Chapter 38.

Mr Roding Necromancy is such a misunderstood art.

Personally I blame the media. They're obsessed with reporting bad news; they never give people the right idea about all the things we have achieved. Turn on any of these crap TV channels nowadays and all you get are zombies, virgin sacrifices, vampiric killing sprees and the walking undead. It genuinely makes me angry whenever I see necromancers portrayed in popular culture as cowardly, bloodthirsty or with a funny limp, as if ligature failure is something to be mocked! In point of fact the training is extremely long and taxing, and most necromancers I personally knowand I like to keep my finger on the pulseare very hard-working individuals with an advanced understanding of organic chemistry. Decay is important. Death is important! Society needs undertakers and butchers and men who pull the guts out from fish, and in the same way I believe society needs its necromancers, to study the mystical aspects of decay and death. Because, frankly, this is a shockingly underfunded area of research, and someone needs to take responsibility for it.

Naturally, in such a poorly regulated area, accidents do happen, and I'm not pretending they don't. But consider the sacrifices we have to make in order to achieve results! I've been practising necromancy for a hundred and ten years and I'm not even eligible for a pension. Benefit fraud, they said down the local office. Benefit fraud! I had to get the birth certificate of a younger man to avoid the authorities, and keep his head in my freezer so that when they asked awkward questions I could just whip it out and pop a fifty-pence piece under the tongue and peel off the masking tape from the eyes and get it to...

Well, never mind what I got it to do, but you have to remember! With a severed head in the freezer, that's no frozen peas in your diet. You're not keeping ice cream, there's no handy loaf of bread to come back to after a long holiday in hot weather. And of course there's the odours. I have such trouble keeping up appearances. Dinner parties have become impossible. Ever since I used the bile of the basilisk to slow my metabolic rates I've had fantastic bone density but a terrible problem with these pustules underneath the crook of my...

What I'm saying is, it's hard to be a necromancer.

People never think these things through.

Chapter 39.

Language Is God's Gift to Man He looks and he sees and he says, "Oh."

The members of the board shift in their seats. They wear matching suits, matching ties, matching shoes and matching faces. It's not that they've been told to, it's not a conscious decision; it's simply that for the senior management of Burns and Stoke this is who they are. Or possibly just who they feel they have to be.

At the head of the table sits a man. Though the chairs run the length of the table, nevertheless without anyone shuffling their chairs or leaning away, there is a distance between him and the assembled board. And though he is dressed as they are, and sits as they do, and though some are sure they have seen him take a sip from his still, volcanic water in its perfect crystal glass, there is no denying that he who sits at the head of the table is different. Other. Apart.

"Oh," he repeats, his voice a breeze that wafts down the table as gently as floating silk. "This is disappointing."

On the wall behind him a film runs in grainy black and white. The camera looks at a door which proclaims AUTHORISED PERSONNEL ONLY. DANGERELECTRICITY. It runs on a loop of nearly fifteen seconds, its gazed fixed. It films nothing, nothing, nothing; then out of nowhere a woman appears and rebounds off the door. She is young, and her hair is black streaked with blue, and she is surprised.

A moment later she rises to her feet, grabs the hand of someone not quite in shot and pulls the person away.

The man at the head of the table turns off the image with a remote, swings back round in his swivel chair, which is gross and black and bigger than himself, and softly repeats, "Oh." Then his face twitches. His thin eyebrows contract over almost impossible pale blue eyes.

"Is disappointed the word I am looking for here? Does disappointed, as an adjective, carry enough weight to describe the sentiments I should express?" He turns to his nearest neighbour. "How does one express due concern and rage at the failure of an institution to protect its secrets? What do you think?"

"I think... disappointed is good?" she declares, eyes flickering across the table in search of something, anything to hold her gaze, that isn't his eyes.

"You don't feel it's a little... weak? As in, how one might sayhe is disappointed, she is upset, you are angry, and I am going to rip your head off and suck on your spinal fluids? Is that not the definition we are aiming for?"

