a hundred strangers ignored her, and came to realise that this city, this place she had thought so beautiful, was a diamond she could never possess. A gleaming ornament on someone else’s glittering coat. A thing bought with money, carved out with blood, cold, beautiful, unyielding, cruel. And not knowing what she did, she wove on London Bridge a spell, as cold and cruel as the city that despised her. Damnation upon the cruelty of strangers, she breathed, curses on the unkind unfamiliarity. Let all who are strange be afraid, let all who are alone be left alone to their furies. ‘Give me back my hat,’ she screamed. ‘Damnation upon this city!’
“Hundreds of people must have heard.
“But as we avoid seeing the cleaners, the dustbin men, the drivers, the road painters and the sewage workers, no one heard.
“Only Mr Pinner.
“Her anger was as beautiful to him as the diamond to an avaricious eye. It summoned him, brought him up out of the streets, built him from the papers drifting in the wind, stitched the suit to his flesh and the fury to his soul, bound him to one purpose, and one purpose alone - damnation on this city! He is the tool of her vengeance, the vehicle for this city’s demise. Her magic created him, fuels him, he cannot die while her fury still lives. You cannot kill him, Matthew Swift. I am sorry that two Midnight Mayors had to die to learn this truth.
“Mr Pinner - the death of cities - is Ngwenya’s revenge made flesh. He has destroyed the protectors of the city, wiped them out, enacted vengeance on all who would hurt her. The man who spat drowned in his own spittle; the man who beat was flayed alive and his skin stitched to the ceiling of his bedroom while his eyes could still look to see. The boy who stole her hat, infected with lingering death and thrown aside like the ruined rubbish he was, condemned and tossed with the contempt he showed a stranger. But her damnation is much bigger than just her personal enemies. She said, a curse on the unkindness of strangers, and the city is nothing more than a commune of strangers, eight million of them, each of whom will never know more than a few hundred faces, a tiny sliver of a per cent of all that there is to know, who will never walk more than a few hundred streets, a fraction of the hive. She has damned the city. Her will be done. Mr Pinner is here to see to that.
“It will be soon.
“She will return to London Bridge.
“She will raise her face to the sky and her arms to the river.
“The city will burn, Mr Swift.
“Mr Pinner has seen that nothing will stop her vengeance. It is simply a matter of time; of bringing down the defences. It is strange that you should be one of these. Another sorcerer. Too late. End of the line.
“For me . . .
“I have little to say.
“I am a true Alderman.
“I look at the city and it is a miracle. That for two thousand years these streets can have stood and grown; that for two thousand years a ragged union of strangers pressed in tighter than blood to a boil can have lived together, fed together, worked together; that now eight million strangers can reside in one place, pressed in like lovers - that it works! That the water flows, the electricity burns, the gas rumbles, the streets hum, the wheels turn, that this works is a miracle! Wonder! Glory! Ours is a world full of strangers, that is what gives it such life. That in this place, at this time, we live; through the actions of strangers, faces we shall never know, miracles we shall never comprehend, history we can never understand. Madness in depth; we can only scratch a tiny percentage of the life, the power that is the city. To understand any more than our little part in it is to slip into spiralling madness. I think you’ve seen it, sorcerer. I think you know what I mean.
“And now it is taken for granted.
“Obscenity.
“Damnation.
“How dare anyone, anyone who lives in this city, how dare they ignore the miracle? How dare they shrug and say, ‘whatever’; how dare they forget the size, the beauty, the wonder, the scale, the life, the vibrancy, the glory, the miracle! How dare a stranger spit in another’s face, how dare a stranger strike a