by Kate Griffin
“Robert…” I began.
“I am Hunger!” he screamed. “I am not bound by the laws of flesh! I am hungry! You are so alive when you burn – I will have that life!”
The dragon’s tail twitched, scraping along the floor.
“We can’t…” we whimpered. “Please… I…”
“Which one? Which one can’t? Which one can’t bear it if she is dead?”
“We are…” we stuttered.
“… almost…” I began.
“… the same.”
“Please,” we said.
“Please…” I added.
Then Hunger grinned. “I will understand these things when I am alive again,” he said, and raised one fist of black claws towards Dana’s face.
We screamed.
The bloody cross within a cross that we had drawn on the floor at our feet caught fire. The fire was bright blue flashing sparks that wriggled and writhed by themselves.
And because we didn’t know what to do, couldn’t cope
not this
my feelings
such feelings
not this
because we couldn’t understand
this feeling
too much
–because we couldn’t
I couldn’t–
we screamed
“Domine dirige nos! Domine dirige nos!”
And the dragon of broken and disobeyed signs was, in the end, an urban creature, summoned out of the city itself; and the city’s dragon, the lord of the city’s gates, did so very much like to lead, and be obeyed, and have its own rules that could, so rumour went, stop the king or queen entering the city, if it was felt that Londoners didn’t need them inside their walls. Hunger had told me the key himself: time, law, humility, a recognition that in the eyes of the city, we were nothing, and the dragon was the lord.
Without a moment’s hesitation, it swiped its tail in an easy gesture that took the head off Hunger where he stood, slashing it from his shoulders with a single razored edge of broken signpost.
Hunger disintegrated into nothing, black wisps of darkness crawling away into the corners of the room, where they melded into the shadows.
We looked at the dragon, it looked at us, as the blue fire of our blood gently retreated back down to dull redness. Then, without a sound, it started to melt. Scales of reflective plastic drifted off its skin, in flashes of bright white, yellow and red. The traceries of a thirty-mile-an-hour warning sign, the remnants of a school crossing notice, part of a placard welcoming you to a council estate, a shard of post office notice, a chipped blue piece of a notable’s plaque, a warning about temporary lights. They slipped off it like seeds from a dandelion as the spell that had sustained it slowly disintegrated.
Last of all, flopping to the ground with a single dull thunk, was a small rounded piece of stone that rolled towards our feet. We picked it up. Its edges were smooth and surface warm; it felt old in our hands. On one side were the words:
n this day in 167
derman of the city
in honour o
Domine dirig
and that was all.
“Matthew?”
I turned to look at Dana, who, without a sound, slipped to the floor in a rapidly growing circle of her own blood.
We dragged our nails into our hand to draw blood, and put all our strength and heat and warmth into it until it burned so brightly that the walls were blazing blue. We rubbed it into her wounds but she didn’t speak, didn’t stir.
We screamed for help, shook her, shouted her name, pressed the heat of our flesh into her cold skin, pressed our hands as hard as we could into the gashes in her chest and neck but the blood just seeped out around our fingers and mingled with our own until we couldn’t tell what was ours and what was hers and the burning of ours was muted in the medley.
I couldn’t
not Dana
I couldn’t
so we had to. We held her in our arms, and every joint seemed to have just broken, every limb hanging so heavy, we were amazed she had been able to lift them, even her fingers were so heavy when we tangled them in ours, and because I knew and couldn’t cope, we screamed.
We screamed until the glass that had shattered on the floor danced again with our voice, until the wires under the floor grew up like ivy through soil and tangled themselves around every railing and buried themselves in every wall, until the foundations warped and the ceiling shook, until the electricity danced around us in a tornado, until the gas pipes burnt inside their casings and the water pipes burst in geysers around our head, erupting towards the ceiling and boiling away in clouds of billowing steam. We screamed until the fire extinguishers burst, until plastic melted, until the thinnest wires started to melt and drip with their own heat, until our voice wasn’t human, but the roar of the traffic and the screech of brakes and rattle of engines and rumble of an underground wind and
come be we
and until our hair danced with electric flame and our breath was black carbon on the air in front of us, bursting through our nostrils, and our fingers had the metallic gleam of a penknife and our heart raced in time to the dedumdedumdedum of the speeding train racing across old tracks deep in the earth and the rats clustered in the gutters and the pigeons scattered to the sky and, all around us, every telephone started to ring.
If we had known how, that would have been when we crawled back into the telephones.
We would have forgotten that moment, would have said goodbye to being human, if this was what it was like. I’d have done it in an instant, if I’d known how. But we’d burnt out the telephones around us, and the lights in the street, so we sat and rocked the body of Dana Mikeda, and whispered the dead sounds that people make at corpses, like the soothing words of a mother to her baby, telling them it’ll be all right, after all.
We became conscious of Blackjack’s wheezing by slow degrees. We looked up. Part of his leg was open and torn, and one arm hung oddly, but he was still alive, for what it was worth. His jacket had been slashed to ribbons and under it I could see the bare flesh of his infected veins. He had found his bag crushed under the remains of his bike and from it, pulled a gun, which he pointed at us. We felt…
… not quite nothing…
He found it hard to speak, but we weren’t going anywhere.
