A Madness of Angels ms-1

by Kate Griffin

  He hesitated, head twisting to one side like an inquisitive pigeon. Perhaps he had some of that blood in his system as well. His mouth wrinkled like a wave was passing along it; but he didn’t growl, and very slowly the hunched shoulders and odd curvature of his back relaxed a little, although the claws at his fingers showed no sign of going away.

  He hissed in a voice that was a good 70 per cent human, “I was meant to protect him.”

  “Well, there’s not much anyone can do against machine guns in the dark,” I pointed out. I was pulling myself up the wall, every inch a triumph of will, every moment a conquest worthy of climbing Everest, until I was sitting nearly upright. “We were all befuddled by that.”

  “I have no reason to trust you.”

  “I’m not rosy about things myself. But put it like this – if I were your enemy, don’t you think I would have fried you by now? Or Sinclair for that matter?”

  “That’s hardly an argument for one who looks as you do.”

  “Then you’ll just have to make a decision on your lonesome, won’t you?”

  We sat on the steps of UCL’s main building, a strange thing pretending to be a Greek temple behind a pair of tall wrought-iron gates, and drank cheap, thin coffee from the union shop. No one bothered with us; torn shoes were probably a question of style for the UCL students, and a blackened eye or so could be a badge of honour within the university athletics club.

  I felt that it should have been drizzling, perhaps with a thundercloud or two overhead; it would have suited my mood. As it was, the day was crisp and clean, a thing of bright light and cold, empty blue skies, big and pale. I sat with my arms curled around as much of my aching body as I could comfortably achieve, and tried not to wobble a newly loosened tooth. There was probably, I knew, some spell or other that could repair the damage, but I wasn’t about to try mystical dentistry and somehow felt as if the entire thing was beneath me. James Bond never had to go for emergency dental treatment; Jackie Chan never smiled a smile of gold crowns; Bruce Lee didn’t spend the final credits of any kung fu film sitting with his arms wrapped round his belly like he had food poisoning, feeling sorry for himself – therefore, neither should I. Besides, from what little we knew and what we could guess, dentists were a species we wished to avoid.

  Charlie said, rolling the cardboard coffee cup between the open palms of his hands, “He found me on the streets. As a child I was fascinated by the creatures in the city. They live around us all the time – foxes, pigeons, rats, crows, gulls, cats, dogs, mice – plus some you wouldn’t expect. I saw a wolf once in Hyde Park; it just sat and stared at me, not the least bit scared. All those creatures that live off the rubbish we leave behind – and we leave a feast. You understand? I was fascinated by them. This whole animal world going on around us and we just ignore it. Choose not to notice.

  “It wasn’t all just childish curiosity, though. Some of it, somehow, got into the blood. My brother always said a rat bit me when I was a baby. I would go wandering in the night, and when I hit puberty, biology lessons weren’t warning enough.”

  “You’re not alone in that,” I sighed. “Tell me about Sinclair.”

  “He… watches. That’s his job.”

  “X-Files?”

  “No. ‘Concerned citizens’.”

  “He said that before; it sounded like a euphemism then and does now.”

  “It’s how things work. Someone in government realises their wife has been putting a curse on their baby daughter; a rich businessman discovers that his number two prays to the neon; a patron of the arts sees an illusion come to life in the spray-paint drawing of a child. Concerned citizens with mutual interests. Sooner or later, they come together. They have influence, power; they want to make sure that these things don’t get out of hand. Sinclair helps.”

  “And now they’re concerned about Bakker?”

  “Yes. The Tower has grown too big, Sinclair said. It’s not just what Bakker is – and Sinclair thought he was a monster – it’s what the Tower is. So big, so fast; so powerful. Its enemies die. Anyone who opposes it dies. There are concerned interests on every side. Sinclair’s sponsors wished to ensure the containment of magic. There are equally those who wish to exploit it; and, perhaps, those who wish to destroy it. You can understand.”

  “Yes. I think I can. All right. Tell me about the others. The warlock, the fortune-teller, the biker…”

  “Sinclair knew Khan. Khan helped him, saw things. When Khan died…”

  “… Sinclair had the fortune-teller moved in?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could she have betrayed us? Told Bakker where we were meeting, organised the shoot-out?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she was Khan’s lover,” he said, in a voice of surprised simplicity. “She wants Bakker dead. That’s why she told Sinclair about you.”

  “What did she tell him?”

  “That either Matthew Swift was alive, or something that was powerful enough to mimic his flesh lived in his place. Either way, Sinclair saw a possibility.”

  “Because he thought I wanted revenge on Bakker?”

  “Don’t you?” he asked sharply, eyes flashing up as he sipped from the paper cup. I didn’t answer. “Sinclair wondered what you might have quarrelled about. He had a few theories. It takes a lot to abandon your teacher, I hear, when you’re a sorcerer.”

