Black City (The Lark Case Files)

by Christian Read

  He combined all three and got himself sent to a cooking school. He excelled. He was a kind of prodigy with the design of meals. His own skill with blade and fire were superlative, but his true genius was developing spectacular menus, combinations of textures and flavours and colours and presentations that sounded stupid and ugly on paper but came alive on a plate. He took a low-paying job at a football club, testing himself under duress. Then, the fateful night he did the Christmas celebration banquet for a team that had gone terribly that season. The right people had been there for the tasting, though, so it worked out pretty ok. He was offered job after job, which he took and, in four years, opened his own restaurant in London. Lionel's skills, his infectious charisma and not a few spells, saw him an enormous success by the time he was twenty-eight. At thirty-one, he opened his own restaurant in the city, coming here in glory. If you know chefs, you know him, but he's smart enough to keep himself off television.

  At thirty-four, he now presided over his third restaurant. He rarely cooked now, except when the mood took him, or special guests were in dining. Or he needed someone under his spell.

  Lionel could have been the greatest political assassin in the history of the city if he chose. The great and the grand love his joint and his food and his waiting lists are long. From his kitchen sanctum, he can dose whoever he chooses with poisons or love potions, or drugs to relieve memories, or to illuminate their spirits to astral hunters, or enslave them to greed. His facility with cuisinamancy, as he thinks it's funny to call it, is legendary. Can't attest to it myself. I can't afford thirty-dollar salads.

  Because Lionel is a clever, clever young man, he paid attention to his mother's second gift. Her magic was a good start but, as his food is fusion, same deal with his magic. Truly a post-modernist, he took hoodoo and spielwerk and santeria recipes and spells. He studied the reagents of alchemy, of course and the modern pagan love of food and anything he could think of. He worshipped an eclectic mix of gods who oversaw house and hearth. Vesta one day, Agni the next. His ovens became altars and his sauces canvas to sigils, his spices a variety of reagents. Ground bone, shaved metals, the tiniest drops of blood, a lover's hair, cut ten times with a five hundred dollar knife. Exotic intoxificants, hallucinogens and depressants as garnish. His ingredients were equally esoteric. Black goats, black cats and albino bats. His presentation unusual to the point of eccentricity: plates marked with weird patterns, meals eaten between two joss sticks, meals that he would insist were eaten only while the diner faced certain directions, at certain times of the year. That's how he still rolls today.

  So it was Lionel became wealthy, famous and a very well known magician in the city. For him, the dream so many have when they first vapour-grasp at magic came true. But only because all he wanted was to cook and magic helped him. Power and influence were always secondary, truly a by-product, not a goal. A worthy lesson to learn for all magicians. Don't lust for result.

  Magic comes where it's wanted but then does as it pleases. Clear yourself of desire. Free yourself from a lust for result.

  It worked out for Lionel.

  I don't have...

  I don't have many friends. Once you're in the life, it's hard to talk to citizens. But I found it hard even before then. All I care about is the work. The history and application of the arch of all art, magic. I can't talk about sports and I don't care about your kids. I don't go to the movies and I don't care for the weather and I don't read fiction. My house is weird, I have to get drunk to have a conversation with anyone who isn't Scarlet half the time, and we haven't spoken without shouting in two years. I smell of cigarettes and I can't tell you my stories.

  So I don't have many friends. Easier that way.

  But I like Lionel.

  The alleyway behind Agni is well-travelled and well lit but we cast shadows over the walls. One of the dish pigs is having a smoke break. He leans against the wall, midnight tired.

  'The man working tonight?'

  He thinks we're autograph hunters. He shakes his head, annoyed at having his reveries spoiled. I whisper a word under my breath, a spell I've used a hundred times. It just makes him suggestible. Bettina smiles behind me. The dish pig grins and I can see the gaps in his teeth. I give him another smoke and he and my bodyguard flirt in Spanish together. That helps the spell.

  He wanders out and in a bit, he wanders in.

  'The man will see you. Restaurant closes in half an hour.'

