“This fault is not mine to bear, Catling,” said Grace.
The stones were now metamorphosing into the shapes of the Sidlesaghes, and as they did so, Grace, despite her calm, cried out in horror.
All of them, all of the beloved ancient sad songsters, were being torn apart before her eyes. A Sidlesaghe directly in front of her screamed as his right arm was wrenched away from his body, then fell to the grass as his right leg was torn away.
“Grace!” came a tortured voice, and she whipped about.
There, crawling towards her across the grass, came the wretched body of the Sidlesaghe she recognised as Long Tom.
“Grace,” Long Tom said, his voice cracking as badly as his body, “take my hand.”
And he held out to her a hand from which Catling’s power was slowly flaying the skin.
Jack and Noah had managed to make it to Blackfriars Bridge. There were some forty or fifty people already on the bridge, all standing next to the railing as if they needed the security of knowing they could plunge into the waters of the Thames any time they needed, and all of them were staring transfixed back towards the massive flames which had now engulfed the City.
Jack and Noah joined them, standing together, Jack’s arm still about Noah as they leaned against the balustrade of the bridge, staring.
As they watched, the smoke cleared a little, and there came a break in the flames and they saw the dome of St Paul’s rising amid hell.
The cathedral was untouched.
Noah abruptly twisted in Jack’s arm, leaned over the side of the bridge, and vomited.
When she finally straightened, she glanced at Jack’s face, and was stunned to see there a faint smile.
“Jack?”
He glanced at her then nodded at the sky. “Do you see it, Noah? Do you feel it?”
Noah frowned at him, then looked up at the sky over St Paul’s Cathedral.
She gasped. The shadow was back, and it was stronger than Noah had felt it previously.
“Grace is alive,” said Jack. “Damn it, she is still alive!”
Tears slid down Grace’s cheek at Long Tom’s horrific dying, but she did not hesitate to step forward and reach for his hand.
Don’t touch him, Catling seethed.
Too late, said Grace, and grasped Long Tom’s bloody hand in hers.
St Paul’s was surrounded by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century warehouses and offices, tightly packed together and separated only by twisting narrow streets.
All of them were ablaze.
As Grace took Long Tom’s hand, a shower of sparks rose from the conflagration and blew northeast, landing on the ancient Guildhall.
It exploded into flames.
Inside, the ancient beings Gog and Magog stirred, and shook their spear and sword.
Long Tom had grasped her hand so tightly Grace could feel his flesh sinking into hers.
“D’you see?” Long Tom whispered in a horrible rasping tone.
“Yes,” whispered Grace. “Yes, I see. Thank you, Long Tom.”
The roof of the Guildhall collapsed, showering the wooden forms of Gog and Magog with sparks.
They caught alight instantly.
The wooden statues, alive with ancient power and with fire, stepped from their pedestals and began a slow dance about the flame-puddled floor of the Guildhall.
“Hello, Grace,” they whispered.
What are you doing? Catling said, coming to stand next to where Long Tom lay semi-prone on the grass, Grace bending over him, their hands still entwined. What are you doing?
Seeing, said Grace. Seeing that which you don’t wish me to know.
Let him go! shrieked Catling, her hands grabbing those of Long Tom and Grace.
Way, way too late now, said Grace.
Robert Stacey, Sidlesaghe and concierge of the residents’ wing of the Savoy, slowly rose from his desk in the foyer of the private entrance.
Outside, bombs rained down, and he could hear the roar of the inferno within the ancient City, even though it was many blocks away.
He was alone. Everyone else had fled for the shelters long since.
Hello, Grace, he said, and the next moment a nearby bomb blast shattered the glass door of the entrance foyer, and a sheet of glass fully five feet long and almost two wide impaled the Sidlesaghe.
Across Britain, the ancient stone circles, or dances, that had stood for so many thousands of years, shuddered as one, and then lost…life. They became shapeless, grey, lichen-covered stones, and nothing else. The dances were dead.
