The Minority Council (27 page)

Down in the courtyard, the spectres too were cowering, their not-hands pressed over their not-ears, at a sound I alone could not hear.

“What
is it
?” pleaded Nabeela through her teeth. “What is it what is it make it stop!”

I looked frantically around but saw nothing. Penny said, “There’s a… sort of… faint sound, high-pitched, can’t you hear?”

“No! What am I listening for, where’s it coming from?”

“It’s… it’s…” She gestured, encompassing several miles with a sweep of her hand.

“It’s everywhere!” shrieked Nabeela, dropping to her knees as she tried to block out the sound.

Then I did hear something.

Not the high-pitched screaming that tormented Nabeela; not a whine; not an unnatural ringing that pierced the innermost ear. This was solid; lower. It sounded like the chittering of a thousand tiny parts moving together, and it came from directly overhead. My eyes met Penny’s. Together, we leant out from the balcony, and looked up.

For a second, just a second, it hung above us. I glimpsed iron mandibles snapping at the air; beyond them, a mouth of brown swirling glass. Then it stretched itself upright on double-jointed steel limbs, and leapt.

I ducked behind the balcony for cover, as it plunged down towards the burning car, its body blocking the light as it passed us. It had an outer skin of broken chimney pots and smashed slate tiles, the pieces smoothly interlocked to create a flexible armour. It had three limbs of iron and concrete dust on either side of its body, itself segmented into two front parts, plus a larger, oval component with a pointed tip at the tail—three parts making head, thorax and abdomen. The wings, small compared to the rest of the creature, were fashioned from black smoke and drawn in, bat-like; and where its segments joined, there was only air and a spinning matrix of broken glass, which rattled and bounced against its slate carapace.

To me the creature seemed silent except for the rattle of its passage, but Nabeela was screaming now, and the spectres down in the courtyard were prostrate. The flames from the burning car swerved, then flared as, no wider than a dustcart and no longer than a truck, it landed in front of them with a neat little bounce. It reared up, opening its dark, steel-framed mouth; and now there was no mistaking what it was meant to be: a mockery of an insect form, a summoned thing which seemed to resemble, in its artificial parts, a living, giant, hungry mosquito.

What happened next was almost too fast to see. Its mouth, then its whole head, seemed to crack open, splitting wider than its whole body. Inside the darkness of its matrix, filled with whirling fragments of glass, flashed a giddy reflection of the flames from the car. The creature rose up on the back four of its six legs, seemed to shake its entire body, then dove down and, in a single gulp, swallowed one spectre whole.

The spectre’s form gave way with a sonic thump, blast
ing out the empty remains of hoodie and tracksuit bottoms as it was consumed. The others were trying to crawl away, but the creature turned, the leisurely swing of its tail shattering one of them into a heap of soiled clothing and, with a casual hook of one claw, grabbed another round the neck, threw it into the air, and swallowed it whole like popcorn. The fourth spectre didn’t even try fighting as the monster curled around it, obscuring it from sight; and when the creature was done, there wasn’t even a shoe left behind.

I looked at Penny; she looked at me. She pressed something into my hand: a roll of police tape. I nodded an acknowledgement and crawled to the far end of the balcony. Penny scurried in the opposite direction and, at a signal to each other, we stood up.

The insect-beast was circling restlessly on the ground, shaking its head to and fro as if trying to work out what it was about its last meal that had been so unsatisfactory. Sensing us, it snapped its head. Black multifaceted eyes, made from the scarred remains of camera lenses, focused in, first on Penny, then on me. Grasping my police tape by one end of the roll, I threw the rest of it at the creature as hard as I could. Penny did the same. Both rolls landed a few feet short, unspooling along the ground. For a moment the creature regarded them, as a bear might examine a wandering mouse. Then its attention came back to us, and its body rattled with rising tension. I jerked the end of the police tape I held and, on the ground near the monster, the rest of it twitched too, shuddered, then, snake-like, began to uncoil. I gave it another tug and, as the end of the tape slithered towards one of the insect’s metal legs, it sprang up, uncurling in an instant, and wrapped itself around the clawed limb.

