The Minority Council (12 page)

Even at this hour of the morning, especially at this hour of the morning, men and women wearing too little for the cold tottered down the middle of the street on each other’s arms, arguing about which way was for the bus and which for the cab, and who lived where and with whom.

And there was something above us, too.

I didn’t point it out. I figured they’d find out for themselves sooner or later. Credit to the anvil-faced man next to me who, craning upwards to peer out of the window, responded calmly to what he saw. “Guv?”

Prince turned to look at him, eyebrows raised, the annoyed employer wondering whether he’s made the right human resources decisions, now the crisis has come.

“Above,” said the anvil-faced man. So Prince lowered the window, on a little electric hiss, and stuck his head out, and saw them.

As animals go, a circling pigeon lacks the same effect on the human soul as, say, a circling vulture. Admittedly circling is not a pigeon’s natural state; a continual flutter from rooftop to rooftop is more standard, as if, on arrival at a new destination, the pigeon can’t quite remember why it went there to begin with, and has to go back to where it started to see if the recollection returns.

But this was several hundred pigeons, swooping from roof gutter to parapet, forming a shoal-like mass that inexorably followed the route of the car.

Without turning, Prince said to me, “That him?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “That’s him.”

We turned into another street, cobbles peeking from beneath the worn-down tarmac. An iron water pump stood as testament to a past of public filth and plague; a bouncer was trying to turn out the night’s last drunkards. A black-and-white eye had been spray-painted onto the wall by his club’s door, its huge pupil watching the entrance to a brothel on the other side of the street. Now was not the time to see this eye again. Our driver turned into a gap between buildings, sometime warehouses now converted to design fashion studios and advertising offices.
A metal gate slid open ahead, revealing a tiny courtyard adorned with one CCTV camera, one parked white truck, one black emergency staircase down from the roof above, and one grey metal door. There were no windows or other sign of life. As the gate closed behind us, my anvil-faced minder said, “Out.”

The pigeons were still with us, forming a jagged battlement along the roofline. I felt the rats scurry in the pipes below and smelt angry fox rummaging in the nearby bins. The door opened for Morris as he advanced on it, and I felt wards warp and flex, almost saw the stretching of silver-grey magic in the air around its hinges. A dull light slipped out from the doorway as if embarrassed to make a fuss, and a group of three people—two men and a woman—appeared. They wore blue overalls and white masks, plus white plastic caps and latex gloves. I hadn’t expected that Morris Prince’s associates would look like the staff of a hospital or laboratory.

But as I looked closer, I saw that where the woman should have had nails, the beginnings of black claws were sprouting, and her eyes hinted at the madness of a shapeshifter who can’t quite maintain a constant morphic form. One of the men stank of magic, with the same crackle of inhuman power, and in his eyes was the same sick yellow I’d seen in the addict at the hotel. The third carried a sub-machine gun, slung over his shoulder as casually as a handbag.

I was hustled to the entrance and pushed inside. The door closed behind me with a clang.

Once it had been a factory. A sweatshop where nimble-fingered women toiled behind ranks of sewing machines while the foreman fried his morning egg on top of the
stove. Trunking in a ceiling of galvanised steel divided into extraction pipes; plastic sheeting and old stained blankets divided up the concrete floor into alcoves. There was a dry, prickling heat. The place was illuminated by bare bulbs hanging at irregular intervals. Within the falling light you could see a dance of slow-moving dust, dropping through the air like sleepy flies. There was a background hum, of fans churning, of an air-conditioning system with asthma, of coughing in a distant corner. Somewhere a man was making incoherent, begging sounds, before his voice dribbled away like the end of an old cassette.

I was made to change my clothes; without arguing, I zipped up a blue overall and pulled on a mask; Prince did the same. We felt dressed for a medically messy funeral, the air too hot behind the mask, whose top was biting into our nose. A woman wearing the same uniform came up to Prince and whispered; he nodded, then told me to follow.

