Summerland

  ‘Should we not wait to—’

  ‘Now, Roger!’ She shot him a furious look. ‘I want to be the one who brings him in. I deserve it.’

  Wordlessly, he passed her his sapgun.

  ‘Take Joan and secure the rear entrance. I am going in.’

  Rachel got out of the car and started running towards the house, gun held low.

  * * *

  Peter was on all fours. The photographic plates lay scattered on the floor.

  He gave up the struggle against the medium for a moment and his thoughts cleared. He might be able to free himself, but not in time. They would use a non-lethal weapon, he knew: that would lock him in the medium’s body long enough for another spirit crown to be installed. He only had moments.

  But there was still a way out.

  He started crawling towards the cupboard where George had kept the camera.

  * * *

  Rachel was at the door. She had not fired a weapon in years and fumbled with the safety for a moment.

  She took a step back, aimed at the lock and fired.

  * * *

  There was a small revolver in one of the cupboard’s drawers. Peter’s legs were numb, but his arms had enough strength left to yank it open. The entire drawer and its contents clattered to the floor. His hands felt like oversized mittens and firecrackers kept going off in his eyes.

  He found something small and heavy and cold. A curved spiky piece of metal had to be the gun’s hammer. He rolled over and pushed the barrel into his mouth.

  He had never killed anyone before and tried to think an apology at Pendlebury. Another soul added to the legions that had to be saved from the Cullers.

  There was a distant boom. Had he pulled the trigger? No, the pain had not stopped.

  Moving the thin sliver of metal was like lifting a mountain. Then there was a flash of light.

  He would have smiled, but he no longer had a mouth.

  * * *

  Rachel heard the gunshot and knew she was already too late.

  * * *

  The force of the medium’s death threw them both into the Second Aether, tangled souls finally unravelling. Peter struggled away from Pendlebury’s newborn spirit—lost in the initial aetheric confusion—and pushed himself down in the kata direction.

  The heart of London was a giant map drawn with blazing electricity. Thought-forms hovered where his body had fallen. One of them looked like Rachel White, but Peter ignored her.

  He gathered the aetheric patterns from the Zöllner camera plates like so many fallen leaves on which the codebook numbers and letters shone, painted with light. He seized them with imaginary fingers and bound them to his own luz, in a memory palace of numbers and letters. Then he visualised the Hinton address for the extraction and hurled himself at it through the aether.

  The lights of the living world blurred into a shimmering tunnel. Immediately, Peter knew that several other spirits were following in his wake, locked on to his luz, pulling themselves towards him as he thought-travelled. It was like swimming against a current with someone else holding on to him.

  He dived into kata, down into Summerland where his hypersight was unobstructed. The penumbra of the living world was a cloudlike layer full of fragmented thought-forms, glowing cones and triangles and spheres that swirled around like confetti. This was thought-refuse: errant ideas that had taken flight from minds touched by inspiration and forgotten. Unweighted by souls, they floated close to the living.

  Hiding amongst the lost thoughts, Peter saw three spirits dive right at him, lean and streamlined souls. Two of them were Summer Court Watchers, he was suddenly sure.

  Peter pushed deeper into kata, beyond the Summer City, falling like a comet towards the edges of the abyss and the luz mines. Old soul-stones were everywhere here, dead stars with the faintest green glimmer of vim still clinging to them, algae of the kata depths. Aetherbeasts swarmed, spiky, angular presences armoured with ossified thoughts, their soul-hooked tendrils dangling. Peter rode in their wake as they pushed their way through the luz cloud, hoping to lose himself in it, but still the Watchers followed.

  The images of the Cullers in the CAMLANN file flashed in his mind and momentarily hurled him even further into kata. A terrible all-consuming chill gripped Peter and he banished the vision from his mind, turning back towards the twilight of the Unseen in ana. His vim was running low. Tiny memories and thought-fragments trailed behind and faded; the smell of pencils at school, his first kiss.

  London again. Power lines like rivers. The thundering Amazon of the Tube’s third rail. Thought-forms of the living like endless fields of poppies. And then the Marconi Tower, an inverted fountain of souls.

