“She says, they break the bottle and let out the fire, and everyone will dance and burn,” he translated. Greta sighed.
“I can see why you’d think that,” she said, “but it’s—it can’t live outside its bottle. It won’t escape and kill anyone, it’ll just go out, like a blown candle, and stop … being dangerous, except the whole mercury contamination angle, which I am not going to think about right now. They have to shut it down, or break it, either way.”
“Shut it down?” Mewleep said.
“Yes. It has to stop.”
“Kill power,” he said, as if to make sure.
“Yes. That. Shut it down, turn it off, kill the power, throw the goddamn switch, whatever phrasing you like,” she said, and heard her voice rising, and hated it.
“I know how.”
In the dim light of the rotting wood he held, Greta could not make out his expression as clearly as she would like. “You do?” she said.
“The humans in the tunnel are talking,” he said. “I do not listen at first but then one says kill, and then I am listening hard. They are talking about power. They are talking about a box and a switch that kills, and where this box is found, outside the tunnels.”
Greta stared at him. If Ruthven had been right and the shelters were all laid out close to the same way—Why hadn’t they thought of that, God, they didn’t have to go walking right into the thing’s lair armed only with a cavalry saber and a couple of silk veils, it—
“Do you remember—” she began, and didn’t have to finish. He nodded.
“I listen,” he said. “I listen very well, Dr. Helsing. I am hearing everything they say, and I remember.”
“We have to get to the St. Paul’s tube station,” she said. “That’s where it is. Underneath. If it’s the same kind of shelter the switch will probably be in the same place. Can you take me there, Mewleep? Can you take me there right now?”
Fastitocalon stood very still in the shadows of a shop doorway on Newgate Street, not seeing the familiar pavement beneath his feet at all. In his rather more complicated vision the surface of the street was merely a translucent intimation, a line drawn on a layered diagram. He could see the lift shaft with its staircase coiling down into the dark, and the peculiar vertically stacked platforms of St. Paul’s station proper, and below that—
Below that was a tangled pulsing knot of brilliant blue, staining and filling up the bores of the abandoned shelter complex. The comings and goings of the blue monks were recorded in their looping and returning traces, like the tracks of animals, and Fastitocalon could see where they had crept from tunnel system to tunnel system on their deadly errands, moving under the city with a kind of blind, insectile determination. The blue trails converged on the throbbing heart of the glow, where whatever it was that had done this to them—to the mad monks, to the murder victims, to Varney and Greta and God knew who else—lay waiting.
He did not think it was aware of them, just yet. He was putting out quite a lot of energy into holding a shield around Varney and Cranswell and Ruthven as they crept down the turns of the staircase, and there was nothing in the pulsing light that indicated it knew he was there. Fastitocalon knew better than to hope, but he had been dwelling here on the skin of the world for a long, long time, and some human habits were hard to break.
He could see, too, the blue points of the two monks still present in the shelter tunnels. When the others had reached almost the bottom of the staircase and stopped to wait for his signal, Fastitocalon took a deep, painful breath—everything hurt now; he was running on empty and he still had so much to do—and focused on the two blue points.
A moment later there was a muffled bang like a car backfiring, as the air where Fastitocalon had been collapsed suddenly in on itself.
He found himself surrounded by a dank, chilly blackness, the dense lightless atmosphere of places under the earth. Not that he needed light to see any more than the Gladius Sancti did. To him the tunnel in which he stood was a transparent outline on a kind of moving blueprint.
He was quite aware that the two monks, who had frozen at the sudden disturbance of his arrival, were now approaching him with their crossblades drawn and ready, and he let them get quite close before he changed.
Through all the centuries he had spent on earth, Fastitocalon had looked very much the same from age to age, grey-pale, fiftyish, respectable, unremarkable. Human. Now he very deliberately took that seeming off and the blackness of the tunnel was suddenly lit with moving, flickering orange light.
The wings felt strange, after so long without them. In fact the whole form felt strange—not unpleasant, simply unfamiliar. Fastitocalon, now not even remotely mistakable for a middle-aged human accountant, floated a few inches off the floor and spread his wings as far as they would go, filling the tunnel bore from side to side.
The wings of demons, contrary to supposition, can look like pretty much anything the owner wants them to. Leathery and batlike had of course been in vogue on and off forever, and some people went in for complicated hymenopteran versions with lots of little iridescent veins, but Fastitocalon’s were the same white as they had been since the flames of Lake Avernus bleached their color away all those ages ago, the morning of the Fall. The feathers were a little tatty, perhaps. In need of a good preen. Mostly the flickering orange light that limned each one of them hid the wear.
The two monks had frozen as soon as the light show had started up, and were staring at him. Their eyes were blank, a boiled-egg white behind the blue glow, like Halethorpe’s had been, and Fastitocalon could remember very clearly saying, Your soul’s intact. I’m looking right at it.
He was looking right at theirs now, and there was something there inside, tangled and overgrown with mad buzzing blue.
“Angel,” one of them whispered. The blades were drooping forgotten in their hands.
This might actually work, thought Fastitocalon, doing his best to smile. And then reached hard, hard into both their minds, sank his grip into the lashing blue tendrils wrapped around each, and pulled.
He could feel the others nearby, and as he pulled, he shouted at the top of his mental voice, NOW!
It was loud enough to make all three of them jump, though none of them had heard a sound. Ruthven looked from Cranswell to Varney, apparently making some final decision of his own, and nodded, and together they plunged down the last curve of the spiral staircase and into the light.