“Anything interesting?” he inquired.
Greta looked up. “Yeah. This stuff … Ruthven, Harry’s results are kind of incredible. It’s like a broad-spectrum antisupernatural cocktail. There’s the iron, for the ones who can’t bear cold iron; there’s silver, for the weres; there’s a bit of lead; and the rest is all a potpourri of classic white-magic herbs. Look at this.”
She pushed a couple of books out of the way and slid her notebook across the table to him. “Furanoacridones and the acridone alkaloids arborinine and evoxanthine, plus coumarins—all of that you can get out of plain old Ruta graveolens, otherwise known as rue. Rosmarinic acid and carnosic acid, from rosemary—and a whole bunch of stuff you can extract from sage and wormwood, including thujone. There’s lavender, valerian, yarrow, all kinds of stuff. And not to leave you out, we’ve got a ton of thio-2-propene-1-sulfinic acid S-allyl ester.”
Ruthven looked at her, one eyebrow slightly raised. “Which is what exactly, when it’s at home with its feet up?”
“Allicin,” she said. “Derived from garlic. What you might call the active principle.”
He was suddenly very, very glad the blade was sealed up in plastic and safely locked away in the garage; even just touching it for any length of time would almost certainly make him break out in hives and wheeze for breath.
“These guys really did their homework,” Cranswell said, still scribbling notes. “There’s a bunch of other stuff in here that I can’t identify as specifically toxic to a specific kind of monster—no offense—but none of it looks like something you’d want to have inserted into you on a pointy instrument.”
“No kidding,” said Greta, touching the side of her neck. “It looks like they’re not only loaded for vampire, as it were, but they’re also equipped to take down pretty much any other kind of undead and/or generally supernatural being that’s known to have a particular physical or chemical weakness. Did you lock the doors?”
“I did,” said Ruthven, “but I am suddenly moved by the inspiration to go and do it yet again. And possibly chalk some sort of protective rune on them, if I knew any. Do you know any?” he added.
“Not my field.” Cranswell shrugged apologetically, but he looked uneasy nonetheless.
Greta rose and went to join Ruthven, and together they checked the locks once more, not only on Ruthven’s front door, but his back door and cellar doors as well, and all the windows one by one.
Elsewhere, another door was opened on blue light.
Something—someone—hit the floor of the low arched little room with a squelchy thud, and moaned. In the blue light his torn habit looked black, sodden with rainwater and less mentionable things from the journey through the tunnels in the dark.
They had found the nameless man in the overflow chamber, and at first he had been glad to see the dim pinpoints of light approaching; at least until the first blow doubled him over and sent him face-first into the shoals of filth on the floor. After that they had dragged him by the arms, silent, their grip implacable as iron, through the undercity to the inner sanctum.
Two blue-eyed monks looked down at his crumpled form. Without saying a word, they drew dull grey crossblades from their sleeves and knelt to cut the remains of his habit away. First the rope cincture around the waist, then the cowl and hood, and finally the garment itself was stripped off in pieces, revealing half-healed burns still weeping fluid. Still without speaking, they folded and set aside the remains of the clothing.
The humming of the spark in its globe seemed to intensify, as if focusing its attention. Both monks crossed themselves, murmuring something under their breath, and then bent to take his arms and drag him toward the metal cabinet. Hanging from the corners of the cabinet were two stained leather straps, just the right length for fastening round somebody’s wrists.
He roused from stupor enough to cringe away from the light, now just inches away, and made a thick choking sound. The straps held firm. The curve of the glass bulb was so close he could feel the heat from it on his skin, in his bones, like desert sunshine. The noise of it filled the world. It resonated in the hollow spaces of his skull, mindless and insistent, and somewhere deep in the remains of the nameless man the thought occurred that it would drive him mad, that this was what the insane must hear inside their heads.
He was not worthy of the light of God, if he could think such things. He deserved the pain.
When the priest with the long braided whip came in, he was silent, hanging half-conscious from the restraints, but it was not long before the dim ozone-smelling tunnel rang and echoed with screams.
“We separate him, together with his accomplices and abettors, from the precious light of the Lord God and from the society of all Christians; we exclude him from our Holy Order.”
Twelve men in rough robes and hoods stood in darkness lit by a single shaking candle flame, their shadows moving on the tiled walls of the sewer tunnel. Twelve men, surrounding a heap of something on the noisome floor. They were together in fellowship, at this time and in this place. The work they did now was entirely the work of God.
“We declare him excommunicate and anathema,” their leader continued. “We judge him damned, with the Devil and his angels and all the reprobate, to eternal fire and torment.”
The words had the ring of practice, of familiarity. In point of fact this small group of men, or men-shaped creatures, had read words like them many times before, under vastly different circumstances. Not these precisely—in that earlier life, one spent under the sky rather than beneath the city streets, there had never been a need to speak these particular phrases, only praise and adulation—but words like these. They knew the text and the cadence and response. It was right. It was true. It was just.
The one who had spoken wore a blue stole around his neck, vivid against his brown monk’s habit, bright and strange in the dimness of the tunnel. Now he reached out shiny-scarred fingers into the candle flame, holding them steady and unwavering in the middle of the light for a moment before pinching it out. Darkness flooded in, so absolute as to be almost tangible; then, slowly, pinpoints of blue light appeared in pairs. A small and shifting group of constellations.
“He is unclean,” said the figure who had snuffed the candle. In the faint light of their combined eyeshine the stole around his neck was just visible. “Expel him. And then purify yourselves.”
Two of the monks broke from the circle and bent to pick up the thing lying on the tunnel floor: a thing that grunted as it was lifted, and left a bloody trail behind it in the dark. A third led them down the tunnel to the circular alcove of a manhole, and without a single word they carried it up the iron ladder and into the larger darkness of the night.