It was remarkably quiet. I could hear my heartbeat and I was in danger of starting to think about my breathing again, so I made myself think about something else. Like who the hell our pale-faced hoodie Earthbender was. Now, you could literally fill two whole libraries, complete with card files, reference sections and a brass ladder thing that whooshes around on rails, with everything I don’t know about magic. But I think, had it been at all common, Nightingale might have mentioned a technique for gouging great big holes in solid cement.
Nightingale aside, the only practitioner that skilled who I’d ever met was the Faceless Man – who could catch fireballs, deflect flying chimney stacks and also, possibly, leap moderately sized buildings in a single bound. I knew this hadn’t been the Faceless Man himself because the Earthbender’s body shape and posture had been all wrong. Could he have been an acolyte or a Little Crocodile or possibly one of the Faceless Man’s chimeras?
Lots of possibilities, not a lot of facts.
The Earthbender had been travelling east, back into the West End, and had got off at Oxford Circus, a station less than a kilometre from the original Strip Club of Doctor Moreau. After we’d closed the club down, me and Nightingale had speculated that the Faceless Man’s new base of operations couldn’t be very far from Soho. He might be faceless but his chimeras, his poor little cat-girls and tiger-boys, weren’t exactly inconspicuous – hard for them to move around unnoticed and most sightings of them had been in the area. When I was chasing after the Pale Lady she’d headed for Piccadilly Station as if it was a safe haven. But they certainly weren’t getting around on the tube, with its ubiquitous CCTV cameras and the ever-vigilant Sergeant Kumar.
Now I knew there were other tunnels, secret tunnels and who knew what else, all going who knew where. Perhaps the Faceless Man knew where. Perhaps the Earthbender was helping him build more. A subterranean secret base in the fashion of a James Bond villain. The Faceless Man had the accent for it, true, but did he have a cat? I had a flash of him sitting in a swivel chair with a full-size cat-girl called Sharon perched on his lap while she’s talking to her BFF on her mobile. ‘And then he’s like “Do you expect me to talk” and the master’s all “No I expect you to die!” and he’s … What? I’m just telling Trace about last night.’ The thought made me giggle, which was nice – you need a bit of humour when you’re buried under a ton of rubble.
I reckoned the sly fucker had built his new lair under cover of the Crossrail construction work. Why not? The project had been sinking random holes into the ground for years and wasn’t even expected to be completed for at least another five – you could have stuck a whole hollowed-out volcano adjacent to Tottenham Court Road station without the public noticing.
But not without the contractors noticing or Health and Safety for that matter, I thought, and then I remembered a cool autumn night and coming across the Murder Team closing off a crime scene at the top of Dean Street. Had that been Graham Beale’s little brother? A top sub-contractor on Crossrail and a tunnelling specialist, as their family had been for more than one hundred and sixty years.
Could he have been done in by the Faceless Man to cover up his new base?
In which case it didn’t work, did it? I thought. Because now I know where to start looking for you, you freaky faceless phantom you.
I laughed out loud. It felt good, even if it did cause dust to fall into my mouth. I tried to spit it out, but as I turned my head to the side I starting giggling again. A little warning bell in my head went off and I remembered that euphoria is one of the warning signs of hypoxia.
Along with impaired judgement – which might explain what happened next.
I conjured a second werelight and had another look around my concrete coffin. To maximise my chances of getting some air I wanted to punch a hole upwards, but not so close to me that if I brought the roof down I would be under it. I chose the top corner on my right on the far side of the rebar portcullis and ran through my impello variations in my head. Impello, like Lux, is what Nightingale calls a formae cotidianae, meaning that generations of Newtonian wizards have poked and prodded and experimented and found lots of fun variations which they then pass on to their apprentices who pass them on to theirs. The hardest thing to learn about magic is that it’s not about wishful thinking. You don’t make an invisible pneumatic drill by picturing it in your mind. You do it by shaping the correct variation of impello, lining it up in the right direction and then essentially turning it on and off as fast as you can.
