it becomes necessary.”
“You are entitled to your wish.”
“What can I do?”
“Bakker has lieutenants, key people in running the Tower.”
“I know some. Guy Lee, San Khay, are they who you’re thinking of?”
“Also Harris Simmons, and Dana Mikeda.”
“Dana Mikeda?”
“You know her?” asked the warlock sharply.
“I… did. What’s her involvement?”
“I suppose, for the sake of saving time, I shall be crude. Protégée. Lover. One or the other, although perhaps it doesn’t do justice to the relationship.”
“How long has she been this way?”
“What way?”
“Protégée, lover, and all the other things you aren’t describing.”
He smiled, a rare flicker of amusement. “Approximately two years. You know her.” It wasn’t a question, and thus didn’t require an answer.
“You’re planning on killing them also?”
“If necessary.”
“You have an alternative?”
“Perhaps. If they can be useful.”
“I see. If there is…”
“Pustulant warts!” shrilled Dorie from her corner.
“For fuck’s sake,” groaned the warlock.
“Oh, well, bollocks to your brain,” she muttered.
We hesitated, looking up from the documents on the table to where she sat, arms folded, in the corner of the room.
“Swift?” asked Sinclair quietly, seeing our expression.
We looked round the room, suddenly uneasy.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Nothing.”
“You’re a nit when not them, aren’t you?” Dorie muttered.
I stepped back from the table. I walked a few paces across the room towards her, hesitated just in front of the window, found my right hand shaking. “You know us,” we said, uncertainly.
“Heard you in the wire,” she said with a yellow-toothed grin. “‘Come be we and be free’, that’s your song, ain’t it, blue-eyes?”
“You have met us?”
“I like the dance you play,” she admitted. “But I wouldn’t stand where you do right now.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Fucking shadow on the wall,” she replied. “Duck!”
I ducked. I can respect formidable magical talent when I meet it, and Old Madam Dorie, the grey bag lady who smelt of curry powder and car fumes, had it in spades. She exuded skilful manipulation of primal forces just like her bags gave off the smell of mould, and if she’d said hop, I would have hopped. She, like my gran, had the look of a woman who talked to the pigeons; and in the city no one sees more than the pigeons.
I ducked, which is why the bullet from the sniper’s rifle shattered the skull of the horse-faced man, who’d just been standing, rather than mine.
“Banzai!” shrilled Dorie.
The lights went out in the room – and, more than that, the power went too. I could feel the sharp loss from the walls and ceiling as the fuses were pulled, somewhere below in the rest of the house. The darkness was intense, but only for a moment, as the orange-white glare from the street lamp outside came in through the curtains. I crawled across the floor towards the horse-faced man’s body, even as Dorie stood up and clapped her hands together with a cry of “Ratatatatatatat!”
Somewhere on the other side of the road, someone duly cocked a small mechanism in a big weapon, and opened fire. The bullets tore through the remnants of one window and shattered the other, peppering the rear wall and filling the room with white puffs of mortar dust. From the floor I saw Dorie scuttling out through a door, utterly unconcerned, while the corpse of the horse-faced man bounced and shook with the impact of every bullet. The line of fire puffed out the stuffing from the sofas, shattered wine glasses, sending a fine spray of red wine and crystal shards flying across the room, blasted pictures off the wall, smashed doors into splinters, ripped up curtains and punched through pillows. In the gloom I saw a pair of high-heeled feet belonging to the fortune-teller as she wriggled towards the hallway door, closely followed by the absurd robe of the warlock, while somewhere behind the remnants of the sofa, now almost reduced to a bare frame with rags hanging off it, I guessed were Sinclair, the biker and the sullen lady in jeans.
The ratatatatatat of the gun on the other side of the road stopped. In the sudden ringing silence I heard the wailing of car alarms, burglar alarms from the houses around, the screaming of people, the flapping of terrified pigeons, the running of feet. And the grinding mechanism of the lift, rising up from the ground floor.
I shouted, “They’re coming upstairs for us!”
“Bedroom,” came the shrill sound of the warlock. “There’s a fire escape.”
“If they’ve got any brains, they’ll come up that too,” muttered the fortune-teller.
“You want to take chances?”
“Some help here, please?” came the biker’s voice.
I crawled on my belly round the back of the sofa. My fingers dipped into sticky blood mingling with wine; my elbows crunched on broken glass.
Behind the sofa was indeed the lady in jeans, with the biker, breathless, face spattered with blood but not his own, and what was left of Sinclair, wheezing desperately, the folders clutched to several holes in his chest and belly. Even though he was a large man, the bullets had penetrated well enough; and as he breathed, he sweated, he bled, he stank of salt and urine and death, as if his whole body was unclenching at once, every cell letting out everything within it, chemicals, blood, fluid, life and all.
The motorbiker was struggling to hold him up. “Can you do anything?” he hissed.
“Come on!” shrieked the fortune-teller. “They’re coming!”
The warlock glanced at Sinclair with a brief look of pity, but kept moving.
“Shit,” I muttered. “Shit.”
I pulled back the front of his jacket and there were even more holes. The entire shape of his body was distorted, as if he was sand pocked by tiny meteors, and bent into the odd dips and curves of impact.
“Do something!” demanded the biker.
“I can’t just fix this!” I retorted angrily.
“Fucking sorcerer!” he roared.
I heard the ping of the lift door in the hall. “Move,” we hissed. “Get him to the back escape.”
“It’ll be watched,” said the woman sharply.
“Then fight!” we replied. “Get him out of here now.”
They didn’t bother to ask questions. The woman snatched up the bloody folders and gracelessly stuck them down the back of her trousers, the tops protruding from behind the belt. With an almighty grunt she helped the biker raise up Sinclair’s great bulk, an arm over each of their shoulders, and started dragging him towards the back door.
I crouched behind the sofa and rummaged frantically in my satchel. I heard footsteps in the corridor outside and, as our fingers closed over the first can of spray-paint, a foot kicked open the remnants of the door. White torches swept across the room, dazzling us, if only for a second.
We stood, letting the world move slowly around us. We stretched out our left hand and pinched out the light on those torches, breaking the glass of their bulbs at our will. With our other hand we threw the spray-paint can at the door and, as it bounced off the shoulder of the first man through it, we pinched that too, and turned our back.
The can exploded with the bang of a firecracker, sending out a shower of blood-red paint and twisted metal.
