by Kate Griffin
Now he screamed, and in that act gave us space to tighten our grip inside his mouth and pull the paper, and keep pulling, falling forward even as his grip relaxed, tumbling head over heel but keeping hold of that paper, and it kept coming, rolled up in a tight tube, half a metre of it, a metre unravelling in my hands, with words illegible from blood and spit on both sides in tiny, tiny lines running from edge to edge; a metre and a half of bloody, stained inky paper that I pulled up from the back of his throat. It flopped around me like wet bandaging, rotten in places, stained with what chemicals I didn’t want to know; and as the end came out of Guy Lee’s mouth, he collapsed backwards, face empty, colour gone, eyes lifeless, and twitched no more.
I fell onto my back next to him, letting the endless sprawl of paper fall at my side. There, without further ado, it hissed at the edges, blackened, curled and crumbled to ash. I lay and wheezed while we brushed our hands unconsciously against our side, trying to rub off the spit and blood and ink and feel of his teeth on our skin, and the touch on us of the paper and its black magic. I was too numb even to cry.
I knew now what Sinclair hadn’t known: that Guy Lee was animated by a metre and a half of crabbed written commands made up of ink and paper. He had been kept alive by magic alone, unable to feel, whether emotion or touch, unless it was so inscribed on the paper in his chest. Not quite a zombie; perhaps just… uniquely empowered. Empowered enough to crave life and wonder what was in our blood that could give it.
There was a dull slapping noise in the darkness. After a while I realised it was clapping. I sat up, taking my time about dangerous things like breathing, and looked into the darkness. A darker patch of shadow stood just outside the circle of lamplight, white hands visible only because they moved, beating out a regular applause.
I staggered up and retreated closer to the lantern, keeping my eyes fixed on that shadow. The clapping stopped. A voice said, “Was that Matthew, or Matthew’s fire, that cried? I really couldn’t tell.”
“Didn’t cry,” I rejoined. “You wouldn’t understand.”
The swirl of darkness drifted nearer, acquired a face, withered and white and pale and smiling and indescribably, sickly, his. “Well,” he said, “perhaps it’s all the same now.”
He knelt down by the body of Guy Lee, and scooped up a handful of black papery ash. Smiling at me, watching my reaction, he ate it. Then scooped up another handful, and another, and another, until the ash of the paper was just a thin black stain on the floor, and ate them all down. He stood up with a sigh and a shudder and tilted his head upwards, as if sniffing the air.
“The taste of life… is this it?” he asked, licking black flakes off his lips with a grey tongue.
“No,” I said.
“I’ve tried water, food, fire, blood, flesh, skin, hair, bone, organ, breath – I’ve tasted them all. I was wondering where he hid his life; it was something hard to fathom, or perceive,” prodding Lee with a toe, “but now I’ve tasted it, it seems … unsatisfying. A drop of water on my thirst, a corner filled in my stomach, but my appetite still… desiring. Still hungry.”
“I don’t think you’d like me,” I said. “My diet is unhealthy.”
“It’s not your blood I desire,” whispered Hunger, moving closer to me, sticking a cautious toe into the light. He drew it back quickly, like a swimmer testing water, surprised to find it so cold. “Just your fire.”
“Can I offer a theory?”
The figure of Hunger gestured dismissively.
“I’m going to suggest that Robert James Bakker sent you here.”
“‘Sent’? Do you think you can apply your little ideas to me?”
“Perhaps ‘sent’ was a mistake,” I conceded, rubbing my burning throat. “Maybe… influenced your desire to come here. You do desire, don’t you? Deep down you want more than you can ever say. You don’t know entirely what it is you want, but you want it now. Perhaps it’s not just your inclination for blood and ash that’s got you here; maybe it’s his?”
For a moment, Hunger almost looked confused. Then he shook his head. “No,” he whispered. “A human can’t… a creature of blood and skin and senses… wouldn’t understand.”
“We do.”
