The Minority Council (38 page)

When they were done, Templeman came over to me. The four others moved to the shadows at the edge of the track.

“We all set?” Instinctively, I glanced towards the scrapyard, where the metal yellow claws that crushed the life out of cars beyond their time sat, bent down like giraffe necks.

“As we can be.”

“How long does your pet take to come?”

“Not long. In its resting state it doesn’t exist so much in a physical form, as a place where physical form might be. Therefore when travelling to a new target, it can remain
largely unencumbered by the basic laws of physics until the final moment before its arrival.”

“Out of interest, how much did you pay Alan for this thing?”

“Grand and a half.”

I stared at him. “A grand and a half? For a creature that puts Isaac Newton through the wringer, a grand and a half?!”

He gave what might have been a shrug. “Alan is seventeen. We could have paid him a hundred pounds and for him it would have felt like a victory.”

“What did you do before you were an Alderman?” I asked.

“I was a tax adviser. I still am a tax adviser, in fact. The stipend as an Alderman is very small. Why?”

“It makes a sort of sense. How’d you get involved in the Aldermen?”

He gave an almost imperceptible sigh. “My brother… became involved in regrettable forces. He was unlucky in the job market, and not academically successful, but he always had an ear for the city, a sense for it that I did not share. He fell in with warlocks, bondsmen of the Regent, a spirit with a less than salubrious reputation who draws his power from the waterways. Like so many young men who try to dabble too fast with forces beyond their comprehension, he made mistakes, and enemies. He drowned, in the end, his lungs full of dirty canal water, though there was no canal nearby where his body was discovered, and no water on his skin or clothes. I suppose you could say I became involved in this world to understand why.”

“You tried to save him?”

“No, it was too late. Much too late. I suppose you could
say I tried to save him at the time, before I really understood what was happening. But he didn’t want to be saved. And I couldn’t do it, even if I’d known how.”

I had nothing to say. We stood together and listened to the wind picking up speed down the open tracks of the railway line.

Templeman said, “May I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“If you could give it up, walk away from this position, from being Midnight Mayor, right now, with no price to pay, would you do it?”

Down the empty railway, the lights were burning red, warning trains that weren’t there to beware of dangers on the line. I said, “If you’d asked me a few months ago, yes. I’d have said yes without hesitation. I never wanted this. Never asked, never was asked. I’m not very good at it, and there are plenty out there who want it more; Christ knows why, because it’s a lousy job.”

“And now?”

“Now… now I’d say that I’d want a serious consult about who got the job after. It’s not about the power, it’s about… what the power does to you, I guess. It’s the same thing that sends sorcerers mad. Spend enough time concentrating on the big picture and, sooner or later, you’ll forget about being human.”

Templeman was about to speak, then changed his mind. I heard a scampering and looked up; but it was just a fox, picking its way over the ballast of the tracks. Its head snapped round and, for a moment, with its tail straight out behind it and its ears high, swivelling like radar dishes, its eyes met ours. Then it looked away and trotted under the sleeping bulk of an empty freight truck.

The truck itself was little more than a metal platform on wheels that had been shunted away from the mainline tracks. It was part of a chain of pallets locked together, such as you saw sometimes in the urban night, rolling through empty stations of the suburbs for minutes at a time. The rolling stock making up this train included the usual unknown things: metal containers with bolted doors, drums for oil, open wagons for scrap, and empty double-deckered modules, for brand-new cars on their way to the dealer.

One shape in all the rest, I couldn’t make out. It was crumpled, lumpen, and sprawled wider than the pallet that held it, all corners and curves. The only light that fell on it was thin and diluted, making it little more than a silhouette. How long had it been there? Had I looked and not seen?

I stepped down onto the railway track, pulling a sphere of fluorescent white light with me to cover my way. Templeman moved to follow; I motioned him to stay. Juggling my bubble of light above my head to cast a circle of illumination, I edged towards the darkness of the goods train.

Thirty feet; twenty. We wanted to drag the electricity out of the cables overhead, our fingers itched with it, we could taste it on our lips; but I kept our hands still, drove the rattling of our heart out of my ears.

It twitched.

The thing on the train twitched. Shuddered from top to bottom, something glinting in the half-light, a thing that might have been a metal limb. I froze, the breath sticking in my throat. Sparks danced along the cables overhead, across the tracks at our feet, as we braced ourself to draw the power—and yet, did not do it.

I heard someone shout on a bridge overhead, heard the clatter of feet running on ballast, but it was all a long way off. As the creature drew itself upright, I could see that the last pieces were still coming together, slate locking against slate to form its armoured shell, glass shimmering up into the cracks between the joins before they clapped shut, its six metal legs trembling as they snapped into place, the bends flexing. And there it was, a sound that wasn’t a sound, a thing that only the internal organs could sense, getting richer and bigger without quite becoming audible. It made the wires rattle overhead, set lights flashing on cars parked near the track, sent ripples shimmering across standing pools of water, made cascades from broken bits of windscreen and old suspension boxes.

Then the culicidae gave one last, great shudder, two of its legs scrambling off the side of the train, raised its head, and looked straight at us.

For a moment, we stood there, and stared right back.

It was motionless, its lens-eyes twitching this way and that as it focused on us, trying to determine if we were friend or foe. I opened our fingers, quieting the power in them that threatened to run free, and took a step towards it. It drew back, head rising up, impossible glass mouth opening and closing like a valve, but didn’t strike, didn’t move. I took another step closer, heard the low hum of who-knew-what night-time machinery powering up behind me, saw the creature’s head twitch in alarm, its long abdomen swish through the air behind it, the tip standing upright like a peacock’s tail. We raised our hands towards it, as you might try to quiet a frightened animal, and its eyes snapped back to us, reflecting the bubble of fluorescence hanging over us.

