Now, making a werelight was the very first spell I ever learnt and I’ve spent more than a year practising it so I’m pretty confident with it. I can run you up a were-light in torrential rain or while reading the newspaper and the size and intensity of the light will be consistent every time.
So imagine my surprise when I flicked open my palm and got a werelight the size of a football and the colour of a yellow party balloon. I closed down the spell and tried again, this time adding impello so I could move the light about. Nightingale says that spells become more stable with each increase in complexity, so I was hoping the second forma would calm things down.
It still came out so bright I expected lens flare, and as it rose up I suddenly understood why Bruno Taut’s sketches has been on Stromberg’s wall. Inside the concrete cylinder was a scaled-down version of Taut’s glass pavilion, like a giant acorn made of interlocking panes of glass. In the brilliance of my werelight the panes reflected back in greens, blues, purples and indigos. I tried to imagine what it would be like without the concealing concrete cylinder. You’d barely see it from ground level. But from a distance, or if it were lit from within. .
There was even a central plinth where, if it had been a lighthouse, the lamp would have stood. A metre across, it was raised to waist height and covered in a thick layer of dust. I wiped at it with my hand and got a static electric shock. Which was a surprise, because I could have sworn the surface was plastic. I used the sleeve of my jacket to clean the top. It was plastic, smooth black PVC with a pattern incised into the surface — a complicated series of interlocking circles and intersecting lines I didn’t recognise from anything I’d read.
It was a lighthouse, I realised, or more precisely a Stadtkrone, a city crown. But it had always been assumed that the ‘spirit’ of the city was a metaphorical concept at best and a bit of metaphysical bollocks at worst.
Is this what Erik Stromberg had been watching for with his telescope from his roof top garden on Highgate Hill? Gazing over the city and waiting to see — what exactly? A magic lighthouse? The mystical energy of the metropolis?
I glanced up at my unnaturally bright werelight bobbing a metre above my head.
Magic, vestigia. . Whatever it is that powers what we do.
Watching for a burst of magic like the burn-off at the top of a refinery flare tower?
Making Skygarden what? A magic refinery, a drilling rig, magic mine? And extracting the magic from where? The ground? The people? Sky’s garden?
Now I knew what it was, I was sensing I could identify it as the greasy, static-charged sense of power in the air. If Toby had been in there with me he would have barked himself right off the yap scale.
Wege der Industriellen Nutzung von Magie, I thought. Towards the Industrial Use of Magic — oh yeah.
Now I knew what the Faceless Man was interested in.
14
There have been developments. Please see me at your earliest convenience. Nightingale.
‘Still hasn’t really got the hang of texting yet has he?’ said Lesley.
She’d been in the kitchen making coffee when I woke up the next morning. I asked her what her evening had been like.
‘We ended up at Shepherd Market,’ she said. ‘In one of those pubs that are tucked into a side street.’
‘Do you want to know why that is?’
Lesley handed me a coffee. ‘If I said “no” would there be any chance you wouldn’t tell me?’
‘Yes. But then it would just niggle away at you until it became unbearable,’ I said.
‘That’s the way you are,’ she said. ‘I’m a little bit more focused on the practical things in life.’
‘Like fairies?’
‘Do you want to know what happened or not?’
I tasted the coffee. It was vile. It always is when Lesley makes instant.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
She sat down at the other end of the sofa-bed.
‘It was an ordinary pub,’ she said. ‘A bit traditional looking, Australian barman, but no TV though and no music. There was a stage area, so maybe they prefer it live. But you can feel it, like at the Spring Court — that something.’
There was a man there so beautiful that he would have stopped a hen party in its tracks, and a woman dressed in strips of fur.
‘You don’t know what it’s like to take your mask off in front of people,’ she said. ‘And know they don’t care.’ She must have caught something in my expression, because she hastily added, ‘People that aren’t you and Nightingale. These people don’t care, in fact they don’t even notice — that includes Beverley you know. So whatever she sees in you, it ain’t your face. Lucky escape for you there really — isn’t it?’
‘Funny,’ I said.
‘So Zach introduces me to some suitably dodgy-looking geezers, who I shall write up when I get back to the Folly.’ She waved her hand vaguely in the direction of central London. ‘I did the spiel to them and they said they’d keep an eye out for the materials we wanted.’
‘Did they ask what you wanted it for?’ I said.
‘First lot didn’t, but then this woman sidles over and says she couldn’t help overhearing, blah blah blah. “What on earth could you want all that for?” That’s how she spoke. “You simply must tell me what you’re planning.”’
So Lesley refused to give any details, while dropping enough hints to make it clear that we were making our own staffs.
‘Did you find out anything about her?’
‘It’s all in my notebook,’ said Lesley. ‘Said she was an artist. Made batik prints and flogged them up Camden Lock.’
Where our Night Witch had gone to ground. Coincidence?
‘After that we all got hammered. And me and Zach. .’ She frowned. ‘And some friends, crashed out in a portacabin on the Crossrail site.’
‘How did you get in there?’
‘Oh Zach’s all over Crossrail now,’ she said. ‘What with him being semi-official liaison between the project and the Quiet People.’ Without whose tunnelling expertise, I learned, Crossrail would have been behind schedule. ‘He must be making some serious money.’
‘Not enough to get his own place, though.’
‘I don’t think he can, Peter,’ said Lesley. ‘I think he has something missing that means he literally can’t settle down. If you put him in a mansion, with servants and a swimming pool, he still wouldn’t be able to sleep there more than a couple of nights.’ She rubbed irritably at the ridge of skin that ran down between her eyes. ‘I think it’s part of what makes Zach Zach. I think they’re all like that you know? Not quite all there.’
Which was when we received Nightingale’s text.
He met us in a Colombian cafe tucked under one of the arches by the Elephant and Castle National Rail station. It had orange walls hung with bundles of wickerwork baskets and shelves crowded with mysterious bottles with red labels. Half the food counter was devoted to hard-to-get treats for the homesick expatriate — La Gitana Tostados and Wafers Noel. The menu was bilingual and I had the arepa con carne adada which was translated on the menu as corn bread with grilled beef. Lesley had a ham omelette on the basis that it was almost impossible to mess a ham omelette up.
Nightingale said the coffee was good, so I ordered a double espresso with a cappuccino chaser.
Nightingale put down his free copy of Express News as we joined him at his table.
‘Dr Walid has made a disturbing breakthrough in the Robert Weil case,’ he said. ‘He’s discovered evidence of chimeric cells on the body of the woman Weil dumped.’
‘Shit,’ said Lesley. ‘So the Faceless Man was involved in that as well.’