The Neon Court (28 page)

“Yep,” I replied brightly.

“I can … feel … it’s … I can’t feel like … when there’s a spider’s web in front of you and you walked through it by mistake and you’re sure you pulled it off yourself but you’re not sure whether there isn’t a spider in your hair? That’s what I feel like. Mean something?”

“Yep.”

She poked me firmly in the shoulder. “Means … ?”

“Oh – you’re under a spell,” I replied calmly. “Your mind tricked into not caring that there’s nothing beyond London, that the map is shrinking and the sun isn’t rising. Don’t beat yourself up over it; everyone else is having a similar thing. And look on the bright side! You’re one of a select minority who’s actually noticed it. Eight out of ten, well done!”

Penny stared at me for a long while. I finished the sausage roll and
got down to the serious business of licking pastry crumbs off my fingertips. She said, “You’re one weird mother to be fucking saviour of the fucking city, you know?”

“Thanks,” I said, finishing the last of the crumbs and scrunching up the bag. “That’s a great comfort. Come on, we’ve …”

I turned.

There was a man standing behind me.

His hair was white, his skin had been slow-roasted beneath a brilliant sun. Today he was wearing a suit jacket and neat blue shirt, jeans and a pair of squash shoes. He looked unarmed, but that didn’t really mean anything. He was smiling, and that meant even less. His eyes were focused on the departures board above, but his words were all for me. He said, “Is it truly a tragedy that the train to Coventry is cancelled?”

I wiped crumbs off my lips with the back of my hand, found to my surprise that the hairs were standing up with static all up the length of my arm, magic ready to be thrown, that I hadn’t even noticed myself preparing. I looked slowly around the concourse, checking the windows of every shop and walkway. A man in a café turned away. A woman buying her ticket bent down closer to the machine. A pair of travellers, their bags carrying goods not intended for casual travel, examined novelty ties in a shop display. I wondered if Euston station was any good for positioning snipers, and if so, whether they’d ever be caught.

I said out of the corner of my mouth, “Penny, give us a moment.”

Penny stared with all the rudeness of the defiantly fearful straight at the man and said, “Who the fuck is this?”

I opened my mouth to reply, but he got there first. “My name, young lady,” he said, “is Anton Chaigneau. I am the head of an organisation entrusted by God with the destruction of you and all your kind. You used to be a God-fearing, devout young woman, Penny Ngwenya. I have prayed for you, that when you have suffered the fires of eternal hell, you may yet be redeemed.”

Penny’s eyes widened. “You are shitting me.”

“Hey, at least he prayed for you,” I sighed. “That puts you one up on me. What do you want, Chaigneau?”

“To talk, Mr Mayor, as if you and I were almost civilised people. I am alone.”

“Like you don’t dig that martyr complex,” I growled. “It concerns,” he added, a flicker of irritation in the corner of his eye, “the woman Oda. Who is, I believe, an acquaintance of yours?” I deflated. “Step into my office.”

There’s never anywhere good to get a drink near railway stations, and Euston was no exception. The pub we found ourselves in had the advantage of convenience, emptiness and dark, shuttered corners away from windows and the passing of strangers, and not much else to recommend it. A fruit machine dazzled with a constant flicker and flow of brilliant yellow and orange lights that raced up and down it like frantic ants in a boiling maze; the carpet was thin, with spilt beer trod in deep, the barmaid a bleary-eyed student with an Eastern European accent who handed out drinks in glasses still carrying the lipstick scars of their previous owners. She looked too tired to sourly judge our order of tap water, two packets of cheese and onion crisps and a glass of cranberry juice for Chaigneau, price: extortionate. A TV in one corner was showing repeats of ancient 80s sitcoms, in which all the female voices rose to earth-shattering pitches, and the audience cackled at every waggling eyebrow. The stained beer mats on our glass-topped table promised that no one knew how to party like the Aussies, and invited attendance to the 2001 Rugby World Cup to test this theory.

In our dull, underlit corner I sat next to Chaigneau, Penny on my other side. I wasn’t sure whether I was protecting her from him, or the other way round.

He said, “Does your apprentice really have to be here?” I looked at Penny. “I don’t know,” I said. “Why don’t we ask her?” Penny beamed and gave a cry, only slightly subdued by fatigue, of “I just dig those religious psycho-bastard fanatics, shit.”

