The Neon Court (37 page)

…
for DJ Sax And His Sexy Babes
…

…
what is the meaning of
…

twice winner of
…

…
entry £6 before midnight, £10 after
…

There was a hole in the fence, cracked wood. I crawled through. Concrete on the other side, broken by the odd feeble tuft of grass, drowning in oil-slick thick rain. My light hit an obstacle, and spread upwards.

The obstacle was grey, stained black, its walls embedded with grit plastered over, as if the architect had decided that here was a building destined for cracks and unevenness, so why not embrace the idea
at an early stage and make it an effect of art, not time? The ground-floor windows were covered over with thick, lightless metal grilles. The door had at some point been covered with plywood, which had then been ripped off in recent times and thrown to one side. A chain had been smashed off by repeated blows and left to hang from the metal door handles of the main entrance. Nothing to steal, go ahead and try. I looked up. Somehow, the tower, square and squat, had seemed a lot taller when I was jumping off it. From the fourth floor up, the windows were burnt black, like ash lips around a surprised square.

Theydon said, “Minjae San died here.”

I thought of the sound the glass blade had made as it entered Minjae’s back.

“She wouldn’t have been able to kill him without you, you know,” offered Bakker, casually leaning up against the wall by the door.

“Sure,” I muttered. “The Court and the Tribe, both summoned to this place by a phone call about the ‘chosen one’; and like monkeys you both come and whaddayouknow, some idiot’s brought petrol.”

“The Tribe attacked
us
.”

“Sure. They said to themselves, ‘Hey, that looks like a harmless bunch of sword-carrying wankers, let’s go banzai on their asses.’”

“Arses,” corrected Bakker. “We are not Americans, Matthew, regardless of the TV we watch.”

“You prefer the Tribe’s ugliness? Their destruction, loathing, self-contempt?”

“Gentlemen,” interjected Dees, “considering that we are, at this exact moment in time, trapped in an endless night outside the laws of geography, could we save this diplomatic discussion for another time?”

“Pragmatism pragmatism pragmatism,” I grumbled, marching up to the door and kicking it open. Broken glass swept back before it: glass from the door itself, glass from the lights that had popped, and tumbled from the ceiling beyond. The water had got in here too, dirty water full of wriggling dirt that twisted like worms with each drop from a torn pipe or cracked ceiling. The doors to a lift, coffin-sized, stood half-open, revealing a black fall with a short stop below, cables hanging limp and crooked. Thin brown mould had worked its way into every contour of every dirty tile on the dirty floor, but still there was the lingering smell of burnt metal and carbon, drying out the
mouth even as the water drip drip dripped onto the floor. I tried the stairs cautiously, and felt only solid concrete beneath my feet. There was a slow hiss behind me. Theydon had drawn his short stabbing swords, one of green glass, one of brown. The air had the common sense to run away from the edge of their blades. In the gloom, his eyes clearly reflected with a lilac tint. The claws were back on Dees’ fingers too, no doubting it now, nails turned to thick black bone, sharpened to a point, skin on the top of her hand half mortal, half metal, eyes flecked with mad dragon red, thin black smoke turning on the air every time she exhaled, like she’d not just smoked the cigarette but swallowed it too. She was between me and Theydon. I wondered if even a daimyo’s glass blade could penetrate the metal back of an Alderman.

We climbed.

On the second floor, in the middle of the landing, was a dark eaten-out patch of concrete, seared deep and black. The smell of petrol was still strong here, and something else, a lingering trace of something just on the edge of sense, a taste of magic. I glanced at Theydon. “Your lot regularly use petrol to start fires?” I asked.

“The Tribe do,” he replied.

I grunted in reply, kept on climbing. The metal handrails of the stair had been twisted by the heat, warped out of shape. A plastic bag had caught itself on a broken shard of glass in the window. Water ran down the inside walls.

A sound, one floor above; probably no louder than a cup falling on carpet, and to us, in that place, the sound of thunder. Our heart started running for the exit, leaving us behind; I heard Dees’ breath, Theydon’s coat move as every muscle tightened.

“Rat?” asked Dees when no more noise came.

“No,” I answered softly. “They’re sleeping too.”

A sound.

This one, unlike the other, had meaning.

It went

Clop. Clop clop. Clop.

We stood. We listened.

It seemed to listen back.

Then it moved again.

Hard and sharp on concrete. Black dust trickled from a crack in the ceiling above us.

Footsteps.

Walking overhead.

Theydon said, “The chosen one?”

“You wish,” I growled.

“Then who?”

“If you see a woman with a hole in her heart, try not to look her in the eyes, OK?”

