorry, we have no one of that name …”

“But you know where to find him. Please. It’s very important.”

“I’m sorry, but …”

“My name is Matthew Swift.”

After a while, a voice said, “Please hold.”

The phone started playing the remnants of Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony on a xylophone. I endured the pain and waited.

Fifty pence later, a new, bored, woman’s voice said, “Hi, you’re through to reception, how may I help?”

My heart rattled at the speed of a train, my mind scuddered along endless silver tracks; but my voice, strengthened by all that buzzing life in one place, was steady. Just like he’d taught me. Forget you are afraid, he’d said. In a place like this, when you step out into the road you could be run down, when you turn a corner you could be knifed, when you come home you could die from a short circuit in the mains, or eat a curry poisoned with badly cooked cat meat and in somewhere this big, and this busy, you will never know what hit you. Forget you are afraid – there is too much worth living to just hide behind your own uncertainties.

I said, “Hi, I’d like to put in a call to Mr Robert Bakker.”

“Mr Bakker is busy at the moment …”

“He’ll want to talk to me; please, it’s very important.”

“May I ask who’s calling?”

“My name is Matthew Swift. Please – tell him.”

“If you will hold the line …”

“I’ll hold.”

I held for another 70p and almost half a movement of xylophone Beethoven. I began to understand the power of tinned telephone music – it gave me something else to get angry about, to marvel at, instead of letting my thoughts dwell on what I was doing.

The woman’s voice came back. “Mr Swift?”

“Yes?”

“Mr Bakker would like to know if there’s a number he can call you back on.”

“Miss?” I answered in my sweetest, gentlest voice.

“Mr Swift?”

“I want you to call Mr Bakker back and tell him that, as well he knows, my body was never found and that this should tell him something about the urgency of my call. Please tell him those exact words.”

“Uh, Mr Swift …”

“Please, miss,” I said nicely. “If that doesn’t get him to the phone, I’ll go away; I promise.”

“I’ll be right back, Mr Swift.”

Vivaldi was the next composer, murdered by someone on a harmonica. Thirty pence later the woman’s voice was back.

“Mr Swift?”

“Still here.”

“I’m transferring you now.”

“Thank you.”

A beep. A long silence. A sigh of distant breath. I found I couldn’t speak. After ten trips of my shuddering heart he said, in that familiar, rich voice, “Matthew?”

“Mr Bakker, sir,” I stumbled, tongue tangling over the automatic, familiar words, feeling like a fifteen-year-old boy again, about to be prescribed tranquillisers.

“Matthew! My God!” Nothing but surprise; no anger, fear, just marvelling wonder, tinged with an odd flavour of almost laughter – perhaps delight. “I heard you were … there was a funeral!”

“Yes. I wasn’t.”

“Clearly, clearly. My God. God. But where are you? I must see you at once!”

Panic was beginning to make my skin burn; whatever I’d been expecting, this was not it. “I don’t think that would be a good idea,” I said.

“Matthew! Are you all right?”

“Fine.”

“I must see you! You must tell me everything – they said you were dead!”

“They were pretty much right.”

“What’s happened to you? My God …”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m staying with some friends.”

“Well you must come round, at once! We have to talk!”

“No, thank you.”

“Why not?” Again, hurt, almost fatherly pain in his voice – whatever I had expected, it was not this, nothing like this, and for a moment, just a moment, I almost said yes. Then we shuddered in fear and turned our face away from the receiver. His voice came, tinny and small, through the phone in our hand. “Matthew? Are you there? Matthew!”

My teacher, Mr Bakker, who came and knocked on my mum’s front door when I was just a kid, voice full of worry and concern.

Give me life, the shadow had said.

And if you gave him a tropical disease, starved him for a month, fed him on nothing but darkness and fear, then Hunger’s face was Bakker’s.

I could taste the blood in my mouth again.

“Make me a shadow on the wall,” I said, leaning my head against the cold of the glass. “Mr Bakker? A shadow on the wall.”

“What’s happened? Tell me what’s happened! Matthew …”

I slammed the phone down on the hook, turned, and ran from that place into the dark, spreading my mind into the wings of the pigeons and the claws of the rats and the honking of the cars and the spinning of the wheels and the drifting of the dust until I forgot that I was running and forgot from what it was I ran.

I did not notice myself sleep, and my dreams flowed like the river.

I woke huddled in a corner underneath Battersea Bridge, brought awake by the sniffing of a dog at the hem of my coat, out for its early-morning run with its well-exercised owner. I smelt of river mud and cement dust; and my legs, when I tried to stand, burned. I had no idea where I’d gone or what I’d seen or done. Although perhaps if we wished …

… we see …

             … we were …

so free

Couldn’t remember.

Didn’t want to remember.

I picked up my few possessions and went to find a shower.

At midday, I found Oda sitting by herself on a bench overlooking the river, outside the white palatial mass of Somerset House, a strange building of stately, many-paned windows, massive stonework, pedimented roofs, and dignified statues surveying its spacious courtyards. It held within its walls a museum, a university, part of a tax office and more besides; a place as confused as the streets compressed around it.

“Where’ve you been?” she asked as I sat down.

“Went wandering.”

“At a time like this?”

“Needed to sort out a few things.” She grunted in reply. I glanced up at her, raising my eyebrows, and said, “Worried?”

“You’ve got us all together – for now – are you going to bail now?”

“I’m staying,” I answered.

“And you’ve made an alliance, sworn on blood – well done. Congratulations. Happy for you. What next? Pitched battle with Guy Lee, blood in the streets and so on?”

“No.”

“You’ve got a plan,” she groaned. “Naturally.”

“It’d be nice to just deal with Lee on his own.”

“Not going to happen,” she said sharply. “Not now San Khay is dead.”

“There’ve been battles before; but they have to be done quietly.”

“A quiet magical battle,” she said with a scowl. “That must be interesting. What do you do – poke each other with your pointy hats?”

“We’ve already got the perfect location.”

She stared at me, understanding. If anything, her expression of dismay deepened. “The Exchange?” she murmured.

“Yes.”

“You’re seriously going to try and get Guy Lee down there?”

“Yes.”

“And what makes you think he’ll be even halfway inclined to do what you want?”

“Because we’re going to be betrayed. Someone’s going to leave the back door open, knock out a few guards, turn off a few alarms and when we’re not looking, poof, Lee is going to sneak right on in there and execute the perfect, self-contained massacre.”

She was on her feet. “You are expecting the people in the tunnels to die?”

“I didn’t say that,” I replied. “I said I’m expecting us to be betrayed.”

“Why?”

“Because we were at Sinclair’s house. Because you know, like I do, that the Tower has contacts everywhere. Because no matter how powerful and important an alliance like this one might seem, it will also look like the number-one opportunity to wipe out the leaders of all those pockets of resistance that Lee has been fussing over for all these years. Someone’s going to tell Lee where we are and what’s going on. Might even be you.”

“Me?” she echoed incredulously.

“Yes.”

“You think that I would …”

“You’ve made your feelings towards me and mine very clear,” I replied sharply, “I’m sure the idea of wiping us all out at a go doesn’t entirely upset you.”

“I don’t just … it’s not …” For a moment, just a moment, there was something in her eyes, a flicker across her face; but it passed, and the mask was there, harder than I’d ever seen it. She swept up her bag and stalked past me, without a sound, without a look. Just for a moment, I felt almost sorry for her.

I met Vera that afternoon outside the local library. She was smoking, with every sign of enjoying it; when I approached, she huffed a cloud in my direction and said, “Have a fag.”

We coughed and recoiled from the stench, from the idea of it, of black tar drifting in our breath. I mumbled, “Thanks, no.”

“Feeling pleased with yourself?”

“Should I?”

“Got an alliance, haven’t you?”

“It wasn’t too hard.”

“It’ll end in blood.”

“I know.”

“And you think it wasn’t too hard? It hasn’t even fucking begun.”

I said, “Sinclair laid the groundwork. I’m just here for Lee, then for Bakker.”

“And you knew the biker, and the warlock, and the Order, and at the end of the day …”

“Yes?”

“… you were Bakker’s apprentice.”

“Is that it?”

“Yes.”

“Does it matter?”

She sucked a long cloud of smoke into her mouth, then puffed it out between her teeth. “Yes,” she said, rolling the cigarette between her fingers. “People want to see if the sorcerers can be redeemed. They’re curious about you – an investment, you might say.”

“Is that it?”

“Don’t you want to be redeemed?” she asked quickly.

“I haven’t done anything wrong to be redeemed.”

“Yes, but what you are, your buddies who like to play with the artificial forces of nature; all horribly gone wrong with the Tower, hasn’t it?” “This is revenge,” we snapped. “There’s nothing more to it.” “Fine,” she said, her voice too light. “Sure. Whatever. What was it you were wanting to chat about?”

“I’m looking for a traitor.”

Her eyes flashed. “There’s a traitor?”

“Almost certainly.”

“The Order?”

“Perhaps.”

“How do you know there’s a traitor? Everyone swore on blood …”

“That’s not the point,” I replied. “Besides, a blood oath doesn’t stop you breaking your vow, it simply makes life difficult once you have, and even spells like that can be broken. Redeemed, I think you’d say.”

“Then who’s the traitor?”

“I have no idea.”

“You have no idea, yet you’re certain that there’s a traitor?”

“There’s got to be!” I said brightly. “All those disparate groups of unlikely people working together, all those busy little people with the big ears who suddenly are ordered to go and hide in the tunnels and prepare for a battle – there’s got to be someone in their numbers who will betray us. Sinclair was gunned down in his room, we did run into the night, the shadow did follow us. Ergo – traitor.”

“This is something you’ve already considered.” Not a question.

“Yes.”

“You want … what? To go around trying to read minds? Shouldn’t the good guys in any heroic battle desist from such tactics?”

“On the contrary,” I said, “we need someone to betray us. We just need to make sure we know what they’re saying when they do it. Need to make them come to us, need to make Guy Lee think it’s important enough to make a stupid move. Take a risk. Come out into the open.”

“And you look like a guy with a plan,” she sighed. “Well, thanks shit.”

“You know you have to fight Lee eventually. Why not now, when everyone is still – sort of – on your side?”

“You’re a real bastard, sorcerer. You’re going to let that many people die, to have your revenge?”

I hesitated, licked dry lips. “Necessary things,” I replied at last. “If … there are greater evils than … there are … Bakker will … it will never stop, Vera? Do you understand that? It will never stop. We have to make it stop, and we have to do it now. If not like this … then how?”

She sucked in a long lungful of smoke, then blew it out between the thin jut of her lips into my face. I coughed, she smiled. “OK,” she said at last. “So we’re gonna be fucking betrayed. Whatever. Lee is going to know of us; he’s going to try and stop us before we can stop him. I get it. You want him to do something stupid. The question is – how stupid do you think stupid can get?”

I shrugged, not really understanding the question.

Her smile widened to a grin, turned nasty. She said, “Matthew Swift – how would you like to meet Mr Guy Lee?”

Oddly enough, she meant it for real.

We went to a club in Soho. It was in a basement and smelt of hot breath compressed into a tiny space, and sweat, and spilt alcohol, and testosterone. The floor was sticky with dried beer splashed across its grey lino surface, the ceiling was low and made lower still by the revolving lights, and the shaking speakers pounding out drumbeats with the rhythm and resonance of a racing heart; and when we saw the dancing, we didn’t know whether to crawl away and cry at the thought of such a hollow, graceless thing, or to stare for ever, hungry to learn. The scent of that place was burning wet heat on our tongue, the sound of it buzzing whispers in our mind, the desire and appetite of it so overwhelming that we didn’t even have to try to hear it; but the feeling of it forced its way into our brain, demanding that we look and be amazed.

