black, wearing a pair of large man’s business shoes, hunched over what I realised were my own footprints.
The figure looked up as my pool of light merged with his own from where I stood some metres away. His face twitched into an expression of surprise, followed by curving contempt. “Sorcerer,” said Lee. “I thought you’d wind up down here. Prophetic powers couldn’t have done a better job.”
“Bugger prophetic powers,” I replied, putting the lantern down and scanning the thick, still darkness around us. “You and I both know, I think, what’s got me down here. Tall guy, wears my coat, bad complexion, essence of living darkness – seen him anywhere?”
“And here I was thinking you and I were about to enter the history books,” he said, straightening up, and brushing dust off his knees. “But all along, you aren’t really interested in me, are you? I don’t think you give a damn about the things I’ve done, or that Khay did, or even about the Whites and the warlocks and all the other cretins I’ve killed to get here. You’re far too busy to care. Am I right?”
“No, but nice try,” I said.
He shrugged. “Do you know what the difference is between a soldier and a murderer, Mr Swift?”
“I haven’t given it much thought.”
“Intent. Whatever I do, I always intend. It keeps me in control. I have an anger, a beast… but control. You cannot imagine. But you – did you even think about all those bodies lying in your way? I think you kill and don’t even have the knowledge of what you’re doing, or why. Useless fucking moron.”
“You know, you’re right.”
“Of course.”
“No, not about everything – but you’re right that I’m not here for you. You are just a dot on my way to something more important. A door that has to be opened, a minor tick on the list before getting to the major, and the fact that you’re a murderer, a rapist, a thief, a coward and a corpse only makes it easier to do what I was always intending all along. So let’s get this whole thing over with so that Hunger can come and take his fill.”
“Get what over?” Lee grinned, and gestured expansively. “Robert wants you alive, Mr Swift, and alive is what I intend to give him.”
A shadow in the darkness behind him. I reached instinctively out for that warm tingle of magic on my fingers. Then a shadow to my left, and my right and, when I dared to glance backwards, a shadow behind me, faces, figures emerging from the gloom. Guy Lee opened up his hands, whose cupped hollow started filling with a thick black smog; and he was grinning, utterly unafraid, as men and women emerged around us from the gloom. As they stepped into the pool of light, I saw the flash of a brightly coloured robe and the remains of the warlock’s face, empty, devoid of life.
I turned to Lee as the dead of the corridor I’d come down from, their bodies still dripping the last of their blood from their open wounds, filed into a circle around me. “Zombies,” we said, with open scorn in our voice. “How 1960s.”
“Not zombies. Zombies are too crude. These are…” Lee searched for the right word “… uniquely empowered.”
My gaze swerved back to the eyes of the warlock. They were not entirely empty, not quite; and his mouth, as it hung open, showed a piece of paper, the white just showing behind his teeth. Life, fuelled by words, shoved down his throat as he died; a spell in paper somewhere inside his chest, rumbling around the remains of his stomach.
“We won’t hesitate to kill them twice,” we said as the last of the bodies from the corridor stepped into the circle closing around us.
“Hard to kill dead things,” said Lee.
“You should know,” we answered, full of immediate purpose. “We set them free.”
And we reached out, grabbed a fistful of heat from the lantern on the floor, cupped it in the palms of our hands, and blew a tiny piece of life into them. The heat bloomed into blue flames between our fingers, rolled out across our hands and arms, billowed around us like a cloak as, with a wrench and a shove, we sent it spilling out between the dead monolith servers. It rolled across the floor and up the walls in a flash of bright blue fire that for a second illuminated the whole stretching expansive dome of the place, burning away every shadow and inch of skin that it touched, boiling the solder in its frames to bubbling, spitting silver bubbles and sweet smoke, blinding out every inch of darkness
except for
just a moment
caught in the flames…
I saw him, fingers outstretched to catch the surge of blue fire, chin tilted up and eyes wide as if trying to breathe my flames, face open and in an expression of absolute delight as the blue light seared around him.
Just for a moment, with the shadows that hid him burnt back and away,
I saw Hunger through the fire.
Then it went out.
Darkness all around.
I was on the floor, eyes running. I couldn’t see through Oda’s gas mask, the inside was steamed up and the outside cracked with heat. I tugged it off and instantly smelt the solder smoke and dead flesh, but no tear gas, not this far down. There was no sign of Lee. I scrambled on all fours across the floor until I found the warlock, lying on his back, blood now soaked through every inch of his clothes. I yanked his twitching jaw open while an arm hanging on by a thread of tendon tried to lift itself up and gouge at my eyes, I dug through the dry hollow of his mouth past his snapping teeth until I found the tip of the piece of paper and carefully, so as not to tear it, pulled it out through his open jaw. The black words written on it in spidery ink were almost illegible with saliva and blood. I saw:
I tore the paper into pieces and threw them away before looking down at the warlock who lay, entirely still, face empty, life utterly gone.
We felt movement behind us, and turned instinctively, snatching a fistful of light up through the air and hurling it at the shape of Guy Lee as he dropped down from on top of a server frame. He staggered back for a moment, throwing his hands up to cover his eyes as the whiteness flared off my fingers; but still he kept coming towards me. A foot staggering forward connected with our side, and we fell back, moving with the pain to try and avoid it, sprawling across the bloody remnants of the warlock. Then Lee’s hands were on the back of our head, pulling it up, an arm going round across our throat and squeezing with an almighty strength that we could only hope was unnatural. There was no breath from his mouth although it was an inch from our ear. With a shudder of horror we realised that he was going to break our neck before we suffocated, even though waves of static darkness were already flashing up and down in front of our vision like the confused black curtain of the final act.
His voice hissed without bothering to exhale, the sound little more than a whisper from the dead air already in his throat. “Robert wants you alive, he says. Bring Swift to me; don’t hurt him more than you must, keep him alive. But you know and I know” – a tug across our neck sent numbness through our limbs – “that of all the people in the world who Robert hates more than any other, he hates you, Matthew Swift, sorcerer, apprentice who betrayed his master. Even if Robert doesn’t know it himself. So what I have to ask is – why does Robert want you alive? What is it in your blue flames and unlikely resurrection that makes him so excited, seems to give him so much life, just in
We tightened our fingers around his arm where he held us, and brought blue burning to our skin, then pushed it down towards his flesh in a wave of searing heat until we could feel the bursting of his skin through his sleeve – even so he didn’t scream, but dug his teeth into the back of my neck hard enough to draw blood and pulled his arm harder across my throat. I whimpered, but we reached up behind ourself until our fingers touched his head and tilted his face up until our fingers brushed his teeth, pushing his jaw open and reaching down inside his mouth. He bit and I felt blood spill across my knuckles but we kept digging, ignoring the pain even as my world grew faint until, at the very back of his throat, past his teeth and the ridged palate of his mouth, into the soft tissues of the windpipe, our fingers touched a slim piece of paper, and pulled.
Now he screamed, and in that act gave us space to tighten our grip inside his mouth and pull the paper, and
