A Madness of Angels ms-1

by Kate Griffin

  As he advanced through them, the melded dyes and water rising from the ground now settled in the empty spaces between the lines of his tattoos. They blurred their edges, disguised their swirls with other, uglier stains of black and blue, and marred the otherwise elegant curves of ink across his skin. As they did, the magic in his flesh began to leach. I could see it, smell it: the enchantments bound into his flesh sparked into the water, flashed with motes of blackness into the rising rain around us, melting away as the patterns that defined the enchantment became distorted. He could still fight, and better than me, but he was so used to that strength in his skin that as it started to fail he began to make mistakes, not understanding his own limitations. So with one swipe he overreached, staggering right past me, and with another his fingers, shining with the water running over us both, nearly opened and dropped the knife, as if it were suddenly too heavy to hold. This was a man who hadn’t used his muscles, really used them as themselves, for years, so that like an astronaut returning to gravity he felt his legs become weak, his breathing difficult, his skin turning to the colour of an industrial accident.

  I moved back and, when he followed, he staggered, barely picking himself up. He stabbed, and I caught his wrist, the strength in his arm suddenly resistible, the speed of his movement now visible as more than just a blur. We twisted his arm back on itself, and his fingers opened automatically, dropping the blade. We pushed him back hard, and his bare feet slipped on the soaking pavement, his toes almost black from the puddles of colour we waded through. We blinked green drops of water out of our eyes and scooped up the knife in passing, moving towards him, wary that he still might have a trick to play but increasingly confident, tasting no more in his movements now than just the ordinary heat of a human passing by. He lunged at us poorly with his other blade, but his arm was an image of worm-thin wriggling splotches of colour flowing up to his shoulder and then away, skywards. We sidestepped easily, kicking down towards the back of his leg as he passed at us, and pushing his knee towards the ground. As he swung his arm back, we stepped round behind him, caught it at the elbow and wrenched it backwards, further than it wanted to bend, hard. He let out a sound between his teeth like his breath had become trapped behind his tongue, and as we put the knife against his throat, his inky face expressed nothing but pain.

  Around us, the water began to fall back down from the sky in bright droplets as the spell ran out, splashing red, green, blue, black in thin swirls across the pavement, dripping off the golden flame on the top of the monument, running down windows, and plopping with a clear, regular drip drip drip onto the twisted metal coverings of the pipes below ground. We felt the rain soak our skin, cold and shocking.

  San Khay’s flesh was the colour of an infected bruise, the outline of his tattoos now marred. He hissed, “If you have sense, you will let me go!”

  We leant forward sharply, pressing the tip of the knife into the hollow at the base of his throat. “If you had sense, you would not have come looking for us,” we hissed. “Did you really not see what you were contending with? Could you not taste it, did you not have the wit to understand?”

  “I serve the Tower,” he snarled. “They will come for me and they will tear your flesh from your bones!”

  “They tried that before and still we live, our blood, our skin, so alive, you cannot understand!”

  He half-turned his head to look at us, and gave a forced laugh. “He will eat your heart,” he whispered. “He likes to keep something to honour his friends.”

  We drew the blade back to cut his throat, the blue anger across our eyes, ready to finish this ignorant, arrogant thing. At the last moment I held back, forced my fingers to stop shaking, and tightened my grip, breathing slowly and steadily until our screaming, our fury at this creature too small to even see his own place in the city, too small to know his own smallness, had abated. I dropped to one knee behind him, thrusting his head back towards mine with the tip of the blade, and whispered, “Tell me what you know of the shadow.”

  “He will eat your heart,” he repeated, voice trembling with victory, fear, rage – I couldn’t tell which. San Khay was not a man used to losing.

  “How long has he lived? How long has the shadow been out there?”

  “Why should you care?”

  “Just tell me what you know.”

  “No. I know what he does to his enemies.”

  “Whose? Hunger’s – the shadow? Or to Bakker’s?”

  A flicker on his face. Perhaps, for a moment, he was beginning to understand. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “My name is Matthew Swift.”

  “The name… seems familiar.”

  “I’m sure it does, and if things had been otherwise, you might have been the one they asked to hide the body.”

