Chapter Text
The phone rang. In my experience, that had never been a good sign.
We picked up anyway. “Hello?”
“Hello, Mr Mayor! You’re needed at The Tower.”
It was Kelly Shiring. Also never a good sign.
“What is it? Have the ravens vanished again?” Just thinking about that whole ordeal with the Death of Cities made every muscle and bone in my body ache in phantom memory, and I would have given a good many things never to have to repeat the experience.
“Well, no. Not exactly. It’s weird.”
“How can ravens ‘not exactly’ disappear? Have they gone on holiday and left a note?”
“No, no. There’s an extra one.”
“An…extra one. Is that bad?”
“We were hoping you would know.”
“How would I know? No one taught me anything about this bloody job! I’ve been figuring it out as I bloody go—“
“See you in half an hour!” Kelly cheerily cut me off, and hung up.
I stared at the phone in my hand, and considered how badly I would burn myself if I turned it to molten plastic with electric current.
~
Penny came to the door after I’d rung the doorbell four times. Her hair rather resembled a black, tangled halo. She was wearing track pants, slippers, and a generally ticked-off expression. To be fair, it was supposed to be her day off.
“Come on, Penny. We’re going to The Tower.”
She gave me a long look, and we couldn’t help but flinch. “Isn’t that more of a Midnight Mayor thing and less of a general sorcerer thing?”
“Yes, and if someone had taught us how to be Midnight Mayor—“
“Nonono, don’t you start on that again! You are not pawning that shite off on me when you die, which could totally be like, any day!”
The sad thing was, Penny was the only person I could conceivably trust with the job, as things stood. But we would have that conversation later. Sometime when I hadn’t just woken her up on her day off. Maybe I’d bring kebabs.
“Sorcerers still have to know the rules and the agencies and entities that enforce them.”
“You actively ignore all of that.”
“Actively being the key word. I know about them, and I choose to ignore them. But you’re my apprentice, and it’s my responsibility to at least teach you these things so you can make an educated decision to ignore them as well. Besides, this is a rare opportunity.”
“Yeah?”
“Yup. As far as I can tell, there probably aren’t any vague, encroaching forces of mega-mystical chaos attached to this one.”
“…Alright. Give me ten minutes.”
~
It being London, we arrived nearly an hour later. The Aldermen had put up a sign out front that declared, a little too cheerily: Sorry, The Tower of London is closed for a public holiday. Come back tomorrow! I suspected Kelly was behind this one, as well as the faint deflection spell in the lettering that would be just enough to convince tourists that yes, there really is a British holiday today you twat, you just didn’t do your research properly, and can’t you read the sign? Deflection spells like this one lent themselves particularly well to official signage, because no one argues with signs anyway.
We walked past the sign and into the inner courtyard where the usual six – and now seven – ravens were milling about on the grass as they always did. (Except for when they didn’t, which was when you worried. But an extra raven? That just seemed like good strategy.) A group of black-clad Aldermen – and I immediately spotted Kelly among them, or rather, she spotted me and was by my side giving me the full briefing just before I’d finished bracing for impact – were spaced at what were probably “strategic” intervals around the lawn with all sorts of techno-magical instruments and expensive equipment thats primary function as far as I could tell was to make them feel more important.
“…the problem is,” Kelly was saying, “we can’t tell whether this is a mundane happenstance or some portent of magical significance. Normally, we would bring the Ravenmaster in on this sort of thing, but he gets so little time off and he's popped off to France for the weekend." She lowered her voice in a rare moment of self-consciousness. "Besides, it would really be best if we could sort this out before he returns and realises anything was amiss. The problem is, he's the only one who can really tell the birds apart, considering ravens, when it comes down to it, all tend to look quite...similar. So that’s where we were hoping you might have some…sense, in either a sorcerer-highly-in-tune-with-his-city way, or in your official capacity as Midnight Mayor, as to which one of these things is not like the others.”
We blinked.
Penny took the opportunity to speak up. “Y’know they clip their wings, right? The Tower ravens, I mean. I heard about it on a tour with my parents when I was little.”
We blinked again. Kelly joined in the fun this time. Of course no one had considered the obvious, non-magical solution.
“Penny, you’re brilliant,” I said.
“No thanks to my teacher,” she said.