Bewildered, the insect gave a tug, but the tape just wound tighter, writhing upwards and starting to curl its way around the creature’s great thorax. The tape Penny held was also unfurling, making its way up the foremost leg towards the insect’s head. The creature raised itself up to utter what might have been a roar of confusion, inaudible to me, and beat its black wings, trying to pull free. The force of its anger nearly dragged me off my feet. We held on to the tape with both hands, hauling the creature back down, and as it came, we called out into the night:

“You do not have to say anything!”

The tape went on furling around the flailing creature; my feet threatened to slide from under me as I leant back to keep up a grip. Pain shot up from my chest and down my arms and legs, bringing water to my eyes, as I wound the tape around my wrist and pulled tighter. “But it may harm your defence if you do not mention, when questioned, something which you later rely on in court.”

The tape was thickening in my grasp, responding to our spell, becoming harder and less yielding, tightening in on the creature, pulling it down to the ground. Penny was half leaning out over the balcony, trying to keep her balance as her lips moved in recitation of the same spell. “Anything you do say may be given in evidence; you do not have to say anything unless you wish to do so, but I must warn you that if you fail to mention any fact which you rely on in your defence in court, your failure to take this opportunity to mention it may be treated in court as supporting any relevant evidence against you.”

By now the tape was fully unwound around the insect, pulling it to the ground. The tail end of its abdomen twitched upwards like a rearing wolf, but the rest of the
body couldn’t escape the spell. Through gritted teeth, I exclaimed, “If you do wish to say anything, what you say may be given in evidence!”

I gave one last pull, dragging the creature down.

Its jaw clitter-clattered in distress; its helpless legs rattled against the concrete. Penny was clinging on to the tape tight enough to turn her knuckles white.

Silence from the creature, made deeper by the noise of flames.

Penny began, “Is that…?”

Then the creature screamed.

It threw its head back and screamed, so loud and so furious that, though I couldn’t hear it, I felt it. Instinctively I put my hands over my ears, letting the tape slip from my fingers, felt the sound vibrate my eyes, felt it stir acid in my belly, tasted it on my tongue. What glass was left in the windows of the car burst, snapped apart; then the street lamps exploded too, plunging us into a fire-warmed gloom. And still the creature screamed, thrashed and rolled, tumbling onto its back and lurching the tape out of Penny’s hands.

Then a claw caught a piece of tape and slashed it in two. I felt the sickening backlash as the spell broke, the tape suddenly just tape, just plastic. There was a popping in my ears; blood was filling the barely healed hollows of my nose. Penny was on the ground, hands wrapped around her head. And as I dropped down below the concrete parapet I saw Nabeela, half raised off the floor. Blood rolled freely from her nose and ears; her skin was sickly white; her lips worked soundlessly. Something was moving beneath her headscarf, pushing up against it from the surface of her head; no time now to look. A shattering
of slate on metal—and the insect’s struggles had brought it down on the burning car, spilling a roar of sparks and flame around its thrashing body. The creature rolled again, the last tendrils of tape coming free, then shuddered upright once more. Bubbles of petrol smouldered and popped, clinging to its shell.

It raised its head and looked straight at me.

Even as I ducked back down, the whole building shook. The creature had rammed us, leapt head first at the balcony. Concrete dust tumbled all around; a crack in the floor was spreading beneath my feet from the point of impact. Then a pair of claws hooked themselves onto the parapet and the creature’s head blotted out the light of the fire as it pulled itself up to eye level.

I grabbed the first thing to hand, a paint spray can from my bag, and as the insect opened that impossibly black jaw full of spinning glass, I squirted a blast of paint straight at its eyes, blocking out one entirely. It flailed against the wall, then crashed down onto its back. In a single powerful motion, however, it flipped itself over again as the paint dribbled away from the lens of its eye. I crawled along the balcony to Nabeela, grabbed her by the shoulder, hissed, “Come on!”

