“Oh yes, that didn’t stop with the Fall. It’s happened more than once, but the last big shakeup Below was, oh, late sixteenth century.” Fastitocalon closed his eyes for a moment, pushing away vivid memories. “That one had to do with a rogue faction directly influencing human interactions and events, partly camouflaged to implicate Heaven. Samael’s response was … abundantly clear regarding his opinion of such activity. I can’t see anyone from my side trying that again, not after what he did to Asmodeus. No, this is … something small enough so neither of them know about it, or know enough about it to care; otherwise it would have been caught and squashed before now. If we can just … quietly stop it without getting either side actively involved, it would save a great deal of political and bureaucratic bother.”
Ruthven just nodded, apparently dismissing postvital political climate and the question of what might have happened to the unfortunate Asmodeus. “How precisely are we going to stop it? These Gladius Sancti people are not only armed with physical weapons that are capable of causing us major damage; they also now have whatever powers this supernatural influence has given them. I would not want to go up against more than one or two of them at a time, and there might be up to ten lurking under the city. Not to mention the … the thing itself, its physical location; that’s likely to be guarded, and we don’t know anything about it.”
“Yet,” Varney said. “We don’t know yet. When he wakes again, he will tell us everything.”
“We don’t know if he’ll be capable of that,” Fastitocalon said. “This … forcible rearrangement business is extremely hard on the individual, and he’s ill and hurt to begin with. It may have damaged his mind beyond repair.”
“Assuming he wakes up at all,” said another voice, and they all looked up. Greta was standing in the doorway, grey with fatigue.
“He’s stable,” she went on. “For now. I’ve done all I can, given the circumstances, but I can’t … tell you when, or in fact if, he will regain consciousness. There’s … a lot of damage. A lot.”
Fastitocalon wondered if he had ever seen her looking quite so bleak, and thought briefly of the morning Wilfert Helsing had died, white sky and winter-barren trees, crows calling from the rooftops. His illness had been—perhaps mercifully—swift; Fastitocalon had not been there at the end, but he had felt him go, felt the change in reality as a familiar signature winked out.
That morning, when he had arrived to find Greta dry-eyed and blank, he had not hesitated a single moment before reaching out to touch her mind: the same instinctive gesture as an outstretched hand, open arms, let me help, you are not alone, I’m here, I’m with you.
“We’ll pursue alternative avenues,” he said, his chest tight with a pain that had nothing to do with pathology. “He did already give us quite a lot, remember. The seminary—Allen Hall—I know where that is, and it sounded to me as if this little sect started out rather more innocently than it ended up.”
“There might be actual records of it,” Ruthven said, and Cranswell looked from him to the others at the table.
“Or if not records, there have to have been other people aware of the group,” he suggested. “We could maybe try figuring out if anybody knows what happened to them, where they went to ground, that kind of stuff.”
Varney nodded. “And perhaps it might be possible to find out where Brother Johann located these peculiar knives, and if there are likely to be any more of them.”
Greta was still looking almost evanescently worn, but Fastitocalon could see renewed determination under the tiredness. He knew very well that having a particular task to accomplish, a set of actions to undertake rather than trying to face the formless enormity of a situation, had always helped her cope.
“I know where the seminary is, too,” she said. “Dad had a friend there years ago, when I was just a kid; we used to visit sometimes. I have to work out how to get there on the bus, though. Cranswell is right, I’m not going into any tunnels right now unless I have to.”
“I’ll drive you,” Ruthven said. “I want to find things out just as badly as you do, but are you sure Halethorpe will be all right without you?”
“He’s stable,” she said again, but now there was guilt in her face as well as determination. Fastitocalon sighed. He could hear it as clearly as if Greta were shouting, the bright-burning thought at the surface of her mind: I can’t leave him alone.
“He won’t be left alone,” Fastitocalon told her. “I’ll keep a close eye on him, Greta. And if anything does go wrong I’m probably the one of us who can stop it going any further wrong, at least in the short term.”
She brightened visibly. “I hadn’t thought of that, but yes. Of course you are. You’re magic. Or mirabilic, whatever.”
There was a warm fondness in the words, and in fact Greta stopped leaning in the doorway and crossed the kitchen to kiss Fastitocalon firmly on the cheek.
“It’s hideous,” said Ruthven, staring across the street at the 1970s-era fa?ade of the seminary building. “I mean, the brick bit on the left is bad, but the concrete egg carton attached to it is beyond contempt. I thought Catholics were supposed to go in for the good kind of architecture.”
It was, in fact, pretty dire. Greta couldn’t remember a lot about her occasional visits here with her father, decades back, only that the chapel had smelled of lilies and brass polish and incense the way Catholic churches always did, and the priests in their black suits had unnerved her with the silent way they moved. The front of the building facing Beaufort Street was mostly a low, unprepossessing yellow-brown brick structure, but the chapel attached to it with its concrete gridwork fa?ade could only be described as grim.
“Are you going to be okay going in there?” she asked.
“My aesthetic sensibilities may need a stiff restorative drink afterward,” he said. “Don’t worry about the God thing. As long as I don’t touch holy water or the Host I ought to be all right.”
“No communion for you,” she said, feeling slightly unhinged. “Or me, for that matter. I’m a heretic. Let’s get this over with.”
Inside it wasn’t much more appealing than the external architecture had suggested, but Greta was rather acutely aware that even in a very nice (borrowed) coat over her jeans and sweater she was underdressed. Beside her Ruthven, in his quietly but extremely expensive dark clothing, fit in much less noticeably. She was a little glad when he stepped in front of her and smiled kindly at the man behind the desk. “Hello,” he said. “I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but my friend and I were hoping you could help us.”
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster, it turned out, was less inclined to be helpful than Greta might have wished. Yes, they had had a Stephen Halethorpe studying formation with them, in his second year as a seminarian. He had left a little over two months ago. No, they did not have any information on his whereabouts. No, he had not said where he was going. No, they did not have a Johann on their books, regardless of surname. And no, they certainly were not aware of any student-run clubs or organizations interested in thirteenth-century armed monastic orders. As they had informed Scotland Yard more than once, they were not a home to cults of any sort, and who exactly had Ruthven said he was, anyway, and why was he so interested in their business?