Youve got my attention.
Can you control them?
What?
Its very simple, Mr Swift. Can you keep control?
I dont understand.
Please, lets not play coy with this. It is the matter on which your whole life currently depends. Should I decide that you are incapable of keeping the creatures currently inside you at bay, should I judge that you are a threat equal or even superior to that which you are attempting to destroy, I will have your head removed from your shoulders, your face shot off, your fingerprints burnt away and the remnants dumped in a variety of rivers feeding a number of fish-infested seas. So please, take me seriously when I say, I will have an answer. Can you keep control?
I licked my lips and felt the shaking in my bones. Im a sorcerer. Ive been taught how to
This isnt about your sorcery! he snapped. Tell me about
them
.
About who?
He hit us with the back of his hand, across the face, and his knuckles slammed into our jaw and the pain filled us with shock and astonishment, anger flashing inside us. Hands pulled me back up and he said again,
Can you keep control?
Who are you?
He hit us on the other side of our head, and when we tried to crawl back up of our own accord he hit us again, knocking us once more to the earth. I bit down the anger turning the silver streaks of sunlight electric blue in my eyes and waited for the people there to pull me up. When they did, he said again, You must be angry by now, Mr Swift, you must be afraid. Youve died once before, and your kind can only see the flames of hell when your heart stops, when your soul leaves, so you must be afraid. Can you control them, when they think about dying, when they wonder about losing their newfound existence, can you stop them from lashing out, can you keep them under the calm waters of reason, can you persuade them not to fight, kick, scream defiance, can you stay human? Can you keep control?
I took too long to think of an answer, tasting blood on my lips, and he hit us again and pressed his foot down across our neck, forcing our face into the mud, and leant close and hissed, Is your blood on fire yet, can you stop it blazing?
We snarled at him, twisting under his weight, but he just smiled and kicked us, knocking us flat to one side; and now we were angry, we were ready to take his heart and crush it until it burst, we were ready to boil the blood in its vessels, we were prepared to
I squeezed my eyes shut against the blueness and pressed my face deeper into the earth, feeling the coldness of it against my skin and breathing rapidly, trying to purge the pain from my muscles, chill the heat away from my blood. Hands pulled me up again, and the silver-haired man came close, pulling my face up so that blood trickled down from my nose into my mouth, and leaning in until his breath tasted of coffee and too many hours without brushing his teeth. He hissed, What are they saying now, sorcerer? Are they cowering like the children that they are, or do they have a darker purpose, a more aggressive intent? Which is it, Mr Swift?
You, I hissed through the blood on my tongue, will have to work it out for yourself.
He tugged my head up until it hurt, staring into our blue eyes, then, with a grunt, pushed me back and stepped away.
I tried calming our anger a little at a time with nice, rational placations, soothing over the fear with the thought that if killing was all he had in mind, we wouldnt have had a chance to notice. As I did, I carefully rubbed my fingers together in the palm of my hand, feeling the dirt between them, the heavy dark soil, with just a hint, delicate, and so hard to pin down with my city-attuned senses, of rich, active magic. I was no druid, I had no understanding of the lore of natural things; but perhaps, just possibly, there was a little strength to be drawn from here, if you could only look at it from the right point of view. Even in this place, strange and alien to us, there was the beauty that, to our eyes, made magic.
The silver-haired man said sharply, I want to talk to them.
To who? I mumbled, probing my teeth with my tongue for any new looseness.
Lets not waste time with definitions. I want to speak to them.
Youre an idiot, I said. Theres only me here. Do you think Ive got an alien in my belly, do you think theres a Siamese twin attached to my shoulder that never had the chance to grow? You talk to me.
I half-expected him to hit me again. We almost relished the idea, ready for the fury that explodes with pain; enough, perhaps, just enough to give us the strength and passion to grasp the tiny fragment of elusive power in this place and use it to pop his chest open. To my surprise, though, he didnt hit me, but squatted down on his haunches in front of me, and said, Let me tell you what I think.
I nodded, hypnotised by his gaze, taste of blood in my mouth.
Im a man of words, you see? I read, I study, I think, I train myself to think only in words, neat, linear structures, passages with correct punctuation that can define a train of reasoning, understanding nothing left to chance. I am also a man of faith. At the end of the logical chain, when all knowledge that I have acquired and the knowledge is significant when the end of the chain runs out into an infinity of uncertain questions and doubts, I know that there is still an answer. You may object to calling it God, you probably find the term too vague I understand that, its fine. You think of a big man with a beard. I think of force. God is force. God is strength, certainty, movement, motion, direction, power, and he sits at the end of all things, and he will, sorcerer, condemn you. Not because you are a heretic which, by the way, you are not because your soul is necessarily so black or so tainted, not because you have killed or fought or stolen; all these sins can be purged in fire. He will condemn you, because you aspire to be like him, and have the arrogance not even to think of the consequences.
He seemed to expect some kind of response to this statement, so I said, nearly choking on the words, Youre going to burn me? We added, You can try, and I immediately bit my tongue so hard I could feel the pain in my ears.
He didnt show any sign of noticing our slip, just gave a dry, humourless chuckle. Times have moved on. The good must be merciful, even if that mercy to the damned is merely in a quick dispatch.
Thats not much of a comfort.
The problem is, times are not so simple as in the days of the Book. Utilitarianism, I think; we must choose the lesser of two evils. I take comfort, when I contemplate your evil enduring, in the thought that when the day of judgment comes, when we are all standing naked in front of the Lord, you will be damned and I will not. And in the mean time, I may, perhaps, do some good to the innocent of this life in setting you against another who is more foul even than your taint.
