The Neon Court (7 page)

It made us feel oddly uncomfortable, as if somehow betraying a sea of trusting strangers. The music went up through the seat. The smoke spun little eddies in the air. There was an ice bucket with champagne in it. There was a minibar, containing more liquors, only some of which we could identify. There were no less than five small TV screens pumping out a mixture of financial news, replete with inexplicable numbers and arrows, and MTV videos. The windows made it hard to see anything outside. The driver was lost behind black glass, silent, unseen. The girl with the silly shoes said, “We are grateful, you know.”

“For what?”

“For your taking our side.”

“I haven’t taken anyone’s side.”

“But you will. There’s a treaty.”

“And no proof that it’s been broken.”

She lapsed into a silence that might well have been a sulk. After a while, she stood up and, hobbling, head bowed, the length of the limo, went to a low ice box, and pulled out something orange and frozen, wrapped in plastic. Vapour tumbled out around her wrists. “Want one?” she asked.

“What is it?”

“Vodka lolly.”

“Too early in the morning for me.”

“Oh, you’re sweet. If you were cute, I might like you. But you’re not. You’re just sweet.”

“I forgot to ask how you found me so fast.”

“We followed the Aldermen.”

“How’d you know to follow Dees?”

“We didn’t. We followed the twelve most senior Aldermen. But I was the only one who found you; so I’m the one who’ll be rewarded.”

“Rewarded, how?”

“Oh,” she said casually, “with whatever I desire.”

We drove through South London, across that zone where old red-brick blocks of flats faced off across a busy road with the new, balcony-sporting, underfloor-heated, terracotta-tiled apartments that had filled up the former warehouses towards the river. I couldn’t see Jamaica Road, not clearly, but I could feel it beneath the tyres of the car, feel the distant plonking of an out-of-tune church bell, smell cleaning liquid and fresh kebab, hear the hiss of buses pulling up. When we crossed Tower Bridge, my right hand twitched, fire – not entirely unpleasant – running through the scars burnt into my skin. The river’s magic penetrated even the black windows of the car, washing away, just for an instant, the smell of cigarette smoke. The Embankment was a series of stop-starts at traffic lights; the beginning of the A4 a slog of narrow old roads too small for the great mass of vehicles poured into them. When the A4 became the M4, a motorway hemmed in by roads with names like Elm Walk and Oak Tree Lane, I put my head back against the seat and watched the regular pulse of the pinkish-white street lights across the ceiling of the car.

The magic changed, the closer we grew to Heathrow. Still urban, still our magic, still the kind of power we could tap, but where the Square Mile was a burning brilliance of electricity and shadows, out here along the motorway the magic was a black snake soaked in moonlight, dancing on a frying pan. Hard to see; hard to catch, and once you’d got your fingers tangled in it, you didn’t let go. Heathrow didn’t sleep; even when the planes stopped, for the few hours that they did stop, lorries bustled in and out, bringing in food and fuel, goods and duty-free barely fast enough for the rate at which they were consumed. I heard the engines of the planes coming in low overhead, felt them shake even a car as fat and decadent as the limousine, even through the relentless music, felt power move around them, caught it like breeze tangling in my fingertips.

I said, as we slowed, “Hope it’s not Terminal 5.”

The girl made no answer.

“That Lady Neon – smart to come when a crisis strikes, isn’t she?”

No answer.

“Must be … what? Ten hours from Mumbai? And to think, her daimyos – this Minjae San? – has only been dead for … eight?”

“Did you sit silently in the car all this time and think of aeroplanes?” asked the girl with a laugh as light and fake as a snowglobe.

“Ducky,” I sighed, “you’re a thrall. The silver bangle you wear round your neck is welded on. You’re never going to take it off. You were sent to do a job, and being a thrall, you did it. Did they tell you what you were collecting, when you came to collect us? Did they say why our eyes are so blue, or why our hands are so scarred? Did they tell you what we are? Doubt it. Because you probably wouldn’t have come, if they had. So, with all due respect, and if you don’t mind, shove it.”

