by Kate Griffin
She started to spin her hands through the air, with a beckoning, gentle gesture. The water pouring out of the taps started to turn, twist up away from the basins it was filling and spin towards her, circling around her like clear silk scarves, winding around her legs and arms without ever actually touching her skin, the taps still running so that she seemed to be almost attached by liquid placentas to the sinks, by lines of still-flowing, thickening water that constantly spun and moved around her as the taps poured more and more into the spell, and kept on pouring. I’d heard of sorcerers who’d sucked whole reservoirs dry doing spells like this; unless someone actually, physically turned off the taps, there was no reason to stop.
And she was good at it. The spell flowed around her, and the way she spun it, the way she let the growing swirls of water dance and mingle into thicker strands of sparkling translucence across her – she knew the effect was beautiful, and in many ways, that sense of the elegance of the thing was what let her craft the spell so well. She’d always said she’d found the sight of still waters to be calming; and watching her then, entirely in control, I felt for a moment that, perhaps, everything would be all right after all.
I raised my fist, the glass clenched inside it, towards the mirror and spun my own version of the same magic. The cracks spread from where I’d smashed it with the lid of the bin, rippling out towards the edges in ever-splitting streams like the passage of water across uneven dry soil, until, with a single heave, the entire thing shattered. The glass fragments, however, did not fall. They drifted at my command; I could feel everyone like the skin on my back, taste them in my mouth, a sharp metallic feel on the tip of my tongue, and when I moved, they moved with me, wrapped themselves around me like a reflective blanket, each one shimmering back the brightness of my eyes
our eyes
bright blue
a moment to remember that our eyes are blue now, a thousand, thousand pieces of blue brightness looking back
beautiful brightness too
before I turned to the door, painfully aware of the silent nothing outside, and said to Dana, “Right. Sorcery.”
I kicked open the door, as much for the drama as anything else.
The corridor outside was empty, except for a trail of burning tyre marks along its length that finished as suddenly as it had begun. Dana gestured, and a slender filament of water still drawing its life from the running taps in the bathroom, and snaking out from the door behind her as she moved, now slithered through the flames, extinguishing them in front of us. I walked ahead, careful, in case I cut her, to keep my distance as the shards of shattered glass and mirror danced and dazzled around me in a standing wave of silver. Moving slowly behind, Dana trailed the umbilical cords of water like the tails of a kite.
We passed through another office. A post room, full of empty sacks and bags; a small kitchen; a canteen, the shutters drawn across the windows. Our shadows stayed obeying the laws of physics, turning and bending with the light. Another office. Another flight of stairs.
Dana said, “Can we break his spell? Can we get out?”
“Sure,” I answered. “But it’d be easier with a motorbike.”
Shouting somewhere below; sounds of battle somewhere above.
“Guns?” asked Dana.
“Yes; my friends don’t have much imagination,” I replied. “Come on.”
“Can’t we find them?”
“Sure,” I said. “Bakker’s ex-apprentice and his current apprentice together at last in front of an angry mob of people come here for the express purpose of destroying the Tower, bloody sorcerers and all their works. What a happy meeting that would be.”
“No need to get sarky.”
“Sorry.”
We started descending, slowly, one step at a time. We turned the corner of the stairwell and I could see the door to the second floor and felt a tight tugging in my belly and we stopped.
Putting our head on one side we leaned gently forward, then back on our heels, feeling the sickness grip us as we did. “It’s here,” we whispered, eyes half shut as we tried to pinpoint the source of our unease. “Right here.”
We looked round. The floor we stood on was uncarpeted, the walls clean. We looked up. The ceiling consisted of plastic panels set into concrete. Dana threw a fistful of tight, high-pressure water at the most central one, which wobbled, came loose, and flopped onto the floor. I bent to pick it up, letting my glass shroud drift above me for a while. On the back, someone had drawn, very carefully in thin black ink, a picture of a stairwell, all odd angles and strange dimensions, that seemed to feed inexorably into itself. I touched it with a fingertip. The hot magic of it burnt; we snatched our hand away and for a moment heard
Matthew’s fire!
