The Minority Council (9 page)

He made a little numb sound, and we said, “We know you know something. That thing coming off you now, it’s not surprise, it’s not uncertainty, it’s not even hope of escape. It’s pure, unrestricted terror. We saw it when the dusthouse was named, we see it in your yellow eyes. What are you so afraid of? Try not to scream.”

I eased our hand away from his mouth, and he drew in a few raggedy breaths. Then he wheezed, “Man—you are totally going to die.”

I felt it a second before it hit, a surge of power from the middle of his being. It slammed into us and threw us straight back into the room, knocking us against the arm of the sofa. From the bedroom I heard a voice raised in concern, before being hushed by someone having far too good a time to care about anything else. I picked myself quickly back up as the man in the dressing gown followed me into the room. His hair stood on end and sparks flashed around his hands. He thrust his palm towards us as I turned, with the sweep of my arm catching a wall of pressure that nearly knocked me down again, and hurling it back at him. He covered his head with his hands and the spell parted around him, shattering the balcony windows.

Now the people in the bedroom did get interested: a woman screamed, and someone shouted out, but the man in the dressing gown was shrugging off the spell like a loose towel. Opening his hands, he hurled a whirlwind of darkness at me, which condensed to tar smoke raging with internal fires. I ducked behind the sofa and deflected it overhead, then smelt fabric burning and felt smoke sting my eyes. With a flick of his wrist he batted the sofa aside,
the entire thing lifting up and slamming into the wall above the minibar, hard enough to splinter wood. I threw up a cone of spinning warm air around me, smelling of ventilation ducts and kitchen steam, which caught and flung away the shards of glass he hurled at me next. The bedroom door opened, and now someone was embarked on full-scale screaming, a proper horror-movies wail. And where the hell was he getting his power from? I knew every sorcerer in the city, or both of them, and he was not a sorcerer. But this—this was more than simple wizardry.

He moved towards me again, already midway through another spell. This looked suspiciously like a transformation: his skin was beginning to mottle over with concrete, his veins started to ridge and shimmer with an internal line of steel. I grabbed a fistful of electricity out of the nearest mains, and threw it. Blue-white lightning danced through the air and slammed into him, twisting his body and briefly disrupting his spell. I hurled it again and took a step forward. He reeled back, bending in on the point of impact, his dressing gown charring, and smoke rising up from it. I was nearly close enough to touch him. I threw another blast of electricity and, as he staggered, I swung round so that my elbow slammed into the side of his face.

The concentration went out of him, body slumping back, hands to his face. I’d felt something crunch as I struck, and saw blood roll between his fingers from his nose. There was movement behind me but we ignored it, grabbed the bleeding, tottering man by his dressing gown, and snarled so loud and so hard that the lights across the floor hummed and dimmed with the force of it, “Where is Meera?!”

It’s hard to throw spells with a broken nose. The pain
runs straight up your face, curls into the hollows of your ears, makes it burn to blink. Only yogi masters concentrate through that.

I dragged the bleeding man by his dressing gown to the nearest elevator, and rode up to the top floor. I marched him down the corridor, knocked on a couple of doors until I found one where the light didn’t come on in answer, opened it, pulled him in, and closed the door behind us. I guessed we had a maximum of fifteen minutes until the police, by now curious as to this trouble roaming around town, arrived to ask annoying questions. I sat the bleeding man down on the end of the crisply made double bed, went into the bathroom, grabbed a towel, ran it under cold water, and gave it to him to press against his streaming nose.

“Jesus you fucker!” he wailed through blood and cloth. “What the fuck you do that for?”

“In fairness,” I said, “I asked you for information and you tried to kill me.”

“You attacked me!”

“You were prone to deceit by silence, and we are not famed for our patience.”

“I’m fucking doing you for assault!”

“Sure, because you’re going to have fun explaining how you fought me off. Let’s talk dusthouse.”

“Fucker!”

“We could try snapping your nose the other way, see if the break runs in both directions,” we suggested.

“I don’t know what the fuck you want!”

“Yes, you do.” I sat down next to him. “Tell me about the dusthouse.” I felt his intake of breath, but he still didn’t answer. Ten minutes to the police, if I was lucky.

“So you’re scared. Figured that part. I just say the word dusthouse and you look like you’re wearing a python for a jock strap. But the thing is”—we shifted closer, dropped our voice to a murmur—“we will find Meera. Heaven and hell will not stop us; we will break every part of you until you help us, but we won’t let you die. We will keep you alive, even if you have to be tied together, so you can even resemble a thing that was once a man.”

His body was so stiff, if we’d struck him it would have pinged.

“I can protect you,” I added. “You’re frightened now; I can keep you safe.”

Silence. But it was a silence waiting to be broken. Finally, he said, “The dusthouse took her.”

“Who are the dusthouse?”

“I don’t know which one…”

“There are many dusthouses?”

He nodded, then flinched as the movement disturbed something inside his broken nose. His voice was strained and high as he whined, “You sign a contract. Don’t talk, don’t tell, don’t say nothing.”

“Is that what you have? A contract with the dusthouse?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the deal?”

“They… supply you. Good rates, cheap rates, best-quality stuff. Shit, it’s not like there’s any competition!” He mopped at a trickle of blood down his chin. “Only, they’ll fucking kill me.”

“What stuff?”

He hesitated.

“Come on,” I said. “We’ve gone this far.”

He said, “Fairy dust.”

There was a long silence while we digested this. I said, “I don’t suppose we’re talking Peter Pan, think your happy thought and fly, are we?”

“It is,” he explained, one word at a time, “the Best Shit.”

“Are we talking… like cocaine?”

A derisory grunt from behind the towel. “Yeah, if getting screwed out of your fucking brain by a sex goddess is like going five minutes with your grandma in the rain.”

“But it is a narcotic?”

“Man,” he flapped expansively with his spare arm, “it’s the dust!”

“So why haven’t I heard of it?”

“Limited supply,” he replied. “Only for the guys who can afford it, appreciate it. Specialist market.”

“How special?”

“Are you loaded?” he asked, giving me a look that suggested he knew the answer. “And are you magic?”

I let the information sink in deep. “There’s a narcotic,” I growled, forcing the words to stay under control, “that’s for magicians only?”

“Fucking
loaded
magicians,” he corrected.

Connections were clicking into place, cogs meeting with other cogs and discovering that, actually, they might like moving that lever together. “You’re on the dust,” I said carefully. “You’re taking it. That stuff you were sniffing earlier—fairy dust?”

“Wish you had some, yeah?” he grunted.

“What else does it do?” I demanded. “I can tell you get a high, else you wouldn’t have been stupid enough to attack me, but what else?”

He gave a “what you on about?” shrug.

“You,” I explained, “are some overpaid, chubby half-cooked wizard with just a few tricks up your sleeve. You shouldn’t have caused us a moment of distraction, and yet… in the nightclub power was fizzing off you that shouldn’t have been there. And Meera… is she on the dust?”

“You have no idea, have you? Fairy godmother is going to take you down, chop you up and serve you as sushi.”

Below—a long way below—I heard police sirens, audible only because I was waiting for them. “Meera was taking fairy dust, yes?”

“Yeah, she was on it.”

“How long?”

“Six, seven months, I dunno. She was this chick from the other office, it’s not like she mattered or shit.”

I forced our hands to stay at our side. “So why’d the dusthouse take her?”

There it was again, that fear, deep and true and unmistakable.

“Dunno,” he lied.

“I’m really trying hard to be nice; don’t make me regret it.”

“There’s… sometimes there’s… sometimes people go to the dusthouse and… there’s…”

“There’s what? Group therapy sessions, free sweeties for all?”