I really couldn’t argue. Instead, I bent down and snatched the nearest raven with the intent of examining its wings.
It gave an indignant squawk, and then its form rippled slightly in my hands, and I immediately let go of the magical bird and gathered what I hoped was enough electricity from the utility mains beneath us to fry it if it should turn into some particularly pissed off and bloodthirsty creature that there would really be no reasoning with. Instead, the raven flapped once, and its wings became the long, black and still feather-irridescent coat of a man, who landed lightly on his feet and whipped around to glare at us.
“Excuse me,” he said, crossing his arms, “but that was quite rude! I was having a lovely conversation with Kyrrl here, until you picked me up and dropped me like I bit you – which I very well could have, mind you! But I, for one, have manners.”
“Erm,” I said.
I let the power fall from my hands to slither back down through the stone slabs and race once more through the mains. The man’s/raven’s eyes followed it with extreme interest, and the irritation was completely gone in seconds. It was replaced, instead, with something suspiciously similar to the look birds get when they spot something shiny.
I tried speech again, and found that it was indeed still an action of which I was capable. “Sorry for dropping you,” I said, and offered my hand, for a lack of anything better to do.
When he hesitated, looking slightly affronted again, I sighed, took of my glove, and offered it again. He shook it with a toothy smile, which quickly turned to a frown as he kept hold of my hand and looked down at the deep gashes of the twin crosses on my palm that never quite healed. It was while he was examining my hand that I noticed his face was lined with systematic scars of his own, sweeping down his neck and disappearing under his shirt – the fault lines where his bones and flesh restructured themselves when he changed form, I guessed – and the whole thing didn’t feel quite as awkwardly drawn-out as it probably looked.
“That’s alright,” he said. “You’re not the first to make the mistake, although there’s really no excuse to handle a bird that way.”
“Sorry to interrupt,” Penny interrupted, “but this means we’re not in danger of gory injury or city-wide destruction, right?”
“Probably not from a shapeshifter,” I said.
“Oh no, I’m not a shapeshifter,” the man laughed. “Well, I guess I am technically, but I really am a raven. Just…among other things. It’s a long story.” He scrutinised me more carefully, in the way that is perfectly normal for animals and incredibly uncomfortable for the rest of us. “What about you? Are you a fairy?”
“A…fairy?” we repeated.
“Well, what with the magic and the wings and all,” he said.
That took us by surprise. Not many creatures could see our wings if we didn’t want them to.
“I’m a sorcerer…among other things,” I said. “It’s a long story.”
“Oh, don’t let him give you any of that cryptic bollocks,” Penny chimed in. “He’s also the Blue Electric Angels, the Midnight Mayor, and kind of a git when he hasn’t been fed properly.”
“But generally a nice guy!” Kelly came to my aid.
“And his name’s Matthew,” Penny continued, a strange tone of amusement and something else that we couldn’t place in her voice.
“Just Matthew?” the raven asked.
“What?”
“I mean, just Matthew’s fine, I’m just Diaval. I was only asking because I hear everyone has two names now.”
“…Swift. My name is Matthew Swift.”
“Oh, I knew a swift once! Killed herself flying into a window, poor thing. Swifts really aren’t the brightest birds. It only took me one go to figure out glass.”
Penny snorted.
“How long have you been a bird?” I asked, suspecting that I already knew the answer.
“Oh, some time now. It’s just so much easier than being a human. Especially these days, from what I hear.”
“We'd be inclined to agree,” we said.
The raven named Diaval ran his fingers through his black hair sheepishly. “Have I gotten myself into some sort of trouble, my lord? I have rather a knack for it, I've found, but I promise I just dropped in for a quick visit—”
“Honorifics are uncalled for, I assure you,” I interrupted glumly.
“But she said you were a Mayor, and you said ‘we,’ when you were talking about yourself just then, so I just assumed…”
“Those are all different things,” I gritted, resisting the urge to bury my face in my hand. “Just call me Matthew.”
“Alright,” Diaval said.
“What sort of a name is Diaval?" I asked. "It sounds very…classic magic.”
“Is there something wrong with classic magic? From what I’ve seen, urban magic seems pretty inelegant to me.”
“In…elegant?”
“Oh no,” Penny said.
