Or slightly desperate. Like me.
I made my way past the sunken steps and pressed myself to the wall so I could peer around the corner. The west end of the church is plainer than the east, being all brick and square doors and lacking those fake classical flourishes that no Renaissance landowner could live without. It still has a pediment, though, this one with a ridiculously wide lower cornice that jutted out like a particularly unsafe balcony.
Parked on the flagstones was a vintage white Ford Transit van, back doors open to show emptiness. I texted Seawoll what I was seeing and, as I pressed Send, I felt a magic detonation from the opposite side of the church. Sand, gravel and a couple of half bricks bounced off the pediment and onto the roof of the van.
‘Try it now,’ said Chorley – I judged he was standing on the left side of the cornice.
‘That did it,’ said Lesley, more muffled – so probably inside.
I texted Seawoll that the crime was ongoing and I was moving to disrupt – TOO LATE, GOING IN.
The main doors were unlocked and I slipped into the narthex, which is the fancy term for that bit of a church with the collection box and the pamphlets and souvenir stand. This being the Actors’ Church, there was a lot of stuff you could buy. There were also two staircases going up – one to the belfry on the left and one to the belfry on the right.
I didn’t have to pause long before I heard a thump and someone swearing up on the left. I went up the stairs as quietly as I could, pushed through the door at the top and nearly got the drop on both of them.
If only the bloody bell hadn’t started humming.
The Punch-summoning bell was larger than the church bell it was replacing, so Chorley had had to knock a big hole in the wall to get it into position. It hung from the original headstock while the original bell perched precariously on the landing.
Lesley was holding the sword occasionally known as Excalibur, while Chorley stood out in the rain on the cornice.
He saw me first.
‘Ah, Peter,’ he said. ‘Why am I not surprised?’
‘So much for Plan B,’ said Lesley.
They were both dressed in boiler suits and blue nylon cagoules, all the better to pass as council workers or contractors.
I was going to say something clever, but Lesley put the point of Excalibur against my chest and pushed gently so that I was forced out onto the cornice with Chorley. The rain had eased off a bit, but the cement was slick. There was no safety rail and the courtyard was a good twelve metres straight down. There was a clock with a blue face in the middle of the pediment and in the distance I heard a roll of thunder – all we were missing was a DeLorean.
‘Do you believe in fate, Peter?’ asked Chorley.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Neither do I,’ he said. ‘And yet despite all our efforts to the contrary – here we are.’
Lesley climbed out to join us. I caught her eye. She’d transferred the sword to her left hand and in her right was the compact semi-automatic she’d used to shoot Stephanopoulos. She held it pointed down by her side with her finger safely outside the trigger guard as Caffrey had taught us both.
‘There’s no—’ I said, but Chorley cut me off with a bark of laughter.
‘No Arthur, no Merlin, no one sword,’ he said. ‘It’s all dull old socio-economic forces acting on an undifferentiated mass of semi-evolved primates.’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
‘Is he right?’ asked Lesley.
‘Why don’t you ring the bell, and we’ll find out?’ said Chorley.
‘Am I right, Marty?’ I said. ‘I think I am.’
‘You’re a bright boy, Peter,’ said Chorley. ‘I’ve always thought so. But you’ve never understood the limitations of your own viewpoint. It doesn’t matter whether there was an actual Round Table, a king, a sword, a mighty magician. Because we can make it so.’
‘And how do we do that?’ I asked, because Chorley liked the sound of his own voice and so did I – especially when I was playing for time.
‘Magic is about man reshaping reality itself,’ he said. ‘That’s what the formae do, that’s what a spell is. A tool to reshape the universe.’
‘And you think you can just wish Merlin into existence?’ I asked.
‘No.’ Chorley gave me a disturbingly confident grin. ‘I think we can change existence so that Merlin is real. Given enough magic – enough juice, so to speak.’
‘Wow. I didn’t realise we were going to have to section you – I was hoping for a trial.’
But I was wondering whether he was right. There were definitely moments when I suspected that Beverley somehow warped the world into a more congenial shape around her. But she was a goddess, and did things beyond mortal ken. And anyway, if it were that easy Lady Ty’s husband would be ageless and her daughter slightly less gullible.
‘Martin,’ said Lesley, pocketing her pistol, ‘he’s stalling.’
‘Of course he is,’ said Chorley. ‘Are you ready?’
Lesley transferred the sword to her right hand.
‘Lesley, this is insane,’ I said. ‘He’s talking bollocks.’
Lesley ignored me and caught Chorley’s eye.
‘I do this and, whatever else, Punch dies?’
‘Dead as a doornail,’ said Chorley.
‘Good enough for me,’ said Lesley and swung the sword.
As I told the subsequent inquiry, I wasn’t sure what I thought I was doing, but I wanted to try and disrupt Chorley’s insane bit of ritual. Given that Lesley was armed with a sword, and Chorley wasn’t, my choice was obvious. While Lesley was swinging I tensed. And as she hit the bell I threw myself at Chorley.
There was a flash that had nothing to do with reflected photons, and a beautiful sound.
The sword is a singing sword, I thought, as the chime struck me like a wave of freezing water. My shoulder struck Chorley just below the armpit and he staggered. I was counting on him being more centred, but he must have been distracted by the beauty of the chime. Because he went over backwards, off the side of the cornice.
And me with him.
I’ve got to stop doing this, I thought, as I fell into the rainy black.
A much shorter distance than I was expecting. And onto mud, not flagstones.
I’d lost my grip on Chorley, so I rolled away on general principle. But not fast enough to avoid getting a kick in the head. I rolled some more but managed to hit a tree – and that’s when I knew where I was.
‘I don’t have time for this,’ said Chorley. Of course he didn’t. Because we were still falling and sooner or later real gravity was going to forcefully introduce us to the real flagstones of real London. ‘Deal with him,’ he said.
Not liking the sound of that, I used the tree trunk to pull myself up.
I was standing in light woodland, in dim grey light, morning or evening – I couldn’t tell – with a light drizzle and mist. Three metres in front of me was a short white man in a yellow buff coat, matching trousers and big floppy cavalry boots. He wore a breastplate over his coat and I just had time to register the pistol he was pointing at me when there was a click, a hiss, a loud bang and a cloud of smoke. Nothing else happened.
Matchlock pistol – effective range five metres in ideal conditions. Which these weren’t.
My cavalier didn’t seem at all surprised at the miss. He calmly stuffed the pistol in his belt, and pulled out a rather fine cavalry sabre with a basket hilt and an effective range of whatever it got close to.
Weirdly, my Metvest would have served quite well if only I could have persuaded him not to stick me in the face, or the arms or the groin – particularly not the groin.