by Kate Griffin
Finally he said, “You look well.”
I grunted, unimpressed.
“You probably need a haircut,” he added.
I resisted the temptation to run my fingers through my hair at his glance, but only just.
“Your coat – it’s not quite the old one, is it?”
I shook my head.
“But still enchanted. A delicate, subtle whiff, yes? Anonymity, the beige jacket of anyone in the crowd. Not quite invisibility – but close enough.”
“It’s been to the cleaners a bit.”
“It’s a good coat. A sorcerer should always have a good coat, with deep pockets and proper waterproofing. Only an idiot wastes their time trying magically to ward against the rain – getting soggy socks is important.”
“Why?” I said, knowing the answer from the olden days but still wanting to ask.
“So that when you get home you can take them off and put them up in front of the fire and let your clothes steam, while drinking a hot cup of tea and feeling your skin dry out of all its wrinkles.”
“That’s important?”
“Of course it is,” he said with a tight smile. “It is a reminder that we are part of our own flesh, not a blazing magical fire in the sky. Or a signal in a wire.”
We smiled and looked down, studying our hands, stretching them to feel the tension in our skin. We said, “How long have you known?”
“Known what?”
“About us.”
“I don’t know that I do know, yet. I hear rumours, of course. From the seers who I have in the basement listening all the time for the voices of the powers whose blood is formed of surplus strands of life, I hear it reported that at such a time, on such a night, the voices of the blue electric angels buzzing in the telephones winked out, vanished like they’d never been there. I hear that San Khay’s body was found among the corpses of rats, and that on a none-too-special evening at McGrangham’s pit, a stranger with bright blue eyes, whom no one recognised, fought against Guy Lee and won, and that when he did, his skin burnt with blue fire. This, I think, is what computer nerds call data, rather than information. Trickles of digital fact, just waiting to be interpreted into the bigger picture.”
“What do you want to know?”
“You’re asking me?”
“Yes,” we said, surprised to find how calm we sounded.
“I want to know… if there’s anything of my apprentice left alive.”
“What?”
“I would like to know if you’ve hurt Matthew.”
“You want what?” I squeaked. “To know if I’m hurt?”
“He was my apprentice,” replied Bakker calmly. “I wish to be assured of his well-being.”
“It’s me! It’s bloody me! Short of having been fucking murdered two years back, do I look like I’ve been hurt?”
A hesitation on Bakker’s face, a twitch of doubt; then a polite smile. “For all I know you are nothing but a demonic parasite infecting his skin, using his memories to pretend to be human. Since what I know of the angels is an entity hungry for life, experience and sense, blazing its presence across the world with a bright fury, such an occurrence is not impossible. Matthew could be dead, and you could be nothing but a replica of him, a crude imitation that doesn’t know what it means to be alive, really alive.”
“You patronising, hypocritical, miserable bastard.”
For a moment, the smile widened. “That sounds, at least, like the apprentice I knew.”
“Whatever I say, you’re going to see nothing but the angels, aren’t you?”
“Why?”
“Perhaps because we are what you want to see.”
“Why should that be? You think I’m pleased at what’s happened to my apprentice? Glad to discover the kid I taught is now possessed by the spirit of telephone interference?”
“We think that you are dying, Mr Bakker,” we said simply. “We think that you’ve been dying all these years, and you’re terrified of it; and we think that when you tried to coax us out of the wire all those years ago, you wanted us for more than just a dance in the fire. Why don’t you swallow a piece of paper, like Lee did?”
“Necromancy is such a clumsy way to survive – I told you that, almost the first week.”
“I take it then that drinking the blood of the black-mass-baptised babe is out of the question too?”
“My God, what do you make of me?”
“Hungry,” I said, rubbing my eyes to wipe away the fatigue. “So hungry.”
“What does that mean?”
“Don’t you know?”
“Matthew!” He raised his arms in an expansive, open gesture. “I’m the one trying to understand! Am I next? Is that what all this is leading up to?”
“My God, haven’t you seen it? Look at the Tower!”
“This is about the Tower?”
“Haven’t you noticed the bodies, the threats, the extortion, the death, the battles, the…”
“This is about the organisation that I created which, for the very first time, brought together under one roof all magicians, witches, warlocks, voodoo practitioners and… and bloody enchantresses of ancient and mystic lore, united at last, regardless of race, faith, creed, colour, gender, social status or wealth, to protect all magic-users in the city from the bias and bigotry of…”
“It’s a monster! It gobbles up the best of the magicians and spits out the bones in a voodoo way! You really think employing a man whose guards carry guns under their armpits, or a dead necromancer with a sheet of paper down his throat, was going to create a friendly public image? You think it was nice of Lee to wage war against the Whites, or charming of Khay to guard a warehouse full of human organs that were most definitely not for the transplant business? The Tower is a unified organisation – a massive one – and the thing that unites it is fear! Of you! Of your servants and your power and your ambition and your …”
“How dare you judge me? I’d like to say that you were my apprentice and thus should have learnt some respect; but you’re not even that! A blue-eyed demon crawled out of the telephone lines into the skin of someone I used to know – and you speak like this to me?”