  In the white hot wet bustle that is a kitchen. It's the last of the meals and the cooks are tense. They throw us filthy looks. Then the booming accent. 'Lark, mate! How're ya!'

  Dressed in his hound's-tooth and white, he crosses the kitchen to hug me. I'm not a hugger. He laughs at my awkward attempts to go with it. It's been three years and he's even skinnier than I recall. Does he have the sickness? No. Some geas, I'd imagine, a cook doomed to a scarecrow physique. It's the sort of thing that happens.

  His cooking station is all done up with idols, kitchen wife poppets, sigils, like that.

  'You like the new digs? We're up some tasty things. Food golems! Ah, just joshing.' And he's off, talking about things in his thick accent so thick that half the time people just listen to it, not his words. It's when he barks commands people pay attention. I have to stop him.

  'Lionel. This is Bettina. She works for me.'

  Something about her wards off the hug and so he grips her hand. 'Charmed, madame.' She likes that but she too gangster to show it.

  'I like your place, man,' she gestures around. 'I never been in a kitchen this big.'

  'You should see the convention centre kitchens I used to run. This is an intimate dining experience.'

  He'll brag for a while if I let him, so I cut him off. 'Bettina needs to eat.'

  'I'll scrounge the lady something.'

  'No. Look.'

  He does, lips moving. 'Ah.'

  'Yeah.'

  Whistling over a sous-chef, who he dispatches into a walk-in. 'I need the red sauce.'

  A moment later the woman comes back with a long, thin glass tube. Lionel unstoppers it.

  'I have a farm. Certain of my clients have unique dietary requirements. I slaughter a cow in the morning, have it driven in especially. Blood, bones, eyes, tripe, offal. All sorts of things get saved. This is fresh this morning.'

  She opens it. 'Not here. They'll smell it.'

  We walk through a corridor to his office, done up in cool colours, bamboo decorations. We take seats over from his desk. Bettina gets greedy, gulping down the blood.

  'You did something to this?'

  Lionel falls with a thump into his chair, tired after a long night. 'Well, we have these blokes who look after all the animals, feed em a special diet. But also, there's a weird group up in the hills who use livestock as their totem animals. Call 'em the sheep-shaggers. Goats, cattle, all that stuff. Probably tasting all that devotion.'

  She swigs again. 'I like it. Can I buy this?'

  He grins with his white, white teeth. 'Not with dosh.'

  I stir uneasily. Pusher economics. And Bettina drinking a diet of enchanted blood? That's how you end up with monsters.

  'Lionel, I'm investigating some people.'

  'Who?'

  'The usual.'

  'Thought you got fired from that job.'

  Trying not to bristle: 'I quit.'

  'Either way, mate.'

  'You know I've been freelance for two years.'

  'Not investigating. You're not Magnum fucking P.I.'

  'I'm investigating now.'

  'Why?'

  'Getting paid.'

  'Who's holding the purse?'

  Nothing.

  'Mate, people leave me alone because I leave them alone. Don't bring me attention I can't use.'

  I laugh. 'You comp free meals each month to every magician of note in the whole city. Half the high-class deals happen in your place. You've got an ear out for everything that happens. You've got more drugs in here to make someone spill their guts t
han is reasonable. Don't play Casablanca with me.'

  'Alright. Alright. What do you want from me?'

  He takes a spliff from his draw and lights it, offering one to me, to refusal, Bettina taking hers. I light my own smoke. He calls up cocktails and we settle in.

  'Lionel, I need to know the score. The layout. I'm not in it like a used to be. What's the state of play?'

  'One thing. Is the Hollow involved?'

  Don't want to talk about this but I give the cook a scrap for free.

  'I haven't seen him in ages. He's too dangerous.'

  He breathes in deep relief. 'You'll owe?'

  I hesitate. I'm working for Scarlet, Lionel.

  'I'll owe.'

  He lays it out.

  Ten

  They call her Wick. One of the guy's mothers called her a skinny as a candle and you know the rest.

