A Madness of Angels

rules. Gotta cause no trouble, ’cause the second you’re trouble” – he snapped his fingers – “no one will even try to save you.” Then, “What exactly do you intend?”

“I need to find the Whites.”

“Why?”

“Bakker is at the heart of the Tower, but he’s protected. Guy Lee, Harris Simmons, Dana Mikeda…”

“San Khay?” It was an accusation as well as a question.

“I didn’t kill him.”

“I would have.”

“I didn’t.”

“Nasty way to go, from what I hear; suggests a slightly loopy brain at work and frankly I…”

“We didn’t kill him!”

He smiled, an expression of unamused interest. “Well,” he said, “at least part of you is honest. Which part, though?”

“Guy Lee is master of an underworld army,” we said. “His creatures prey on the ignorant, the innocent; he keeps the clans down under an iron fist, his enemies…”

“All enemies of the Tower disappear, little sorcerer!” he snapped. “You know this, I think? But perhaps such people should be fucking controlled, yes? By concerned citizens, maybe, making sure that those who know the secrets of these things don’t go spilling them too easily to the masses? To the piss-stupid fucking people?”

“Bakker does it for his own ends, not for others.”

“And what ends are those? Does anyone know?”

“I can make a good guess,” I muttered.

“Can you?” He leant forward eagerly. “I’m all ears.”

We met his eyes squarely. “He wants to be like you, your majesty. He wants to be an idea. He wants to outlive his own flesh.”

He drew back, face darkening. “Impossible,” he said. “So shit.”

“You know it’s not. There wasn’t always a Beggar King, there wasn’t always a Bag Lady. These things have to grow out of something, they have to have a vessel, a beginning, and eventually, a conclusion. He will be like you.”

“You know this?”

“I know this.”

“But do you know this?” There was an urgency to his voice, a hungry intensity. “Not you, little sorcerer, but you, do you know this?”

We recoiled, surprised at the force of his gaze, and stammered, “We are not… this world is still strange.”

“You’re just a fucking child, aren’t you?” he laughed.

“I’m not.”

“Sure, sure, whatever,” he said, waving a casual curled, dirty fist in the air. “You’ve lived long enough to die. But them, the other ones with the bright blue eyes – fucking kids! Never seen nothing! Never felt nothing! Christ, and you want my help?”

“Yes,” we replied. “We do.”

He leant back slowly, a look of dissatisfaction on his face. Finally he said, “If I do anything for you, all my people are put at risk. I have a responsibility.”

“The Tower is dangerous,” I repeated.

“And you can stop it?”

“Yes.”

“Why? Because Bakker’s shadow slit your throat and with your dying breath you managed to slip into the blueness that he dreams of achieving?”

I felt the pain of a dozen old aches, weeks old to my mind, a life ago to the world, the burning in my skin. Taste of blood in my mouth. I thought that, with enough fish and chips, hot tea, crispy bacon, with enough new memories to wipe over the old, it would go. But there it was again, still again, the iron bite of it on my lips.

I still needed help.

So, I got down on one knee in front of him, and bowed my head in respect to the Beggar King.

“If you help me,” I said, “if you would honour us,” we added, “we will stop the shadow.”

His eyes flashed up brightly, alert, interested. “The shadow?” he asked quickly.

“It grows out of nothing. It has yellow teeth, dead skin, watery eyes,” I replied, trying not to see too clearly the images in my head. “You’ll have heard of it. It says, ‘Give me life.’ Help us. Join us against the Tower.”

He thought about it, then put his hand on my shoulder, the skin warm through my clothes. “I offer you a thought to consider, little sorcerer. If Bakker thinks he can beat his own death, have you not considered that, now you are out of the wire, it might be your very blue blood that can help him do this?”

We looked up slowly, uncertainly, and were met with an almost fatherly sigh. He patted us on the head, as if we were a young child making innocent remarks that, to a wiser audience, were laced with hidden meaning. “I suggest this, in case you’re wondering who might have brought you back.”

We opened our mouth to speak, but he said abruptly, “Right, can’t have you lolling around here, bugger off!”

The moment passed, our mind still revolving this interesting, frightening idea. Who brought us back? Why? I stood up uncertainly, to occupy the space of my own silence, and said, “Will you…”

“Maybe. I’ll think about it.”

“But if…”

“You’re going to ask the Whites, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“They will help you.”

“I don’t know where they are.”

“Well, shit!” he laughed. “All you gotta do is follow the writing on the wall!”

We left him there, the Beggar King in his court of rags and fleas.

We navigated while my mind drifted, picking our way through the night with our eyes wandering through every flowerpot, lamp-post, fence and street sign, marvelling that however well we thought we knew these streets, when we looked again we could still find something new in them. I thought about Elizabeth Bakker, sitting with just the pigeons for company in her care home. I thought about the Beggar King, the Bag Lady, and my gran, who liked the songs that the rats sung in the night through the hole in the corner of her floor, and always fed the squirrels. Somehow, thinking about it all made me feel tired, cold, the anger of my certainty fading down to just a flat recognition of things that needed to be done, rather than things that I desired.

However, before anything more could be done, there was somewhere we had to go first.

If I was going to get help, I wasn’t going to be picky about where it came from.

Subways at roundabouts and beneath busy streets are, in general, frightening places. It’s not simply the basic London subway with its friendly sign in big blue letters “POLICE PATROLS HERE” to comfort the uneasy traveller; it’s not the strange, translucent stalactites drooping down from the ceiling like warm salt icicles; it’s not even the odd patch of pondlike green mould on the floor to trip the unwary passer-by. It’s the enclosed, hidden nature of the place, which makes human instinct flex its fingertips in uncertainty and distress at the thought of imminent destruction, the utter confidence that whatever happens, in the subways there’s no place you can run.

I arrived early, around 2 a.m. in the maze of tunnels underneath the roundabouts, one-way systems and sprawling circular roads on the edge of Aldgate, where the City becomes simply the city, and the signs point to The North as well as to Bow and Whitechapel. In London, places beyond its boundaries are always called The North or The West, too big, too vague and too Not London to merit any more detailed descriptions.

I huddled down by the specified exit, pulling my coat around me for warmth, and let the hum of the intermittent traffic – lorries full of the next day’s shopping, bras, socks, shoes and a dozen different kinds of apple – travel with a buzz up my fingertips.