A Madness of Angels: Or the Resurrection of Matthew Swift (66 page)

 

I heard the cracking of metal and saw that Blackjack had crawled away from his bike. He had a chain in his hand, which was lashing out towards Dana’s face; but she ducked, and hurled tall funnels of water at him. They spattered his face, then knocked him off his feet, and bowled him backwards like they were ocean waves breaking from a storm. The tendrils of her spell, winding around her and back through the doorway to the stairwell, led from where the taps were still running, some floors above.

 

Above me, meanwhile, the dragon raised a paw. Its palm, ready to smash down on my head, was a blackened “STOP” sign, graffitoed over in big green letters by some wag with the comment “Caliper Boy SMELLS”. I dropped instinctively to one knee, raising my hands above my head, and, from under this metallic death, in the second before the lights went out I shouted, “Lord lead us!”

 

The paw hesitated, hovering a few inches above my head, so wide that I couldn’t see the ceiling above it.

 

Somewhere on the foyer floor, I heard a hacking and spluttering as Blackjack tried to spit water out of his lungs; and the sloshing of Dana preparing another twist to her spell.

 

The paw trembled in the air above me.

 

“
Domine dirige nos!
” I repeated, shouting the words up at it. “Lord lead us! Lord lead us!”

 

The paw drifted to one side. A pair of camera-lens eyes stared down at us.

 

“You are the dragon that guarded the city of London,” we whispered frantically. “We recognise you, we know you; you are the dragon on all the old gates at the city walls, you are the symbol of the old part of the city;
Domine dirige nos
is your motto: Lord lead us; we know you…”

 

A rumbling sound from somewhere inside the monster like the passing of a distant train.

 

“No!” The voice came from the shadows, where Hunger emerged. “No! I summoned you. Obey
me
!”

 

“Lord lead us,” I whispered again. “We know you; Lord lead us. ‘The city of London shall have all its ancient liberties and free customs, as well by land as by water; furthermore, we decree…’”

 

“I summoned you!” shrieked Hunger. “You are mine! I summoned you out of the city; you will…”

 

“‘…know that I have granted to my citizens of London for themselves and their heirs, the citizens may appoint as sheriff whomever they want from among themselves and as judge whomever they want from among themselves to take charge please of the crown and supervise their conduct; no one else shall be judge over the men of London…’”

 

“They are the blue electric angels, they do not know these laws!” shrieked Hunger.

 

“You are the dragon of the city of London,” I whispered. “Listen to me! I’m from this city, I know its laws, I know what makes it alive, I understand it.
Domine dirige nos
; I know your history, I understand
how
the shadow summoned you, but you don’t have to listen, I know the history, duty, humility, laws, time…”

 

“No!”

 

The scream came from somewhere other than the shadows. I looked round and saw that the shadow had moved; he now stood behind Dana, one black arm across her throat, claws pressed against-her eyelids, his eyes burning. “Stop it, sorcerer,” he muttered, and then, in a voice that wasn’t quite his, not quite, “Stop it, Matthew.”

 

I stayed absolutely still, while the dragon coiled back in on itself, watching with empty eyes. “You know the Magna Carta, you know the rights of the city; you may even know how to unsummon an urban dragon,” not Hunger’s voice, coming from Hunger’s mouth, “but if you push me, I
will
kill her!”

 

Blackjack was on his knees, throwing up water through his nose and mouth. Dana’s trailing spirals of tap water were now flooding pools splashed across the floor, her eyes shut and breath coming in-little wheezes as Hunger held her close to his frozen skin. “I kept-her-alive for this,” he whispered. “Just like my sister. I kept her alive.”

 

I started forward, but his fingers pressed harder into her face, pushing the blood out of it. Hunger grinned. “Where’s Matthew’s fire now?”

 

“You didn’t know I’d come back!”

