The Nightmare Stacks: A Laundry Files novel (19 page)

I wonder if this has got something to do with the urgent requirement to reinforce the security wards around Quarry Hill this week?

Alex’s experience of dating is similar to his experience of string theory: abstract, intense, and entirely theoretical due to the absence of time and opportunities for probing such high-energy phenomena. He is therefore understandably nervous when he walks into the Playhouse bar after work and looks around for Cassie.

Unbeknownst to Alex, Agent First’s experience of dating is no more extensive than his own. The
original
Cassiopeia Brewer has indeed been dating since secondary school and spent her first eight months at university partying, drinking, and sharing a bed with one of her classmates (then the next eight months pretending not to know him and the former BFF whose bed he had switched to). But the original Cassiopeia Brewer considerably outstrips both Alex
and
Agent First in terms of sexual experience. Casual sex is common among the People, but courtship tends to be abrupt if not invariably brutal, and longer-term relationships are cold-blooded political alliances. The idea of approaching the subject gradually, bonding over dinner and dialog and shared experiences, is perplexing. On the other hand, such an approach serves Agent First’s needs perfectly well.

Agent First started a secret diary in the back of a Moleskine notebook right after she met Alex for the second time, on the Playhouse steps. She has a to-do list:
Get to know the urük mage’s mind. Ask about his liege and his responsibilities.
She records her notes using the cramped syllabary of the High Tongue, her handwriting spiky and somewhat hesitant. Knowing nobody else in this world can read them is reassuring.
Discover what he knows of the High Tongue and who taught him,
she notes. (It is inconceivable that a magus of his evident power can function without a working knowledge of the metagrammar that permits the direct manipulation of reality.) She writes in pale violet ink, using a gold and lacquer fountain pen she fell in love with in a shop window. (The proprietor gave it to her spontaneously, thanking her for her role in some film she had never heard of.) And that part of her which is forever Cassie adorns the margins with pictures of daisies and elder signs.

Agent First is nearly as nervous as Alex when she walks into the Playhouse bar. She pulls Cassie tight around her shoulders like an invisible security blanket as she looks around. Alex is perched on a stool at one of the bar-style tables alongside the back wall of the room, eyes swiveling restlessly. In a desperate attempt to psych himself up, he ordered a medium cappuccino; he has nearly finished it already, and he’s wired.

“Eee!”
Cassie squeaks. With Cassie’s fashion sense, Agent First sees that he is dressed extraordinarily badly. It’s not just a matter of drab ill-matched colors or poorly fitting office-casual: it takes hard work to clash that loudly. From the ankle-skimming cuffs of his navy blue M&S chinos to the randomly cut tips of his hair, by way of his brown tweed sports jacket and button-down shirt, no single aspect of his ensemble is remotely flattering. On the other hand, his will-to-power washes over her like a blast of heat from an open furnace door. To Agent First’s inner eye he’d seem like an emperor even if he was wearing a grocery sack. “You look great!” she half-lies.

Alex’s smile goes goofily up to eleven. “Hi!” he manages. He regains control of his larynx and repeats himself, in a lower register: “Hi. You’re just as beautiful,” he says, then his tongue stops working and his cheeks flush as his brain catches up with his mouth. “Er… nice dress?”

Cassie tries not to jump out of her skin. “I want one of those,” she says, looking pointedly at his coffee. Some raptorial instinct prompts her to bat her eyelashes at him as she climbs onto the bar stool opposite. “Get me one! And another for yourself,
please
,” she adds, clamping down on the glamour with a frisson of fright. (It’s dangerous to use glamour on a magus: they can sense the flow of
mana
, and she doesn’t want to discover the consequences of being caught trying to suborn a blood sorcerer. If it provokes anything similar to the reaction it would get from one of her father’s magi she can expect it to be drastic and probably fatal.)

But Alex doesn’t notice her momentary slip. He looks befuddled for a moment, or perhaps star-struck. “Okay, I’ll be back in a minute,” he says nervously. “Don’t go anywhere?” He gets up and heads towards the counter at the front of the room, moving like a sleepwalker.

