London again. Power lines like rivers. The thundering Amazon of the Tube’s third rail. Thought-forms of the living like endless fields of poppies. And then the Marconi Tower, an inverted fountain of souls.
Peter threw himself into the dense flow of spirit messengers and ectomail postmen, weaving between them, bumping into them, eliciting stinging angry thought-arrows. He emerged above London in the ana direction, the four-dimensional view strangely inverted, brighter in the Unseen light than he had ever perceived it before. The effort of pushing against it drained him of vim. He felt like a hollow crystal shell.
One of the three Watchers emerged from the flow of the Tower and rose towards him. The other two could not be far behind. He had barely enough vim to thought-travel once more. He had to deal with the Watcher now.
Peter wound himself tightly around his luz. He imagined a perfectly sharp, singular edge, the solution to a system of equations, and the aether summoned it into being. Then he let himself fall towards the Watcher, pulled by kata’s entropic gravity. The Watcher spread himself into a light-medusa, stretching out thought-tendrils to catch him.
Peter passed through him. His thought-blade slashed and tore, shredding thought and memory, then glanced off the Watcher’s luz. There was an aetheric scream. He gave the tattered spirit one glance: only wispy, trailing shreds of vim remained around the soul-stone.
Peter summoned the Hinton address Nora had given him and sped towards it. An instant later, a medium’s mind blazed before him, calmed into stillness by the gently pulsing cage of the spirit crown. He dove into it. There was a jerking sensation, like dreaming of falling on the edge of sleep and waking with a jolt.
He was in a new body, lying down, with the cold metal of the spirit crown squeezing his temples. Tears of guilt stung his eyes and it was hard to see. A familiar, strong hand—Nora’s—cupped his face gently.
‘It’s all right, FELIX,’ she whispered. ‘You’re going home soon.’
* * *
Rachel and Roger kneeled next to the blood-spattered dead medium. The round, white mask was still intact except for a jagged hole where the mouth had been. A broken crimson and white mass of tissue and bone peeked through.
‘God. What a mess,’ Roger said. He pulled a sheet that covered a nearby sofa over the body. A dark red stain immediately emerged, turning the thing into a ghost from a children’s book, with red eyes and mouth.
Rachel looked away, fighting nausea, stomach acids rising into her mouth. Max and the Watchers had to be after him. Bloom would pay for this. The dead medium must have a Ticket, but still.
Her ectophone tinkled and the icy chill of a spirit presence passed through the room. She picked up the earpiece.
‘Max? Where did he go?’ She turned to Roger. ‘Get ready to call the Court.’
At first, there was only static. Then Max’s voice came through in fragments.
‘—cut me … have known. Wounded. Desperate. Losing—’
‘Max!’ Rachel shouted.
‘Hard to … pulling down … Gwladys.’
She balled her hands into fists, hoping there was something she could hold on to, but there was only the cold, and the smell of blood.
Then, suddenly, the voice came through clearly with that belly-tickle warmth.
‘Mrs White. Bloom was warned. He knew we were coming. You have to be careful.’ A hiss of static again. ‘Ah.’ Max’s voice was full of wonder. ‘Goo is here.’ She heard something that sounded like a bird, and then there was only white noise.
As Rachel White stood up in the Soviet safe house and let the hissing ectophone fall to the floor, a cold sense of purpose descended upon her.
While Roger paced and raged, smoking and coughing like a steam engine, she called Special Branch using the house’s telephone. She leafed through the book on the table. Several pages had been torn out and burned. She noted down the Hinton address scrawled inside the cover with a pencil—no doubt it was already inactive, but it would have to be checked.
She consoled Joan and Helen. They were in tears, unable to process what had happened. Max had made a habit of describing his agents in less emotional terms than the ones he applied to his pets, but apparently the lack of affection had not been genuine.
Rachel explained that there was such a thing as spirit violence, although it was rare in a world where you could escape any hostility with a thought, but Max had given everything in pursuit of Bloom.
When Roger had calmed down, they spoke to Booth and Hickson via ectophone together. Hickson had witnessed the struggle between Max and Bloom but arrived too late to follow the mole. Rachel made notes in preparation for her statement. Roger contacted Symonds to ask for help with the clean-up.
The Special Branch officers arrived, two pale, thickset men with bad complexions Rachel remembered from the Langham. Both looked intimidated by the heavy Service presence. Rachel gave them a precise statement, leaving very little out. An unofficial SIS operation in pursuit of a Soviet operative; yes, she had been in charge; yes, an unofficial spirit consultant had Faded as a result, for which she took full responsibility. As she spoke, she felt as if she was outside of her body, and her body was an Edison doll she inhabited.
She kept moving. She called Susi at Max’s Sloane Square flat to give her the bad news and listened to the German girl’s sobs on the phone. Roger refused to speak to Rachel after Special Branch came, clearly already trying to distance himself from the whole affair. She called Harker and weathered his explosion on the phone.
Then it was getting dark, and there was nothing to do except to go home.
Gertrude was used to her late homecomings by now and had prepared supper. She ate mechanically, asked the maid to run a bath but then decided against it, instead sitting in her study in a bathrobe writing a resignation letter. A rational voice in her head tried to say that it was not as bad as she thought, they had still exposed the mole, the Service knew what material was compromised.
She signed the letter and put the fountain pen down, then sat still for the first time in hours. Her hands started shaking. She folded them in her lap, and at last the tears came.
Her crying woke up the Gouldian finches, which fluttered around in their cage. The female made a faint tee-tee sound.
Rachel wiped her eyes and looked at the birds. She still had no clue what went on inside their tiny heads and wondered how well Max had truly understood his animal companions.
How well could you ever really know even other human beings? After all the confessions and meetings, Bloom had remained a closed book to her, a cipher as unintelligible as the CAMLANN files. She doubted he had known her, either. They had just sat together for a few hours, politely lying to each other, even if the lies were mostly true.
She thought of Joe’s story about the war: it was a truth he had shared with no agenda behind it, simply because he wanted her to understand. And now she might not have the chance to do the same for him. At least Spain might be a little safer, with Bloom gone from the Summer Court.
It was only then that Max’s last words caught up with her.
Maybe it wasn’t safer. Bloom had been warned. That meant there was a second mole in the Service. The realisation was sharp as a surgeon’s knife, physically painful, and her entire body tensed.
She had to get hold of Noel Symonds.
* * *
‘Madam, I am terribly sorry but Mr Symonds is not available. He is at his club at present.’