 

“But I never found a body either,” he replied. “And the angels always loved to talk to you. Come be me, they said, and be free, and you’ve always wanted to be free, Matthew. You’ve always dreamed of turning yourself into dancing blue fire and spinning across the sky, you’ve always wanted to be a rumble on the wind, a dancer in the clouds; what creature of flesh would want less? The chance to fly and be free, to forget the poor, constructed laws of humanity, the pain, the fear, the feeling, the ageing, the dying. The angels have always loved you, because you’ve loved them, you’ve always wanted their message to be real, you’ve always wanted to be fire and light and life and now that you are… you will not share. So I kept her alive, and maybe, just maybe, the sorcerer has enough control over the angels to not let her die?”

 

“Robert…” I began.

 

“I am Hunger!” he screamed. “I am not bound by the laws of flesh! I am hungry! You are so alive when you burn – I will have that life!”

 

The dragon’s tail twitched, scraping along the floor.

 

“We can’t…” we whimpered. “Please… I…”

 

“Which one? Which one can’t? Which one can’t bear it if she is dead?”

 

“We are…” we stuttered.

 

“… almost…” I began.

 

“… the same.”

 

“Please,” we said.

 

“Please…” I added.

 

Then Hunger grinned. “I will understand these things when I am alive again,” he said, and raised one fist of black claws towards Dana’s face.

 

We screamed.

 

The bloody cross within a cross that we had drawn on the floor at our feet caught fire. The fire was bright blue flashing sparks that wriggled and writhed by themselves.

 

And because we didn’t know what to do, couldn’t cope

 

not this

 

my feelings

 

such feelings

 

not this

 

because we couldn’t understand

 

           this feeling

 

                      too much

 

                                 –because we couldn’t

 

                                            I couldn’t-–

 

 

we screamed

 

“
Domine dirige nos!
Domine dirige nos!”

 

And the dragon of broken and disobeyed signs was, in the end, an urban creature, summoned out of the city itself; and the city’s dragon, the lord of the city’s gates, did so very much like to lead, and be obeyed, and have its own rules that could, so rumour went, stop the king or queen entering the city, if it was felt that Londoners didn’t need them inside their walls. Hunger had told me the key himself: time, law, humility, a recognition that in the eyes of the city, we were nothing, and the dragon was the lord.

 

Without a moment’s hesitation, it swiped its tail in an easy gesture that took the head off Hunger where he stood, slashing it from his shoulders with a single razored edge of broken signpost.

 

Hunger disintegrated into nothing, black wisps of darkness crawling away into the corners of the room, where they melded into the shadows.

 

We looked at the dragon, it looked at us, as the blue fire of our blood gently retreated back down to dull redness. Then, without a sound, it started to melt. Scales of reflective plastic drifted off its skin, in flashes of bright white, yellow and red. The traceries of a thirty-mile-an-hour warning sign, the remnants of a school crossing notice, part of a placard welcoming you to a council estate, a shard of post office notice, a chipped blue piece of a notable’s plaque, a warning about temporary lights. They slipped off it like seeds from a dandelion as the spell that had sustained it slowly disintegrated.

 

Last of all, flopping to the ground with a single dull thunk, was a small rounded piece of stone that rolled towards our feet. We picked it up. Its edges were smooth and surface warm; it felt old in our hands. On one side were the words:

 

n this day in 167

 

derman of the city

 

in honour o

 

Domine dirig

 

and that was all.

 

“Matthew?”

 

I turned to look at Dana, who, without a sound, slipped to the floorin a rapidly growing circle of her own blood.

 

 

We dragged our nails into our hand to draw blood, and put all our strength and heat and warmth into it until it burned so brightly that the walls were blazing blue. We rubbed it into her wounds but she didn’t speak, didn’t stir.

 

We screamed for help, shook her, shouted her name, pressed the heat of our flesh into her cold skin, pressed our hands as hard as we could into the gashes in her chest and neck but the blood just seeped out around our fingers and mingled with our own until we couldn’t tell what was ours and what was hers and the burning of ours was muted in the medley.

 

I couldn’t

 

not Dana

 

I couldn’t

 

so we had to. We held her in our arms, and every joint seemed to have just broken, every limb hanging so heavy, we were amazed she had been able to lift them, even her fingers were so heavy when we tangled them in ours, and because I knew and couldn’t cope, we screamed.

