by Kate Griffin
“Was that Matthew or the angels saying no?” he asked. “Just in case one of you’s teetotal.”
“We are the same,” we said. “The distinction is merely one of presentation and form. To us… all things are new. Humans and the things they do. We were made by them… but had never experienced them before. As for me… I just want to get on with it. When we blaze, when we fight, when we rejoice, then I am all us, for that is all we are. When I am… afraid… we do not understand, do not like these things. We are me. It is… frightening, having to be me.” I caught his expression, somewhere trapped between genuinely bemused and hopefully open. I shrugged. “And I’m not teetotal. Thank you. I’d just like to keep a clear head.”
“Things are very weird,” said Blackjack.
“There,” we said, “we also agree.”
We waited in those tunnels for another two days before it happened. By the time it did, I almost believed that it wasn’t going to, that Lee had got his head screwed back on right, that Bakker wouldn’t order it, that they wouldn’t come. No one said it; but we had begun to think it even after the first night. It was hard to tell whether I felt disappointment or hope when Vera woke me up with a shake in the dark and murmured, “Come. Now.”
I followed her through tunnels lined with sleeping bags below still-damp paint, stepping over the hunched forms of snoozing weremen, the curled-up shapes of slumbering warlocks and around the heavy black, weapon-laden bags of the Order, until we dropped down a narrow flight of grey concrete stairs, illuminated by a single light that sat in the wall like a squid clinging to the side of a sunken ship. The shadows here were almost thick enough to swirl like fog, and at the bottom, by a heavy, shut iron door, there lay a body, almost floating in a puddle of its own accumulated blood.
Holding up an electric lamp to see more clearly, Vera said in a hushed voice, “The door leads down to the Post Office tunnels. Trains used to go through there to the sorting offices. It’s not marked on the map.”
I said nothing and squatted down on the steps just above the body. Repulsed and fascinated, we reached out without thinking, even as our stomach turned, and carefully prodded the side of the broken man. His skin was still warm through the remnants of his clothes, and as we pushed his body over we saw that something had torn open his belly, dragged out a handful of intestines and wrapped them round the man’s middle a few times, like a badly knitted belt. We tasted bile in our throat and felt a physical convulsion through our body as our heart skipped a beat, and stood up quickly, backing a few steps and suddenly not sure what to do with the blood on our fingers, running them over the wall to try and wipe it off.
“Is it Bakker?” hissed Vera. “Are they here? Is it Lee?”
“They’re coming,” I answered. “But it’s not Bakker.”
I snatched the lantern from out of her hands and held it close to myself, sweeping it from side to side in front of me; as the bright light moved around my feet, my shadow, stretching out behind me, did not move with it, but simply grew longer and thinner, like a rubber band being drawn towards breaking point. We felt a laugh grow in our throat, shrill and frightened, and I bit down hard to contain it, so the sound that came out was more like a whimper.
“What is it?” Vera could see how the light didn’t bend the shadows at our feet, and was smart enough to be scared.
“Something much, much worse,” I declared, handing the lantern back to her. “Wake everyone up. Don’t let anyone go around in groups of less than five, or without a strong light. Tell them that Lee’s coming.”
To the best of my knowledge, this is what happened in the Kingsway Exchange; but in such chaos, even with the best of intentions, it is hard to tell.
Guy Lee had an army at his command. It wasn’t a big army, nor was it well disciplined; but when the individual soldiers of the said army can blend their skin to the colour of concrete or burst bubbles of burning hydrogen in the pipes above your head or scream with the roar of the exploding fuel tank on the back of a bus in billows of black fumes, size doesn’t matter. They’d been paid, bribed, threatened, blackmailed, cajoled, promised, and coaxed into working for Lee, and when the survivors were questioned they all whispered that somewhere, behind it all, they knew what Lee was. Not just a man with a will: a servant of the Tower. And those who disobeyed the Tower did not live to regret their mistake for more than a few days of blood loss and pain.
