A Mage's Gambit: New York Falling (A Malachi English book)

by Andy Hyland

  ‘We have a problem,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t be so dramatic. We always have problems. They go away eventually.’

  I glanced over to the bookshelf. The guy was now out of sight but well within hearing distance. ‘Can we talk?’

  ‘With complete transparency,’ Simeon assured me. ‘There is nothing you can tell me that the man over there doesn’t already know. And in any case, he’s one of the good guys. You might even meet him in time.’ This drew a cough from the subject of our conversation. ‘Or maybe not. His choice, apparently. But please, go ahead. My time is yours, but there are other things that need attending to.’

  I took a deep breath. ‘This morning. I met Melanie -’

  ‘Oh, her,’ Simeon interrupted. ‘Now she’s got a problem. You’ve seen this?’ He reached over to a nearby desk and grabbed a newspaper, chucking it across to me.

  Banker Viciously Murdered the headline ran. Below was a brief but detailed description of how Neville Compton, VP of Investments for Willis, Beck and Thornton, had met his untimely end. Someone had really done a job on him, including ‘Castration?’

  ‘Yes, that did stand out. Along with the fact that a certain Melanie Carter is wanted in connection with it.’

  ‘Two cops tried to drag her away for questioning.’

  ‘Just questioning, though? No arrest? I think you know as well as I do that she can extricate herself from that situation quite easily. If they try burning her at the stake she’s got a problem, but apart from that-’

  ‘Stop it,’ I interrupted. ‘Stop it. Please.’ All of a sudden I was having trouble catching my breath.

  ‘Damn it, Malachi, this woman drags you down time and time again.’ He paused. Leaned forward and peered closely. ‘We’re not only talking about two police officers here, are we?’

  I filled him in, running through the main events of the day. His eyebrows twitched twice, once when I mentioned the card, and again for the shambler. Other than that, he sat perfectly still, taking it in, arms folded. When I’d finished he reached out, beckoning. I took out the warded handkerchief and handed it over.

  ‘Careful. It packs a punch.’

  ‘Oh, I think I’m up to the challenge. Let’s have a look at you.’

  I winced when he unwrapped the card and took it carefully between two fingers. I needn’t have worried.

  ‘Now that,’ he said slowly, holding it up and gazing at it with something approaching admiration, ‘that is showing off. Nasty, I grant you,’ he said, glancing at me, ‘but so pretentious. No effect on the Unaware at all, hence the police officer not getting struck down, but if someone even remotely magical picks it up, it gets all fizzy.’ He held it out to me. ‘Don’t worry. It’s quite safe now.’

  I took it gingerly, but sure enough it didn’t try to give me a heart attack this time. It was now simply a good quality business card with two words, elegantly stated in a flowing script. ‘Associate.’ And below that: ‘Carafax.’

  ‘Carafax. Heard of them?’ I asked.

  ‘No. And that’s bothersome. Knowing things is the point of me.’

  I looked around the room. ‘You’re not going to check the books?’

  ‘Not necessary. I told you. I haven’t heard of them. And if I haven’t heard of them,’

  ‘Then they’re very new,’ I said.

  ‘Or something else entirely.’ He drummed his fingers against the arm of the chair. ‘Something that’s coming out of the woodwork.’

  ‘We need to get on this now,’ I demanded. ‘Whoever Carafax are, they’ve got Melanie. We need to act on this.’

  ‘You can’t get that floozy out of your head, can you?’

  ‘She’s not a floozy. And nobody says floozy anymore.’

  ‘Shame. I like the word. Look, Malachi, we’ve got a castration-murder, a new firm on the block with lethal calling cards and shamblers wandering around in broad daylight. You can have a quick answer or you can have the right answer. Only the latter is going to be of any use. So deal with that. And stop sulking.’

  ‘Not sulking,’ I pouted.

  ‘Oh for pity’s sake. Look, do you trust me to look into this for you or not?’

  ‘Sure. Yes, yes I do. I apologise.’

  ‘Not necessary. And believe me, this is getting priority treatment. But rushing in could alert people. People we do not want to know about us.’

  ‘I understand. And thank you, Simeon. But you’ll understand if I start making my own enquiries. Quietly, I promise.’

