The Magpye: Circus (9 page)

"Marv," said Grace icily.
"Still clinging to the past."

"Says the four hundred year old
whore."

Grace's cup clattered onto her
saucer. "It's impolite to mention a girl's age."

Marv smirked. "You're no girl,
Grace. You never were."

"But I can be a woman," replied
the witch, seduction in her voice. She slid her hand across the
table, her fingers crawling up onto Marv's hand. "You used to like
that."

"That was a long time ago,"
said Marv, snatching his hand back. "What we were is dead and
buried."

"If I believed that, you'd be
dead too," she replied. She feigned a wounded note in her voice and
dipped her head, hiding her face from Marv behind her cup as she
took another sip of her tea.

Marv sighed. He didn't fall for
the act, not for a moment, but there was truth to the words
nevertheless. Grace had saved his life, and that meant something.
No magician wanted to be indebted to another, and Marv was in deep
with Grace.

"And I'm supposed to be
grateful?" shouted Marv. "You told me they were after me! I left
Marissa with the circus to keep her safe, but all I did was put her
in the firing line."

"I saved her too, didn't I?"
said Grace indignantly.

"You know that. But don't
pretend that you didn't get what you wanted."

"Did I? You were supposed to
stay gone," Grace replied. "Never come back, those were my exact
words."

"I didn't choose this,
honestly. I was supposed to be in town for a night, two at most.
Here and then gone again, and no one would ever know."

"So what happened?"

Marv took a breath. Magicians
were, partly by trade but mostly by necessity, masters of
subterfuge. Lying to a magician was hard, even for another
magician. "I saw the circus," he replied, sticking to the fringes
of the truth to support his deception, "And I realised that I
should never have run. I'd been a coward, and my friends had paid
the price. If I'd have been there, I could have stopped them."

"Could you?" asked Grace.
"You're an escape artist, sweetheart, not a fighter. Not being
there is what you do best."

"Well, I'm here now."

"That you are," replied Grace,
"And I must admit I'm surprised. I'd heard you'd burnt out, lost
your gift. But here you are, as you say, and trouble seems to have
followed you home."

"I don't know what you're
talking about," said Marv, cursing whoever it was who was feeding
Grace her information. It was true, Marv hadn't had the power to
move a card out of a deck since the night he'd turned his back and
run out on the circus. "I've got some... ghosts to put to rest,
that's all. Some unfinished business."

"Unfinished business with Cane
King, you mean."

"No," said Marv with a chuckle,
"I'm not stupid, Grace. I came close enough to run in with the
Kings last time I was here, I'm not going back down that road."

"Do you think I'm a fool?" snapped Grace. "You've been
hitting King's operation. Your fingerprints are all over it.
Impossible break-ins, impossible escapes. The violence... that's
new, but you always did like things a little rough, I
suppose
.
"

"You're wrong, Grace. Dead
wrong," said Marv. He felt a trickle of cold sweat run down his
back. If he told her the truth, that he didn't have enough magic in
him now to take on King even if he wanted to, he'd be exonerated
and it would maybe even take Able out of the frame for a little
while. The problem was, you didn't admit to not being a magician
anymore in a room full of magicians. The only thing keeping the
peace in this room was that there was nobody without power to take
anything, especially revenge, on any of the others without
consequences. And there was a lot of revenge to go around.
Magicians lived a long time, and picked up plenty of grudges along
the way.

"For your sake, I hope so."
said the witch. "Because Cane King is going after whoever it is
that's been hunting him, and things are going to end very badly for
whoever it is, and for anyone they're connected with."

"If whoever it is has got
you
rattled," said
Marv, "Perhaps Cane King is the one who needs the
warning."

"I've put a lot of time and
energy into that family," hissed Grace. "I've watched generations
come and go, honing them, forging them. It's not just Cane they'll
be up against, it's me too."

"Then it's my turn to tell you to run," said Marv. "Because
it isn't me you're up against, but I do know who it is. I'm not
sure
what
it is, but I do know who. I thought I'd seen
things, Grace, I thought I knew how the world really worked. What
I've seen him do? It's beyond anything either of us ever even
attempted."