A grin of sharp grey teeth. “Yes,” he whispered. “But you aren’t human any more. Is that why you couldn’t cry, little sorcerer? Won’t you burn out your lovely blue eyes?”
“I’m a little confused,” I said, crawling back onto my feet and straightening my back to face him.
“Shall I be the one to give you enlightenment, or do you simply not want to understand?”
“We understand,” we said, opening our fingers at our side, stretching them out to catch the feeling of that place, one last time, pulling in the blue fire ready to burn. “But it doesn’t mean we have to feel sorry for you.”
He opened his fingers, a second before we could – he’d seen the attack coming and he loved it, opened his mouth and breathed in the magic around us, sucked it down like air. He raised his arms, and all the darkness moved up with him, stretching arms across the ceiling, drawing out the length of his form behind him in a wing of blackness; and from his fingers came nothing but dark, was nothing but dark, a living burning fire of it rushing forth and popping out the light of the lantern, swimming towards me in a tide that sucked the colour from the servers, the light from the wires, the heat from the frames, and left nothing but dry grey frost in its wake.
We saw all this and, for a moment, it made perfect sense to us, and we didn’t need a sorcerer’s tricks to match this darkness, just the fire inside that made us bright.
We opened our fingers, and let it blaze. The blue fire burst across our flesh and rippled up our arms, rolled over our face and set our hair blazing, we breathed in and it rushed up through our nose and down our throat, filling our lungs and stomach and passing across them into the blood, setting the arteries under our skin exploding with bright blueness, filling the blood vessels in our eyes with its flame until all we saw was the blue of it; we let the fire run through our clothes and spread out from our fingers and it didn’t burn, that wasn’t what was needed; it simply blazed. We put all our strength, our anger, our fears, our senses into it and pushed the flames out of us in a blue rippling wall of power that slammed into the tide of darkness, like two glaciers made of silk charging into each other, a silent swish of force that nearly sent us off our feet, and for a moment
just a moment
Hunger was afraid.
Then the fire started to burn. There was no controlling it, not once it was locked into opposition with that wall of moving shadows. It started at the edges, where it rippled against the encroaching tide of blackness, solder starting to smoke and boil, plastic beginning to drip and melt, frames glowing an eerie purple as the redness of the metal was lost somewhere behind the blueness of our perceptions. We could feel the rising heat start to run across our skin and the pain of it start up in our blood, but we kept burning
my blood
because to stop was to let that darkness suffocate us, tear us in two, and in its own strange way the burning was beautiful
my blood burning
and we didn’t mind the pain because it was sense, a pounding demand for attention, a physical awareness that was interesting as much in its intensity as its symptoms – what was it about the rising redness of our skin and the smoking of our clothes and the bleeding of our ears that caused this thing we thought of as pain, what about this sense was not in itself amazing
my blood on fire my skin burning my pain and I want…
in itself beautiful?
For a moment
just a moment
I forgot that I was Matthew Swift. And I looked up through my blue eyes and saw the creature that I called Hunger, and recognised in it a power not entirely unlike myself, and I was nothing more than a creature of the wires. We were me, and I was the blue electric angel, and nothing more, and nothing less.
Through the walls of competing power, I
met Hunger’s pale, drained eyes, and saw him blink.
The spells broke – his and ours, they snapped almost simultaneously. The tide of darkness rolled back in on itself then broke forward, slamming into the wall of fire we had raised against its progress and in that instant neither of us could control the scale of magic that we’d thrown against each other, nothing could keep it controlled or in that place. The shock of the two spells meeting, tearing, breaking loose, picked us up off our feet and threw us backwards; it illuminated the entire room, every distant wall, and its endless cobweb of trailing dead cable, with a flash of light so blue and so bright that when we closed our eyes all we could see on the back of our eyelids was the dazzling glare of a clean winter sky. The combined, uncontrolled magic ripped through the body of Guy Lee and burnt it down to dust in a second, tore apart every inch of the reanimated paper servants he had summoned down from the stairway, and sent cracks splintering through the roof above. It smashed through every dead, dark server tower, splintering the circuitry and twisting every joint of every frame so that they fell like crooked dominos, tangling in each other in a mess of concrete dust, broken metal and twisted plastic, blocking out every path around on every side and filling the place with the toppling trunks of corkscrewed dead machines. In the streets above, the LSE university shuddered, glass cracking in every old window frame, dust trickling down from the bricks. Car alarms started to wail, the leaves trembled in the trees, the roads, some said, seemed to shudder under their own weight.
