Strangeness and Charm
Page 23
"There was a disturbance in the outer courtyard during the alarms – we assumed that this was a backup team or an exit strategy, but that isn't played out by what followed. The tourist party shadowing the ceremony of the keys was immediately detained, pending investigation. In the event it appears they were innocent bystanders. The gates to the courtyard were secured, though, and armed guards posted to the exits in accordance with security procedure. They were attacked by one or more assailants and physically assaulted. The gate was opened and there is a brief glimpse here…"
He panned the view to the corner of the screen where three shadows crossed open grounds and disappeared under some trees. "Injuries to the guards were not severe, though there is a disciplinary pending on how four armed soldiers can't defend one gate from what appear to be a group of unarmed teenagers."
He panned back again into full-field view.
"More interesting is just under six minutes later." He fastforwarded and then slowed. "Watch here."
A dark blur slipped along the top of the wall facing the river. It seemed to cling to the edges and veer around like a candlelight shadow in a breeze, flickering and dodging. It hesitated, then continued, tracking along the wall, then hesitating.
"She's looking for a way out," said the tech.
"She?" said Garvin.
The shadow slipped along the wall to a gate structure, flanked by square towers.
"Traitor's Gate," said the Scot. "Quite appropriate in the circumstances."
The tech continued. He seemed "The water gate itself is wood reinforced with iron. It's old and not really intended as an effective barrier. On the other side of it, though, the entrance to the Thames has been bricked up and there's a significant barrier. The Thames is high, as you can see, but the water doesn't enter the tower itself. The water behind the wall is quite shallow – a few inches only. The tide turned twenty-three minutes before this and is on the ebb. The current is downstream towards the estuary."
He panned across the wall where the gate had been sealed. "According to witnesses there was no splash or ripple, and they initially discounted the water as an exit route. It's not as easy a way out as it appears and has trapped the unwary before. Instead they focused their attentions on the parapet and any attempt to abseil or scale down the wall. Only when the water started to move did they realise where's she'd gone."
"That's the second time you've used a female pronoun," said Garvin.
"The wave oscillated three times, initially moderately but with increasing force. On the third oscillation the gate is forced open. That's when the outer wall starts to collapse. Within moments there's water flooding through. A section of the wall collapses and the Thames is through."
He looked up at them.
"The wall was inspected a month before. There was no sign of any weakness then, though subsequent inspection shows water damage to be the cause. We're at a loss to explain it. That would have been it," said the tech, "except that there are cameras under the bridge which monitor boats passing underneath. One of them caught this image…
The screen changed to a black view with a small white spot in it. He zoomed into the spot until it resolved into a face in the water. The girl had her eyes closed, arms extended, carried by the strong current downstream. It was Alex.
Garvin and I exchanged glances.
"Good," said the Scot. "I thought you'd recognise her."
Garvin interlaced his fingers on the table. "We are not unaware of this individual's activities."
"Excellent," said the Scot, opening a file in front of him. "The girl has been identified as Alexandra Dobson, née Petersen, daughter of Katherine Dobson and Niall Petersen, who, if I'm no mistaken, is about three feet to your right at the moment. Any comment?"
"We are not currently aware of her whereabouts," said Garvin quietly.
"Not currently aware? Is that shorthand for you've fucking lost her?"
"You try my patience," said Garvin.
"We're not talking a bit of mindless vandalism here. These are the crown jewels. They are a symbol of this country's integrity and lawfulness. Can you imagine how embarrassing it would be if we'd had them stolen?"
"About as embarrassing as having it discovered that you're conducting illegal and immoral experiments on human beings?" said Garvin.
"They weren't human," said the Scot.
"That's an interesting point of view," I said, earning a sharp look from Garvin.
"Nothing human can do that!" the Scot said, pointing at the screen.
I was standing before I knew it, the power boiling up inside me, aching to be released. Garvin was up beside me, pressing down on my shoulder, making me sit, pushing me back down, and the power with it. If we hadn't been surrounded by the dampening effect of the horse shoes, I don't think I could have contained it. I allowed myself to be re-seated, slowly and carefully, acutely conscious of how close I'd come to killing him.
The Scot was elated that he'd provoked a reaction. "You're on every alert list we have, Petersen," he said. "The only thing missing is a bounty on your head."
"Are you threatening me?" My voice was low and level, but far from how I felt.
"Enough," said Garvin. "Niall, hold your tongue. You're not helping and there's more at stake here than you're dignity."
"It's not my…"
"Enough!" Garvin stared me down. When I looked away he turned to the Scot. "You've already admitted they didn't take anything. I'll ask you again, is there any point to this exhibition?"
