A Madness of Angels: Or the Resurrection of Matthew Swift (67 page)

 

 

There were Whites scattered on every floor. Vera said they’d lost the signal from the tracker in my shoe just outside the tower, but it hadn’t taken much guessing to work out where I’d gone. She said there’d been confusion about why they kept on arriving at the same floor over and over again, no matter how many times they went upstairs, but it was nothing a lot of shooting and a dash of magic couldn’t solve.

 

She agreed that we looked like shit.

 

It almost sounded like a compliment, coming from her.

 

We took the lift up to the tenth floor, where it stopped working. At the twelfth we found another dozen Whites and a lot of bodies; on the seventeenth a group of weremen dropped in; on the twenty-third we found a gaggle of warlocks; on the twenty-seventh, Oda greeted stony-faced Order men, laden with more weapons than we had ever seen.

 

At the thirty-fifth, the very top floor, Oda pressed a gun in our hand.

 

I said, “I don’t know if I can…”

 

Vera, standing behind us, said, “Arseholes, we’ve come this bloody far!”

 

Oda thought about it, looked us straight in the eyes and said, “You came here for revenge. Now you’ve got a real reason for it.”

 

“I… I was… it…” I couldn’t really explain.

 

She thought about it, then said, lowering her voice, “Bakker is alone up there. No one is coming for him, not Amiltech, not Lee, not Simmons. You destroyed them all to get to him. Even the
shadow
is gone…”

 

“Not yet,” I replied, “not quite.”

 

“… if you can’t finish this,” she said, firmer, “then maybe you should let
them
do it for you.”

 

We stared at her in surprise. “Oda?” we said.

 

“Well?”

 

“We don’t know if we can do it either.”

 

“This is the only thing you have.”

 

We took the gun, left the Whites in the stairwell, and went alone to meet Mr Bakker.

 

 

There is a magazine, published irregularly in the UK, and distributed occasionally in the US, Australia, South Africa and among a specialist English-speaking market, whose imaginative founding editor dubbed it
Urban Magic
. Students sometimes read it when they’re bored and listless, in case they can get useful hints about sex out of it; fluffy ladies who care about gardening sometimes read it in case it can advise them on how to read their own palms; sinister men with an unhealthy interest in rabbit’s blood sometimes read it, in case they can find clues in its-pages to a conspiracy. All of these people tend to be disappointed. If you ignore the occasionally garish covers designed to entice readers of just this sort into paying the Ł1.60 required per issue, the contents tend to be rather dry – essays on the various applications of ultraviolet light in binding spells; studies on the effect of different kinds of road paint in summoning circles, with excruciatingly detailed footnotes and usually a URL link to online case notes as supporting evidence; an assessment of how the wave–particle theory of light might be connected to the manipulation of pure elemental forces, and so on. It is the magazine of the professional urban magician, and a fairly specialist one at that. I first started reading it when I was in my twenties, a while after the first issue was published, and borrowed the back copies from the local library, because my teacher told me to. When I couldn’t find the more obscure issues, I joined the British Library and went through their archives. There, after much scrutiny, I found an article very well received at the time, entitled “The Changing Concept of Magic”, written for one of the earlier issues by my very own teacher. I read it, took notes and reported back favourably enough; but it took me a long while to work out what it was about the thing that bugged me so much.

 

It said: magic is life.

 

And there, quite simply, should have been the warning.

 

 

There was a pair of double doors at the end of a hall, and an empty reception desk in front of them. The doors were locked. We kicked them until they opened, no strength left for subtlety, and marched into the room beyond.

 

The room was gloomy, the lights switched off; but more than enough street light drifted through, reflected down from the orange clouds outside, drawing long shadows within shadows across the carpeted floor. Spread out beyond the windows, on every side except the one I’d come from, was the city. It ran away as far as the eye could see, a chaotic pattern of orange, white and pinkish stars across an uneven black floor, gleaming off the Thames, catching the flashing yellow indicator lights of the cars in the streets below, the glare of headlights where the streets aligned with our point of view, the glint of bedroom lights as they were turned out for the night, or the neon glow of the signs above the restaurants, clubs and bars.

