A Madness of Angels: Or the Resurrection of Matthew Swift (40 page)

 

The booming of the audience continued. I waited. I was happy to wait, ten, twenty seconds, let those who were smart enough to see, or perhaps simply not-stupid enough to care, that this was something more than a cheap spell.

 

Let Lee watch my face, see the blueness in our eyes.

 

I waited, holding her trapped there in my spell for nearly twenty seconds until the horn finally went to end the combat, at which point I dropped her. Feeling oddly unclean with my victory, I went to sit down on the cold floorin my corner of the pit, hugging my knees to my chin, while Inferno, face inflamed an appropriate colour for her name, was dragged off screaming defiance to the walls.

 

We were surprised that we felt no sense of triumph, only a sick hollowness, as if our stomach was empty but had no sense of gnawing hunger to match.

 

 

The Master of Ceremonies announced in a bright, overly cheerful voice, “Ladies and gentlemen, five minutes please while we prepare for a new champion! Drinks are available upstairs and if any of
you
brave contestants want to try your hand…”

 

I tuned out the noise, huddled myself in my coat and tried to ignore the staring eyes and the sick swirls of expectation around me like tendrils of smog on a murky evening. Vera stood at one end of the observers’ stands and, through the long, dark shadows that the uplights drew across her eyes, I saw not a glimmer of a smile.

 

“Oi, you!”

 

The voice came from a staff member in a T-shirt which bulged around muscles so highly exercised I was amazed there was any room left for bone. With an imperious gesture, he summoned me into the preparation room behind the pit.

 

Sitting on a rough wooden bench in that grey concrete room, wearing stylish black and drinking from a bottle of mineral water, was Guy Lee.

 

He looked me over and grunted. “Scrawny bastard, aren’t you?”

 

I said nothing.

 

“You’re Swift, yes?”

 

I nodded.

 

“What the fuck do you think you’re playing at here, Swift?”

 

I put my head on one side and examined his face. He looked middle-aged, but that could simply have been the passage of many events, rather than much time. His nose was crooked and a long-healed scar ran across it; his skin was worn and dry and tanned, and he was clean-shaven. His hair hinted at grey peeking out at its roots, although through the defining clinginess of his black shirt and trousers he looked as well-built and hale as any man of twenty. He sat with his elbows on his knees, leaning forwards, like a boxer between bouts, and his fists were big and meaty, with signs of scarring across the back of his left hand, badly healed; his feet were set wide apart, legs tense like at any moment he might uncoil like a spring.

 

There was something very wrong with the entire picture.

 

We leant forward, peering, trying to work out what it was.

 

“You want to lose those fucking eyes?” asked Lee, glaring up at us. “I told Robert I’d have them for him on a plate.”

 

We said, “There is… no magic about you.”

 

“You just wait and see,” he replied. “Just because I can’t get you here, doesn’t mean I won’t have you out there,” jerking his chin up towards the street. “You bastard – you think we weren’t expecting you after you killed Khay?”

 

We murmured, “We think we understand.”

 

Outside, a horn bellowed, three times, a summoning to the pit. Lee stood up, slapping his hands together briskly. “You know how many sorcerers I’ve killed?” he said.

 

“One,” I answered. “Although you claim six.”

 

He grinned, but there was unease in his defiance. I felt a moment of gratitude to Sinclair and his excellent files. “Looking to double it soon.”

 

With that, he strode out into the pit to the roar of a sycophantic crowd.

 

I followed slowly, surprised. I didn’t understand what he expected to achieve by this gesture, here, where the Neon Court was watching and the spells were thick on the walls. He couldn’t kill me in McGrangham’s, nor could I kill him while the wards were written up on the walls and the crowd looked on. Others would intervene, and this was, after all, neutral territory.

 

Perhaps it was the arrogance of someone who couldn’t understand the possibility that they might lose.

 

I followed after him, and the crowd screamed and roared to see us beneath them with sick glee. I moved away to the other side of the pit, and watched him as he shook his fists at the ceiling and grinned and lapped up the applause of those people. They knew who he was; knew when to scream and clap.

