by Kate Griffin
“I mis-spoke. You are… were… perhaps… afraid of what you could be, what you could do. That is why you argued with Bakker. You were afraid. He wanted you to give power, so much power, the blood of angels in his veins – you said, Mr Swift, you said – some magics don’t ever change. You were afraid of that power. That isn’t weakness, it is intelligence. To feel so alive, have the heartbeat of a city under your shoes – fear it. Fear what you may do. It is human. For misjudging you, I apologise. And perhaps for misjudging you, I apologise.”
“You know about us?”
“Dear boy, it is my business.”
“I accept your apology. We accept your apology.”
“You are… smart…” he said hesitantly. “Yes, smart. You hide it well, perhaps; but you know when a power shouldn’t be used.” His eyes gleamed in the dull light. “You said some magic didn’t change. Charlie told me what you did, told me about your blood burning blue, told me that… and I know. Should not have lived, they said, fire in the blood. Isn’t that your story? We be light, we be life, we be fire? Such creatures that revel in such living, should not be afraid… Ask me.”
“Why does Oda hate magicians?”
“Her brother was one. She killed him.”
“Why?”
“No one knows. They say he turned bad, went mad with his power. I do not entirely believe it. I think they lie, and so does she. It is a question that you do not ask.”
“Why did you ask the Order to come to the house in Marylebone, the night we were attacked? Knowing what they are – it was a risk.”
“A risk? To expose so many magicians to such hate, yes, well, I suppose… a risk.”
“Why?”
“I think you may guess.”
“Chaigneau didn’t know who was in charge of the Order – he said he followed orders, and so does Oda.”
Sinclair’s smile widened.
“Mr Sinclair,” I said, struggling to keep some patience in my voice, “are you the head of the Order?”
“No, dear boy, no! Just a head. One of many. Best not to know how many there are, or who they are, or where they are; dangerous, dangerous indeed. No. A head, Mr Swift, a head.”
“You use them?”
“A tool. If you know who those are who hate magic with such fire that they would burn the world to be rid of it, you can tame them, use them, direct them, yes? Yes, and when you need them, perhaps you can give them that magic that they long to destroy, point them at a target and say, ‘There is the sorcerer’ or ‘There is the shadow’ or ‘There is the demon’ or ‘There is the angel’, yes? And they will strike, and it will not go back to me.”
“They have decided to kill me,” I pointed out reasonably. “That has me a little concerned.”
“Chaigneau will follow orders.”
“How ironic.”
“Oda won’t,” he whispered. “Once she has her target, she will not stop. I can tell them to stop – difficult, perhaps, but then you can always say, ‘He is a lesser evil. Let him be damned in his own time.’ There are ways to spin these things. Oda will not stop.”
“If you knew that, why did you introduce me to her in the first place?”
Sinclair grinned, then flinched at the pain even of that, and gave a grunting sound. “Because you are Robert Bakker’s apprentice,” he wheezed, pressing his fat fingers into his chest like he was trying to massage the pain from his bones. “Because you are the blue electric angels. And if he were to take your power, to catch you and work out how to steal that life that keeps your eyes blue… well… well… imagine.”
“So you’d have me killed?” I said, forcing my voice to stay low. “Like that?”
“I would have anyone killed whom I deemed a risk,” he replied, voice rising in stern reproach. “And you always will be a risk. But, I think, you will always be smart, and smart enough to be afraid. And perhaps that will be enough.”
“We have something else we need to ask.”
“Go on?”
“Did you summon us? Did you bring me back?”
“No, Mr Swift. I would like to see Bakker gone, but to bring the blue electric angels into this world? No. A risk – indeed, a terrible risk. Such a deed would have required a sorcerer’s skills. I would suggest, in fact, that if anyone did summon you, it would have been Bakker trying to bring the angels into being, or, perhaps, his more sensitive apprentice, Dana Mikeda.” He let out a long, easier breath. “You will have to fight her, sorcerer. That’s how it is in these things. Neither of you, I think, can just walk away.”
