A Madness of Angels: Or the Resurrection of Matthew Swift (46 page)

 

“Tell me about the paper.”

 

I mumbled incoherent throwaway noises through a mouthful of salami and chewed more slowly.

 

“How does paper keep someone alive?”

 

There was a neediness to her voice; so, resignedly, I swallowed, put the rest of the roll to one side, folded my arms and said, “What do you want to know?”

 

“Paper. Explain to me about the paper.”

 

“It’s nothing too special.”

 

“Then it won’t tax you too much to tell me about it.”

 

“There is a history of… people trying to stay alive under unusual circumstances. In the good, old-fashioned days, magicians would pluck out their own heart and encase it in a lead chest dropped at the bottom of a well where no one could ever find it, thus gaining a degree of invulnerability – hard to kill someone when you can’t stop their heart beating. Problem with that, of course, is that if you become too hard to kill, too invulnerable, then all the other bugger need do is cut off your arms, head and legs, scatter them in twenty different places, chained to a rock, and there you are, still alive, head on a spike in Newcastle, scrabbling arms chained to a wall in Cardiff, and heart still beating, senses still functioning, still alive, still not dead; just in pain. You can be too safe, you see – and what’s the point of being alive unless there is a progress, a journey, and somewhere, at some point, an end? What else other than that motivation makes us really
live
, the sense that this is a chance we must use, and now? Think of the laziness of immortality – so easy to say ‘tomorrow’ for ever.”

 

“I was hoping for a technical explanation; thank you anyway.”

 

“I’m telling it to you as…”

 

“As what?”

 

“As it was told to me.”

 

She grunted, but said nothing more.

 

I wiped my mouth with my sleeve and tried again. “Necromancers go other ways – traditional magics that will never lose their validity, I fear – blood of the newborn babe, or even better, placentas, transplants from blessed vessels of Godly might, vampirism, reanimation, possession and so on and so forth. The modern medical era has made it easier; you’d be amazed how useful the MRI scanner has been to necromancers. But it is a messy business, unhygienic, usually defined by bad complexions, spots and rapid hair loss; and besides, it causes a lot of attention and provides little gain. Dead is dead is dead; even if it’s walking and talking, the flesh decays – nothing yet, that I know of, can stop time.”

 

“You know a lot about this.”

 

“I was well taught.”

 

“Bakker?”

 

“Yes. Why do you think he hasn’t tried any of these things? He is desperate to stay alive, determined to survive at any cost – but he understands that life, real life, is much more than just survival in dead bones. He wants to live in every way. He wouldn’t try necromancy.”

 

“But Lee did?”

 

“Sort of. A different kind of ripping out of the heart, you might say. The magician writes on a piece of paper certain incantations, a few spells of a kind that usually are old enough and vague enough, that have been through endless mistranslations, to carry
consequences
, and to that adds a few compulsions. To the servants of the magician, usually there’s a clause in there to obey and serve, to never wither until he commands, to feel no pain unless in failure. But when a magician does it to himself, swallows that paper with those enchantments, the words are usually… aspirations.”

 

“Aspirations?”

 

“Things like, ‘I am a good man’, or ‘I will never age’ or ‘My favourite colour is blue’ or ‘I will be for ever powerful’ or ‘I will not sleep’ or…”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because you die when you eat the paper,” I explained, surprised at the sharpness of her voice. “You choke on it, you have to swallow it whole and it kills you, invariably; it’s part of the deal. That’s why it’s magic – at that instant, the paper absorbs your death, your… well, I suppose, life – it absorbs your dying breath and that gives
it
life, the words on the paper define who you are from that instant onwards; define everything about you. You’re not technically dead, because there’s still your life inside your body. But unlike a heart in a box you can die if the paper is removed; the spell is broken, it is a guarantee against extreme eternal agony, and at the same time…”

 

“A form of invulnerability?”

 

“Close.”

 

“But… when you fought Guy Lee, you hurt him?”

 

“No. I hurt his flesh – he felt nothing. There was no pain in him until I actually pulled the paper out of his throat; the spell probably went with an ‘I will feel no pain’ clause – it’s fairly standard.”