“Sometimes they go to the dusthouse and… people don’t come back. It’s not going to happen to me,” he added quickly. “I mean, I’m totally in control. I’m like… I’m like way out there, you know? But Meera? She’d been on it a while, and there’s the contract… gotta go to the dusthouse when the fairy godmother calls.”

“Where is this dusthouse? Where are they likely to have taken her?”

“Dunno.”

“Yes, you do.”

“We don’t go there, we don’t, man, we don’t. Only the handlers know where it is, only our dealers.”

“Then you’re going to give me the name of your dealer.”

“Dude…” he whined.

“You know you are, so let’s not pretend like you aren’t. Let’s just take it as read that you’ve been all manly and macho and didn’t crack until the very last moment, and that way I don’t have to break you into any more pieces than you’re already in. Tell me who your dealer is, where I can find him, and I’ll leave you alone. Whatcha say?”

“They’ll kill you,” he muttered. “They’ll rip you to shreds.”

“Then it’s a win-win for you, isn’t it?”

Behind his blood-soaked towel he keened like a distressed animal. Then, in a rare act of good common sense, he told me.

It was time to go.

I took the fire escape down to the next floor, but voices below gave warning of coppers coming up. There were CCTV cameras in the stairwell and corridors; none resisted my command, each turning slowly to avoid catching me in their lens. I found the nearest fire alarm, mumbled an apology to those whose sleeps were about to be destroyed, and smashed it with my elbow.

Amid the deafening noise, in every corridor alarms leapt to spinning red life. I waited for the first hotel guests, in dressing gowns and slippers, to stagger bewildered into
the corridor, then let myself into a vacated room, grabbed one of the bathroom’s white dressing gowns, pulled off my socks and shoes, shoved the socks in my bag and tied my shoes by the laces around the strap, and joined the mass escape. There was no screaming, nor jostling, but rather the quick shuffle of zombie-eyed sleepers, not a man nor woman who considered themselves in real danger and many of whom were already considering their letter of complaint.

There were coppers guarding the fire exits, inspecting all who passed outside. I pulled my dressing gown around me to hide my working clothes; only the trousers, visible below the knee, gave any sign of nefarious intent. No one was inspecting knees downwards, and it didn’t take much to blend in. I lingered a few moments in the crowd gathered beneath the wailing hotel building, eased my way outwards and, when I was sure no eyes were on me, pulled off the dressing gown, bundled it beneath my arm, and walked away.

Fairy dust.

How had I missed this?

How the hell had I missed this?

I threw my stolen dressing gown into a bin as I passed the Tower of London, its walls blue-white from floodlights in the grassy moat. I paused to put my shoes back on and all the time thought, fairy dust. Dusthouses and, but of course, the fairy godmother, dealing in a narcotic that turned its victims’ eyes all the same sickly yellow I’d seen in Meera the night we’d taken the boat. It made petty wizards powerful enough to perform deadly spells. And like all such things, it came with a price. Fairy dust.

At least now I had a name to look for.

I was only fifteen minutes’ walk from the Aldermen’s office. So, in those night-time hours when the streets are empty of all but the swish of a distant lone vehicle, or the wail of a reversing dustcart, I headed in to work.

The offices of Harlun and Phelps were closed. Except that, like most offices in the financial district, they had a security guard on the door, who sat reading books and playing solitaire through the lonely hours of the night. He acknowledged me, and pushed a button to open the heavy glass door. I padded through the expanses of the entry hall, summoned the one working elevator and rode up in silence to the fourteenth floor.

The doors opened onto a white open-plan office under strip lighting. Desks with photos of grinning toddlers, unread mail, sleeping computers, highlighted reports and Post-it notes warning of dire events. I headed for a door labelled “Responses Unit” in white lettering on black, and was about to unlock it when it swung open. A voice, trying to make surprise sound like delight, exclaimed, “Mr Mayor! I’m so glad you’re here!”