Ruthven came around fairly quickly, in time to catch Greta telling the others about the house fire, whereupon he promptly fainted again. Kneeling beside him, she felt the pulse in his throat and looked up at the others grimly. “We need to get him out of here. Sooner rather than later.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Cranswell asked.
“Other than the burns—shock, dehydration, UV poisoning. He shouldn’t have come down here in the first place. Fass was right.”
“He and Varney were fighting off the monks together,” Cranswell said. “Without both of them here I’m pretty sure we’d all be dead right about now, or at least permanently insane. Can you fix him?”
“He needs blood,” she said. “And not to be here. There’s—I think there’s some of that poisonous stuff in the air. It’s almost certainly contaminated most of the surfaces; it’s not doing him any good at all. How did you get down here?”
“We took the stairs,” said Varney, and looked at her, blinking. “How did you get in? For that matter, why are you here in the first place? I thought it had been agreed that you were to stay on the surface.”
“The ghouls brought me,” she said, sitting back on her heels. “I had this idea based on something Mewleep had said that it might be possible to turn off the goddamn rectifier the easy way, by flipping a switch, but it doesn’t matter now. You killed it.”
The quality of the sudden silence struck Greta as strange. “What?”
“You turned off the power somewhere? Down here? Just now?” Cranswell demanded.
“I turned it off and then right back on again, because, well, that was when Fass kind of vanished from my head,” she said, looking up at them. He was still there, in her mind: very faint now and far, but present. “And the obvious mental linkage was that I’d fucked up somehow by flipping that switch, logic or no logic, so I turned it back on. Why?”
He and Varney were staring at one another. “When—” Varney began. “Just at the end, for that one moment—”
“—it dropped out,” Cranswell finished for him, and then returned his gaze to Greta. “We didn’t know why, but the power just kind of flickered out briefly, and we could actually kind of think again without that voice yelling in our heads, and more importantly we could move, and before it could grab us again I got close enough to hit it with my sword.”
“Which I doubt he would have been able to do,” Varney said, “without the momentary flicker in its attention. It was … strong. Stronger than we anticipated. I think we all owe you rather a large debt of gratitude.”
“It worked?” said Greta, blinking.
“It sure as hell did,” Cranswell told her. “That probably saved everybody’s collective ass, right there. ‘Thank you’ sounds puerile, doesn’t it? Samael said a whole bunch more people would have died if we hadn’t stopped the thing, so, that’s kind of on you, I think. Well done.”
“Thank Mewleep, not me,” Greta said. “He was the one who knew about the switch panel and also not only where it was but which one of the goddamn switches I needed to pull. Look, never mind that for the moment. We really do have to get Edmund out of here.”
She tucked her hair back, feeling about four thousand years old, and tried to consider logistics. “We’ll have to carry him up the stairs—shit, there won’t be any light; this is going to be impossible—”
“Allow me,” said Varney, kneeling down beside her. He gently nudged her aside, and she proceeded to watch in astonishment as he hoisted Ruthven’s limp form over his shoulder as if the vampire weighed nothing at all.
Greta and Cranswell exchanged looks. “Lead on,” she said to Varney, pushing herself to her feet, and took a last look around the tunnel: the heaps of feathers, the black bloodstain on the floor, the bodies of the two Gladius Sancti monks Fastitocalon had been trying to free. “It’s over, isn’t it? It’s over.”
“It is,” said Varney, and as she turned to follow him out of the shelter, Greta thought, slightly to her own surprise, that she believed him.
The journey up the spiral staircase in the dark was not something Greta wanted to recall with any clarity afterward. It was not completely dark, but the light thrown by Varney’s eyes was barely enough for them to make out the stairs, and Cranswell and Greta had to move slowly, feeling their way. It took what felt like hours, every muscle in her body aching as she forced herself up one more step, and one more, and one more.
Cranswell’s watch was broken; she had no idea how long they had been down there, underneath the city. It might be midday in the world above. It might be the next night. She was so tired she could not think in straight lines, and it did not help that the staircase was a twisting spiral, dizzying and endless. Nor did she have any idea what kind of state the world might be in when they emerged, though she could not seem to muster the strength to care so terribly much.
Greta was so lost in her own swirling, treacle-thick thoughts that she didn’t notice the darkness of the shaft slowly changing color. She almost walked into Varney when he stopped and held up a hand.
In front of them, light outlined some kind of door. She could hear things. Sirens. The sounds of a city: people, cars.
Varney very carefully pushed the rectangular door open a little, letting in dim greyish light that nonetheless hurt Greta’s eyes with its brightness. He peered through the crack and pushed it open all the way, then stepped through.
She followed, and Cranswell after her. They were—she blinked, looking around—they were on a traffic island between Newgate Street and King Edward’s Road. The tower of Christ Church Greyfriars stood across the street, its spire catching what Greta realized must be the light of dawn.
It was London. Still there. Still in one piece. Although as the three of them stared around themselves a fire engine went past with lights and sirens blaring, and the smell of smoke was heavy in the air. Greta could see two—no, three—columns of black smoke rising over the rooftops.
They didn’t just hit Ruthven’s house with their firebombs, she thought. They must have had a busy night.
She looked down at herself. She was covered in grime—luckily most of the blood just looked black, less alarming than it might otherwise have been. The others were just as filthy. Ruthven, still draped over Varney’s shoulder, gave a little moan, and Greta felt the jagged edges of despair opening up, threatening to swallow her. He needed to be in bed, he needed medical attention, and his house was probably a smoking ruin, and they didn’t have anywhere to go.
“What do we do now?” asked Cranswell. Whitish dust powdered his hair, turned his dark face ashy. “Not to point out the obvious or anything, but we’re kind of in bad shape.”