A Madness of Angels: Or the Resurrection of Matthew Swift (16 page)

 

The man on guard whose merest magical presence twisted the otherwise cool, calm, pale blue sense of that place into himself, like a small moon warping the space around it, glanced up at me as I passed, and at my badge, and the edge of his consciousness scraped along my own. I kept him out instinctively, throwing up a rough wall in his mental path, focusing clearly on that one image to fill my entire consciousness and keep him from penetrating my intent. He was a crude magician – potentially powerful, I felt, but, unlike sorcerers, unlike those who can taste the magic of the city, who revel in it, his power was one of spells, incantations and gestures, a thing tamed, rather than a thing natural. We had no fear of him, so nodded coldly in his direction as we went by, and walked on.

 

I rode up to the 24th floor. The lift was clear glass, on the outer wall of the building, so I could see the city drop away beneath me. As on the London Eye that night, I was astounded by the beauty of its multicoloured spectrum: not just the sodium orange of the suburban sprawl, but the white interiors of office blocks, green traffic lights, red aircraft beacons on the taller towers, purple floodlights washing over high walls, pooling beams of silver on enclosed courtyards, shimmering blues on fountains, or in the doors of clubs, the moving snakes of traffic, defined only by headlights, brakes, or indicators flashing on and off like an endless slithering column of eyes, and the reflected pinkish glare across the ceiling of the sky, except for where an aircraft’s guiding lights sent out a cone of brightness, through the black scudding clouds heavy with rain as the wind carried them towards the sea.

 

I could almost drink the magic of what I saw, almost lie back suspended on nothing but its intensity and float above the ground with the force of it, the sudden, overwhelming sense of it – and that, we knew, was all that sorcery was; all, perhaps, that we were. An awareness, an understanding, a point of view. Take away that sense of the city’s wonder and we were no more than insects, grey figures on a grey landscape scuttling along, unable to see the daily extraordinary things. Though it was a strange emotion, we almost felt pity.

 

 

The door to the Amiltech office was more than locked – it was warded. Not the first that I’d seen on my arsonist’s/burglar’s progress around Amiltech’s client base, but the strongest. My blank keys would not change shape to fit the lock, nor, I felt, would mere force – a bombardment with the electricity in the wires above, nor the use of sound – settle it satisfactorily until the ward itself was broken. For a ludicrous moment I wondered if there were any air ducts I could crawl through to get inside the office; but life was not like the movies. The door was pretty much immovable, not even breakable without a considerable expenditure of time and energy. So, with this in mind, I went up, to the offices of the company on the floor above – Verity – which, according to the brochure by the door, specialised in proving insurance claims wrong even if, so the small print suggested, they weren’t. They appreciated a challenge. Its door was not warded, and my keys, after the usual coaxing, fitted perfectly.

 

I walked through Verity’s office until pretty much dead-centre, got out my all-purpose Swiss Army knife, and started cutting a square in the thin nylon and lino carpet on the floor. I pulled up a piece of flooring roughly big enough to let me step through, put it to one side and went in search of the office kitchen. I found it eventually, next to the ladies’ toilets, a small space dominated by a coffee machine. I filled the kettle and set it to boil. Under the sink I found a bottle of bleach. When the kettle was done, I took it, full and steaming, back to my square of exposed floor, and poured the boiling water over the small area of concrete underneath. I dribbled a few drops of bleach onto the wet floor, at the four points of the compass, then stood back and tried to find the right spell.

 

Transmutation is not a strong point of mine – even if you can convince the substance in question to become what you want it to be, it tends not to be a permanent process (at least, not without ending in an explosion), and it requires a lot of time and effort to get it right.

