The Neon Court (2 page)

I half dragged her to the door, felt the heat blasting through it, said, “Can you run?”

“No,” she growled through gritted teeth.

“Can you fight?”

“No.”

“You got a fireproof suit beneath that jumper?”

She didn’t grace that with a reply. “Deep breath,” I wheezed, and, wrapping my shirt around my fingers against the scalding heat, took hold of the door handle, and eased the door back.

Flame, brilliant yellow-orange, leapt inward round the door frame.
I opened the door a little further, felt the draught in my hair as the fire, already clothing the walls and ceiling, sensed oxygen behind me and started to surge. Along both sides of the corridor some apartment doors stood open; some were shut; some had been bashed off their frames, pinched for who knew what purpose, some were already half-eaten black cinders, tumbling out smoke that blasted this way and that across the ceiling in giddy twists. In places the flame had found handy little holes between the ceiling’s ruined timbers and cracked plaster, through which it was crawling to the floor above. My feet slipped as the soles of my shoes began to liquefy; I felt the hair of my eyebrows and on the back of my neck curl and singe in the heat, could barely breathe for the knives of pain that came with every gasp of oxygenless vapour. Among the carbon and baking damp fungus I smelt petrol.

I half shook Oda, demanded, “Stairs?”

“That way,” she mumbled, jerking her head towards the end of the corridor.

Too bright to look at, too much, too hot, just glancing that way dragged the water from my eyes. I adjusted Oda’s weight on my shoulder, hissed, “Take a deep breath.”

As she inhaled, so did I. The effect was like swallowing a mosquito swarm, that roiled and writhed inside my lungs. Transmutation had never been one of my strong points; on the other hand impending death had always produced my very best work. So, as the burning air settled in my lungs like charred meat swallowed the wrong way, I half closed my eyes, clawed at what little part of my strength wasn’t dedicated to staying upright, and inwardly pushed. Something foul and chemical, toothpaste without the mint, rotting eggs and white dust, settled over my tongue, coated the inside of my throat, grabbed my chest from inside. The urge to retch contorted my back once, twice, but I swallowed it down, face aching with the strain of keeping my mouth locked over the pressure and taste trying to crawl back up. Oda’s fingers dug into my shoulder; she half closed her eyes against the heat. I waited until my bones could no longer take the strain, then waited half a second more and exhaled.

A white cloud, fine powder on billowing air, burst from my mouth and nose, hard and fast enough to knock my head back and send a
shudder down my back that nearly shoved me and Oda off our feet. I steadied myself, instinctively reaching towards the wall for support and then shying away from the intense heat of the flame licking along the cracked old surface. More graffiti, more paint:

hocus pocus

ONE NATION UNDER CCTV

let me out of here

slowly fracturing and popping till it resembled the multifaceted black surface of a bottle fly’s skin as the fire raced along.

I couldn’t stop myself now, the breath was coming out of me too much and too fast, more breath than I had in me to give, sucking up acid from my stomach and blood from the inside of my nose, its pressure too high as the white cloud burst out from between my lips and blasted down the corridor. The fire recoiled from it, shied and shimmered away, bent backwards and, in one or two places where its dominion was still thin, winked out as if it had never been, leaving carbon scars. And for a moment, I could see the way out. I half fell forward as the last gasp left my body, then heaved in air, shuddering with the strain of it, mouth full of a chemical taste, blood trickling down from our nose, its salt taste blissful against the foulness inside our throat. Oda was already moving, tugging at my coat like she was pulling on the reins of a horse. Even after being blasted by the mixture of magic and fire extinguisher from my throat, the flames were coming back, slithering probes towards us from the ceiling. The glass in the metal-mesh door at the end of the corridor had cracked, turning yellow-green in the heat. I could see the staircase beyond; its metal railings were glowing cheery orange-rose hot, the smoke billowing upwards as if the stairwell were a giant chimney. I peeked down and immediately looked away, half blinded, the after-image of the fires below playing behind my eyelids. Oda risked a glance too, snapping her head away like a frightened bird as the rising heat and light hit the back of her retinas.

“Other ways down?” I wheezed.

“Back there,” she replied, indicating the corridor behind us. “Smell petrol?”

