And lo it came to pass that the nine-volt battery was invented, shoved into a torch, stuffed into the right hand of a woman and shone in our eyes.
We kicked out instinctively. Our foot hit the torch, sent it flying back, struck the hand that held it, knocked it to one side. It occurred to us that we had to be lying down, and lo, that also came to pass. We rolled to one side, tried to get up, found our eyes were full of water and our stomach full of grit, crawled onto our hands and knees and verily the Lord God smote us with the butt of a 9 mm pistol swung by a woman known mostly, of course, as psycho-bitch.
There was a lot less light.
There was a bit of time. There was some blood. Mine, I guessed. It seemed the norm.
I was aware of hands pulling at mine. I turned my head and saw somewhere on the other side of the equator my right hand, stretched out on a dirt floor popping with weeds. Someone was pulling off my glove, unwrapping the bandage. A lot of light was being shone on my hand. I twitched my fingers and a boot - big, black, with straps instead of laces, in case you hadn’t got the idea - pressed down on my wrist hard enough for us to cry out, turn away, losing sight of the scrabbling at my palm.
We felt the bandages peel away. We heard a voice, male, mutter, “Fuck shit.”
The pressure on my arm relaxed.
Faces crowded in to look closer at my hand. I recognised some of them. Earle, Kemsley, Anissina and, behind them, others, more men and women dressed in preacher’s black, peering in with a collection of torches and rifles, examining me and my damned hand. Oda. A face almost as dark as her close-cropped hair. She had the damn gun pointed at my face, not in an offensive way, but casually, as if it had just happened to flop there from the end of her trigger-pulling fingers. She looked at the brand on my hand and there was nothing there but contempt.
“You’re in trouble, sorcerer,” she said.
I tried to speak. My voice was trapped somewhere behind a great warty toad that had taken up residence at the entry to my lungs, inspecting each molecule of air one at a time on their way up and down.
Earle’s face appeared upside down over mine. I was lying on my back in dirt and weeds. I could taste . . . magic of a sort, but different. Distant, shut away. He said, “How did you get this?”
He meant our hand.
I licked my lips and croaked, “Nair.”
“Nair what?”
“He did it. He gave it to me.”
“No.”
“He did.”
“He would never have let you be Midnight Mayor. How did you get this?”
“The phone rang. I answered.”
“Tell me the truth!”
“I am.”
“He is.” Oda’s voice, calm and level.
Earle’s face flashed with anger. “You have nothing to do with this,” he spat. “You and your people are not involved.”
“I was invited here for a reason,” replied Oda calmly. “The Order was invited here for a reason. I know the sorcerer. He’s telling the truth.”
“What makes you sure?”
“I know him.”
“Is that it?”
“Yes. That’s it.”
“That’s nothing,” snapped Earle. “The Midnight Mayor is an Alderman, that’s how it’s done. It passes from one Alderman to another, has done for hundreds of years, never moves outside the circle. No one outside would understand what’s necessary, what is needful to be done. Nair would not have chosen this creature!”
A toe prodded the side of my head. It wasn’t meant to be a hard kick, not particularly, but it was my brain and it was a tough leather shoe and I wasn’t at my best. I could hear the thump of it roll like the sea in my ears, feel the soft tissue of my brain bounce nervously against the sides of my skull.
Kemsley said, “What happens if we kill him?”
I said, “End of the line.” We laughed, let it roll up the desert of our throat. “End of the line!” we cackled, “End of the line!”
“Get him up.”
Earle had authority. A pair of arms helped get me up. I slouched in them for all I was worth, making their lives hard, from spite mostly. Grass and trees, dead leaves and black twigs. We were in a park somewhere, a big park, couldn’t even hear the traffic. Trimmed hedges and neat