“We need you, Jack,” Silvius said softly, still holding onto Jack’s shoulders.
Ah, that’s better. Yes, you all need me, but I doubt all of you are glad at my return.
“You’re a cynical laddie,” Silvius said, finally letting his son go and bending down to grab Jack’s holdall. “God knows where you picked that up.”
Jack grinned again, his humour restored, and stubbed out his cigarette under his shoe. “And you, father? What is this form you step out in? Do I detect an Italian accent in your voice?”
Silvius nodded towards the concourse, and they started to walk towards the gate at the end of the platform. “Mr Silvius Makris, esquire, at your service,” he said. “And a vaguely Mediterranean birth, if you please, not Italian. Not in this milieu in which we live.”
“And what does Mr Silvius Makris do in this modern world, eh?”
Silvius smiled. “He mixes with the best crowd, don’t you know, spreading vague hints of an industrial fortune at his back and buying the jolly crowd at the dance halls and nightclubs as many cocktails as they can manage before management has to drag them out by their coat-tails and mink stoles.”
“A somewhat jolly but shallow existence, Silvius?”
“Beats the hell out of living trapped in the heart of the labyrinth, sonny.”
That silenced Jack and dampened the mood between them as little else could have done. He and his father may have reconciled, but Jack still felt deep pangs of guilt at the way he’d trapped his father in the labyrinth.
“I’m sorry, Jack,” Silvius said as they walked through the gate, Jack handing the inspector his ticket as they passed. “I could have said that a little more diplomatically.”
“You have every right to say it any way you want, Silvius.”
“Ah, Jack, we shouldn’t have to spend the rest of our lives apologising. In our time I’ve been a pitiful father and you’ve been a lousy son. We’ll just have to live with it.” They’d reached the revolving doors leading out from the station into the street. “Now, what say you we see what the London night has to offer, eh?”
As he had in his dream, Jack paused once they stood on the pavement outside. There was a fair amount of traffic on the road—mostly lorries and taxicabs, all with their headlamps dimmed—but few pedestrians. Many buildings were darkened, and many streetlamps left unlit.
Most people would be home, glued to the wireless, waiting on news from Europe.
Or Downing Street.
And, as he had in his dream, Jack looked northwards. It was difficult from this angle, but he thought he could make out the dome of St Paul’s across the Thames.
He shivered again, and silently cursed the fact he’d agreed to come home.
“The car’s this way, Jack,” said Silvius, nodding to a point further along the road.
“You’re driving?”
Silvius ginned. “Yes. Normally Harry would have given me a driver—he’s certainly surrounded with enough lackeys at Faerie Hill Manor—but I thought that for tonight we might like to talk. Catch you up on the news, so to speak.”
They’d been walking along the pavement towards Silvius’ car, but now Jack stopped again. “Harry?”
Silvius shifted the weight of Jack’s holdall into his other hand. “Brigadier—retired—Sir Harold Cole.” His grin spread a bit wider as he waited for his son’s reaction.
Jack suddenly realised who Silvius meant and gave a short nod of understanding. Coel, reborn as Harold, King of England, reborn as Charles II—the Lord of the Faerie. Harold Cole now, in this mortal world. Jack hadn’t realised, as the only times he’d met with the man was when he walked in his Faerie form.
“When he’s in this land of toil the Lord of the Faerie becomes Harry Cole,” Silvius said as they moved on. “He lives as a sort of…oh, a sort of a ‘boffin’ up at Faerie Hill Manor in Epping Forest. No one—beyond those of us who have known him for the past few thousand years, of course—really knows what he does, but he is trusted within the highest echelons of government and military and is consulted by both on matters of intelligence and defence. He’s a close friend of the king.” Silvius slid a look Jack’s way. “You know…”
“That John Thornton has been reborn as George VI? Yes, I knew that.” Jack gave a short laugh.
“We’ve been handing that pretty title about our group fairly evenly, I think.”
“Very democratically,” Silvius agreed. Then he stopped by a huge black saloon car. “Here we are.”
