A Madness of Angels ms-1

by Kate Griffin

  The firm he works for is called Amiltech, and it is based on the 24th floor of a tower. Not “the Tower”, as Sinclair would probably hasten to point out were he not in critical condition with three bullets in his chest – this was not “the Tower”, merely a corporate subsidiary, a security firm that had floated its very special assets and been bought, absorbed into the ever-growing conglomeration of companies and interests headed by Robert James Bakker. During San’s average day, he will hold three meetings in his office, and perhaps another three outside, in locations as diverse as the café on the corner, or Pentonville Prison, depending on what he is looking for. On his official payroll are secretaries, lawyers, administrators, accountants, press secretaries, drivers, assistants and managers. On his unofficial payroll are fortune-tellers, prophets, seers, magicians, witches, wizards, voodoo-artists, murderers, thieves, criminals, a few judges, policemen, politicians and, so Sinclair recorded with “a rumour?” written in the margin, a member of the royal family.

  When asked his job description, San Khay is very vague – but usually just ends up saying “securities”. Not merely insurance, he adds, but actual security. After all, he says, he is far more likely to make a profit from insurance premiums if he can absolutely guarantee that no harm will come to the client.

  Needless to say, among his clients are other names that interest me:

  Guy Lee, officially unemployed, wizard, benefactor of the arts, suspected of dabbling unhealthily in necromancy, vampirism and all the other much hyped, vaguely defined “dark arts”. He’s Bakker’s enforcer in the magical community and, after San Khay, next on my list of people to have a conversation with. Amiltech provided personal security for Mr Lee, at a very reasonable rate.

  Harris Simmons, Bakker’s chief financial adviser. A poor and clumsy magician, from what Sinclair’s files suggested of him, whose chief talent in that area lay in his vast collection of magical artefacts and other items, including, so the rumours went, Nostradamus’s ashes (overrated), at least three contenders for the name of Excalibur, plus over seventeen possible candidates for the skull of King Arthur (pointless), several vials of fairy dust, and a tub of dragon blood (extracted from a pet lizard). He had also accumulated numerous protective items and enchantments whose precise nature was unclear to me, as it was to Sinclair, but which seemed to have Sinclair greatly concerned as to how easy it might or might not be to eliminate Harris Simmons. Amiltech provided security for Simmons’s personal vault, and Simmons churned out money for the Tower.

  Dana Mikeda. Here, I was not prepared to speculate.

  San Khay has little or no contact with these others, except for occasional brief meetings with Lee in the City, or the odd telephone conversation with Harris Simmons. Dana Mikeda, as far as he and most of the rest of the corporation are concerned, doesn’t exist, and probably for good reason.

  At 12.30 precisely San leaves his office and goes to the gym. He works out until 1.30 to build appetite, then returns to his office, and has lunch at his desk. His lunch is a salad, sushi, and a bottle of green sludge that Sinclair swears is a kind of organic vegetable drink, and which we find interesting, in much the same way we are fascinated by the play of light across the shimmering shell of a dung beetle. All things we do not know interest us.

  At 6 p.m. he has a one-hour dinner with members of his staff, in his office. The food is prepared by the catering unit three floors below. Rumour is he likes pine nuts, but I am not convinced that this isn’t detail gone mad in Sinclair’s notes. On Monday he dines with the finance department, on Tuesday with the executive managers, on Wednesday with the press office, on Thursday with the secretarial administrators and on Friday with the lawyers. They all turn up exactly on time, every week, without fail and without question.

  Between 7 p.m. and 8.30 p.m., he either works at his desk or, if need be, travels around the city to inspect his various interests and ensure the smooth managing of business. This business can be as diverse as double-checking the vault codes on a door, or commissioning an assassin and delivering the target details. Partially for this reason, I am almost entirely certain that San Khay took the pre-emptive step of sending a litterbug after me that first night in Dulwich, perhaps with the philosophical attitude of “if you want it done, do it hard and fast”. Perhaps for his arrogance, he is at the top of our list of people to see.