I was led further through the building, seeing dust turn in a thin haze through the air, felt it tingle and itch against our skin, the little snap-pop of flaring magics blooming and dying as fast as they’d come, sparks in the dark all around. There were wards everywhere, clinging to the skin; they were scratched into the concrete walls, nailed into the old shuttered windows, pressed in tight around the doors: thick, suffocating blankets of protective magic designed to shield against flood, fire, tempest, blizzard and vengeful mage. It could take months to build up this kind of protection, and months to destroy it. Except…

Except.

We couldn’t resist looking down at our feet as we went deeper into the gloom. Except that magicians were thick,
they were so often thick, they raised spells against other magicians, against demons and monsters, but they never stopped to think like a proper security consultant or clever thief, their heads were so full of magic that common sense didn’t really get a look-in; and if you were smart, and if you were flexible in your approach, and if you didn’t mind getting your feet wet, there was a hole in the defences. A hole we could use.

I was taken down a corridor of plastic sheets and dirty fabrics strung along a single rope overhead, until we came to a long piece of blue plastic pressed in against the wall. The woman with Prince pulled it back, and he said, “This her?”

The crude cubicle contained within its plastic walls was just long enough for a child to lie stretched out inside. A second sheet of clear plastic had been stapled to the floor. In one corner was a pile of ragged, puke-stained clothes, in another a bucket whose smell penetrated straight through the mask and twisted in the stomach. Lying on the floor, wearing a white plastic overall but no mask, her eyes open and breathing shallow, was a woman who might once have been Meera. Her skin was a sickly yellow-brown, the colour of old worm-eaten pine wood; her eyes had a bright film and oozed yellowish goo which clung to her lashes and thickened into crystals. Her lips were cracked, her hair was thin and shedding, her nails cracked, blood clotted black in the gaps, and she lay on her side, as if dropped there and unable to move, shuddering with every shallow breath.

Prince must have seen the horror on our face because he snapped, “Is this the woman?”

I stammered, “Yes. This is her. This is Meera.”

Squatting down, he clamped his hand around Meera’s face and turned her head up towards his. She gave a sharp intake of breath and, as his fingers dug into her skin, I saw it break and crack, like fracturing burnt sugar. “Woman!” he barked, shaking her. “Tell me about the Midnight Mayor!”

Her eyes rolled in her head, straight over him and then up and away. He shook her again. “You! Midnight Mayor!”

Her breath came as a ragged wheeze. I whispered, “What in God’s name has happened to her?”

Prince let her head drop with a hiss of disgust. It bounced on the plastic floor. Standing up he wiped his hands on his overall, leaving a trail of yellowish something. “She’s a fucking fairy. Happens to them all, at the end.”

I took a slow breath through the confines of my mask. “Is she dying?”

“What do you think this is, a health spa? They come to the dusthouse for nothing else.”

Meera’s head had rolled to one side and now, as her eyes drifted upwards, for a moment, just a moment, they met mine, and her lips opened in surprise. I locked my gaze onto Prince’s.

“Then we’ve got a problem,” I said, taking it one heavy word at a time. “Because if she’s dying and you haven’t stopped it, the Midnight Mayor is going to tear this place to shreds.”

“He’ll be massacred if he comes in here. I don’t care how tough he thinks he is, he won’t dare.”

“It’s not whether he thinks he’s tough, it’s whether he’s crazy enough to do it. Ask yourself this—is the kind of guy who came back from the dead really going to be open to reasonable and rational policy planning?”

Prince hesitated, then shrugged in exasperation. “Well, what the fuck do you expect us to do? The bitch is dying, nothing we can do about that; couple more hours and she’ll have turned like all the rest of them and then what?”

“Is there no cure for fairy-dust poisoning?”

“What do you think I am, Mother Teresa?”

“Mr Prince,” I replied, “I’m not here to judge you or your business. I’m not here to save this woman’s life; I’m not here to piss the Mayor off. I’m not here, really, for anything other than my fee. So here’s what you’re going to do: you’re going to call a private ambulance, you’re going to put this woman in it, you’re going to phone for a woman called Dr Seah; then I’m going to speak to the Aldermen, because that is the only way I can get the Midnight Mayor off your back.”

For a moment, I thought he might take the bait. Then he shook his head. “No one leaves the dusthouse,” he said. “Not once they’re brought in.”