“You talk in riddles,” he snapped.

“See this serious face?” I asked. He looked. He saw. Something crawled away behind his eyes. “Don’t look,” we repeated. “You’ll die if you do.”

Footsteps.

Not overhead.

They’d moved without seeming to move. Beneath us now. A door banged back and forth on its shattered hinges.

Stopped.

Then again, just one set of feet, somewhere in the distance, now, far off, but not getting any further away.

I found that our hand was itching with electric energy. I squatted down and ran my hand over the black dirt of the stairs, rubbing it between my fingers, scratching under my nails with the dry sound of thick chalk on an old board. I licked my fingertips and for a moment tasted

heat

back blister heat flesh crinkle and curl

fire

too bright

smoke

Help me?

black dropping ash tongue to ash skin to ash carbon in the lungs too tight to breathe every breath hurts

Kill me?

feet running in the dark help me?

grey eyes

eyes turned to blood

grey eyes

paint on the wall, letters running in the blaze

JG WOZ ERE

I straightened, wiped my fingers on my trousers. “Your Minjae San – he got a tip-off sending him here?”

“Yes.”

“And the Tribe were already here?”

“Yes.”

“And that didn’t strike you as odd?” I sighed.

“Mr Mayor,” interjected Dees before Theydon could get into a proper fume. “Your meaning?”

“JG woz ere,” I repeated. “I saw it on the walls. The girl was here. Oda said ‘Where’s the girl?’, but none of the bodies brought out of the fire were hers. She was alive when the tower burnt, she was alive when it finished burning. I think I can find her.”

Footsteps. Scuttling, running overhead, picking up speed and stopping as quickly as they’d begun.

“Do we need to be here for you to do that?” murmured Dees.

“This building is the only connection I have to your damned chosen one,” I replied. “It’s the only link I can use. Ignore the footsteps. Oda seems to be on a slow-killing bent these days.”

I started to climb, but Theydon’s arm reached up and caught mine, a grip that went straight down to the bone. “Wait. This … Oda … is the creature Blackout?”

“Yeah.”

“And what do you mean, she asked you ‘Where’s the girl?’”

My eyes flickered to Dees, for just a moment, and she half shook her head. We looked back at Theydon, straight in the eye, and his grip slackened. “Your life will be easier and simpler,” we answered, “if you just stick with the war.” We pulled our arm free, and I started to climb before he could object at our empty half-words delivered in the dark.

No footsteps.

Another floor up.

Nothing but falling rain tapping in through broken windows across burnt-out floors.

On the next stairway up, Bakker stood, leaning out of the shattered,
scorched remains of a window, one hand turned up to the sky, trying to catch the rain. He blocked the stair. We walked straight through him.

“Rude,” he remarked as we passed by.

Next floor.

I stopped, hesitated.

“It all looks so different when not actually in flame, doesn’t it?” remarked Bakker, coming up beside me. Everything that had once been wood, door or frame, was now a black tooth, sliced to scraggly spikes. Everything that had once been metal, handle or wire, was withered out of shape. Everything that had once been clean, or cleanish, was now black, eating up the thin light my bubble of illumination cast. I started walking down the corridor, past doors to flats long since cleaned out, shattered remnants of gone lives, TV glass smashed out, sofa of burnt springs, glass melted from an empty picture frame.

Footsteps ran beneath us.

I thought I heard a woman laugh, or maybe cry, or maybe neither.

I pushed back what remained of a door. It creaked like the granite eyelids of a mountain opening after a long sleep. Dust and flakes of powdered wood trickled between my fingers.

The fire had burnt away the last trace of Oda’s blood, but we knew this was the room.

Beneath us, a door slammed.

Dees said, “Something’s coming.”

I knelt on the burnt floor, scorched down to tortured concrete. It shifted beneath my weight, a stiff stone mattress feeling its age. I ran my hand over it.

“How do we kill it?” asked Theydon. “The thing outside?”

I looked around for Bakker. He wasn’t there.

“Sorcerer!” A note of frightened urgency in his voice. “How do we kill it?”

“Her,” I replied softly. “How do we kill
her
.”

Our fingers running along the floor brushed a place rougher than the rest. There was power, thick, hot power, a sauna without the moisture, burning without light. It made it hard to breathe. My hand hurt. Right hand, where the scars were. I pulled off my glove. The thin
scars, twin crosses of the Midnight Mayor, were filling with tiny lines of blood.

Outside, there was the sound of something whispering. Not a voice. Not dust falling. But something somewhere in between. I glanced over my shoulder. Theydon stood by the door, shoulders hunched like an animal. Dees’ skin had a silver sheen to it, her features distorted, bones too sharp, nails too black, eyes too red. Aldermen, when trying to scare, took on some of the aspects of the city’s dragon, that old symbol meant to guard the gates. It hadn’t occurred to us that Aldermen would do the same when they were afraid.

I ran my hand along the floor, feeling in a wide arc around me.

The sound of whispering was now something more, not feathered wings, not wind full of snow, not quite human, but alive, and coming closer.

My fingers brushed something sticky. I pulled them closer to my face, examining the substance by the thin light. It looked almost black, was tough, barely liquid at all, and stuck to itself like dried glue. I looked closer. Flecks of red shimmered, caught the light, seemed to wriggle, writhe, try to burst out of each other like a living thing and flicker a dull electric blue. I looked down at the ground. Something was moving beneath me, trying to crawl off the floor, surfacing and falling like the back of a maggoty whale. I pressed my hand into it and it responded, a sudden flare of brightness, brilliant red, writhing crimson, spread out beneath my fingers and traced across the blackness, the raggedy outline of twin crosses, drawn in blood.

A foot moved next to me. A pair of suit trousers, knee bent, as Bakker squatted down on the other side of the cross. We saw how he pulled his trousers smartly up around his ankles, keeping everything neat and creased. “Fascinating,” he murmured, as the blood of the twin crosses wriggled and wormed to life beneath my fingers. “You know, it occurs to me, Matthew, that the power of the Midnight Mayor is one whose potential you’ve never fully grasped.”

I could taste dust on my lips, feel a wind, hotter and faster than the one that came with the rain, coming our way, and now the sound was a whooshing, a rush of something fast and dense moving on the wind, trying to push and pull all at once. The blood on the floor was moving too, spilling out of its ridged shape, flowing like water downhill, but
there was no down to encourage it, sending out little tendrils of liquid like a nervous lake that wishes it had managed to do the river thing. Dees hissed, “Matthew!”

“Nearly there,” I replied.

“
Matthew!
”

I heard her moving, felt the heat now, like the touch of moonlight, only the moon had got envious of its bigger brother and was doing the thermal thing with a vengeance.

A tendril of rolling red blood reached a crack in the concrete, slim and black, a fault line, paused, pooled, reached critical mass, and went,
drip
. I bent down until my nose almost touched the floor, peering into that crack.

Drip
.

Another little red bead fell away. I could feel Bakker beside me, watching, and as I closed one eye tight and scrunched down right below, I saw that drop of blood fall, and keep on falling, down and down and down into a blackness further and darker and deeper than the tower block itself, before the distance travelled blotted out its light.

I breathed, “Damn.”

Then Dees’ hand was on my shoulder, yanking me up and there was a roaring in the corridor outside and heat that made my skin try to shrink in on itself and Theydon was yelling, or had perhaps been yelling all along and there was smoke pouring in through the door and a shaking underfoot and above and dust falling all around and Dees screamed, “There’s something …”

Then it was in the doorway, moving so fast and so hot it blasted the hinges off the door frame, smoke and dust and dirt and ash that bloomed hot red before folding in on itself. I curled up tight, and our hands were in front of our face, throwing up a wall of thick colder air against the blast. It was like trying to stop a lorry with tissue paper. I rocked back as the blast hit, filling my world with smoke, above and on all sides, blotting out the rest of the world, pushing in at the little bubble I’d thrown up and the fire in the blood on the floor was blotted out and our hand hurt, it hurt so much and we could hardly breathe, not enough air in our bubble, a few lungfuls at best, and we were breathing too fast, unable to stop ourselves.
The moisture in our bubble turned to steam and curled around our face, stung our eyes, burnt our skin. I could see the cracks in the floor spreading, breaking out and expanding beneath my feet and a few more seconds of this and we’d have to breathe again, and when we did the magic at our fingers would fail and we’d breathe fire and smoke and die burnt from the inside out. I couldn’t see Theydon or Dees, couldn’t see anything beyond my own hands, curled in around my face, not an inch of air left between them and the fire. We shuddered and tried to force our bubble of air wider, give ourself more space to move, but the air was already burning out and we felt a rush like petrol sucked from the engine as the breath was sucked from our lungs with the effort. We screamed our rage, pushed harder, saw the ash buckle and burst around us, pushed again, saw it retreat a few precious inches, raised our head and roared sapphire fury, and without so much as a sigh it split, burst and rolled around us, spat out of the shattered windows and tumbled away into the night, leaving nothing more than sickly brown curling hot vapours rolling over the floor.