I stood up slowly, as footsteps in the corridor behind me grew louder; the roar of a chainsaw suggested that the Downers had come equipped for the obstructions I had thrown up in their way. But we were unconcerned, and our face split into a slow grin as, his arms dripping blue paint, Captain Zog stretched across the length of the wall, and reached
out
. First came yellow-gloved fingers, then a cautious yellow toe, then a bright blue kneecap tiny and knobbly, far too small to support the bulk of his frame then the blue hulk of his chest. His face came last of all, stretching behind him as a few residuals of paint clung to the wall, before peeling away from the rest of his dripping form with a few colourful pops. Next to me, the ruby-red nose of the tiger protruded from the wall, then a hint of pink neon stripe; a spider the size of my hand, bright emerald green and completely smooth except for where black brushstrokes picked out a hint of fur, scuttled across my leg, leaving pinprick stains of bright green points across my trousers. On the ceiling, a pointed spaceship sprayed a fine grey paint from its exhaust vent, that settled in a mist on the floor; the craft spun out of the wall and back, then twisted once more into the air and accelerated away again, amid silence except for the
dripdrip dripdrip
of paint falling in its wake.
I jumped as the tiger brushed affectionately against my legs, leaving a long streak of muddled pink across my trousers. Its feet made a flat
splash, splash
sound on the concrete, as it padded towards the corridor from which Id just come running. Then Captain Zog and all the tiny scurrying creatures of the walls painted butterflies with the mandibles of soldier ants, children with faces longer than the bodies that carried them, and tubby black and yellow bees walking on two legs and carrying carving knives with every limb, with three black fingers to support each dribbling blade all the monsters of the Exchange marched in silence apart from the running of wet paint, straight towards the corridor where the Downers were. As they went, they flowed in and out of the wall and each other, and, where their features were human enough to read, every face wore a single intent.
Hello, Matthews fire!
I spun round, but saw nothing in the glow of my lantern but dancing darkness and running colours. I half-closed my eyes, and listened.
A brush of cold across my shoulder
smell of sewage
ripple of magic in my ear
taste of salt
bile
blood
silk
hello Matthews fire
we be
fire
light
life
fire
stop
we be
enough
so brightly burning
make me
be free
STOP
Thank you.
Better.
Hello, little sorcerer
.
I lashed out at the whisper of cold in my ear and, for a second, my hand closed around something like fabric-woven ice, a bite of frost that went straight to the bone, then up the wrist, a slither of silk under my skin, malleable, bending to the touch. I opened my eyes as it slipped from my fingers, and saw a tendril of darkness vanishing into the wall and rippling away, and for a moment, just a moment, I thought that perhaps, I could beat him after all.
I picked up my lantern and ran between the heaving masses of living paint, closing my ears to the Downers behind me as the first screams began, before they were choked off by a mouthful of paint.
Dark tunnels lose meaning after a while; I had had no idea how many there were in the Exchange it takes being lost to give you a true sense of proportion. I didnt care where I was going, and it was only instinct that made me obey when I heard, through the darkness, a voice shout, Swift, get down!
I threw myself flat on basic principle, since the voice hadnt sounded too threatening, merely urgent, and saw a burst of fire at the end of the corridor, and felt the mechanical snaps of bullets biting overhead, striking something that made a dull thumping noise on each impact. When the firing stopped, I looked up and behind me, to see the body of a woman, dressed in very little indeed, torn apart by the impact of the bullets. I recognised her; when she went out in those clothes, her name had been Inferno. I tasted bile.
Hands pulled me behind a short line of men armed with rifles. With them was Chaigneau; he held a short, heavy mace, inscribed with scratched words in Latin that in the gloom I couldnt decipher. He glared at me and said, What are you doing here, sorcerer?
I staggered away from him, dragging my lantern with me, and ran on into the dark.
What do you think youre playing at? his voice echoed behind me.
Gunshots in the dark.
A taste of magic blooming and dying all around me, we felt
we smelt
sickly black spots of pain bursting behind our eyeballs, we felt
trickles of red agony down the back of our spine and I knew, even if we were too afraid to acknowledge it, that this was what a sorcerer felt near to too much death.
We came to a corridor of bodies. Warlocks and witches and wizards, their flesh burnt half away to reveal carbonised bone, the walls scorched black, all the paint long since bubbled away by the force of magical fire, wires and pipes shattered from the ceiling, and, when we risked pulling off the gas mask to sniff the air, the smell of roast skin.
We put the gas mask back on, the smell of rubber better than the stench of all that, and the limited vision afforded by its goggles a blessing, rather than a disadvantage. We put one foot between the bent arm of a woman whose face had been burnt away to a hollow shell, and the scorched body of a man whose eyes were, mercifully, turned away from us as we advanced. At the end of the corridor the shadows crawled across the wall, roiling despite the steadiness of our lamp. We made it almost halfway down before we spotted a robe of exotic, tasteless colours and knew who was wearing it, and knew that he was dead. We had nothing we could call affection for the warlock, but stopped and pressed our head against the wall and trembled and felt our flesh burn for many minutes before the realisation came that all this fear and sickness made no difference. We had to keep walking regardless, turning our head away from the sight of the bodies and trying to make the exercise a mechanical one, flinching nonetheless when our toe prodded the remnants of some dead magician.
At the end of that corridor was a metal door, rusted crispy brown. The bolt had been twisted out of shape, by what power I didnt know, and the thing stood ajar, inviting. Like an idiot, I nudged it further open, and ducking under the low top, stepped down the cold staircase beyond it.
