The Neon Court (17 page)

“Well, first up, we need to convince the Tribe and the Court to hold off on the whole massacre thing a little longer.”

“Fair enough. And Oda?”

“Need to find her. Need to stop her.”

“Kill her?” interrupted Sinclair.

“Can we do that?” asked Penny, an edge of unease entering her voice. “I mean … is that something we do?”

“Ms Ngwenya,” replied Sinclair smoothly before I could feel ashamed, “Oda is a disciple of the Order. Killing people such as yourself, and Matthew, is something she does. And now you say one look from her eyes and people die? And she has a wound to her heart?”

“Yes.”

“I assume a serious injury?”

“Well … it’s got the words ‘wound’ and ‘heart’ in the same sentence, so yeah, we’re talking pretty terminal.”

“And, despite all this, is walking and talking and saying ‘we’ when she should be saying ‘I’?”

“Yeah.”

“And she nearly killed you.”

I hesitated. Then, “Yeah.”

“You see, Ms Ngwenya,” concluded Sinclair, “motive is mounting. All of which leads to the key question –
can
you kill her? Matthew?”

“I … dunno.”

A hardness entered his voice. “Did you try?”

“I … she attacked me and I ran and …”

“Did you try to defend yourself?”

“Of course I defended myself …”

“Did you try to kill her?”

“I … there wasn’t really a thought process at work.”

“Forgive me, Matthew, but that sounds a good deal like a ‘no’.”

“Look,” I exclaimed, raising my hands defensively, “so it wasn’t like I went into being beaten up with a plan, no, and sure, maybe if I did have a plan, I could have … stopped her. Sure, maybe, yeah. But this doesn’t get round the fact that if you look her in the eye you go blind, and die, so no, I’m not exactly in a tearing hurry to rush off for round two. Besides …” My voice trailed off.

“Besides?”

“Possession,” I sighed. “Or … possession may not even be the right word. Synthesis. Fusion. Possession, you expect just one dominating consciousness, you expect ‘hello, I am Argh the Unstoppable, you cannot stop me’ and so on. You don’t expect …
we
feel and
I
feel in the same breath. That’s not possession, that’s …”

“What you do?” murmured Sinclair. “Yes, I had noticed that. And you aren’t possessed, are you, Matthew? For all that some would have us think you are, in our extensive dealings I have been forced to conclude that you are simply … human plus some. Is that what you’re saying Oda has become?”

“Dunno. Maybe. Good news if yes.”

“Why?”

“Because she said ‘kill me’. Suggests there’s some part of her brain still hanging on in there. Some little corner of her consciousness going ‘uh-uh, bad roaming nastiness’ and holding back.”

“Did she hold back when attempting to harm you?”

“Hard call. Don’t really want to think about what she could do if that
was
her holding back.”

“Erm?” Penny’s voice, strained with the effort of seeming calm. “Like,
don’t want to rain on your parade or anything, but reality check? You seriously talking about killing and stuff like it’s OK?”

“Yes, my dear.” Sinclair’s voice oozed uncle-reassurance. “Yes, I do believe we are.”

“What did you find out about Oda?” I asked quickly. “Anything useful?”

Sinclair sighed. His chair creaked beneath an adjustment of considerable weight. “How much do you know about her?”

“Name; occupation. That’s it.”

“In that case, perhaps there are some things I should fill you in on.”

And so he did.

First Interlude: The Life and Times of Psycho-Bitch

In which an acquaintance finally gets introduced.

“The woman,” said Sinclair, “that you know simply as Oda, was born Oda Ajaja-Brown in Reading. Her mother was a teacher, her father was a gambler and an adulterer; the first drove him to crime, the second to drink. I’m sure we need not linger on the inevitable psychological consequences. She had an elder brother and a younger sister – we don’t know who the father of the sister was. When she was seven years old, Oda Ajaja-Brown was given the privilege of watching the police come in the middle of the night and take her father away screaming abuse and vengeance. Her mother made the tip off. He served fifteen years for a number of offences. But by then, Oda was gone, as was his name from hers; she was simply Oda Ajaja, and had already found her calling.