“Yep.” I looked up. The smoke had blackened the stairwell above, and no lights shone enough to pierce the darkness, but it was moving,
I could feel it moving, drawn up towards colder, more breathable air. I closed my fingers tight together, dragged in a little strength from inside my aching chest, opened my palm and let the sodium light blossom between my fingers, yellow-orange, the colour of street lamps, the light that all good urban magicians summon when they need a guide. I aimed it towards our feet, its glow barely enough to illuminate the steps in front of us, and, heads bowed towards that one light, we began to climb. Oda reached instinctively for the banister, then flinched away with a smell of scorched skin as her fingers brushed against it. The plastic cover on the iron rails had begun to melt and run like tar on a summer’s day. On the first landing I found a window, already cracked and foul from earlier times, and smashed it out with a swing of my bag. Smoke spiralled greedily out of it into the open air. I took a breath of the momentarily cold, ice-cold by comparison, blissful pure air of the outside world, and then kept on climbing. The flames were already claiming the floor above, but they had come by easier ways than the stairwell, crawling through cracks in the ceiling, and sending sparks up the tattered remains of curtains. And everywhere there were the graffiti, old dirty paint, cracked pipes and dangling wires that led from nothing to nowhere, mould and fungus and the grey bane-mark of too much time and not enough love, eating as surely as the fire at the heart of this building. Up another floor, and the smoke grew thinner, the fire not yet penetrating this far, but I could still feel it buffeting from below, drawn towards the roof and the wide open sky. We rounded the corner, and there was a body on the stairs.

We nearly tripped over him, feet splayed, arms stretched up like a pinned butterfly in a specimen box. His soot-stained face had once been pale, until someone with a red-hot needle had driven the tip into every freckle across his nose and cheeks, raising swollen pinpricks of scarred red tissue in a dot-matrix printer pattern. He wore the remnants of a black hoodie, starting to smoulder, a pair of blue jeans slashed at the knees and grey trainers, the heels smoking and warped out of shape. Someone had cut his throat; the black-red blood was still working its sluggish way down from the wound. Oda’s fingers tightened in my coat, but she didn’t speak. We stepped round him, shuffling over the outflung barrier of his arm and upwards, past a pair of empty grey eyes vanishing into the thickening smoke.

One more floor, and the air was almost breathable, the sodium cast from my little summoned light almost good enough to see well by, if you ignored the residual burning pain in the lungs, the cracked lips, the blistered skin, the brilliant yellow-blue afterburn that was visible on the front of the eyes even when you didn’t try to close them. One more flight of stairs, smaller than the rest, led to a metal door, its rusted chain long since wrenched off, the lock twisted and broken, a sign dangling by a single screw saying,

ROOF ACCESS – AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

I pushed at the door, and it gave with a banshee screech of rust. We tumbled out onto a flat concrete surface, stained with the white tidemarks of a decades-old battle between pooling stagnant rainwater and pigeon crap. The rain was bliss, cold and wonderful and pure. We turned our face towards it, gasped down air, felt the water run down our face and neck, let it. I could hear sirens somewhere below, a distance away but drawing closer. Oda untangled herself from me and flopped on her hands and knees into a puddle of rainwater, gasping for breath, eyes shut, head bowed. The twisted remnants of satellite dishes and TV aerials made up the forestry of this rooftop, and here and there were the sad remnants of beer cans, billowing plastic bags weighed down by pooling water inside them, and limp fast-food boxes. A vent, taller than me, stood dead and silent, some of its bars broken, leaving just enough space for birds to hop inside and nest. A low metal railing ran round the edge of the roof. I staggered over to it, as much to have something to lean on as to get my bearings, and draped myself over it to catch my breath. From here, I could see in every direction, and could fill in the picture that I hadn’t been able to complete in the flat below. Canary Wharf, white speckled monuments rising up in the darkness, a hint of silverish water below; the Millennium Dome, a bulb of white before the thicker darkness where the city started to end and the estuary began; Greenwich Hill, a small patch of rising darkness crowned with a glimmer of light where the observatory sat, blasting out a thin green line into the night to declare that here, right here and no more than a needle thick, was the middle of the world.

