by Kate Griffin
With that, he strode out into the pit to the roar of a sycophantic crowd.
I followed slowly, surprised. I didn’t understand what he expected to achieve by this gesture, here, where the Neon Court was watching and the spells were thick on the walls. He couldn’t kill me in McGrangham’s, nor could I kill him while the wards were written up on the walls and the crowd looked on. Others would intervene, and this was, after all, neutral territory.
Perhaps it was the arrogance of someone who couldn’t understand the possibility that they might lose.
I followed after him, and the crowd screamed and roared to see us beneath them with sick glee. I moved away to the other side of the pit, and watched him as he shook his fists at the ceiling and grinned and lapped up the applause of those people. They knew who he was; knew when to scream and clap.
I found myself wondering, with a genuine sense of scientific process, how I could go about killing Lee, although that was not, I realised, the exercise for the evening.
The horn blasted and Lee, without even pausing for the echo to die away, turned, opened his mouth and puffed in my direction. His breath rolled out in big, black, billowing clouds that stank of carbon and sulphur and filled the pit in a second with its polluted smog, blinding me. Automatically, I dropped to my knees and sent a random blast of force through the smoke, spinning it backwards towards what I hoped was its source in an eddying of black fumes. I didn’t know if it did any good, but heard it smash into the wall on the other side of the pit a moment later and, in that instant, Lee emerged from the darkness, brought his hands together in two clenched fists, and pulled them apart. Where his fingers touched his wrists, he drew from them, pulling them out of the skin itself, although there was no blood, two long white daggers made of bone.
The crowd roared its appreciation as he flourished the blades. I could not tell whether they failed to recognise cheap necromancy when they saw it, or if they simply didn’t care. He slashed the blades a few times through the air in smooth, careful movements; and where they moved, they trailed red sparks.
Slowly, grinning like an ape, he advanced towards me, bone-blades first.
I backed away, moving at the same speed as his walk to keep him apart from me, until my fingers brushed the concrete wall at my back. His grin widened. I shook my head in response at him, and pressed my fingers into the concrete. It bent like cold butter, slowly easing away under my pressure until my fingertips, buried in it up to the wrist, brushed the iron edge of a foundation support. I wrenched, sending chilling power down to my fingertips as I did, and with a heave and a shudder that made my arms ache and my head throb, dragged a length of twisted hard iron out of the wall itself. The concrete behind me melted back into its place like water filling a wound; I had no interest in keeping it as anything other than what it was, now that I was armed.
The audience screamed its applause as I tested the weight of my weapon, turning it a few times in the air and feeling it swish in my grasp. It was approximately two feet long – a very short staff by the tradition of any wizard.
Lee’s confident face became, for a moment, something else entirely. With a roar, he threw himself at me.
I have little experience of fighting hand-to-hand. But we were fast, and the dance – the dance at least we were used to. We jumped onto our toes and leapt away from the first slash of his bone knife, feeling the twisting in the air as it passed by us, ducked our back beneath the high swipe of his second attack, spun to the side of his next onrush, and rolled past his stumbling feet and landed a kick on his shin as we did. The air burnt with our passage, we were on fire with the blood and stench and brightness and hunger of the place, we loved this dance! We realised almost for the first time that the weight of our my flesh and bone was not just a burden to be borne from sense to sense; it was a living tool. We could feel the movement of every muscle and nerve, the booming of every capillary under our skin and they obeyed, our body obeyed as we caught a slash on the end of our weapon and lashed the longer tip of the iron up until it clipped his elbow and knocked his arm back hard, and we were already away by the time he knew what had happened, marvelling as our arms went up and our feet went back and our head went down and our stomach went in all at once, everything corresponding to the dance, everything, for a moment, completely alive. And for a moment, we couldn’t hear the shouting of the crowd, or their stamping feet, or the cat calls or the cheers or the screams or our own breath; for a moment, we were nothing more than the brilliance of that room, the minds of those people, the life dancing on the knife’s edge, nothing but the dance, and the freedom of it.
