A Madness of Angels

without thinking, even as our stomach turned, and carefully prodded the side of the broken man. His skin was still warm through the remnants of his clothes, and as we pushed his body over we saw that something had torn open his belly, dragged out a handful of intestines and wrapped them round the man’s middle a few times, like a badly knitted belt. We tasted bile in our throat and felt a physical convulsion through our body as our heart skipped a beat, and stood up quickly, backing a few steps and suddenly not sure what to do with the blood on our fingers, running them over the wall to try and wipe it off.

“Is it Bakker?” hissed Vera. “Are they here? Is it Lee?”

“They’re coming,” I answered. “But it’s not Bakker.”

I snatched the lantern from out of her hands and held it close to myself, sweeping it from side to side in front of me; as the bright light moved around my feet, my shadow, stretching out behind me, did not move with it, but simply grew longer and thinner, like a rubber band being drawn towards breaking point. We felt a laugh grow in our throat, shrill and frightened, and I bit down hard to contain it, so the sound that came out was more like a whimper.

“What is it?” Vera could see how the light didn’t bend the shadows at our feet, and was smart enough to be scared.

“Something much, much worse,” I declared, handing the lantern back to her. “Wake everyone up. Don’t let anyone go around in groups of less than five, or without a strong light. Tell them that Lee’s coming.”

To the best of my knowledge, this is what happened in the Kingsway Exchange; but in such chaos, even with the best of intentions, it is hard to tell.

Guy Lee had an army at his command. It wasn’t a big army, nor was it well disciplined; but when the individual soldiers of the said army can blend their skin to the colour of concrete or burst bubbles of burning hydrogen in the pipes above your head or scream with the roar of the exploding fuel tank on the back of a bus in billows of black fumes, size doesn’t matter. They’d been paid, bribed, threatened, blackmailed, cajoled, promised, and coaxed into working for Lee, and when the survivors were questioned they all whispered that somewhere, behind it all, they knew what Lee was. Not just a man with a will: a servant of the Tower. And those who disobeyed the Tower did not live to regret their mistake for more than a few days of blood loss and pain.

They entered the old, forgotten Post Office train tunnels at the Mount Pleasant sorting office, a truly unpleasant collection of tin roofs and grey walls that sat beside heavy fuming traffic at the junction of Rosebery Avenue and Farringdon Road. They slipped down through the darkness, their way lit up by the witches who coaxed the mould around the leaking pipes to fluoresce into vibrant light and guide the travellers on their way to the Exchange. They didn’t know how Lee had known where to go. They said there was a traitor somewhere within the Whites. It could have been anyone.

The watchman on the Post Office tunnel was called Yixiao, a White from Brixton who specialised in inscribing his spells in towering green letters on the brick cuttings of railway lines, and in his youth had been part of a gang who labelled themselves MORTON BOYZ in big black letters across the wheelie bins of their local estates. That was before Yixiao had discovered, to his surprise, that the crows he drew in the daytime flapped their way across the white walls of the tower blocks at night, squawking the words “caw caw” in squiggly small black letters from their beaks across the paint on the walls, before sunrise forced them to land again across the garage doors where they’d first been painted. In the tunnels behind the big iron doors that he guarded, he’d painted on the encrusted walls, their surface finely textured with layers of solid dirt built up over the years, the images of his coal-coloured crows, who patrolled up and down the corridor every night to see who might be coming in the dark, and shrieked with silent letters their warnings across the concrete walls, for Yixiao’s hearing only.

Doubtless he had seen the advancing troops of Lee’s army as they marched down the forgotten tunnels, and was doubtless on his way to sound the alarm when he’d met his untimely end, claws scratching at his eyes, tearing straight through his cheeks to reveal the teeth inside, ripping out his belly and playing with its contents like a child fascinated by a new toy – had I known that this would be how he’d die? Perhaps. One more thing about which it was best not to think.

