by Kate Griffin
“You know that Dhawan is dead, and Akute. I didn’t mention deMaurier, MacKinnon, Samuels, Zheng…”
“I don’t believe this.”
“… and if they’re not dead, they’ve fled. Do you understand this, Matthew Swift? They’ve hidden, run away – people who oppose Bakker die. Do you think the litterbug just happened to turn up in Dulwich this morning? You must have been seen. It takes power to summon a creature like that; it was looking for you. If you are to oppose the Tower, Mr Swift, you need to do it discreetly. As we do now. You cannot simply charge in and hope to come away alive.”
I looked round the room. Embarrassed faces avoided my eyes. Even Dorie sat perfectly still on her chair, studying her bowl of peanuts. Finally I said, “All right. Let’s say, just for the moment, that I believe you. What exactly do you propose to do?”
There was an almost audible relaxation of breath. In her corner Dorie muttered, “Bug bug bug bug bug blue bug…”
The man with a horselike face stumbled, “We had a plan…”
“Fucking idiotic plan!” the warlock contributed.
“Moron,” snapped the fortune-teller.
“Fight!” said the motorbiker with a happy smile. “Go on, fight!”
The woman in the jeans said nothing, but looked more angry than ever before.
“Ladies, gentlemen,” soothed Sinclair. “Charlie, please?”
The one addressed as Charlie turned out to be Sinclair’s loyal shadow, he with his dark eyes and straight black hair. At the mention of his name, he produced from behind a sofa a slim black briefcase. He entered a pair of combination codes on the clasps, snapping them back with a press of a brass button, and carefully put the whole contents of the briefcase onto the table.
Pictures, words, columns, figures, diagrams, maps – all sprawled out at Sinclair’s fingertips as he arranged them across the table. “This,” he said, spreading his hands above it like it was spider’s silk that might drift away on a breeze, “is everything we know about the Tower: who runs it, how it works, how it stays alive.”
I waited for something more.
“Anyone who tries to approach Bakker directly – assuming they can find him – fails.” For a moment, his eyes were on the lady in jeans, whose scowl, if possible, deepened. “You must understand – he is not merely a dangerous practitioner of magic. He has wealth: his lawyers can protect him from the law, and should they fail to do so, he has a plane ready to take him out of the country, and money overseas. His reach is international, his friends are in the highest circles and can operate in the lowest gutter.”
“He’s always had power.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” murmured Sinclair. “But only recently has he exploited it so flagrantly. What we propose, then, is to remove as much as possible of the source of his power before we strike against him. We are not merely talking the odd curse here or there. We are talking about undermining his wealth, his reputation, his influence, removing his friends one at a time until there is nothing left, merely him, alone. Then, perhaps, he will be vulnerable, if such a thing is even possible any more.”
“You have a plan?”
“Everything,” he said, waving his hands over the documents, “everything is here. We will tear the Tower apart piece by piece.”
I studied the papers he’d spread in front of me. The room waited. I said, “Sounds like a shitty plan to me.”
“Sinclair, do we have to have shit-for-brains here?” growled the warlock. We felt flickering sapphire-blue anger.
“Mr Swift, you have an alternative? You think you can find Bakker by yourself, you think you can… undo whatever has happened here… without our help?” Mr Sinclair was still smiling, but his voice was the incantation of the bored priest administering funeral rites.
I shifted uncomfortably, looking down at the tumble of papers. “I will help you. But I will not kill Bakker unless it becomes necessary.”
“You are entitled to your wish.”
“What can I do?”
“Bakker has lieutenants, key people in running the Tower.”
“I know some. Guy Lee, San Khay, are they who you’re thinking of?”
“Also Harris Simmons, and Dana Mikeda.”
“Dana Mikeda?”
“You know her?” asked the warlock sharply.
“I… did. What’s her involvement?”
“I suppose, for the sake of saving time, I shall be crude. Protégée. Lover. One or the other, although perhaps it doesn’t do justice to the relationship.”