Vera looked completely at home. As she trailed through the crowd, myself in tow, men and the odd woman reached out for her and here she’d trail her fingers through there, and press her hips to the waist of some stranger, and even, when an especially tall man with hair spiky from gently melting gel grabbed her round the middle, kissed him, until he let her go and moved on to the next woman to walk across his path. We stared, enthralled, until I forced my eyes away and stared at the floor until my head ached, trying to paste its greyness across my thoughts to keep out the pounding assault on the senses.

We found a corner of black leather sofas underneath a dull red lamp. Vera bought cocktails, strange bluish things in tall elegant clear glasses that were the coldest things in that place. She sat down with her shoulder pressed right into ours and said, “Not your kind of place?”

We took a cautious sip, recoiling at first at the cocktail’s bitter taste, then relaxing as it heated our throat all the way down to the belly with an oddly pleasant sensation of burning. “Different,” I said. “Why are we here?”

“I want you to meet someone.”

“Who?”

“Guy Lee.”

We felt our stomach tighten. “Lee’s here?”

“He will be this evening.”

“This is … his place?”

“No, it’s run by a man called McGrangham; he pays protection money to Lee, and Lee leaves him alone, except for when he occasionally sends some of his men here, to learn how things are done. But that’s not the point. McGrangham also pays money to the Neon Court.”

I nodded slowly, running my finger round the top of the wide cocktail glass. If the Tower made the mafia look polite, then the Neon Court made those members of the mafia locked away for ever gibbering at the back of the asylum look like fluffy teddy bears. It wasn’t a case of punishment and reward; you crossed the Neon Court, you died, pure, quick, simple. The only redeeming feature of the place was that it had only a few very special interests, and never messed with you unless you were stupid enough to mess with it first. And like all the best mafia families, once you were in, you never, ever got out again.

“OK,” I said, “I get it. Neutral territory. No one makes a move in this place without getting a knife in the back. Sure. Why’s Lee here?”

“There’s a pit.”

“A pit?”

“I’m sure you’ve heard of them.”

“Only by reputation and the occasional coroner’s report,” I declared, trying to contain our rising anger.

“Good,” she said, unflustered. “There’s a lot of things going down here,” she added, waving casually around the room. “Trade, sport, knowledge, games – you know how it is. Lee sends his bully dogs here to learn how to fight. And Lee likes to fight.”

“I don’t see how this will help us.”

“Know thine enemy. And …” She let out a long breath. “If you’re gonna fuck with me and mine, sorcerer, I’m gonna fuck with you and yours.”

“I guessed that much; I don’t suppose you can go into specifics.”

“You want Lee to come after us? You want it now?”

“Yes.”

“Then how do you think he’ll feel if he knows, knows that the Whites have allied themselves with Bakker’s fucking apprentice?”

I took a slow, careful slurp of cocktail, smaller than I pretended. “It’s dangerous,” I said at last, “what you’re trying to pull.”

She grinned, stretched like a black leather cat. “Sure,” she said. “It’s the right place, the right time. I’m guessing Lee will know Matthew Swift is alive. I’m guessing he’ll recognise you, tonight. And if he tells his boss – and he’ll have to tell his boss – I’m guessing Bakker will order Lee to do something a little bit stupid. How much does Bakker want you back, Mr Swift?”

I shrugged.

“Mr Swift?”

As casual as a fly creeping down the side of a cream-covered bowl.

“Vera, mostly properly elected White?” I replied, staring into the depths of my glass.

“Mr Swift, how long have your eyes been blue?”

I smiled. I felt old, tired, too big for my skin.

“Bakker will want you back, won’t he, Matthew Swift?”

“Yes.”

“He’ll want Lee to find you. Bring you in. Alive?”

“Perhaps.”

“He’ll know you’re working with us, he’ll know it’s a bad idea. But you don’t argue with Robert Bakker and live. So let’s remind Guy Lee of that. Let’s show him how alive you are. Let’s make him do something stupid.”

“This doesn’t seem like a world-beater of an idea,” I said.

“Necessary things,” she replied.

It was a pit. Very much according to the traditional definition of the word. It lay beneath the club, down deep spiralling stairs where the-boomboomboom of the disco music faded under the sound of the ventilation hum, behind thick metal doors and metal-faced doormen; and when you finally got down there, you stepped into a room plastered with enchantments. They were painted across the walls-in black swirls, ran across the floor with yellow road-marking thickness; the air was oppressive with them, so dense they almost crushed the gestures of incantation beneath them, made the casting of the-lightest spells tantamount to lifting a heavy weight, or to speaking underwater.

That was the observers’ platform.

The pit itself lay beneath, with high black concrete walls and fierce uplighting, its floor also black, and covered with sawdust. We stood among the observers, hundreds strong, from everywhere and dressed in every way, men and women and wizards and people who had no sense of magic at all but could smell the hidden blood waiting to be spilt below. They roared and cheered and screamed with delight as a lurching demon, all bound up in chains, its skin formed from the slimy fat that congealed in the sewers, its eyes burning with blue paraffin flame, lashed and lunged at a group of three men dressed in all kinds of strange armour – shields welded from broken car doors, spears made from torn aerials sharpened to a point – who with every stab got a shriek of pleasure from the crowd, while the demon dripped bleach for blood from the tears in its warping, wobbling skin.

I knew such things existed.

Mankind has always loved its blood sports, and with magic there was an infinite variety of ways to draw fresh, exciting blood.

The smell and the sight of it nearly overwhelmed us. We struggled to control it, keep it out, shocked by the depravity, the sickness, the blackness pouring out of every wall, the bloodshot delight in the eyes of every viewer, the pain in the creatures as they suffered and died; life corrupted, twisted. It horrified us, that all these people seemed to wish to do with life was seek its end; it appalled us that any gift so great could be so easily disregarded, as if they had grown bored with ordinary living and needed to seek out this new thrill to make up for the mundanities of existence. And very quietly, on the edge of the screams and the shouts and the stench of rotting magic, was an excitement and a thrill that threatened to blanket out all sense and leave us howling like the rest.

“We can’t stay here,” we whispered.

“Why not?” asked Vera.

“It is … compelling,” we said.

She looked at us for a long moment, then muttered, “Shit, sorcerer, you’d better not go bang. Come on.”

She dragged me by the sleeve through the crowd, to where two men stood by a locked metal door, and moved to block her way. “McGrangham,” she snapped. “I’m here to see McGrangham.”

“He’s busy.”

“I want to place a really big bet; and he might want to think about doing the same.”

McGrangham’s office was soundproof and looked down on the pit. But it didn’t block out the power of that place, and we pressed our head against the glass and trembled to keep it from filling our senses with its presence.

McGrangham himself was a short man with dark hair and a big moustache, who lolled behind a desk counting crumpled banknotes and wore a mildly amused expression. “You’re telling me,” he said in an accent full of rolling rs and thick, weighted vowels, “that johnno here,” nodding at me, “is a fucking sorcerer?”

“Yes,” said Vera.

“The man’s a mess! Christ!”

“Guy Lee,” she snapped. “Guy Lee comes here to see the fights. I want you to arrange an introduction, on neutral territory, underneath the Neon Court’s eye. I don’t want anything flash; just prod Mr Swift and Mr Lee in each other’s direction. There will be payment for your time.”

“I give money to Lee, girl,” snapped McGrangham. “Why the hell would I deal with the Whites anyway?”

Vera could act the mostly properly elected head of the Whites when she wanted to; she exuded it from every pore, a dangerous, rich charisma that hinted, below the surface, at something more. “Things are going to change,” she snapped. “Bakker is going to tell Lee to do something stupid. Lee is going to obey. He, and everything about him, will be destroyed. Now I know you get your protection from the Neon Court, but you still need customers. You still need goods, trades, deals, money. Lee is going to lose all these things, and the Whites are going to get them. You seriously want to fuck around with the next big thing?”

McGrangham stared long and hard at us. “I heard Matthew Swift was dead,” he said at last.

“Imagine people’s surprise,” I growled.

“Lee’s got a pit bull down there tonight. A girl who thinks that kinky is the same thing as confidence, and confidence is the same thing as strength. He’s going to be watching her. She’s going to do great things. He’s not going to talk to any old corpse.”

“So?” snapped Vera.

“If this guy is a fucking sorcerer” – a fat red finger stabbed in my direction – “there’s one great way to get Lee’s attention.”

Two pairs of eyes turned to look at me. I said through gritted teeth, “I don’t have time for this.”

“Kinky, huh?” asked Vera.

“You wanna get Lee’s attention? Wanna let him know oh-so-kindly that your whacked-out sorcerer isn’t dead? Wanna make a profit on a game?” There was a sparkle in McGrangham’s eye; he could smell money a mile off, was already thinking about a big, bright, treachery-filled future full of booze, blood and wealth. Eyeing us up, studying, thinking of the best way to make more profit from our flesh.

Vera’s eyes had the same glow, for a different cause.

“OK,” she said, “I’m listening.”

“Take down Lee’s pit dog,” McGrangham proposed. “He’ll be interested then. Hell – he might even have a conversation with you before he uses your skin for wallpaper.”

I had to wait almost four hours for my turn – into the small hours of the morning – and the crowd at the edge of the pit simply grew bigger. We waited outside in the cold of the street, but now that we were sensitive to its presence, aware of what was going on beneath us, we could feel the fire of every roar and the shuddering of every hit rise up through our body like the rumble of a train beneath the tarmac.

I had never fought in a pit.

It was a thing for either the desperate, or the insane. Those with nothing to lose, or those who believed that they could never fall. A man who had fought and failed was thrown out of the front door, and told to make it to the end of the street before calling an ambulance. They didn’t want the police to investigate. He made it halfway to the end, and collapsed in a puddle of blood, skin and bile. I dragged him to the end of the street by his armpits, and dialled 999 from the nearest call box, skulking in the shadows to watch as the paramedics came and went, glancing into the darkness of this Soho street with the weary faces of men who knew enough not to ask, had seen enough to no longer care to know.

Vera came to fetch me, when it was time.

The “kinky pit dog” of Lee’s was a woman who called herself Inferno. You can’t be Dave the biker, Bob the master of mystic arts. X-Men had seen to that. She was roared into the pit with a friendly clamour of familiarity, and posed, hands on hips, chin thrust out, wearing as scant a mixture of leather and hooked chain as I had ever seen, every part of her bulging and gleaming like it would at any second explode from the thin patches of clothing that held it in place. She was armed with a whip, wore purple contact lenses to disguise the colour of her eyes, and had dyed her hair pure black. There was nothing sensuous in her, I decided, nothing particularly sexy – the costume was intended to be something that a fantasy hero might have worn, but it just looked ridiculous and childish. I skulked by the door that Vera had pushed me through into the pit, ashamed and foolish at what had to be done.

Above the ring, to one side of McGrangham’s office, was a window of reflective black glass.

I tried to imagine Guy Lee standing behind it. Wondered if he was leaning forward, watching my face, trying to see why I was so familiar.

I would remind him.

When the horn went for the battle to start, she slashed her whip a few times up and down through the air, just to make her point, and grinned with pure white teeth as the end of her rope wound and curled by itself, the end lifting off the ground and wriggling towards me like a snake, defying gravity and the laws of physics while it lashed across the empty air between us, searching for a way to bite. This part was a performance, we realised, designed to raise the crowd’s blood as they saw the intricacies of her art. It was also, in terms of pure and simple combat magic, an immensely stupid thing to do, and in that instant our respect for her hit absolute bottom.

