by Kate Griffin
“What happened to you?” she asked.
I coughed dust in answer.
“Head hurt?”
I nodded.
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Three.”
“Know what day it is?”
I thought about it. “No,” I said, surprised to find it was the case. “Not really.”
“Can you walk?”
“Perhaps.”
“Any demonic magic you’ve got useful right now?”
I laughed through the dryness of my throat, and regretted it as the movement of my lungs sent pain racing all the way to my elbows. “Nothing,” I whispered. “Nothing.”
She hesitated, her face draining of all feeling, becoming suddenly cold. She looked suddenly stiff by my side, eyes fixed on mine, mouth hard. Fear wriggled into my belly and started doing the cancan all across my stomach wall. She didn’t move, didn’t speak.
I croaked, “You still…” The words became tangled behind my trembling tongue. “You still – need me.”
No answer; her hands didn’t move, her face didn’t change.
“Not yet,” I whispered. “Please. Not yet.”
Her eyes darkened, then a half-smile flitted across her face. “Maybe not,” she answered. “A conversation for another time.”
I grabbed her wrist as she started to stand, and to my surprise, she didn’t try to pull free. “What about… everything else? What about the Whites?”
“Lee is dead, isn’t he?” she said, sounding surprised. “Half his goons just died with paper in their mouths – isn’t that a sign? What does anything else matter?”
“It matters to me,” I rasped.
There was a look in her eyes, taken aback; but the mask was so finely drawn and so expert, it was down in a second over whatever she felt. She said, “Come on. Let’s get you out of here,” and put an arm under my shoulder and, a bit at a time, and with surprising gentleness, helped me to my feet.
Part 3: The Madness of Angels
In which things must end.
Hospitals. Life suspended. Not our favourite place.
Oda told no one where we went, and I did not, in honesty, even know that the place existed – a private ward somewhere south of the river, where the nurses were all old, loud, and, by implication, far too experienced to tolerate any sort of strop or independent thinking from their patients. They fed us boiled vegetables and slices of overcooked meat, until Oda, to my surprise, brought us ice cream, which we ate by the tub.
The attending doctor, a small, infinitely cheerful woman who introduced herself with “Hi, I’m Dr Seah – hey, who beat you up? Jesus,” and who wore a long stethoscope that went almost down to her waist, informed me that I had a nasty cut to the back of my head but no need for stitches, several cracked ribs that necessitated my staying still while the world moved around me, a twisted ankle and various lacerations, burns and bruises, some on the inside, that only time and a good diet could heal. We were furious at the vulnerability of our own body, but we scattered wards as best we could around the bed, threatening to walk out, healed or otherwise unless they were left untouched by the cleaners, and, despite ourself, we obeyed the doctor’s orders, and stayed in bed. From our room we could see the sun rise, and watch the shadows bend to long, luminous angles as it set in the west, and the regular cycle of days and nights had never seemed more reassuring than it did then. Of Hunger, we saw and felt nothing. Perhaps we had frightened him more than we thought; we didn’t know and didn’t want to.
The only person I saw in that time confined was Oda. She would arrive every day at 11 a.m. precisely with a new pile of books and some new secret food smuggled in past the wary eye of the nurse and the cheerfully unfussed eye of the doctor (“You know, I figure… fuck it!”), and sit by my bed saying not a word unless I spoke first, until exactly 6.30 p.m., at which point she’d stand up and say, “There’s a guard downstairs who’ll watch you,” and pull on her coat.
“Shouldn’t it be ‘look after me’?”
“What?”
“Shouldn’t the guard be looking after me, rather than just watching me? Watching makes it sound like I’m a prisoner, instead of the valiant injured.”
“In that case, he’ll do both,” she said, and without further comment, swept out of the room, leaving me alone with the radio headphones and the latest three-for-two book offers from the bookshop down by the riverside market.
