Anyway, I make it up. I tell her I was always fascinated by all the exciting things you can discover when you take a dead body to pieces, and Kazia gives me this funny look. So I change the subject and we talk about several more things that aren’t her uncle but finally there’s no escaping him anymore. I know nothing about Henry Wallace, apart from the fact that he’s dead and may have had a thing about housemaids, but I’m getting this feeling that maybe he wasn’t that nice to be around.
I’m probably imagining this, but despite the dead bodies I get the impression that maybe Kazia likes me. Time to put an end to that.
“Before your uncle was killed—”
“I told you—”
“But was there anything—I don’t know . . . Was there anything that happened ?”
Her face has gone hard. “Many things.”
If you’re in a hole, keep digging. “Something that didn’t make sense. Something . . .”
The auditorium is nearly empty. A couple of families with kids; a gang of cool-looking guys about my age, with their legs over the seats in front; old blokes sitting on their own; three men coming in at the back. I want to explain to Kazia why I’m doing this, but I know if I try I’ll make a mess of it—
“Could he have been using an unlicensed sorcerer?” She’s on her feet. I say, “Please, don’t go. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Have you ever met an unlicensed sorcerer?”
“Once. He was just this kid, about twelve. Small-time stuff—you know, buried treasure, love potions . . .”
She’s staring down at me so intently it’s actually kind of scary. God, she’s beautiful!
“Did you tell anyone?”
“No. He wasn’t doing any harm and I didn’t want to see him wind up on a bonfire.”
A couple of ushers are going around turning down the gas; the fading light dances across her cheek and for a second I imagine it’s my lips and I come over all giddy.
“Akinbiyi,” I manage to say. “How old is he?”
“Twenty-one . . . twenty-two. Why?”
“Too old. The kid who works in the gardens—he’s the housekeeper’s son, or something—anyway, he’s the right age.”
“For what?”
“To be Gifted. There has to be sorcery. Too many things don’t make sense.”
She settles back into her seat. “Your friend the monk . . .”
“Andrew?”
“He has—what do you call it?” She gestures. “On his shoulder.”
“A chip on his shoulder?”
“Yes. And he knows the cathedral.”
I shake my head. “But there has to be someone under twenty . . .”
She leans closer to me and whispers, “What about me?”
“Huh?”
Only the emergency lights are still glowing. I can’t see her face anymore, just this tiny sharp gleam in her eyes.
“If you suspect anyone who’s under twenty . . .”
“Yeah, right.” Do I have to explain this? “You’re a girl. Women can do witchcraft, but they never get the Gift.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Witches serve demons. Sorcerers command them.”
The audience starts clapping as a spotlight comes on and a bloke in a dinner jacket and a bow tie walks out onto the stage below the mirror. He bows and sits down with his hands resting on his knees.
“And women never have the Gift?” she whispers as everyone goes quiet.
“Never. Count yourself lucky.”
The guy on stage is an elemental. His eyes close. The scryer glows . . .
And we’re in Mexico, flying down the Grand Canyon. I suppose they’ve stuck a scryer in a Montgolfier and it’s all dead impressive if you like rocks, but I’m finding it hard to pay attention. My elbow is touching Kazia’s, on the rest between the seats. I can sort of feel her breathing and I want to concentrate on that . . .
Except that I’m still running through names in my head, trying to come up with a likely sorcerer. And Einstein’s Laws have crept back to haunt me. Contiguity fades over time, but never absolutely disappears. It cannot be destroyed by magical means . . .
I found no contiguity between the head and body. Ferdia found lots, but he’s an idiot. Cimerez told me . . . what did Marvo say? “Fact is, Frank, this guy has no head.” Now what the hell did that mean?
I realize that Kazia has stopped breathing. When I look around, she’s staring past me.
Next thing, she’s on her feet, stumbling away along the row and dashing for the exit. I jump up and chase after her. As I run up the aisle I hear scuffling behind me. I chase her along passages, down stairs . . .
