“But I am, most apparently,” said Noah with a disarming grin, “no good at cleaning.”
“And you can’t discern it at all,” Silvius said to Weyland. Talk! Tell me what is wrong!
But Weyland just gave a terse shake of his head, still averting his eyes from Silvius, and it was left to Noah to explain.
“I have taken Weyland outside,” she said, “and tried to show it to him, but he felt nothing.”
Silvius might have stood up and walked over to shake Weyland at that point, save that Jack asked Grace to explain what she’d discovered of the shadow.
Grace sat forward and laid a hand on the satchel at the side of the chair. “Are you sure it is safe?” she asked Jack. “Catling spends her life peering over my shoulder.”
“The hall is wrapped in ancient druidic magic for the next few hours,” said Jack, making Silvius raise his eyebrows in surprise. “We shall be safe from Catling’s prying for the time being.”
Grace nodded, and lifted the satchel to her lap. She opened the flap and pulled out a folded map, which she proceeded to unfold and spread out on the rug between the chairs and sofa.
Despite his growing concern about Weyland, Silvius leaned forward and studied the map. It was a large and detailed map of Greater London—so large it virtually filled the space between the chairs and sofa—and it had been marked in a myriad of places with red ink.
“Jack and I have spent the past months walking the city,” Grace said, “tracing out what we have felt.” She explained how it was that they actually had to put foot to pavement to be able to trace out the pathways of this strange phenomenon, and thus the slowness in their accumulation of data.
“We’ve done nothing systematically for fear of alerting Catling,” she said, a hint of apology in her voice, “thus the haphazard nature of what we’ve discovered.”
Haphazard, indeed, thought Silvius, although he acknowledged the reason behind it. There were groups of lines splotched here and there about the map. A group to the east centred on Greenwich, another to the south around Peckham, yet another to the west around Clapham. Besides the centre of London which they had mapped out in some detail, in all there were some nine areas where Jack and Grace had discovered manifestations of what they called their “shadow”. But even with all this work, they had thus far covered only about a fiftieth of London; there wasn’t enough marked on the map, there wasn’t enough known about this shadow, to be able to clearly define it.
Yet there was enough to tantalise.
“It’s labyrinthine,” said Silvius, one hand extended as he slowly traced the lines out with his forefinger.
“Aye,” said Jack, “but it makes no sense. None! If it is labyrinthine, and it is, then it must, must, be connected to the Troy Game. There is no other reason it could exist.” He hesitated. “I should have asked Ariadne here tonight. Her input would have been valuable, and I will make sure to ask her the next time I gather you together to discuss this. Now, Silvius, what I can’t make out, and neither can Noah or Grace, is how all these separate sections—” he waved a hand over the ten areas they’d mapped so far “—connect up. Look,” he leaned over to the hearth and picked up a poker, which he used to trace over the map, “if we extrapolate these groups of lines here, and here, then nothing makes sense. If this is some kind of reflection of the Troy Game, which it must be, damn it, because nothing else can explain it, then it simply doesn’t ‘fit’ the Troy Game. It is…”
“Skew-whiff,” said Grace, with an apologetic shrug for her unscientific term.
Jack grinned at her, the casualness of which sent a jolt of surprise through Silvius.
“Aye,” said Jack. “It is skewwhiff.”
“And that’s why,” Noah said, “Jack and I think it is a weakness of the Troy Game. Something has gone wrong with it.”
“Do you think that because the Game has been left so long for completion,” Silvius said, watching out the corner of his eye as Grace slid back in her chair, once more studying her hands in her lap, “it has…warped? Grown thin? Started to deteriorate?”
“Yes!” said Noah. “Jack and I both think that it is a weakness.”
“But Grace doesn’t think so,” said Silvius.
“Grace,” said Jack, “believes it is a trap set by Catling. Something designed to fool us.” He turned to look at Grace directly. “Grace, I acknowledge your point of view, but Catling’s behaviour—the fact she hasn’t pushed for completion as hard as I expected—indicates some vulnerability.”
“The shadow is malevolent, Jack,” Grace said.
Jack narrowed his eyes, suspecting that Grace kept something from him.
He opened his mouth to ask, but she dropped her eyes away from his, and Jack knew Grace well enough by now to know she would not give him an answer.
“Jack?” said Silvius, interrupting Jack’s train of thought.
“Yes?”
“There is one person we haven’t heard from today…and I think we need to. Badly.”
Jack frowned at his father, then his expression cleared. “Oh. Weyland, do you have any input?”
It was very clear to Silvius that neither Jack nor Noah thought Weyland had anything to say at all. In fact, Noah’s expression was so lovingly indulgent it bordered on the condescending.
For the longest moment Silvius thought Weyland wasn’t going to speak. Then, staring into the fire, refusing to look at anyone, Weyland finally began talking.
“The imps have been murdering the women to feed the shadow. It feeds from terror and death. The imps work for it, or worship it, I don’t know.”
“Weyland—” Jack began.
“I watched them,” said Weyland, his voice horribly flat. “Several nights ago. Murder a woman by means so slow that she died in degrees in agony and terror. The shadow fed from that terror.”
Finally he looked up, the expression in his eyes terrible. “I’m with my daughter. I don’t think this shadow is a ‘weakness’ at all. I think it is something constructed by Catling and designed to trap or destroy us.”
There was a lengthy silence following Weyland’s words.
“Weyland,” Jack said eventually, his voice surprisingly even and calm, “what do you know of the imps? What have they been up to these past few hundred years?”
“I have barely registered them,” Weyland said. “I knew they were about the city. Occasionally I could sense them up to some mischief—nothing dramatic, just mischief—but nothing spectacular.”
“They’re still Catling’s instruments?” Jack said.
Weyland gave a small shrug. “So far as I know. They’re not my instruments. Not any more.”
“We need to speak to the imps,” said Noah. “Perhaps they can tell us—”
“They’re hardly likely to spout forth helpfully,” snapped Weyland. “Besides, I have been trying to find them for the past few weeks, and it was only because I’d been keeping an eye on St Magnus the Martyr that I eventually saw them. If the imps don’t particularly want to be found, then they won’t be.”
“Father?” Grace said. “Why St Magnus the Martyr? Why leave the bodies there?”
Again Weyland shrugged, but his expression softened as he regarded his daughter. “It isn’t like the imps to be neat and tidy. There must be a good reason for that church, for its porch, but I don’t know what it could be.”
“I don’t think any of us can know what to infer from what Weyland has told us,” said Silvius. “The imps could be trying to repair a weakness with fresh blood, or they could be strengthening a trap.”
“Or they could be feeding something monstrous of which we have as yet no idea,” said Weyland, his voice hard-edged.
“Or they could be feeding something unknown and monstrous,” Silvius agreed. “But unless someone can find the imps, and they actually talk, then we’re still in the same dilemma we’ve been in for months. Only Jack and Grace can discover anything new about this shadow, and only at a snail’s pace. Weyland, can you continue to try to find the imps? Try to discover the reason behind their actions?”
Weyland gave a curt nod.
“Jack,” Silvius said, “I don’t think you really have any option, unless you want to wait another twenty years until you and Grace have mapped out this shadow in its entirety. You’re going to need to probe the shadow. See what happens.”
“The Faerie won’t survive the twenty or so years it will take for Grace and me to map it entirely,” Jack muttered. “Frankly, at the moment I’m almost more scared of the Lord of the Faerie than I am of Catling…or of whatever monstrosity that shadow is.”
“Besides,” said Noah, “too many women are dying.”
Jack nodded, his face grim. “We need to move, and we need to do so soon.”