Survivors

Chapter the Fourth: The Kingdom of the Blind

Márton-hegyi Apátság, Magyarország, Pannonhalma House of the Black Order of Knights-Exorcist, 6 January 18—

As a young woman, Exorcist General Miranda Lotte had never considered herself a particularly pious individual. She had not, for example, ever attended church with anything approaching regularity: she had sewed for the charitable societies sponsored by the wives of assorted ecclesiastical officials of the marrying variety, yes; she had rubbed beeswax polish into the floors and pews and refectory tables belonging to the non-marrying sort, yes; but she had rarely permitted herself the leisure to idle in any particular house of worship except on Christmas and Easter, when it seemed proper to offer a small word of thanks among all the others. After all, bad as things sometimes were in her life, they could always be that much worse and that they weren't she was inclined to attribute to divine intervention. It wasn't that she lacked faith – she was, in fact, quite sure that God had everything well in hand was generally untroubled by allegations to the contrary by certain of her loudly, publicly disgruntled countrymen – and she was equally sure that, as she had little to offer her wholly material employers, there was even less she could give to Omnipotence. That she might possess intrinsic personal value, invisible to human eyes, had never once entered her mind and once that truth had been blatantly obvious it still took a not inconsiderable length of time to fully settle in and become an immutable part of her character. Now that she was a somewhat older woman, General Lotte still did not consider herself particularly pious, though not for want of faith in the Almighty or direct knowledge of Its hand at work in the world; rather, her failure to observe niceties of form was a function of being continually embroiled in the demands of her office. In fact, she quite enjoyed finding new ways to make her position work for her in that regard, since she could think of nothing more irritating to the peace of her spirit than to sit about in chapel doing nothing while reports piled up on her desk or the men under her command sat idle for want of direction or someone needed help with their Algebra homework. And when there was no waiting pile to deal with, she often simply poked about the premises and found something else to tidy up, stitch back together, or scrub clean, metaphorically and literally, to the point that the refectory staff had permanently banned her presence from the kitchen in order to spare the crockery – she had never, after all, completely shed the physical awkwardness that had been the bane of her early life.

It was, in fact, before an empty desk that she found herself sitting that night, three days after Illes' visionary fit had chased her out of her bed and one after Rinali had emerged from her annual Twelve-tide hermitage. She had disposed the last of her official business some time before, a neat stack of reviewed and signed reports occupying the little wooden bin on the mirror-polished upper left hand corner, the little wooden bin in the upper right empty, waiting for more work to come to it, permanently ink-stained blotter bare but for a several sheets of paper, copies of the images Illes' visions had imparted. The originals had, of course, been forwarded to Home over the wireless network, but she had ordered Signals Division to make a copy for her personal files; she had, in fact, been poring over them for days, trying to make sense of whatever connection existed between them, if any. Now, five days later, she was still no closer to any particular answers on that score – and apparently neither was anyone else, to judge from the relative silence and lack of questions originating westward – and her concern had yet to abate in any serious way. Home had, in addition to asking no further questions of a frail and delicate child, not forwarded any comforting findings with regard to the fate of that child's subject matter.