“You know of Oda as a servant of the Order. Needless to say, she was not always so. The family believed in God, and went to church every Sunday, and the church was kind to them in times of hardship, both emotionally and, when things were bad, physically too. For the children, the local church became a place of friendship, where they were cared for unconditionally, a place of rest, as well as of prayer. The law required Oda to remain in school until she was sixteen, and she did, earning acceptable grades at GCSE. But her school record was a
pattern of confusion. She was praised for her voluntary work, for her commitment to those in need, for her dedication to the elderly and almost obsessive desire to help others. She was also reprimanded severely for a temper that, at its worst, led to a seventeen-year-old boy who had been attempting to bully a thirteen-year-old girl finding himself in hospital, nail marks across his face and bite marks along the length of his arm, delivered at Oda’s hands. If she was a knight in armour to the child whom she saved from a bully, let no one for a minute think that this armour was white.

“For all this, the history of Oda Ajaja could have been a happy one, were it not for the actions of her elder brother, Kayle. Too young when his father was taken, and too old to find comfort from anything that restored his sisters, Kayle embarked on a journey whose course could only truly end in tragedy. Fuelled by anger at his father, and hatred of his mother for betraying him, Kayle left home at seventeen years old with the resolution that he would be something better, something bigger than the life he had grown up with. His journey took him variously through business schools, entrepreneurship programmes, apprenticeships, and finally by what route we are not entirely clear, to London, and into the world of magic.

“You are sorcerers, Matthew, Penny; you see the city and you see magic, you feel it beneath your feet, you taste it on the air. When rush hour comes, your heart races faster; when you close your eyes you can feel the beat of pigeon wings across your skin and when you flex your fingers, static fills the speakers of the mobile phones all around, as if the air was disturbed with a thing richer than what we can perceive. That, I believe, is sorcery. Kayle saw something too, when he came to London. He looked onto the towers of the city, saw glass and steel, felt time beneath his shoes and power behind the locked doors, heard the rustle of money behind the wall of every ATM and smelt the sex in the sweat of the dancers in the clubs beneath his feet. He saw sorcery, but where I believe your sorcery is defined by a life unstoppable, of hearts beating behind every pane of frosted glass and breath mingling in every corner of every dusty underground tunnel, his was that of a power untameable, of a city that can only exist by every part moving, functioning, working, turning, earning. His magic was about power, and he quickly found those to teach him. This was in the time before Robert
Bakker and his hungry shadow; before the Tower and the creature that came out of the night and killed sorcerers. There were many with … shall we say … dubious ethics willing to instil what they knew in hungry young Kayle Ajaja, for a reasonable price, or a reasonable percentage of the take.

“And so it continued, for some years. Oda left school and got work in a kitchen on the edge of her home town; her younger sister, just ten years old, continued studying. Her mother grew older, lonelier, throwing herself into supporting her one remaining at-home child, and to the charitable works of the church. Kayle Ajaja neither wrote nor rang, and truth be told, none of the family sought him out.

“Kayle began to … how is the phrase? ‘Go off the rails’ I believe most aptly covers it … shortly after his twenty-fourth birthday. He had that delusion that the young and successful can sometimes have, of conceiving themselves a shark in a fishing pond, instead of a minnow in a rolling sea. He had, perhaps, failed to understand that the magicians he saw and met, and who he judged inferior to himself, were merely those who wished to be seen, or who lacked the capacity to disguise themselves. If he had been raised in the city from the start, trained from a younger age, introduced to some more … temperate … circles, perhaps he would not have acquired the misconceptions he did. But he wanted to succeed fast and young, and as a result fell in with those whose philosophies were those of speed, action without consequence, and no eye for the day after tomorrow.

“I believe the first act of rashness that attracted the attentions of the more … concerned citizens … was when he tested his abilities on his own father, cursing him, through the rather crude means of extracting waste from the prison sewage facilities and using that as the focus of his spell. Naturally, dozens of others fell under the spell’s effect, so much so that the prison warden wrote a report proclaiming that bubonic plague had broken out within his walls. Medical science was baffled, and it was only through the good fortune of one of the attending doctors having had some trifling dealings with magic that an exorcist was called in before the situation grew out of control. It is not the business of concerned citizens to dabble too far in the actions of intemperate magicians; not unless they are clearly out of control. As
the situation was contained, and the source of the outbreak unproven, if suspected, no further action was taken.