The limo pulled to a stop as she opened her mouth to answer. I opened the door, kicked it wide with the heel of my shoe, raised a warning finger towards her. “That was the final word, by the by. Enjoy it! And buy some sensible shoes?”

I slammed the door shut before she could start screaming.

I had expected to be at Arrivals.

I wasn’t. I was on the edge of a car park. On one side was a field. A rabbit regarded me from behind the chain-link fence separating field from tarmac. A line of red lights announced that the field was probably busier than the rabbit’s calm expression implied. In the distance were the white lights of Heathrow stretching off, the control tower a blinking red spike in their midst. To say planes came and went didn’t do it justice; planes landed even as others took off, and no sooner had their wheels touched down than you could see the one behind already descending, no room for error, no time for doubt.

I looked across the gloomy, yellow-lit car park as the engines roared and the wind was cool, and the thought dawned somewhere in the back of my mind that something was wrong with this picture. Then a voice said, “Mr Swift?”

I turned.

The man wore a dinner jacket without the bow tie, white silk gloves and sunglasses despite the night. He had come out of nowhere. He said, “Mr Matthew Swift?”

“And you look like hired muscle,” I sighed. “Did you have to bring your own gun, or is it one of the perks?”

“If you could come with me, please, Mr Swift.”

I shrugged and followed. A chain-mesh gate was set into the fence. He unlocked it with a fat black key, startling my friend the rabbit, and walked down a neat path of square flagstones towards the red lights of the runway. He stopped a few metres from the tarmac, and checked his watch.

I said, “You know, I’ve got stuff to do, people to see.”

“Her ladyship will be here within a few moments, Mr Swift. Trouble with air traffic control.”

We waited. Then, without any apparent sign of having looked, the man said, “Ah, here she comes.”

I looked up, half expecting to see the lights of a private jet or, at the very least, a 747 heading in to land. No such thing. The skies were clear. Which was, in and of itself, an oddity. A breeze, warmer, smelling faintly of grease, tickled the top of my head. I craned back, looked straight up. Something darker than the sodium-tinted clouds above flickered for a second with a hint of reflected runway light, and then twisted again out of sight. I heard the faintest creaking of metal, and felt something hot bite between my fingertips. I closed my fists up tight, felt the power tingle up my arms, lots and lots of magic, as thick and cloying as steam in a sauna. It made us think of the sound that metal wheels made when braking too sharply on a railway track, and we had to resist the urge to raise our defences.

Then there was a sound, the swish-swish-swish of a tail, the rolling pressure of air being displaced. I shielded my eyes as the wind grew up around the runway, pushing dust and dirt into the air, and looked through a crack in my fingers as a thing made of ebony darkness and pinpointed white light came twisting out of the sky like a paper wrapper in a storm.

It was …

… not a bird …

… nor a plane …

but resembled more the ancient Chinese dragons of old, a snake-worm of segmented metal parts that slid over and under each other like polished black armour, some thirty metres long and four metres wide. It had a tail that sharpened to a point which swished and snatched at the air; it had four tiny little metal wings, insufficient and insubstantial
to the task of keeping it afloat, and not doing any work in that regard. From the polished black metal of its flesh rose spikes of aerials and transmitters, of radar dishes and electronic masts, stretched back across its skin at jagged giddy angles like they’d been beaten flat in the world’s largest car wash. In the middle part of its body, which was barely a quarter of its total length, its belly bulged outwards and a few gashes in its skin revealed clear glass through which shone dim blue-white light. Its outstretched legs, four of them, had pneumatic pumps along the thighs and metal claws that glimmered in the dull red of the runway light as they reached out to land; its eyes were two brilliant white lamps, its nose two spinning jet engines, the exhaust visible just behind two bumps that might have been ears, the air distorting from the heat passing through. Its jaw, when it parted the great metal maw of its mouth, revealed a black conveyor-belt tongue licking at the air. It was aerodynamically impossible, as beautiful as a raging fire and the glow left when the fire goes out.

When it landed, the ground shook, and its whole body seemed to arch in the middle as its claws gouged twelve claw-shaped holes in the earth. It came to rest, steam venting from between the joins of its body; briefly its head half turned and those brilliant white lamps of eyes swept over to me. We felt suddenly sad and small, and took a half-step towards the thing, reaching out towards it, to touch its black skin and make the foolish comforting sounds mortals make in the presence of frightened animals lesser than themselves.

