A Madness of Angels ms-1

by Kate Griffin

  “An impassable barrier, to something without a ticket.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “I suppose that is clever,” she admitted. “In an obscene way.”

  “It’s sorcery,” I replied with a shrug. “All that sorcery is, is a point of view.”

  Her eyes flashed up to me, and held, and for a second there was a fire in them that scared me. “Sorcery,” she said quietly, “makes men into gods, and men were not meant to be such creatures.”

  “You’re… not what people call nice, are you, Oda?”

  “There is a distinction between being nice and being righteous,” she replied primly.

  I groaned and slumped back into the tattered embrace of the seats as the bus turned onto Tottenham Court Road.

  University College Hospital was new, clean, busy, bright and smelt of disinfectant. The floors and walls were so bright and white they almost hurt, the glass in every window an odd, reflective bottle-green, the potted plants were cheerful plastic in full bloom, the seats padded and pale, the uniforms of the night staff bright blue. Outside the Accident and Emergency entrance was parked a very large, black motorbike.

  We didn’t look out of place in A and E: two bedraggled figures stained with blood, staggering in from the street. The receptionist took one look and promptly assured me that a doctor would see to me soon. We didn’t ask where Sinclair was – as two bloody people, looking for a gunshot victim didn’t seem the best way to go about matters. Instead we followed signs on the wall up through the hospital, endless identical-looking corridors of gleaming white and strip lighting, tried intensive care, found no one, and eventually made our way towards the operating theatres.

  We found the motorbiker sitting on a bench with a can of Red Bull open in one meaty hand, outside Operating Theatre 3. He grunted as we approached and said, “You took your time.”

  “Were you followed?” asked Oda sharply.

  “You don’t follow me,” he replied in a voice that left no room for argument. Then with a sudden flash of a smile, “But you’d be welcome to try, lady.” Oda rolled her eyes.

  There were no windows or other way of seeing into the operating room, so I sat down on the bench opposite him, every muscle exhausted, every nerve throbbing in reproach, and said, “What do they think?”

  “Oh, you know. Police must be called, immense internal damage, may not make it through the night, miracle he got so far, don’t understand what’s keeping him alive will do everything they can so on and so forth yadder yadder yadder, you get the drift?” There was an alert gleam in the corner of the motorbiker’s eye. “You get trouble?”

  “A little.”

  “Come out OK?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Well, shit, now you’re here, I don’t know about you but I think we should consider buggering off.”

  “What about Sinclair?” asked Oda quickly.

  The biker burped. “He lives, he dies, we can’t change it, OK? But the police are coming. And I don’t want to deal with the police, do you?”

  “You’ll leave him to die?”

  “Christ, woman, I signed him in under a false name and like I said, the police will be here soon. If the guy pulls through, he’ll be safe enough.”

  Oda glanced at me, eyebrows raised. I said, “We’ll only bring him more danger.”

  “I don’t believe that,” she replied.

  “Then we will only suffer more inconvenience if we stay,” I corrected, “is that better?”

  She gave a snort in reply, but didn’t disagree. The biker stood up in a single quick movement, slapping his thighs cheerfully as he did and tossing the empty can of drink with perfect aim into the recycling bin by the vending machine. “Right! Let’s bugger off out of here before the shit really hits the fan.”

  The biker lived, for want of a better description, in a garage, in a scrapyard. If that wasn’t bad enough, it was in Willesden.

  Willesden, to most of the population of London, is a place that you pass through on your way to somewhere better. It is a composite, an area whose character is defined by the places around it – by the leafy streets of Hampstead to the east, by the broad avenues of Maida Vale to the south, by the squat, semi-detached homes of Wembley to the north, and by that strange, indefinable area sprawling out, along streets with still-young trees that aspire one day to be great oaks, from the boundary on Willesden’s western edge where city becomes suburb, and stays that way for nearly fifteen miles beyond. London, indeed, can be defined as one big suburb spread around a relatively small core, and at Willesden, every aspect of this suburbia seemed to combine into a mishmash of scrapyards, railway junctions, neat terraced homes, semidetached bungalows, tall terraced houses, giant supermarkets, strange ethnic greengrocers, synagogues, mosques and Hindu temples galore, all pressed together like they didn’t quite know how they’d got there in the first place.

