A Madness of Angels

“Tell me about the paper.”

I mumbled incoherent throwaway noises through a mouthful of salami and chewed more slowly.

“How does paper keep someone alive?”

There was a neediness to her voice; so, resignedly, I swallowed, put the rest of the roll to one side, folded my arms and said, “What do you want to know?”

“Paper. Explain to me about the paper.”

“It’s nothing too special.”

“Then it won’t tax you too much to tell me about it.”

“There is a history of… people trying to stay alive under unusual circumstances. In the good, old-fashioned days, magicians would pluck out their own heart and encase it in a lead chest dropped at the bottom of a well where no one could ever find it, thus gaining a degree of invulnerability – hard to kill someone when you can’t stop their heart beating. Problem with that, of course, is that if you become too hard to kill, too invulnerable, then all the other bugger need do is cut off your arms, head and legs, scatter them in twenty different places, chained to a rock, and there you are, still alive, head on a spike in Newcastle, scrabbling arms chained to a wall in Cardiff, and heart still beating, senses still functioning, still alive, still not dead; just in pain. You can be too safe, you see – and what’s the point of being alive unless there is a progress, a journey, and somewhere, at some point, an end? What else other than that motivation makes us really live, the sense that this is a chance we must use, and now? Think of the laziness of immortality – so easy to say ‘tomorrow’ for ever.”

“I was hoping for a technical explanation; thank you anyway.”

“I’m telling it to you as…”

“As what?”

“As it was told to me.”

She grunted, but said nothing more.

I wiped my mouth with my sleeve and tried again. “Necromancers go other ways – traditional magics that will never lose their validity, I fear – blood of the newborn babe, or even better, placentas, transplants from blessed vessels of Godly might, vampirism, reanimation, possession and so on and so forth. The modern medical era has made it easier; you’d be amazed how useful the MRI scanner has been to necromancers. But it is a messy business, unhygienic, usually defined by bad complexions, spots and rapid hair loss; and besides, it causes a lot of attention and provides little gain. Dead is dead is dead; even if it’s walking and talking, the flesh decays – nothing yet, that I know of, can stop time.”

“You know a lot about this.”

“I was well taught.”

“Bakker?”

“Yes. Why do you think he hasn’t tried any of these things? He is desperate to stay alive, determined to survive at any cost – but he understands that life, real life, is much more than just survival in dead bones. He wants to live in every way. He wouldn’t try necromancy.”

“But Lee did?”

“Sort of. A different kind of ripping out of the heart, you might say. The magician writes on a piece of paper certain incantations, a few spells of a kind that usually are old enough and vague enough, that have been through endless mistranslations, to carry consequences, and to that adds a few compulsions. To the servants of the magician, usually there’s a clause in there to obey and serve, to never wither until he commands, to feel no pain unless in failure. But when a magician does it to himself, swallows that paper with those enchantments, the words are usually… aspirations.”

“Aspirations?”

“Things like, ‘I am a good man’, or ‘I will never age’ or ‘My favourite colour is blue’ or ‘I will be for ever powerful’ or ‘I will not sleep’ or…”

“Why?”

“Because you die when you eat the paper,” I explained, surprised at the sharpness of her voice. “You choke on it, you have to swallow it whole and it kills you, invariably; it’s part of the deal. That’s why it’s magic – at that instant, the paper absorbs your death, your… well, I suppose, life – it absorbs your dying breath and that gives it life, the words on the paper define who you are from that instant onwards; define everything about you. You’re not technically dead, because there’s still your life inside your body. But unlike a heart in a box you can die if the paper is removed; the spell is broken, it is a guarantee against extreme eternal agony, and at the same time…”

“A form of invulnerability?”

“Close.”

“But… when you fought Guy Lee, you hurt him?”

“No. I hurt his flesh – he felt nothing. There was no pain in him until I actually pulled the paper out of his throat; the spell probably went with an ‘I will feel no pain’ clause – it’s fairly standard.”

“What happened when you pulled it out?”

“Imagine having a metre and a half of rolled-up paper stuffed down your throat and suddenly becoming aware of it,” I answered. “Then guess.”

She nodded slowly, eyes elsewhere. Finally she said, “What about… the others. The dead with the paper…”

“A basic command. I’m guessing that the warlock I met wasn’t dead when Lee found him, merely dying, and that Lee pushed a simple spell of obedience down his throat when he died, catching his last breath in its snare, trapping it in his lungs. Not alive, not dead, just… bound. The magic of a dying breath is a powerful thing.”

“Even today?”

“Even today. Christ,” I muttered, “what do you think? Life is magic! Where there is life there is magic! Sure, the magic is in the city, in the street, in the neon lamp and the coughing pigeon and the stray cat and the sewers and the cars and the smell of dirt; that’s something new – but life really hasn’t changed so much. Certain things – blood, skin, breath, words, paper, ink – will always have their own very special power, one which I don’t think will ever really change.”

She thought about it, then nodded again. In a voice that wasn’t entirely there, her eyes fixed on some distant, other place, she said, “Is that why Bakker wants you alive?”

“What makes you think…”

“I found one of Lee’s men. I asked him things.”

“You…”

“I asked him things,” she repeated firmly, eyes flashing bright and angry towards me. “That’s all. He said they were under orders not to harm the sorcerer.”

I shrugged.

“You don’t seem surprised.”

“Not really.”

“Why?”

“Oda, you know why Bakker and I argued.”

“He wanted you to help him summon the blue electric angels and you said no.”

“He wanted me to summon us, so that he could feed off our power, off our life, use it to sustain him. He wanted to force us from the telephone, get us into the world of flesh where we would be vulnerable so he could steal our essence – we are creatures of left-over life, creations of surplus feeling whispered into electric energy – to his eyes, we are the answer to his problem. He desires life and we are all that he desires. And here we are, trapped in this skin, vulnerable, just like he always wanted.”

“I see.”

“Would you betray us?”

“Me?”

“It is always a fear.”

She made no answer.

“We… do not know who we should trust. When we were in the blue, there was no need for ‘friend’. We were all the same, our thoughts burnt off each other with static fire, we were one, never alone. Here, things are different.”