out-of-body experience as can be achieved short of fifty volts, a circle of warding, a pigeon’s claw cut from an albino female of purest white feathers, or a lot of mushrooms. In such a state, not only does the process of their thoughts play across their face, but the observant listener can also trace the sense of their feeling in their mind. More than just the flicker of an eye, the mind, usually such an insensitive object, opens itself, drifts, even while the conscious, controlled aspect – a tiny part of the human brain at any moment – is focused.
So it was with the receptionist, tapping through his computer; and so it was that we could almost hear the buzz of his thoughts, their deepest undercurrents, see the rich purple veins of his suppressed desires, feel the heat of his passions, locked away beneath the professionalism of the day, taste the sharp edge of his envy, a drop of vinegar on the tip of our tongue, resentments and jealousies that he himself probably didn’t know he had, but which drifted in his unconsciousness, shaping how he spoke even while he didn’t know why he said the words he did. The mind, so exposed, fascinated us, as we perceived the thick longing strains of his thoughts, the black oily surface of his disdain for the job, and glimpsed, just for a second, the fiery images of his dreams.
So I pulled just a little, just a tiny sliver, of magic across his eyes, blurring his vision for a moment, spinning the fatigue of his day into his nerves, so that for a second he didn’t care that he had to check all people coming in and out, didn’t care that his boss was insistent on security, didn’t care that he hadn’t really seen this guy’s credentials, not really, not properly – for a moment, all he cared about was that he was in a shit job and just wanted to be left alone.
He said, “Uh… sure, right, yeah, whatever. You know the way?”
“Uh-huh. Thanks.”
“No problem.”
He gave me a paper badge in a plastic holder. I took it with a grateful smile, pinned it to the front of my coat, and walked towards the lift.
The man on guard whose merest magical presence twisted the otherwise cool, calm, pale blue sense of that place into himself, like a small moon warping the space around it, glanced up at me as I passed, and at my badge, and the edge of his consciousness scraped along my own. I kept him out instinctively, throwing up a rough wall in his mental path, focusing clearly on that one image to fill my entire consciousness and keep him from penetrating my intent. He was a crude magician – potentially powerful, I felt, but, unlike sorcerers, unlike those who can taste the magic of the city, who revel in it, his power was one of spells, incantations and gestures, a thing tamed, rather than a thing natural. We had no fear of him, so nodded coldly in his direction as we went by, and walked on.
I rode up to the 24th floor. The lift was clear glass, on the outer wall of the building, so I could see the city drop away beneath me. As on the London Eye that night, I was astounded by the beauty of its multicoloured spectrum: not just the sodium orange of the suburban sprawl, but the white interiors of office blocks, green traffic lights, red aircraft beacons on the taller towers, purple floodlights washing over high walls, pooling beams of silver on enclosed courtyards, shimmering blues on fountains, or in the doors of clubs, the moving snakes of traffic, defined only by headlights, brakes, or indicators flashing on and off like an endless slithering column of eyes, and the reflected pinkish glare across the ceiling of the sky, except for where an aircraft’s guiding lights sent out a cone of brightness, through the black scudding clouds heavy with rain as the wind carried them towards the sea.
I could almost drink the magic of what I saw, almost lie back suspended on nothing but its intensity and float above the ground with the force of it, the sudden, overwhelming sense of it – and that, we knew, was all that sorcery was; all, perhaps, that we were. An awareness, an understanding, a point of view. Take away that sense of the city’s wonder and we were no more than insects, grey figures on a grey landscape scuttling along, unable to see the daily extraordinary things. Though it was a strange emotion, we almost felt pity.
