A Madness of Angels: Or the Resurrection of Matthew Swift (18 page)

 

He saw the sparks running down my arm, and that, more than my speaking, made him hesitate. He crawled back on all fours, nose twitching, the corners of his mouth turned up in a bestial snarl, but there was still a glimmer of human consciousness there, watching, listening.

 

I licked my lips, wondering how best to keep his attention, and tasted blood. My nose felt like someone had set off a small bomb just behind the solid front of cartilage, and was streaming copiously. My back felt like it was made of jelly, my stomach like any movement would cause me to throw up: every breath was one breath away from the sick bowl. In a voice made unnatural by stress and pain, I said, “Listen to me. Just listen.”

 

He made a little sound between his teeth, but didn’t attempt to rip my throat out, which I took to be a good sign. “I tried to protect Sinclair,” I began. But all this seemed to provoke was a snarl, and a shudder across his flesh as ginger fox fur and slimy grey tufts of rat hair squeezed their way up through the human softness of his skin. Weremen were not as uncommon in the city as I personally wished; and behind the human exterior he seemed to have a bad case of the condition, a mingling of rat and fox, and perhaps just a hint of crow, boiling somewhere in his veins. Though their forest-dwelling descents, the werewolves, didn’t exactly have a good reputation for personal hygiene, this latest twist on the species always upset me – unpredictable, unstable, highly territorial, and often clever in the unhealthy way of a child who devises ingenious methods of torturing a fly.

 

I tried to think through the now relentless aching of my bones. Being in a hospital helped a little; as with the underground, it had its own unique magics tingling on the edges of sense, and I tried to dabble my fingers in it as much as I could, while continuing to pay attention to the electricity still bound up in my right hand. “If you’re thinking I sold Sinclair out,” I tried again, “you’re wrong, and if you give me half a chance, I’ll prove it. If you’re thinking I’m here to cause him harm, you’re wrong, and frankly you should have worked it out by yourself. If you’re thinking I abandoned him, you’re wrong and again, I can prove it. And if you think we will let you harm us further or raise one more finger against us, then we will have to kill you. So… I suggest you try and get control over your more unusual nature, see if you can’t coax those claws away, and I’ll try very, very hard not to throw up over what’s left of your shoes. How does that sound?”

 

He hesitated, head twisting to one side like an inquisitive pigeon. Perhaps he had some of that blood in his system as well. His mouth wrinkled like a wave was passing along it; but he didn’t growl, and very slowly the hunched shoulders and odd curvature of his back relaxed a little, although the claws at his fingers showed no sign of going away.

 

He hissed in a voice that was a good 70 per cent human, “I was meant to protect him.”

 

“Well, there’s not much anyone can do against machine guns in the dark,” I pointed out. I was pulling myself up the wall, every inch a triumph of will, every moment a conquest worthy of climbing Everest, until I was sitting nearly upright. “We were all befuddled by that.”

 

“I have no reason to trust you.”

 

“I’m not rosy about things myself. But put it like this – if I were your enemy, don’t you think I would have fried you by now? Or Sinclair for that matter?”

 

“That’s hardly an argument for one who looks as you do.”

 

“Then you’ll just have to make a decision on your lonesome, won’t you?”

 

 

We sat on the steps of UCL’s main building, a strange thing pretending to be a Greek temple behind a pair of tall wrought-iron gates, and drank cheap, thin coffee from the union shop. No one bothered with us; torn shoes were probably a question of style for the UCL students, and a blackened eye or so could be a badge of honour within the university athletics club.

 

I felt that it should have been drizzling, perhaps with a thundercloud or two overhead; it would have suited my mood. As it was, the day was crisp and clean, a thing of bright light and cold, empty blue skies, big and pale. I sat with my arms curled around as much of my aching body as I could comfortably achieve, and tried not to wobble a newly loosened tooth. There was probably, I knew, some spell or other that could repair the damage, but I wasn’t about to try mystical dentistry and somehow felt as if the entire thing was beneath me. James Bond never had to go for emergency dental treatment; Jackie Chan never smiled a smile of gold crowns; Bruce Lee didn’t spend the final credits of any kung fu film sitting with his arms wrapped round his belly like he had food poisoning, feeling sorry for himself – therefore, neither should I. Besides, from what little we knew and what we could guess, dentists were a species we wished to avoid.

