by Unknown
‘Uncle Saatvik Saatalya.’
Bosh grabbed her and hissed, ‘Don’t say that to his face!’ He turned smoothly and greeted the man with a slight bow. ‘Chopra-ji, I presume? Terrible thing, terrible thing. And you’re standing right where it happened. We haven’t even had a chance to clean up the blood.’
The stout Asian man jumped backwards, shiny shoes skidding. Bosh clasped his forearm. For one so short, it was remarkable how strongly he steadied Dev’s uncle. Alfie growled so deep it sounded like an earthquake. Mr Chopra recoiled. I didn’t blame him.
Where Dev had been mildly plump, his uncle was the shape of a basketball, only taller. His expensive suit struggled to contain him. He was probably in his fifties, white streaks standing out in his curly black beard, and he had all the arrogance of a self-made man. ‘Who are you? Where’s my nephew’s widow? What have you done with her?’
I stepped forward, holding out my hand for him to shake. ‘We’re friends of the family, sir. We’re here to keep Nisha company in her hour of need.’
He dropped his gaze to my outstretched hand and not-quite-sneered. ‘Then you are redundant. I am here. She doesn’t need anyone else meddling in her affairs. Thank you and goodbye.’ He barged forward but I held my ground.
‘You’re standing in the blood again,’ Bosh observed, holding Alfie by the collar he hadn’t been wearing a moment ago. ‘What does that tell us?’
I could have sworn a wraith shaped like Dev swirled up and pointed at seemingly random spots round the bully. Mr Chopra Senior shivered, leaped aside and scraped his shiny shoes frantically on the pavement. He’d gone a pale, trembly grey.
‘Ah, it tells us you’re frightened the djinn that killed your nephew might target you next. You are absolved, Chopra-ji. Step inside and allow us to come to your assistance.’
***
There was a lot of chat in their language. I was not only tired, the plum brandy was beginning to give me a headache. I could happily have drifted off to sleep only Alfie (cute version) rested his head on my lap and suddenly I could understand every syllable. We were in Nisha’s perfectly normal living room on her perfectly normal three-piece suite talking about feuds and blackmail and djinns. Bosh was some kind of a mage; I was an empath, whatever that meant; it was less than four hours ’til my first big presentation at work – and I was so going to get fired.
Suddenly Mr Chopra stopped blustering about being the head of the family and sending Nisha back home to save the family’s good name.
Oddly – well, all of it was odd to me – Bosh had taken my hand. And the old gentleman’s; and all at once the uncle was babbling about his foolish son up to his ears in gambling debts being forced to transport drugs or he’d be murdered. How Mr Chopra tried to buy off the blackmailer but it had ended in a stupid shoot-out in Strathclyde. How they’d packed the boy off to college in America. How it hadn’t ended with the blackmailer’s death because the clan used his blood to summon a djinn. Words like ‘ended’ and ‘stupid’ seemed a large part of Mr Chopra’s vocabulary. ‘Bemused’ was the largest part of mine.
‘So I paid a wizard for protection for my family in Glasgow.’ The old man was weeping now. ‘How was I to know they’d come all the way down to London to target my dead brother’s child?’
***
Leaving this mish-mash of terror and weirdness and grief to do my big presentation come nine o’clock felt all wrong. Still, Alfie stayed to guard Nisha and the tired old man while Bosh carried my laptop onto the train. As if stage-fright and the fear of losing my job weren’t enough to set off armies of butterflies in my stomach, the thought of invisible demons had me turning my head like nobody’s business all the way down the platform. Once we were on the train at Harringay, Bosh said they couldn’t get us and I calmed down a nano-degree. He fiddled with my computer until ten seconds before our stop, then led me by the hand towards the office. I could feel all my anxieties draining away, leaving not so much as a chrysalis worming in my tum.
In a daze of unnatural calm, I showed the board what I’d got. Even my boss seemed pleased with it. She smiled, anyway, which was a big step up; and I didn’t get the boot. I’d expected Bosh to be hovering outside the door to see how I’d got on but there wasn’t a sign of him.