The door to the Amiltech office was more than locked – it was warded. Not the first that I’d seen on my arsonist’s/burglar’s progress around Amiltech’s client base, but the strongest. My blank keys would not change shape to fit the lock, nor, I felt, would mere force – a bombardment with the electricity in the wires above, nor the use of sound – settle it satisfactorily until the ward itself was broken. For a ludicrous moment I wondered if there were any air ducts I could crawl through to get inside the office; but life was not like the movies. The door was pretty much immovable, not even breakable without a considerable expenditure of time and energy. So, with this in mind, I went up, to the offices of the company on the floor above – Verity – which, according to the brochure by the door, specialised in proving insurance claims wrong even if, so the small print suggested, they weren’t. They appreciated a challenge. Its door was not warded, and my keys, after the usual coaxing, fitted perfectly.
I walked through Verity’s office until pretty much dead-centre, got out my all-purpose Swiss Army knife, and started cutting a square in the thin nylon and lino carpet on the floor. I pulled up a piece of flooring roughly big enough to let me step through, put it to one side and went in search of the office kitchen. I found it eventually, next to the ladies’ toilets, a small space dominated by a coffee machine. I filled the kettle and set it to boil. Under the sink I found a bottle of bleach. When the kettle was done, I took it, full and steaming, back to my square of exposed floor, and poured the boiling water over the small area of concrete underneath. I dribbled a few drops of bleach onto the wet floor, at the four points of the compass, then stood back and tried to find the right spell.
Transmutation is not a strong point of mine – even if you can convince the substance in question to become what you want it to be, it tends not to be a permanent process (at least, not without ending in an explosion), and it requires a lot of time and effort to get it right.
I wasn’t after perfection, and I hoped that after I’d raised the temperature of the water and mixed in one of the nastiest substances I could find in the kitchen, the liquid spilt on the floor was already halfway to a change of state. Magicians tend to have pre-written incantations and spells for these kind of things, usually calling on various dire or implausible powers (of which my favourite was “Upney, Grey Lord of Tar”, who I’d heard mentioned by amateurs and who we knew to be real) to achieve their temporary wills. Sorcerers rely on will power and raw magic, and I now deployed both, snatching heat and power out of the air around me until my breath condensed with the sudden cold, and the lights above me whined and flickered. I stretched my arms out, fingers turned towards the floor, and pushed every inch of power I could get from that room, every trace of snatched breath left lingering in the air, every hum of electricity, every remnant of warmth from human skin, every smell of sweat, every half-forgotten lingering sound of shouting, all the detritus of left-over life that makes magic what it is, for life is magic, magic
The water–bleach mixture started to bubble. Then it started to smoke, a thin, acrid white billow that made my eyes water and reminded me of the taste of hot solder. It hissed, it boiled, and for a moment – just a moment, because I couldn’t sustain this intensity of concentration for long – the water on the floor became acid strong enough to eat through lead.
It ate through the exposed area of the floor in no more than sixty seconds, reducing its substance like it was made of half-baked flour. The hole in the floor spread out across the entire area where the liquid had spilt, eating into the carpet around. When I felt it was wide enough, I let the power go, jerking with the pressure of it running away between my fingers. At my feet, the hole was now human-sized, looking straight down onto floor 24.
I waited a few seconds for the acid to revert back to its watery, bleach-spotted state, then poured the rest of the kettle over it for good measure. When that had stopped dripping too much, I sat on the edge of the hole, and lowered myself down. I still got a soggy bottom and wasn’t happy about the drop, but managed a survivable, if not a dignified, flop into Amiltech’s London headquarters.
In cursing them, I inscribed the black shadows not just on the wall, but on the floor and across the doors. We found San Khay’s office, with its wide windows looking out across the city, and, in big blue letters, wrote across the glass for all the world to see:
Then, because I wasn’t entirely sure why I had written this, I added a caveat with a biro on one of the neatly laid-out pads of papers on a conference table.
Feeling that this made more sense, I wandered round the office, flicking through desk drawers and rummaging under piles of paper with no real concept of what I might be looking for, but a feeling that it was the right thing to do. It was all depressingly mundane. Lists of stationery acquisitions, tax details for the accountants, scribbled notes to remind X to talk to Y about Z and how it might affect the pension plan – not at all what I’d hoped