  “What body?”

  “That,” I said, “is the question they really should have explored. Can Bakker control it? The shadow?”

  “It kills his enemies. It’ll kill you eventually.”

  “Doesn’t mean he’s in charge. How do I kill it?” He didn’t answer. We dug the blade into his throat until it drew a thin line of beady blood. “How do we kill it?!”

  “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “It is a shadow. You can never kill it.”

  “Then how does Bakker control it?”

  “You said yourself, maybe he can’t.”

  “How does he control Dana Mikeda?”

  “How do you know Dana Mikeda?”

  We pressed the knife closer until his breath wheezed. “We can rip out your thoughts,” we hissed, “as you yourself would see the mind of the dying man. We can dance in your senses, as you would have played with others; we can put maggots of blue fire into your blood and feel through their eyes as they roam around your heart, your blood, your thoughts, your soul. And we will do it, we will do it and so much more in order to live, to be free in this world, not hunted, not lost, not afraid to be free. So… tell us. How does he control Dana Mikeda?”

  “He doesn’t. She controls herself.”

  “She wouldn’t help him of her own will.”

  He gave a snort that was somewhere between laughter and a croak of pain. “She can’t, but she would.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re not a magician, are you?” he hissed. “Not just a magician. I think you’re more.”

  “Where is Dana Mikeda?”

  “I think you’re like them,” he replied, eyes narrowing. “I think you feel your heart race at rush hour, that on a bank holiday you can hardly raise your head, that in the centre of the city you walk with its rhythms, and only when you are away from it do you remember your own gait, only when you close your eyes from all those lights do you remember who you are. I think you’re one of them, just like Bakker, just like Mikeda. Sorcerer.”

  “I’m a sorcerer,” I answered into his ear. We lowered our voice. “But we are the angels.”

  He spat. Again we considered slitting his throat, ending him right now for his arrogance and his stupidity. But he was no longer a danger to us, and without the blue rage in front of our eyes, we found the thought repulsive. We could imagine the feel of the skin parting at our strength, the slickness of the blood on our hands. We felt colder now, the water no longer refreshing but bringing out stained goosebumps in the night breeze, and the idea of killing him seemed like murder. That was fine. I had prepared for this event: a magic circle drawn in Camden, with enough sandwiches and water to keep him alive for a week. Long enough to get answers. Murder might have to come eventually; but not yet.

  So I pressed my hand across the back of his neck and put darkness over his thoughts until he went loose in my grip, slipping to the pavement like a dead salmon, in a pool of spreading green ink.

  I left him there, and went to get the van.

  When I got back with the van, approximately thirty seconds later, San Khay’s heart was missing. Part of his ribcage too, although the odd shard of bone spread across the sca
rlet pool of his blood suggested it hadn’t been taken, merely broken in the process of getting into the chest. His stomach had been split open, and the veins and arteries running down either of his neck slit straight down from ear to collarbone. I had seen death before, but never this death, in such proximity, or with myself so heavily to blame.

  We got down on our knees without noticing that we fell, and threw up. Salt in our eyes and acid on our tongue, we emptied out the entire contents of our stomach in the puddles of colour around us and retched until we thought we would throw out our bones. When we were done, we sat in a pool of blue water with our arms across our knees and shook.

  I saw the shadows move, but still all we could do was sit and tremble. I saw the way the shadows bent around the lights, twisting across the paving stones, the long arrow of the pillar’s shade turning like the point of a sundial, shrinking and bending slightly in the middle, as if cast by something concave. When he started to rise out of the ground, dragging the darkness up with him like a blanket spread on the earth, all we could do was stare, and shake, and feel tiny.

  He solidified a bit at a time, starting with his feet and spreading upwards: the whiteness of his hands, the face becoming brighter and more intense, his features growing out of the darkness into eyes, nose, and eventually, a smile of curved blue lips, and yellow teeth. He opened his arms – in greeting or an apologetic shrug, we couldn’t tell which – and said,

  “Hello, Matthew’s fire.”

  I got us up off the floor somehow, on hands and knees first, pulling us up a little at a time and feeling hollow inside, as if at any moment we might collapse in on ourself. I said, “He was on your side! One of yours!”

