The Neon Court (32 page)

“How long is this going to last?” I asked Dees, and was surprised at how dry my voice was.

“It varies. There’s nothing set. But the longest … was no more than a few days.”

“Even when the sun isn’t rising?” asked Bakker, sitting down next to me so close I could almost feel the not-heat from his not-body. “Difficult, defining ‘day’ when there is no daylight. The Norwegians probably have a trick to it. Very underestimated people, the Norwegians.”

I kept my head locked dead ahead, not looking at him. Dees said, “Mr Mayor? What exactly are you experiencing?”

“All sorts of weird bad shit. If I start talking to myself, you won’t call the guys in white coats, will you?”

“I think we’re all past that, don’t you? Is there … do you have any further thoughts on … Blackout?” she ventured.

“You could ask,” suggested Bakker, examining his nails.

“I’m going to go to the bathroom now,” I said, easing myself off the couch. “Where the hell is it?”

Bakker wandered with me down the corridor, examining everything.

The bathroom was made of dull beige tiles and smelt of cheap dull air freshener. There were cubicles down one side, and mirrors down the other.

There was an Alderman there washing his hands.

I said, “You – out!”

He took one look at our face and left.

I waited for the door to close, did a quick scan round the edges of the ceiling for CCTV cameras, and turned on Bakker. He was leaning against the wall by the hot air puffers, casually running his hand underneath them to see if they’d work. They didn’t. He looked up as I turned, raising his eyebrows expectantly.

“Right!” I said. “A few ground rules! You’re dead, which means the you I’m seeing right now is entirely dependent on my brain as the living bit of the equation. Therefore, no playing silly buggers! I say jump, you jump, savvy?”

He sighed, scratched his chin. “That’s all very easy to say,” he sighed, “but, alas, current evidence suggests that this relationship may not be so straightforward.”

“Uh-uh,” I snapped, wagging a finger at him. “No complicated shit we’re doing this for a very simple reason. Oda is possessed by Blackout; you killed Blackout; you tell me how to do a repeat number. That simple, end of story, we all get to go home.”

“I take it you’re choosing to ignore the fact that by now the Neon Court will have concluded you are not going to honour your alliance and will be sending people to kill you, and the Tribe will have by now decided that they just don’t trust you and will equally be preparing reprisals? All very tactfully of course – no one will be admitting to it, but so it goes.”

“Yep!” My voice was rising towards a shrill. “Yep, totally choosing to ignore that. Totally, utterly, totally, because you know what, civil war has nothing on the sun not coming up or my having to share my brain with your ghost.”

“And we’re not going to handle this slight conflict of interest?”

“Slight conflict of interest?” I echoed, ready to shout.

“Naturally,” he replied, detaching himself from the wall. “I mean, my dying breath was collected, by definition, as I was dying, capturing my very last thoughts, state of mind and being. Needless to say, your having just pushed me off the thirty-sixth floor left me in a rather absolute frame of mind regarding my relationship with you.”

“Let’s not get schoolkid about this,” I replied with a scowl. “You killed me, I killed you, you started it, boo sucks boo, end of rant.”

He was walking towards me. I stood my ground, clenching my fingers to stop them shaking, looking at a point just between his eyes and hoping he’d mistake my glare for the real thing. “It’s hardly going to be that easy,” he said, stopping within throttling distance in front of me. “Issues all round, and we do know how difficult issues are in sorcerers. Your apprentice had issues and the city was nearly destroyed. I had issues and … well …”

He waggled his eyebrows towards the mirror behind me.

Instinct turned me where sense would have made me stand my ground.

There was a man in the mirror.

His hair was a few stray strands of wilting grey, his skin was stained with liver death, his teeth were yellow, his eyes were watery grey, he wore a coat – a familiar coat – stained with blood – familiar blood. He grinned, revealing a black gullet to a bottomless belly, and as he did so, he leant straight out of the mirror, dragging the glass with him, the glass bending like water trapped behind a rubber bubble, leant right out, his fingers stretching towards me, nails black cracked bone, mouth opening wider and wider and as he came he screamed, “I’m
HUNGRY
!!”