However Yixiao had died, Vera had always speculated that they would come through the Post Office tunnels, and whatever she thought of my role in letting the man meet his end, she said nothing about it as she started to sound the alarm. The problem was that Guy Lee didn’t just come up from the tunnels – he came in through the underground, from the ventilation shafts, and from the street, and all at once.

This, more than anything, is why I still do not, to this day, fully know the secrets of the dead of the Kingsway Telephone Exchange. Did some die that day who didn’t need to? Did the Order aim every shot at enemies, or were a few friends caught in the fire? Did the were-men fight their own, did the Whites stand or run?

Sometimes, it is better for the historian to wait until their subjects really are dead and gone, just in case no one wants to hear the truth.

This, then, is what I saw.

I don’t know where I was when I felt the first shudder of the first explosion. The concrete surfaces blended into each other, the endless colours and paintings just one long bad hallucination trip. The shock of the blasts sent shimmers of concrete dust down from the ceiling; it hummed through the exposed pipes and tangled wires that ran across the roof, with a high-pitched ringing note, like the striking of a distant church bell that lingered even after the thud through the air had faded. I knew where I was meant to be – finding Lee and dispatching him before he could hurt us – but as the corridors filled with running bodies and shapes and shouting people pushing and shoving and racing with eyes wild and a scent of the animal about them, I followed my own shadow, let it guide me as it twisted across the floor in front of my footsteps.

Just because you can use magic, that doesn’t mean it’s always the best tool for the job. Guy Lee understood this and had put explosive charges on the sealed-off metal doorways down to the tunnels beneath the street, blasting them in with a cacophony that set the car alarms wailing, along with the burglar alarms of all the lawyers’ chambers and the local university buildings that were now howling into the dark. Then, just to make his point, he started pumping in tear gas through the ventilation shafts. I noticed it first as a puff of white drifting vapour trickling out from a crack in the ceiling, and an odd smell that couldn’t be defined by the nose so much as the stomach, where it burnt its way to the centre of the body’s mass, gripped its tight, sticky hot fingers around my middle, and twisted.

I dropped to my hands and knees instinctively as the vapour started to fill the corridor, and tried to find an appropriate spell, fingers scrabbling on the cold, dry floor for a handful of warm, solid magic to throw up around me, blasting the thicker plumes of white gas away. Before I could do so, a hand fell on my shoulder and another grabbed at the back of my head, pulling me up even as the first dribbles of bile started pouring down from my mouth and nose. Something hot, rubber and heavy was pulled down over my eyes and mouth, and then tightened at the back of my head, and a hand pushed me back against the painted wall as the clouds of impenetrable smoke billowed around us, gushing out of the ceiling like a waterfall on the edge of freezing. I blinked through the condensation- dripping lenses of the mask that had been pulled down over my nose and eyes and saw the dark eyes of Oda blink back at me through the black, nozzle-like thing over her own face. She was trying to speak, but the words were nothing more than a muffled mmmwhhh through the layers of plastic between us and the infected air. She was silenced by another series of short booms that I felt as much as heard, like the sensation of a lift suddenly stopping in mid-descent, all the parts of the air moving too quickly around us in different directions.

Oda hefted a rifle that looked like it hadn’t been manufactured so much as carved out of some primal black void, and tugged at my sleeve. I shook my head and pulled away, trying to find my shadow on the floor through the smoke, and when I couldn’t, I crawled over to a wall, holding up the lamp to see my own shape cast on the concrete. For a moment, just a moment, the shadow that I cast, thick and black against the close brightness of the lantern, looked up, looked straight at me, flexed its fingers into a clawlike spread, and opened its wings.

The lights went out in the tunnels, spitting into nothing on the ceiling and on the walls by the doors. My shadow was suddenly gone, melted into a rising backdrop of blackness, and only my lantern was alight in that place. Oda looked at me and despite the mask, her face, her entire body language, was an open question. I looked around but saw nothing but stretching, rectangular, contained blackness in either direction, until at one end I also saw the movement of torchlight struggling to break through the billows of gas and smoke, and heard distant muffled