In the pit, the crushing weight of the spells that suppressed magic upstairs was less. We watched her snarl and hiss and her whip wriggle and worm its way through the air, straining to reach us, growing at its base as it writhed its way in our direction; and we considered the tools at our disposal. I didn’t want to expose yet what I was capable of, nor did I feel particularly inclined to indulge the crowd with any sort of performance. So I waited, until, with a scream of attack, she hurled the tip of the whip towards me and it grew, convulsing through the air towards my throat. Patiently we watched it fly towards us, then stepped aside with the speed of the electricity in our blood and grabbed the end of it just before the tip, squeezing down on it like a zookeeper pressing down on the jaws of a snake. We shook it once, hard, sending a ripple flying back through the stretched-out rope that jerked the handle from her grasp.

Without her power sustaining it, the whip held in my hand became a lifeless thing of twine and leather. I let it drop to the floor. She spat and hissed like a feral animal and brought her hands together in the opening gestures of a spell I recognised, lips shaping traditional words of invocation. I wasn’t sure how far I wanted the onlookers to realise my capabilities, so raised my hands and roughly mimicked her gestures, twisting my fingers in familiar, half-hearted forms of magical gesture, and moving my lips in a silent whisper. The sounds of magic came to me instinctively, slipping onto my tongue – not merely words, but the whisper of tyres through a thick puddle on a lonely street, the sound of wings beating in an empty sky, the snap of a door slamming in the dark – these were the new sounds of urban magic.

I dragged my hands through the air, feeling its particles thicken around my fingers as it congealed at my command. My ears popped, sensing the pressure decline around my head, and the wall of controlled air in my hands became thick enough to be almost visible. Moisture condensed around it as I exhaled, billowing out of its heart as I compressed more and more into that fistful of contained wind.

She finished her spell almost without me noticing and with a shriek sent it my way; the shriek became a roar in the air between us; the roar filled with the sounds of traffic – cars, wheels, exhaust, rattling engines, the smell of diesel, unleaded petrol, engine oil, tar, burnt rubber. For a moment, I saw, about to impact, the shadow of a hundred vehicles heading towards me, carrying with them the sounds of screeching brakes and the pressure of bending air, all of it thrown out of her throat. It was not the world’s most dangerous spell, but it looked good and I did not want to cause myself any more harm than had already befallen me; so, in old-fashioned style, I threw myself out of its way. The crowd on the observers’ platform upstairs roared its disappointment at such a mundane tactic, and started stamping, a regular growing boom boom boom like the heartbeat sound of the disco drum upstairs. I picked myself up and, by now thoroughly irritated, let my spell go.

The wall of rapidly decompressing pressure I threw at the woman called Inferno picked her up, threw her backwards three feet across the room, slammed her against the wall and, at the pinch of my finger and thumb, held her there, writhing and slapping her fists furiously against the black concrete, screaming amplified and deepened indignities through the thick wind that held her in place.

The booming of the audience continued. I waited. I was happy to wait, ten, twenty seconds, let those who were smart enough to see, or perhaps simply not-stupid enough to care, that this was something more than a cheap spell.

Let Lee watch my face, see the blueness in our eyes.

I waited, holding her trapped there in my spell for nearly twenty seconds until the horn finally went to end the combat, at which point I dropped her. Feeling oddly unclean with my victory, I went to sit down on the cold floorin my corner of the pit, hugging my knees to my chin, while Inferno, face inflamed an appropriate colour for her name, was dragged off screaming defiance to the walls.

We were surprised that we felt no sense of triumph, only a sick hollowness, as if our stomach was empty but had no sense of gnawing hunger to match.

The Master of Ceremonies announced in a bright, overly cheerful voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, five minutes please while we prepare for a new champion! Drinks are available upstairs and if any of you brave contestants want to try your hand …”

I tuned out the noise, huddled myself in my coat and tried to ignore the staring eyes and the sick swirls of expectation around me like tendrils of smog on a murky evening. Vera stood at one end of the observers’ stands and, through the long, dark shadows that the uplights drew across her eyes, I saw not a glimmer of a smile.

“Oi, you!”

The voice came from a staff member in a T-shirt which bulged around muscles so highly exercised I was amazed there was any room left for bone. With an imperious gesture, he summoned me into the preparation room behind the pit.

Sitting on a rough wooden bench in that grey concrete room, wearing stylish black and drinking from a bottle of mineral water, was Guy Lee.

He looked me over and grunted. “Scrawny bastard, aren’t you?”

I said nothing.

“You’re Swift, yes?”

I nodded.

“What the fuck do you think you’re playing at here, Swift?”

I put my head on one side and examined his face. He looked middle-aged, but that could simply have been the passage of many events, rather than much time. His nose was crooked and a long-healed scar ran across it; his skin was worn and dry and tanned, and he was clean-shaven. His hair hinted at grey peeking out at its roots, although through the defining clinginess of his black shirt and trousers he looked as well-built and hale as any man of twenty. He sat with his elbows on his knees, leaning forwards, like a boxer between bouts, and his fists were big and meaty, with signs of scarring across the back of his left hand, badly healed; his feet were set wide apart, legs tense like at any moment he might uncoil like a spring.

There was something very wrong with the entire picture.

We leant forward, peering, trying to work out what it was.

“You want to lose those fucking eyes?” asked Lee, glaring up at us. “I told Robert I’d have them for him on a plate.”

We said, “There is … no magic about you.”

“You just wait and see,” he replied. “Just because I can’t get you here, doesn’t mean I won’t have you out there,” jerking his chin up towards the street. “You bastard – you think we weren’t expecting you after you killed Khay?”

We murmured, “We think we understand.”

Outside, a horn bellowed, three times, a summoning to the pit. Lee stood up, slapping his hands together briskly. “You know how many sorcerers I’ve killed?” he said.

“One,” I answered. “Although you claim six.”

He grinned, but there was unease in his defiance. I felt a moment of gratitude to Sinclair and his excellent files. “Looking to double it soon.”

With that, he strode out into the pit to the roar of a sycophantic crowd.

I followed slowly, surprised. I didn’t understand what he expected to achieve by this gesture, here, where the Neon Court was watching and the spells were thick on the walls. He couldn’t kill me in McGrangham’s, nor could I kill him while the wards were written up on the walls and the crowd looked on. Others would intervene, and this was, after all, neutral territory.

Perhaps it was the arrogance of someone who couldn’t understand the possibility that they might lose.

I followed after him, and the crowd screamed and roared to see us beneath them with sick glee. I moved away to the other side of the pit, and watched him as he shook his fists at the ceiling and grinned and lapped up the applause of those people. They knew who he was; knew when to scream and clap.

I found myself wondering, with a genuine sense of scientific process, how I could go about killing Lee, although that was not, I realised, the exercise for the evening.

The horn blasted and Lee, without even pausing for the echo to die away, turned, opened his mouth and puffed in my direction. His breath rolled out in big, black, billowing clouds that stank of carbon and sulphur and filled the pit in a second with its polluted smog, blinding me. Automatically, I dropped to my knees and sent a random blast of force through the smoke, spinning it backwards towards what I hoped was its source in an eddying of black fumes. I didn’t know if it did any good, but heard it smash into the wall on the other side of the pit a moment later and, in that instant, Lee emerged from the darkness, brought his hands together in two clenched fists, and pulled them apart. Where his fingers touched his wrists, he drew from them, pulling them out of the skin itself, although there was no blood, two long white daggers made of bone.

The crowd roared its appreciation as he flourished the blades. I could not tell whether they failed to recognise cheap necromancy when they saw it, or if they simply didn’t care. He slashed the blades a few times through the air in smooth, careful movements; and where they moved, they trailed red sparks.

Slowly, grinning like an ape, he advanced towards me, bone-blades first.

I backed away, moving at the same speed as his walk to keep him apart from me, until my fingers brushed the concrete wall at my back. His grin widened. I shook my head in response at him, and pressed my fingers into the concrete. It bent like cold butter, slowly easing away under my pressure until my fingertips, buried in it up to the wrist, brushed the iron edge of a foundation support. I wrenched, sending chilling power down to my fingertips as I did, and with a heave and a shudder that made my arms ache and my head throb, dragged a length of twisted hard iron out of the wall itself. The concrete behind me melted back into its place like water filling a wound; I had no interest in keeping it as anything other than what it was, now that I was armed.

The audience screamed its applause as I tested the weight of my weapon, turning it a few times in the air and feeling it swish in my grasp. It was approximately two feet long – a very short staff by the tradition of any wizard.

Lee’s confident face became, for a moment, something else entirely. With a roar, he threw himself at me.

I have little experience of fighting hand-to-hand. But we were fast, and the dance – the dance at least we were used to. We jumped onto our toes and leapt away from the first slash of his bone knife, feeling the twisting in the air as it passed by us, ducked our back beneath the high swipe of his second attack, spun to the side of his next onrush, and rolled past his stumbling feet and landed a kick on his shin as we did. The air burnt with our passage, we were on fire with the blood and stench and brightness and hunger of the place, we loved this dance! We realised almost for the first time that the weight of our my flesh and bone was not just a burden to be borne from sense to sense; it was a living tool. We could feel the movement of every muscle and nerve, the booming of every capillary under our skin and they obeyed, our body obeyed as we caught a slash on the end of our weapon and lashed the longer tip of the iron up until it clipped his elbow and knocked his arm back hard, and we were already away by the time he knew what had happened, marvelling as our arms went up and our feet went back and our head went down and our stomach went in all at once, everything corresponding to the dance, everything, for a moment, completely alive. And for a moment, we couldn’t hear the shouting of the crowd, or their stamping feet, or the cat calls or the cheers or the screams or our own breath; for a moment, we were nothing more than the brilliance of that room, the minds of those people, the life dancing on the knife’s edge, nothing but the dance, and the freedom of it.

Just like we were before …

… come be me and be free …

but I am …

And just for a moment, as we spun away beneath Guy Lee’s blades, we were entirely ourself, and we burnt with blue fire across the air as we passed.

I do not know what happened in that place, that night. I am frightened by the things I cannot remember.

What I do recall was the sounding of the horn and hands pulling me back, someone shouting, “Enough, enough!”

And there was Lee, his bone daggers broken at his side, his arms slashed and bruised from the impact of my weapon’s edge, his nose bleeding a slow, thick blood,

but no magic

and how silent the audience was.

Absolute stillness.

Just the settling of hot air like snow on stone.

I pulled myself free of the arms that held me and dropped my iron weapon. Its tip was bloody, and so were my hands.

but no life

The wards were blazing up the walls, lit up with Lee’s blood. They crushed me like the great fat belly of a woolly bear, pushed my fingers to the earth, stopping this going any further.

It had already gone far enough.

blood on fire

and empty, utterly drained, I turned and walked away from that place.

Outside in the cold air, Vera took me by the arm and said, “And now we need to get you to safety.”

“Why?”

“Lee is going to come after you now with everything he’s got – nothing will stop him.”

“What did I do to him?” I asked. “We just … I don’t … I didn’t …”

She looked up at me, surprised, and said, “You were on fire, Matthew Swift. Your skin was on fire.”

I looked down at myself, half-expecting to see blistered and withered flesh, but my hands looked fine in the cold, pale neon light. “Will he attack the Exchange?” I stuttered as she pulled me down the narrow, sleeping road.

“After that, nothing short of a total annihilation of you and yours will serve,” she replied grimly. “Honour – prestige – they matter. Forget Bakker, that’s nothing now. Fear is just the perception of a threat, sorcerer, and I think you altered a few perceptions tonight.”

