The Neon Court (5 page)

Canary Wharf was a cluster of white-silver towers in the night, cloud bristling off the very top of the tallest buildings.

I turned down an alley between a red-brick church and a row of little shops selling everything from Ye Olde Souvenire to Traditional Sunday Roast Only £12.99 and walked until I came to a sign above a small blue door which said,
‘Kim’s Korean Restaurant – A Taste of the Orient’
.

I knocked on the door.

The door opened.

I looked down, and then a little bit further down, onto a head almost entirely bald, except for a few loose wisps of grey hair. The head craned up, and a face that had been sun-dried like a tomato peered up into mine. A pair of toothless lips smacked against sticky gums, and this ancient creature replete with green slippers and a bathrobe with a yellow duck on it said, “Are you death?”

“Um. No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Um. Yes?”

“Are you an angel?”

We licked our lips. If we had learnt one lesson in our complicated existence, it was never to underestimate the power of little old ladies. “In a way,” we said.

“Are you from the council about the rubbish?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Couldn’t really say, ma’am. Um … is Mr Kim about?”

She sighed and smacked her lips against her gums a few times. “Busy busy busy,” she complained, and waddled inside. I peered past her, down a white corridor with the soul of a parking fine, and smelt something sharp on the air. “Come on come on come on!” she trilled back at me.

I followed her down the corridor.

A silver-metal door at the end opened onto a kitchen of gleaming saucepans and a less than gleaming floor. Steam rose from a knee-high pot in which strange greenish-grey weeds rose and fell on the bubbling surface. The wall was hung with roots and herbs, barely half of which I could name, and on every other work surface were great pink slabs of
meat, ready to be sliced. A man sat by a long workbench, head bowed over a bowl of something that required slurping. The woman waddled up to him, said, “He says he’s not death or the council or the angels, and I think he lies!”

The man half turned. A small round Korean face split into a thin polite smile. He wore a white freshly ironed shirt and black freshly pressed trousers. He held a bowl of thick soup in one hand, and a pair of chopsticks in the other. “Mr Swift,” he intoned, waving me with the chopsticks towards a stool. “It is an honour. Ms Dees is on her way.”

I sat on the stool, looked at the tray in front of him. It contained a mixture of little bowls. I could recognise the rice, and the salad, but a bowl of some sour-smelling stuff crinkled like old wrapping paper and a dish of perfectly rectangular grey slabs that looked like they’d been extruded from the end of some obscene machine were beyond me. He said, “Breakfast?”

“Um … thanks, I’m fine.”

“Tea?”

“That’d be nice.”

“Mother!” hollered the man.

The woman scowled. “Tea,” she said. “Tea tea tea! I only bore you, you know, I only gave my life for you, your poor father worked to death, my youth, my strength, but don’t you worry, tea!”

So saying, she waddled away.

“Ignore the old woman,” said my host. “Her time is almost come.”

I smiled the best smile I had to hand. “Sorry,” I said weakly. “I was told to come here and meet an Alderman. Are you …?”

“Community liaison officer,” he replied. “The Aldermen employ me to liaise with some mystical communities which might not be used to the idea that you can’t go around cursing the business of your enemies in this city without an appropriate permit.”

“You need a permit to curse your enemies?”

“Only if you get caught. Are you sure I can’t tempt you to something to eat? Kimchi?” A chopstick waggled towards the dish of sour-smelling stuff.

I set my smile to the locked position and mouthed, “I’m fine.”

“Just let me know if you change your mind.”

The woman returned carrying a tray on which were set a fine white
porcelain teapot and two little handleless cups. She laid these down next to us, glared at me, glared at her son and said, “Sugar? Milk? Cream? Napalm?”

“Mother,” chided her son, “that will be all.”

“Lights going out and all you want is tea!” she tutted, wobbling away.

The man who I guessed to be Mr Kim treated me to another flash of his neat little white teeth. “She used to be a seer of sorts. But the NHS got hold of her and now, you know, the pills …”

I nodded, the dumb expression of someone who knew, yes, and understood, yes, and wasn’t it sad?

Conversation lagged.

Kim poured tea.

I drank it one sip at a time, in case of napalm.

