SEVENTEEN
The Ruins of Coronation Avenue, London
Tuesday, 15th October 1940
Nauseated with fear and worry, Jack rejoined Noah and Weyland’s vigil at Coronation Avenue.
It was late at night now, almost midnight, but still the emergency personnel worked at the rubble, shifting it by hand, piece by piece, desperately searching for the entrance to the stairwell leading down to the basement shelter. It had been over twenty-four hours since the bomb had struck, and most of the initial crowd of onlookers had gone home to bed or their shelters, but a score or more still huddled about, sharing thermoses of tea or chocolate, transfixed by the horror before them.
The tent was still there, its interior as stark with despair as it had been when Jack had left it hours earlier. There was a table set out with the remnants of tea and sandwiches, but the Red Cross staff and volunteers had gone home an hour or so earlier. Noah and Weyland, the only two left within, had stood up when they heard the car pull up, its door slam, and then footsteps walking towards the tent, pausing as their owner stared for a long minute at the rubble.
When he entered, his uniform dishevelled, his face stubbled with beard, his eyes haggard, Noah gave a soft cry and turned her own face into Weyland’s shoulder.
“You didn’t find the White Queen,” Weyland said, his voice flat and emotionless. He looked even worse than Jack, his face grey, his eyes bloodshot, and he wavered slightly on his feet, as if exhaustion was but a few minutes from claiming him completely.
Jack gave a terse shake of his head. “The cafe was boarded up. A passing postman told me it had been that way since the beginning of the war. What Grace and I entered had been a construct of the White Queen.”
“Who is she?” Noah said, turning her head to look at Jack although she kept it resting against Weyland. “What does she want. Why? Why?”
Weyland’s arm tightened about her, and Jack looked away briefly before continuing: “There’s worse. The shadow has gone.”
“What?” Noah and Weyland said together.
“You didn’t feel it?” Jack said to Noah.
She shook her head. “I was concentrating only on Grace,” she said. “And I…we…”
Noah burst into tears, and it was Weyland who finished what she’d been trying to say. “We lost any sense of her about an hour ago,” he said.
“Aye,” Jack said, then sat down abruptly on a nearby chair. “Matilda is dead—”
He’d been about to add “too”, and stopped himself only just in time.
“Oh, gods…” Noah said brokenly. “Not Matilda. Not Matilda as well.”
Weyland sat down in a chair, pulling Noah down into one beside his. “They can’t all be…”
“She isn’t dead,” Jack said, and Noah and Weyland understood he wasn’t referring to Matilda. “She can’t be. Catling can’t kill her without killing herself.”
They were empty words, and he knew it. Catling patently had the capability of making things far worse than death for Grace.
Noah straightened up, wiping away her tears. “Jack, we’ve got to—”
“I know,” he said.
“Dear gods,” Weyland said. “Complete the Troy Game? But—”
We will promise only, said Jack into Weyland’s mind, holding the man’s eyes with his. And, in promising, free Grace from whatever hell Catling has constructed for her.
“We must, Weyland,” Noah said.
Then pray to all the gods and heavens you can get out of the promise when you need to, Weyland said.
Jack and Noah walked slowly through the crypt of St Paul’s. Again, while there were many members of the cathedral Watch about, none of them were aware of the man and woman—of the two ancient gods—who walked among them.
Jack and Noah had come straight from Coronation Avenue. Both looked terrible, close to exhaustion both physically and emotionally. They walked hand in hand, their steps dragging, their faces pale and drawn.
As they neared the tomb of Florence Nightingale, Catling emerged from the shadows.
This was the first time Noah had seen her in centuries, and she instinctively drew closer to Jack as they came to a halt a few paces away from Catling.
“Well,” said Catling, “for a Kingman and Mistress of the Labyrinth, you’re looking rather dilapidated. Where your pride? Your elegance? Your might?”
“Buried with Grace,” said Jack, “as well you know.”
Catling smiled, the expression terribly cruel. “And look what it has brought me, eh? What I wanted. My Kingman and Mistress, at my feet. So, tell me, what do you here? What do you have to say?”