“Dana Mikeda is my problem.”
“No,” he murmured. “Not any more. She serves Bakker now. He took her hand when they held your funeral with the empty coffin, and he said he was her friend, her new teacher; now she serves him utterly. He helped her when you were gone; she’s his apprentice now, not yours. And I would not like to think what he may have taught her; no, indeed. You may, in fact, save some time by directing Oda her way. You could eliminate two threats in a single stroke – the woman who…”
“No.”
“The Order hopes you will destroy each other; Bakker and Swift. Why should these two not do the same?”
“No,” I repeated.
“I can send the Order word, command them to…”
“Our blood is in your veins,” we insisted. “Some magics never change. Leave Dana Mikeda to me.”
His voice didn’t alter, nor did his light smile; but there was that edge there, that danger. “Kindly don’t threaten me, blue electric angels. You are so far lost in this world that the lightest push could send you toppling over the edge into madness. Save your anger for someone else.”
I swallowed. “There is one last thing I need to know.”
“Go on.”
“The night we were attacked, the first night I met you…”
“Yes?”
“Who attacked us?”
“At a guess, San Khay’s men.”
“And who sent the litterbug to attack me on my first night?”
“Those kinds of magic… Guy Lee.”
“How did Guy Lee know where I was?”
“I would suggest,” he said carefully, picking every word out like a piece of stuck apple from between his teeth, “that the house you were living in was sold on after your death to a woman who works for a company called KSP. KSP stands for Kenrick, Simmons and Powell and is the company run by Harris Simmons. I suggest that, since you clearly returned to a place of comfort in your old home, she phoned Simmons on the night of your resurrection and warned him that a naked, confused-looking man had just crawled out of the telephone lines and that perhaps someone should investigate. Lee would have been the one to send the litterbug; Khay would have been the man following on foot. You see – the Tower doesn’t like loose ends.”
I thought about the business card stolen from a wallet in my old home that I’d seen on the first night of my new life; Laura Linbard, Business Associate, KSP. I said, “I… I had friends, before this. I haven’t dared… it seemed risky to…”
“Until the Tower is gone,” replied Sinclair flatly, “everyone you knew or valued is being watched. Bakker will know by now that you are… perhaps shall we say… more than you once appeared. He’ll have worked out why the phones went silent the night you returned; he isn’t a fool. He will do anything he can to find you and if that means killing the people you once knew, he will. That’s the Tower, Mr Swift, that’s why you should really be fighting rather than from any motive of revenge; and when this is over that’s what I will tell people you died for – a good, heroic cause, rather than your loosely defined sense of injured personal pride. My advice, if you’ll take it – and please, consider it well intended – is to forget everything you were and everything you think you can continue to be; to stop imagining that things can go back to normal when Bakker is dead, and accept. You are not Matthew Swift any more.”
I nodded. “Mr Sinclair,” I murmured, “I feel I must tell you something.”
<
br /> “Of course, of course.”
“There are times when I can believe that you are right.” I met his eyes, and he didn’t look away. “There are times when there isn’t us in our skin, when there isn’t the fusion of miscellaneous life and thought that is what we have become, Swift and angel mixed up into one great roiling cauldron. There’s just me, just fire in the blood, just vengeance and anger and pure blazing blue life. I let the angels be all that I am, let them do what they want and… do you know why, in the telephone lines, we would tell those who wished to listen, ‘come be we, and be free’?”
“Enlighten me.”
“When we are the angels, we do not care about the thoughts of men, or their laws, or their ideas, or their conceptions of morality. We are beyond that, above that, free from these petty fictions by which you live your days – laws, rules, duties, responsibilities. We are pure fire and light and life, and nothing can contain us or bind us, and nothing can make us die. That is what it is to be free. That’s why I let them be me.” I straightened up, shook my head. “That’s it. That’s all that I wanted to tell you.”
