Саймон Морден - Down Station

The geomancer turned as quickly as her injuries would allow, and Dalip stayed where he was on the staircase, his empty hands raised.

‘You.’

‘Yes,’ he said. His gaze left Mary, alighted on the geomancer, then was back on the bird. Which had gone, and only the coffee-coloured girl remained.

‘And me,’ she said.

The geomancer was confronted front and back.

‘Mary?’ said Dalip.

‘It’ll take too long to explain. Is everyone else all right?’

‘They’re downstairs. If the guards get in, then… I don’t know.’

‘Then she has to call them off.’

‘She’s only going to do that if we threaten to hurt her.’

The geomancer banged her stick against the floor. ‘Stop discussing me like I wasn’t here. You◦– you are my slave, and you◦– I should have killed you on the mountain-top while I had the chance.’

‘I refuse to be your slave.’

‘And…’ Mary frowned. ‘You weren’t on the mountain-top.’

‘You silly little girl. Are you really that stupid?’

‘Fuck you,’ was her automatic response. ‘And fuck your wolfman, too. You’re shits, the pair of you.’

The geomancer lurched towards Mary, raising her stick to strike that foul mouth. She staggered as she swung, and she fell against a bench, upsetting the delicate brass instrument on it. It teetered for a moment, and she scrabbled to save it, all thought of violence lost.

The effort left her sprawled on the ground at Mary’s feet. Mary looked down at her trying to rise, and she realised what the pattern of cuts and bruises meant.

‘You’re the—’

‘Dragon,’ said Dalip. ‘One of the servants told us. But you, you’re a…’ He flapped his arms uselessly. ‘You’re a bird.’

‘Yes, I am, when I want to be.’

‘You’re also not very dressed.’ He shook his head to clear his mind. ‘How do we prevent her from turning?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think we can. Perhaps I hurt her badly enough to stop her, for a bit.’ Mary snatched the geomancer’s stick away. It didn’t seem like it was a magic wand, or wizard’s staff, like she’d seen in films, but there was no point in risking it. It might just be a smoothed length of wood, but it might be as lethal as a loaded gun.

‘You did this to her? How?’

‘I came to find you, see if I could sneak into the castle and get you all out. She came at me as the dragon, tried to kill me.’ Thinking about it, even though she’d been utterly desperate and out of her depth, she’d been brave and resourceful, and in the end, despite her injuries, she’d won. Her chin came up. ‘I still beat her.’

The geomancer hung on to the edge of the table and pulled herself up. The brass thing rattled and rolled.

‘You were lucky.’

‘I beat your arse good and proper. Now, call off the heavies.’

‘That would be very stupid of me. And I’m not stupid.’

‘Dalip,’ said Mary. ‘You should leave.’

Everything close by that was loose, started to hum, chatter or buzz.

‘Mary, what are you doing?’

‘Finishing what I started.’

‘We can’t fight everyone.’

‘We don’t have to. We just need to fight her, and the whole place falls apart. Isn’t that right, your ladyship? This castle wasn’t built by you. Down gave it to you, and it can take it away just as easily.’

‘Mary, what are you talking about?’

‘She knows. She knows exactly what I’m talking about.’

‘Oh, I know far more than you do, girl. You caught me off guard before: not now. I know how to deal with you this time.’

‘You threw everything you had at me and you fucked up.’ Mary was still holding the stick, and she swung it at the geomancer’s head.

The blow was blocked by the sudden interposition of the same brass apparatus that the geomancer had gone to all the trouble of saving minutes before. Rather than a skull being cracked, it was metal that bent and twisted.

It fell, broken, between them.

Then it was the geomancer’s turn. After the first flung object came from behind Dalip and nearly took his head off on its way to bludgeon Mary, he ducked back down into the stairwell.

Mary squared up for the fight. She dodged the jar easily◦– its arrival had been telegraphed for longer than a drunken punch outside a kebab shop◦– and heaved the now-empty table up to be her shield.

The wood shuddered and groaned, and the legs scraped towards her. The impacts came regularly, a continual barrage of heavy concussions that was going to leave nothing in the room intact. She knew that this was treasure the geomancer was wasting, destroying it all in an attempt to destroy her, but also to deny it to her when Mary inevitably triumphed.

She let her pound the table for a few moments longer, crouching behind it as debris exploded in cogs and dust, then retreated a little way. She took a step to the side, then another, and blindly, everything was still directed at the table, taking the brunt of the geomancer’s fury.

Quickly, quietly, she skipped across the room. She hadn’t done so much physical activity as this since she’d faced the dragon: the cuts on her back and the bruises in her flesh dragged and ached as she ran and jumped up on the big bed, leaping down on the other side. Something sailed past her ear, fast and bright, but it was only passing.

She thought she should have a weapon of some sort, but even then, it wasn’t very street. She’d settle this like a true Londoner, with fists and feet and nails and teeth. As the geomancer orchestrated her destructive volleys like a demented conductor, Mary came up behind her and threw herself at her back, pulling at the wild blonde hair with one hand, and clawing at her face with the other.

Mary’s knees punched down, and the geomancer went over. Her face smacked the floor, and there was a spray of blood, thick and red, across the stone flags. Oh, Mary knew how to do this, savage and relentless and utterly without mercy, yanking handfuls of hair and battering her face, half-letting her up only to shove her back down and keep going. There was no one to intervene: no police or social workers or care home staff to drag her away, trailing scraps of skin and cloth, to be forced into some Home Office-approved restraining position until she’d calmed down; not even other kids who’d cheer her on for the first few minutes and end up pulling at her arms because she was taking it just too far.

She could keep on until she’d reduced her opponent to bloody ruin and beyond.

‘Mary. Mary.’

She slowed, and then stopped. Something heavy◦– one of the wall coverings, thick and rich◦– draped over her shoulders, and she was gently guided aside. She sat with her back against one of the bed posts, while Dalip peered uncertainly at the geomancer.

‘You’ve,’ he said, dry-mouthed. ‘I mean, she’s really…’

‘I know,’ said Mary, and pulled the covering tighter. ‘What were you going to do?’

‘I don’t know. I talked Stanislav out of just killing her. I wanted to see if I could,’ he shrugged, and his hands fluttered, ‘reason with her.’

The geomancer covered her ruined face with her ragged hands, and wept. Dalip clearly had no idea what to do and, if she was honest, neither did Mary.

This was the woman who, a couple of nights ago, tried to cut her into strips with her sharp teeth and sharper claws. This was the woman who had turned her friends into slaves, and she didn’t know how that had gone: Dalip had clearly been changed by his experiences, because the shy, uncertain engineering student was nowhere to be seen. This was the woman who had forced Crows’ villagers out of their homes and staked out this part of Down as her personal kingdom, making a claim on everyone and everything in it.