A Madness of Angels: Or the Resurrection of Matthew Swift (45 page)

 

A single match flared in the darkness. It illuminated rounded shadows and grainy textures, then the end of a cigarette, before it went out. The shadow behind that tiny red glow squatted down next to me and said gruffly, “Cigarette?”

 

I shook my head.

 

“Now,” said the beard behind the glow, “I want to offer a few thoughts for you to consider right now.”

 

I said nothing.

 

“You see, I figure, here you are – kinda looking like a watermelon after a nasty accident, thinking, ‘Shit, I’ve just blown up half of the Kingsway Exchange in an uncontrolled magical explosion that really I should have stopped before it went mental; and I wonder if the primal force of darkness and shadow that I keep on forgetting to mention to people is going to come back?’ And I figure that this is the prime opportunity for me to impart a few pearls of wisdom that I, in my extensive travels, have gleaned about life.”

 

He drew a long puff from his cigarette, then blew it sideways and away. “Now, being Beggar King,” he said, “I see things. People don’t see me, in fact they go out of their way not to see, quite deliberately avert their eyes, but I see things. I know that when you were a kid, getting older, you’d give a few pennies to the kids on the street and I liked that, I respect that, you know? Sure, nine out of ten might be pushing drugs and you might have just bought that one last fix they need, but that every tenth penny you give – hell, it might just keep someone alive. Now, a callous person would say, ‘Don’t be so dramatic, they’re not going to die, and besides, you’re just supporting a useless burden on society, encouraging them, not helping, and, hell, you’re only in it for your own ego.’ But as I look at it, you can die a whole number of ways that don’t involve your skin. Death of the soul. Death of the spirit. Death of youth – sure, it’s kinda tied into the death of the flesh, but I reason, you waste away before your time, still alive, still ticking over, but you might as well be bed-bound for all the strength you have left in your bones, and there’s no way twenty pence in a coffee cup will buy you that bed for the night. Getting old before your time with none of the perks of age.

 

“As for the ego thing – no point thinking you’re good and fluffy inside if you don’t keep up the habit on occasion. You seriously gonna tell me you’re a compassionate bastard and not meet the beggar’s eyes and feel sorrow? But I figure, hell! You’re a good sorcerer, you understand this whole cycle of life crap, you get the fact that when you die, it’s just one set of thoughts snuffing out and that somewhere else there’s six and a half billion other buggers whose minds will tick along just as bright, just as clear, just as loud, just as alive, because that’s what sorcery is, right? That’s why you put the pennies in the cup, because when you’re dead and gone and your thoughts are silent and you are nothing but shadow on the wall, someone will think of you who you forgot, and their thoughts will be richer for it. Am I right?”

 

I didn’t answer, didn’t move, didn’t know if I could do either.

 

“Then there’s this whole vendetta thing you’ve got going. Now, that seems strange to me.” Another long, thoughtful puff. “You’d let people die so you can kill Lee. Granted, the guy is already dead, if you’ll excuse the pun – sometimes I astound myself at my own bad taste – but you’re willing to let others die just so you can pin him down so you can pin down Bakker so you can pin down this shadow and for what? The greater good? There’s a lot of shit done for the greater good, sorcerer. When the lady with the swish coat and the expensive shoes doesn’t give the beggar a pound on the street, it’s because she’s giving ten to a charity and sure, that’s the greater good. Sure, of course it is. It’s giving more, probably to be used better. But it isn’t compassion. To look away from someone in pain because you know that your e-account is paying monthly contributions to the ‘greater good’; to walk on by while all those people suffer and die because you’ve got a cause and a
big
sense of perspective… says something about the soul. Compassion. And that” – he flicked the end of the cigarette at me in the dark – “is the first thing that died in Robert James Bakker.”

 

He drew another breath, tossed the butt away, ground his heel into it and sighed. “I guess you’ll want a few reassurances. I don’t pretend to be the good guy, that whole moral crap is for someone with a bigger beard; but this is basic survival instinct stuff, yeah? You’ve rattled your shadowy friend. That’s what you’re hoping to hear, isn’t it? Now, the thing I find myself wanting to know is what your lady friend will ask when she comes to rescue you any minute now” – a glimmer of light somewhere in the shadow, the sound of footsteps on metal, and not from his hard-heeled boots. The Beggar King’s teeth flashed white in the dark, although I couldn’t see where the light came from that reflected on them. “Like, are the blue electric angels any better than the shadow? What’d you think?”