No doubt there was a fourth-order spell, of elegant construction, which would have served. But I didn’t know it, and when you’re buried under the ground and running out of air you go with what you’ve got.
I took a deep breath, which didn’t satisfy the way it should have, and smacked my drill into the corner. It made a satisfyingly loud thumping sound. I did it again, then again, trying to get a rhythm going. Dust spurted with each impact, falling slowly as a haze in the still air. I stopped after about twenty strikes to check progress and realised that there was no way of measuring it.
So I started banging away again as dust thickened and my breathing got shorter, and then suddenly there was a thud just behind my right eye and everything went dark. Sweat broke out on my face and back and I was suddenly terrified that I’d done something irreparable. Had I just pushed myself into a stroke? Had I gone blind or had my werelight gone out? In the pitch dark it was impossible to tell.
I didn’t dare conjure another werelight for fear that I’d give myself another stroke – if that’s what had happened. I lay still and pulled funny faces in the darkness – there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with either side of my face.
Then I realised I was breathing deeply and the air smelt fresher. So at least the drill had worked.
I don’t know how long I lay there in the darkness, nursing a really bad headache, before I noticed that water was pooling around my boots. I did a little kick and heard it sloshing around. Ever since I’d started hobnobbing with the Goddess of the Thames and her daughters I’d started taking a keen interest in the hidden hydrography of London. So it didn’t take me long to work out that the nearest river to me was the Tyburn. But from the lack of smell I figured that this water was more likely to be coming from a ruptured water main.
In 1940 sixty-five people died when a bomb ruptured water and sewer pipes which flooded Balham Tube station. I really wasn’t in a hurry to recreate that particular historical precedent.
I told myself that my little void was unlikely to fill very quickly and in fact there was no reason for me to think that the water level would reach any higher than my ankles. I found myself just about as convincing as you can imagine and I was considering whether to indulge in a bit more panicked screaming when I heard a noise above me.
It was a vibration in the concrete, sharp percussive sounds of metal on stone. I opened my mouth to shout but a shower of earth fell from the darkness and I had to turn my head and spit frantically to avoid choking. Bright sunlight struck me like a blow on the side of my face, fingers dug into my shoulders. There was swearing and grunting and laughter and I was yanked into the light and dumped on my back. I flopped around like a fish and flailed my arms around just because I could.
‘Watch it, he’s fucking possessed,’ said a man’s voice.
I stopped moving and lay on my side just getting my breathing under control.
I was lying on grass, which was a bit of a surprise, I could feel it against my cheek and the green smell was tickling my nose. Birdsong, shockingly loud, came from above me and I could hear a crowd, which was to be expected, and the lowing of cattle – which wasn’t.
As my eyes adjusted to the bright light I saw that I was lying on a grassy bank. About three metres in front of my face was a haze of white dust kicked up by the feet of passers-by and a herd of a cattle. Pint-sized cattle, I realised, because their shoulders barely reached the chest of the teenaged boy who was driving them with expert flicks from a long-handled w
hip. The mini-cows were followed by a stream of strangely dressed people all carrying sacks over their shoulders or satchels under their arms. They mostly wore long tunics of russet, green or brown, with caps and hoods upon their heads, some bare-legged others in tights. I decided to stop looking at them and concentrated on sitting up instead.
Oxford Circus is fifteen kilometres from the nearest farm – had I been moved?
I tried to work some saliva into my mouth – somebody had to have something to drink. And soon.
A couple of metres away a trio of disreputable-looking white guys was staring at me. Two of them were bare-chested, wearing nothing but loose linen trousers that were rolled into their belts and barely reached their knees. Their shoulders were ropey with muscle and sheened with sweat. One had a couple of nasty red welts striped down his upper arm. They had dirty white linen caps upon their heads and both were sporting neatly trimmed beards.