Somehow I got through the next couple of hours but there were demons abroad in The Smoke and zig-zags of nervousness started to make me feel like my head was going to explode. I couldn’t wait to leave.
I didn’t have to. At three o’clock the fire alarms went loco. Malfunction, they said, but they couldn’t stop them ringing without turning all the power off so we might as well go home. Why was I not surprised to find Bosh reading a newspaper on the wall outside the building?
‘It’s all fixed,’ he said happily.
‘Aren’t you even going to ask how I got on?’
‘I know how you got on. You’re radiating emotions again. Between that and worry about all this magic stuff you’re lit up like a firework. Let me fill you in on the plan. You can start by calming little Anjuli. She’s cute as a button when she’s not crying.’
***
Apart from a strong aroma of dog-wee the area round the Himachal Palace was all very normal in the sunny afternoon. Except, now I came to think of it, for rows upon rows of cars and minibuses lining both sides of the street as far as I could see. Also, I was pleased to note, it was agreeably warm. After the inexplicable frost last night the Met men may have said more on way but once again they’d got it wrong.
We went in past the sign that said closed due to bereavement. The cosy living-room was crowded, not least because Alfie was big enough for Anjuli to be riding him round the couch. She waved limply at me and snuggled her chin on his furry neck. It didn’t seem like she needed me at all. Alfie just rolled his gaze ceiling-wards but he seemed happy enough. A flock of brightly-clad Asian women were talking over one another in Glaswegian accents across enough samosas to build a life-size model of the Taj Mahal. From inside the rainbow gaggle Nisha gave me a teary smile.
Bosh took me through to a room I’d never seen. Even before I got there a tumult of rage rushed round me in a clash of waves. The place was full of hostile men, some in Western clothes, others in long tunics and baggy pants; some of them had daggers under their vests.
I wished I was anywhere else. They all stopped yelling to stare at me when I came in. Well, all except one little man as old and craggy as the hills. His thin voice called me and the men stepped aside. Nervously I shuffled towards him.
The moment I looked into his pale blue eyes I had the inescapable urge to kneel before him. He didn’t demand it. It was just that his aura of serenity spread such power I was overwhelmed. He took my hand and I felt like I was standing in a great golden bell.
As the guru addressed each man, I had to touch their hands to form a living bridge; not for his words, which I didn’t understand, but for the cool rivers of reason that carried them. He had compassion for all of them – for each felt he’d been slighted or wronged. Even those whose relatives would have starved but for their poppy fields learned pity for the ones they’d harmed. Even the sharp-dressed man who owned casinos saw how far he’d drifted from The Path. Even the touchy young hot-heads who competed for the flashest cars with the loudest stereos.
Only one man seemed still to have a small dark core of rage.
***
Most of the men left in small bunches. They weren’t exactly bosom pals but at least they were no longer walled inside private compounds of their fears. Several of the women stayed, since Nisha clearly had the guru’s blessing. One, a cousin she’d never met, was going to stay and help her expand the Palace. They were chatting like good’uns about how they’d share the parenting since she was a widow with two small children of her own. Anjuli thought it would be nice to have someone to play with when her par— When her mother was working. She was in bed, cuddled up with her new sisters.
Only Mr Chopra and the angry man remained.
By n
ow it was midnight. When the guru led the rest of us outside, the street was deserted. Strangely, not a light was on in any of the houses nearby, nor any streetlamps either. Orion bestrode the heavens, his great sword at his jewelled belt. And, as warned, Bosh and I had put on warm coats.
The little man with the blue eyes stepped into the empty road and gestured.
Over Mr Chopra’s head appeared – something. A sick, transparent shimmer that made me shiver.
It grew and grew, humanoid yet not human.
And it was in chains.
It flinched snarling from the old man. All up and down the hills of North London dogs howled in reply, and snow blizzarded around us. Goodness knows what the weathermen would make of this.
At a sign, Bosh led me towards the shifting gleam that was the djinn. I cowered away from it but the old man made little shooing motions that sent me reluctantly closer. ‘No fear, Zoe,’ Bosh whispered. ‘It feeds on fear. Find out what it wants.’
