by Kate Griffin
“Which ones?”
“The Post Office ran trains between its depots. The government always had something being moved about down here. The markets – they’d bring meat to Smithfield in subterranean trucks. Some of the lines never went above ground. You can’t say that about many trains in the city. But it’s different now. People forget about the things underground.”
I thought about the spirit I’d spoken with in Camden, guardian of the old railway line, and the empty magical circle that I’d intended for Khay. Perhaps, I thought, it might still have its use.
When I emerged, up a hooked ladder embedded in a concrete wall stained with flaking rust, it was to one side of Lincoln’s Inn, in a shaft full of the roar of sucked-in wind and heavy machinery. For a moment I thought it might be daybreak; but the clock on Holborn tube station left no room for doubt. Time moved differently underground. It was a drizzling, overcast evening, with the thin London rain and thick London clouds that never quite do their stuff, but constantly threaten.
Vera left me there. She said she didn’t like to be seen above ground, and didn’t offer to shake my hand goodbye.
Oda was standing outside Holborn station, her bag of weaponry slung over her shoulder, mobile phone in her hand. The big stone-built blocks of Kingsway and the wide, blank slabs of High Holborn’s offices met in a medley of traffic lights, bright corporate signs, and crowding pedestrians jostling for space while the bendy buses hogged the middle of the road.
“Well?” I said, blinking as my eyes adjusted to the grey, monochrome evening outside after the glaring bulbs and sinking shadows of underground.
“They cut off a couple of the biker’s fingers,” she replied briskly, folding the phone up and slipping it into her pocket.
“They what?”
“That’s the last time you call me humourless,” she said with a smile as welcoming as the open jaw of a shrieking bat. “Are the Whites going to help?”
“Yes.”
“What exactly can they do?”
“They can stay exactly where they are,” I replied with forced brightness. “And with any luck, that should be enough. Now, I need you to do me a favour.”
“A favour?” The word sounded dirty in her mouth.
“Yes. I need you to call your pissy bastard friends and tell them to let Blackjack go.”
“Why?”
I ticked the reasons off on my fingers, just like she’d ticked them off on hers. “One: it’s nice. Two: you don’t need to hold anyone hostage to get me fighting the Tower; that’ll happen anyway. Three: we need the bikers as allies and Blackjack is the only man I know of who can conveniently find them, and perhaps get a message to the warlocks in Birmingham as well. Four: I’ve cursed the head of your Order – right now he’ll think it’s flu and soon he’ll realise that it’s not, and I’m not going to uncurse him until you people stop playing silly buggers – how does all that sound to you?”
She thought hard about it; then said, without any change in expression, “When we are away from this place and these people, I will kill you, sorcerer.”
“That,” I replied, “would be what the corporate consultants call ‘unproductive’. Make the phone call – I’m sure we’ll have plenty to talk about.” I was beginning to feel better.
—
I waited in a café on Kingsway, drinking overpriced coffee with some kind of foul-tasting syrup in it, while Oda paced in the street outside and talked and talked into her phone. By the looks of things, she was having one hell of an argument. When she’d been talking for half an hour, I tried as casually as possible to move further into the recesses of the shop, away from the windows, just in case she was serious about shooting me.
I wondered what form my curse on the head of the Order had taken while I was gone, how deeply it had burrowed into his flesh, how far the worm of blue maggot magic had feasted on the heat of his blood. He’d had our blood on his hands, by the time we’d finished our conversation – such proximity to our blood, we hoped, could only make the passage of our spell more deadly and swift.
When Oda eventually finished on the phone she stomped into the café, face glowing with anger, sat down on the sofa in the alcove opposite me, threw her bag down on the floor, reached into her jacket pocket and surreptitiously pulled out a gun. It lay under the table in her grasp, pointed vaguely at me – but in such a small space, accuracy of aim didn’t matter. Though our heart skipped faster at the thought of it there, I struggled to keep my face calm, a smile half in place against impending disaster.
She said through gritted teeth, “What have you done?”
“Are you planning on using that?” I asked, nodding down at the thing under the table.
“I have orders to shoot you as soon as you’ve reversed your spell.”
“Thank you for your honesty at least, but you’re going to have trouble there.”
“Why?”
“I’m not going to reverse it, and you’re not making much of a case for me trying.”
“What did you do to our leader?”
“He had our blood on his hands,” we snapped. “You should have known that our blood is potent. Am I going to have a conversation with your boss or not?”
“I knew you couldn’t be trusted.”
“Of course you did. But the fact is, you kidnapped me and my friend, and did a lot of shouting and hitting in the mean time; and really I’m only” – I considered the choice of words – “evening up the balance sheet?”
For a moment she looked pained, small, almost childish, but then the mask was back on. “He’ll talk to you by phone.”
“He’ll see me in bloody person,” I said, “and without his damned armoured bodyguard, thanking you kindly.”
“Impossible. You’ll kill him.”
“Oda” – I struggled to keep the anger out of my voice – “I have done nothing to harm you. I have told you the truth. You didn’t need to try and hurt me to get my attention – I was willing to help. I still am.”