Just like we were before…
… come be me and be free…
but I am…
And just for a moment, as we spun away beneath Guy Lee’s blades, we were entirely ourself, and we burnt with blue fire across the air as we passed.
I do not know what happened in that place, that night. I am frightened by the things I cannot remember.
What I do recall was the sounding of the horn and hands pulling me back, someone shouting, “Enough, enough!”
And there was Lee, his bone daggers broken at his side, his arms slashed and bruised from the impact of my weapon’s edge, his nose bleeding a slow, thick blood,
but no magic
and how silent the audience was.
Absolute stillness.
Just the settling of hot air like snow on stone.
I pulled myself free of the arms that held me and dropped my iron weapon. Its tip was bloody, and so were my hands.
but no life
The wards were blazing up the walls, lit up with Lee’s blood. They crushed me like the great fat belly of a woolly bear, pushed my fingers to the earth, stopping this going any further.
It had already gone far enough.
blood on fire
and empty, utterly drained, I turned and walked away from that place.
Outside in the cold air, Vera took me by the arm and said, “And now we need to get you to safety.”
“Why?”
“Lee is going to come after you now with everything he’s got – nothing will stop him.”
“What did I do to him?” I asked. “We just… I don’t… I didn’t…”
She looked up at me, surprised, and said, “You were on fire, Matthew Swift. Your skin was on fire.”
I looked down at myself, half-expecting to see blistered and withered flesh, but my hands looked fine in the cold, pale neon light. “Will he attack the Exchange?” I stuttered as she pulled me down the narrow, sleeping road.
“After that, nothing short of a total annihilation of you and yours will serve,” she replied grimly. “Honour – prestige – they matter. Forget Bakker, that’s nothing now. Fear is just the perception of a threat, sorcerer, and I think you altered a few perceptions tonight.”
“Did I…?” I began, and then decided I didn’t want to know.
“Come on,” she muttered. “Time to get you home.”
A thought struck me. I grabbed her by the shoulder, harder than I’d meant – she pulled back quickly, face opening in an expression of surprise. “Lee,” I stuttered, “Lee is dead.”
“Let’s not get carried away…” she began.
“No, I mean… right now. Right now as we’re talking. That wasn’t Guy Lee down there. His flesh has no warmth, he gave off no scent of magic.”
“Are you fucking kidding? He pulled bloody knives out of his wrists!”
“Life is magic,” I insisted, shaking her by the shoulders. “Life is magic, there is no separating the two. Where there is life, there will be magic; the one generates the other. He has no magic. At least, not of his own – he leeches it from the air, feeds on its use by others, but he, he gives off no scent of it. Life is magic. He has no life. Guy Lee is a walking corpse.”
She pulled herself free with a sharp wrench. “Bollocks,” she muttered. “Bollocks!”
“We saw it!” we shouted, and she flinched back from us, fear in he
r face, clear now, easy to read. I felt ashamed. “I saw it,” I said. “I’m sorry. Sorry. I… I’m sorry.”
Slowly she relaxed, and patted me half-heartedly on the shoulder. “You’re very screwed, sorcerer.”
“I know.”
“Yeah,” she muttered. “But who can tell? Maybe it’ll be in a good way.”
We slept on the floor of the Kingsway Exchange, in a room packed with other sleeping forms, pressed in shoulder to shoulder, snoring and breathing and warming each other in the darkness, the light wavering through the empty, glassless window of the room, in the concrete corridor outside. I wondered what would have happened if there had been a nuclear war, and people had tried to live down in these tunnels, without time, colour and space. Vera said that all the Whites were coming in, that they’d been warned not to walk alone at night, that Lee would want his revenge.
And Bakker would want his apprentice back.