“You know why we are here,” said Jack. “We’ve come with what you want. A promise to complete you, to raise the final Flower Gate.”
Something came over Catling then, and it took Noah and Jack a moment to realise it was intense excitement. Her entire form blurred, became a dense mass of darkness, before she returned to her usual form of the white-faced young woman.
“When?” Catling said.
“The winter solstice,” said Noah.
“No. No delays. Do it now.”
“Blame yourself for the delay!” snapped Jack. “You bound the Game to the land, you bound both your Kingman and Mistress to the land, and if you want this done properly then you need to wait until one of the nights of power which will bring the entire land behind us. The winter solstice it will have to be…unless you want something less than what we’re capable of delivering.”
Catling went very still, so much so that for a long moment she appeared to be a statue capable of neither breath nor movement.
“Two and a half months,” she said, finally. “I’ll tell you what, Jack. If you don’t mind me pushing Grace deeper and deeper into torment during those two and a half months, then I’m happy to wait. It’s no trouble on my part to strip Grace’s soul a little barer for each hour you delay. Your choice, Jack. Your choice.”
Jack wanted nothing more than to reach out and strangle her. “You said you’d give Grace back to us once we’d promised—”
“And so I will. Most of her, anyway. The best bits I may keep. Play with a little bit, if you understand my meaning. Whatever happens, Jack, Grace is not going to be the same girl if ever she wakes up.”
Suddenly Catling’s face twisted. “Complete me!” Then she was gone, and Jack and Noah were left staring in horror at the space where she’d been.
They fled back to Coronation Avenue, using their power rather than more conventional means.
It was a vastly different place to that they had left but an hour earlier. The rescue efforts were now frantic, and directed in one spot, whereas previously they had been desultory and spread over most of the mound of rubble.
“Weyland?” Noah said as she and Jack appeared at his side (it was well that everyone’s attention was concentrated on the rescue effort, so that their sudden appearance raised no eyebrows).
“They’ve found the stairwell,” Weyland said, his voice tight. “You’ve promised, then.”
Noah and Jack glanced at each other, their faces gaunt.
Then they looked back at the rescue efforts, not bothering to answer.
Catling seethed. Icy dread be damned, she’d succumbed to incandescent rage. Jack was delaying.
Very well. If he wanted to delay then he was going to pay the price.
When he finally got Grace back he was going to wish she had died instead.
An hour later came a shout, then the activity became even more frantic. Noah moaned and would have started forward, save that Weyland held her back. “They’ll bring her out soon,” he said. “Wait.” The waiting was the worst thing any of the three had ever endured. It took another three hours before enough of the rubble had been removed that the rescue workers could lift a limp, bloody figure onto a stretcher. Medical and rescue personnel leaned over her and, after several terrible, long minutes, the fire chief trudged over to where Noah, Weyland and Jack stood.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and Noah burst into tears.
Part Six
THE WHITE QUEEN
London, November 1703
The weather had been shocking over northern and western Europe throughout mid-November, but no one had anticipated the fury of the storm that blew in over Europe in the early hours of the twentysixth of that month. A fleet of one hundred Russian ships in the North Sea was scattered, and many lost. Four hundred coal barges which had just left port in northern England were sunk. In Norfolk fire swept through a town as chimney stacks were blown over.
London was devastated by the storm. At one a.m. most residents woke terrified as hurricane-force winds battered the capital. Over two thousand chimneys toppled in the first ten minutes of the tempest, and the air became a lethal mix of flying shards of glass, bricks, slates and nails. The lead on the roof of many churches rolled up like parchment, and spire after spire cracked, leaned and sometimes toppled in the raging winds. On the Thames, every single ship moored at wharves, save for four, were torn from their moorings and carried downriver to collide and break apart as the wind drove them ashore. Scores of houses blew down completely, thousands more had walls topple and roofs fly off, so that by next morning it appeared as if the city consisted only of the skeletal framework of houses.