“Yes,” I translated for Chaigneau. “I think she does. Talk – tell me about Oda.”

“I’m here to help you, sorcerer,” he said. “Sure.”

“I have information that could be relevant to the safety of the city.” I let the silence hang, hoping that my expression was at least partially receptive, mingled to dilute our natural hate.

“The Order has come across information that the woman Oda has engaged herself to dark powers.”

I waited. “Are we talking … rings, bells and a honeymoon in Ibiza?” I queried at last. “Or do you mean something specific?”

“This is hardly a time for flippancy.”

“I’m sorry; it’s my defence mechanism. So Oda has gone and got herself mixed up in dark powers. What dark powers and why?”

He hesitated. Then, eyes fixed on a point somewhere just above my head, “We’re not sure.”

“Of which bit?”

“Both. But she has … killed … at least two people that we know of, in a hotel in Greenwich. We think she may have killed more. And her means were not of God’s creation. I will not lie to you; our relationship with her has cooled.”

“Before or after the dead people in Greenwich?” asked Penny sourly.

His eyes flashed. “Oda lost her path some time ago. She has not been a true scion of the Order for … many months.”

“You think it’s been a long-term engagement with darkness and death?” I asked through a fistful of cheese and onion crisps.

“In a way.”

“And what exactly, Anton Chaigneau, psycho-nutter who goes around killing guys and thinking that’s a good thing, do you want me to do about it?”

“She could be a threat to us all. If you encounter her …”

“You’d have me kill one of your own?” I asked. He didn’t answer, and didn’t need to. “Blimey, but you’re a right bastard.”

Muscles worked in his jaw. “My place may not be in heaven, Matthew Swift; I accept that. It is not my fate that motivates me in this, but the fate of many, many others.”

“Sounds like sanctimonious shite, if you don’t mind me saying so,” offered Penny from over the edge of her glass.

Chaigneau turned to her, and I felt a shimmer of something that might have been fear, might have been anger as his eyes met hers. “Have you asked yourself, Miss Ngwenya, what your magic is good for? You are adept at fighting other magicians, you are skilled in destruction, you are gifted in the art of making tragedies or, at the very best, averting tragedies that magic has already made. Do you heal? Do
you work, do you toil, do you assist the greater good? What use are you?” She slurped in reply, but there was a light in her eyes that I had seen only very rarely, and which usually portended fire. Chaigneau saw it too, for his eyes flickered back to me. “
If
,” he declared, “if you see Oda, know that the Order will not consider it an act of aggression should you take action against her. She is a threat to everyone and everything; she has lost her path, her light and her soul. I tell you this as Midnight Mayor, as a necessary evil, who even I must occasionally cooperate with if many many more are to be protected and saved.”

He stood up, pushing the barely touched cranberry juice to the middle of the stained table top. “Do with this what you will, Mr Mayor.”

“Thanks a bundle.”

He eased himself out of our corner, moved as if to go, then hesitated at the last, turned back, looked us in the eye. “It’s your fault,” he said, voice low and weather-worn. “No one else, Matthew Swift. What happened to Oda, to her body, to her heart, to her mind, to her soul. It’s your fault. Think on that.”

He turned away.

I said, “Chaigneau?”

He paused, but didn’t look back. I could see his shoulder blades pressing against his shirt.

“There’s a chosen one in Sidcup,” I said.

He didn’t move. Breath pushed fabric out, pulled it back in again.

“And the sun’s not coming up,” I added.

His head half-turned, he looked at me over his shoulder, as if he couldn’t be bothered to grace me with more of his presence than he had to. “That,” he replied, “is exactly the kind of problem that inspires us to keep you alive.”

Drawing himself up, he stalked away.

Penny watched him go. She reached across the table, and started drinking his cranberry juice. Her nose wrinkled in distaste. “Never as good as I think it’ll be,” she concluded after a few sips. “Hate wasting stuff.”

“That man …” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Remember him.”

“Sure. Why?”

“Because when I’m dead, he’ll come after you.”

Penny raised her eyebrows.

We looked squarely at her. She wasn’t meeting our eyes. Her fingers were tight around the glass. I held out my hand to her, stood up. She took it tentatively, allowed me to pull her to her feet.

