by Kate Griffin
The reply came back in less than five minutes.
WHAT PROBLEM, WHAT DANGER, HE WILL BE ANGRY.
I replied:
MIDNIGHT MAYOR ALDERMEN HELP ME MEET?
This time, the response took nearly ten minutes. I watched the trains go by, counting down towards midnight and the last train.
Then it came:
HACKNEY MARSHES; NAVY CADETS BUILDING, TWO HOURS.
This, we could do.
I caught the first train heading east.
* * *
We could taste the beginning of the end.
I just felt tired.
Disrupted sleep patterns?
Too much of too much.
Ta-da!
Still not dead.
Still alive.
Watch us burn.
Central Line, heading east. North Acton, East Acton, White City, the beginning of the descent into tunnels, Shepherd’s Bush, Holland Park. The stretch that ran beneath Oxford Street and I could still feel it overhead, its vibrancy, brightness, tacky, gaudy glee making me feel more tired by comparison, a great fire raging just overhead and me down in the cold, empty carriages of the tunnels. Holborn, Chancery Lane, our hand ached, how it ached as we passed beneath the Square Mile, the Golden Mile, the City, the Corporation, call it what you wanted, the oldest part of the city, where the shadows were most thick, where the dragons with the mad eyes guarded long-forgotten gates. Domine dirige nos, Lord lead us, city protect us, a higher power, a miracle beyond comprehension.
St Paul’s, Bank — a vortex in space and time that made the weird corridors of the Barbican seem straight as a Roman road — Liverpool Street, Bethnal Green. We climbed off the train, the last train — well, maybe not quite the very last — up onto a crossroad junction, mainline track to one side, museum and park grounds to the other, traffic still waiting by the lights, passengers still milling around for the buses. A strange place, Bethnal Green. It sat at a junction of more than just geographical borders. Druids call it ley lines, paths of power, but the Glastonbury “away days with the faeries” had undermined some of the pride of those who believed in such things. Didn’t mean such things weren’t possible. At Bethnal Green, things met and melded into each other. Hackney borough met Tower Hamlets, and on each side of border streets hung banners proclaiming that this borough was the best in London, don’t believe the lies of your neighbours! The rich towers of the city were but a few minutes away to the west, the low slabs of Mile End but a few minutes to the east; and in the middle, old Bethnal Green, just far enough from squalor to be respectable, far enough from wealth to be poor, winding enough to be old, open enough to be new, where all the buses met and divided, to take their passengers to a place more certain than the crossroads where all these things converged.
Sure, there are ley lines. Transport for London could probably draw a map.
It was an easy hop from Bethnal Green towards Hackney Marshes, made only less so by the cordon of signs warning “Olympic Site Development — Road Closed”. I got off the bus at the edge of the marshes, and the shadows were thick, crawling up from the pavements, gnawing at our feet, aching in our fingers. The old was dying, they whispered, glaring at the Olympic signs, all going to be knocked down, washed away. East End, end of the east, place where things ended, rejects and slums, squalid history of neglect, all being washed away behind gleaming steel and glass. Wipe away the history; wipe away the shame; forget that the shadows were once alive.
Midnight Mayor, protector of the city.
Remember those memories?
“Busy now,” I snapped at the darkness. “Next time.”
Hackney Marshes — get them while you can. A few more years, and they might have been mown away to make place for a running track, a tennis field, a sports ground, a swimming pool, something, where the world can come and celebrate this strangeness that mortals seem to find so fascinating — Olympic games. We do not understand why mortals, trapped in a fleshy shell, must make their own flesh suffer.