 

I found myself wondering, with a genuine sense of scientific process, how I could go about killing Lee, although that was not, I realised, the exercise for the evening.

 

The horn blasted and Lee, without even pausing for the echo to die away, turned, opened his mouth and puffed in my direction. His breath rolled out in big, black, billowing clouds that stank of carbon and sulphur and filled the pit in a second with its polluted smog, blinding me. Automatically, I dropped to my knees and sent a random blast of force through the smoke, spinning it backwards towards what I hoped was its source in an eddying of black fumes. I didn’t know if it did any good, but heard it smash into the wall on the other side of the pit a moment later and, in that instant, Lee emerged from the darkness, brought his hands together in two clenched fists, and pulled them apart. Where his fingers touched his wrists, he drew from them, pulling them out of the skin itself, although there was no blood, two long white daggers made of bone.

 

The crowd roared its appreciation as he flourished the blades. I could not tell whether they failed to recognise cheap necromancy when they saw it, or if they simply didn’t care. He slashed the blades a few times through the air in smooth, careful movements; and where they moved, they trailed red sparks.

 

Slowly, grinning like an ape, he advanced towards me, bone-blades first.

 

I backed away, moving at the same speed as his walk to keep him apart from me, until my fingers brushed the concrete wall at my back. His grin widened. I shook my head in response at him, and pressed my fingers into the concrete. It bent like cold butter, slowly easing away under my pressure until my fingertips, buried in it up to the wrist, brushed the iron edge of a foundation support. I wrenched, sending chilling power down to my fingertips as I did, and with a heave and a shudder that made my arms ache and my head throb, dragged a length of twisted hard iron out of the wall itself. The concrete behind me melted back into its place like water filling a wound; I had no interest in keeping it as anything other than what it was, now that I was armed.

 

The audience screamed its applause as I tested the weight of my weapon, turning it a few times in the air and feeling it swish in my grasp. It was approximately two feet long – a very short staff by the tradition of any wizard.

 

Lee’s confident face became, for a moment, something else entirely. With a roar, he threw himself at me.

 

I have little experience of fighting hand-to-hand. But we were fast, and the dance – the dance at least we were used to. We jumped onto our toes and leapt away from the first slash of his bone knife, feeling the twisting in the air as it passed by us, ducked our back beneath the high swipe of his second attack, spun to the side of his next onrush, and rolled past his stumbling feet and landed a kick on his shin as we did. The air burnt with our passage, we were on fire with the blood and stench and brightness and hunger of the place, we loved this dance! We realised almost for the first time that the weight of our my flesh and bone was not just a burden to be borne from sense to sense; it was a living tool. We could feel the movement of every muscle and nerve, the booming of every capillary under our skin and they obeyed, our body obeyed as we caught a slash on the end of our weapon and lashed the longer tip of the iron up until it clipped his elbow and knocked his arm back hard, and we were already away by the time he knew what had happened, marvelling as our arms went up and our feet went back and our head went down and our stomach went in all at once, everything corresponding to the dance, everything, for a moment, completely alive. And for a moment, we couldn’t hear the shouting of the crowd, or their stamping feet, or the cat calls or the cheers or the screams or our own breath; for a moment, we were nothing more than the brilliance of that room, the minds of those people, the life dancing on the knife’s edge, nothing but the dance, and the freedom of it.

 

Just like we were before
…

 

…
come be me and be free
…

 

but I am
…

 

And just for a moment, as we spun away beneath Guy Lee’s blades, we were entirely ourself, and we burnt with blue fire across the air as we passed.

 

 

I do not know what happened in that place, that night. I am frightened by the things I cannot remember.

 

What I do recall was the sounding of the horn and hands pulling me back, someone shouting, “Enough, enough!”

 

And there was Lee, his bone daggers broken at his side, his arms slashed and bruised from the impact of my weapon’s edge, his nose bleeding a slow, thick blood,

 

but no magic

 

and how silent the audience was.

 

Absolute stillness.

 

Just the settling of hot air like snow on stone.

 

I pulled myself free of the arms that held me and dropped my iron weapon. Its tip was bloody, and so were my hands.

