“You’ve become quite the lyricist, father.”
Silvius grinned. Jack only called him “father” when he was truly annoyed. “You’ve got to make room in the sky for her, Jack. You’re the only one who can do that.”
“How? What do you want me to do?”
“Court her, Jack. Over the past three thousand years you’ve raped and bullied and threatened and taken women. Have you ever taken the time to court one?”
“Matilda—”
“Matilda you just decided you wanted, and she you. I doubt there was any ‘courting’ involved at all. Courting takes time, Jack. It means that either of you can pull back, think, inch forward again if you want to. It doesn’t mean commitment. It just means taking a very close look at it.”
“Is that what you’re doing with Ariadne?”
Silvius roared with laughter. “We’re circling warily, laddie. We’re both too jaded for courting.”
“As am I.”
“No. I don’t think you are, and Grace certainly isn’t. Try it out, and, who knows, you may enjoy it.” He paused. “I also think you’ll discover a great deal more about her.”
“I don’t want to trick her.”
“Then don’t say or do anything you don’t mean, Jack. But I think Grace is the only one who can solve the problem of this shadow labyrinth hanging over London.” He grinned. “And don’t forget she has four of your kingship bands embedded in her flesh. She isn’t going to give those to you if you’re not very, very nice to her.”
Jack grunted, and busied himself with his whisky.
“Jack, can I say something else to you? Something about this labyrinthine puzzle? Open your mind, and consider this: what if this shadow is not a weakness, and not even a trap? What if it is something else?”
Very early the next morning, almost dawn, the imps were disturbed from their hiding place in an abandoned warehouse in London’s wharf district by a soft call.
“It’s her!” whispered Bill. “Jim! Jim! It is her!”
Jim scrambled to his feet, dusting down his clothes. “Get yourself presentable, man!” he hissed at his brother. “She hates it when—”
“No need for fuss,” said the dark-haired woman, walking silently into the little back room the imps had bedded down in. “I don’t need ceremony.”
The imps both were standing now, hands folded before them, heads hanging guiltily.
“Have we done something to offend?” said Jim.
The woman tipped her cold, white face to one side, regarding them. “You mean the murders?” She considered it a moment. “Of course not. It was needed, and I thank you for it. All my plans would have gone awry if you hadn’t…helped.”
The imps beamed.
“But now,” the woman continued, “the murders must stop. Weyland has seen you.”
“Oh!” cried the imps as one, their faces falling.
“And Weyland has told all his friends,” the woman continued. “Malcolm came to me this past night, and told me that Jack wants to speak to you.”
“We won’t be found,” said Bill. “Promise.”
“Indeed you won’t,” said the woman. “I am sure I can find some mischief for you across the Channel. I shall find transport for you within the day. The murders must stop. It is enough.”
“But the dancing needs to feed!” cried Jim.
“And it shall,” said the woman. “Tonight it shall have all the food it needs to grow strong and healthy.”
“Tonight?” said Bill. “But you told us that…” He broke off, watching his mistress’s face. “Oh, it is to begin, then.”
Both the imps smiled and, after a moment, so also did the cold-faced woman.
The new day dawned clear and bright, a beautiful early autumn day.
There was little enemy aircraft activity over England during the morning, but in the early afternoon Luftwaffe aircraft, numbering over a thousand planes in total, formed up over Calais.
In mid-afternoon, with Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring watching by the seashore, the planes turned for England.
And London.
The bombs first fell in the East End, lighting terrible infernos. Then, as the afternoon and evening wore on, the bombs and fires spread to the central part of the city. The fires lit the way for successive waves of Luftwaffe bombers. During the night enemy aircraft continued to drop bombs into the massive firestorms raging through London. The city’s defences, faced with their first test, could not cope with the onslaught and the complete chaos on the ground. There were too few firemen and engines for the firestorms, and what effort they could make was compounded by an almost complete failure of the city’s water mains and the thousands of people, covered with blast dust, wandering dazed and shocked in the streets.
When Sunday morning dawned, much of the City and the East End lay in ruins, the docks were almost completely destroyed, and over eighteen hundred Londoners were dead or terribly injured. Burned corpses littered the streets or lay dismembered amid the rubble of homes.
In France, Göring gave a triumphant radio address to the Germans, claiming a historic victory for the Fatherland.
The war had come to roost in London.
Catling rested, replete, deep in the heart of the labyrinth. She had fed well during the day and night, drawing nourishment from the pain and terror that had consumed London.
The German offensive over London had begun, and Catling knew that over the following weeks and months she could grow strong enough to counter whatever Jack and Noah might throw at her.
“Just a few more months,” she whispered. “Just a few more months, and then I will be unstoppable.”
Over London, the shadow throbbed.
It, too, had feasted well.
Part Four
MISTRESS OF THE LABYRINTH
London, 1205
The physician sighed, leaned down, and closed Peter de Colechurch’s eyes. The man was in God’s hands now, and there was nothing anyone on earth could do for him. The physician stepped back and allowed the brothers of St Mary Colechurch access to their venerable brother’s body, thinking that Peter had lived an exceptional life, and an exceptionally long-lived one at that. It had been a good life, and a good death, and no one could wish for better than that.
The new stone London Bridge was almost complete. It would stand as a monument to Peter—an elegant and strong series of Gothic arches straddling piers built on starlings dug deep into the bed of the Thames. The bridge was the wonder of Europe—it was the longest stone bridge that anyone had ever seen, and everyone commented on Peter’s extraordinary engineering skills.
No one else could have designed and built such a bridge.
There was only one problem.
Peter had designed and caused to be constructed a beautiful chapel on the bridge. Situated almost at the centre of the bridge, the chapel straddled the ninth pier from the London bank. Dedicated to St Thomas, the chapel projected almost sixty feet from the side of the bridge, and boasted graceful stained-glass Gothic windows, and entrances both from the road level on the bridge and from the starling below, so fishermen could tie up and worship when they needed. The best craftsmen had fitted out the interior of the chapel, and it had been dedicated only a few months before Peter’s death.
The problem lay in the crypt Peter had insisted be incorporated into St Thomas’ Chapel.
In itself the crypt was not unusual because most churches and chapels had them. But St Thomas’ crypt was different in two respects.
Firstly, Peter insisted it be dug deep. So deep, in fact, that it lay well under the riverbed. Even though it was underwater, the crypt had been so well constructed that it was utterly watertight. It ran the entire length of the chapel above, had a spectacular fan-vaulted roof, and an altar at the east end.
As a crypt it was one of the best examples in London, and was easily accessible from the chapel above via a twisting stone stairwell in the ninth pier.
But…in that “but” lay the second problem. Even though it was bone-dry, and even though it was commodious, the crypt was unusable.
There was something wrong with it.
Peter could never sense it, but from the day the crypt was completed, whenever someone else went down there they left almost immediately, complaining of a sense of foreboding so terrible they felt the world was about to end. Some people claimed to have seen a lovely young woman down there, huddled by the altar and weeping inconsolably as if she had been trapped and left to die by those she loved most. Others said the young woman had a terrible aspect, as though she were the most malevolent witch imaginable.
On the day after Peter’s death, a workman went down to collect some tools, and never returned.
When his comrades went looking for him, they found him lying dead before the altar.
He had been strangled with a twisted length of red wool, and his face wore an expression of such terror that everyone who saw him instinctively looked over their shoulder as they hurriedly stepped back.