from the cracked spider’s web clinging to the wall, curling my fist around it until it bit into my skin, drawing blood. Dana raised her hands from the final basin, water pouring off them, and grinned. “Right,” she said. “Not so useless!”
She started to spin her hands through the air, with a beckoning, gentle gesture. The water pouring out of the taps started to turn, twist up away from the basins it was filling and spin towards her, circling around her like clear silk scarves, winding around her legs and arms without ever actually touching her skin, the taps still running so that she seemed to be almost attached by liquid placentas to the sinks, by lines of still-flowing, thickening water that constantly spun and moved around her as the taps poured more and more into the spell, and kept on pouring. I’d heard of sorcerers who’d sucked whole reservoirs dry doing spells like this; unless someone actually, physically turned off the taps, there was no reason to stop.
And she was good at it. The spell flowed around her, and the way she spun it, the way she let the growing swirls of water dance and mingle into thicker strands of sparkling translucence across her – she knew the effect was beautiful, and in many ways, that sense of the elegance of the thing was what let her craft the spell so well. She’d always said she’d found the sight of still waters to be calming; and watching her then, entirely in control, I felt for a moment that, perhaps, everything would be all right after all.
I raised my fist, the glass clenched inside it, towards the mirror and spun my own version of the same magic. The cracks spread from where I’d smashed it with the lid of the bin, rippling out towards the edges in ever-splitting streams like the passage of water across uneven dry soil, until, with a single heave, the entire thing shattered. The glass fragments, however, did not fall. They drifted at my command; I could feel everyone like the skin on my back, taste them in my mouth, a sharp metallic feel on the tip of my tongue, and when I moved, they moved with me, wrapped themselves around me like a reflective blanket, each one shimmering back the brightness of my eyes
our eyes
bright blue
a moment to remember that our eyes are blue now, a thousand, thousand pieces of blue brightness looking back
beautiful brightness too
before I turned to the door, painfully aware of the silent nothing outside, and said to Dana, “Right. Sorcery.”
I kicked open the door, as much for the drama as anything else.
The corridor outside was empty, except for a trail of burning tyre marks along its length that finished as suddenly as it had begun. Dana gestured, and a slender filament of water still drawing its life from the running taps in the bathroom, and snaking out from the door behind her as she moved, now slithered through the flames, extinguishing them in front of us. I walked ahead, careful, in case I cut her, to keep my distance as the shards of shattered glass and mirror danced and dazzled around me in a standing wave of silver. Moving slowly behind, Dana trailed the umbilical cords of water like the tails of a kite.
We passed through another office. A post room, full of empty sacks and bags; a small kitchen; a canteen, the shutters drawn across the windows. Our shadows stayed obeying the laws of physics, turning and bending with the light. Another office. Another flight of stairs.
Dana said, “Can we break his spell? Can we get out?”
“Sure,” I answered. “But it’d be easier with a motorbike.”
Shouting somewhere below; sounds of battle somewhere above.
“Guns?” asked Dana.
“Yes; my friends don’t have much imagination,” I replied. “Come on.”
“Can’t we find them?”
“Sure,” I said. “Bakker’s ex-apprentice and his current apprentice together at last in front of an angry mob of people come here for the express purpose of destroying the Tower, bloody sorcerers and all their works. What a happy meeting that would be.”
“No need to get sarky.”
“Sorry.”
We started descending, slowly, one step at a time. We turned the corner of the stairwell and I could see the door to the second floor and felt a tight tugging in my belly and we stopped.
Putting our head on one side we leaned gently forward, then back on our heels, feeling the sickness grip us as we did. “It’s here,” we whispered, eyes half shut as we tried to pinpoint the source of our unease. “Right here.”
We looked round. The floor we stood on was uncarpeted, the walls clean. We looked up. The ceiling consisted of plastic panels set into concrete. Dana threw a fistful of tight, high-pressure water at the most central one, which wobbled, came loose, and flopped onto the floor. I bent to pick it up, letting my glass shroud drift above me for a while. On the back, someone had drawn, very carefully in thin black ink, a picture of a stairwell, all odd angles and strange dimensions, that seemed to feed inexorably into itself. I touched it with a fingertip. The hot magic of it burnt; we snatched our hand away and for a moment heard
We dropped the panel. Then, with a scowl, we directed a handful of shattered glass at it, tearing the thin plastic to shreds in an instant.
“You OK?” asked Dana.
“Children’s games,” we snapped, louder than we’d meant. “We have no patience with these tricks of the light!”
I grabbed back my handful of glass, tossing it into the whirling mêlée around my head, and kept descending. This time, the second floor stayed the second floor, and the first floor was the first. The door to the ground floor was locked, but Dana leant out of her watery cloak for a moment to stroke it, whispering gentle invocations into the bars on the door, which eventually, reluctantly, clicked loose. The doors swung back.
There was a foyer beyond, high-ceilinged, full of odd alcoves and strange shapes, along with the occasional neglected potted plant, a battered reddish carpet and an abandoned reception desk. Beyond that were a pair of large, black glass doors.
In front of them sat the motorbiker, and there too, its long tail curled round the back of him, was a dragon.
There was no mistaking the creature. The tail was the signs of street names that had been changed by the local council; its claws were the bent pipes of signposts that had been smashed into by speeding cars; its spine rippled with the reflective Catseyes of the motorways; its belly was plated with speed warnings; its haunches were tense with the triangular fluorescent warning signs of “DANGER!” or “SLOW – CHILDREN CROSSING”, bent and twisted to fit the curves of its hulk. Unlike the litterbug, this creature was at least fifteen feet end to end, and all metal; no vulnerable cardboard underbelly here, nor beating recyclable heart. It didn’t so much blink as that the reflective coating of its eyes – the battered lenses of smashed speed cameras – glinted with the slightest movement of its head, capturing the shimmer of the white lamps dangling high over head like suspended jellyfish.
If there was an expression on the biker’s face, it was hidden under his shiny helmet, and the impassive curling dragon showed no inclination towards feeling across its twisted metal snout, buckled together by the reflective neon yellow bands of cyclists’ warning straps.
Dana said through the corner of her mouth, wisely keeping perfectly still as we surveyed the creature and the dwarfed shape of the biker beneath it, “You didn’t mention dragons.”
“Oh, come on. I must have.”
“Pretty sure I would have remembered.”
I considered the beast. There was a familiarity in its shape and form. I said, “I don’t suppose you’ve ever lived in the City of London?”
“Not my kind of rent,” she admitted. “Is this going to be relevant?”
“Perhaps.” We looked down at the biker, cleared my throat and raised my voice. “Bakker still needs us,” we said. “The shadow still wants us.”
Blackjack reached up, and slowly pulled off his helmet. Underneath, his face was blistered, red, eruptions of pus around his throat and chin, and thick infected arteries standing out across his forehead. “I know,” he said, staring straight at me, his voice hoarse and weak. “He told me.”