  The biker’s shed, for there wasn’t a kinder way to describe the cobbled sheets of corrugated iron that enclosed his home, was near an old canal, a remnant of a more industrial past, opposite a field of dead cars and mechanised hands for crushing them. The walls of his home were hung with tools, jackets, salvaged spare parts from bikes and cars, and pictures of bikes, reminding me of a cross between a garage and a teenager’s bedroom. There were no overt symbols of a mystical nature anywhere to be seen. But as he stoked the small iron stove in a corner and kicked a small electricity generator until the lights stopped flaring up and down and settled for a dull consistent glow, I tasted a certain unique spice on the air, like a flash across the senses, seen and instantly gone. I could only guess at its nature since whenever I tried to catch the sensation again, it was as elusive as a bar of wet soap slipping from my fingers.

  The biker gestured at a couch covered with old, stained blankets and said, “Want coffee?”

  “No,” replied Oda, not bothering to sit.

  “Yes,” I said, slumping across the couch with the sudden, absolute certainty that coffee was the thing around which every ambition in my life revolved.

  “Want to talk about what happened?”

  “Yes,” said Oda.

  “No,” I replied.

  “Shit, well, I guess I’ll just make the running,” he said, putting an old iron kettle on top of the stove. “Any of you two think we were sold out?”

  “Yes,” said Oda.

  “Perhaps,” I whimpered, pressing my hands against my temples with the effort of staying awake.

  “Want to guess whether they’ll come after us again?” added the biker, cheerfully spooning a large heap of instant caffeine into a chipped brown mug.

  “If they are smart,” said Oda calmly.

  “Perhaps,” I added.

  “The creature – what you call Hunger – said he would come after you, Matthew Swift,” she pointed out, without any sign of concern.

  “You had to remind me,” I groaned.

  “What creature is this?” asked the biker casually.

  “Just a shadow.”

  “It knew the sorcerer,” she corrected. “Called him by his name.”

  “I’ll handle it,” I said.

  “You sure of that?”

  “It’s what I’m here for.”

  “Fair enough,” muttered the biker, as the kettle started to spout hot steam. “So – what do you want to do about this shit?”

  “I am here to destroy Bakker,” said Oda flatly, folding her arms. “This changes nothing.”

  “You’ll get no complaints from me on that one. Question is – how do you want to do this? We’re not doing a great job right now.”

  Oda produced the bundle of blood-smeared documents and spread them across the rough metal floor of the shed. “We have what we need, here,” she said.

  I rolled over on the couch to see more clearly.

  “Everything we need to destroy the Tower, to stop Bakker from whatever he plans, to rein in his power, to destroy his evil,” she added, and the way she said it was more frightenin
g than any shadow, it made my nerves itch, “is here. I am not without my friends, or my resources.”

  “Me neither,” murmured the biker, passing a mug of coffee in my direction, though his eyes were fixed on the documents.

  I picked up a picture from the pile of papers on the floor and studied it. The pale, fine features were familiar to me – indeed, I could give them a name. San Khay, Bakker’s right-hand man.

  I took the picture, folded it and, very carefully, slipped it into my bag.

  Part 1: The Hunting of San Khay

  In which the beginning of a plan unfolds, revenge is plotted, and a lot of rats decide to congregate.

  At dawn, we parted company. Oda went – where, she would not say – and the biker’s only contribution was that he was going to “hit the road” for a while. We agreed a time and a place to meet again, and I, with the sum effect of Sinclair’s research on the Tower in my bag, went to find a safe place to sleep, and read, and think.