Long Tom lay lifeless at Grace’s feet. Very slowly,
reverentially, she let his hand go, and straightened up.
“You bitch,” said Catling. “You can’t beat me.”
“I know that,” said Grace. “I won’t even try.”
With that, she turned her back, walked down the
hill with small careful steps, and vanished, leaving Catling standing amid the tattered remains of what had once been Sidlesaghes.
Beneath Blackfriars Bridge the water sprites screamed.
“Jack!” Noah gasped, grabbing onto his arm for support. “Gods…Jack!”
“What is it?”
Noah gulped a huge, shocked breath. “The Sidlesaghes are dead,” she whispered. “Every one of them. Catling has murdered the Sidlesaghes.”
Before he could answer they were both reeling back as Catling appeared not a pace away.
“The Sidlesaghes tonight,” she hissed, “and whoever I feel like in the morning. I will work my way through the creatures of the Faerie until you come back and finish what you started. How long will it take, eh? How many deaths?”
And with that she was gone.
The streets and buildings of the City, the ancient square mile of London, had seemingly been replaced by an impenetrable firestorm. Firemen did their best, but combined with the ferocity of the blaze, its extent, the abnormal low tide of the Thames and the fractured water mains in the City, there was very little they could accomplish. The incendiary bombs set roofs and gutters alight, and then the following high explosive bombs tore buildings apart, scattering burning fragments far and wide and setting hithertountouched buildings ablaze.
Many fire crews had to abandon their equipment and run for their lives, holding their breath against the searing, ember-choked air.
One of the escaping firemen had an IB fall and embed itself into his back.
He burned alive, and no one could do anything to save him.
The wave after wave of German bombers returned to refuel and reload bombs at their airfields in France. The first raid of the night had been a stunning success, and as aircraft were refuelled, their crews chattered excitedly about their experiences flying over burning London.
“Like flying over bubbling pea soup,” one pilot exclaimed, referring to the sight as each newly dropped stick of bombs “bubbled” up through the churning clouds of smoke and flames. Others remarked on the stomach-dropping experience of having their aircraft suddenly hurtled thousands of feet into the air by the super-heated air over the City, only to just as suddenly drop thousands of feet once the aircraft were past the conflagration.
At the planes, ground crew struggled with the payload for this return raid. Gone were the IBs—they had already done their task—and the bombers were now loaded with Satans, massive eighteen-hundredmegaton bombs which would be used to literally blow central London apart.
As the crews chatted, and the aircraft were refuelled and reloaded, something strange began to happen on the beaches of France.
A young woman dressed in nothing but a heavy hound’s-tooth check coat walked barefoot along the sand at tide’s edge, the grey waves of the Channel foaming about her ankles. She walked heavily, as if exhausted, or as if she had been weakened by some serious illness, but nonetheless carried about her an air of serenity that counteracted any heaviness of gait. She held her forearms a little out from her body, waving her hands and fingers to the beat of a melody only she could hear.
The beat of the land.
She smiled as she walked, occasionally humming, occasionally speaking a few words as if murmuring a conversation to someone, and sometimes laughing out loud.
At one point she tipped her head back, shook out her loose mop of curls, and ran lightly—stunningly lightly considering the heaviness of her gait to this point—along the sand, the waters splashing about her bare legs.
Diamonds flashed and glowed about her wrists and lower arms.
After a while, her form became indistinct, as if a fog coalesced about her.
At Luftwaffe airfields, crews raced to their aircraft as the signals sounded that indicated refuelling and loading was completed. The crews clambered aboard, and the engines of the aircraft roared.
One after another, the bombers taxied onto their runways, their crews looking forward to an easy bombing run.
As the aircraft took off one by one, circling their respective airfields until their particular squadron was in the air, phones began ringing in airfield control rooms.
On the beaches of France, the young woman had vanished, hidden within the thick yellow fog which now blanketed the coastline, rising to almost nine thousand feet.