"I didn't say they didn't take anything," said the Scot. "I said they didn't get the jewels"
"So what did they get?" he asked.
"Will you stop pacing up and down?" said Blackbird, "You're distracting the baby."
I looked down at our son, resting in Blackbird's arms and watching me rather than latching on to her to feed.
"Sorry." I sat down, but that just provoked a bout of wriggling and tipping his head back until he could reach a position where he could see me again. He was developing fast, and had become much more aware of his surroundings in the last few days.
"Here, you take him for a moment. It's you he wants to see anyway. You might as well hold him."
I took him from her and he kicked his legs while I manoeuvred him into a comfortable position resting on my forearm. He waved his arms around until I gave him a finger to hold, at which point he promptly pulled it to his mouth and started to suck and gum it.
"You see?" I said to him. "You were hungry after all, and you're not going to get much out of that, are you?" He continued sucking my finger, despite my advice. Sometimes children just don't listen.
Blackbird stacked up some pillows on the bed, made herself comfortable and then offered her arms. "Shall we try again poppet, and your father can sit down and keep still this time."
I passed him back to her and in a moment he got the idea and settled down to sucking noisily.
"So what exactly are they accused of taking?" she asked me.
"Alex was identified by one of the Yeoman Warders as the girl in the aviary. They're trying to establish whether she can be tried for treason for interfering with the ravens, assuming they can catch her. According to the man responsible, one of the ravens has a tail feather missing and Alex is being blamed for it."
"I wouldn't fancy taking a tail feather from a raven. They're big birds and they tend to put up a fight. Maybe it fell out on its own," she suggested. "Proving any of this is irrelevant anyway, it's never going to come to court."
"Maybe not a human court. I don't know what the Feyre courts are going to think of this. At the very least it's an embarrassing incident, and at worst a treaty violation. Who knows what Kimlesh will say."
"Alex isn't part of the courts. She never joined, and therefore she's not anyone's responsibility. Unfortunately she doesn't have any of the court's protection either. If she's caught, she could just be killed without a hearing."
"That's comforting," I remarked.
"Sorry, Niall
, I didn't mean it like that, and it's not like she's stolen anything of national importance. It's a feather for goodness sake. The bird can grow another one."
"That doesn't apply to the other item that was stolen," I said.
"Oh?"
"Supposedly the Queen's keys are stored in the gatehouse and used to lock up the Tower of London at night, but not all the keys fit the locks."
"And why would that be?" asked Blackbird, shifting our son from one breast to the other in a nifty move that was too quick for him to wail before another breast was presented. There was some wriggling and waving of arms, and then he settled again.
"One of the keys was a gift to the crown, found as part of a treasure trove in long barrow in East Anglia, buried with a Angle nobleman."
"The Sutton Hoo burial?" asked Blackbird.
"No, a smaller horde, but in some ways more significant. Some of the items were hard to identify – the key was out of time. The metallurgy was too sophisticated for the period and therefore the key was thought to have contaminated the find at some later point and somehow been included with the horde as a less valuable item."
"An anachronism."
"Except that the horde was otherwise intact. The items were very well preserved and various valuable items were included, which would have been stolen if the horde was discovered by treasure hunters."
"Something shiny like a key could have been dropped in a hole by a magpie, and just ended up with the rest of the horde by accident," she pointed out.
"Except it wasn't shiny. It was dull grey, and the exact metal it was made of was never determined."
"Dull grey?" she asked.
"Not tarnished silver, and iron would certainly have rusted. It was the wrong colour for gold and was unlikely to have been aluminium – far too early for that. Where else have you seen a dull grey metal object that's hundreds of years old?" I asked her.
"You're comparing it with the Quick Knife, the knife from the Quit Rents Ceremony?"
"I'm trying not to leap to conclusions, but I'm running out of alternatives here. The key was not corroded, even though it is easily over four hundred years old, and may be more like a thousand. It was made of an unidentified grey metal."
"Perhaps it was an aluminium key which got mixed up with the horde much later?"
"It was given to Elizabeth I in 1593 as part of the horde, but the key was passed to the Tower of London for safe-keeping. Nothing else from the horde was taken there, though there may have been other items that weren't documented. Aluminium wasn't discovered in a metallic form until the eighteenth century – I checked."
"Perhaps it was discovered earlier than we thought?" she said.
"Perhaps it wasn't aluminium. Why else would a team of part-fey teenagers break into the Tower of London and steal it?"
"Are you sure that's what they were after?"
"The only other thing unaccounted for was the feather which Alex took. The group made a big fuss around the jewels but made no serious attempt to steal them."
"A distraction."