“You…” he began, then spat blood and a piece of tooth, and tried again. “You… knew I was the traitor.”
We said nothing.
“Used me!” he rasped. “Used me to find Bakker, find her. Knew I’d betray, knew you had to be alive. They followed… you were followed… so that the others could come here, destroy the Tower.”
Still we said nothing. There wasn’t anything that seemed to need saying.
“Used me,” he repeated, nodding a quick, frantic nod. “Respected that, sorcerer. Respected it.” He flicked back the safety on the gun. “I’m dying,” he said.
Nothing.
“Blood curse. I swore and I betrayed. Knew it’d happen. Knew I’d die when I swore. Gotta be done. Gotta… gotta keep moving … gotta… find speed… enough… it’s gotta be real. Life has to be lived on the edge, you have to see how it ends, to know that you’re living it. I was so fast… you gotta be different, you know? To know you’re alive? The whole clan they fucking said… gotta fight the Tower. Gotta work as one. Gotta work with others, say the right fucking thing, walk the right fucking walk, talk the right… you gotta bleed and burn and die and do what is right, because that’s what’s expected. You gotta do right. Because that’s what a normal guy is meant to do. I ain’t never going to be that normal guy. I ain’t never going to be what they told me to be. When the shadow killed the head of my clan… he set us free. Do you understand, Matthew? The chaos? The speed? Do you understand being free? It’s… it’s all about… it’s… no one tells me who I’m going to be. No one.”
We said nothing.
He levelled the gun. “Don’t you want to hear the rest?”
We thought about it. We shook our head.
He closed his finger over the trigger.
There was a single, sharp gunshot. Then another. It echoed across the flooded, shattered debris of the room. Blackjack staggered forward, the curse-ridden, battered remnant of his body barely able to support even that movement, then slid into a puddle on the floor.
From the stairwell, Vera said, “Psycho-bitch can shoot, can’t she?”
We heard the clicking of a rifle, and footsteps coming towards us. We looked up. Oda looked back at us, behind her Vera, and behind that, a dozen or so Whites stinking of various destructive magics.
Oda said, “You look shit. Need a hand?”
We thought about it. Then we nodded, took hold of the hand that she offered us, and let her pull us back onto our feet, carefully laying down the body of Dana Mikeda on the floor behind us as we did.
There were Whites scattered on every floor. Vera said they’d lost the signal from the tracker in my shoe just outside the tower, but it hadn’t taken much guessing to work out where I’d gone. She said there’d been confusion about why they kept on arriving at the same floor over and over again, no matter how many times they went upstairs, but it was nothing a lot of shooting and a dash of magic couldn’t solve.
She agreed that we looked like shit.
It almost sounded like a compliment, coming from her.
We took the lift up to the tenth floor, where it stopped working. At the twelfth we found another dozen Whites and a lot of bodies; on the seventeenth a group of weremen dropped in; on the twenty-third we found a gaggle of warlocks; on the twenty-seventh, Oda greeted stony-faced Order men, laden with more weapons than we had ever seen.
At the thirty-fifth, the very top floor, Oda pressed a gun in our hand.
I said, “I don’t know if I can…”
Vera, standing behind us, said, “Arseholes, we’ve come this bloody far!”
Oda thought about it, looked us straight in the eyes and said, “You came here for revenge. Now you’ve got a real reason for it.”
“I… I was… it…” I couldn’t really explain.
She thought about it, then said, lowering her voice, “Bakker is alone up there. No one is coming for him, not Amiltech, not Lee, not Simmons. You destroyed them all to get to him. Even the shadow is gone…”
“Not yet,” I replied, “not quite.”
“… if you can’t finish this,” she said, firmer, “then maybe you should let them do it for you.”
We stared at her in surprise. “Oda?” we said.
“Well?”
“We don’t know if we can do it either.”
“This is the only thing you have.”
We took the gun, left the Whites in the stairwell, and went alone to meet Mr Bakker.
There is a magazine, published irregularly in the UK, and distributed occasionally in the US, Australia, South Africa and among a specialist English-speaking market, whose imaginative founding editor dubbed it Urban Magic. Students sometimes read it when they’re bored and listless, in case they can get useful hints about sex out of it; fluffy ladies who care about gardening sometimes read it in case it can advise them on how to read their own palms; sinister men with an unhealthy interest in rabbit’s blood sometimes read it, in case they can find clues in its pages to a conspiracy. All of these people tend to be disappointed. If you ignore the occasionally garish covers designed to entice readers of just this sort into paying the £1.60 required per issue, the contents tend to be rather dry – essays on the various applications of ultraviolet light in binding spells; studies on the effect of different kinds of road paint in summoning circles, with excruciatingly detailed footnotes and usually a URL link to online case notes as supporting evidence; an assessment of how the wave–particle theory of light might be connected to the manipulation of pure elemental forces, and so on. It is the magazine of the professional urban magician, and a fairly specialist one at that. I first started reading it when I was in my twenties, a while after the first issue was published, and borrowed the back copies from the local library, because my teacher told me to. When I couldn’t find the more obscure issues, I joined the British Library and went through their archives. There, after much scrutiny, I found an article very well received at the time, entitled “The Changing Concept of Magic”, written for one of the earlier issues by my very own teacher. I read it, took notes and reported back favourably enough; but it took me a long while to work out what it was about the thing that bugged me so much.
