She pulled her hand back into a fist when she saw me, but I was already casting a nice reliable impello palma even as I closed the distance between us. The spell knocked her on her back, but she rolled, did something that I didn’t recognise, and a viciously bright flash in front of my face blinded me. I went crashing down to the cobbles. All I could see was a bruise-coloured blotch in front of my eyes. But, figuring that lying on the cobbles was not conducive to my health, I scrambled off to my right where I knew there were parked cars. After banging my face on somebody’s hatchback, I found the gap between cars and slotted myself in.
I crouched down with my back to a wheel arch and blinked, trying to clear my vision.
It’s the ultraviolet content of a bright light that damages your retinas – I just had to hope Lesley had her flashbulb lux variant tuned to the lower wavelengths. Meanwhile I found I could follow the magic part of the fight through the echoes of the combatants’ formae.
There was the tick-tock precision of Nightingale doing something complicated, followed by a whispering crash like cymbals when his spell hit home. Chorley was a series of painful razor strops speeding up until it was like a buzz saw meeting metal. Somewhere out in the real world I heard real metal tearing and sirens in the distance.
And then there was Lesley with a little bit of tick-tock, some razor strop, and a strange cry like a seagull that I was beginning to recognise as uniquely her own.
Now, it would be really useful if I could use all these lovely sense impressions to get a sense of distance. But some hours spent wearing a blindfold while Abigail and Nightingale set spells off around me had proved you couldn’t. At least I couldn’t. At least not yet.
Still, the beauty of being stuck on a down ramp with nice solid Victorian brick walls on either side was that there was a limited number of directions Lesley could be coming from. When I sensed her gearing up to cast her next spell – some difficult impello-based procedure – I lobbed a glitter bomb in her general direction.
This was one of Varvara’s wartime spells as translated by Abigail – Ledyanaya Bomba in Russian, but we call it a glitter bomb because of the way light sparkles off the ice crystals that form around the epicentre.
I distinctly heard Lesley say ‘fuck’ not five metres away, and then I felt the wave of cold air roll over me. The sight in my left eye was mostly purple but my right was almost clear – obviously I’d been squinting. I risked a look.
Everything around the van was bright and sparkly, like a bright winter’s day after a frost. I saw a blurry figure who was probably Lesley turn away from me and start to run down the ramp, only to slip over and fall down hard with a yelp.
I wasn’t going to get a better invitation than that, so I rolled out of my hiding place and charged down the slope with my shield up for good measure. Which is just as well, as I ran straight into Chorley coming the other way. I was half blind and he was looking over his shoulder – it was one of them meeting engagements that military theorists suggest you should never ever do if you can help it. He didn’t spot me until we were less than three metres apart. He tried to turn away, but slipped and went down on one knee with an audible crack. It looked really painful, but not as painful as I was planning to make it.
Lesley was to his right, trying to get to her feet. She was trying to wrench something out of her jacket pocket, and making a mess of both actions. I couldn’t pass up a shot at Chorley, so I tried to body-slam him with my shield.
I’m not sure, but I think he sort of picked up my shield and used it and my momentum to throw me over his head. Certainly for me there was a confused moment where everything was upside down, a painful impact on my back, and then I slid down the icy cobbles for a couple of metres.
I rolled over in time to see Chorley turn his full attention on me, with a look in his eyes that said I’d just reached the end of the rope he’d been giving me.
Then he fell twitching to the floor – I knew that twitch. I’ve suffered it myself. There were wires trailing from his back to the yellow X26 taser in Stephanopoulos’ hand, and she kept pumping the juice just as instructed by the big bumper manual of how to deal with criminal practitioners.
Lesley was still trying to get something free of her jacket, and I scrambled up to stop her. But before I could get to my feet she had a compact semi-automatic pistol in her hand, which she pointed at Stephanopoulos.
‘Drop the fucking taser,’ she shouted.
Stephanopoulos signalled me to hold back.
‘Or what?’ she asked Lesley.
‘Don’t test me,’ said Lesley. ‘I’m having a very trying day.’
‘For God’s sake, just shoot her,’ said Chorley, and then wriggled a bit as the current hit him again. ‘Or Peter. Or fucking somebody.’
I thought it might be quite handy if Nightingale were to turn up about then.
‘If you’re going to shoot, then shoot,’ said Stephanopoulos.
So Lesley shot her in the leg – which, looking back, was probably the sensible thing to do. If you were Lesley.
Stephanopoulos fell over sideways as her left leg gave way. She tried to keep hold of the taser, but Chorley had taken advantage of the distraction to pull the barbs out. I was already surging forward when Lesley turned the gun on me.
‘Plan B,’ said Chorley as he got up and headed for the van.
‘Copy that,’ said Lesley, keeping the gun on me.
Stephanopoulos had dragged herself behind a parked car but I could hear her swearing.
There was the sound of shooting behind me and I instinctively crouched down. At first I thought Seawoll had escalated up to an armed response once Stephanopoulos had been shot. But the gunshots didn’t sound right. Chorley was in the van by then and had it started. I jumped to the side as it pulled out and turned, not upslope as I expected, but down towards the underground car park. The curve of the ramp meant I couldn’t see the actual entrance, but there was no mistaking the bark of shotguns firing from that direction. Suddenly a white man dressed in dark military trousers and a navy bomber jacket flew backwards into view and landed on the roof of a parked car. Chorley had obviously been out recruiting in Essex again. Even as he bounced onto the bonnet he held tight to a pump-action shotgun. But before he could recover, the shotgun was wrenched out of his hands and sent flying all the way up and over the safety railing to West Smithfield Road fifteen metres above.
That explained what had delayed Nightingale.
I turned back to find Lesley had gone, so I ran over to find Stephanopoulos lying on her back with her leg elevated and her belt in place as a tourniquet. She gave me a look of annoyed exasperation.
‘Get down there and help Nightingale,’ she said.
I hesitated.
‘Ambulance is on its way,’ she said. ‘Go.’
I went down the ramp with my shield up and rounded the curve to find Nightingale finishing off a couple of wannabe hard men by knocking them down, stripping off their weapons with impello and throwing them up and out of reach in the direction of Smithfield Market.
As the guns went up, somebody unseen above threw down a couple of pairs of speedcuffs. Nightingale grabbed one and threw me the other – together we cuffed the pair and left them for the follow-up team.
I wanted at least to ask them their names, but Nightingale said we had to hurry.
‘He’s gone to ground,’ he said. ‘But he won’t stay there long.’
There were two vehicle and one pedestrian entrances into the underground. We took up position by a blue and white painted wooden office extension where we could cover the vehicle access. Behind us TSG officers in public order gear collected up our suspects while others guided one of their Sprinter vans to reverse so that it blocked the door to the pedestrian footpath.