A Madness of Angels

wind and

come be we

and until our hair danced with electric flame and our breath was black carbon on the air in front of us, bursting through our nostrils, and our fingers had the metallic gleam of a penknife and our heart raced in time to the dedumdedumdedum of the speeding train racing across old tracks deep in the earth and the rats clustered in the gutters and the pigeons scattered to the sky and, all around us, every telephone started to ring.

If we had known how, that would have been when we crawled back into the telephones.

We would have forgotten that moment, would have said goodbye to being human, if this was what it was like. I’d have done it in an instant, if I’d known how. But we’d burnt out the telephones around us, and the lights in the street, so we sat and rocked the body of Dana Mikeda, and whispered the dead sounds that people make at corpses, like the soothing words of a mother to her baby, telling them it’ll be all right, after all.

We became conscious of Blackjack’s wheezing by slow degrees. We looked up. Part of his leg was open and torn, and one arm hung oddly, but he was still alive, for what it was worth. His jacket had been slashed to ribbons and under it I could see the bare flesh of his infected veins. He had found his bag crushed under the remains of his bike and from it, pulled a gun, which he pointed at us. We felt…

… not quite nothing…

He found it hard to speak, but we weren’t going anywhere.

“You…” he began, then spat blood and a piece of tooth, and tried again. “You… knew I was the traitor.”

We said nothing.

“Used me!” he rasped. “Used me to find Bakker, find her. Knew I’d betray, knew you had to be alive. They followed… you were followed… so that the others could come here, destroy the Tower.”

Still we said nothing. There wasn’t anything that seemed to need saying.

“Used me,” he repeated, nodding a quick, frantic nod. “Respected that, sorcerer. Respected it.” He flicked back the safety on the gun. “I’m dying,” he said.

Nothing.

“Blood curse. I swore and I betrayed. Knew it’d happen. Knew I’d die when I swore. Gotta be done. Gotta… gotta keep moving … gotta… find speed… enough… it’s gotta be real. Life has to be lived on the edge, you have to see how it ends, to know that you’re living it. I was so fast… you gotta be different, you know? To know you’re alive? The whole clan they fucking said… gotta fight the Tower. Gotta work as one. Gotta work with others, say the right fucking thing, walk the right fucking walk, talk the right… you gotta bleed and burn and die and do what is right, because that’s what’s expected. You gotta do right. Because that’s what a normal guy is meant to do. I ain’t never going to be that normal guy. I ain’t never going to be what they told me to be. When the shadow killed the head of my clan… he set us free. Do you understand, Matthew? The chaos? The speed? Do you understand being free? It’s… it’s all about… it’s… no one tells me who I’m going to be. No one.”

We said nothing.

He levelled the gun. “Don’t you want to hear the rest?”

We thought about it. We shook our head.

He closed his finger over the trigger.

There was a single, sharp gunshot. Then another. It echoed across the flooded, shattered debris of the room. Blackjack staggered forward, the curse-ridden, battered remnant of his body barely able to support even that movement, then slid into a puddle on the floor.

From the stairwell, Vera said, “Psycho-bitch can shoot, can’t she?”

We heard the clicking of a rifle, and footsteps coming towards us. We looked up. Oda looked back at us, behind her Vera, and behind that, a dozen or so Whites stinking of various destructive magics.

Oda said, “You look shit. Need a hand?”

We thought about it. Then we nodded, took hold of the hand that she offered us, and let her pull us back onto our feet, carefully laying down the body of Dana Mikeda on the floor behind us as we did.

There were Whites scattered on every floor. Vera said they’d lost the signal from the tracker in my shoe just outside the tower, but it hadn’t taken much guessing to work out where I’d gone. She said there’d been confusion about why they kept on arriving at the same floor over and over again, no matter how many times they went upstairs, but it was nothing a lot of shooting and a dash of magic couldn’t solve.

She agreed that we looked like shit.

It almost sounded like a compliment, coming from her.

We took the lift up to the tenth floor, where it stopped working. At the twelfth we found another dozen Whites and a lot of bodies; on the seventeenth a group of weremen dropped in; on the twenty-third we found a gaggle of warlocks; on the twenty-seventh, Oda greeted stony-faced Order men, laden with more weapons than we had ever seen.

At the thirty-fifth, the very top floor, Oda pressed a gun in our hand.

I said, “I don’t know if I can…”

Vera, standing behind us, said, “Arseholes, we’ve come this bloody far!”

Oda thought about it, looked us straight in the eyes and said, “You came here for revenge. Now you’ve got a real reason for it.”

“I… I was… it…” I couldn’t really explain.

She thought about it, then said, lowering her voice, “Bakker is alone up there. No one is coming for him, not Amiltech, not Lee, not Simmons. You destroyed them all to get to him. Even the shadow is gone…”

“Not yet,” I replied, “not quite.”

“… if you can’t finish this,” she said, firmer, “then maybe you should let them do it for you.”

We stared at her in surprise. “Oda?” we said.

“Well?”

“We don’t know if we can do it either.”

“This is the only thing you have.”

We took the gun, left the Whites in the stairwell, and went alone to meet Mr Bakker.

There is a magazine, published irregularly in the UK, and distributed occasionally in the US, Australia, South Africa and among a specialist English-speaking market, whose imaginative founding editor dubbed it Urban Magic. Students sometimes read it when they’re bored and listless, in case they can get useful hints about sex out of it; fluffy ladies who care about gardening sometimes read it in case it can advise them on how to read their own palms; sinister men with an unhealthy interest in rabbit’s blood sometimes read it, in case they can find clues in its pages to a conspiracy. All of these people tend to be disappointed. If you ignore the occasionally garish covers designed to entice readers of just this sort into paying the £1.60 required per issue, the contents tend to be rather dry – essays on the various applications of ultraviolet light in binding spells; studies on the effect of different kinds of road paint in summoning circles, with excruciatingly detailed footnotes and usually a URL link to online case notes as supporting evidence; an assessment of how the wave–particle theory of light might be connected to the manipulation of pure elemental forces, and so on. It is the magazine of the professional urban magician, and a fairly specialist one at that. I first started reading it when I was in my twenties, a while after the first issue was published, and borrowed the back copies from the local library, because my teacher told me to. When I couldn’t find the more obscure issues, I joined the British Library and went through their archives. There, after much scrutiny, I found an article very well received at the time, entitled “The Changing Concept of Magic”, written for one of the earlier issues by my very own teacher. I read it, took notes and reported back favourably enough; but it took me a long while to work out what it was about the thing that bugged me so much.

It said: magic is life.

And there, quite simply, should have been the warning.