  “You know nothing about it,” I snapped. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I think I do,” he replied. “Sinclair taught me how to control what I am, cared for me. Isn’t that what sorcerers do for each other? You are more than other magicians, you lose yourselves in the city, your minds and thoughts are so much a part of it that at rush hour you must walk because the city is moving, and at end of office hours you cannot help but feel a rush of relief and the desire to look at the sky, because that is how the city works. There are sorcerers who have lost themselves entirely to the power of it, their minds submerged for ever in the rhythms of the city, identities stripped down to nothing more than the pulsing of the traffic through the streets. You see? I understand how these things are. I can hear the creatures of this place wherever I go, all the time, and when I dream, my dreams are in the eyes of the pigeons and I wish I could never wake, and fly with them for ever. Sinclair told me, when I told him my dream, that that was sorcery.”

  “That’s part of it,” I admitted. “But just a part. What about the others? Who was the man with the horse’s face?”

  “The…”

  “He was shot in the room. A sniper killed him as I walked in front of the window.”

  “His name was Edward Seaward. He was a wizard, a representative of the Long White City Clan. They’re an underground movement. We usually just call them the Whites. They oppose the Tower.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the Tower attempts to control people, to use them for its own end. The Whites protect their own people from the Tower and, unlike the Tower’s protection, they don’t demand services in return. They say they’re ‘the good guys’. I think they’re just out for kicks. Don’t like being told anything, get stubborn for the sake of being stubborn.”

  “Why haven’t I heard of them?”

  “They’re still weak. Their last leader was murdered – betrayed from within. They vie in their own small way for influence within the community – they find individuals like me, who need their help and who keep order in their ranks, stop too many demons being summoned by people who should know better. They can cause some irritation to Guy Lee – they break his spells, disrupt his activities; but they are weak.”

  “What activities?”

  “Glamours, illusions, enchantments, bedazzlements – these are the tricks he uses on behalf of the Tower, to bring in basic resources. He runs brothels in the city, whose walls are covered with enchantments, makes them an addiction, charges for every second of glamour-washed magic; brings back illusions of dead ghosts, runs fortune-telling parlou
rs where the minds of the victims are ransacked for information, the better to relieve them of their wealth. The Whites find this offensive, dangerous. So do plenty of others, but they won’t risk offending the Tower’s agent.”

  “What about the warlock?”

  “He was sent to us from Birmingham, where the Tower has also been attempting to move in. A pre-emptive strike, I think, was what the warlock desired. He’s also been working to get the Scottish wizards on side; there’s a lot of people running angry in Edinburgh and Glasgow at Bakker’s ambitions.”

  “How about the biker?”

  “His clan resents the Tower. It demanded the services of the bikers, carrying messages, goods, passengers. No one can get anywhere as fast as a biker; to them, distance, space, is simply a matter of perception. They bring the road to them when they travel.”

  “What went wrong?”

  “The money offered wasn’t much, and some of the things they were being asked to carry were… disturbing.”

  “Such as?”

  “The crisis came when they were asked to transport a piece of flesh around the country perpetually. The flesh belonged to a man who had been caught in a brothel, one of Guy Lee’s honey traps. They sliced off a piece of his skin from the base of his skull while he slept and kept it so that at any given moment they could curse him with his own flesh, or blind his senses with pain, or paralyse him from the neck downwards, or send dreams to his eyes. This man was an enemy of Bakker, an accountant who had somehow offended the Tower. The bikers were ordered to keep the man’s flesh constantly moving, lest someone broke the Tower’s hold on him. The bikers said no and burnt the flesh to break the spell – their leader was killed. It was not a pleasant death. Since then, the bikers have been moving too, never stopping, outrunning Bakker’s revenge on them.”

  “And the biker at the meeting?”

  “He calls himself Blackjack. He was sent as envoy to Sinclair to discuss the possibility of an alliance against the Tower. Don’t underestimate him. To your eyes he may just look like a man in black, but I have seen what the bikers can do. Their magic is a wild, dangerous thing, it never stops moving. They can find anything, anywhere, and lose themselves at any moment, and you will never catch them.”

  “What about Oda?”

  “I do not know anything about her. Sinclair seemed afraid of her.”

  “But she’s not a magician.”

  “Perhaps… not her, then; but the people behind her… I do not know.”

  In honesty, I hadn’t expected much more. “How about Dorie?”

  “I think he may have feared her above all others. She is old, sorcerer. Sinclair says she was old when he first knew her, and he was younger then. She has been old for a very long time.”

  “Could she have betrayed us? Why was she there?”

  “I don’t know. Sinclair said… to understand Dorie, you have to know about the city. He called her the Bag Lady, as if that was a good thing.”

  “The Bag Lady? With a definite article and a strong emphasis?”

  “I suppose so. Is it important?”

  “Yes – could be.” I tried a stretch and immediately regretted it, nausea filling my belly, and the taste of bile rising in my mouth. “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “I protect Sinclair.”

  “Has anyone come looking?”

  “The police. I hid. They can’t find out much from the sleeping body of a patient with no medical record, so they leave a man on the door. When he is awake, I hide as a rat and crawl through the water pipes. When he sleeps, I move like the fox so he doesn’t hear me pass. I make sure that if they should return for Sinclair, they will fail. Will you kill Bakker?”

  The question came so suddenly, I almost didn’t hear it. “What?”