“Inelegant? Have you seen neon arc in a thousand colours at your fingertips? Have you felt the vital life-pulse of the city during rush hour? Have you heard the wind of the Underground wail as it fills your mind with the endless, circular rumble of the trains and the footsteps of their passengers? Have you tasted the lingering ghost of the old city smog on the air, or run your fingers along a wall and read all of its stories, layered over with time and life and memory? Have you walked with the fucking shadows in the unstoppable tide of life and history, knowing you could be swept away and lost if your step falters, because they are not your steps, but the steps of every Londoner that came before, and the very heartbeat of the city itself?”
“I…can’t say that I have,” Diaval admitted.
We caught our breath a little.
“But have you ever done classic magic?”
“…No.”
“Well then, I guess neither of us has a right to judge.”
Bugger all. Penny and Kelly were both snickering, though Kelly at least had the professionalism and decency to try and fail to contain it.
“How about I talk to the raven, and you two go over and keep the Aldermen entertained so they don’t realise how useless they are,” I said, in my best ‘I’m-not-suggesting-I’m-ordering’ voice, which was usually heeded about twenty percent of the time, on a good day.
“But I’m your apprentice,” Penny pouted.
“And I’m your PA,” Kelly complained.
“And you’ve both seen plenty of ravens before, and so have I, and I think we can handle just one. So shoo.”
Penny frowned, but she took Kelly’s hand and dragged her off to where the other Aldermen were standing and awkwardly shifting their weight waiting to be told whether or not they could go home. I really do love my apprentice sometimes.
We turned our attention back to the raven. “Now if it were up to me I would just send you off with a ‘happy holiday, don’t mess with any mega-mystic forces while you’re here,’ but the Aldermen won’t be happy unless I give them something to file. So can I ask you a few questions?”
“Fine by me.”
“You’re from the countryside, then?”
“Well, everywhere was countryside when I hatched into this world. Unless you lived in one of the castle towns, but those were not nice places.”
“...You're saying you're from the past?”
“Mhmm. Well, it’s not like I time traveled here or anything, I’ve just lived a really long time because of an old enchantment of eternal servitude that was placed upon me, and when my Mistress died, there was just the eternal bit left.”
“Oh. That's alright then, I guess. Time travel is usually a full investigation involving a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Mostly blood. Next question: what brings you to London? And The Tower of, specifically?”
Apparently Diaval had to think about this. “Well I’ve always wanted to chat with the famous ravens of The Tower. It seemed like they would have to be such cultured birds, being around so many people from all over the world every day. And they don’t disappoint! But you're asking why now, right? And I have to say, I really don’t know. I guess I just felt…drawn here.”
Oh no. No bloody way. “Drawn? Do you mean in a mystical way, or more in a ‘Paris has been nice for a couple centuries but now I see through its overpriced sidewalk cafes and outdated renaissance culture to how boring and shit it is as a city, and oh, I know, maybe I should try London’ kind of way?”
“Mystical, I’m afraid,” Diaval said cautiously. “But nothing too strong. Just a kind of…soft calling.”
“Yeah, but see, London doesn’t call for tourists, it calls for help. But if it really was London calling, then why didn’t it call me? It’s my bloody job to protect this city.”
Diaval giggled. Giggled. “You said ‘London calling’ and it totally worked in context. Man, I miss The Clash.”
“Don’t we all. Can we focus on the ominous mystical calling, or do you have the attention span of a bird too?”
“Oi, ravens are the smartest birds!”
“Yes, and that’s what makes them…complicated. Magically. I prefer pigeons.”
“Who prefers pigeons to ravens? Pigeons are disgusting – no sense of personal hygiene.”
“I can’t scry though ravens.”
Diaval looked appalled. “Well that's just borderline unethical.”
“That's nothing we haven't been accused of before. And you’ve sidetracked us again. Were you the only one called?”
“That I know of… No, wait, I met a couple sprites on my way into town. And I thought I saw a manticore, but it might have just been a large dog. It’s hard to judge proportions when everything’s bigger than you. This isn’t good, is it?”
“Probably not. Not with our luck, anyway. Kelly!”
Kelly, whose eyes probably never left us while she was pretending to be critically involved in Alderman business with her coworkers, was by my side instantly. Penny was quick to follow.
“It looks like the Aldermen have something to do after all,” I told her reluctantly.