  At 8.30 p.m. he stops work, unless there are unusual circumstances, and when his schedule does not require anything more he goes into the city, to one of the exclusive underground clubs where only the very rich dare enter, where he will buy champagne just for himself, and talk politely with the many young men and women of the City who desire his patronage. If it is a Tuesday or a Friday, he will find a man of a similar sexual inclination, and take him home. His preferred type, according to Sinclair, is broad, and dark, and probably rather shallow.

  At 11.30 p.m. he goes home, and he will be asleep by 1 a.m. If he has company he will do as company does – if not, he reads until it is time to turn the light out.

  Five and a half hours later, his day begins again.

  I resolved to disrupt this routine.

  I started relatively small.

  The International Investment Bank of Tokyo had its central London office behind Paternoster Street, in a gloomy enclosure ironically known as Angel Court, where in the last century a bomb or two had clearly fallen, and the debris been replaced with architecture that was less than inspired. I went down there for 10.30 p.m., coat buttoned up as well as might be, satchel over my shoulder, well fed, well slept and ready for the fight. Riding the train to Moorgate, I let the unique taste of the underground’s magic wash over me. Back on the street I shuddered with every swish of passing traffic, as with its passing, it spun the latent magic drifting through the air into eddies. In Telegraph Passage I ran my hands down the old, narrow house wedged in between two shiny new office buildings, feeling its sluggish, heavy history tingle against my fingers, its own unique power. By the time I reached Angel Court I was almost giddy on my own prepared spells and gathered forces. As I walked, I directed the CCTV cameras away from me, guiding them with the twisting of my fingers to point this way, not that, so that I might slip unobserved past the lowered traffic barrier into the lurking buildings beyond.

  There was a single sleepy security guard on the front desk of the International Investment Bank of Tokyo’s office. I pulled my coat and my spells tighter around myself and walked by him without stopping – he didn’t even look up. I called a lift to the fourth floor, and rode up in the polished brass interior, fighting the urge to whistle.

  At the fourth floor I politely asked the CCTV camera to look the other way, and stepped carefully over the ankle-height laser alarm by the front door. I walked up to the burglar alarm fitted by the first bulletproof glass door into the office there, and considered it. It required a combination that I guessed wouldn’t stop at the tenth digit, and after so much effort in coaxing the CCTV cameras to look elsewhere, I doubted if I had the patience to send my thoughts into its intestines and wheedle the code out of it. Besides, we weren’t there to be discreet.

  So, wanting to laugh with the exhilaration of it, we pressed our palms to the glass exterior of the first door into the office, opened our mouth and hummed. We started low and quiet, then built up the hum from the back of our throat to its full strength, pushing it out of our lungs like it was water and we were drowning in it. We then took the sound, and pulled it back, into us, through us, sending the power of it down our arms so that it tickled our nerves, made our skin tremble until we were buzzing with it, let it build up just behind our wrists and kept the sound going from the very back of our mouth, until we thought we would burst. Then, with a pinch of our lips to cut off the movement of air, we let go the built-up power in our hands.

  Glass shattered beneath our fingertips and we wanted to laugh, dance, as it rained down around us like diamond snowflakes. Above us, the alarm wailed, shrieking indignation, and we laughed again, letting the
sound pummel us, loving the sudden change in the air as downstairs the guard woke from his reverie in a panic, as in the streets outside people jumped, the whole texture of life around shifting up a key, and through that change the magic that we fed on becoming sharper, the feel of it in our head clearer, solid, like the knives of glass falling around us.

  I struggled to control our euphoria, and crunched over the glass to the next door. This one was heavy and wooden, with locks of more ordinary design. Fumbling in my satchel, I took out the blank keys on their ring, and caressed one with the tip of my index finger until its form wobbled, taking on an almost liquid quality. Seizing that moment of uncertainty, I pushed the key into the lock, felt it assume the shape of the barrel within, and twisted. The lock came undone. I repeated the procedure with two more blank keys and stepped into the office.

