by Kate Griffin
“H-H-Harlun and Phelps,” she whispered. “Boom Boom took it, didn’t r-r-realise its power, what it m-meant. I hid it in Harlun and Phelps. I th-th-thought they would n-never . . .”
Oda stroked Anissina’s chin with the end of the gun. “God loves you,” she whispered. “Remember that, when the Devil comes. God is suffering as you suffer, crying out when you cry out. He loves you. He weeps for you. He sees that there is only one way for you to learn.”
So saying, she leant down, and carefully planted a kiss on Anissina’s forehead. She stood up briskly, looked down at me and said, “Are you still not dead?”
“Still alive,” we replied. “Ta-da!”
“Do you want to end this?” she asked.
“Depends on what you mean.”
And for a moment, Oda, psycho-bitch, almost smiled.
“Lucky man,” she said, and bending down, helped to lift us up. “He must love you too, in His own special way.”
She pulled me to my feet.
I felt things moving beneath my skin that shouldn’t have been moving, and we bit so hard on the scream that we caught our tongue between our teeth and for a moment, the pain was almost a welcome relief.
Anissina whimpered, “Swift? Help me?”
We looked down at her.
“Remember Vera?” we asked.
She didn’t answer.
Oda helped us limp away.
Hackney Marshes.
Running. There was blood running between my fingers, blood running down from my side, too fast, too hot. I hissed, “Shot . . .”
“I know. Come on.”
Grass and bumps and sticky wet mud and little flowing streams that sunk up to our ankles and reeds that pulled at our legs and I couldn’t see magic here, now, not tonight, but there it was, the bright neon glow of the city, so close, just a little more and there it would be, electric fire!
“Nearly . . . there . . .” we breathed.
“I know. Come on!”
She’d stolen a car, a Volkswagen Passat, the most boring car manufactured by man, parked it on the edge of the marshes. She opened the back door, threw me in, stepped into the driver’s seat, turned on the ignition, handbrake down, clutch up, boy-racer to the full. I groaned and rolled onto my back in the passenger seats, fumbled for a torch in my pocket, found it, shone it down onto my own abdomen. Something small and angry had torn a jagged smile in the upper-left side of my flesh, just below the floating ribs, and blood was now merrily dribbling out from the grin. I cursed and swore and threw in a bit of blasphemy just in case, groped in my satchel, found the first-aid kit, unravelled pads and bandages and pressed them in, but no sooner was one white pad applied than it had turned scarlet with blood and had to be tossed aside.
“Oda,” I croaked.
“I know,” she snapped. “You’re losing plenty of blood, which probably means it grazed your spleen. You’ll get anxious, your heart rate will pick up, your breathing will accelerate. Then you’ll lose more blood and get calmer, but that won’t be a good thing. Your blood pressure will plummet, your head will spin, your peripheral nervous system will essentially shut down. Then you’ll just collapse. You’ve got a few hours. Like I said: could be worse. Lucky man.”
“Anissina . . .”
“We’re going to Harlun and Phelps. If we don’t find the hat, I’ll kill her. Ngwenya. I’ll kill her, Swift. And if you try and stop me, I’ll kill you. I’ll tell the Aldermen everything. I know . . . why . . . you protected Penny Ngwenya. It was . . . human weakness. The Midnight Mayor cannot be so . . . soft. If you cannot break the spell, I will gun her down. Do we have an understanding?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Lie still, apply pressure, and consider whether you need a deity in your life.”
“I thought it was too late to repent.”
“Never too late to repent. Just too late to avoid your fate.”
“Thank you.”
“Any time.”
“I mean, thank you.”
“I know what you meant.”
The lights of the sleeping city.
What time was it?
“Oda?”
“Yes?”
“For any hurt I did you. For any hurt you think I have done. For all that there needs to be something said, that I . . . that we did not know to say. I am sorry.”
“It sounds like a death speech.”
“I mean it.”
“I know. Too late, sorcerer — it’s too late. But thank you for trying, Matthew Swift. It means nothing to me, but I imagine for you, it is important.”
Sleeping roads, sleeping streets. Even Bethnal Green was turning out the lights, the buses slinking away up Mare Street towards the mysteries of Dalston, Clapton, Stamford Hill and the north. I watched the lights go by the back window, pressed my fingers into the blood seeping from my skin. Anxiety, high breathing, high heart rate. What did a spleen do anyway? Little mortal little fleshly death by a dribble at a time.
Railway lines overhead, a face that might have been ours reflected in the black background behind the glass. Names with a hundred years of history slipping by on the street signs, the shadows watching as we swished through the soaking streets. Midnight Mayor, protector of the city, stay and fight for stones, shadows, memories, strangers, family, whatever, pick one, pick them all, all of them valid reasons to die, if that’s what it came down to. Three Colts Lane, Dunbridge Street, Shoreditch, Grimsby Street, Oakly Yard, Great Eastern Street, Holywell Lane, Curtain Road, Willow Street, Blackall Street, Old Street, City Road — and there it was! The silver-skinned dragon holding his shield, red crosses in red crosses, eyes too mad to comprehend, tongue rolled out in a hiss against the night-time air! We almost jerked with the touch of it, felt its magic hit us like electricity; closed our eyes and the shadows were still there, bleeding into the red lines of the city cross, Domine dirige nos, Lord lead us, trust in a higher power, a miracle day by day, this was what it meant to be the Midnight Mayor, mad eyes in a dragon, City Road, Finsbury Road, Moorgate, Swan Alley, White Horse Lane, Kings Yard, so close, Masons Alley, Basinghall Street, just there, Aldermanbury Square.
Empty, sleeping; but the lights still burnt in all the offices around, windows into an empty room, a thousand empty rooms, coats hung up on the backs of chairs, pictures of kids and wives, executive toys that distracted from any work and even more the personal touches of the little empty rooms. A model yacht on the lit-up sixth floor of a sleeping office tower, a conference room, table covered in old coffee cups, a meeting room with pads laid out in perfect geometric style, a floor entirely of computers in rows, an office with a tiny roll-out crazy golf course stuck into a corner. Close your eyes and you could imagine the windows of the lit-up office blocks watching you back, a thousand insectoid eyes peering out of the towers, just like the shadows.
“Oda!” we hissed. “Can you see?”
“See what?” she grunted, dragging us out of the back of the car.
“Look!” We waved at the lit-up towers.
“See what?”
“Magic!” we exclaimed. “Can’t you see? The city is the magic, we made it, we made the magic out of the stones and the streets and the life! How can you not see?!”
“This had better be the pain talking,” she growled, and half dragged, half carried us across the lit-up neon courtyard to Harlun and Phelps.
The doors were locked, but seeing us, the security guard lounging sleepy inside unlocked them, the great swish spinning door beginning to turn automatically as they sensed our approach. We staggered inside; Oda half-dropped me in the foyer, marched up to the security guard, grabbed him by the lapels and snapped, “Get Earle, get the Aldermen, get a doctor and then get out of here. Do you understand me?”
He nodded numbly.
“Good. Which floor was Anissina’s office on?”
We took the lift to almost the top floor. I sagged against the glass walls as we rose, breathed the lights stretching beneath me. Our palm left a bloody pr
int on the pristine glass. We could feel blood running down the outside of our leg, too much blood, couldn’t sustain this for long.
The doors opened on a dimmed floor of white strip lights and silent computers. I staggered, fell onto my hands and knees as we clambered out of the lift. Oda dragged me up. “Come on!” she snarled. “Think of Ngwenya, think of her brains on the wall, her blood on the wall, little Penny Ngwenya dead, because if you die now and don’t find this hat, don’t undo her curse, then I swear to God I’ll do it. You thinking of this, Matthew? You watching Ngwenya die, you hearing her skull burst, her blood splatter? Are you there yet?”
I nodded dumbly, she dragged me along the corridor. Pale beige doors on either side, white walls you could stick a pencil in, pictures of valued clients and random token works of could-be art, strange bits of sculpture next to the coffee machines and beside the water coolers, potted plants so bright and shiny they should have been made of rubber and saved everyone the effort. Names on the doors; I recognised Kemsley’s as we went by, locked doors, venetian blinds lowered over the window panes.
