Spectred Isle (Green Men #1)(31)

“I am an occultist. I am a protector of the realm under the King’s seal. I am the twenty-third Glyde to carry out an extremely ancient duty, and I am also, faute de mieux, carrying out someone else’s extremely ancient duty because there’s nobody else to do it. Before the War, I was a wealthy and privileged scion of one of the great and ancient families. Now I’m half a ghost-hunter and half I don’t know what, with my world hanging in shreds around me, staring into a pit most people don’t even see, but it’s there. It’s bloody there.”

He clamped his mouth shut, not sure how that had come tumbling out, except that he couldn’t bear to be the Heir of Glyde now. Not with this vulnerable, frightened man in this inhumanly empty place. Saul’s eyes were on him, wide, watching.

“That sounds bad,” Saul said after a while. “Are you all right?”

“Of course I am. Ah, God. Do you want the truth?”

“Yes.”

“There are other worlds, other places, beyond or behind, outside or under our own, a breath away. Sometimes people summon the denizens of those places to ours. Sometimes they try to get in all by themselves.”

“Last night, the thing that was laughing,” Saul said. “It was outside and it was in the room, both at once. I heard it right behind me and so did Major Peabody, at the same time.”

“Yes. Don’t expect them to play by the rules, including geometry. There are no rules.”

“You said Abchurch’s story called it because things have changed. What do you mean?”

Randolph didn’t want to tell this part. He glanced at a waystone, its grey top poking out of the rank grass. Swaffham Prior, 2 miles. “The other worlds have always been with us, and so have people like myself. Occultists like my family maintained the health of the land, and the monarch—latterly the government—let us get on with it. Towards the end of the last century, though, things began to change. Warfare was becoming more mechanised, more industrial in scope and nature. A big war was coming, as any fool could see, and governments were casting round for new and larger weapons. Machine-guns. Dreadnoughts. Mustard gas. Us.”

“Wait a moment,” Saul said. “You don’t mean—”

“Of course they used it. All that power, that potential for destruction? They all did, as though they’d just been waiting for a chance. The Germans, the Belgians, the French, the British. There was a war going on beneath yours—that’s what we call it, the War Beneath—and you probably even heard about it. You read about the event at Mons, I suppose?”

“You mean the Angel of Mons?”

“Those weren’t angels,” Randolph said. “Oh, my friend, those weren’t angels. That was the first Great Summoning. We started it there, the British. We—arcanists who ought to have known better, under direction of generals who ought to have been shot—we summoned things that should never have been, in unimaginable quantities . And we ripped the veil to shreds.”

“The veil. As in, ‘beyond the veil’?”

Randolph wasn’t sure how he’d gone from the lofty keeper of knowledge to a blubbering penitent pouring out his shame, but if he had to do this, it was a relief to have an intelligent confessor. “It’s an imperfect metaphor for an intangible thing. A veil or a curtain, a barrier of sorts between our world and what’s outside. The act of summoning tears a hole in the veil and invites the outside in. It’s an act of supreme stupidity, and we summoned, and summoned, and summoned. Before the War Beneath, perhaps Abchurch’s story was just a folktale. Now it’s a calling. He called, something came.”

“What came? I mean—what was it?”

“Something eight hundred years dead in the fens,” Randolph said. “Something that wanted to put out the lights.”

Scrunch, scrunch, went their feet on the road. The sun was warm on Randolph’s neck, casting a short shadow in front of his feet.

“If you’re trying to alarm me, you’ve succeeded,” Saul said at last.

“Good. I want you to run away.”

“What happened on Cock Lane?”

“Something came through. It’s a place of belief, and that seems to have weakened the veil.”

“And you sent whatever it was away.” Saul had a kind of baffled acceptance in his voice now. “You said—what did you say?”

“Certain words, a protection. Old and deep. It’s my duty to keep the words, and speak them when needed.”

“I couldn’t remember them. I tried to tell myself I wasn’t paying attention.”

“There’s no attention in the world that would let you remember them,” Randolph said. “If I wrote down the sounds for you, you couldn’t speak them. I paid a significant price to be their keeper.”

“Who else knows them?”

“Nobody. I’ll pass them on to someone else before I shuffle off this mortal coil. That’s how it works.”

Saul turned to look at him, frowning. “And at Camlet Moat? What did you do there?”

“God knows.”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” Randolph said. “Sorry. The Glyde family has provided the Keeper of the Words and the Walker of the Moat for twenty-three generations. I’m the Keeper; my cousin Theresa was the Walker. She studied it for years, taking over from our Uncle Archibald. She’d have known what medieval noblemen have to do with it all, and what Camlet Moat wanted with you. I don’t.”