“Let me guess,” Penny said, “there are vague, encroaching forces of mega-mystical chaos.”
“That is essentially the job description,” Kelly agreed.
I told them what Diaval had told me, and while Penny still seemed skeptical about the whole thing, Kelly had fallen into her serious Alderman mode, already planning and contingency planning for the next 24 hours.
“First we have to figure out why London’s sending out a distress signal, and why it only seems to be calling to mystical creatures, or if that’s even what’s happening here at all,” I said.
Everyone looked at me expectantly.
“I meant ‘we’ collectively!” I growled. “I’m not doing this on my own this time!”
Kelly cleared her throat sheepishly. “Right, of course. It’s just that…you’re always so good at the reconnaissance piece…”
I stared at her, disbelieving. “You have access to every CCTV camera in the city.”
“Yes, but somehow you always manage to find the trouble before we do. Or it finds you. It’s remarkably more efficient that way, as long as you keep the destruction of public property to a minimum, and I keep writing in your reports that you really should try to improve in that area.”
“…Fine,” I said. “We’ll do the reconnaissance bit, but the Aldermen had better be ready to back us up with all of your shiny automatic weapons. I’m not in the mood for my normal routine of nearly dying facing off against the city’s doom in a form that is always bigger, nastier and less squishy than me.”
“Don’t worry, Mr Mayor,” Kelly said, as if I had just expressed the minor concern that I might have left the kettle on this morning. “Just say the word. We’ll be ready.”
“Alright, Penny, raven, you’re with me.”
“Us?” Diaval asked, surprised.
“I said bloody ‘we’ didn’t I?” I said as I turned and trudged back the way we’d come.
I heard Diaval whisper to Penny behind me, “That switching pronouns thing is incredibly confusing.” To which she replied, in an even less subtle whisper, “Yeah, but he’s really stubborn about it. It’s like, his thing. I think if he tried to stop he’d just confuse himself. You get used to it.”
They both caught up to me at a jog as we left The Tower. “So do you wear that long coat just so it looks cooler and less like a temper tantrum when you storm away from people?” Penny asked.
“You know why I wear this coat, and you should really find a good camouflaging coat of your own.”
“Yeah, but the thing is, coats like that are like fashion black holes. They just swallow it all up.”
Diaval chuckled.
“It’s not about fashion,” I complained. “It’s about protection.”
Penny ignored me. “Now Diaval’s coat on the other hand. Very nice. You should give Matthew some pointers.”
“Alright,” I said, “new rule: no hitting on the raven until we figure out what's going on with London. Got it?”
“But you started it.”
I stopped. Penny nearly ran into me. “Why would you think…?” I trailed off, bewildered.
“I mean, yeah, you’ve got a pretty skewed emotional spectrum, what with the two extremes being well-fed and divine wrath, so it’d be hard to tell the difference if we didn’t practically live together,” Penny continued, “but most of the time, you just look at people like we’re insignificant. Or a nuisance, if we especially distinguish ourselves. Except, you don’t look at him like that.”
Her words hurt. But mostly because I knew they were true. My humanity, or possible lack thereof, was a sensitive subject. I was even going to a not-so-anonymous support group. “I… We…” I looked to Diaval, who looked distinctly uncomfortable. “Forget it, we have important shit to deal with.”
I began walking again, and the two of them followed, albeit at a distance and in uncomfortable silence. I knew Penny hadn’t meant what she’d said to hit so hard. She was always brutally honest, which I secretly appreciated most of the time. It kept our sight clear. But what bothered me the most was the fact that I was trying so hard to be a decent guy – a decent human being – and still, apparently, failing miserably. Being constantly at war with mystical forces of darkness had probably skewed my own self-perception, since I had little else to compare myself to. Or at least, that’s what Sharon would probably say.
I had been so caught up in my own thoughts that my feet had gone off and done their own thing, falling into the rhythm of the city and, apparently, following the path of the old city wall into Islington. It was only when I heard whispers from behind me again that I had the presence of mind to break from the rhythm and let it carry on without me so that I could walk once more of my own accord.
“Does he know where he’s going?” Diaval whispered. “That guy couldn’t get lost in London if he tried,” Penny reassured him.
“Not getting lost and knowing where I’m going are two different things,” I said over my shoulder, startling them both. “This is a test, Penny. Where would you start with this investigation?”
