The Midnight Mayor

Book 2: Matthew Swift

by Kate Griffin

Genres: Contemporary Fantasy; Action & Adventure; Urban Fantasy

Synopsis

It's said that if the ravens ever leave the Tower of London, then the Tower will crumble and the kingdom will fall. Resurrected sorcerer Matthew Swift is about to discover that this isn't so far from the truth. . . One by one, the protective magical wards that guard the city are falling: the London Wall defiled with cryptic graffiti, the ravens found dead at the Tower, the London Stone destroyed. This is not good news. This array of supernatural defenses -- a mix of international tourist attractions and forgotten urban legends -- formed a formidable magical shield, one that could protect London from the greatest threat it has ever known. But what could be so dangerous as to threaten an entire city? Against his better judgment, Matthew Swift is about to find out. And if he's lucky, he might just live long enough to do something about it . . .

Release date: February 17, 2010

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 492

Sample

Prelude: The Heavy Metal Spectres

In which a sorcerer is surprised to find himself cursed, burnt, branded, chased and condemned without any apparent reason
and in the wrong pair of shoes.


 

The telephone rang.

I answered.

After that…

… it’s complicated.

Pain.

No room for anything else.

Just pain.

Time went by.

Don’t know how much. Watch fused to wrist; burnt. No clocks. Mobile phone somewhere in my bag, but my bag wasn’t on my shoulder.
Wasn’t near at hand. I raised my head. Drying blood crackled like Velcro. I saw my feet. They were wearing someone else’s
shoes. It took a minute to remember why.


I raised my head a little higher.

My bag was on the ground. It had fallen some distance away, spilling paint cans and old socks. Above it swung the telephone.
A dribble of blood was running down the receiver and splatting droplets onto the ground. The blood was mine. There didn’t
seem to be any other candidate.


I put my head back down on the concrete, and closed my eyes.

More time went by.

It started to rain. Proper night-time rain, that sensed the wind chill and wished it was snow. I found that my left arm, the
one that hadn’t answered the phone, would obey basic commands. I said twitch, it twitched. I said check for anything broken,
and it checked. Nothing was broken. Even the blood running down the back of my neck was melodrama. There’s two kinds of head
wounds—the kind that look worse than they are, and the kind that kill you. Not dead; not again.


I let my left hand relax.

The wind was blowing the rain in at a 45-degree angle. In the gloom it was visible only as a sheet across the sodium-coloured
streetlamp at the edge of this patch of concrete nothing. There was a drumming on the roofs and a rumbling in the gutters
as three weeks of unswept dirt was washed into the grating. The rain was a blessing. We turned our shaking right hand up to
the cool water and let it wash the blood off our fingers. Then, as it started to seep through my coat, shivering and the ache
of deep-down cold began to replace the burning pain.


The decision to get out of the rain meant getting up.

Hercules didn’t have anything on us; Muhammad Ali would have been impressed.

We got up.

Halfway there, my knee slipped on the wet concrete. My right hand hit the rough grain of the floor, and we nearly screamed.

The Terminator would have given up and gone to bed by now; the Knights Templar would have called it a day.

I got up. My world swam between blood-red and sapphire-blue. A dying streetlamp buzzed like a mosquito. Water had pooled in
the plastic bubble that held the bulb, casting rippling shadows over the black-silver street. I staggered to the phone. My
bag was a faded satchel made of plastic fibre pretending to be cotton. I picked it up and slung it over my shoulder. The phone
swung uselessly on its cord. From the speaker it made the loneliest sound in the world:


Beeeeeeeeeeeppppp…


Wedged around the telephone itself, in the gap between machine and wall, were cards offering:

!!!SEXSEXSEXSEXSEX!!

Or:

**PERKY PLAYFUL BLONDE**

Or:

THINKING OF ENDING IT ALL? CALL THE SAMARITANS.

I had a scarf around my neck; I noticed one end was scorched. I pulled it tighter and tucked it inside my coat, an off-beige
colour turning off-brown in the rain. Our head hurt. Our everywhere hurt, so many different parts demanding attention that
it was hard to identify any single one. In my bag there was a first-aid kit, showing its wear. I found a bandage and wrapped
it round my right hand. All I could see was blood, rain, and angry purple flesh puffed up so thick it was hard to tell where
my palm ended and my fingers began. To hold the bandage in place, I pulled on a black fingerless glove. Pressure on the pain
made it worse; but worse was good. Worse made the agony local, and meant we couldn’t notice all the other parts of us that
hurt.