  “I would have taken his skin, but it isn’t so beautiful any more,” he murmured, drifting across the soaking ground. The water ran off his feet like droplets from a puddle of oil. “You did that.”

  I backed away, mind racing without my being aware of it, a background scream. Unable to think coherent thoughts, we burned with anger, fear, shame, sickness, guilt, hate.

  I said, “How did you find me?”

  “I heard your dance,” he replied, his voice tipping over his teeth like oil popping in the pan. “I felt the electric burning. I tasted you play with shadows. I knew it was you, even from so far away. I rushed through the dark to get here, I sped across the river in the shadow of the waves blown in the wind. I thought perhaps I would be too late.”

  “I wasn’t going to kill him!” I spat, and realised, to my surprise, that it was true. A wave of relief nearly knocked me to the ground, passing as quick as the last breath of the storm. Relief, and something riding the back of the wave: hot sharp anger.

  “No,” whispered Hunger. “I had to do that for you, because you were too afraid.”

  “You are an abomination!” we snarled.

  “Such fire! What shall I call you, deepest blue?”

  I bit my lip and snapped, “Do you know why I call you Hunger?”

  “Yes,” he said, almost preening, stretching out the unnatural length of his limbs, and uncurling his fingers to admire the black curve of his nails. “It is myself.”

  “Do you remember what you said when we first met?”

  “No.”

  “You said, ‘Give me life.’ You tried to see if my life really did flash before my eyes as I died; you scratched at my face asking, ‘Can you see yet? Can you see?’ Do you remember that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Learnt anything since then?”

  The shadow thought about it. “I’m still hungry,” he replied.

  “We thought you might be.” Bending, not taking our eyes off him, we picked up the two curved steel knives that San had carried. My hands were shaking. “And we could kill for fish and chips.” We swiped the blades a few times through the air, testing their weight. “Fish and chips and ketchup.”

  The creature looked confused. “I hunger for life! What are your desires to mine?”

  “We,” we said firmly, “are living it.”

  His face darkened, the shadows spreading out from beneath his eyes, around his mouth. “Give it to me,” he hissed.

  “No,” we replied.

  He stretched his arms out wide, the darkness spreading around him with the movement. “Give it to me!”

  “Get stuffed,” I said, and, because the words made us feel stronger, we added, with a feeling of recklessness that made us almost dizzy, “Arsehole!” We felt like a child caught stealing sweets and wanted to laugh at the terrifying, impossible consequences we faced. Anger was heating up my skin, despite the sodden state of my clothes, and the rage across my eyes was clean, not a hint of blue, entirely mine. I raised the knives towards him, and they dragged fiery sparks through the air as I laced their edges with the heat in my heart.

  Hunger grinned, and flexed its fingers. It could kill me, I was pretty confident of this, but in that moment of heady drunkenness, we didn’t care.

  There was a rattling.

  It sounded like a hundred broken teeth being knocked around inside a metal box.

  It took me a moment to realise that it had nothing to do with the shadow. Surprise must have shown on my face; suspicion was on his.

  It got closer, an uneven noise of bouncing, of metal clanking. As it approached, so did the smell: a mixture of curry powder, dust, car fumes, petrol, mothballs, wool and old tea bags which was somehow familiar. Hunger’s face was a picture of confusion, the darkness still warping the air around him, as he stood, ready to pounce. The rattling came nearer, the smell got stronger and with it came another sound.

  The sound went like this:

  “Buggery buggery bugger youth today! Buggery arseholes when I was young but no no no they don’t listen, moving with the phones, jazz, bling, ting, zing! Fucking pigeons! Shit where’s me oranges? Oranges oranges oranges gun oranges two pairs of nylons oranges…”

  Hunger whispered, “Sorcery.”

  I said, “You have no idea.”

  The voice replied, “Show respect you imbecilic nit toad flea insectoid wart!” Rattling along in front of her on three wheels, her trolley heaved with ancient plastic bags as Old Madam Dorie bounced her way into Paternoster Square.

  There is a story of the Bag Lady.