 

He leant down so his ear was a few inches from my mouth. “Go on,” he said brightly. “Just between you and me, seriously, tell me why your lady friend shouldn’t kill you like all those other faceless people who are dead upstairs. Go on. Give me a clue.”

 

I thought about it, felt the hot, smelly breath of the Beggar King on my face. “Because…” I said, then realised what I’d been about to say was stupid, and tried again. “Because… because we
are
me.” I saw reflected in his eyes a dull glow, moving through the dark, and heard the sound of falling debris somewhere in the distance. “And I won’t forget,” I said.

 

The Beggar King straightened up and grinned. “Good!” he said. “Well, fair dos, good luck to you, enjoy, don’t be a stranger and all that so on and so forth; glad, all things considered, that it was you, not Lee who made it through after all – unhygienic, all that paper, a mess – be seeing you!”

 

He started to retreatinto the darkness. I called out as best I could, which wasn’t good at all, “What if I don’t want this?”

 

“Want what?” his voice drifted back through the darkness.

 

“To be… me.”

 

A laugh, fading as he did. “Then you’re kinda stuffed, sorcerer!”

 

The
click, click, click
of his heels faded into nothing. A new sound replaced them, a scrabbling of fingers over broken machines, and a voice, rising up in the dark.

 

“Sorcerer! Swift!”

 

I recognised it, and tried to call out. “Oda!”

 

She heard me eventually, and the gentle bubble of dull torchlight swept over my feet, then found the rest of me, a spot of brightness scrambling unevenly out of the dark. Oda slipped clumsily down the side of a fallen bank of servers to where I lay. Her clothes were stained with dust and blood, but by the relative ease of the way she moved, very little of that blood could have been hers. She knelt by me and ran the torchlight in a businesslike manner over the length of me. Clearly I didn’t make a good impression. Professional fingers felt around the back of my head and turned my face this way and that, digging into me in search of injuries with a strength almost as bad as the injuries themselves, whatever they were.

 

“What happened to you?” she asked.

 

I coughed dust in answer.

 

“Head hurt?”

 

I nodded.

 

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

 

“Three.”

 

“Know what day it is?”

 

I thought about it. “No,” I said, surprised to find it was the case. “Not really.”

 

“Can you walk?”

 

“Perhaps.”

 

“Any demonic magic you’ve got useful right now?”

 

I laughed through the dryness of my throat, and regretted it as the movement of my lungs sent pain racing all the way to my elbows. “Nothing,” I whispered. “Nothing.”

 

She hesitated, her face draining of all feeling, becoming suddenly cold. She looked suddenly stiff by my side, eyes fixed on mine, mouth hard. Fear wriggled into my belly and started doing the cancan all across my stomach wall. She didn’t move, didn’t speak.

 

I croaked, “You still…” The words became tangled behind my trembling tongue. “You still – need me.”

 

No answer; her hands didn’t move, her face didn’t change.

 

“Not yet,” I whispered. “Please. Not yet.”

 

Her eyes darkened, then a half-smile flitted across her face. “Maybe not,” she answered. “A conversation for another time.”

 

I grabbed her wrist as she started to stand, and to my surprise, she didn’t try to pull free. “What about… everything else? What about the Whites?”

 

“Lee is dead, isn’t he?” she said, sounding surprised. “Half his goons just died with paper in their mouths – isn’t that a sign? What does anything else matter?”

 

“It matters to me,” I rasped.

 

There was a look in her eyes, taken aback; but the mask was so finely drawn and so expert, it was down in a second over whatever she felt. She said, “Come on. Let’s get you out of here,” and put an arm under my shoulder and, a bit at a time, and with surprising gentleness, helped me to my feet.

 

 

 

 

Part 3: The Madness of Angels

 

 

In which things must end.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hospitals. Life suspended. Not our favourite place.