  The guys don't like her. She's thin, short and sly. She keeps her black hood up and she sees strange things that no one else sees. Her tags are weird as well. She doesn't write her name, or spray the mythologies in paint on storm drains or trains, or warehouse wall or disused Mason hall. Wick sprays landscapes, drawn from her dreams and her daydreams and her nightmares. She loves the colours, brighter the better. She doesn't know about surrealism and symbolism and expressionism and words like that and she wouldn't care if she did. Wick seeks absolute fidelity to her own artistic vision and the tenets of an artistic school would annoy her. But she doesn't know those words and likely never will. Her work, therefore, is disturbing to the others. The others.

  The artists create elaborate identities for themselves. CaesarZero1, The Blue Fairy, Smeer, Fuckstick, Beats, Tak0Tak. They leave each other messages, jokes, threats and disses and lessons and sometimes create spaces for other artists to finish their work, collaborations between people who will never meet. Wick tries to create her own identity, but they don't care. She's not a part of a movement. The weird girl they don't let in the gang.

  The tagging sets are a strange assemblage moved by art, moved by a notion to express visions, to claim territory, to proclaim their existence. Many of them are poor, so poor, and run with criminals, with bastards, looking for drugs to fuel their art, for money to buy paint and phones and trainers and that stuff to look cool to their friends. Some are just kids who want to paint a city, living with their parents, whose ambitions run to DJing in clubs, their tags used for fashion designs or as backdrop for R&B or hip-hop clips.

  Wrong to call the tag artists an aristocracy of the streets. More like an artisans in a lot of ways. Their services are always in demand, to scrawl gang semiotics or to simply brighten dark streets and alleys and so they have a kind of social mobility, an immunity, so long as they respect all the street's laws and treaties. Some of the work is political, although many sneer at this brand of optimism and pretension. Some exorcise old grief or old beefs and famous trysts and killings are remembered with a certain word, a certain image that stains the city, unknowable but to the few who can decipher such words.

  The elite, the known taggers, can speak to who they choose, move freely through the city, listen to what music they like, the graffiti artists. They only have one law: don't fuck with one another's work.

  It wasn't just a diss on a personal level. It was maiming the folk art of the tribes. It was something taken seriously enough to break arms over. Except...

  Except for Wick's work. She didn't have her own crew. She didn't have muscle. She didn't have anything except for the strangeness and the characteristic unsettling patterns and weirdly juxtaposed glyphs and images. Foreign climes. Circulatory systems. Wrong-shaped eyes. Dancers doing ill dances.

  When they found her the last time, they took a philistine's glee in destroying her work. When they just covered over it, blanked it white or black, Wick didn't care. She knew that piece had just plain scared them and she kind of liked that. One time, she tried to fight them off, but fourteen years old and underfed, she was never really convinced by her own violence and neither were they. Some girl gave her a black eye. It was when they made her watch cocks and tits drawn over her fang-eyed mermaids that she finally cried.

  The tags are more than just art. They're a little piece of her marking the city and making it hers. Marking it, letting people know she exists, that she has ideas, visions, that she has a right to be here. These aren't things she can speak of, but they're her true thoughts. That she has as much right as the guys who tease and mock her to live here. That she's as much a citizen as the mayor or the people in the coffee shops with computers or the nannies or the lawyers striding along the sidewalk or the girls shivering in tiny dresses that cost more than her mum pays in rent. Wick marks the city and it becomes something she participates in.

  Wick is sensitive. She has the mind of a magician, receptive to illogic and symbolism and so she crawls down into the underworld of Crom Cruach and subways. She climbs up to the water towers, circling them with invented alphabets, solar symbols, Ra invocations. Crossroads at midnight and the scenes of ancient murders, or the great bathhouses, closed by the bug, or the sites where murders were done, famous love was made, terror seized. If there was a haunted place, Wick haunted it in turn, marking it surely. She'd never know it until after she was dead, but she had fans and admirers amongst metropolitan spirits and magicians who made forsaken places the loci of their explorations.