Days passed and they were, I realised, little better than the passing of days when I had been underground. Down in the Exchange, though time had been a sunless, timeless series of patiently ticking events, at least underground the non-today and non-tomorrow had kept me occupied. In the hospital, the day was well enough defined by the rising and setting of the sun outside my window, but there were no events to make yesterday any different from today, or tomorrow any better than the day after.
To keep ourself busy we read books, tuning down our worries and fears into the strange, artificial reaction of feelings in the face of ink and paper, until we forgot that we were doing anything so mechanical as reading; the things we saw simply were, rather than being a conglomeration of syllables. Thus, drifting through the best of the three-for-two offers, we managed for a while to forget the passing of time.
I don’t know what day it was when Oda came in, her bag of books slung under one arm and a paper bag of bread rolls and salami hidden in her jacket pocket, and I asked, “Who knows I’m here?”
“Me, Chaigneau, the men guarding you.”
“Just the Order? What about Vera?”
“What about her?”
“Shouldn’t she know?”
“The Whites are alive. Guy is dead. Half the people he employed have expired with bits of paper in their throats; everyone’s up in arms against what’s left of his men. They had to hire a lorry to get the bodies out to Essex for a burial.” She saw my face and her eyes narrowed. “You look like a wet tissue. Isn’t that what you wanted? Lee dead, his army broken?”
“A lorry of bodies?”
“Get used to the idea. Sacrifices have to be made. Besides, they were mostly the other side.”
“I didn’t mean for… I didn’t think that…”
“No, you didn’t think that, did you?” she said, slicing open a bread roll with a penknife and loading it with folded salami. “But it’s fine. You didn’t think about it and it happened and it’s a good thing it happened and frankly we should all be pleased that it did. So go on and pretend you’re guilty that people died if you must, but do it somewhere else, please? It was necessary.”
She handed me a roll with an imperious tilt of an eyebrow. I took it automatically and rubbed the thin white flour on its top between my fingers for a moment, then licked my fingers clean again before taking a careful bite. Oda watched all this and, for almost the first time since she’d sat vigil by my side, spoke without being spoken to.
“Tell me about the paper.”
I mumbled incoherent throwaway noises through a mouthful of salami and chewed more slowly.
“How does paper keep someone alive?”
There was a neediness to her voice; so, resignedly, I swallowed, put the rest of the roll to one side, folded my arms and said, “What do you want to know?”
“Paper. Explain to me about the paper.”
“It’s nothing too special.”
“Then it won’t tax you too much to tell me about it.”
“There is a history of… people trying to stay alive under unusual circumstances. In the good, old-fashioned days, magicians would pluck out their own heart and encase it in a lead chest dropped at the bottom of a well where no one could ever find it, thus gaining a degree of invulnerability – hard to kill someone when you can’t stop their heart beating. Problem with that, of course, is that if you become too hard to kill, too invulnerable, then all the other bugger need do is cut off your arms, head and legs, scatter them in twenty different places, chained to a rock, and there you are, still al
ive, head on a spike in Newcastle, scrabbling arms chained to a wall in Cardiff, and heart still beating, senses still functioning, still alive, still not dead; just in pain. You can be too safe, you see – and what’s the point of being alive unless there is a progress, a journey, and somewhere, at some point, an end? What else other than that motivation makes us really live, the sense that this is a chance we must use, and now? Think of the laziness of immortality – so easy to say ‘tomorrow’ for ever.”
“I was hoping for a technical explanation; thank you anyway.”
“I’m telling it to you as…”
“As what?”
“As it was told to me.”
She grunted, but said nothing more.
I wiped my mouth with my sleeve and tried again. “Necromancers go other ways – traditional magics that will never lose their validity, I fear – blood of the newborn babe, or even better, placentas, transplants from blessed vessels of Godly might, vampirism, reanimation, possession and so on and so forth. The modern medical era has made it easier; you’d be amazed how useful the MRI scanner has been to necromancers. But it is a messy business, unhygienic, usually defined by bad complexions, spots and rapid hair loss; and besides, it causes a lot of attention and provides little gain. Dead is dead is dead; even if it’s walking and talking, the flesh decays – nothing yet, that I know of, can stop time.”