“Did I …?” I began, and then decided I didn’t want to know.

“Come on,” she muttered. “Time to get you home.”

A thought struck me. I grabbed her by the shoulder, harder than I’d meant – she pulled back quickly, face opening in an expression of surprise. “Lee,” I stuttered, “Lee is dead.”

“Let’s not get carried away …” she began.

“No, I mean … right now. Right now as we’re talking. That wasn’t Guy Lee down there. His flesh has no warmth, he gave off no scent of magic.”

“Are you fucking kidding? He pulled bloody knives out of his wrists!”

“Life is magic,” I insisted, shaking her by the shoulders. “Life is magic, there is no separating the two. Where there is life, there will be magic; the one generates the other. He has no magic. At least, not of his own – he leeches it from the air, feeds on its use by others, but he, he gives off no scent of it. Life is magic. He has no life. Guy Lee is a walking corpse.”

She pulled herself free with a sharp wrench. “Bollocks,” she muttered. “Bollocks!”

“We saw it!” we shouted, and she flinched back from us, fear in her face, clear now, easy to read. I felt ashamed. “I saw it,” I said. “I’m sorry. Sorry. I … I’m sorry.”

Slowly she relaxed, and patted me half-heartedly on the shoulder. “You’re very screwed, sorcerer.”

“I know.”

“Yeah,” she muttered. “But who can tell? Maybe it’ll be in a good way.”

We slept on the floor of the Kingsway Exchange, in a room packed with other sleeping forms, pressed in shoulder to shoulder, snoring and breathing and warming each other in the darkness, the light wavering through the empty, glassless window of the room, in the concrete corridor outside. I wondered what would have happened if there had been a nuclear war, and people had tried to live down in these tunnels, without time, colour and space. Vera said that all the Whites were coming in, that they’d been warned not to walk alone at night, that Lee would want his revenge.

And Bakker would want his apprentice back.

Guy Lee, a man of no magic. I ran scenarios through my head, twisted spells around, considered the powers that might have, could have, would have stopped Lee’s heart but still sustained him. Or perhaps it wasn’t Lee at all who I’d fought; perhaps something else inhabiting his flesh, mimicking life. He wasn’t any sort of traditional, boring, hollow-eyed, pale-skinned zombie; his movements were fluid, his face healthy, his skin tanned. Not death in the traditional vampiric way; simply an absence of life, as if his body had been frozen at a single moment.

I couldn’t sleep.

Shortly after dawn – I had expected it to still be night – I climbed out of the Kingsway tunnels, and went to find a phone box.

I called the Tower, and this time, when I asked for him, I was put straight through to Bakker. He didn’t sound like he’d been asleep.

“Matthew? Are you all right?”

“Fine.”

“I’ve been hearing rumours. If you want to talk …”

“Guy Lee isn’t alive. He has no magic about him, no spark of life. He’s cold.”

“Matthew, I don’t know what you’ve been doing …”

“Necromancy – the magic of the dead. I want to know … what you did to him.”

“What I did to him?”

“You fear dying, Mr Bakker,” I said to the voice in the phone, “you are so afraid. If his non-life, his frozen existence could offer you the solution to your problem, wouldn’t you have taken it? I have racked my imagination, all the things you taught me, and I can’t think of a single power, magician or enchanted tome which could do the things to Lee that I think must have been done – only you. You’d do it, I think, and not look back.”

A sigh, tired and old, down the phone. I watched the sunlight thicken on the pavement and crawl over the tops of the grand old houses surrounding Lincoln’s Inn. “He told me you attacked him, you went to a pit?”

“Yes.”

“I thought I had taught you better.”

I shrugged, then realised the absurdity of the gesture. “I will undo whatever it is you’ve done, Mr Bakker.”

“Matthew?” His voice had a darker, lilting edge of polite, poison-edged enquiry.

“Mr Bakker?”

“Lee tells me that when you fought, you burnt blue. Your skin was on fire with flames the colour of your new eyes, and the rumour goes …”

“Yes?”

“… the rumour goes that the voices in the telephone stopped talking, when you came back, that the angels suddenly stopped singing their blue songs.”

I said nothing.

“Matthew?”

Nothing.

“What have you done, Matthew?” he whispered. “What did you think you could do?”

“Mr Bakker?”

“Yes?”

“Did you bring us back?”

Now he was silent on the other end of the line. A breath, a slow exhalation transmitted in zeros and ones to our ears. “My God,” he murmured.

“Did you bring us back?” we repeated.

“It’s true!” Not a confession: surprise, horror, perhaps a hint of delight in his voice.

“Mr Bakker?” we said.

“Matthew Swift, what deal did you make? What did you think you could do?!”

“We are coming for you,” we said. “We will not stop.”

We slammed the phone down onto the hook, and walked until we were me again, breathing furious, angry, frightened breaths, and the dawn light was starting to bring some warmth to the streets of the city.

In the Kingsway Exchange, for the whole of a non-day and a non-night, they prepared. The Whites painted every wall, sprayed every inch of glass, every door and every frame with their winding images, and when there was no more space left in the tunnels, they climbed up onto the streets and drew their creatures and their words onto the walls of the university library, and the Starbucks, and the closed shutters of the newsagents, and the pillars of the stations.

Below ground, the delegation of a dozen or so warlocks moved from room to room and blessed them in the names of the spirits from whom they drew their special powers: Harrow, Lord of the Alleyways; the Seven Sisters, Ladies of the Boundaries; Ravenscourt, Master of Scuttling Creatures; and of course, our personal favourite spirit to invoke – Upney, Grey Lord of Tar. Theirs was a borrowed magic of other powers; high priests in the service of skulking city shadows.

The Order kept themselves to themselves, but the street kids under the Whites’ protection, scampering from room to room with wide, marvelling eyes, whispered of enough weaponry to fight a war, and I believed them. I didn’t like to ask what the shapeshifters did, and they didn’t offer to tell. We all knew Lee would come. He would find us. Nothing would stop him now.

Blackjack found me, eventually, sitting with my back against an old, abandoned stack of telephone connectors, standing like an overgrown tombstone of dead wires and slots and metal frames and broken bulbs. Its presence comforted us, reminded us, in a strange small way, of our life before now, when we’d been on the other side of those wires, looking out.

He sat down next to me, considered his words, then said what I think he’d been intent on saying all along. “You look like a piece of rotting road kill.”

“Thanks.”

“Why the long face?”

“We don’t like waiting. Sitting around waiting for them to attack; we want to be outside, looking, exploring.”

“You’re talking in plurals again.”

“What?”

“‘We’,” he explained with an embarrassed expression.

“Sorry.”

He leant back nonchalantly against the bank of forgotten equipment, its edges flecked with rust, and pulled a small whisky flask out of his pocket. He downed a slurp and offered it to me. I took it and we risked a cautious gulp of the stuff; an acquired taste, we decided, although it grew in charm as it sunk deeper into our stomach. “So,” he said finally, in a strained voice that was leading to something more.

I waited.

“I got told I owe you for getting me away from the nutters with the guns.”

“The …”

“The Order.”

“Right. Yes.”

“Nice stunt; how’d you pull it?”

“I cursed the leader of the Order – Chaigneau – with a long and withering death,” I said. “He saw my point of view.”

“Bastard’s going to kill you, Matthew Swift,” he said brightly. “Just in case you hadn’t figured it out.”

“I know.”

“Although, if you need help when push comes to shove …”

“Thanks. I appreciate the offer.”

He gave me a long, sideways glance. “That means ‘no’, doesn’t it?”

“What?”

“You like working alone.”

“I … have nothing here,” I said, struggling to find the right words, caught off guard. “The people I trusted or thought I could trust either can’t be, or are gone. Vanished, dead. Or those who may live I put at risk by my presence – people will get hurt around us. Given those circumstances, wouldn’t you rather work alone?”

“Don’t get me wrong; I get the whole lone rider vibe,” he said, raising his hands in defence. “But I’m just saying: it’ll put you in the scrapyard twenty years earlier than might’ve been.”

“We think … that we are grateful for your concern,” we stumbled. “Thank you.”

“That’s a fucking weird thing you’ve got going there,” he grunted, turning away and half shaking his head, hand going towards the whisky flask again.

“What is?”

“For Christ’s sake, Matthew, this is a fucking telephone exchange! Do you think no one noticed when suddenly poof, the voices in the wire went missing? Do you know how many nerds in basements were watching those rogue pieces of frequency, the bursts of inexplicable interference in the system? One second there’s a semi-demonic power whispering out of the telephone to anyone with half the senses to hear it, and the next second it’s just gone! And there you are, walking around with bright blue eyes and a bewildered crap expression and, you know, it doesn’t take a million brain cells to work it out. That’s what’s so fucking weird, the way you can’t work out if you’re even bloody human any more.”

I looked away, ashamed. We mumbled, “We … meant no harm.”

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered.

We looked up sharply, trying to read his voice, his words. His eyes were fixed on an opposite bank of dead machinery as, with shaky fingers, he unscrewed the top of his whisky flask. “We also have nothing here, except what I remember, and that’s largely gone. We did not mean for any of this to happen; we hope you will understand.”

“This is a new one,” he groaned.

“What is?”

“Me talking to a bloody mystic power no less, disguised as a guy with a face like a soggy sandbag.” Clumsily he touched his forehead with a couple of fingers and smiled. “Nice to meet you, blue bloody electric bloody angels. How you doing?”

We looked him straight in the eye and said, “Things have been better.”

“I bet they bloody have.” He waved the whisky flask at us again; we shook our head.

“Was that Matthew or the angels saying no?” he asked. “Just in case one of you’s teetotal.”

“We are the same,” we said. “The distinction is merely one of presentation and form. To us … all things are new. Humans and the things they do. We were made by them … but had never experienced them before. As for me … I just want to get on with it. When we blaze, when we fight, when we rejoice, then I am all us, for that is all we are. When I am … afraid … we do not understand, do not like these things. We are me. It is … frightening, having to be me.” I caught his expression, somewhere trapped between genuinely bemused and hopefully open. I shrugged. “And I’m not teetotal. Thank you. I’d just like to keep a clear head.”

“Things are very weird,” said Blackjack.

“There,” we said, “we also agree.”

We waited in those tunnels for another two days before it happened. By the time it did, I almost believed that it wasn’t going to, that Lee had got his head screwed back on right, that Bakker wouldn’t order it, that they wouldn’t come. No one said it; but we had begun to think it even after the first night. It was hard to tell whether I felt disappointment or hope when Vera woke me up with a shake in the dark and murmured, “Come. Now.”

I followed her through tunnels lined with sleeping bags below still-damp paint, stepping over the hunched forms of snoozing weremen, the curled-up shapes of slumbering warlocks and around the heavy black, weapon-laden bags of the Order, until we dropped down a narrow flight of grey concrete stairs, illuminated by a single light that sat in the wall like a squid clinging to the side of a sunken ship. The shadows here were almost thick enough to swirl like fog, and at the bottom, by a heavy, shut iron door, there lay a body, almost floating in a puddle of its own accumulated blood.

Holding up an electric lamp to see more clearly, Vera said in a hushed voice, “The door leads down to the Post Office tunnels. Trains used to go through there to the sorting offices. It’s not marked on the map.”