 

“What happened when you pulled it out?”

 

“Imagine having a metre and a half of rolled-up paper stuffed down your throat and suddenly becoming aware of it,” I answered. “Then guess.”

 

She nodded slowly, eyes elsewhere. Finally she said, “What about… the others. The dead with the paper…”

 

“A basic command. I’m guessing that the warlock I met wasn’t dead when Lee found him, merely dying, and that Lee pushed a simple spell of obedience down his throat when he died, catching his last breath in its snare, trapping it in his lungs. Not alive, not dead, just… bound. The magic of a dying breath is a powerful thing.”

 

“Even today?”

 

“Even today. Christ,” I muttered, “what do you think? Life
is
magic! Where there is life there is magic! Sure, the magic is in the city, in the street, in the neon lamp and the coughing pigeon and the stray cat and the sewers and the cars and the smell of dirt; that’s something new – but life really hasn’t changed so much. Certain things – blood, skin, breath, words, paper, ink – will always have their own very special power, one which I don’t think will ever really change.”

 

She thought about it, then nodded again. In a voice that wasn’t entirely there, her eyes fixed on some distant, other place, she said, “Is that why Bakker wants you alive?”

 

“What makes you think…”

 

“I found one of Lee’s men. I asked him things.”

 

“You…”

 

“I asked him things,” she repeated firmly, eyes flashing bright and angry towards me. “That’s all. He said they were under orders not to harm the sorcerer.”

 

I shrugged.

 

“You don’t seem surprised.”

 

“Not really.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Oda, you know why Bakker and I argued.”

 

“He wanted you to help him summon the blue electric angels and you said no.”

 

“He wanted me to summon us, so that he could feed off our power, off our life, use it to sustain him. He wanted to force us from the telephone, get us into the world of flesh where we would be vulnerable so he could steal our essence – we are creatures of left-over life, creations of surplus feeling whispered into electric energy – to his eyes, we are the answer to his problem. He desires life and we are all that he desires. And here we are, trapped in this skin, vulnerable, just like he always wanted.”

 

“I see.”

 

“Would you betray us?”

 

“Me?”

 

“It is always a fear.”

 

She made no answer.

 

“We… do not know who we should trust. When we were in the blue, there was no need for ‘friend’. We were all the same, our thoughts burnt off each other with static fire, we were one, never

 

alone. Here, things are different.”

 

“My breaking heart,” retorted Oda with a scowl.

 

I glared and snatched up the rest of my salami roll, biting into it-to hide my anger. Not hiding it very well, clearly, since Oda sat up straighter and said, “I didn’t mean that…” She hesitated, then made a grunting sound, relaxing. “Chaigneau hates you,” she said finally.

 

“It’s mutual.”

 

“You embarrassed him.”

 

“It’s something I’m good at.”

 

“It’s more than that – you tainted him. He’s now been touched by magic.”

 

“So? He’s a killer of magicians, a paladin of narrow-minded insanity; surely it’s good to know his enemy?”

 

“He doesn’t believe you’ve really lifted the curse you put on him.”

 

“Why not?”

 

“He won’t say.”

 

“Is this another of his paranoid irrationalities coming through?”

 

“Did you undo what you did to him?” she asked sharply.

 

I met her eyes, unafraid of her cold glare. “Yes.”

 

Another hesitation – perhaps something more too? “If you live,” she said finally, “if you meet Bakker and have your revenge, if you kill him – what will you do then?”

 

“I don’t know.” I thought about it. “Clearly Chaigneau will try to kill me, the instant all this is over. So either you and I become implacable enemies, or I run away to another city and learn French or something.”

 

“He’ll find you.”

 

“Then you and I become enemies,” I answered. “And if I survive that…” There was nothing on her face to answer the hopeful enquiry in my voice, so I just said, “If I survive your Order, then… I don’t know. My CV isn’t great; and, besides, there’s this two-year gap where I vanished, which employers will assume was spent in prison. I don’t have any money that isn’t obtained by the use of a spell; I don’t have a home; I don’t even know what’s happened to my friends. I just… I don’t know. Maybe I’ll pack up and go. Head out to some other place and start again. Go back to being eighteen with just my qualifications and a week’s work experience, wipe everything else clean, say I had cancer or something. Maybe be someone else, get a false name, try discretion and tact for a change. It could be an adventure.”