  When the first shops opened at 8.30 a.m., I bought myself a heavy-duty box of plasters to cover the cut on my left hand, a new shirt to replace the bloody remnants of my current one, and a packet of aspirin, just in case. At 9.30 a.m. I checked myself into a small but friendly enough hotel off the Cromwell Road, in that strange, transient part of town where the mansions of the rich compete with the squalor of endless bed-and-breakfasts and their constantly migrating population. In the tiny, windowless space next to my room, I had a bath. The experience was bliss, a sudden sinking into warmth and contentment that we had not imagined possible, a moment when our fears and senses began to relax, letting go of the night’s tension which, we realised, had clenched every muscle to the edge of rupture. We lowered our head underwater and stayed there until we thought we would burst, lungs burning, and emerged again with a sense of being more alive and powerful than ever before, risking death and coming away unharmed, clean, safe. Blood and dirt turned the water pinkish-grey as it floated off our skin like mist rising in the morning sun. We then wrapped ourself in towels and stood behind the net curtain in the window to watch the bright morning light cast the shadows of the trees across the street below, and felt, at last, content.

  Clean and dry, I bandaged my cut hand, brushed my hair with my fingers, having forgotten to buy a comb, and examined myself in the cracked mirror above the sink. In my new shirt and stolen trousers, I looked almost dignified. An almost perfect resurrection, then, just like we’d thought, just like we’d hoped – at least physically.

  My eyes were still too blue. I leant in close to the bathroom mirror and saw that the iris was tinted, as human eyes should be, with flecks of other colour, a hint of brown, a suggestion of green, a darker rim. But the overall prevalence was the colour of a summer sky. It didn’t particularly suit me, and gave a disconcerting albino appearance; but I supposed, like a new haircut or a shave after a week of neglect, I would grow used to my current appearance, and forget the old. I considered being frightened, curling up at the base of my bed and whimpering in fear at what consequence this change in my appearance might bring. The mood wasn’t on us, so I didn’t.

  I felt less than confident about painting a ward onto the door of the hotel room, so settled for a compromise and, with a biro, drew a swift protective symbol onto five pieces of hotel-headed notepad paper and left each sheet around the bed in a vague semicircle as the closest I could come to a magical defence without causing criminal damage. Then I lay down and slept. This time, we did not try to resist, and could not remember our dreams.

  I woke in the mid-afternoon. Sitting on the floor at the foot of my bed, I spread out the bloodstained remnants of Sinclair’s documents in front of me.

  I did not care why Sinclair really wanted Bakker dead. I did not care particularly why the rest of them were involved, although I suspected Oda’s reasons went beyond mere personal motives and into a more dangerous realm. We chose not to be concerned with this now, however, until we knew if it threatened our own interests.

  What did I want?

  What did we want?

  I wanted… I wanted…

  … come be we…

  … to find and…

  … we be fire, we be light…

  … stop…

  … we dance electric flame…

  … “hello Matthew’s fire!”…

  … stop…

  … we want…

  … stop NOW.

  …

  Done?

  …

  Good.

  I wanted to kill Hunger.

  If that meant ploughing through more mortal creatures on the way, then so be it.

  I wanted to kill the shadow.

  We found it ugly, and dangerous.

  I picked up Bakker’s photo and studied the face. There was a bloody fingerprint, probably Sinclair’s, in the top corner. If you aged the face, gave it a tropical disease, starved it of food and drink, took the fire out of its eyes and the smile away from its lips, if you looked at it with all that in mind, just out of the corner of your vision, then Bakker’s face could just, perhaps, be fitted onto another creature’s shoulders. For that alone, I suspected Bakker might have to die.

  However, these things were easier said than done. And revenge, we decided, should be more than about dying.

  I turned my attention to San Khay.

  An impression of the daily life and routine of San Khay.