It’s dark outside. When I catch up and grab her arm, she looks scared.
“Kazia?”
It’s like she’s trying to hide behind me, and when I look around I see three men coming down the steps from the cinema.
One of them’s the size of a building. Number two is this skinny little runt—the top of his head’s so flat, if it rained it’d form a puddle. Light flickers across the pockmarked face of the third as he stops for a moment to light a cigarette.
Kazia jerks her arm free and she’s off like a hare, her coat billowing behind her. I give chase and when I look around the three men are charging after us. I follow her around the side of the cinema—my God, she can move!—across the road and down a high-walled, narrow alley between two derelict buildings. I realize she doesn’t know where she’s going.
“Kazia!”
She scorches down a flight of rough stone steps, like all the hounds of hell are on her tail. I can hear the thunder of boots behind me and I’m getting a stitch in my side. She’s through an archway, across a wooden footbridge over a stagnant stream, and we’re struggling across a rubbish dump. Rags. Rotting food. Rats squealing in the darkness. The stink is ghastly and I’m up to my knees in crap; but I’m doing better than her, and even if I can’t see where I’m going, at least I know where I am.
I grab her hand. There’s an iron rail, muddy ground, a row of derelict warehouses . . . and the lights of a busy street market that stinks of rotting vegetables and ragged lumps of meat, buzzing with flies. There’s two blokes—one on an accordion, the other on bagpipes—glaring across the street at each other and hacking out different tunes. A solid mob of people is shuffling, pawing, and haggling in the light of lanterns and torches. I look back and see the Building peering over the crowd at us. I duck low, drag Kazia down the side of one of the stalls, and double back.
Peering through a rack of dried fish, I see the Building plowing through the crowd with Flathead on his heels. After a few seconds there’s no sign of the bloke with the cigarette. I turn to Kazia . . .
Oh God! She’s pulled her coat open and she’s panting for breath, and I can see her breasts rising and falling beneath her sweater. Inappropriate thoughts! Where are the termites when you need them? I turn quickly and lead the way over a pile of rubble between two collapsed buildings . . .
Into the heart of the Hole.
Chapter Eighteen
The Hole
History lesson. They used to have this real hotshot university here, until they got bored of rugby and cricket and decided that real weapons and ammunition would liven things up a bit. By the time the fun stopped, about eighty years back, most of the real estate had been burned and looted.
A few of the old colleges survived by bringing in sorcerers. They still take in students and hand out degrees, but mostly they deal in conventional weapons and the occasional freelance sorcerer. And according to Gerry Ormerod, more than half the drugs that come into the country are shifted by Christ Church or Keble.
Most of the old city center was flattened during the fighting. When things quieted down it sort of grew back, from the outside in, like new grass around the ashes of a fire. There’s the cathedral at Osney and the municipal offices on reclaimed ground across the river, out to the west; the rich—like my mum, before she blew it all and had to
start taking in lodgers—up on Boar’s Lump; the middle classes out in Summertown, Marston, and Headington; the poor around the factories in Cowley, Littlemore, and Kennington and down the river to Abingdon, where the Society turned the old abbey into a headquarters.
That’s why they call it Doughnut City: there’s nothing in the middle apart from burned-out buildings, tin shacks, and a population of thugs, maniacs, and witch doctors.
Why have they never sent in the army? At first because the army had its hands full, fighting off the French. Later they said there was no future in trying to recapture a square mile that had been packed with enough explosives to turn most of Oxfordshire into a crater. But now there’s another story: that there’s a renegade sorcerer in the Hole, so powerful that even the Society is scared to take him on.
I can see problems with both stories, but either way it’s a standoff. There’s talk of a deal to re-house the riffraff in a huge new town out the other side of Otmoor. Or the corporation may just call their bluff and finally send in the cavalry.
Anyway, not quite what I anticipated on what was, if you look at it the right way, a first date.
