A Madness of Angels

rose, so did the water: geysers gushing up from the pipes, puddles forming between the paving stones, even the dazzling spatter from the fountain. It wasn’t just water: where it had mingled with the dyes it was blue, red, black, green, dragging up vivid hues along with sheets of clean liquid, filling the square with the effect of backwards rain, rising away from the ground in a cloudburst of cleanliness and colour.

The effort of that took the breath out of me for a moment – long enough for San Khay, dripping with the water spiralling up around us, to reach me. I didn’t even see him coming. But we felt the movement of his arm through the air, and instinctively ducked under the first blow, which would have torn our throat in two. He swung next with his right arm, fast, powerful, jabbing towards our heart. We had no choice but to retreat, back-stepping as our shoes started to soak through and turn black as we stepped into a pool of half-diluted dye. And still he kept coming, right, left, an unrelenting rhythm that didn’t even give us time to throw another spell, we had to turn and duck and move so fast. He didn’t just advance in a straight line, but spun round the axis of his own shoulder so that at any moment death might come from left or right or above or below. We had never been so unsure of our own abilities nor, as we danced in front of his knives, so thrilled with ourselves that, second from second, we survived. We kept retreating through the upwards rain, feeling the water crawling up our chin, leaving streaks of black and red across our face as it curled up into our hair; we felt it shiver along our fingertips, running between the curves of our knuckles, staining our skin a motley bruised colour as the inky water ran across our flesh.

And little by little, San Khay started to falter.

As he advanced through them, the melded dyes and water rising from the ground now settled in the empty spaces between the lines of his tattoos. They blurred their edges, disguised their swirls with other, uglier stains of black and blue, and marred the otherwise elegant curves of ink across his skin. As they did, the magic in his flesh began to leach. I could see it, smell it: the enchantments bound into his flesh sparked into the water, flashed with motes of blackness into the rising rain around us, melting away as the patterns that defined the enchantment became distorted. He could still fight, and better than me, but he was so used to that strength in his skin that as it started to fail he began to make mistakes, not understanding his own limitations. So with one swipe he overreached, staggering right past me, and with another his fingers, shining with the water running over us both, nearly opened and dropped the knife, as if it were suddenly too heavy to hold. This was a man who hadn’t used his muscles, really used them as themselves, for years, so that like an astronaut returning to gravity he felt his legs become weak, his breathing difficult, his skin turning to the colour of an industrial accident.

I moved back and, when he followed, he staggered, barely picking himself up. He stabbed, and I caught his wrist, the strength in his arm suddenly resistible, the speed of his movement now visible as more than just a blur. We twisted his arm back on itself, and his fingers opened automatically, dropping the blade. We pushed him back hard, and his bare feet slipped on the soaking pavement, his toes almost black from the puddles of colour we waded through. We blinked green drops of water out of our eyes and scooped up the knife in passing, moving towards him, wary that he still might have a trick to play but increasingly confident, tasting no more in his movements now than just the ordinary heat of a human passing by. He lunged at us poorly with his other blade, but his arm was an image of worm-thin wriggling splotches of colour flowing up to his shoulder and then away, skywards. We sidestepped easily, kicking down towards the back of his leg as he passed at us, and pushing his knee towards the ground. As he swung his arm back, we stepped round behind him, caught it at the elbow and wrenched it backwards, further than it wanted to bend, hard. He let out a sound between his teeth like his breath had become trapped behind his tongue, and as we put the knife against his throat, his inky face expressed nothing but pain.

Around us, the water began to fall back down from the sky in bright droplets as the spell ran out, splashing red, green, blue, black in thin swirls across the pavement, dripping off the golden flame on the top of the monument, running down windows, and plopping with a clear, regular drip drip drip onto the twisted metal coverings of the pipes below ground. We felt the rain soak our skin, cold and shocking.

San Khay’s flesh was the colour of an infected bruise, the outline of his tattoos now marred. He hissed, “If you have sense, you will let me go!”

We leant forward sharply, pressing the tip of the knife into the hollow at the base of his throat. “If you had sense, you would not have come looking for us,” we hissed. “Did you really not see what you were contending with? Could you not taste it, did you not have the wit to understand?”

“I serve the Tower,” he snarled. “They will come for me and they will tear your flesh from your bones!”

“They tried that before and still we live, our blood, our skin, so alive, you cannot understand!”

He half-turned his head to look at us, and gave a forced laugh. “He will eat your heart,” he whispered. “He likes to keep something to honour his friends.”

We drew the blade back to cut his throat, the blue anger across our eyes, ready to finish this ignorant, arrogant thing. At the last moment I held back, forced my fingers to stop shaking, and tightened my grip, breathing slowly and steadily until our screaming, our fury at this creature too small to even see his own place in the city, too small to know his own smallness, had abated. I dropped to one knee behind him, thrusting his head back towards mine with the tip of the blade, and whispered, “Tell me what you know of the shadow.”

“He will eat your heart,” he repeated, voice trembling with victory, fear, rage – I couldn’t tell which. San Khay was not a man used to losing.

“How long has he lived? How long has the shadow been out there?”

“Why should you care?”

“Just tell me what you know.”

“No. I know what he does to his enemies.”

“Whose? Hunger’s – the shadow? Or to Bakker’s?”

A flicker on his face. Perhaps, for a moment, he was beginning to understand. “Who are you?” he asked.

“My name is Matthew Swift.”

“The name… seems familiar.”

“I’m sure it does, and if things had been otherwise, you might have been the one they asked to hide the body.”

“What body?”

“That,” I said, “is the question they really should have explored. Can Bakker control it? The shadow?”

“It kills his enemies. It’ll kill you eventually.”

“Doesn’t mean he’s in charge. How do I kill it?” He didn’t answer. We dug the blade into his throat until it drew a thin line of beady blood. “How do we kill it?!”

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“It is a shadow. You can never kill it.”

“Then how does Bakker control it?”

“You said yourself, maybe he can’t.”

“How does he control Dana Mikeda?”

“How do you know Dana Mikeda?”

We pressed the knife closer until his breath wheezed. “We can rip out your thoughts,” we hissed, “as you yourself would see the mind of the dying man. We can dance in your senses, as you would have played with others; we can put maggots of blue fire into your blood and feel through their eyes as they roam around your heart, your blood, your thoughts, your soul. And we will do it, we will do it and so much more in order to live, to be free in this world, not hunted, not lost, not afraid to be free. So… tell us. How does he control Dana Mikeda?”

“He doesn’t. She controls herself.”

“She wouldn’t help him of her own will.”

He gave a snort that was somewhere between laughter and a croak of pain. “She can’t, but she would.”

“Why?”

“You’re not a magician, are you?” he hissed. “Not just a magician. I think you’re more.”

“Where is Dana Mikeda?”

“I think you’re like them,” he replied, eyes narrowing. “I think you feel your heart race at rush hour, that on a bank holiday you can hardly raise your head, that in the centre of the city you walk with its rhythms, and only when you are away from it do you remember your own gait, only when you close your eyes from all those lights do you remember who you are. I think you’re one of them, just like Bakker, just like Mikeda. Sorcerer.”

“I’m a sorcerer,” I answered into his ear. We lowered our voice. “But we are the