They entered the old, forgotten Post Office train tunnels at the Mount Pleasant sorting office, a truly unpleasant collection of tin roofs and grey walls that sat beside heavy fuming traffic at the junction of Rosebery Avenue and Farringdon Road. They slipped down through the darkness, their way lit up by the witches who coaxed the mould around the leaking pipes to fluoresce into vibrant light and guide the travellers on their way to the Exchange. They didn’t know how Lee had known where to go. They said there was a traitor somewhere within the Whites. It could have been anyone.
The watchman on the Post Office tunnel was called Yixiao, a White from Brixton who specialised in inscribing his spells in towering green letters on the brick cuttings of railway lines, and in his youth had been part of a gang who labelled themselves MORTON BOYZ in big black letters across the wheelie bins of their local estates. That was before Yixiao had discovered, to his surprise, that the crows he drew in the daytime flapped their way across the white walls of the tower blocks at night, squawking the words “caw caw” in squiggly small black letters from their beaks across the paint on the walls, before sunrise forced them to land again across the garage doors where they’d first been painted. In the tunnels behind the big iron doors that he guarded, he’d painted on the encrusted walls, their surface finely textured with layers of solid dirt built up over the years, the images of his coal-coloured crows, who patrolled up and down the corridor every night to see who might be coming in the dark, and shrieked with silent letters their warnings across the concrete walls, for Yixiao’s hearing only.
Doubtless he had seen the advancing troops of Lee’s army as they marched down the forgotten tunnels, and was doubtless on his way to sound the alarm when he’d met his untimely end, claws scratching at his eyes, tearing straight through his cheeks to reveal the teeth inside, ripping out his belly and playing with its contents like a child fascinated by a new toy – had I known that this would be how he’d die? Perhaps. One more thing about which it was best not to think.
However Yixiao had died, Vera had always speculated that they would come through the Post Office tunnels, and whatever she thought of my role in letting the man meet his end, she said nothing about it as she started to sound the alarm. The problem was that Guy Lee didn’t just come up from the tunnels – he came in through the underground, from the ventilation shafts, and from the street, and all at once.
This, more than anything, is why I still do not, to this day, fully know the secrets of the dead of the Kingsway Telephone Exchange. Did some die that day who didn’t need to? Did the Order aim every shot at enemies, or were a few friends caught in the fire? Did the were-men fight their own, did the Whites stand or run?
Sometimes, it is better for the historian to wait until their subjects really are dead and gone, just in case no one wants to hear the truth.
This, then, is what I saw.
I don’t know where I was when I felt the first shudder of the first explosion. The concrete surfaces blended into each other, the endless colours and paintings just one long bad hallucination trip. The shock of the blasts sent shimmers of concrete dust down from the ceiling; it hummed through the exposed pipes and tangled wires that ran across the roof, with a high-pitched ringing note, like the striking of a distant church bell that lingered even after the thud through the air had faded. I knew where I was meant to be – finding Lee and dispatching him before he could hurt us – but as the corridors filled with running bodies and shapes and shouting people pushing and shoving and racing with eyes wild and a scent of the animal about them, I followed my own shadow, let it guide me as it twis
ted across the floor in front of my footsteps.
Just because you can use magic, that doesn’t mean it’s always the best tool for the job. Guy Lee understood this and had put explosive charges on the sealed-off metal doorways down to the tunnels beneath the street, blasting them in with a cacophony that set the car alarms wailing, along with the burglar alarms of all the lawyers’ chambers and the local university buildings that were now howling into the dark. Then, just to make his point, he started pumping in tear gas through the ventilation shafts. I noticed it first as a puff of white drifting vapour trickling out from a crack in the ceiling, and an odd smell that couldn’t be defined by the nose so much as the stomach, where it burnt its way to the centre of the body’s mass, gripped its tight, sticky hot fingers around my middle, and twisted.
