The Minority Council Read Online Free PDF Page A

there another kissed his wife, who’d brought in their child, complete with red wellington boots, to collect Daddy from work. The magic in this place was old, rich and silver; it clattered on roads of tarmac laid on roads of stone laid on cobble laid on mud. It oozed up from the shadows between the street lights and steamed off the glowing silver towers. It was a heat haze that made our skin tingle.
    Then a voice said, “You’re not one of them, but they let you inside. Why?”
    I glanced round.
    It was the woman in the purple headscarf who only a few minutes before had been screaming “Nazi!” at the security men of Harlun and Phelps. She regarded me with a look of speculation.
    “Sorry. Don’t know what you mean.”
    “Yes, you do,” she replied. “Don’t give me that. Do you work there?” She indicated the building I’d just left.
    “Not really.”
    “But they do know you. They let you inside, right?”
    “It’s not exactly a nine-to-five job.”
    “That’s fine, I don’t need to get in nine to five.”
    She was a pale, coffee ice cream colour, with longrounded nails. The scarf that hid her hair was bright purple, shot through with silver threads, and layered so thickly it looked like she was wearing an uneven sponge.
    There was a something about her, a crispness to the air, that set our senses itching.
    I said, “What’s your beef anyway? What’s so interesting about that place?”
    “Nothing,” she replied. “But I need to talk to someone inside it and no one will let me get a foot in the door. I have rights, you know.”
    I waited for an indication of irony in her voice, and when it didn’t come I made what would be the first fatal mistake of the night. I said, “Who d’you need to see?”
    “This guy called the Midnight Mayor.”
    It was ten minutes later. We were in a chain coffee shop, drinking mass-produced coffee on a mass-produced sofa beneath some mass-produced art in a mass-produced frame proclaiming that Originality Can’t Be Bought. The girl was explaining, “… and I said, ‘I’ve been to the local wizards, the local wizards don’t know shit, they’re only into the magic because they think it’ll help them find a girl, as if’ and they were like ‘Look, darling’—can you believe they called me
darling
? I mean what the hell do they think this is, the Middle Ages?—‘look, darling,’ they said, ‘even if we knew this Midnight Mayor bloke, which we’re not saying we do, yeah, but even if we did’—I think they may have put in another ‘darling’ at this point—‘even if we did, you really think he’s going to be bothered with you and your like, little problem or whatever?’ And here, which I realise was wrong,” she added, throwing up her hands in what might have been contrition, “here I said some things which probably weren’t my most polite butyou know, they were such arseholes, I couldn’t believe it, and since then they won’t let me get even a foot in the building. It’s been so fucking frustrating!”
    She threw herself back against the sofa. Her fingernails were beating out a rhythm on the side of her coffee mug that wasn’t far off the Ride of the Valkyries.
    I put down my black coffee with its layer of scum and said, “Sooo… you want to see the Midnight Mayor?”
    She gave me a look, then added, “Yeah, like, wasn’t that the whole point of the story?”
    “Does it have to be him?” I asked. “I mean, you’re talking senior dude here, the protector of the city and all that. And the guy, I’ve gotta tell you, the guy is usually a pompous ass. You tell someone they’re the protector of the city and, before you know it, you’ve got ego issues, you’ve got character defects, you’ve got nervous tics—I mean, I’m just speculating, but that’s how it sounds.”
    “No!” she exclaimed. “This is important, this is protector of the city stuff! What use is a guy whose job is to watch out for the magical security of this place,