even reasonable to turn what seems a constancy of miracles into the idea of a higher power, and call it simply, the city?”
“Oh. I get it now. Philosophy 101 for Midnight Mayors.”
“Life is magic, Matthew. You said it yourself. Even the boring, mundane acts, even breathing, seeing, perceiving, being perceived. Life is magic. That is all a sorcerer is.”
“I know,” I sighed. “I remember.”
We were nearing Ludgate. A great joining of places, confused, wriggling in from all sides, monuments to the war dead, supermarkets for the living, and coffee shops for all. The squeaking of Bakker’s wheelchair was growing less. I glanced down at him. His face was sunk, dark, grey, fading into shadow. His chair was fading into shadow, stretching thin and flat across the floor.
I looked away.
We had no need to see such things again.
There was something wrong. It wasn’t that Bakker faded into shadow; it was that he faded into his own shadow, and that shadow faded into my shadow, and my shadow was doing the pencil-thin thing behind me as I walked towards the light, and in front of me, and around me, and it wasn’t so thin as it ought to be and wasn’t so flat on the pavement as the normal laws of optics demanded. If water was nothing more than moonlight on the earth, this is how it would behave.
My hand hurt.
It more than hurt.
I cradled it to my chest. The stitches in my skin hurt. My head hurt. The paper cuts stung across every part of me. We could feel warm blood rolling down from the tiny slice below our eye, feel itching in the palm of our hand. The travelcard of destiny is never behind the sofa, these things are never as easy as a party with pineapples. I opened my hand. The twin crosses were burning, the blood in them turned to warm red flame. I didn’t know if this was a good sign or a bad one. We turned our face away. I walked the southern edge of Gray’s Inn, past shuttered shops and gloomy, lights-out banks, past bus stops declaring on their orange boards:1. 341 - North’land Pk - 14 mins.
2. 11 - Liverpool St - 15 mins.
3. 17 - runrunrunrunrunrunENDOFTHELINErunrunrunrun run - Due
4. 11 - Liverpool Street - 18 mins Want flexible hours and excellent pay? Be a bus driver! Then you too can become a shadow on the wall! Phone Arriva on 0800 924 7100.
A splat of a pub was turning out for the night, customers, mostly drunken students, spilling onto the streets, arms full of stolen ketchup sachets and packets of brown sauce, cackling merrily under the streetlights. A couple of taxis went by. A woman was leaning against the window of an electronics store, arms folded, head turned towards me. I recognised her as I approached, but turned my eyes away from her face. She fell into step with me as I passed, saying nothing. It’s hard to say anything when your throat is half missing. In films it’s always neat, a single cut, one slice and that’s it, just another scarlet smile a bit lower than your first. This wasn’t a neat missing throat. This was a five-fingered yawn torn from muscle and flesh, that gaped and laughed obscenely with each rattle of her jaw.
In life, the woman whom this obscenity mimicked had been called Dana Mikeda. My former apprentice. The half-Russian daughter of a sandwich shop owner in Smithfields. She’d been taken in by Mr Bakker, when I’d died. She’d been the one who cast the spell that brought us back.
She hadn’t died a tidy death.
When she talked, her voice bubbled through crimson blood popping out of the gaps in her neck. She said, “You can still run away.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.”
“Seriously. Find another city, find somewhere else. The world is big enough, even for you. What loyalty do you have to this city?”
“I was born here.”
“And what loyalty do you have to this city?”
“We were born here too.”
She smiled, and so did her throat. “Haha. Deep. You should write Christmas crackers. Still, plenty of people stuff their domestic loyalties.”
“Nah. You get born in London, you get raised in London, sooner or later you’ll put ‘Londoner’ on your passport. Hey - I can even give you a bit of Midnight Mayor pep talk, while you’re here, Dana, not being dead. How’s this for Alderman crap: the city defines you. Or even better - I am born in this city and it makes