A Madness of Angels ms-1

by Kate Griffin

  I met her by the bar of a small jazz café near Hyde Park. She said her name was Felicity, and that it was nice of me to try, but she wasn’t really interested. I told her I just wanted to have a conversation and she answered that that was what everyone said, that men were all the same. But she didn’t say no when I bought her a drink; and we talked about the weather, the price of tickets on the underground, the embarrassment of our current politicians and all their useless prancing for the media, and what was on television, until at last I felt human again, and when it was time to say goodbye, we kissed and promised never to see each other again.

  When I dreamt that night, I didn’t wake up with the taste of paper in my mouth, and that, I concluded, could only be a good sign.

  The next day I bought a mobile phone – the first I’d ever bought in my life – and rang the hospital where I’d been staying until they put me through to Dr Seah, who after a lot of umming and aaahing and “Have you been in a fight yet?” agreed to ring Oda and give her my number.

  Oda rang me no more than ten minutes later. She was not a happy person.

  “You bastard! I’ll kill you if you ever do that again!”

  “Hello to you too.”

  “Where the hell did you think you were going, what did you think you were doing, you can’t just…”

  “I needed some air.”

  “You needed two days of air without telling me? Just walking off into the dark like you were… what if something had happened?!”

  “Please don’t try concern; you’re much better at indignation.”

  “If you ever pull something like that again…”

  “Oh please, like the sniper rifle isn’t gleaming through the window already,” I said. “I’m calling now, aren’t I?”

  “You’re a selfish pig, sorcerer. A lying, selfish pig.”

  “I just thought I’d let you know I’m OK.”

  A calmer edge entered her voice. “I’ve got something to tell you.”

  “Is it abusive?”

  “Sinclair woke up.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know – they moved him the second he gained consciousness.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “His assistant.”

  “Charlie?”

  “If that’s his name.”

  “You know where?”

  “I just said I didn’t.”

  “Right – got any way to contact him?”

  “No.”

  “Then how do you know he woke up?”

  “Because he’s not in the morgue and he’s not in the hospital, what do you think?”

  “All right, thanks. I’ll try and find him.” I hung up quickly, before she could shout any more.

  I spent the day with the pigeons, on a bench in Trafalgar Square, my bag of belongings huddled to my chest in case someone thought of taking them, and a pile of breadcrumbs at my feet. I let the pigeons congregate around me, listening to their thoughts, too brief and insubstantial to be anything other than a glimpse of yellow sound or sight. Eventually a local warden came up to me and said, “Sir, we ask people not to feed the pigeons,” with such an expression of civic determination that I pretended not to understand English. Instead, I lisped my way through various “eh?” sounds until, having exhausted his two words of French and three of Spanish, he concluded that, since I was neither nationality, I wasn’t worth the bother.

  Though the pigeons’ thoughts were too fleeting to give me anything really coherent, I lingered in their minds, drifting with them over the rooftops, until a tingling on the edge of my senses warned me that my own body was starting to get pins and needles. London from above only emphasised how dense, furious and busy it was; with the height of the houses obscuring the streets, all you could see was building on building, stretching as far as the pigeon’s sight could perceive, way beyond Alexandra Palace on its hilltop to the north, and then beyond that by quite a way, and south as far as the Downs, whose slopes were obscured by sprawling suburbs. At ground level, it was harder to remember that only a few metres away was another street running parallel, and another and another, each filled with as many people as those you could see. Doubtless they had the same sense of significance as I felt when I went about my day, all of them walking at the Londoner’s brisk speed to their own Very Important Meeting Thank You. It was only the pigeons overhead who understood the scale of the city.

  The rats were more useful. Their brains were sharper, and as I sat by the dumpsters behind a restaurant in Chinatown, letting them flock around me and nibble at the chocolate I’d bought for their delight, their noses picked out scents that the pigeon brain was simply too harried to consider. A flash of strong, unusual scent – creatures that were sometimes rats and sometimes foxes and sometimes neither. I dabbled my senses in the rats’ memories, felt the claws flex at my fingers and a pelt of dark, greasy fur on my back, remembered how it was to sense the width of the tunnel with the twitching of my whiskers and to smell the tantalising poison of the rat-catcher being laid down three floors above me.

  In the evening, I sat by the Regent’s Canal, near Caledonian Road, with a hamburger in a box and waited in the drizzle for the foxes. They came along the towpath, limping in the twilight from badly healed injuries or scampering with uncertain fearfulness out of their holes, and nuzzled at the hamburger with their curious black noses, sniffing through the stench of their own matted fur for a scent of something interesting.

  I stroked them behind the ears, and through that contact borrowed their senses, searching their brief memories for a recollection of something out of place. A flash of an unfamilar smell, the sound of unusual movements, the image of a creature that resembled a fox but wasn’t quite of the right mould. Weremen left all sorts of interesting scents across the city, to which the animals were perhaps more sensitive than even the average alert magician. I took the sensations gleaned from the rats, the foxes and the pigeons, who along with the beggars and the dustbin men probably see and know more than anyone else in the city, and followed the wavering smells they’d detected, to where the strongest sense of something out of place seemed to combine; the smell led north, to the wide, tree-shaded streets of Muswell Hill.