“Why?”

Silence. A well-trained silence that wasn’t about to break.

I sighed, rubbing my forehead with the back of my hand. The air was suffocating, thick and hot behind the mask, and heat too high in the room. “Fine,” I said. “Fine, it’s your funeral. If this is the attitude you’re going to adopt then I’d politely ask you to let me go, as I have no desire to be standing here when the bombs start to fall. I tried my best and I just hope my employers will understand that.”

I turned and pushed my way past the blue plastic sheet and started marching down the passage. He waited too
long; for a moment I thought I’d played it too hard. Then there was a scurry of feet and he said, “Wait!”

I stopped, turned back, eyebrows raised. “Yes, Mr Prince?”

“I need to make a call,” he said. “Stay here.”

“Make it quick.”

As he hurried away, I ducked back inside the blue plastic sheeting of Meera’s cubicle, knelt down next to her, took her hand in mine. Her skin was shiny, slippery, dry. No; and another word too. Another word which had been hammering for attention since the moment we walked through these doors and would now not be denied. Dusty.

Her eyes rolled slowly up to mine, she tried to speak and all that came was a little rasp from the back of her throat.

“Hey, Meera,” I whispered. She sort of smiled, but the expression was glancing, gone almost immediately in a flinch of pain. Her tongue was yellow-brown in her mouth, flecked with black. “You rang?” I added.

Her fingers pushed deeper into mine. The rasping in her throat became barely audible words that disintegrated even as they formed. “Took you… long… enough.”

“Know when I told you I was busy being the protector of the city and all that? It’s not like I’ve not got commitments.”

“Didn’t… even bring… flowers.”

“Left them at the door.”

She almost laughed, and the sound turned to a hacking cough, body shaking, muscles tensing and, as she coughed, yellow dust filled the air, bursting in thick clouds from inside her lungs. I wrapped my arms around her, sliding my knees beneath her head to form a crude cushion, held her tight. When her coughing had subsided and she could
breathe again, I sighed, “This is a bloody awful bloody mess you’re in now, isn’t it?”

“Dust…” she began. “Fairy dust…”

“You don’t have to explain.”

She tried to shake her head, and even that induced another bout of coughing, her back arching, the plastic beneath her staining yellow as each breath expelled a fine dusty mist. When it was over she gripped my hand in her slippery fingers and gasped, “Tried to stop, tried to stop, tried…”

“It’s okay,” I lied. “You’ll be okay.”

“Listen! Matthew, listen!” She kicked feebly, trying in vain to raise herself up. “Dust to dust,” she breathed. “Dust to dust.”

“Meera, you…”

“No! Listen! The beggars are watching, they’re watching, the dusthouse takes the dust but there’s someone else, there’s someone else who takes, you have to, it’s the dust, dust and dust and… and…”

I hushed her, held her close, murmuring the empty sounds you make when words won’t do the job.

Then a voice at the plastic door exclaimed, “What the fuck is this?” Prince was back, radiating fury and surprise.

“Back off!” I snapped. Meera’s fingers were twitching in mine, unable to get a grip.

I looked down into her eyes, sick with yellowness and gum and she gasped, “I… I… I…” and then the sound dissolved. It went from sound to noise, from noise to breath, from breath to air as her head rolled back and her eyes lolled upwards and her fingers in my hands started to crumble; they crumbled from the ends backwards, fingertips and finger joints and knuckles and palm and wrist, it
all started to crumble away into dust and her eyes were still moving, unseeing in her sockets as her wrist crumbled to the elbow, elbow to the shoulders and her feet turned to dust and the overalls that held her started to deflate from inside as ankles gave way to knees and her hair rained fine yellow powder down onto the floor and she tried to speak but there was nothing inside her left to speak with and as the breath rolled out from her mouth and nose it was heavy with dust that billowed and fell silently to the plastic ground and her skin fell away in little pieces that dissolved in the air to drifting flakes and suddenly I was holding nothing, there was nothing there to hold, but dust was falling all around, great clouds of yellow dust, enough dust to have once been human and the woman called Meera was gone.