Tall as the houses, it hung above the rage-filled man and growled at my approach. I was too afraid to touch it. All I wanted was to go home. Back to Rutland, back to peace and quiet and the placid hills and lakes. Back to the life when I thought I’d been loved and wanted and safe. The djinn howled again, rattling its chains.
‘It’s homesick,’ I murmured, and my own longings spiralled sharply up the glimmering links. ‘Something’s stopping it being where it belongs.’
‘You’re – you’re right,’ Bosh whispered, his hand trembling in mine.
Alfie leaped with a roar like a lion, slashing through the djinn’s shackles with one swipe of his claws. ‘Well it can bloody well sod off out of my manor.’ I heard, and in a wail of swirling snow the djinn rocketed up into the night. The angry man fainted.
I stood staring after it, mouth agape. Something hot was shoved into my hand and I nearly died of surprise. It was Nisha, handing me a packet of onion bhajis. The old man had gone and Mr Chopra was scuttling up the road to his car with Mr Used-to-be-Angry as fast as they could go.
‘So is it all right if I kip on your sofa then, Zo?’ Bosh said.
I goggled.
Alfie shrank back to cute fluffy dog and gambolled around us. ‘’Course it is, mate,’ he said. ‘She’s got pals now. She’s right where she belongs. Bags I the outside of the bed.’
‘On your bike, Alfie!’ I snapped, listening to the silent tinkle of other chains breaking. ‘I’ll put you a cushion by the radiator but that’s your lot. Coming?’
Family Business
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Douglas was expecting us. I’m willing to bet he’d had an eye on the door every half-minute in case my lads showed up, with his other eye on the back way out. They always think they can run.
It was a poor place he’d chosen to spend his last night in, some wretched pasta dive that turned into a card den after dark. He had enough money to play cards, did Douglas, but not to pay his debts.
We caught him between half-minutes, me and my boys. The place went quiet. Douglas had been dealt a good hand. He was halfway through sliding some chips forward. He stopped: a lean, shaven-headed man in an old suit, aces and eights dropping from nerveless fingers.
He ran. I called the old magic about me.
‘Stop.’
He stopped. Every eye in the house was on him, because they didn’t want to look at me. We cut between the tables like sharks. Douglas was trembling, now, though I’d heard some of the things he’d been saying, about him not being afraid. About how old Tarrant didn’t scare him, not hardly.
‘Outside.’ The trick is in how you say it. A good, clear diction, for the magic to work. A click of the ‘t’ and the ‘d’, not a lost letter. Douglas turned and left the back way, just like he’d planned, only in company. In the acid streetlight he stood, shaking. I wondered what he’d been hoping to gamble the money together for. A ticket out of town, no doubt. Should know better. If he’d been any good with cards he’d not have had to borrow from me in the first place.
‘Douglas,’ I said. My lads were all around him now, so I let him go by speaking his name.
‘Mr Tarrant – I – have the money—’ he got out.
‘But you don’t.’ I stood outside the circle of my boys, arms folded. There was a gap, in that circle, leading to me. There always was. It’s been a while since anyone tried to take it. Six-foot-six and broad and bearded am I, but more than that. The magic leaks out of me, I know: the magic that commands. I remember, six years before, when some mad-eyed junkie tried it on, rushing me with a knife. I told him to stop and he stopped, the point inches from me. Plenty of witnesses to that one, and to the price I took out of his hide.
‘Do you know what we call your kind, in the trade?’ I asked him. When I’m not using the magic I have a very pleasant voice, soft and low and rich. I could sing Sinatra and charm the birds off the trees, but what tyrant ever charmed where he could command.
Douglas was displaying his ignorance, so I told him, ‘We call your kind ‘lemons’, Doug. It’s because I squeeze you and squeeze you, but all I get is bitter.’
He said something. It might have been, ‘Please.’
‘Thirty thousand quid’s a lot of juice, Douglas the Lemon,’ I told him, and lucky for him I was Tarrant, and not my brother Winston, whose names stuck when he gave them.