 

Charlie said, rolling the cardboard coffee cup between the open palms of his hands, “He found me on the streets. As a child I was fascinated by the creatures in the city. They live around us all the time – foxes, pigeons, rats, crows, gulls, cats, dogs, mice – plus some you wouldn’t expect. I saw a wolf once in Hyde Park; it just sat and stared at me, not the least bit scared. All those creatures that live off the rubbish we leave behind – and we leave a feast. You understand? I was fascinated by them. This whole animal world going on around us and we just ignore it. Choose not to notice.

 

“It wasn’t all just childish curiosity, though. Some of it, somehow, got into the blood. My brother always said a rat bit me when I was a baby. I would go wandering in the night, and when I hit puberty, biology lessons weren’t warning enough.”

 

“You’re not alone in that,” I sighed. “Tell me about Sinclair.”

 

“He… watches. That’s his job.”

 

“
X-Files
?”

 

“No. ‘Concerned citizens’.”

 

“He said that before; it sounded like a euphemism then and does now.”

 

“It’s how things work. Someone in government realises their wife has been putting a curse on their baby daughter; a rich businessman discovers that his number two prays to the neon; a patron of the arts sees an illusion come to life in the spray-paint drawing of a child. Concerned citizens with mutual interests. Sooner or later, they come together. They have influence, power; they want to make sure that these things don’t get out of hand. Sinclair helps.”

 

“And now they’re concerned about Bakker?”

 

“Yes. The Tower has grown too big, Sinclair said. It’s not just what Bakker is – and Sinclair thought he was a monster – it’s what the Tower is. So big, so fast; so powerful. Its enemies die. Anyone who opposes it dies. There are concerned interests on every side. Sinclair’s sponsors wished to ensure the containment of magic. There are equally those who wish to exploit it; and, perhaps, those who wish to destroy it. You can understand.”

 

“Yes. I think I can. All right. Tell me about the others. The warlock, the fortune-teller, the biker…”

 

“Sinclair knew Khan. Khan helped him, saw things. When Khan died…”

 

“… Sinclair had the fortune-teller moved in?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Could she have betrayed us? Told Bakker where we were meeting, organised the shoot-out?”

 

“I doubt it.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because she was Khan’s lover,” he said, in a voice of surprised simplicity. “She wants Bakker dead. That’s why she told Sinclair about you.”

 

“What did she tell him?”

 

“That either Matthew Swift was alive, or something that was powerful enough to mimic his flesh lived in his place. Either way, Sinclair saw a possibility.”

 

“Because he thought I wanted revenge on Bakker?”

 

“Don’t you?” he asked sharply, eyes flashing up as he sipped from the paper cup. I didn’t answer. “Sinclair wondered what you might have quarrelled about. He had a few theories. It takes a lot to abandon your teacher, I hear, when you’re a sorcerer.”

 

“You know nothing about it,” I snapped. “You wouldn’t understand.”

 

“I think I do,” he replied. “Sinclair taught me how to control what I am, cared for me. Isn’t that what sorcerers do for each other? You are more than other magicians, you lose yourselves in the city, your minds and thoughts are so much a part of it that at rush hour you must walk because the city is moving, and at end of office hours you cannot help but feel a rush of relief and the desire to look at the sky, because that is how the city works. There are sorcerers who have lost themselves entirely to the power of it, their minds submerged for ever in the rhythms of the city, identities stripped down to nothing more than the pulsing of the traffic through the streets. You see? I understand how these things are. I can hear the creatures of this place wherever I go, all the time, and when I dream, my dreams are in the eyes of the pigeons and I wish I could never wake, and fly with them for ever. Sinclair told me, when I told him my dream, that that was sorcery.”

 

“That’s part of it,” I admitted. “But just a part. What about the others? Who was the man with the horse’s face?”

 

“The…”

 

“He was shot in the room. A sniper killed him as I walked in front of the window.”