I said nothing and squatted down on the steps just above the body. Repulsed and fascinated, we reached out without thinking, even as our stomach turned, and carefully prodded the side of the broken man. His skin was still warm through the remnants of his clothes, and as we pushed his body over we saw that something had torn open his belly, dragged out a handful of intestines and wrapped them round the man’s middle a few times, like a badly knitted belt. We tasted bile in our throat and felt a physical convulsion through our body as our heart skipped a beat, and stood up quickly, backing a few steps and suddenly not sure what to do with the blood on our fingers, running them over the wall to try and wipe it off.

“Is it Bakker?” hissed Vera. “Are they here? Is it Lee?”

“They’re coming,” I answered. “But it’s not Bakker.”

I snatched the lantern from out of her hands and held it close to myself, sweeping it from side to side in front of me; as the bright light moved around my feet, my shadow, stretching out behind me, did not move with it, but simply grew longer and thinner, like a rubber band being drawn towards breaking point. We felt a laugh growin our throat, shrill and frightened, and I bit down hard to contain it, so the sound that came out was more like a whimper.

“What is it?” Vera could see how the light didn’t bend the shadows at our feet, and was smart enough to be scared.

“Something much, much worse,” I declared, handing the lantern back to her. “Wake everyone up. Don’t let anyone go around in groups of less than five, or without a strong light. Tell them that Lee’s coming.”

To the best of my knowledge, this is what happened in the Kingsway Exchange; but in such chaos, even with the best of intentions, it is hard to tell.

Guy Lee had an army at his command. It wasn’t a big army, nor was it well disciplined; but when the individual soldiers of the said army can blend their skin to the colour of concrete or burst bubbles of burning hydrogen in the pipes above your head or scream with the roar of the exploding fuel tank on the back of a bus in billows of black fumes, size doesn’t matter. They’d been paid, bribed, threatened, blackmailed, cajoled, promised, and coaxed into working for Lee, and when the survivors were questioned they all whispered that somewhere, behind it all, they knew what Lee was. Not just a man with a will: a servant of the Tower. And those who disobeyed the Tower did not live to regret their mistake for more than a few days of blood loss and pain.

They entered the old, forgotten Post Office train tunnels at the Mount Pleasant sorting office, a truly unpleasant collection of tin roofs and grey walls that sat beside heavy fuming traffic at the junction of Rosebery Avenue and Farringdon Road. They slipped down through the darkness, their way lit up by the witches who coaxed the mould around the leaking pipes to fluoresce into vibrant light and guide the travellers on their way to the Exchange. They didn’t know how Lee had known where to go. They said there was a traitor somewhere within the Whites. It could have been anyone.

The watchman on the Post Office tunnel was called Yixiao, a White from Brixton who specialised in inscribing his spells in towering green letters on the brick cuttings of railway lines, and in his youth had been part of a gang who labelled themselves MORTON BOYZ in big black letters across the wheelie bins of their local estates. That was before Yixiao had discovered, to his surprise, that the crows he drew in the daytime flapped their way across the white walls of-the tower blocks at night, squawking the words “caw caw” in squiggly small black letters from their beaks across the paint on the walls, before sunrise forced them to land again across the garage doors where they’d first been painted. In the tunnels behind the big iron doors that he guarded, he’d painted on the encrusted walls, their surface finely textured with layers of solid dirt built up over the years, the images of his coal-coloured crows, who patrolled up and down the corridor every night to see who might be coming in the dark, and shrieked with silent letters their warnings across the concrete walls, for Yixiao’s hearing only.

Doubtless he had seen the advancing troops of Lee’s army as they marched down the forgotten tunnels, and was doubtless on his way to sound the alarm when he’d met his untimely end, claws scratching at his eyes, tearing straight through his cheeks to reveal the teeth inside, ripping out his belly and playing with its contents like a child fascinated by a new toy – had I known that this would be how he’d die? Perhaps. One more thing about which it was best not to think.

However Yixiao had died, Vera had always speculated that they would come through the Post Office tunnels, and whatever she thought of my role in letting the man meet his end, she said nothing about it as she started to sound the alarm. The problem was that Guy Lee didn’t just come up from the tunnels – he came in through the underground, from the ventilation shafts, and from the street, and all at once.

This, more than anything, is why I still do not, to this day, fully know the secrets of the dead of the Kingsway Telephone Exchange. Did some die that day who didn’t need to? Did the Order aim every shot at enemies, or were a few friends caught in the fire? Did the were-men fight their own, did the Whites stand or run?

Sometimes, it is better for the historian to wait until their subjects really are dead and gone, just in case no one wants to hear the truth.

This, then, is what I saw.

I don’t know where I was when I felt the first shudder of the first explosion. The concrete surfaces blended into each other, the endless colours and paintings just one long bad hallucination trip. The shock of the blasts sent shimmers of concrete dust down from the ceiling; it hummed through the exposed pipes and tangled wires that ran across the roof, with a high-pitched ringing note, like the striking of a distant church bell that lingered even after the thud through the air had faded. I knew where I was meant to be – finding Lee and dispatching him before he could hurt us – but as the corridors filled with running bodies and shapes and shouting people pushing and shoving and racing with eyes wild and a scent of the animal about them, I followed my own shadow, let it guide me as it twisted across the floorin front of my footsteps.

Just because you can use magic, that doesn’t mean it’s always the best tool for the job. Guy Lee understood this and had put explosive charges on the sealed-off metal doorways down to the tunnels beneath the street, blasting them in with a cacophony that set the car alarms wailing, along with the burglar alarms of all the lawyers’ chambers and the local university buildings that were now howling into the dark. Then, just to make his point, he started pumping in tear gas through the ventilation shafts. I noticed it first as a puff of white drifting vapour trickling out from a crack in the ceiling, and an odd smell that couldn’t be defined by the nose so much as the stomach, where it burnt its way to the centre of the body’s mass, gripped its tight, sticky hot fingers around my middle, and twisted.

I dropped to my hands and knees instinctively as the vapour started to fill the corridor, and tried to find an appropriate spell, fingers scrabbling on the cold, dry floor for a handful of warm, solid magic to throw up around me, blasting the thicker plumes of white gas away. Before I could do so, a hand fell on my shoulder and another grabbed at the back of my head, pulling me up even as the first dribbles of bile started pouring down from my mouth and nose. Something hot, rubber and heavy was pulled down over my eyes and mouth, and then tightened at the back of my head, and a hand pushed me back against the painted wall as the clouds of impenetrable smoke billowed around us, gushing out of the ceiling like a waterfall on the edge of freezing. I blinked through the condensation-dripping lenses of the mask that had been pulled down over my nose and eyes and saw the dark eyes of Oda blink back at me through the black, nozzle-like thing over her own face. She was trying to speak, but the words were nothing more than a muffled mmmwhhh through the layers of plastic between us and the infected air. She was silenced by another series of short booms that I felt as much as heard, like the sensation of a lift suddenly stopping in mid-descent, all the parts of the air moving too quickly around us in different directions.

Oda hefted a rifle that looked like it hadn’t been manufactured so much as carved out of some primal black void, and tugged at my sleeve. I shook my head and pulled away, trying to find my shadow on the floor through the smoke, and when I couldn’t, I crawled over to a wall, holding up the lamp to see my own shape cast on the concrete. For a moment, just a moment, the shadow that I cast, thick and black against the close brightness of the lantern, looked up, looked straight at me, flexed its fingers into a clawlike spread, and opened its wings.

The lights went out in the tunnels, spitting into nothing on the ceiling and on the walls by the doors. My shadow was suddenly gone, melted into a rising backdrop of blackness, and only my lantern was alight in that place. Oda looked at me and despite the mask, her face, her entire body language, was an open question. I looked around but saw nothing but stretching, rectangular, contained blackness in either direction, until at one end I also saw the movement of torchlight struggling to break through the billows of gas and smoke, and heard distant muffled bangs and tasted the scent of magic. In that darkness we did not want to chase our shadow, regardless of what it might be up to; not yet. So we pulled at Oda’s sleeve and ran towards that light.

The torchlight splitting the gloom of the corridor belonged to the bikers; and it wasn’t torchlight, but firelight, oily orange, dripping off the ends of flaming rags that each one twirled at arm’s length. For all their fire, spitting red droplets onto the floor, the ignited rags didn’t seem to be getting any shorter as the bikers swung them into darkened and empty rooms of endless stained paint and broken machines, which looked more and more like electronic tombs as we hurried through the dark. The bikers all wore helmets – some painted with white angels, or a skull and crossbones, or a spider stretched out in all its furry detail, or a dart heading towards a bullseye, or other such symbols of identification – and all wore goggles and had a scarf over their nose and mouth; implausibly, this seemed protection enough for them as they moved slowly, confidently, through the tunnels. They swung crowbars, lengths of chain, even the odd spanner at the end of their leather-covered arms.

They didn’t run, but their walk was … odd. A subtle shifting of perspective, perhaps, a magic so fleeting and hard to define that all we could say of its nature was that in one step we were by a white door with the words “Storage B08” written on it, and two steps later we were at the end of the corridor and looking back to see at least thirty steps behind, the door that only a moment ago we’d glanced at. Chicken or egg – what moved us more? Us walking, or the world moving beneath us? Perhaps the bikers, at least, knew the answer.

We found a small hall that I imagined had once been used as a canteen by the telecom workers; and there we also found the mercenaries. At first, we didn’t recognise them for what they were, and the whole crowd of us stood uncertainly in the doorway, staring at these men dressed in gas masks and black, wondering if they were part of the Order or not. In that moment of uncertainty, it was they who recognised us as adversaries – and they threw themselves at us with alarming speed. I guessed they were mercenaries by the markings on their skin – in many ways like San Khay’s, swirls of power and magic embedded in their flesh. But unlike San Khay, this wasn’t just a tattoo – the mercenaries had carved their magic into their skin with knives, and each of them wore precisely the same symbols of strength across their flesh as their brothers.

The fight in that hall was a confusion of shadows and black-clad bodies caught in the unsteady light of flames. I saw the bikers slash through the air with their crowbars, and as they did, the gashed air poured out fire from where it was torn. I saw the mercenaries leave the surface of the floor and dance a few paces across the ceiling before dropping, nails-first, towards the eyes of their nearest enemies; I saw bikers hurl their lengths of chain, which ignited with the colour of boiling oil, flying and coiling like living things and following the enemy through every twist and dive like a writhing Chinese dragon. When the bikers screamed, their voices were the roar of an engine firing; when they spun, the air whipped around them like they moved at eighty miles an hour; and when their blood dripped onto the floor – perhaps it was the light – it had the look of engine oil.

Watching the mêlée, I moved my fingers through the air in search of subtler powers that might let me help my allies and harm my enemies, without doing both to each in that confined space. Oda, however, had little patience to see what we might do, and stepped briskly past us, dropping her rifle and pulling instead, from a sheath across her back, a sword.

The likely effect of a sword in that place was ugly, especially when wielded by a faceless figure in a gas mask. When Oda stepped into that fight, she moved the blade like it was a ribbon in her hand; and slowly the horror dawned on us, the realisation, that for Oda as she stepped neatly round each flailing figure and ducked each tattooed swipe from a mercenary’s knife, she was dancing, and as with all good dances, she was enjoying it: each swish of the blade through another person’s flesh, and every turn of her foot to meet some oncoming attack, and every flicker of shadow, and every movement of her arms – she relished it.

And for a distracted moment, we watched her, horrified, delighted. Then a voice whispered in our ear out of the darkness, “Hello, Matthew’s fire.” We spun round, unleashing a fistful of crackling electricity from the wires overhead into the space where the words had come from; but there was nothing there except shadows moving across the wall. I saw one dance away towards the end of the corridor; it wasn’t moving right; its shape was too defined for all that darkness. I grabbed two fistfuls of electricity from the ceiling and ran, racing after it down the corridor, snatching the lamp in one burning blue hand and holding it up to light my way. At the end of the corridor I reached a set of heavy, shut iron doors. I hesitated, then put down my lamp, let the electricity out of my fingers, and pressed my ear to the door. The metal felt oddly warm to the touch, and through it, very faintly I could hear the clink clink clink of machinery, and feel the hum of a growing electric current.