I fell back, lost my footing, landed on my wrist on the floor, covered my head instinctively, electricity rising to our fingertips. The light flickered and hummed, sound of an angry wasp nest poked with a stick, and death, in the form of two sets of claws dragged from a reflection that shouldn’t have been there, failed to come.

I risked peeking.

The mirror was empty.

Bakker’s foot tapped, bored, on the tiles of the washroom floor. If a ghost taps its foot unseen in the forest, does the foot tap? Discuss.

I uncoiled, picked myself back up, forcing down long slow breaths, feeling the pain in my chest where once those claws had done their work, many, many nights ago, focusing on the ends of my shaking fingers, numbing them one at a time, until I felt strong enough to raise my head, look Bakker in the eye and say, “Very funny.”

He shrugged.

“I see death doesn’t lead to repentance,” I added with a scowl.

“Matthew, we could stand here all day – well, maybe not that – debating the ethics of guilt and innocence.”

“Let’s not.”

“If you insist.”

“What we need,” I added, forcing the words out one at a time, “is, in fact, to get over the whole cock-up that is my current meta-magical, post-psychological, moderately psychical …”

“You’re misusing the word.”

“What?”

“You’re misusing ‘psychical’.”

“Yet you are in my head and you knew exactly what I mean and do you really feel it’s necessary to correct my usage, that being the case?”

Bakker sighed. “Do go on.”

“What we need – leaving aside the current psychic baggage – is a plan.”

“I would say that was a reasonable position.”

I waited.

He waited.

I said, “Well go on then, Mr Bakker. You’ve stopped Blackout before. Gimme a plan.”

He examined the ends of his nails. “It’s a pity you never shared my taste for the fine things in life, Matthew. A gourmet meal and a glass of Sauvignon does wonders for the intellectual processes.”

“How about a kebab and a Ribena?” I snapped. “It’s bad enough having to share my brain with you, I’m not about to throw in the digestive system as a job lot.”

“Matthew …” he began again, in that special voice reserved for the particularly foolish pupil who is quite deliberately refusing to understand the matter at hand.

The toilet door opened.

It was Dees.

I said, “This is the men’s and I’m having a moment.”

She looked slowly round at the empty bathroom. “You know,” she said finally, “this is the first time I’ve been in a men’s toilet and I can honestly say it fails my expectations.”

“Dees! There are social norms and I’m still having a moment!”

“It’s Lady Neon,” she replied. “Without wishing to alarm you, she’s
here
.
Now
.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. The pain had enough rivals for attention across my body that it didn’t really make much difference. “Would you describe her current position as volcanic?”

“Krakatoa,” she replied.

“I’m guessing that the Neon Court are pretty pissed, huh?”

“The ground beneath their feet clatters with the broken glass of metaphorical vodka bottles.”

I waggled a finger at where Bakker was perched casually on top of a curved bin. “To be continued.” I caught the flicker in Dees’ eyes as I turned back. “Yes, my imaginary friend,” I snapped, “keep it to yourself, OK?”

We went upstairs.

The foyer of the British Library was indeed occupied.

Two dozen men and women in various states of leather-clad skimpiness, ozone dying around their sprayed hair and skin gleaming with sweat, sweat substitute, and make-up to make the sweat seem sensuous instead of sticky, were arrayed throughout the broad, complex indoor space, with various weapons pointedly unsheathed. I saw glass blades, nasty stabbing things that reminded me of the smell of smoke and the look of surprise in the burning eyes of Minjae San the night he died. Even when armed for war, the Neon Court managed to make itself look like something out of a fashion shoot, beautiful people preparing for an ugly thing like it was ballet, not death. Their magic was a sticky perfume on the air. We could feel it as a fuzziness
behind our eyes, a woolliness in the head. It made us angry. The anger made it easier to fight.

The Aldermen were arrayed at the top of the wide stairs, black silent shapes in long black coats. They weren’t beautiful people, and they never intended to be. When you died by their hand, and die you likely would, it would be a cold and quiet death.

No one seemed to have anything to say.

Lady Neon stood in the middle of them all. Even when the sun failed to rise, she found time to change. She wore pristine white, unaffected by dirt, dust or the rain, thick swaths of silk that clung to every surface of her body so that while next to no skin was revealed, they still managed to leave very little to the imagination. Her face was covered by a gauzy veil that obscured the details of her features, and she stood small and still, a spider guessing – no, knowing – that it
is
faster than the snake.

