A Madness of Angels: Or the Resurrection of Matthew Swift (17 page)

 

I dragged my hands down to my side with a shudder of effort and waited for the blue rage to go out of my vision, and for the blue buzzing in my skull to subside. We were angry, we were so
angry
, and it had been a moment of choice, just a second, that had stopped us from asking the iron growing out of the wall to grow straight through that creature’s heart.

 

Around the room, there was a low, animal chitter of caged monsters, punctuated by the low, self-pitying whimper of the troll. We stabbed an accusing finger at it and spat, “If you want to live, you will be silent!”

 

Wisely, the troll bit its own lip until the oily black blood rolled, and made not a sound.

 

We looked round the room again. In various pots and jars were creatures from across the magical spectrum, fairies with their fine aluminium wings, tiny trapped elves with their burning hair, neon fireflies that sparked orange and pink as they banged angrily against the side of their jar, moths of purest moonlight, kept in a dark corner so that their strange beauty might be better admired, visible for a second only in the flap of a wing. In other jars were merely the remnants of some creatures – the concrete skull of a shambler, the steel bone of a banshee, the still-beating heart of some monster, which spat electric sparks with every pulsation across the floor of the pot it rested in. We said, for the benefit of those creatures that could understand, “You all know us. You know our dance.”

 

There was a chitter of animal motion, a flash of wing, a blink of sullen reflective eyes.

 

I went first to the cage containing the three trapped fairies, their delicate foil wings glinting silvery in the dull light, their long, pale faces crowned with wreaths of woven fuse wire. I leant down so my face was level with them and pointed accusingly. “You be good fairies, capisce?”

 

There was a tiny squeaking, like the sound of a rusted wheel on an old trolley. I opened up the door to the cage, and with a sigh, they flapped out, and hovered uncertainly round my head. I considered my options, and said, “Amiltech imprisoned you. If you want revenge, now is the time.”

 

Little smiles, no wider than the curved nail on my little toe, passed across the fairies’ faces and, with a flap, they were out of the room.

 

I released every other creature in that room and listened with content to the sound of banging as they, each in their own fashion, tore through the office, ripping up computers and smashing glass, spinning their spells or simply tearing with tiny fists against the institution that had trapped them.

 

I nearly missed the last trapped creature in all the commotion, but my attention was drawn to it by a small squeaking sound near my foot, and looking down, I saw a single, fat black rat, its coat slimy and the end of its tail an ugly stump, looking up at me with a pair of dark, beady eyes. I knelt down next to the cage that contained it and said, “Hello.”

 

It blinked at me, unimpressed, and unafraid. I opened the cage door and it scuttled out, crawling up my extended arm to sit happily on my shoulder, where I petted it vaguely, the slime of its coat sticking to my fingers in a thin, dirty goo. I then let it run down my arm to the floor again, where it looked up at me, squeaked once, and waddled off into the office. I followed it without too much concern, to find the floor covered with torn paper, broken glass, overturned furniture, shattered desks; the computer screens were in pieces, the hard drives of the computers spitting sparks, the light fittings spread across the floor and in some cases embedded in the walls, and everywhere chaos as the imprisoned creatures of Amiltech let go the full vent of their anger. I cleared my throat and said loudly, “No one gets hurt, understand!”

 

There was an audible sigh of disappointment from one or two of the monsters I’d released, but I felt that in this, at least, I could be obeyed. I looked across the floor for the rat, and saw it scuttling into San Khay’s office. Suddenly curious, I followed – rats rarely do anything without good reason.

 

In San’s office, it went straight to the desk and raised itself up on its hind legs, resting its forelegs against the lower drawer. I knelt next to it and pulled the lower drawer open a few inches – but there was nothing inside that I hadn’t already seen. I closed it and the rat repeated this exercise, rearing itself up to press against the drawer and then collapsing again, then rearing, and collapsing, and after longer than I care to admit, it occurred to me that the creature wasn’t trying to get into the drawer, but was, in fact, trying to move the desk. I heaved against it until it moved, and when it finally went I saw beneath it a small hole dug into the floor, leading into what looked like a series of pipes. The rat squeaked once, and vanished down the hole, probably never to be seen again.