She had not seen Ravi in the flesh for the best part of seven years. If Illes' vision was anything to judge by, those years had treated him at least passingly well: a scattering of silver in his red hair, a cluster of tiny wrinkles next to his single visible eye, a suggestion of something faintly sad about the set of his mouth. As a younger man, he was almost never to be found without a smile of some sort on his face, a teasing little smile that forced whomever he turned it on to smile back at him no matter how dire the situation, the tight fierce grin he flashed just before he called down lightning or fire or screaming sledgehammer winds, the softer, gentler expression he wore when he looked at everyone else and he thought no one else was looking back. She somehow got the feeling that nowadays he didn't smile half so much; she knew, from assorted reports that she'd seen in her official command capacity, that he had effectively resigned his position in the Black Order and remained connected to it by only the most tenuous of ties, more out of some sense of duty than any overwhelming desire to maintain that bond. If, indeed, there was any bond truly still there; she had not been privy, all those years ago, to the precise details of the events surrounding Ravi's departure from Home and his subsequent year-long disappearance, during which Komui Li had not precisely expended all the energies at his command searching for the somewhat wayward young Bookman. She had gathered, by virtue of being a shoulder to half the Order's weary, heart sore survivors, including Rinali, that something had passed between them that had cooled the once warm friendship they had enjoyed, but she had never felt it quite proper to press for more than that. She expected that, eventually, Rinali or Ravi or both would eventually come to her of their own recognizance and seek comfort or her advice or that the situation would eventually right itself as time worked its healing touch on both their hearts. But she had reckoned without the ferocity with which Rinali would nurture both her grief and her anger and Ravi's willingness to turn his back on everyone who had loved him and whom she had thought he loved in return. In truth, she had been hurt by that abandonment herself, especially in the days immediately after the end, when there had been so many in pain and in need and so few to offer help for it, so few to soothe the hurts and begin putting everyone and everything back together again. In truth, she had all-but given up on him but, then, the letters began arriving – first for Rinali and then for her, once a year, on their birthdays; that was how she learned he had set up premises in a working-class neighbourhood of London as a bookseller, that he thought of them often, that he missed them both fiercely, though he never said as much in so many words. As with many things about him, it came down to being able to read between his lines. Occasionally, she would even write back; even more occasionally, she would find some excuse to call him on the wireless network, some minor matter of research most often, so she could hear for herself that he was well.

Or, if not well, at least not laying dead in a ditch somewhere.

The wireless golem buzzed softly as she activated it, sounding like nothing so much as a wildflower field full of bees, a technical oddity that the Science Division nagged her regularly to have fixed, but which she found oddly endearing. "Signals."

"General?"

"Please connect me to the Bookman's wireless station."

"Just a moment, General." A pause, a number of clicks, a low cyclical droning.

It occurred to her, as she sat there waiting for the call to connect, that she really didn't have a good reason at all to be calling just now, practically in the middle of the night, and that she ought to come up with at least a half-reasonable attempt at a cover story. She was still rooting amongst the most recent field reports on her desk when the call connected.

"Hello...?"

Miranda froze, the papers in her hand rustling slightly, at the sound of Ravi's voice emerging from the wireless speaker; even in the single word he spoke, there was something audibly...off in his tone – something just slightly too tense, something almost wary. "Ravi. Hello – it's Miranda. Am I disturbing you?"

On the other end of the line, a quick intake of breath, expelled in a sigh. "Miranda. No, no, you're not disturbing me. I hadn't retired yet. What can I do for you?"

" – I – " A frantic flip through the papers provided her rescue. "One of my field teams recently brought a matter to my attention that I thought would interest you, as well. Have you ever heard of a 'Black Madonna'?"

"...Yes," A somewhat wry admission, as though he feared he was about to deflate her wholly manufactured enthusiasm. "'Heard' being the operative term, as I've never seen one. Why do you ask?"

"Evidently, there's one up and moving about the area. Or so the report I've received says – the team encountered at least three refugee villages in the area that claim to have been visited by a creature they describe as a 'walking statue' of the Virgin, black-skinned and glad in gold, speaking a language none of them knew. One of the team said the description reminded of the statue that had stood in Częstochowa, before the town was destroyed."

"Hm. I'll query the Archive, if you like, to see if I can come up with an image of the Virgin of Częstochowa for your teams to show about – there's more than enough evidence to support the idea that it might be an Innocence-bearing inanimate object," A pause. "Now. Why did you really call me?"

"...I wanted to see if you were well." She replied, softly. "I hadn't a chance to write or call before...before Christmas."

"I'm fine." His voice softened, as well. "Not even a sniffle to mar the joy of my holiday season, this year." Another pause, longer this time. "Is...Rina...?"

"Rinali is...well. Better than she was at this time last year, at least. The weather has held unusually mild." It came out in a rush, before she could stop it. "Ravi, there's a boy here...a little boy who carries a defensive form parasite-type...He sees things. Has visions, I should say, of things before they happen. He saw you, Ravi, and I'm very afraid that something – " She stopped, took several deep breaths. "I was worried that you might be in danger. You're still in London, aren't you?"