 

We screamed until the glass that had shattered on the floor danced again with our voice, until the wires under the floor grew up like ivy through soil and tangled themselves around every railing and buried themselves in every wall, until the foundations warped and the ceiling shook, until the electricity danced around us in a tornado, until the gas pipes burnt inside their casings and the water pipes burst in geysers around our head, erupting towards the ceiling and boiling away in clouds of billowing steam. We screamed until the fire extinguishers burst, until plastic melted, until the thinnest wires started to melt and drip with their own heat, until our voice wasn’t human, but the roar of the traffic and the screech of brakes and rattle of engines and rumble of an underground wind and

 

come be we

 

and until our hair danced with electric flame and our breath was black carbon on the air in front of us, bursting through our nostrils, and our fingers had the metallic gleam of a penknife and our heart raced in time to the
dedumdedumdedum
of the speeding train racing across old tracks deep in the earth and the rats clustered in the gutters and the pigeons scattered to the sky and, all around us, every telephone started to ring.

 

If we had known how, that would have been when we crawled back into the telephones.

 

We would have forgotten that moment, would have said goodbye to being human, if this was what it was like. I’d have done it in an instant, if I’d known how. But we’d burnt out the telephones around us, and the lights in the street, so we sat and rocked the body of Dana Mikeda, and whispered the dead sounds that people make at corpses, like the soothing words of a mother to her baby, telling them it’ll be all right, after all.

 

 

We became conscious of Blackjack’s wheezing by slow degrees. We looked up. Part of his leg was open and torn, and one arm hung oddly, but he was still alive, for what it was worth. His jacket had been slashed to ribbons and under it I could see the bare flesh of his infected veins. He had found his bag crushed under the remains of his bike and from it, pulled a gun, which he pointed at us. We felt…

 

… not quite nothing…

 

He found it hard to speak, but we weren’t going anywhere.

 

“You…” he began, then spat blood and a piece of tooth, and tried again. “You… knew I was the traitor.”

 

We said nothing.

 

“Used me!” he rasped. “Used me to find Bakker, find her. Knew I’d betray, knew you had to be alive. They followed… you were followed… so that the others could come here, destroy the Tower.”

 

Still we said nothing. There wasn’t anything that seemed to need saying.

 

“Used me,” he repeated, nodding a quick, frantic nod. “Respected that, sorcerer. Respected it.” He flicked back the safety on the gun. “I’m dying,” he said.

 

Nothing.

 

“Blood curse. I swore and I betrayed. Knew it’d happen. Knew I’d die when I swore. Gotta be done. Gotta… gotta keep moving … gotta… find speed… enough… it’s gotta be real. Life has to be lived on the edge, you have to see how it ends, to know that you’re living it. I was so fast… you gotta be different, you know? To know you’re alive? The whole clan they fucking said… gotta fight the Tower. Gotta work as one. Gotta work with others, say the right fucking thing, walk the right fucking walk, talk the right… you gotta bleed and burn and die and do what is right, because that’s what’s expected. You gotta do right. Because that’s what a normal guy is meant to do. I ain’t never going to be that normal guy. I ain’t never going to be what they told me to be. When the shadow killed the head of my clan… he set us free. Do you understand, Matthew? The chaos? The speed? Do you understand being free? It’s… it’s all about… it’s… no one tells me who I’m going to be. No one.”

 

We said nothing.

 

He levelled the gun. “Don’t you want to hear the rest?”

 

We thought about it. We shook our head.

 

He closed his finger over the trigger.

 

There was a single, sharp gunshot. Then another. It echoed across the flooded, shattered debris of the room. Blackjack staggered forward, the curse-ridden, battered remnant of his body barely able to support even that movement, then slid into a puddle on the floor.

 

From the stairwell, Vera said, “Psycho-bitch can shoot, can’t she?”

 

We heard the clicking of a rifle, and footsteps coming towards us. We looked up. Oda looked back at us, behind her Vera, and behind that, a dozen or so Whites stinking of various destructive magics.

 

Oda said, “You look shit. Need a hand?”

 

We thought about it. Then we nodded, took hold of the hand that she offered us, and let her pull us back onto our feet, carefully laying down the body of Dana Mikeda on the floor behind us as we did.