  To most of the population of London, Muswell Hill is simply a name. An interesting name – unlike many, there is no easy guess at how it arose. Certainly there’s a hill, but was there a Mr Muswell who named it, or was it simply well mussed? It has none of the easy recognition of Bishopsgate or Aldersgate – the gates for bishops and aldermen, in their times – nor of Westminster nor Kings Cross – each with a physical feature to give it a name. More, it was hemmed in by places that had tube stations, whose very presence on the underground map made recognition a hundred times easier – Wood Green, Finsbury Park, Crouch End – so that Muswell Hill tended to exist in relation to somewhere else.

  The scents and memories I had gleaned from the animals weren’t enough to pin down the wereman’s location to one particular house, not least since the red-bricked, heavy doorways of every street seemed identical, and the long, curved avenues made it hard to judge which way was north or south.

  From the overall impression got from the pigeons, foxes and rats, I focused on a block of four streets. These encased a series of terraced Edwardian houses, whose windows featured rectangles of stained glass set above the larger panes, to give an impression of traditional gentility rendered on a reasonable budget.

  The glances of the foxes and the swoops of the pigeons gave me no clue as to street number, and there were too many houses for me to start knocking on doors. But after wandering for a while I found a flat green telephone switchbox tucked into a corner of one road; and with much banging, and levering with the end of my penknife, I finally coaxed the cover off it, to reveal the circuits inside. I pulled out my newly purchased mobile phone and, from my paint-splatted satchel, a thread. I tied the thread round the phone at one end, and round
a single wire in the telephone box at the other, turned on my phone, spread out my coat under me and sat down to wait.

  In a while, my phone started to talk.

  “Hello, love, uni treating you OK? Hum. Hum. Yes, Dad’s here too…”

  “I just want you to talk to me! Is that so much to ask? Just talk and…”

  “Three pizzas with the mushroom topping and the… no, the mushroom… yes and the… no, crispy crust…”

  “Look, I was really sorry to hear about…”

  “Tomorrow evening? Yeah, great, what shall I wear?”

  As my phone caught the signals travelling through the wire, the sound of it was strangely therapeutic, like a medley of lullabies being sung just for me. I sat on the pavement and waited for something to happen; in the mean time it calmed us down, made us feel stronger for it. This was, after all, where we had come from – bits of life transformed into electrical signals and sent round the planet, all those sighs and laughs and shouts and thoughts and feelings transmitted in electrical bursts until eventually, as these things must, they had become too much for just one signal to contain and had, in their own way, come alive, become us. Perhaps, now we were no longer in the telephone wires, it would all happen again. Maybe even now, a new blue electric angel was starting to grow, fed by all that surplus life in the system, and would eventually become like us, and start to feel alive.

  We felt somehow happy at the thought. It seemed like an appropriate development, the right thing. Circle of life doing its revolving thing, all over again, just like it probably should. It made sense.

  “Sweet and sour pork, special fried rice… yeah… yeah… black bean sauce…”

  “I was in! I was in all bloody day and you people couldn’t just wait for the bell to stop ringing to see if I’d answer the door… you try without hot water!”

  “OK, can you see the button in the left-hand corner? Now I want you to click on it just once… look, you rang me, do you want this document to print or not?”

  “Please press one to top up. Please press two for customer services. Please press three if you wish for payplan details. Please press the hash key for the flight of angels. Please press the star key to hear the options again…”

  I shifted my weight, and wished I’d brought a coffee.

  “Yeah, hi. No, we don’t know. Yeah. No, we’re going to keep him here a bit. No. I heard. Yeah.”

  I sat up.

  “Don’t, for Christ’s sake. Not even the sorcerer, he might…”

  Clutching my phone, I pressed the call key. “Hi, Charlie?”

  There was a grunt on the other end of the line and a tinkling of something falling. Then, a voice trying not to shout but not quite making it: “Who the hell is this?”

  “The sorcerer, remember me? Swift?”

  “Swift? How the hell did you…”

  “Magic.” I managed to bite off the “duh” sound before it could escape my lips, but only just.

  “Right. Yeah. Of course.”

  “We need to talk.”

  “I’m… I’m on the phone.”

  “Yes, I noticed that. And hello whoever’s at the other end of the line, sorry for interrupting.”

  A woman’s voice, confused but otherwise friendly enough: “It’s fine.”

  “Is there going to be a problem?”

  Charlie’s voice: “Where are you?”

  “Muswell Hill.”

  “What are you doing there?”

  “Looking for you and doing, I think, a very good job of it too. We really should talk.”