Cassie watches his receding back, captivated and terrified.
He likes me!
she realizes, trying the idea on for size. On the one hand, this is as it should be: after all, Agent First wanted to get his attention, and what Agent First wants she usually gets. But on the other hand, becoming an object of fascination for an
urük
magus might be a bit too much of a good thing. The skin on her neck and wrists prickles and the tips of her ears stand on end, for she can
feel
the strength wrapped around the armature of his will, just as she did at their last meeting. Alex is remarkably unassuming for one with such vast potential. In the empire, he would be a Magus of the First Rank, terrible and puissant, his ambitions held in check only by the
geas
of a powerful noble and the enforced tranquility of castration. But she will eat her diary, card covers and all, if Alex is a eunuch. She crosses her legs restlessly at the idea of a virile male blood-mage. Such a thing would never be permitted in the empire: it brings visions from Cassie’s bookish fantasy habit to life, uncomfortably detailed visions, unaccountably attractive.
How do their rulers control them?
she asks herself, desperate for something to distract her from the fruits of Cassie’s overheated imagination. She racks her brain: but Cassie has no memory of ritual castration as a tool of management in this place, unless it’s symbolized by the neck-wrappings many male
urük
wear as part of their uniforms.

Alex takes a couple of minutes to get served, during which time Agent First calms down enough to be mildly perplexed. Perhaps his failure to use his power to demand obedience from the servants is a sign of compliance to whatever directive of secrecy requires him to hide his light under a bushel? It strikes her as sweet but faintly ridiculous. At home, any duke or baron with such a powerful magus among their retinue would parade them around in their robes of office, accompanied at all times by an armed retinue of bodyguards, to trumpet their own wealth and power. But the rules are different among the
urük
, and while Alex is pretending to be a humble desk-bound bureaucrat, Agent First manages to settle her apprehension, regains her outward poise, and allows Cassie to quickly check her lipstick in a compact mirror.

Alex returns to the table, bearing two cups of cappuccino: they clatter as he sets them down, one of them splashing into its saucer. “I don’t normally drink this stuff,” he says apologetically, “caffeine doesn’t agree with me.”

“Really?” Cassie bubbles, despite his downbeat tone: she can’t help herself. “Then we won’t be able to hang out here all evening! Did you have anything particular in mind for later?” Her heart pounds. Dating, with its conventions of multiple social encounters as a prelude to fucking, seems absurdly complex to her, like cooking your own food rather than having servants and poison-testers prepare it for you.

“I was thinking, um, I don’t know, what movies are worth seeing? Have you eaten? Or we could find a pub —”

“Movies.” Cassie blanks for a moment. This is a
date
and
people on dates
often go and
watch movies
together, at least among the
urük
. She has only warped second-hand memories of motion pictures, none of them her own. It seems like a fantastically unproductive use of her time with Alex, staring vacantly at an elaborate visual lie. At this point, if he were one of the People they’d already be getting down to business.

But he persists: “Would you like to see a movie?”

The penny drops:
This is one of those
bonding experiences
, isn’t it?
“YesYes! That’d be great!”

“But, um, the Odeon is half a mile uphill from here —” He takes a mouthful of coffee, pulls a face as it burns his mouth. “Yes well, we could do that. Um. But um there’s this problem I have um caffeine doesn’t agree with me and c-can we wait until sunset?” he asks.

“Sunset?” His pupils are dilated, and she fancies she can hear his heart pounding.
Caffeine doesn’t agree
with me seems like a massive understatement. She smiles encouragingly: “I can wait. Do they sell beer here?”

Two gassy pints of Tetley’s Bitter take the edge off Alex’s jitters and relax Cassie pleasantly, then it’s time to go. Theatergoers are arriving for tonight’s production and the bar is filling up behind them.

They end up at the Odeon. Most of the smaller screens are running anime and other cartoon movies in the run-up to the comics festival down by the dock, but one of them is showing a movie that’s on Cassie’s hit-list: a Jim Jarmusch romantic comedy starring Tilda Swinton against Tom Hiddleston, vamping it up as a pair of immortal star-crossed lovers. To her surprise Agent First enjoys it, although she is certain that she’s missing some of the sardonic jokes. She’s acutely aware of Alex’s presence in the seat next to her, even as her eyes and ears drink in the lights and sounds that dance across the screen in front of them. He twitches a couple of times during the blood-drinking scenes, almost as if it makes him uneasy, which is perplexing. (If he can’t cope with a little bloodletting why did he become a magus?)