"Yes," He actually sounded a little amused around the edges. "But that doesn't mean I'm not in danger. The air here is terrible – you can choke to death on the fog on a hot summer's day."

"Ravi, please do not take this lightly. I – "

"I know. Miranda," He sounded so weary, for a moment her heart ached sharply in the back of her throat and tears pricked at her eyes, "Thank you for telling me. No one else called. I'll keep watch as best I can. And I'll call you in a day or two with what I can find. Agreed?"

"Agreed. But – " The line clicked closed before she could finish.

Within the ranks of the Black Order, years of long and bitter experience had affixed in the imaginations of all and sundry the proper image of what a sorcerer ought to look like. This image – heavily influenced by both the preferred appearance of the Order's most dire enemy and assorted lurid publications of a completely inappropriate nature that had found their way into the library's possession – was not what anyone could consider flattering: rotund to the point of grotesquery, features of an exaggeratedly distorted inhuman nature, a ludicrously overdeveloped sense of fashion that, laying over the aforementioned bloated corpus, was productive more of pure visual trauma more than any sort of sensual appreciation. Pince-nez. An umbrella. The literature of the time provided the occasional addition of a Satanic little goatee to the image, but not everyone thought such things the inevitable product of dabbling in the realm of arts and sciences man was not meant to know; the Order was willing to allow that some people simply didn't like to shave as often as Order general regulations and the basic standards of hygiene dictated. Similarly, it was usually understood that every sorcerer required, as part of his standard equipage, a sanctum of some sort: a high spindly tower rising over the ruins of a broken city or off the top of some lonely windswept mountain somewhere; a mist-shrouded island off the barren coast of some faraway land; a crumbling medieval fastness brooding on a cliff overlooking the valley in which his serfs trembled beneath his long, cold shadow. Were the sorcerer not evil – simply ancient and ascetic, a delver into the deep mysteries of the universe and a maker of divers and wonderful devices to aid mankind – he was occasionally permitted to resemble in form a member of the Science Division and possess a cosy if cluttered laboratory full of half-finished inventions and assorted masses of loose paper that were still scrawled in things that didn't bear close examination.

Exorcist General Marian Cross (Ret.) thus managed to avoid being known as a sorcerer by virtue of failing in nearly every respect to adhere to type or stereotype except one – the Satanic little goatee – and generally behaving in a manner that suggested his darkest secrets likely revolved around the number of redheaded children left behind everywhere he travelled in his misspent youth. This was the way he preferred it, for otherwise he knew in his heart of hearts he would spend most of his waking hours shoving heartsick young men and women begging him for love spells, love potions, love advice, or, occasionally, simply love out of his office with a push broom and writing stern letters to their parents about the sort of morally deficient offspring they were raising. He had decided, when he took the post of Headmaster at the Walker School, that he would make an honest (for him) attempt at rehabilitating his thoroughly disreputable reputation for at least a decade or so and, thus, it behoved him not to bed the sizeable portion of the student body who sat classes with him and immediately became smitten or otherwise encourage the sort of immoral behaviours amongst the ones who were smitten with each other that would inevitably result in Crown educational inspectors making even more snide remarks about the state of Scottish education in their annual reports than they already did. Thus he permitted his students and faculty to suspect that all his oats were sown quite well in the past, that he was doing his best to atone for all that hell-raising by becoming a valuable and staid member of the academic community, and that the abnormal dimensions of his office and personal quarters were tricks of the light and well-placed mirrors and not a function of skills he had learned in schools of a far darker provenance than any of them could guess at much less imagine. Being a sorcerer, he did, after all, require a sanctum.

