Was (Was #1)

1x07: Dead flowers at night mirror dead words from the past

Episode 1x07: Dead flowers at night mirror dead words from the past

London, December 12th, 2009

It was twenty past ten in the evening; standing under Waterloo Bridge, Cleopatra's Needle in her back on Victoria Embankment, Ring was staring at the oily river Thames.

Her gaze wandered on the trees nearby; on the opposite bank, with its buildings and lit windows that cut dark shapes against the sky, too clear from all the city lights reflected against its heavy layer of clouds; on Blackfriars Bridge at the east, with its old orphaned pillars; on the Eye flaunting its electric blue circle in the night. Wrapped in her heavy coat and cloak, the Blood Witch did not pay attention to the biting cold, nor even to Echoes, standing not far from her, one of his awful Dunhill cigarettes held between his long bony fingers. Above them, cars rushed on the lane, their drivers unaware of the presence of these two lonesome silhouettes under the heavy layers of steel and concrete.

They stood a few yards from a corpse, another one, a woman in her late fifties with short curly grey hair and shabby clothes too large for her. With her right hand, she clutched at a bunch of withered roses; next to her, the small basket she had been carrying lay half crushed, revealing what was left of the poor flowers stuck in it. She had died the same way as the Mundane killed under the Technomancer’s eyes the night before, her Heart, the very core of her soul, carved out of her spiritual pattern in an act that was at once very delicate and full of tremendous violence. Although examining the wound had been easier this time, for they knew what to look for, it had not made the task more bearable.

Nobody had been paying attention to the corpse. Seen from one of the many cars speeding down the A3211 along the river, she was just but another homeless person having found shelter for the night under a bridge, curled up on herself to fight off the biting cold.

‘Fuck,’ Echoes spat, throwing what was left of his cigarette in the Thames; the butt bumped against the nearest pillar before disappearing in the black waters. ‘That's Mad Hattie we're talking about here. Bloody fuckin' Mad Hattie.’

‘No need to say it over and over again. And no need to swear that much.’ If a voice could cut, Ring's would certainly have been one large meat cleaver at the moment. ‘Still no news from the Archon?’

‘Nope. And I've been checking my phone, like, every minute since I sent the data. Shit, she was a loony, but she wouldn't hurt anyone. Just her and her silly flowers all the time.’

‘You sound like you—’

‘Sorta.’

‘Echoes, she wasn't in our ledgers, and the Anima Mundi never had to go after her. So, tell me. How come you knew her?’

‘A—a friend of mine did. She told me about her a couple of times. Used to buy her flowers before... Well. She was never very talented, Hattie. But there’s no way I wouldn't recognise her. Kind of an urban legend in the Westminster area, see?’

He let out a groan, then squatted on his heels to reach for his laptop case and take the flat device out of it. Ring looked up at the shadow-eaten structure of the bridge, on which the river sent faint moving reflections. There were countless magicians, sorcerers and other minor willworkers in the whole kingdom—people with just a speck of power in them. Of course the Anima Mundi did not know them all, in spite of what it liked to claim, at least not when it came to those who did not follow a specific craft and wielded their powers according to their own solitary beliefs. Among those, some ended up raising havoc against their will when they accidentally lost control of their abilities; and some others never caused any ripples, so discreet or so useless in their spell-casting that a lifetime could go by without anyone noticing that they had been mages at all.