The Minority Council (18 page)

“No,” I stammered. “I didn’t see any of your people in there. I’m sorry. I wasn’t… I wasn’t looking for them.”

“Didn’t figure as much,” he said, and the moment passed.

We walked on past a Georgian square with tall railings, where men in overalls were blowing rotting leaves into great piles on the grass, while others hung fairy lights in the bare trees. He said, “When I heard you’d got in, I figured, cool, my favourite mega-mad sorcerer is getting his head in the game, I can use this. My people are everywhere, eyes on every street, but there are some places where they can’t go. We are shadows on the street corner, not kung fu fighters or shit. We don’t have the strength to go up against the dusthouses and win.”

“Me neither. Last night was touch and go, by a means that probably won’t work again.” I hesitated. Then, “Why did you ask about your people? Fairy dust is expensive, from what little I know, as well as destructive. Why would your people be involved?”

“They wouldn’t. Not with that.”

“Then…”

He waved me to silence, took a final draw of his cigarette, and trod out the stub, exhaling thick smoke. “People go missing all the time. My people are not tied down by
anyone or anything. Sometimes they go into a home, sometimes they find a friend, family. Sometimes they die. Some do drugs. Most don’t. I’m not their judge. Then this!” He slammed his fist into his other hand. “I didn’t think the dusthouses would be so stupid to try, but if they have then it is an offence against all my kind.”

“Done what?”

His voice was low, but still carried clear. “My people… my subjects, my kin… we disappear and no one asks questions. No one asks where we went. But we see everything. It’s been happening for several months now, a few people at a time. They wouldn’t have run, they didn’t fall through the cracks. I can judge the character of those who would, and these were not they. They just vanished.”

“Murdered?”

“No bodies have been found.”

“But you think…?”

“There was one. Her name was Ai. She was an illegal, who was tricked into this country and ran away from the brothel where they kept her. She found us on the streets, and we protected her. Then one day, she disappeared. We looked for her for three days, and could find no trace, but Ai was a woman determined to survive, and finally, at the end of the third day, we found her. Or rather, she found us. She’d escaped from a house in Enfield. She was dying. Her body was crumbling before our eyes, her entire form turning to dust. We tried everything we could, but the poison was already in her blood and within just a few hours she was dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s cute, but kinda meaningless, so save it. The Midnight Mayor protects the city, not the people.”

“So I keep being told.”

“We went to the house in Enfield, of course, but it had been cleared out. We are not detectives or warriors, Swift, our skills are… of a different nature. You asked for my help in the past, and I refused it, because it would have endangered too many of my people. Now I’m asking you for your…”—the word filled him with distaste—“… help. Fairy-dust poisoning takes months, sometimes years, to reach its… inevitable end. Ai was clean when she vanished, and three days later she was dead. I want to find out why. Do this for me, and the beggars will forever be your friends.”

As he gave me an address, I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to drive back the fatigue from behind my eyes.

I asked, “Why would the dusthouses poison Ai?”

“That’s what you’re gonna find out.”

“How long has this been happening?”

He shrugged. “Not so easy to say. The junkies, the runaways, the lost, the freezing, the ones who lie down and won’t lift their heads up, I can be there for them, I’ll sit by them when no one else will slow and be still, but there’s gotta be a calling. Sometimes people wanna die alone. Makes it hard to judge these things. But as you ask, and since you’re wondering, I’d say a few months. Maybe almost a year, silent and soft, like foxes on grass.”

“A year?” I choked. “Why didn’t you tell the Aldermen?”

“I did. They said they couldn’t do anything.”

“Did you do your scary face?”

He glowered at me, then gave a giant, crooked grin. “Hey,” he said. “The Aldermen, it’s all about protection of the city. Big maps, big boroughs, big cars and big streets.
They forget about the dirty alleys and the quiet places, which is thick of them, because that’s where the cruellest stories happen. But I guess they’ve been busy—I mean, you do kinda pull in the major-league trouble, don’t you?”

“It’s a chemical thing,” I retorted. “Pheromones to attract psychos.”

On the corner of a pedestrianised passage that ran down to the rumble of Oxford Street, the Beggar King paused. The air was cold; great plumes of white vapour were rising up from the heating systems of the buildings all around. He seemed about to speak, so I waited.

“Swift,” he said, “there’s a thought I should run by you, in a spirit of social-minded cooperation.”

“Yes?”

“You can’t win this thing alone.”

“Is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“That’s a real comfort.”

“You’ve survived a lot of things that most wouldn’t have; I respect that. But how’d you survive?”

I shrugged.

“You let others die for you,” he explained. Our fingers tightened at our sides, something glinted in the corner of our eye. He smiled and tutted. “You mayn’t want to hear it, but I’m the Beggar King, it’s my gig to say it and my right. You can’t win alone. Think about it.” He let out a long breath and flashed a smile. “Well, that’s it from me, nice to have this little chat with you, bye bye, so long, don’t cock it up or be a stranger, wear your gumboots in the rain and all that, ta-ta!”

He spun with surprising grace and started striding towards Oxford Street. I called out, “Hey!”

He paused, glancing back. “Yeah?”

“If I’m alone then no one else gets hurt.”

“Nice thought,” he admitted, “but basically bollocks. After all, you can’t save everyone!”

He loped off towards the end of the street, and the crowds parted without knowing what they did, and swallowed him up.

I walked.

Walking helped me think.

