The Minority Council (13 page)

I sat in shock, before the gag reflex took over and we crawled on hands and knees away from that settling cloud, staggered out into the corridor, dust falling off our overall as we ran, made it only a few yards before dropping to our knees and shaking, the taste of bile in our throat, our stomach too dry to empty itself. Our hands were stained yellow, every crease filled with yellow dust, our hair released clouds of it. We shook ourself to try and get free of it, wiped our hands on our clothes, brushed down every inch of our overalls, until a small pile of dust had fallen at our feet. Our eyes burnt, every breath burnt, and there were footsteps behind us and I heard Prince say, “Don’t waste any.”

Then someone shoved us aside, and a man in overalls and a mask was on his hands and knees and, God help us, he was vacuuming the dust from the floor, sucking it up like so much lint off a dirty carpet, into a small clear plas
tic bag with a nozzle attached, business-like and effective, and we grabbed him by the throat and screamed, “Don’t touch her! Don’t touch her don’t touch her don’t you fucking touch her!”

I heard a sharp click behind my head. It was the sound of the safety coming off a pistol. Our eyes were blazing, our vision tinged sapphire blue, we could hear our heart pounding in our ears. I forced our hands away from the man’s throat, forced ourself to stand, fingers open at our side, forced ourself to turn and look Prince in the eye. The pistol he held was customised silver with an ivory handle, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t fire like any regular weapon for any regular man. He said, “Who are you?”

I looked down at the floor. Dust was still drifting in the air around me. People in overalls were already getting to work in Meera’s plastic cave; I could hear the sound of motors whirring, fans turning. Calmly, they were harvesting the dust.

We looked up and met Prince’s eye; briefly, he flinched. I said, dull-voiced, “I would like to use your bathroom now.”

“What?”

“I would like to wash my hands.”

He hesitated. Then snapped at the technician whose throat was still marked red from our fingers, “Swab him.”

The man edged forward. Prince moved round to keep the gun still level at our head. From inside his deep blue pockets, the man pulled out a small plastic envelope containing white, slightly damp tissues. He took our unresisting hands by the wrist and cleaned off every last speck of dust, from between our fingers and the creases in
our palms, sealing up his stained swipes in little plastic bags.

When he was gone Prince said, “I asked you who you are.”

“Sinclair,” I murmured. “My name is Dudley Sinclair.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“It is.”

“I asked. I made a call. Sinclair is a ghost, a legend, a power behind the throne but you know what he is most of all? He’s not the kind of man who gets involved. So who are you?”

“Friend of a friend.”

“You knew the woman?” he asked, gesturing towards Meera’s cell.

“No,” I replied, keeping my eyes locked on some point far, far away. “But she called for help. She was dying.”

“She was a fairy. Of course she was dying.”

“Yes,” I said, voice dead flat. “You next.”

For answer, he moved the gun a few inches closer.

We didn’t raise our voice, didn’t shout or rage or scream. “When the Midnight Mayor finds out what has happened here he will hunt you down. You will try to run, of course you will, but it won’t be enough. The stones will open up to consume you, the lights will darken as you pass, rats, foxes and all living things will shun the places where you walk, shadows will cringe back into the hidden places of the alley, the air that you breathe will turn to blackened soot and all the world will know that you are marked. There is nothing you can do to stop this. This is how it will be.”

He was not a man who scared easily.

Then, this wasn’t easy fear.

“I should kill you,” he stammered.

“What’s the point?” I asked. “Won’t change what’s coming.”

“Get out,” he hissed, gesturing towards the door. “Go back to the Aldermen. Tell them if your Midnight Mayor comes, I’ll kill him. I don’t fucking care, I’ll kill him.”

“No, Mr Prince. You won’t even know he’s there.”

They threw us out, and locked the door behind us.

As if that would be enough.

Templeman was waiting.