  Peter threw himself into the dense flow of spirit messengers and ectomail postmen, weaving between them, bumping into them, eliciting stinging angry thought-arrows. He emerged above London in the ana direction, the four-dimensional view strangely inverted, brighter in the Unseen light than he had ever perceived it before. The effort of pushing against it drained him of vim. He felt like a hollow crystal shell.

  One of the three Watchers emerged from the flow of the Tower and rose towards him. The other two could not be far behind. He had barely enough vim to thought-travel once more. He had to deal with the Watcher now.

  Peter wound himself tightly around his luz. He imagined a perfectly sharp, singular edge, the solution to a system of equations, and the aether summoned it into being. Then he let himself fall towards the Watcher, pulled by kata’s entropic gravity. The Watcher spread himself into a light-medusa, stretching out thought-tendrils to catch him.

  Peter passed through him. His thought-blade slashed and tore, shredding thought and memory, then glanced off the Watcher’s luz. There was an aetheric scream. He gave the tattered spirit one glance: only wispy, trailing shreds of vim remained around the soul-stone.

  Peter summoned the Hinton address Nora had given him and sped towards it. An instant later, a medium’s mind blazed before him, calmed into stillness by the gently pulsing cage of the spirit crown. He dove into it. There was a jerking sensation, like dreaming of falling on the edge of sleep and waking with a jolt.

  He was in a new body, lying down, with the cold metal of the spirit crown squeezing his temples. Tears of guilt stung his eyes and it was hard to see. A familiar, strong hand—Nora’s—cupped his face gently.

  ‘It’s all right, FELIX,’ she whispered. ‘You’re going home soon.’

  * * *

  Rachel and Roger kneeled next to the blood-spattered dead medium. The round, white mask was still intact except for a jagged hole where the mouth had been. A broken crimson and white mass of tissue and bone peeked through.

  ‘God. What a mess,’ Roger said. He pulled a sheet that covered a nearby sofa over the body. A dark red stain immediately emerged, turning the thing into a ghost from a children’s book, with red eyes and mouth.

  Rachel looked away, fighting nausea, stomach acids rising into her mouth. Max and the Watchers had to be after him. Bloom would pay for this. The dead medium must have a Ticket, but still.

  Her ectophone tinkled and the icy chill of a spirit presence passed through the room. She picked up the earpiece.

  ‘Max? Where did he go?’ She turned to Roger. ‘Get ready to call the Court.’

  At first, there was only static. Then Max’s voice came through in fragments.

  ‘—cut me … have known. Wounded. Desperate. Losing—’

  ‘Max!’ Rachel shouted.

  ‘Hard to … pulling down … Gwladys.’

  She balled her hands into fists, hoping there was something she could hold on to, but there was only the cold, and the smell of blood.

  Then, suddenly, the voice came through clearly with that belly-tickle warmth.

  ‘Mrs White. Bloom was warned. He knew we were coming. You have to be careful.’ A hiss of static again. ‘Ah.’ Max’s voice was full of wonder. ‘Goo is here.’ She heard something that sounded like a bird, and then there was only whit
e noise.

  21

  A REUNION AT THE ALBA CLUB, 5TH DECEMBER 1938

  As Rachel White stood up in the Soviet safe house and let the hissing ectophone fall to the floor, a cold sense of purpose descended upon her.

  While Roger paced and raged, smoking and coughing like a steam engine, she called Special Branch using the house’s telephone. She leafed through the book on the table. Several pages had been torn out and burned. She noted down the Hinton address scrawled inside the cover with a pencil—no doubt it was already inactive, but it would have to be checked.

  She consoled Joan and Helen. They were in tears, unable to process what had happened. Max had made a habit of describing his agents in less emotional terms than the ones he applied to his pets, but apparently the lack of affection had not been genuine.

  Rachel explained that there was such a thing as spirit violence, although it was rare in a world where you could escape any hostility with a thought, but Max had given everything in pursuit of Bloom.