 

There was, however, something more about the hole. Resting in one corner, wrapped up tight in a plastic bag to protect it, was a small, unaddressed envelope. I picked it up, and opened it.

 

Inside, inscribed in thin biro, was the outline of an angel on a sheet of paper. It had a crude triangular body, a circular head, and sweeping wings. All of it had been shaded in blue.

 

We dropped the envelope and scrambled back, shocked to our core. We knew of Bakker’s interest in such things, of course; but to find that San Khay also had the image of the angel in his possession, and that perhaps he knew of its significance, disturbed us. It was too late, however – our fingers had brushed the image as we pulled it from the envelope and now, as we watched, the angel shimmered on the page, the thin blueness of its form thickening to the texture of liquid paint, and then without a sound, it caught fire, a bright blue flame that leapt up from the dropped paper and burnt ice-cold in the air until the image had been entirely scoured out of the sheet on which it was drawn. We shredded what was left of the paper, and, disturbed to think that our secrets might already be known, we left that place as fast as we could, while behind us the fairies tore it all to pieces.

 

 

In the early hours of Saturday morning, someone scried for me, and they were formidable.

 

I became aware of their scrying when the protective pieces of paper I’d put around the edge of my bed, warding me against harm, caught fire. The fire alarm then woke me up, and that in itself was a shock – that they’d not only scried, but had had the will to suppress my ward and suppress my own instinct, to keep me asleep while they tried to tune in to my location. I felt them the instant I was awake, a burning, crushing pressure, almost a physical weight on my back as the sheer volume of their will slammed against my senses – a sorcerer without any doubt, and there were only two sorcerers I could think of who might be even remotely interested, who might be even remotely not dead. I had grabbed my belongings and was out of the door even as the hotel manager and a porter with a fire extinguisher burst in; I was hopping down the stairs, struggling to get my shoes on, by the time the fire alarm went out, and staggering, breathless, covered in a cold sweat, into the street even before half the lights in the hotel had been turned on and the first angry voices raised.

 

And still that will remained, fixed straight on me, trying to push me to the ground, see through my eyes, determine through my own senses what I might have seen. Such a scrying could only be using something of my own to track me – there was no way that a spell like this could be achieved without it – but there were plenty of things, I reasoned, which could serve the purpose. My mind went to my old coat, sitting on Hunger’s emaciated shoulders, and I ran, gasping for breath, into the night, searching for an underground station or, at the least, a crowded and well-lit place where I might be safe. All the while I could see my own shadow contract and increase, contract and increase like the motion of a heartbeat, as I moved from pool into pool of light. The laws of physics did not suspend themselves – the steady movement of my shadow continued without change, and no smell of litter or other magical intent tingled on my nose, despite my constant imaginings. We wanted to strike out at the sense following us, to strike out randomly into the dark and see what banged; we wanted to burn the consciousness that dared intrude on us – but it had something of ours on which to focus, and we had nothing.

 

The scrying broke about twenty minutes after I became first aware of it – truly, a formidable act of will on the part of my unseen enemy, considering how hard I was running and how determined I was to shake it off – and I ran for another ten minutes until I found a night bus which might as well have been going anywhere, and which I rode to the end of the route, just for good measure.

 

That event had scared me, and perhaps threw into a different light my disruptive antics at Amiltech. I had clearly got someone’s attention, and that someone was more of a danger than I had considered – we were not ready to fight this kind of battle, and were shaken by the revelation of our own weakness. I did not sleep for the rest of that night, but rode in silence, contemplating all that had happened. And, perhaps for the first time, all that could.

 

 

In the morning I went to University College Hospital. Perhaps it was guilt.

 

I found Sinclair by drifting along the endless corridors of various intensive-care units and in-patient wards, glancing in through every door for a hint of plumpness. It occurred to me that I didn’t even know if Sinclair had survived his operation, just like I didn’t know if my gran still talked to the pigeons or if any of my friends – from back then – remembered my name, those who were still alive. Or indeed if any of them lived. Maybe it wasn’t guilt that had brought me here after all – loneliness, perhaps, although we found it hard to understand how, in this city, anyone could be lonely.

