A Madness of Angels

footsteps, when I eventually picked them up again, had a sharp, nail-in-sole click to them, and a steady, inevitable beat, as if the walker was in no great hurry, but would somehow get somewhere regardless of anything. It sounded a good kind of stride.

The owner of the footsteps stopped by my chalk drawing of the stylised king in his crown, rocking back and forward on the balls of his tattily shod feet. The feet wore a pair of once-comfortable soft loafers, now held together with so much hammering and thread, I felt my toes curl at the sight of them. The owner of the shoes said in a nasal voice, “Could be worse.”

I raised my eyebrows and waited for an explanation.

“Could have rained. You wanting something?”

I looked him up and down. He wore badly patched corduroy trousers, a big puffed jacket with stuffing coming out of a clumsily sewn-up gash in the side, which gave him an inflamed, swollen appearance, a shirt that smelt of sweat and old hamburger, together with a pair of knitted gloves, a big blue scarf, and a large woollen hat with the words Arsenal FC in red and white across the front. His face was long and angular, not merely stretching down top to chin, but out in odd directions too, so that the tip of his grizzled jaw protruded nearly as far as the end of his nose, and his ears stuck out, even inside the hat, like he had half a lemon on either side of his head. He scratched his chin with long, dirty brown nails the texture of old wood, and surveyed me through a pair of intelligent grey eyes.

I found that after a day of silence, the words didn’t come.

“New to this?” he asked.

I managed to stumble an “In a way.”

“You’re not one of us, then?”

“No. Not really.”

“But you know about things, I’m guessing.”

“Things? Yes.”

“And I’m just guessing,” he said, rolling his eyes with melodramatic emphasis, “that you’ve got an agenda.” He spat the word between his wonky front teeth. “Everyone’s got a fucking agenda these days, too easy just to give money on the street, oh no, we’ve got social assets to consider and fucking community spirit. All right. You’ve sat the sitting, drawn the fucking picture, whatever. What do you want, sorcerer?”

He didn’t like the word sorcerer. That was just fine. I was beginning to understand why it might not be popular.

“Well,” I said, pulling myself up one stiff joint at a time and rubbing some of the numbness out of my arms, “ideally I want to destroy the Tower and all its works for the evil it has committed, for its own selfish acts against the magical community of the city among others, and to see the shadows of its making burnt so even the walls can no longer remember their stains. But right now, I’d settle for a cup of tea, a comfy chair and an audience with the Beggar King.”

He led me to a scrapyard underneath the Westway, a great big sprawling bypass that in five minutes of motorway trundling takes the traveller from Paddington to Shepherd’s Bush, above and parallel to the railway line out of the station. In the grey, smelly shadows underneath the motorway some of his flock were clustered: men in torn jackets, clumped round fires burning in old metal canisters, women with pale, lifeless skin, and thick veins standing out on the tops of their hands, eating chips and sharing a single, depressing cigarette.

He lived in an abandoned London Transport maintenance van, whose walls were insulated with more variations on a theme of flearidden blanket than I had ever seen. It boasted at one end a large metal safe, into which he deposited from his pockets two packs of hotel matches, presumably lifted from some expensive side table before he was thrown out, a rusted tin-opener, and some loose change amounting to roughly £27. He said, not really paying me much attention, “I accept donations.”

I gave him all my day’s takings. There are always rules, always prices to be paid. A day sitting in the cold; an offering of pennies and shiny five-pence pieces. These are rules so obvious, they never needed to be written down. Nothing about the Beggar King is ever written down.

He grunted and said, “Seen worse,” turned on a tiny paraffin heater, put a tin of tomato soup onto it, and as it started to bubble in the can he sat down, cross-legged on top of a pile of thick, itchy tartan blankets and old stained trousers, scratched his chin and said, “So… I’m guessing you’ve got issues if you’re looking for a chat with the old miser. That’s the word, isn’t it? We aren’t allowed to say problem these days.”

“‘Issues’ is fine,” I said. “I think the king might even have a few in common with me.”

“Such as?”

“The Tower.”

“Shit, what the hell’s he got to do with it? They don’t bother us much.”

“How little is ‘much’?”

“He can’t protect everyone,” said the man, eyes flashing.

“From what I hear, have read, the Tower takes beggars off the street. San Khay offered me a trip in the senses of an addict on the edge of death. I can think of no better way to get that than from a beggar, alone, unnoticed, dying in the dark.”

“We have… the occasional clash. These things happen.”

“I saw a warehouse,” I replied carefully. “It was run, maintained, by Amiltech, probably on behalf of Guy Lee. In the basement, I found the body of a beggar. Things had been done to it. Everyone knows Guy Lee has an interest in necromancy. It needs tools. Are you going to sit and wait for Guy Lee to catch an unfortunate disease off one of his badly washed bodies until you say, No more?”

“You see what happens to the enemies of the Tower?” he asked, casually scraping a thick nailful of dirt out from under his thumb.

“Yes.”

“And you’re still looking for a fight. Well, shit.”

“I think the Beggar King would understand.”

“Why?”

He wasn’t looking at me, this man with his huge beard. He gave off the air of a man who just didn’t care, who, above all these things, was lost in fascinated study of the dirt under his nails. Perhaps it wasn’t an act. Perhaps these things really were as tiny to him as dust in the street.

I shifted uneasily, licked my lips. “Because, like the Bag Lady and the Boatman, it’s not just a title, is it?” I stared at him, daring him to speak. “Sure, there’s been a lot of beggar kings, a lot of dead bodies left in unmarked graves or thrown into the river. But the Beggar King, the real Beggar King, who comes when you draw the image of his crown on the pavement and sacrifice a day of takings to his throne, lives on, generation after generation. The Beggar King is there when the druggie dies alone in the puke and shit of his last shot, holding a bloodless hand until the last breath is gone. The Beggar King is the shadow across the street who smiles up at the window of the refuge when the homeless girl gets given her own room, and tells her it’s all right, you don’t have to fear the walls. The Beggar King… the real Beggar King… is the one you offer your prayers to when your jacket is too thin and the stones are too hard, and every penny you have has just been taken away by the spite of people who don’t understand. Not just flesh and blood, yes?”

“You should know,” he replied quietly. “They told me, when you went from the telephone lines.”

We went cold, and my jaw felt like it was locked.

He smiled at us.

“Bright blue eyes,” he murmured. “They don’t suit you.”

“We are… we… as… we are…”

“Tongue-tied?”

I stuttered, “Will you help me?”

“Just you? Just the little mortal wearing a dead man’s flesh? Or do you want something more? What, you have to ask yourself, but what do the angels want?”

“We are… we… we want revenge.”

He chuckled. “Join the queue. You get used to that too, on the streets. Gotta be polite. Gotta keep to the