Greta leaned her head back against the door and took a long, unsteady breath. He was not here; no one was here but her, and in fact she did have something useful to do. Even if it was so far from the action.
She thought of Ruthven saying the city needs you, of Varney asking why do you do this. Of trying to explain it to him. What it meant to be needed, and to deliberately accept the responsibility of trying to meet that need.
I can do something useful, she thought. I can do my job.
Greta got up, laboriously, using the doorknob to pull herself to her feet, and started up the stairs toward her solitary patient.
It was not a long walk from Ruthven’s house to St. Paul’s any way you decided to take it, barely a mile’s distance. At this time of night there were not many people on the streets paying attention to their fellow pedestrians. Despite what he’d told Cranswell, Fastitocalon was expending energy he did not really have to spare in a very slight don’t-notice-me field around the group, and as he did so he could feel both Ruthven and Varney also either instinctively or deliberately making themselves unremarkable. The way they did it was slightly different, and if Fastitocalon hadn’t had other things on his mind he would have been interested to note more carefully the individual flavors of influence the vampire and the vampyre were exerting.
The vast bulk of the cathedral was having its own effect, bending the background mirabilic field lines around itself like a weight on a rubber sheet. As they drew nearer, Fastitocalon began to pick up the characteristic cyan traces of the monks’ signatures beneath the city streets, and at the turn from Creed Lane onto Ludgate Hill, facing the cathedral’s huge west front, he stopped to try to mark how many of them there were. He drew in his breath sharply.
“What is it?” Varney asked. Fastitocalon shook his head—give me a moment—and closed his eyes. At least two current traces, lots of older, fading ones, and something much more intense, much more powerful than any of the individuals. That one hadn’t moved. That one had stayed right where it was.
“It’s down there, all right,” Fastitocalon said, starting to walk again. “Maybe a hundred feet down. Could be deeper; it’s hard to tell with the cathedral distorting the fields. It’s … it must have grown stronger just recently. I’ve passed by here I don’t know how many times and felt nothing but the church. If it can drown that out, it’s definitely gathering strength.”
“Does it know we’re here?” Cranswell asked.
“Not yet,” he said. “I’m doing my best to make sure it won’t until we’re a great deal closer.” Already the strain was audible in his voice. “There’s just two of them down there at the moment; it could be worse.”
“We’ll have to take the lift-shaft stairs down,” Ruthven said. “If it’s anything like the shelters at Belsize Park and Clapham there will be a separate direct surface access shaft as well as the entrance from the tube station. Fass, can you tell—”
He had his eyes closed again, feeling for the shape of the spaces under the earth, reaching out with his mind as much as he dared without alerting anything to their presence. “Ventilation ducts,” he said, eyes still shut, and turned a little to point. “In the traffic island between Newgate Street and King Edward’s Road. That way. Opens on a deep shaft. I can’t see clearly but that’s got to be it.”
Cranswell was trembling slightly with excitement. “How are people not gonna notice us prying open the gratings and climbing inside?”
“You’re going to do it very quickly,” said Fastitocalon, “and since both Ruthven and Sir Francis can make themselves unnoticeable, you’ll stay very close together.”
“What about you?” Cranswell asked.
“I’m going to be giving the Gladius Sancti chappies a bit of a surprise,” he said, feeling the edges of his strength, trying to determine if he could actually do what he planned to attempt. Maybe. Probably. It wasn’t as if there was much choice. “At least I hope I am. We’ll find out in a hurry, either way.”
In fact it took surprisingly little time to get into the shaft. They timed it carefully, watching the traffic, and Cranswell stuck close to Ruthven as advised. The shaft rose up like a brick pillar—or a chimney—aboveground; there was an access door in the brick wall, fastened with a padlock that Ruthven twisted open as if it had been made of chewing gum. Inside, metal steps led down into the dark.
Into the complete dark. It was like walking into a cave. “I can’t see,” Cranswell hissed once they were all inside; he clutched the hilt of the saber at his hip and flattened himself to the invisible wall of the shaft.
“Yes, but we can,” Ruthven said, and sighed irritably. Cranswell stared as two pinpoints of red appeared in the darkness, brightening rapidly, and blinked themselves at him. “There. Is that better?”
He had instinctively jerked backward, and his head bonked into the metal wall with a faint musical note. “Jesus Christ, Ruthven, how about you warn me when you’re gonna do something ridiculously creepy, okay?”
The points of light rolled upward in exasperation and then vanished as their owner turned to face the other way, but the dim red glow they cast was still enough for Cranswell to make out the swells of rivets in the curved wall of the shaft, and the steps leading downward in a spiral around the narrow circular hoistway of the old lift. The cables were so rusty they looked as if a good tug would snap them in two.
Ruthven led the way down the staircase and Varney followed, and, after a moment, so did Cranswell, hand tight around the hilt of the saber. It was actually easier going than he had feared. With the red glow to see by, his night vision was just about up to the task.
“Assuming it was designed the same way as the other deep-level shelters,” Ruthven said in an undertone, “this ought to lead down to one end of the shelter tunnel complex, which is probably directly underneath the tube station. The rectifier is probably located not very far away from the bottom of the shaft, because it and the transformer and rheostats run the lift and the fan machinery. I don’t know which direction it will be, but we’ll find out.”
“Let’s hope we don’t find out that it’s guarded by a brace of armed lunatics,” Varney said sourly.
Cranswell was conscious of a certain gathering conviction, as they descended the staircase, that perhaps his insistence on coming along with the others might not have been his wisest-ever move. The hilt of Ruthven’s sword was slick with sweat and felt entirely alien to his hand, weighing heavily on its belt, and he wished fervently that he hadn’t eaten quite so much at dinner.
“Stop,” Ruthven said softly. All three of them halted, listening intently for any sound from below.