Guy Lee, a man of no magic. I ran scenarios through my head, twisted spells around, considered the powers that might have, could have, would have stopped Lee’s heart but still sustained him. Or perhaps it wasn’t Lee at all who I’d fought; perhaps something else inhabiting his flesh, mimicking life. He wasn’t any sort of traditional, boring, hollow-eyed, pale-skinned zombie; his movements were fluid, his face healthy, his skin tanned. Not death in the traditional vampiric way; simply an absence of life, as if his body had been frozen at a single moment.
I couldn’t sleep.
Shortly after dawn – I had expected it to still be night – I climbed out of the Kingsway tunnels, and went to find a phone box.
I called the Tower, and this time, when I asked for him, I was put straight through to Bakker. He didn’t sound like he’d been asleep.
“Matthew? Are you all right?”
“Fine.”
“I’ve been hearing rumours. If you want to talk…”
“Guy Lee isn’t alive. He has no magic about him, no spark of life. He’s cold.”
“Matthew, I don’t know what you’ve been doing…”
“Necromancy – the magic of the dead. I want to know… what you did to him.”
“What I did to him?”
“You fear dying, Mr Bakker,” I said to the voice in the phone, “you are so afraid. If his non-life, his frozen existence could offer you the solution to your problem, wouldn’t you have taken it? I have racked my imagination, all the things you taught me, and I can’t think of a single power, magician or enchanted tome which could do the things to Lee that I think must have been done – only you. You’d do it, I think, and not look back.”
A sigh, tired and old, down the phone. I watched the sunlight thicken on the pavement and crawl over the tops of the grand old houses surrounding Lincoln’s Inn. “He told me you attacked him, you went to a pit?”
“Yes.”
“I thought I had taught you better.”
I shrugged, then realised the absurdity of the gesture. “I will undo whatever it is you’ve done, Mr Bakker.”
“Matthew?” His voice had a darker, lilting edge of polite, poison-edged enquiry.
“Mr Bakker?”
“Lee tells me that when you fought, you burnt blue. Your skin was on fire with flames the colour of your new eyes, and the rumour goes…”
“Yes?”
“… the rumour goes that the voices in the telephone stopped talking, when you came back, that the angels suddenly stopped singing their blue songs.”
I said nothing.
“Matthew?”
Nothing.
“What have you done, Matthew?” he whispered. “What did you think you could do?”
“Mr Bakker?”
“Yes?”
“Did you bring us back?”
Now he was silent on the other end of the line. A breath, a slow exhalation transmitted in zeros and ones to our ears. “My God,” he murmured.
“Did you bring us back?” we repeated.
“It’s true!” Not a confession: surprise, horror, perhaps a hint of delight in his voice.
“Mr Bakker?” we said.
“Matthew Swift, what deal did you make? What did you think you could do?!”
“We are coming for you,” we said. “We will not stop.”
We slammed the phone down onto the hook, and walked until we were me again, breathing furious, angry, frightened breaths, and the dawn light was starting to bring some warmth to the streets of the city.
In the Kingsway Exchange, for the whole of a non-day and a non-night, they prepared. The Whites painted every wall, sprayed every inch of glass, every door and every frame with their winding images, and when there was no more space left in the tunnels, they climbed up onto the streets and drew their creatures and their words onto the walls of the university library, and the Starbucks, and the closed shutters of the newsagents, and the pillars of the stations.
Below ground, the delegation of a dozen or so warlocks moved from room to room and blessed them in the names of the spirits from whom they drew their special powers: Harrow, Lord of the Alleyways; the Seven Sisters, Ladies of the Boundaries; Ravenscourt, Master of Scuttling Creatures; and of course, our personal favourite spirit to invoke – Upney, Grey Lord of Tar. Theirs was a borrowed magic of other powers; high priests in the service of skulking city shadows.