I dropped to my hands and knees instinctively as the vapour started to fill the corridor, and tried to find an appropriate spell, fingers scrabbling on the cold, dry floor for a handful of warm, solid magic to throw up around me, blasting the thicker plumes of white gas away. Before I could do so, a hand fell on my shoulder and another grabbed at the back of my head, pulling me up even as the first dribbles of bile started pouring down from my mouth and nose. Something hot, rubber and heavy was pulled down over my eyes and mouth, and then tightened at the back of my head, and a hand pushed me back against the painted wall as the clouds of impenetrable smoke billowed around us, gushing out of the ceiling like a waterfall on the edge of freezing. I blinked through the condensation-dripping lenses of the mask that had been pulled down over my nose and eyes and saw the dark eyes of Oda blink back at me through the black, nozzle-like thing over her own face. She was trying to speak, but the words were nothing more than a muffled mmmwhhh through the layers of plastic between us and the infected air. She was silenced by another series of short booms that I felt as much as heard, like the sensation of a lift suddenly stopping in mid-descent, all the parts of the air moving too quickly around us in different directions.
Oda hefted a rifle that looked like it hadn’t been manufactured so much as carved out of some primal black void, and tugged at my sleeve. I shook my head and pulled away, trying to find my shadow on the floor through the smoke, and when I couldn’t, I crawled over to a wall, holding up the lamp to see my own shape cast on the concrete. For a moment, just a moment, the shadow that I cast, thick and black against the close brightness of the lantern, looked up, looked straight at me, flexed its fingers into a clawlike spread, and opened its wings.
The lights went out in the tunnels, spitting into nothing on the ceiling and on the walls by the doors. My shadow was suddenly gone, melted into a rising backdrop of blackness, and only my lantern was alight in that place. Oda looked at me and despite the mask, her face, her entire body language, was an open question. I looked around but saw nothing but stretching, rectangular, contained blackness in either direction, until at one end I also saw the movement of torchlight struggling to break through the billows of gas and smoke, and heard distant muffled bangs and tasted the scent of magic. In that darkness we did not want to chase our shadow, regardless of what it might be up to; not yet. So we pulled at Oda’s sleeve and ran towards that light.
The torchlight splitting the gloom of the corridor belonged to the bikers; and it wasn’t torchlight, but firelight, oily orange, dripping off the ends of flaming rags that each one twirled at arm’s length. For all their fire, spitting red droplets onto the floor, the ignited rags didn’t seem to be getting any shorter as the bikers swung them into darkened and empty rooms of endless stained paint and broken machines, which looked more and more like electronic tombs as we hurried through the dark. The bikers all wore helmets – some painted with white angels, or a skull and crossbones, or a spider stretched out in all its furry detail, or a dart heading towards a bullseye, or other such symbols of identification – and all wore goggles and had a scarf over their nose and mouth; implausibly, this seemed protection enough for them as they moved slowly, confidently, through the tunnels. They swung crowbars, lengths of chain, even the odd spanner at the end of their leather-covered arms.
They didn’t run, but their walk was… odd. A subtle shifting of perspective, perhaps, a magic so fleeting and hard to define that all we could say of its nature was that in one step we were by a white door with the words “Storage B08” written on it, and two steps later we were at the end of the corridor and looking back to see at least thirty steps behind, the door that only a moment ago we’d glanced at. Chicken or egg – what moved us more? Us walking, or the world moving beneath us? Perhaps the bikers, at least, knew the answer.
We found a small hall that I imagined had once been used as a canteen by the telecom workers; and there we also found the mercenaries. At first, we didn’t recognise them for what they were, and the whole crowd of us stood uncertainly in the doorway, staring at these men dressed in gas masks and black, wondering if they were part of the Order or not. In that moment of uncertainty, it was they who recognised us as adversaries – and they threw themselves at us with alarming speed. I guessed they were mercenaries by the markings on their skin – in many ways like San Khay’s, swirls of power and magic embedded in their flesh. But unlike San Khay, this wasn’t just a tattoo – the mercenaries had carved their magic into their skin with knives, and each of them wore precisely the same symbols of strength across their flesh as their brothers.