Then nothing.
We fell somewhere in the dark as it settled quietly back over that place. We curled in around the pain throughout our whole body, shook
with it, screamed with it until I…
… because it was my pain…
forced control, crawled, with dust filling my nose and throat, blood wetting my lips, a relentless pulsing at the end of every nerve, forced myself to lie flat on my back in the nearest patch of open space. I breathed through the pain as it rolled over my system, while we contorted our mouth and tried to shout or scream or cry through the worst of it; any sound or sight or sense to distract us from the fear and the horror of it. I tried to think about it medically, assess the whirling of my vision and sickness in my stomach, patted the back of my head and felt blood, ran my hands down my side and felt an uneven lump around my ribs, twitched my legs and felt an ankle twisted at the wrong angle, not a pretty picture, I imagined; and managed to get a laugh through our overwhelming desire to scream. That was good, it was a start, better.
We heard a gentle click, click, click in the darkness. Blinded with all the lights gone, I tried to crawl away from it, while a shower of mortar dust filtered down from the ceiling and something creaked in the darkness. I got a few yards before I found my way blocked by some twisted metal remnants, scorching hot, and turned, tried to find enough strength to summon a little light – a flash within my fingers, burning bright neon, but gone too fast – to see my imminent demise, before it occurred to me, despite our terror, that in the dark, Hunger made no sound as he walked.
A single match flared in the darkness. It illuminated rounded shadows and grainy textures, then the end of a cigarette, before it went out. The shadow behind that tiny red glow squatted down next to me and said gruffly, “Cigarette?”
I shook my head.
“Now,” said the beard behind the glow, “I want to offer a few thoughts for you to consider right now.”
I said nothing.
“You see, I figure, here you are – kinda looking like a watermelon after a nasty accident, thinking, ‘Shit, I’ve just blown up half of the Kingsway Exchange in an uncontrolled magical explosion that really I should have stopped before it went mental; and I wonder if the primal force of darkness and shadow that I keep on forgetting to mention to people is going to come back?’ And I figure that this is the prime opportunity for me to impart a few pearls of wisdom that I, in my extensive travels, have gleaned about life.”
He drew a long puff from his cigarette, then blew it sideways and away. “Now, being Beggar King,” he said, “I see things. People don’t see me, in fact they go out of their way not to see, quite deliberately avert their eyes, but I see things. I know that when you were a kid, getting older, you’d give a few pennies to the kids on the street and I liked that, I respect that, you know? Sure, nine out of ten might be pushing drugs and you might have just bought that one last fix they need, but that every tenth penny you give – hell, it might just keep someone alive. Now, a callous person would say, ‘Don’t be so dramatic, they’re not going to die, and besides, you’re just supporting a useless burden on society, encouraging them, not helping, and, hell, you’re only in it for your own ego.’ But as I look at it, you can die a whole number of ways that don’t involve your skin. Death of the soul. Death of the spirit. Death of youth – sure, it’s kinda tied into the death of the flesh, but I reason, you waste away before your time, still alive, still ticking over, but you might as well be bed-bound for all the strength you have left in your bones, and there’s no way twenty pence in a coffee cup will buy you that bed for the night. Getting old before your time with none of the perks of age.
“As for the ego thing – no point thinking you’re good and fluffy inside if you don’t keep up the habit on occasion. You seriously gonna tell me you’re a compassionate bastard and not meet the beggar’s eyes and feel sorrow? But I figure, hell! You’re a good sorcerer, you understand this whole cycle of life crap, you get the fact that when you die, it’s just one set of thoughts snuffing out and that somewhere else there’s six and a half billion other buggers whose minds will tick along just as bright, just as clear, just as loud, just as alive, because that’s what sorcery is, right? That’s why you put the pennies in the cup, because when you’re dead and gone and your thoughts are silent and you are nothing but shadow on the wall, someone will think of you who you forgot, and their thoughts will be richer for it. Am I right?”