Realisation hit; I was halfway up the corridor and throwing myself face first towards the concrete floor, hands over my head, willing the concrete to open up beneath me and encase me in its hold, feeling it warp obediently to the shape of my body as I fell, when the vaultlike doorway exploded. My ears probably popped, it was hard to tell behind the overwhelming punch dealt straight to the eardrum by the force of that bang. I felt the tips of my hair curl up in indignity at the heat that rushed over them, the pressure and force of it racing across my back, raising hot bloody blisters through my clothes, which smoked on the edge of flame.

I didn’t bother to see who was coming through the hole behind me, but staggered up, crawled a few paces towards the opening of the corridor, then pulled myself round the corner and slumped against the wall while waiting for the static to fade from my eyes. I heard shouting behind me and tasted sickly bright magic, smelt the stench of the sewers, right at the back of my throat; and instantly had a name for the people coming up that corridor. And didn’t want to think about it.

Deep Night Downers. A clan not unlike the Whites – a collection of like-minded magically inclined individuals – a conglomeration of magicians who understood that the city you saw in daylight, and on the surface, was only a lie, an illusion sustained by all the things going on underneath, and at night – the lorries delivering food to the shops between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m., and the men cleaning the congealed fat from the sewers, painting lines onto the roads when all the traffic had stopped, changing the bulbs in the street lamps, checking the rails in the underground, fixing the water pipes when no one was awake to want something to drink, and listening for the wires under the streets – the Downers understood that all these things had to happen for the city to survive, and they drew their power from it, a slick, invisible, pulsing presence of magic, that was almost imperceptible by daylight and became most powerful at 3 a.m., flooding the streets with its subtle, silvery glow.

Sitting raggedly round the corner from where they were slowly advancing up the corridor, I reached a dusty hand towards the ceiling. I let my thoughts tangle up in the mess of wires and piping running through it until I felt I had a good strong grip, then wrenched the whole lot down and spun it across the corridor until it formed a spider’s web-like mesh of metal and sparking electric wire across the tunnel between them and me. It wouldn’t hold them for long, I knew; but I didn’t feel the need to stay there for long – at this time of night, and in this place, I didn’t want to take on Downers single-handedly, when their magic was strongest and they felt that the city, the true city of necessary pulsing daily functions, was most alive.

I moved to get up, and run away, but before I could move, something cold splatted onto the top of my head, like the first drop of a rainstorm. I looked up. On the ceiling, someone had painted a spaceship racing towards a series of bright blue and green ringed planets – something that might have been appropriate in a 1960s comic book; and underneath, in large stylish letters, the caption: “CAPTAIN ZOG SAVES THE DAY!!!” As art went, I could see its merit, in a retro way; but now, watching them, I saw something a good deal better as, silently, the big blue and green planets started to revolve across the ceiling.

On the wall opposite me, a figure of huge, bulging muscles, heaving chest and impossibly small waist, picked out in thick blue paint with yellow shiny buckles, stirred. Its fingers flexed. On the wall next to me, a tiger drawn in neon pink and lime-green stripes twitched its bright purple whiskers, its red eyes narrowing. Above it, a flock of jet-black doves flew up onto the ceiling and down the other side on the wall, before doing a complete circle, rippling across the surface of the floor. A single bright blue eye set on a bed of trolley wheels blinked at me with an eyelid of sparkling scarlet paint, then rolled from side to side on its gently turning wheels. A pair of cyclists made entirely out of human ears started peddling with their tiny ear-feet, cruising across the bottom of the opposite wall, and then up onto the ceiling, and doing a quick orbit of a rotating blue planet before descending again.

I stood up slowly, as footsteps in the corridor behind me grew louder; the roar of a chainsaw suggested that the Downers had come equipped for the obstructions I had thrown up in their way. But we were unconcerned, and our face split into a slow grin as, his arms dripping blue paint, Captain Zog stretched across the length of the wall, and reached out. First came yellow-gloved fingers, then a cautious yellow toe, then a bright blue kneecap – tiny and knobbly, far too small to support the bulk of his frame – then the blue hulk of his chest. His face came last of all, stretching behind him as a few residuals of paint clung to the wall, before peeling away from the rest of his dripping form with a few colourful pops. Next to me, the ruby-red nose of the tiger protruded from the wall, then a hint of pink neon stripe; a spider the size of my hand, bright emerald green and completely smooth except for where black brushstrokes picked out a hint of fur, scuttled across my leg, leaving pinprick stains of bright green points across my trousers. On the ceiling, a pointed spaceship sprayed a fine grey paint from its exhaust vent, that settled in a mist on the floor; the craft spun out of the wall and back, then twisted once more into the air and accelerated away again, amid silence except for the dripdrip dripdrip of paint falling in its wake.

I jumped as the tiger brushed affectionately against my legs, leaving a long streak of muddled pink across my trousers. Its feet made a flat splash, splash sound on the concrete, as it padded towards the corridor from which I’d just come running. Then Captain Zog and all the tiny scurrying creatures of the walls – painted butterflies with the mandibles of soldier ants, children with faces longer than the bodies that carried them, and tubby black and yellow bees walking on two legs and carrying carving knives with every limb, with three black fingers to support each dribbling blade – all the monsters of the Exchange marched in silence apart from the running of wet paint, straight towards the corridor where the Downers were. As they went, they flowed in and out of the wall and each other, and, where their features were human enough to read, every face wore a single intent.

“Hello, Matthew’s fire!”

I spun round, but saw nothing in the glow of my lantern but dancing darkness and running colours. I half-closed my eyes, and listened.

A brush of cold across my shoulder …

… smell of sewage

             ripple of magic in my ear

taste of salt

bile

                blood

                       silk

… hello Matthew’s fire …

… we be …

                             fire

                                light

                                               life

                               fire

stop

we be

enough

so brightly burning

make me

be free

STOP

…

Thank you.

Better.

“Hello, little sorcerer.”

I lashed out at the whisper of cold in my ear and, for a second, my hand closed around something like fabric-woven ice, a bite of frost that went straight to the bone, then up the wrist, a slither of silk under my skin, malleable, bending to the touch. I opened my eyes as it slipped from my fingers, and saw a tendril of darkness vanishing into the wall and rippling away, and for a moment, just a moment, I thought that perhaps, I could beat him after all.

I picked up my lantern and ran between the heaving masses of living paint, closing my ears to the Downers behind me as the first screams began, before they were choked off by a mouthful of paint.

Dark tunnels lose meaning after a while; I had had no idea how many there were in the Exchange – it takes being lost to give you a true sense of proportion. I didn’t care where I was going, and it was only instinct that made me obey when I heard, through the darkness, a voice shout, “Swift, get down!”

I threw myself flat on basic principle, since the voice hadn’t sounded too threatening, merely urgent, and saw a burst of fire at the end of the corridor, and felt the mechanical snaps of bullets biting overhead, striking something that made a dull thumping noise on each impact. When the firing stopped, I looked up and behind me, to see the body of a woman, dressed in very little indeed, torn apart by the impact of the bullets. I recognised her; when she went out in those clothes, her name had been Inferno. I tasted bile.

Hands pulled me behind a short line of men armed with rifles. With them was Chaigneau; he held a short, heavy mace, inscribed with scratched words in Latin that in the gloom I couldn’t decipher. He glared at me and said, “What are you doing here, sorcerer?”

I staggered away from him, dragging my lantern with me, and ran on into the dark.

“What do you think you’re playing at?” his voice echoed behind me.

Gunshots in the dark.

A taste of magic blooming and dying all around me, we felt … we smelt … sickly black spots of pain bursting behind our eyeballs, we felt … trickles of red agony down the back of our spine and I knew, even if we were too afraid to acknowledge it, that this was what a sorcerer felt near to too much death.

We came to a corridor of bodies. Warlocks and witches and wizards, their flesh burnt half away to reveal carbonised bone, the walls scorched black, all the paint long since bubbled away by the force of magical fire, wires and pipes shattered from the ceiling, and, when we risked pulling off the gas mask to sniff the air, the smell of roast skin.

We put the gas mask back on, the smell of rubber better than the stench of all that, and the limited vision afforded by its goggles a blessing, rather than a disadvantage. We put one foot between the bent arm of a woman whose face had been burnt away to a hollow shell, and the scorched body of a man whose eyes were, mercifully, turned away from us as we advanced. At the end of the corridor the shadows crawled across the wall, roiling despite the steadiness of our lamp. We made it almost halfway down before we spotted a robe of exotic, tasteless colours and knew who was wearing it, and knew that he was dead. We had nothing we could call affection for the warlock, but stopped and pressed our head against the wall and trembled and felt our flesh burn for many minutes before the realisation came that all this fear and sickness made no difference. We had to keep walking regardless, turning our head away from the sight of the bodies and trying to make the exercise a mechanical one, flinching nonetheless when our toe prodded the remnants of some dead magician.

At the end of that corridor was a metal door, rusted crispy brown. The bolt had been twisted out of shape, by what power I didn’t know, and the thing stood ajar, inviting. Like an idiot, I nudged it further open, and ducking under the low top, stepped down the cold staircase beyond it.

The room I came into was too big for me to see anything but its nearest edges, the ceiling lost in darkness, and the walls stretching out in long perspectives. The floor full of telephone servers. They stood like the dead black trunks of some haunted forest, gleaming with the occasional hint of circuit-board green and solder silver when they caught the lamplight, stretching on in neat rows as far as I could see. I picked my way carefully down the nearest aisle, not daring to call any more light than I already had, for fear of who else might be looking. My footsteps were flat, dull and impossibly loud in that still room; the air was heavy, like it hadn’t been disturbed for years; as I moved, puffs of white dust swirled up beneath my feet.

It took me almost five minutes of padding through that empty, dead place, between the straight lines of the telephone servers, before I found another set of footprints. They had been made by a pair of man’s shoes, business wear rather than trainers. I turned and followed the line of their walking, feeling like a counter in a game of snakes and ladders, who might at any moment step on a snake and find myself back where I’d started. The tracks were, however, fairly easy to follow. They led between the endless rows of servers to a junction resembling any other, except that here there was another bubble of light, just like the one I carried. It lit up a hunched shadow dressed in black, wearing a pair of large man’s business shoes, hunched over what I realised were my own footprints.

The figure looked up as my pool of light merged with his own from where I stood some metres away. His face twitched into an expression of surprise, followed by curving contempt. “Sorcerer,” said Lee. “I thought you’d wind up down here. Prophetic powers couldn’t have done a better job.”

“Bugger prophetic powers,” I replied, putting the lantern down and scanning the thick, still darkness around us. “You and I both know, I think, what’s got me down here. Tall guy, wears my coat, bad complexion, essence of living darkness – seen him anywhere?”

“And here I was thinking you and I were about to enter the history books,” he said, straightening up, and brushing dust off his knees. “But all along, you aren’t really interested in me, are you? I don’t think you give a damn about the things I’ve done, or that Khay did, or even about the Whites and the warlocks and all the other cretins I’ve killed to get here. You’re far too busy to care. Am I right?”

“No, but nice try,” I said.

He shrugged. “Do you know what the difference is between a soldier and a murderer, Mr Swift?”

“I haven’t given it much thought.”

