‘Not unless he’s shed a lot of fur,’ said Abigail, ‘started walking upright, oh and let’s see, put on about fifty kilograms. . Unless you think that’s possible.’
I wasn’t sure what to say. There were reports of were-creatures and shape changers in the Folly’s library, but nothing after the nineteenth century. Nightingale had taught me to be cautious of the early sources. ‘A great deal of it is accurate,’ he’d said. ‘And great deal is less so. Unfortunately it can be difficult to determine which is which.’
‘Unlikely,’ Nightingale told Abigail. ‘But I have to say that recently I have lost my faith in the word impossible.’
But ‘impossible’ still seemed to apply to catching a break in any of our cases. Nightingale returned from the Monday morning briefing and reported that the mood was not optimistic.
‘At this rate,’ said Lesley, ‘no one’s going to want to work with us. We’re clear-up rate poison.’
Nightingale — who came from an era when clear-up rates were something applied to char ladies — decided, as he had threatened in the aftermath of the Spring Court, to teach us some magical blacksmithing. So we trooped into the classroom with a forge — Nightingale insisted that we call it the smithy — and donned our heavy leather aprons and protective goggles.
The forge itself looked bolted together out of random sheets of blackened steel. There was an extractor hood surmounted by what appeared to be a lawnmower engine and a shelf filled with coke at groin level which was fed by what looked to me to be a suspiciously jury-rigged gas line.
‘The Sons of Weyland maintain,’ said Nightingale as he turned the gas on, ‘that the smiths were the first true practitioners of magic.’ He lit the forge with a practised flick of his finger and a lux spell.
For the hardy men of the North, the alchemists and the astrologers that preceded the Newtonian revolution were a bunch of conmen and grifters. ‘As above, so below,’ was so much bollocks. Not that Nightingale used the word bollocks. Craft, dedication, hard work and hitting bits of metal very hard with a hammer — that was the true path to wisdom.
‘And it is true,’ said Nightingale. ‘That you can always tell where a smithy stood by the vestigium it leaves behind.’
‘What about hospitals?’ asked Lesley. ‘You get tons of vestigia off old hospitals.’
‘But not the new ones,’ said Nightingale. ‘Have you noticed that?’
I hadn’t, until he pointed it out.
‘Sudden death seems to imbue a locality with a degree of power,’ he said. ‘People don’t die in hospitals in the quantity they once did.’ He paused and frowned. ‘Or perhaps the technology mutes the effect. In either case, it is of a quite different quality from the sensus illic of a smithy.’
‘You don’t get much around graveyards,’ I said.
‘The magic is released upon the point of death,’ said Nightingale. ‘Despite the attachment spirits have for their bodies, I was taught that little magic stays with those earthly remains.’
‘What about massacre sites?’ I asked. ‘You know like when they get the victims to dig a pit and then-’
‘Extremely magical and extremely unpleasant,’ said Nightingale. ‘I suggest you try to avoid such sites if you wish to sleep soundly again. Although I imagine becoming inured would be worse.’
He pulled out a steel rod, ten centimetres long, from a box on a nearby work surface.
‘This will be our raw material,’ he said. ‘One rod of sprung steel, six of mild.’
But first they needed cleaning with wire wool, which can be a surprisingly painful experience if you’re not careful. By the time we’d finished, the forge was good and hot — two thousand degrees Fahrenheit according to Nightingale, which was just over a grand in real temperature.
‘You need to learn to read the colour of the flame,’ he said.
He bundled the seven rods together with wire and pushed one end into the glowing centre of the forge.
‘Now, this is where you need to watch carefully,’ he said, and stretched his hand over the forge. He said the spell quietly and I caught that weird echo you get when someone does some serious magic in your presence. Heat bloomed off the forge, real heat not vestigia, that crisped the hairs on my forearm and made me and Lesley step smartly backwards. Nightingale pulled back his hand equally sharply and, using a pair of tongs, rotated the bundle of rods a couple of times before withdrawing them from the forge.
For a moment the heated end shone like a magnesium flare and I added an arc welding mask to my list of things to acquire before the next lesson. The light faded to merely bright as Nightingale swung around and placed the bundle on the anvil.
‘What now?’ asked Lesley.
‘Now?’ said Nightingale. ‘Now, we hit it with a hammer.’
At breakfast the next morning Lesley pitched her plan for using the weird way of the Sons of Weyland and the staffs they made to lure out the Faceless Man.
‘Because he’s bound to want to know how it’s done,’ she said.
Nightingale finished a mouthful of scrambled egg before speaking.
‘I understand the principle,’ he said. ‘I’m just not sure of the practicalities.’
‘Such as?’ asked Lesley.
‘Where do we cast our lure?’
‘I thought we’d start at the Goblin Fair,’ she said.
Nightingale nodded.
‘We should be looking to maintain a presence at the fairs anyway,’ I said. ‘We need to get that whole community used to seeing us out and about.’
‘The community?’ asked Nightingale.
‘The,’ I groped for a word, but I couldn’t find any other term that fit, ‘magical community. We need to open up channels of communication.’ It was your basic policing by consent, currently referred to as stakeholder engagement, and we’d done at least one lecture on it at Hendon — although judging by Lesley’s amused snort I might have been the only one who stayed awake.
She exchanged looks with Nightingale, who shrugged.
‘Perhaps we could do with a bit of dredging in that direction,’ he said. But before I could ask what that meant, he asked Lesley for specifics.
‘We go in as if we’re looking to scoop up any staffs floating around on the open market,’ she said, and explained that having established our interest we’d then imply that we were looking for the materials to construct new ones. ‘We want to make,’ she tilted her head at me, ‘the community link our presence with the staffs. That might be enough to draw the Faceless Man out — although I think it might be a bit of a long-term strategy.’
Nightingale sipped his coffee and gave it some thought.
‘It’s worth a try,’ he said. ‘And who knows? We might recover some genuine staffs into the bargain. Do we know when the next fair is?’
‘We know a man who does,’ I said.
‘I presume that would be our Mr Zach Taylor?’ asked Nightingale.
‘Well if you want to know where the goblins are. .’ said Lesley.
The Goblin Fair was, as far as we could tell, a combination mobile social club, shabeen and car boot sale for London’s supernatural community. I’d actually gone digging in the mundane library and found references to a Goblin Fayre and to a hidden market that was tucked into great St Bartholomew’s feast as a flea hides upon a dog. The earliest reference was recorded in 1534, which meant that the institution predated Isaac Newton and the establishment of the Folly.
Nightingale had said that there’d always been a supernatural demi-monde at the fringes of the great horse fairs and the traditional markets, but he’d never had anything to do with them.
‘Not my department,’ he’d said.
Not that the Folly had departments, you understand, it being the child of an era when a gentleman might serve his country in any number of ways regardless of previous experience, probity or talent. And if at the same time he might accrue some influence, some status and a huge estate in Warwickshire — then so much the better. Still, Nightingale had worked abroad at the behest of the Foreign and Colonial Offices while others had worked with the Home Office, offering assistance to the police and other civil authorities. Some had done what I considered scientific research, and others still had researched by studying the classics or collecting folklore. Many just used the Folly as their London club while in town from their parsonages, estates or university positions — ‘Hedge Wizards’ Nightingale called them.