The Minority Council (19 page)

I flagged it all, every bit of spam in the system. Then I kept on working.

The Aldermen’s internal server had contact lists for all
emails. I searched for Rumina, and got seventeen hits, all beginning with “R.” I sighed, and started typing.

The first email I wrote was sent to myself, and it said this:

I sent it to myself, waited for it to arrive, then pasted into the address box every single name on the Aldermen’s list that began with “R.” Then I added a note at the top, and the note said:

This done, I looked around to make sure no one was paying too much attention, got down on my hands and knees, and crawled under the desk. The hard drive of
the computer was tucked away down here, padlocked to the floor, the fans whirring busily, a little green LED flashing brightly. I pressed my ear up against it, listening to the hum. It was warm, a high vibration that buzzed at the back of our teeth. I pressed my palm against the side of the machine, felt that particular tingling beneath my fingers, and closed them tight, drawing power into my hand. It took a while: what I needed from the computer was very specific. A spark, a shimmer of amber-gold magic, a whisper of energy that, when asked if it felt like going fast, would answer that mere light speed was for losers.

It was the magic that lurked just the other side of the Ethernet cable, that buzzed behind the sound of the telephones, that crackled when the radio was tuned to a new station. It was rich and ready and ours to command and, as I drew my hand back from the computer, it came with it, a tiny blob of snapping, spinning light which bulged and warped inside my cupped fingers, aching to be free. I crawled out from under the desk, slipped back into my chair with a nonchalance worthy of a mobster, opened up my email one-handed, and selected attachment.

The screen asked for a file.

I looked left, I looked right and, feeling unobserved, I pressed my palm against the screen. The sphere of stolen, fan-pitched power between my fingers spread out for a moment like a bubble about to burst across the screen, which blurred briefly from side to side. Then the stolen light melted into the screen with the quiet whoosh of drivers powering down. And where there had been nothing, now there was a definite something attached to the email, a file without a name, a spell sat waiting in the wire.

I shook the last of the heat of the computer from my fingertips, and sent the message on its way.

There was one more email to send.

I found as many spam messages as I could in my inbox, and copied them into one email. Then I huffed on the screen, so that a small cloud of condensation showed up any grease, and on this canvas I started to draw with my finger. I drew the signs of the circuit breakers and the viral wizards who liked nothing better than to make their monsters out of static. I drew the symbols of the cultists who heard gods in the radio waves and found demons lurking behind every other line of code. I drew ancient runes, of some thirty years’ provenance, discovered by junior staffers at IBM the day someone chose “abort” instead of “retry” from the wrong menu, and the wrong thing came crawling out of the computer screen. For a moment we considered drawing the ultimate sign, our own: blue electric angels with wings made from the sounds in the telephone wires, which the ignorant mistook for interference. Sometimes, though, even we felt the need to be discreet.

When we were done, the screen could barely contain the weight of magic written into it. Pixels danced giddily, and the computer’s own anti-viral program was starting to pop up warnings of errors so arcane it didn’t even grasp if they were errors, rather than something close to evolution in progress. I copied in the email address of every Alderman on the system, and pressed send.

Just one thing left.

I went onto the internet, and printed out the address, with maps, of every major recycling and refuse centre within ten miles of central London.

It was, we concluded as we signed out of the system, a thoroughly worthwhile use of an hour.

I headed towards Aldermanbury Square.

But not to Harlun and Phelps.

Not yet.

Instead, I went to the office across the street, found the service entrance, and swaggered in with the confidence of someone who had every need to be there, every desire to be there and, above all else, every right to be there. The one bored security man having a fag by the back door looked straight over me, eyes sliding off the thin coat of enchantment that I wore: a spell of nothing-to-see-here more than of genuine invisibility. If some spells could only be woven with the correct gestures, this was an enchantment that relied upon a very special gait—neither too relaxed nor too hurried, but utterly confident of its purpose.

A gloomy concrete-floored corridor passed the kitchens and a buzzing server room. I found a set of iron-railed stairs down into a dark basement smelling of damp and mouldering insulation foam. Great pipes ran along the ceiling, clad as if by NASA in wire and foil; doors were unmarked and even the spiders had despaired of weaving their webs in the dirty corners, confident that no self-respecting life would be seen down here to be eaten up.

I found the door I was looking for by the quality of the tubes running through the nearby wall. Here they were great fat square things, neither humming with electricity nor hissing with heat, but carrying from their flaps at the bottom the unmistakable stench of the rubbish heap. The lock gave after some persuasion, into a room like an oversized cupboard, lined with metal shelves on which sat
bottles of pink cleaning fluids ordered in bulk cardboard boxes. Blue overalls were hung up behind the door, and unfastened lockers revealed sad collections of latex gloves, dust masks, ancient stained copies of free newspapers, and a woman’s abandoned sports shoe. At the back of the room was a group of three vacuum cleaners—great beasts on four wheels each that could have sucked up the curious cat and its doings without even showing a bulge. They sat now, silent monsters, waiting for something interesting to happen in their lives.

And there it was.

That interesting thing.

Almost impossible to spot unless you were looking for it: in the third cleaner along, there was a bulge in the bag that might have been…

… easy to imagine but no, definitely, look a little closer…

… just might have been the world’s smallest foot.

I pulled the vacuum cleaner away from its neighbours and rapped with my knuckles on top of the main body of the beast, where pipe met dust sack.

“Hello?” I said.

Silence.

“Look,” I went on, “I’m just going to open up the bag, but I don’t mean you any harm, so try not to bite, okay?”