Our voices had grown too loud. People were looking towards us, their conversation turning to a low buzz, while curious hearers tried not to be seen snooping. Bakker scowled and put his fingertips together in front of his nose; took in a long breath. Quieter, struggling to control his anger, he said, “You are correct; I have wanted to meet the angels for some time now; but I do not know what purpose you think I had in mind. I wished to study them, to learn about them, to understand what kind of a creature the angels are, nothing more.”
“Hungry,” we muttered, feeling tired and drained. “Hungry.”
“Should have had a vol-au-vent then.”
“The last time we met,” I said, “you said you wanted to summon the angels; you wanted to bring them out of the phone lines into this world. You said you couldn’t hear them any more, that you needed the help of another sorcerer to make the spell work. I asked why you wanted them out of their natural realm, and you said, ‘Because they are alive; because they will not die.’ I asked what you wanted. You said, ‘Life. Just life.’ Did it ever occur to you that there was a reason we didn’t want you to hear us when we played in the wire? Did the thought cross your mind that perhaps the reason you couldn’t hear us any more was because we didn’t want you to? Did you think we were unaware of your attempts to summon us, to pull us out of the wires even before you approached me and asked for my help? What made you think you could just snatch us from our home and bind us to your desires? And Mr Bakker, give me credit for a little imagination. You don’t want to study us; it was quite clear what your aims were. When you taught me you said that the angels were too dangerous to be listened to; that they preached freedom from all restraint, all laws, that they had no conception of responsibility, duty, need or even basic moral principles; that they were free in the purest, most unbound sense. You do
n’t summon creatures like that to study them. You summon them if you’ve got their song in your head, if you think that perhaps, the freedom that they enjoyed could be yours. Power and fire and light and movement in a simple, cure-all spell.”
“Well,” he replied softly, fingers tight around the arms of his chair, knuckles sticking up through the skin like at any moment they might pop out, “that part at least sounds like my mistaken apprentice.”
“We kept away from you,” we said, “because even then we could sense that there was something about you that did not conform to our sense of what we should be, and what we are. It poured off you then and you stink of it now.”
“And what, tell me,” he half-growled, fighting to keep his voice civil and his face fixed in the polite smile of good company, “is that?”
“Hunger,” we replied. “You do not simply want to study us, you were hungry for it, a starving creature desperately scrabbling for life – but not your life. Ours. You had passed the point where you made a distinction between what others had and what you desired for yourself. We sensed your intent, and I know it.”
He half-lowered his head, tucking in his chin and nodding to himself in silence for a moment. Then he looked up sharply and said, perfectly level, “I’m sorry.”
“You are?”
“I’m sorry for the bad opinion you have of me. I do not know how you have reached this, but I am sorry for your…”
“How I’ve reached it?! I reached it at roughly the same point the first set of claws severed a long list of my arteries! I reached it about the time my blood pressure dropped so low I started to go blind. I reached it at approximately the same moment that the shadow – your bloody shadow – pressed its fingers into my face, stared into my eyes and whispered through my blood on its teeth, ‘Give me life!’ Try that and see how it alters your long-held opinions in a very short time!”
A tremor of confusion on his face. “What?”
“When I walk out of here, do you know the first thing I’m going to do?”
“No.”
“I’m going to find an underground station and sleep in it behind the biggest protective ward I can raise with a travelcard and a good spell until sunrise, so that the creature that you sent after me last time we met has a hard time killing me this time round too!”
“Matthew, what creature? What happened?!”
His voice was pained, shrill, tense. But I didn’t know whether it was from the effort of lying – something I felt sure he could do perfectly well – or a genuine sound of need and upset. And just then, for an instant, we felt a hint of uncertainty, and almost pitied him. But this was what we were here for, what we wanted to know.
“It’s a shadow,” we said. “He has your face.”
“I don’t understand.”
“He comes up out of the paving stones, wherever there’s a thick enough patch of darkness. He killed Patel, Awan, Khan, Akute …”
“A creature? A summoned creature?”
“He has your face, this shadow,” I repeated gently, studying his eyes for any hint of a reaction that wasn’t a trembling uncertainty, tainted with fear. “The night we argued, he attacked me when I was alone, by the river. I’d never seen anything move so fast. He just appeared, bang, right behind me, and he had won before I even had a chance to raise a spell. Now that we are here, he is less certain in what he does. It seems he doesn’t just want to kill; rather, he is interested in what makes us alive. ‘Hello, Matthew’s fire,’ he says; and we are sure that if he wished to kill us he could have done so. But instead he toys, watches, studies, tries to work out what makes us what we are. We can hold him off for a while. But in the end, we doubt there is a way to kill just him, and for what he did to me, and what he wants with us, we will kill him.”