  When Roger had calmed down, they spoke to Booth and Hickson via ectophone together. Hickson had witnessed the struggle between Max and Bloom but arrived too late to follow the mole. Rachel made notes in preparation for her statement. Roger contacted Symonds to ask for help with the clean-up.

  The Special Branch officers arrived, two pale, thickset men with bad complexions Rachel remembered from the Langham. Both looked intimidated by the heavy Service presence. Rachel gave them a precise statement, leaving very little out. An unofficial SIS operation in pursuit of a Soviet operative; yes, she had been in charge; yes, an unofficial spirit consultant had Faded as a result, for which she took full responsibility. As she spoke, she felt as if she was outside of her body, and her body was an Edison doll she inhabited.

  She kept moving. She called Susi at Max’s Sloane Square flat to give her the bad news and listened to the German girl’s sobs on the phone. Roger refused to speak to Rachel after Special Branch came, clearly already trying to distance himself from the whole affair. She called Harker and weathered his explosion on the phone.

  Then it was getting dark, and there was nothing to do except to go home.

  Gertrude was used to her late homecomings by now and had prepared supper. She ate mechanically, asked the maid to run a bath but then decided against it, instead sitting in her study in a bathrobe writing a resignation letter. A rational voice in her head tried to say that it was not as bad as she thought, they had still exposed the mole, the Service knew what material was compromised.

  She signed the letter and put the fountain pen down, then sat still for the first time in hours. Her hands started shaking. She folded them in her lap, and at last the tears came.

  Her crying woke up the Gouldian finches, which fluttered around in their cage. The female made a faint tee-tee sound.

  Rachel wiped her eyes and looked at the birds. She still had no clue what went on inside their tiny heads and wondered how well Max had truly understood his animal companions.

  How well could you ever really know even other human beings? After all the confessions and meetings, Bloom had remained a closed book to her, a cipher as unintelligible as the CAMLANN files. She doubted he had known her, either. They had just sat together for a few hours, politely lying to each other, even if the lies were mostly true.

  She thought of Joe’s story about the war: it was a truth he had shared with no agenda behind it, simply because he wanted her to understand. And now she might not have the chance to do the same for him. At least Spain might be a little safer, with Bloom gone from the Summer Court.

  It was only then that Max’s last words caught up with her.

  Maybe it wasn’t safer. Bloom had been warned. That meant there was a second mole in the Service. The realisation was sharp as a surgeon’s knife, physically painful, and her entire body tensed.

  She had to get hold of Noel Symonds.

  * * *

  ‘Madam, I am terribly sorry but Mr Symonds is not available. He is at his club at present.’

  Rachel squeezed the ectophone receiver harder. ‘And which club would that be?’

  ‘The Alba, madam. May I take a message?’

  ‘No, that is fine. I will call back later.’

  ‘As you wish, madam. Good evening to you.’

  She put the receiver down and sighed. Symonds would probably stay at the club all night. No doubt he was doing damage control with the other SIS bigwigs, having failed to catch Bloom. Tomorrow would be too late. Harker would be satisfied with nothing less than her resignation by then.

  The problem was that the Alba was the most exclusive gentlemen’s club in the capital. It also happened to be Joe’s club and Rachel was well aware of their policies. They never disturbed their members for any reason, always giving polite excuses on their behalf. And one of their foundational principles was no admission for women, not even as a member’s guest. Joe had often used the Alba as a refuge when things were difficult between them.

  Sometimes being a woman truly was like being a foreigner in a strange country, visiting—

  The idea that came to her was so sudden and absurd that she laughed aloud.

  She jumped up and rushed to the hallway where Joe’s old spirit armour stood like an attendant knight. It was a first-generation thing, a heavy contraption of brass, coils and Crookes tubes, rubber and fabric criss-crossed by copper wires, and a small backpack unit of batteries. Joe had kept it in perfect condition.

  Rachel touched the plate over the heart. Joe was not the only one who could wear armour in battle, she thought.

  * * *

  The Alba Club was located in a grand house in Westminster, with a beautiful Palladian facade painted azure with a white trim. The closed curtains and a door lacking a nameplate projected a forbidding reserve.