“How long has she been this way?”
“What way?”
“Protégée, lover, and all the other things you aren’t describing.”
He smiled, a rare flicker of amusement. “Approximately two years. You know her.” It wasn’t a question, and thus didn’t require an answer.
“You’re planning on killing them also?”
“If necessary.”
“You have an alternative?”
“Perhaps. If they can be useful.”
“I see. If there is…”
“Pustulant warts!” shrilled Dorie from her corner.
“For fuck’s sake,” groaned the warlock.
“Oh, well, bollocks to your brain,” she muttered.
We hesitated, looking up from the documents on the table to where she sat, arms folded, in the corner of the room.
“Swift?” asked Sinclair quietly, seeing our expression.
We looked round the room, suddenly uneasy.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Nothing.”
“You’re a nit when not them, aren’t you?” Dorie muttered.
I stepped back from the table. I walked a few paces across the room towards her, hesitated just in front of the window, found my right hand shaking. “You know us,” we said, uncertainly.
“Heard you in the wire,” she said with a yellow-toothed grin. “‘Come be we and be free’, that’s your song, ain’t it, blue-eyes?”
“You have met us?”
“I like the dance you play,” she admitted. “But I wouldn’t stand where you do right now.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Fucking shadow on the wall,” she replied. “Duck!”
I ducked. I can respect formidable magical talent when I meet it, and Old Madam Dorie, the grey bag lady who smelt of curry powder and car fumes, had it in spades. She exuded skilful manipulation of primal forces just like her bags gave off the smell of mould, and if she’d said hop, I would have hopped. She, like my gran, had the look of a woman who talked to the pigeons; and in the city no one sees more than the pigeons.
I ducked, which is why the bullet from the sniper’s rifle shattered the skull of the horse-faced man, who’d just been standing, rather than mine.
“Banzai!” shrilled Dorie.
The lights went out in the room – and, more than that, the power went too. I could feel the sharp loss from the walls and ceiling as the fuses were pulled, somewhere below in the rest of the house. The darkness was intense, but only for a moment, as the orange-white glare from the street lamp outside came in through the curtains. I crawled across the floor towards the horse-faced man’s body, even as Dorie stood up and clapped her hands together with a cry of “Ratatatatatatat!”
Somewhere on the other side of the road, someone duly cocked a small mechanism in a big weapon, and opened fire. The bullets tore through the remnants of one window and shattered the other, peppering the rear wall and filling the room with white puffs of mortar dust. From the floor I saw Dorie scuttling out through a door, utterly unconcerned, while the corpse of the horse-faced man bounced and shook with the impact of every bullet. The line of fire puffed out the stuffing from the sofas, shattered wine glasses, sending a fine spray of red wine and crystal shards flying across the room, blasted pictures off the wall, smashed doors into splinters, ripped up curtains and punched through pillows. In the gloom I saw a pair of high-heeled feet belonging to the fortune-teller as she wriggled towards the hallway
door, closely followed by the absurd robe of the warlock, while somewhere behind the remnants of the sofa, now almost reduced to a bare frame with rags hanging off it, I guessed were Sinclair, the biker and the sullen lady in jeans.
The ratatatatatat of the gun on the other side of the road stopped. In the sudden ringing silence I heard the wailing of car alarms, burglar alarms from the houses around, the screaming of people, the flapping of terrified pigeons, the running of feet. And the grinding mechanism of the lift, rising up from the ground floor.
I shouted, “They’re coming upstairs for us!”
“Bedroom,” came the shrill sound of the warlock. “There’s a fire escape.”
“If they’ve got any brains, they’ll come up that too,” muttered the fortune-teller.
“You want to take chances?”
“Some help here, please?” came the biker’s voice.
I crawled on my belly round the back of the sofa. My fingers dipped into sticky blood mingling with wine; my elbows crunched on broken glass.
