Chapter Text
There had always been that question in the back of my mind, that faint curiosity, even when Nightingale had first introduced me to the whole Shinto-esque phenomenon of ‘nature spirits’. I knew that the rivers were not the only ones, nor the only kind. And the more experience I gained in dealing with magic, the more kinds of magical beings I learnt of. The world around me was alive with living things like some particularly wormy apple.
First, there had been Mother and Father Thames, of course. Then we – Nightingale, Lesley, and I, that is – had chased down a spirit of mischief. Thanks to a lucky guess I had taken during that case, ever since then I had had a vague knowledge that Lady Justice of the Old Bailey might be something more than a whole lot of bronze (which was an intriguing idea, but one even I did not care to turn into an experiment). After that, I had met Sky; and there were others, undoubtedly, many, many others – millions, maybe. Maybe more.
And I had always thought, in the world where every goddamn blade of grass seems to have some sort of divine patron, how come nobody ever encountered any guardian spirits of cities? Shouldn’t there be an Uncle Edinburgh – or an Aunt Oxford? There must be an awful lot of magic accumulated in these stones.
“Tutelary deities,” Lesley had told me once, “seem to appear when there is real power. Oxford is thirteen centuries old, and that’s if we are being generous. Thames is fifty million years old. Fifty million, Peter. Who cares about your pathetic Radcliffe Camera? Or the Bodleiana? They could be destroyed tomorrow for all Father Thames cares.”
“Yeah,” I had murmured. She had sounded strangely lofty to me, very Nightingale-ish, probably because we both had been kind of drunk. Tutelary deities. “Maybe justice is just as old as Thames, then. Sweet.”
“We have a bit of a problem,” said Nightingale.”With the town of Cricklade.”
I guiltily swallowed down the last bite of my sausage roll and turned to him. The morning was devilishly cold, and I hadn’t had any kind of breakfast prior to being dragged out of the Folly to deal with a minor emergency in the form of a flying notebook. Neither of these facts helped my attention span.
“Yes, sir?”
“It refuses to sink,” he said. “He refuses to sink.”
“Hey, no wonder,” I plumped out automatically. “He? The town of Cricklade? Refuses to sink? Sir?”
I imagine I must have sounded like a script returning a critical error message, because Nightingale’s eyes twinkled with amusement.
“Yes, I have quite forgotten that you are unaware of his existence. Or of the existence of any other genii urbium, for that matter.”
“Genii urbium,” I repeated dumbly. “City spirits. They are like the rivers, aren’t they?”
“Mm. Not really. They are not nearly as sensitive to physical changes as the rivers – you can imagine what building demolition would have done to them had it not been so. But they are very sensitive to mental changes – to the mood of their inhabitants, the emergence of new cultural currents. If that makes sense.”
“Oh, yes, it does,” I said, and thought of all the vestigia that had felt like the texture of period clothes or furniture, like the smell of old cigars and the taste of drinks from the Roaring Twenties. The magic of culture. “Why have you never told me this before?”
“I’m not Scheherazade to tell you every story I know,” shrugged Nightingale. “It wasn’t relevant.”
“I see,” said I. Not that I found his argument particularly convincing, but I saw that he was reluctant to discuss the topic.
“Now, back to the problem we are to solve,” he continued, with some measure of dryness. “As you now know, Peter, guardian spirits of cities are a kind of genii locorum. Most, if not all, cities have them, and so does Cricklade.”
“You may or may not be aware of the situation with sea level rise that causes considerable trouble in some coastal cities, Cricklade being one of these.”
"The lost city of Cricklade,” I said. “There was a project in 2008. I remember, sir.”
I had little idea as to why I remembered it, especially since it had had absolutely nothing to do either with the Job or with any of the various and sundry things I had been interested in back in 2008. I could only suppose that the footage shown by the BBC Oceans had somehow stricken my imagination.