Apart from a few bonfires and braziers, I can’t see much. I’m dragging Kazia along a ragged line of wood and tin shacks, built into the shell of one of the old colleges. Basically we’re back in the Middle Ages. There’s guys struggling with crutches and rolling themselves around on little wooden trolleys. A boy with only one arm, lying on his side squeezing howls of agony out of a set of bagpipes held between his legs.
A man struggles out of a torch-lit doorway. Both eyes are bandaged and his hand clutches the shoulder of a child, maybe five or six and covered in filth and sores. The man stumbles over a loose plank in the crumbling walkway and almost falls. He lashes out with a stick. The kid howls, pulling at the chain that keeps her from running away.
The pole to which the torch is attached has a moldy-looking stuffed snake wound around it, indicating some sort of healer. Another satisfied customer: the blind man’s hand clamps down again on the kid’s shoulder.
Kazia pulls away. “I want to go home.”
I’m too busy trying to catch my breath to speak. We’re near what’s left of the old museum, so the palace is, let me see . . . that way. Kazia, unfortunately, is walking determinedly off in the opposite direction. My turn to trail after her again, deeper into the Hole. There’s the sound of shouting not far away. The crack of gunfire . . .
There’s this fountain. Well, sort of. The basin’s taken a bashing so the water spurts out of a ragged hole and makes a scummy pool an inch or so deep around a stone figure with no arms or head, then trickles out through a crack and into a ditch. Drinking water and a place for the locals to get their annual wash.
I lean over the spout and splash water into my face. We’re in a kind of square—except it’s not really square, just an irregular open space surrounded by wooden shacks shoved one on top of another three, even four stories high. They fall down regularly. The locals clear the bodies away then rebuild, just as dangerously.
I shake my head wildly, to throw the water off and clear my thoughts.
“Frank, do you like me?”
I don’t think I really have to answer that question. I wet my finger and draw a pentagram on the stone rim of the fountain. It won’t last long, but I don’t think we’re hanging around here . . .
“Will you help me? I’m in a lot of trouble.”
Do you know what I see here? I see an opportunity. I can’t imagine why she’d like me, but maybe she’d feel grateful to a boy who helped her.
“What sort of trouble? Who were those guys?”
“I don’t know.”
I’m making a list in my head of all the reasons why this is a lie, when she puts her hand on my arm.
“Can you take me away from here?”
“Yeah, this way—”
“No, right away—I want to go home . . .”
I’m slow sometimes. Even while I’m standing there staring at her, it’s like I can hear this clock ticking down and I know I’m blowing it. She’s peering into my face:
“Frank?”
And suddenly it’s too late. Her gaze flickers to the side, over my shoulder. Her eyes widen with fear . . .
We’ve got four friends now. OK, Flathead is even more of a runt than I am, so I figure I can take him . . . until the Building hands him a knife. As the third guy lights another cigarette, the flame is reflected in the lenses of a pair of round sunglasses that hide the eyes of the thick-set bloke I saw in the cathedral the morning I met Kazia there . . .
Seconds later I’m tearing down an alley, dragging Kazia after me. The goons are right behind us . . .
It’s pitch-dark, but I know my way around here. Two corners. Up some steps between a couple of battered stone heads on pillars. Into a sea of rubbish: broken glass, scrap metal, rags and bones, bits of old carriages and bicycles.
There’s even the burned-out remains of a Ghost with half a dozen yelping, skeletal dogs tied to it.
The building I’m making for, it must’ve been nice till somebody took explosives to it. We race inside and stumble up a flight of stairs. The banisters have all been hacked out for firewood. There’s holes in the walls and lumps of charred stone and plaster all over the place.
First floor, three men come out of a doorway. My heart does a somersault, but then I recognize one of them. Dinny. The French guy I told you about: the one who lost both hands at the Ghost factory.
“Ah, Fronk.” He’s swinging a couple of dead puppies from one hook. “You can use them, maybe?”
I cast a professional eye over them. One’s a beagle and fresh enough, but the other’s been run over or something; it’s basically soup held together by the skin.