I looked around.

I was in a garage. I knew this because, facing the street, a stained banner the colour of weak tea said: “CAR WASH AND SPARE
PARTS”. There were no other clues as to its function. Just a concrete floor exposed to the sky, four walls of corrugated iron,
and a chain across the entrance. The telephone and a few discarded buckets were the only equipment I could see. Weeds were
coming up between the cracks in the floor, and a sheet of torn plastic that might once have been a roof flapped in the wind.


A truck went by in the street outside. The sound of wheels through water always seems further off than it is. At this time
of night, or morning, trucks were almost the only vehicles, delivering tomorrow’s supermarket food to be stacked on the shelves
behind yesterday’s leftovers. Trucks; and the night buses, every passenger a suspect simply for being awake, every driver
a lunatic who hears the call of fifth gear on every empty street.


Our head throbbed. I could feel each artery pulsing. We felt sick. I looked at the telephone receiver; then reached out, knuckles
first, not trusting my fingertips to it. And would have touched it except that a sound—or the absence of a sound—held me back.


The beeeeeeeeeepppp of the dialling tone stopped.


I drew my hand away instinctively. The phone hung limp as a dead squid. I listened. The sound of rain, the buzzing of a neon
light about to pop. I stepped back a few paces, nursing my right hand, watching the telephone.


The sound of rain, the buzzing of a neon lamp, the swish of distant tyres…

What else?

We half closed our eyes, and listened.

Sound of rain, buzzing of neon, swish of tyres, scuttling of rats beneath the streets, scampering of the urban fox, king of
the middle of the road, rustling of a pigeon in its overhead gutter; what else? Hum of mains voltage just on the edge of hearing,
smell of rain, that incredible, clean smell that washes the dirt out of the air for just a few minutes, banging of a front
door somewhere, crackling of a radio left on in the night, wailing of a car alarm, sing-song soaring of a siren, a long way
off, distant tumtetetumtetetumtete of a goods train heading for Willesden Junction, and… and…


And there it was, right there on the edge; there was the strangeness.

It went:

Chi-chichi chi-chichi chi-chichi bumph bumph chi-chichi chi-chichi chi-chichi bumph bumph…


I couldn’t immediately work out what it was. Our ignorance frightened us. We wanted a weapon.

Chi-chichi chi-chichi chi-chichi went the sound. Chi-chichi chi-chichi chi-chichi. We didn’t even have to close our eyes to hear it. Advancing, getting closer. Chi-chichi chi-chichi…


The buzzing neon light gave up, popped and went out, shrivelling from sodium orange brightness to a blue shimmer in its core
before darkness took it. It’s easy to forget, in the city, how dark real darkness can be.


I started to walk. Climbed over the chain. Stepped out into the street.

There was someone at the far end, a few hundred yards off, smothered in shadows.

They were looking at me.

I turned in the other direction. If my shoes had been my own, I would have run.

I was in Willesden.

Christ.

Willesden is a nowhere-everywhere.

It isn’t close enough to the centre of London to be inner city, nor far enough away to be suburb. It isn’t posh enough to
be well tended or have a single class of citizen, nor is it squalid enough to be dubbed “action zone” by a righteous local
government bureaucrat. It doesn’t have a unique ethnic character, but instead a mix of all sorts pile in from every corner,
from tenth-generation Englishman dreaming of the south of France, to third-generation Afro-Caribbean who has never seen the
equatorial sun. It sits astride a maze of transport links, buses, trains and canals, most of which are passing through to
somewhere better. No one quite knows where Willesden begins or ends.


You can find anything you want in Willesden, so long as you don’t go looking for it.

I would not have chosen to be in Willesden of my own accord. But we’d made a promise, and our promise had taken us here. Then
a phone had rung in a garage and we’d answered it…


… and now there was something else on the streets tonight.

I could feel it.

Hear it.


A sound like an angry bee stuck in a jar, banging its head in regular and rapid rhythm on the glass.