 

Oda told no one where we went, and I did not, in honesty, even know that the place existed – a private ward somewhere south of the river, where the nurses were all old, loud, and, by implication, far too experienced to tolerate any sort of strop or independent thinking from their patients. They fed us boiled vegetables and slices of overcooked meat, until Oda, to my surprise, brought us ice cream, which we ate by the tub.

 

The attending doctor, a small, infinitely cheerful woman who introduced herself with “Hi, I’m Dr Seah – hey, who beat you up?
Jesus
,” and who wore a long stethoscope that went almost down to her waist, informed me that I had a nasty cut to the back of my head but no need for stitches, several cracked ribs that necessitated my staying still while the world moved around me, a twisted ankle and various lacerations, burns and bruises, some on the inside, that only time and a good diet could heal. We were furious at the vulnerability of our own body, but we scattered wards as best we could around the bed, threatening to walk out, healed or otherwise unless they were left untouched by the cleaners, and, despite ourself, we obeyed the doctor’s orders, and stayed in bed. From our room we could see the sun rise, and watch the shadows bend to long, luminous angles as it set in the west, and the regular cycle of days and nights had never seemed more reassuring than it did then. Of Hunger, we saw and felt nothing. Perhaps we had frightened him more than we thought; we didn’t know and didn’t want to.

 

The only person I saw in that time confined was Oda. She would arrive every day at 11 a.m. precisely with a new pile of books and some new secret food smuggled in past the wary eye of the nurse and the cheerfully unfussed eye of the doctor (“You know, I figure… fuck it!’), and sit by my bed saying not a word unless I spoke first, until exactly 6.30 p.m., at which point she’d stand up and say, “There’s a

 

guard downstairs who’ll watch you,” and pull on her coat.

 

“Shouldn’t it be ‘look after me’?”

 

“What?”

 

“Shouldn’t the guard be looking after me, rather than just watching me? Watching makes it sound like I’m a prisoner, instead of the valiant injured.”

 

“In that case, he’ll do both,” she said, and without further comment, swept out of the room, leaving me alone with the radio headphones and the latest three-for-two book offers from the bookshop down by the riverside market.

 

 

Days passed and they were, I realised, little better than the passing of days when I had been underground. Down in the Exchange, though time had been a sunless, timeless series of patiently ticking events, at least underground the non-today and non-tomorrow had kept me occupied. In the hospital, the day was well enough defined by the rising and setting of the sun outside my window, but there were no events to make yesterday any different from today, or tomorrow any better than the day after.

 

To keep ourself busy we read books, tuning down our worries and fears into the strange, artificial reaction of feelings in the face of ink and paper, until we forgot that we were doing anything so mechanical as reading; the things we saw simply
were
, rather than being a conglomeration of syllables. Thus, drifting through the best of the three-for-two offers, we managed for a while to forget the passing of time.

 

 

I don’t know what day it was when Oda came in, her bag of books slung under one arm and a paper bag of bread rolls and salami hidden in her jacket pocket, and I asked, “Who knows I’m here?”

 

“Me, Chaigneau, the men guarding you.”

 

“Just the Order? What about Vera?”

 

“What about her?”

 

“Shouldn’t she know?”

 

“The Whites are alive. Guy is dead. Half the people he employed have expired with bits of paper in their throats; everyone’s up in arms against what’s left of his men. They had to hire a lorry to get the bodies out to Essex for a burial.” She saw my face and her eyes narrowed. “You look like a wet tissue. Isn’t that what you wanted? Lee dead, his army broken?”

 

“A lorry of bodies?”

 

“Get used to the idea. Sacrifices have to be made. Besides, they were mostly the other side.”

 

“I didn’t mean for… I didn’t think that…”

 

“No, you didn’t think that, did you?” she said, slicing open a bread roll with a penknife and loading it with folded salami. “But it’s fine. You didn’t think about it and it happened and it’s a good thing it happened and frankly we should all be pleased that it did. So go on and pretend you’re guilty that people died if you must, but do it somewhere else, please? It was necessary.”

 

She handed me a roll with an imperious tilt of an eyebrow. I took it automatically and rubbed the thin white flour on its top between my fingers for a moment, then licked my fingers clean again before taking a careful bite. Oda watched all this and, for almost the first time since she’d sat vigil by my side, spoke without being spoken to.