(You are a fucking disgrace to the office of Midnight Mayor.
Thanks. I really needed a skinned mystical projection to tell me that.)
We passed a kitchen, Oda paused for a minute, propped me against the door frame, grabbed a green first-aid kit from above the sink, then dragged me on. “Come on!” she screamed, almost lifting me off my feet as we lurched down the corridor.
And there it was.
Ms Anissina, Senior Executive, engraved in boring white plastic on a boring beige door. The door was locked. Oda kicked it and got nowhere, Oda shot it and got in. The office inside was quiet, dull, uninspired. A harmless company picture, showing a couple of trees by a waterfall, hung on one wall; a grey filing cabinet had been wedged into a corner; a shelf above drooped under the weight of uninspiring cardboard folders. The desk had a laptop, not a computer, a thin white thing too trendy to be plugged into anything else, next to an immaculate white pad of paper and a line of perfectly ordered biros. Oda dumped me in the nearest chair, started sweeping folders off the shelves.
I opened a drawer, saw a stapler, a couple of highlighters, a notepad, a box of paperclips. I opened the one beneath it, found papers, full of numbers, including figures that were surely too big to have anything to do with money, except possibly in the City. I opened the one beneath that. There was nothing in it except a calendar. The calendar read, “Take That 2001!” It was worn, battered, fondled, and clearly much loved. I flicked through it. Various male faces plonked on various male bodies, vacuum-sucked into distressingly tight trousers. They pouted, smiled, frothed and flirted at me out of the semi-cardboard pages. I put it carefully on the desk by Anissina’s computer and stared at it long and hard.
We wondered what it was like, being digested from the inside out.
I stuttered, “Oda?”
I heard a bang from behind me, flinched away instinctively from the noise, raising my hands to cover my face. When death did not ensue, I looked carefully back. Oda had dragged open the drawers of the filing cabinet, and was going through them, throwing paper and files onto the floor in great armfuls.
“Oda?” we stumbled again.
“There’s stuff in the first-aid kit,” she snapped back.
We picked up the kit in our bloody hands, tried to undo the zip; our hands were shaking. Anxiety first, then calmer and goodbye to the peripherals, that’s what she’d said; and we’d been grateful to not fully understand her meaning. Bandages and padding, not enough; antiseptic, as if that wasn’t the least of our concerns.
“Oda?”
Silence from behind me. I half-turned in the chair, kicking it round to see.
She stood in front of the wide glass window, eyes turned down towards her hands, hands turned up towards the ceiling. Something small, quaint and black was resting in her upturned palms. It was made out of the hybrid offspring of felt and plastic, its top dully reflecting the white light. A band of small white and yellow squares ran round its base, just above the shallow, upturned rim, and a small silverish shield had been stuck to the front, that a gleeful child might have mistaken for a sheriff’s badge. It was, in short, a very boring, rather small, quite old-fashioned not-quite-bowler hat, a piece of headgear that in the 1950s would have been the embodiment of modern style and which now was just . . . a bit sad. A piece of uniform that time forgot.
Oda murmured, “Um . . .”
I took the hat carefully from her hands and turned it over.
Inside, a rim of elastic had been sewn in to make the hat sit easier on the head. On this rim, in faded yellow letters, someone had written in lopsided capitals:
PENNY
We put the hat down carefully on Anissina’s desk.
We looked at it.
Silence.
“Well?” demanded Oda. “Is it . . .”
“Shush!”
She shushed, then in a lower whisper added, “What’s the matter?” “I’m having a moment of reverence. I would have thought you’d appreciate it.”
“For heaven’s sake, I don’t have time for this. Is it . . .”
“Yes. It’s the traffic warden’s hat. It’s her hat.”
“And can . . .”
“Yes. I can break the curse.”
A pause. Then, “Well? Do it! What are you waiting for? Full moon?” We reached out tentatively, ran our hands over the black dome of the hat, picked it up by one side and turned it over in front of us. “He’s coming,” I muttered. “Mr Pinner is coming.”
“What?”
