The Minority Council (39 page)

For a moment the creature was paralysed, its whole body warping at the force of the spell: sound and noise and shadow slamming into it, passing through it, and for a moment I wondered if this might be enough, if it might not burst in two from the force of the magic; but the spell was only the length of a high-speed train passing by, broken almost as soon as summoned, and I sagged to my knees, gasping for air from the force of it, and the culicidae was staggering drunkard-like towards me.

I made it up onto one knee just as a claw from one of the crushing machines slammed down between us, smacking into the culicidae’s head hard enough for the place to be briefly visible where skull and thorax met, and sending splinters of glass whirling outward from the join. The fingers of the claw closed around the culicidae’s skull, pushing it down, making its claws scrabble against the earth like the wheels of a lorry churning soft mud. I struggled to my feet, hauling down breath, and another mechanical arm swung round, thrusting the culicidae down harder yet. It burrowed and writhed, but a third claw was making its turn, the machine that drove it clattering with the strain of what the Aldermen were making it do, and even as it looked that the culicidae might pull free, the metal fist came down and spiked the writhing tail of the beast, pinning it to the ground.

Lenses flickered in those multifaceted eyes, jerking this way and that, mouth opening and closing noiselessly, deafeningly, as slate shattered and glass spilt, and even we could perceive pain. The tracks were singing it, a high-pitched angel hum, the wires were shaking it, cables swaying overhead, the yellow claws pinning the culicidae down were crying it in little runs of dirty oil, and the culicidae screamed and screamed and screamed, as the claws around it closed tighter.

We stood staring at it, I don’t know how long.

The Aldermen stood together above the track, rusty light flaring off them as they struggled to control the spell. Someone shouted my name, and we ignored it. Someone shouted again, “Matthew! We can’t hold it long!”

We looked down at our burnt fingers, felt the creature’s screaming in our gut, looked back up at the culicidae, its mouth opening and closing wildly, legs still scrambling uselessly at dirt.

The boy had been right.

Even the foolish mortal summoner, a child playing with toys, had been right.

It was beautiful.

“For God’s sake!” someone shouted. “Kill the fucking thing!”

We limped towards it. The movement of the creature’s mouth slowed as we neared, its eyes fixed on us. We reached out with the scarred palm of our right hand, holding it a centimetre above its hot shell. We wanted to make the comforting noises mortals make to soothe their animals, or parents make to calm a child, but did not think the creature had the wit to comprehend. It had not been summoned with soothing in mind.

I don’t know why we thought of it, or even if what we did could be said to travel such rigid paths as thought, but as our hand hovered above its skin, I found ourself making a sound, to match the singing of the rails. We couldn’t achieve the pitch, but there was a point, a few octaves lower, where we could match the sound of the creature in distress. We hummed, starting at the bottom of our lungs, letting the sound grow, catching a corner of that sound and watching it shimmer down our arm, tingle at our fingertips, scald the air between us and it, the trapped creature. It grew inside of us and we thought, as it grew, that the culicidae seemed to respond, eyes growing less frantic, the open–shutting of its jaw slower, the whirling of glass inside it becoming still. Its legs beat a little less against the ground, the writhing of its body inside the claws grew slower. But between our fingertips and it we could still hear,

You’re a failure, good-for-nothing, and that’s all you’ll ever be

Sorry babe, but I just don’t want to waste my life on nothing

Hey hey man it’ll be cool you know it’ll be totally cool

I’m no coward

You talk big but you don’t do shit about nothing

People like you always end up alone

Still humming, we felt again for the dryness of concrete over our skin, dragged up a protective sheath of it from the earth, let it wrap around our legs, spin around our outstretched arms, coat our hand in thick heavy dust, but leave our face free; and still we hummed, and the culicidae became quiet. Its head sank forward onto the track, its legs lay down to rest their joints on the ballast.
Heavy with the weight of my concrete armour, I stepped aside, letting the humming fade. There was silence.

Neither the cables sang nor the tracks buzzed, no alarm wailed or metal clashed.

Only the slow creaking of the culicidae’s shell gave any proof that it was alive.

“Sorry,” I whispered, and looked down the track.

Two dots of white sprang into life, where before there had just been railway darkness heading out to nowhere. An engine hummed somewhere, far off. Nearer, a set of points snapped from left to right. A red lamp switched to green further down the line, spilling a cheery emerald glow across the track. Then another, and another behind that. The culicidae tried to move against the vice that held it, but finding no point of weakness, it lay back down, still and passive. The sound of wheels beginning to move against the track was like the screech of witches; venomous blue-white electric sparks started spurting into the night. We reached out towards the creature again and hummed, at the same pitch, with the same harmony, as the culicidae’s silent scream, stilling it for a while; and the heat coming off its shell was almost bearable, merely enough to make the air ripple and warp around it, a burning off from

You have a responsibility and you’ve failed

Can’t be a child forever

To be honest, I don’t think he’s going to get good enough grades

Grow up, damn you, just grow up!

Have you considered that he might be dyslexic?

Move along, okay, this isn’t the place for you…

Move along…

It was clear now, that thing on the tracks, a black face with two white eyes. A squat freight engine hauling empty trucks, the kind that at night rattled through sleeping suburbs at twelve miles an hour, hauling twenty, thirty, forty wagonloads of steel, sand and oil between the backs of terraced houses. At that slow speed it could still move a ferry-load of goods; at thirty it could smash a brick wall without needing to slow, and at fifty a lead-lined vault wouldn’t have stopped it.

I think the culicidae saw it coming.

It kicked and it struggled, but not, we thought, as hard as it might have.

Perhaps it didn’t understand.

