A Madness of Angels

“So many dead,” she replied. “He killed them – Akute, Pensley, Foster, all the sorcerers who you told me to run to if things got bad – he killed them all! Not just because they were his enemies, but because they were your friends! To have his revenge on you even once you were dead because you wouldn’t help him; wherever I went he killed! And you left me!”

Talking to me, I guessed, not us; we had never entirely left her.

“You left me half-trained, unprepared, what was I supposed to do when you were dead?” Her voice was rising in anger and fear and, perhaps, something else. “He said he’d kill everyone I knew, everyone I touched, everyone I… but I’d be alive because they’d never found your body, because he saw you the night you died, he saw you breathe your life into the telephone lines, saw your flesh eaten away in a second by a mountain of blue electric maggots that fed on you until there was nothing but blood left, and I hoped, I thought, that perhaps… what was I meant to do?”

We stared at her, and there were the beginnings of tears in her eyes, although she was fighting with all her pride to hold them back, daring me to disagree. We said, “We’re sorry.”

She grunted, half-turned away from us to wipe her eyes with her sleeve, snuffled and turned back, as if somehow we hadn’t noticed the gesture.

I said, “I’m sorry. Dana – I’m sorry.”

She swallowed and nodded. “Run away,” she said. “You can’t stop him. Please. Run away.”

“It may be a bit too late for that,” we answered. “Dana?”

“Yes?”

“What did your mother have to say?”

Dana half-laughed, a choked-off, failed sound. “She said you were an arrogant bastard and probably in league with the Devil.”

“Really?” I asked, not too surprised.

“She said you told her everything. She said you apologised.”

“That’s true.”

“In all the years since you’ve been gone, with all the things that have happened,” murmured Dana, “Bakker has never apologised. He doesn’t know that he needs to.”

A distant thud, another trickle of mortar dust from the ceiling. I said, “That’s not the Northern line.”

A flash of a grin on her face, wry and familiar. “Central line around here too.”

“Really?”

“Sure.”

I thought about it, then started to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

“I know where we are. Christ, the guy’s got some cheek,” I muttered. “Dana?”

“Yes, Matthew?”

“Will you help me?”

“He’ll kill us.”

“I can handle Bakker.”

“It’s not him I’m talking about.”

“We know. We can handle him.”

“Mum said you were possessed. Mr Bakker said you were possessed too.”

“It’s too short a word for the relationship,” I murmured. “Please, Dana. You wouldn’t be here at all if you weren’t going to help me. So I’m sorry to rush this, but please, please do what you had to, sooner rather than later?”

“Why’d you see my mum?”

“I was worried!”

“About me?”

“Of course about you!”

“But you thought she might call me. Say you came by. You counting on me to help you out? You were dead until a few weeks ago. You’ve got the wrong colour eyes.”

“Please,” I said. “Please, you know that this is still me. Help me.”

She thought about it. “Maybe we should talk,” she said.

We talked.

She told me about being Mr Bakker’s apprentice. That he had shown her the wonders of the city, taught her to find beauty in all the brightest things, taught her that everything was alive, and bright and full of potential and wonder if you just bothered to see, and that this was good, this was how sorcery felt it should be.

Then she told me that he’d told her that magic was life. That there would be no life if there wasn’t magic, that the study of magic, the pursuit of it, the analysis of it, the understanding of it, all these things were key to understanding life.

Then he’d told her to listen to the voices in the wire, the angels that had always talked to her in her childhood, because we’d always sensed that she had a love for life and could live it so fully, we were drawn to that delight in all things that she had in her voice even over the phone. Even when speaking to a faceless machine her words had been full of feelings and thoughts and honest truths, even in the wire we had sensed the expressions on her face, she had given us so much life.

Then he’d told her to talk back to the angels.

Then he’d told her that they were another form of magic, and that as such, they could give life.

Then he’d told her to summon them.

And after the shadow had appeared in her room at night and all the spells she’d thrown at it had been for nothing, she had. After it had told her that it was hungry, so hungry, that it wanted to drink the blue fire of the angels and, if it could not, it would have to feast on the meagre blood of sorcerers – or sorceresses – so, instead, she had.

We were going to say something rude, but I bit it back. Thinking about it, I pointed out a few basic flaws. It wasn’t about talking; all I had to do was listen, and I wasn’t going anywhere until the story was done.

Then she let us go.

We were surprised how weak we were. We did not understand how I could bear it; but then, I wasn’t in the mood to consider what could go wrong for us next.

Dana helped us to the door of the white room, and pushed it open. There was nothing outside but an empty corridor, with strip lights buzzing quietly overhead, and the humid hotness of water pipes running through the ceiling. There was also, however, the familiar smell of…

rich deep blue magic rising up from the underground lines

rumbling reddish-brown tints of the traffic overhead

silvery sparkle from the water pipes

flashing blue fire from the electricity!

… enough magic to grasp hold of and tangle in our fingers, a remembrance of our power, thick and compelling.

We let out a sigh of relief.

“I know where we are,” I repeated, pressing my fingers into the dry, unadorned concrete of the walls. More than just the ordinary hodgepodge of sensation, I knew why Bakker chose this place for his home. It buzzed with something more, a deeper line of power that in the good old days of naked dances and ritual sacrifice would probably have been worshipped at dawn.

“You’ve been here before?” she asked.

“No. But, Central line, Northern line, the Tower; and Mr Bakker always had a sense of the ironic. You didn’t need to tell me anything more.”

“I don’t like this dark,” she muttered. “He keeps on popping out of it.”

“It’s all right,” we answered. “We can protect you.”

“I’d rather Matthew did,” she replied.

“I’ll do my best,” I said. “Tell me: when I was brought here, was I wearing shoes?”