The Minority Council: A Matthew Swift novel by Griffin Kate

Author:Griffin, Kate [Griffin, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780748128969
Publisher: Hachette Littlehampton
Published: 2012-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

He was saying, “When the Beggar King calls, of course it’s important. No. I understand that. I understand that, but what you need to understand is this: the beggars have eyes everywhere and if they’ve found … I know that. Of course I can arrange that, I understand. No. No, listen. Yes. I understand. I’ll handle it.”

I risked lifting my head. Instantly he was there, phone vanishing into his pocket. His clothes were smeared with dirt, but somehow Templeman had cleaned his face and hands back to their usual polished selves; and his expression as he looked down was all concern. “Mr Mayor, are you all right?”

I considered the hypothesis.

“No,” I concluded. “Not really, but what’s new?”

Templeman had somehow dragged me to the top of the basement stairs. Below, only a few feet below, the basement floor was a mess of broken bricks and shattered concrete. I shook off splinters of mortar and patted dust from my clothes. He flinched as the yellow stuff rose in the air. “Please do be careful, Mr Mayor. The circumstances were less than hygienic.”

He held out a hand to help pull us up, and we were not so far above our own distress that we refused it.

“The wall,” he explained as I felt my head for a new patch of crusting blood. “There was fairy dust in the mortar. Somehow our presence must have disturbed it, and the reaction was … unfortunate. I pulled you out of the basement; it seemed the least that could be done.”

“Fairy dust in the walls of the house,” I acknowledged. “And in the floors and ceiling, I’d guess. Dust everywhere, and doesn’t it love to scream.”

“I am not familiar with this phenomenon,” he admitted. He stood at a tactful distance, a man ready to catch a fall, as I limped towards the door. “By my understanding, fairy dust is inert until activated by an interaction with human physiology.”

“They were experimenting.”

“‘They’?”

“That’s what the beggars said. Find a house like any other in a street with not much going for it, and you’ll find some bastard experimenting with fairy dust.”

“The fairy godmother?”

“I dunno. Not many guys with guns, are there? Not many braying bloodhounds, not much in the way of sheet plastic on the floor or a big dollar sign above the door.” I hesitated, glancing around the quiet interior of the house. Our mouth was dry, eyes itched. Templeman was looking at me closely, rigid at the knowledge of this too-still, too-empty place where the dust had come crawling out of the walls. “Thanks for pulling me out,” I said.

He nodded in acknowledgment of the deed, but his eyes were elsewhere, running over the cracks and torn wallpaper, listening for something that shouldn’t be. We opened the front door, and the world outside was too bright and too natural, possessed of too much normality to be true. I fumbled in my pocket for the painkillers, swallowed two of them dry. The ache in our head made it difficult to think, the fire in our chest, hard to breathe.

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