The Neon Court (16 page)

“But … they were OK with Matthew being like … Midnight Mayor and shit. So they’re up on the magic and stuff, right?”

“Oh, yes. Loveless and Headley have been providing fine wines to most of the major magicians of the city for the last one hundred or so years; theirs was the liquor that graced the table at the 1959 treaty signing between the Midnight Mayor and the Neon Court; they also provide various elixirs, potions of life, as well as an alchemical archive detailing some of the more interesting work on such projects as the fountain of youth, the font of knowledge, the sacred springs of the dryads, the elixir of the immortals et cetera et cetera. But personally, I find them most enjoyable for their excellent collection of fine ports and sherries.” Sinclair let out a little breath, a half-sigh, as of a man contemplating both of the above and finding happiness in the process.

I coughed politely. “Funny you should mention the Neon Court …”

“Isn’t it just?”

“… but Lady Neon’s in town.”

“Now you mention it, I had heard something of the sort.” A hand closed around mine and a fork was pushed between my fingers. A plate was rested on my lap. I prodded it with the end of the fork, felt something that could have been salad. We impaled what we hoped was a tomato, and took a careful nibble. Disaster failed to strike.

“I hear rumours,” went on Sinclair, “that a man called Minjae San, a daimyo, I believe, of the Neon Court, was murdered by warriors of the Tribe?”

“Yeah. I heard that too.”

“I heard that the Neon Court was demanding vengeance.”

“Yep.”

“I understand that by the terms of the treaty you have with the Neon Court, you are going to be obliged to go to war with the Tribe over this breach of the peace?”

“That’s the way it’s looking.”

“I imagine,” went on Sinclair, in the same easy, lawyer-at-work tone, “based on some certain information now available to me – for example
the fact that you are demonstrating a hearty interest in the woman Oda and appear to be
temporarily
blind – that there is a great deal more to the matter than I, or anyone, is aware. Except, perhaps, you.”

I ate another tomato. Penny said, “You’re good!”

I swallowed, wiped my mouth with my sleeve, put the fork down carefully on my plate and directed my gaze at what I hoped was roughly the location where Sinclair was sitting. “OK,” I said. “Here’s how it is. One: the Tribe didn’t kill Minjae San. Oda did. Two: I was with Oda when she dunnit, having been summoned to the burning tower block without warning or explanation where various people then proceeded to attack me, and Oda asked me to, in short order, save and kill her. Three: the Tribe was at the tower too. I saw a body in the stairwell. But they did not kill Minjae. Four: Oda has a stab wound to the heart which I think she sustained in the tower from either Tribe or Court or sources unknown. Five: this stab wound hasn’t killed her. Six: her eyes are now black mush and if you look at them, you’ll go blind and die. Oh yes, and she’s talking about ‘we’ as well as ‘I’ and is, all things considered, possessed. Seven: many people are dead. Eight: Lady Neon was on the way to London even before her daimyo was killed. Nine: both the Neon Court and the Tribe are seeking a ‘chosen one’ as prophesied by a guy with a Monopoly board called O’Rourke who was, when I last saw him, lying incapacitated in his own living room having accurately predicted the arrival of Oda, suffering, pain and a blackout, if nothing else. Ten: where’s the sun gone? Questions?”

There was a long, gratifying silence.

Finally, “Well … it all makes a little more sense now.”

“Glad to hear it. Is this thing on the end of my fork mushroom?”

“Some kind of cheese,” replied Penny from behind my head. “Looks kinda rank, you know?”

“It’s an excellent cheese,” replied Sinclair primly, “and in many ways I feel the flavours will be enhanced by your … current incapacity.”

“We try anything once,” we replied, and ate it. It was like eating a kick to the teeth soaked in chilli pepper. Our nose watered.

“Um … I kinda got some questions.” Penny was either oblivious or uncaring for our cheese-induced traumas. “Like … who summoned you to this burning fucking tower in the first place?”

I wiped my nose and wheezed, “At first, hadn’t got a clue. I mean,
it takes serious whack to just go ‘poof’ and summon a guy, particularly a guy who doesn’t want to be summoned. But thinking about it, I’d say Oda. She was lying face down in her own blood, and drew the symbol of the Midnight Mayor in it. I mean, she’s no sorceress, but whatever’s got inside her has some hefty magical punch at its command and so I guess with her being in a confused and dubious mental state combined with having that sorta kick … yeah … Oda summoned me. She asked me to kill her.”

