by Kate Griffin
“I’ll have to think about it,” he said, with an unsympathetic face, and nodded at one of his henchmen. “Good night, angels, good night!”
We pinched that fragment of magic between our fingers, ready to slip it into the blood of anyone who dared to touch us. “You will be a shadow on the wall,” we snarled. “A remnant of the night. You will fade, and your darkness will blend into the memories of the city and be forgotten, lost inside all the better things that happen around you.”
Oda stepped towards me. Her hand went into a jacket pocket, her eyes meeting ours; and I hesitated. The grey-haired man leant down until his face was almost level with mine and whispered, “You have no idea who you’re dealing with.”
I grinned, and leant forward sharply, banging my head against his. Not hard, but it was contact I needed; just that moment of touching was enough. I let that morsel of power slide into his skin, a maggot of blue, burrowing down in an instant, seen out of the corner of the eye, and gone. Where our heads had banged, blood from my battered skin slid a thin red slide over his own. Some magics never change. Blood is one of them.
He blinked and recoiled, then slapped me, open-palmed. This time I didn’t even bother to get up, but lay curled on the ground and said nothing. My blood on his hands; even better.
“We are the Order!” he snapped. “We watch you people all the time, we are everywhere! Can you begin to imagine our power?”
I laughed despite myself. “So powerful,” I exclaimed through hysterical bursts of breath, “you can’t even kill Bakker by yourself. You need to get us to do your work for you. We know you. We heard your voice inside our mind, when you whispered into the phone. You are an infestation in our skin, a worm in our flesh. You’re part of us. Think about that next time you shoot us!”
He rubbed his head, a nervous gesture. Could he sense our magic, the tiniest curse, working through his body? Probably not. It was out of our hands. “Maybe I will,” he said.
He nodded at Oda, who stepped up to me, pulled my head back with a quick gesture, and stuck something into my neck that filled my throat with oil and my head with the sickly blanket of darkness.
I woke and had never been more grateful to find myself uncomfortable. Everything ached, throbbed or stung; and it was bliss, simply because there was too much of it to be a dream. Nor, I suspected, was it anything resembling an afterlife. I was on a small, bare wooden floor in a small, bare room with rough plastered walls that had once been painted blue and were now a theme of faded and chipped. The room sported a plastic panel of flashing green lights that circled the head of Jesus Christ like fairy lights on a Christmas tree, while he looked on benevolently. There was one door, one window, and a smell of dust. It was also, very much, in the city. The smell of fumes hit immediately, and I heard the rumble of traffic, the screech of brakes on a bus; I was back in my home, alive.
I risked getting up on all fours, and looked round the room. By the door, fiddling with her rifle in the casual manner of someone accustomed to bullets, Oda said, “Hi.”
“Hi,” I replied, pulling myself into a sitting position and feeling around the inside of my mouth for any more loose teeth. There was blood on my shirt and face; I hadn’t considered how quickly a vendetta, and prolonged magical confrontation, could eat through my wardrobe. We said, as reasonably as we could, “Why are you here?”
“Got to keep an eye on you,” she said. “I’m not happy about it either, if you’re wondering.”
“You are – not afraid?”
“Afraid?” she echoed, raising one surprised eyebrow.
“Pissed off doesn’t really cover it,” I said. “We would kill you for what you did. And I want you to be impressed, by the way, at the fact that I’m not spontaneously combusting, because I promise, it’s just two nerve endings and a snappy word away.”
“The blue electric angels are much quicker to go around killing than the little sorcerer, aren’t they? Or at least, much quicker to talk about it,” she said, not bothering to look at me. “If you’re going to throw up, there’s a toilet next door.”
“Why would I throw up?”
“It’s a standard reaction to the drugs.”
“What have you done?” we barked.
Perhaps the anger in our voice jerked her from her complacency. “Just to make you sleep for the trip,” she said in a defensive tone. “We want you alive – for now.”
“I’m not happy about this arrangement.”
“And I am under orders to shoot you at the first sign of overly Satanic inclinations.”
“What are those?” I asked, my genuine curiosity briefly overriding our fury.
“My remit is to use my own judgement to determine when the harm that you might do outweighs the necessary evil of using you against a worse danger. Or in order words, if you look like you’re going to shape up to be a son of a bitch worse than Bakker, I pop two in your skull and three in your chest and make sure the phones are switched off.”
“You’re not making much of a case for my liking you,” I said, flexing my fingers for that familiar crackle of electricity. There was a little, running through the walls only a few feet away, and a plug quite close to her feet from which I could snatch some power, if it became necessary.
“Well, there are a few things you can consider,” she said, patting the barrel of her rifle with a gesture more motherly than threatening. “For a start, I can be immensely useful to you.”
“How?”
“I can kill anyone who gets in your way,” she explained, smiling hopefully, “so long, of course, as I deem them to be worthy of the death. And I know a very good dentist.”
“I’m thinking that perhaps you’re something of a breakaway cult.”
“Cult?”
“References to God, damnation, dentistry, Satan, mixed with a violent tendency and samurai swords.”