Grace frowned. She never backed
down from a fight, Marv remembered that only too well. Fighting was
in her nature, no witch could have lived as long as she had
otherwise. But she wasn't sure if she believed him.

"If you know who he is, then
give him to me now."

"No," said Marv flatly. "I've
given you fair warning, and I consider my debt to you paid. Get out
while you can, Grace. Write this generation off, come back for the
next lot of Kings, and call it evens."

"And if I don't?"

"Then my debt is still paid," said Marv.
"
And you're one more dead
witch.
" He left the table
before Grace could say another word.

Where: an old print mill, a
relic from the days when the Kings made their money in the print
media and a front page headline was as powerful as any bullet.
When: midnight, which was pure theatricality on Cane King's part.
He wanted to make a statement, wanted the world to wake up to a new
order of his making.

How, for the most part, had
been left to Grace. She'd spent hours in the mill, fortifying it as
if they were under siege. She commanded King's thugs and hired guns
as well as anyone he had ever seen, a natural general, and even
Jack Taylor fell into line. The plan was perfect. An iron clad
defence, except for one crucial mistake. A mistake that Grace was
relying on her prey finding. Well hidden enough so as not to be
obvious, but there. Exploitable by the right opponent. Perfect.

Except for one thing.

Perfect except for Wally
Wu.

Wally was a contortionist. He
had died hidden in a crate in the big top, folded up as tight he
could, praying that nobody would find him. Wally was a coward,
everybody knew. He said he'd learnt how to hide himself when he was
a kid. Anyone who asked how, or why, didn't get an answer, but
there was something in Wally Wu's eyes that told you that he'd had
something to hide from. And so Wally Wu died the way he'd lived,
hiding, heart racing, and a prayer on this lips. "Please don't let
them find me". And nobody did. Just a stray bullet, its lethal
trajectory through Wally's right lung nothing more than a bouncing,
clattering, dice roll.

In death, Wally wasn't a coward
anymore. He'd found a place to hide where no-one could touch him,
and like all the others all he thought about now was bloody
revenge.

That was why Wally Wu had shown
Magpye how to fold his body, how to contort and squash and squeeze,
how to dislocate and relocate and rotate. It was Wally Wu who had
put Magpye into an old packing crate down in the basement of the
place hours before Cane, Grace, or any of the others had even
arrived. They had built their trap around them, never knowing that
they were there, and all the while Wally had kept on praying.

"Let the bastards find us, let
the bastards find us."

But they hadn't. Not until
Magpye had pushed the lid off the crate with his feet and slowly
unfurled his body, which was not the shape of a normal body any
more. The sound of bones cracking back into place had brought an
inquisitive guard their way, and he had been the first to die,
gasping for air as the Magpye's blade slipped between his ribs and
burst him inside like a water balloon. The Magpye picked up the
guard's radio and listened to the chatter. Able's trick, learnt
from a movie.

"The cops are here."

"Jesus, they've rolled right up
to the front door."

"They just got themselves
screwed then. Shut the gates behind them. This is going to be
easy."

"They're not getting out."

"Fuck it, kill 'em in their
car."

"No, wait. Send someone down.
There's something not right."

The explosion that came next
sounded small through the radio, but the shock wave that reached
all the way to the basement told a different story. Magpye smiled.
Turned out Owen White had some tricks of his own.

***

Owen smiled. Through his night
vision goggles the explosion had been a ball of pure white, like an
instant snowfall burying the old mill and every scum bag Kingsman
in it. All too soon, the bright ball of brilliant white faded away,
leaving the mill with its heavy iron doors hanging open. White
flames moved across the green background of the night vision,
silhouetting dark blurry figures.

To Owen's right, Nutt looked
down the scope of his rifle. "Three, four, five..." he counted
slowly.

"Expendables," said White,
"They're not sending any of their big guns down to check the car.
Take them anyway, let them know we're here."