The room I came into was too big for me to see anything but its nearest edges, the ceiling lost in darkness, and the walls stretching out in long perspectives. The floor full of telephone servers. They stood like the dead black trunks of some haunted forest, gleaming with the occasional hint of circuit-board green and solder silver when they caught the lamplight, stretching on in neat rows as far as I could see. I picked my way carefully down the nearest aisle, not daring to call any more light than I already had, for fear of who else might be looking. My footsteps were flat, dull and impossibly loud in that still room; the air was heavy, like it hadnt been disturbed for years; as I moved, puffs of white dust swirled up beneath my feet.
It took me almost five minutes of padding through that empty, dead place, between the straight lines of the telephone servers, before I found another set of footprints. They had been made by a pair of mans shoes, business wear rather than trainers. I turned and followed the line of their walking, feeling like a counter in a game of snakes and ladders, who might at any moment step on a snake and find myself back where Id started. The tracks were, however, fairly easy to follow. They led between the endless rows of servers to a junction resembling any other, except that here there was another bubble of light, just like the one I carried. It lit up a hunched shadow dressed in black, wearing a pair of large mans business shoes, hunched over what I realised were my own footprints.
The figure looked up as my pool of light merged with his own from where I stood some metres away. His face twitched into an expression of surprise, followed by curving contempt. Sorcerer, said Lee. I thought youd wind up down here. Prophetic powers couldnt have done a better job.
Bugger prophetic powers, I replied, putting the lantern down and scanning the thick, still darkness around us. You and I both know, I think, whats got me down here. Tall guy, wears my coat, bad complexion, essence of living darkness seen him anywhere?
And here I was thinking you and I were about to enter the history books, he said, straightening up, and brushing dust off his knees. But all along, you arent really interested in me, are you? I dont think you give a damn about the things Ive done, or that Khay did, or even about the Whites and the warlocks and all the other cretins Ive killed to get here. Youre far too busy to care. Am I right?
No, but nice try, I said.
He shrugged. Do you know what the difference is between a soldier and a murderer, Mr Swift?
I havent given it much thought.
Intent. Whatever I do, I always intend. It keeps me in control. I have an anger, a beast
but control. You cannot imagine. But you did you even think about all those bodies lying in your way? I think you kill and dont even have the knowledge of what youre doing, or why. Useless fucking moron.
You know, youre right.
Of course.
No, not about everything but youre right that Im not here for you. You are just a dot on my way to something more important. A door that has to be opened, a minor tick on the list before getting to the major, and the fact that youre a murderer, a rapist, a thief, a coward and a corpse only makes it easier to do what I was always intending all along. So lets get this whole thing over with so that Hunger can come and take his fill.
Get what over? Lee grinned, and gestured expansively. Robert wants you alive, Mr Swift, and alive is what I intend to give him.
A shadow in the darkness behind him. I reached instinctively out for that warm tingle of magic on my fingers. Then a shadow to my left, and my right and, when I dared to glance backwards, a shadow behind me, faces, figures emerging from the gloom. Guy Lee opened up his hands, whose cupped hollow started filling with a thick black smog; and he was grinning, utterly unafraid, as men and women emerged around us from the gloom. As they stepped into the pool of light, I saw the flash of a brightly coloured robe and the remains of the warlocks face, empty, devoid of life.
I turned to Lee as the dead of the corridor Id come down from, their bodies still dripping the last of their blood from their open wounds, filed into a circle around me. Zombies, we said, with open scorn in our voice. How 1960s.
Not zombies. Zombies are too crude. These are
Lee searched for the right word
uniquely empowered.
My gaze swerved back to the eyes of the warlock. They were not entirely empty, not quite; and his mouth, as it hung open, showed a piece of paper, the white just showing behind his teeth. Life, fuelled by words, shoved down his throat as he died; a spell in paper somewhere inside his chest, rumbling around the remains of his stomach.
We wont hesitate to kill them twice, we said as the last of the bodies from the corridor stepped into the circle closing around us.
Hard to kill dead things, said Lee.
You should know, we answered, full of immediate purpose. We set them free.
And we reached out, grabbed a fistful of heat from the lantern on the floor, cupped it in the palms of our hands, and blew a tiny piece of life into them. The heat bloomed into blue flames between our fingers, rolled out across our hands and arms, billowed around us like a cloak as, with a wrench and a shove, we sent it spilling out between the dead monolith servers. It rolled across the floor and up the walls in a flash of bright blue fire that for a second illuminated the whole stretching expansive dome of the place, burning away every shadow and inch of skin that it touched, boiling the solder in its frames to bubbling, spitting silver bubbles and sweet smoke, blinding out every inch of darkness
except for
just a moment
caught in the flames
I saw him, fingers outstretched to catch the surge of blue fire, chin tilted up and eyes wide as if trying to breathe my flames, face open and in an expression of absolute delight as the blue light seared around him.
Just for a moment, with the shadows that hid him burnt back and away,
I saw Hunger through the fire.
Then it went out.
Darkness all around.
I was on the floor, eyes running. I couldnt see through Odas gas mask, the inside was steamed up and the outside cracked with heat. I tugged it off and instantly smelt the solder smoke and dead flesh, but no tear gas, not this far down. There was no sign of Lee. I scrambled on all fours across the floor until I found the warlock, lying on his back, blood now soaked through every inch of his clothes. I yanked his twitching jaw open while an arm hanging on by a thread of tendon tried to lift itself up and gouge at my eyes, I dug through the dry hollow of his mouth past his snapping teeth until I found the tip of the piece of paper and carefully, so as not to tear it, pulled it out through his open jaw. The black words written on it in spidery ink were almost illegible with saliva and blood. I saw:
