Ezra scowled, but he took a swig of wine from a nearby wooden cup—which made him sputter for a moment and turn a bit blue. Then he leaned forward and whispered into the little figure’s face. His breath left his mouth as sparkling white vapor and wreathed around the inert little man of red clay before it seemed to be sucked into the figure’s mouth and nose. Ezra leaned back, his eyes huge as he stared at the thing on the table. The golem had changed color and grown hair. Now it looked like a tiny version of the drunk at the end of the table, except this one had a complete right ear.
Master Simeon circled his finger over the homunculus again, clockwise this time, murmuring more words that froze in the air as crystalline shapes before they dissolved and spiraled down into the clay figure in a stream of blue smoke.
Ezra shuddered until he doubled over and heaved up the wine in a red mess that shattered on the packed dirt floor like thin glass. Icy mist rose off the shards while they melted in the heat of the fire and the wine soaked into the ground. The wine-red mud heaved and rippled with tiny stalagmites that fell away in a moment.
“Oh,” the younger man moaned. “I don’t feel well.”
“That’s because we used the blood of a drunkard. What the one feels the other feels.” Simeon grinned like a wolf. “But as he’s an accomplished souse and you’re a blushing lily who barely tastes the seder wine, it’s not surprising you feel wretched.”
“How does it work? And when will it stop?” Ezra asked, swallowing hard.
“Your ring, boy. It is the channel. Your dear possession or your likeness joined in the clay to the blood or meat of the man knits together both your sensations in the golem. Watch.”
The hand-high man on the table sat up and looked around. Simeon waved the knife in front of its face.
“What do you see, creature?”
The drunk at the other end muttered, “Knife.”
Ezra drew a sharp breath, staring into the middle distance as if he, too, saw a knife where none could be.
The sorcerer poked the creature with the knife. “And what do you feel?”
Ezra yelped. The drunk whimpered in his sleep.
“Cold,” said the golem.
“It—he doesn’t feel pain?” Ezra stammered, rubbing his belly in the same spot where Simeon had stabbed the figurine.
“Of course not. It is not a man, only an homunculus of clay.” He rose and walked to stand over the sleeping drunk, raising his eyebrows in speculation. Then he jabbed his knife point into the man’s arm and jerked it away again.
Both the drunk and the student shouted in pain and alarm. Simeon eased the irritated souse back to the floor and sent him back to sleep with the soporific contents of another bottle. Then the sorcerer returned to the table and resumed his seat. “If I were to stab you, he would not notice—it’s not your blood that ties you together, but the ring,” Simeon said. “I can wield my knife against this little creature much more easily than torturing the real one—unless I wanted to. But if we removed the ring, you would feel nothing.”
Ezra narrowed his eyes and looked speculative. “Without the ring I feel nothing and the golem is but a mindless slave who knows no pain. We could raise an army of these things—”
Simeon gave a harsh laugh. “All the size of your fist. And they’d last no longer than an hour or the first rain. You need a great deal more material than a mere drop or two of blood to make one as large as a man that walked a week or more.”
Ezra cut a glance at the drunk, his eyes gleaming.
“Do not think you can divide him up like a beeve at the market,” the older man snapped. “You need the man living, for the image to live. Dead men power nothing, nor do they speak. You must be content with this.”
“Surely, we can do better. I can think of a way, I’m certain. ”
The worlds shuddered again and the light in the window faded as I fell through chilly layers of time.
CHAPTER 22
Crashing out of the temporacline, I skidded into a small courtyard in the normal world, where the sun hadn’t begun to set. I stumbled against a brick wall and into a short passageway to a street where, back in the sunshine of the normal, I stopped to catch my breath. A sign on the wall beside me read WHITE HORSE ALLEY on one corner and COWCROSS on the other. I remembered passing Cowcross.
I looked right and left and glimpsed the grand entrance to Smithfield Market down to my left. The road nearby must have been St. John Street before it split and made St. John Lane by the priory gate. So the Underground station would be to my right and up Cowcross, according to my map. But there was no White Horse Alley on the map and the sign on the wall nearby seemed more of a historical marker than an active street sign. I suspected that White Horse Alley had been gone for a long time.
I walked on to Farringdon Underground Station and spent a while figuring out where in the layers of the station’s platforms I needed to go to catch the right train going the right way. Having lived all my life on the West Coast of the United States where subways are a rarity, wrapping my brain around the overlapping complexities of the London Underground took a bit of faith and hope—two things I’m not that good with. I eventually sussed out that I needed to take a Circle line train towards Aldgate, which would go east for a while before it turned and went west closer to the Thames with a stop at Temple Underground—right across the street from my hotel. Confusing if you tried to reason it out, but plain enough if you just trusted the map.
As I stood studying the map and figuring out the fare, floods of commuters bustled in and out of the station while a public address system reminded them about long-distance trains to outlying parts of England. They weren’t as pushy as Seattle commuters, but they were in just as much of a hurry. They paid me very little heed—almost like ghosts but much heavier when they stepped on my feet—swimming in a human tide as slick and rapid as salmon looking to spawn with the occasional “sorry” or “ ’scuse me” tossed into the air as they passed. I joined the swarm and went down to the Circle line platform.
The platform ceiling was a brick vault held up by painted iron columns, and even modern lighting left the ends a bit gloomy. So I wasn’t surprised to see ghosts and squiggles of Grey energy wandering loose over the sizzling yellow lines of the electrified rails. Down at the far end a blur of white sent off a broken-mirror glitter. My mysterious shadow was here, too, and sick of creepy enigmas for one day, I fixed my gaze on it and strode down the length of the platform to catch up to whatever was making that freakish gleam.
As the station wall drew nearer, I could see only one source the gleam could have come from: a man, seated on the floor in the farthest corner. He wore old-fashioned trousers that had once been white under a vestlike thing and a long coat both made of some kind charcoal gray material that looked a bit like ratty crushed velvet. The light show was his aura, which, up close, looked like a wavering heat mirage. As I got within talking distance, he pushed back into the shadows a bit more—they seemed to ripple and close partway around him like a cloak—and kept his head down. Shoulder-length filthy blond hair streaked with white fell forward in clumped strings, hiding his face.
“I was expectin’ a boy,” he said.
“What?” I snapped, cocking my head to peer at him sideways, a trick I’d learned to filter out the chaff at the cusp of the Grey. Under my gaze he seemed to flicker and fall in and out of focus, and the curiously colorless energy around him looked like a hole in the world. My concentration narrowed to him alone and the ghost chorus of London I’d started to ignore swelled in my head like a forming wave.