Chi-chichi chi-chichi chi-chichi…


Cynics call it fate, romantics call it destiny, lawyers call it malign intent. No one uses the word “coincidence”. I didn’t.
If you see vultures flying overhead and hear the distant sound of cannon, you don’t call it coincidence, and in this city
there were plenty of scavengers that could be lured out into the night, by the smell of blood. And our blood was a long way
from merely human.


We thought of courage, we thought of fighting, we thought of running. Tonight, we concluded, was not a night for pride. Run.

I tried and couldn’t. The shoes on my feet had been part of the promise too. But they were too big for me, and the two pairs
of socks I wore to try and make up for it were soaked with rainwater. My right hand had been used as bait in a shark-fishing
competition, my head had been sawn off for the trophy and reattached with a staple gun. And deep down we knew, though we didn’t
dare think about it, that these were probably just the superficial consequences of the night’s work. There are more things
you can catch from a telephone besides a burnt hand.


So I walked as fast as I could through the rain, head rising like a pigeon’s to look ahead, then down to blink water from
my eyes, then up again. Postbox, streetlights, falling rain, terraced houses, zebra crossing, with one of the flashing orange
bubbles on its post smashed long ago. The lights were off in all the houses, except for the flickering of a TV to whose comforting
nothings an old lady had fallen asleep this night like all the others. In someone’s back garden, a cat shrieked with that
unnatural sound that was either sex or death.


At a T-junction ahead a night bus stood; shadows sat in the bright whiteness of its windows. It was a short-route single-decker,
the kind associated with old people out to collect their pension books, and empty beer cans rolling with each acceleration
and brake. I couldn’t see a number and didn’t care. Four red walls and a set of wheels were all the protection I needed.


I picked up speed, half walking, half falling over the rhythm of my own feet, no longer caring if I was cold or wet, so long
as I was somewhere that wasn’t here. The road became lined with council flats, built from grey concrete streaked black in
the rain. Lights shone from the communal doorways, and on the low wall separating the ground-floor flats from the street,
some wit had written in tall white letters:


GIVE ME BACK MY HAT

I turned to follow the bus, in time to watch its brake lights disappear round a corner. Closer to, I saw the dim white light
of a bus shelter, overhung by a plane tree. I went towards it, my shadow playing backwards and forwards like one cast on a
sundial as I passed under the streetlamps.


There was someone at the bus shelter. Either I hadn’t noticed him, or he’d just arrived.

There were also other, nastier possibilities. We tried to ignore them.

He sat on the narrow red bench, which was designed to be as uncomfortable as possible. His knees were wide apart as if someone
had stuck a frisbee down his pants, his arms were folded across his chest to make it clear he didn’t care about anything.
He wore pale grey trousers three sizes too big, passed down by an elder brother moved on to better things, whose crotch began
around the knees; a pair of black gloves like a motorbiker’s gauntlets; sporty trainers adorned with rip-off logos; and a
hoodie. The grey hood was drawn so low over his face I couldn’t even see a protruding nose. It looked more like a cowl than
a fashion accessory or, heaven forbid, protection against the weather. His head bounced gently to the rhythm playing from
a pair of headphone cables that vanished into the interior of his tracksuit. The only sound that escaped them was a regular:


Chi-chichi chi-chichi chi-chichi…


Not an angry bee, but the bass rhythm of a song turned up too loud; tune, if there was one, lost to beat. Madness was no longer
talking to yourself; technology had changed all that.


But this was something more.

On the top of the shelter someone had thrown a small plastic screwdriver and what looked like a child’s left shoe, pretty
pink turned dirty grey by the rain and the darkness. The single white lamp in the shelter was stained with dirty spots where
a hundred insects had crawled inside it, and found it too hot for their wings to bear. A moth was the only survivor, fluttering
impotently against the plastic cover.


The hoodie kept on bobbing to that invisible beat.

You don’t ask strangers their business when waiting for the bus. Especially not in the small hours of the morning. I leant
against the stop with its list of what was due when, and clutched at my burning hand.


