The Minority Council (63 page)

“But before you do this, ask yourself—what are you giving away? What will you lose, to make this wonder? Who will you become, when you are a god, no longer human? Is the victory worth the price you will pay?

“So I bring you back to my first point. Thaumaturgy: what’s it good for?”

And the days trickled by.

A report came in of an explosion of imps in the rubbish dumps of Walthamstow. Whole populations of seagulls and rats had been culled and there were rumours, so they said, of tribal dances between burning tyres, and the rattling of impish song.

We nodded and smiled and did nothing.

Because, just this once, it was the right thing to do.

And a report came in of a dusthouse destroyed, and the dust itself, gone.

And tales of a creature that came from the dust and took the dust into itself, and vanished, without a trace.

Not human, and not animal.

Something silent, something new.

And I said, how interesting, I’d look into it.

Perhaps you should send me a memo.

And one day Penny said, “There’s this security guy down in Guildhall who looks at me funny, and I thought at first he, like, totally fancied me because, you know, that’s kinda what you’d think, isn’t it?”

“Yes, Penny.”

“Then he kept on looking and looking and I looked back because it was, like, whoa there, you’re kinda freaking me out now and you know, I coulda sworn, as I was looking… there was something kinda funny about the way he moved.”

“What kinda funny?”

“His shadow. His shadow kept on looking even when he turned his head away.”

I leant back in my chair, folding my fingers behind my head. “Penny,” I said, “have I ever told you about the ways in which untrained sorcerers can manifest?”

“Um… not really. I mean, I guessed you were kinda holding off on that, seeing as how
I
manifested by, like, you know, nearly destroying the city and shit.”

“Believe it or not, that was kinda a one-off.”

“Jeez, thanks for making me feel better.”

“There are other ways…”

And the days rolled by.

Until one unremarkable evening, when the sun was setting over the city and the air smelt of that chill you get before rain, we pulled on our shoes and rubbed the sunlight out of our eyes, and stood up, and went for a walk.

We walked through the city, the old city, through little alleys lined with great buildings, past the staring statues with their Rule Britannia faces and long marble spears, between the rolling mad red eyes of the watching silver dragons and down the cobbled streets that snuck between the bus routes, where only the most adventurous cabbie dared venture.

We walked across the course of old rivers sealed over
long ago, under faded signs offering ha’penny cures for ancient ills, beneath clocks raised up by learned councilmen as their civic duty, past the Gothic towers of the Royal Court and round the teeming curve of Aldwych, down towards the river.

We walked through the subways beneath Waterloo, where the beggars huddled beneath changing light and white stalagmites that hung from between the ceiling cracks, and south again, past the silent black guns of the Imperial War Museum and towards that strange place where distances started to warp and the centre of the city met inner city and had a fight that left both bleeding by the one-way signs.

And as we walked, the light turned away from our shadow, and the twin crosses burnt on our hand, and the pigeons fluttered in their dens, and the rats were still beneath the city streets.

Finally we said, “Thank you for the clothes.”

He fell into step beside me, as he had been beside me for a long way, though not always seen. “You’re welcome,” he replied. “Glad you didn’t screw up too bad.”

“That’s my speciality,” I told the Beggar King. “I screw up just bad enough for things to get moderately shit, and then by the remarkable deed of stopping them from being mega, people think I must be onto something.”

“Yeah—you tell yourself that,” he replied, sucking in air through his crooked teeth.

“How are your subjects?” I asked. “No more disappearances?”

“No, no more. At least—no more that end in dust. My people vanish all the time, but now… our evils, evils of our making… it is somehow better.”

We walked on. I said, “Before he… before he died, Templeman said that there were things I don’t know about being Midnight Mayor. Things I haven’t worked out, haven’t been told yet.”

“Well, yes, obviously.”

I glanced sharply at him, but the Beggar King’s bearded face was unreadable.

“Anything I should be scared of?”

“Christ,” he laughed. “You should be terrified!”

“That’s what I figured.”

We kept on walking.

Then,

“Its footsteps burn the earth.”

“What?”

“Its footsteps burn the earth. The gates are down and it is coming, and its footsteps burn the earth.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

He shrugged.

“You’re the Midnight Mayor. Work it out.”

We walked further.

I opened my mouth to say, hold on a second, jimbo: work it out, what kind of pretentious shit is that, what the hell is it with all these people trying to teach me lessons? Anyway I mean dammit, no one’s perfect so cut me a break or…

… but when I looked he was gone.

I sighed, shoved my hands in my pockets, bent my head down against the wind, and kept on walking.

K
ATE
G
RIFFIN
is the pseudonym of Carnegie Medal-nominated YA author Catherine Webb. Her first novel for adults was
A Madness of Angels
, introducing the sorcerer Matthew Swift. She lives in London. Find out more about the author at
www.kategriffin.net
.

If you enjoyed
THE MINORITY COUNCIL,
look out for

EQUATIONS OF LIFE

by Simon Morden

Samuil Petrovitch is a survivor.

He survived the nuclear fallout in St. Petersburg and hid in the London Metrozone—the last city in England. He’s lived this long because he’s a man of rules and logic.

For example, getting involved = a bad idea.