“Which would imply that whatever is possessing her, if that’s the right term, isn’t yet fully in control? Or that she has some sense of her own precarious situation?” suggested Sinclair. “Well, that is promising, at least.”

“Did I mention the stab wound to the heart?” I added helpfully. “I mean, leaving aside how I got into the tower block, you gotta ask yourself, what was Oda, Order psycho-nut with a religious hatred thing going down, doing in the same place, at the same time, as a daimyo of the Neon Court and a bunch of Tribe warriors?”

“Do you have an answer to that question?” asked Sinclair.

“No – although you can probably bet your merry backside that it has something to do with wanky complication the second – this ‘chosen one’.”

“Ah yes. May I say, Matthew, that I detect a certain … shall we say … cynical lilt to your voice when you say those words together?”

“That’s because it’s total bollocks,” I explained. “‘Chosen one’? Seriously? Chosen by whom? God? Destiny?”

“Uh – Jesus?” suggested Penny.

“Yeah, because Jesus went around all the time kicking up wars between the Neon Court and the Tribe.”

“Uh – crusades?”

“All right, so there’s Jesus. And Mohammed. And like … you know … those sorts of dudes. But unless you’re going to tell me that (a) God has appointed another of his kiddies to walk upon the earth and (b) this kiddie lives in Sidcup and is at the heart of a petty bastard war between two petty bastard factions, then no. Total bollocks.”

I heard the sound of liquid being poured into a glass, and a judicious drawing in of breath from Sinclair. “You do raise an interesting point,” he said. “Purely from an academic perspective, one must ask oneself
what is meant by ‘chosen one’. It is possible, for example, that future historians might argue you, Matthew, as a ‘chosen one’ – not in any theological sense, but merely in that you seem to have a perpetual habit of stumbling into cataclysmic scenarios and surviving through improbable methods.”

“By that definition, we should sanctify anyone who’s ever served in the SAS,” I growled. “Can we get back to the point? Even if you and I know that this ‘chosen one’ stuff is, from a mystical perspective, ninety-nine per cent sure to be total bollocks, the Neon Court and the Tribe both seem to have gotten wind of it and O’Rourke seemed fairly sure of his crap. Which suggests … ?”

“It suggests,” sighed Sinclair, with the infinite patience of a man whose brain was having to rewalk routes it had covered half an hour ago, “that Lady Neon’s arrival in London was planned even before Minjae San was murdered; that the presence of both Tribe and Court in the same place at the same time was not an accident; and that Oda knows more than she is currently saying about all of the above.”

“Which means that this war between the Court and the Tribe … ?” I prompted.

“Isn’t about retribution, it’s about finding this ‘chosen one’ before the other side does – oh, how very tedious,” groaned Sinclair. “And of course Lady Neon has seen the death of her daimyo as an excellent excuse to invoke the treaty between the Court and the Midnight Mayor, forcing you …”

“To either get involved with a war between the Court and the Tribe that I don’t want to fight, or to find this ‘chosen one’ for her. Yep. Seems about right.”

“Dear boy,” Sinclair complained, “why didn’t you come to see me sooner?”

“I was amassing information,” I replied primly. “And … you know … getting the crap beaten out of me. Thing is,” I went on, putting my plate gingerly down on the floor, “the really bad thing is, that this war business? It’s kinda secondary to our real problem.”

“You consider the condition of the woman Oda to be more serious than a war between the Tribe and the Court?”

“Yeah. I really do. And I consider it more serious for two reasons. One: she kicked the merry crap out of me. And, as you pointed out, I’ve
got this thing for surviving improbably shitty situations, and I was in trouble. We were … we were hurt. She hurt us. That should alarm you in and of itself. Two: where’s the sun gone?”

“You keep saying that,” said Penny, “and then kinda look like you want us to say something else.”

“Yes, do please explain,” added Sinclair.

I folded my hands together across my knees, leant forward on my elbows. “So, I’ve been up and about now for … what? I don’t know. Hours. Hours and hours and hours. And I can’t help but notice, in all this business and adventure, that the sun isn’t coming up.”

“Well, that’s total bollocks for a start …” began Penny.