The third man was better dressed. He wore an emerald tunic with fine embroidery around the neck and armholes over a brilliantly white linen undershirt, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. The tunic was cinched with a leather belt, an elaborate buckle that supported a classic English arming sword with a cruciform hilt contrary to section 139 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988 which prohibits the carrying of blades in a public place. He had black hair cut into a pageboy, pale skin and dark blue eyes – he looked familiar to me. As if I knew his brother or something.
‘Has he been burnt?’ asked one of the half-naked men.
‘Only by the sun,’ said the man with the sword. ‘He’s a blackamoor.’
‘Is he a Christian?’
‘A better Christian than you I think,’ said the man with a sword. He gestured in a direction behind the men. ‘Is that not your master? Should you not be about your work?’
The silent member of the pair spat into the ground while his friend jerked his chin in my direction. ‘It was us who dug him up,’ he said.
‘And I’m sure he thanks you for it.’ The man’s hand slipped down to rest casually on the hilt of his sword. The silent one spat once more, clasped his comrade’s upper arm and pulled him away. As I watched them go I saw there was a line of similarly dressed men, perhaps thirty, working with shovels and rakes and other implements of destruction on a ditch by the side of the road. It looked like a chain gang right down to a large man in beige tights, a russet tunic with sweat stains around the arm holes and a sword at his belt. The only reason he wasn’t wearing sinister mirrored sunglasses was because they hadn’t been invented yet.
My young friend with the sword followed my gaze. ‘Thieves,’ he said.
‘What did they steal?’ I asked.
‘My birthright,’ he said. ‘And they are stealing it still.’
Some of the men were lowering hollowed-out tree trunks into the ditch which, once sealed together with pitch, would form a crude pipeline otherwise known as a conduit.
‘Water,’ I said wishing I had some.
‘Not so burnt by the sun as to be lacking your wits,’ said the man.
I recognised him then, or rather I saw the resemblance to his father and his brother Ash. With an effort I clambered to my feet and turned to look along the road in the other direction. It stretched out, straight and dusty, between big wide fields that had been planted with green stripes of crops. A continuous stream of people, carts, horses and livestock trudged towards a hazy orange horizon from which reared the oversized gothic spike of St Paul’s Cathedral. That was London, this was the Oxford Road and the young man with the sword was the original Tyburn from back when the stream tumbled down from the Hampstead Hills to quench the thirst of the crowds come to watch the executions. Now being diverted, by Royal Charter no less, to slake the forty thousand throats of London.
I hadn’t been moved. I’d been dug up eight hundred years too early.
‘You’re Tyburn,’ I said.
‘Sir Tyburn,’ he said, ‘And you are Peter of the Peckwater Estate, apprentice wizard.’
‘Bugger,’ I said. ‘This is an hallucination.’
‘And you know this for certain?’
‘I’ve heard Chaucer read out,’ I said. ‘I understood one word in five and there’s this thing called the great vowel shift – which means everyone pronounces everything differently anyway. Which means I’m still stuck in the hole.’ And if I start singing David Bowie’s ‘Golden Years’ someone would just have to shoot me in the head.
I looked down into the ditch from which Tyburn and his merry band had ‘rescued’ me. At the bottom there was a ragged hole a little bigger than a cat flap.
‘Since you are fixed for certain, and can do nothing for yourself, does it matter where you wait for rescue?’ asked Tyburn. ‘And I seem substantial to myself.’
‘You might be a ghost,’ I said, studying the ditch and wondering whether I should go in head or feet first. ‘Or a sort of echo in the memory of the city.’ I really had to come up with some better terminology for this stuff.
I jumped down into the ditch. The soil was soft, sticky yellow London clay. Head first would be quicker.
‘Or we could get a boat to Southwark,’ said Tyburn. ‘Hit the stews, get steamed – meet some hot girls from Flanders. Oh come on,’ he pleaded. ‘It’ll be kicking and I’ve …’ Tyburn trailed off.
‘You’ve what?’
‘I’ve been alone – here,’ he said. ‘For a long time I think.’