“You know a lot about this.”
“I was well taught.”
“Bakker?”
“Yes. Why do you think he hasn’t tried any of these things? He is desperate to stay alive, determined to survive at any cost – but he understands that life, real life, is much more than just survival in dead bones. He wants to live in every way. He wouldn’t try necromancy.”
“But Lee did?”
“Sort of. A different kind of ripping out of the heart, you might say. The magician writes on a piece of paper certain incantations, a few spells of a kind that usually are old enough and vague enough, that have been through endless mistranslations, to carry consequences, and to that adds a few compulsions. To the servants of the magician, usually there’s a clause in there to obey and serve, to never wither until he commands, to feel no pain unless in failure. But when a magician does it to himself, swallows that paper with those enchantments, the words are usually… aspirations.”
“Aspirations?”
“Things like, ‘I am a good man’, or ‘I will never age’ or ‘My favourite colour is blue’ or ‘I will be for ever powerful’ or ‘I will not sleep’ or…”
“Why?”
“Because you die when you eat the paper,” I explained, surprised at the sharpness of her voice. “You choke on it, you have to swallow it whole and it kills you, invariably; it’s part of the deal. That’s why it’s magic – at that instant, the paper absorbs your death, your… well, I suppose, life – it absorbs your dying breath and that gives it life, the words on the paper define who you are from that instant onwards; define everything about you. You’re not technically dead, because there’s still your life inside your body. But unlike a heart in a box you can die if the paper is removed; the spell is broken, it is a guarantee against extreme eternal agony, and at the same time…”
“A form of invulnerability?”
“Close.”
“But… when you fought Guy Lee, you hurt him?”
“No. I hurt his flesh – he felt nothing. There was no pain in him until I actually pulled the paper out of his throat; the spell probably went with an ‘I will feel no pain’ clause – it’s fairly standard.”
“What happened when you pulled it out?”
“Imagine having a metre and a half of rolled-up paper stuffed down your throat and suddenly becoming aware of it,” I answered. “Then guess.”
She nodded slowly, eyes elsewhere. Finally she said, “What about… the others. The dead with the paper…”
“A basic command. I’m guessing that the warlock I met wasn’t dead when Lee found him, merely dying, and that Lee pushed a simple spell of obedience down his throat when he died, catching his last breath in its snare, trapping it in his lungs. Not alive, not dead, just… bound. The magic of a dying breath is a powerful thing.”
“Even today?”
“Even today. Christ,” I muttered, “what do you think? Life is magic! Where there is life there is magic! Sure, the magic is in the city, in the street, in the neon lamp and the coughing pigeon and the stray cat and the sewers and the cars and the smell of dirt; that’s something new – but life really hasn’t changed so much. Certain things – blood, skin, breath, words, paper, ink – will always have their own very special power, one which I don’t think will ever really change.”
She thought about it, then nodded again. In a voice that wasn’t entirely there, her eyes fixed on some distant, other place, she said, “Is that why Bakker wants you alive?”
“What makes you think…”
“I found one of Lee’s men. I asked him things.”
“You…”
“I asked him things,” she repeated firmly, eyes flashing bright and angry towards me. “That’s all. He said they were under orders not to harm the sorcerer.”
I shrugged.
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“Not really.”
“Why?”
“Oda, you know why Bakker and I argued.”
“He wanted you to help him summon the blue electric angels and you said no.”
“He wanted me to summon us, so that he could feed off our power, off our life, use it to sustain him. He wanted to force us from the telephone, get us into the world of flesh where we would be vulnerable so he could steal our essence – we are creatures of left-over life, creations of surplus feeling whispered into electric energy – to his eyes, we are the answer to his problem. He desires life and we are all that he desires. And here we are, trapped in this skin, vulnerable, just like he always wanted.”