“Uh-uh. Just listen to me. I asked you, Penny, what you had for lunch; you couldn’t remember. You, Mr Sinclair, you described the food as breakfast, when in fact it’s suppertime. When you picked me up from Mile End, Penny, it was still dark, the middle of the early morning, predawn stillness and a sleep that could not be broken. By the time we got to Smithfield, the pubs were open and there were people drinking. Did you look at them? You said they were just guys in suits, but I bet, I just bet, there was something wrong about them. I took the Tube from Heathrow to the centre of town, and it was wrong: commuters in business suits next to tired drunks next to little old ladies next to schoolkids next to tourists next to party-goers in daft shoes. You get all these things on the Tube, every day – but the Tube has its rhythms, its ebbs and its flows, and it was like all these people were compressed, time-compressed, like it was school-leaving time and rush hour and party hour and happy hour and lunch hour and all hours all at once, packed in together. I bet you if we went outside right now, all of us, I could find twenty things, even blind, that prove something is wrong. Find the seers, find the Old Bag Lady, find the Beggar King, find the Seven Sisters or Upney, the Lord of Tar; find Fat Rat and the deep downers, invoke any spirit of the lonely night you care to name and ask them, just ask them to stand upon Greenwich Hill and look east and tell you what they see, and I can guarantee you they’ll say the same thing that I say to you now. Where’s the sun gone? Where has it gone?”

There was silence.

Finally Sinclair began, an edge of warning in his voice, “Matthew …”

“I am the Midnight Mayor. I am Robert Bakker’s apprentice, I was trained by the most powerful sorcerer to screw the city over in the last hundred years. We are the blue electric angels. We see things that others do not. Believe us or be damned.”

Silence again.

Then, “You understand that what you are saying is incredible.”

“Considering my record, shouldn’t that comfort you?”

“Inconceivable.”

“Dodgy word.”

“Matthew” – a little, uneasy laugh escaped Sinclair’s lips – “we all know that the sun has come up.”

“And gone down,” I added. “We all know it’s gone down because it’s been dark for … well … hours. We all remember doing very interesting and potentially dangerous things in the dark, rescuing mentors, researching psycho-bitches and so on and so forth, we can all place activities in the night that we’ve done recently. And the day? What have we all done lately in the daylight that was quite as exciting as this little chat?”

“You know, right,” hazarded Penny, “that you’re kinda asking us to believe you’re not talking total crap, right?”

“That sounded to me like a woman with
doubts
,” I said. “Are you doubting, perhaps, whether you’re
not
caught in a nightmare in which time stretches and the sun fails to rise? And more importantly, do you doubt whether it really
can’t
be connected to this whole Oda-chosen-one-war crap? Go on. Surprise me.”

“You’ve been attacked,” murmured Sinclair. “You’re hurt, you’re upset, you’re …”

“The fucking Midnight Mayor, mystic fucking protector of the city!” I snarled. “Two thousand years’ worth of tradition and magic in the palm of my hand! Jesus, did every guy who went before me have to put up with all this crap, or do I get special treatment on the basis that no one quite knows what we’re going to do next, no one trusts us not to set the sky on fire and everyone knows we can, is that why we are talked to like a child? I am telling you, as the guy in the know, that this is what is happening; now that the thought is in your head, I dare you to go another twelve hours without seeing that I’m right. Cut the mystic crap, I’m just plain
right
.”

There was the little shuffling sound of breaths being exhaled, feet being twitched, bellies warping against waistcoats. Then, “All right. Supposing that, perhaps, you are correct about all of this. What do you propose we do?”

“We need to stop a war, and stop Oda,” I replied. “Because I just bet you whatever this is, it’s connected to one or both of those.”

“You mean you don’t know
why
the sun isn’t coming up?” demanded Penny. “Oh, fat lot of use.”

“It’s not like this is something that happens regularly!”

“Sure, because you’re just a regular sorta guy, like ‘hey, this is normal shit for me, what’s that, death of cities walking around, is that a dragon, whoo-hoo, let’s get zappy on that shit, dude!’”

“This is bordering on harassment …”

“Matthew,” interrupted Sinclair, “let us say – perhaps – that you are correct about our current … temporal hiccup. Let us say that these things are linked to Oda, who is somehow involved with this chosen one business that has the Court and the Tribe up in arms. What action do you propose taking?”