head to the window and saw torchlight, heard the faint snatch of voices lost in the twisting of the grass. The bouncing uneven strays of white light from the bulbs sent crazy shadows across the wall, that twisted and writhed and proclaimed runrunrunrunrunrunRUNRUNRUN!
I slunk back deeper into my gutted sofa and waited, tangling my fingers in my hair to keep them still, rubbing at old scabs and scars, keeping alert through the faint pressure-pain. A footstep outside dislodged something; I heard the scuttling of little ratty feet over concrete. Then the door opened. Two men with pistols and torches slunk in, doing the SWAT-team stuff. The way they moved seemed familiar, something straight off the TV, all signals and armour and guns. They saw me straight away; one gave a cry of “Hey-oi!” and the other turned to look.
I said, “Surprise!”
Two more men, slightly more heavily armed than their colleagues, also entered the room. The four of them took up positions in a semicircle around my sofa. I sat up, pressing my feet down on the concrete floor, listening for the scuttle of ratty claws.
“Ta-da,” I added weakly.
They just stared at me. None of them looked like they had a sense of humour.
“Ms Smith?” I asked nicely.
Another person at the door, another figure entered the room. This one was a woman. She wore a big black coat. She said, “Mr Swift.”
You can get big black coats almost anywhere.
And hell, it wasn’t like I was hard to crack.
But I knew her voice too.
I reached into my pocket for my torch, and at once the guns, which had been doing little more than pointing, came closer, making their point a little more pointed. I put my hands carefully by my side, smiled my nicest smile and said, “Just looking for my torch. Dark in here.” And then, because the terror was starting to set in, we blurted, “Hello, Ms Smith. You couldn’t have found a more inspiring name, could you?”
The shadow from the door became a darkness behind the four points of torchlight, moved between them, said, “He’s coming, Swift. Coming to end it all. No phones, no redial, no ringing in the night. End of the line. He’s coming, and then it will be done.”
“I’m guessing by ‘he’ we’re talking about Mr Pinner?”
She didn’t answer.
I stood up, as slow as I dared, and the lights and the guns kept on following. “You know, I never trust people who don’t have anything to say.”
No answer.
“And you knew that it was me asking for the meeting . . . because you have my number already on your phone?” I added carefully, trying out the idea for size.
No answer.
“Silence is contempt.”
And, because even people who don’t have anything to say have nerves to touch, she stepped into the torchlight, and the big black coat was stained with dirt and smog, but her face was still clean, and still familiar, and she was still, when not the unimaginative Ms Smith, comrade of the death of cities, a woman I had called Anissina.
She said, “You can’t begin to understand.”
“Try me.”
She said, “If you move, we’ll shoot you.”
“I guessed.”
“I don’t want to shoot you.”
“Bless.”
“If you die, the Midnight Mayor will still come back. Mr Pinner says he has ways. We are waiting for him.”
“Mr Pinner . . . death of cities Mr Pinner? Mr ‘I feast on the flame, stand beneath the bomb, drink the flood waters, rage with the burning and lick my lips on mortal terror’ Mr Pinner? This is the ducky we’re talking about? Don’t get me wrong, but I think I’d rather get shot.”
I took a step forward, and all the guns moved, and all the breaths were drawn. “Don’t!” she snapped. “There’s a reason I chose this place to meet. I know that you are weaker away from the streets and the lights and the electricity! Don’t make this be worse.”
“Nice to think you care.”
“I don’t.”
“Ah. So much for that consolation. I know it’s cliché, Anissina, but I gotta ask you: what exactly are you, an Alderman, and one who should theoretically be dead with the rest of her men, doing here, pointing guns at me?”
She thought about it, and then, because we had nothing to do but wait, she told me.
Third Interlude: Damnation, Contempt and Traffic Wardens
In which all is explained at the point of a gun.
“The city is going to burn,” she said. “It has been damned, cursed, blighted. The death of cities has been summoned, the ravens killed, the