We dropped the panel. Then, with a scowl, we directed a handful of shattered glass at it, tearing the thin plastic to shreds in an instant.
“You OK?” asked Dana.
“Children’s games,” we snapped, louder than we’d meant. “We have no patience with these tricks of the light!”
I grabbed back my handful of glass, tossing it into the whirling mêlée around my head, and kept descending. This time, the second floor stayed the second floor, and the first floor was the first. The door to the ground floor was locked, but Dana leant out of her watery cloak for a moment to stroke it, whispering gentle invocations into the bars on the door, which eventually, reluctantly, clicked loose. The doors swung back.
There was a foyer beyond, high-ceilinged, full of odd alcoves and strange shapes, along with the occasional neglected potted plant, a battered reddish carpet and an abandoned reception desk. Beyond that were a pair of large, black glass doors.
In front of them sat the motorbiker, and there too, its long tail curled round the back of him, was a dragon.
There was no mistaking the creature. The tail was the signs of street names that had been changed by the local council; its claws were the bent pipes of signposts that had been smashed into by speeding cars; its spine rippled with the reflective Catseyes of the motorways; its belly was plated with speed warnings; its haunches were tense with the triangular fluorescent warning signs of “DANGER!” or “SLOW – CHILDREN CROSSING”, bent and twisted to fit the curves of its hulk. Unlike the litterbug, this creature was at least fifteen feet end to end, and all metal; no vulnerable cardboard underbelly here, nor beating recyclable heart. It didn’t so much blink as that the reflective coating of its eyes – the battered lenses of smashed speed cameras – glinted with the slightest movement of its head, capturing the shimmer of the white lamps dangling high over head like suspended jellyfish.
If there was an expression on the biker’s face, it was hidden under his shiny helmet, and the impassive curling dragon showed no inclination towards feeling across its twisted metal snout, buckled together by the reflective neon yellow bands of cyclists’ warning straps.
Dana said through the corner of her mouth, wisely keeping perfectly still as we surveyed the creature and the dwarfed shape of the biker beneath it, “You didn’t mention dragons.”
“Oh, come on. I must have.”
“Pretty sure I would have remembered.”
I considered the beast. There was a familiarity in its shape and form. I said, “I don’t suppose you’ve ever lived in the City of London?”
“Not my kind of rent,” she admitted. “Is this going to be relevant?”
“Perhaps.” We looked down at the biker, cleared my throat and raised my voice. “Bakker still needs us,” we said. “The shadow still wants us.”
Blackjack reached up, and slowly pulled off his helmet. Underneath, his face was blistered, red, eruptions of pus around his throat and chin, and thick infected arteries standing out across his forehead. “I know,” he said, staring straight at me, his voice hoarse and weak. “He told me.”
The lights shuddered, dimmed overhead. The dragon stirred. I murmured to Dana, for her ears only, “Legally the City of London is a historical anomaly; it’s been almost unc
hanged for centuries. They say the Mayor has the power to exclude even the sovereign from entering the city, not that anyone’s tried for a while.”
“If it’s not relevant I will actually chain you back up in that damn room myself,” sung out Dana in a fluty, frightened voice. The shadows stretched, bent at our feet.
“The city’s symbol,” I replied, keeping my voice as low and as calm as I could, “is a dragon, holding the cross of St George. And its motto…”
… darkness thickening in front of the dragon, tightening to a spot, warping, rising…
“… is Domine dirige nos.”
“Nice,” squeaked Dana. “Catchy.”
… rising up from the floor, forming a head, a chest, arms, a face…
“Let me handle the dragon,” I muttered.
Hunger emerged from the shadows. He stood in front of the dragon, which seemed quite content to have him there, and stretched, the darkness swirling around him. I saw Blackjack flinch in his presence, but he didn’t otherwise move. Hunger looked at the biker, like a snake drawn by movement, and grinned, exposing rotten teeth. “Poisons in your blood?” he murmured.
