A Madness of Angels ms-1

by Kate Griffin

  I arrived early, around 2 a.m. in the maze of tunnels underneath the roundabouts, one-way systems and sprawling circular roads on the edge of Aldgate, where the City becomes simply the city, and the signs point to The North as well as to Bow and Whitechapel. In London, places beyond its boundaries are always called The North or The West, too big, too vague and too Not London to merit any more detailed descriptions.

  I huddled down by the specified exit, pulling my coat around me for warmth, and let the hum of the intermittent traffic – lorries full of the next day’s shopping, bras, socks, shoes and a dozen different kinds of apple – travel with a buzz up my fingertips.

  I was half-asleep by the time the biker sat down next to me with a loud “Oof!”, stretching out his legs into the narrow concrete width of the passage and dumping a big black sports bag down at his side. “You look shitty,” he said. “Not a morning person?”

  “I didn’t notice you,” I said.

  “You surprised?”

  “Not entirely. No great reprisals got to you, since I saw you last?”

  He gave a grunting half-laugh. “You really surprised?” he repeated. “I move too fast for any whacked-out fucker to catch.”

  “Not at all,” we sighed.

  “I hear you’ve been busy.”

  “Really?”

  “San Khay.”

  “I didn’t kill him; please let’s not go down that line of enquiry.”

  “It wasn’t you?”

  “No.”

  “Jesus. Although – you didn’t seem like the blood-drinking, heart-ripper type.”

  “Touching. I don’t suppose you’re up for lending me a hand?”

  “That’s why I’m sat in this shit-hole talking to you,” he replied with a shrug. “Anything in particular?”

  “I’m looking for help to go up against Guy Lee; are you interested?”

  “Why Lee?”

  “He might know things about Bakker. And even if he doesn’t, he has a small army at his command. It’d be nice to know that it’s not at his command, before going after the top of the Tower.”

  “Why do you need help? You seemed just fine with Amiltech. Swanned off all mysterious for your solo day of judgment, like something out of a fucking Clint Eastwood movie.”

  “That’s just it,” I replied, thinking of the shadow rising up from the darkness of Paternoster Square. “This time, they’ll know I’m coming. Guy Lee isn’t going to make the mistake San did.”

  “How much help?” he asked carefully. “I ain’t gonna speak for the others.”

  “It’s still all in the planning, but I thought the Whites, the beggars, the bikers, the painters, the drifters, the…”

  “Dregs of fucking society, right?”

  “Guy Lee isn’t renowned for his selectivity, either, when it comes to membership.”

  “You think you can beat Lee?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s not going to be like pissing around with San Khay. If Lee knows you’re coming, he’s not just going to sit by while you torch the office and curse the staff.”

  “Yes,” we said. “We were thinking that.”

  “You must have one hell of a beef.”

  “It’s the entire bull and the horns, since you ask.”

  “What makes you think you can pull this lot together? Shit, no wonder sorcerers have short life expectancies – that’s some cock-arsed arrogance you must have, wobbling around inside the pink stuff in your head.”

  “I think they’ll want to help.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the Tower will probably make the decision for them.”

  “You like being a mysterious bastard, don’t you?” he asked with a grin. “Sweet.”

  “I learnt a few nasty lessons.”

  “Bakker teach you any in-between classes?” he asked in an overly casual voice, and when I looked up, “Oh, yeah, I can do fucking research too, you know.”

  I steepled my fingers, took in a long breath of the piss-stained air of the subway tunnels, half-closed my eyes. “And you are called Blackjack, Christ knows why; you’re a member of the biker clan, the men and women who specialise in living off speed, being nowhere and everywhere, who revel in their own freedom; and when they travel, the road is shorter for them than for anyone else. Your leader, if you guys can really be said to have one, was murdered, and your clan attacked. You like being unpredictable, unexpected, everywhere and nowhere, standing up for being a difficult bastard just to see the looks on people’s faces, you think being normal is being shameful… shall we carry on, and see who runs out of trivia first?”

  To our surprise, he grinned. “You want to know a secret?”

  “Always.”

  “My real name is Dave.”

  “I see.”

  “This doesn’t seem to amuse you.”

  “I met Jeremy the troll a few nights ago.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. Also known as the Mighty Raaaarrggh! Although… I can sorta see why you changed the name. ‘Dave’ isn’t known for its mysterious, mystic sexiness.”

  “What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “‘Matthew the sorcerer’? You weren’t tempted to go for something… well… with more vowel sounds?”

  “To tell the truth, the idea didn’t occur to me.”

  A footstep at the end of the subway, loud on the wet stairs leading down. Blackjack added casually, fingering his bag, “Like I say, I got a lot of research done on you while I was wandering.”

  “Hum?” I asked absently. We eyed the stairwell at the end of the tunnel.

  “Uh-huh. But the bird – Oda?… she’s a slippery fish to pin down.”

  We tried in vain to decipher the layers of imagery. We opened our mouth to ask a question, and Oda was at the end of the tunnel, and Oda wasn’t alone.