As we moved, our fingers caught at strands of magic trailing on the cold air, wrapping them as if with spiders’ silk. Sorcerers went mad so easily, minds and bodies forgetting what it was to breathe, unless it was to breathe an air bursting with noise and smell, shared by a thousand lungs before.

I thought about the dusthouses.

I thought about the Neighbourhood Eye.

About the Beggar King and his warnings.

About my apprentice, Penny, and all the things I didn’t want to happen to her.

About Templeman walking his dog.

Kelly Shiring on the other end of the phone.

Nabeela demanding to see the Midnight Mayor, so that he could solve all her problems.

Callum staring at nothing.

Morris Prince sweeping up fairy dust from the factory floor.

Meera.

Thoughts were measured in footsteps, not words; time, in distance travelled, not seconds lived.

Then we were at Trafalgar Square, looking down at where the kids sat, kicking at the empty air, on the four
giant lions, waving proudly from above the signs saying “Please do not climb.” Not long ago, I’d come here with my would-be-murderer and a ghost, and we’d talked about darkness, and regret and guilt and hell, and the outcome of our conversation was a death that shouldn’t have been needed.

I thought about words written in steam on the bathroom wall.

YOU CAN’T SAVE EVERYONE

And without quite realising it, standing there and looking at a busy, bustling nothing of hundreds of busy, bustling people, I reached a decision.

I called my apprentice.

“Penny!”

“Yeah, Matthew,” she replied, “not that I’m not, like, totally wowed to hear from you or nothing, it’s just that when you call me usually it’s to tell me to cancel my date because of, like, mega forces of death and shit, so sorry that I’m not more ‘Yay’ to hear from you, okay?”

“You’re still annoyed?” I hazarded.

“I told Femi that your appendix had exploded.”

“I see.”

“He offered to come to the hospital with me to see if you were okay.”

“Wow.”

“That’s what I fucking thought! I mean, you know how hard it is for someone, even someone as kick-ass as myself, to find a decent bloke? I mean, it’s not just that I’ve got a few lifestyle issues what with the major-league magic shit, it’s just men; I mean,
Jesus
, you’d not think we were the same fucking species, you know what I’m saying?”

“Penny, fascinating as this is…”

“I’m all like sat there giving out signals, and I mean, you know what my signals are like, I’m not what you’d call a wilting flower or shit, and they’re all like ‘so yeah, babes, see you when I see you’ or whatever…”

“Penny!” She paused, her silence a sharpened blade. I flinched back from it and added, meekly, “Lovely, wonderful Penny, my amazingly wonderful and incredibly talented apprentice who I completely appreciate giving up an evening of romance and… well, romance… for my worthless sake…”

“Nice try,” she grumbled.

“… lovely Penny,” I went on desperately, “how’d you feel if I asked you to help me out with a little field exercise?”

Suspicion filled her voice. “What kind of field exercise?”

“Nothing too bad. A little summoning. A little binding. A little chat with a thing with claws.”

She complained.

She said something about keeping a low profile from mobsters and how summoning monsters wasn’t part of the brief.

She grumbled a bit more.

Then she said yes, just like she’d always meant to, and said she was hanging up now, to go and get supplies.

This was good.

This was the beginning of a plan.

We felt very…

… executive.

I went in search of the next step.

Marchmont Street was a second-hand place.

A place for second-hand books, on second-hand sub
jects. Tomes on the best skiing resorts of the 1970s, magazines railing against the Yom Kippur war, novels about sex in the era of Thatcher, thrillers translated direct from the Norwegian and tourist brochures to countries that still felt the need to mention their former Soviet status in diplomatic documents and, probably, the national anthem. Even the food felt second-hand, from Chinese noodles reheated behind a plastic screen, to solidifying cake proffered at £2.50 a pop. To the east, Brunswick Square was a pass-me-down housing project built in an era when jet packs were the future, and latex was the fashion-to-be. It was a place of mixing worlds, where the tides of the city’s magics met and spun around each other like water vortexing around a plughole. It was loud and quiet, new and old, busy and still, a good place to find pretty much anything and nothing in particular.

The only sign to the place I sought was a board above a doorway between a minicab company and a video rental store. It read:

INTERNET CAFÉ

£2.50 an hour.

Free coffee.

At the top of a gloomy flight of stairs a door stood ajar. It led to what had once been an office, with faded white ceiling panels and scuffed carpet tiles, and which now held the paying public as well as the humming of computers. A desk by the door held, as advertised, a kettle, a box of teabags, two tubs of instant coffee offering the full range of flavour from caffeinated to decaf, and a jar of teaspoons; and a young man sat there behind an ancient second-hand PC, reading a book about Macroeconomic Development Policy in the Twenty-first Century.

I paid my money and helped myself to coffee, then retreated to the deepest, furthest corner of the café. Logging on, I went straight to the internet.

Aldermen believed in email. They went electric every time, rather than walk ten yards and say something to your face. To make us cooperate with this oppression, we had recently been given an email address and a password to Harlun and Phelps’s internal mail.

My inbox was surprisingly full. Harlun and Phelps did a good job of blocking most of it, but some had slipped past them.

From: unknown

Subject: Great Opportunity!

Hey there, have you heard about this amazing opportunity to work from home and make money, money, money?

From: [email protected]

Subject: Limited offer—must end soon!

Worried? Nervous? Feeling your performance may not be what it should? For $50 this revolutionary treatment could change the way you feel about your body…

From: [email protected]

Subject: Have you heard?

Hello friend, Im writing to tell u about a great oportunity to get fit fast, no pain no cost, just the new u and ur new amazing life…