The Midnight Mayor

her eyes with hands dirtier than her face: instinct, not practicality.

We turned sharply to her. “If the Order raids it, when this is done, if they attack the hospital, if they dare go after the healers, we swear, we swear we will bring you and them down.”

She just smiled. “Right,” she said. “More magic.”

“Sure, because black cabs just happen to drive into magical war zones on a regular basis,” I snapped.

“I am serene, am I not?”

“Getting used to it?”

Her face darkened, but she said nothing. The head of our driver was just a black outline peeking out from behind the slab of his headrest, lit up only by the reflected glow of his headlights and the dull red illumination from the tariff metre. I looked across at Oda and said, “You carry much cash?”

“No. Why?”

“Cab rides are always expensive.”

Especially this one.

“You’re worried about the fare?”

“I thought you’d be pleased with me. A good, noble, avoiding-whichever-sin-it-is sentiment.”

“He sees your heart, not your smile,” she intoned.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that twenty quid slipped to a cabby can’t redeem your soul.”

“That’s a ‘no’ on the fare, then?”

“Yes, that’s a no.”

“Fine.” I turned away, and our eyes passed over Kemsley. He was leaning forward against his seat belt and wheezing. I could see the veins pumping through the remnants of the skin on his neck, jerking in and out like some obscene production line in a food factory, filling with thick blue blood and then deflating to a bruised tube among the ruined mess of his skin. We looked away. Outside, the smog seemed to be lifting, streetlights flashing between the sickly mist, reflected orange stains moving from back to front across the ceiling of the cab, too fast and too erratic to pick out any shapes or shadows. I thought about Anissina. I slipped my hand into my jacket pocket for Nair’s phone, thumbed through the address file, found her right near the top, dialled.

“Who are you—” began Oda.

“Anissina.”

“Why?”

“She might still be lost.”

“We can’t do anything for her, even if it should be done,” replied Oda primly. “She falls or she fights. That’s how it is.”

A phone rang on the other end of the line, and kept on ringing. There was no reply. It went to answerphone. We hung up. We knew better than to leave our voice floating as electricity in the wire. Outside the window, the smog was almost entirely gone, just a few loose traceries being washed away by falling rain, that slipped sideways like tiny transparent snakes across the taxi’s window. I could see flashes of houses, but that’s all they were — shadows that came and went in some impossible, too-far-off distance, perspective playing tricks, architecture playing tricks as terraced house melted into flashy apartment melted into rickety shed melted into bungalow. It gave us a headache to look at it, would have set an epileptic screaming. Oda had noticed too, a warning was in her voice: “Sorcerer?”

“Don’t look too hard.”

“What is this?”

“It’s the Black Cab. It goes anywhere.”

“Does it take the North Circular?”

“Oda! That almost sounded like desert-dry humour.”

“It wasn’t.”

“It doesn’t take the North Circular. If Einstein had seen how the Black Cab moved, he’d have given up physics and gone back to playing the trombone.”

“Einstein played the trombone?”

“I don’t know. But it would fit the hairstyle.”

I had the sense we were picking up speed. I risked glancing out of the window. Signs drifted by, seemed to hang in gloomy nothing, pointing at nothing, suspended in nothing, just floating by in the darkness outside, lit up by no source I could see. The road was nothing but a black shimmer beneath us, defined only by the painted-on markings that lit up blinding yellow and white as we skimmed over them. In the distance, I could see neon signs drifting by like a lit-up ship far out to sea, promising plays, shopping, films, long hours and cheap prices. A billboard drifted by too slow for the speed our wheels were spinning at, the long eyelashes of a perfume-soaked model blinking at us from the pale paper; a single pedestrian, hat drawn down across his eyes, every inch of him as dark as shadow, without variety in texture or tone, vanished round an unseen corner, not once looking up. We felt suddenly tired, sad and alone. A blazing billboard advertised a car whose engine revved inside the hoarding’s plywood frame; it floated up overhead, drifted above the roof of the taxi and set down on the other side. A great fat rat, larger than any urban fox, looked up from where it was chewing a grey-green soaking hamburger, and blinked a pair of bright red eyes at us as we drove by. A short road of bright pink streetlamps flashed, came, went; a lorry, as tall as a house, driver lost in the soot-black, burnt-black darkness of his roaring vehicle, streaked by outside, horn blazing: a sheet of spray containing more than its fair share of goldfish and flapping river eels slapped over the cab. A pair of headlights flashed for a second, then vanished; a pair of pulsing yellow bulbs declared a zebra crossing, on which a zebra grazed, its skin carved from curved aluminium, its legs glued together out of old toilet rolls. It chewed on spilt chicken tikka with a patient gnaw and watched us as we sped on.

Oda whispered, “Obscene. Damnation. Obscene.”

We replied, “Beautiful. Just beautiful.”

She stared at us in horror. “How can you pretend to be human, and not be afraid?”

“It is beautiful,” we replied. “You’ve just got to look at it right. Of all the things, the frightening and inexplicable things, the terrifying and the chaotic and the uncontrolled, you just had to pick on magic to fear and hate, in that order and in equal measure.”

“Don’t think you know me, sorcerer.”

“Is there anything more to know?”

That seemed to silence her. We were almost surprised, and felt again a thing, strange and hollow, that might have been sadness. The beat of Kemsley’s blood, pushing and falling against the protruding pipe of his veins, was slowing. There was no point pretending it was our imagination; that just made it worse. No point asking the driver to go faster. If Einstein couldn’t work out how the Black Cab moved, we certainly couldn’t; and besides, back-seat drivers just made the fare steeper when the cab stopped.

One problem at a time.

“Oda,” I said carefully, “when we get to where we’re going, we’ll have to pay a fare. It’ll be . . . more than money. It may be . . . almost anything. Don’t argue. Don’t shout, don’t haggle. And, for the sake of all that’s merciful, don’t try and shoot anything.”

“Why more than money?”

“The Black Cab can go anywhere. I mean . . . anywhere. Get your mind outside the boring three-dimensional trivialities of geography and you still haven’t come to terms with it. We’re not going there. Humans can’t abide ‘anywhere’; they . . . we are built for very specific environments. It is only natural that the fares are steep.”

“Sorcerer?”

I sighed. “Yes?”

“The man in the suit. He’s not human.”

“No.”

“He bleeds paper.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. There are constructs that can bleed things other than blood, but I’ve never seen one looking so ordinary as him. And he’s clearly not ordinary. Not human, not ordinary, mortal. His suit was part of his flesh; he