“I see.”
“Would you betray us?”
“Me?”
“It is always a fear.”
She made no answer.
“We… do not know who we should trust. When we were in the blue, there was no need for ‘friend’. We were all the same, our thoughts burnt off each other with static fire, we were one, never alone. Here, things are different.”
“My breaking heart,” retorted Oda with a scowl.
I glared and snatched up the rest of my salami roll, biting into it to hide my anger. Not hiding it very well, clearly, since Oda sat up straighter and said, “I didn’t mean that…” She hesitated, then made a grunting sound, relaxing. “Chaigneau hates you,” she said finally.
“It’s mutual.”
“You embarrassed him.”
“It’s something I’m good at.”
“It’s more than that – you tainted him. He’s now been touched by magic.”
“So? He’s a killer of magicians, a paladin of narrow-minded insanity; surely it’s good to know his enemy?”
“He doesn’t believe you’ve really lifted the curse you put on him.”
“Why not?”
“He won’t say.”
“Is this another of his paranoid irrationalities coming through?”
“Did you undo what you did to him?” she asked sharply.
I met her eyes, unafraid of her cold glare. “Yes.”
Another hesitation – perhaps something more too? “If you live,” she said finally, “if you meet Bakker and have your revenge, if you kill him – what will you do then?”
“I don’t know.” I thought about it. “Clearly Chaigneau will try to kill me, the instant all this is over. So either you and I become implacable enemies, or I run away to another city and learn French or something.”
“He’ll find you.”
“Then you and I become enemies,” I answered. “And if I survive that…” There was nothing on her face to answer the hopeful enquiry in my voice, so I just said, “If I survive your Order, then… I don’t
know. My CV isn’t great; and, besides, there’s this two-year gap where I vanished, which employers will assume was spent in prison. I don’t have any money that isn’t obtained by the use of a spell; I don’t have a home; I don’t even know what’s happened to my friends. I just… I don’t know. Maybe I’ll pack up and go. Head out to some other place and start again. Go back to being eighteen with just my qualifications and a week’s work experience, wipe everything else clean, say I had cancer or something. Maybe be someone else, get a false name, try discretion and tact for a change. It could be an adventure.”
“What about them?”
“Them?”
She tapped the side of her head conspiratorially and said, “Them with the blue eyes.”
We thought about it, and grinned. “We will find joy in all life, anywhere. To be whoever we want to be… nothing but joy.”
“Doesn’t sound joyous to me,” said Oda.
“That’s because you don’t like living without certainties,” I replied. “You’re just afraid.”
“I am not!”
“It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Fear is the art of being alive – without fear there’s no bravery, no heroism, no…”
“Shut up,” she exclaimed.
I raised my hands defensively. “Sorry – I’m sorry. Is there anything else to eat?”
We lost patience before I was due to be discharged; in the middle of the night I got up, wrote Oda a brief and reasonably polite note, gathered up what few clothes we could find, and slipped out of the hospital, into the empty streets. Cold air on our face and hard pavement under our feet was a bliss we could not describe.
I spent the next day replenishing my stock – I found a new cardboard ad offering the services of “***PLAYFUL SEXY CHICK!!!!***” and scribbled my symbols of magic onto its back with a biro, sliding it into the ATM to withdraw enough money for my day of shopping. I bought new clothes and replenished my supply of tools for the trade – then went to the dry-cleaners and sat and waited while they struggled to remove the endless swirls of paint, dust, smoke, dirt and blood from the fabric of my coat and the surface of my bag. The result looked like a faded clown’s costume that had once been dyed beige, but the fabric felt warm and dense, a weight without which I would have felt naked. For lunch I had a curry at the local tandoori house, dipping poppadoms into every chutney and spice. We were determined to find out what even the fiery red one was like, having avoided it in my previous life, and found that there were indeed flavours that could make our teeth burn. In the afternoon I booked myself into a hotel, and that evening, I went out for a drink.