He also, on the morning after Twelfth Night, required a vast quantity of black coffee, assorted preparations obtained from the local chemist suitable for the treatment of an aching head and a somewhat sour stomach, a comfortably be pillowed sopha on which to lounge most of the morning while taking all those things, along with a breakfast of soft-cooked eggs, toasted bread, milky porridge, and other foods gentle to the digestion for he was as cruelly, viciously hungover as he could ever recall being. Over the Christmas and New Year's holidays it was his custom of at least the last several years to spend that halcyon period of time when the school was empty of all but him and the kitchen staff in as profound a state of personal dissipation, debauchery, and general rakish disregard for the high honour of the position he occupied as he could manage. This year, he managed spectacularly and he privately blamed the cook's egg-nog, which was precisely as potent as she had suggested and probably somewhat more. Also: Cloud Nine's presence Home for the first time in several years, which they had celebrated exuberantly enough that he suspected the presence of bruises in places that would prove most embarrassing over the next handful of days. It was thus that the cook, Mrs. McFarland, found him, sprawled on a sopha stolen from the innards of some depraved heathen sultan's pleasure-palace, only dubiously clad in a pair of loose silk trousers, a sleeping-mask pulled over his eyes, snoring quietly, as the hour drew close to midday.

"Headmaster."

The gentle chorus of snores did not cease in any appreciable way.

"Headmaster."

The aforementioned rolled over onto his side away from her, pulling a coverlet over his head to augment the sleeping-mask.

"Headmaster, the General's respects and will you kindly drag yourself out of bed before tea? He's come all the way from Italy to see you."

"Italy?" Cross sat up, shedding coverlet and mask in one swift motion. "General Theodore is here?"

"I warned you about the egg-nog, but would you listen? No, you did not." Mrs. Jennet McFarland was a formidable woman of middle years, comprised of equal parts admirable efficiency, the boundless capacity for meddling, and no tolerance whatsoever for fools; she made it quite clear on a regular basis that she only tolerated working for him because, otherwise, she feared he would burn the building down. "Yes, General Theodore is here. I have laid a meal in the private dining parlour and I expect you to attend him there in no less than a quarter of an hour. And put on some clothes, you heathen."

A quarter of an hour and precisely thirty seconds later, Marian Cross entered the private dining parlour set aside for the entertainment of visiting dignitaries and assorted parents of sufficiently advanced social position, clad in something resembling decent clothing inasmuch as all his major limbs were covered, though he had refused to brush his hair. General Froi Theodore, seated at the table laid before the cheerfully crackling fire and looking approximately a century older than he had the last time Cross had laid eyes on him, declined to rise but instead inclined his head briefly in greeting and reached out to pour the tea. Theodore was, Cross realized, not dressed in his formal black-and-gold uniform for the first time in memory, but a somewhat travel stained suit of unrelieved black: black linen shirt, watered silk black waistcoat, sharply creased black trousers, jet cravat pin and cuff-links and buttons, either still in full mourning for his apprentices or fresh mourning for someone more recently dead. The ensemble did him no favours: his already deep-set eyes seemed sunken even more deeply into his saturnine face, his skin touched with an unhealthy pallor beneath the light tan he had acquired at some point since moving permanently south.

"Theo. To what do I owe the honour of this visit to my present bailiwick?" Cross sat, trying not to be too visibly shocked; Theodore had not been a young man when they first met but the change in him was drastic even so, and could not all be attributed to the Mediterranean climate he had been marinating in since his election to his current post: the Order's resident ambassadorial delegate to the Holy See, the reward for a lifetime of service, an inadequate balm for cruel loss.

"I cannot simply call upon an old friend?" Theodore's usually gentle smile, framed in the deep grooves worn by a lifetime of such smiles, seemed somehow less than totally sincere.

"Oh, certainly you could call – if you were coming from Edinburgh, not, oh, to choose a random example, Rome." Cross replied with pardonable asperity, accepting the steaming cup handed him and liberally adulterating its contents with sugar and a freshly cut round of lemon, in the absence of whisky. "What – "

"I have resigned my commission," Theodore's soft voice crossed his own and silenced him as effectively as a shout. "And my ambassadorial position at the Vatican."

"What." He could not quite manage the inflection necessary to make that a question, so surprised was he.

"I am dying, Marian," Theodore answered as though he had, anyway. "I have been ill for some time – there is nothing more to be done for it, and so I have come home while I am still able to travel."