 

“What about them?”

 

“Them?”

 

She tapped the side of her head conspiratorially and said, “Them with the blue eyes.”

 

We thought about it, and grinned. “We will find joy in all life, anywhere. To be whoever we want to be… nothing but joy.”

 

“Doesn’t sound joyous to me,” said Oda.

 

“That’s because you don’t like living without certainties,” I replied. “You’re just afraid.”

 

“I am not!”

 

“It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Fear is the art of being alive

 

– without fear there’s no bravery, no heroism, no…” “Shut up,” she exclaimed. I raised my hands defensively. “Sorry – I’m sorry. Is there anything

 

else to eat?”

 

 

We lost patience before I was due to be discharged; in the middle of the night I got up, wrote Oda a brief and reasonably polite note, gathered up what few clothes we could find, and slipped out of the hospital, into the empty streets. Cold air on our face and hard pavement under our feet was a bliss we could not describe.

 

I spent the next day replenishing my stock – I found a new cardboard ad offering the services of “***PLAYFUL SEXY CHICK!!!!***” and scribbled my symbols of magic onto its back with a biro, sliding it into the ATM to withdraw enough money for my day of shopping. I bought new clothes and replenished my supply of tools for the trade – then went to the dry-cleaners and sat and waited while they struggled to remove the endless swirls of paint, dust, smoke, dirt and blood from the fabric of my coat and the surface of my bag. The result looked like a faded clown’s costume that had once been dyed beige, but the fabric felt warm and dense, a weight without which I would have felt naked. For lunch I had a curry at the local tandoori house, dipping poppadoms into every chutney and spice. We were determined to find out what even the fiery red one was like, having avoided it in my previous life, and found that there were indeed flavours that could make our teeth burn. In the afternoon I booked myself into a hotel, and that evening, I went out for a drink.

 

I met her by the bar of a small jazz café near Hyde Park. She said her name was Felicity, and that it was nice of me to try, but she wasn’t really interested. I told her I just wanted to have a conversation and she answered that that was what everyone said, that men were all the same. But she didn’t say no when I bought her a drink; and we talked about the weather, the price of tickets on the underground, the embarrassment of our current politicians and all their useless prancing for the media, and what was on television, until at last I felt humanagain, and when it was time to say goodbye, we kissed and promised never to see each other again.

 

When I dreamt that night, I didn’t wake up with the taste of paper in my mouth, and that, I concluded, could only be a good sign.

 

 

The next day I bought a mobile phone – the first I’d ever bought in my life – and rang the hospital where I’d been staying until they put me through to Dr Seah, who after a lot of umming and aaahing and “Have you been in a fight yet?” agreed to ring Oda and give her my number.

 

Oda rang me no more than ten minutes later. She was not a happy person.

 

“You bastard! I’ll kill you if you ever do that again!”

 

“Hello to you too.”

 

“Where the hell did you think you were going, what did you think you were doing, you can’t just…”

 

“I needed some air.”

 

“You needed two days of air without telling me? Just walking off into the dark like you were… what if something had happened?!”

 

“Please don’t try concern; you’re much better at indignation.”

 

“If you
ever
pull something like that again…”

 

“Oh please, like the sniper rifle isn’t gleaming through the window already,” I said. “I’m calling now, aren’t I?”

 

“You’re a selfish pig, sorcerer. A lying, selfish pig.”

 

“I just thought I’d let you know I’m OK.”

 

A calmer edge entered her voice. “I’ve got something to tell you.”

 

“Is it abusive?”

 

“Sinclair woke up.”

 

“You’re sure?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Where is he?”

 

“I don’t know – they moved him the second he gained consciousness.”

 

“Who’s ‘they’?”

 

“His assistant.”

 

“Charlie?”

 

“If that’s his name.”