‘press the red button’ or told Bomber Harris that it would just be a little, little fire, you seem to be more of a consequence, not a cause. A feeding parasite who finds magic in life, life in death. So I gotta ask you: what brought you to London this time?”
He seemed almost to hesitate. Then he smiled. “You must be Bakker’s apprentice,” he said. “The sorcerers are dead, which saved me killing them. The Tower has fallen, which saved me destroying it. When you killed Bakker, you made my life so much easier. I would not have come here had he still been alive. I should thank you for that, sorcerer.”
The vacuum cleaner in my stomach turned from suck to pump, filled it with ice and vomit and dust.
So I said, just to see, because if I didn’t ask, I’d never know, “‘Give me back my hat’.”
His face darkened, his fingers tightened in his trouser pocket. We grinned. “Come on,” I said. “Like it was never not going to be important.”
And for a moment, just a little, little moment, Mr Pinner, the death of cities, was afraid.
Then I felt the first slither of blood run down my face, felt the first sting of the paper cut. We drew back our right hand, behind our shoulder, and then flung it forward, throwing the snapped end of fishing rod like a dart, like a spear. It slammed dead-centre into his chest, point-first through the place where there should have been a breastbone. He looked at it, a little surprised, then back up at us. “Nothing can stop me,” he murmured. “You cannot begin to comprehend.”
I shrugged. We opened our palms out to our sides, felt the electricity crackle through our blood. “Waste not, want not,” we said. He reached to pull the fishing rod from his chest, utterly unconcerned to have it sticking from his paper flesh; and as he did so, we pushed.
Not at him; we pushed sideways, backwards, down, closed our eyes and twisted our fingers towards the great piles of discarded junk, remembering the smell of it, the rusted touch, the slime, the rot, the stink, the decay, the dead cat in its cardboard box, the fungus oozing over rotted things, the torn stuffing, the biting wire, the razored shattered edges, the tumbled glass, the melted plastic, the burnt steel, the broken pipes, the shattered cans, the twisted hinges, the abandoned everything. Everything we didn’t want to see and didn’t want to know, thrown aside; didn’t care, didn’t think, didn’t need, didn’t use, didn’t work, tossed and discarded and abandoned and forgotten and alone.
Life is magic, magic is life. It’s a conundrum sorcerers have always worried at. So much that had once been alive, so many abandoned forgotten things that had been a part of life. It was only logical, only natural, only the most sensible conclusion in the world that with so much association and neglect piled up in one place, there would still be a shard of forgotten life, waiting to burn. And it, being lonely and abandoned and left to die, was angry.
Mr Pinner pulled the piece of fishing rod from his chest, and looked at it with an expression of surprise. Small scraps of paper drifted down from the wound, caught in the wind and billowed upward for a moment, before the falling rain cast them down into the puddle at his feet.
Then, quietly and off to our left, something went thunk.
He looked up sharply and, just a bit too late, realised. Something else went eeeeeeeeeeeeeeiiiiiiicccccccckkkkkk . . .
A plastic bottle tumbled from a pile and bounced away. A piece of rotting brown string snapped free from a Gordian knot. A sprout of purple buddleia twisted and shrivelled, its roots dislodged. Then came the scuttling. It started as a distant tap dance performed by a flea circus, rose into a tumbling of meltwater, the ice still in it, became a high chattering noise, and only at the last moment did we understand. The rats were coming out of the junk: hundreds of fat brown rats. They slithered from inside the humming piles of twisted debris, plopped down onto the earth, onto each other and scuttled for the exit, worming past my ankles, brushing against my legs, flowing over my feet and past me without even bothering to slow down, streaming around Mr Pinner and away, tumbling into the street and gutters, searching for a way out.