But when he stumbles into a kidnapping in progress, he acts without even thinking. Before he can stop himself, he’s saved the daughter of the most dangerous man in London.

And clearly saving the girl = getting involved.

Now, the equation of Petrovitch’s life is looking increasingly complex.

Russian mobsters + Yakuza + something called the New Machine Jihad = one dead Petrovitch.

But Petrovitch has a plan—he always has a plan—he’s just not sure it’s a good one.

Petrovitch woke up. The room was in the filtered yellow half-light of rain-washed window and thin curtain. He lay perfectly still, listening to the sounds of the city.

For a moment, all he could hear was the all-pervading hum of machines: those that made power, those that used it, pushing, pulling, winding, spinning, sucking, blowing, filtering, pumping, heating and cooling.

In the next moment, he did the city-dweller’s trick of blanking that whole frequency out. In the gap it left, he could discern individual sources of noise: traffic on the street fluxing in phase with the cycle of red-amber-green, the rhythmic metallic grinding of a worn windmill bearing on the roof, helicopter blades cutting the gray dawn air. A door slamming, voices rising—a man’s low bellow and a woman’s shriek, going at it hard. Leaking in through the steel walls, the babel chatter of a hundred different channels all turned up too high.

Another morning in the London Metrozone, and Petrovitch had survived to see it:
God, I love this place.

Closer, in the same room as him, was another sound, one that carried meaning and promise. He blinked his pale eyes, flicking his unfocused gaze to search his world, searching…

There. His hand snaked out, his fingers closed around thin wire, and he turned his head slightly to allow the approaching glasses to fit over his ears. There was a
thumbprint dead center on his right lens. He looked around it as he sat up.

It was two steps from his bed to the chair where he’d thrown his clothes the night before. It was May, and it wasn’t cold, so he sat down naked, moving his belt buckle from under one ass cheek. He looked at the screen glued to the wall.

His reflection stared back, high-cheeked, white-skinned, pale-haired. Like an angel, or maybe a ghost: he could count the faint shadows cast by his ribs.

Back on the screen, an icon was flashing. Two telephone numbers had appeared in a self-opening box: one was his, albeit temporarily, to be discarded after a single use. In front of him on the desk were two fine black gloves and a small red switch. He slipped the gloves on, and pressed the switch.

“Yeah?” he said into the air.

A woman’s voice, breathless from effort. “I’m looking for Petrovitch.”

His index finger was poised to cut the connection. “You are who?”

“Triple A couriers. I’ve got a package for an S. Petrovitch.” She was panting less now, and her cut-glass accent started to reassert itself. “I’m at the drop-off: the café on the corner of South Side and Rookery Road. The proprietor says he doesn’t know you.”

“Yeah, and Wong’s a
pizdobol,
” he said. His finger drifted from the cut-off switch and dragged through the air, pulling a window open to display all his current transactions. “Give me the order number.”

“Fine,” sighed the courier woman. He could hear traffic noise over her headset, and the sound of clattering
plates in the background. He would never have described Wong’s as a café, and resolved to tell him later. They’d both laugh. She read off a number, and it matched one of his purchases. It was here at last.

“I’ll be with you in five,” he said, and cut off her protests about another job to go to with a slap of the red switch.

He peeled off the gloves. He pulled on yesterday’s clothes and scraped his fingers through his hair, scratching his scalp vigorously. He stepped into his boots and grabbed his own battered courier bag.

Urban camouflage. Just another immigrant, not worth shaking down. He pushed his glasses back up his nose and palmed the door open. When it closed behind him, it locked repeatedly, automatically.

The corridor echoed with noise, with voices, music, footsteps. Above all, the soft moan of poverty. People were everywhere, their shoulders against his, their feet under his, their faces—wet-mouthed, hollow-eyed, filthy skinned—close to his.

The floor, the walls, the ceiling were made from bare sheet metal that boomed. Doors punctured the way to the stairs, which had been dropped into deliberately left voids and welded into place. There was a lift, which sometimes even worked, but he wasn’t stupid. The stairs were safer because he was fitter than the addicts who’d try to roll him.

Fitness was relative, of course, but it was enough.

He clanked his way down to the ground floor, five stories away, ten landings, squeezing past the stair dwellers and avoiding spatters of noxious waste. At no point did he look up in case he caught someone’s eye.

It wasn’t safe, calling a post-Armageddon container home, but neither was living in a smart, surveillance-rich neighborhood with no visible means of support—something that was going to attract police attention, which wasn’t what he wanted at all. As it stood, he was just another immigrant with a clean record renting an identikit two-by-four domik module in the middle of Clapham Common. He’d never given anyone an excuse to notice him, had no intention of ever doing so.

Street level. Cracked pavements dark with drying rain, humidity high, the heat already uncomfortable. An endless stream of traffic that ran like a ribbon throughout the city, always moving with a stop-start, never seeming to arrive. There was elbow-room here, and he could stride out to the pedestrian crossing. The lights changed as he approached, and the cars parted as if for Moses. The crowd of bowed-head, hunch-shouldered people shuffled drably across the tarmac to the other side and, in the middle, a shock of white-blond hair.