The Neon Court (19 page)

“The Order,” he added smoothly, “will know more about Oda than you do: her habits, life, motives, her actions and deeds. These will all be useful.”

“The Order get a prize for hating me more than anyone else in this city, and there’s stiff competition at the high levels,” I snapped.

“You came to me for help,” he pointed out. “As for the rest of my suggestions … I suggest you find Oda. I suggest that, after due consideration, you destroy her. I believe that covers an initial plan of action.”

Silence again. I heard the swishing of fans in the ceiling, and smelt cheese. Then Penny said, “I’ve got a question.”

“My dear?”

“What kind of ‘academic guidance’?”

“Ah – you do raise a thorny point. Alas, Mr Bakker’s elimination of a large part of the magical community of London has led to a bit of a dearth of appropriate information, although, of course, alternative sources still exist.”

“You just said you don’t know, right?”

“If you analyse my words in detail,” chided Sinclair, “I think you’ll find that what I said was I do know, but I don’t think anyone in this
room will enjoy the answer. But I really do feel this is a conversation best shared with Ms Dees. After all, sooner or later, Matthew, you are going to have to trust someone, aren’t you?”

Phonecalls were made.

By the sound of it, they were made to a lot of different people, by Charlie, Sinclair, and Penny.

Someone found me a nice padded bench to curl up on.

I lay, hands tucked underneath my head, knees folded up to my chin, and dozed, and half listened.

Sinclair’s voice: “I understand your concerns, Ms Dees, but he really is very convincing and … yes, I am aware of that particular issue, but in this case there may be … yes … yes …”

Charlie’s voice; “When I say ‘can’ we get some people looking into this, what I really mean is ‘now’ get some people looking into this, all right?”

Penny, always unmistakable, reliable, freaked-out Penny, always trying so hard to sound calm, as she talked to her aunt: “Yeah … no, listen, yeah … yeah look, if you like … no, I know I took your car but I had to, like … yeah … I’ll pick some up on the way back, look, you gonna listen to me or what? It might be kinda like … worth going out of the city for a bit. What do you mean ‘where?’ I don’t fucking know do I, just go visit a mate or someone – what about that woman who always sends you those fuc … those Christmas cards with the pictures of her kids and the whole kinda ‘little Tiddles is four now and has started learning recorder’ kinda shit? No, look, I just kinda figure it’d be cool to get out of town for a bit, you know?”

“… obviously the issue is a sensitive one …”

“What do you mean ‘they’re weeping blood’? Jesus weeps blood. The Holy Mary weeps blood. Scryers being paid forty quid an hour to do a simple job don’t weep blood! Well then get them chow mein and put it in the microwave or something!”

“I did not nearly swear! I did not! Look, I’ve got a fuc … I mean, I’m like totally on it, you know?”

And after a while, because it had been a long endless night, our thoughts began to drift into the random currents and giddy tides of sleep.

We dreamt of the lights going out.

We dreamt of footsteps in the dark.

Of lilac eyes and fingers drooping down from white silk sleeves.

Of fire on our back and blood on our lips.

Of endless falling rain.

And woke to the sound of “Well, Mr Mayor, isn’t this a mess?”

There was a crick in my neck, and one of my feet had gone to sleep. A hand touched my shoulder. “It’s Dees,” she added.

“I guessed,” I groaned, rolling one cautious limb at a time upwards. My eyes felt dry and itchy, but no longer two times too large for their sockets. Static flickered across my vision as I rose and my head floated momentarily on a hot custard bath. I wondered if this was a good or a bad thing. “Hi, Dees, and before you say anything, I know that it’s all a bit of a cock-up and I’m sorry about that.”

A sigh as she sat down next to me. I imagined her folding her legs and adopting the clasped hands of a woman trying to be patient in the face of the irredeemably naive. “Mr Sinclair was kind enough to fill me in on some of the details – Mr Mayor, why didn’t you come to me sooner?”

“Didn’t have enough information.”

“We could have helped …”

“We or you?”

“The Aldermen are dedicated to the protection of the city …”

“And I quote: ‘It is not worth risking a war with the Neon Court over one life; these are the political realities we deal with.’”