“A curious choice of conversational matter,” he said with a half-laugh. “Are you telling me in the hope that I will… maybe reconsider my orders; perhaps, even, permit your demise? A strange hope, for a creature who blazes without thought for lesser species in its path. Perhaps you’re just telling me for the sake of telling someone. It must be lonely, yes indeed, of course it must, inside your life. Not quite anything at all. Not quite human, not quite angel. Come be we and be free – and you’re stuck as both, and neither. Indeed, difficulties, naturally. I am tired.”
“Tired? Is that it?”
“For now,” he replied, waving absently towards the door. “Charlie!” He hardly raised his voice and Charlie was there. I stood up, acknowledging my dismissal, and noted his slow, shuddering breaths.
“Mr Sinclair?”
“Yes?”
“Who do you think betrayed us the night you were shot? How did they know we were there?”
“A pertinent question, indeed, yes. I would say Oda – but no, it isn’t her style. Perhaps the warlock…”
“He’s dead. He died fighting Lee. Lee stuffed paper down his throat to catch his dying breath.”
“Indeed.” Sinclair showed not a tremor. “I trust the fortune-teller, she has too much history to be a convincing suspect; and the wizard died. The Bag Lady, well, she is…”
“I know about the Bag Lady.”
“Well, then,” said Sinclair mildly, “you are starting to run short of suspects, aren’t you, Mr Swift?”
I nodded and forced a smile. “Thank you, Mr Sinclair. I hope you recover soon.”
“I will, Mr Swift, I assure you, I will. It’s all in the blood.”
I glanced at his face, but his eyes were shut and his expression that of a sleeping child, innocently relaxed as if it had always been that way. I let Charlie show me out, and wandered off in search of a bus.
This is the history of Harris Simmons.
He was born Harry Simon in a small town just outside Colchester, a fact that he didn’t like other people knowing – to the tune of one dead teacher, a mysteriously vanished family member with a Swiss bank account, and an arson attack at the local County Records Office. At the age of twenty-two, Harry Simon disappeared from his job at the local estate agency and Harris Simmons materialised in London with a degree in Econometrics from the London School of Economics, a perfect new pinstriped suit, a big briefcase, an accent that could have been polished on velvet and three months’ work experience with HSBC in Boston. Perhaps it was simply a bad year for PricewaterhouseCoopers in terms of intake – or perhaps they respected the kind of man capable of forging such credentials, as a useful asset to the team on his own basic merits. Whatever the reason, potential employers found it hard to say no to such a confident and self-possessed young gentleman, and Harris Simmons was soon earning more per bonus than his entire family had earned in twenty years of taxi-driving and bar service down at the pub. Sinclair ascribed no great moral evil to the fact that Simmons no longer supported his family – once he was so much more than just Harry Simon, he didn’t look back; and that, it was grudgingly admitted, was probably the only way to survive, with such an ambitious agenda.
At twenty-five, Harris Simmons became the youngest, best-paid executive inside the Golden Mile, that area of EC postcodes in the centre of London where between Monday and Friday you cannot move for sharp suits, and which on Saturday and Sunday lies as still as the morgue. Somewhere around this point, he was also introduced to the supernatural, and on the realisation that it was possible to manipulate markets by something as easy as cursing a German steel company on the Wednesday, having invested in their competitors on the Tuesday, he took to it with the slick ease of a man bred to such devices. At the age of twenty-six, a few months before I abruptly found myself dead beside the river, Harris Simmons was approached by Mr San Khay on behalf of a budding new finance and investment company largely owned by Mr Robert Bakker, and asked if he would like to be a partner. When he demanded what this company had going for it that made it worth his highly expensive time, the answer was simple. Market manipulation was a profitable business and at this company they knew the value of a good goblin in the files. Thus, Kenrick, Simmons and Powell was born, and quickly swept into the FTSE 100 and onto the markets with Simmons’s hand at the rudder. Indeed, its success was so astounding and its predictions so true and accurate, as it followed market fluctuations, that several discreet investigations were launched within its first year, in an attempt to determine whether it might be influencing events to its own advantage. But no conclusive evidence was found, and even the concerned citizens, of whom Sinclair was one, had difficulty understanding how such a new company could have such astounding success.
