keep pulling, falling forward even as his grip relaxed, tumbling head over heel but keeping hold of that paper, and it kept coming, rolled up in a tight tube, half a metre of it, a metre unravelling in my hands, with words illegible from blood and spit on both sides in tiny, tiny lines running from edge to edge; a metre and a half of bloody, stained inky paper that I pulled up from the back of his throat. It flopped around me like wet bandaging, rotten in places, stained with what chemicals I didn’t want to know; and as the end came out of Guy Lee’s mouth, he collapsed backwards, face empty, colour gone, eyes lifeless, and twitched no more.
I fell onto my back next to him, letting the endless sprawl of paper fall at my side. There, without further ado, it hissed at the edges, blackened, curled and crumbled to ash. I lay and wheezed while we brushed our hands unconsciously against our side, trying to rub off the spit and blood and ink and feel of his teeth on our skin, and the touch on us of the paper and its black magic. I was too numb even to cry.
I knew now what Sinclair hadn’t known: that Guy Lee was animated by a metre and a half of crabbed written commands made up of ink and paper. He had been kept alive by magic alone, unable to feel, whether emotion or touch, unless it was so inscribed on the paper in his chest. Not quite a zombie; perhaps just… uniquely empowered. Empowered enough to crave life and wonder what was in our blood that could give it.
There was a dull slapping noise in the darkness. After a while I realised it was clapping. I sat up, taking my time about dangerous things like breathing, and looked into the darkness. A darker patch of shadow stood just outside the circle of lamplight, white hands visible only because they moved, beating out a regular applause.
I staggered up and retreated closer to the lantern, keeping my eyes fixed on that shadow. The clapping stopped. A voice said, “Was that Matthew, or Matthew’s fire, that cried? I really couldn’t tell.”
“Didn’t cry,” I rejoined. “You wouldn’t understand.”
The swirl of darkness drifted nearer, acquired a face, withered and white and pale and smiling and indescribably, sickly,
He knelt down by the body of Guy Lee, and scooped up a handful of black papery ash. Smiling at me, watching my reaction, he ate it. Then scooped up another handful, and another, and another, until the ash of the paper was just a thin black stain on the floor, and ate them all down. He stood up with a sigh and a shudder and tilted his head upwards, as if sniffing the air.
“The taste of life… is this it?” he asked, licking black flakes off his lips with a grey tongue.
“No,” I said.
“I’ve tried water, food, fire, blood, flesh, skin, hair, bone, organ, breath – I’ve tasted them all. I was wondering where he hid his life; it was something hard to fathom, or perceive,” prodding Lee with a toe, “but now I’ve tasted it, it seems … unsatisfying. A drop of water on my thirst, a corner filled in my stomach, but my appetite still… desiring. Still hungry.”
“I don’t think you’d like me,” I said. “My diet is unhealthy.”
“It’s not your blood I desire,” whispered Hunger, moving closer to me, sticking a cautious toe into the light. He drew it back quickly, like a swimmer testing water, surprised to find it so cold. “Just your fire.”
“Can I offer a theory?”
The figure of Hunger gestured dismissively.
“I’m going to suggest that Robert James Bakker sent you here.”
“‘Sent’? Do you think you can apply your little ideas to me?”
“Perhaps ‘sent’ was a mistake,” I conceded, rubbing my burning throat. “Maybe… influenced your desire to come here. You do desire, don’t you? Deep down you want more than you can ever say. You don’t know entirely what it is you want, but you want it now. Perhaps it’s not just your inclination for blood and ash that’s got you here; maybe it’s his?”
For a moment, Hunger almost looked confused. Then he shook his head. “No,” he whispered. “A human can’t… a creature of blood and skin and senses… wouldn’t understand.”
“We do.”
A grin of sharp grey teeth. “Yes,” he whispered. “But you aren’t human any more. Is that why you couldn’t cry, little sorcerer? Won’t you burn out your lovely blue eyes?”
“I’m a little confused,” I said, crawling back onto my feet and straightening my back to face him.
“Shall I be the one to give you enlightenment, or do you simply not want to understand?”
“We understand,” we said, opening our fingers at our side, stretching them out to catch the feeling of that place, one last time, pulling in the blue fire ready to burn. “But it doesn’t mean we have to feel sorry for you.”
He opened his fingers, a second before we could – he’d seen the attack coming and he loved it, opened his mouth and breathed in the magic around us, sucked it down like air. He raised his arms, and all the darkness moved up with him, stretching arms across the ceiling, drawing out the length of his form behind him in a wing of blackness; and from his fingers came nothing but dark, was nothing but dark, a living burning fire of it rushing forth and popping out the light of the lantern, swimming towards me in a tide that sucked the colour from the servers, the light from the wires, the heat from the frames, and left nothing but dry grey frost in its wake.
We saw all this and, for a moment, it made perfect sense to us, and we didn’t need a sorcerer’s tricks to match this darkness, just the fire inside that made us bright.
We opened our fingers, and let it blaze. The blue fire burst across our flesh and rippled up our arms, rolled over our face and set our hair blazing, we breathed in and it rushed up through our nose and down our throat, filling our lungs and stomach and passing across them into the blood, setting the arteries under our skin exploding with bright blueness, filling the blood vessels in our eyes with its flame until all we saw was the blue of it; we let the fire run through our clothes and spread out from our fingers and it didn’t burn, that wasn’t what was needed; it simply blazed. We put all our strength, our anger, our fears, our senses into it and pushed the flames out of us in a blue rippling wall of power that slammed into the tide of darkness, like two glaciers made of silk charging into each other, a silent swish of force that nearly sent us off our feet, and for a moment
just a moment
Hunger was afraid.
Then the fire started to burn. There was no controlling it, not once it was locked into opposition with that wall of moving shadows. It started at the edges, where it rippled against the encroaching tide of blackness, solder starting to smoke and boil, plastic beginning to drip and melt, frames glowing an eerie purple as the redness of the metal was lost somewhere behind the blueness of our perceptions. We could feel the rising heat start to run across our skin and the pain of it start up in our blood, but we kept burning
my blood
because to stop was to let that darkness suffocate us, tear us in two, and in its own strange way the burning was beautiful
and we didn’t mind the pain because it was sense, a pounding demand for attention, a physical awareness that was interesting as much in its intensity as its symptoms – what was it about the rising redness of our skin and the smoking of our clothes and the bleeding of our ears that caused this thing we thought of as pain,
my blood on fire my skin burning
For a moment
I forgot that I was Matthew Swift. And I looked up through my blue eyes and saw the creature that I called Hunger, and recognised in it a power not entirely unlike myself, and I was nothing more than a creature of the wires. We were me, and I was the blue electric angel, and nothing more, and nothing less.
Through the walls of competing power, I met Hunger’s pale, drained eyes, and saw him blink.
The spells broke – his and ours, they snapped almost simultaneously. The tide of darkness rolled back in on itself then broke forward, slamming into the wall of fire we had raised against its progress and in that instant neither of us could control the scale of magic that we’d thrown against each other, nothing could keep it controlled or in that place. The shock of the two spells meeting, tearing, breaking loose, picked us up off our feet and threw us backwards; it illuminated the entire room, every distant wall, and its endless cobweb of trailing dead cable, with a flash of light so blue and so bright that when we closed our eyes all we could see on the back of our eyelids was the dazzling glare of a clean winter sky. The combined, uncontrolled magic ripped through the body of Guy Lee and burnt it down to dust in a second, tore apart every inch of the reanimated paper servants he had summoned down