It was all right.

“You run this place?” I asked finally.

“Yes. Stipend for being a community liaison officer in this time is pittance. Times being what they are.”

“Good business?”

“We do well enough. I also offer a freelance service blessing cars.”

“How does that work?”

“Oh, there’s various different kinds of blessing I offer. The most common one is the blessing of a thousand emeralds; which translated means that all red lights at the car’s approach will turn green regardless of their system programming. Cuts commuting times in half.”

“How much do you charge for that?” I asked.

“Eight grand for minis; ten for estates; fifteen for trucks and upwards. I charge more for high-emission vehicles.”

“How very environmental of you.”

“We all have to do our bit. What about you?”

“Me?”

“How do you make your living?”

I thought about this for a while. Then we said, “We destroy the enemies of the city, drive back unstoppable darknesses and purge the night of the things that would make us fear.” I thought a little bit more. “Although it doesn’t pay very much.”

Now it was Mr Kim’s turn to think. “You get pension with that?”

“I don’t think it’s intended I live long enough to find …”

There were footsteps behind us, sharp heels on the tiles. I turned, surprised to find myself as jumpy as I was. Leslie Dees, five foot nothing in a sharp black suit, sharp pointed chin beneath a sharp pencil nose, straight mousy hair cut to a sharp line above her straight shoulders, grey eyes above a face of freckles, briefcase in hand, stood in the doorway. “Hello Mr Mayor; Mr Kim,” she said politely, a BBC nothing in her accent, nothing in her voice to betray a thing.

“Hi,” I sighed. “Tea?”

She seemed to move without use of her knees, and was in an instant standing by Mr Kim’s chair, laying her briefcase down beside his tray. “Thank you; no, I had some coffee before I came here. Thank you very much, Mr Kim, for your cooperation in these events.”

Even the implacable smile of Mr Kim wavered beneath Dees’ well-bred inscrutability. “Always happy to help,” he mumbled.

“And it is appreciated.”

She didn’t gesture, didn’t nod, didn’t flutter an eyelash, but it was a dismissal nonetheless, that radiated from every neat line of her body. Mr Kim sensed it and did the wisest thing in acting on it, shuffling away, head bowed, leaving his meal to cool on the worktop. Dees took the seat he had vacated and immediately turned to me, snapping open her briefcase.

“The matter, Mr Mayor, is serious.”

“Hi,” I replied wearily. “Good morning to you too. How are you, Ms Dees? How’s the kid?”

“Mr Mayor, you appear to have burn marks on your trousers,” she replied.

I looked down.

Somehow, between the blood and soot, I hadn’t really bothered to pay attention to my ankles. “You know what, Ms Dees, I do believe you’re right.”

“May I ask how you acquired them?”

“When you became an Alderman, Dees, were you hired for your tact and managerial sensitivity, or for your capacity to vaporise your enemies at a thought?”

She smiled, diamond teeth glimpsed between a paper cut. “Hopefully you need never find out, Mr Mayor.”

“Please don’t call me that.”

“What would make you more comfortable?”

“Almost anything. Go on. Hit me. What’s so ridiculously serious that we have to gather at silly o’clock in a room smelling of fermented cabbage to have a heart-to-heart about it?”

She sighed and leant forward, elbows resting on her knees, chin on the upturned palms of her hands. “A daimyo of the Neon Court has been murdered.”

I raised my eyebrows, waiting for something more.

“The Neon Court accuse the Tribe.”

I waited for further enlightenment.

“The Neon Court are threatening to declare war on the Tribe.”

“And this bothers me … how?”

“Mr Ma … Mr Swift, do you really want to have two of the most ruthless magical clans in the city attempting to wipe each other out in the streets of London?”

It was my turn to lean forward. We looked her in the eye, and to her credit, she held our gaze. Very few mortals do. “Ms Dees,” I said, “let me get this absolutely clear. The Neon Court – a bunch of narcissistic wankers who haven’t yet come to terms with the fact that the age of the Faerie Court is over – have this major-league grief with the Tribe, a bunch of self-mutilating wankers who haven’t yet come to terms with the fact that the world isn’t out to get them personally – and someone somewhere is dead, which is very sad, and they’re threatening to kill each other and I care … how?”