The Order kept themselves to themselves, but the street kids under the Whites’ protection, scampering from room to room with wide, marvelling eyes, whispered of enough weaponry to fight a war, and I believed them. I didn’t like to ask what the shapeshifters did, and they didn’t offer to tell. We all knew Lee would come. He would find us. Nothing would stop him now.
Blackjack found me, eventually, sitting with my back against an old, abandoned stack of telephone connectors, standing like an overgrown tombstone of dead wires and slots and metal frames and broken bulbs. Its presence comforted us, reminded us, in a strange small way, of our life before now, when we’d been on the other side of those wires, looking out.
He sat down next to me, considered his words, then said what I think he’d been intent on saying all along. “You look like a piece of rotting road kill.”
“Thanks.”
“Why the long face?”
“We don’t like waiting. Sitting around waiting for them to attack; we want to be outside, looking, exploring.”
“You’re talking in plurals again.”
“What?”
“‘We’,” he explained with an embarrassed expression.
“Sorry.”
He leant back nonchalantly against the bank of forgotten equipment, its edges flecked with rust, and pulled a small whisky flask out of his pocket. He downed a slurp and offered it to me. I took it and we risked a cautious gulp of the stuff; an acquired taste, we decided, although it grew in charm as it sunk deeper into our stomach. “So,” he said finally, in a strained voice that was leading to something more.
I waited.
“I got told I owe you for getting me away from the nutters with the guns.”
“The…”
“The Order.”
“Right. Yes.”
“Nice stunt; how’d you pull it?”
“I cursed the leader of the Order – Chaigneau – with a long and withering death,” I said. “He saw my point of view.”
“Bastard’s going to kill you, Matthew Swift,” he said brightly. “Just in case you hadn’t figured it out.”
“I know.”
“Although, if you need help when push comes to shove…”
“Thanks. I appreciate the offer.”
He gave me a long, sideways glance. “That means ‘no’, doesn’t it?”
“What?”
“You like working alone.”
“I… have nothing here,” I said, struggling to find the right words, caught off guard. “The people I trusted or thought I could trust either can’t be, or are gone. Vanished, dead. Or those who may live I put at risk by my presence – people will get hurt around us. Given those ci
rcumstances, wouldn’t you rather work alone?”
“Don’t get me wrong; I get the whole lone rider vibe,” he said, raising his hands in defence. “But I’m just saying: it’ll put you in the scrapyard twenty years earlier than might’ve been.”
“We think… that we are grateful for your concern,” we stumbled. “Thank you.”
“That’s a fucking weird thing you’ve got going there,” he grunted, turning away and half shaking his head, hand going towards the whisky flask again.
“What is?”
“For Christ’s sake, Matthew, this is a fucking telephone exchange! Do you think no one noticed when suddenly poof, the voices in the wire went missing? Do you know how many nerds in basements were watching those rogue pieces of frequency, the bursts of inexplicable interference in the system? One second there’s a semi-demonic power whispering out of the telephone to anyone with half the senses to hear it, and the next second it’s just gone! And there you are, walking around with bright blue eyes and a bewildered crap expression and, you know, it doesn’t take a million brain cells to work it out. That’s what’s so fucking weird, the way you can’t work out if you’re even bloody human any more.”
I looked away, ashamed. We mumbled, “We… meant no harm.”
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered.
We looked up sharply, trying to read his voice, his words. His eyes were fixed on an opposite bank of dead machinery as, with shaky fingers, he unscrewed the top of his whisky flask. “We also have nothing here, except what I remember, and that’s largely gone. We did not mean for any of this to happen; we hope you will understand.”
“This is a new one,” he groaned.
“What is?”
“Me talking to a bloody mystic power no less, disguised as a guy with a face like a soggy sandbag.” Clumsily he touched his forehead with a couple of fingers and smiled. “Nice to meet you, blue bloody electric bloody angels. How you doing?”
We looked him straight in the eye and said, “Things have been better.”
“I bet they bloody have.” He waved the whisky flask at us again; we shook our head.
