A Madness of Angels ms-1

by Kate Griffin

  “A pit?”

  “I’m sure you’ve heard of them.”

  “Only by reputation and the occasional coroner’s report,” I declared, trying to contain our rising anger.

  “Good,” she said, unflustered. “There’s a lot of things going down here,” she added, waving casually around the room. “Trade, sport, knowledge, games – you know how it is. Lee sends his bully dogs here to learn how to fight. And Lee likes to fight.”

  “I don’t see how this will help us.”

  “Know thine enemy. And…” She let out a long breath. “If you’re gonna fuck with me and mine, sorcerer, I’m gonna fuck with you and yours.”

  “I guessed that much; I don’t suppose you can go into specifics.”

  “You want Lee to come after us? You want it now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then how do you think he’ll feel if he knows, knows that the Whites have allied themselves with Bakker’s fucking apprentice?”

  I took a slow, careful slurp of cocktail, smaller than I pretended. “It’s dangerous,” I said at last, “what you’re trying to pull.”

  She grinned, stretched like a black leather cat. “Sure,” she said. “It’s the right place, the right time. I’m guessing Lee will know Matthew Swift is alive. I’m guessing he’ll recognise you, tonight. And if he tells his boss – and he’ll have to tell his boss – I’m guessing Bakker will order Lee to do something a little bit stupid. How much does Bakker want you back, Mr Swift?”

  I shrugged.

  “Mr Swift?”

  As casual as a fly creeping down the side of a cream-covered bowl.

  “Vera, mostly properly elected White?” I replied, staring into the depths of my glass.

  “Mr Swift, how long have your eyes been blue?”

  I smiled. I felt old, tired, too big for my skin.

  “Bakker will want you back, won’t he, Matthew Swift?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’ll want Lee to find you. Bring you in. Alive?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “He’ll know you’re working with us, he’ll know it’s a bad idea. But you don’t argue with Robert Bakker and live. So let’s remind Guy Lee of that. Let’s show him how alive you are. Let’s make him do something stupid.”

  “This doesn’t seem like a world-beater of an idea,” I said.

  “Necessary things,” she replied.

  It was a pit. Very much according to the traditional definition of the word. It lay beneath the club, down deep spiralling stairs where the-boomboomboom of the disco music faded under the sound of the ventilation hum, behind thick metal doors and metal-faced doormen; and when you finally got down there, you stepped into a room plastered with enchantments. They were painted across the walls in black swirls, ran across the floor with yellow road-marking thickness; the air was oppressive with them, so dense they almost crushed the gestures of incantation beneath them, made the casting of the-lightest spells tantamount to lifting a heavy weight, or to speaking underwater.

  That was the observers’ platform.

  The pit itself lay beneath, with high black concrete walls and fierce uplighting, its floor also black, and covered with sawdust. We stood among the observers, hundreds strong, from everywhere and dressed in every way, men and women and wizards and people who had no sense of magic at all but could smell the hidden blood waiting to be spilt below. They roared and cheered and screamed with delight as a lurching demon, all bound up in chains, its skin formed from the slimy fat that congealed in the sewers, its eyes burning with blue paraffin flame, lashed and lunged at a group of three men dressed in all kinds of strange armour – shields welded from broken car doors, spears made from torn aerials sharpened to a point – who with every stab got a shriek of pleasure from the crowd, while the demon dripped bleach for blood from the tears in its warping, wobbling skin.

  I knew such things existed.

  Mankind has always loved its blood sports, and with magic there was an infinite variety of ways to draw fresh, exciting blood.

  The smell and the sight of it nearly overwhelmed us. We struggled to control it, keep it out, shocked by the depravity, the sickness, the blackness pouring out of every wall, the bloodshot delight in the eyes of every viewer, the pain in the creatures as they suffered and died; life corrupted, twisted. It horrified us, that all these people seemed to wish to do with life was seek its end; it appalled us that any gift so great could be so easily disregarded, as if they had grown bored with ordinary living and needed to seek out this new thrill to make up for the mundanities of existence. And very quietly, on the edge of the screams and the shouts and the stench of rotting magic, was an excitement and a thrill that threatened to blanket out all sense and leave us howling like the rest.