She said nothing.
“Are you going to shoot me?” I asked, forcing a smile onto my face. “It’s more of a test of faith, really, shooting someone and getting caught for it, rather than dying in a heroic bloodbath. If you die in the act, you become a martyr, you get nothing but glory or at the worst, unanswered questions – your motives remain entirely your own. If you get caught, alive, you’ll have to take responsibility, explain why, answer all the world’s questions and I bet, I just bet that the Order won’t bother to bail you out when the police come asking, ‘So, Oda, why are you armed to the teeth and why did you shoot that utterly harmless Mr Swift?’ They’ll call you insane and lock you up and you’ll never have the glory or the thanks or the innocence that dying in the attempt might, in its own twisted way, have given you.”
“Sorcerer?”
“Um?”
“I will kill you – maybe not now, maybe not in the eyes of men, but I promise, I will kill you.”
“Good!” I said brightly. “Then I look forward to our meeting. I’m sure you can work something out.”
I left her in the café. It was a risk, but it had to be done.
I thought about how I’d feel with Blackjack’s blood on my hands. I hardly knew the man, had little reason to trust him, and nothing more between us than a common enemy. I wanted no responsibility for the man’s welfare; but the obligation had been given to me anyway. If he died, it would be my fault.
And if he died, we knew with absolute certainty that we would not stop until we had destroyed the Order, washed away our guilt with their blood. Another enemy on the list, and one we were happy to oblige.
But I want…
… we feel…
come be me
and be free
but I
and we
but I AM
… and we be… we be…
I bit my lip until it bled, and until my thoughts were nothing but the grey wash of the early evening street, filling with the gently p
attering rain.
We met in a place and at a time of my choosing: 10.30 a.m. at Stansted Airport. There were a lot of reasons; for a start, Stansted Airport is my least disliked of all the airports ringing London, not as packed and confusing as the heaving mass at Gatwick, or as clinically airless as Heathrow; not as isolated and battered as Luton, not as small as City, which sat in the middle of a disused wharf, surrounded by housing and old patches of neglected concrete, and didn’t even have the good grace to be at the end of a railway line. I liked Stansted because its roof was high and clear, letting in white morning sunshine, because the train service left Liverpool Street on time, was fast, clean and, as express services went, relatively cheap; most of all I liked it because in every corner and on every wall, coffee shop booth and behind every door there was a CCTV camera, and because the police were everywhere, and always suspicious. Even outside the technical limits of the city, the air in the airport hummed with its own slick, fast, silvery-shimmered power.
We met by the security checkpoint leading to international soil, where the travellers of the day queued in bored, neat lines to have their baggage scanned and their passports swiped. He arrived alone – at least, he walked up to me alone, although there were plenty of suspects for an entourage – and we were shocked at how ill he looked already. Fat blue veins bulged on his hands and face, their colour visible even through the thick pigment of his skin; his eyes looked sunken, his hair more bedraggled. His expression was no longer one of triumph but cold, determined hate; his walk was uneven and when he raised his hands they trembled, the fingers convulsing in little bursts, like the nerves wanted to exercise themselves without permission from the brain. He walked up to me, stopped a metre away, looked me straight in the eye and said, “You have become a liability already, Mr Swift.”
“So shoot me!” I said.
“Don’t tempt fate.”
“I wasn’t tempting fate, I was asking you,” I replied. “I’m sure that all these lovely gentlemen with the guns” – I gestured round the court at the security guards patting down the passengers as they passed through the endless rows of metal detectors – “would be only too happy to testify the case.”
“You want the biker freed – we can do that.”
“It’s not just my personal pissed-off mood,” I retorted. “I need Blackjack.”
“Why?”
“To convince the rest of his gang to join the Whites; to stir up a few allies against Lee.”
“The Whites – Oda told me of your plan.”
“And I’m sure that when you’re done with the Tower you’ll be turning your attention to them,” I sighed, “but right now, you need them, and you still bloody need me – more than ever, by the looks of things.”
“You did this,” he snarled, eyes flashing dully in the folds of his diseased skin.
“Yes. If you’d just talked to me politely, we could have avoided this entire situation.”
“I am willing to die for my faith,” he declared, edging a step closer. “What makes you think that this curse of yours will change my mind about you?”
“Nothing at all,” I said. “You hate me and I hate you, end of story. But you need me, and I may just bloody well end up needing you and all your pig-stupid moronic cultist followers. So. I’ll lift the curse when I know that Blackjack is free. And you’ll still help me even though you don’t have a hostage against me, because you still need me against Bakker. And I won’t do anything against you because I still might need you to help against him. And when this whole thing is over we’ll do a tally list of who hurt who the more. And if it doesn’t come out even, we can fight it out till doomsday, what do you say?”
“What… help…” he spat the word, “do you need?”
“Men with weapons,” I replied. “Everyone you have available, in the Kingsway Exchange by midnight tomorrow, ready to fight it out with Guy Lee.”
“In the Exchange? Why there?”
“Because that’s where Guy is going to attack.”