  Sometimes, dignity is sacrificed under the weight of sheer, adrenalinrush instinct. Instinct said fight or flight, but there wasn’t anywhere to fly to in that long tiled gloom under the ring road. We stood up hastily, keeping the rumbling of the traffic still in our fingertips to be unleashed at any given moment, and said, very carefully, “We were to meet alone.”

  Blackjack was also on his feet, eyeing up the two men who stood flanking Oda. He had a tight, cold look on his face; at his side his fingers gently flexed.

  Oda said, “Someone wants to talk to you.”

  The men on either side of her reached into their pockets. Their hands weren’t even out before Blackjack was taking something from his bag and his fist was wrapped in a length of chain that seemed to grow at his touch into a writhing, living snake of metal links, lashing into the air and stretching as it moved. I saw guns being pulled out from the bulging jackets of the two men with Oda, and instinctively snuffed out the light, crudely swiping at the strip lights overhead with the rumbling heat still in my fingertips, bursting the bulbs with a loud static pop and a sprinkling of falling glass. I put my hands round my head to protect it from the crystal tinkling as the shards rained down, and turned and ran.

  Somewhere in the dark I heard a loud snap, a rattling sound as of a chain scraped along a tiled wall and the crunch of tiles being pulled free from their mortar with the passage of the metal links; I heard running feet, shouting, the click of catches and gears. Perhaps in different circumstances we would have stayed and fought, we would have burnt them all for daring to challenge us – but I feared guns, I didn’t like to try and stop bullets in the dark, it was too unpredictable. I stuck my hands out to feel along the wall and stumbled towards the yellow glow at the other end of the tunnel, away from Oda, Blackjack and the men in black. I heard a gunshot – it wasn’t as I had expected, not a ringing blast in the dark, but a snap, more like the bursting of an air rifle than an explosion of chemicals – but whatever it was, I heard a shout in the gloom that could well have been Blackjack’s voice, and for a moment thought about going back for him, pulling up all the glass pieces on the floor and
throwing them down the tunnel in a wave, like a swarm of angry flies; but by now I was at the staircase at the other end and clawing my way up into the open where I could see, stand my ground, fight with more effective tools and…

  “Hey, sorcerer?”

  The voice came from the pavement above the mouth of the subway stairwell, out of my line of sight. That too was probably the source of the dart that impaled my back like the nose of an angry swordfish, and with it, the quick shrinking down of my world to a pinprick of yellow light that tightened, tightened and, with a sigh, went out, taking me with it.

  We woke, didn’t know where we were, and panicked. In our confusion we lashed out at the nearest thing we could find and shattered the front passenger seat window into a hail of safety glass with our fear, before a hot electric snap across our neck sent us lurching back into a painful blackness, from which no amount of violent dreaming could wake us.

  When we next woke, we felt a tightness in our chest, an aching in our arms, a terrible pain in our shoulders, and a hot patch of blood in the small of our back, where the dart that had first knocked us into darkness had been pulled out by someone who didn’t care how much it bit into our skin. We jerked on waking, the fear sweeping us; but this time awareness and control were quicker to come and with all my strength I kept my eyes shut, my breathing level, and my face empty.

  That first start of surprise when we woke, though, had betrayed us, and over the sound of rushing traffic, through the flashing regular pulse of neon light racing by and the cold breath of wind through the shattered passenger window, we heard Oda’s voice say, disinterestedly, “He’s awake again,” and that was cue enough for someone to send us back to darkness.

  The last waking of that outward journey was the slowest of them all. There was no more traffic hum around me, but the pain in my joints was amplified tenfold. I came back to awareness with the slow understanding that the greyness on the edge of my vision was the beginning of sunrise, that the wetness on my face was from dew on the grass, that the cold dampness seeping through my clothes was rising up from the mud I’d been dropped on, that the pain in my shoulders came from the position of my arms, pinned behind my body, which had then fallen back, cutting off any remaining circulation to my fingertips. I felt frazzled and sick, but not entirely afraid. Perhaps the repetition of my wakings and sleepings had inured me to fear; perhaps it was simple relief at being alive, I didn’t know and didn’t care – the stillness of my own mind was a comfort in itself.

  The world fascinated us, that I now saw at right-angles from where our head had fallen on the grass. As the pale sunlight started to sneak over the top of a chalky hill, we became aware of the smell of mud, animals, dead leaves, mould, rain, dew, cattle manure and fresh water, mixed with just a hint of burnt tyre. We heard the calls of wrens, sparrows, starlings, magpies, blackbirds, blue tits, and woodpeckers, and saw, crawling an inch from our nose through the mud, tiny flies and other insects, some no more substantial than the lightest drizzle glimpsed falling at night in front of a street lamp. We had never seen so much open nothingness, nor imagined that nothingness could be so busy in the pallid light. We searched for power to drag to our hands, to pick at the tight plastic cuffs that were rapidly causing our fingers to go numb, and though it was there, though we could sense some sort of magic, some lingering essence on the cold air, it was strange to us, like an echo of song, heard far off.

  Countryside.

  Bloody crappy pollen-drenched, grass-covered, dew-soaked bloody countryside.

  Not a neon bulb, not a power line, not a water or gas main within half a mile all around. Nothing to arm myself with, except what little warmth was left inside our blood.