  “We can’t stay here,” we whispered.

  “Why not?” asked Vera.

  “It is… compelling,” we said.

  She looked at us for a long moment, then muttered, “Shit, sorcerer, you’d better not go bang. Come on.”

  She dragged me by the sleeve through the crowd, to where two men stood by a locked metal door, and moved to block her way. “McGrangham,” she snapped. “I’m here to see McGrangham.”

  “He’s busy.”

  “I want to place a really big bet; and he might want to think about doing the same.”

  McGrangham’s office was soundproof and looked down on the pit. But it didn’t block out the power of that place, and we pressed our head against the glass and trembled to keep it from filling our senses with its presence.

  McGrangham himself was a short man with dark hair and a big moustache, who lolled behind a desk counting crumpled banknotes and wore a mildly amused expression. “You’re telling me,” he said in an accent full of rolling rs and thick, weighted vowels, “that johnno here,” nodding at me, “is a fucking sorcerer?”

  “Yes,” said Vera.

  “The man’s a mess! Christ!”

  “Guy Lee,” she snapped. “Guy Lee comes here to see the fights. I want you to arrange an introduction, on neutral territory, underneath the Neon Court’s eye. I don’t want anything flash; just prod Mr Swift and Mr Lee in each other’s direction. There will be payment for your time.”

  “I give money to Lee, girl,” snapped McGrangham. “Why the hell would I deal with the Whites anyway?”

  Vera could act the mostly properly elected head of the Whites when she wanted to; she exuded it from every pore, a dangerous, rich charisma that hinted, below the surface, at something more. “Things are going to change,” she snapped. “Bakker is going to tell Lee to do something stupid. Lee is going to obey. He, and everything about him, will be destroyed. Now I know you get your protection from the Neon Court, but you still need customers. You still need goods, trades, deals, money. Lee is going to lose all these things, and the Whites are going to get them. You seriously want to fuck around with the next big thing?”

  McGrangham stared long and hard at us. “I heard Matthew Swift was dead,” he said at last.

  “Imagine people’s surprise,” I growled.

  “Lee’s got a pit bull down there tonight. A girl who thinks that kinky is the same thing as confidence, and confidence is the same thing as strength. He’s going to be watching her. She’s going to do great things. He’s not going to talk to any old corpse.”

  “So?” snapped Vera.

  “If this guy is a fucking sorcerer” – a fat red finger stabbed in my direction – “there’s one great way to get Lee’s attention.”

  Two pairs of eyes turned to look at me. I said through gritted teeth, “I don’t have time for this.”

  “Kinky, huh?” asked Vera.

  “You wanna get Lee’s attention? Wanna let him know oh-so-kindly that your whacked-out sorcerer isn’t dead? Wanna make a profit on a game?” There was a sparkle in McGrangham’s eye; he could smell money a mile off, was already thinking about a big, bright, treachery-filled future full of booze, blood and wealth. Eyeing us up, studying, thinking of the best
way to make more profit from our flesh.

  Vera’s eyes had the same glow, for a different cause.

  “OK,” she said, “I’m listening.”

  “Take down Lee’s pit dog,” McGrangham proposed. “He’ll be interested then. Hell – he might even have a conversation with you before he uses your skin for wallpaper.”

  I had to wait almost four hours for my turn – into the small hours of the morning – and the crowd at the edge of the pit simply grew bigger. We waited outside in the cold of the street, but now that we were sensitive to its presence, aware of what was going on beneath us, we could feel the fire of every roar and the shuddering of every hit rise up through our body like the rumble of a train beneath the tarmac.

  I had never fought in a pit.