"Maybe?" she stutters, gripping the edge of the table.

If the man at the head of the meeting notices her response, he doesn't seem to care. "Disappointed," he echoes, turning the word over in his mouth. "Frustrated? Concerned. I am concerned that this woman," gesturing at the screen, "this woman who, from what I can see, has no significance whatsoever in the grand scheme of things, is interesting herself in our affairs. I am concerned that the Midnight Mayor continues to probe us despite the three-month golf membership we offered, which, I was assured, would be more than enough to guide him away from our affairs."

"He doesn't..." began one man, then wished he could swallow the words back down.

"He doesn't...?"

"He... the Midnight Mayor doesn't like golf."

Silence. Then, "But everyone likes golf. People smile while they play it. They walk across well trimmed grass with their friends and they say, 'Isn't this nice?' How does the Midnight Mayor not like golf?"

"He said it was... it was... it..." The unfortunate executive was breathing hard. "He said it was a stupid wanky game for lazy tossers and we could take our golf clubs and stick them."

"Stick them?" queried the man at the head of the table. "Stick them where?"

"He seemed to think we'd know the answer to that, Mr Ruislip, sir."

The man addressed as Mr Ruislip sir leaned back in his chair. He wrapped his long fingers around the back of his thin shell-like head and considered the ceiling. Then he said, "The Midnight Mayor is being difficult, but he can be contained. However, this business with Dog is... may one say unfortunate?"

"Unfortunate is good, sir," stammered the woman nearest him.

"Unfortunate," he repeated. "It is unfortunate that Gavin was disembowelledyes, unfortunate is accurate, isn't it, for it implies a negative attribute of fortune, so yes! And so it is indeed unfortunate that Gavin was disembowelled. Likewise it is regrettable," he savoured the word, warming to his theme, "regrettable that Scott was decapitated, and most... most concerning that Christian has started hearing the howling in the night. But, ladies and gentlemen!" He straightened, pleased at his own conclusion. "Ladies and gentlemen, let us remember! The fact that you are all being dismembered, one at a time, only indicates how close we are to success! Indeed, the break-in of this unwelcome visitor, this woman, could also be taken as a sign that we are achieving our aims! Greydawn will be ours, and then we may all get our wishes and live... how is the phrasehappily ever after?" He sat back in his chair, beaming with delight. "And of course nothing shall stand in our way. Should we put that in a memo?"

Chapter 40.

There Is Always a Solution The house was in Walthamstow.

Sharon had never understood Walthamstow. Was it a posh suburb or a squalid dump at the end of the Victoria Line? She didn't know if it was big or small, where its centre was or how to measure it, for Walthamstow had this odd way of stretching out in unexpected directions, its lower end brushing the Olympic site, its topmost edge blending into forests, and motorways that suddenly found themselves amid greenery, as if an invisible limit had been thrown around the city, proclaiming STOP. On the one hand, she knew Walthamstow had an Underground stationpossibly severalbut the buses were the rat-route runners of the suburban city, single-deckers or ancient beat-up red monsters with the stuffing falling out of their seats. Bored youth, busy mums and old ladies pulling their shopping behind them on wheels mingled in the shabby little shops of its narrow streets, while over all fell the shadow of the area's new mega-markets. It was an unknown quantity of a place whose quality changed with every turn of the street.

This street was no exception. A mixture of shops and houses jostling each other as if the designer had dropped his plans on the way to work and not got them back in order before building began. An Albanian restaurant shared kitchens with a curry house; an off-licence sold Polish beer by the six-pack and French wine by the litre; notices in the window of the newsagent offered hatha yoga for women and cheap calls to Ghana for everyone. Amidst it all, small, quaint and defiant, was Mr Roding's house.