The place had once been a swamp or marsh, and still looked it. The Lee Valley might have been tamed, the river diverted to a more useful course than through valuable real estate on its way down to the Thames, but the drooping, green-brown grass and thick, razor-stemmed reeds still told you, if the spongy ground didn’t, that this was a place with a history humanity had not fully managed to tame. It was not by any means a public park — since that implied benches, bins, children’s play areas, flower gardens, ordered hedges and tactfully planted trees. Hackney Marshes had none of these things, and was all the purer for it. It was a place for the dog walkers to ramble, for the kids to slouch, for the fishermen to wait hours on end to catch a trailing shopping bag; an open patch of sullen, sagging land just like it might once have been a thousand years ago, full of unreliable dips and delves, strange smells and unlikely strangers. We liked it, although as a meeting place, it had one serious disadvantage. It was a long way from the roads, the power lines, the gas mains, the water pipes; these things that were the most natural and useful tools of an urban sorcerer’s trade. There was magic here, time and shadow and proud defiance of the “here we are, here we remain” category — but it was fainter, unfamiliar, harder to tangle our fingers in and command to our use. It was, in short, exactly the kind of place where you might stand a better than usual chance of killing a sorcerer.
We should have taken the gun from Mr Umbars’s house.
As it was, I took a few precautions. I rummaged in my satchel for my penknife and, feeling halfway between extremely clever and utterly inane, stuck it in my right sock and pulled down my trouser over the bulge. I put a torch in my coat pocket, not wanting to risk a possibly futile effort in summoning a light so far from a reliable source of neon. I pulled my gloves off and stuck them in the bottom of my bag. We didn’t know anything about fighting with fists, but if worst came to worst, ignorance was not going to stop us.
And then, because she had guns, and I didn’t, I texted Oda.
HACKNEY MARSHES, NAVY CADETS. DANGER. SHARPEN YOUR KNIVES. SWIFT.
She didn’t text back, so I went in search of Ms Smith.
The Navy Corps building was a corrugated-iron shed whose great-great-grandfather might once have held the Titanic. It was now little more than an iron curve over a bit of concrete floor, but it was still an interior, among the dank grasses of the marsh, and above the battered wooden door a battered old wooden sign declared:
R YAL NA Y CADET
O EN 14-21 YRS OL
BE T E BEST
I knocked at the door with the knuckles of my scarred hand.
The wind went through the reeds, the thin waters of the tamed river dribbled and stirred in their uncanny paths. A druid might have found it beautiful, magical, might have breathed deep of that cold, slightly muddy air and from it summoned the lightning. I could see how such things were possible. Life is magic. It just wasn’t the kind I liked.
No one answered, so I kicked the door until it opened, half falling in when it swung back suddenly on its rusted old hinges. The inside of the iron building consisted of four rooms, each one as low, grey and unimaginative as its partner. One might have once been a kitchen, with great rusted pots in which litres of baked beans had been boiled at a go. One had been a dining room, the tables kicked aside; one a bathroom, the sink long since broken, the taps too depressed even to drip ominously in the dark. Broken bulb glass was on the floor, the mirror cracked from a single smashed point. The last room had, once upon a time, been a place for people to feel proud. Pictures still hung on random hooks across the wall, showing beaming boys (and some less so) and stretching back generations to the days when stripy knee-length socks and rounded caps were considered the height of fashion. Here they proudly waved from on top of a canoe; there they sat in sombre rows, their captain holding a battered football, their coach with whistle clasped firmly in hand. Wooden panels had been nailed into the walls on which were emblazoned the names of extra-special boys who had done such and such
a deed while serving in the Navy Cadets, the little silver shields now tarnished faint green, the little flags, proclaiming victory at this game of rugby or honourable inspection by such and such a rear vice admiral, now drooping limp, threadbare. There would be rats living in a building like this, hiding away innocuous in the dark. Rats we could work with.
There was no one else in the building.
We were early.
A brown sofa in one corner had had its cushions stolen, revealing the thin veil of fabric beneath. We sat down in it, stretched out our legs, folded our fingers behind our head, feeling the thick scab of the cut down the back of our skull from that night — however many nights it had been — when the telephone had rung and it had all begun — and waited. We were usually very bad at waiting. Tonight it was the most thrilling boredom we could ever have conceived.
There was no risk of sleeping, regardless of how tired we felt.
Weight, not fatigue, was the symptom of our restlessness; a great shallow pressing down on our heart and chest.