Behind the sofa was indeed the lady in jeans, with the biker, breathless, face spattered with blood but not his own, and what was left of Sinclair, wheezing desperately, the folders clutched to several holes in his chest and belly. Even though he was a large man, the bullets had penetrated well enough; and as he breathed, he sweated, he bled, he stank of salt and urine and death, as if his whole body was unclenching at once, every cell letting out everything within it, chemicals, blood, fluid, life and all.
The motorbiker was struggling to hold him up. “Can you do anything?” he hissed.
“Come on!” shrieked the fortune-teller. “They’re coming!”
The warlock glanced at Sinclair with a brief look of pity, but kept moving.
“Shit,” I muttered. “Shit.”
I pulled back the front of his jacket and there were even more holes. The entire shape of his body was distorted, as if he was sand pocked by tiny meteors, and bent into the odd dips and curves of impact.
“Do something!” demanded the biker.
“I can’t just fix this!” I retorted angrily.
“Fucking sorcerer!” he roared.
I heard the ping of the lift door in the hall. “Move,” we hissed. “Get him to the back escape.”
“It’ll be watched,” said the woman sharply.
“Then fight!” we replied. “Get him out of here now.”
They didn’t bother to ask questions. The woman snatched up the bloody folders and gracelessly stuck them down the back of her trousers, the tops protruding from behind the belt. With an almighty grunt she helped the biker raise up Sinclair’s great bulk, an arm over each of their shoulders, and started dragging him towards the back door.
I crouched behind the sofa and rummaged frantically in my satchel. I heard footsteps in the corridor outside and, as our fingers closed over the first can of spray-paint, a foot kicked open the remnants of the door. White torches swept across the room, dazzling us, if only for a second.
We stood, letting the world move slowly around us. We stretched out our left hand and pinched out the light on those torches, breaking the glass of their bulbs at our will. With our other hand we threw the spray-paint can at the door and, as it bounced off the shoulder of the first man through it, we pinched that too, and turned our back.
The can exploded with the bang of a firecracker, sending out a shower of blood-red paint and twisted metal. The spray tickled the back of my neck as I ran towards the door, and a razor-sharp shard of metal nearly took my ear off as it spun past. In the doorway I heard screaming, and a familiar voice shouting, “Shoot, shoot, dammit!” San Khay, a friend of Bakker’s even when I’d been one too. I’d never met him until now but, even back then, back before all the things for which I couldn’t find a name, his star had been rising.
One of them got enough paint out of their eyes to find a trigger, but not enough to aim well. I dove through the bedroom door and slammed it shut, one hand already in my satchel for another can of paint. As the crowd of attackers in the other room got control of themselves again, I drew a ward across the door, big and exaggerated, stretching it over the walls in long strokes that eventually described a crude key. A foot slammed into the door, which shook, but didn’t open. I murmured gentle words into my ward and backed away. Someone opened fire, the noise at this proximity almost painful, shocking to our senses, but the door didn’t splinter, didn’t move, didn’t open. That wouldn’t last long, but it was good enough. I crawled across the room, past a neatly made double bed to where a window stood open, a metal staircase visible below. I half-fell onto the cold stair, damp from the evening drizzle, and saw below the struggling shapes of the motorbiker and the woman, hauling Sinclair down towards the ground.
I scurried after them, and caught up as they managed to drag the gasping Sinclair into a small passage at ground level.
“The men?” the motorbiker asked me, with a strong grasp of the relevant.
“They’ll get through eventually.”
Sinclair’s face was white and slick. “He needs a hospital,” I muttered.
“You think?” snapped the motorbiker.
“Do you have a vehicle?”
“My bike.”
“Can you get him on it?”
“Shit, you think he’s in a fit state? You’re a fucking sorcerer, do something!”
“It’s not that simple! To repair something like this you need equipment, preparation…”
“Sorcerers can’t heal,” said the woman. It was the first time I’d heard her speak. Her voice was low and cold, almost dispassionate. “It’s not part of their magic.”
