by Kate Griffin
I tried calming our anger a little at a time with nice, rational placations, soothing over the fear with the thought that if killing was all he had in mind, we wouldn’t have had a chance to notice. As I did, I carefully rubbed my fingers together in the palm of my hand, feeling the dirt between them, the heavy dark soil, with just a hint, delicate, and so hard to pin down with my city-attuned senses, of rich, active magic. I was no druid, I had no understanding of the lore of natural things; but perhaps, just possibly, there was a little strength to be drawn from here, if you could only look at it from the right point of view. Even in this place, strange and alien to us, there was the beauty that, to our eyes, made magic.
The silver-haired man said sharply, “I want to talk to them.”
“To who?” I mumbled, probing my teeth with my tongue for any new looseness.
“Let’s not waste time with definitions. I want to speak to them.”
“You’re an idiot,” I said. “There’s only me here. Do you think I’ve got an alien in my belly, do you think there’s a Siamese twin attached to my shoulder that never had the chance to grow? You talk to me.”
I half-expected him to hit me again. We almost relished the idea, ready for the fury that explodes with pain; enough, perhaps, just enough to give us the strength and passion to grasp the tiny fragment of elusive power in this place and use it to pop his chest open. To my surprise, though, he didn’t hit me, but squatted down on his haunches in front of me, and said, “Let me tell you what I think.”
I nodded, hypnotised by his gaze, taste of blood in my mouth.
“I’m a man of words, you see? I read, I study, I think, I train myself to think only in words, neat, linear structures, passages with correct punctuation that can define a train of reasoning, understanding – nothing left to chance. I am also a man of faith. At the end of the logical chain, when all knowledge that I have acquired – and the knowledge is significant – when the end of the chain runs out into an infinity of uncertain questions and doubts, I know that there is still an answer. You may object to calling it God, you probably find the term too vague – I understand that, it’s fine. You think of a big man with a beard. I think of force. God is force. God is strength, certainty, movement, motion, direction, power, and he sits at the end of all things, and he will, sorcerer, condemn you. Not because you are a heretic – which, by the way, you are – not because your soul is necessarily so black or so tainted, not because you have killed or fought or stolen; all these sins can be purged in fire. He will condemn you, because you aspire to be like him, and have the arrogance not even to think of the consequences.”
He seemed to expect some kind of response to this statement, so I said, nearly choking on the words, “You’re going to burn me?” We added, “You can try,” and I immediately bit my tongue so hard I could feel the pain in my ears.
He didn’t show any sign of noticing our slip, just gave a dry, humourless chuckle. “Times have moved on. The good must be merciful, even if that mercy to the damned is merely in a quick dispatch.”
“That’s not much of a comfort.”
“The problem is, times are not so simple as in the days of the Book. Utilitarianism, I think; we must choose the lesser of two evils. I take comfort, when I contemplate your evil enduring, in the thought that when the day of judgment comes, when we are all standing naked in front of the Lord, you will be damned and I will not. And in the mean time, I may, perhaps, do some good to the innocent of this life in setting you against another who is more foul even than your taint.”
“Bakker.” I didn’t need to ask.
“Robert James Bakker,” he agreed. He slapped his thighs and straightened with a sudden jovial expression. “Of course, if you were not in your current condition I would just let the two of you tear each other apart – sorcerer against sorcerer. But he is more powerful, I think, than you ever were, even though he chose you, Matthew Swift, to be his apprentice. I could take comfort in the fact that perhaps you could, for a time, weaken him with your attack, and that he, in killing you, had rid the world of one more sorcerer – but it doesn’t solve the initial problem, does it? How do you defeat a man like Robert Bakker? A man surrounded by every kind of protection and ally, a man with powerful friends and powers of his own, a man whose enemies die, and they seem great until they fall. I find that under such circumstances, I am forced to deal with the better kind of devils, to defeat a worse. Am I making sense?”
I nodded.