The profits from KSP did as profits do – fed more profits, and more, cycling back forever into the system that created them, largely for the sake of yet more profit. When that profit was simply too absurdly large to invest, and after the taxman had been sent away with the sneaky suspicion that he hadn’t taken his fill, the rest – millions a month – was siphoned off into the organisation loosely known as the Tower. Some went on simple personal pleasures – the wine, girls and general luxury of a particular lifestyle. Some went to Lee, to fund his bribery and blackmail throughout the lower magicial communities in the city; some was sent to other cities to establish more links for the Tower. And a large part went on what was simply known in the records as “Operations”.
It took Sinclair eighteen months to get an inventory of the needs of Operations, and the result explained to a large extent why so much was sucked into it each year. The silver teeth of dead prophets, the finger bones of ancient sorcerers, the blood of mythic beasts filtered through a sieve of frozen mercury, the jade-encrusted skull of a deceased necromancer, the still-beating heart of a newborn child whose mother’s womb was cursed by the hand of a voodoo witch – these things all cost money, particularly in the quantities in which Bakker, Khay, Simmons and Lee were acquiring them. For Lee, a regular supply of corpses and high-quality paper seemed a priority; for Khay, his tattoos were hardly cheap; for Simmons, endless trinkets of magical enchantment were wanted, to compensate for what was by nature a weak magical inclination.
To Bakker went all the rest. I recognised some of the ingredients and could guess at their purpose. There were only so many reasons why tens of thousands of pounds could have been spent on phone lines, modems, servers and intercept technology, only so many excuses to purchase shards of stone dug up from the first Roman ruin found underneath the city’s streets; only certain spells that could possibly require blue laser light reflected off a fairy’s aluminium wing – it was easy enough to recognise the ingredients of summonings and enchantments in Bakker’s wish-list, and to guess at their purpose. And it was all paid for by KSP, and Harris Simmons.
Did we need to find him?
Perhaps.
&n
bsp; What would we do if we found him?
A problem for another time. Best not to think about it now.
I started by making a few phone calls.
“Good morning, KSP reception, how may I help you?”
“Hi, I’m calling on behalf of Amiltech Securities, I’m hoping I could make an appointment to see Mr Simmons.”
“Mr…”
“Harris Simmons, yes, sorry, you must have a lot in the business.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but Mr Simmons’ schedule is entirely full…”
“I’m willing to be very, very persistent.”
“Amiltech, was it?”
“Yes.”
“Can I take your name?”
“Adam Rieley.”
“Just a moment.”
The moment lasted five minutes of what sounded like the nose-pipe rendition of “Greensleeves”; it felt like five years. When she came back, I was so close to falling off the end of my hotel bed in dismay and irritation that I nearly did just that from surprise.
“Mr Rieley?”
“Still here.”
“I’m very sorry, but Mr Simmons is out of the country right now on business and won’t be back for several weeks. If you’d like to contact him, I suggest you send an email to his secretary – would you like the address?”
“Any idea where he’s gone?”
“No, Mr Rieley, sorry.”
She didn’t sound very sorry, but I couldn’t really blame her. “Thank you very much, ma’am, you’ve been most helpful.”
“Sorry I couldn’t be of…”
“It’s fine. Thank you.” I hung up and went in search of my satchel.
Harris Simmons lived in that elusive part of London to the north of Marylebone station that doesn’t quite know what it’s trying to be, and ends up being a bit of everything – old, new, rich, poor, sprawled and compressed all at once, so that the most expensive fish and chip shops in the world can find themselves between a council estate, with its police witness-appeal signs, and a walled-off, high-gated mansion. In the midnight-dimmed shops between the area’s quiet mews and its wide thoroughfares, parmesan cheeses the size of chubby babies were displayed, and Italian and Greek flags drooped from windows here and there. From the pubs a polite buzz of thick-carpeted gentility rolled out from half-open doors and warmly lit interiors.