  It was a depressing place, the weight of it heavy on my senses: dull plywood tables, grey standard-issue chairs, neat pencil pots, polished stainless-steel flat-screened computers which clearly in my two years of absence had become the fashionable thing – and strip lighting, left on every day and night of every working week and holiday, including Christmas. Regardless of my aesthetic reaction, I felt no need to burn it all to the ground nor even rearrange the furniture; a breach of security was enough to achieve what I wanted. I pulled out a black can of spray-paint, shook it vigorously, and with extreme care and caution, started to draw.

  The white strip lighting had cast a faint stretched shadow from my body up the white wall; I now filled in its features with the black paint, until my shadow was a thick, dripping void plastered almost as high as the ceiling. As curses went, it wasn’t the most powerful. But it was enough to make the pipes in the ceiling start to drip even before I was done, and, according to the local newspaper, the fuses in the box downstairs shorted on alternate Thursdays for six months after. Our power still seemed unpredictable, the feel of it across our fingers, something we had to remember anew, as if tasting its heady sweetness for the very first time.

  I left by the fire escape, sauntering out onto Moorgate just as the first police vans started to arrive.

  The bus shelters in London are, more often than not, badly designed. Roofed with thin plastic sheets that sag under any weight, curving downwards to form a slight bowl, they collect pools of rainwater on their tops, which can remain there for days. Most of these shelters are below tree height, so that fallen leaves can rot down in these pools, creating the odd muddy pond with its own fungal subculture that nothing can erase, short of a burning August drought.

  The flatness of these shelters allows other things to be left on top of them. A single, decomposing sock is a common feature, or a laceless left-foot plimsoll. Half a shopping trolley has been known, or a bicycle handlebar, as have Ikea catalogues and plastic bags full of broken bananas. However, above everything else, on the top of every other bus shelter in London there is almost invariably a rotting copy of the Yellow Pages.

  People tend not to ask what a copy of the Yellow Pages is doing on the roof of a bus shelter, nor how it got there, and this is probably a good thing – a poor reflection on the curiosity of the human spirit, perhaps, but an excessively useful defect for the struggling sorcerer, for inside every Yellow Pages left on the top of the shelter, and those pages only, are the exclusive listings.

  I found my own copy of the fat book, with its thin, mouldering pages, on top of a shelter opposite Liverpool Street station, and sat down on the bench beneath to flick through its unique content. I ignored Witches-for-hire, Alchemists, Abjurers, Seers, Prophets, Fortune-Tellers, Magical Suppliers, Hunters, Questing Adventurers, Crusaders, Mages, Mediums, Mystic Scholars and all the other members of the magical community who sell their often suspect wares to each other through the adverts and listings in the bus-stop pages, and eventually found my way to Exorcists. I picked the biggest advert – “Evil at work? Being sent curses to your inbox? Haunted by the spirits of the deceased? Call Exorminator, guaranteed 100% success in cleansing your local magical environment!!!” – wrote the number down on my hand, tossed the Pages back onto the top of the bus stop for the next magician who might be passing, and went to find a phone box.

  The man who answered sounded very cheerful for the time of night and greeted me with, “Exorminator, how can we help?”

  “Hi, I’m phoning about an exorcism.”

  “Can I take your name?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “Sure, fine, we understand. May I ask as to the nature of your problem?”

  “There’s a curse going round.”

  “Uh-huh, sure, no problem, we can handle that. Do you have any details on what kind of curse?”

  “A shadow on the wall.”

  “Nasty. Anything more?”

  “A curse of the stones of a building, of the bricks in its walls, of the earth that shelters it, the water that feeds it and the sky that guards it.”

  “That’s a pretty solid curse, man. Haven’t seen shit like that for a while. You sure of it?”

  “I wrote it, I’m fairly sure of it.”

  “OK, you wrote it?” The exorcist had a slightly Australian tinge to his voice, and the laid-back, whatever-comes-next attitude of a man who had suddenly realised two degrees short of sunstroke that exorcism was the perfect career choice he’d never been offered at school.

  “Yes.”

