“Lamia,” she said. “I’m a Velvet.”
“Ah,” he said. “Right. Are there a lot of you?”
“A few,” she said.
Richard collected the containers with the curry. “What do you do?” he asked.
“When I’m not looking for food,” she said, with a smile, “I’m a guide. I know every inch of the Underside.”
Hunter, who Richard could have sworn had been over on the other side of the stall, was standing next to Lamia. She said, “He’s not yours.”
Lamia smiled sweetly. “I’ll be the judge of that,” she said.
Richard said, “Hunter, this is Lamia. She’s a Velcro.”
“Vel-vet,” corrected Lamia, sweetly.
“She’s a guide.”
“I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”
Hunter took the bag with the food in it from Richard. “Time to go back,” she said.
“Well,” said Richard. “If we’re off to see the you-know-what, maybe she could help.”
Hunter said nothing; instead, she looked at Richard. Had she looked at him that way the day before, he would have dropped the subject. But that was then. “Let’s see what Door thinks,” said Richard. “Any sign of the marquis?”
“Not yet,” said Hunter.
Old Bailey had dragged the corpse down the gangplank tied to its baby carriage-base, like a ghastly Guy Fawkes, one of the effigies that, not so very long ago, the children of London had wheeled and dragged around in early November, displaying to passersby before tossing them to their flaming demise on the bonfires of the fifth of November, Bonfire Night. He pulled the corpse over Tower Bridge, and, muttering and complaining, he hauled it up the hill past the Tower of London. He made his way west toward Tower Hill Station and stopped a little before the station, beside a large gray jut of wall. It wasn’t a roof, thought Old Bailey, but it would do. It was one of the last remnants of the London Wall. The London Wall, according to tradition, was built on the orders of the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, in the third century A.D., at the request of his mother Helena. At that point, London was one of the few great cities of the Empire that did not yet have a magnificent wall. When it was finished it enclosed the small city completely; it was thirty feet high, and eight feet wide, and was, unarguably, the London Wall.
It was no longer thirty feet high, the ground level having risen since Constantine’s mother’s day (most of the original London Wall is fifteen feet below street level today), and it no longer enclosed the city. But it was still an imposing lump of wall. Old Bailey nodded vigorously to himself. He fastened a length of rope to the baby carriage, and he scrambled up the wall; then, grunting and ‘bless-me’-ing, he hauled the marquis up to the top of the wall. He untied the body from the carriage wheels and laid it gently out on its back, arms at its side. There were wounds on the body that were still oozing. It was very dead. “You stupid bugger,” whispered Old Bailey, sadly. “What did you want to get yourself killed for, anyway?”
The moon was bright and small and high in the cold night, and autumn constellations speckled the blue-black sky like the dust of crushed diamonds. A nightingale fluttered onto the wall, examined the corpse of the marquis de Carabas, and chirruped sweetly. “None of your beak,” said Old Bailey, gruffly. “You birds don’t smell like flipping roses, neither.” The bird chirped a melodious nightingale obscenity at him, and flew off into the night.
Old Bailey reached into his pocket and pulled out the black rat, who had gone to sleep. It stared about it sleepily, then yawned, displaying a vast and ratty expanse of piebald tongue. “Personally,” said Old Bailey to the black rat, “I’ll be happy if I never smell anything ever again.” He put it down by his feet on the stones of London Wall, and it chittered at him, and gestured with its front paws. Old Bailey sighed. Carefully, he took the silver box out of his pocket, and, from an inner pocket, he pulled the toasting fork.
He placed the silver box on de Carabas’s chest, then, nervously, he reached out the toasting fork, and flipped open the lid of the box. Inside the silver box, on a nest of red velvet, was a large duck’s egg, pale blue green in the moonlight. Old Bailey raised the toasting fork, closed his eyes, and brought it down on the egg.
There was a whup as it imploded. There was a great stillness for several seconds after that; then the wind began. It had no direction, but seemed somehow to be coming from everywhere, a swirling sudden gale. Fallen leaves, newspaper pages, all the city’s detritus blew up from the ground and was driven through the air. The wind touched the surface of the Thames and carried the cold water into the sky in a fine and driving spray. It was a dangerous, crazy wind. The stall holders on the deck of the Belfast cursed it and clutched their possessions to keep them from blowing away.
And then, when it seemed that the wind would become so strong that it would blow the world away and blow the stars away and send the people tumbling through the air like so many desiccated autumn leaves—
Just then—
—it was over, and the leaves, and the papers, and the plastic shopping bags, tumbled to the earth, and the road, and the water.
High on the remnant of the London Wall, the silence that followed the wind was, in its way, as loud as the wind had been. It was broken by a cough; a horrid, wet coughing. This was followed by the sound of someone awkwardly rolling over; and then the sound of someone being sick.
The marquis de Carabas vomited sewer water over the side of the London Wall, staining the gray stones with brown foulness. It took a long time to purge the water from his body. And then he said, in a hoarse voice that was little more than a grinding whisper, “I think my throat’s been cut. Have you anything to bind it with?”
Old Bailey fumbled in his pockets and pulled out a grubby length of cloth. He passed it to the marquis, who wrapped it around his throat a few times and then tied it tight. Old Bailey found himself reminded, incongruously, of the high-wrapped Beau Brummel collars of the Regency dandies. “Anything to drink?” croaked the marquis.
Old Bailey pulled out his hip-flask and unscrewed the top, and passed it to the marquis, who swigged back a mouthful, then winced with pain, and coughed weakly. The black rat, who had watched all this with interest, now began to climb down the fragment of wall and away. It would tell the Golden: all favors had been repaid, all debts were done.
The marquis gave Old Bailey back his hip-flask. Old Bailey put it away. “How are ye feeling?” he asked.