  ‘I’d expect nothing less. Malachi,’ he added after a thoughtful pause, ‘this concerns me. I thought the Melanie thing was in the past. I’d heard there was someone else. I was hopeful.’

  ‘You heard right, which is no surprise. There is someone else. Someone great. Very new, but I’m hopeful as well. This thing with Melanie though – it’s not what you think. She’s…she’s done some bad stuff, and she’s majorly dysfunctional, but that description fits most of us. What it comes down to is that she’s family. Like you and the rest of us. We’ve lost everything – everyone – else, so I guess I cling tightly to what I do have. But that’s all. I’m not going to do anything stupid over this.’

  ‘Thank you. That is reassuring.’ He tossed me the newspaper. ‘I assume you’ll find this useful. But there’s something else that needs your attention. I mentioned when you arrived that you were just the man I’d been looking for. Benny wants you. Fresh meat walked in.’

  This raised all the usual questions. Like how Benny knew I’d be coming here. And how the message got to Simeon, because you can believe that there was no way a telephone was involved. But I’d tried forcing answers out of Simeon before, and they weren’t coming.

  ‘I’m busy,’ I told him, without much conviction. ‘Send someone else.’

  ‘He requested you. Said time was of the essence. Apparently Stacey’s taking an interest.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Language, Malachi. But, yes. Shit. Look, you’ve taken some knocks lately, and you’ve sucked it up like you always do. But you can’t go on like that forever. A man needs to win every now and then. Leave Carafax to me. Go to Benny’s. Help the kid. Take the win. We’ll talk soon. Anyway, what are you going to do? Walk away?’

  I shook my head and a grin escaped. ‘You know that’s not happening. And you’re right. A win sounds good. And it’s always good seeing the look on Stacey’s face when she has her food snatched away. Tell Benny I’m on my way.’

  Simeon’s green eyes danced. ‘Oh, he knows.’

  I walked out and the door shut politely behind me. Something made me pause, and a second later I heard a voice – not Simeon’s – it must have been the other guy. Closer to the door now – close enough for me to hear the words clearly. Odd voice, mix of accents – a hint of Welsh in there somewhere. ‘That’s him is it, Simeon? You really think he can be trusted?’

  Chapter three

  Simeon played it as a kind of self-help gesture, and yes I admit that I desperately needed a bit of success in my life lately. But that doesn’t change the fact that for the young guy who’d wandered into Benny’s for the first time, this was serious. Life, death and all the crap that comes after it – everything was up for grabs. We’d all been there at one point, and we usually made it out the other side because someone took time out to grab us by the scruff of the neck and give us a good slap before we did something really stupid. Today, it was my gentle, loving hand doing the slapping. The rest of the world can go to hell for all I care – and for all it cares about me – but you’ve got to look after your own.

  Benny’s is in the Fades, and to get there you need to slide. The first time you do it by accident, like our intrepid newbie. After that, if you want to live beyond a few weeks, you put in the effort and learn to do it at will. To some extent it doesn’t matter where you are in the world, although some places are decidedly thinner than others. The way that the Fades connect geographically to what we like to call the ‘real’ world is less than straight
forward. And yet, despite the vastness of the reality we deal with, if you slide for the first time, it’s Benny’s you’ll end up at. Almost without exception (unless you’re abducted, or suckered into going to Rarkshah by some git of a demon). Some sit around sinking shots and talk this over till the bars run dry, trying to figure it all out. Me, I simply take it as God giving us a fighting chance. God, as usual, stays silent on the matter.

  If you were around in the nineties you probably saw those magic eye pictures – the ones that looked like random geometric patterns, but if you defocussed your eyes in the right way, the picture became apparent. For the Aware, life’s a bit like that. Just defocus from this world a little and let what’s underneath slide into view.

  A good spot to slide was only three blocks up from the chapel. My first slide happened here, during a night of drunken terror, which later ramped up into a night of sober terror. Not a happy time. Stuck between an express dry cleaning store and a Deli there’s a very narrow townhouse with pasted over windows and a door that hasn’t opened for decades. Starting on the outside edge of the sidewalk to give myself a short run-up, I turned sharply, let my gaze drift and slide, and felt the door dissolve around me.

