I was half-asleep by the time the biker sat down next to me with a loud “Oof!”, stretching out his legs into the narrow concrete width of the passage and dumping a big black sports bag down at his side. “You look shitty,” he said. “Not a morning person?”
“I didn’t notice you,” I said.
“You surprised?”
“Not entirely. No great reprisals got to you, since I saw you last?”
He gave a grunting half-laugh. “You really surprised?” he repeated. “I move too fast for any whacked-out fucker to catch.”
“Not at all,” we sighed.
“I hear you’ve been busy.”
“Really?”
“San Khay.”
“I didn’t kill him; please let’s not go down that line of enquiry.”
“It wasn’t you?”
“No.”
“Jesus. Although – you didn’t seem like the blood-drinking, heart-ripper type.”
“Touching. I don’t suppose you’re up for lending me a hand?”
“That’s why I’m sat in this shit-hole talking to you,” he replied with a shrug. “Anything in particular?”
“I’m looking for help to go up against Guy Lee; are you interested?”
“Why Lee?”
“He might know things about Bakker. And even if he doesn’t, he has a small army at his command. It’d be nice to know that it’s not at his command, before going after the top of the Tower.”
“Why do you need help? You seemed just fine with Amiltech. Swanned off all mysterious for your solo day of judgment, like something out of a fucking Clint Eastwood movie.”
“That’s just it,” I replied, thinking of the shadow rising up from the darkness of Paternoster Square. “This time, they’ll know I’m coming. Guy Lee isn’t going to make the mistake San did.”
“How much help?” he asked carefully. “I ain’t gonna speak for the others.”
“It’s still all in the planning, but I thought the Whites, the beggars, the bikers, the painters, the drifters, the…”
“Dregs of fucking society, right?”
“Guy Lee isn’t renowned for his selectivity, either, when it comes to membership.”
“You think you can beat Lee?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not going to be like pissing around with San Khay. If Lee knows you’re coming, he’s not just going to sit by while you torch the office and curse the staff.”
“Yes,” we said. “We were thinking that.”
“You must have one hell of a beef.”
“It’s the entire bull and the horns, since you ask.”
“What makes you think you can pull this lot together? Shit, no wonder sorcerers have short life expectancies – that’s some cock-arsed arrogance you must have, wobbling around inside the pink stuff in your head.”
“I think they’ll want to help.”
“Why?”
“Because the Tower will probably make the decision for them.”
“You like being a mysterious bastard, don’t you?” he asked with a grin. “Sweet.”
“I learnt a few nasty lessons.”
“Bakker teach you any in-between classes?” he asked in an overly casual voice, and when I looked up, “Oh, yeah, I can do fucking research too, you know.”
I steepled my fingers, took in a long breath of the piss-stained air of the subway tunnels, half-closed my eyes. “And you are called Blackjack, Christ knows why; you’re a member of the biker clan, the men and women who specialise in living off speed, being nowhere and everywhere, who revel in their own freedom; and when they travel, the road is shorter for them than for anyone else. Your leader, if you guys can really be said to have one, was murdered, and your clan attacked. You like being unpredictable, unexpected, everywhere and nowhere, standing up for being a difficult bastard just to see the looks on people’s faces, you think being normal is being shameful… shall we carry on, and see who runs out of trivia first?”
To our surprise, he grinned. “You want to know a secret?”
“Always.”
“My real name is Dave.”
“I see.”
“This doesn’t seem to amuse you.”
“I met Jeremy the troll a few nights ago.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. Also known as the Mighty Raaaarrggh! Although… I can sorta see why you changed the name. ‘Dave’ isn’t known for its mysterious, mystic sexiness.”
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“‘Matthew the sorcerer’? You weren’t tempted to go for something… well… with more vowel sounds?”
“To tell the truth, the idea didn’t occur to me.”
A footstep at the end of the subway, loud on the wet stairs leading down. Blackjack added casually, fingering his bag, “Like I say, I got a lot of research done on you while I was wandering.”
“Hum?” I asked absently. We eyed the stairwell at the end of the tunnel.
“Uh-huh. But the bird – Oda?… she’s a slippery fish to pin down.”
We tried in vain to decipher the layers of imagery. We opened our mouth to ask a question, and Oda was at the end of the tunnel, and Oda wasn’t alone.
Sometimes, dignity is sacrificed under the weight of sheer, adrenalinrush instinct. Instinct said fight or flight, but there wasn’t anywhere to fly to in that long tiled gloom under the ring road. We stood up hastily, keeping the rumbling of the traffic still in our fingertips to be unleashed at any given moment, and said, very carefully, “We were to meet alone.”
Blackjack was also on his feet, eyeing up the two men who stood flanking Oda. He had a tight, cold look on his face; at his side his fingers gently flexed.
Oda said, “Someone wants to talk to you.”
The men on either side of her reached into their pockets. Their hands weren’t even out before Blackjack was taking something from his bag and his fist was wrapped in a length of chain that seemed to grow at his touch into a writhing, living snake of metal links, lashing into the air and stretching as it moved. I saw guns being pulled out from the bulging jackets of the two men with Oda, and instinctively snuffed out the light, crudely swiping at the strip lights overhead with the rumbling heat still in my fingertips, bursting the bulbs with a loud static
Somewhere in the dark I heard a loud snap, a rattling sound as of a chain scraped along a tiled wall and the crunch of tiles being pulled free from their mortar with the passage of the metal links; I heard running feet, shouting, the click of catches and gears. Perhaps in different circumstances we would have stayed and fought, we would have burnt them all for daring to challenge us – but I feared guns, I didn’t like to try and stop bullets in the dark, it was too unpredictable. I stuck my hands out to feel along the wall and stumbled towards the yellow glow at the other end of the tunnel, away from Oda, Blackjack and the men in black. I heard a gunshot – it wasn’t as I had expected, not a ringing blast in the dark, but a snap, more like the bursting of an air rifle than an explosion of chemicals – but whatever it was, I heard a shout in the gloom that could well have been Blackjack’s voice, and for a moment thought about going back for him, pulling up all the glass pieces on the floor and throwing them down the tunnel in a wave, like a swarm of angry flies; but by now I was at the staircase at the other end and clawing my way up into the open where I could see, stand my ground, fight with more effective tools and…
“Hey, sorcerer?”