“Which brings me to my only serious problem. I am more than prepared to let you live, for the moment, Mr Swift, so that you and Bakker can, I hope, destroy each other. But before I let you live, I need to know that you are not a greater threat, that the things which sustain you have not yet consumed all rational restraint. So, Matthew Swift” – he brushed invisible dirt off the black fold of his trousers – “let us talk about the blue electric angels.”
We looked up into his eyes, and held his gaze, and I was happy to see an instant of doubt on his face. We said, “We are hard to kill, if you are thinking of trying. We persist, even if it will not be in this place.”
He let out a satisfied breath, and murmured, “Well, it is nice to finally meet you.”
“It’s not like I went anywhere,” I declared. “Even if you kill us, we will endure, we will find a way back; it is our nature, although I won’t be too happy about it.”
“That’s remarkable!”
“What is?”
“The way you switch without even blinking. One second, monster from beyond the plane of flesh and blood; next second, angry little man, suddenly cut off from all that power he’s used to throwing around. A seamless switch, not even dribbling on the way. Not normal for possession; something more subtle, yes?”
“We are the same,” we said.
“The same what? Same flesh? Doesn’t mean anything, haven’t you seen any 1970s horror films?”
“We are Matthew Swift.”
“However pretentious the man may have been in life, I’m sure he didn’t use the plural pronoun.”
“I am the blue electric angels,” I explained, licking away the taste of salt and iron around the edges of my mouth. “It’s really very simple. We are me and I am us.”
“That doesn’t sound simple at all.”
“You have a limited imagination. I guessed as much.”
His jaw tightened, but he didn’t move. “I am curious, Mr Blue-Eyed Swift, how exactly you found yourself in this predicament.”
“I’m assuming one of your men shot me,” I replied. “It’s all a bit blurred.”
“I was thinking more of how you found yourself bonded to and controlled by…”
“There is nothing to control,” we snapped.
“… controlled by,” he repeated firmly, “creatures as strange as the blue electric angels.”
I said, “I doubt you’d understand.”
“I’m not here to understand, I’m here to assess.”
“That’s not much of a comfort.”
“Don’t you want to buy some time, to see if you can get your senses round the magic of this place, see if you can coax your brain to the magic of leaves and sunlight rather than concrete and neon? I’m sure you must. Tell me.”
I let out a long, shuddering breath that I hadn’t realised was inside me. That seemed to take all the fight out of me, leave my chest empty, so I shook my head and muttered, “All right. All right; it goes something like this:”
First Interlude: The Sorcerer's Shadow
In which certain memories best left forgotten are duly remembered.
“When I was fourteen years old, the phones started talking to me. I dialled the wrong number one day – I was trying to get the local library, but instead I got a bank helpline. It said:
“‘Welcome to telephone banking! To change your credit card details, please press one. To check your current account balance, press two. To dance in fire until the end of your days, please press three. Hi, this is Mara speaking; sorry,
I’m out at the moment, but if you could leave your message after the beep, I’ll be sure to get back to you when the shadows have swept down the wall. Thanks! Which service do you require, police, fire, ambulance or exorcist? To cancel a direct debit, please press the star key. To send your soul across the infinite void faster than the blink of the mind dreaming in the moonlight, please press hash now.’ And so on.
“I would wait at the bus stop and the rats would come and look at me; I would run through the streets at night and the freedom of it, the exhilaration of it, nearly killed me. I forgot to eat, to drink, to sleep, grew drunk on the feeling in my bones, on the beauty of the lights around me, on the sounds of the city, on the senses of other creatures.
