The Neon Court
Authors: KATE GRIFFIN
COURT
As he stormed through a door into what I guessed to be the sitting room I followed. He reached out for a phone, and I tapped him on the shoulder. He spun, hands coming up into fists. As he did, we caught him round the throat with our scarred hand. Sapphire fire flared behind our eyes, we felt the hair stand up on the back of our neck. The light flickered in the hall, electricity snapped in the sockets, blue sparks crawled around the handset of the telephone, the TV flickered on and mad static danced over its screen. He wheezed and pawed at our hands as the electrical fire built inside our soul and, for a moment, he met our eyes, and was afraid.
“Hi,” we said. “Let us make our position clear. We are the Midnight Mayor, protector of this city, carrier of its secrets and bearer of its shadows. The shadows watch us as we pass, the pigeons turn away at our passage, the rats scurry beneath our feet and shudder at the sound of our footsteps on the stones. We are the blue electric angels, the telephones sing at the passage of our voice, our blood is blue fire, our soul carries a pair of angel wings. We are the killer of Robert Bakker, sorcerer, master of the Tower; we destroyed the death of cities; we came back from the dead, Swift and the angels, two minds become one, two souls in one flesh, in one form, in one voice. We are me and I am we. And we’re frustrated.”
A Madness of Angels
The Midnight Mayor
By Catherine Webb
Mirror Dreams
Mirror Wakes
Waywalkers Timekeepers
The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle
The Obsidian Dagger:
Being the Further Extraordinary Adventures of Horatio Lyle
The Doomsday Machine:
Another Astounding Adventure of Horatio Lyle
The Dream Thief
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 978-0-748-11919-6
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Catherine Webb
Excerpt from The Drowning City by Amanda Downum
Copyright © 2009 by Amanda Downum
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
Prelude: The Summoning of Matthew Swift
Part 2: The Vanishing of Cockfosters
Part 3: A Fully Rounded Education
“Who, me?
Midnight Mayor. Protector of the city.
Go figure.”
— Remark attributed to M. Swift, 127th Midnight Mayor of London; probably apocryphal
There’s something at the end of the alley.
It’s waiting for you.
— Anonymous graffito, Soho
In which an enemy asks help of the last person in the world you might have expected, a fire leads to more than just minor burns, and a war breaks out in Sidcup.
I thought I could hear footsteps in the darkness behind me. But when I looked again, they were gone.
I was in the middle of a sentence. I was saying, “… ‘dragon’ is probably too biologically specific a way to look at the …”
Then someone grabbed me by the throat with the fist of God, and held me steady, while the universe turned on its head.
There was a hole in the world and no fingers left to scrabble.
I fell into it.
It was my phone ringing in my pocket that woke me.
I fumbled for it and thumbed it on, held it to my ear without raising my head, just in case stillness was the only thing keeping my head attached to my body. My throat was dry. I guessed it had something to do with all the smoke. I said, “Yeah?”
Penny, my apprentice, was on the other end. She sounded too cool, too calm, and therefore afraid. “You vanished.”
“Uh?”
“Like … hello poof whoops bye bye.”
“Uh-huh?”
“You dead?”
“That supposed to be funny?”
I rolled onto my back, every rib in my chest pressing against skin like they had been vacuum-packed into place. Something wet and sticky moved underneath me, made the sound of velcro tearing. My fingers brushed it. It smelt of salt and iron. It had the thickness of thin honey. She said, “So what the fuck happened?”
I licked my lips. They tasted of charcoal. “Summoned,” I wheezed. Why was it so much work breathing in here? “Some bastard summoned. Me. Summoned me.”
The smoke was getting thick now, grey-black, tumbling in under the crack beneath the door. Through it I could half see the walls, cracked and grey, the only colour on them from scrawled messages in cheap spray paint,
ANARKST 4EVR
JG WOZ ERE
NO GOD GAMES ALLOWED
help
WE’RE WAITING FOR YOU
I said, “I’ll call you back,” and hung up before my apprentice could start swearing.
My eyes burnt. The room was too hot, the light behind the smoke too bright. Somewhere outside the broken window it was raining, thick pattering on the still London night. I crawled onto my hands and knees, ears ringing. Something warm dribbled into the hollow of my ear, pooled there, then continued its journey down the side of my neck. I felt my head, found blood drying in my hair, and a lump. I looked down at the floor and at the same sticky stuff on my fingertips. Against my skin it had appeared almost black, but in the dull sodium light that reflected off the belly of the night-time clouds, and the glare of the unknown something on the other side of the smoke-tumbling door, it was undeniably crimson.
Undeniably blood.
But not my blood.
That at least was a pleasant discovery, though it came with the snag that it was not my blood because nothing bled that much and lived. It had saturated the thin carpet, splattered across the gutted tattered remains of a couch, smeared its paw marks over the paint-scrawled wall behind a low gas stove and a graveyard of broken beer bottles. It was fresh, and only felt cool because its surroundings were so rapidly growing hot.
Someone had been finger painting on the floor with this blood. They’d painted a pair of crosses. One was smaller than the other, nestling in the top left-hand quadrant of its big brother’s shape. Look at it with a knowing eye, and you might consider it to be a sword, not a cross, although when your tool was blood and your surface was carpet, the distinction was academic. What it was, and what there
could be no doubt that it was, was the ancient emblem of the City of London and, by no coincidence at all, the symbol once carved by a mad bastard, with a dying breath, into the palm of my right hand – the mark of the Midnight Mayor.
I made it to the window, pulled myself up by my elbows, broken glass cracking underneath the sleeves of my anorak, looked out, looked down. A half-moon was lost on the edge of rain clouds turned sodium orange by reflected street light from the terraced roads below. A line of hills cut off the horizon, their tops tree-crowned and unevenly sliced by the carving of motorway planners. The falling rain blurred everything: the neat straight lines of buildings that peeked up between Chinese takeaways and bus stations; the pale yellow worm of a mainline train arcing towards a floodlit station; the darker stretch of a public heath on a low hill around which tiny firefly cars bustled; the reflection of TV lights played behind curtained windows; big square council estates with bright blue and red buttresses as if the vibrancy of colour could disguise the ugliness of what they supported. But no distinctive landmarks other than to say that this was anonymous surburbia, not my part of town. But still my city.
I looked down. Down was a long way away. Paving stones shimmered black with rain-pocked water, like a disturbance on the dark side of the moon. A play area of rusting swings and crooked see-saws. A little patch of mud sprouting tufts of grass for dogs to run about on; a bicycle rack that no one had trusted enough to chain their bicycle to. A line of garages, every door slathered with graffiti ranging from would-be art to the usual signatures of kids out for a thrill. A single blue van, pulling away up the narrow street leading from a courtyard below and out of my line of sight. The glow of fire where there should only have been fluorescent white floodlights, and somewhere, not very far at all, the sounds of alarms starting to wail and flames eating at the door.
Smoke tumbled past my head, excited by the prospect of open air beyond the smashed-up window. I pulled my scarf over my mouth and my bag across my back. I fumbled in my pocket for the phone, my bloody fingers slipping over the keys, got as far as dialling the first two nines, and a hand closed around my ankle.
We jumped instinctively, kicking ourself free and snatching power
from the mains ready to hurl at our unseen enemy, our hair standing on end, our heart beating like the engine of a car about to blow. I looked down, expecting death, pain, an end, a stop, a terror, something nameless that I had not had the wit to imagine until now, and saw the hand. Skin on top dark, deep-roasted cocoa; pink underneath. Soaked in its own blood, too much, too fresh. Arm, covered in a long black sleeve. Head. Wearing a headscarf of white and green that was half knocked off, revealing the long-ago-burnt scalp. Face. Round, smart, angry, lips curled, eyes tight with pain, a tracery of scars down the left side like a map of shifting desert sands. I knew that face. I’d regretted seeing it many times before, and tonight was heading for the clincher.
I wheezed, eyes running and carbon on my tongue, “Oda?”
Oda – assassin, murderer, fanatic, holy woman or insane psychopath, pick one – looked us in the eye and whispered through her cracking lips, the smoke curling around her breath as she spoke, “Help me.”
Penny Ngwenya, sorceress (in training) and one-time traffic warden, announced one mild evening as we walked through Spitalfields together, “You know, you were really cool until I met you.”
Under normal circumstances, I might have said something rude.
But Penny, whose anger had nearly destroyed an entire city, was not a woman who had much truck with normality.
“Thing is,” she went on airily, “you’re an urban sorcerer. You bend sodium light with a thought, can taste the rhythms of the city, feed on dust and carbon monoxide and get major hayfever if you go near anything green. And that’d be like, pretty cool, you get what I’m saying? And it’s even cooler than that – you’re a
dead
sorcerer. Like there’s a grave marked ‘Matthew Swift, got killed by a mystical shadow or whatever’ and an empty coffin, but you’re not dead. You came back, and you came back with like, the blue electric angels attached, or whatever, and that’s like, you know, Jesus. And you’re the Midnight Mayor, which is this majorly pompous job thing that’s been going for like two thousand years and you’re supposed to protect and save the city and stuff, which is like King Arthur, so … you know … you’re pretty cool. Until you speak.”
I thought about this a while.
I said, “Like Jesus?”
She said, “Yeah. You should probably forget I said that.”
Oda aka ‘psycho-bitch’ lay behind the spring-poked remnant of the sofa, in the thickest, deepest pool of blood in the room. It had sunk so far into the carpet that when she moved, little swells and bubbles burst out beneath her, as pressure dynamics did its thing. There was blood on her hands, on her face, in her hair, it had saturated her jumper, and soaked into the side of her leg. There was no doubt that it was hers. Her face was as grey as a face so richly coloured could be, her eyes were bloodshot, pinky-red, her grip round my ankle had the unnatural strength of the newborn babe or the nearly departed dying. We felt our stomach turn, but squatted down and tried to help her up. She grabbed the back of my coat, bundling it up in her fist like a yachtsman’s lifeline in a storm. “Help me,” she repeated.
“What the bloody hell is happening?” I wheezed.
“We’ve got to leave this place,” she replied, reaching her other arm round my neck to form a crude sling. “Help me!”
“No shit,” I growled, and putting my arms round her waist, tried heaving her to her feet. She cried out in pain, an animal shrill of distress, her eyes closing. As she moved, a knife-slice smile opened and shut in the front of her jumper, right above her heart. We half thought we could see something else grinning beneath, and quickly looked away.
She made it to more or less upright, head bumping against my shoulder, her weight dragging down on my neck. “Out,” she hissed. “Have to get out.”