Eventually they stumble out onto the pavement. The air is cool but the rain clouds have blown away towards the east, and the sky above them is darkening from azure to indigo in the north. Venus drifts overhead, a bright and lonely promise of the starry night to come. “Walk with me?” Agent First asks as she takes hold of Alex’s arm. She leans on him for balance as they descend the slope down Vicar Lane, heading back towards Quarry Hill. She’s wearing a pair of ankle boots with spiky heels that Cassie’s memories prompted her to buy, but balancing in them is challenging.

“Let me show you the river walk,” Alex offers.

“Yes, let’s. Which way is it?” she asks, wobbling slightly. She likes hearing his voice. It reminds her that she’s not alone in this drab,
mana
-bereft world.

“Back the way we were, past the Playhouse…” He leads her along the side of Eastgate, half-deafened by buses and cars, under the old railway viaduct and past the shiny glass and concrete hotel. “Not far to go.”

“You work in Quarry House, don’t you?” she asks. “Are you really a civil servant, then?” The nest of twisty concepts behind the term baffles Agent First: as if it’s possible for abstractions to command minions to serve them. “A servant of the, the Crown?”

“I —” He pauses for a moment. “I suppose I am.” He sounds surprised and slightly depressed, as if she’s shocked a confession of guilt out of him. “I’d rather not talk about it,” he adds apologetically.

“Then don’t,” she says. Normally she’d find this reluctance irritating, as it threatens to prolong her mission. (It’s already getting late, and if she wants to maintain the pretense of being a student she’ll need to go home soon and get some sleep before lectures.) But instead she finds herself warmly happy at the excuse for a second date, an opportunity to spend more time in his company. “What did you think of the movie?”

“I thought it was —” Alex pauses. There are steps here, leading down to a path alongside the river, which is as thoroughly walled-in as an artificial canal. “It annoyed me,” he admits as he helps her descend.

“Why?” she asks breathily, leaning on him a bit more heavily than is strictly necessary for balance.

“Vampires —” He stops again, as if a distant instructor is reading lines for him to repeat: almost as if he harbors a secret narrative, Agent First recognizes with a shiver. “Bah.” The air alongside the river is moist and cool, and there’s a faint shimmer of activity in the air by some bushes. “Midges.”

“Midges —” The haze dances closer. “They bite, don’t they?”

Alex glitches again. She squeezes his fingers encouragingly. He takes a deep breath, preparation for the confessional: “Midges are vampires.”

She looks at him sharply, but he’s not smiling. “What?”

“Midges and mosquitos are blood-suckers, but nobody thinks they’re sexy, do they?”

“YesYes, but…” Cassie’s head spins as, abruptly, she sees Alex on the edge of self-disclosure – not the insight she’d asked for, but an important one nonetheless. “What do you mean?”

“Insects. Bats.” They pick their way hand-in-hand along the tow path, past a mooring where a narrow-boat is tied up, light leaking from behind curtained portholes. “Blood-suckers. They’re not sexy, are they? Not like Adam and Eve.” The stars of the movie, star-crossed ancient lovers. “There’s a species of leech, you know?
Placobdelloides jaegerskioeldi
, the hippo arse leech. Leeches come in all shapes and sizes and are adapted to feed on different hosts. Hippos have thick skin, so the only place
jaegerskioeldi
can suck blood is inside the hippo’s rectum. They
breed
in there, if you can believe it? And if you ever wondered why hippos spin their tails when they shit, it’s to throw the leeches as far away as they can.
That’s
what
a vampire is,” he adds, either bitterly or enviously – his tone of voice is distinctly odd. “A hyperspecialized parasite. The only sexy blood-suckers are ones that look like us – and they don’t – ” He coughs. “Well. What I’m saying is, real vampires are
nasty
. You want to avoid them.” And he lets go of her hand.

“Well, thank you very much for spoiling what was shaping up to be a really good evening!” Cassie fumes. She stands in the path and glares.

Alex looks stricken. “Oh gosh, I didn’t mean it like that,” he says with a deer-in-the-headlights look that makes him seem a decade younger, “I wasn’t trying to gross you out, honest. I was just…” Finally his brain catches up with his mouth. “I should stop talking now, shouldn’t I?” he asks nobody in particular.