“When he found me, I weighed eight stone two, had just failed GCSEs, was on tranquillisers and on the verge of being consigned to a care home. He showed me kindness, took me away from my home, where my mother was trying to care for me – and my gran. She didn’t say no when this wealthy, kindly man offered to take me under his wing; but only later did I realise it wasn’t just his smile that had talked her into it. My gran told me always to trust the pigeons, and when I told him I didn’t know what she meant, he just smiled, patted me on the shoulder and said it would be all right, I’d work it out one day. Magic isn’t genetic, it’s not something programmed in your DNA. But it does run in families – in the same way that you can say, these people are morose or these are funny or these have their own, unique turns of phrase. For example, my mum didn’t like the city; but when we went outside to the country she became like I was when I first tasted that magic, glowing, alive with the feel of it, revelling in all its forms in her blood, strengthening her by mere presence. It wasn’t a spell, it was something more than that, a link, a consciousness that here is something special, indescribable, infinitely rich. I learnt from her a relish for life; but for me, it was something to be found in the city; and that, nothing more, is what makes me a sorcerer.
“He said his name was Robert James Bakker, but I was to call him Bobby. I called him Mr Bakker though, like my mum said. He paid for me to retake my GCSEs and hired me a tutor, and I passed – not well, but well enough. He said that you had to understand the minds of others, their learning and their ideas, before you could excel them; that to be a good sorcerer, you had to be a good man first. The day I got my A-levels he took me out into the city and taught me my very first lesson. We walked through the empty arcade of Leadenhall Market, late at night, when the wind was cold off the river, and he taught me to feel the light on my skin, as if it was silk, how to tighten my fingers around it and pull it along like a cloak, drag it down to me away from the walls and ceilings until I was on fire with its brightness and everything else around me was smothered in dark, taught me to wear it inside me, as well as over me, a furious burning in the heart. I learnt how to summon the Beggar King, about the legends of the city – the Midnight Mayor, Fat Rat, the Seven Sisters, the dragon that guards the old London Wall, Domine dirige nos, the old rules and the new magics. He taught me everything I know, was teacher, sponsor, father, friend for nearly ten years. Rich, kind and powerful; things I had never seen or imagined in my childhood.
“Sorcerers don’t have any textbooks, formal lessons, ritual incantations or spells like the magicians do. Magicians use the wisdom of others, gestures of power, words of binding to do their bidding – theirs is a precise, focused magic. Sorcerers bind a different kind of magic: ours is the power of seeing the power in the most ordinary thing, and binding it to our will; it is wild, free, beautiful and dangerous. Teaching control is the most vital lesson, one that is learned at various speeds. Some sorcerers submerge their natures entirely to the rhythms of the city, forget that they do not have wings or that their feet are in Knightsbridge, because their mind is too busy following the route of the number-nine bus up Piccadilly at the same time that their eyes are lost in the senses of a rat somewhere in Enfield. Others establish control ruthlessly, minimise all that they do, everything tight, precise; they revel in what they can do only for themselves, everything for a neat, exacting purpose, rather than the richer enchantments known to some.
“Bakker said I could be whatever I wanted, that every sorcerer was unique to their own nature. I studied under him until I was twenty-four, but I could never have the control he had. He was, then, a middle-aged man, who didn’t show a day of it: his personality – vibrant, powerful, passionate – was stamped all over his magic, in extravagant shows of force that you felt he could never contain, and yet which were always, in the most delicate manner possible, well within his control. I have never seen a more powerful, nor a more talented sorcerer; he could breathe the air off the river and, on its smell alone, run a mile. Perhaps that should have warned me. He was so full of the stuff of life, one day it had to burst.
“When I was twenty-four, he said I was fine, ready; that my life was my own and I could do what I wished. So I did. I travelled – to Bangkok, Beijing, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Madrid, New York; in every place I earned money by teaching English or serving as a cleaner or a kitchen dishwasher for a few months, just so I could experience the different magics of those places. In New York the air is so full of static you almost spark when you move; in Madrid the shadows are waiting at every corner to whisper their histories in your ear when you walk at night. In Berlin the power is clean, silken, like walking through an invisible, body-temperature waterfall in a dark cave; in Beijing the sense of it was a prickling heat on the skin, like the wind had been broken down into a thousand pieces, and each part carried some warmth from another place, and brushed against your skin, like a furry cat calling for your attention.