“Yes, that.” We had rounded the corner and were approaching the Folly, the sun shining straight in our faces. Nightingale squinted. He looked sullen now; I knew that what he was about to tell me would not be to my liking. “The city is still in some danger of being destroyed by the sea. And the current genius urbi has just expressed his extreme discontent with the fact. As it happens, he is threatening to do harm to civilians if the local authorities do not start a project for restoring the underwater part of the city and securing the rest of it so as to avoid further sinking.”
“Restoring the underwater part?” I stared at him incredulously. “I’m pretty sure that’s impossible. And even if it were not so, the cost of the project would be, like – they could buy the state of Liechtenstein with that sum.”
“True,” agreed Nightingale, with a kind of sourness that confirmed my worst suspicions. “Which is why we are going to parley with him.”
He walked up the small front staircase of the Folly, every step punctuated with a quiet click of his cane against the faded marble, and stood there, looking down at me. I had to admire his perfect obliviousness to how dramatic the scene was.
“Did they consider evacuating the civilians?” asked I.
“Evicting them from their houses for an indefinite amount of time? Under what excuse, pray tell?”
He was right, of course. I could only suppose it was the lack of breakfast that prompted me to pose that question.
“Right,” I said. “There are only us, then.”
“There are only us.” Nightingale smiled at me.
I followed him with my eyes as he turned around and disappeared in the hall, and then went to find Molly. Maybe she’d give me something if I asked nicely enough – she did, after all, have a whole lot of Yorkshire puddings left from the last Sunday dinner, and there wasn’t much opportunity to dispose of them other than to feed them to me.
Come to think of it, life in the Folly still went on in a manner that would have been far more appropriate if there were a vast number of people inhabiting and visiting the place; Molly’s uncontrollable passion for banqueting, Nightingale’s perfectly formal manner, the sheer size of the rooms, the number of books in the library would have all made more sense had there been a hundred young and hungry apprentices eager to mess around with some obscure formae in their spare time.
No wonder I felt a little lost. It was a pity Nightingale would never agree to train another hundred people.
I rounded the corner and opened the kitchen door a little. It was strangely dark, though there was some muffled light coming from the right, just enough for me to make out the cutlery on the table.
“Molly,” I called.
At first, nothing happened, and I started doubting if going inside would be a wise course of action. Molly could be doing something she didn’t want me to see – and chances were I wouldn’t want to see it, either.
When I almost decided to forget about the Yorkshire puddings, there was a sound of hurried footsteps, and a moment later the kitchen was flooded with light.
I blinked in confusion.
In front of me there stood Molly, holding a steaming plate, a thermos, and something unidentifiable wrapped in brown paper. I blinked some more; neither of us moved. I stepped aside. She frowned, shoving the plate into my hands, and I dropped my gaze to it. It was a Sunday roast, the Yorkshire puddings, young carrots, gravy, and all.
“Do you want me to take it to him?” I asked. “As much as I appreciate the necessity, I really don’t think it’s a good idea for me to do it. He isn’t going to like it.”
Her frown deepened, and she exhaled heavily through her nose.
“No way,” I said, incredulously.
Molly looked as though she were about to explode, and I realized that I was tempting fate. I quickly took the plate away from her and sat behind the table, still looking at her. I would have started eating immediately, but I suspected she would be pissed off if I spoke with my mouth full; and I needed to speak to her now. Admittedly there wasn’t much chance of her giving me any valuable information, but asking couldn’t hurt.
“Do you know anything about Nightingale’s plans?” I tried. Molly wrinkled her chiseled white nose.
“I see. No, of course I’ll ask him. It’s just that I talked to him not half an hour ago, and he said nothing about going anywhere.”
She raised an eyebrow, one of her eyes widening, queerly, while the other one remained narrowed.
“Just a guess? I trust your intuition, though. Did he tell you about the Cricklade affair?”
Molly wasn’t going to dignify this one with an answer, and I sighed, turning my attention to the carrots. Out of the corner of my eye I could see her walk around the kitchen, heading for the door.
“Thank you,” I said.
Her bare feet kept pattering on the floor and away from me.