She said nothing, but we could feel her eyes on us. Her gaze made our head hot and fuzzy, set off a tingling in the pit of our stomach, made every cell of our blood feel too thick for our veins to hold it. Her magic – it was overwhelming, all-encompassing, like trying to find a grain of salt in a dish of chillis, and left no room for clear thought. Then a man stepped forward. He wore a floor-length red coat, trousers that could have been engineered to taut perfection by a team from NASA, and was apart from that bare-chested, not a hair on him, just oiled, polished skin. His complexion was pale almond, his eyes narrow, flecked with street-lamp yellow, his skull perfectly shaven. We imagined that he was what the times called beautiful, a work of art, not a human at all, assuming there was anything of the human left in him. He looked young; far too young for the glare of contempt he now gave us.

We stopped, Dees and I, near the bottom of the stairs, and waited.

He said, “Are you ready for war?”

“I’m guessing that was a rhetorical question,” I said, as our fingers itched to strike.

“We gave you time. More time than you asked for. You haven’t found her. You haven’t found the chosen one. You have consorted with the Tribe. If we didn’t hold you in such high regard, we would have destroyed you for all this.”

I sighed. “Thanks for that. I feel all fluffy inside.” We looked straight past him, to Lady Neon. “Sun’s not coming up, my lady.”

Silence.

“And the city is folding in on itself. You got a way out? You got an escape plan?”

“War!” barked the man in red. “Betrayal, then war!”

“There’s a creature called Blackout doing the rounds,” I added, ignoring him entirely. “The thing that crawled out of the shadows at the end of the alley, creature of night. Got pissed off when the street lamps were turned on, when the night grew that little bit less scary. Got banished after, may I say, a disastrous attempt by the Neon Court and Midnight Mayor to push it back, that ended in blood all around. That thing. Blackout. Back, right here, right now. It’s waiting for you.”

“Your lies are …”

Lady Neon raised one hand. The man in red fell silent. She took one delicate step forward. She didn’t raise her veil or her voice, but her words carried like a breeze from an open summer sky. “Do you think they are not related?” she asked softly. “Do you believe all this can happen by pure change, together, tonight; this endless night?”

Our mouth was dry at the sound of her voice. We struggled in vain to speak.

“The last time Blackout came to this city, the Court allied with the Mayor,” she went on. “The Tribe attack us. We cannot help you, unless you help us. If you wish your city to be consumed in darkness, your memory lost to all time, then continue on the path you have chosen. Our price … is not as high as that we usually charge for such services.”

“This is hardly the time to consider the smaller picture,” blurted Dees.

Lady Neon’s head turned a fraction, and I felt Dees, Leslie Dees who never shied back from anything, rock on her heels as if blasted from an open furnace door. The look in her eye wasn’t fear, but an all-purpose sensory overload.

“You think your city matters? You think the world will care when you are destroyed? I am Lady Neon. I have no need for just one city.”

Bakker was at the bottom of the stairs, circling Lady Neon slow and steady, head tilted on one side. “Fascinating specimen,” he offered.
“And entirely sincere, I believe, in her intention to exploit this situation for her own gain. She really doesn’t care what happens to you and yours. You’re just not … interesting enough. That must be a rather humiliating consideration for a man of your ego, Matthew.”

Dees whispered, “War with the Court …”

“It won’t come to that,” I replied.

“This chosen one is …”

“Relevant,” snapped Bakker. He had one hand on Lady Neon’s shoulder, like a possessive lover. “Perhaps not in the way anyone expects, but you know, and therefore I am entirely free to say it, that Lady Neon is correct in one sense. You do not get coincidences like this in politics or magic. The idea may turn your stomach, but that’s the truth of it.”

“Fine,” I said. And then louder, for her, “Have it your way.”

“You will swear,” Lady Neon insisted, “to seek the chosen one immediately.”

“I swear,” I replied.

One hand reached towards mine, slender pale fingers uncurling. “You will swear,” she added softly, “to bring her straight to me.”