Coincidence is usually mentioned only when something good happens. Whenever it’s something bad, it’s easier to blame someone,
something. We don’t like coincidence, though we were newer to this world than I. Inhabiting my flesh, being me as I was now
us, we had quickly come to understand why so many sorcerers had died from lack of cynicism. I had been a naive sorcerer, and
so I had died. We, who had been reborn in my flesh, were not about to make the same error. Too many people had heard of the
blue electric angels for our new-found mortality to ever be safe.


Chi-chichi chi-chichi chi-chichi…


And because I didn’t believe in coincidence, I raised my head from contemplation of the bus timetable, turned to the hoodie
on the red plastic bench and said, “Hey, you got the time?”


He didn’t move.

“Hey, mate, you got a light?”

He looked round, taking his time. He didn’t need to rush; his kind never do. I stepped back, reaching instinctively with my
bandaged fingers for the nearest light, the nearest whiff of mains power.


It’d have been nice, for once, to be surprised.

And “he” was an “it”, and “it” had no face. It was a sack of clothes sitting on empty air, a pair of white headphones plugged
into the floating nothing of his not-ears. The body of his clothes, bulked out so humanly, was held in shape by air, by an
ignorance of gravity and a perversion of pressure, by floating shadow and drifting emptiness bundled together into a nothing-something
in a tracksuit. He was an it, and it was a spectre.


Once, when I was a kid, I was taken to see a seer. His name was Khan. He read the future in the entrails of old shopping bags
and the interweaving of vapour trails in the sky. He told me a lot of things, most of them sounding like they came out of
a Christmas cracker; but finally he said “Yeah, man… you’re like… you know… like gonna die.”


I said something along the lines of “Yeah, I kinda figured that”. Sorcerers do not have a long life expectancy, especially
urban ones.


“Hey, dude, you totally don’t get it!” he replied. “You’re like… gonna die. It’s after when it gets complicated.”

At the time I thought he was being pretentiously metaphorical.

There are two ways to look at the gift of prophecy. Theory the first goes like this: prophet sees future = there is a predetermined
path that the prophet is capable of perceiving = destiny = no free will = almighty God with a really sick sense of fun. Which
is bad news if you’re anyone lower than “pope” in the spiritual pecking order of life.


Theory the second: prophet sees future = ability to determine with an almost omnipotent degree of accuracy and skill the one
most likely future from a whole host of determining factors, including human free will, random variables and continual and
unexpected cock-up, what will happen next = omnipotence = God in mortal flesh. Khan didn’t look like any sort of God to me,
but as Mr Bakker always said, sorcerers should keep an open mind. Just in case someone tried to hit it with a sledgehammer.


That was back in the good old days.

Back before Mr Bakker’s stroke. Back before Mr Bakker resolved not to die. Back before his shadow grew a pair of teeth and
a taste for blood. Back before the Tower killed the sorcerers of the city in Mr Bakker’s name. Back before his shadow killed
me, one gloomy night by the river, in its endless quest for life. Before the blue electric angels, the battles and the vengeance
and the life left behind in the telephone wires.


Back before we came back into this mortal world.

No human can survive having their major organs ripped out by the angry manifestation of a dying sorcerer’s incarnated will.
Or, for that matter, by any other sharpened implement. And while my continued existence may argue against this medical truth,
I was always reminded when I looked in the mirror that once upon a time my eyes had been brown. Not our burning electric blue.


Khan, in his own special, unhelpful way, had been right all along.

Imagine my embarrassment.

I ran.

See what we were capable of, when the situation called?

Our feet flapped and flopped on the wet pavement, our breath was a puff of cloud lost in the rain. I’d never realised how
ridiculous a man can sound when running, all bouncing bag and thumping shoe, graceless and soaked. I crossed the empty street
and was inside a council estate in a matter of seconds that took an hour each to pass, rushing past doors behind iron grates,
and doors with children’s pictures doodled on them, and windows broken and windows cleaned and doorsteps scrubbed and bicycles
locked and bicycles smashed and bins overturned and bins emptied and flowers tended and pots abandoned and council pledges
made and council policies forgotten and walls graffitied with all the rambling thoughts of the inhabitants…


C & J 4EVER

WHO DOESNT LIKE BULLET TRAINS THINK ABOUT IT

CALIPER BOY SMELLS

apkamı geri ver!

