The Neon Court (10 page)

and I whimpered, “Oda!”

And for a moment, just a moment, I was in her head, seeing through her eyes, and all she saw was still water, still black water, knee-deep, she was walking in black water and there was pain in her chest, unbearable pain but she didn’t seem to care, wasn’t crying out or pulling at it, just staring at the water and there was a reflection in it, a face, and the face had no eyes, or rather eyes full of black pudding, sockets stuffed with dead mashed flesh and they were looking at the water and the face was empty and

and then they were looking at me.

And Oda smiled.

Those no-eyes were looking at me.

They
saw
us.

She whispered, a breath of dust on still silent air, “
Sorcerer
.”

And something not entirely unlike the fist of God swung down with the inexorability of Judgement Day, caught us in the belly, picked us up, and threw us as hard as it could, spine-first across the hall.

Villains faint.

Sidekicks pass out.

Heroes are knocked unconscious.

I know which I’d rather be.

I risked opening my eyes.

Still here.

Still in the chapel hall.

Lying in a pile of collapsed chairs, a good five feet from my last location when I was anything resembling conscious, but still here.

Still not dead.

I tried moving and another chair collapsed beneath me, knocking me, if possible, even further to the floor, in even less of a dignified heap. I decided not to risk moving for a while, and lay on my back, eyes closed against the brilliant brightness of the strip lighting overhead, and did a quick physical inventory.

Nothing felt broken.

Splitting headache.

Nosebleed.

No broken nose; just a nosebleed. I wiped the blood away with the back of my hand, wiped my hand on the soggy coat plastered to my skin.

After a while, my nose stopped bleeding.

I considered moving.

I considered it for a very long time.

It remained an unattractive if inevitable prospect and so, after due contemplation, I risked it.

My brain sloshed from side to side with my first attempt, but eventually settled into a reasonably stable form, and I risked getting onto my knees. My passage back and away from the altar had ploughed a small me-shaped rift through the stackable church chairs. I crawled out into the aisle and tried getting upright. I pulled the bloodstained coat off, bundled it into the nearest bin, and set it on fire with a fistful of gaseous blue-yellow flame. I told myself I’d learnt a valuable if unwelcome lesson. I told myself that all the way to the exit, and didn’t bother to turn out the lights on my way out.

In the outside world, I fumbled for my phone, and dialled Dudley Sinclair.

He took his time to answer, and his first few words were a slurred mumble. I had succeeded in catching Dudley asleep. I had never thought the day would come.

“Uh? Yes?”

“Mr Sinclair?” I wheezed, one hand holding the phone to my ear, the other clutched to my belly as if somehow that would stop me being sick in the nearest gutter.

“Who is this? Swift? What time is it?”

“No idea,” I replied. “You’ve still got major connections with the Order psycho-bastards or what?”

“Swift?” He was regaining consciousness, and with it, a degree of indignation. “Matthew, what is this about?”

“Remember Oda psycho-bitch?” I asked. “Member of the Order, religious nutter out to kill all magicians et cetera et cetera, got her in mind?”

“Yes – and, as I remember, your last collaboration didn’t end particularly well …”

“She’s in serious shit and I need to find her.”

I heard the sound of bedclothes moving as the not inconsiderable mass of Dudley Sinclair, “concerned citizen” and, generally speaking, a
man with a plan, hoisted himself into something resembling an upright position. I thought I heard the muted mumble of someone else in the bed, disturbed in restless sleep, but couldn’t bring myself to speculate.

“You
care
for this Oda woman?”

“Not really. But it’s something about the way she’s walking around with a hole in her heart like it was a paper cut and breaking my scrying spells when I try to find her like they were a fucking cheese twist that kinda gets me uppity.”

“She’s …”

“Got a stab wound to the heart and is fine. Well, I say ‘fine’, I suppose it all really depends on your sense of …”

“Matthew, Matthew, please talk slowly,” chided Sinclair, now fully back to his impressive, booming self, even by telephone. “What exactly is going on with this woman?”