Not sleeping, we heard them coming a quarter of a mile off, feet rustling through the reeds while the wind whispered its sad resentments over the marsh.
More than one set of footsteps; we half-turned our head to the window and saw torchlight, heard the faint snatch of voices lost in the twisting of the grass. The bouncing uneven strays of white light from the bulbs sent crazy shadows across the wall, that twisted and writhed and proclaimed runrunrunrunrunrunRUNRUNRUN!
I slunk back deeper into my gutted sofa and waited, tangling my fingers in my hair to keep them still, rubbing at old scabs and scars, keeping alert through the faint pressure-pain. A footstep outside dislodged something; I heard the scuttling of little ratty feet over concrete. Then the door opened. Two men with pistols and torches slunk in, doing the SWAT-team stuff. The way they moved seemed familiar, something straight off the TV, all signals and armour and guns. They saw me straight away; one gave a cry of “Hey-oi!” and the other turned to look.
I said, “Surprise!”
Two more men, slightly more heavily armed than their colleagues, also entered the room. The four of them took up positions in a semicircle around my sofa. I sat up, pressing my feet down on the concrete floor, listening for the scuttle of ratty claws.
“Ta-da,” I added weakly.
They just stared at me. None of them looked like they had a sense of humour.
“Ms Smith?” I asked nicely.
Another person at the door, another figure entered the room. This one was a woman. She wore a big black coat. She said, “Mr Swift.”
You can get big black coats almost anywhere.
And hell, it wasn’t like I was hard to crack.
But I knew her voice too.
I reached into my pocket for my torch, and at once the guns, which had been doing little more than pointing, came closer, making their point a little more pointed. I put my hands carefully by my side, smiled my nicest smile and said, “Just looking for my torch. Dark in here.” And then, because the terror was starting to set in, we blurted, “Hello, Ms Smith. You couldn’t have found a more inspiring name, could you?”
The shadow from the door became a darkness behind the four points of torchlight, moved between them, said, “He’s coming, Swift. Coming to end it all. No phones, no redial, no ringing in the night. End of the line. He’s coming, and then it will be done.”
“I’m guessing by ‘he’ we’re talking about Mr Pinner?”
She didn’t answer.
I stood up, as slow as I dared, and the lights and the guns kept on following. “You know, I never trust people who don’t have anything to say.”
No answer.
“And you knew that it was me asking for the meeting . . . because you have my number already on your phone?” I added carefully, trying out the idea for size.
No answer.
“Silence is contempt.”
And, because even people who don’t have anything to say have nerves to touch, she stepped into the torchlight, and the big black coat was stained with dirt and smog, but her face was still clean, and still familiar, and she was still, when not the unimaginative Ms Smith, comrade of the death of cities, a woman I had called Anissina.
She said, “You can’t begin to understand.”
“Try me.”
She said, “If you move, we’ll shoot you.”
“I guessed.”
“I don’t want to shoot you.”
“Bless.”
“If you die, the Midnight Mayor will still come back. Mr Pinner says he has ways. We are waiting for him.”
“Mr Pinner . . . death of cities Mr Pinner? Mr ‘I feast on the flame, stand beneath the bomb, drink the flood waters, rage with the burning and lick my lips on mortal terror’ Mr Pinner? This is the ducky we’re talking about? Don’t get me wrong, but I think I’d rather get shot.”
I took a step forward, and all the guns moved, and all the breaths were drawn. “Don’t!” she snapped. “There’s a reason I chose this place to meet. I know that you are weaker away from the streets and the lights and the electricity! Don’t make this be worse.”
“Nice to think you care.”
“I don’t.”
“Ah. So much for that consolation. I know it’s cliché, Anissina, but I gotta ask you: what exactly are you, an Alderman, and one who should theoretically be dead with the rest of her men, doing here, pointing guns at me?”
She thought about it, and then, because we had nothing to do but wait, she told me.
Third Interlude: Damnation, Contempt and Traffic Wardens
In which all is explained at the point of a gun.