  The sky was a choked ash, as it is everywhere in the Fades, all the time, empty of stars. A pale disk that could have been a sun or moon hovered overhead, giving neither heat nor comfort. The cobbles underfoot were wet and filthy, a coat of slime reflecting the glare of a single ornate streetlamp. A mild acrid smell hits you at first, but it’s so pervasive that you forget it’s there after a few minutes. Ahead, tall walls on either side stretched away into the distance. The only door was a hundred yards down on the left. That was Benny’s. Between me and the door was a pack of ambling kids. Or kid-shaped somethings, because normal kids don’t have orange eyes or leering grins that display rows of tiny sharpened teeth. As far as I’m aware anyway – I’ll be the first to admit that my experience with children is limited. Their skin was flawlessly pale, and they were dressed like orphans out of a production of Oliver. One of them even carried a small rag doll. We called them urchins. Human and pitiful from a distance, but deadly close up. They hunted in groups, preying on whoever they could fool. Give them a dark night, an alleyway, a pitiful cry for help and an inch of sympathy on your part, and you’d be finished.

  I flexed and stretched my right hand as they approached, fixing a small but effective ward in place. It wouldn’t stop them, but it would buy me time, and time is always a good thing to have in a tight spot.

  The leader of the pack was a short girl with blond pigtails and a disconcerting mild lisp. She held her head at an angle. ‘You’re Malachi, right? That’s the name you claim now, anyway.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s me. We’ve not met, so I’m pretty sure we don’t have a problem with each other.’

  She twirled a pigtail around her finger, tilting her head to the side. ‘Don’t care. Sitri is the one you’ve got the problem with. He said it was okay to do whatever we wanted to you.’

  ‘And we’re hungry,’ said a boy from the back.

  ‘So hungry,’ confirmed the girl. ‘Sitri told us where to find you. When you’d be here. And Sitri said we could have you and we wouldn’t get into any trouble at all. Said it’d be easy, and he’d make it worthwhile for us.’

  ‘Sitri lies,’ I said slowly, weighing up my options. They’d fanned out, and in a few seconds I’d be surrounded. Keeping my right hand slightly in front of me to keep the ward placed effectively, I scrabbled about with my left in my pockets. The metal spike would be of no use at all against this many, but that wasn’t what I was hunting for.

  ‘Recognize this?’ I asked, holding up the vial of blue angeldust, now half empty.

  ‘I’ve seen it,’ another girl replied from my left. ‘I was clawing away at this old woman and she had some. Threw it over me. It hurt.’ She grimaced at the memory but then grinned. ‘Still took her eyes though. Still had those. Juicy. Popped between my teeth while she cried. She cried such a long time.’

  The first girl tutted and turned her orange eyes back to me. ‘But that was over there. Nothing works the same here, does it? I think,’ she said slowly, eyeing the angeldust, ‘I think you’re bluffing. I think we’re going to start with your fingers, and I think we can strip the flesh from your arms and still have you awake and screaming. I think we can.’

  She was right, unfortunately. The angeldust wouldn’t have the same effect here in the Fades that it has back on our plane, but that didn’t mean it was powerless. You just had to know how to use it. And Becky, my mistress of potions and all things magical, Becky is good.

  ‘But still, pretty isn’t it?’ I asked lifting it up and drawing their gaze, getting them looking at the vial. Then I closed my eyes and threw it to the ground as hard as I could.

  Angeldust, originally, was a good paralyser for minor demons on our plane, but virtually useless in the Fades. Nothing against Becky – that’s how it goes. Applies to a lot of things. Which is why the Fades is a significantly more dangerous place to be than back home – current situation as a case in point - even for a straightforward trip to Benny’s. It’s the wild west of the magical community, only without the sheriffs and not that many good guys. Fortunately Becky is one of life’s great experimenters, and a minor tweak last month saw her blue gunk transform into the magical, Fades-equivalent version of a flash-bang grenade.