  “OK… uh… not usual we get people writing their own curses and then getting them exorcised. Some kinda accident with the spray-paint?”

  “No.”

  “No. Uh… OK. But I’m guessing you want it removed.”

  “Oh, no, not at all,” I said quickly. “I’m phoning to tell you that probably tomorrow morning, you or one of your associates will get a call from someone else wanting it removed, and I’m asking you not to.”

  “I see. Look, sorry to say this, but it’s our job. We exorcise things. You know. Exorminator… no exorcism too big? Gotta pay the rent, man.”

  “Yes, but you’ll have difficulty exorcising this one.”

  “Uh… we will?”

  “You have to understand – this is a fundamental curse inscribed for revenge. It’s more than just a bit of spray-paint. When I drew the curse, I thought of every second of pain and suffering that I’d endured and of my undying thirst for vengeance. We’re way out of the holy water and garlic league. Sorry about that, by the way, it’s nothing personal against you, it’s just how it had to be done.”

  “Look, Mr…”

  “Also,” we added quietly, “if you undo the curse, then we’ll come after you next.”

  Silence from the end of the line. “Uh…” said the man at last, “you know, mate, I’d love to help you with this, but it sounds like you’ve got some serious issues…”

  “I’m just giving you a heads-up,” I burst in. “These things are going to appear all over town, and Amiltech is going to come to exorcists to clear it up. And I’m asking you nicely not to.”

  “Because…”

  “Amiltech is going to burn,” we replied cordially. “We are going to shred them from top to toes and leave nothing but a shadow on the wall behind. And I figured… it’d be a shame for you guys to get hurt on the way.”

  “Are you for real?”

  “Good night, Mr Exorminator.”

  “Jeez, whatever.”

  I hung up and walked away, feeling, all in all, that things were going rather well.

  —

  Between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon, I broke into a total of six offices, one penthouse suite and a small bank, and cursed them all. I cursed the stones they were built on, the bricks in their walls, the paint on their ceilings, the carpets on their floors. I cursed the nylon chairs to give their owners little electric shocks, I cursed the markers to squeak on the whiteboard, the hinges to rust, the glass to run, the windows to stick, the fans to whir, the chairs to break, the computers to crash, the paper to crease, the pens to smear; I cursed the pipes to leak, the cooler t
o drip, the pictures to sag, the phones to crackle and the wires to spark. And we enjoyed it. We enjoyed all the magic, the shaping of it at our fingers, the tiniest cantrip up to the most profound curse; we enjoyed the edge of danger. It made us feel alive.

  Not that this was a random venting of my general dissatisfaction with life, fate and all the things it had done wrong in the last few days, months, years. I chose my targets very carefully, from Sinclair’s immaculately maintained and only slightly blood-spattered list of Amiltech’s favourite clients.

  On Monday morning I dialled the Financial Times from a telephone near the Blackwall Tunnel, and politely told the receptionist to have someone check up on a spate of break-ins and look for an Amiltech connection. It was not the subtle kind of call from which journalistic myths were made, but it had its use. On Tuesday morning the Financial Times ran with a headline on page three reporting a damaging series of attacks on offices and properties either owned by, insured by or protected by various divisions of Amiltech Securities. By Tuesday evening the headline in much smaller form was hitting the freebie City rags, and by Wednesday morning the broadsheets had picked up on it too. Amiltech responded that it was being victimised by a systematic campaign of hatred, and that it would bring the perpetrators to justice. On the unusual painted signs left behind at all the scenes of crime, they made no comment.

  On Monday afternoon I moved out of my small hotel room on the Cromwell Road, and migrated under a new name to a larger, more expensive hotel off the Strand. It seemed only a matter of time before reprisals headed my way, if they were not already en route, and I wanted to stem any more significant encounters until I felt sure of my abilities, and our readiness. We were not yet certain that we could stop Hunger, should he come for us again; and we knew that he desired our blood. Not only was Hunger an ugly creature, offensive to all our senses; he was, perhaps, equal to all that we could be.