The Minority Council (23 page)

I was crossing the wide paved space that had once held an ice rink, before council cutbacks made it a dead zone, another unmarked path in the Barbican’s core. Halfway across I knelt and ran my fingers over the paving, feeling for cracks and changes in texture. There were ways to move unexpectedly in the Barbican, if you knew what you were doing; ways to convince place A that it was really location B, and B that, really, it shouldn’t bother its little head with things it couldn’t understand. The Biker clan had a way of doing this, of moving without travelling, based largely on the theory that since so much of Britain’s motorways looked to the human eye like every other bit of motorway, why shouldn’t nature be fooled as well?

I felt it: a dip beneath my fingers, a softening in the texture of the ground beneath our feet, and if we just pushed, just right, just
there…

Footsteps moved behind us.

Sound travelled well in this place.

Between the white globes of light on a nearby row of posts, a figure was moving; by his shape and size, a man, and probably one who thought you couldn’t put a value on personal fitness. Also he’d brought friends. Here they came, up a wide flight of stairs leading from the main complex itself—the boy in the baseball hat, the girl with the oversized headphones, the man in the blue shirt from the Central Line. Others too, more than a dozen, now surrounded the area. They wore black suits and white shirts that were only a pair of wrap-around glasses away from screaming CIA.

One of them stepped forward.

He too was in black, and had a slightly too-small head on a too-wide neck, dark hair cut to a mere shimmer on
his skull, skin that showed signs of having been tanned once, pale blue eyes, and just on the very tip of his chin, a tiny, thin, old white scar. His hands were too big and, as he moved, there was a stench of magic that came with him, a thick odour of iron and salt.

Then he spoke, and his voice was deep but soft, carrying without apparent effort.

“Good evening, Mr Swift. I would like to ask you to come with us.”

The others seemed to be waiting for his orders. I wondered how many carried guns. I wondered how many needed to.

“You’re from the fairy godmother?” I asked.

He nodded, and said, “May I please invite you to come with us?”

“In a couple of hours?”

“I’m afraid it must be now.”

I sighed, still kneeling on the ground. “So you guys know who I am, right? I mean, you’ve cottoned on to the whole thing about this being my city, my heart, my place of power? I just ask, because it seems like it could be important for people in your line of work to know that sort of thing.”

“We are aware, Mr Swift, of your inclinations.”

“Then I’ll do you a deal. You tell me your name, and how you’re tracking me, and I promise not to go spontaneously mega-mystic in a way that would embarrass everyone involved.”

“Forgive me, Mr Swift, if I doubt the integrity of your offer. Your reputation has you as one who… if you’ll pardon my saying so, goes ‘mega-mystic’ as something of a default reaction to a situation.”

I stood up, brushing my hands off on my trousers. I looked up at a narrow stretch of sky between the towering blocks of flats, then down at the cracks between the paving stones. “I didn’t get your name,” I said.

“You may call me Hugo.”

“Hi Hugo,” I replied. Then, “Bye Hugo.”

They started to move, an instant too late. One of them had a gun half out of his pocket; another was pulling what looked suspiciously like a wand, all coathanger wire and rust, ready to fire. I raised my hands to shield my head and stomped down as hard as I could on the softness between the stones. Anywhere else, I would have hurt my foot, but this was the Barbican, where geography and reality had given up a long time ago.

The earth split beneath my feet, opened with the wide jaws of a blue whale, and swallowed me up.

I landed a second later, dropping out of the ceiling on the third floor, just inside the library, and slamming down onto the crime novel section in a dirtied flurry of paperbacks. The lights were out in the library, and the only sound was the distant noise of pre-theatre chit-chat from the concert-hall foyer. I limped a few paces as blood started returning to my feet, and was as far as the locked library doors when in the corridor outside the first of the fairy godmother’s men appeared, barrelling down a glass-walled staircase. They didn’t stop to look left or right, but headed straight for me. I cursed, turned, and ran for the nearest wall, where a yellow-painted panel had been welded into place, perhaps to hide trunking and pipes. I reached out for it as I neared, felt the air thicken and split in front of me, and passed straight through without slowing for reality.

