by Kate Griffin
Sitting raggedly round the corner from where they were slowly advancing up the corridor, I reached a dusty hand towards the ceiling. I let my thoughts tangle up in the mess of wires and piping running through it until I felt I had a good strong grip, then wrenched the whole lot down and spun it across the corridor until it formed a spider’s web-like mesh of metal and sparking electric wire across the tunnel between them and me. It wouldn’t hold them for long, I knew; but I didn’t feel the need to stay there for long – at this time of night, and in this place, I didn’t want to take on Downers single-handedly, when their magic was strongest and they felt that the city, the true city of necessary pulsing daily functions, was most alive.
I moved to get up, and run away, but before I could move, something cold splatted onto the top of my head, like the first drop of a rainstorm. I looked up. On the ceiling, someone had painted a spaceship racing towards a series of bright blue and green ringed planets – something that might have been appropriate in a 1960s comic book; and underneath, in large stylish letters, the caption: “CAPTAIN ZOG SAVES THE DAY!!!” As art went, I could see its merit, in a retro way; but now, watching them, I saw something a good deal better as, silently, the big blue and green planets started to revolve across the ceiling.
On the wall opposite me, a figure of huge, bulging muscles, heaving chest and impossibly small waist, picked out in thick blue paint with yellow shiny buckles, stirred. Its fingers flexed. On the wall next to me, a tiger drawn in neon pink and lime-green stripes twitched its bright purple whiskers, its red eyes narrowing. Above it, a flock of jet-black doves flew up onto the ceiling and down the other side on the wall, before doing a complete circle, rippling across the surface of the floor. A single bright blue eye set on a bed of trolley wheels blinked at me with an eyelid of sparkling scarlet paint, then rolled from side to side on its gently turning wheels. A pair of cyclists made entirely out of human ears started peddling with their tiny ear-feet, cruising across the bottom of the opposite wall, and then up onto the ceiling, and doing a quick orbit of a rotating blue planet before descending again.
I stood up slowly, as footsteps in the corridor behind me grew louder; the roar of a chainsaw suggested that the Downers had come equipped for the obstructions I had thrown up in their way. But we were unconcerned, and our face split into a slow grin as, his arms dripping blue paint, Captain Zog stretched across the length of the wall, and reached out. First came yellow-gloved fingers, then a cautious yellow toe, then a bright blue kneecap – tiny and knobbly, far too small to support the bulk of his frame – then the blue hulk of his chest. His face came last of all, stretching behind him as a few residuals of paint clung to the wall, before peeling away from the rest of his dripping form with a few colourful pops. Next to me, the ruby-red nose of the tiger protruded from the wall, then a hint of pink neon stripe; a spider the size of my hand, bright emerald green and completely smooth except for where black brushstrokes picked out a hint of fur, scuttled across my leg, leaving pinprick stains of bright green points across my trousers. On the ceiling, a pointed spaceship sprayed a fine grey paint from its exhaust vent, that settled in a mist on the floor; the craft spun out of the wall and back, then twisted once more into the air and accelerated away again, amid silence except for the dripdrip dripdrip of paint falling in its wake.
I jumped as the tiger brushed affectionately against my legs, leaving a long streak of muddled pink across my trousers. Its feet made a flat splash, splash sound on the concrete, as it padded towards the corridor from which I’d just come running. Then Captain Zog and all the tiny scurrying creatures of the walls – painted butterflies with the mandibles of soldier ants, children with faces longer than the bodies that carried them, and tubby black and yellow bees walking on two legs and carrying carving knives with every limb, with three black fingers to support each dribbling blade – all the monsters of the Exchange marched in silence apart from the running of wet paint, straight towards the corridor where the Downers were. As they went, they flowed in and out of the wall and each other, and, where their features were human enough to read, every face wore a single intent.
“Hello, Matthew’s fire!”
I spun round, but saw nothing in the glow of my lantern but dancing darkness and running colours. I half-closed my eyes, and listened.