  It was a thing for either the desperate, or the insane. Those with nothing to lose, or those who believed that they could never fall. A man who had fought and failed was thrown out of the front door, and told to make it to the end of the street before calling an ambulance. They didn’t want the police to investigate. He made it halfway to the end, and collapsed in a puddle of blood, skin and bile. I dragged him to the end of the street by his armpits, and dialled 999 from the nearest call box, skulking in the shadows to watch as the paramedics came and went, glancing into the darkness of this Soho street with the weary faces of men who knew enough not to ask, had seen enough to no longer care to know.

  Vera came to fetch me, when it was time.

  The “kinky pit dog” of Lee’s was a woman who called herself Inferno. You can’t be Dave the biker, Bob the master of mystic arts. X-Men had seen to that. She was roared into the pit with a friendly clamour of familiarity, and posed, hands on hips, chin thrust out, wearing as scant a mixture of leather and hooked chain as I had ever seen, every part of her bulging and gleaming like it would at any second explode from the thin patches of clothing that held it in place. She was armed with a whip, wore purple contact lenses to disguise the colour of her eyes, and had dyed her hair pure black. There was nothing sensuous in her, I decided, nothing particularly sexy – the costume was intended to be something that a fantasy hero might have worn, but it just looked ridiculous and childish. I skulked by the door that Vera had pushed me through into the pit, ashamed and foolish at what had to be done.

  Above the ring, to one side of McGrangham’s office, was a window of reflective black glass.

  I tried to imagine Guy Lee standing behind it. Wondered if he was leaning forward, watching my face, trying to see why I was so familiar.

  I would remind him.

  When the horn went for the battle to start, she slashed her whip a few times up and down through the air, just to make her point, and grinned with pure white teeth as the end of her rope wound and curled by itself, the end lifting off the ground and wriggling towards me like a snake, defying gravity and the laws of physics while it lashed across the empty air between us, searching for a way to bite. This part was a performance, we realised, designed to raise the crowd’s blood as they saw the intricacies of her art. It was also, in terms of pure and simple combat magic, an immensely stupid thing to do, and in that instant our respect for her hit absolute bottom.

  In the pit, the crushing weight of the spells that suppressed magic upstairs was less. We watched her snarl and hiss and her whip wriggle and worm its way through the air, straining to reach us, growing at its base as it writhed its way in our direction; and we considered the tools at our disposal. I didn’t want to expose yet what I was capable of, nor did I feel particularly inclined to indulge the crowd with any sort of performance. So I waited, until, with a scream of attack, she hurled the tip of the whip towards me and it grew, convulsing through the air towards my throat. Patiently we watched it fly towards us, then stepped aside with the speed of the electricity in our blood and grabbed the end of it just before the tip, squeezing down on it like a zookeeper pressing down on the jaws of a snake. We shook it once, hard, sending a ripple flying back through the stretched-out rope that jerked the handle from her grasp.

  Without her power sustaining it, the whip held in my hand became a lifeless thing of twine and leather. I let it drop to the floor. She spat and hissed like a feral animal and brought her hands together in the opening gestures of a spell I recognised, lips shaping traditional words of invocation. I wasn’t sure how far I wanted the onlookers to realise my capabilities, so raised my hands and roughly mimicked her gestures, twisting my fingers in familiar, half-hearted forms of magical gesture, and moving my lips in a silent whisper. The sounds of magic came to me instinctively, slipping onto my tongue – not merely words, but the whisper of tyres through a thick puddle on a lonely street, the sound of wings beating in an empty sky, the snap of a door slamming in the dark – these were the new sounds of urban magic.

  I dragged my hands through the air, feeling its particles thicken around my fingers as it congealed at my command. My ears popped, sensing the pressure decline around my head, and the wall of controlled air in my hands became thick enough to be almost visible. Moisture condensed around it as I exhaled, billowing out of its heart as I compressed more and more into that fistful of contained wind.

