"An anachronism."
"Except that the horde was otherwise intact. The items were very well preserved and various valuable items were included, which would have been stolen if the horde was discovered by treasure hunters."
"Something shiny like a key could have been dropped in a hole by a magpie, and just ended up with the rest of the horde by accident," she pointed out.
"Except it wasn't shiny. It was dull grey, and the exact metal it was made of was never determined."
"Dull grey?" she asked.
"Not tarnished silver, and iron would certainly have rusted. It was the wrong colour for gold and was unlikely to have been aluminium — far too early for that. Where else have you seen a dull grey metal object that's hundreds of years old?" I asked her.
"You're comparing it with the Quick Knife, the knife from the Quit Rents Ceremony?"
"I'm trying not to leap to conclusions, but I'm running out of alternatives here. The key was not corroded, even though it is easily over four hundred years old, and may be more like a thousand. It was made of an unidentified grey metal."
"Perhaps it was an aluminium key which got mixed up with the horde much later?"
"It was given to Elizabeth I in 1593 as part of the horde, but the key was passed to the Tower of London for safe-keeping. Nothing else from the horde was taken there, though there may have been other items that weren't documented. Aluminium wasn't discovered in a metallic form until the eighteenth century — I checked."
"Perhaps it was discovered earlier than we thought?" she said.
"Perhaps it wasn't aluminium. Why else would a team of part-fey teenagers break into the Tower of London and steal it?"
"Are you sure that's what they were after?"
"The only other thing unaccounted for was the feather which Alex took. The group made a big fuss around the jewels but made no serious attempt to steal them."
"A distraction."
"Quite. But how did they know there was a key there? It's mentioned in the internal inventory of the tower, but you'd have to know where to look. It's not a published treasure of the tower and even the museums were unaware of its existence."
"If you wanted to hide a key, where would you hide it?" asked Blackbird.
"Amongst a lot of other keys?"
"Inside a guarded Tower with soldiers and a sophisticated alarm system," she added.
"The alarms are a recent addition."
"But they replaced earlier alarms, which have been upgraded by each generation according to the times. Someone tried to protect it, both physically and by hiding it, which implies that someone knew what it was and what it opens."
"You think it opens something?"
"It's a key, Niall. That's what keys do."
"It could be decorative?"
"If it was purely decorative then why steal it? No, whoever took it knows what it's for, and when we know that, we'll know why they stole it."
"What about the feather?"
"Another distraction? Who knows? You can get a raven feather anywhere there are ravens, but there looks to have been only one key like that one."
"So how do we find out what the key is for?"
"You ask a man who knows," she smiled.
"A locksmith?" I asked.
"No, a wizard," she smiled.
"You sodding well abandoned me!" said Alex. "You saved your own skinny arses and left me there for the ravens."
"Nonsense," said Eve. "You're here now, aren't you?"
"No thanks to you. You could have waited for me. You could have stayed at the gate, I was seconds behind you."
"And therein lies the problem," said Eve. "We didn't have seconds. You were told to be at the gate at the appointed time. You weren't there. They had armed guards and reinforcements on the way. If we'd stayed we would have been caught."
"Chill out," chimed in Sparky. "We'd have had to started killing people if we'd stayed any longer."
"Which would raise the profile of our little adventure a tad too far," said Eve. "Much better that you made your own exit."
"I could have drowned," Alex said. "I could have washed out to sea and then you'd never get your sodding feather."
"You can't drown," said Eve. "I don't think it's possible for anyone with your abilities to drown, even in sea water. Besides, you've shown yourself to be resourceful and quick-witted, independent and capable of defeating the best security that man can devise. You should be proud of yourself."
"It was a pretty cool way out, wasn't it?" said Alex.
"It rocked," said Sparky. "Even I wouldn't have thought of that."
Mollified, Alex flopped down on the old sofa, the springs protesting as she sank into it. "This is messed up," she said. "We need a new one."
"When we're done, the world will be at your feet," said Eve. "Where's the feather?"
Alex looked up. "Somewhere safe."
Eve held out her hand.
Alex sighed, and pulled down her top and fished into her bra, while Sparky made a show of not staring at her cleavage while she did it. Chipper was too busy playing Xbox to notice anything. She extracted a polythene zip-lock bag containing the long feather and handed it to Eve.
"You kept it dry, that's good," said Eve.
"It's a tail feather."
"I really wanted a wing pinion," said Eve, examining the sheen. "But this will do well enough, I think."
"I had to bargain for it."
Eve's head lifted. "You spoke with the birds?"
"Kind of," said Alex. "They understood what I was saying, or maybe they're like that with everyone?"
"No, you are favoured, Alex. The birds have knowledge beyond human comprehension, and they must have seen something in you to act so. They have acknowledged what I saw in you when you first came to us — the capacity for great things."
"Great thing, huh?" Alex shrugged it off, but she was smiling as she did.
"Your time will come Alexandre, and when it does you should not flinch from the task. It will take courage and faith, a leap into the dark to gain a path to enlightenment."
Alex shook her head slowly, sceptical of Eve's grand words. She glanced at Sparky who raised an eyebrow slightly, implying that even if Eve wasn't all there, she had engineered a theft from one of the most closely guarded places in the country. She deserved their respect simply for that.
Alex folded her arms. "So what's next? What's the next step in the plan for world domination?"
"We seek not dominion, only the reordering of the universe, to better reflect that which resides within us," said Eve.
"Yeah, whatever," said Alex, but she watched Eve admiring the feather twirling between her fingers.
"Our assembly is almost complete. Once we have the key, the well will open. Then we will hold the fate of the universe in our hands."
"I thought we already had the key?" said Alex.
"That is only a part of the key, one piece of the whole. We will have the other parts soon and then we will see what can be done."
Alex watched Eve's intense fascination with the blue sheen on the feather and wondered not for the first time whether Eve was firing on all cylinders.
"I should have stayed with the baby," I told Blackbird. "You don't need me for this."
We were marching down yet another corridor of the maze of buildings in Bloomsbury where the University of London has whole blocks dedicated to academic pursuits. Blackbird had reverted to her older persona of the older lady I had first met in London a year ago. I still found it hard to reconcile the young vibrant Blackbird I knew with the lecturer in medieval history from Birkbeck — the role she adopted to fit into human society.