  “Will you kill him? I read that Amiltech is suffering – that is, San Khay; he is loyal to Bakker. You wish harm to the Tower, but you haven’t said if you’ll kill him. I want you to. Kill him and destroy everything he’s made. Can you?”

  “We can kill Bakker,” we said thoughtfully, “but it is not him who we fear.”

  “Then who? Who if not Bakker?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Kill him.”

  “Why?”

  “He is a monster.”

  “Is he? I haven’t seen any claws.”

  He flinched, but said, “If you want to know what Bakker has done, visit Carlisle.”

  “The city?”

  “No. The care centre.”

  “Why? What’s there?”

  “If you go, you’ll want to kill him.”

  I stood up, and that was an achievement. “If I need you, you’ll be…”

  “With Sinclair,” he said firmly. “I’ll see you. Although,” he grinned, and the teeth were yellow and ratty, “you may not see me. Goodbye, sorcerer. Bring me some of his blood on your hands, when you make up your mind.”

  “You’re a funny guy,” I replied, and walked away.

  I don’t know why I let myself in for these things.

  I went to Carlisle.

  The care home was on the southern edge of Croydon, in a converted red-brick house with a big driveway, near a park rolling down towards the green belt and its countryside. Even here the taste of the air was different, not as sharp and strong as in the city, but hinting at that other magic, the strange magic that so few people understood these days – that of places beyond the city, the slower, sluggish, calm magic of the trees and the fields, that had, once upon a time, burnt as brightly as the neon power through which I now wandered. There were still some left who could harness it as it had once been used – druids and the odd magician out in the countryside who summoned vines instead of barbed wire from the earth – but they were few in number and generally didn’t talk to their urban counterparts, whose magic they regarded as a corruption rather than an evolution of the natural order of things. It was a debate I kept well out of.

  I didn’t exactly know who I was there to see when I arrived at the Carlisle care home. But the question was quickly answered when I got a glimpse of the residents’ book in reception. One name leapt out at me – Elizabeth Jane Bakker.

  I signed myself in as Robert James Bakker, and went to meet her. They didn’t question who I was, but the nurse informed me that she was delighted I had finally come to the home and that Elizabeth was showing good signs of improvement, though she still screamed at the sight of mirrors.

  Elizabeth Jane Bakker sat in a wheelchair at one end of a living room full of beige furniture. She wore a white veil over her face and a bandage of white around what was left of her hands, as well as the obligatory, shameful blue pyjamas of the other residents. On her lap was a tray of untouched food – mashed potato, carrot and some kind of sausage meat in suspiciously fluorescent gravy. I sat down on a stool opposite her and said, “Hello, Elizabeth.”

  The veil twitched. Between its hem and the top of the pyjamas, I could see the scrambled, scarlet remnants of the burnt skin on her neck. When she spoke, her voice was distorted by the effort of shaping words with the twisted remains of her mouth, and came out almost inaudible at first, so I had to lean right in to catch it.

  “I see… to be free… they say… be me…” she whispered.

  “How are you?” I asked, and immediately felt stupid.

  “The rats keep singing when I try to sleep. All the time, singing singing singing. But the voice in the phone went away.”

  “Aren’t you hungry?” I tried.

  Her glance moved down to the plate. With a deep grunt from the back of her throat, she seized the tray with the remnants of her hands, throwing it across the room. Mash flew out from the little plastic indents as it smashed against the far wall. The nurse hurried in from the corridor, saw the mess, and merely rolled her eyes, as if this was something regular and understandable, before cleaning it up.

  Elizabeth lapsed into sullen silence. Unsure what else I could say that wouldn’t be either dangerous or mad, so did I.

>   We stayed sitting in silence for almost ten minutes before she looked up slowly and said, “Is it free, where you are?”

  I hesitated. “It’s all right,” I said, hoping this was a safe answer.

  “Come be me,” she sang, in a faint, distant voice of one remembering a nursery rhyme. “Come be me and be free!”

  We felt a shudder run all the way down from the hairs on our skull to the tips of our toes. “Where did you hear that?” we asked.

  “They used to burn in the telephones. I danced with them before they went away. Did you lie?”

  “Did your brother hear them sing too?” we asked.

  She shook her head, slowly, uncertainly, then added in a more cheerful voice, “Have your pudding and eat it, that’s what they said, save the best for last, meat and two veg, do you see?”

  “Did he hurt you?” I asked, as gently as possible.

  “Said to dance, said to burn and we’ve always loved the city…”

  “Did he do this to you?”

  “He just sits in the chair that’s all, nothing bad, just sits and likes to eat, watches, gets on with things, although the water doesn’t taste so good any more, vodka, vodka and lick the lamp post…” Her shoulders were starting to shake – with a shock, we realised that she was starting to cry.

  Uncertainly, I leant forward, and put my arms round her shoulders, although she was so limp that it was hard to tell what good it did. We put our mouth near her ear, and so close now we could see through the veil, the burnt, sunk flesh, the remnants of a nose, the unevenness of burnt-off lips, and murmured as quietly as we could, like a mother singing her lullaby, “We be fire, we be light, we be life, we sing electric flame, we slither underground wind, we dance heaven – come be we and be free. Come be me.”