feet and the hot, heavy nature of the air, we didn’t go above ground. Besides, our senses were tingling, picking up a low, familiar buzz, a texture to the air between our fingers that seemed… enticing, and which grew with every passing second.
We walked, I estimated, for nearly ten minutes. At one point the smell of the sewers – congealed fat and diluted waste – hit my senses; at another I walked in the company of the rats, watching through their eyes as they scuttled in the dark ten paces behind us, until one of the people escorting us heard the pattering of their claws, and shooed them away with a violent shout in their case, and a clip across the back of the head in mine – not painful nor particularly threatening, but a warning enough that they guessed why the rats were so interested. Our footsteps echoed, and the air grew thicker. So did the taste of magic in that place, a heavy texture as if the breeze passing through my fingers when I moved were liquid, not gas, and as if the floor were covered with treacle, which clung to my feet when I moved.
As we walked, I heard the opening and shutting of several heavy metal doors or gates, and the clicking of many locks. The overall trend seemed level – what few steps up we took were counteracted by a similar number leading back down, so that I imagined we couldn’t be much higher than the Piccadilly line itself by the time we reached our destination. When we arrived, we knew the place at once, familiar to us even from the outside, and I had to struggle not to laugh.
The place where they took off our blindfolds was close, gloomy, made of concrete – concrete walls, floor, ceiling, once a uniform pale beige, now inclining to grey – and full of giant, silent old pieces of machinery. There were banks and banks of it, cables drooping from the monoliths of their bulk, wires sagging and exposed, bulbs off and rust beginning to creep onto the exposed circuit boards inside their slotted structures. But still you could see these were, undeniably, the remnants of a telephone exchange. We could sense, even now, the humming of the place, the clatter of its underground workings – though, by the look of it, many years had passed since the place had been put to its original use.
What had been put to use, however, were the floors, walls and even parts of the ceiling, which were vividly covered with paint. Swirls of colour, messages in orange, blue, purple, pink, images of watching eyes, scampering rats, elves in fancy clothes, creatures fictional and real and some who walked the fine line in between, caricatures of politicians, images of images done in mock-graffito style – here a Rembrandt, reproduced with all the characters playing poker rather than watching the potatoes boil, there a Monet where all the faces were reproduced as beady-eyed ferrets jostling each other in their frilly dresses – if there was any space at all, someone had filled it with paint. The floors glowed with it, the ceiling dripped it, the walls ran with it. The place looked like a psychedelic nightmare, an LSD trip gone wrong, down in the remnants of the Kingsway Telephone Exchange.
They took us into a room whose walls were variations on a theme of purple – purple tower blocks melting into violet flowers that curled around maroon caterpillars squirming their way around lavender bushes that themselves melted into tower blocks again, whose lights described little faces peering out from the rectangular frames of their windows. A heavy iron door, with the words “Committee Room” in old-fashioned lettering, was slammed behind us, and locked. At the far end of the room, someone had left an old mattress stained a suspicious brown, and a bucket.
Oda said, “Is this part of your plan, sorcerer?”
I sat down – not on the mattress – yawned and said, “It’s fine for now.”
“In what way is this ‘fine’?”
“You’re not dead, I’m not dead, they haven’t killed us, we haven’t killed them, it’s fine,” I replied. “If I was a White being pursued by the Tower for nonconformity and antsiness, I’d be iffy about strangers too. I suggest you get a bit of sleep and try not to worry.”
“I won’t sleep in this place,” she answered, pacing across the room and scowling.
“Why not?”
“It’s horrific.”
I stared at her in surprise. “Why?”
“They’ve painted enchantments into the walls, sorcerer! How can you sleep, knowing that?”
I looked round the room at the swirling landscape. “We think it’s beautiful,” we said. “Tire yourself out if you must; I’m going to sleep.”
With that I pulled my coat up around my shoulders, tucked my knees into my chest, rolled onto my side, closed my eyes, and was quickly asleep. My dreams were all purple.
They woke us – there was no way to tell when: day, night, we had nothing to go on – and took us down the corridors, past a reinforced iron door and into a room with a large round table and a single suspended light. A woman was seated there with her red-booted feet up on the table, examining her nails. Her hair was black, and heavy quantities of make-up made her eyelashes seem to stretch on for ever; the corners of her eyes were painted with the long curving lines I’d seen in the Egyptian eyes at Farringdon station. Her lips were black, her skin was pale, her nails were painted bright blue and her clothes were all leather, studs and chains. She said, not looking up as we entered, “I haven’t got much time, so let’s get it over with.”
Oda’s bag of weapons stood in the corner, opened and rummaged; at the sight of such disdain for her equipment, Oda’s face darkened.
“OK,” I said, sitting down where indicated by one of the people who’d brought us here. “Briefly – I’m a sorcerer, and this lady here represents a truly vile and unimaginative group of idiots who may prove useful. I’ve got a grudge against the Tower; I was responsible for the campaign against Amiltech, although not for Khay’s death; Dudley Sinclair recruited me to an alliance of people cooperating against the Tower, including bikers, warlocks, fortune-tellers and bag ladies; the Beggar King told me how to find you; I’m told that you and Guy Lee are locked in a bitter and losing battle. Would you like my help, and will you help me?”
The woman flicked the end of one of her nails and didn’t look at me. “I’ll think about it,” she said. “Thanks for asking.”
She nodded airily at the wall, and our guards pulled us back up by the elbows and led us from the room, back to our purple prison.
With the door locked again, Oda stared at me in horror. “What was that?” she asked, in a voice too calm to be what it seemed.
I sat back down in my corner. “Personally, I thought it went rather well.”
More meaningless time.
No one had told me that vengeance could be so boring.
They fed us sandwiches – spam and stale bread, with tea in chipped mugs. We ate, curious to see if spam was as bad as I remembered it, and were satisfied to find that it was. Oda ate nothing; so, just to make sure, we ate hers.
Oda started doing push-ups in a corner.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“I have to stay fit,” she replied.
“For what?”
She glared at me. When she’d done fifty push-ups, she switched, and did fifty sit-ups. I felt tired just watching her.
When there had been what I guessed was a whole no-night and a long no-day, Oda said, “You know, if I don’t make regular calls, they start cutting bits off the biker, Blackjack.”
I groaned and stood up from my corner. “Right!” I snapped. “
“Bored?” she asked, raising one cocky eyebrow.
I glared, marched up to the iron door and hammered on it. “You talk to me right now!” I shouted. “Or I swear I will fry everything in bloody sight and lots of stuff besides!”
When there was no answer, I gave them a count of thirty seconds, then stood back. “Right,” I muttered. I pressed my ear against the door, half-closed my eyes, and started murmuring the guiding, meaningless sounds of an opening spell, whispering imploring noises into the iron, coaxing the touch of my breath all the way down to the
