A Madness of Angels

“You… think this creature is connected to me. That’s why you’ve done all this?”

“Yes.”

“Why, because… because it looks a bit like me?” His voice was rising again, I could hear the tight edge in it as he struggled to keep it under control.

“Yes. And because it kills your enemies…”

“My enemies? I have no enemies!”

“The sorcerers who said ‘No’ to the Tower?”

“Do you really think I’d kill someone just because they couldn’t see a good thing when it happened to them? Do you really think I’d hurt you?”

I hesitated and for the first time that evening, reluctantly let myself think about it, the certainty draining away like blood from a corpse.

“I don’t know,” I answered finally. “I really don’t.”

“So on a hunch you’re attacking my friends?”

“I have… seen evidence.”

“Evidence? What kind of evidence?”

“Concerned citizens…”

“You’re being used.”

“Dead was dead was dead,” I replied. “No getting round that very personal fact.”

“And you blame me?”

“Yes.”

“Why? Because we argued?!”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe that my Matthew would be so stupid. But perhaps with the consciousness of an entity that is incapable of grasping more than its own flightiness…”

“This is my battle.”

“You’re just using the angels?”

“No.”

“Then how does it work?”

“We are also angry.”

“Why?”

“We… we…”

He looked at me and drummed his fingers impatiently on the armrest of his chair as we struggled to find the answer. “Well?” he spat finally. “You… things of little surplus electricity, you odd remnants of feeling, confused signals, what’s your anger about? You’ve been given a gift beyond the wildest comprehension – you are alive! You’ve been called out of the wires where you were nothing more than a conglomeration of sense, and been given your very own, pre-packaged body, memories, experiences and learning that is probably the only thing that stopped you going mad at the first realisation of sight, sound and senses all for yourself. You have all your power and you have the pleasure of being really alive with it, in perfect, three-dimensional, physically stable sorcerer form! Why should you be angry at such a thing?”

“We… are not… we are glad to have seen this world, to understand at last what it is that the thoughts in our signal meant when they described ‘yellow’ or ‘pink’, to hear sounds as more than a flash of mathematics across our wings when we were travelling in the telephones. But we are not ourself any more. We were free. This world leaves you no capacity for what we were, and … in coming here, we have gained perceptions and… instincts… that we could never before conceive of. But we have lost everything. Everything. We were the blue electric angels, we could be in a thousand places at once and still be whole, we could bounce off the moon for sport and skim the sum total of the world’s knowledge in an instant, ride the signal from America to Zimbabwe without even travelling, the world moving around us, we flew on radio waves three times round the earth and knew every inch of atmosphere that we touched as we went by. We were gods. Now we are just… mortal.”

He nodded slowly. “I see. You really are just a child in this place, aren’t you?”

We didn’t answer.

“A child with a lot of power,” he added, in a reproving voice. “There’s an irony there.”

“How so?”

“When I asked Matthew to help me summon you, he refused. Now that he is you and you are him – a complicated relationship, I’ll grant you – surely he can see the irony.”

“The thought had crossed my mind.”

“Well? Now you know what the angels are like, do you still begrudge me my desire to know them better?”

I thought about it. “Yes,” I said.

“Why?!” He nearly laughed on the word.

“I think… it boils down to intent.”

“That isn’t an argument the judge would respect.”

“You’re going to sue me?”

“Don’t be so shallow.”

“I don’t have a permanent address to send the order to.”

“You vanished for two years!”

“And now you know where I was.”

“No, not entirely.”

“I think you can guess.”

“Guess at what? You say you were killed – now that is something I find hard to get my head round, not least since I taught you so well never to dabble with necromancy; and you don’t look like a man suffering from the skin complaints of the average animated corpse.”

“I’m not particularly inclined to tell you the details, to be honest.”

“Then you’re not really giving me a chance, are you?”

“A chance?”

“Are you here for any better reason?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you know why you’re here at all?”

“You invited me.”

“Yes – because you were my apprentice. What’s your reason?”

“I think… I wanted to be absolutely sure.”

“About what?”

“Whether you were as I remembered.”

“And am I?”

“I don’t know.”

“You seem confused.”

“It’s very complicated. Can I… I just want to ask something. I think it might be why I came, in fact.”

“Ask away.”

“Do you really not know that the shadow has your face?”

He met our eyes squarely. “Matthew – or whatever you’d like to be called now – I have no idea what you are talking about.”

We tried to read some sort of truth in him and, for a second, I desperately, desperately wanted to believe it, to say I was sorry and that I’d never do it again and I hoped he could understand and forgive me and we could explain everything and it would all go back to how it was and…

… never going to be how it was…

wouldn’t that mean Lee and Khay were dead for nothing?

… a lorry of bodies…

we simply didn’t know.

I stood up quickly. “Sorry,” I said, not knowing why. “I’m sorry.” I stepped round him quickly and headed for