“We take all sorts. Those who believe are, naturally, those best equipped for our mission.”
“And what, exactly, is your mission?”
She shrugged. “Ultimately, the complete obliteration of all magic on this earth, although right now we’re dealing with priorities, and will settle for the obliteration of all actively malign and threatening magic on this earth, starting with Bakker.”
“And progressing to me?” I asked, guessing the answer.
Her eyes flashed, stayed for a second on mine; then looked away. “We’ll have to reassess our priorities when the time is right.”
“Religion has got corporate-speak?”
She smiled, just for a moment. “We find it easier to mention ‘issues’ than talk about the advancing horde of the evil masses.”
“And I’m currently not sending two hundred and forty standard mains volts into you for what reason?”
She ticked them off on her fingers. “One: you’re inquisitive. Two: I know you need allies and we” – a grin – “are very good at what we do. Three: any second now you’re going to wonder where your biker friend is and whether he’s all right, and I’m going to give you an answer that’s not entirely satisfactory from your point of view, yet really dead predictable. Four: there is still a part of you, Matthew Swift, that is human enough to give a damn, I think, about the entire killing thing in general. You didn’t kill San Khay.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“You wouldn’t have had the guts,” she replied. “The blue electric angels might have, but at the end of the day, you’re still in there being a coward. Did I miss anything?”
I shook my head, feeling small. “No,” I said. “I guess you didn’t.” With a sigh, “Where is Blackjack?”
“Is that his name?”
“It’s Dave really.”
“I see why he changed it.”
“Really? I don’t.”
“Should you ever get into the world of online fantasy gaming, Mr Swift, you will find, to your surprise, that Bob the Master of Arcane and Mystic Arts is a rare creature, and that Gary the Sacred Warrior of Eternal Might d
oesn’t buy so many potions of smiting when he goes shopping for his battle gear. You have no sense of style; your friend does.”
“You have him?” I asked. “And he’s not really a friend.”
“Yes.”
“Hurt him?”
“No.”
“Going to?”
“Perhaps. Do you care?”
We thought about it. I knew the answer, though I couldn’t find a reason for it. “Yes,” I sighed. “What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to kill Bakker,” she said with a bright, sucrose smile. “And I’m going to be there at every step, until you do.”
“And if I do?” I asked wearily. “What then?”
She stretched, slinging the rifle casually over her shoulder. “I’m sure we’ll work something out.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why bother? What’s your reason?”
“Did you miss the mission statement?”
“I think I understand what’s going on with the Order. You’re The X-Files meets the Jesuits meets the SAS, yes?”
She shrugged.
“What about you, Oda? Why are you the one standing there with the big sword, the nasty gun and the attitude?”
She thought about it for a moment, then looked me in the eye and said, “My brother is a murderer. He kills with magic. Is that enough, or shall I tell you of the light of God and the Truth of his Word?”
I shook my head. “No thank you. I think I’ve got the picture.”
“Excellent!” she exclaimed. “So! Did you have a plan?”
The bathroom was chipped and brown, the white tiles filled in with old crumbling cement where they’d cracked, the floor warping with thin plastic sounds of distress, the sink too small, the tap too low. I washed as best I could, and in the kitchen found a small tray of ice in a freezer containing nothing else but fish fingers and suspicious tubs of home-made dripping. I wrapped the ice cubes in a tea towel stained with tabasco, sat down on the floor and tried my very best to relax.
Oda was packing a small arsenal of weapons into a sports bag, utterly uninterested in my self-pitying looks as I moved the ice around various ugly, swollen areas of bruising on my face. I hadn’t been this hurt since I was fifteen and got into a fight at school; and that had ended by my accidentally sending fifty volts into the fist of my attacker, back when I hadn’t understood why the squirrels brought me nuts in the winter, or why the local fox didn’t run away when I found it digging through the bins.
I said, “The plan’s simple.”
“Well?”
“I intend to destroy the Tower.”
“We’re with you on that one; any bigger plans?”
“There were four people Sinclair identified as important in sustaining the Tower – San Khay, Guy Lee, Harris Simmons and…”
“Dana Mikeda, yes, I know.”
“Sinclair thought that by targeting those four you could undermine the Tower itself. San Khay is… Amiltech is a wreck. They won’t be able to provide proper security any more. Now I’m on to Guy Lee.”
“One down, three to go. Sure, I get that.”
“Oda?” I bit my lip. “There’s something I need to make clear now. If the Order or you so much as touch Dana Mikeda, I will show you just how Satanically inclined I can be.”
“I thought you might say that.” She shrugged. “No promises, not that vows mean anything to you. We’ll have to see how things play.”
I grimaced and tried not to think about large quantities of electricity. “So,” she said, with a thin smile, “Let’s talk about Guy Lee.”
Sinclair’s files were thorough, but not nearly as useful as they had been for San Khay. For a start, Guy Lee was not a man of nice, predictable habit. He had no fixed address, no family, no real friends and no consistent lovers. Even his driver, shepherding him across town night after night, was changed on a frequent but unpredictable basis. Khay had offered to provide Lee with personal security; rumour went that Lee just laughed and said he was better off dealing with his own affairs. Certainly, he was a man with many minions, and his interests spread from Enfield to Croydon across the whole sweep of the city – brothels in Soho, beggars in Holborn, street cleaners in Moorgate, thugs in Dagenham and racketeers in Acton.
