Ben Aaronovitch

The trouble with turning a blind eye is that people often take the opportunity to punch you in the face.

“Desperate people do desperate things,” said Spencer-Talbot. “Perhaps if we all did more to make things less desperate, then perhaps there would be less violence.”

“This is a terrible work,” I said. “Why did you do it?”

“The usual reasons,” said the Magister. “I told myself it was piety and duty to the Church, but a thousand years of contemplation will batter down the doors of one’s own delusions.”

You make a plan without intelligence—you might as well not have a plan at all.

“Are there aliens?” Simon asks Indigo.

“Not that I know of,” she says. “Unless you count cats.”

“You’re probably wondering why I decided to grace you with my presence,” he said.

Which was true, since DCIs spend most of their life in their offices or, worse, in other people’s offices and conference rooms. “Playing,” Seawoll once said, “pin the fucking buzzword on the sodding flow chart.”

“Are you a practitioner?” I ask. “A wizard?”

“Sorceress, my dear,” she says. “Practitioner is how the gentlemen have styled themselves, as quacks now style themselves as physicians.”

If you run everywhere you miss stuff that you might have been better off noticing—just saying.

“Have fun,” she says and releases me. “Make trouble.”

None of those choices seemed likely, but if I’ve learned one thing on the job, it is that a coincidence can kill someone just as easily as malice.

Now I was used to it, the bell-like silence was louder than ever, and I was starting to get undertones of orange blossom and incense. You have to be careful with this stuff or you begin to sound like a wine taster—with about the same amount of meaningless bollocks.

“Isn’t the internet wonderful?” she said. “Better than dragons any day.”