“You… think this creature is connected to me. That’s why you’ve done all this?”
“Yes.”
“Why, because… because it looks a bit like me?” His voice was rising again, I could hear the tight edge in it as he struggled to keep it under control.
“Yes. And because it kills your enemies…”
“My enemies? I have no enemies!”
“The sorcerers who said ‘No’ to the Tower?”
“Do you really think I’d kill someone just because they couldn’t see a good thing when it happened to them? Do you really think I’d hurt you?”
I hesitated and for the first time that evening, reluctantly let myself think about it, the certainty draining away like blood from a corpse.
“I don’t know,” I answered finally. “I really don’t.”
“So on a hunch you’re attacking my friends?”
“I have… seen evidence.”
“Evidence? What kind of evidence?”
“Concerned citizens…”
“You’re being used.”
“Dead was dead was dead,” I replied. “No getting round that very personal fact.”
“And you blame me?”
“Yes.”
“Why? Because we argued?!”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe that my Matthew would be so stupid. But perhaps with the consciousness of an entity that is incapable of grasping more than its own flightiness…”
“This is my battle.”
“You’re just using the angels?”
“No.”
“Then how does it work?”
“We are also angry.”
“Why?”
“We… we…”
He looked at me and drummed his fingers impatiently on the armrest of his chair as we struggled to find the answer. “Well?” he spat finally. “You… things of little surplus electricity, you odd remnants of feeling, confused signals, what’s your anger about? You’ve been given a gift beyond the wildest comprehension – you are alive! You’ve been called out of the wires where you were nothing more than a conglomeration of sense, and been given your very own, pre-packaged body, memories, experiences and learning that is probably the only thing that stopped you going mad at the first realisation of sight, sound and senses all for yourself. You have all your power and you have the pleasure of being really alive with it, in perfect, three-dimensional, physically stable sorcerer form! Why should you be angry at such a thing?”
“We… are not… we are glad to have seen this world, to understand at last what it is that the thoughts in our signal meant when they described ‘yellow’ or ‘pink’, to hear sounds as more than a flash of mathematics across our wings when we were travelling in the telephones. But we are not ourself any more. We were free. This world leaves you no capacity for what we were, and … in coming here, we have gained perceptions and… instincts… that we could never before conceive of. But we have lost everything. Everything. We were the blue electric angels, we could be in a thousand places at once and still be whole, we could bounce off the moon for sport and skim the sum total of the world’s knowledge in an instant, ride the signal from America to Zimbabwe without even travelling, the world moving around us, we flew on radio waves three times round the earth and knew every inch of atmosphere that we touched as we went by. We were gods. Now we are just… mortal.”
He nodded slowly. “I see. You really are just a child in this place, aren’t you?”
We didn’t answer.
“A child with a lot of power,” he added, in a reproving voice. “There’s an irony there.”
“How so?”
“When I asked Matthew to help me summon you, he refused. Now that he is you and you are him – a complicated relationship, I’ll grant you – surely he can see the irony.”
“The thought had crossed my mind.”
“Well? Now you know what the angels are like, do you still begrudge me my desire to know them better?”
I thought about it. “Yes,” I said.
“Why?!” He nearly laughed on the word.
“I think… it boils down to intent.”
“That isn’t an argument the judge would respect.”
“You’re going to sue me?”
“Don’t be so shallow.”
“I don’t have a permanent address to send the order to.”
“You vanished for two years!”
“And now you know where I was.”
“No, not entirely.”
“I think you can guess.”
“Guess at what? You say you were killed – now that is something I find hard to get my head round, not least since I taught you so well never to dabble with necromancy; and you don’t look like a man suffering from the skin complaints of the average animated corpse.”
“I’m not particularly inclined to tell you the details, to be honest.”
“Then you’re not really giving me a chance, are you?”
“A chance?”
“Are you here for any better reason?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know why you’re here at all?”
“You invited me.”
“Yes – because you were my apprentice. What’s your reason?”
“I think… I wanted to be absolutely sure.”
“About what?”
“Whether you were as I remembered.”
“And am I?”
“I don’t know.”
“You seem confused.”
“It’s very complicated. Can I… I just want to ask something. I think it might be why I came, in fact.”
“Ask away.”
“Do you really not know that the shadow has your face?”
He met our eyes squarely. “Matthew – or whatever you’d like to be called now – I have no idea what you are talking about.”
We tried to read some sort of truth in him and, for a second, I desperately, desperately wanted to believe it, to say I was sorry and that I’d never do it again and I hoped he could understand and forgive me and we could explain everything and it would all go back to how it was and…
… never going to be how it was…
wouldn’t that mean Lee and Khay were dead for nothing?
… a lorry of bodies…
we simply didn’t know.
I stood up quickly. “Sorry,” I said, not knowing why. “I’m sorry.” I stepped round him quickly and headed for the stairs.