It turned out Molly had guessed right, and some three hours later I found myself in the front seat of the Jag, dressed in my Met vest and feeling like an idiot. I had slipped the vest on without giving my outfit a second thought, but now I began to have doubts if it had been an entirely reasonable choice for what seemed to be about to turn into an undercover operation involving copious amounts of delicate negotiations.
I cast a sidelong look at Nightingale. Apart from having one of his suits on, he wore a pair of leather gauntlets – the proper kind, made of classy black leather and with a quirk at the base of each finger. Those are the ones you use to hook up with girls, I thought. Or boys. Except I really wasn’t sure if Nightingale was interested in either.
“Are we going undercover, sir?” ventured I.
“What?” He swung the wheel sharply to the right, turning onto the A12. We were out of town now, and there was very little traffic in our direction, what with it being a Monday. “Undercover? God forbid, Peter. Not in this car. On the contrary, we ought to be very conspicuous. We’ll stress the fact that we are police officers in every way possible. No dubious half-legal methods, not unless it is absolutely necessary. We must avoid provoking him.”
“Oh,” I said. “All right.”
The vest was far more appropriate than any civilian clothes, then. More appropriate than any modern civilian clothes, at any rate – Nightingale was sure to make a suitable impression regardless of whether there was anything that made him resemble a policeman.
It was a two hours’ drive, and I’m not terribly good at making small talk, which is why I mostly sat in silence, observing the changing landscape on my left. We passed Chelmsford, a little town composed mostly of red-brick semis and with a church spire sticking up into the faded blue sky. Nightingale lowered the window, and I caught a whiff of wild rose and hot tarmac as we crossed the last streets and were out on the A12 again.
It did not feel like vestigia, though – just a smell.
I wondered as to what kind of genius loci Chelmsford would have, even though from experience I knew it to be a perfectly pointless question. Looks didn’t seem to play much of a part in determining who would become the god of what. In fact, sometimes I had suspected that the choice was random: once somebody found themselves in the right kind of circumstances in a particular location, the location just tried to snatch them like a frog snatching a fly.
I wondered if it was possible for a location to make a wrong choice.
Sometimes I just wonder too fucking much about things, as Lesley had been fond of saying.
“Sir?”
Nightingale raised an eyebrow.
“What is Oxford like?”
He frowned a little.
“You’ll meet her, sooner or later. Then you’ll see for yourself. There are almost a thousand towns in England, and almost every one of them has a genius loci – and most villages, too.”
“Wow,” I said. “That’s impressive. Her?”
“Yes.” Nightingale paused. “Aunt Oxford. She’s a little like Miss Marple, a very canny lady.”
We ended up sharing a room.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Nightingale had said. “You see, it isn’t that the Folly is suddenly short of money. It’s just that I’d like to be close if things start to happen.”
“Things.”
“Yes.”
And now I lay in the darkness, slack spots of red and yellow light sliding along the ceiling above my head and disappearing in the corner. There was an incessant soft patter outside: the day’s dead heat had ended in a rain, and that one part of my brain that was responsible for memorizing useless facts reported that such abrupt transition meant a windy day tomorrow. I asked myself whether wind was capable of affecting formae. Would impello be more effective if cast in the direction of the wind?
You wonder too fucking much about things, said a voice in my head.
I turned my head and looked at Nightingale. He lay on his back, ramrod straight, his arms folded on his chest. But he wasn’t asleep.
“Sir?” I called in a whisper.
“Peter?”
“Who is London?”
“What do you want, his name?” grumbled Nightingale. “It would tell you nothing. Go to sleep.”
I sighed.
“Good night, sir.”
“Good night.”
He still lay on his back in that Terminator pose of his, and his duvet was as smooth as if he had somehow contrived to make his bed after climbing into it. It wasn’t an impossibility, either. Such a spell would have been more useful, at least, than the one that created a small raincloud following you everywhere you went.
I couldn’t help smiling. Thankfully, he couldn’t see that.
It was strangely calming to sleep in the same room with Nightingale. Not merely because things might start to happen, but also because there was something inherently pleasant, soothing in hearing his deep regular breaths a couple of feet away from me.
I know, it’s weird. Maybe I was being a bit touchy-feely there.