  Rachel was sweating inside the spirit armour as she entered. It was enormously uncomfortable. The joints were stiff and she could barely see through the eyeholes. The batteries were hot and added to her misery.

  At least the discomfort distracted her from the feeling that this was the stupidest thing she had ever done.

  The entrance hall had a copper-plate memorial to the members of the club who had fought in the Great War. The receptionist gave Rachel an unblinking stare.

  ‘May I help you, sir?’

  The voice was the only truly difficult part. She had called her friend Sykes at the Service’s technical section. He had explained how to plug the armour’s voice box—meant for spirits who could not use the medium’s vocal cords—into a microphone.

  ‘Yes, I am here to visit a member—Mr Symonds. I am supposed to meet him at the bar.’ It was disturbing to hear the crackling alien words coming out of her chest, an octave lower than her own.

  ‘Very good, sir. Have you been here before?’

  ‘A very brief visit with the Earl of Orford, late last century,’ Rachel said, scrawling an unreadable signature in the visitors’ book. ‘I suspect that was before your time.’

  ‘Indeed, sir. However, if you go past the billiards room, you will find that the bar is still open, just as it has been for the last two hundred years.’

  The bar was a narrow, high room with chairs and couches, and a large naval painting on one wall. Joe was nowhere in sight, thankfully. She had planned to ask him to take a message to Symonds but was suddenly not sure what to say to her husband.

  Then she heard a familiar voice.

  ‘Ho there, my dear chap!’

  Sir Stewart Menzies, the head of the Winter Court, was waving at Rachel. He had an outdoorsman’s complexion and a thick triangular moustache. He was sharing a small alcove with a New Dead gentleman in a spirit crown and a domino mask.

  ‘Here, have a drink with us!’ Sir Stewart said. He slapped his knee and motioned towards an empty seat next to him. ‘You, sir, are the perfect man to settle our bet!’

  Her superior’s superior officer was gloriously drunk.

  Unsure what else to do, Rachel lumbered to the alcove and s
at down heavily.

  ‘Oh my, that thing must be dashed uncomfortable! Are you a member?’

  ‘No, just visiting. Very kind of you to invite me over. I was at the Carlton earlier this week and never had so much as a hello from any of the members.’

  ‘Oh, they let anyone in at the Carlton,’ Sir Stewart said, winking at his companion. ‘Right, Symonds?’

  Rachel was grateful that the armour’s helmet hid her widening eyes. She had to find a way to speak to Symonds alone.

  ‘Tell me more about your bet, gentlemen,’ she said.

  There were definite political implications to this jovial-looking gathering. Maybe Symonds was worried about the fallout from the Bloom affair and was seeking support against C from the rival Court chief. Sir Stewart must surely relish the opportunity to lay the whole thing at C’s feet: Bloom’s existence would make the Winter Court blameless in the recent Dzhugashvili fiasco in Spain.

  Sir Stewart leaned forward conspiratorially. ‘We are all men of the world here, eh? I claim that our living bodies are superior to spirits when it comes to the Venusian arts. Symonds here maintains that the aetheric pleasures far exceed those of crude flesh. We decided to make a bet on the matter and recorded it in the club book. You see our dilemma—we needed a third party to resolve it. And then you walked through the door, sir, fresh from the golden fields of Summerland!’

  The barman appeared and put a martini glass with a straw in Rachel’s gloved hand. She managed to take a sip through the armour’s mouthpiece without spilling any.

  ‘Well, gentlemen,’ she said, ‘that is a topic regarding which I have very little experience.’

  Sir Stewart raised his eyebrows. ‘Really?’

  ‘I passed over very young, and still innocent.’

  ‘My God, man!’ Sir Stewart exclaimed, slapping his knee. ‘That is a tragedy and a shame! I should take you straight to the Golden Calf right now. Then you would be in a position to settle our bet. A very comfortable position. What do you say, eh?’

  These were the men she had served her entire life? These were the best the Service had to offer?

  ‘Your generosity knows no bounds,’ she said quickly, ‘but sadly, I am engaged.’