‘Mr Tarrant,’ he said, but I knew my own name, here on this side of the fence, and no need for some walking dead man to remind me. ‘Just a week,’ he croaked on. ‘You gave Jimmy Sarker a week. Come on, Mr Tarrant.’
‘Jimmy Sarker was a lemon like you, Doug. He used his week to fly to Spain,’ I said reasonably. ‘Which forced my boys to mail him back home in a number of shoeboxes. Since then we’ve changed the way we cut lemon wedges. It’s cheaper on postage.’ I nodded to my boys, and Douglas at last began to scream. I heard the radio in the pasta place turned up, loud enough to drown him.
We drowned him. You can do it, if you know which arteries to cut. My lads were good at it now. I didn’t get a drop on me.
‘Good work,’ I told my boys, when it was done. ‘You two wrap him and dump him. Then…’ No pressing business tonight, so why not? ‘Let’s get inside and see how Dougie’s luck would have run, shall we?’ And we’d better come out ahead, or the owner would be explaining to me why someone on my hit list was playing at his joint without him tipping me the nod.
It was about an hour later, with Douglas safely out of mind, when I heard it. I stood up, cards still in hand. It had been a long, long time. Memories rushed in: the war; the silenced voices, suddenly, mid-cry; my family, those that hadn’t made it. The Call. The Call to Arms.
I started for the door. The lads were jumping up all over, reaching into the coats, knowing there was trouble but not what. I waved them down. ‘Stay here,’ I told them. Some of them protested. ‘Stay here,’ I commanded, and that did it. I left.
By that time, I had an idea where it was. I hailed a taxi. Embankment,’ I said, and Embankment he took me to. I walked upriver until I saw it.
A handful of bystanders. An ambulance. Not surprising for London in the small hours. I’d have walked right past, if not for the Call. The paramedics were standing round uselessly, come too late. A handful of drunks, insomniacs and homegoing party girls were standing to stare. One figure stood alone, a thin, pale man with sandy hair and gaunt cheeks. He wore army surplus and a long, stained coat. He could have been any tramp from any city in the world, but I knew him. Even in the Old Country, Trevor had never been much to look at.
‘Traveller,’ I said.
‘Tyrant,’ he replied.
There was a pause. We had never been enemies; never been friends. Our paths had not crossed often enough, back on the other side of the fence. I suppose that made him as close to an ally as I was ever likely to get. I was never interested in popularity contests.
After the pause had, in my opinion, ended, I said, ‘I hope you didn’t call me here to talk about old times.’ Just because he wasn
’t an enemy doesn’t mean I liked him.
‘I didn’t call you,’ he said. ‘I called everyone.’ He nodded at something on the ground. Somehow I had overlooked the body, amongst the onlookers. Their very focus on it had drawn the eye away to themselves. A body, saturated, pooling river water on the pavement, dumped here at the head of the steps they had dragged it up. The Thames’ latest victim. I hunched closer to see the face.
‘No…’
‘Yes.’ Trevor was at my side. In this we were brothers. The cold shock that went through me came from a world away, another time.
Pallid, dirty, a young man whose hair had been golden but was now murky, long and tangled like water weeds. Thin, frail, he looked starved: I could see the skull through the skin. The sunken eyes were closed, at least. It was Winston, my brother, as Trevor was my brother. Winston was dead.
It had been over a decade since I had lost family. I did not have so very much family left to lose. Many of them were my enemies. Many of them hated me and were hated right back. That didn’t stop them being family. I had never liked Winston, but I liked him being dead a good deal less.
The crowd moved to make way for another brother’s arrival. He was still in uniform, and that helped: a big, handsome man who straight away started moving people along, speaking to them, convincing them. He shone. The people couldn’t see it, but he glowed with his own light: about his head was the glittering radiance of an invisible crown. They did not see it with their eyes, but their minds did. Every word from him was reassurance and authority. He spoke to the paramedics, and they packed up their ambulance and left the body there. I could have done the same, but they would have remembered me for it. I command, Lorne inspires. We’re natural opposites. Before the war we’d tried to kill each other a dozen times. That was then, before blood became too precious to waste.