The Minority Council (57 page)

“You can’t be the Midnight Mayor,” he whispered. “It’s a bluff.”

“Which part about it confuses you? Is it the power, the strength, the darkness, the magic?” Sparks coiled around our fingers, danced in front of his eyes; he flinched at the brightness. “I get it. You’re confused by the outfit. You don’t understand why a Midnight Mayor is wearing the vestments of the Beggar King. What crap luck you must have, to piss off every major power in the city. Or maybe it’s our eyes. Maybe you look at us and know, deep down inside, that we were never human. Perhaps that’s what you can’t understand.”

“A bullet will still kill you,” he wheezed.

“Will it?” I asked. “What part will it kill? My body, sure, that will rot and turn to muck; but then again, will it? What are the blue electric angels, if not more than flesh
and bone? What is the Midnight Mayor, if not a power as eternal as the stones themselves? You think it’s worth it, then, sure, get your guy to pull the trigger. See if killing one out of the three of us is good enough.”

“He’d never…” blurted Prince, then stopped.

“He’d never… what?”

“He’d… the Midnight Mayor wouldn’t have… he wouldn’t…”

“Our infinite patience, on which many an epic ode shall one day be written, has been taxed by recent events,” we murmured. “The Midnight Mayor wouldn’t… what?”

Our fingers against the hollows of his eyes were leaving red marks.

“He… he… he wouldn’t have done all this for some woman called Meera.”

We hesitated.

I smiled.

Wanted to laugh.

Hurt inside.

“You know what,” I said. “I think you’re absolutely right. A proper Midnight Mayor wouldn’t have bothered, would he? I mean, look at all the shit it’s caused. But then again,” I pushed a little deeper, “do you want to meet the real me?”

He must have gestured, because the shadow with the gun turned away, the safety clicking back on. I eased the briefcase of little yellow packets away from his lap, tucked it under one arm, smiled at him.

“Screwed over twice in one week,” I exclaimed, pushing open the passenger door and stepping out into the cold night. “You might want to consider a different career, Mr Prince.”

I slammed the door, and watched the taxi speed off.

I needed somewhere to work, out of the wind.

I crossed the river, to Waterloo Bridge.

There was a place beneath the walkways of the South Bank centre. By day it was full of kids on skateboards and tourists ogling their tricks; by night, a place of paint and grey shadows. Its concrete walls were a graffiti artist’s paradise, scrawled with colour and movement that bore tags as mundane as “
Police Greu
” through to a more political “
No To Cuts
.” They changed every other day, as new contributors came in with their dirty bags and metal cans to spray on top of the thick bright paint. Look closely, and you could see the work of the Whites, those magicians who found life and power in the signs on the street. Some of the stones themselves echoed hollowly beneath these bridges, where imps and mean-eyed, foul-mouthed pixies had dug their lairs into the embankment floor, drawn by the powers at work on the walls. There were runes and wards, curses and invocations painted here; it was a good place for any magician to work, safe within its tangle of spray-thick magic.

I opened up Prince’s briefcase, pulled out the bags of fairy dust. So many—even now I was surprised—and money too, thick wads that I gave up counting after the first grand and a half. At the bottom of the case itself was a ridge in the lining. I felt along it, found the tracking spell scratched with a scalpel into the leather itself, and rubbed it out with the ragged ends of my nails. I kept on tearing until I found the GPS tracker too, plugged into a tiny lithium battery. Magicians aren’t good with technology. I let this one be.

Then I opened up the bags of yellow fairy dust, covering my nose and mouth with my sleeve as I did.

I spread them out in a circle on the ground, large enough to hold a man, patting down the edges like a chef fussing over a piece of pastry. I pulled the culicidae’s heart out of its black bin bag and placed it in the centre of the circle. I rolled my sleeve up and looked for the tiny scab in the crook of my arm where Templeman had pushed the needle in. I scratched at it until it bled, and held my arm out over the centre of the circle until a few drops of blood had welled and dropped onto the heart itself, which hissed as they struck. The red blood flashed blue for an instant on impact, before sinking into the plastic shell of the heart.

