Ruthven looked as if he had been about to pursue the diplomatic line further, but—thankfully—decided against it, taking the computer back and resuming his search. He had been looking up Underground maps, and unsurprisingly finding only the standard line maps rather than the more useful blueprints indicating where the off-limits tunnels ran. As Varney watched, one of his searches popped up a picture of a complicated intersecting series of brick arches and openings.
Ruthven stared at it, his pupils expanding and contracting rapidly. “I’m an idiot,” he said.
“Pardon me?”
“An idiot. Really, I ought to have thought of it at once. You’ve read your Hugo just the same as I have; what did he famously spend half a damn chapter describing in detail as the easiest way of moving around a city while escaping pursuit?”
Varney straightened. “They can’t be using the sewers, surely?”
“Look.” Ruthven searched for, and found, a map of the main drainage network of London (circa 1930, but close enough). He centered it on the map of modern-day London and turned down the opacity just enough to let the two superimpose, and turned the screen to show Varney. Every single one of the markers he’d placed at attack or murder scenes was located along a sewer line. Not entirely surprising, given the way the sewers often tended to lie beneath the roads, but the correlation was exact.
“I think the question now is not how they’re getting around,” he said, “but where it is they’re coming and going from.”
Greta had brought back blood and danishes for the household when she’d come back from the clinic, which meant Ruthven didn’t have to go out to eat. Just as well, he thought, looking out at the uninviting prospect of a cold rainy night. Even if there weren’t mysterious zealots with poisoned spikes out there looking to perforate him, he wouldn’t have looked forward to braving the elements; it took some little time to first select and then thrall somebody, and then find somewhere they wouldn’t be disturbed for the few minutes it took to drink, and all this was much more tiresome to contemplate in the rain. Besides, it really did make his hair frizz.
Everyone was home: Cranswell and Fastitocalon had returned from the museum sans priceless literary artifacts shortly after Greta’s arrival, and were in the middle of a conversation about metaphysics. Ruthven listened with half an ear, and then with his full attention, coming to lean in the doorway of the kitchen and watch Cranswell consuming pastries while Fastitocalon explained how demons worked.
After a little while Greta came to join Ruthven, and they exchanged a look. Neither of them had ever actually come right out and asked Fastitocalon to tell them the details of his nature, but Ruthven at least had been curious about it for decades. One did not flat-out ask an old friend what they were. Perhaps it was different for Cranswell, who had only just met him, or perhaps Cranswell simply didn’t mind the impropriety. Either way, this was fascinating.
It seemed that Heaven and Hell both existed, although much of theology had got hold of the wrong end of the stick. The two sides were not in active competition. “You don’t go after souls,” Cranswell repeated.
“No. Well. … see, this is the biggest misconception people have and I’m fairly sure Sam has left it this way for a reason, but we don’t actively try to tempt people into Hell. Hell just provides the torments, or the boredom, either way, which people believe at the most basic unconscious level that they deserve.”
Cranswell stared at him, hand frozen halfway through reaching for the last pastry. “You’re kidding, right? Hell is what you make it?”
“Well, not exactly. Your fate is sort of whatever you subconsciously know it ought to be.” He looked wretched. “This is not my field. I’m … I was an accountant, not an afterlife counselor.”
“What if you’re an atheist?” Greta said. “What if you don’t believe there even is an afterlife, that you just die and decompose and are recycled?”
Fastitocalon looked over at her. “Then that’s more or less what happens, I think. The idea is not that one side gets more souls than the other in order to win, like celestial checkers or something, but that the influence and power of the two sides remains in balance at all times. The balance is incredibly important. Otherwise very bad things happen. Rivers of blood, rains of fire, horses eat each other. Generally to be avoided.”
He looked dreadfully tired, Ruthven thought. Tired, and ill; this was taking a lot out of Fass, first the business with the artifacts and now having to tell everyone things that were probably supposed to be kept secret. Even as the thought crossed his mind, Fastitocalon began to cough, and Greta nudged Ruthven aside and went into the kitchen to steady him with a hand on his back.
“You need to be in bed,” she said, when the fit was over. “I should have sent you there directly when you got back from the Museum, but I’m sending you now. Varney’s already taken himself off.”
“Mmh,” Fastitocalon said, leaning into her hand. “I’m … not going to argue.”
Ruthven glanced at Greta, saw the flicker of concern behind the calm doctor-face. It wasn’t a good sign when Fastitocalon didn’t immediately protest that he was quite all right and people shouldn’t fuss. “Well, good,” she said. “Go on. I’ll bring you a cup of something heartening in a little while. Do you—”
“I’m all right,” he said, cutting her off, and got up with a brief effort. “I can manage the stairs without expiring, I believe.”
Cranswell looked up at him as he rose. “Thank you,” he said. “For the—the museum thing. Thank you, Fastitocalon. That was kind of incredible, actually, and I really appreciate you doing it.”
Fastitocalon blinked at him, looking surprised. “Oh, well,” he said, “you’re quite welcome. I’m glad I was able to help. It is so pleasant being useful.”
After Fastitocalon had gone to bed, Ruthven made dinner for the human contingent, and when he was finished with the washing up he went to check the locks again, unable to excise a certain formless nagging anxiety. He could not make himself settle to anything. For the first time since this whole business began he was thinking about getting out of London—maybe not Scotland, maybe somewhere warm and dry, with scenery. Italy might do. Or Greece. He’d liked Greece, even if the last time he’d been there it had been during a less-than-admirable phase of his existence and he had made some extremely poor decisions—but the seas really had been wine-dark, and the olive groves fragrant, and all in all it was a much more pleasant prospect than London in November.
Ruthven filed that thought under profoundly unhelpful, and sighed. Running away was out of the question.
Cranswell and Greta were looking through the lab results on the fragment of metal she’d dug out of Sir Francis, and he joined them in the dining room. The table was covered in books—half of which he barely even remembered buying, back in one of his more Gothic phases: witchcraft lore, herbals, and … apparently a paperback of Montague Summers’s drivel that he absolutely had no memory of purchasing at all. The contrast between their bowed heads, dark and fair, under the warm lamplight made him think of Renaissance paintings.