Silence.

“Okay,” I continued. “Going to open it up now.”

I eased back the catches on the lid of the machine and twisted the pipe free. The grey fabric bag inside was swollen like a bloated toad, with twists of human hair around the place where it met the pipe. I prodded it with a finger and, when nothing happened, reached in my shoulder bag
for my Swiss army knife. Opening up the knife, I cursed for a few moments as I looked through a mixture of mini-hacksaws and fish descalers before finding the blade I wanted; then, with a slow, shallow slice, I opened up the bag.

Dust.

Unsurprisingly.

Thick grey dust that had been compressed into solid lumps of felt, tangled in with human hair and bits of old coffee granule and the occasional shard of broken glass. The odd lumpen food remnant too—crumbs, bits of rotting salad leaf, here a tomato-coated bean, and the smell of a sneaky cigarette, the ash swept up in the medley; but, mostly, felt-like dust.

I said, “Don’t make me reach in there and get you, okay?”

Silence.

“I mean it. I’m a genuinely friendly and approachable guy, but both those qualities get dented by rummaging around inside refuse sacks all day.”

Then something moved inside the bag.

A small cloud of particles billowed upwards like reversed snow, hung in the air, then began to descend again. A thing as grey as the felt that surrounded it inched up through the depths and curled around the tear in the bag, so lightly as to hardly twitch the fabric. It was a finger, comfortingly dry, but grey and coated over with thick dark hairs that stood upright like the quills of a porcupine, in which all the dirt of the vacuum sack tangled. It was no bigger than a child’s thumb, but had one joint too many in its little length. A tiny hand barely large enough to support the finger itself followed, then a wrist, also quilled over. Then a shoulder, skinny enough that I could
have held it between my thumb and finger and still had room for a book on law, and, finally, an eye, the colour of rotting brown sludge, with an oval pupil of inky blackness. The eye was in a head which was almost perfectly round and possessed of tiny ears and more black quills, with a bare slit for a nose and a mouth far too wide and thin. This opened, revealing, first, two rows of pointed yellow teeth, and, just behind, a set of bristles not unlike the hairs of the vacuum brush itself, in which bits of old rotting paper and crunchy pieces of bone were tangled.

The eye blinked at me, first with one pair of eyelids, then with another, translucent one that oozed thin greenish oil. Another eye appeared, and from beyond the bared teeth came a low, long hiss of animal intensity.

“Hi there,” I said. “How’s it going?”

The hiss came again, every black quill standing a little stiffer on the creature’s arm and head. It was an imp, no taller than a waste-paper basket and no wider than the head of a broom. Judging by the rustling beneath it in the bag, it was not alone in its den.

“Now, before you get the wrong idea,” I went on, rooting around in my bag, “I’m not here to complain or anything. You guys want to make your nest down here, that’s fine with me. I have no problem with imps per se, and if you don’t mind me, I won’t mind you et cetera.”

It twitched a little in the bag, crawling a cautious inch or two higher, a bit of a knee visible, toes hooked into the soft sides of the bag. Feeling that I had its attention, I smiled my brightest smile, took a deep breath and launched straight in.

“Have you ever considered the possibilities of a real-life relocation?” I sang out. “Have you been yearning for
more, better, brighter, fresher garbage? Do you dream of making the pilgrimage to the rubbish sites where all good imps find heaven? Well today might just be your lucky day!”

I flashed my printed-out maps and lists of refuse dumps around the city, pattering on as the imp’s head turned this way and that to follow the papers moving through the air. “This is an exclusive, one-time offer, a chance of a lifetime to move yourself and your tribe to possibly the filthiest, foulest, most dust-filled havens of London. Don’t worry about the dangers of the trip, just load yourself up into the vacuum cleaner of your choice and you will be transported at no extra cost to your dream rubbish site. All you have to do in return is temporarily to move your nest one building over, and wait for the relocation team to give you a lift to your new nesting ground.”

I paused. There were other things moving in the vacuum bag now—two more little heads were surfacing to peer up at me. “So… uh… sound cool?” I asked.

Three imp heads turned to each other for advice. Then the imp furthest out of the bag looked up at me and made a noise, a thin, high whine that was as much broken metal plates in a smoking machine as it was words, but which, over an agonising stretch of time, resolved into “W… wh… whhyyy?”

“Guys…” I said, opening my arms in an expansive gesture of defeat, “I cannot tell a lie. I want to go poking around inside the offices on the other side of the street, place called Harlun and Phelps, and they’ve got wards and defences and CCTV and stuff, and I really don’t want to have to muck around with all that, and don’t get me wrong, it’s cool because I’m their boss, but sometimes to be a boss, you’ve got to be a bastard, and it’d be really,
really handy if, say, a whole tribe of imps spontaneously relocated—just for a little while—to their basement, as that might cause a little disruption which I could use to… you know… do my thing… And obviously it would only be a temporary thing because, as established, you could…” I thrust the maps of the refuse sites towards the imps again, “you could soon be living in your very own deluxe rubbish dump along with your mates, minions and spawn!”

The imps looked at each other again, then one reached out and carefully folded its overlong fingers around the edge of the paper. The A4 sheets were too large for the little hands that held it, and flopped limply in the imp’s grasp, so that two of them had to grasp the sides to hold it steady. They peered in at the pictures, leant right up close, eyes blinking busily away at images of piled-up rubbish and shattered goods, rotting food and churned-up mud. Finally they lowered the paper, looked up long and hard at us, and said, “Ssss… sswww… swwweear?”