  A voice said, “I take it you’re not a country man.”

  I croaked, tasting bile in my mouth, “It’s got its charms.”

  “But you are an urban magician, Mr Swift. Your disposition lies elsewhere, you find your magic in the cities, not the fields, correct?”

  “Just a point of view,” I whispered. “That’s all.”

  Hands pulled me up by the elbows and shoulders, and as the world swung back into place I forced down the taste of acid in my throat, and half-closed my eyes against the sensation of spinning. I saw a pair of black leather shoes, topped by smart black trousers, a black jacket and – here was the bad news – a dog collar and a purple scarf. Never underestimate the ridiculous things that have been done in the name of religious-semantic obscurity.

  The face that topped these defining features was round and smiling, friendly in the manner of all inviting alligators who only want to talk; it was the colour of rich, dark chocolate, and topped by silvery-grey curly hair, plaited at the back of the neck into dreadlocks of such solidity that I suspected they’d never be undone. The owner of this ensemble appearance spoke in a soft voice, lyrical with a gentle tone, and said, “May I put a suggestion to you, Mr Swift?”

  “Where’s the biker?” I asked. “What about Blackjack?”

  “He’s fine.”

  “Fine what? Finely chopped, with a stick of celery?”

  “I think, considering your position, you’ll have to take my word on it, Mr Swift.”

  I looked round cautiously. The field in which I’d been dumped was bordered by tall trees on two sides; elsewhere it stretched away into more rolling muddy shapes: a landscape devoid of any kind of help. Around me, in various poses of threatening or sceptical looming intent, were more men and women, of every colour and age; some held guns, and one or two, we noticed with something resembling disgust, were holding swords, or fireman’s axes, with the look of people who not only knew how to use them, but enjoyed doing so. Oda was among them; in one hand she had a curved blade that resembled a samurai’s katana, still in its ornate sheath, while over her shoulder and more to the point, I felt, was slung an automatic rifle with a sturdy wooden butt and the well-oiled look of a weapon properly cared for.

  She stared at me, and there was no pity in her gaze.

  I stammered, trying to keep our eyes on the silver-haired man, “You want something.”

  “I have a question I’d like to ask you. Or at least, I’ve got a question I’ve been asked to ask you. Personally, I find it unlikely you will survive the judgment, but these tests must still be administered, even now and to someone as shrunken as you.”

  “You’ve got my attention.”

  “Can you control them?”

  “What?”

  “It’s very simple, Mr Swift. Can you keep control?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Please, let’s not play coy with this. It is the matter on which your whole life currently depends. Should I decide that you are incapable of keeping the creatures currently inside you at bay, should I judge that you are a threat equal or even superior to that which you are attempting to destroy, I will have your head removed from your shoulders, your face shot off, your fingerprints burnt away and the remnants dumped in a variety of rivers feeding a number of fish-infested seas. So please, take me seriously when I say, I will have an answer. Can you keep control?”

  I licked my lips and felt the shaking in my bones. “I’m a sorcerer. I’ve been taught how to…”

  “This isn’t about your sorcery!” he snapped. “Tell me about them.”

  “About who?”

  He hit us with the back of his hand, across the face, and his knuckles slammed into our jaw and the pain filled us with shock and astonishment, anger flashing inside us. Hands pulled me back up and he said again,

  “Can you keep control?”

  “Who are you?”

  He hit us on the other side of our head, and when we tried to crawl back up of our own accord he hit us again, knocking us once more to the earth. I bit down the anger turning the silver streaks of sunlight electric blue in my eyes and waited for the people there to pull me up. When they did, he said again, “You must be angry by now, Mr Swift, you must be afraid. You’ve died once before, and your kind can only see the flames of hell
when your heart stops, when your soul leaves, so you must be afraid. Can you control them, when they think about dying, when they wonder about losing their newfound existence, can you stop them from lashing out, can you keep them under the calm waters of reason, can you persuade them not to fight, kick, scream defiance, can you stay human? Can you keep control?”

  I took too long to think of an answer, tasting blood on my lips, and he hit us again and pressed his foot down across our neck, forcing our face into the mud, and leant close and hissed, “Is your blood on fire yet, can you stop it blazing?”

  We snarled at him, twisting under his weight, but he just smiled and kicked us, knocking us flat to one side; and now we were angry, we were ready to take his heart and crush it until it burst, we were ready to boil the blood in its vessels, we were prepared to…

  I squeezed my eyes shut against the blueness and pressed my face deeper into the earth, feeling the coldness of it against my skin and breathing rapidly, trying to purge the pain from my muscles, chill the heat away from my blood. Hands pulled me up again, and the silver-haired man came close, pulling my face up so that blood trickled down from my nose into my mouth, and leaning in until his breath tasted of coffee and too many hours without brushing his teeth. He hissed, “What are they saying now, sorcerer? Are they cowering like the children that they are, or do they have a darker purpose, a more aggressive intent? Which is it, Mr Swift?”

  “You,” I hissed through the blood on my tongue, “will have to work it out for yourself.”

  He tugged my head up until it hurt, staring into our blue eyes, then, with a grunt, pushed me back and stepped away.