Nutt grunted his approval
before opening fire. "Five, four, three, two ... one..."

***

King paced back and forth.
Taylor was at the window, smiling.

"Is this supposed to happen?"
King barked. "Because it looks like our people are getting
shot."

"Nobody important," replied
Taylor, his voice showing a rare trace of excitement. "Their
shooter is quite impressive though."

"Great, that's just... great,"
hissed Cane. "Where the hell is Grace?"

"Baiting the trap," replied
Taylor.

***

Magpye crept through the
basement of the mill, a shadow among shadows. The place reeked of
oil and ink and even though the great machines here were rusted and
tired, their immense power still resonated from within them. Lives
were made and lives were broken here, in the incantations of ink on
paper. That was the true power of the Kings - they controlled all
the stories. They could burn a circus to the ground, kill everyone
in it, then tell whatever lies they wanted and everyone believed
them. It said it in the paper, honey, so it must be true. The real
lives, the real stories that they crushed were lost forever. All
there was was their story, their history.

He was going to change that.
After tonight, people were going to know who he was.

"And who, pray tell, are
you?"

The voice startled him. Nobody
could creep up on him, could they? He cursed the ghosts and all
their eyes and ears as he spun around, looking for a gap amongst
the steel and iron leviathans to disappear into. Wally Wu, still a
little bit of a coward after all, was looking for a place to
hide.

He didn't find a gap to squeeze
into. He found Grace Faraway.

Lithe, naked, her tattoos
swirling like smoke across her dark skin, she walked towards him a
thing of living ink and shadows. He knew what she was instantly. A
voice, somewhere deep down in the river of ghosts that ran through
his head, bubbled up its wisdom. He'd heard the voice before, when
the others were quiet enough. It was the only voice that frightened
him, and it frightened him to hear it now.

"Faraway," said the Magpye.
"The ghost that haunts Kings."

Faraway laughed,
and
it sounded like someone walking through broken glass, as if she
hadn't laughed before and the apparatus had all but dried
up
. "I haven't heard that one
in a long time. Someone's been... reading."

She trailed a hand across the
leather and plastic of Magpye's mask, her fingertips like ice and
electricity combined.

"Do you feel safe in there,
little spirit?"

"Safer than you are, I..."

Suddenly, the witch shoved
Magpye hard in the chest with both hands. His chest felt as if it
were on fire and he staggered back. His feet kicked up old
newspapers and he saw something on the floor, something the ghost
who hid deep in the river recognised. Magpye remembered something
Marv had told him, or at least had told Quirk.

Magicians could hide traps in
patterns.

The Magpye collapsed to the
ground, his lungs burning. In his head, the ghosts screamed. They
screamed louder than the day they'd died, louder than the times he
dragged them back from the afterlife through a droplet of blood or
smear of burnt flesh. He felt them become fragments in his head,
shreds of souls torn to strips by the witch's trap. The minds and
memories of his friends became rags and tatters in his head,
leaving him exposed and vulnerable.

"I wasn't sure what you were," said Grace, standing over
him. Ethereal light shone from within her, casting a silhouette of
the crone she really was up on the wall. "So I thought it best to
trap you. That
sigil
can hold anything, at least for a
time."

Behind the mask, it wasn't the
Magpye who looked up, but Able. For the first time in a long time
he was alone in his own head. No Dorothy, no Malcolm, no Magda. No
Wally Wu, no Zip Nolan. No Magpye. Just Able, the boy who ran, the
boy who hid, trapped and alone and looking up a creature unlike
anything he'd ever seen.

***

Owen dashed across the street, his gun drawn, a
sub
-
machine slung across his back. Across the street, he
knew Nutt was covering him, but he still felt exposed. The car had
drawn them out, just as he had planned, but at best they'd taken
out a fraction of King's forces. People were expendable to Cane
King, it stood to reason he'd have come here mob handed. Further
down the street, Owen could see Rogers and Hartley making slow but
steady progress along the nearest wall of the mill.