“Not a clue. Not a dicky bird. But there’s a war about to break out between the Court and the Tribe, Lady Neon’s come to town, there’s a chosen one, apparently, if you believe that sort of shit, wandering the streets of London, and oh yes, Oda is right in the middle of it. So very much in the middle of it. And now I can’t find her. And …” I stopped dead. “And … something’s wrong with eyes.”

“With … her eyes?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. There was this hotel and … and there’s something wrong generally, Sinclair. I can’t put my finger on it. But there’s something really really wrong. I can feel it. It’s … we can feel it. We don’t know what it is but it’s … it’s worse than Court or Tribe or anything else. It’s just out of our reach and it’s going to stab us in the back. It’s … there’s something waiting for us and we don’t know what it is.”

“Matthew” – a little laugh, entirely forced and not a little frightened, rolled across Sinclair’s lips – “you sound almost afraid.”

“I think I’m going to puke,” I moaned, sitting down quickly in the nearest gutter before this became reality. “Jesus! She broke my fucking scrying spell like I was a ten-year-old kid wizard trying to spy on Merlin’s love nest. Broke it and sent it straight back at me like nothing. I didn’t even have any defences up, I wasn’t prepared, she … she
can’t
do that, do you see? She isn’t a magician, she’s certainly not a sorceress, she’s about as magical as Marmite and she caught me and … I’ve
got to find her. I’ve gotta. Whatever this shit is, she’s the heart of it. I shouldn’t have left her in that bloody hotel …”

“Matthew, I can try and help of course; but do understand, I have my own objectives. I cannot permit … exterior forces … to damage the very sensitive relationships I have with the various practitioners of magic in this city, and indeed, with their enemies. You are of course aware of this.”

“I just need to find Oda,” I groaned.

“Very well. I need a little time to make some … appropriately discreet enquiries. Say, three hours?”

“Fine. And Sinclair?”

“Yes?”

“If the Aldermen, or the Court, or the Tribe, hear a word of this …”

“I would assume,” he replied primly, “that you are asking my assistance on this matter for the very reason that you would not wish them to.”

“Exactly.”

“May I ask, in the interest of the bigger picture, just how far involved you are with something you can’t control?”

I thought about it. “About … chin-deep?” I suggested.

“So still waving, not drowning?”

“I hope so. Where shall I meet you?”

A judicious drawing in of breath. Then, “How well do you know St James’s?”

Three hours.

Dudley Sinclair, “concerned citizen”, a man with his fingers into every pie, including, it turned out, several pies that would quite like to eat the other pie.

I could use three hours.

I limped and wheezed my way to the nearest bus shelter.

On the top of the shelter was a single spiky plastic object that looked like some sort of dog’s toy.

No good.

I limped and wheezed my way to the next one.

On top of this, amid the smeared stain and dirty greenish-grey marks of mould from stagnant water that would never wash clear, was a mildewed and extremely crinkled copy of the Yellow Pages.

I climbed up on top of a bin to pull it down, and sat on the narrow red bench under the shelter to flick through its pages.

There are business directories, and then there are the business directories that you get on the top of bus shelters. No one really knows how they get there, and no one really asks, but the services these somewhat smelly and decaying items provide are invaluable to the roaming urban magician.

I flicked through listings for magicians, witches, warlocks, exorcists, petty alchemists and full-blown speakers with the dead. Ads proclaimed here and there:

NO GHOST TOO BIG, NO EXORCISM TOO CHALLENGING!!

(Standard call out fee applies.)

Or:

Can’t get it summoned?

Magic no longer at your fingertips?

You need Mrs Jameson’s Mystic Lift-Me-Up.

Mrs Jameson: The mother of all good magics.

I flicked through “p” for “prophet”. No entries.

I flicked into “s”, roamed a little too far and found my own entry. I hadn’t put it there, but that hadn’t stopped the power of the Yellow Pages. It said:

Swift, M. (Sorcerer): c/o Aldermen, 149 Aldermansbury Square, London EC2 9TU.

I sighed and flicked back a few pages, until I came to ‘Seers – see also prophets, mystics, visionaries’.

There was one entry, an ad that took up approximately a quarter of the page. It read:

The Future doesn’t have to be Frightening!