  They’d put him on a bed too small for him in a room too small for anyone, dominated by a large wardrobe and with a stool by the bed. The curtains were closed and, as I entered the room, Charlie warned, “No light.” I fumbled my way to the stool in the orange glow seeping past Charlie’s outline in the doorway, and sat down next to Sinclair’s bed.

  Charlie said from the door, “I heard Lee is dead.”

  “Yes. Was all along, really.”

  “I heard the Whites killed many of their enemies.”

  “Yes. Although some of them were dead already too.”

  “My friends helped you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Some of them died.” It wasn’t a question, but still surprised me.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “They knew what they were doing. Everyone who went to the Exchange knew what they were doing – even Lee.”

  I looked up at the tone of his voice. Charlie added, “Do or die. That’s how sorcerers are – there’s no middle ground. You fight or you die.”

  “That’s not true,” I said.

  A voice wheezed from the bed next to me, audible only because of its strangeness, “Yes it is.”

  I looked down at Sinclair. His eyes reflected dark puddles in the orange glow from the doorway, and his breathing was slow and laboured. His skin looked a strange, sickly yellow, his eyes protruded, and his chin had been badly shaved. He raised a hand towards Charlie, but I couldn’t read the gesture – dismissal, warning, greeting, hard to tell. Whatever it was, Charlie didn’t move, although his jaw grew tight.

  Sinclair smiled a grim smile at me and added, “Sorcerers… burn too brightly. Their magic is life: their life and the lives around them. When you fight with the purest powers of blazing life, all you can do is fight… or die.” He coughed and feebly gestured again at Charlie, who reached past me to the top of the wardrobe and took down a bottle of water, tenderly lifting the old man’s head to help him drink.

  When Sinclair was done he flopped back, eyes staring up at the ceiling as if turning his head was too much effort, and said, “I think I am meant to thank you, sorcerer.”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Candid as ever,” he said. “Good, of course. Khay is dead, Lee is dead…”

  “Was dead, all along.”

  “He dabbled in necromancy.”

  “He wrote the essence of his life on a sheet of paper and swallowed it whole,” I answered. “That’s how dead he was.”

  “Really?” Sinclair let out a disappointed breath that rattled through his throat like it was made of loose marbles. “An absence in the files. And now…”

  “I want to find Harris Simmons.”

  “He’ll run.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s a poor magician. He depends on other people’s enchantments – Lee was always the toughest, and you made an alliance that … crudely, I suppose… ‘killed him good’.” There was a tone of harsh mockery in his voice. “Simmons knows he can’t stand up against that. He’s always been a coward.”

  “Where will he go?”

  A half-shrug, followed by another burst of wheezing.

  “The Tower won’t be destroyed until the money stops; Simmons provides the money.”

  “The Tower is already crippled; why waste the time? You’ve killed the security, the soldiers…”

  “I want Bakker to know,” I said. “I want him to know that I’m coming. I want him to know that there’ll be nothing left. All of it, gone.”

  “Revenge,” rasped Sinclair. “Of course, of course… revenge is perhaps a mundane motive, but when it leads us to excel, perhaps … perhaps useful. Listen to me. Come close. Listen.”

  I leant closer. “The woman – Oda – there is something about her you must know.”

  “I know she’s part of the Order.”

  A glint of surprise, then a smile. “Good, good. Yes, I am glad. Good. She hates with such fire, she despises you all. All magicians. She is their killer. Do you understand me? Their killer, their assassin, the lady of the knives, that’s what they call her. They think I don’t know, but in the Order… there are also concerned citizens.”

  “Charlie was telling me about concerned citizens.”

  “Good; it is good you know. They will send her after you, she will try to kill you.”

  “I know.”

  “Do not trust her. She hates with such fire…”

>   “I know. I won’t. You have… contacts… in the Order?”

  “Contacts? Yes, yes, I suppose I do. It is a tool, sorcerer, a useful entity: gather up the hate, the anger, put them in one place, use them…”

  “A tool?”

  “Use them to… to eliminate creatures as dangerous as they are; and they have such hatred, such passion…”

  “Chaigneau wouldn’t tell me who was in charge of the Order.”

  For a moment his eyes turned to me with an effort; his hands trembled. “Anton Chaigneau? He doesn’t even tell people his name.”

  “I cursed him.”

  “You cursed Chaigneau? How?”

  “He had my blood on his hands. There are some magics that don’t ever change.”

  Sinclair’s eyes went to Charlie. “Charlie, dear boy… Charlie… leave us.”

  “Mr Sinclair…” began Charlie, starting forward.

  “Leave us, Charlie. I’ll call when I need you.”

  Charlie reluctantly moved away from the door; I listened as he plodded downstairs. Sinclair gestured me closer still, until my ear was only a little way from his mouth and I could feel the strained tickle of his breath. “I mis-spoke when I said, before, that you were a poor sorcerer.”

  “I don’t remember…”

  “I said you were not powerful, before you became what you are, Mr Swift. I said you were merely average.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”