“It may not sound much of a life to you – travelling, with no real home, no constant friends as such. But for me it was a day-to-day revelation, which Bakker had taught me a sorcerer’s life should be, even if it stood still. A sorcerer, he said, can walk down the same street, twice a day for the rest of his life, and should be able to spot something new about it every time. Relish what you see, what you have: sounds, sight, touch, smell, that’s what keeps you a sorcerer, that’s what lets you understand what magic really is. It took me some time to realise what he meant, but he was right. Whatever has happened to him now, I will always remember then – he was right.
“I will spare you the details of my doings. I was, as you have pointed out, not one of the most interesting sorcerers, I did not seek to change the world, and had no great crusade to fire me. I will jump ahead a little.
“I came back to London. Worked a little, lived a little; nothing extraordinary. Then, about two years ago, I got a phone call from Robert Bakker’s office. He had had a stroke and was in hospital; he wanted to see me. I didn’t understand, at first, how this strong, vibrant man could be a mortal. But everyone gets older, even if it’s only in the flesh. I visited him, of course I did – anyone would have done the same. I was relieved to find his mind was still in one piece – he recognised me, spoke to me reasonably, lucidly, didn’t seem to have any difficulty with the mundane, automatic skills that strokes sometimes kill, as simple as lifting a fork, or putting on a pair of trousers – all that, he remembered well enough. But there had been complications, the doctors weren’t sure how serious, and all the best consultants were called in to offer placating sounds.
“Over the weeks, however, it grew evident how serious it was. He was paralysed from the waist down, and would not walk again.
“At first he laughed and said it was an excuse for the lazy lifestyle he’d always wanted. But the reality of paralysis is more than just being unable to move – it is a loss of dignity. He could not put on his own trousers any more without help, or go to the toilet, or stand in the shower, or climb stairs, or get out of the bath, or reach a book on the shelf, or reach a pot to cook a meal. I think it was the indignity that first started to turn him. I noticed it, in my visits to him, over the weeks at the hospital as he went into physiotherapy, a growing anger at the indignity of it all, the unfairness – he, who had
never smoked, drunk to excess, travelled to dangerous places or even had any particularly reckless sexual adventures – still he was stuck in a wheelchair. He said he was getting old, that life was going to pass him by, and for the first time, he sounded angry.
“One evening, his office called me and said I needed to go to the hospital, urgently. I thought something terrible had happened to him; but when I arrived, he was sitting up in bed, quite composed, the phone in his hand. He said,
“‘Matthew, I want to summon the angels.’
“I remember, because he said it so flatly, so calmly, that I could hardly believe my ears. I spluttered confused noises and eventually said something along the lines of ‘Why?’ and ‘It’s dangerous!’ and other empty sounds.
“He said, ‘The doctors tell me that I am dying. I have not had just one stroke, I am at risk of several, they said. They tell me that over the next few days, weeks, months, years, they can’t be sure, I will have more minor strokes, one on the other, perhaps so small I don’t even notice, perhaps large enough to leave me without feeling in my fingers, and that they will eventually eat away my brain, my mind, my memory, and my feelings until I am just a gibbering shell. I want to summon the angels.’
“‘What good will they do?’ I asked.
“‘You’ve heard them, think about it,’ he replied – he was never one for a straight answer, always liked you to work it out for yourself, said if you could understand by yourself why a thing was true, you would believe it more than just having it told to you by a teacher.
“‘Why do you need me? Surely they’re still there, in the dialling tone…’
“‘I can’t hear them.’ He held up the receiver towards me and, for the first time, looked me straight in the eye. ‘I want you to listen, tell me if they’re there.’
“I took the receiver – I was trained not to disobey him; such things when you are a learning sorcerer are dangerous. I listened.
“He hadn’t dialled any particular number, but with the angels you don’t need to; an open line is what they always enjoyed. And eventually, through the dialling tone, I heard them.