Get your future read by 20th of December, and get £10 off for a friend!

A discreet, sensitive service.

No terminal patients, wanted fugitives or walking undead please.

There was an address and a telephone number. I wrote both down on the back of my hand, tossed the Yellow Pages back on top of the bus shelter, and went to find the future.

The address was for a house in Mile End.

I rode the bus back to the river, and got out at what the tourist guide
proclaimed to be Historical Maritime Greenwich. There indeed were the shops selling bent brass implements of every sort, flags and knots in their windows; away to the right the grand pillared arcades of the old Greenwich navel college; there the
Cutty Sark
, surprisingly small up close, an elegant reconstructed ship with three tall masts where the children could run up and down playing pirates during the day while their parents followed meekly and tried not to bump their heads.

A small green dome was all that announced the long descent to the Greenwich Foot Tunnel. Lights on the ceiling curved down and out of sight, a long spiral towards an unknown depth. Tiles lined the wall, once white turned pale yellow, dirt embedded in the cracks. A pair of wide lift doors faced the exit. I waited. The lift came, great wheels churning and clunking to haul the thing upwards. The doors opened. Inside, a wood-panelled lift car with little seats around the edges was almost entirely empty. A man in a navy-blue jumper sat on a stool beside a small portable cassette player, his head rolled back and mouth hanging open in sleep. I stepped inside. The cassette cracked its way through a song about trampolines and love to the strain of gentle guitar.

We went down.

When we reached the bottom, the sleeping man half stirred, his jaw working slackly, lips smacking, and he murmured blearily as I passed, “Where’s the sun gone?”

I hesitated.

But without opening his eyes, he shifted his position on the stool, and went back to sleep.

The tunnel bent away in front of me, dipping down to a point in the middle and then up towards an unseen distance. Tiled walls, bare concrete floor, regularly spaced dull yellow lamps. The doors of the lift slid shut behind me, cutting out the music. I walked. Our footsteps were loud in the too-quiet of the empty space. I felt bare space on my back and wished there was a wall against it. The only movement beside us was the twisting and turning of our shadow, like a mad sundial’s point, as we passed underneath and towards each ceiling lamp.

The lift returned again, letting out a little blast of music, heavier this time, lyrics wondering what the story was and why no one else seemed to have got it, whatever it was.

The doors closed again. The music stopped.

I walked on.

I could hear footsteps behind me, a sharp snap-snap-snap on the concrete, louder than the gentle step of my soft soles. I told myself it was nothing. Feeling like an idiot, I stopped. The footsteps stopped a few moments later. I started. They started. I stopped. They stopped. The lift returned, the doors opened. The singing voice drifting down the corridor was running out of battery, dull and distorted against the hard tiles.

I turned and looked behind me. No one there.

I looked to the left, I looked to the right.

No one there.

I risked walking a few more steps.

No sound of footsteps other than my own.

I said, “This isn’t funny, universe.”

My voice bounced down the tunnel around me, fading at last to a high whisper on the air.

I started walking faster towards the exit, not quite running, not exactly lounging along either. Silence in the tunnel. Just my breathing and my footsteps, nothing else. I could see the lift at the end of the road, see the stairs spiralling upwards towards the other bank. Nothing behind me. Not a sound, not a breath, not …

Not music.

I slowed.

I stopped.

The air around me thickened with cold river magic, as I raised my defences. I turned and looked back the way I’d come.

For a moment, I saw someone, or rather, owing to the trick of perspective played by the dip of the tunnel, I thought I saw someone’s feet and knees, standing by the other lift, some few hundred yards behind me. They were caught in the light coming out of the open lift door. Then that light went out. Then the light in front of that. Then the light in front of that, a sharp snap-hiss and a brief ultraviolet flash as they burnt to darkness. Then the light in front of that, a moving darkness coming down the tunnel, heading for me.

I turned and, this time, I ran.

*

I stopped running at the top of the spiral staircase that led out onto the north bank of the Thames. I stopped running because my knees were aching, my heart was pounding, and because out here, the lights still burnt and the air was clear. Here was as good as anywhere to stand and fight.