Penny thought for a moment. Eventually, she turned to look at Diaval. I had taught her well.
“Well, you’re the one who had the weird feeling, right?” she asked him. “So can’t you just do like a ‘warmer/colder’ thing?”
“I think I could do that,” Diaval said. “But the feeling was stronger when I was a bird.”
Penny’s gaze didn’t change.
“Oh, right. I’ll just change on command for you, then. Shall I call you Mistress as well?”
Penny’s look became more threatening. I was beginning to worry that my sour mood had infected everyone.
“Fine, fine,” Diaval said. “But I’ll have you know I’m doing this out of the goodness of my heart.” There was a flutter of coat and a flurry of feathers, and a second later, a raven was standing in the place of the near-six-foot-tall man.
I looked around to see if anyone had seen this slightly-stranger-than-the-normal-strangeness-of-London-streets occurrence, but there was no one around. There was never anyone around in this part of Islington.
Diaval ruffled his feathers and looked ready to take off, but I told him to wait. He looked at me and cocked his head to the side while I quickly removed the SIM card from my mobile and a piece of string from my coat (suffering the loss of yet another button), and kneeled down to tie the card around the bird’s ankle with minimal protest on his part.
“I can keep track of you with that,” I explained, feeling only slightly ridiculous talking to a bird. “I don’t want to end up following some random raven all over the city.”
Diaval shrugged his wings in a very human way, hopped once, and took off into the sky with a loud caw. After flying in circles a few times above the rooftops, he began to fly westward, and we followed below.
The feeling was, apparently, not that strong even while he was a bird. Diaval would set off confidently in one direction, only to stop, fly in a few more circles, then start again in a different direction, and often the complete opposite one. We crossed the Thames over Blackfriars Bridge, only to cross right back again over Waterloo Bridge. Penny complained that she had been planning to go to the gym later today and that now she had lost all motivation. We were used to this kind of thing, but still, London as the crow flies is very different from scampering about down alleyways, ‘round roundabouts, through crowded shopping centres and across busy streets whirring with London drivers – one of the most vicious and dangerous creatures we had faced in London before the city introduced the congestion charge.
We were beginning to devise ways of shocking the bird with the SIM card to get his attention when the city fell away into grass and trees and little paved paths that some tosser somewhere would probably call “quaint,” and we found ourselves in Hyde Park. Diaval spiraled downwards and landed, rather surprisingly, on my shoulder. Before Penny could crack a pirate joke, however, Diaval cawed loudly again, this time right next to my ear.
“Ow,” I said, cringing.
The raven held out his leg and I dutifully removed my makeshift tracking device. Then he hopped once, flapped his wings, and in a rush of black feathers and magic that I could never quite catch the mechanics of each time he did it, turned back into a man.
“Sorry about that,” he said, at least having the decency to look guilty. “I forget people can’t speak raven sometimes.”
“What were you yelling at Matthew about, then?” Penny asked.
“I think it’s here, in the park,” Diaval said. “Whatever it is we’re looking for.”
“The park is rather big,” I pointed out. The figure of 600 acres surfaced vaguely in my memory.
“Well it’s better than the entire city of London,” Diaval said defensively. “And the focus has gotten weaker again. I'll find it, I just need to walk around a bit.”
Hyde Park was a large piece of land smack in the middle of London that had never been paved over and swallowed by the urban sprawl. It was far from what a tour book might call “pristine natural beauty,” but it had stayed green in some form or another through the centuries as London grew up around it. It had been the hunting grounds and garden estates of kings and queens, and it had been the site of exhibitions and ceremonies that had changed London’s course through history. It was filled with its own, tense magic, and it was entirely possible that something in it had finally begun to act out.
“If this is where the call is coming from, then shouldn’t there be loads of mystical creatures around?” Penny asked.
“Yes,” we answered. “But if they’ve survived this long, it’s because they are very discreet. We probably won’t see them. Still, I’ll call Kelly and have her close off the park. We don’t want a clueless little kid provoking a water elemental by throwing a penny into it.”
I made the call, but as I was finishing explaining everything to Kelly, I felt a tug on my sleeve.
“Um, Matthew?” Diaval said, not looking quite at me, but at something behind me. “It was definitely a manticore that I saw earlier.”