She just shook her head and whimpered.

The building shook again, hard enough to send more cracks spreading outwards like a chaotic family tree: the insect had head-butted the place where I’d been a moment before. I cast around for anything that might serve as a weapon, but the electricity had been cut off long ago, and the mains cables were buried too far below to be of use. Gas was closer to the surface, but what use were flames against a creature made from the remains of chimneys?
Close at hand I heard a scratching sound: the monster had levered itself back up to the balcony.

It was too large to fit in between floors, but it was compensating for this by starting to bash out the balcony above with the arch of its back, splitting the walls and sending great slabs of concrete tumbling all around. As an old building, scheduled to be demolished, this was already a place of decay, ready to crumble.

I got down on my hands and knees, bending my fingers into the damp concrete floor… Something deeper lay there, a further dampness beneath the mere surface covering of drizzle. I pushed, and something answered inside the building; I felt it rise, and within moments it was there in plain sight: a greenish-yellow stain beneath my fingers. It began to spread outwards, crawling up the walls and erupting in a sickly bloom between the cracks in the concrete. Moving as swiftly as water, already it had reached the metal feet of the creature. I pressed my fingers deeper into the concrete, until the grey surface beneath me began to smoke and hiss; then deeper still, until the concrete was liquid, thick and cold. I pushed my arm in up to the wrist, then almost to the elbow, feeling through the clammy depths of the floor until my fingers sensed iron. I closed my fist around it, and pulled with all my strength.

The plague of lichen continued spreading. White and yellow encrustations burst across the skin of the insect, instantly spawning more growths, which then worked through the gaps, embedding themselves beneath the slates. The insect reared up like a poisonous creature wounded with its own sting as it tried to scratch and burn away this sudden infection on its body. The metal I’d seized from beneath the floor came free reluctantly, snapping loose and bursting upwards
as suddenly as ketchup from a bottle, and knocking me backwards: a rusted iron bar once part of the building’s framework. Still writhing back and forth, the creature was trying to chew off the lichen embedded under its skin, an itch it couldn’t scratch. I ran towards it, and as it turned its head to look at me I hurled the bar with all my strength, point first down its open throat.

The sound, the not-sound that was a force itself, stopped.

The mosquito reared up, its body shaking violently, and clawed at its own head with two of its flailing limbs; then, overbalanced by the effort, it slipped and fell backwards from the balcony.

I peered down after it.

It was rolling and flapping, trying to pull the bar from its throat and rub the lichen from its back.

Not dead; maybe just annoyed.

I ran to where Nabeela was slowly uncurling, streaked with blood from her ears and nose, and helped her to her feet.

As I did so, she gave me a look. For a moment there was something in her eyes, something dark and animal and not quite right. But then she shook her head and it was gone. She wheezed, “The things I do for local government.”

“Penny?” I called out as my apprentice dragged herself up by the cracked parapet. “You all right?”

“Do I look fucking all right?” she hollered. “Fucking monsters and fucking magic and fucking sorcerers who can’t fucking bind…”

“She’s fine,” I reassured Nabeela. Then, “That thing’s not dead and it’s not happy. Shall we scarper?”

“I suppose you’ll be wanting a fucking lift now?” Penny shouted.

“That’ll be grand, since you mention it. Let’s go, right now.”

Penny’s car was a few blocks away, by a row of shops featuring one off-licence, one pharmacy with a strong sideline in water pistols, and one greengrocer that sold mostly plantain and butternut squash. As we passed the pharmacy I paused, gasping between each breath at a shooting agony the painkillers had barely numbed, and said, “Whoa there a moment!” Penny turned to say something rude, saw my face, and hesitated.

“That bad, huh?” I asked.

She laughed, a little too loud, her voice reverberating in the empty night. “Don’t worry, you always look bad.” But she moved closer, the better to look at my eyes. “You, uh… going to pass out or anything like that?”