  She isn’t simply a bag lady – a lady who carries plastic bags full of the strangest scrounged items she can get her hands on – she is The Bag Lady, the queen of all those who scuttle in the night, gibbering to themselves, and the voices only they can hear. She is the mistress of the mad old women in their slippers who ride the buses from terminal to terminal, she is the patron of the scrapyard girls who play with the rats, she is the lady of all dirty puddles. She has been in the city since the first old woman left alone in the dark decided to tell the dark why she was crying, and she is, of course, myth, and no one believes a word of it, including me.

  However, when the pigeons were nested for the night, it was to the Bag Lady that my gran would always offer her prayers.

  Dorie looked at me, she looked at the shadow, she looked back to me and said, “All right, you stupid bastard, piss off out of here!”

  I said, “What the bloody hell are you doing here?”

  “Fucking trailing you, fucker!” she shrilled. “You dense like the kids say?”

  “We didn’t see you,” we complained.

  “That’s because you’ve got all the brains of a concussed cod!” she shrilled, flapping her pink fingerless woollen gloves furiously in the air. “Shit, and you’re supposed to be a saving fucking grace?”

  “You smell of… nothing,” hissed Hunger, head twisted on one side, his attention momentarily diverted. “You taste of… nothing.”

  “You going to smell shit in the sewer?” she asked, glaring straight into Hunger’s empty eyes without even blinking. “Oi, sorcerer?”

  “What, me?”

  “You want to be someone else?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Fucking run already, nit!”

&nb
sp; I began feebly, turning in Hunger’s direction. “Evil creature, essence of darkness and undying hunger…” Already I felt like I was losing momentum overall.

  Dorie’s attention flashed to me in an instant, and for a moment her eyes were the colour of the pigeons’, yellow-orange, intense, bright, alert. She said, in a voice as sane as I had ever heard it from her lips, “I only do this for you once, blue electric sorcerer. Next time, you’ll burn.”

  And with that, she leant over her trolley, and opened the plastic bags.

  Out of the first came the twitching nose of a rat, climbing up and over the edge of the trolley before landing with a big flop in the middle of its body onto the pavement of the square and looking round with confused, blinking eyes. Then came another rat, and another, and another, half a dozen, a dozen, two dozen; they swarmed out of the battered old Sainsbury’s bag in a writhing mass of black bodies, streaming down the sides of the trolley, flopping onto the ground into a teeming, twitching mass, spreading out from her like a pool of black blood, scuttling and scampering, and still they kept coming, a hundred, two, more than I could count, crawling across the pavement, along the walls, up Dorie’s legs, her middle, until her whole body was covered in rats and there wasn’t a body there at all, just a heaving tower of blackness and there were more rats in the bag than could get out, a hill of rats building up around the half-obscured hub of the trolley, spilling towards me, towards Hunger.

  That was one bag.

  The second bag released the pigeons. They exploded upwards in a shower of feathers, one, half a dozen, two dozen, the same crowding and swiftness as the rats, and whirled overhead, and level too, the sky somehow not big enough for them, flying across my face, obscuring Dorie from my sight in moments. It snowed feathers, blinding me with the touch, smell, taste of dirt-grease pigeon as their wings beat at me, their claws scraped my shoulders, their feathers brushed my nose; while at my ankles the rats scuttled, flowing round me like I was an island in their black sea.

  From the last bag came the other creatures. A swarm of big black bluebottle flies, the skulking ginger bodies of young foxes, a scampering contingent of mice that ran easily across the backs of the ratty mass like pebbles skimming the sea. Sinuous stray cats, missing a tail or half an ear, teeth bared, cruel, fur in tufts; the black feathers of crows, brown sparrows, flashing yellow breasts of a flock of great tits, even the curved necks of a pair of herons, hopping mottled frogs, the swooping shapes of swallows, the coiling gleam of a snake, teeming gleaming shells of the cockroaches, the long, arched back of a deer. They scrambled, flew, writhed, twisted, leapt, lurked or scuttled out of Dorie’s bags, out of the trolley, until the world was so full of moving creatures that it was as if the sky had become a solid mass, or we were trapped in a tornado, lost in a spinning torment of feather, flesh and fur.