He was leaning on the bonnet of a black hybrid car parked illegally in front of a shop offering Adult Entertainment and the latest in PVC fashion for the connoisseur. It was drizzling, the gentle, senseless London drizzle that soaked right through without announcing that you were getting wet. The pigeons still sat overhead, watching.

He asked me, “Did you find what you were looking for?”

We didn’t answer, but paused by the car to scan the street around us. Eventually we found what we were looking for: a ridged metal panel set into the pavement. We knelt down and slipped our fingers into the metal holes at either end, feeling inside them until we detected each one’s locked catch. We turned with more than just strength, and the covering jerked free in our hands. We eased it upwards, letting a smell of congealed kitchen fat and diluted faeces wash up to hit us in the face.

“Boots,” we said. “We need boots, a mask, gloves and, when we’re done, detergent and lots of lemons.”

For a moment Templeman looked like he might argue. Then he said, “All right. I can do that. Anything else?”

“Yes. Salt-water, a strip of rusting steel—steel, mind
you, not just iron—water-resistant matches, a can of petrol and a crowbar.”

Another pause as he processed this information. Then, “How long will you need?”

“Ten minutes, once I go down. When I’m in there, call the police, tell them there’s a bomb.”

“To what purpose?” he asked.

“There are people in the dusthouse. Not all of them are going to die tonight.”

“You can’t help every stranger,” warned Templeman. “There are always consequences.”

“Are you going to help or not?” we asked.

For what it was worth, he was.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

It didn’t take him long. The crowbar was already in the back of his car. Meanwhile we sat in a doorway, watching nothing, listening to nothing. It was the hour of absolute stillness, when even the hardest of the partyers had gone to bed, the doors had been closed, the lights snuffed out. Muggers and bandits, with no one left to prey on, turned in for the night; cat burglars had made their hauls and in the supermarkets tomorrow’s milk was stacked up on the shelf. In the emergency ward at UCH the last of the night’s alcohol-poisoning victims and men caught up in the wrong pub brawl were laid up to sleep on a cocktail of morphine and absent-adrenaline, and the only ambulances now skidded through empty dream-time roads towards the flats of old women whose hearts had missed a beat, and old men whose alarms had started to ring in the night. At this hour, even emergencies were losing their drum roll of intensity.

We sat alone, and wondered if that was the dust from Meera’s death clogging up the space under our nails. Could we scrape her out, like mud?

We sat, and did not move.

When Templeman returned, he brought big yellow boots, big yellow gloves, a bright orange plastic pair of trousers complete with braces, a bright orange jacket with two zips up the middle, and a gas mask which stank of rubber and chewed peppermints. We didn’t ask where he’d found them. He also carried a plastic bag and, as we changed, he produced from inside it a small plastic bottle into which he poured eight paper sachets of purloined restaurant salt; a pack of water-resistant matches with warning signs on the pack; a piece of rusting old metal with deadly sharp edges that looked like it had been snapped off the frame of a rotting bicycle; and a small, half-empty can of petrol.

My feet swam inside their yellow boots, my palms were sticky with instant sweat. I took the plastic bag of goods off him wordlessly, felt the weight of the petrol moving inside its container, said, “Call the police” and, without another word, we descended down the open manhole, into the darkness below.

People think the wrong things about sewers.

They think piss and shit, a sludge of brown.

That’s not it. That’s just the scum that skims along the surface, that’s just the loathsome icing on the cake.

It’s the cooking fats, the congealed remnants of washed-away meats, the scrubbed-down rotting husks of vegetables, and yesterday’s mashed potatoes. It’s sanitary towels flushed into a toilet prone to blockages, it’s old tissue paper never quite disintegrating, and it’s human hair that
tangles like spider silk and doesn’t break. It’s detergent from the washing machine and soap from the dishwasher, it’s baked-bean grease and uneaten leek soup that has grown mould on its surface from being left in a broken fridge. It’s the fat they fast-fried the chips in, and the remains of old rotting onion. It’s pregnancy tests that gave the wrong answer and the condom that split; it’s used nappies and puke and the bleach they tried to use to take away the smell. It’s everything you’ve ever not wanted it to be, running busily away downhill through brick-built tunnels, towards pits of rotating slime or the wide open sea.