"Quite. But how did they know there was a key there? It's mentioned in the internal inventory of the tower, but you'd have to know where to look. It's not a published treasure of the tower and even the museums were unaware of its existence."
"If you wanted to hide a key, where would you hide it?" asked Blackbird.
"Amongst a lot of other keys?"
"Inside a guarded Tower with soldiers and a sophisticated alarm system," she added.
"The alarms are a recent addition."
"But they replaced earlier alarms, which have been upgraded by each generation according to the times. Someone tried to protect it, both physically and by hiding it, which implies that someone knew what it was and what it opens."
"You think it opens something?"
"It's a key, Niall. That's what keys do."
"It could be decorative?"
"If it was purely decorative then why steal it? No, whoever took it knows what it's for, and when we know that, we'll know why they stole it."
"What about the feather?"
"Another distraction? Who knows? You can get a raven feather anywhere there are ravens, but there looks to have been only one key like that one."
"So how do we find out what the key is for?"
"You ask a man who knows," she smiled.
"A locksmith?" I asked.
"No, a wizard," she smiled.
"You sodding well abandoned me!" said Alex. "You saved your own skinny arses and left me there for the ravens."
"Nonsense," said Eve. "You're here now, aren't you?"
"No thanks to you. You could have waited for me. You could have stayed at the gate, I was seconds behind you."
"And therein lies the problem," said Eve. "We didn't have seconds. You were told to be at the gate at the appointed time. You weren't there. They had armed guards and reinforcements on the way. If we'd stayed we would have been caught."
"Chill out," chimed in Sparky. "We'd have had to started killing people if we'd stayed any longer."
"Which would raise the profile of our little adventure a tad too far," said Eve. "Much better that you made your own exit."
"I could have drowned," Alex said. "I could have washed out to sea and then you'd never get your sodding feather."
"You can't drown," said Eve. "I don't think it's possible for anyone with your abilities to drown, even in sea water. Besides, you've shown yourself to be resourceful and quick-witted, independent and capable of defeating the best security that man can devise. You should be proud of yourself."
"It was a pretty cool way out, wasn't it?" said Alex.
"It rocked," said Sparky. "Even I wouldn't have thought of that."
Mollified, Alex flopped down on the old sofa, the springs protesting as she sank into it. "This is messed up," she said. "We need a new one."
"When we're done, the world will be at your feet," said Eve. "Where's the feather?"
Alex looked up. "Somewhere safe."
Eve held out her hand.
Alex sighed, and pulled down her top and fished into her bra, while Sparky made a show of not staring at her cleavage while she did it. Chipper was too busy playing Xbox to notice anything. She extracted a polythene zip-lock bag containing the long feather and handed it to Eve.
"You kept it dry, that's good," said Eve.
"It's a tail feather."
"I really wanted a wing pinion," said Eve, examining the sheen. "But this will do well enough, I think."
"I had to bargain for it."
Eve's head lifted. "You spoke with the birds?"
"Kind of," said Alex. "They understood what I was saying, or maybe they're like that with everyone?"
"No, you are favoured, Alex. The birds have knowledge beyond human comprehension, and they must have seen something in you to act so. They have acknowledged what I saw in you when you first came to us – the capacity for great things."
"Great thing, huh?" Alex shrugged it off, but she was smiling as she did.
"Your time will come Alexandre, and when it does you should not flinch from the task. It will take courage and faith, a leap into the dark to gain a path to enlightenment."
Alex shook her head slowly, sceptical of Eve's grand words. She glanced at Sparky who raised an eyebrow slightly, implying that even if Eve wasn't all there, she had engineered a theft from one of the most closely guarded places in the country. She deserved their respect simply for that.
Alex folded her arms. "So what's next? What's the next step in the plan for world domination?"
"We seek not dominion, only the reordering of the universe, to better reflect that which resides within us," said Eve.
"Yeah, whatever," said Alex, but she watched Eve admiring the feather twirling between her fingers.
"Our assembly is almost complete. Once we have the key, the well will open. Then we will hold the fate of the universe in our hands."
"I thought we already had the key?" said Alex.
Alex watched Eve's intense fascination with the blue sheen on the feather and wondered not for the first time whether Eve was firing on all cylinders.
"I should have stayed with the baby," I told Blackbird. "You don't need me for this."
We were marching down yet another corridor of the maze of buildings in Bloomsbury where the University of London has whole blocks dedicated to academic pursuits. Blackbird had reverted to her older persona of the older lady I had first met in London a year ago. I still found it hard to reconcile the young vibrant Blackbird I knew with the lecturer in medieval history from Birkbeck – the role she adopted to fit into human society.