“I can fucking heal when I have the fucking equipment!” I retorted. “But no, if you’re asking, we’re not exactly into bringing people back from death or even the bloody edge!”
“Great,” the motorbiker hissed. “You’re just so grand, aren’t you?”
“We can keep him alive,” we snarled. “Our blood can hold him for a little; if you can get him to a place to heal.”
Perhaps even the motorbiker sensed our intent – certainly he was not foolish enough to question us. I pulled out the Swiss Army knife from my satchel, the cool metal slipping in my bloody fingers. My hand was shaking; I didn’t know what I was doing, nor if it would work. And if it didn’t, then…
We steadied our hand, forcing ourselves to be still. We took a long, slow breath, every nerve on edge, and tried to calm our heart from its thundering in our ears. We searched, and levered out the hinged knife we needed from within the casing. Then, careful not to cause ourselves more than a shallow injury, we drew the blade across the palm of our left hand. We could feel the disgust and horror in the woman, even though her expression stayed cold, and see the surprise in the man’s face. For a moment, the pain was a shocking relief, a distraction that removed the ringing in our ears, the burning in our eyes and the shaking in our limbs, and focused us entirely on the blood pooling in our cupped hand.
At first the blood was not appropriate: dark, almost black in the poor light. Just crude human fluids; ugly, temperatureless. We waited. After a few seconds, the change began. A bright worm of blue light rose to the surface of the blood welling between our fingers, then dipped down again, like an animal breaking from the sea for air. A moment later, another shimmer of blue flashed like a static spark between two lightning rods across the surface of our blood; then another. I tried to hold back nausea as, emerging like blue maggots, the colour spread throughout the blood in my hand, a bright glow of sparks that rose up to the surface, shimmering and twisting, so bright it cast shadows across our faces, pushing back the darkness in its electric-blue glow. It wasn’t just in the blood in my hand; as the writhing blueness spread, I could feel it running up inside my veins, saw my skin turning white and blue as the redness drained from it, a pallor running from my wrist up my arms, that seemed to turn my blood to ice, shuddering through my flesh like frozen electricity, rattling off my bones and making my head buzz with…
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… come be…
… we be…
I closed my eyes as the blueness rose in front of my vision, burning away the darkness and covering the world with its sapphire glow. But even behind my eyelids the blueness burnt and, God help me, we loved it, revelled in it, raised our fingers and felt the electricity flash between them like every nerve carried a hundred volts, like every organ was bubbling acid feeding a spark plug inside my heart that, with every pump, set our skin on fire. In all my life I had never felt so alive, so inhuman.
We moved automatically through the fear, performing our function. We pulled back the jacket of the injured man, peeled away the remnants of his waistcoat around the worst of his injuries and tipped some of our burning blue blood onto his flesh. Where it touched, the flesh crisped, and at every drop the man jerked and moaned like he was being burnt with pincers. We poured a few drops into each of his wounds and pulled open his shirt over his heart. We waited for his breathing to become steadier, and said, “You will need to hold him.”
“What are you doing?” demanded the woman.
“We will keep him alive, as long as we can without harming ourself,” we said. “Our fire in his flesh.”
We poured the blood over his heart. He screamed, but the man obeyed our command and held him down as we rubbed the blood into his chest, the liquid dividing into worms of blue light, each one brighter than a diamond at noonday, which wriggled across his skin for a moment and then started burrowing, digging down into his flesh, a dozen, more, of our sparks burrowing into his skin, his nervous system. Where they had entered his flesh, they left tiny, pale burn marks, and we were not sure if those would heal. However, he slowly relaxed as the last of our blood dug itself into his skin, and his breathing became more natural. Across his skin and in the palm of our hand, the smears of blood still visible gently faded back to their original dark red; carefully we tore the end off our shirt sleeve to bind around our hand and prevent further bleeding.
“Now,” I said breathlessly, fighting the spinning in my head and sickness in my belly, “he’ll live long enough to reach a hospital. Can you get him there?”
The motorbiker smiled. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I think so.”