"I – " Cross stopped, considered, restarted. "I could try – "

"No. I have not come here to beg the aid of your arts, Marian. My sons sleep here, and soon I will sleep beside them." Theodore set down his cup and bent, with obvious difficulty, to extract a thick packet of documents, wrapped in an aged leather folio and bound with rough twine. "I have come to bring these to you – certain documents of a somewhat...prejudicial nature that Inquisitor-Commander Link thought best extracted from the Vatican archive..." He handed the package across the table. "And also to deliver you a warning. His Holiness has ordered the activation of a special unit of the Inquisition Contra Diabolum enim et alii Daemones."

"What?" Cross looked up from the folio, an entirely too familiar-looking folio by half, stunned twice in as many minutes.

"The Holy See has come to the not entirely irrational conclusion that the threat currently facing humanity is far greater than that arising from any number of feral akuma." Theodore refreshed his tea, sipped meditatively, and continued on. "The number of accommodators has not, after all, fallen off but has continued to increase since the advent of the Heart. That implies, to some, the continued existence of a threat vulnerable to Innocence that is not directly derivative of the Earl of the Millennium, or entirely dependent upon his acts."

"The Noah."

"Even so."

"And so the rational response was to reactivate an arm of the Inquisition responsible for hunting witches and demons?" Cross' couldn't quite keep the derision from his voice. "Who thought that was the height of brilliance, I'd like to know – "

"Malcolm Louvellier." The sound of Theodore setting down his teacup was the loudest thing in the room for several moments thereafter. "Or, to be more precise, he heavily promoted the idea, along with Inquisitor-General Montesi and an assortment of Cardinals, bishops, and individuals who have no excuse for not knowing better. It is my understanding that an Inquisitorial delegation will be dispatched to the Order before spring arrives."

"To the Order. For what bloody purpose? Innocence doesn't detect the presence of Noah – "

"No – but the Order does possess the most expansive collection of information concerning the House of Noah, due to the efforts of the Bookmen to compile and relay such information, and the most salient direct experience in dealing with the Noah. The Inquisitors are coming to interrogate and train." A deep sigh emerged from him, and Cross very distinctly felt an even worse headache than he'd already possessed coming on quite swiftly. "They are also enjoined to determine what, if any, resources the Order possesses that might enable the identification of Noah who have not yet awakened – and, if such resources do not yet exist, they are to require the Order's assistance in developing them."

"...That's insane."

"'Preventative measures,' are, I believe, the term that is currently being employed." Theodore paused for a moment to finish his tea. "I do not know precisely what connection you possess to the House of Noah, Marian – I do not want to know, and I have made a point of never learning it – but I doubt that the Inquisitorial delegation will exercise such forebearance. You may wish to consider what you want to do with the rest of your life."

River Wendham was not a man given to regular effusive expressions of emotion – any emotion. When all was panicky, tearstained bedlam around him, he preferred to be the strong pillar of calm and sanity to which others clung instead of another voice in the chorus of doom. When one of Komui's innumerable ill-conceived experiments ran amuck, he preferred to be the one clinging to its back wielding the coffee pot or the giant diamond-tipped armour-cracking drill rather than one of the screamers fleeing to relative safety in one of the rooms equipped with a blast-proof door. When lovesick young Exorcists or Support Division personnel came to him with their hearts on their sleeves, he preferred to shoo them out the door with a firmly-worded command to seek advice from Jerry, since he had forgotten more about such things than anyone else in the Order even knew. He had, to his subordinates' knowledge, only had any sort of emotional display not related to near-fatal exasperation with Komui Li only a handful of times in all his years with the Order, and those displays came at the nadir of tragedy or the height of triumph: the cruel aftermath of the akuma attack that had nearly destroyed the Motherhouse; discovering that, against all reason and hope, Allen Walker had survived the destruction of his Innocence, the near-destruction of his own body, and had emerged stronger than anyone could have imagined. No one could easily recall him losing his temper at anyone or anything other than their somewhat feckless Chief of Operations-turned-General. He was most certainly not the sort of person to lose his temper at largely inanimate objects, thump those objects while swearing loudly, or otherwise consider defenestrating those objects when the thumping and the swearing failed to achieve the desired results.