“Alas, young Kayle’s activities did not stop there. His misdemeanours ranged from the petty – ATM robberies to the amount of over £60,000 – and I know, Matthew, that you yourself have been guilty of occasionally defrauding the odd electronic account, but not, I think, to spend on your eighth car, or at any time less urgent than when being pursued for your life. A man Kayle got into a fight with outside a Camden bar was set alight, in public, in the full sight of the street, and later died of an infection to his burns; there were plenty of other incidents of this sort. By now the police had enough images of his face to have put together a criminal case against him for both the attack on the man in Camden and a number of other offences, including fraud, GBH and robbery. At this point, the Midnight Mayor, the then new incumbent Nair, was called in at the warning of the Aldermen, to bring the situation under control.

“According to the official Alderman report, Nair scryed for Kayle and detected him easily, without his subject even being aware of the magic being performed around him. He approached him and informed him that he had three choices: he could either give up magic with immediate effect, in which case he would be tolerated; he could allow himself to be arrested for his crimes and serve his time, in which case he would be redeemed; or he could leave London immediately and never return, in which case he would be simply ignored. Kayle made the … regrettable … error of laughing in Nair’s face, both ignorant of and unwilling to understand exactly what sort of power and authority the Midnight Mayor possessed. Nair gave him twenty-four hours to change his mind. The story says that Kayle spat acid into Nair’s face, which Nair simply wiped away with a silk handkerchief. Personally, I believe that aspect of the tale to be apocryphal.

“Twenty-four hours later, and Kayle was, if anything, flaunting his capabilities still further. Nair approached him again on Hampstead Heath, and told him to leave the city immediately and never set foot in it again. Kayle derided him, mocked him, and finally, in a moment of madness, attacked him.

“Kayle may have been a sorcerer, but he was untrained, and unprepared for the power that the Midnight Mayor commands. Nair shook
off his attack without creasing his shirt and launched in reply such a storm that they say you can still feel the place where the earth was burnt by it, if you know where to look. Kayle ran, but the city no longer wanted him, the streets themselves cracked beneath his feet, the lights went out ahead of him, the buses wouldn’t brake at the shelters, the trains wouldn’t open their doors. He ran; he ran until his shoes were torn and his feet were bleeding, through street and across field, down alley and over garden wall, until finally, breathless and hurt, almost a whole day after the fight on Hampstead Heath he ran across the M25 motorway that rings the city, and fell onto the dirt of the countryside around, free from the grasp of the Midnight Mayor’s power.

“A wiser man might perhaps have left it there.

“Kayle Ajaja, as I think we have established, was not a wise man.

“He swore retribution, and wandered the country in search of the means to achieve it. But the Aldermen had contacts; in Newcastle and Manchester, Glasgow and Edinburgh, to every place he went where urban magic thrived, the moment he spoke his name the locals turned away, and said it wasn’t worth their time to try and explain it to him. London isn’t the only city with its mystical protectors. Finally, after months of travel, the penniless, hungry, bleeding, weak Kayle Ajaja returned to the place he had begun; he returned to his family home in Reading.

“And they welcomed him.

“Good people as they were, the family asked no questions, expected no answers, but gave him a place to sleep and food to eat, and let him recover at his own pace. Oda returned to help care for him, for her mother was now beginning to show the first signs of old age, and the diseases that only old age can bring. The youngest sister of the house, a girl called Jabuile, was fascinated to meet her older brother, who she could barely remember from her youth, and the two seemed to strike up a good friendship.

“Alas, neither Oda nor anyone in her family fully understood the reasoning of her brother’s mind, for he had come to conclude that there was only one way to amass the power to destroy the Midnight Mayor and all who had slighted him in the past, and that was through a dalliance with the magics of blood.