Blackjack looked away, and for a moment it occurred to me that the expression on his face wasn’t anger, but shame.
Hunger turned to me, still grinning; then his attention moved to Dana. “I always knew you’d betray me, to him,” he whispered, voice carrying like the hiss of a serpent. “I hoped that the pain of you betraying him would be enough to kill his heart, and let them take over what was left; but you didn’t. Little child, running back for safety.”
Dana didn’t answer.
Hunger’s empty black eyes settled on my face. “Ever killed a dragon, sorcerer?”
“Not lately,” I replied.
Behind him, the dragon flexed its claws.
“This is a beast of forgotten and disobeyed things,” said the shadow. “He is summoned from the broken street sign, from the smashed order and the bent commands, vulnerable to being summoned because so much of what he is has simply been ignored.”
A hand stroked the dragon’s metal flank, nails scraping across the rusted remains of a one-way street sign. “Little humans always think they know best. Forget the past, forget the rules, forget humility – that is their natural place, being petty things. It is why he is angry.”
I licked my dry lips and risked staring into the cracked camera lens of the dragon’s eye. It shimmered back at me.
“I hoped that she would free you,” explained Hunger. “Does that surprise you?”
“You wanted what?” Dana’s voice was a bare breath on the air.
“We thought you would let her help us,” we replied coldly.
“And why?” he asked, enjoying his moment.
“To make us fight to escape. To make me fight to protect her.”
“To make your blood burn blue!” He almost laughed it, practically clapped his hands together with childish delight. “When you are the sorcerer your blood is nothing to me. I have drunk my fill of it already and it tastes like the others, like all the other dead old men and frail little women; it barely touches a corner of my belly, it is tepid in my throat! When you are the angels, your blood burns so brightly it… it…” A whine entered in his voice, he seemed to constrict, shrink into himself like a petulant child. “Hungry.” The words rattled out thin across his teeth. “So hungry…”
“We can beat you,” we said easily.
“You’ve never killed a dragon,” explained Hunger, eyes burning bright.
I grinned. “Life is full of… well, a lot more life.”
And, because we had it to hand, we threw a wall of glass towards Hunger and Blackjack; Hunger melted into the shadows in a second, Blackjack threw himself down under the blast and the glass shattered lightly off the dragon’s metal sides. Its nostrils flared with the clanging of tempered metal, and it raised itself up, shaking its bulk with a deafening clamour. I grabbed Dana’s wrist and hissed, “You worry about the biker.”
Dana opened her mouth to complain, looked into our eyes and changed her mind. She nodded, turned and threw a head-sized ball of water at Blackjack, wrapping it around his nose and mouth as he struggled to his feet. I focused my attention on the dragon.
It raised itself up on its back legs, the slashed wreckage of a speed-humps sign warping around its thighs as it did, the bent remnants of a “dog fouling” notice cracking under the strain, and roared. The sound severed the lamps in the ceiling, which smashed down on the floor in front of it and around it; it shattered the glass of the foyer and knocked Dana off her feet. We dropped to a crouch, ready to pounce, and I dug my nails into the palm of my hand without even thinking about it, digging them deep until the blood ran. I dipped two fingers in the pool of red liquid accumulating in my hand and, the blood sloshing thinly, drew a crude cross on the floor in front of me, and another, smaller cross in the left-hand corner of the shape. The dragon lumbered towards me with surprising ease and grace, its form shimmering across the floor. It didn’t even need to claw me to death; a single swipe of its neck would break every bone in my body.
I heard the cracking of metal and saw that Blackjack had crawled away from his bike. He had a chain in his hand, which was lashing out towards Dana’s face; but she ducked, and hurled tall funnels of water at him. They spattered his face, then knocked him off his feet, and bowled him backwards like they were ocean waves breaking from a storm. The tendrils of her spell, winding around her and back through the doorway to the stairwell, led from where the taps were still running, some floors above.