The fight in that hall was a confusion of shadows and black-clad bodies caught in the unsteady light of flames. I saw the bikers slash through the air with their crowbars, and as they did, the gashed air poured out fire from where it was torn. I saw the mercenaries leave the surface of the floor and dance a few paces across the ceiling before dropping, nails-first, towards the eyes of their nearest enemies; I saw bikers hurl their lengths of chain, which ignited with the colour of boiling oil, flying and coiling like living things and following the enemy through every twist and dive like a writhing Chinese dragon. When the bikers screamed, their voices were the roar of an engine firing; when they spun, the air whipped around them like they moved at eighty miles an hour; and when their blood dripped onto the floor – perhaps it was the light – it had the look of engine oil.
Watching the mêlée, I moved my fingers through the air in search of subtler powers that might let me help my allies and harm my enemies, without doing both to each in that confined space. Oda, however, had little patience to see what we might do, and stepped briskly past us, dropping her rifle and pulling instead, from a sheath across her back, a sword.
The likely effect of a sword in that place was ugly, especially when wielded by a faceless figure in a gas mask. When Oda stepped into that fight, she moved the blade like it was a ribbon in her hand; and slowly the horror dawned on us, the realisation, that for Oda as she stepped neatly round each flailing figure and ducked each tattooed swipe from a mercenary’s knife, she was dancing, and as with all good dances, she was enjoying it: each swish of the blade through another person’s flesh, and every turn of her foot to meet some oncoming attack, and every flicker of shadow, and every movement of her arms – she relished it.
And for a distracted moment, we watched her, horrified, delighted. Then a voice whispered in our ear out of the darkness, “Hello, Matthew’s fire.” We spun round, unleashing a fistful of crackling electricity from the wires overhead into the space where the words had come from; but there was nothing there except shadows moving across the wall. I saw one dance away towards the end of the corridor; it wasn’t moving right; its shape was too defined for all that darkness. I grabbed two fistfuls of electricity from the ceiling and ran, racing after it down the corridor, snatching the lamp in one burning blue hand and holding it up to light my way. At the end of the corridor I reached a set of heavy, shut iron doors. I hesitated, then put down my lamp, let the electricity out of my fingers, and pressed my ear to the door. The metal felt oddly warm to the touch, and through it, very faintly I could hear the clink clink clink of machinery, and feel the hum of a growing elect
ric current.
Realisation hit; I was halfway up the corridor and throwing myself face first towards the concrete floor, hands over my head, willing the concrete to open up beneath me and encase me in its hold, feeling it warp obediently to the shape of my body as I fell, when the vaultlike doorway exploded. My ears probably popped, it was hard to tell behind the overwhelming punch dealt straight to the eardrum by the force of that bang. I felt the tips of my hair curl up in indignity at the heat that rushed over them, the pressure and force of it racing across my back, raising hot bloody blisters through my clothes, which smoked on the edge of flame.
I didn’t bother to see who was coming through the hole behind me, but staggered up, crawled a few paces towards the opening of the corridor, then pulled myself round the corner and slumped against the wall while waiting for the static to fade from my eyes. I heard shouting behind me and tasted sickly bright magic, smelt the stench of the sewers, right at the back of my throat; and instantly had a name for the people coming up that corridor. And didn’t want to think about it.
Deep Night Downers. A clan not unlike the Whites – a collection of like-minded magically inclined individuals – a conglomeration of magicians who understood that the city you saw in daylight, and on the surface, was only a lie, an illusion sustained by all the things going on underneath, and at night – the lorries delivering food to the shops between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m., and the men cleaning the congealed fat from the sewers, painting lines onto the roads when all the traffic had stopped, changing the bulbs in the street lamps, checking the rails in the underground, fixing the water pipes when no one was awake to want something to drink, and listening for the wires under the streets – the Downers understood that all these things had to happen for the city to survive, and they drew their power from it, a slick, invisible, pulsing presence of magic, that was almost imperceptible by daylight and became most powerful at 3 a.m., flooding the streets with its subtle, silvery glow.