Possibly since you ‘died’ in the 1850s under a tide of shit, or so your father claims.
‘Now you’re saying things that I’ve just thought of,’ I said. ‘You see why I’m suspicious.’
This is why magic is worse even than quantum physics. Because, while both spit in the eye of common sense, I’ve never yet had a Higgs boson turn up and try to have a conversation with me.
‘Did you hear that?’ asked Tyburn.
I was going to ask what when I heard it – a long wail floating over the landscape from the direction of London. I shivered.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
The wail came again, wordless, angry, filled with rage and self-pity.
‘You know who that is,’ said Tyburn. ‘You put him there, you pinned him to the bridge.’
As an experiment I stuck my foot in the hole, which sucked at it with an unpleasantly organic movement.
The wail was fainter the third time, fading into the wind and the noise of the passers-by.
‘Sooner or later you’re going to have to set the hooknosed bastard free,’ said Tyburn.
Not any time soon, I thought.
‘I don’t want to die in a hole with my eyes closed,’ I said, and shoved my foot in up to the ankle.
‘Don’t do that,’ said Tyburn, and jumped into the ditch with me. ‘I know a better way.’
‘Really?’ I asked. ‘What’s that, then?’
‘This,’ he said, and hit me on the side of the head with the pommel of his sword.
I regretted the decision as soon as I opened my eyes to darkness, and the feel of water sloshing around my knees. It was cold – a wetsuit won’t keep you warm if you don’t move about.
I wondered if I hadn’t been a bit hasty. Was it better to die in the illusion of sunshine and warmth or face death in a cold darkness of reality? Was it better to die in happy ignorance or terrified knowledge. The answer, if you’re a Londoner, is that it’s better not to die at all.
So that is when I came up with the most ridiculous plan since I’d decided to take a witness statement from a ghost. It was a plan so stupid that even Baldrick would have rejected it out of hand.
I was going to reach out and contact Toby the Dog with my mind. Well not exactly with my mind – that would have been unlikely. Ever since Molly sent me on my little trip down London’s memory lane it had seemed obvious to me that all the accumulated vestigia that seemed to power the ghosts of the city were somehow connected. Information was definitely being passed from location to location. Like a magical internet. How else had I se
en so much of the city while my physical body had remained in the Folly? I figured that if I could generate a sort of formless forma, enough to put magic into the stone, it might be possible to create a signal – a beacon that would propagate through the stone memory that might be detected by a particularly sensitive dog of my acquaintance. Who would then bark in an expressive fashion and rush over to Oxford Circus as fast as his little legs would carry him. There he would scamper about snuffling amongst the debris and a particularly intuitive rescue worker would say, ‘Hold up, I think the mutt may be on to something.’
Did I not say it was the most ridiculous plan I’d ever thought of? It had to be Toby because one of the first things I’d done, once Lesley had become an apprentice, was to buy a pack of ESP cards and see if I could use magic to talk mind to mind. So me, Lesley and Dr Walid spent a fun afternoon recreating various bonkers telepathy experiments from the 1960s and ’70s with disappointing results. Even the one experiment where I tried to identify the forma that Lesley was creating didn’t work properly because while I could sense the ‘shape’ in the magic I couldn’t have told you what it was. And besides, even that much only worked when we were less than a metre apart.
That’s what I hate about science – negative results.
But Toby had been proven to be sensitive to magic. And I’d always thought we’d shared a special affinity. And the water was pooling around my ribs and I was getting desperate.
I took a deep breath and created a forma in my mind. It was like Lux, which you use for creating werelights and, with a bit of modification, fireballs, skinny grenades and a really hot flame thing that I have hopes I could use for burning through steel if only I could get the heat to go in one direction only. Like the ESP experiments, I try to avoid telling Nightingale about my little innovations unless I have to explain why one of the labs is on fire. Lux was perfect because it’s known to put a lot of magic into the environment, and what I was going for was cool but noisy.
Whispers Under Ground Page 23