"This makes absolutely no sense."

This declaration went unheeded both by the universe in general and the recalcitrant analytical engine sitting on the desk, humming peacefully, emitting the occasional high-pitched tone, and continuing to display an entirely unsatisfactory analysis of the data that had been laboriously entered into it. River, despite his general dedication to not treating inanimate objects as though they possessed sufficient intellect to thwart him personally when there were enough animate objects on hand to satisfy that purpose, glared, swore quietly again, and repeated the query, for the fourth time that morning. The analytical engine – admittedly a handsome specimen of the breed, sleek and black and considerably smaller than the early generations taking up storage space in the lower levels – hummed thoughtfully to itself, beeped, and returned the same analysis that it had been all morning. River took a deep, cleansing breath and expelled it in a shout.

"Johnny."

Johnny was, River suspected, lurking rather close to the office door, as he presented himself before the echoes finished bouncing off the main laboratory's walls. "Chief?"

"I must have done something wrong – I checked the figures a half-dozen times before I put them into this...thing...but it keeps returning a null result." River glowered at the machine, which purred quietly as Johnny turned it to examine the analysis. "It seems to like you. If you've got the time, could you – "

"Check the data-entry and run the query again?" Johnny smiled wryly. "Sure. How far did you expand the search parameters?"

"All the way – every active and retired Exorcist." River rose and stepped aside, letting Johnny have his seat. "I'm beginning to think we might have read the whole thing wrong from the start. In any case, I need to update Komui. Can we have this done by supper-time?"

"I think so."

"Thanks, Johnny."

River left the laboratory by the swiftest route, taking the lift out of the Science Division down into the realm of the "public," where lay the office he never really used and Komui Li had never really relinquished. The floor was, as always, covered to a depth of approximately two feet with paperwork Komui was resolutely refusing to attend to despite the somewhat enhanced responsibilities of his new position and the man himself was seated behind a desk tottering with enormous piles of the same, be-rabbited coffee mug in one hand the receiver of his wired communications unit in the other. He waved the mug by way of greeting as River removed a stack of personnel files from the office's only other useable chair and seated himself.

"Yes, I understand. I'll put some of the novices out to watch the train station for his arrival. Thank you for letting me know." Komui set the receiver down. "Well. General Theodore managed to leave his escort behind in Calais -- Marie seems to think he's coming Home, eventually, but has a stop or two he plans to make one the way." A little smile came and went. "I don't think I'll warn Cross."

"You enjoy torturing him a little too much, Komui." River shook his head in mock-sorrow; Cross enjoyed torturing the rest of the Order far too much. "We may have a problem with our little 'discovery.' The analysis of the data isn't panning out the way we thought it would – the signature in the pulse that the Heart emitted doesn't seem to match the energy signature of any of the Exorcists we have current data for, which would be more or less all of them."

"What about – "

"I checked Ravi's most recent data first. Unless his Innocence evolved drastically or he dramatically improved his synchronization ratio, the energy signature is not his. The problem is, it doesn't seem to belong to anyone else we know of, either." River ran an irritated hand through his hair and admitted, grudgingly, "Which leaves us only two options, really: either a data-entry error in the analytical engine is causing the query to fail, or the Heart's resonation was caused by the emergence of a new Exorcist – an incredibly strong, extremely well-synchronized Exorcist."

"And which answer do you prefer, Chief?" Komui asked dryly.

"I have Johnny hand-checking the data for errors – which, admittedly, I already did – and running the query again. I'm almost hoping I transposed some digits somewhere." A sigh. "I'd rather not be pinned down at Home when...you know."

"Yes. Did they write back?" Komui refreshed his coffee and pushed a second mug across the desk to River who, for a change, took it.

"Oh, yes. Yes, they did. They'd like to meet us for dinner at the Avondale dining-parlour Tuesday after next, before the Royal Thaumaturgical Society meeting." He took a pull on the coffee cup, grimaced at the incredible black bitterness of it, and swallowed manfully. "I'm going to say 'yes,' if that's agreeable to you."