“Intent. Whatever I do, I always intend. It keeps me in control. I have an anger, a beast … but control. You cannot imagine. But you – did you even think about all those bodies lying in your way? I think you kill and don’t even have the knowledge of what you’re doing, or why. Useless fucking moron.”

“You know, you’re right.”

“Of course.”

“No, not about everything – but you’re right that I’m not here for you. You are just a dot on my way to something more important. A door that has to be opened, a minor tick on the list before getting to the major, and the fact that you’re a murderer, a rapist, a thief, a coward and a corpse only makes it easier to do what I was always intending all along. So let’s get this whole thing over with so that Hunger can come and take his fill.”

“Get what over?” Lee grinned, and gestured expansively. “Robert wants you alive, Mr Swift, and alive is what I intend to give him.”

A shadow in the darkness behind him. I reached instinctively out for that warm tingle of magic on my fingers. Then a shadow to my left, and my right and, when I dared to glance backwards, a shadow behind me, faces, figures emerging from the gloom. Guy Lee opened up his hands, whose cupped hollow started filling with a thick black smog; and he was grinning, utterly unafraid, as men and women emerged around us from the gloom. As they stepped into the pool of light, I saw the flash of a brightly coloured robe and the remains of the warlock’s face, empty, devoid of life.

I turned to Lee as the dead of the corridor I’d come down from, their bodies still dripping the last of their blood from their open wounds, filed into a circle around me. “Zombies,” we said, with open scorn in our voice. “How 1960s.”

“Not zombies. Zombies are too crude. These are …” Lee searched for the right word “… uniquely empowered.”

My gaze swerved back to the eyes of the warlock. They were not entirely empty, not quite; and his mouth, as it hung open, showed a piece of paper, the white just showing behind his teeth. Life, fuelled by words, shoved down his throat as he died; a spell in paper somewhere inside his chest, rumbling around the remains of his stomach.

“We won’t hesitate to kill them twice,” we said as the last of the bodies from the corridor stepped into the circle closing around us.

“Hard to kill dead things,” said Lee.

“You should know,” we answered, full of immediate purpose. “We set them free.”

And we reached out, grabbed a fistful of heat from the lantern on the floor, cupped it in the palms of our hands, and blew a tiny piece of life into them. The heat bloomed into blue flames between our fingers, rolled out across our hands and arms, billowed around us like a cloak as, with a wrench and a shove, we sent it spilling out between the dead monolith servers. It rolled across the floor and up the walls in a flash of bright blue fire that for a second illuminated the whole stretching expansive dome of the place, burning away every shadow and inch of skin that it touched, boiling the solder in its frames to bubbling, spitting silver bubbles and sweet smoke, blinding out every inch of darkness

except for

      just a moment

            caught in the flames …

I saw him, fingers outstretched to catch the surge of blue fire, chin tilted up and eyes wide as if trying to breathe my flames, face open and in an expression of absolute delight as the blue light seared around him.

Just for a moment, with the shadows that hid him burnt back and away,

I saw Hunger through the fire.

Then it went out.

Darkness all around.

I was on the floor, eyes running. I couldn’t see through Oda’s gas mask, the inside was steamed up and the outside cracked with heat. I tugged it off and instantly smelt the solder smoke and dead flesh, but no tear gas, not this far down. There was no sign of Lee. I scrambled on all fours across the floor until I found the warlock, lying on his back, blood now soaked through every inch of his clothes. I yanked his twitching jaw open while an arm hanging on by a thread of tendon tried to lift itself up and gouge at my eyes, I dug through the dry hollow of his mouth past his snapping teeth until I found the tip of the piece of paper and carefully, so as not to tear it, pulled it out through his open jaw. The black words written on it in spidery ink were almost illegible with saliva and blood. I saw:

live for

            black burnt

                 fire command

                                 be free

I tore the paper into pieces and threw them away before looking down at the warlock who lay, entirely still, face empty, life utterly gone.

We felt movement behind us, and turned instinctively, snatching a fistful of light up through the air and hurling it at the shape of Guy Lee as he dropped down from on top of a server frame. He staggered back for a moment, throwing his hands up to cover his eyes as the whiteness flared off my fingers; but still he kept coming towards me. A foot staggering forward connected with our side, and we fell back, moving with the pain to try and avoid it, sprawling across the bloody remnants of the warlock. Then Lee’s hands were on the back of our head, pulling it up, an arm going round across our throat and squeezing with an almighty strength that we could only hope was unnatural. There was no breath from his mouth although it was an inch from our ear. With a shudder of horror we realised that he was going to break our neck before we suffocated, even though waves of static darkness were already flashing up and down in front of our vision like the confused black curtain of the final act.

His voice hissed without bothering to exhale, the sound little more than a whisper from the dead air already in his throat. “Robert wants you alive, he says. Bring Swift to me; don’t hurt him more than you must, keep him alive. But you know and I know” – a tug across our neck sent numbness through our limbs – “that of all the people in the world who Robert hates more than any other, he hates you, Matthew Swift, sorcerer, apprentice who betrayed his master. Even if Robert doesn’t know it himself. So what I have to ask is – why does Robert want you alive? What is it in your blue flames and unlikely resurrection that makes him so excited, seems to give him so much life, just in thinking of it? Because whatever it is, I want it for me. It can set me free!”

We tightened our fingers around his arm where he held us, and brought blue burning to our skin, then pushed it down towards his flesh in a wave of searing heat until we could feel the bursting of his skin through his sleeve – even so he didn’t scream, but dug his teeth into the back of my neck hard enough to draw blood and pulled his arm harder across my throat. I whimpered, but we reached up behind ourself until our fingers touched his head and tilted his face up until our fingers brushed his teeth, pushing his jaw open and reaching down inside his mouth. He bit and I felt blood spill across my knuckles but we kept digging, ignoring the pain even as my world grew faint until, at the very back of his throat, past his teeth and the ridged palate of his mouth, into the soft tissues of the windpipe, our fingers touched a slim piece of paper, and pulled.

Now he screamed, and in that act gave us space to tighten our grip inside his mouth and pull the paper, and keep pulling, falling forward even as his grip relaxed, tumbling head over heel but keeping hold of that paper, and it kept coming, rolled up in a tight tube, half a metre of it, a metre unravelling in my hands, with words illegible from blood and spit on both sides in tiny, tiny lines running from edge to edge; a metre and a half of bloody, stained inky paper that I pulled up from the back of his throat. It flopped around me like wet bandaging, rotten in places, stained with what chemicals I didn’t want to know; and as the end came out of Guy Lee’s mouth, he collapsed backwards, face empty, colour gone, eyes lifeless, and twitched no more.

I fell onto my back next to him, letting the endless sprawl of paper fall at my side. There, without further ado, it hissed at the edges, blackened, curled and crumbled to ash. I lay and wheezed while we brushed our hands unconsciously against our side, trying to rub off the spit and blood and ink and feel of his teeth on our skin, and the touch on us of the paper and its black magic. I was too numb even to cry.

I knew now what Sinclair hadn’t known: that Guy Lee was animated by a metre and a half of crabbed written commands made up of ink and paper. He had been kept alive by magic alone, unable to feel, whether emotion or touch, unless it was so inscribed on the paper in his chest. Not quite a zombie; perhaps just … uniquely empowered. Empowered enough to crave life and wonder what was in our blood that could give it.

There was a dull slapping noise in the darkness. After a while I realised it was clapping. I sat up, taking my time about dangerous things like breathing, and looked into the darkness. A darker patch of shadow stood just outside the circle of lamplight, white hands visible only because they moved, beating out a regular applause.

I staggered up and retreated closer to the lantern, keeping my eyes fixed on that shadow. The clapping stopped. A voice said, “Was that Matthew, or Matthew’s fire, that cried? I really couldn’t tell.”

“Didn’t cry,” I rejoined. “You wouldn’t understand.”

The swirl of darkness drifted nearer, acquired a face, withered and white and pale and smiling and indescribably, sickly, his. “Well,” he said, “perhaps it’s all the same now.”

He knelt down by the body of Guy Lee, and scooped up a handful of black papery ash. Smiling at me, watching my reaction, he ate it. Then scooped up another handful, and another, and another, until the ash of the paper was just a thin black stain on the floor, and ate them all down. He stood up with a sigh and a shudder and tilted his head upwards, as if sniffing the air.

“The taste of life … is this it?” he asked, licking black flakes off his lips with a grey tongue.

“No,” I said.

“I’ve tried water, food, fire, blood, flesh, skin, hair, bone, organ, breath – I’ve tasted them all. I was wondering where he hid his life; it was something hard to fathom, or perceive,” prodding Lee with a toe, “but now I’ve tasted it, it seems … unsatisfying. A drop of water on my thirst, a corner filled in my stomach, but my appetite still … desiring. Still hungry.”

“I don’t think you’d like me,” I said. “My diet is unhealthy.”

“It’s not your blood I desire,” whispered Hunger, moving closer to me, sticking a cautious toe into the light. He drew it back quickly, like a swimmer testing water, surprised to find it so cold. “Just your fire.”

“Can I offer a theory?”

The figure of Hunger gestured dismissively.

“I’m going to suggest that Robert James Bakker sent you here.”

“‘Sent’? Do you think you can apply your little ideas to me?”

“Perhaps ‘sent’ was a mistake,” I conceded, rubbing my burning throat. “Maybe … influenced your desire to come here. You do desire, don’t you? Deep down you want more than you can ever say. You don’t know entirely what it is you want, but you want it now. Perhaps it’s not just your inclination for blood and ash that’s got you here; maybe it’s his?”

For a moment, Hunger almost looked confused. Then he shook his head. “No,” he whispered. “A human can’t … a creature of blood and skin and senses … wouldn’t understand.”

“We do.”

A grin of sharp grey teeth. “Yes,” he whispered. “But you aren’t human any more. Is that why you couldn’t cry, little sorcerer? Won’t you burn out your lovely blue eyes?”

“I’m a little confused,” I said, crawling back onto my feet and straightening my back to face him.

“Shall I be the one to give you enlightenment, or do you simply not want to understand?”

“We understand,” we said, opening our fingers at our side, stretching them out to catch the feeling of that place, one last time, pulling in the blue fire ready to burn. “But it doesn’t mean we have to feel sorry for you.”

He opened his fingers, a second before we could – he’d seen the attack coming and he loved it, opened his mouth and breathed in the magic around us, sucked it down like air. He raised his arms, and all the darkness moved up with him, stretching arms across the ceiling, drawing out the length of his form behind him in a wing of blackness; and from his fingers came nothing but dark, was nothing but dark, a living burning fire of it rushing forth and popping out the light of the lantern, swimming towards me in a tide that sucked the colour from the servers, the light from the wires, the heat from the frames, and left nothing but dry grey frost in its wake.

We saw all this and, for a moment, it made perfect sense to us, and we didn’t need a sorcerer’s tricks to match this darkness, just the fire inside that made us bright.

We opened our fingers, and let it blaze. The blue fire burst across our flesh and rippled up our arms, rolled over our face and set our hair blazing, we breathed in and it rushed up through our nose and down our throat, filling our lungs and stomach and passing across them into the blood, setting the arteries under our skin exploding with bright blueness, filling the blood vessels in our eyes with its flame until all we saw was the blue of it; we let the fire run through our clothes and spread out from our fingers and it didn’t burn, that wasn’t what was needed; it simply blazed. We put all our strength, our anger, our fears, our senses into it and pushed the flames out of us in a blue rippling wall of power that slammed into the tide of darkness, like two glaciers made of silk charging into each other, a silent swish of force that nearly sent us off our feet, and for a moment

just a moment

        Hunger was afraid.