I didn’t answer, didn’t move, didn’t know if I could do either.
“Then there’s this whole vendetta thing you’ve got going. Now, that seems strange to me.” Another long, thoughtful puff. “You’d let people die so you can kill Lee. Granted, the guy is already dead, if you’ll excuse the pun – sometimes I astound myself at my own bad taste – but you’re willing to let others die just so you can pin him down so you can pin down Bakker so you can pin down this shadow and for what? The greater good? There’s a lot of shit done for the greater good, sorcerer. When the lady with the swish coat and the expensive shoes doesn’t give the beggar a pound on the street, it’s because she’s giving ten to a charity and sure, that’s the greater good. Sure, of course it is. It’s giving more, probably to be used better. But it isn’t compassion. To look away from someone in pain because you know that your e-account is paying monthly contributions to the ‘greater good’; to walk on by while all those people suffer and die because you’ve got a cause and a big sense of perspective… says something about the soul. Compassion. And that” – he flicked the end of the cigarette at me in the dark – “is the first thing that died in Robert James Bakker.”
He drew another breath, tossed the butt away, ground his heel into it and sighed. “I guess you’ll want a few reassurances. I don’t pretend to be the good guy, that whole moral crap is for someone with a bigger beard; but this is basic survival instinct stuff, yeah? You’ve rattled your shadowy friend. That’s what you’re hoping to hear, isn’t it? Now, the thing I find myself wanting to know is what your lady friend will ask when she comes to rescue you any minute now” – a glimmer of light somewhere in the shadow, the sound of footsteps on metal, and not from his hard-heeled boots. The Beggar King’s teeth flashed white in the dark, although I couldn’t see where the light came from that reflected on them. “Like, are the blue electric angels any better than the shadow? What’d you think?”
He leant down so his ear was a few inches from my mouth. “Go on,” he said brightly. “Just between you and me, seriously,
tell me why your lady friend shouldn’t kill you like all those other faceless people who are dead upstairs. Go on. Give me a clue.”
I thought about it, felt the hot, smelly breath of the Beggar King on my face. “Because…” I said, then realised what I’d been about to say was stupid, and tried again. “Because… because we are me.” I saw reflected in his eyes a dull glow, moving through the dark, and heard the sound of falling debris somewhere in the distance. “And I won’t forget,” I said.
The Beggar King straightened up and grinned. “Good!” he said. “Well, fair dos, good luck to you, enjoy, don’t be a stranger and all that so on and so forth; glad, all things considered, that it was you, not Lee who made it through after all – unhygienic, all that paper, a mess – be seeing you!”
He started to retreat into the darkness. I called out as best I could, which wasn’t good at all, “What if I don’t want this?”
“Want what?” his voice drifted back through the darkness.
“To be… me.”
A laugh, fading as he did. “Then you’re kinda stuffed, sorcerer!”
The click, click, click of his heels faded into nothing. A new sound replaced them, a scrabbling of fingers over broken machines, and a voice, rising up in the dark.
“Sorcerer! Swift!”
I recognised it, and tried to call out. “Oda!”
She heard me eventually, and the gentle bubble of dull torchlight swept over my feet, then found the rest of me, a spot of brightness scrambling unevenly out of the dark. Oda slipped clumsily down the side of a fallen bank of servers to where I lay. Her clothes were stained with dust and blood, but by the relative ease of the way she moved, very little of that blood could have been hers. She knelt by me and ran the torchlight in a businesslike manner over the length of me. Clearly I didn’t make a good impression. Professional fingers felt around the back of my head and turned my face this way and that, digging into me in search of injuries with a strength almost as bad as the injuries themselves, whatever they were.