“I don’t faint,” Greta said crossly. “Or at least I’ve never done it before, and I don’t plan on doing it again.” She took the cup in both hands. “How’s Varney?” Thank God he hadn’t seen that; it was bad enough for Ruthven to have witnessed it, but Varney was a comparative stranger, and she particularly hated doing embarrassing things in front of people she didn’t know.
The tea was strong and extremely sweet, with brandy in it, and she realized with a slightly sheepish smile that it was exactly what she’d push on someone else under the circumstances. Oh, Fass.
“Varney,” he said, “is awake and talking. Ruthven’s with him now. He’s led an interesting life, apparently. We had quite a nice little conversation about being ancient and decrepit, he and I.” Fastitocalon coughed. “And he was good enough to confirm that the account we found in one of that young chap Cranswell’s books sounded a great deal like the people who’d attacked him. Some sort of medieval warrior monks wielding magic swords, if you can imagine.”
Greta stared at him, and then put down the teacup and looked wildly around the room. “Where’s my bag? What happened to my bag?”
“Right here,” August Cranswell said, coming through from the kitchen with Greta’s battered handbag. She recognized him after a blank moment; they’d met at a party Ruthven had thrown several months back.
“You’re awake,” Cranswell added, unnecessarily. “Are you okay? What’s going on?”
She pushed herself to her feet, grimly fighting off another wave of dizziness, and grabbed the bag out of his hands. Ignoring the others for the moment, she rummaged frantically through the litter of phone and notebook and Chapstick and keys and receipts and bits of string. Her fingers closed around something cold and heavy at the very bottom of the bag, and her hand shook a little as she drew it out into the light.
It was a knife about eight and a half inches long, including the hilt. The blade, or blades, tapered to a sharp point, and resembled two daggers intersecting at right angles, forming an X. Or a cross. Where the blades met the leather-strapped hilt, the metal was a sort of tarnished-looking silver color, but from a little farther down the length of the cross-shaped blade was covered by a dull dark grey coating. It looked powdery, friable. Here and there a little of it had flaked off, revealing the paler metal beneath.
One of the four blade edges had a dark smudge along it, and Greta’s other hand rose slowly to the wound on her throat.
London’s lost rivers had taken on a romantic sort of mystery in popular awareness. The idea of waters flowing on and on in the endless darkness under the city streets was deliciously eerie, and of course lost and abandoned tunnels and caverns had always appealed to a certain sort of adventurous spirit. Even the names were evocative: the Tyburn, the Fleet, the Effra, the Westbourne, once broad streams in their own right—now bound and channeled in the bowels of the ancient city, but not entirely forgotten. The old rivers flowed now in a muffled roar and chime of water through cathedrals of tile and brick, unseen arches and coigns of gorgeous complexity guiding and shaping their eventual journey to the sea.
Now the unrelieved darkness of one of these tunnels resolved itself around two pinpoints of light, moving with a steady loping rhythm against the flow of dirty water. There was a heavy, almost snoring sound of breathing accompanying the two glowing points as they proceeded through the darkness; that breathing and the slosh and splatter of footsteps echoed and re-echoed in the close confines of the tunnel, so narrow a bore that the creature moving through it had to stoop over; but after a few minutes the pipe abruptly opened into a much larger chamber. It paused, just inside the opening, the little steady pinpoints of light blinking on and off twice, and then moved out into the wider space beyond.
The illumination of those pinpoints was limited to perhaps two or three feet of distance, but the creature did not actually require visible light to perceive its surroundings; it could see quite well. It stood in a high-ceilinged space. Above it stretched an arching, intersecting set of vaults at sharp angles to one another, the old brick glistening with slime. Other tunnels opened into the chamber, black maws in the greater blackness.
It stood there for several minutes—apparently waiting for something. Eventually a second pair of blue pinpoints appeared in the mouth of an intersecting tunnel, higher up on the chamber’s wall.
The second creature came to a halt looking down at the first; there was silence again in the chamber, underneath the rush and murmur of moving water. “Well?” the newcomer demanded, after a moment.
“The monster-doctor lives,” said the first. “Wounded, but not severely. She is with the demons again. Under their protection.”
There was a hiss, and the points of light above it blinked on and off, once, and steadied as their owner regained control of itself. It looked down once more. “She is unclean and shares the habitation of devils; she is anathema; she nurses the wicked.” It paused, and when it spoke again the voice was cold and blade-sharp around the edges. “Our brother has failed to destroy her; the task will be given to one more worthy. He will find no welcome for him among our order, but the retribution of sins. Henceforward he, too, is excommunicate and anathema. Find him, and cast him out.”
In the darkness of the chamber the first pair of lights moved, and the short, ugly blade of a knife gleamed bright for a moment, drawn from its sheath and then replaced again. “It will be done,” it said.
“Go. Instruct the others and then continue your vigil.”
“Lux aeterna,” said the thing, and it bowed, low, before turning and loping away into the dark. Behind it, the twin blue pinpoints of its interlocutor remained still for a moment longer, watching until it was beyond the range of even these rather remarkable senses; shortly afterward complete and utter darkness returned to the chamber where three tunnels met.
In Crouch End, the rain had tapered off to the sort of miserable drizzle common to Novembers all over the world, and the dome light of Greta’s abandoned Mini was fading to a dull, tea-colored glow as the car’s elderly battery gave up what was left of the ghost.
The driver’s-side door was closed; the back door on that side gaped open, and rain had soaked the worn upholstery from blue to black. The car stank of the incapacitant spray residue that coated most of its interior, and also of old sweat and something unpleasantly sharp and acrid, metallic. Here and there on the backseat little shreds of something that looked like damp tissue paper lay mashed into the upholstery. Some of them still showed the raised loops and whorls of fingerprints.