 

And it was beautiful. No getting round the fact. It was simply and utterly beautiful.

 

And sitting in front of it, looking south towards the high red lights of Crystal Palace and the distant blackness of the North Downs where they cut off the orange sky, his back turned to the door, was Mr Robert Bakker.

 

He sat utterly still in his wheelchair, head forward, breathing slow and steady. Tubes were attached to his arms. On one side was a bag of some clear fluid that we couldn’t guess at, leading into a drip. On the other side was a bag of bright red blood. I could guess whose. We felt the weight of the gun in our hand, the sticky hotness of our palm, and noticed in the light of the moon peeking out occasionally between the scudding clouds that he was casting a very respectable black shadow.

 

“Mr Bakker?” I said.

 

He stirred slightly in the wheelchair. “Matthew?” he asked, in a distant, confused voice.

 

We moved forward. “Mr Bakker?” we repeated, louder.

 

“Matthew, is that you?”

 

I stepped round so that I was next to him. He looked up, confused, then smiled. “Come to admire the view?”

 

I nodded and looked out across at it. “It’s a good view,” I said finally.

 

“One of the best. I had this whole floor cleared out so I could see it better.” His eyebrows tightened. “How’d you get here? Not that I’m not pleased to see you…”

 

“I was kidnapped, drugged, tied up and left in a basement thirty-something floors beneath this,” I replied cordially. “I then had a large amount of my blood taken out of my body for what I can only assume were experimental purposes, before my friends, having followed me here with foreknowledge of my imminent kidnapping and likely fate, attacked, and I escaped.”

 

He thought about it, then said, “That’s not what I expected to hear, I’ll admit.”

 

“Would you like to hear the rest?”

 

“Yes,” he said. “I would.” And by now, his eyes had clocked the gun in my hand, and the blood on my clothes and skin, and his voice was

 

level and tense.

 

“Your shadow is alive.”

 

“What?”

 

“Your shadow is alive,” we repeated, struggling not to raise our voice. “It’s been alive for several years. It killed Patel, Pensley, Dhawan, Akute, Foster, Awan…”

 

“Matthew, are you quite all right?”

 

“… Koshdel, Khay, Dana, and me, to name a few. It is you. No getting round it. And it won’t be killed until you are.”

 

His fingers tightened on the arms of his chair. “You… believe this to be true?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“What did you mean by Dana?”

 

I met his eyes squarely, and saw him flinch. “It killed her. It held her, and I said, ‘
Domine dirige nos
’…”

 

“The blessing of the city?”

 

“The very same, just like you taught me, the invocation of all its guardians and its spirits. And it killed her. I held her and I couldn’t stand it, so I just… we were… anyway. It killed her. It wants to be alive – really alive. It is hungry. Nothing will ever sate its appetite, it is so hungry for life. It has no pleasure in anything, it cannot understand delight or feeling or pain, but it tries; it feasts on the blood and the fire of others, kills in order to see how people die, is fascinated by death and feasting and life. And it is a he; and he is you. That’s how it is, I’m afraid. How it’s going to go.”

 

“Matthew…” he began.

 

“It came alive when you had the stroke. You were a good man – a brilliant sorcerer. You had always delighted in life, seen beauty in it; that’s what sorcery is. The ability to see something wonderful, magical, where other people see just mundane and boring nothing. A point of view. You taught me that. Then you started dying and you couldn’t cope. You couldn’t reconcile the loss of your faculties, your abilities, your strength, your life, to how you’d lived it in the past. You were a healthy and active man and suddenly you’re trapped in this dying carcass. But you’ve still got those scruples. The moral part of your brain says, “Oh, well, such is life, et cetera et cetera, better make the most of it and not cause any fuss.” Then there’s this other part, the part that everyone has anyway, that screams and fights and kicks against the idea of dying, that is terrified of it, can’t cope with it, refuses to accept it and longs, above all other things, to live. That can find nothing in this life that doesn’t lead to death, can see nothing in this life that it doesn’t think is destructible or must have an end. I’m sure you see where this is leading.”

 

“You’re wrong,” he said simply.