 

Sinclair was alive. That merest fact brought a salve to my conscience, a moment of relief as a tension lifted that I hadn’t even realised was there. I found him by the plain-clothes policeman sitting, half asleep in the first silvery early-morning light, outside Sinclair’s room. The door was locked, but the policeman wasn’t paying any attention to me or my antics, so I took a key and unlocked it, letting myself inside with a quiet click.

 

The room had the orangey-brown quality of light filtered through the curtains of almost all sickrooms – a warm colour that made the eyes instantly feel sleepy and relaxed, as if the walls themselves could be hypnotic. The fat man was not so fat; even in a few days his bulk had been reduced to nothing more than a distortion under the sheets, and his skin had an unhealthy pallor, visible even in the softening gloom of the room. Various devices beeped and whined around him, monitoring things I couldn’t begin to guess at, while wires and tubes ran in and out of his skin. Every breath condensed a cloud onto the mask on his face; but other than that and the steady beeping of the machines around him, there was nothing to suggest that he was alive at all. The sight of him in this state horrified us: to show only the tiniest symptoms of life and yet be, somehow, still alive, trapped, motionless, unaware – the thought made us recoil. I sat down on a chair by his side, careful to stay out of the sight of the door, and said, feeling foolish but that it was also, somehow, necessary, “Hello.”

 

The little cloud of condensation appeared and faded, appeared and faded on his mask.

 

“The shit’s hitting the fan,” I added, and watched the stillness of his eyes, not even movement beneath his lids, and the drooping utter immobility of his face. I didn’t know what I was doing there or why; we just wanted to leave, to get away. This non-life frightened us, it wasn’t what we were here for.

 

I stood quickly, and said, “Sorry,” the word slipping out unconsciously before I realised I meant it. “You probably expected more.”

 

I turned to the door, and walked straight into Charlie’s fist.

 

 

Charlie. I knew his name was Charlie because that was how Sinclair had addressed him, when asking his loyal shadow to do something, and that was the name that Charlie, silently, immovably, had reacted to. I knew that he had dark eyes and black hair and wore a black suit that seemed to blur into itself; I also found that when he moved, he left a taste of thick treacle in the air, a sludgy afterglow that twined into my senses.

 

In the small hospital room next to Dudley Sinclair’s motionless body, I learnt two more things about him. The first was that he had a fist made of reinforced steel woven into a block of concrete, disguised as four protruding, callused knuckles; the second was that he was an unstable wereman, a fact I discovered when I noticed, on my way to the floor, the silvery rat claws and pinkish withered toes, warped and stretched mimics of their previous human form, curling out beyond where they’d burst through the end of his shoes.

 

He clearly understood a key fact about sorcerers – while in theory we should be able to harness the primal forces of magic to our very will, it’s hard to concentrate on building up a really good, three-hundred-volt smack when someone’s hitting you. After the initial pain came the realisation that it wasn’t about to stop. We curled in on ourselves, shivering away to the back of our senses, tucking our head into our hands and cowering, hoping to blank out the impact of a fist knocking us to the ground, a boot in the belly, a smack across the back, each one rendered with the force of a boulder hitting a wall, each one a shudder through our flesh, but unable to block out the sensations that we thought would overwhelm us, drown us in a big black pit. Only instinct remained as I slid down the wall, and it was instinct that, somewhere between the shock and the pain, grabbed his foot as it came up from the floor for another swing and, with my fingers scraping across the rat-edged claws that protruded from his feet, twisted. In an ordinary person, even under the best of circumstances, this would have broken their ankle. But Charlie was not ordinary. From the savage twist I gave his ankle, he seemed to transmit its spinning movement throughout his whole form, turning his body through three hundred and sixty degrees with a leap and landing on all fours, like a cat jumping from a tree. He crouched, shoulders hunched, eyes burning yellow, the beginning of whiskers protruding around the animal bulge of his mouth. He snarled, and it was the snarl of the fox cornered in his den, and his fingernails were claws, and the hair sprouting on the backs of his hands was tatty and grey. Slumped against the wall, I fumbled for support and in doing so, one hand fell on a mains plug: a blessed relief. I snatched the first dribble of voltage I could get out of the system and as he raised himself up on his oddly bent knees to strike, I threw my hand up, the electricity burning between my fingers, and shouted, “Pax!”