A brush of cold across my shoulder…
… smell of sewage
ripple of magic in my ear
taste of salt
bile
blood
silk
… hello Matthew’s fire…
… we be…
fire
light
life
fire
stop
we be
enough
so brightly burning
make me
be free
STOP
…
Thank you.
Better.
“Hello, little sorcerer.”
I lashed out at the whisper of cold in my ear and, for a second, my hand closed around something like fabric-woven ice, a bite of frost that went straight to the bone, then up the wrist, a slither of silk under my skin, malleable, bending to the touch. I opened my eyes as it slipped from my fingers, and saw a tendril of darkness vanishing into the wall and rippling away, and for a moment, just a moment, I thought that perhaps, I could beat him after all.
I picked up my lantern and ran between the heaving masses of living paint, closing my ears to the Downers behind me as the first screams began, before they were choked off by a mouthful of paint.
Dark tunnels lose meaning after a while; I had had no idea how many there were in the Exchange – it takes being lost to give you a true sense of proportion. I didn’t care where I was going, and it was only instinct that made me obey when I heard, through the darkness, a voice shout, “Swift, get down!”
I threw myself flat on basic principle, since the voice hadn’t sounded too threatening, merely urgent, and saw a burst of fire at the end of the corridor, and felt the mechanical snaps of bullets biting overhead, striking something that made a dull thumping noise on each impact. When the firing stopped, I looked up and behind me, to see the body of a woman, dressed in very little indeed, torn apart by the impact of the bullets. I recognised her; when she went out in those clothes, her name had been Inferno. I tasted bile.
Hands pulled me behind a short line of men armed with rifles. With them was Chaigneau; he held a short, heavy mace, inscribed with scratched words in Latin that in the gloom I couldn’t decipher. He glared at me and said, “What are you doing here, sorcerer?”
I staggered away from him, dragging my lantern with me, and ran on into the dark.
“What do you think you’re playing at?” his voice echoed behind me.
Gunshots in the dark.
A taste of magic blooming and dying all around me, we felt… we smelt… sickly black spots of pain bursting behind our eyeballs, we felt… trickles of red agony down the back of our spine and I knew, even if we were too afraid to acknowledge it, that this was what a sorcerer felt near to too much death.
We came to a corridor of bodies. Warlocks and witches and wizards, their flesh burnt half away to reveal carbonised bone, the walls scorched black, all the paint long since bubbled away by the force of magical fire, wires and pipes shattered from the ceiling, and, when we risked pulling off the gas mask to sniff the air, the smell of roast skin.
We put the gas mask back on, the smell of rubber better than the stench of all that, and the limited vision afforded by its goggles a blessing, rather than a disadvantage. We put one foot between the bent arm of a woman whose face had been burnt away to a hollow shell, and the scorched body of a man whose eyes were, mercifully, turned away from us as we advanced. At the end of the corridor the shadows crawled across the wall, roiling despite the steadiness of our lamp. We made it almost halfway down before we spotted a robe of exotic, tasteless colours and knew who was wearing it, and knew that he was
dead. We had nothing we could call affection for the warlock, but stopped and pressed our head against the wall and trembled and felt our flesh burn for many minutes before the realisation came that all this fear and sickness made no difference. We had to keep walking regardless, turning our head away from the sight of the bodies and trying to make the exercise a mechanical one, flinching nonetheless when our toe prodded the remnants of some dead magician.
At the end of that corridor was a metal door, rusted crispy brown. The bolt had been twisted out of shape, by what power I didn’t know, and the thing stood ajar, inviting. Like an idiot, I nudged it further open, and ducking under the low top, stepped down the cold staircase beyond it.