 

“Because you’re a sorcerer,” I went on, drained, empty. “Because you have a certain view on life, this other part comes alive. Perhaps it’s harmless for a while, but then its thoughts seep into your own, its dreams infect your own, and you start thinking, ‘Hey, let’s see if I can stay alive, I’m sure it wouldn’t cause anyone any trouble, where to start?’ And you think of the blue electric angels and go, ‘They’re just surplus life waiting to be tapped, I wonder if they’d like to give some of their power to me?’ And somehow in this process you forget the rules. You forget that the angels are about freedom from restraint and laws and all the earthly things, and you forget that they are not just life, they are
power
. And the hungry part of your brain might be thinking, ‘I shall be a burning blue fire across the sky,’ but you sure as hell don’t say it. You could steal the electric angels’ power and be a god, without flesh, form, feeling, substance, without restraint by the laws of man. And you’re already halfway there, as we’ve established, because there’s your shadow doing its thing. So you ask your apprentice round. And I said no. Probably didn’t explain it well at the time – sorry – but no was the answer and it was the right answer. And you’re a bit pissed at that.”

 

“Matthew, I didn’t…” he tried again.

 

“Let me finish,” I snapped. “I need to get it right this time. You’re a bit pissed off and, whether you like it or not, there’s a part of you going, ‘Little bastard betrayed me! The angels always talk to him, why not to me, little shit!’ or words to that effect and, Bob’s your uncle, I am surprised to find myself dead at the claws of a creature that wears your face but is distinctly, definitely not alive, merely hungry. So very, very hungry.”

 

We clicked off the safety on the gun, and turned it this way and that in our grip, wiggling a finger into the trigger guard. “So there’s really two things, as far as we see, which need explaining on our part, us to you. The first thing is why we didn’t talk to you, when you listened for us in the phone lines. And the short answer is this – you are a great sorcerer, a brilliant master of your arts, you see magic wherever you go. But you said, ‘Magic is life,’ and that’s not quite right. You think that the study of magic, the understanding of it, gives you some sort of better grasp of life. Unfortunately, even I worked out that this isn’t quite true; it’s a bit skewed, see? We understand this. Magic is not life. Life
is
magic. Even the boring, plodding, painful, cold, cruel parts, even the mundane automatic reflexes, heart pumping, lungs breathing, stomach digesting, even the uninteresting dull processes of walking, swinging the knees and seeing with eyes,
this
is magic. This is what makes magic. Understand that, and you are some way to understanding why we are what we are.

 

“And I guess that covers point the second – why I didn’t help you summon the angels. It pretty much boils down to this: a man who looks at everything and sees a tool to be used, a force to be manipulated, rather than just good, old-fashioned stuff doing its thing, should not be free of the restraints of humanity. Have we missed anything?”

 

He thought about it a while, then smiled. “I don’t think so.”

 

“You don’t seem particularly surprised.”

 

“I knew you had to believe something like this.”

 

“You don’t seem particularly surprised that Dana’s dead.” He didn’t answer. “Why did you keep her alive?”

 

He thought about it a long while, then said, “I doubt you’d really care for the reasoning. And it really is worth staying alive, however you can.”

 

I saw it coming a second before it happened, a flick of his wrist. I raised the gun, swinging it up instinctively towards his head, but he’d already opened his fingers. The wall of twisted air slammed into me and picked me off my feet, knocking me back and wrenching my wrist as I skidded across the floor. The barrel of the gun smoked and burnt red-hot. I threw it aside and crawled back onto my feet, spinning my fingers through the air to catch a fistful of the magic of that place, dragging the reflected orange light in the clouds around me like a fluffy blanket to ward off the cold, until my skin burnt with its dull gleam. Bakker hadn’t moved from his chair, hadn’t stood; his back was half-turned to me. But as I watched and prepared a spell, he reached over and slipped out from his skin the needles carrying blood and other fluids, put them to one side and, very carefully, stood up. His legs buckled, but he caught himself on the handles of the chair, and rose nonetheless. He steadied himself and turned to look at us, standing on his own two feet, unsupported; and his face was white, his eyes empty, his teeth rotten, he trailed darkness as he moved, and he cast no shadow.