There was a moment of giddy darkness full of sparks, a roaring in my ears, a taste of dirt in my mouth, impossible to breathe, then I hauled myself up into the cold open air of a walkway: posters on the walls advertising Japanese kabuki, a Bollywood movie season and kids’ playtime club on Sunday mornings. I heaved down air, dragging darkness and shadows with me as I ran, wrapping them around me like a blanket, feeling static rise around my fingers and every step shudder through my body as the magic came.

And heard the howling.

It started behind us, then it was everywhere. I changed direction, hands over my ears. Flats below and above, well-tended window-boxes, electronically operated blue metal doors and ranks of faded-letter buzzers. The howling came again, closer this time, and I glimpsed something skidding round the concrete columns of the flats behind me, no taller than a bicycle, no wider than a coffee table and no less angry than a smoking hornets’ nest. Eyes flecked with yellow and red above a black coat, and there were teeth, of course but there were teeth, and they were coming right for me.

I ran for the door to the nearest apartment block, reaching again for that slippery hole between what should be and what was, saw the light flicker in the stairwell behind the door, half closed my eyes, and pushed straight on through, staggering out the other side with my chest bursting and a whole construction site drilling at the back of my head. I was inside a hallway; small, square, ground floor, with a lift bearing a sign that said “We Apologise for the Inconvenience.”

But it was not the same apartment block I’d run into;
this was the other side of the lake, with the creature nowhere to be seen. I let myself out back into the night and ran the few yards onto the walkway high above the water. There were three men down there, eyes already turned up towards me and, at their feet, hackles raised and ears drawn back, was a creature that could only be a bloodhound; just not the kind that helped to seek out missing persons. Feed anything enough blood and magic, and you shouldn’t be surprised at how quickly genetics adapt.

Cursing, I turned, and nearly collided with two more men, who must have run up the stairs from the lakeside. They weren’t even out of breath, and had the rugged, determined look of people who’d long since sacrificed basic mental functions in favour of physical endurance. One carried a piece of glass and metal that might once have been the cathode ray tube from a TV; the other had gone for the simpler gun option. I swung instinctively, sending a blast of hot, vent-smelling air rolling out from the back of my hand. It slammed into the one with the gun, hard enough to spin him a hundred and eighty degrees with the snap of a dislocating shoulder. The other levelled the cathode ray tube at me, lips moving in the beginning of an enchantment. As the thing spat strobe-white fire at me I dove to one side, tasted metal and smelt the nasty smoke of boiling tiles just a few inches from where I’d stood. I ran, felt a weakness in the ground beneath me and dropped down into darkness just as another blast of too-bright light fractured the air overhead.

I landed in the apartment block below, the ceiling re-solidifying overhead. Two children with brown skin and curly hair were watching a TV near where I’d landed
on a mass of sheet music and magazines. The smaller girl stared open-mouthed; the older, with more sense of propriety, screamed with the uninhibited vocal power of the young. I ran for the door as, further back in the apartment, a door slid back on rollers and a voice began with, “What is…?”

… fumbled with the lock, slammed the door behind me. There were already footsteps on the floors above, and I could smell the still-smarting magic of the cathode ray tube, a nasty weapon for a wizard, a wand that was as much X-ray and unpleasant overdosed radiation as it was heat and light. I went downwards, the air growing colder and lights yellower as I descended, felt once again the shimmering power of the London Wall close by. A metal door opened into an underground car park smelling of urine and old oil. A pounding off to my right, and there was a woman and two men, their bloodhound off its leash and coming straight for me.