Slowly, Penny and I turned. About twenty metres away, among the the trees behind us, was a creature the size of a small truck, its scimitar-like claws kneading the soil and its long, scorpion tail swishing silently through the air. Its eyes were fixed on us.
“Kelly,” I hissed into the phone, “what do you do with manticores?”
“There are manticores?”
“Yes, and this one looks hungry.”
“Well, that’s weird. I mean, manticores aren’t really urban creatures normally, so…yeah, I haven’t been trained on manticores. I can forward you the relevant documents from our archives...”
“Never mind. Just get here as soon as possible and be prepared for man-eating mystical beasts.”
“Yes, Mr Mayor! We’re on our way.”
I hung up. Kelly had sounded disturbingly excited.
“The Aldermen are coming,” I said.
“Yeah? And do you suppose this manticore is going to wait politely for them to show up? What are we supposed to do in the meantime?” Penny hissed.
“In the meantime, I suggest we run,” I said, and, grabbing Penny’s and Diaval’s hands, we did just that.
I heard the manticore roar, and start bounding after us, so I pulled left and we were running through the trees, at least slowing the creature down if we couldn’t lose it. Like Kelly, Bakker hadn’t bothered to teach me anything about manticores, because you never saw them in cities. In fact, no one was sure there were even any left in the world. No one except, now, for Penny, Diaval and myself, who were currently running from some very compelling evidence.
If we weren’t so deep into one of the bloody biggest parks in London it would have been an easy fight, but here there was little to fight with. Still, we let go of Diaval’s and Penny’s hands once we were satisfied that they had got the running idea, so that we could begin drawing as much power as we could from the electric-but-made-to-look-like-gas lamps sprinkled throughout the park that were just starting to come on with the dusk. The lamps in the immediate vicinity blinked out again, and electricity arced into our hands, dancing and sparking around our fingers and making the hairs on the back of our neck stand on end. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to kill a human, so hopefully it would do significant damage to a manticore. All I had to do was aim, which meant turning around…
“Matthew, get rid of the electricity!” Diaval yelled from beside me.
“What? Why?” we demanded.
“Because it can follow us from our scent, so we’re going to run through that fountain up there, and I don’t want to get electrocuted!”
The raven had a point, which did nothing to ease my frustration as I let the beautiful, powerful current run back to the lamps and drain away, leaving us feeling vulnerable and mortal once more.
Several things happened in quick succession over the next few moments, and I only had time to process them after the fact. The last of the electricity left me just as we came to the large, shallow fountain, and there was a curious shimmer across the surface of the water just before Diaval and I took our first splashing step into it. Our feet did not touch the bottom of the fountain, which appeared to be no more than ten centimetres beneath the surface, but instead kept falling rapidly, throwing us both off-balance and we flailed, head-first, into the fountain. In the split-second before I was submerged, still without having touched the bottom, I heard Penny, who had been a step behind us, yell “Shit!” and begin running around the fountain without following us in. A smart decision, given that it seemed likely that Diaval and I would drown in the next few minutes if we kept falling through the mysterious depths of the ten-centimetre-deep fountain.
The good news was we didn’t drown. The bad news might have outweighed the good.
We were pulled down through more and more shimmering water, and then there was a strange lurching sensation that felt like nausea and gravity had teamed up to twist my guts into intricate double helices, and then we resurfaced in the middle of a large lake in the middle of a much larger forest, that was most definitely not London.
Diaval came up, spluttering, beside me. “Did we…provoke one of those…water elementals you were talking about earlier?” he asked while hacking up lungfuls of lake water.
“No,” I said, looking around for the closest shore and paddling in that direction with as much dignity as I could muster while my heavy, waterlogged coat worked against me every step of the way.
“That was some kind of magic portal,” I said, once we’d reached the shore. “And a really powerful one at that. It may be that whatever was calling to you and the other mystical creatures was coming from here.”
While I took off my coat and tried hopelessly to wring it out, Diaval turned into a large, black wolf and proceeded to shake off all the water. And while I couldn’t possibly have gotten any wetter, Diaval was certainly not helping. He bared his teeth at me in what we took to be a grin, then suddenly transformed back into a man. A man who was no longer smiling.
“I know this forest,” he said slowly, looking around again, but this time more carefully, critically, in the way one might examine an old photograph. “This is…home.”