“We would never betray one of our own …”

“And are we one of your own, Ms Dees? Really? When we were first introduced to the Aldermen, as I remember it, a large percentage were all in favour of killing us. After all, the Midnight Mayor, the power and the name, lives on, even if the last poor bastard lumbered with the title is dead.”

“I can understand your concerns,” she began carefully, “but in this case could you not have risked a certain … ?”

“I had no information! Since I last saw you, I’ve been dragged to Heathrow and back, met a dragon, had a chat with Lady Neon, been concussed out of my own scrying spell, found two corpses with their
eyes burnt out in a hotel, been chased by a moving darkness, chatted to a seer and had the crap kicked out of me by a psycho-nutter whose very gaze turns your brain to chicken food! And only at the end of all of this do I have even the beginnings of an inkling of what might, just might, be going on, and that a vague one.”

I heard Dees letting out a long, slow breath. “All right,” she murmured. “Very well. The situation is not yet irredeemable. We need to find this ‘chosen one’, whoever she is, and resolve this conflict before it can escalate …”

“Not to mention dealing with bloody Oda and the sun not bloody coming up!” I wailed, throwing my hands up in despair. “Let’s not forget that little snag.”

“Do you have any idea what manner of creature it is that could have caused this? The sun failing to rise, even if the sun is failing to rise …”

“Bollocks!” I shouted.

Dees waited, then went on as calm as ever, “… the power required to cause such an event of … of such magnitude must be immense. To not only elongate time, if that is indeed what is happening, but to enchant an entire city to be unaware of its own predicament, save for, with all due respect, one somewhat … harried … man? Have you ever considered, Mr Mayor – and please try very hard not to shout when I suggest this – but have you ever considered the dangers to your own … mental well-being … that some of the circumstances of your life may have created?”

“You’re right,” I growled. “I am trying very, very hard not to shout and it’s a fine balance right now.”

“Your appointment as the Midnight Mayor, your dealings with Robert Bakker, your resurrection with another consciousness sharing your own, your death … ?”

“I want you to think very hard about the next sentence, Dees, because if the words ‘post-traumatic stress’ are involved in it I might just start hyperventilating.”

“And that in and of itself doesn’t concern you?”

“Catch twenty-two! I’ve either got post-traumatic stress and admit it, or I haven’t and am therefore concealing it because of how trauma-tised I am!” My voice was rising again. “Dees,” I said, as slow and calm as I dared, “if I was anyone else, anyone at all, who had this brand on
my hand, the mark of the Midnight Mayor, and I came to you and told you that the lights were going out, the sun wasn’t rising and whole swaths of the city were turning to blackout, would you doubt me?”

She was silent so long I half imagined she’d left, and forced myself to sit still and patient at what I hoped was her side while she considered this. Then somewhere in the darkness, she said, “No. No, I wouldn’t.”

“Well then. Let’s reach a compromise, you and I. I’ll try very, very hard not to stress out, screw things up or generally be an arse, and you listen to me. Deal?”

“Yes. Deal.”

“Fantastic. Now, screwy as this Tribe–Court bollocks is, I’m more worried about the walking blackout that seems to go wherever Oda goes and the whole eternal night stuff. Do you reckon we could maybe get someone onto that?”

“We need more information,” replied Dees, her voice the hollow thing of a mind working some distance away from the words it made. “Perhaps something similar has happened before?”

“That’d be worth knowing – especially if it came with a tag line on how to stop it.”

“I can make some enquiries …”

“Beautiful.”

“But we really do need to resolve this Court–Tribe matter before it escalates any further …”

“Lady Neon gave me twenty-four hours to sort it out, deal with this chosen one bollocks.”

“Twenty-four hours … since when?”

“You know, I’m really not sure any more. Sorry! But time’s got a bit muddled.”

“So … they could already be at war?”

“I’ve been busy!”

Even Dees couldn’t quite prevent the hiss of frustration escaping her lips. “I’ll have our ambassador at the Neon Court ask for an extension of the peace, but we have no such institution with the Tribe, no means of contact …”

“Sure we have means of contact,” I sighed. “It’s just not a very fun means of contact.”

“You are proposing … ?”

“We ask Fat Rat.”

“You see, Mr Mayor, it’s exactly statements like that which cause me concern.”