 

I wasn’t after perfection, and I hoped that after I’d raised the temperature of the water and mixed in one of the nastiest substances I could find in the kitchen, the liquid spilt on the floor was already halfway to a change of state. Magicians tend to have pre-written incantations and spells for these kind of things, usually calling on various dire or implausible powers (of which my favourite was “Upney, Grey Lord of Tar”, who I’d heard mentioned by amateurs and who we knew to be real) to achieve their temporary wills. Sorcerers rely on will power and raw magic, and I now deployed both, snatching heat and power out of the air around me until my breath condensed with the sudden cold, and the lights above me whined and flickered. I stretched my arms out, fingers turned towards the floor, and pushed every inch of power I could get from that room, every trace of snatched breath left lingering in the air, every hum of electricity, every remnant of warmth from human skin, every smell of sweat, every half-forgotten lingering sound of shouting, all the detritus of left-over life that makes magic what it is, for life is magic, magic
is
life, the left-over life we don’t even notice we’re living; I drew it into me, and pushed it into the floor.

 

The water–bleach mixture started to bubble. Then it started to smoke, a thin, acrid white billow that made my eyes water and reminded me of the taste of hot solder. It hissed, it boiled, and for a moment – just a moment, because I couldn’t sustain this intensity of concentration for long – the water on the floor became acid strong enough to eat through lead.

 

It ate through the exposed area of the floorin no more than sixty seconds, reducing its substance like it was made of half-baked flour. The hole in the floor spread out across the entire area where the liquid had spilt, eating into the carpet around. When I felt it was wide enough, I let the power go, jerking with the pressure of it running away between my fingers. At my feet, the hole was now human-sized, looking straight down onto floor 24.

 

I waited a few seconds for the acid to revert back to its watery, bleach-spotted state, then poured the rest of the kettle over it for good measure. When that had stopped dripping too much, I sat on the edge of the hole, and lowered myself down. I still got a soggy bottom and wasn’t happy about the drop, but managed a survivable, if not a dignified, flop into Amiltech’s London headquarters.

 

 

In cursing them, I inscribed the black shadows not just on the wall, but on the floor and across the doors. We found San Khay’s office, with its wide windows looking out across the city, and, in big blue letters, wrote across the glass for all the world to see:

 

Come be me and be free!

 

Then, because I wasn’t entirely sure why I had written this, I added a caveat with a biro on one of the neatly laid-out pads of papers on a conference table.

 

Make me a shadow on the wall.

 

How long until he comes for you?

 

Feeling that this made more sense, I wandered round the office, flicking through desk drawers and rummaging under piles of paper with no real concept of what I might be looking for, but a feeling that it was the right thing to do. It was all depressingly mundane. Lists of stationery acquisitions, tax details for the accountants, scribbled notes to remind X to talk to Y about Z and how it might affect the pension plan – not at all what I’d hoped for from an organisation that dabbled in mystic forces beyond our ken.

 

The most promising object, I found in the broom cupboard. Behind a pile of mops was a small security pad, clearly designed for a numerical code. It had been scribbled over with a number of protective wards in permanent red ink; but on looking closer I saw that these only covered the pad itself, and with my knife I was able to undo the screws that held it to the wall, and pull the entire thing away from the surface it rested on. Behind was a fat cable running into a small hole in the wall. I unplugged the pad from the cable, put it to one side, and snatched a small handful of static out of the nearest sleeping computer screen on an office desk, twisting it between my fingers like a cat’s cradle as I contemplated how best to make it work. I tried touching my electric fingertips to the cable, then tried sending it down the wires in short bursts, and eventually – though how I did not pretend to understand – something went very quietly,
click.

 

I looked round for the source of the sound, and found it in a small panel that had slid back behind the bottles of cream cleaner, with a lever in it. Never the kind of man who didn’t press the button, I pulled the lever and, with a hiss of tortured hydraulics, one wall of the broom cupboard swung back. This, I felt, was much more like it; this was how things should be.

 

The room beyond filled with a dull bluish-white light as I stepped inside it, illuminating some extraordinarily interesting objects. One of them said, “You’re not a regular fucker, are you?”

 

I walked up to the chin-high blue jar that suspended the thing inside it and said, “What are you then?”

 

The creature belched a small cloud of car fumes, which were quickly sucked up through the ventilation tube at the top of its thick jar. “Could ask you the same bloody thing,” it said through the glass, which gave its voice an odd, almost mechanical resonance.