“You know,” I murmured as we gathered our few meagre things, “this whole being shit-scared thing …”

“Yeah?” Voice a little too loud.

I hesitated, felt words reducing to empty platitudes. “Way smarter than the alternative,” I stumbled.

“Sure,” she said with a shrug. “Whatever. Where we going now, boss?”

Back to the British Library. The front doors were open, lights shining inside, the main hall a vista of broad stairway. The security guard was asleep, the receptionists looked tired and grey. A woman with curly brown hair was wearing a blue suit jacket over a sequinned dress, and stood in the middle of the hall with a rucksack in one hand, not sure if she was coming or going. I looked around at the high ceilings and down at the slippery tiles on the floor and said, “I have no idea which way to go.”

Penny grinned. “See how much you rely on me?”

She led the way downstairs into a series of corridors that looked like they’d escaped from a local swimming pool, past giddy artwork of crazy proportions and strange lines, into a locker room of grey steel, through a door stamped with the words “
Authorised Personnel Only
” in firm black letters, and down. I heard the same vents humming as before, the same lift shafts whirring, smelt books and cleaning fluid. She pushed back a pair of heavy, brass-handled doors that seemed to be the only exit, and stepped into a small carpeted reception area. “See?” she began. “Just like I …” A man in a flat black hat looked up from behind the desk, put his fingers to his lips and interrupted her with a pronounced “
shush
”. Penny’s face fell a little, but she pushed back the next set of doors and led me through to a hall of endless moving books behind glass, vast ceiling, sprawling cold floor and, in the very middle of it, a desk that would have shamed
Ikea with its rickety simplicity. Behind the desk was sat an Alderman in his long black coat, small shield-shaped badge bearing the crosses of the city pinned to its front, fast asleep. A small door stood open in one corner of the room, white fluorescent light spilling out. There was the faint sound of voices from the other side. We walked over to it, peeked round the corner, saw shelf upon shelf upon shelf stretching away to an uneasy heat-haze-lost distance, Aldermen poring over every part. One spotted us, showed a tiny flicker of recognition and scurried away. Penny said thoughtfully, “So this is academic shit, huh?”

“Wouldn’t really know,” I answered. “Not my thing.”

The Alderman came scurrying back, Dees in tow. She put a hand on my arm and pulled me quickly along a row of shelves and down a corridor smelling of old paper and string. “Welcome back, Mr Mayor. I’m glad you’re here. I see you can see again then? Good, excellent, there have been developments …”

I struggled to keep up. How such little legs on such a little frame could carry Dees with such speed was a mystery. Penny puffed along behind. We spun round a corner and down another corridor that could have been the first. A few titles caught my eye.

Necromancy: Proof of God and Proof of Hell?

Invocation for Idiots (2nd edition)

Everything I Learnt about Magic I Learnt from a Gnome Called Reginald: a fond magician’s recollections

Summoning Unleashed – Who’s Got Your Back?

Another corner, another blur. A door ahead, low, grey metal. Dees pushed it back, shooed me through in front of her, and then turned, barring Penny’s path. “We need to have a private chat, Mr Swift and I.”

“Oi! I’m his fucking apprentice, I’m the fucking bitch who’s done all the fucking legwork all this fucking …”

“The matter is highly personal,” Dees replied, “and while we’re all very grateful for your efforts, this is something that must be handled quickly, privately, and alone.”

Penny fumed. I said cautiously, “Dees? How personal and how private?”

She turned back to me, and there was something in her face that might almost have been regret. “It concerns Robert Bakker.”

I raised my eyebrows, struggling not to do anything more extreme. “OK. Yeah. We should probably talk.”

Dees nodded smartly, closed the door, cutting us off from the rest of the world, and locked it behind us.

We were in a medical examination room.

The British Library had a medical examination room. There was a high black couch, covered over with white paper, a white curtain, standing open, a low desk with many drawers and a silverish metal canister on top of it, a blood pressure monitor, a set of scales, and, as if the situation needed it, two Aldermen who looked like they took themselves too seriously, and a man in a white coat. Dees said, “Please, sit down,” indicating the couch.

I perched on the edge, leaning back on the palms of my hands. “Dees,” I said, “you should know that we do not like medicine. What’s going on?”