A Madness of Angels

my hands.

but no life

The wards were blazing up the walls, lit up with Lee’s blood. They crushed me like the great fat belly of a woolly bear, pushed my fingers to the earth, stopping this going any further.

It had already gone far enough.

blood on fire

and empty, utterly drained, I turned and walked away from that place.

Outside in the cold air, Vera took me by the arm and said, “And now we need to get you to safety.”

“Why?”

“Lee is going to come after you now with everything he’s got – nothing will stop him.”

“What did I do to him?” I asked. “We just… I don’t… I didn’t…”

She looked up at me, surprised, and said, “You were on fire, Matthew Swift. Your skin was on fire.”

I looked down at myself, half-expecting to see blistered and withered flesh, but my hands looked fine in the cold, pale neon light. “Will he attack the Exchange?” I stuttered as she pulled me down the narrow, sleeping road.

“After that, nothing short of a total annihilation of you and yours will serve,” she replied grimly. “Honour – prestige – they matter. Forget Bakker, that’s nothing now. Fear is just the perception of a threat, sorcerer, and I think you altered a few perceptions tonight.”

“Did I…?” I began, and then decided I didn’t want to know.

“Come on,” she muttered. “Time to get you home.”

A thought struck me. I grabbed her by the shoulder, harder than I’d meant – she pulled back quickly, face opening in an expression of surprise. “Lee,” I stuttered, “Lee is dead.”

“Let’s not get carried away…” she began.

“No, I mean… right now. Right now as we’re talking. That wasn’t Guy Lee down there. His flesh has no warmth, he gave off no scent of magic.”

“Are you fucking kidding? He pulled bloody knives out of his wrists!”

“Life is magic,” I insisted, shaking her by the shoulders. “Life is magic, there is no separating the two. Where there is life, there will be magic; the one generates the other. He has no magic. At least, not of his own – he leeches it from the air, feeds on its use by others, but he, he gives off no scent of it. Life is magic. He has no life. Guy Lee is a walking corpse.”

She pulled herself free with a sharp wrench. “Bollocks,” she muttered. “Bollocks!”

“We saw it!” we shouted, and she flinched back from us, fear in her face, clear now, easy to read. I felt ashamed. “I saw it,” I said. “I’m sorry. Sorry. I… I’m sorry.”

Slowly she relaxed, and patted me half-heartedly on the shoulder. “You’re very screwed, sorcerer.”

“I know.”

“Yeah,” she muttered. “But who can tell? Maybe it’ll be in a good way.”

We slept on the floor of the Kingsway Exchange, in a room packed with other sleeping forms, pressed in shoulder to shoulder, snoring and breathing and warming each other in the darkness, the light wavering through the empty, glassless window of the room, in the concrete corridor outside. I wondered what would have happened if there had been a nuclear war, and people had tried to live down in these tunnels, without time, colour and space. Vera said that all the Whites were coming in, that they’d been warned not to walk alone at night, that Lee would want his revenge.

And Bakker would want his apprentice back.

Guy Lee, a man of no magic. I ran scenarios through my head, twisted spells around, considered the powers that might have, could have, would have stopped Lee’s heart but still sustained him. Or perhaps it wasn’t Lee at all who I’d fought; perhaps something else inhabiting his flesh, mimicking life. He wasn’t any sort of traditional, boring, hollow-eyed, pale-skinned zombie; his movements were fluid, his face healthy, his skin tanned. Not death in the traditional vampiric way; simply an absence of life, as if his body had been frozen at a single moment.

I couldn’t sleep.

Shortly after dawn – I had expected it to still be night – I climbed out of the Kingsway tunnels, and went to find a phone box.

I called the Tower, and this time, when I asked for him, I was put straight through to Bakker. He didn’t sound like he’d been asleep.

“Matthew? Are you all right?”

“Fine.”

“I’ve been hearing rumours. If you want to talk…”

“Guy Lee isn’t alive. He has no magic about him, no spark of life. He’s cold.”

“Matthew, I don’t know what you’ve been doing…”

“Necromancy – the magic of the dead. I want to know… what you did to him.”

“What I did to him?”

“You fear dying, Mr Bakker,” I said to the voice in the phone, “you are so afraid. If his non-life, his frozen existence could offer you the solution to your problem, wouldn’t you have taken it? I have racked my imagination, all the things you taught me, and I can’t think of a single power, magician or enchanted tome which could do the things to Lee that I think must have been done – only you. You’d do it, I think, and not look back.”

A sigh, tired and old, down the phone. I watched the sunlight thicken on the pavement and crawl over the tops of the grand old houses surrounding Lincoln’s Inn. “He told me you attacked him, you went to a pit?”

“Yes.”

“I thought I had taught you better.”

I shrugged, then realised the absurdity of the gesture. “I will undo whatever it is you’ve done, Mr Bakker.”

“Matthew?” His voice had a darker, lilting edge of polite, poison-edged enquiry.

“Mr Bakker?”

“Lee tells me that when you fought, you burnt blue. Your skin was on fire with flames the colour of your new eyes, and the rumour goes…”

“Yes?”

“… the rumour goes that the voices in the telephone stopped talking, when you came back, that the angels suddenly stopped singing their blue songs.”

I said nothing.

“Matthew?”

Nothing.

“What have you done, Matthew?” he whispered. “What did you think you could do?”

“Mr Bakker?”

“Yes?”

“Did you bring us back?”

Now he was silent on the other end of the line. A breath, a slow exhalation transmitted in zeros and ones to our ears. “My God,” he murmured.

“Did you bring us back?” we repeated.

“It’s true!” Not a confession: surprise, horror, perhaps a hint of delight in his voice.

“Mr Bakker?” we said.

“Matthew Swift, what deal did you make? What did you think you could do?!”

“We are coming for you,” we said. “We will not stop.”

We slammed the phone down onto the hook, and walked until we were me again, breathing furious, angry, frightened breaths, and the dawn light was starting to bring some warmth to the streets of the city.

In the Kingsway Exchange, for the whole of a non-day and a non-night, they prepared. The Whites painted every wall, sprayed every inch of glass, every door and every frame with their winding images, and when there was