  At 6.30 a.m. his alarm goes in his penthouse flat on the river by Victoria. If he has had romance the night before, he does not wake his sleeping partner, but walks across his white-carpeted floor to the bathroom, a thing all of mirrors and silver taps, so that, standing at any point in the room, he can see his own reflection, muscles and polished almond skin, reflected back at him. The tattoos that cover his entire body are done in deep black ink, and every six months he returns to a very special tattooist in Hong Kong, to make sure that any faded areas, around his buttocks or across his chest where they may have experienced strain, are kept up in full, ebony-coloured glory. The swirls of ink crawl around his ankles and across his toes, run round the back of his knees, spiral up his hips, curl lovingly around his belly button, sinking inside like some sort of strange root burrowing into earth, lash themselves across his back and chest, bend luxuriously down his arms and, at the wrist and neck, just below the collar line, fade gently, into nothing.

  The men he takes home with him on Tuesdays and Fridays (his days for such affairs) often regard such extensive swirls of ink as kinky, but not unattractive. To the more considerate magician, such an embedding of symbols of magic into skin is as much dangerous as it is potentially rewarding. For this reason, San Khay usually keeps the ink hidden, studying his flesh all over only in the morning when he is sure he is alone in his bathroom.

  In other men this relentless examination of themselves every morning would be vanity. For San Khay, the studying of his own naked form is the perusal of an investment: nine months of pain for his mother, twenty-three years of school fees at the best institutions in America, Asia and Europe for his father, and a subsequent fifteen-odd years of gym sessions, martial arts classes, dance lessons, organic food detox diets and nearly forty-eight hours of intense pain under that tattooist’s needle, every six months, for himself. San Khay wishes to be assured that his investment is being well maintained, since presumably he will be reliant on its dividends for the rest of his life.

  He showers in the 360-degree power shower installed by his Spanish plumber Enrico to his special request, at the highest temperature allowable, until his skin is lit up red like the end of Rudolf’s nose on Christmas Eve. He then turns the shower down to its coldest temperature for a few seconds, and dries himself off with a neat white towel, fluffy as a bunny’s tail, before going into the kitchen to prepare breakfast.

  Although he has three staff serving his needs – a chauffeur, a maid and a personal assistant, who live in the building and are on call at any hour of the day – San Khay makes his own breakfast, a bowl of nuts and fruit t
hat all but clatter on their way through the gut, they are so unpleasantly healthy. He dresses in his wardrobe room, itself lined with mirrors, and again it is not vanity that leaves his reflection stretched out to infinity around him, but the monitoring of an impression. When San Khay goes to work, he is not merely selling his product, he is selling himself. He wears a black suit with polished black shoes and does up every button of his smart pink shirt, his only flash of colour, to hide every trace of ink on his skin. He combs his dark hair slicked back, but shaves only on Wednesday and Monday, since his beard grows at a snail’s pace anyway and he has very sensitive skin.

  All this takes him no more than half an hour.

  At 7 a.m. he leaves the penthouse. His chauffeur has his car – a long, black but otherwise anonymous Mercedes – waiting down in the car park. He seems to prefer it if his lover of the night does not wake before his departure, as that saves embarrassing goodbyes, but instead leaves orders with the maid, Sally, to make sure his companion has everything he wishes and is treated with the utmost courtesy, before he is shown out.

  By 7.30 a.m. San Khay is at his desk, having beaten the early-morning traffic and everyone else in his office. New members of his company often attempt to beat San and turn up before he does, but find that more than a few weeks of working 7.30 a.m. to 8.30 p.m. in order to impress their boss, and be in before and out after his working hours, is beyond human endurance. The more courageous ask how he does it, but he merely smiles and assures them that he drinks a lot of water.

  His office is in the heart of the City, in that area just off Bishopsgate where the giant glass towers of the megacorporations loom over the traditional guildhalls and converted old mansions of their lawyers and clerical providers. Certain names appear on every street corner as regularly as the Corporation of London bollards – Merrill Lynch, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Morgan Stanley, the National Westminster, Saudi Arabia, Credit Suisse – the bankers of the City and their lawyers, compressed into a space no more than a mile wide, within easy walking distance of each other and their favourite sandwich bars for lunch.