“Are you kidding, Dinny?” His face falls. “Look, what I need is a shark. Can you get me one of those.”
There’s a lot I can do with a dead shark.
Kazia is looking out of a window. “Frank!”
Priorities, priorities.
“Sorry, Dinny. Another time, yeah?”
And we’re off again. This was a library once, but the books were sold or burned for fuel long ago and now the empty bays between the stacks of shelves have been turned into tiny dwellings. We fight our way through a line of washing and dodge through a hole in a wall, across a smoke-filled room where someone’s set up a still, down two staircases, along a basement corridor, then up and out into a courtyard where chickens squawk and scatter.
“Hey!” A kid with yellow teeth like a hamster heaves a half brick at us.
I drag Kazia over a pile of rubble and through a gateway—and we’re back in the street market, where the accordion and the bagpipes are still struggling to drown each other out.
Within seconds the crowd has swallowed us up. We struggle past a fight going on around a stall piled with crude chinaware. I get over to a wall and stop, gasping for breath. I feel dizzy, like the world keeps falling away beneath my feet and coming up in a different place.
But the fun’s only just begun. I don’t know which is the bigger shock, the crash as the crockery stall topples over . . .
Or the gentle feeling of Kazia’s fingers brushing down my cheek. I’m still blinking when she kisses me.
As she pulls away, the world isn’t bouncing anymore. It isn’t even turning. Everything has stopped dead, including the fight around the broken crockery. Even the buskers have shut up.
The only thing moving is me. Slowly. Toward her. Her lips are open, ever so slightly. A moment’s warmth, then she pulls back again. She looks at me. In the dim lamplight, her pupils are huge and for a moment I feel myself falling into them . . .
I’m asking myself, what’s her game?—when I see that our four friends have caught up with us. It’s turned into this dead social evening.
“Who are you guys? ASB?” I step in front of Kazia. “She’s got nothing to do with this.”
Apparently they don’t see it that way. The Building swipe
s at me with a broken shaft from the crockery stall. As I jump aside, the goon with the cigarette stubs it out on the back of my neck. And by the time I’ve stopped yelling, he’s holding Kazia from behind for Sunglasses to whack her across the face. He’s screaming at her—something I can’t hear, because the bloody music has started up again . . .
I dodge another swing from the Building and make a lunge in Kazia’s direction. I’ve got Flathead riding on my back and we get tangled up in a gang of kids, fighting over scattered crockery.
It gets really messy now. Kazia wriggles out of her coat and manages to kick Cigarette in the balls. He staggers back, clutching himself. I crash into him and we both fall down. The Building should have looked where he was waving his knife, coz he’s stuck it into one of the kids and they’re swarming all over him.
Sunglasses has got Kazia around the neck and is trying to drag her away. I roll over and manage to grab her foot.
Her shoe comes off.
A kid comes flying out of nowhere and shoves a burning torch at the Building. Sunglasses has still got Kazia in a stranglehold. Flathead jumps over me, grabs her around the knees, and lifts her off the ground. The Building is stumbling around, flapping away at the flames rising from his coat . . .
There’s a shadow like a tombstone beside me. Cigarette is just kneeling there with a knife sticking out of his back.
I grab his shoulder to haul myself up. As he goes facedown in the mud, I throw myself into the scrum. The Building is right behind me, trailing smoke. We all stumble around like a drunken spider then fall down in a heap. I hear something snap and when I try to get up I realize it was my leg.
A moment later, somebody kicks me in the head. I’m seeing stars. My leg is agony and when I grab it I feel the bone sticking out of it. Blood is pouring down my face. Kazia is screaming.
This has been a memorable first date, but I’m losing it fast now. I can’t see properly but there seem to be more and more people piling in. There’s a blinding flash and a bang, right in front of my face.
There were some questions I needed answered. Somebody wanted to go somewhere . . .
A Dangerous Magic Page 17