I rolled my sleeve back down, and stood well away from the ring of dust. I turned my hands palm-upwards and breathed in the river smell, let it fill me, then breathed it out again. I whispered,

“Meera.”

A ripple ran through the dust.

“Meera,” I said again, and the ripple danced round the rim of yellow dust and, in the centre of the circle, the culicidae’s heart contracted and expanded, just once.

There was no spell, no symbols I could define, but there didn’t need to be.

Here was the sound of the river, the memory of a ride on the boat.

Here was breath of her breath on the air, dust of her dust on the ground.

Here the place where once her feet had walked, and the recollection of the place in which she had died.

No one can come back from the dead.

Or rather, nothing human.

I said again, “Meera!” and raised my hands as I did
and the dust seemed to dance in its circle, leap upwards like iron filings towards a magnet, and the heart in the centre of the circle beat once, then twice. I pulled again, and again the dust swirled and spun, and now, when the heart pulsed inwards, so the dust moved in, and as the heart beat out again, so the dust rolled away.

And here was my blood on the floor and dust of her dust spinning in its circle.

And once, perhaps, we’d shared something that only we had known about, and it had been one night, and it had been barely a few words and a little breath, but the taste of it was real, a lifeline to the world.

I didn’t know where the spell came from, or how it happened, but the words were there now, on my lips, and the dust was dancing, and I called out:

“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

The culicidae’s heart shook with the strength of its own beat and now the dust was rushing into it, clinging to it, wrapping itself around the heart like a swarm of tiny insects, hiding it from view.

“My heart was hot within me, and while I was thus musing the fire kindled: and at last I spake with my tongue; Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days; and verily every man living is altogether vanity. For man walks in a vain shadow, and disquiets himself in vain: he heaps up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them.”

I couldn’t see the heart now, didn’t know where the words were coming from, but the fog was rising at my feet, the thick white fog that Meera had made, and the
heart was rising inside its shell of dust, the dust itself shaping around the heart, the circle obliterated, forming a new, writhing pattern in front of me. I thought I heard someone shout from the bridge but didn’t look, couldn’t look away.

“Take thy plague away from me: I am even consumed by means of thy heavy hand. For I am a stranger with thee: and a sojourner, as all my fathers were. O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength, before I go hence, and be no more seen.”

A shape now in the dust, the heart was gone, vanished, consumed by the whirling fairy dust, but whatever it had become was solidifying, stretching outwards and thickening, forming something liquid but upright, solid but moving, and to stop speaking now was to explode, voices and sounds that were not my own coming out on my breath, my breath flecked with yellow, and I gasped,

“Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life!”

The spell snapped. It felt like an iron bar landing across my shoulders. I staggered forwards, head pounding, hauling down air. There were footsteps around me, men running; I sagged to my knees and looked up at the thing in front of me, which, though it had nothing I could call eyes to see, looked right back at me.

Alive.

It’s alive.

Skin of dust, hair of dust, eyes of dust; it could only be called human in that it was trying to grow legs out of a solid trunk, in that it raised up arms and sprouted fingers which at once melted away to dust, subsumed back into the living whole. Sometimes it had a head which opened a
mouth as if it would speak, but the mouth collapsed like sand before a wave and the head vanished back into the worm-body before a new head grew, and sometimes the head had the neck of a man and the chin of woman, and sometimes its shoulders were round and broad, and sometimes thin and bent and always, all the time, the thing in front of me morphed and rippled, swayed and moved, as it tried to find a shape, and found instead a thousand. Only one thing about it was consistent, a hot place in what I supposed had to be called its chest, a beating pounding thing beneath its dust skin, a core that might have been a heart.