 

“His name was Edward Seaward. He was a wizard, a representative of the Long White City Clan. They’re an underground movement. We usually just call them the Whites. They oppose the Tower.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because the Tower attempts to control people, to use them for its own end. The Whites protect their own people from the Tower and, unlike the Tower’s protection, they don’t demand services in return. They say they’re ‘the good guys’. I think they’re just out for kicks. Don’t like being told anything, get stubborn for the sake of being stubborn.”

 

“Why haven’t I heard of them?”

 

“They’re still weak. Their last leader was murdered – betrayed from within. They vie in their own small way for influence within the community – they find individuals like me, who need their help and who keep order in their ranks, stop too many demons being summoned by people who should know better. They can cause some irritation to Guy Lee – they break his spells, disrupt his activities; but they are weak.”

 

“What activities?”

 

“Glamours, illusions, enchantments, bedazzlements – these are the tricks he uses on behalf of the Tower, to bring in basic resources. He runs brothels in the city, whose walls are covered with enchantments, makes them an addiction, charges for every second of glamour-washed magic; brings back illusions of dead ghosts, runs fortune-telling parlours where the minds of the victims are ransacked for information, the better to relieve them of their wealth. The Whites find this offensive, dangerous. So do plenty of others, but they won’t risk offending the Tower’s agent.”

 

“What about the warlock?”

 

“He was sent to us from Birmingham, where the Tower has also been attempting to move in. A pre-emptive strike, I think, was what the warlock desired. He’s also been working to get the Scottish wizards on side; there’s a lot of people running angry in Edinburgh and Glasgow at Bakker’s ambitions.”

 

“How about the biker?”

 

“His clan resents the Tower. It demanded the services of the bikers, carrying messages, goods, passengers. No one can get anywhere as fast as a biker; to them, distance, space, is simply a matter of perception. They bring the road to them when they travel.”

 

“What went wrong?”

 

“The money offered wasn’t much, and some of the things they were being asked to carry were… disturbing.”

 

“Such as?”

 

“The crisis came when they were asked to transport a piece of flesh around the country perpetually. The flesh belonged to a man who had been caught in a brothel, one of Guy Lee’s honey traps. They sliced off a piece of his skin from the base of his skull while he slept and kept it so that at any given moment they could curse him with his own flesh, or blind his senses with pain, or paralyse him from the neck downwards, or send dreams to his eyes. This man was an enemy of Bakker, an accountant who had somehow offended the Tower. The bikers were ordered to keep the man’s flesh constantly moving, lest someone broke the Tower’s hold on him. The bikers said no and burnt the flesh to break the spell – their leader was killed. It was not a pleasant death. Since then, the bikers have been moving too, never stopping, outrunning Bakker’s revenge on them.”

 

“And the biker at the meeting?”

 

“He calls himself Blackjack. He was sent as envoy to Sinclair to discuss the possibility of an alliance against the Tower. Don’t underestimate him. To your eyes he may just look like a man in black, but I have seen what the bikers can do. Their magic is a wild, dangerous thing, it never stops moving. They can find anything, anywhere, and lose themselves at any moment, and you will never catch them.”

 

“What about Oda?”

 

“I do not know anything about her. Sinclair seemed afraid of her.”

 

“But she’s not a magician.”

 

“Perhaps… not
her
, then; but the people behind her… I do not know.”

 

In honesty, I hadn’t expected much more. “How about Dorie?”

 

“I think he may have feared her above all others. She is old, sorcerer. Sinclair says she was old when he first knew her, and he was younger then. She has been old for a very long time.”

 

“Could she have betrayed us? Why was she there?”

 

“I don’t know. Sinclair said… to understand Dorie, you have to know about the city. He called her the Bag Lady, as if that was a good thing.”

 

“
The
Bag Lady? With a definite article and a strong emphasis?”

 

“I suppose so. Is it important?”

 

“Yes – could be.” I tried a stretch and immediately regretted it, nausea filling my belly, and the taste of bile rising in my mouth. “What are you going to do?” I asked.

 

“I protect Sinclair.”

 

“Has anyone come looking?”

 

“The police. I hid. They can’t find out much from the sleeping body of a patient with no medical record, so they leave a man on the door. When he is awake, I hide as a rat and crawl through the water pipes. When he sleeps, I move like the fox so he doesn’t hear me pass. I make sure that if they should return for Sinclair, they will fail. Will you kill