But its head turned away, and the hand of the hired muscle man fell on my shoulder and he said, “If you don’t mind, sir,” and pulled me back.

There was a hiss from one of the central body plates and, as I watched, a piece of metal skin slid back over its neighbour to create a kind of door leading into the creature’s belly. Two people – I couldn’t see their faces in the darkness and the pouring steam – rushed forwards to secure a ramp from inside and scurried down to secure it at the bottom. Their work done, they then quickly arranged themselves, one on either side, kneeling on the tarmac, heads bowing against the cold ground, hands held forward in front of them, palms down, prostrate at the bottom of this unlikely exit. A small army of attendants promptly descended the ramp and lined themselves up like dignitaries at a state
arrival. Six women wearing white silk kimonos, their faces painted the colour of fresh snow, pink cheeks daubed on, hair drawn up tight with gold and silver bangles to keep it in place; four men dressed in black dinner jackets, the guns none too subtly hidden under their arms; two boys, faces sour and pinched, wearing black leather outfits ten years too old for them; a gaggle of eight men and women dressed in not much of everything, some armed, at least three carrying in their belts what I recognised with a shudder as the short tanto stabbing blades that Dees had spoken of, and whose acquaintance I had already made under unpleasant circumstance. Last came a guard of four, shoulders wide, necks thick, heads shaved, suits bulging and, pressed over their features, masks, of twisted crimson and black, the mouths curved into huge, almost comical grimaces of anger and rage, the eyes tight, the features crinkled. I could see no means by which these face-pieces were attached to the heads of those that wore them. These four arranged themselves like a private guard at the foot of the ramp, and the rest of the entourage variously bowed, knelt and grovelled depending on, I guessed, their social status.

Two more people appeared at the top of the ramp, a man and a woman. The man wore what looked like a crimson dressing gown, loosely tied, and a pair of crimson slippers. He too had a mask on, though this one was white, smooth and empty, with just little slits for the eyes and mouth.

The woman next to him was …

smell of magic so much magic careful not to drown

purple-scarlet flickers of thought on the edge of sight

silk on skin

… undeniably the Big Event. She stood no more than five foot and a half high, and wore a smoke-coloured veil that dropped down from a large three-pointed headdress. Beneath this, someone had taken half a mile of silver shimmer and draped it over and under and around every part of her body, so that no skin showed except for the very end of each hand, from which drooped a set of fingers longer and thinner than any I had ever seen, each adorned with a silver ring, from which occasionally ran a thin chain into the sleeve of her robe, hinting at more expense beneath just out of sight. For all that every part of her was covered, there was no doubting, no doubting at all, that she was beautiful,
with the unspecified, undeniable beauty of a woman who knew herself to be the sexiest thing ever to walk the earth and through believing it had, in her walk, her talk, her existence, come to make it so, regardless of the fashion of the time.

She paused on the top of the ramp, head half turning this way and that as though to assess and approve of the grovelling of those around her, and then, one dainty step at a time, left hand drooping at the wrist to be supported by her colleague in red, she descended, and stepped as carefully onto the tarmac of Heathrow as if she were a crusading knight come to the Holy Land. As one, her entourage rose to their feet, bowed once more, and straightened to their full height.

By now, the unseen eyes beneath the veil had fallen on me.

We felt them.

For a curious moment, we almost had a desire to look away. But we resisted.

Then the man in red spoke; or rather, he intoned. “In the name of our trusted alliance, our sacred friendship and our joyous reunion, her ladyship, mistress of the night and most beauteous upon this earth, greets the protector of this city.”

I smiled wanly, and found I had nothing to say.

Her ladyship half leant towards the man in red, and I imagined whispers passing between her lips and his ears.

He gave a little nod, then raising his head again added, “Her ladyship is grateful for the assistance of the protector of this city in the just war against the murderers of loyal servants of the Neon Court and expresses the desire that the protector of this city share drink with her war council.”