It said: magic is life.
And there, quite simply, should have been the warning.
There was a pair of double doors at the end of a hall, and an empty reception desk in front of them. The doors were locked. We kicked them until they opened, no strength left for subtlety, and marched into the room beyond.
The room was gloomy, the lights switched off; but more than enough street light drifted through, reflected down from the orange clouds outside, drawing long shadows within shadows across the carpeted floor. Spread out beyond the windows, on every side except the one I’d come from, was the city. It ran away as far as the eye could see, a chaotic pattern of orange, white and pinkish stars across an uneven black floor, gleaming off the Thames, catching the flashing yellow indicator lights of the cars in the streets below, the glare of headlights where the streets aligned with our point of view, the glint of bedroom lights as they were turned out for the night, or the neon glow of the signs above the restaurants, clubs and bars.
And it was beautiful. No getting round the fact. It was simply and utterly beautiful.
And sitting in front of it, looking south towards the high red lights of Crystal Palace and the distant blackness of the North Downs where they cut off the orange sky, his back turned to the door, was Mr Robert Bakker.
He sat utterly still in his wheelchair, head forward, breathing slow and steady. Tubes were attached to his arms. On one side was a bag of some clear fluid that we couldn’t guess at, leading into a drip. On the other side was a bag of bright red blood. I could guess whose. We felt the weight of the gun in our hand, the sticky hotness of our palm, and noticed in the light of the moon peeking out occasionally between the scudding clouds that he was casting a very respectable black shadow.
“Mr Bakker?” I said.
He stirred slightly in the wheelchair. “Matthew?” he asked, in a distant, confused voice.
We moved forward. “Mr Bakker?” we repeated, louder.
“Matthew, is that you?”
I stepped round so that I was next to him. He looked up, confused, then smiled. “Come to admire the view?”
I nodded and looked out across at it. “It’s a good view,” I said finally.
“One of the best. I had this whole floor cleared out so I could see it better.” His eyebrows tightened. “How’d you get here? Not that I’m not pleased to see you…”
“I was kidnapped, drugged, tied up and left in a basement thirty-something floors beneath this,” I replied cordially. “I then had a large amount of my blood taken out of my body for what I can only assume were experimental purposes, before my friends, having followed me here with foreknowledge of my imminent kidnapping and likely fate, attacked, and I escaped.”
He thought about it, then said, “That’s not what I expected to hear, I’ll admit.”
“Would you like to hear the rest?”
“Yes,” he said. “I would.” And by now, his eyes had clocked the gun in my hand, and the blood on my clothes and skin, and his voice was level and tense.
“Your shadow is alive.”
“What?”
“Your shadow is alive,” we repeated, struggling not to raise our voice. “It’s been alive for several years. It killed Patel, Pensley, Dhawan, Akute, Foster, Awan…”
“Matthew, are you quite all right?”
“… Koshdel, Khay, Dana, and me, to name a few. It is you. No getting round it. And it won’t be killed until you are.”
His fi
ngers tightened on the arms of his chair. “You… believe this to be true?”
“Yes.”
“What did you mean by Dana?”
I met his eyes squarely, and saw him flinch. “It killed her. It held her, and I said, ‘Domine dirige nos’…”
“The blessing of the city?”
“The very same, just like you taught me, the invocation of all its guardians and its spirits. And it killed her. I held her and I couldn’t stand it, so I just… we were… anyway. It killed her. It wants to be alive – really alive. It is hungry. Nothing will ever sate its appetite, it is so hungry for life. It has no pleasure in anything, it cannot understand delight or feeling or pain, but it tries; it feasts on the blood and the fire of others, kills in order to see how people die, is fascinated by death and feasting and life. And it is a he; and he is you. That’s how it is, I’m afraid. How it’s going to go.”
“Matthew…” he began.
“It came alive when you had the stroke. You were a good man – a brilliant sorcerer. You had always delighted in life, seen beauty in it; that’s what sorcery is. The ability to see something wonderful, magical, where other people see just mundane and boring nothing. A point of view. You taught me that. Then you started dying and you couldn’t cope. You couldn’t reconcile the loss of your faculties, your abilities, your strength, your life, to how you’d lived it in the past. You were a healthy and active man and suddenly you’re trapped in this dying carcass. But you’ve still got those scruples. The moral part of your brain says, “Oh, well, such is life, et cetera et cetera, better make the most of it and not cause any fuss.” Then there’s this other part, the part that everyone has anyway, that screams and fights and kicks against the idea of dying, that is terrified of it, can’t cope with it, refuses to accept it and longs, above all other things, to live. That can find nothing in this life that doesn’t lead to death, can see nothing in this life that it doesn’t think is destructible or must have an end. I’m sure you see where this is leading.”