Bakker. I didnt need to ask.
Robert James Bakker, he agreed. He slapped his thighs and straightened with a sudden jovial expression. Of course, if you were not in your current condition I would just let the two of you tear each other apart sorcerer against sorcerer. But he is more powerful, I think, than you ever were, even though he chose you, Matthew Swift, to be his apprentice. I could take comfortin the fact that perhaps you could, for a time, weaken him with your attack, and that he, in killing you, had rid the world of one more sorcerer but it doesnt solve the initial problem, does it? How do you defeat a man like Robert Bakker? A man surrounded by every kind of protection and ally, a man with powerful friends and powers of his own, a man whose enemies die, and they seem great until they fall. I find that under such circumstances, I am forced to deal with the better kind of devils, to defeat a worse. Am I making sense?
I nodded.
Which brings me to my only serious problem. I am more than prepared to let you live, for the moment, Mr Swift, so that you and Bakker can, I hope, destroy each other. But before I let you live, I need to know that you are not a greater threat, that the things which sustain you have not yet consumed all rational restraint. So, Matthew Swift he brushed invisible dirt off the black fold of his trousers let us talk about the blue electric angels.
We looked up into his eyes, and held his gaze, and I was happy to see an instant of doubt on his face. We said, We are hard to kill, if you are thinking of trying. We persist, even if it will not be in this place.
He let out a satisfied breath, and murmured, Well, it is nice to finally meet you.
Its not like I went anywhere, I declared. Even if you kill us, we will endure, we will find a way back; it is our nature, although I wont be too happy about it.
Thats remarkable!
What is?
The way you switch without even blinking. One second, monster from beyond the plane of flesh and blood; next second, angry little man, suddenly cut off from all that power hes used to throwing around. A seamless switch, not even dribbling on the way. Not normal for possession; something more subtle, yes?
We are the same, we said.
The same what? Same flesh? Doesnt mean anything, havent you seen any 1970s horror films?
We are Matthew Swift.
However pretentious the man may have been in life, Im sure he didnt use the plural pronoun.
I am the blue electric angels, I explained, licking away the taste of salt and iron around the edges of my mouth. Its really very simple. We are me and I am us.
That doesnt sound simple at all.
You have a limited imagination. I guessed as much.
His jaw tightened, but he didnt move. I am curious, Mr Blue-Eyed Swift, how exactly you found yourself in this predicament.
Im assuming one of your men shot me, I replied. Its all a bit blurred.
I was thinking more of how you found yourself bonded to and controlled by
There is nothing to control, we snapped.
controlled by, he repeated firmly, creatures as strange as the blue electric angels.
I said, I doubt youd understand.
Im not here to understand, Im here to assess.
Thats not much of a comfort.
Dont you want to buy some time, to see if you can get your senses round the magic of this place, see if you can coax your brain to the magic of leaves and sunlight rather than concrete and neon? Im sure you must. Tell me.
I let out a long, shuddering breath that I hadnt realised was inside me. That seemed to take all the fight out of me, leave my chest empty, so I shook my head and muttered, All right. All right; it goes something like this:
***
First Interlude: The Sorcerer's Shadow
In which certain memories best left forgotten are duly remembered.
When I was fourteen years old, the phones started talking to me. I dialled the wrong number one day I was trying to get the local library, but instead I got a bank helpline. It said:
Welcome to telephone banking! To change your credit card details, please press one. To check your current account balance, press two. To dance in fire until the end of your days, please press three. Hi, this is Mara speaking; sorry, Im out at the moment, but if you could leave your message after the beep, Ill be sure to get back to you when the shadows have swept down the wall. Thanks! Which service do you require, police, fire, ambulance or exorcist? To cancel a direct debit, please press the star key. To send your soul across the infinite void faster than the blink of the mind dreaming in the moonlight, please press hash now. And so on.
I would wait at the bus stop and the rats would come and look at me; I would run through the streets at night and the freedom of it, the exhilaration of it, nearly killed me. I forgot to eat, to drink, to sleep, grew drunk on the feeling in my bones, on the beauty of the lights around me, on the sounds of the city, on the senses of other creatures.
When he found me, I weighed eight stone two, had just failed GCSEs, was on tranquillisers and on the verge of being consigned to a care home. He showed me kindness, took me away from my home, where my mother was trying to care for me and my gran. She didnt say no when this wealthy, kindly man offered to take me under his wing; but only later did I realise it wasnt just his smile that had talked her into it. My gran told me always to trust the pigeons, and when I told him I didnt know what she meant, he just smiled, patted me on the shoulder and said it would be all right, Id work it out one day. Magic isnt genetic, its not something programmed in your DNA. But it does run in families in the same way that you can say, these people are morose or these are funny or these have their own, unique turns of phrase. For example, my mum didnt like the city; but when we went outside to the country she became like I was when I first tasted that magic, glowing, alive with the feel of it, revelling in all its forms in her blood, strengthening her by mere presence. It wasnt a spell, it was something more than that, a link, a consciousness that here is something special, indescribable, infinitely rich. I learnt from her a relish for life; but for me, it was something to be found in the city; and that, nothing more, is what makes me a sorcerer.
He said his name was Robert James Bakker, but I was to call him Bobby. I called him Mr Bakker though, like my mum said. He paid for me to retake my GCSEs and hired me a tutor, and I passed not well, but well enough. He said that you had to understand the minds of others, their learning and their ideas, before you could excel them; that to be a good sorcerer, you had to be a good man first. The day I got my A-levels he took me out into the city and taught me my very first lesson. We walked through the empty arcade of Leadenhall Market, late at night, when the wind was cold off the river, and he taught me to