Only a few feet away now. Someone had filleted the bones from my legs. The culicidae’s head craned down as I approached; then down a little further, its body blocking out the cables overhead. We reached up, fingers shaking, and whispered, “Hello, you.”

Its head was bent so close we could almost touch slate, see into the spinning glass within its throat and belly. We could feel heat coming off it, a strange oven warmth, dry, crawling out from its solid skin. There was no expression that a human could make out in that not-quite-insect face, nothing cartoon-readable about it, as it wondered what we were and why we were not attacking, and I wondered much the same. Yet one thing was certain: the culicidae, this summoned thing of glass and stone, was alive, aware.

“What have these foolish creatures done to you?” we breathed and, as it drew its head back as if it was trying to understand the question, our fingers brushed one edge of its slate head and

For fuck’s sake Mum that is so fucking

What you saying, man?

Fuck off okay, just fuck off

They don’t understand

You’ll never be anything if you carry on like this

Do you know how much I’ve sacrificed for you and now you throw it all away

Are you having problems at home?

Go away!

God you’re a right loser carrying on like that

That is so sick, man

Burning.

You ungrateful little bastard, you shit, is this what I gave up half my life for, is it?

They never understand

Until you learn how to buckle down you’ll never amount to anything

I see a dark future for you, young man

Do you know how hard it is out there in the real world?

You want to be treated like an adult but you act like such a child!

Burning?

It’s your life, waste it if you want

Get out, get out of this house, get out right now!

How dare you talk to me that way?

You’re a failure

You’re never going to be

Give up then

Do you know what happens to young men like you?

Burning!

I snatched my hand away: the fingers were burning, raw down to the knuckle. The culicidae drew up its head and screamed its silent scream, loud enough yet to shatter the glass in the parked cars and make the railway tracks hum with it, a single note reverberating up and down the line between the canals and under the bridges, and I ran, cradling my burning fingertips to my chest, ran as the culicidae slammed a claw down into the place where I had been. And there was something human about it now, something we could recognise and name, and we named it rage and anger and all those feelings born of incomprehension that didn’t know any better than to be both of the above, sucked out of the minds of all those children who hadn’t been given a chance to move on, grow up and get over it.

We ran, and now nothing held back the power: electricity
danced from the cables overhead, stabbing down all around us like lightning, searing holes into the earth behind us, smacking into the shell of the culicidae; but still the creature kept coming, roaring its silent roar. The tracks began to sing with electricity as we leapt over each one; the culicidae landed one claw on a rail and its whole body arced as current rushed through it, sending black smoke pouring out of the cracks. Then, with a great snicker-snap, it pulled itself free and reared up, leaping across two tracks at a time, springing like a cat. The ballast spun into whirlwinds as we passed, whipped up and round, forming a wall between us and the creature, which just smashed past it as if through falling blossoms on a spring breeze. The movement of stones beneath our feet made the ground slippery, a living thing; the air stank of burning metal and slate, of black smoke; and we felt something move behind us, and dove just in time, wrapping our hands around our head, sending up a column of spinning, rattling stone to deflect a swinging blow from the culicidae’s claw.

Then its weight was on top of us, pushing us down, and we dragged our knees to our chest and felt the air pushed from our lungs, and our skin begin to cake over with another layer, begin to roughen and turn silver-grey, a sorcerer’s defensive concrete wall growing around us and the light going out as the culicidae pressed down on top of us with all its weight, forcing us deeper into a cocoon of darkness and liquid concrete that swelled up around us to try and shut it out, but of course, in shutting it out, it shut the air out too and I felt the beginning of that suffocation that begins with a heart pounding in the chest and becomes a pressure behind the eye and a seizing in the
stomach and a collapsing in the lungs and a burning in the ears and a bursting in the throat and…

… and then the weight was gone with a loud thump overhead and I crawled upwards from a pressed hollow in the earth, shedding dust and cracked concrete in time to see a great claw, bigger than the culicidae itself, swinging overhead. It was silver, on a yellow-painted arm, and it swung and struck like a thing alive. Now there were two others, coming to life behind the iron fence, bending and stabbing down to try and capture the culicidae in their metallic fists. These were the claws that crushed the cars, with bits of internal wiring and scraped-off rust still clinging to their three fingers, and the stench of oil leaking from their internal hydraulics. I ducked as one swung, spitting oxide-red magic, to slam into the side of the culicidae with all the force that, by day, could crush a truck in a single grasp. The culicidae was rocked off its feet, legs flailing briefly, comically, in the air, and no sooner had it flicked itself upright than another claw stabbed down from above, grabbing it by the abdomen, slate crunching beneath the impact, before the culicidae wriggled away. I peered towards the metal fence that separated the railway from the car-crunching dump, and there they were, Aldermen, half a dozen at least, black figures against a floodlit background. Playing over their bowed heads and their fingers, spread wide, were the same rusty-red magics that sparked off the shells of the metal claws circling overhead; and I remembered why people feared the Aldermen.

Then the culicidae saw me and, associating me with its distress, swung round and charged head first, mouth gaping to reveal a pit of glass. I hurled the first spell that came
to our fingers’ end, and in that instant all I could hear was the roaring of trains and the scraping of metal wheels on a metal track, felt a rush of wind against my back that stank of tunnels and diesel and grease and that nearly knocked me off my feet, felt around me the dancing shadows of a train, ghostly and blurred almost to nothing, driving past me, through me in the night, and straight into the culicidae.