Then someone shouted and there were men running towards me, men in suits; some held guns, some held wands. I heard a footstep behind me and looked round and a man was already there. He slammed the butt of his gun into the back of my head, knocking me to the ground, then grabbed me by the collar and pulled me back up, gun pressed to my head. I went passively with him, eyes still fixed on this creature of dust that stood before me, and whose eyes, when it had such, I felt were fixed on me.

Then a voice breathed, “What have you done?”

He stood there, in a bright white suit with a yellow striped tie, leaning on a silver-topped stick. I almost didn’t recognise him outside the pool and not on drugs, but his voice was the same, though flecked with fear. Oscar Kramb, the fairy godmother, pushed through his men and past the empty briefcase, its GPS tracker exposed to the sky. He was staring at the living man-woman-thing of fairy dust, which turned its unformed head to look at him. An arm was forming, which tried holding a cane, before crumbling back into its own swelling surface. Mimicking, like a child, I realised. Alive, aware.

“What is it?” he breathed, eyes still fixed on the creature.

“It’s Meera,” I replied, and even the act of speaking earned me the gun pressed deeper against my skull, bending my neck to one side.

His eyes turned to me, and it was as if the act of seeing caused him to remember his hate, face darkening at the sight. “What do you mean, ‘Meera’?” he barked. The fairy-dust creature recoiled, as if surprised by the harshness of his words.

“I mean,” I replied, “that it’s Meera. Or, at least, that part of her that lived in her final breath, that was captured in the moment of death, that could be defined by heart, head, hand, skin, flesh, bone. It is Meera, solid and whole, fed on the beating heart of a monster, brought to life with just a little blood, and a little magic, since, all things considered, she didn’t exactly die a natural death.”

Kramb moved round to inspect the creature from every side, and it shuffled a leg, trickling dust, to watch him in turn. “Of course,” I added, “it’s also a lot of other things. There’s probably a Bob and a Joe, and a Mary and a Sarah, in there too. I mean, I haven’t met anyone called Bob or Joe or Mary or Sarah lately, but it seems a fairly good guess that of all the thousands and thousands of people you’ve killed, four of them had these pretty ordinary names.”

Kramb’s scowl deepened. He nodded at the man with the gun to my head, who kicked my knees out from behind and, as I flopped to the ground, pushed my head further down with the barrel of the gun.

“You’ll be wanting to ask what happens next!” I blurted. “I mean, obviously you’ll kill me because, shit,
who wants to see the same killing spree twice? But you’ll be needing to ask yourself, ‘What is up with this dust creature anyway? Why the hell has this really annoying Midnight Mayor guy summoned it; is he still on something? I mean, wow he’s gotta be pretty mental to just let me come and find him with all my armed boys; I wonder if I should let him say something. I mean, that’s what I’d be thinking, if I had half a brain.’ ”

“Go on, Mr Mayor,” growled Kramb. “Spit it out.”

I craned my neck upwards so I could just about see the creature, and it turned and looked back at me. “Meera,” I breathed, and for just a moment it had eyes, and it saw, and it was, perhaps, a she. “I mean, shit,” I whispered, “you killed them. You killed them all, Mr Godmother, because it kept you in caviar. Don’t tell me you were fulfilling a demand. You could have stopped, and you didn’t, so they died. And it wasn’t a good death. Christ, but it wasn’t a good death…”

An instant in which the features of this ever-changing creature were feminine; a second in which a hand rose from the dust as if in greeting.

“… and the culicidae’s heart, you see, it was designed to focus in on one very specific thing—on anger, on rage—and to drain it out of the souls of its victims. Well this… this thing I’ve summoned; this…
her
…”—fingers evolved towards me, but they kept melting before they made it to the fingertips—“… she’s fed on the same magics, made from the same spells. She’s programmed to find fairy dust, to feed on it like the culicidae fed on anger, and nothing you do can stop it. Oscar, meet Meera. Not five minutes old, she is, and she’s going to destroy the dusthouses.”