Jack of Ravens

5

People were flooding into the Tube as quickly as they had entered the Holborn Empire, but the mood now was tense and fearful. The half-lit platform was packed. People made themselves as comfortable as they could. Men smoked in silence, or whispered to their wives and children. Young couples gripped each other’s hands desperately, while the old folk huddled under blankets to keep warm. Babies woken from their cots were crying in unison, their voices merging into one constant wail.

And then the bombs began to fall. It was the pounding of a great machine whose job was to reduce the city to dust. Thoom-thoom-thoom. Dust fell from the ceiling. The babies cried more, and whimpering young children joined them.

Church looked around the faces and saw the dread grow stronger, reaching through the taut expressions and into their bones. He couldn’t begin to guess how they coped with the horror night after night for months on end.

Suddenly a voice chimed up. ‘It’s Max Masque. Oi, Max! Tickle me ribs for a guinea!’

‘I’ll tickle yer ribs for a guinea!’ Jerzy responded. His eyes smiled at Church. ‘My public awaits.’

‘Go to it.’

‘How about a song?’ Jerzy called. A cheer went up. In a clear, strong voice, Jerzy began, ‘You are my sunshine, my only sunshine …’

The whole platform joined in. ‘You make me happy when skies are grey …’

Jerzy moved through the crowd, his very presence transformative. Church leaned against the wall, feeling the vibrations of the distant rhythm section shaking the city, marvelling in turn at how Jerzy had been transformed by his experience. One simple choice had made him something better.

As he listened to the singing, Church noticed something flare briefly in the black mouth of the tunnel. It was bright blue, like the hissing flame of an acetylene torch. He could have dismissed it as men at work on the line, but it looked to him very much like the flaming breath of Spring-heeled Jack.

While the sheltering crowd was distracted by Jerzy, Church slipped off the platform and, keeping close to the wall, edged his way into the tunnel. Rats scurried away from him into the depths. When he reached the point where he’d seen the flare, there was no sign of any workmen, but there was movement further along the tunnel.

The emergency lights of the platform already looked distant. Church knew he would be crazy to venture any further into the tunnel, but another blue flare much further ahead drew him on.

For the next fifteen minutes he progressed slowly through a deep, uncomfortable darkness, punctuated only at irregular points by emergency lights. The sounds of movement and the occasional flare kept him moving, but he never appeared to draw any closer.

Then, on the edge of the illumination of one of the emergency lights, he came across a branching tunnel wide enough for two men to walk side by side. A security door hung open and inside chipped white tiles gleamed from a distant light. He could hear sounds coming from down the corridor.

Inside, it smelled of engine oil. The corridor led past empty storerooms, and then through a ragged hole where the tiles gave way to new wood. Church could hear voices ahead, like flies buzzing in the distance.

Eventually he came to a complex of rooms that he guessed were part of the civil defence system constructed in the early days of the war to house the government in case of devastating attack. They were newly built, the emergency lights still strung on temporary wires along the walls.

One door stood ajar, and it was from inside that the voices emanated. Peering through the crack, Church could see a group of men in dark suits. Some of the mutterings he heard were in German, others in English. Beyond stood Salazar, his silver mask glowing in the half-light, and next to him was the Libertarian. Between them, on a wooden table, were the crystal skull and the Anubis Box. Church thought of coincidence and the vagaries of fate, and decided none of it mattered. This was his chance.

The air was filled with a dark energy and heavy with anticipation. The gathered men were intense, as though they had been waiting for a long time. It felt as if something very bad indeed was going to happen. Another god was going to be summoned and corrupted. Which one? Church wondered. What new, dark powers would be lined up against him and his allies? He delved into his knowledge of mythology and then wished he hadn’t, shivering briefly at some of the dreadful possibilities.

A man with a silver-grey moustache and florid jowls joined Salazar and the Libertarian and raised his hands to silence the congregation. ‘This time has been long coming,’ he said with the hint of a middle-European accent, ‘but here at this confluence of the old lines of power, we are in the right place. And after decades of waiting, events have conspired to make this the right time. The skull is now filled with power once again. We can begin the ritual. Are you ready?’

A murmur ran around the room. The Libertarian eyed the assembled group with unconcealed contempt.

Church wondered what the man meant by ‘the right place’. Was it simply that the energies were right for the ritual, or was the god they wanted to call somehow tied to the place of the summoning?

‘Tonight,’ the florid-jowled man continued in a tremulous voice, ‘we enter the halls of the Aesir. Tonight we dare to entice one of the great gods of our northern homeland — the trickster and shape-changer. Stand in awe — Loki comes.’

Church felt another frisson. He didn’t know enough about the Northern gods to anticipate the threat of a corrupted Loki, but the excitement evident in the crowd made him think it would be worse than he could imagine.

Salazar began his ritual before the crystal skull. Church threw off his overcoat and removed Llyrwyn from the harness on his back, but was still unsure how to proceed — there were too many people in the room to attempt to storm it. His window of opportunity was closing rapidly. If he didn’t disrupt the ritual before the god arrived, he wouldn’t stand a chance.

Light shimmered across the ceiling and walls from the now radiant skull. Shadows danced. The Libertarian and Salazar both moved back as the air began to peel open.

As Church searched for a line of attack, he heard a voice at his ear: ‘Over here.’ In the confusion of light and sound from the ritual, he presumed he had imagined it, but his attention was drawn to a store cupboard on one wall. It had been closed when he arrived, but now the doors hung open. Inside was a large box of the flares the workmen carried in case of emergencies while they were working on the rails.

As Church ignited one flare, he saw that Loki had emerged from the rift and Salazar was in the process of opening the Anubis Box. In the glare of the skull it was impossible to get a clear view of the god, but Church could still feel the power crackling off it.

Church thrust the lit flare into the full box, kicked open the door and hurled the makeshift bomb into the midst of the rapt crowd. He slammed the door briefly as the box ignited with a thunderous explosion.

When he darted inside there was horrific confusion. Men were on fire and screaming, and the air was filled with thick, foul-smelling smoke. Gripping his sword, Church drove through the stumbling bodies.

Salazar appeared out of the billowing clouds. As he had done once before, Church swung his sword and cleaved the thing from shoulder to hip. The blade met as little resistance as he expected. Spiders gushed across the floor.

And then Church was at the table where the crystal skull burned with an intense inner power. Beyond it, Church glimpsed feral eyes and a face marked with black runes carved into it by the Anubis Box. The god let out a bestial growl.

Church brought his blade down on the crystal skull and shattered it in an explosion of white light. Half-blinded even though he had shielded his eyes at the last, Church fumbled for the box. When his fingers closed on it, he ran to the wall, hoping to follow it around to the door while everyone else was disoriented by the smoke. Instead he came across another door. He wrenched it open and entered a shaft with a winding metal staircase.

When he was halfway up it, a chilling growl echoed from the darkness and the stairs vibrated from heavy footsteps in pursuit.