I stepped back at the last moment, letting the concrete shield complete itself, covering my head and mouth, blocking out the light for a few hot, suffocating seconds. The speeding freight train, trailing white sparks and black smoke, its driver’s compartment empty and its lights flickering like a dying firefly, slammed into the culicidae. It shattered slate and spilt glass, snapping one of the mechanical claws that held the beast down, and sending razored debris shooting out across the tracks. I felt the heat through my shield, the snap of broken monster striving to batter against me. Then, muffled and far off, all I could hear was the engine quietening, wheels slowing on metal, and the clink of falling shell. I let my concrete armour dwindle, until only my right arm was covered, as far up as my elbow.

The train had rolled to a stop fifty yards away. Its rear lights were red and dim, its engine burping a periodic dying rumble, like a tape machine running out of batteries but unwilling to give up the game.

The culicidae had been cut in two. Broken glass and
splintered slate tumbled across the railway track. A metal leg had embedded itself in the support of a signal box; one glass eye lay broken in its crib, the shattered lenses still twitching. Torn in half, but not dead, not yet. Glass still spun weakly inside what was left of the slate shell; three of the creature’s remaining limbs scrabbled feebly at nothing; and I heard a little hum, like pings from a submarine, as it struggled to find its voice, its twisted jaws gaping in distress. One of the two remaining claws suspended overhead was dangling from its mechanical arm by a few wires, the spell that held it broken.

I picked my way across broken glass and torn slate towards the monster, searching for a gap in the torn black shell. Cracks were trying to heal already, bits of broken blackness twitching this way and that as the culicidae’s internal mechanism tried to fix the torn puzzle of its own body. Thin, sickly yellow light ran between the cracks beneath the shell; I found one thicker than the rest, wriggled my concrete fingers into it until it parted, then pushed deeper, up to the wrist, then the elbow. Even with the creature in two pieces, glass whirled inside it, tearing at my shell almost as fast as I could renew it and thicken the concrete, to stop my arm being cut to shreds. The heat went straight through the concrete, an unpleasant throb rising to all-out shooting distress that only got thicker the deeper I went. Even as the crack my arm was in began to close, I went on flailing around inside the creature. The glass at its core was thicker than water, making movement sluggish as I tried to shove it aside and find the source of the fire now running up my arm. Aldermen were coming, running, but they were still far off and our arm felt huge now, bundles of nerves made bigger than the rest of us by
the volume of their distress and… There was something there, something ragged that got knocked a little out of reach as we strove for it, and we reached again, the edge of the wound in the slate starting to bite against our skin as we tried to find it and

there

There it was, our fingers tightened round it; the heat coming off it made the concrete on my arm begin to pop and simmer, splinters of glass stabbing through the cracks in it to scratch and tear at my skin. I felt blood run across my hand from where the creature’s gashed slate shell had started to close on my arm, and we braced ourself feet-first against the side of the beast and closed our fingers around its heart and pulled, pulled, until the slate carapace snapped open again and we went tumbling onto the line.

The culicidae crumbled.

No final scream, no last twitch, no great explosion.

A thing that had been alive, a living, raging creature, was suddenly no more than glass and slate, impossible, a defiance of the laws of physics which, pissed off at being defied, now made themselves known once more.

It collapsed, tumbling into a thousand constituent parts that spilt like so much litter from a torn plastic bag across the track, with a hiss as the last of the heat rushed to escape, and the life went out.

I looked at the thing in my hand. The heart of the culicidae.

It still burned and smoked and blazed, too hot to hold except through concrete, and even that not good enough to stop the burning.

It was a bag, a plastic shopping bag, scrunched up to form a tight ball. Inside, just visible through the thin
sheet: a broken mobile phone, a smashed couple of CDs, a torn-up notebook and a broken pen, a picture burnt at the edges and torn in three, a stained baseball cap, and the headless remains of what might once have been a child’s action figure, the limbs melted to pinkish liquid goo.

Alan was a good summoner, too good; too much of himself had gone into this beastie, and then a bit too much of everybody else.

Then Kelly was by my side, and she had a cool-box, big, plastic, heavy-duty, as much about keeping curry warm as ice cream cold, and when she slammed the lid shut on the heart in its box there was a smell of magic as the wards snapped shut, sealing it in.

One or two of the Aldermen clapped.

In the excitement of the event, they seemed to have forgotten their default position of pissed-off bastards.

In the silence of destruction, Templeman swung into action.

Glass was swept, and slate removed, bundled up into the same Dumpsters that might once have transported the culicidae in its dormant state, before the souls of a dozen angry teenagers sent it quite, quite mad.

I sat on the side of the railway track, staring at nothing, while Kelly tutted over my burnt hand and bleeding right arm. The glass hadn’t penetrated far through the concrete, barely enough to scratch; but it had done a lot of scratching, and the black shirt Templeman had lent me after the death of my last had seen its final days.

A first-aid kit was produced from somewhere. Then a fresh cup of hot coffee.

“I do have milk somewhere…” Kelly proclaimed, looking around her.

“Don’t worry about it,” I replied. She tutted again, and went back to bandaging my arm. Kelly was a medic who believed there was no such thing as too much padding, and any hope of fitting my arm back into a coat sleeve was rapidly failing.

“You seem to have had quite a knack with that monster thing, Mr Mayor,” she declared as a tube of alcoholic-stench burn cream was produced from her first-aid kit. “When you went up to it back then, I thought ‘Whoops, that’s it, he’s gone,’ but then it was really like you were bonding with it. I had a cat like that, you know, very shy of humans, probably had a bad experience in the past, rescue cats are like that, but if you let it know you weren’t a threat and gave it its own time, its own place, it could really come round.”