The Minority Council (58 page)

There was a moment.

I think, perhaps, he understood.

Then, having understood, he chose not to believe, and raised his head to his boys and barked, “Kill him.”

It doesn’t take long to pull a trigger.

It took a fraction of a second less for the creature of dust to raise up a blob that might have been a head, stretch out arms longer than a human’s should have been, stretching and thinning like a rubber band, and scream. It had no lungs to scream with, no muscle to stretch out the air, but it had dust that buzzed like a swarm of bees, and if a giant’s foot had crushed the head of the hive’s only queen, it could not have roared with a greater rage and hate than this thing gave, fuelled on dust, heart and magic.

I covered my head with my hands as the creature seemed to burst outwards, in an explosion made from whirling grains of dust, each grain bearing a sting; pressed my head down and felt it roll over me, knocking back the men who stood all around, submerging them in a storm of dust that was twice, three times, a hundred times the size and shape of the meagre packets I’d spilt over the culicidae’s heart. I felt it burn against my skin, tried to breathe and lost all breath, tried to open my eyes and couldn’t do it, thought I heard someone shout, but there was only the roaring of the dust, the sound of it, the heat of it and perhaps still very very faint somewhere behind

just a…

didn’t mean…

never understood

just a…

… please why won’t you?

kid

Then it parted.

I felt it move away, and now the roaring of the dust was further off, a background buzz. I forced my eyes open, squinting in the gloom, and tried hauling myself to my feet. I couldn’t see the lights of the city: neither the reflections on the river nor the glow of the north bank. A dark wall hid them: a moving wall. I summoned a bubble of light, but all it did was to cast a pinkish-sodium glow on a patch of circle of ground just large enough to fit a corpse. There was no one to be seen, only a spinning prison of dust.

Then something curled round our ankle. I yelped and clenched my hands, ready to call fire.

A face that had been a man’s stared up at me, eyes yellow, skin burnt by abrasion and hanging off in tatters, hair blasted from the skull, clothes stained the same smeary yellow as his eyes. He stared up at me and managed to gasp with what was left of his lungs, breath bursting with yellow as he did so, “You… you… you make it… make it… make…”

I staggered away from Oscar Kramb, and the wall of dust moved with me. He screamed as it passed over his feet, consumed his legs; his body shook, his hands clawed at the air. The dust closed in fast, rising over his back and shoulders, swallowing them up in a thickness that left no room for seeing, until only his head was visible, and he tried to scream but his breath turned to dust and his skin was flaking off his face in yellow rags and he tried to say something, or possibly beg, or maybe curse, but the dust swallowed him whole, consuming him in darkness.

It ended as quickly as it had begun.

The wall of dust seemed for a second to freeze on the air.

Then it fell, drifting downwards like snow on a still winter day. It fell into a circle all around me, piled far thicker than it had been at the start, and lay there, a bit of refuse in an ordinary, undisturbed night. Buses passed on the bridge overhead. Seagulls competed for discarded chips by a Dumpster. A tug hauling a barge of yellow crates rumbled towards the estuary. Of Oscar Kramb and his men, nothing remained, except the undigested scraps of yellowed clothing and the guns they’d carried.

A light breeze caught the circle of dust and blew it along the ground. I recoiled as it tumbled towards my feet. The grains kept tumbling, even when the breeze had stopped, pooling together in thickening clumps, rising back up with a busy rattle, re-forming a little at a time, a yellow ant hill become a yellow spire, which became again a warping fragment of humanity. When the last few grains had been absorbed into its form, I looked at it, and it looked at me, face changing from male to female, happy to sad, body growing and shrinking as it mixed and matched, moving through various forms.

I saw nothing of Meera in it now.

Something animal in the way it turned its head.

Something alien in how it looked at the light.

We said, “Pain is difficult,” and its head turned towards us, neck rippling with the movement. We held out our hands, placating, adding, “Though you are of humans, you are not human. That is difficult too.”

Its body shimmered with movement, but we felt that what might be its eyes were on us.

We said, “Feeling is difficult. Mortals have other mortals with whom to share their thoughts. They have built houses to hide in, words to protect them, stories to make
them feel right. You will have none of that. It will be difficult.”

A shudder took the creature throughout its body, shedding a small cloud of dust onto the ground.

“There are dusthouses in this city. There is fairy dust,” we stammered. “It killed you. You can stop it doing the same to others.”

The fallen cloud of dust had instantly begun to reassemble, wriggling back to join the fluctuating mass of its feet.

We said, “We have made you with three of the most potent forces we could find. Fairy dust, insect heart, angel blood. It will make you strong.” We took a deep breath and added, “Stopping will be difficult—when you are strong, when you can revel in it. Being weak will be difficult. Choosing to be weak. Choosing when not to… choosing to be human will be difficult.”

It hesitated, then formed a mouth.

The sound of little bones cracking, of pebbles sliding down a mountainside, of sand in a breeze.

It moved its head.

It might have been a nod.

It might have been a greeting.

It might have been goodbye.

We held out our hand in farewell.

Its fingers ran through our own, dissolving.

It turned away.

It managed a step.

Then another.

Its third attempt was less successful: it gave a lurch and its whole body spun forward, the human shape disintegrating for a moment into a yellow cloud, a grey shadow
at its heart that might just have been, perhaps, the heart itself.

Briefly it regained a vague human shape, and took all of five steps before it span back into dust.

I called out, “Hey!”

My voice echoed back in the concrete pillars beneath the bridge.

It didn’t turn, but we felt it was waiting.

I said, “Hey, you! You be good, okay?”

On what might still have been its face, a flash of something familiar.

