I shrugged again.
“Good recovery,” she added, eyeing me up for a reaction.
“Thanks.” I didn’t feel like offering her anything more.
A moment while she waited; it passed, she moved on. “As for you” – another finger uncurled at Oda – “I have no idea who you are or what you want, and that bothers me.”
Oda tilted her chin proudly and said, “You cross me and mine, and you die.”
“Don’t give her any credit for humour,” I agreed quickly. “She really does believe all that.”
“Quaint. Who are you?”
Oda glanced at me. I said, “Give her the bad news.”
“I belong to the Order.”
“Never heard of you.”
Oda smiled thinly. “That’s how good we are.”
Vera hesitated, then a slow, nasty smile spread across her face. “I see.”
“We can help you destroy Bakker.”
“Charming of you. Where’s the catch?”
“I need to make a phone call,” said Oda flatly.
“Tough,” retorted Vera, eyes flashing.
“Please let her make the phone call,” I said wearily, “she’ll be insufferable until she does.”
“Why should I?”
“Because she’s a member of the Order, an evil group of unimaginative people who are holding an acquaintance of mine hostage against my good behaviour, and I’d like him to survive long enough to join you and to join me in helping bring down Bakker and all his works. How does that sound?”
“What kind of sorcerer are you?” chuckled Vera, doing her best to look unimpressed. “A reasonable one. I know that I can’t fight Lee alone, not now he knows I’m coming; I know that I need your help. Will you help us?” To my surprise, Vera grinned. “When you put it like that, sorcerer, we may have grounds to talk.”
Oda got her phone call, and I got a tour of the Kingsway Telephone Exchange.
“It’s built to survive a nuclear attack,” explained Vera as we wandered through the bland, tight tunnels. “Nuclear attack didn’t happen so they used it as a telephone exchange. You could come down here at seven in the morning and go out nine hours later; and in winter it’d still be dark, the entire day gone, poof, just like that. Time loses its meaning away from the sunlight.”
“What are you doing down here?” I asked as we drifted through the endless corridors of psychedelic paint. “Why’s the Clan here?”
“We used to be in White City – that’s where our name came from. Then they demolished our home in order to build this new shopping mall, and by then, Guy Lee had decided we were a pain. Harris Simmons has fifteen million invested in the shopping mall – tell you something? Fingers in every pie. The Clan picks up lost magicians – kids who don’t understand that the things they draw are coming alive, voodoo artists possessed by the spirits, enchanters who can’t control their own creations – we look after our own, make sure that the word doesn’t get out about what we do, keep the authorities out of our hair.”
“What makes you better than Lee?” I asked.
“In the grand scheme, I suppose not much. Our members will still steal, bewitch, bedazzle and charm when they need to, in order to profit or survive. We have a lot of strays to look after; you mustn’t be surprised that some of them bite. Prostitutes who are not afraid of a cantrip for temporary beauty, thieves who sometimes find that it is useful to be more than just a metaphorical shadow – these things happen, you live with it. But we don’t nail people to trees if they break our rules. And we don’t rape the women who don’t obey us when we order them to cast a spell. And we don’t torture the fortune-tellers who refuse to give us money, and we don’t experiment on the plucked-out eyes of the seers to see if we can leech away any of their sight, and we don’t poison beggars with heroin so we can ride their trip without the drugs in our blood, or sacrifice human flesh to the spirits of a place for their good favour, or cast impenetrable glamours enriched with the blood of children to make our whores seem more beautiful, even the pig-ugly ones. And we don’t like to talk with the dead. They tell you things that are sometimes best not heard. Is that what you wanted to hear, sorcerer?”
“I was hoping for something in shining armour, but thanks for the run-down,” I said.
“You’re welcome. So, Lee doesn’t like us. He thinks we’re treading on his toes. He wants things from us.”
“What sort of things?”
“Money. Services. Snitching. We’ve got a lot of contacts and he doesn’t like rivals. And he’s tough – there’s an army out there who’ll follow him, and more just waiting at the Tower to do his word. He likes to have control. Whites don’t like to be controlled. It’s only going to get shittier. Although, with Amiltech kinda fucked…”
“It’ll recover,” I sighed. “Sure, it’s bad, it looks bad, but Amiltech will always recover while the Tower’s around.”
“Even though San Khay is dead?” she asked quickly.
I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t kill him. Let’s get this sorted right here, right now. I didn’t kill him.”
“Pity,” she sighed. “Why not? I would have.”
“Someone else got there first.”
She waited.
I said nothing more.
She shrugged. “Fine. OK. So Amiltech are fucked for now – that’s a good thing. What can you do for me?”
“I can help you against Lee.”
“How?”
“I can get you some help.”
“Warlocks, bikers and religious psycho-bitches? Thanks; I’d rather take my chances.”
“The Beggar King too.”
“And you of course!” Mocking doubt bit acid into her voice. “Our own pet sorcerer, hand-trained by the man sitting at the top of the Tower.”
“Bakker is my enemy too.”
“Yeah. I heard he might be. Why can you get me all this help, when no one’s given a fuck until now?”
I considered the reasons, ticked them off on my fingers. “One: I’m a sorcerer, and I’m told that right now, that’s a bit of a novelty. Two: Sinclair has already laid the groundwork for this, I’m just finishing it off. Three: I was Bakker’s apprentice. His chosen pupil, surrogate brat kid, spoilt adopted fucking son. You’re scared of him? Be scared of me too. Four…”
We hesitated.
“Four?”
I thought about the telephone exchange, looked into the bright knife-edge of Vera’s gaze, bit back our words. “Never mind about four,” I said quickly. “It’s not important, yet.”
She grunted, half-shook her head. “OK. Whatever. There’s something else I need to ask you, though.”
“Ask, then.”
“You heard how so many sorcerers died? About Awan, Akute, Patel…”
I nodded.
“Good. Then you’ll know the basics. A creature that can’t be killed, that delights in the death of its enemies, that kills Bakker’s enemies, that can’t be stopped and…”
“I stopped it. Ask Oda. I held it back.”
“How?”
“It was just temporary, a spell – but it came looking for us, and didn’t succeed. Not this time.”
“You know about this creature? Can you kill it?” She spoke quickly, eager – afraid. “Kill it and you’ll have a bargain.”
She knew about Hunger.
Better – she knew enough about it to be afraid.
That, I could respect.