  She finished her spell almost without me noticing and with a shriek sent it my way; the shriek became a roar in the air between us; the roar filled with the sounds of traffic – cars, wheels, exhaust, rattling engines, the smell of diesel, unleaded petrol, engine oil, tar, burnt rubber. For a moment, I saw, about to impact, the shadow of a hundred vehicles heading towards me, carrying with them the sounds of screeching brakes and the pressure of bending air, all of it thrown out of her throat. It was not the world’s most dangerous spell, but it looked good and I did not want to cause myself any more harm than had already befallen me; so, in old-fashioned style, I threw myself out of its way. The crowd on the observers’ platform upstairs roared its disappointment at such a mundane tactic, and started stamping, a regular growing boom boom boom like the heartbeat sound of the disco drum upstairs. I picked myself up and, by now thoroughly irritated, let my spell go.

  The wall of rapidly decompressing pressure I threw at the woman called Inferno picked her up, threw her backwards three feet across the room, slammed her against the wall and, at the pinch of my finger and thumb, held her there, writhing and slapping her fists furiously against the black concrete, screaming amplified and deepened indignities through the thick wind that held her in place.

  The booming of the audience continued. I waited. I was happy to wait, ten, twenty seconds, let those who were smart enough to see, or perhaps simply not-stupid enough to care, that this was something more than a cheap spell.

  Let Lee watch my face, see the blueness in our eyes.

  I waited, holding her trapped there in my spell for nearly twenty seconds until the horn finally went to end the combat, at which point I dropped her. Feeling oddly unclean with my victory, I went to sit down on the cold floor in my corner of the pit, hugging my knees to my chin, while Inferno, face inflamed an appropriate colour for her name, was dragged off screaming defiance to the walls.

  We were surprised that we felt no sense of triumph, only a sick hollowness, as if our stomach was empty but had no sense of gnawing hunger to match.

  The Master of Ceremonies announced in a bright, overly cheerful voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, five minutes please while we prepare for a new champion! Drinks are available upstairs and if any of you brave contestants want to try your hand…”

  I tuned out the noise, huddled myself in my coat and tried to ignore the staring eyes and the sick swirls of expectation around me like tendrils of smog on a murky evening. Vera stood at one end of the observers’ stands and, through the long, dark shadows that the uplights drew across her eyes, I saw not a glimmer of a smile.

  “Oi, you!”

  The voice came from a staff member in a T-shirt which bulged around muscles so highly exercised I was amazed there was any room left for bone. With an imperious gesture, he summoned me into the preparation room behi
nd the pit.

  Sitting on a rough wooden bench in that grey concrete room, wearing stylish black and drinking from a bottle of mineral water, was Guy Lee.

  He looked me over and grunted. “Scrawny bastard, aren’t you?”

  I said nothing.

  “You’re Swift, yes?”

  I nodded.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re playing at here, Swift?”

  I put my head on one side and examined his face. He looked middle-aged, but that could simply have been the passage of many events, rather than much time. His nose was crooked and a long-healed scar ran across it; his skin was worn and dry and tanned, and he was clean-shaven. His hair hinted at grey peeking out at its roots, although through the defining clinginess of his black shirt and trousers he looked as well-built and hale as any man of twenty. He sat with his elbows on his knees, leaning forwards, like a boxer between bouts, and his fists were big and meaty, with signs of scarring across the back of his left hand, badly healed; his feet were set wide apart, legs tense like at any moment he might uncoil like a spring.

  There was something very wrong with the entire picture.

  We leant forward, peering, trying to work out what it was.

  “You want to lose those fucking eyes?” asked Lee, glaring up at us. “I told Robert I’d have them for him on a plate.”

  We said, “There is… no magic about you.”

  “You just wait and see,” he replied. “Just because I can’t get you here, doesn’t mean I won’t have you out there,” jerking his chin up towards the street. “You bastard – you think we weren’t expecting you after you killed Khay?”

  We murmured, “We think we understand.”

  Outside, a horn bellowed, three times, a summoning to the pit. Lee stood up, slapping his hands together briskly. “You know how many sorcerers I’ve killed?” he said.

  “One,” I answered. “Although you claim six.”

  He grinned, but there was unease in his defiance. I felt a moment of gratitude to Sinclair and his excellent files. “Looking to double it soon.”