The mask wasn’t there to stop the smell; that would have been futile. It was just there to minimise the initial shock, so that you only gagged instead of passing out. Walking was at first a slippery nightmare, feet going out beneath you, hands scrambling at walls of slime bred into the brick. I called a flare of sodium light to my fingers and had it burn as dim as I dared, the churning currents of the absolutely-not-just-water bouncing and twisting around my feet. We could feel the rats watching, moving away from us. They, at least, knew what was coming. The pipes feeding into the sewer tunnel were blessedly quiet, the ceiling low, head-banger height. I followed the tunnel along, its downward slope almost imperceptible to our shuffling feet, until overhead I felt the tug of magic, the wards of the dusthouse above my head, the ozone snap of its flare-pop power.

We stopped beneath it.

Once upon a time, not as long ago as people thought, Soho had been the kingdom of cholera and all the diseases of faecal-drenched drink. When enough people throughout London had died, and enough MPs had been
offended at the capital’s stench of decay and death, the present sewerage system was built, by Victorian engineers who didn’t just believe their works should be made to last, but were so attuned to the idea that they didn’t even bother to consider it.

Then, the sewers of London were a technological triumph, a marvel whose inception changed the face of the city. But within a short space of time, as with all things flushed down the drain, they were forgotten.

And that was a mistake.

I opened up my plastic bag and unscrewed the bottle of water, splashing its contents along the walls and ceiling before pouring what was left into the rushing water of the sewer. Then I opened up the can of petrol, and repeated the same procedure, tossing it onto the walls and then draining the rest into the water, where it ran away gleaming fly-wing blue on the surface of the scummy rush. The rusted lump of had-been bicycle we scratched along the walls, leaving a fine red scar-line of dust, and then this too was thrown into the tide. Out came the matches, and when they were struck they flared up vivid orange, burning too bright and hard in the noxious mixture of vapours in this tight hot tunnel.

I caught the flame in my fist, dragging it free from the stick of the match before it could go out, and held it in the palm of my hand, letting it grow bigger and rounder on the foul air, before tossing it at the nearest smear of petrol-stained wall. Already mingling with fumes and slime and salt-water, it had an effect more like a smoky Christmas pudding gone horribly wrong than a triumphant whoomph of flame. But it caught and held, dribbling lines of fire down the walls where the petrol had run, and spilt as little puddles, on the surface of the water like oil in a pan.

I pulled out the crowbar, and hesitated.

Then our jaw tightened, we raised the crowbar overhead and, before I could change our mind, slammed it point-first into the floor beneath our feet.

Where the fire was clinging to the wall, it flared, a burst of red-tainted flame flashing up and spreading into the mortar between the bricks, tracing the pattern of their construction.

We lifted the bar and struck again, and the salt-water that had spilt onto the wall began to bubble and hiss, eating through the bricks like acid, and spilling out foul grey smoke to mix with the fumes from the fire.

We drew the crowbar up a third time and, a third time, drove it down against the floor, and where the rust had scratched its way into the surface of the bricks, now it began to eat and burrow, forming first a stripe, then a crack, then a network of cracks, a spider’s web of destruction that raced outwards across the walls; and we raised the crowbar and slammed it down one last time and in response the whole tunnel seemed to jerk sideways. As if a great pair of bellows was blasting in from both ends at once, mortar dust and dirt rained down, while the cracks spread across the ceiling cavity and the fire crawled into them and began to eat deeper and the bricks crumbled and the sludge beneath our feet hissed and raged and churned, and we ran as, behind us, the tunnel beneath the dusthouse began to cave.

Even in this day and age, the Worshipful Company of Magi, Maguses and Mages teaches of certain things that still hold power. Earth, air, fire, water; salt, iron and petrol will do at a pinch. Blood. Blood will always hold its magic, even when everything else fades.