What the hell is it, Jack?
“I want to go down to St Paul’s,” said Jack. “Please, Harry, bear with me a while longer.”
Harry wasn’t sure he could live a moment longer, let alone “bear” with anything, but he grimaced and merely followed Jack as he walked down towards St Paul’s. Of all places in the city, the cathedral seemed the most active. People may have wanted to attend the regular services, or simply wanted to sit in the nave or one of the side chapels to pray silently.
Jack halted in the churchyard, almost where he’d waited for Walter Herne the previous night.
“It is here as well,” he said. “It is all over.”
“Jack…talk to me,” said Harry, who was relieved his normal voice came out, instead of the scream that threatened.
Jack had been looking skyward, past the great mass of the cathedral. Now he looked back to Harry.
“Had Noah said anything to you? Stella? Ariadne, if you’ve had any contact with her? Weyland?”
“No. What is it?”
Jack took a deep breath. “From this brief walk, Harry, I can tell you that Catling—the Troy Game —appears healthy and vibrant and, yes, dark and dismal and so strong I don’t think all the gods in their heavens could ever dislodge her. But there’s something else hanging over and about and through London. Something other. Shadowy. Insubstantial. Whether or not it relates to Catling, and the labyrinth that Genvissa and I built…I don’t know. If it did relate to Catling then I would have thought that Noah or Weyland, or any one of the others trained in the arts of the labyrinth, would have picked it up. Maybe I have been away too long. Something has happened here, Harry. Something I can’t even comprehend, let alone explain.”
“Jack—”
“There’s only one thing I do know, Harry, and that is that whatever this is, it is huge. What we’ve covered today is only a fraction of it. Tell me, what is happening in the Faerie? Is there any intimation of something ‘different’ reflected into the Faerie?”
“No. Only the growing presence of the Troy Game, bad enough as that is. Nothing else.”
“None of the creatures of the Faerie have mentioned anything to you?”
Harry shook his head. All the lines had deepened in his face, making him look so physically weary, and so emotionally exhausted, that Jack reached out a hand and rested it on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry, my friend,” he said softly, “but there is something very, very wrong with this city.”
NINE
The Savoy
Sunday, 3rd September 1939
NOAH SPEAKS
Oh, how terrifying, how incredible, how nerveracking, how relieving to have him back.
How wonderful.
I don’t think I can possibly put into words all the emotions that surged through me when first we realised Jack—as he called himself now—was coming home. Guilt—oh yes. Excitement—yes, I’ll confess to that also. Terror, at what he would say to me, and what he would think of me.
During the seventeenth century I’d destroyed his world. He’d wanted me, had loved me, had thought to build a life together with me.
Believed he and I would complete the Troy Game together.
Instead I had abandoned him and the life together I’d promised him to love Weyland Orr, the Minotaur and Brutus-Jack’s hated enemy, and I had abandoned the Troy Game, claiming it would be our destroyer, not our saviour.
He’d walked away, hurt beyond knowing, and bitter, and I am not the one to blame him for that.
Meanwhile, Weyland’s and my own little paradise, so briefly enjoyed, fell apart about us. We’d had a beautiful daughter, Grace, who healed so many wounds: Weyland’s at losing the daughter Ariadne had given him so many thousands of years ago, and mine, at losing my own tiny daughter to Genvissa’s malevolence.
Then Catling snatched, twisting her red wool hex about baby-Grace’s wrists, and our daughter, our beloved, so-much-wanted daughter, became an open wound of her own.
These few hundred years between the terrible events of 1666 and 1939 had been…difficult.
Ah, let me be frank. They’d been a waking nightmare. Grace suffered so terribly, and we could do nothing. Our daughter twisted in upon herself, losing all warmth and gaiety and love, until no one could reach her. Gods alone know I tried, but I was too emotional I think, too desperate, and eventually she pushed me away. The closest anyone came was Stella. I don’t know why—what was it about Stella that I didn’t have?—but I did not tax either Grace or Stella with it. If Grace found a little more companionship with Stella than with me, then so be it.
Yet even that friendship had waned over the past fifty years or so as Grace isolated herself more deeply than ever. She talked, she breathed, she occasionally came out with a sentence or two (her “almost conversation” with Jack in the car outside the Savoy had stunned me. I hadn’t heard her say so many words at one time in years), and she washed and dressed herself.
She suffered whenever Catling chose to visit her with agony.
She didn’t live. Not really.
Weyland and I were at our wits’ end. We loved her so much, we wanted so much for her, we wanted to help her so badly.
And in the end we couldn’t do a thing for her.
Now Jack was back. And he’d said he would look at Grace’s hex! I tried not to think that somehow tonight Jack would make it all right, that he would find what everyone else had singularly failed to do—the means of removing the hex. After all, he was a Kingman, and he created the Troy Game, and maybe he did have the skill and knowledge to help Grace.
I tried not to hope too much, but I am afraid that after we dropped off Jack and Harry, and all through the day as we waited within the Savoy for them to arrive for dinner, I went about with a silly smile on my face.
Weyland commented on it as soon as we’d arrived back in our suite and Grace had gone to her room.
“Noah?” He didn’t have to say any more. There was an infinite weight of questions in that single word.
“What do you think, Weyland?” I went to him, and slid my hands about his waist, leaning in against him. “Do you think Jack can do something for Grace?”
He studied me a moment, his hazel eyes clouded with something I couldn’t quite read. “Is that hope all that’s fuelling the light in your face, Noah?”
Ah, gods, when would Weyland realise how much I loved him? “No,” I said, and leaned closer and kissed him. “I’m thinking also of how we might entertain ourselves once our guests have gone for the night.”
He smiled, but it wasn’t convincing. He extricated himself from my embrace and walked over to the sideboard in our sitting room and poured himself a drink.
“Weyland—”
He turned about. “Noah, I have been both dreading and hoping for this day for so long. We all need Jack if we’re going to have a hope of destroying the Troy Game…if we’re going to have a hope of saving Grace. But he’s such a wild card. He can both save us or destroy us. He could take you from me with a single word—”
“Weyland, don’t be ridiculous—”
“—with a single look. Gods, he is so much more powerful now than he was as Louis de Silva. Did you not feel the power rippling out from him when he spoke to Walter? And that was but a fraction of what I think he’s capable of commanding.”
“He’s not Theseus, Weyland.” In his first life as the loathed Minotaur, Weyland had been murdered by Theseus, who had been given the power to destroy him by Weyland’s then-lover, Ariadne.
“Really, Noah? Everything rides on him. Everything. Us. Grace. This land. The Faerie. He has the power to either save us or doom us.”
I tried to joke. “But you must trust him if you’re going to give him one of your cars!” Weyland loved his motor cars, and had allowed no one else but me to drive them.
He grunted, and drained the contents of his glass. “Do you think he will help us?”
“What choice does he have?”
I got nothing but a cynical look for that, so I gave up on the conversation and went to the windows to look down on the Thames. We’d been living at the Savoy for about six years. Because none of us—Weyland, myself or Grace—died or aged (Grace had taken about eighteen mortal years to grow to her present height and maturity, and hadn’t aged from that point on) we tended to move from house to house, and neighbourhood to neighbourhood, on a fairly regular basis, generally about every ten years. Every so often we moved into a village in the countryside surrounding London for a period of twenty years or so, so that people in the city would forget our faces.