"Of course. I've wanted to meet your parents for an age." Komui's smile came and went quickly, and he fished through the papers scattered on the topmost layer of his desk. "I also want to go into London for an entirely separate reason, I'm afraid." He pushed a folded newspaper, liberally covered in coffee-mug circles, across to River, as well. "I'm beginning to think that Ravi might not have been completely honest with us."

It was a copy of The Daily Telegraph, dated 4 January 18--, the front page above the fold taken up with a grainy dageurreotype: the boles of a half-dozen trees leaning at decidedly unnatural angles, a mass of twisted wreckage half-sunk in what looked like the remnants of a once-impressive body of water, a number of uniformed police-men and assorted other staid official sorts surveying the impressive degree of damage. The banner headline, in inch-tall letters, read THE DESTRUCTION IN HYDE PARK.

"Oh, dear," River muttered, and read.

"Yes, that's rather what I said. You'll note the witness testimony – "

"Komui..."

"The Serpentine wouldn't have risen 'half a hundred feet' out of its bank without supernatural intervention. No matter how hard the wind might have been blowing. You know that's true as well as I do – and there's only one Exorcist in the world, much less in London, whose Innocence allows him to command the elements." Komui leaned back in his chair, and glanced away. "I think we should have him placed under discreet surveillance."

"Komui." River pinched the bridge of his nose, feeling a headache coming on. "I...agree that something unusual went on in the Park. I also agree that Ravi...was not wholly forthcoming when he told us that he didn't notice any such thing going on. But...why don't we talk to him first? We'll be in London in two weeks, anyway – if we're not satisfied with the answers he gives us, then we can set some Watchers on him."

"What makes you think he'd answer us any more truthfully face-to-face?" Komui asked in tones of pure exasperation. "He's the straightest liar any of us have ever known."

"Komui. Please."

"Very well, Chief. If that's your recommendation, I'll take it under advisement." A pause. "I don't know what you still see in him, River."

"You will." River handed the paper back. "Eventually."

Tyki woke in perfect darkness and nearly perfect silence, the sound of his own breathing, his own laboured heart beating the loudest sounds he could hear, the taste of blood thick on his lips. It took a long moment but, eventually, he managed to identify that blood as his own. The sound that made it past his lips was made up of roughly equal parts relief and disgust: relief, because much of the last day or so was, at best, a blur of deeply unpleasant sense-memory but at least he could say with a comforting degree of certainty that he hadn't killed anyone; disgust because it was simply never pleasant to wake in utter darkness with his hair plastered to a pillow by what felt quite distinctly like his own dried blood, still bound up in a considerable length of cordage, with a sore throat parched utterly dry. Working enough moisture into his mouth to manage words was a ridiculously lengthy production that only enhanced the nasty taste, pushing disgust well ahead of relief in the hierarchy of his personal reactions. "Hello? Is anyone there?"

Silence. Which was, all things being equal, rather what he hoped for: silence allowed for the possibility of disentangling himself and slipping out the back without having to encounter anyone he didn't really want to meet, just now, which included the majority of the household. Someone answering would have required formal dress and being pleasant over breakfast, two activities he felt quite strongly could only lead to the immediate dispensation of horrible violence or, at the very least, more sarcasm than would really be good for him in the long run. It also allowed him to dispense with his bonds by the expedient of simply passing through them, or letting them pass through him, as the case happened to be. An eye blink of insubstantiality restored his personal mobility but did not instil any particular desire for actual motion and so he simply lay where he was, taking stock of the situation, mind functioning at the level of a slow amble, at best. He felt about as well as could be expected, which wasn't very, though the worst of it seemed to have healed during his – day? Day and night? Impossible to tell – period of restful repose, though there was still the odd sore spot here and there and his throat ached abominably, only partially with thirst. Reaching up, his questing fingertips encountered just what he'd expected: a thin line, no, two lines of clotted blood, stretched across his throat like a double-strand of rusty pearls, one longer and deeper than the other. With a disgusted sound, he let his hand fall away, back into the covers alongside him.