I was in South London; at a guess, Sidcup or, optimistically, Blackheath. Distances changed their meanings south of the river; short became long, long became expected. I could taste the buzzing magic
of the place, tight, full of corners and bumps where a slither of power could suddenly become an overwhelming roar, and a river of magic could dwindle to nothing just when you thought you’d tangled your fingers in it. South, and not as far south as I would have liked, and the familiar silver taste of the city’s magic began to give way to the elusive older magics of the countryside, of forests and rivers and the old ways of doing things. We did not like those magics; we neither fully understood nor mastered them, and that left us vulnerable.

I glanced down and saw that the tarmac below the tower was now glowing with the crazy fire dance of reflected light from where the flames were beginning to crawl out of the windows, smoking and steaming in defiance of the falling rain. Blue lights played off the streets around us as the emergency services arrived, their siren sounds calming, a strange reassurance in the night, even though they were much, much too late. The fire had spread too fast, too far, and not entirely of its own accord. I crawled back to where Oda still knelt, head down, resting on the palms of her hands, back arching with the effort of drawing breath.

“You OK?”

She nodded in reply, eyes still fast shut. “Can you get us out of here?”

“Fire’s all over the lower floors.”

“You can control fire?”

“I can negotiate with it.”

“Thought sorcerers loved fire.”

“More in a metaphorical than practical sense. It’s too big for me to stop it now. And …”

“And?”

“It moves too fast. Takes a lot of power to argue with petrol once it’s got a big idea.”

Slowly she raised her head, and opened her eyes, and for a moment, I thought I saw blood pooling along the rim of her lower eyelids. Then she blinked and it was gone. “You’re the Midnight Mayor. You’re the blue electric angels. Work something out.”

“Oda … what the hell is going on here?” She closed her eyes, lowered her head again, and said nothing. “I get us out, you owe me,” I said, voice low to her ear. “You
owe
me for this.”

“You want to die here?” she asked.

Our lips curled in frustration. Now that the need to survive the next five seconds had receded, other feelings were returning, as hot and raw as the inferno beneath us. I heard sirens below, wheels splashing through water, the voices of men. I stood up slowly, flexing my fingers at my sides, breathing down our anger, and looked into a pair of lilac eyes.

There was a man on the roof.

He was half a foot taller than me, wore black trousers slashed on the inside in that very neat, very minced way that made it fashion, not poverty, wore a cream-coloured T-shirt, five layers of gold chain that at their lowest dropped to just above his diaphragm and at their shortest hugged his throat like a jealous lover, an open black jacket, fingerless white driving gloves and golden spiked hair like a billionaire hedgehog. His skin was white, snow white, painted white, and someone had gone to the trouble of adding to this two great red spikes of paint that stretched up across each eyelid like a mask. He carried a thing that, while not exactly a sword, was well past the point where it could claim to be a knife. It had a handle in the shape of a bottleneck, but of ornate silver wound round with golden wire, and the blade was made of cobalt-blue glass. It looked like it shouldn’t be sharp, but the ease with which it tore through the air, sending spinning eddies of rain flying out of its path as it came down towards my throat, suggested otherwise.

I squeaked like a startled rabbit, tried to leap away, banged into Oda, knocking her to the floor, and then fell backwards over her, landing with a splash in the puddle behind me. Oda lay still where she’d fallen, like one dead already, showing none of the usual violent instincts I had come to rely on. So he came after me, face contorted, as if he was a hiccup away from a seizure. I began, “Wait just a …” and the glass blade smacked down on the place where my heart should have been. We rolled. Instinct was better than reason, and we were not willing to die in this place, at the hands of this painted bug. We rolled across Oda and then kept rolling up onto our feet, in a half-crouch ready to strike, spreading our fingers to the sides and letting the power flow to them. We took the rain running across our skin, and then we took the faint bite of acid inside it, the faint chemical sting and we pushed it between
our fists, let it build up into a bubble of burning not-quite-water that fizzed and hissed as the rain passed across its translucent surface. Surprise, almost comical in its briefness and intensity, passed across the man’s face, then he raised his blade high above his head, face contorted again, and gave a battle cry of spit and fury that briefly drowned out the sirens and the flames below. We said, calm and true, “We will kill you if you try.”