 

but no life

 

The wards were blazing up the walls, lit up with Lee’s blood. They crushed me like the great fat belly of a woolly bear, pushed my fingers to the earth, stopping this going any further.

 

It had already gone far enough.

 

blood on fire

 

and empty, utterly drained, I turned and walked away from that place.

 

 

Outside in the cold air, Vera took me by the arm and said, “And now we need to get you to safety.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Lee is going to come after you now with everything he’s got – nothing will stop him.”

 

“What did I do to him?” I asked. “We just… I don’t… I didn’t…”

 

She looked up at me, surprised, and said, “You were on fire, Matthew Swift. Your skin was on fire.”

 

I looked down at myself, half-expecting to see blistered and withered flesh, but my hands looked fine in the cold, pale neon light. “Will he attack the Exchange?” I stuttered as she pulled me down the narrow, sleeping road.

 

“After that, nothing short of a total annihilation of you and yours will serve,” she replied grimly. “Honour – prestige – they matter. Forget Bakker, that’s nothing now. Fear is just the perception of a threat, sorcerer, and I think you altered a few perceptions tonight.”

 

“Did I…?” I began, and then decided I didn’t want to know.

 

“Come on,” she muttered. “Time to get you home.”

 

A thought struck me. I grabbed her by the shoulder, harder than I’d meant – she pulled back quickly, face opening in an expression of surprise. “Lee,” I stuttered, “Lee is dead.”

 

“Let’s not get carried away…” she began.

 

“No, I mean… right now. Right now as we’re talking. That wasn’t Guy Lee down there. His flesh has no warmth, he gave off no scent of magic.”

 

“Are you fucking kidding? He pulled bloody knives out of his wrists!”

 

“Life is magic,” I insisted, shaking her by the shoulders. “
Life
is magic, there is no separating the two. Where there is life, there will be magic; the one generates the other. He has no magic. At least, not of his own – he leeches it from the air, feeds on its use by others, but he,
he
gives off no scent of it. Life is magic. He has no life. Guy Lee is a walking corpse.”

 

She pulled herself free with a sharp wrench. “Bollocks,” she muttered. “Bollocks!”

 

“We saw it!” we shouted, and she flinched back from us, fear in her face, clear now, easy to read. I felt ashamed. “I saw it,” I said. “I’m sorry. Sorry. I… I’m sorry.”

 

Slowly she relaxed, and patted me half-heartedly on the shoulder. “You’re very screwed, sorcerer.”

 

“I know.”

 

“Yeah,” she muttered. “But who can tell? Maybe it’ll be in a good way.”

 

 

We slept on the floor of the Kingsway Exchange, in a room packed with other sleeping forms, pressed in shoulder to shoulder, snoring and breathing and warming each other in the darkness, the light wavering through the empty, glassless window of the room, in the concrete corridor outside. I wondered what would have happened if there had been a nuclear war, and people had tried to live down in these tunnels, without time, colour and space. Vera said that all the Whites were coming in, that they’d been warned not to walk alone at night, that Lee would want his revenge.

 

And Bakker would want his apprentice back.

 

Guy Lee, a man of no magic. I ran scenarios through my head, twisted spells around, considered the powers that might have, could have, would have stopped Lee’s heart but still sustained him. Or perhaps it wasn’t Lee at all who I’d fought; perhaps something else inhabiting his flesh, mimicking life. He wasn’t any sort of traditional, boring, hollow-eyed, pale-skinned zombie; his movements were fluid, his face healthy, his skin tanned. Not death in the traditional vampiric way; simply an absence of life, as if his body had been frozen at a single moment.

 

I couldn’t sleep.

 

Shortly after dawn – I had expected it to still be night – I climbed out of the Kingsway tunnels, and went to find a phone box.

 

 

I called the Tower, and this time, when I asked for him, I was put straight through to Bakker. He didn’t sound like he’d been asleep.

 

“Matthew? Are you all right?”

 

“Fine.”

 

“I’ve been hearing rumours. If you want to talk…”

 

“Guy Lee isn’t alive. He has no magic about him, no spark of life. He’s cold.”