“Oh, come on,” I exclaimed with forced merriment. “Fat Rat’s not that bad. And he goes everywhere and the Tribe practically worship him.”

“And how exactly do you suppose the Tribe will react to an overture from us, I mean from you, as Midnight Mayor?”

“I imagine … radically.”

“I cannot condone this plan, if we’re going to glorify it even as that.”

“Come up with something better before I get my sight back, and I’ll be all eyes,” I replied, fumbling my way along the length of the couch for space to lie back down again. “Until then, good luck with that whole war business.”

Dees seethed with frustration, but said nothing more.

I lay on a couch in a wine cellar in St James’s, and thought about the Tribe.

Up to now, I hadn’t given it much consideration, largely on the basis that it hadn’t given me any grief, so why bother? The Tribe, as far as I knew, had no reason to come after me, nor me after it, unless the Neon Court got us involved. Sure, I didn’t like the bastards; but that was about the extent of my relationship with them.

The Tribe.

Bunch of self-mutilating wankers, caught up in a war with a bunch of all-purpose wankers.

Once upon a time, there had been hundreds of smaller tribes, made up of the various outcasts of the city. Back in the day when you got burnt for your belief, the tribes had been the dissenters, the witches, the criminals and the heretics. They made their lairs in the leper colonies and filled their ranks with the plague carriers whose skin was still burst black with disease but whose bodies would not die for all of this. When times had changed so they had changed again, and their ranks had been filled with the necromancers and the dabblers in profane arts, the ones who wouldn’t hide behind gentility or pretend to the rest of the world that they were anything but what they were, but
rather flaunted their disregard for the sanctity of humanity, such as it was, and cast dark magics in the quiet places of the night.

But times had changed again, and by the early 1960s the tribes were fracturing into more definitive shapes, and from them you acquired fully formed clans such as the Whites, the Bikers, the deep downers, the warlocks, mercenary magicians for hire and tattooed men and women who found magic in skin. The entity left over was made up of the men and women that no one else really wanted and so they, the last fragment of the tribes, became just the Tribe, a collective that needed no other name, a place for the ones who wanted nothing of society’s norms or demands, a shelter for those determined to be alone.

The cruder among the magicians of the city called them the orcs, semi-savage beasts with no place in civilised society, the ones who would eat the flesh of other men, the ones who found honour in ugliness and pride in pain. The sociologists who were lucky enough to live long enough to study the Tribe concluded that this was a misnomer. The members of the Tribe were human, in as much as their base physiology was concerned, but had acquired through the self-infliction of wounds, pains, scars and disfigurement a quality of violent and potent magic that evaded their more mundane human counterparts. Not for them the mainstream trappings of urban spells and urban sorceries, which drew their magics from the world around; theirs was a power that came from them and them alone, a defiant, potent mixture of pain, blood and fury that had no regard for the laws of other men, or indeed, for other men in any form at all.

How the Tribe had come to be on the brink of perpetual war with the Court was a matter of only limited interest; how they’d managed not to go to war with everyone else was more of a curiosity. They were not without their rules, their honour or their gods. Where the Neon Court viewed Lady Neon with an almost divine adoration, the Tribe paid quiet tribute to the gods of the underworld, to Fat Rat, and the One-Armed Angel who tended the graves of the unknown buried in the public cemeteries.

There was a smell of coffee. I said, “Penny, if it’s you, and if it’s coffee, I’ll kiss you.”

“You should be so fucking lucky,” she replied. A hand found mine,
pushed a hot mug between my fingers. “For all you know I’ve got a bloke anyway.”

“Have you?”

“No – but that’s entirely my choice! Way too busy to be pissing around with some toy boy.”

I slurped coffee, rich and thick and slightly grainy towards the bottom, and tactfully said nothing.

“So,” she said finally, “I guess there’s kinda a lot of people round here went through the whole ‘let’s kill Penny’ business.”

“Yeah. I guess there sorta are. But they’re over it now that they’ve met you and discovered how charming you are.”

“I seriously screwed things up for you, didn’t I?”

“Hey – you saved my neck.”

“I mean … you know … back when I wasn’t being trained proper and you had this whole ‘oh shit, death of cities’ bollocks crap to sort. Seriously screwed, right?”