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Kate Griffin: A Madness of Angels

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Kate Griffin A Madness of Angels
  • Название:
    A Madness of Angels
  • Автор:
  • Издательство:
    Orbit
  • Жанр:
  • Год:
    2009
  • Язык:
    Английский
  • ISBN:
    978-0-316-05296-2
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A Madness of Angels: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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For Matthew Swift, today is not like any other day. It is the day on which he returns to life. Two years after his untimely death, Matthew Swift finds himself breathing once again, lying in bed in his London home. Except that it's no longer his bed, or his home. And the last time this sorcerer was seen alive, an unknown assailant had gouged a hole so deep in his chest that his death was irrefutable...despite his body never being found. He doesn't have long to mull over his resurrection though, or the changes that have been wrought upon him. His only concern now is vengeance. Vengeance upon his monstrous killer and vengeance upon the one who brought him back.

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The feel of that place where I huddled like a child had a sharp, biting quality, thin on the ground, not so heavy as in other places where life moves more often and more densely, but carrying traces of other areas drifting in the air, snatched across the city in tendrils that clung to the commuter trains rattling overhead. What power and texture I could feel had a strong smell, but a slippery touch, retreating from too firm a command like a frightened bird. It gave me comfort, and a little warmth.

I pulled myself up and looked at the white-painted walls, examining the graffiti on them. Most of it was the usual stuff – “J IS GAY!” or “P & N FOR EVER” – but there was across one wall an orange swish of paint, all loops and sudden turns, that I recognised. It felt warm when I pressed my fingers to it, and tingled to the touch like slow-moving sand. A beggar’s mark, delineating the edge of a clan’s territory. It was good to find my senses still sensitive to such things – or even, I had to wonder, more sensitive than they’d been before? Though we could see the advantages, the thought did not comfort me.

I staggered down the tunnel, examining now in careful detail each splash of paint and scratch across the whitewashed walls. Messages like:

DON’T LET THE SYSTEM GET YOU DOWN

or:

××ULTRAS××

or:

Don’t lick the brushes

melted into each other over the cemented, painted surface of the bricks.

One splash of paint at the far end of the tunnel caught my attention, and held it. It had none of the usual trappings of protection that most who understood such things used to defend their territory, but was written in crude capital letters across the wall in simple black spray-paint. It said: “MAK ME SHADOW ON DA WAL”.

It made me uneasy, but other things that evening were taking priority on my list of concerns, so I ignored it. I had no paint, but dribbled my fingers in the sharp sense of that place and, in the middle of the tunnel, started to draw my own mark on the wall, feeling even that slight movement give me comfort as I made the long shape of the protection symbol, my own ward against evil and harm. Not quite a guard dog; but close enough.

When I had finished, my head ached, and my fingers shook. Even something so small took too much out of me, the last vestige of strength left in my limbs. A warmth inside me suggested a hollowness that time, perhaps, might repair, and the weakness was not so much one of exhaustion, but of inexperience, as if every finger was freshly grown, the muscle untested, not yet conditioned to its former use. I slumped against the opposite wall and waited.

It took only a few seconds before the shape I’d drawn started to burn and hiss on the wall, its lines emerging in thin black swirls. I slid back onto the paving stones, tucked my knees up to my chin and shivered. The white strip lights overhead buzzed quietly; I could taste the electricity in them. Lesson one for anyone in my profession was always about electricity.

I took a risk, and with the tips of my fingers snatched a little warmth and light out of one of them, which died into darkness as I drew its energy to myself. The pea-sized ball of light and heat I managed to drag from it was like a match held between two fingers – shockingly hot when I brought my skin close to it, but not enough on which to sustain life. Uncertain which was likely to cause more pain, the cold or the failure of my own strength, I risked pulling down more light, and a few degrees more heat, caressing it into the sphere between my fingers, until almost all the lights overhead were extinguished, leaving just one at either end of the tunnel. The effort left me in a cold sweat, breathless and with a nasty case of tinnitus, but it also left me clutching a fat bubble of white light the size of a small, immaterial football. I lay down and curled myself around it like it was a bag of pure gold, feeling it warm me through and drive some of the wetness out of my clothes, and closed my eyes.

We did not want to sleep – our thoughts raced, our senses strayed out as far as we could reach, into the scuttling of a rat’s claws under the street, the snuffling nose of a ragged-tailed urban fox, while we tried to pick out every shape and sense of life around us. But I was tired – too tired – and regardless of what we wanted, I had to sleep. I felt my eyes sink like an executioner’s blade.

Taste of blood.

Yellow teeth and watery, weak blue eyes.

Give me life give me life give me life give me life GIVE ME

Not quite sleep.

Distant siren, distant cars. Someone was out tonight looking for someone else; crawling through the gutters, talking to the pigeons, stealing the nose of the orange fox seeking its hamburger supper.

We did not enjoy sleep. Our dreams were mixed in with our reality, the world seen through a haze of blue. I had always loved nights like this, when the rain bubbled in the gutter. It gave everything a clean, clear quality, and allowed the mind to roam far and easily without becoming obstructed by the haze of crowded life and busy sense that too often obscures the wandering vision. Thoughts without words.

I couldn’t have slept for more than a few hours. When I woke, the warmth in my hands had slipped away back into the lights, which glowed with their earlier harsh whiteness. On the edge of my senses I was distracted by a faint drip drip drip drip .

At one end of the tunnel, the beggars’ orange-painted mark was running down the wall in trickles, like blood from a nosebleed. It caught on a chip in the wall, pooled, then overflowed, dripping with a tiny, regular rhythm into a sad stain on the ground. I looked over at my own protective mark, the swirl of burnt paint at the other end of the tunnel, and saw that it too was starting to wobble round the edges, the lines of its power shimmering as if caught in a heat haze, the very bottom of the sign starting to liquefy.

I pulled myself up onto my feet, which immediately reported that they wanted nothing to do with the rest of me, and throbbed with a dull ache to prove the point. Blood and dirt had mixed into a dull brownstain. Hobbling to the end of the tunnel, I looked out into the dark. It was still night, or at least that dead time of morning before the dwindling gloom can muster any outline on the horizon. The rain was giving its all, pocking the ground with tiny silver craters, and turning the pavement into a reflective sheen of ebony blackness, pink-orange neon and flashing puddles.

I let my senses wander, and felt uneasy, a shuddering across my skin more than just the cold. There was a smell cutting through the rain, a blunt assault on the senses, a taste as much as a stench, that forced itself to the back of the nose and activated every receptor at once so that the brain was overwhelmed with so much information it couldn’t even begin to decipher the component parts of the smell to say that this is orange peel and that wet cardboard. It was the smell of warm, wet rubbish, left to rot and moulder in interesting ways in a tight, dark, compressed area, before being let out into the air. And it was getting stronger.

I listened for dustbin trucks, scavengers and thieves.

Nothing.

Just the slow hiss of melting paint and the pattering of the rain.

I am not given to paranoia, but recent experience had altered my perspective. It seemed unlikely that paint could melt and the air smell of litter – no, of something more than litter, a bite sharper than disgust – without there being some direct and unpleasant connection. I turned away from the stench and started walking as quickly as my battered feet would allow me, down the tunnel and out into the rain, letting it wash over me and enjoying the shock as it ran into my eyes and washed out the sleep; even as the rest of my senses came up to scratch and reported… . .

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