He stowed Jack’s holdall in the boot, nodding for Jack to get in the passenger side.
When he was behind the wheel, Silvius took a moment to draw on his leather gloves. “It’s been bad without you, Jack,” he said, looking ahead at the road rather than at his son. “None of us know what we can do against the Troy—”
“I don’t want to talk about that now,” Jack said quietly, his own eyes fixed ahead. His hand fumbled about in the pocket of his greatcoat and he drew out his cigarettes and matches. “Smoke?”
Silvius shook his head. “Jack—”
“Not now, Silvius, please,” Jack said, then struck a match and drew deeply on his cigarette. “Not yet.”
Silvius sighed, started up the car, and drove off.
Within moments they were on Blackfriars Bridge, and moments after that Silvius turned the car right, up Ludgate Hill.
“Silvius?” Jack straightened in his seat. “Where are we going?”
“To pick someone up,” Silvius said. “Another reason neither Harry or I wanted a civilian driver tonight.”
Jack tensed, his cigarette forgotten in his hand. They were driving directly towards St Paul’s Cathedral.
TWO
London
Saturday, 2nd September 1939
Silvius pulled the car to a stop half on the pavement, half on the road, just outside the quire at the eastern end of St Paul’s Cathedral. Jack didn’t believe this was quite legal, but the last thing he wanted to do right now was argue parking etiquette with his father. His heart was thumping and his breath felt tight in his chest.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to get this close, this quickly.
“What are we doing here, Silvius?” His cigarette suddenly burned at his fingers, and Jack gave a exclamation and stubbed it out in the car’s ashtray.
Silvius glanced at his son. “I told you. We’re here to pick someone up. Who do you think, Jack?”
Catling? No, not her. Neither Silvius, nor anyone associated with him or the Lord of the Faerie, would want Catling. The land, as represented by the Faerie, loathed the Troy Game, believing it more likely to destroy the land than protect it.
Jack glared at his father, then wrenched open the car door and climbed out, slamming the door behind him.
Silvius had the sense to stay where he was.
Jack looked over the roof of the car in the direction of Cheapside as it branched off to run eastward towards the Tower. Traffic was heavy around St Paul’s, both vehicular and pedestrian, and Jack wondered that no one complained about Silvius’ big saloon parked partway on the pavement.
But both people and vehicles flowed around the car without a second glance, and Jack supposed Silvius must be using a little of the Faerie to smooth out whatever blockage he caused to traffic.
Jack took a deep breath, and turned around.
St Paul’s loomed above him. Gods, it was massive. He’d seen photos of Wren’s masterpiece, but nothing prepared him for the sheer enormity of the structure.
Cornelia’s stone hall. This was it. The last battlefield. Finally.
Jack thrust his hands inside the deep pockets of his greatcoat, then clenched them. He thought of all the times he had met Cornelia—and later, Caela, as she had been reborn, and now Noah—inside her visionary stone hall. All that rancour and bitterness and misunderstanding they had shared within it. The vision of her lying with Asterion. His murdering her.
Asterion had torn her to pieces, but he hadn’t quite murdered Noah, had he? And she still loved him? After all the agony he’d put her through?
Jack fought down the anger which, after so many hundreds of years, still threatened to overwhelm him. Did he still love and want her? He didn’t know.
He was terrified of meeting her.
A movement caught his eye. There were a score of people moving through St Paul’s churchyard at that particular moment, all bustling into or from the cathedral, or taking a short cut through the gardens, but this one movement grabbed at Jack’s attention.
A man, disguised by the gloom. Coming slowly towards Jack and the car.
Moving slowly, dragging a leg.
Jack let his breath out on a ragged sigh. Walter Herne. Loth-reborn.
Walter had walked under the low light of a nearby lamp now, and Jack could see him clearly. A short and neat man, fair-haired with a chubby-cheeked face. He was in what Jack called “civvies”: a white shirt under a faded Fair Isle hand-knitted pullover, topped with a tweed jacket. Somewhat threadbare trousers. A dog collar. He was using a walking stick, putting his left foot gingerly to the ground.