Above me, meanwhile, the dragon raised a paw. Its palm, ready to smash down on my head, was a blackened “STOP” sign, graffitoed over in big green letters by some wag with the comment “Caliper Boy SMELLS”. I dropped instinctively to one knee, raising my hands above my head, and, from under this metallic death, in the second before the lights went out I shouted, “Lord lead us!”
The paw hesitated, hovering a few inches above my head, so wide that I couldn’t see the ceiling above it.
Somewhere on the foyer floor, I heard a hacking and spluttering as Blackjack tried to spit water out of his lungs; and the sloshing of Dana preparing another twist to her spell.
The paw trembled in the air above me.
“Domine dirige nos!” I repeated, shouting the words up at it. “Lord lead us! Lord lead us!”
The paw drifted to one side. A pair of camera-lens eyes stared down at us.
“You are the dragon that guarded the city of London,” we whispered frantically. “We recognise you, we know you; you are the dragon on all the old gates at the city walls, you are the symbol of the old part of the city; Domine dirige nos is your motto: Lord lead us; we know you…”
A rumbling sound from somewhere inside the monster like the passing of a distant train.
“No!” The voice came from the shadows, where Hunger emerged. “No! I summoned you. Obey me!”
“Lord lead us,” I whispered again. “We know you; Lord lead us. ‘The city of London shall have all its ancient liberties and free customs, as well by land as by water; furthermore, we decree…’”
“I summoned you!” shrieked Hunger. “You are mine! I summoned you out of the city; you will…”
“‘…know that I have granted to my citizens of London for themselves and their heirs, the citizens may appoint as sheriff whomever they want from among themselves and as judge whomever they want from among themselves to take charge please of the crown and supervise their conduct; no one else shall be judge over the men of London…’”
“They are the blue electric angels, they do not know these laws!” shrieked Hunger.
“You are the dragon of the city of London,” I whispered. “Listen to me! I’m from this city, I know its laws, I know what makes it alive, I understand it. Domine dirige nos; I know your history, I understand how the shadow summoned you, but you don’t have to listen, I know the history, duty, humility, laws, time…”
“No!”
The scream came from somewhere other than the shadows. I looked round and saw that the shadow had moved; he now stood behind Dana, one black arm across her throat, claws pressed against-her eyelids, his eyes burning. “Stop it, sorcerer,” he muttered, and then, in a voice that wasn’t quite his, not quite, “Stop it, Matthew.”
I stayed absolutely still, while the dragon coiled back in on itself, watching with empty eyes. “You know the Magna Carta, you know the rights of the city; you may even know how to unsummon an urban dragon,” not Hunger’s voice, coming from Hunger’s mouth, “but if you push me, I will kill her!”
Blackjack was on his knees, throwing up water through his nose and mouth. Dana’s trailing spirals of tap water were now flooding pools splashed across the floor, her eyes shut and breath coming in little wheezes as Hunger held her close to his frozen skin. “I kept her alive for this,” he whispered. “Just like my sister. I kept her alive.”
I started forward, but his fingers pressed harder into her face, pushing the blood out of it. Hunger grinned. “Where’s Matthew’s fire now?”
“You didn’t know I’d come back!”
“But I never found a body either,” he replied. “And the angels always loved to talk to you. Come be me, they said, and be free, and you’ve always wanted to be free, Matthew. You’ve always dreamed of turning yourself into dancing blue fire and spinning across the sky, you’ve always wanted to be a rumble on the wind, a dancer in the clouds; what creature of flesh would want less? The chance to fly and be free, to forget the poor, constructed laws of humanity, the pain, the fear, the feeling, the ageing, the dying. The angels have always loved you, because you’ve loved them, you’ve always wanted their message to be real, you’ve always wanted to be fire and light and life and now that you are… you will not share. So I kept her alive, and maybe, just maybe, the sorcerer has enough control over the angels to not let her die?”
