“He… watches. That’s his job.”
“
“No. ‘Concerned citizens’.”
“He said that before; it sounded like a euphemism then and does now.”
“It’s how things work. Someone in government realises their wife has been putting a curse on their baby daughter; a rich businessman discovers that his number two prays to the neon; a patron of the arts sees an illusion come to life in the spray-paint drawing of a child. Concerned citizens with mutual interests. Sooner or later, they come together. They have influence, power; they want to make sure that these things don’t get out of hand. Sinclair helps.”
“And now they’re concerned about Bakker?”
“Yes. The Tower has grown too big, Sinclair said. It’s not just what Bakker is – and Sinclair thought he was a monster – it’s what the Tower is. So big, so fast; so powerful. Its enemies die. Anyone who opposes it dies. There are concerned interests on every side. Sinclair’s sponsors wished to ensure the containment of magic. There are equally those who wish to exploit it; and, perhaps, those who wish to destroy it. You can understand.”
“Yes. I think I can. All right. Tell me about the others. The warlock, the fortune-teller, the biker…”
“Sinclair knew Khan. Khan helped him, saw things. When Khan died…”
“… Sinclair had the fortune-teller moved in?”
“Yes.”
“Could she have betrayed us? Told Bakker where we were meeting, organised the shoot-out?”
“I doubt it.”
“Why?”
“Because she was Khan’s lover,” he said, in a voice of surprised simplicity. “She wants Bakker dead. That’s why she told Sinclair about you.”
“What did she tell him?”
“That either Matthew Swift was alive, or something that was powerful enough to mimic his flesh lived in his place. Either way, Sinclair saw a possibility.”
“Because he thought I wanted revenge on Bakker?”
“Don’t you?” he asked sharply, eyes flashing up as he sipped from the paper cup. I didn’t answer. “Sinclair wondered what you might have quarrelled about. He had a few theories. It takes a lot to abandon your teacher, I hear, when you’re a sorcerer.”
“You know nothing about it,” I snapped. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“I think I do,” he replied. “Sinclair taught me how to control what I am, cared for me. Isn’t that what sorcerers do for each other? You are more than other magicians, you lose yourselves in the city, your minds and thoughts are so much a part of it that at rush hour you must walk because the city is moving, and at end of office hours you cannot help but feel a rush of relief and the desire to look at the sky, because that is how the city works. There are sorcerers who have lost themselves entirely to the power of it, their minds submerged for ever in the rhythms of the city, identities stripped down to nothing more than the pulsing of the traffic through the streets. You see? I understand how these things are. I can hear the creatures of this place wherever I go, all the time, and when I dream, my dreams are in the eyes of the pigeons and I wish I could never wake, and fly with them for ever. Sinclair told me, when I told him my dream, that that was sorcery.”
“That’s part of it,” I admitted. “But just a part. What about the others? Who was the man with the horse’s face?”
“The…”
“He was shot in the room. A sniper killed him as I walked in front of the window.”
“His name was Edward Seaward. He was a wizard, a representative of the Long White City Clan. They’re an underground movement. We usually just call them the Whites. They oppose the Tower.”
“Why?”
“Because the Tower attempts to control people, to use them for its own end. The Whites protect their own people from the Tower and, unlike the Tower’s protection, they don’t demand services in return. They say they’re ‘the good guys’. I think they’re just out for kicks. Don’t like being told anything, get stubborn for the sake of being stubborn.”
“Why haven’t I heard of them?”
“They’re still weak. Their last leader was murdered – betrayed from within. They vie in their own small way for influence within the community – they find individuals like me, who need their help and who keep order in their ranks, stop too many demons being summoned by people who should know better. They can cause some irritation to Guy Lee – they break his spells, disrupt his activities; but they are weak.”
“What activities?”
“Glamours, illusions, enchantments, bedazzlements – these are the tricks he uses on behalf of the Tower, to bring in basic resources. He runs brothels in the city, whose walls are covered with enchantments, makes them an addiction, charges for every second of glamour-washed magic; brings back illusions of dead ghosts, runs fortune- telling parlours where the minds of the victims are ransacked for information, the better to relieve them of their wealth. The Whites find this offensive, dangerous. So do plenty of others, but they won’t risk offending the Tower’s agent.”
“What about the warlock?”
“He was sent to us from Birmingham, where the Tower has also been attempting to move in. A pre-emptive strike, I think, was what the warlock desired. He’s also been working to get the Scottish wizards on side; there’s a lot of people running angry in Edinburgh and Glasgow at Bakker’s ambitions.”
“How about the biker?”
“His clan resents the Tower. It demanded the services of the bikers, carrying messages, goods, passengers. No one can get anywhere as fast as a biker; to them, distance, space, is simply a matter of perception. They bring the road to them when they travel.”
“What went wrong?”
“The money offered wasn’t much, and some of the things they were being asked to carry were… disturbing.”
“Such as?”
“The crisis came when they were asked to transport a piece of flesh around the country perpetually. The flesh belonged to a man who had been caught in a brothel, one of Guy Lee’s honey traps. They sliced off a piece of his skin from the base of his skull while he slept and kept it so that at any given moment they could curse him with his own flesh, or blind his senses with pain, or paralyse him from the neck downwards, or send dreams to his eyes. This man was an enemy of Bakker, an accountant who had somehow offended the Tower. The bikers were ordered to keep the man’s flesh constantly moving, lest someone broke the Tower’s hold on him. The bikers said no and burnt the flesh to break the spell – their leader was killed. It was not a pleasant death. Since then, the bikers have been moving too, never stopping, outrunning Bakker’s revenge on them.”
“And the biker at the meeting?”
“He calls himself Blackjack. He was sent as envoy to Sinclair to discuss the possibility of an alliance against the Tower. Don’t underestimate him. To your eyes he may just look like a man in black, but I have seen what the bikers can do. Their magic is a wild, dangerous thing, it never stops moving. They can find anything, anywhere, and lose themselves at any moment, and you will never catch them.”
“What about Oda?”
“I do not know anything about her. Sinclair seemed afraid of her.”
“But she’s not a magician.”
“Perhaps… not
In honesty, I hadn’t expected much more. “How about Dorie?”
“I think he may have feared her above all others. She is old, sorcerer. Sinclair says she was old when he first knew her, and he was younger then. She has been old for a very long time.”
“Could she have betrayed us? Why was she there?”
“I don’t know. Sinclair said… to understand Dorie, you have to know about the city. He called her the Bag Lady, as if that was a good thing.”
“