“He’s just passed across the boundary of the old London Wall. We can feel him. He hurts, right here, in the palm of our hand. He knows we’ve got the hat. The hat is the key to the spell that summoned him. Break that, undo the curse, and he’ll die. He’s coming.”
“Then do it! Do it!”
“I need Ngwenya.”
“If this is . . .”
A voice from the door said, “The traffic warden?”
I looked up slowly, ran my eyes up the immaculate length of Earle’s suit, his black coat, his stern face. There were other Aldermen behind him. None looked happy. Earle carefully pulled off a pair of black leather gloves, passed them over to an Alderman in the corridor, slipped through the door, reached out for the traffic warden’s hat. We snatched it back defensively, cradling it to our chest, and seeing this, he smiled.
“I thought Ngwenya wasn’t a sorceress, Swift? After you ran off at St Pancras, Oda informed us she was . . . just an innocent. And yet you seem to be holding a traffic warden’s hat, and seem to think that the death of cities is coming here, and seem, may I add, to have been shot and to be breaking into the property of one of our missing colleagues. You’ve clearly been busy these last few hours. Did you . . . lie to us about Ngwenya?”
We met his eyes. “Yes,” we said. “Deal with it.”
His fingers tightened on the edge of the desk. “You lied to us about the woman who has damned this city, cursed it, condemned it, whose anger summoned the death of cities, whose power is going to rain mystic vengeance down on our streets, and you . . . you dared to lie?”
We thought about it, then nodded. “Yes. And would do it again. Anissina, by the by, is a loony backstabbing bitch, and yeah, thanks for your concern, I’ve been fucking shot and yes, Mr Pinner is coming. Very very much is he coming: we can hear him on the stones, inside the city. He’s coming for this.” I twiddled the hat in the air. “So, since there’s not much time left for you to get angry in, Mr Earle, why don’t you ask me the incredibly important question — why, Mister Swift, Mister Mayor, why oh why oh why did you get shot trying to find this damn hat, and quite how are you going to save the city with it?”
“Doesn’t really matter, now I know to kill Ngwenya after all . . .” he began, turning away.
We reached up, grabbed his arm, pulled him tighter towards the desk. “It matters to us. We can break the spell, and she doesn’t have to die.”<
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“Weakness! Stupid ineffectual blind stupid weakness! You are a . . .”
“Disgrace to the office of Midnight Mayor, yes, I know!” I snarled, climbing to my feet. “Every bloody stranger in the fucking city has been telling me this at every given moment and you know what, I have had it up to here! I am a disgrace to everything that the office used to be, to the bigger picture, to the sensible solution, to the pragmatic deeds, to the necessary sacrifice, to the stones and the streets! And good! Frankly, excellent! I am honoured to have got this brand on my hand and be able to say with it, up yours, this is the big city! We exist to change the rules, and here I am, changing one now! Ngwenya doesn’t have to die! I have her hat! I can break the curse, I can destroy Mr Pinner, I can stop the death of cities. We can do it!”
“And how, exactly,” growled Earle through gritted teeth, “do you plan to do this?”
“I’m going to give her back her hat.”
There was silence while the collected Aldermen considered this.
Finally Oda said, “What?”
“Thank you, Oda, for your essential ignorance of mystic procedure,” I sighed, the energy suddenly gone back out of my bones, groping for my chair again. “I am going to give her back her hat.”
“And that’ll just do it? That’ll break the curse?”
“Haven’t you been paying attention? ‘Give me back my hat’!”
“But that’s . . . you said that was just . . .”
“A warning. A solution. You ever wonder how the ravens, the London Stone, the river, the Wall, the Midnight Mayor get any of their defending done? Bloody mystic forces and their uselessly obscure ways.”
“We could have killed her, sorcerer,” growled Earle.
“Yeah. The most efficient strategic solution in response to the onsite risk assessment analysis. The police would never have known, a crime without consequence. A stranger kills a stranger and that’s it, goodbye, goodnight, end of the line. Cold, efficient — very financial. As cruel and distant as mankind can ever really get. We will not sink to your level. We are going to give her back her hat.”
Silence.
