“But Stephen was?” Greta asked, her hand still on his back.
“Oh yes. Yes, Stephen was.”
She exchanged a look with Ruthven, over Whitlow’s bowed head, and felt the weight of uncertainty spinning down to a single, solid point.
“What happened after that?” she said.
“John wanted us all to take an oath,” he said. “I could recognize bits of it. He was cherry-picking from Scripture. But the night he wanted us to sign this paper—”
He gave another racking, hoarse little sound halfway between a cough and a sob. “It wasn’t John. Or, not just John. I could … I could have sworn his eyes were brown before, but that night in the church they were blue. And he—he sounded like more than one voice was speaking, when he talked. Like the demons. Our name is Legion.”
“What did you do?” she asked, gently.
“I said I needed to meditate on it. He didn’t like that, but he let me go. I went back to our room and prayed. For hours. I was still praying when Stephen came back.”
She and Ruthven exchanged a glance, but neither spoke. After a moment Whitlow sagged a little farther, burying his face once more in his hands. “He came back late at night. Early in the morning, actually. He was … different.”
“Different how?” Greta asked, with a fair idea of the answer.
“His eyes were strange. Bluer. They had been grey before. I could have sworn they gave off light, how—I don’t know what I saw, just—he said some things, some stuff out of Revelation, it wasn’t like him at all. I asked what had happened and he said he’d seen the light, like one of those American preachers on TV, do you see the light, and he said he wanted me to see it, too, and his voice—like John’s earlier, it wasn’t just his voice, there was something else in there talking, something that wasn’t Stephen—”
Whitlow broke off again, pressing his hands against his face. “And I saw him across the room, clear as day, and I saw—I saw the carpet underneath his feet, and there was light there, he wasn’t touching the ground, he wasn’t standing on the fucking ground at all—”
She could feel him shaking helplessly under her hand. “What did you do then?”
“I ran,” he said, still hiding his face. “I ran, what the fuck do you think?”
It was late into the afternoon, getting on toward evening, when Halethorpe regained consciousness again. This time it was Fastitocalon dozing in the chair by the bed. The slight shift in Halethorpe’s signature as he woke caught his attention.
“Hello,” Fastitocalon said, sitting up properly. “How are you feeling?”
Halethorpe blinked several times, hard, the exaggerated blinking of someone trying to clear his vision, but the ruined eyes remained unfocused. His face was turned almost, but not quite, in Fastitocalon’s direction.
“Who’s there? I can’t … I can’t see, who’s there?”
The voice was … different, now, subtly; it had lost a quality Fastitocalon realized had been something like an echo, a reverb effect. Now he just sounded tired and desperately ill, and very, very human. But recognizably himself, and not that other.
Fastitocalon was struck, again, by how tenacious the human race could be—against what odds it had managed to hang on over the centuries. “I’m Fastitocalon,” he said. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced; I’m a friend of Ruthven and Dr. Helsing.”
The blind face turned farther toward him, looking not at Fastitocalon’s own face but somewhere just beyond his right ear. Without the blue glow Halethorpe’s eyes looked even nastier. Visible ulceration had begun to spread.
“Not … with the mirror eyes?”
“No, that’s Varney. Another friend. The chatty young man with the American accent is August Cranswell. I’m the antique in the beautifully cut suit.”
“You’re … grey,” Halethorpe said, half a question.
“That’s right. It’s a constitutional thing, I’m afraid.”
Halethorpe seemed to consider that, closing his eyes for a moment. Fever spots burned in his cheeks, the shiny blotches of burn scars standing out starkly against the red. “I can’t see,” he said again. “Why can’t I see?”
Fastitocalon sighed. “Well. It’s rather a long story, and we were hoping you could tell us most of it, actually. Do you remember anything at all?”
“The … blue light underground. Light of God. Voice of God.”
“You know it isn’t really God,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“It speaks … in your head. Speaks words. Voice of God … only not still or, or small. It burns you.”
“It puts out a great deal of UV radiation,” said Fastitocalon. “I gather you were … made to do vigil before it?”
“There was … there was a ritual.” He seemed to be making an effort to speak, eyes still squeezed shut, but slightly more lucid than before. “Fasting and … prayer and … being allowed to enter the light. Be burned clean.”
Fastitocalon watched as his hands on the bedclothes curled into fists. “Gave us … new sight. Different sight. I … I learned how to move again. To recognize where walls were, seeing through them …” He swallowed hard, and fresh tears spilled down his face. “Only … only the purified could carry the blade.”
“Those blades, where did they come from? Who made them?”
Halethorpe shook his head slightly. “I don’t know. Johann—Brother Johann—he found them. God guided him to find them.”
Fastitocalon sighed. “You lived underground, then?”
“Yes. In the tunnels. Once we were burned … we stayed underground, except to do God’s work.”
“And God’s work was to execute monsters.”
“Evil,” he said. “Yes. And … and the wicked. The workers of iniquity.”
“The light determined who was wicked and who wasn’t, I gather?”
“It spoke to Brother Johann. Those who failed to carry out his orders are … punished.” The hollow between his collarbones pulsed with the rapid beating of his heart.
“Where is it? The thing itself?”
“Under the Underground,” Halethorpe said. “Deep under. Some kind of … old tunnels beneath St. Paul’s tube station.”
Fastitocalon blinked. It had been that close to them, all along? The half a mile or so of space that separated Ruthven’s house from St. Paul’s Cathedral felt suddenly very, very narrow indeed.
“Thank you,” he said, after a moment, gently. “Enough for now. You need to rest; you’re safe here, nothing can harm you.”
“Not safe. I’m damned. Cursed of God, anathema—”
“No, you aren’t. Believe me, I would know. You were a creature other than human for a while there, but the thing that was inside you has gone; you are no more damned than any other man, and less so than some, I would say. Being excommunicated from the Gladius Sancti is a serious mark in your favor.”
“How do you know?” Halethorpe sounded faintly peevish.
“I’m a demon. Well, mostly a demon. I felt it leave you.”