Mike Carey - The Naming of the Beasts

Trudie showed me her map with a proprietary and slightly nervous air. It had changed a lot since the last time I’d seen it: it was marked now by hundreds of short black dashes, clustered together and aligned to form longer lines. The lines swept and swirled across the face of the city like the tracks left by primordial particles in a bubble chamber, the spoor of something both ephemeral and eternal, struck from violence the way sparks are struck from stone.

‘This is where he’s been,’ I said, tracing the nearest lines with my finger.

‘Yes.’

‘But where is he now?’

Trudie’s expression went from anxious midwife to grieving parent. ‘I have no idea. There’s a faint sense when I’m tracing the lines that some are fresher than others. They’re the ones that are easiest to find, the ones that have the strongest attraction. But there’s no . . .’ She hesitated, searching for a word.

‘Gradient?’ I suggested.

‘Exactly. No real gradient, so no way of telling which way he walked along each line or how long he spent in any of these places. It’s just a map of his movements.’

‘Which means it will get less and less useful as he goes to more and more places. Eventually the map would be solid black.’

Trudie eyed me grimly. ‘Thanks, Castor. I only spent twelve hours on this. Don’t spare my feelings.’ Behind her, Etheridge glared at me fiercely, outraged on her behalf.

‘I didn’t say it wasn’t useful now,’ I pointed out. ‘It’s amazing. I never expected you to get this far.’

Trudie seemed as unhappy with praise as she was with criticism. ‘Well, it’s only the first stage,’ she said defensively. ‘We’ve still got to go over the map again and try to figure out where he’s actually spending his time.’

I pointed to one of the densest tangles on the map, and then to another: two places where a great many lines came together, merging into areas of pure shiny black. At the heart of those areas the paper had rucked into hard wrinkles, swollen and saturated with ink. It was like looking at one of Trudie’s cat’s cradles translated onto a flat, static medium – because, of course, that’s what it was.

‘Here,’ I said, ‘and here.’

‘Yeah,’ said Trudie. ‘He’s been to those two places a lot. Both in north London, about seven miles apart. Do you have any idea what’s there?’

‘This one – that’s a couple of miles north of King’s Cross – is where I live. No surprises there – I knew he was staking out Pen’s house. This one over to the west though, that’s more worrying.’

‘Why?’ Trudie stared at me hard, hard enough to let me know that my face was showing too much of what I felt.

‘This is Royal Oak,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a friend who lives out there.’

The penny dropped. ‘Oh my God,’ Trudie murmured.

‘About as far from your God as it’s possible to get, strictly speaking,’ I said grimly.

‘The succubus. The fallen creature you used to work with.’

‘Exactly.’

I weighed my options for a few moments. I’d already said too much in front of Etheridge. Damaged as he was, he still owed his allegiance to Jenna-Jane, and I had to assume he was going to report back to her. I wasn’t ready to trust Trudie either, come to that – at least, not all the way – but probably I needed to tell her at least something about what was going down on the Juliet front. ‘Let’s take the air,’ I suggested, looking pointedly at her alone.

Trudie hesitated, then nodded. Turning to Etheridge, she gave him a notepad and a pen. ‘Start writing down the names of the streets, Victor,’ she told him. ‘When I come back we’ll start checking them out with Google maps.’

We went to Paddington Basin, which runs right behind St Mary’s. Part of the basin had been drained a few months back, and the council had erected a sculpture of a giant plug and plughole to raise the morale of local residents while their picturesque canal was a plain of stinking mud. This was where we fetched up, sitting out in front of a pavement café that hadn’t opened for lunch yet.

After extorting a promise from Trudie not to pass any of what I was about to say on to Jenna-Jane, I told her about the bizarre glitches in Juliet’s behaviour, including the beating she’d administered to Susan and the threat she’d made to me. I mentioned the ward I’d found in Juliet’s garden, too, but only in passing because it was part of a wider pattern whose meaning seemed to lie elsewhere. Trudie heard me out in silence, then as soon as I’d finished she started in with the questions.

‘Isn’t this creature savage by her very nature?’ she demanded. ‘Why is any of this a surprise?’

‘It’s a surprise because it goes against everything that Juliet has done since she decided to stay on Earth,’ I explained patiently. ‘She knows damn well that she can only live here as long as she manages to stay on the wagon. If she starts to eat people, even just on special occasions, every exorcist in London is going to come looking for her. And good as she is, sooner or later someone is bound to sneak up on her blind side and finish the job.’

Trudie didn’t look convinced. ‘But what would that do?’ she asked with a shrug. ‘It might just send her back to Hell. She’d be free to rise again whenever she wanted.’

I stared her down. ‘Is that what you think exorcism is?’

‘I don’t know, Castor. And neither do you.’

‘But we know that demons avoid it strenuously. Desperately, even. It’s got to be more than a cab ride home.’

There was a silence. A waiter unlocked the front door of the café, obviously thinking we were his first customers of the day. Not being in the mood for coffee, tea, or any other drink that wasn’t at least 30 per cent proof, I got up and moved on. Trudie followed.

‘Can I see the wards you found?’ she asked.

‘I’ve got a photo of it on my phone,’ I said. ‘I’ll send it on to you.’

‘What about you, Castor? What’s your next move?’

‘I’m going to Macedonia to meet what’s left of Rafi’s family. How about you?’

‘I’ll work over the map with Victor. See if it gives us any clues to where Asmodeus is hiding.’

‘And then when I come back we’re going to make a second raid on Super-Self.’

Trudie rolled her eyes. ‘That’ll be fun.’

‘Working for Jenna-Jane is like being in the army,’ I said. ‘Every day is a holiday.’

‘Send me those pictures before you go,’ Trudie said.

‘Sure.’ I turned to face her. Might as well have this out now as later. ‘But these are the standard terms and conditions, ’ I told her. ‘We don’t share any of this with either your former or your current employer unless I say we do.’

After the barest moment of hesitation, Trudie nodded. ‘Agreed.’

‘And anything new you come up with, you run it by me before you go to Jenna-Jane.’

Another pause. ‘If you agree to do the same thing,’ Trudie said. ‘Share whatever you find in Macedonia with me. And pass me anything you get from Nicholas Heath.’

That came as something of a shock. ‘How did you know I’d seen Nicky?’ I demanded, tensing involuntarily.

Trudie smiled, a little smugly. ‘I researched you very thoroughly when I worked for the Anathemata,’ she said. ‘You’re too set in your ways, Castor. Got your habits. Your superstitions and foibles. Your prime directives. Heath is one of them.’

‘I’m still alive,’ I reminded her.

‘Yeah,’ she agreed. ‘That’s another.’

From Alexander the Great International Airport I went straight to downtown Skopje. The airport was a strip of tarmac and a Coke machine, but the city itself was pretty impressive. Sprawling along both sides of the Vardar River, and standing on the main drag from Belgrade to Athens, it’s always seen a fair bit of passing trade. Admittedly it’s also had its fair share – maybe slightly more – of wars, pogroms, earthquakes, corruption, industrial collapse and apocalyptic mismanagement, but it’s always managed to pick itself up, dust itself off and start all over again. Today it looks like any other medium-sized metropolis, with old and new buildings jostling each other for position on most streets, and a pall of smog closing down the middle distance.