Then the fire started to burn. There was no controlling it, not once it was locked into opposition with that wall of moving shadows. It started at the edges, where it rippled against the encroaching tide of blackness, solder starting to smoke and boil, plastic beginning to drip and melt, frames glowing an eerie purple as the redness of the metal was lost somewhere behind the blueness of our perceptions. We could feel the rising heat start to run across our skin and the pain of it start up in our blood, but we kept burning

my blood

        because to stop was to let that darkness suffocate us, tear us in two, and in its own strange way the burning was beautiful

my blood burning

and we didn’t mind the pain because it was sense, a pounding demand for attention, a physical awareness that was interesting as much in its intensity as its symptoms – what was it about the rising redness of our skin and the smoking of our clothes and the bleeding of our ears that caused this thing we thought of as pain, what about this sense was not in itself amazing

my blood on fire my skin burning my pain and I want …

in itself beautiful?

For a moment

        just a moment

I forgot that I was Matthew Swift. And I looked up through my blue eyes and saw the creature that I called Hunger, and recognised in it a power not entirely unlike myself, and I was nothing more than a creature of the wires. We were me, and I was the blue electric angel, and nothing more, and nothing less.

Through the walls of competing power, I met Hunger’s pale, drained eyes, and saw him blink.

The spells broke – his and ours, they snapped almost simultaneously. The tide of darkness rolled back in on itself then broke forward, slamming into the wall of fire we had raised against its progress and in that instant neither of us could control the scale of magic that we’d thrown against each other, nothing could keep it controlled or in that place. The shock of the two spells meeting, tearing, breaking loose, picked us up off our feet and threw us backwards; it illuminated the entire room, every distant wall, and its endless cobweb of trailing dead cable, with a flash of light so blue and so bright that when we closed our eyes all we could see on the back of our eyelids was the dazzling glare of a clean winter sky. The combined, uncontrolled magic ripped through the body of Guy Lee and burnt it down to dust in a second, tore apart every inch of the reanimated paper servants he had summoned down from the stairway, and sent cracks splintering through the roof above. It smashed through every dead, dark server tower, splintering the circuitry and twisting every joint of every frame so that they fell like crooked dominos, tangling in each other in a mess of concrete dust, broken metal and twisted plastic, blocking out every path around on every side and filling the place with the toppling trunks of corkscrewed dead machines. In the streets above, the LSE university shuddered, glass cracking in every old window frame, dust trickling down from the bricks. Car alarms started to wail, the leaves trembled in the trees, the roads, some said, seemed to shudder under their own weight.

Then nothing.

We fell somewhere in the dark as it settled quietly back over that place. We curled in around the pain throughout our whole body, shook

with it, screamed with it until I …

… because it was my pain …

forced control, crawled, with dust filling my nose and throat, blood wetting my lips, a relentless pulsing at the end of every nerve, forced myself to lie flat on my back in the nearest patch of open space. I breathed through the pain as it rolled over my system, while we contorted our mouth and tried to shout or scream or cry through the worst of it; any sound or sight or sense to distract us from the fear and the horror of it. I tried to think about it medically, assess the whirling of my vision and sickness in my stomach, patted the back of my head and felt blood, ran my hands down my side and felt an uneven lump around my ribs, twitched my legs and felt an ankle twisted at the wrong angle, not a pretty picture, I imagined; and managed to get a laugh through our overwhelming desire to scream. That was good, it was a start, better.

We heard a gentle click, click, click in the darkness. Blinded with all the lights gone, I tried to crawl away from it, while a shower of mortar dust filtered down from the ceiling and something creaked in the darkness. I got a few yards before I found my way blocked by some twisted metal remnants, scorching hot, and turned, tried to find enough strength to summon a little light – a flash within my fingers, burning bright neon, but gone too fast – to see my imminent demise, before it occurred to me, despite our terror, that in the dark, Hunger made no sound as he walked.

A single match flared in the darkness. It illuminated rounded shadows and grainy textures, then the end of a cigarette, before it went out. The shadow behind that tiny red glow squatted down next to me and said gruffly, “Cigarette?”

I shook my head.

“Now,” said the beard behind the glow, “I want to offer a few thoughts for you to consider right now.”

I said nothing.

“You see, I figure, here you are – kinda looking like a watermelon after a nasty accident, thinking, ‘Shit, I’ve just blown up half of the Kingsway Exchange in an uncontrolled magical explosion that really I should have stopped before it went mental; and I wonder if the primal force of darkness and shadow that I keep on forgetting to mention to people is going to come back?’ And I figure that this is the prime opportunity for me to impart a few pearls of wisdom that I, in my extensive travels, have gleaned about life.”

He drew a long puff from his cigarette, then blew it sideways and away. “Now, being Beggar King,” he said, “I see things. People don’t see me, in fact they go out of their way not to see, quite deliberately avert their eyes, but I see things. I know that when you were a kid, getting older, you’d give a few pennies to the kids on the street and I liked that, I respect that, you know? Sure, nine out of ten might be pushing drugs and you might have just bought that one last fix they need, but that every tenth penny you give – hell, it might just keep someone alive. Now, a callous person would say, ‘Don’t be so dramatic, they’re not going to die, and besides, you’re just supporting a useless burden on society, encouraging them, not helping, and, hell, you’re only in it for your own ego.’ But as I look at it, you can die a whole number of ways that don’t involve your skin. Death of the soul. Death of the spirit. Death of youth – sure, it’s kinda tied into the death of the flesh, but I reason, you waste away before your time, still alive, still ticking over, but you might as well be bed-bound for all the strength you have left in your bones, and there’s no way twenty pence in a coffee cup will buy you that bed for the night. Getting old before your time with none of the perks of age.

“As for the ego thing – no point thinking you’re good and fluffy inside if you don’t keep up the habit on occasion. You seriously gonna tell me you’re a compassionate bastard and not meet the beggar’s eyes and feel sorrow? But I figure, hell! You’re a good sorcerer, you understand this whole cycle of life crap, you get the fact that when you die, it’s just one set of thoughts snuffing out and that somewhere else there’s six and a half billion other buggers whose minds will tick along just as bright, just as clear, just as loud, just as alive, because that’s what sorcery is, right? That’s why you put the pennies in the cup, because when you’re dead and gone and your thoughts are silent and you are nothing but shadow on the wall, someone will think of you who you forgot, and their thoughts will be richer for it. Am I right?”

I didn’t answer, didn’t move, didn’t know if I could do either.

“Then there’s this whole vendetta thing you’ve got going. Now, that seems strange to me.” Another long, thoughtful puff. “You’d let people die so you can kill Lee. Granted, the guy is already dead, if you’ll excuse the pun – sometimes I astound myself at my own bad taste – but you’re willing to let others die just so you can pin him down so you can pin down Bakker so you can pin down this shadow and for what? The greater good? There’s a lot of shit done for the greater good, sorcerer. When the lady with the swish coat and the expensive shoes doesn’t give the beggar a pound on the street, it’s because she’s giving ten to a charity and sure, that’s the greater good. Sure, of course it is. It’s giving more, probably to be used better. But it isn’t compassion. To look away from someone in pain because you know that your e-account is paying monthly contributions to the ‘greater good’; to walk on by while all those people suffer and die because you’ve got a cause and a big sense of perspective … says something about the soul. Compassion. And that” – he flicked the end of the cigarette at me in the dark – “is the first thing that died in Robert James Bakker.”

He drew another breath, tossed the butt away, ground his heel into it and sighed. “I guess you’ll want a few reassurances. I don’t pretend to be the good guy, that whole moral crap is for someone with a bigger beard; but this is basic survival instinct stuff, yeah? You’ve rattled your shadowy friend. That’s what you’re hoping to hear, isn’t it? Now, the thing I find myself wanting to know is what your lady friend will ask when she comes to rescue you any minute now” – a glimmer of light somewhere in the shadow, the sound of footsteps on metal, and not from his hard-heeled boots. The Beggar King’s teeth flashed white in the dark, although I couldn’t see where the light came from that reflected on them. “Like, are the blue electric angels any better than the shadow? What’d you think?”

He leant down so his ear was a few inches from my mouth. “Go on,” he said brightly. “Just between you and me, seriously, tell me why your lady friend shouldn’t kill you like all those other faceless people who are dead upstairs. Go on. Give me a clue.”

I thought about it, felt the hot, smelly breath of the Beggar King on my face. “Because …” I said, then realised what I’d been about to say was stupid, and tried again. “Because … because we are me.” I saw reflected in his eyes a dull glow, moving through the dark, and heard the sound of falling debris somewhere in the distance. “And I won’t forget,” I said.

The Beggar King straightened up and grinned. “Good!” he said. “Well, fair dos, good luck to you, enjoy, don’t be a stranger and all that so on and so forth; glad, all things considered, that it was you, not Lee who made it through after all – unhygienic, all that paper, a mess – be seeing you!”

He started to retreatinto the darkness. I called out as best I could, which wasn’t good at all, “What if I don’t want this?”

“Want what?” his voice drifted back through the darkness.

“To be … me.”

A laugh, fading as he did. “Then you’re kinda stuffed, sorcerer!”

The click, click, click of his heels faded into nothing. A new sound replaced them, a scrabbling of fingers over broken machines, and a voice, rising up in the dark.

“Sorcerer! Swift!”

I recognised it, and tried to call out. “Oda!”

She heard me eventually, and the gentle bubble of dull torchlight swept over my feet, then found the rest of me, a spot of brightness scrambling unevenly out of the dark. Oda slipped clumsily down the side of a fallen bank of servers to where I lay. Her clothes were stained with dust and blood, but by the relative ease of the way she moved, very little of that blood could have been hers. She knelt by me and ran the torchlight in a businesslike manner over the length of me. Clearly I didn’t make a good impression. Professional fingers felt around the back of my head and turned my face this way and that, digging into me in search of injuries with a strength almost as bad as the injuries themselves, whatever they were.

“What happened to you?” she asked.

I coughed dust in answer.

“Head hurt?”

I nodded.

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Three.”

“Know what day it is?”

I thought about it. “No,” I said, surprised to find it was the case. “Not really.”

“Can you walk?”

“Perhaps.”

“Any demonic magic you’ve got useful right now?”

I laughed through the dryness of my throat, and regretted it as the movement of my lungs sent pain racing all the way to my elbows. “Nothing,” I whispered. “Nothing.”

She hesitated, her face draining of all feeling, becoming suddenly cold. She looked suddenly stiff by my side, eyes fixed on mine, mouth hard. Fear wriggled into my belly and started doing the cancan all across my stomach wall. She didn’t move, didn’t speak.

I croaked, “You still …” The words became tangled behind my trembling tongue. “You still – need me.”

No answer; her hands didn’t move, her face didn’t change.

“Not yet,” I whispered. “Please. Not yet.”

Her eyes darkened, then a half-smile flitted across her face. “Maybe not,” she answered. “A conversation for another time.”

I grabbed her wrist as she started to stand, and to my surprise, she didn’t try to pull free. “What about … everything else? What about the Whites?”

“Lee is dead, isn’t he?” she said, sounding surprised. “Half his goons just died with paper in their mouths – isn’t that a sign? What does anything else matter?”

“It matters to me,” I rasped.

There was a look in her eyes, taken aback; but the mask was so finely drawn and so expert, it was down in a second over whatever she felt. She said, “Come on. Let’s get you out of here,” and put an arm under my shoulder and, a bit at a time, and with surprising gentleness, helped me to my feet.