  My eyes were closed against the blast but there was nothing I could do about my hearing and the subsequent loss of balance. All I could do was stumble and stagger through the screaming and distracted child-monster-thugs who, I noted with some satisfaction, had thick black blood streaming from their eye-sockets. I reached the wall to my left and more or less rolled along it, expecting small clawed hands to reach me at any moment. With some relief I reached the wooden door, shoved it open, and fell in.

  Benny was pretty gracious, given that I vomited breakfast all over his floor. ‘You made it past the brat pack then?’ he asked, dragging me to my feet.

  ‘You knew about them? And you didn’t lift a finger to help?’

  ‘Mate, if you couldn’t handle that bunch, you wouldn’t be a whole lot of use to anyone around here, would you?’ Benny is, I’m pretty sure, human. But if one of these days I find out he’s not completely one of us, I won’t be entirely surprised. Slightly shorter than me, he had an almost spherical bald head and no neck to speak of. ‘Good to see you. Come on over. This new guy’s a bit of a prick and if you don’t step in he’ll be birdfood in ten minutes.’

  Benny’s bar was called Benny’s because he was always there. So it was his. The sign outside was faded down to bare wood. If it had ever had another name, nobody knew about it. In a world where there was so much else to worry about, it paid to keep things simple where possible.

  Tonight (because in the Fades it was never daytime, not in any recognizable sense of the word) the bar was far from empty, but not exactly buzzing. To me it looked like your typical English Olde Worlde pub, with a wooden floor and small tables dotted around, and booths along the wall, their red leather seats faded and cracked. I suspected it looked different to others of a non-human persuasion. Or maybe it looked different to absolutely everyone. Truth be told, I didn’t want to know. I liked Benny’s bar as it was, and couldn’t handle yet another illusion being shattered.

  There were a few shamblers, hunched over tables, heads almost touching while their bug riders communicated however it works for them. A couple of shrouded figures that could have been anything, deep in conversation in the corner. A few humans too, but nobody I recognised. And none of them had the look of a first-timer.

  ‘Hey, you gonna clean that up?’ a guy called over from a side booth. A scar ran diagonally across his face from temple to chin. He gestured at the little pool of sick I’d left on the floor. ‘I’m paying good money here. Get your house in order, barman.’

  ‘Leave it,’ Benny said, steering me away. ‘He’s a nasty drunk. Probably have to ban him befo
re too long. Get on with what you came here to do.’ He saw me looking round. ‘He’s not here. I stuck him out back for safekeeping, but Stacey was persuasive, so he let her in. You can imagine how it’s going. Best hurry.’

  If Simeon described Melanie as a floozy, I doubt he’d have words to describe Stacey if he ever met her. Legs all the way up to the shortest leather skirt possible, and a crop top designed to cover as little it could get away with. Tanned skin, long black hair, red nails and a killer smile. If I’d met her for the first time, I’d have let her in anywhere she wanted to go. Fortunately, I know better now.

  ‘Hey, private party,’ the newbie shouted out as I barged in to the back room. Empty bottles littered the table, and, as my old Dad would have said, he was three sheets to the wind.

  ‘Yeah, you,’ Stacey turned and glared. ‘We want some alone time, don’t we honey?’

  ‘Oh, we sure do. We sure do.’

  He was young. Early twenties. Jeans, shirt and a biker’s jacket. Acne-scarred skin and a slightly hooked nose. Not exactly one of life’s lookers, so drinking with Stacey was probably the highlight of his adult life.

  ‘So, you’re going to leave, right. Because,’ he leaned forward and spoke to me like he was addressing a simpleton, ‘we’ve asked nicely, and we’re not going to ask again.’

  What a prick. I was almost tempted to walk off and leave him to it. But, in his situation, back then, would I have been any different? To my shame, I had to think no. And someone back then stepped out of their way to help me.

  ‘First off,’ I said, sitting down, ‘you’re not drunk. You’re not even tipsy.’

  ‘Pretty sure I am,’ he slurred, grinning at Stacey.

  ‘No,’ I insisted. ‘You’re really not. Alcohol has no effect on you here unless you let it. Try it out. Decide to be stone cold sober. Now.’

  He looked at me like I was mad. Then something clicked behind the eyes and he sat back, slightly stunned. ‘What the hell kind of stuff are they serving here?’