“The city is going to burn,” she said. “It has been damned, cursed, blighted. The death of cities has been summoned, the ravens killed, the Wall defaced, the Stone broken, the Midnight Mayor weakened. You cannot be weak in the city. He should defend the stones, the streets, the history, the ghosts. Two thousand years of ghosts are sitting on the banks of the Thames, on whose bodies the houses were raised and the stones settled, a history too big, a life too immense for any one mind to comprehend. That is why the dragons are mad, Swift, the ones who guard the gates of London. When you look into their eyes you see nothing but endless insanity. They comprehend how big the city is, how great and how deep and how beautiful and how dark, and it sends them mad.
“But you . . . Midnight Mayor . . . for you to be here, you must be seeking the traffic warden’s hat. You must know about her. You must know that Penny Ngwenya is a sorceress, though she does not understand it. To know this and to not have killed her is unforgivable. For a one in eight million, for 0.0000000125 of a city, you will let London burn. Damnation waits for you, Midnight Mayor. It is the ultimate failure of your office.
“I am sure you have learnt much — much too much — of what you need to about Penny Ngwenya. I have no interest in what motivates you in your mistakes. At the end of the day, regardless of the brand on your hand, of your bright blue eyes, you are also 0.0000000125 of a city, and even fewer will notice your passing this time than they did the last.
“The death of cities is coming for you, Matthew Swift.
“A child stole her hat, a kid on a bike stole Penny Ngwenya’s hat, and a stranger beat her for doing her job, and a stranger spat in her face, and strangers abused her, and strangers called her names. Little frightened sorceress, who saw life and beauty and magic in the city, who stood by the river’s edge and felt the beating of its heart as if it were her own, who stared down on the lights of the city and saw the starlight of the world spread beneath her feet for her to tread lighter than the breeze. Do you remember how it was, sorcerer, when you first began to breathe the magic of the city, to taste its burning brightness, to dream in neon and rejoice to smell the streets in your sleeves? She could have been so bright, little Penny Ngwenya, but not any more. Strangers beat, robbed and spat at her, faces she will never see again, and who will never see her, too many million between her and them. They did it no
t for who she was, or why she was, or what she was — but because she was there and they did not have to care for her, a stranger. A cruelty without consequence, a deed without responsibility.
“The night that this boy, Mo, stole Ngwenya’s hat, she walked to the river. You and she have that in common; you seek the river to calm you; you breathe deep of its magics and become lost in time and movement, for that is what the river is. She went to the river, as you would, and stood upon the bridge at the height of rush hour. She turned her head towards the sky and her arms towards the water. Tourists, commuters, workers, travellers, call them what you will — the bridge was full, London Bridge, the heart of the city, the oldest bridge, the last barrier to the city, the final part of the city wall, she stood there as the city moved around her and — for whatever reason it was, for whatever cruelty — she turned her hands towards the water and her head towards the sky and called out to these passing strangers, ‘Give me back my hat.’
“And no one listened.
“Not a single man or woman turned their head.
“Crazy woman alone on a bridge.
“Crazy shouting woman alone.
“Leave her alone.
“Give me back my hat — sorcerer. This was her curse. Give me back my hat!
“And no one listened.
“Except Mr Pinner.
“Sorcerers love to burn.
“It is why the blue electric angels love the sorcerers — you are moulded of the same light and fury, the same madnesses.
“You see magic where there is life.
“So it was with Penny Ngwenya.
“She stood on the bridge and saw the magic of the city, a harsh, cruel, unloving thing, stood alone and cried as a hundred strangers ignored her, and came to realise that this city, this place she had thought so beautiful, was a diamond she could never possess. A gleaming ornament on someone else’s glittering coat. A thing bought with money, carved out with blood, cold, beautiful, unyielding, cruel. And not knowing what she did, she wove on London Bridge a spell, as cold and cruel as the city that despised her. Damnation upon the cruelty of strangers, she breathed, curses on the unkind unfamiliarity. Let all who are strange be afraid, let all who are alone be left alone to their furies. ‘Give me back my hat,’ she screamed. ‘Damnation upon this city!’