The room I came into was too big for me to see anything but its nearest edges, the ceiling lost in darkness, and the walls stretching out in long perspectives. The floor full of telephone servers. They stood like the dead black trunks of some haunted forest, gleaming with the occasional hint of circuit-board green and solder silver when they caught the lamplight, stretching on in neat rows as far as I could see. I picked my way carefully down the nearest aisle, not daring to call any more light than I already had, for fear of who else might be looking. My footsteps were flat, dull and impossibly loud in that still room; the air was heavy, like it hadn’t been disturbed for years; as I moved, puffs of white dust swirled up beneath my feet.
It took me almost five minutes of padding through that empty, dead place, between the straight lines of the telephone servers, before I found another set of footprints. They had been made by a pair of man’s shoes, business wear rather than trainers. I turned and followed the line of their walking, feeling like a counter in a game of snakes and ladders, who might at any moment step on a snake and find myself back where I’d started. The tracks were, however, fairly easy to follow. They led between the endless rows of servers to a junction resembling any other, except that here there was another bubble of light, just like the one I carried. It lit up a hunched shadow dressed in black, wearing a pair of large man’s business shoes, hunched over what I realised were my own footprints.
The figure looked up as my pool of light merged with his own from where I stood some metres away. His face twitched into an expression of surprise, followed by curving contempt. “Sorcerer,” said Lee. “I thought you’d wind up down here. Prophetic powers couldn’t have done a better job.”
“Bugger prophetic powers,” I replied, putting the lantern down and scanning the thick, still darkness around us. “You and I both know, I think, what’s got me down here. Tall guy, wears my coat, bad complexion, essence of living darkness – seen him anywhere?”
“And here I was thinking you and I were about to enter the history books,” he said, straightening up, and brushing dust off his knees. “But all along, you aren’t really interested in me, are you? I don’t think you give a damn about the things I’ve done, or that Khay did, or even about the Whites and the warlocks and all the other cretins I’ve killed to get here. You’re far too busy to care. Am I right?”
“No, but nice try,” I said.
He shrugged. “Do you know what the difference is between a soldier and a murderer, Mr Swift?”
“I haven’t given it much thought.”
“Intent. Whatever I do, I always intend. It keeps me in control. I have an anger, a beast… but control. You cannot imagine. But you – did you even think about all those bodies lying in your way? I think you kill and don’t even have the knowledge of what you’re doing, or why. Useless fucking moron.”
“You know, you’re right.”
“Of course.”
“No, not about everything – but you’re right that I’m not here for you. You are just a dot on my way to something more important. A door that has to be opened, a minor tick on the list before getting to the major, and the fact that you’re a murderer, a rapist, a thief, a coward and a corpse only makes it easier to do what I was always intending all along. So let’s get this whole thing over with so that Hunger can come and take his fill.”
“Get what over?” Lee grinned, and gestured expansively. “Robert wants you alive, Mr Swift, and alive is what I intend to give him.”
A shadow in the darkness behind him. I reached instinctively out for that warm tingle of magic on my fingers. Then a shadow to my left, and my right and, when I dared to glance backwards, a shadow behind me, faces, figures emerging from the gloom. Guy Lee opened up his hands, whose cupped hollow started filling with a thick black smog; and he was grinning, utterly unafraid, as men and women emerged around us from the gloom. As they stepped into the pool of light, I saw the flash of a brightly coloured robe and the remains of the warlock’s face, empty, devoid of life.
I turned to Lee as the dead of the corridor I’d come down from, their bodies still dripping the last of their blood from their open wounds, filed into a circle around me. “Zombies,” we said, with open scorn in our voice. “How 1960s.”
“Not zombies. Zombies are too crude. These are…” Lee searched for the right word “… uniquely empowered.”
My gaze swerved back to the eyes of the warlock. They were not entirely empty, not quite; and his mouth, as it hung open, showed a piece of paper, the white just showing behind his teeth. Life, fuelled by words, shoved down his throat as he died; a spell in paper somewhere inside his chest, rumbling around the remains of his stomach.
“We won’t hesitate to kill them twice,” we said as the last of the bodies from the corridor stepped into the circle closing around us.
“Hard to kill dead things,” said Lee.
“You should know,” we answered, full of immediate purpose. “We set them free.”