“You’re sure of this?”
“Not yet. But if you give me a few more hours, I will be.”
“You’re… luring him into a trap?” suggested the man weakly. “How? Why will he attack?”
“He’ll be ordered to from above,” I replied. “Do you really want the quibbling details, or will you just help me?”
“Undo what you’ve done,” he said.
“Your word pretty please on a plate.”
“I will help you in this.”
“Your word pretty please on the Bible.”
A flicker of anger around his eyes, just for a second; but then he raised one shaking hand and said in a clear, precise voice, “I swear before God. Until the Tower is defeated and Bakker is dead, if you do not harm mine, we will do nothing to harm yours. We will support and help each other against this… greater… evil. Before God I swear.”
I grinned. “Good. I’m glad that one is sorted.”
I spoke to Blackjack on the phone before I undid the curse, just to make sure. He sounded tired, but alive, and promised that he had all his fingers intact. I asked him to find allies. When he’d heard the details, eventually, he said yes, and hung up briskly without another sound.
In the men’s bathroom, I put my hand on the priest’s forehead and slowly, shivering as it wormed its unfamiliar presence back into my skin, drew the curse out of his flesh, the sliver of blue magic trickling across my fingers and melting back into my skin.
The man said, “Is that it?”
“Yes. You’ll recover soon enough. Plenty of bedrest.”
“I do not understand how you managed to cause me harm. You were defenceless.”
“Prayer,” I replied cheerfully, washing my hands clean in the basin. “Prayer and a soul soaked in positive karma.” I glanced at him in the mirror, to find his expression not so much angry any more as curious. “And I am a sorcerer. Magic is just… a point of view. We don’t know your name.”
His eyes flashed up to mine, met them in the mirror; then he looked away. “Names give power.”
“You know that I’m Matthew Swift. I’m assuming you’re ex-directory – secret cultists tend to be – so you might as well tell me.”
“Anton Chaigneau.”
“French?”
“My mother was from the Congo. My father was from whatever Satanic pit spawns such creatures.” He was rubbing his forehead where I’d pulled the curse out, head on one side, a look of discomfort in his eyes.
I said, watching him, forcing myself to sound disinterested, “You’ve come a long way.”
“The Order is good to those who adhere to it,” he insisted. “They are kind.”
“You’re not in charge?”
“I am a servant of the Order, I bring their will…”
“Who’s in charge?”
He shook his head. “Is there anything else I can indulge you with, sorcerer?”
“Who did Oda’s brother kill?”
His face became stone for a moment, then widened out again into a tight grimace. “She told you?”
“Yes.”
“Did she tell you that her brother was a witch doctor?”
“She implied it.”
“Did she tell you that when he first discovered his magic, he tried to help the family, heal others and use his craft for goodness? Did she tell you that the power of it tainted him, corrupted him, as such power always does, and that he swore he could only do the best by creating things of such evil as, I think, will never leave her dreams?”
“Again, it was implied.”
He met my eyes and said, utterly flat, “He killed her two little sisters, and tried to kill her. He said it was a necessary sacrifice to summon creatures of knowledge, spirits. He said that nothing else would do but the blood of kin, and apologised and wept but said it was the necessary thing. Oda was fourteen at the time – her sisters were nine and eleven. She escaped, and didn’t speak for three years after. Her brother was killed by the local pol
ice when he refused to surrender himself, but not before his arts had burnt Oda’s family home, and everything she possessed, to the ground. The Order loves her. We will be a better family than any formed of kin. What do you do that’s ‘necessary’, Mr Swift?”
“Necessary?” We tried the word a few times, rolling it around our tongue and lips. “We work with you, Mr Chaigneau. Only because it is necessary. I hope to be seeing your men armed and ready for battle by tomorrow night; in the mean time, I wish you a speedy and successful recovery. Good day to you, Mr Chaigneau.”
I turned and walked away, and to my relief, no one tried to stop me. On the train, my hands were shaking. I had never played such games before; no degree of magical inclination can teach you the character skills necessary for cloak-and-dagger dealing; never before, however bad things had got, had I felt that my life was in danger. At least, not while I was technically alive, last time, and living it.
After lunch, I went back to University College Hospital.
Sinclair was still sleeping a sleep that was too close to death for our taste, and Charlie was still on the door.
“Did you visit her?” he asked, slipping into the room as I looked down at Sinclair’s sickbed and listened to the puff of his machines.
“What?”
“Elizabeth Bakker. Did you visit her?”
“Yes.” I wrenched my gaze from Sinclair and forced myself to meet Charlie’s ever so slightly feral gaze. “I saw her.”
“Did you kill Khay?”
“No.”
“But… he is dead,” said Charlie, in the strained voice of a clever man trying to work out something obvious.
“I didn’t kill him… I need to ask you a question.”
“OK. What do you want to know?”
“Two things. First – I’m mustering allies in the old Kingsway Exchange. We’re going to fight Guy Lee.”
He laughed. “Perhaps Harris Simmons will invest in the coffin-making market today and make a huge profit tomorrow?”