Then it dissolved, and billowed away, dust in the night.

I went back to Osterley.

Got lost in the streets near the station.

Identical semi-detached houses in endless straight lines.

It looked different as the sky grew lighter, and eventually I found a small park that looked halfway familiar. I sat on one of the empty swings, and rocked a little.

The warmth of the walk became a chill, the chill became cold.

At this time of year, dawn was slow to come.

I slumbered for a while in the mind of a half-sleeping pigeon roosting at the cracked base of a chimney stack.

I rolled through the water pipes under the streets, splitting and dividing at every junction until I was as wide as the city and as thin as light.

Thought I heard Nabeela say: “Fascist pig.”

And smiled, and felt guilty for smiling.

Hey, Nabeela.

Wow, you’re like, Midnight Mayor. You’re like, cooler
and more powerful than all the little people, so everyone can fuck right off; I mean, don’t you hate that?

Yeah, Nabeela. Right now, kinda do.

Well stuff it, you’re still stuffed. Just saying. As one dust-stained corpse to another, you know? So come on, get yourself up.

I struggled to my feet.

Walked without thinking.

Walking without thinking took me back to the house.

Let myself in.

Penny was sleeping.

The house was grey and silent. Dead-hour morning silent, when the night shift start to think about breakfast, and the closed eyes of all day-shift dreamers jerk back and forth in response to stories due to be forgotten at the instant of waking.

I put the keys back on the table where I’d found them.

Went to bed.

Fell asleep immediately, and couldn’t remember our dreams.

We woke to the smell of bacon.

There was a dressing gown in the wardrobe.

It was pink, and had the image of a small brown teddy bear sewn into one corner.

The smell of bacon sang its siren song.

I put on the dressing gown and went to find it.

Penny was in the kitchen. As I walked in she said, “I’m not like, domestic woman or nothing, and when I find Femi again and we start going out proper, I’m not even gonna to tell him I like cooking, I’m not even gonna tell him I can cook, until at least the sixth or seventh date.”

Penny wore a dressing gown too. Somehow she’d managed to find a striped blue and white one with no teddy bears, and a pair of fur-lined slippers.

“So you’re an equal opportunist?” I asked as Penny professionally cracked open a couple of eggs on the sharp edge of the pan. Simmering became a sizzle.

“Way I see it,” she explained, kneeing shut a cutlery drawer with a brutal up-thrust, “there’s nothing romantic about equal opportunities. ‘Hey, you fancy me?’ ‘Yes, I do.’ ‘Do you feel like going halves on a meal?’ ‘Yes, how equitable.’ ‘I was thinking it might be nice to buy you some flowers.’ ‘Cool, keep the receipt and I’ll be sure to get you something of an equal floral value within three working days.’ ”

She laid a plate down on the table in front of me. The bacon was crispy, the egg was perfect. “So, yeah,” she concluded. “Basically, what I’m saying is don’t get used to me making breakfast.”

She plonked down opposite me, picked up a nearly empty bottle of tomato ketchup, shook it vigorously and squeezed. It made the noise of all plastic ketchup bottles everywhere. When there was no more ketchup left to come, she threw the bottle with perfect aim at a small green recycling bag hanging up by the sink, and speared a mouthful of sauce with a little egg garnish.

“Being shot at is shit for my diet,” she explained through the mouthful. “I was all ‘fruit and muesli’ and now I’m like ‘fuck it’ or whatever. Jesus, I’ve missed bacon.”

“You’re on a diet?” I asked.

“I know,” she declared. “You’re thinking, my apprentice is already like, amazing already isn’t she, so why the fuck should she need to diet? Thing is, Matthew, it takes
work
to be this sodding amazing. You’re a weird skinny freak and wouldn’t understand.”

Somehow, even having started later, and with more ketchup, she finished before me. She put the kettle on, and watched while I got up and made a start on the washing up.

Finally, “You have fun last night then, sneaking off and shit?”

“Oodles.”

“You gonna tell me about it?”

“You want to know?”

“Was it,” she stubbed the table with her finger at each word, “disgusting, sickening, repulsive, icky, sticky, stupid or wank?”

I paused. “If I went for ‘all of the above’ would that be a good thing?”

“I wouldn’t have to go far for my surprised face, put it like that.”

“I summoned a monster.”

Penny hesitated, teabag halfway to a mug proclaiming “I Love Cake.” Then, “Okay. Because… that hasn’t caused major shitty problems recently, oh no.”

“I used the culicidae’s heart.”

“And you’re gonna explain to me how that’s actually a shiny okay thing to do? I mean, instead of, like, a monumentally stupid fucked-up thick thing, yeah?”

I scraped at encrusted grease round the edge of the pan, watched it float clear.

“It was the only way I could think of to hurt the dusthouses. In a hurry, I mean. You don’t win these kind of battles by just… torching coca leaves or poppy heads or anything like that. You can’t change people by pointing
guns in their faces and saying, ‘Yo, dude, your craving and your pain—deal with it already!’ But the dusthouses
are
evil. Evil’s a dodgy word, Midnight Mayors shouldn’t say evil, it doesn’t leave you much wiggle room after, but stuff it, it’s said, there it is. And we were angry. It will be a long time before we are not. So we summoned a… thing. A dust-storm. And it walks and it has… awareness… and it is made from the dust of all who died. It is made from those who were killed by the dusthouses. Because if there is a conservation of mass and energy in physics then likewise there must be a conservation of life in magic. And if I’m right, and if the culicidae’s heart works like I think it does, then this creature will seek more life where it can, and its life is of dust, and so it will hunt down dust, and find it, and absorb it, and no one will be able to stand in its way.”