There was a play area in the middle of a forlorn patch of grass: two sad swings above “safe” tarmac that falling children
could bounce on. A bike, its handlebar, wheels and seat ripped off, was chained to some railings.


Next to the bike, another spectre was waiting. At first I thought he was just some kid. But when he looked up, there was nothing
inside that hood to stare with. And that nothing stared straight at me. He was dressed identically to the one at the bus stop;
but nothing could have moved that fast, and the beat out of his headphones went dumdumdumdumdumdumdumdum with relentless cardiac monotony. For a moment we regarded each other, I too tired to look afraid, he too empty to look anything
at all. Then he tilted his head back, and roared. It was the sound of old brakes about to fail, screeching a last scream on
an icy road, of razored metal being scraped over a rusted surface, of a guitar string just as it snaps. I ducked and covered
my ears, hoping to get below the sound. Around me it made each window pane hum and crack, and set the swings swinging in distress.


Spectres always hunt together, and it’s easy to mistake a summons for a scream. I pushed my left ear into my shoulder and
reached deep in my satchel until I found what I was looking for: a can of red spray paint. I shook it and, turning on the
spot, drew around me a double red line. It spattered in the rain, and started to blur. I thought for a moment it wouldn’t
hold—but a double red line is a powerful enchantment, even in the worst of weathers, and as I completed the shape, its paint
flashed brighter and settled, gleaming, into a solid state.


The summons stopped. Perhaps the spectre reasoned that sound wouldn’t do much good against my ward on the ground. Perhaps
it ran out of air from inside its floating chest. The physiognomy of a creature that isn’t there is hard to study. I could
hear the wailing of car alarms set off by the din; lights were coming on behind the area’s newly cracked windows. Soon the
whole estate would be up and buzzing, and then so would be the police, and then questions, about the dead and the almost dead
and the should-be dead. We couldn’t afford to waste time on such details.


The spectre moved towards me. He had no shadow and, apart from the dumdumdumdumdumdumdum of his headphones, made no sound as he approached.


Behind me was the chi-chichi chi-chichi of the creature at the bus stop and, somewhere against the car alarms, another rising bass line, of:


Boom boom boom boom-te-boom boom boom boom boom-te-boom

I squatted down inside my red circle and pressed my fingers into the ground, sniffing the air. I had none of the right equipment,
nothing that could do more than slow down the pack. Just checking my bag had wasted twenty yards of their inexorable stride.
The nearest spectre stopped, its toes scraping the edge of my double red line. Reaching with a gloved hand into the saggy
kangaroo pocket of its grey jumper, it pulled out a flick knife. The knife was cheap black plastic with a silverish blade
which revealed a series of notches at the hilt end that probably served no purpose, except to make an ugly weapon somehow
”cool” by being that bit more ugly. The blade was no more than four inches long; but when four inches is two inches longer
than the thickness of your wrist, size doesn’t matter. We watched it, fascinated.


The spectre drew back the blade, held it up, and rammed it towards my face. As it passed through the air above the red lines
it stuck, point-first, as if buried in thick foam; beneath it, the paint on the ground bubbled and hissed. Still the spectre
kept up the pressure, pushing with both hands on the hilt. A little at a time, the blade began to move towards me.


Behind, a hiss-swipe through the air and the smell of burning plastic announced that the second spectre was doing the same
with its knife. Coming out of a corner by the refuse bins was a third, heading towards me with a casual swagger. I knew it
didn’t need to run.


I dug my fingers deeper into the tarmac. It bent beneath them with the cold, crinkly texture of dry cereal, resisted, then
parted. I pushed in my fingers, my wrist, then the lower arm, then in as far as my elbow, straining to delve through the mass
of the earth. Still not deep enough. I cursed and bent lower, pressing my cheek to the ground and pushing my shoulder into
the tarmac. It was faint and a long way off, but close enough now for my fingers to tingle with it, and most of all, I could
smell it. Gas mains have always been built down deep; it’s a sensible enough precaution.