He walked a fine line between reward and punishment – those who openly crossed him tended to be discovered nailed to a tree on Hampstead Heath, or a remnant of their bloated flesh would be picked out of the water at the Thames Barrier; those who served him faithfully might acquire a penthouse suite overlooking the river at Putney, or a town house in Knightsbridge, and were driven in cars with tinted, bulletproof windows, and doors that closed with a thump so heavy they might have been weighted with gold. You did not take the charity of Lee for granted, and more than a few lieutenants had found themselves hung upside down by parts of their own internal anatomy for crossing Lee’s will, his favour taken away as quickly as it had come.
Sinclair was a precise man who clearly disapproved of presenting things as fact when they were merely supposition. But as a best guess a marginal note in his file read: Lee can summon for his needs at least 143 men and women from within his own adherents to any place at any time.
Further down it added: Amiltech can provide support.
And last, scrawled in minute pencilled handwriting: He summons monsters.
I thought about the litterbug I’d run into on my first hour of reliving, and the craft and power that had gone into its creation.
All that Sinclair would say with certainty of Lee’s personal activities was that his day began at sunset and finished around sunrise. All night he would not stop moving for more than an hour, inspecting his investments, making sure that the right enchantments were being cast to ensnare the appropriate MP or CEO, punishing those who did not appreciate his power, and paying visits to those families honoured by his good graces, like a royal prince shaking hands with a foreign dignitary before flying on to the next negotiation. Sinclair loathed the boundary that Lee crossed: he was one of the few in the city cocky enough to use magic to achieve mundane political ends, and his minions could be found lurking around the edges of a dozen government committees and corporate boards. Magic didn’t change the scope of human ambition; just the means it used.
Outside his work, he didn’t seem to pursue any special pleasures – certainly, he might demand a meal of such a quality, or a woman for his bed, or such and such a drug – but the delivery of each thing was given out as a test of abilities, or loyalty. Rumour was that he would deliberately sup at the house of a man he did not trust and, despite the fear of poison, would eat every last morsel, while his host quaked with the dread of failing to satisfy.
One last rumour, unsubstantiated but interesting, related to Lee’s magical interests. In sum, the man was a magician – competent, no doubt, but a man who shaped the forces he controlled through learning, gesture, words – the traditional components of spells and spell-casting, rather than the less traditional arts such as sorcery. His magic was precise, neat, and highly competent. But a question arose over where he’d acquired these skills, since the forms taken by a lot of his magics were decidedly unwholesome. Enemies cursed by him were consumed from the inside out; those foolhardy enough to attack him tended to die choking on their own blood. There were even reports that some of his more unusual servants, as they moved around on their business, were never hotter nor colder than room temperature.
I didn’t like to say necromancy. It’s a messy art, not entirely without its uses but not for those with a weak stomach or who particularly care about personal hygiene. I could imagine Lee doing it.
“So your plan is…”
I foresaw Oda fast becoming even more of a pain.
“Allies. Khay was different, he was in the public eye. Lee is entirely below board; and this time, he’ll know I’m after him. Allies. Help.”
“You’ve got the Order.”
“I wasn’t about to call you an ally,
as such.”
“Get used to the idea.”
“Whites.”
“Who are the Whites?”
“The Long White City Clan.”
“What are they?”
I smiled and stretched, getting up to put the remnants of my ice pack in the sink. “Artists.”
When I asked the Beggar King how to find the Whites, his answer had been short and to the point: the writing is on the wall.
“So what does that mean?” snapped Oda.
“Oda, has it ever occurred to you that if in the good old days ladies with bad skin and big hair drew mystic pentagrams and pointed stars on the walls with bits of old chalk, then the invention of spray-paint would only have enhanced this tendency?”
That evening, we found the first one sprayed onto the local launderette’s closed shutters in bold white and black: a frog with a huge snout and long, bulbous fingers. With one hand it stroked its beard, while the other pointed a curling finger towards the bus stop. On its head was a big top hat with the price still in it, $1.41, and in its mouth a fat, smoking cigar.
We followed the curved finger to the bus stop, Oda’s sports bag clanking with its weight of weaponry. When the 141 bus came, we rode it till we came to a rectangular, railed-in area of grass beneath huge plane trees floodlit in bright green, blue and purple. Oda snapped, “There!”, and we hurried to get off.
What she’d seen was a picture of a small girl with angel wings. It was painted on the side of a Unitarian chapel, beneath a dredge of less artful efforts making statements like DaN iS gAy! and C4D 4ever. The girl’s face was turned up, studying a large red balloon drifting upwards towards the shiny aluminium venting funnels of a patisserie next door; one small painted white hand reached up in vain for the trailing string.
Oda said, “Well?”
“Angel,” I replied, trying to sound more confident than I felt.