keep control?”
I took too long to think of an answer, tasting blood on my lips, and he hit us again and pressed his foot down across our neck, forcing our face into the mud, and leant close and hissed, “Is your blood on fire yet, can you stop it blazing?”
We snarled at him, twisting under his weight, but he just smiled and kicked us, knocking us flat to one side; and now we were angry, we were ready to take his heart and crush it until it burst, we were ready to boil the blood in its vessels, we were prepared to…
I squeezed my eyes shut against the blueness and pressed my face deeper into the earth, feeling the coldness of it against my skin and breathing rapidly, trying to purge the pain from my muscles, chill the heat away from my blood. Hands pulled me up again, and the silver-haired man came close, pulling my face up so that blood trickled down from my nose into my mouth, and leaning in until his breath tasted of coffee and too many hours without brushing his teeth. He hissed, “What are they saying now, sorcerer? Are they cowering like the children that they are, or do they have a darker purpose, a more aggressive intent? Which is it, Mr Swift?”
“You,” I hissed through the blood on my tongue, “will have to work it out for yourself.”
He tugged my head up until it hurt, staring into our blue eyes, then, with a grunt, pushed me back and stepped away.
I tried calming our anger a little at a time with nice, rational placations, soothing over the fear with the thought that if killing was all he had in mind, we wouldn’t have had a chance to notice. As I did, I carefully rubbed my fingers together in the palm of my hand, feeling the dirt between them, the heavy dark soil, with just a hint, delicate, and so hard to pin down with my city-attuned senses, of rich, active magic. I was no druid, I had no understanding of the lore of natural things; but perhaps, just possibly, there was a little strength to be drawn from here, if you could only look at it from the right point of view. Even in this place, strange and alien to us, there was the beauty that, to our eyes, made magic.
The silver-haired man said sharply, “I want to talk to them.”
“To who?” I mumbled, probing my teeth with my tongue for any new looseness.
“Let’s not waste time with definitions. I want to speak to them.”
“You’re an idiot,” I said. “There’s only me here. Do you think I’ve got an alien in my belly, do you think there’s a Siamese twin attached to my shoulder that never had the chance to grow? You talk to me.”
I half-expected him to hit me again. We almost relished the idea, ready for the fury that explodes with pain; enough, perhaps, just enough to give us the strength and passion to grasp the tiny fragment of elusive power in this place and use it to pop his chest open. To my surprise, though, he didn’t hit me, but squatted down on his haunches in front of me, and said, “Let me tell you what I think.”
I nodded, hypnotised by his gaze, taste of blood in my mouth.
“I’m a man of words, you see? I read, I study, I think, I train myself to think only in words, neat, linear structures, passages with correct punctuation that can define a train of reasoning, understanding – nothing left to chance. I am also a man of faith. At the end of the logical chain, when all knowledge that I have acquired – and the knowledge is significant – when the end of the chain runs out into an infinity of uncertain questions and doubts, I know that there is still an answer. You may object to calling it God, you probably find the term too vague – I understand that, it’s fine. You think of a big man with a beard. I think of force. God is force. God is strength, certainty, movement, motion, direction, power, and he sits at the end of all things, and he will, sorcerer, condemn you. Not because you are a heretic – which, by the way, you are – not because your soul is necessarily so black or so tainted, not because you have killed or fought or stolen; all these sins can be purged in fire. He will condemn you, because you aspire to be like him, and have the arrogance not even to think of the consequences.”
He seemed to expect some kind of response to this statement, so I said, nearly choking on the words, “You’re going to burn me?” We added, “You can try,” and I immediately bit my tongue so hard I could feel the pain in my ears.
He didn’t show any sign of noticing our slip, just gave a dry, humourless chuckle. “Times have moved on. The good must be merciful, even if that mercy to the damned is merely in a quick dispatch.”
“That’s not much of a comfort.”
“The problem is, times are not so simple as in the days of the Book. Utilitarianism, I think; we must choose the lesser of two evils. I take comfort, when I contemplate your evil enduring, in the thought that when the day of judgment comes, when we are all standing naked in front of the Lord, you will be damned and I will not. And in the mean time, I may, perhaps, do some good to the innocent of this life in setting you against another who is more foul even than your taint.”
“Bakker.” I didn’t need to ask.
“Robert James Bakker,” he agreed. He slapped his thighs and straightened with a sudden jovial expression. “Of course, if you were not in your current condition I would just let the two of you tear each other apart – sorcerer against sorcerer. But he is more powerful, I think, than you ever were, even though he chose you, Matthew Swift, to be his apprentice. I could take comfort in the fact that perhaps you could, for a time, weaken him with your attack, and that he, in killing you, had rid the world of one more sorcerer – but it doesn’t solve the initial problem, does it? How do you defeat a man like Robert Bakker? A man surrounded by every kind of protection and ally, a man with powerful friends and powers of his own, a man whose enemies die, and they seem great until they fall. I find that under such circumstances, I am forced to deal with the better kind of devils, to defeat a worse. Am I making sense?”
I nodded.
“Which brings me to my only serious problem. I am more than prepared to let you live, for the moment, Mr Swift, so that you and Bakker can, I hope, destroy each other. But before I let you live, I need to know that you are not a greater threat, that the things which sustain you have not yet consumed all rational restraint. So, Matthew Swift” – he brushed invisible dirt off the black fold of his trousers – “let us talk about the blue electric angels.”
We looked up into his eyes, and held his gaze, and I was happy to see an instant of doubt on his face. We said, “We are hard to kill, if you are thinking of trying. We persist, even if it will not be in this place.”
He let out a satisfied breath, and murmured, “Well, it is nice to finally meet you.”
“It’s not like I went anywhere,” I declared. “Even if you kill us, we will endure, we will find a way back; it is our nature, although I won’t be too happy about it.”
“That’s remarkable!”
“What is?”
“The way you switch without even blinking. One second, monster from beyond the plane of flesh and blood; next second, angry little man, suddenly cut off from all that power he’s used to throwing around. A seamless switch, not even dribbling on the way. Not normal for possession; something more subtle, yes?”
“We are the same,” we said.
“The same what? Same flesh? Doesn’t mean anything, haven’t you seen any 1970s horror films?”
“We are Matthew Swift.”
“However pretentious the man may have been in life, I’m sure he didn’t use the plural pronoun.”
“I am the blue electric angels,” I explained, licking away the taste of salt and iron around the edges of my mouth. “It’s really very simple. We are me and I am us.”
“That doesn’t sound simple at all.”
“You have a limited imagination. I guessed as much.”
His jaw tightened, but he didn’t move. “I am curious, Mr Blue-Eyed Swift, how exactly you found yourself in this predicament.”
“I’m assuming one of your men shot me,” I replied. “It’s all a bit blurred.”
“I was thinking more of how you found yourself bonded to and controlled by…”
“There is nothing to control,” we snapped.
“… controlled by,” he repeated firmly, “creatures as strange as the blue electric angels.”
I said, “I doubt you’d understand.”
“I’m not here to understand, I’m here to assess.”
“That’s not much of a comfort.”
“Don’t you want to buy some time, to see if you can get your senses round the magic of this place, see if you can coax your brain to the magic of leaves and sunlight rather than concrete and neon? I’m sure you must. Tell me.”