It took him a moment to realize the object that his hand thus encountered actually belonged to another human being and that it was, in fact, a hand itself; the flesh was cold, the skin had the consistency of desiccated, hardened leather, and the fingers themselves were contorted in a posture suggestive of extreme pain. Tyki's hand recoiled at once and the rest of his body followed suit, right over the side of the bed, encountering an assortment of unkindly positioned furniture and abandoned aides de amour as he went. It wasn't so much the waking up next to a corpse that bothered him – he had, in fact, done so more than once – it was the sensations involved in touching it: he had, in his time, produced a fair number of corpses and knew in an entirely intimate way the feel of a body recently evicted of its resident, and that corpse was in no way fresh. Moving with extreme care, he felt about along the bedside furniture, locating first a candlestick, and then the candle that had been in it, and finally a lucifer match with which to light it. The corpse was one of Madame's preferred type, a lithe and lissom nymphet whose slender charms were more likely the result of living in East End penury than any deliberate effort at maintaining an enticing figure, probably no more than fifteen and likely somewhat less. He risked a glance at her face and was somewhat relieved to find that she wasn't someone he knew, or at least wasn't someone he recognized, from what he could see: the lower half of her face was partially obscured by the apparatus that had been used to muffle any sounds she might have made. Her throat was a still-livid welter of bruises and had, he was fairly certain, been quite comprehensively crushed; she had choked to death on her own blood. Swallowing hard, he examined his own hands and found them gratifyingly free of bloodstains, scratch-marks, or anything lodged under the nails that might have suggested an intimate involvement in her demise. In fact, he couldn't even remember her arrival much less her demise, no matter how he cudgelled his brain, a fact he found quite thoroughly disturbing.

The entertainment room exited into the private bedroom suite, through the back of an enormous wardrobe that took up the majority of one wall in the Master's private dressing-room and which did, in fact, contain a considerable selection of perfectly ordinary clothing. Tyki wrapped himself in a linen dressing-down, holding the neck closed high, and tugged the bedchamber bell-pull to summon a servant, settling down to wait in front of the low-burning fire, thinking fixedly of nothing. A handful of minutes passed, and then came a knock on the door, and Mrs. Landry, the chief housemaid, poked her head into the room; Tyki offered her appalled look a somewhat wan smile. "I'm afraid Their Excellencies were in a rather uncivilized temper...last night? Yesterday?"

"Oh, dear." Mrs. Landry was a woman of absolutely flawless servile character: she would never take it into her mind to criticize her employers, no matter how much trouble they made for her with their excesses. "I'll warn Bertram. And it was three days ago now, ducks, don't you remember?"

"Three – " Tyki stopped, took a deep breath, and forced his voice back down again. "Three days. Of course. It's quite easy to lose track of time, without the sun or a clock to go by."

"I'm certain it is. Can I get you anything, love? You look peaky." She was also a creature of perfect motherly inclinations, as evidenced by her willingness to treat everyone beneath her roof as though they were an orphan child only in need of a warm meal and a new suit of clothes to set them right, no matter who that person might be.

"I assure you I feel peaky. A hot bath would be lovely, and a pot of tea if there's one to be had." He didn't think himself capable of being less hungry, but his desire to wash the abominable taste and dryness out of his mouth was almost impossibly strong.

"Of course. I'll send Margaret up straightaway." The door clicked shut.

Tyki laid his head back, closed his eyes, and tried not to think too deeply on the fact that he had, somewhere, lost three days.

"Chief."

"Johnny – you're up late. I didn't think you had night-watch tonight – "

"I don't...I wanted to bring you the results of the query I ran. I...didn't think you'd want me to wait till morning."

"You got it to work?"

"Yes. I had to...expand the parameters again, but, yes, I got it to work. Your data-entry was fine, by the way, that wasn't the problem. We just weren't looking in the right places."

"What do you mean? The only parameter I excluded was – "

"Yes, I know. I added all the...all the data from the inactive files, just to see what would happen when I ran the query again. River – "

"...What is it?"

"It's Allen's, River. The energy signature that the Heart just emitted belongs to Allen Walker."