I dragged my fingers out of the pavement, trailing loose chips of black tarmac. Wet dirt, grey, the colour of clay, clung
to the length of my arm as I pulled myself free. When my fingertips finally came away, there was a broad tear in the earth,
and the air above it wriggled like a desert mirage. The smell of gas is artificially pumped into it at the factory, a dry
stink that makes itself known in every part of the nostrils and tickles at the back of the throat. I scrambled to my feet
and let it rise around me, watched it spill out around my feet and ankles and, raising my hands, dragged more of it higher
even as the red paint I had sprayed onto the ground began to melt, dribble, lose its shape. As the shimmering on the air spread
around me, bringing tears to my eyes and making my lungs hurt, I reached into my satchel, digging deep for a much-used lighter
that had never lit a cigarette. I slotted it into my bandaged right hand, drawing my coat up around my face and hunching my
shoulders to present as small a target as possible.


When the ward broke, it did so fast. The third spectre, Mr Boom boom boom boom-te-boom, was still a few yards away. The paint bubbling at my feet gave way, turned black and peeled like dead skin off a corpse.
Chi-chichi chi-chichi chi-chichi put his full weight on his blade, making it jerk forwards and down in an arc meant for my neck. I closed my eyes, and spun
the wheel of the cigarette lighter.


I was aware of pain in the vicinity of my left collarbone, but it wasn’t the moment to care. Though my eyes were pressed tight,
the flash from the ignition burnt to the back of my retinas like a full summer’s sun. Even with my coat wrapped around me
and all the will I could spare focused on keeping the flames away, the heat dried up every inch of my lungs, burnt the inside
of my nose, turned my tongue to leather, singed my eyebrows and caused black smoke to dribble from my hair. It was the thump-hiss of all igniting gas stoves, and it spread out around from me in a pool of shimmering leakage from deep below the streets,
a bright blue centre spitting out a circle of yellow flame. Those windows close by that hadn’t been broken by the spectre’s
cry were now blasted inwards, shredding curtains, and embedding glass in every wall. The bins lined up at the recycling point
were blasted open and their contents set instantly alight.


It faded quickly, leaving just a hiss-whine as the gas still trickling up from the pavement burnt at my feet like a candle, smothered to a tiny core by the falling rain.
Every sound I still heard had to seep through a background whumph in my ears; every sight seemed dimmer, full of spinning whiteness that followed the movement of my eyeballs. Steam rose in
tropical illusion from my hair and coat. The soles of my shoes, their laces charred, ripped away from the tarmac, leaving
their impression on the hot earth.


The spectres had been thrown back from the blast, and two of them were still aflame. They staggered in the rain, trying to
douse the fires eating through their clothing, revealing the nothingness beneath shreds of sleeve and blackened baggy trousers.
Their headphones were still playing the relentless rhythms that marked out each one. A blast that would have stopped an angry
mammoth had barely singed these creatures, and bought me not nearly as much time as I’d wanted. I cursed from the bottom of
my soul. Feet hissing as my hot soles met the cold, rain-soaked tarmac, I ran.


I was two streets away before breathlessness and a burning in every muscle forced me to slow to an uneasy lope. My mind caught
up with the rest of me, and reported another, new sensation—a hot, itchy dribble from just below my left shoulder. I kept
walking, tugging my scarf and coat aside to see the problem, and found my shirt stained pink from a mixture of rainwater and
blood. A spectre’s knife, though wide of its target, had certainly found something. The bloody gash ran from just below my
collarbone to deep beneath my left armpit. With each step I took it opened and shut like it was telling some obscene joke.
Turning our face away, we pressed our bandaged hand over the injury, and smothered it from sight. Not too far behind, we heard
the spectres’ screams again and the crack of fractured glass. We tried to run, but only managed a few undignified paces before
the pain throughout our limbs announced that death was preferable to haste.


A street corner brought me to a road lined with shops, the kind above which sat the owner’s home, lights dimmed and curtains
drawn. These were the strange, unlikely businesses driven from the centre of town years ago: discount stores selling nothing
but plastic boxes and drying racks, hairdressers specialising in dreadlocks, wholesalers of Jamaican spice, cobblers who cut
keys and sold raincoats as well, suspicious computer shops offering 5p-per-minute calls to Zambia. Strange, anorexic mannequins,
creatures with waists as thick as my neck, stared out from bargain clothes shops, with scornful eyes. Inside a darkened pub,
the bingo machine rippled all the colours of the