“Your job is the protection of the city, as regards the rash exercise of magical forces.”

“Doesn’t seem that rash to me. Neither Court nor Tribe ever pay council tax as far as I can tell, and I don’t have much time for the ethics of either. The Court are smug self-satisfied bastards, the Tribe are angry world-hating bastards. Why should I get involved?”

“You should get involved, Mr Mayor, because Lady Neon is coming to town.”

I was quiet a long time.

Dees let me think.

I thought.

I reached the only available conclusion.

“Shit.”

*

There is a story of the Neon Court.

Actually, there are several stories, but the one I have always liked, and the one which is most often told, goes like this:

Once upon a time, in that old time when life was still magic and life was lived in the trees and the forests and the rivers and the hills, in the old time of wild, ivy-tangled, rain-dropped magic, before the lights burnt neon and the spells flickered with electric fury, there existed the Faerie Court. And it was beautiful, sensual, powerful, rich, decadent and dangerous. One touch from the lips of a faerie and he or she who was touched was enchanted; one whisper from the faerie queen and the course of nations would be changed for ever.

But alas, the Faerie Court did not move with the times, and did not predict how a steam train could carve through the landscape, or how a factory could discolour the sky and, as the times changed, so did the magic, migrating with the people to the cities and becoming rich with smoke and stone and the sound of metal. And so the Faerie Court declined, and those who sought its blessing dwindled, until there was nothing more than a dusty hollow in the carved-out heart of a wood, crumbling with the fall of autumn leaves.

Then one day, one fairly unremarkable day at the beginning of the twentieth century, an enterprising princess of the court, one of the very last, decided that rather than sit at home and watch her world dwindle and die, she was going to explore this new world. So she set out to travel, visiting all the cities of the globe and, as she travelled, she came to understand that new magic, urban magic, and bend it to her will. When finally she stopped, she summoned all her surviving subjects and friends and declared the founding of a new court: the Neon Court, whose heart was in the heart of the cities, and whose magic would be of the new magics, and whose ways would be of the new ways. Soon, in Tokyo and New York, in London and Macau, in Istanbul and Kuala Lumpur, in any city where the lights blazed long into the night and the sound of music could be heard at the end of the street, the Neon Court set up its palaces, to forever revel and entice the more reckless of mankind into its lairs after the sun had gone down. And so there came the daimyos, who ruled each branch of the Court in each city where it came; and the warriors and the thralls, the humans who sold themselves to the Court, body and soul, for what looked like the party of
their lives. And when they grew too old, or too ugly, or too tired of playing the Court’s games, the thralls would try to free themselves, and find that they couldn’t, trapped now as playthings of this never-sleeping monster.

And in time Lady Neon herself became little more than a myth: a figure only ever seen by the shadow of a street light, moving between city after city, forever chasing the night and avoiding the sun, a reveller whose lips could seduce any creature they touched, and, if you believed the darker stories that came from the back alleys of Soho, of Itaewon, Harlem and Galata, a monster and a murderer who struck down all in her way. For the Neon Court had been slow to move into the cities, and there were already many other clans to contend with. The Whites, whose magic was paint; Bikers, whose power was speed; the warlocks who worshipped the power of the Seven Sisters and the ley lines made by the Underground; the Tribe, who prided strength above all else; the Tower, which hungered for life; the Guild; the seers; the sorcerers; the Aldermen. It was only a matter of time before the Neon Court found itself in conflict with one or more of these, and it proved itself a ruthless player of the game. “Beware her violet kiss” became a very literal warning whispered by those lucky enough to survive.

Eventually truces were made, in most cities across the world, with just a few exceptions. London was not the only city with a Midnight Mayor; every city had its own mechanism for dealing with the turbulence of the Neon Court’s arrival. But still the Neon Court continued, a fire below the decks, waiting for a chance to spring into an inferno. And while most of the time the fire was contained, if there was one thing guaranteed to send it into a fury, it was the arrival of that queen of the court, Lady Neon.

All of which brought me back to my original conclusion.

I said, “Shit. Really?”