 

It was short, approximately four feet nothing, its skin a pale grey colour, and rough, like old tarmac on a road. Its eyes were big and round, reflective and multifaceted, and from its nose and mouth dribbled a pale brown liquid that looked for all the world like engine oil. I reached the obvious diagnosis.

 

“You’re a troll,” I said.

 

“Well, give the man a prize.”

 

“What the hell are you doing in a jar?”

 

“I got fucking caught; what the hell do you think I’m doing in a jar?!” it wailed.

 

I considered the creature from every possible angle. Back in the distant dark ages, its ancestors had probably eaten the bones of men slain in anger, and bathed in the local swamp. But evolution had done its thing with trolls, like most other creatures of magic, and now the little thing probably enjoyed nothing more than a leftover hamburger and a bath in crude oil. I squatted down until my eyes were level with its own, and managed to hold its gaze despite the initial moment of revulsion as I saw the thin sheen of ethyl alcohol secreted by its tear glands to keep the black surface of its lenses clean.

 

“You got a name?” I said.

 

“Mighty Raaaarrrgghh!” it replied.

 

“I was thinking of something shorter and less guttural.”

 

It shrugged and said in an embarrassed voice, “Jeremy.”

 

“Jeremy?”

 

“I have endured every fucking indecency, wart-face, don’t think you’re getting me high with Jeremy.”

 

“Jeremy the troll,” I repeated, just to make absolutely certain I’d got it right.

 

“The Mighty Raaaarrrgghh!” it added for good measure. “And when I get out of here I’ll suck the jelly from your eyes!”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because I’m a fucking troll!”

 

“I was under the impression trolls these days liked nothing more for supper than a used tea bag with a few days’ mould on it.”

 

“For you, I make an exception.”

 

“Why? I haven’t done you any harm. Surely it’s Amiltech that you have the beef with.”

 

“You have an ugly face,” it replied with a leer that revealed a set of sharpened steel teeth. I do not attempt to understand evolution in the age of urban magic.

 

“Let me put it this way,” I said patiently. “You’ve been trapped in a jar for I don’t know how long by Amiltech and all its works, you probably want out, and I’m willing to let you out, and you’re going to eat the jelly from my eyes?”

 

“Uh… right.”

 

“You see where I’m going with all this?”

 

“I’m waiting for the catch, there’s always a catch with fucking magicians, isn’t there?”

 

“I just want to piss Amiltech off.”

 

“Is that
it
?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Why? What’s your grind?”

 

“You would not begin to understand,” I sighed. “So, you want to be let out?”

 

“You’re not going to ensorcel me, are you?”

 

“No.”

 

“You sure?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“You know, I find that really hard to believe.”

 

“You can just stay there…”

 

It waved its spindly grey arms as wildly as was possible inside a jar and said, “Hey, hey, I was just asking… release away, human!”

 

I undid the various nuts and bolts that secured the top of the jar and with a pop of trapped pressurised air, the thing came free. The troll sprang out of its container with a single leap, and perched on the lid, grinning hugely, a whiff of car fumes trailing down from the end of its nose. “Human?” it said, the grin stretching as far as its tiny, circular ears.

 

“Almost.”

 

“I get paid to stay in the jar.” It leapt, fingers outstretched, teeth shining, in a perfect descending line from its perch straight towards my throat. I staggered back, raising my hands instinctively, and snatched magic into them, twisting the air around us into a wall, a whirlwind, spinning thick sheets of it across our path so that they picked up the little creature as it leapt and slammed it back against the wall of the room. Then, before it had a moment to recover, we flung our hands out and reached for the nearest amenable resource, found the cold, hard sense of iron rods running through the building, leading all the way to the foundations, and, with a twist of our fingers, made them grow.

 

The troll wailed, but the sound was choked off as a sharp splinter of worked iron spat itself through the wall and wound round its throat, pulling it up by the neck until it twitched and wheezed. Then another wrapped itself across the creature’s convulsing legs, and a third growth of iron lodged itself under the troll’s armpit, dragging it up on one side while on the other the weight of its body dragged it down, until it looked like a misshapen accident, all lopsided and moaning.