A path of chipped beige tiles led past a rubbish dump disguised as a front garden to a small red-brick porch. A ceramic family of ducks took flight across the bricks surrounding the front door; the flat plastic image of a teddy bear hugged a sign proclaiming this lone two-storey home, between the wine warehouse and the tyre yard, to be SUNSHINE COTTAGE. The curtains were drawn across every window of the house. The sun was setting on the world outside, the sky turning green-grey, the traffic faint and far off.

Sharon knocked.

Behind her Rhys fidgeted. He didn't quite know how he'd ended up in Walthamstow, though he had this memory of Sharon grabbing him by the sleeve and pulling him out of the toilet. He had this sense that she'd walked at a speed which didn't really have anything to do with distance covered or time taken, this special speed at which all things had begun to blur. And then. Then he couldn't shake the feeling, imagined or not, that as she dragged him out of Burns and Stoke with a cry of, "Come on, druid, make yourself useful!" she hadn't bothered to open any doors. Which was unfortunate, because he hadn't logged out of the servers at Burns and Stoke before shutting down, and if refusing to obey the laws of matter was disconcerting, failure to observe proper security procedures was just bad IT.

The door opened a cautious inch on a brass chain. A single pale eye regarded Sharon. "Yeah?"

"Mr Roding?"

The eye narrowed. "I know you," grumbled the voice. "You're that shaman."

Sharon beamed. "That's me, Mr Roding sir! I'm Sharon and this is Rhys."

"Hello," quavered Rhys.

The door stayed on the chain. "What you doing here?" demanded Mr Roding. "What you want?"

"Well now, Mr Roding," trilled Sharon, her voice rising like the call of an alarmed blackbird, "I was wondering if you knew anything about wards."

Mr Roding responded with the deep silence of a man running through, in his mind, the myriad ways in which he is not going to enjoy this conversation.

"Wards," he repeated. "As in hospitals or mystic?"

"The magical kind?"

"I do know about wards," came his voice through the door. "But then I did my own research, didn't I?"

Sharon hesitated. "I'm sensing a slightly negative attitude from you, Mr Roding..."

A grunt was the only answer.

"If I told you, Mr Roding sir, that the fate of the city was in the balance, would you be more positive?"

Mr Roding considered. "Nah," he said and began to close the door. Sharon stuck her foot in the gap.

There was a moment of silence as shaman and necromancer wondered where things could go from here. Then Rhys leaned forward, raising one hand like a schoolboy at the back of the class and said, "Um, excuse me? I don't know much about this sort of thing, but have you thought about lavender oil?"

After a pause there came a cautious "What?" from Mr Roding.

"Well," gabbled Rhys, "I couldn't help but notice that, what with you being into the whole metabolic thing, which is fine, by the way, I'm not to judge, but I couldn't help but notice how you've got some, um, some dermatological issues, see? And I didn't get very far in the potions training because I get these allergies, but I am a druid and actually I think I could be really good and I was wondering have you thought about lavender oil? I know this amazing recipe for acne, you know. You don't even have to ceremonially strangle a cat."

Silence again.

Sharon removed her foot from the door. The door drifted shut; there was the sound of the chain being pulled off its track, and the door opened all the way. "You can come in," grumbled Mr Roding. "But I only got Earl Grey."

Chapter 41.

Reflect But Do Not Dwell Upon the Past A picture of the house of Mr Roding.

He lives alone and has done for some time. Japanese printsflowers, wading birds, the fall of water between the treesline a corridor painted a dubious lime green. Pale cracks line the ceiling where the pipes have begun to weigh a little too heavily. And everywhere there is the smell of air freshener. It's an almost visible cloud, overwhelming but still not enough to cut through the unmistakable odour of rot.

No, not just rot.

Something worse.

Meat.

Rotting meat.

The kitchen is maintained to almost surgical standards of cleanliness: a box of latex gloves by the sink and a dozen kinds of antiseptic with lemon-fragrance washing-up liquid lined up on white-tiled shelves. Two small windows swing open at the top to let cold air in and the smell of- best not to think -out into a back garden which to a four-year-old with a plastic truck would be a full-size jungle and which Mr Roding was evidently developing to the same ambition.