  No surprise, then, that when the Bleak Electors made their move on the House of Gallowglass, Wick knew about it. She'd spotted the house before on her rounds, looking for likely places, but she'd dimly perceived the wards that would have maimed her had she tried entrance. But she'd left marks in the neighbourhood, and her own faith in and obsession with her art had left her sensitive to them.

  She'd left her mother, drunk by twilight like always, then wandered up to rich neighbourhood, just plain knowing something was going down.

  Climbing a fire escape across the street from the house, no mean feat in itself but she'd learned a monkey's tricks in her time, Wick watched the combat go ahead. Two fine cars and a cheap old van unloading tough men and weirdos. Combat on the lawn. More was going on than she could see, but she could feel it, sure as sure.

  Wick has an artist's instincts but none of the training. No notebook to scribble ideas or images. But she has patience.

  She waited, four hours or more, not bored, wishing only to sign what she felt. Heard screams from inside the house. Saw things moving in the windows that she didn't like. In time, some men and women came out of the house, angered and spitting, pointing fingers at each other. They hadn't found what they were looking for. Soon it was all over, and no one moved in the whole house and the bodies on the grounds weren't faking.

  Sure it was clear, Wick leapt from her roost and opened the gates. A sudden migraine spikes the inside of her skull, but she's too excited to care. Besides, it's clearly meant to kill her and it can't, so she's not so impressed.

  Wick saw the same sights Lark would see only twenty-four hours later. Bodies and hurts. And at the top, in the museum, she found one thing he did not. What Wick couldn't know was that she was being read, treated as text. It was surprised, insofar as it had such capacities, at the aptness of the new arrival. It had felt hands upon its skin, eyes delighted as they read Its words, confirming its presence. Affronted at such little minds grazing its alphabet and hieroglyphs, It wiped memories of their retrieval of its prison.

  Wick however, was completely aware of the Scroll. It was a cynosure in the room and all the other prizes were irrelevant in comparison. She gazed at the delicate tracings, a language she had no way of knowing was like Arabic or Bedirxan but cursed and justly forgotten. Unaware that people had killed, had died, for the honour or crime of gazing upon the terrible mandala illuminated upon the paper.

  It was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen.

  Fingers tracing the language, the patterns, she took entire and sudden inspiration.

  By midnight, she was at work, delighting in the hiss, the rat
tle of the spray can and the living symbols she branded the city with.

  The Scroll, which was delighted in Its idiot manner, was in her bag at her waist. It felt Itself expand and stretch and become.

  Eleven

  WARNING:

  THE FOLLOWING FILE IS CLASSIFIED CRIMSON GLOVE. IF YOU ARE NOT CLEARED FOR STATUS: CRIMSON GLOVE, REPLACE THE FILE NOW AND REPORT TO THE SECURITY CLEARANCE OFFICER.

  NOTE:

  ANOTHER LETTER RETRIEVED FROM CODENAME: BLUEFLY.

  Rule 2

  You can't do magic if you've got a regular mind.

  There's a lot of meanings to that phrase. First of all, you've got to crave the miraculous. You have to want more from your life than money can give you. Or love. Or power. Or religion. Or anything. Most people who might search for it lose themselves in sex or drugs or the usual things that take us out of our worlds. Many see that part of themselves and mistake it for faith. They hit the churches and the mosques and the temples. Some take the vows. A swing. A miss.

  You can't just read out the books or chants the chants. You have to want it.

  That's just how it starts.

  That just gets you in the door, homes.

  Then you have to bring your brain in line.

  You'd have to talk to someone who specialises in the human mind to really understand what I'm saying. Read a book that doesn't have a weird occult symbol or a dragon on the cover one time. But the brain in the skull is a thing designed to live on a plain in Africa and find awesome mangoes and watch out for hyenas and dinosaurs and all that. It recognises patterns. It makes leaps in logic. It works against its own self-interest and can't be relied on. It rewires itself all the time, it's pretty good at paying attention to things that are right in front of it.