And we reached out, grabbed a fistful of heat from the lantern on the floor, cupped it in the palms of our hands, and blew a tiny piece of life into them. The heat bloomed into blue flames between our fingers, rolled out across our hands and arms, billowed around us like a cloak as, with a wrench and a shove, we sent it spilling out between the dead monolith servers. It rolled across the floor and up the walls in a flash of bright blue fire that for a second illuminated the whole stretching expansive dome of the place, burning away every shadow and inch of skin that it touched, boiling the solder in its frames to bubbling, spitting silver bubbles and sweet smoke, blinding out every inch of darkness
except for
just a moment
caught in the flames…
I saw him, fingers outstretched to catch the surge of blue fire, chin tilted up and eyes wide as if trying to breathe my flames, face open and in an expression of absolute delight as the blue light seared around him.
Just for a moment, with the shadows that hid him burnt back and away,
I saw Hunger through the fire.
Then it went out.
Darkness all around.
I was on the floor, eyes running. I couldn’t see through Oda’s gas mask, the inside was steamed up and the outside cracked with heat. I tugged it off and instantly smelt the solder smoke and dead flesh, but no tear gas, not this far down. There was no sign of Lee. I scrambled on all fours across the floor until I found the warlock, lying on his back, blood now soaked through every inch of his clothes. I yanked his twitching jaw open while an arm hanging on by a thread of tendon tried to lift itself up and gouge at my eyes, I dug through the dry hollow of his mouth past his snapping teeth until I found the tip of the piece of paper and carefully, so as not to tear it, pulled it out through his open jaw. The black words written on it in spidery ink were almost illegible with saliva and blood. I saw:
live for
black burnt
fire command
be free
I tore the paper into pieces and threw them away before looking down at the warlock who lay, entirely still, face empty, life utterly gone.
We felt movement behind us, and turned instinctively, snatching a fistful of light up through the air and hurling it at the shape of Guy Lee as he dropped down from on top of a server frame. He staggered back for a moment, thr
owing his hands up to cover his eyes as the whiteness flared off my fingers; but still he kept coming towards me. A foot staggering forward connected with our side, and we fell back, moving with the pain to try and avoid it, sprawling across the bloody remnants of the warlock. Then Lee’s hands were on the back of our head, pulling it up, an arm going round across our throat and squeezing with an almighty strength that we could only hope was unnatural. There was no breath from his mouth although it was an inch from our ear. With a shudder of horror we realised that he was going to break our neck before we suffocated, even though waves of static darkness were already flashing up and down in front of our vision like the confused black curtain of the final act.
His voice hissed without bothering to exhale, the sound little more than a whisper from the dead air already in his throat. “Robert wants you alive, he says. Bring Swift to me; don’t hurt him more than you must, keep him alive. But you know and I know” – a tug across our neck sent numbness through our limbs – “that of all the people in the world who Robert hates more than any other, he hates you, Matthew Swift, sorcerer, apprentice who betrayed his master. Even if Robert doesn’t know it himself. So what I have to ask is – why does Robert want you alive? What is it in your blue flames and unlikely resurrection that makes him so excited, seems to give him so much life, just in thinking of it? Because whatever it is, I want it for me. It can set me free!”
We tightened our fingers around his arm where he held us, and brought blue burning to our skin, then pushed it down towards his flesh in a wave of searing heat until we could feel the bursting of his skin through his sleeve – even so he didn’t scream, but dug his teeth into the back of my neck hard enough to draw blood and pulled his arm harder across my throat. I whimpered, but we reached up behind ourself until our fingers touched his head and tilted his face up until our fingers brushed his teeth, pushing his jaw open and reaching down inside his mouth. He bit and I felt blood spill across my knuckles but we kept digging, ignoring the pain even as my world grew faint until, at the very back of his throat, past his teeth and the ridged palate of his mouth, into the soft tissues of the windpipe, our fingers touched a slim piece of paper, and pulled.