"I got no milk neither," he barked as the kettle began to boil. He snapped on a pair of rubber gloves before pulling matching mugs from a pristine cupboard. "It's barbaric to have milk with Earl Grey. I can do you a slice of lemon."

Sharon grinned a little too wide. "That'd be cool."

Rhys had turned a curious grey-green, his eyes watering under the weight of chemicals in the air. "I-I-I-I-I'm fine, thank you, sir," he gasped between pulses of histamine-laden blood.

The urge to call Mr Roding "sir" had overcome Sharon and Rhys almost as swiftly as the stench-disguising stench of the house he lived in. It wasn't that Mr Roding looked oldhe could have passed for late fifties if he'd wanted to, despite a crook to his back that pushed his neck down and head forward. It wasn't the clothes he woreblack shirt and black slacks and a pair of brown loafers pinched up around the seams like an apple pie. Or even the way he talked. It was more in self-defence, through offering respect against adversity, though neither Sharon nor Rhys could quite say what that adversity might be.

Perhaps it was the slick sheen to Mr Roding's skin, the almost plastic quality about his face as if, between each layer of flesh, someone had stretched a sheet of grease-coated cling film. Or maybe it was the way he'd superglued some of his nails back on, with one or two of them crooked; or his mismatching false teeth, which protruded too far from beneath his top lip. Or, just perhaps, it was the unmistakable odour of a body whose internal organs had long since given up trying to understand their neighbours and settled for doing the best job they could under difficult circumstances. Mr Roding wasn't deaddefinitely not. He was simply going through the process, and had been for nearly forty-five years.

None of them spoke while the kettle boiled.

None of them spoke as Mr Roding made three careful cups of tea. He dunked each tea bag individually, each one going in and out precisely twenty-five times. Then a single slice of lemon was carefully added to the mix and a tiny silver teaspoon dropped into the bottom of each cup. He handed them to Rhys and Sharon. Rhys quaked; Sharon's grin stretched a little thinner. The three eyed each other up, murderers at a poisoners' ball, and then, at an unspoken signal, sipped all together. A pause to observe effect. No one transformed into a specimen of the living dead, so all three began to sip more freely, in their own time. When a suitable quantity had been consumed to establish some kind of trust, Mr Roding pulled off his latex gloves, dropped them in an orange bag marked BIOLOGICAL WASTEINCINERATE ONLY and said: "So you want to commit a crime, is that what this is about?"

"Oh, no!" exclaimed Rhys, only to be silenced by Sharon.

"Why d'you think that?"

He shrugged. "Youth these days, smashing things, breaking up wards..."

Sharon bristled. "Because the youth of the 1950s were all rosemary and sunshine?"

"At least we knew how to respect our elders."

"Respect your... what about the 1960s? What about the sex, the drugs, the rock and roll?"

Mr Roding sniffed, a dangerous thing for any man whose nasal hair was attached only by inertia.

"Besides!" Sharon felt her indignation rising. "You're the one who wasn't motivated by the concept of saving the city!"

"Saving the citywhat do you know about that? Why do you even get to say those words?"

She hesitated. Rhys was staring at her too. It seemed he too hadn't received an answer to this question.

"Because a goblin shaman told me that the city is dying, the soul of the city is being ripped away; and because wherever this happens there's this firm called Burns and Stoke. And when I went to their office I heard the walls whispering, Help us, help us, and they were talking to me. And I couldn't see anything bad, but there was this locked door, and when I tried to go through it I couldn't because it was warded. And people there were scared, and Greydawn is missing, whoever that is, but everyone seems kind of worried 'bout that so I figured yeah, it's like, the fate of the city. You gonna help or what?"

The only sound came from Mr Roding, dinging his silver spoon against the rim of his cup. He laid the spoon down with a tiny clink and sipped his tea.