In the stark fluorescent light, I could see the hound clearly: cracked yellow fangs that pushed its lower lip back, revealing the soft interior of its mouth. Eyes stained the liver-failure yellow of any fairy-dust addict, for reasons that couldn’t be coincidence, ears too small for the mass of black head that carried them. A neck thick enough to melt into the body without slowing for the joins, and black fur stained with something slippery, like oil on a duck, but thicker, viscous, and scarlet. The creature’s eyes were fixed on me, its nostrils flared; I ran for the nearest upwards ramp, stretching my hands out as I moved, tangling my thoughts in the cars around me.

They rumbled and shuddered to life; first a few, then with brake lights flaring along the length of the car park.
Dirty black exhaust filled the low-ceilinged space in moments: there was a haze, then a fog, then a thick smog of carbon-dry dust. I heard sharp claws scutter across the floor, right behind me—and swung round into the nearest pillar, plunging head first into the weakness between here and wherever there was going to be, so long as there was elsewhere.

A moment of spinning darkness, and the sound of barking faded. A burst of heat in the back of my nose, an unbearable ache as, for an instant, I couldn’t breathe; then head first out the other side, slipping in a puddle of engine oil and stagnant water as I tumbled onto the floor of another car park, on the other side of the Barbican.

Our nose was bleeding, dry sweat burnt our skin; this body was not designed for so much movement without travelling. I wiped away the blood from my nose with the back of my hand, then smeared the back of my hand across the pillar I’d just fallen by, leaving a thin red trail. Then I ran, every step jolting something soft inside my head. I was at the entrance to the lift foyer before the first shout from the stairs above. I hurled myself into the lift, elbowing a floor number at random. As the lift started climbing, at the first floor I hit emergency stop, then clapped my hands together and pulled them apart, dragging the lift doors open. I was only crookedly in line with the first floor, and had to wriggle on my belly to get out. Finding the nearest toilet, I pushed my way in and looked around for what I needed.

Inside the brightly lit space, a door opened into a cubby-hole containing mop, bucket, packs of spare toilet paper, bottles of chemicals and a large sign saying “Cleaning in Progress—Do Not Enter.” I grabbed the sign and
wedged it in front of the door, then snatched up a roll of tissue paper and the most powerful chemical detergent I could find. Hearing noises outside, I fumbled for my Swiss army knife, tried to find the blade I wanted, got the scissors instead and used those.

A sudden fizzle in the air and the door rocked on its hinges. Though bent in the middle, it held. I looked the other way, then quickly ran my thumb over the sharp blade of the scissors. Another blast of magic slammed the door back; it dangled on one hinge. No time to register the pain; that would come later.

The first bloodhound bounded through, followed by two of its owners. I raised the bottle of chemical cleaner and sprayed a blast into the air. The creature was leaping at me; it took a blast of the stuff right on the muzzle and fell back, its slobber flecked with red. I hit the spray again, filling the small room with the smell of chemicals and, as the black-clad man and woman tried to rush me, I swept my bloodied hand through the fine droplets, gathered them into a fistful of burning acid and threw it straight at them.

It didn’t impact; instead it burst outwards in a shimmering explosion of foul-smelling moisture, sudden as popcorn in a pan. The blood was running freely down my hand; I could see the bloodhound’s fur stand up at the smell, its pelt oozing scarlet goo in recognition. One of the humans tried reaching through the chemical wall I’d thrown up. As her fingertips brushed the cloud of moisture she snatched them straight back. A second later, and she was screaming as their instant redness turned to bleeding.

As I turned to look for an exit, a voice said from the door, “Now Mr Swift, you are being very unreasonable.”

Hugo, the man with the pale blue eyes and tiny scar on
his chin, looked unconcerned at my makeshift barrier. I pointed at the yellow sign between him and me.

“Cleaning in progress!” I exclaimed. “Do not bloody enter!”

In response, the wall of chemical droplets hanging in the air contorted and shrank, forming a thick spinning bubble above the sign. As it began to boil I was inside the nearest cubicle and slamming the door shut. Outside were sounds of shock as the men there realised what was coming, and ran.

The spell exploded, splattering smoky chemical remains across most of the room. I ran at the bolted cubicle door, and through it and straight out into darkness.