Page 21 of Smoke & Ashes
Tens & Queens
So it turned out that ringing every estate agent in a town of 73,000 people took longer than I thought it would, but I managed to get most of them to at least tell me that theydidn’thave an Edward Brown working for them. That narrowed the field down to three places that insisted on a policy of not discussing their staffing, of which one was the Maidenhead branch of the same firm that he’d worked for in Brentford, so I felt pretty confident there, leads-wise. Although not so confident that I thought I could schlep all the way out there, find out what the shit was up with the guy, and get back to town in time to see Nim, make sure Sofia hadn’t been murdered by a hate-fuelled witch-vampire working for a master manipulator with two millennia of scheming under his belt, and then catch a ride back to Safernoc in time to see if Tara had been serious about the dungeon.
Not that I was totally sure Iwantedher to be serious about the dungeon. I’d been down there before and for all my bravado it was a nasty place to be chained up in. Then again, the right company would probably have made the world of difference.
To my unbelievable shame, the hospital where Nim had been lying ever since she and Arty King did the mutual-embrace-of-death thing on each other was all of forty minutes’ walk from my office. I crossed Waterloo Bridge and took what would have been a pleasant late-afternoon stroll up the waterfront if it hadn’t got to the point where I was incapable of watching a boat go down the Thames without assuming it was some kind of deep and meaningful metaphor for a primordial vision quest that I was spectacularly fucking up.
Outside a modern concrete building which claimed to be a pub but was clearly actually a bar which is a whole different vibe with way more tapas and way less atmosphere, I stopped for a moment by a lichen-covered wall and stared at the river flowing under Blackfriars bridge. Of course I said “bar” but basically it was a bunch of low tables where—once it got to more that time of the evening—people would be sitting and drinking overpriced beer under a perma-grey London sky. Right now, the tables had exactly one inhabitant, an old woman in a grey anorak and fingerless gloves. I knew without looking that she’d be dealing cards in front of her. I looked anyway.
Sighing, I went up to her. “Okay,” I said. “What have you got to tell me?”
“Why don’t you sit down.”
I sat down. “Should I ask who you are?”
“A famous clairvoyant,” she replied. “But not as the likes of you would know about.”
“The likes of me?” Was I sitting down with a homophobic fortune teller?
“You in your high tower, watching from the windows and never coming down into the muck with the rest of us. You what thinks you know but knows nothing.”
I rubbed my temples. “And which of the many, many weird creatures that seems to live in my dreams are you, exactly?”
“My but you do ask a lot of questions.”
“Funnily enough I don’t get many answers.”
“Perhaps you’re asking the wrong thing.”
Quite a large part of me wanted to get the hell up and walk the hell away. “Just read my damned fortune.”
She turned over a card. It showed a body lying face down on a riverbank, ten swords sticking haphazardly into its back. “An ending,” she said. “Sudden and inevitable, although perhaps unlooked-for.”
Great.
Another card. A woman on a wooden throne, still at the water’s edge, an ornate chalice in her hand and pebbles strewn at her feet. “A lady of situations,” said the fortune teller.
“Yeah, pretty much all my ladies are ladies of situations.”
A final card. A man facing out over the sea, a staff in his hand and two more beside him. “A journey underway. A land in ruin that must be healed.”
I sighed. “Is that it?”
“I can only show you the signs. It is for you to act on them.”
“Thanks, this has been spectacularly unhelpful.”
The old lady gave me a worryingly knowing smile. “The fates help those who help themselves.”
Well, at least she hadn’t told me to fear death by water. I pressed on, passing under the sleek, steel tubes of the Millennium Bridge, which had probably seemed incredibly futuristic when they were designing it in the ‘90s but had now dated much like the wordMillenniumhad,past incongruous urban greenery and joyless signs prohibiting busking, because obviously the trendy, artsy atmosphere of the South Bank would be ruined if people could play music on it.
The weird thing about London—well, one of the many weird things about London—was that it was terrifyingly enormous in some ways and incredibly tiny in others. It was so sprawling that when you looked at satellite pictures of England it smeared grey-brown across the whole South-East like a skidmark on the crotch of the country, but if you walked for twenty minutes through the middle of it you’d pass almost every famous landmark in the whole place. You could stand outside Shakespeare’s Globe and look at St Paul’s across the river. You could lean on the side of London Bridge, look out across the water and see the bridge that you alwaysthoughtwas London Bridge because it’s the one with the big towers, but which is actually Tower Bridge because of course it is. The giveaway, and stop me if this gets complicated, is the towers.
When I finally got to the hospital where Nim was … staying? … resting? … in a coma? … I honestly wasn’t sure I had the right address. It was one of those incredibly private-healthcarey places that looks like a hotel from the outside and charges accordingly. It wasn’t until I was rocking up at reception that I realised I had no idea what name she’d be booked under. I didn’t think it was likely she’d be down asNimue, but then I also didn’t think she’d be under her real name either, whatever that was. Then again, maybe this place was posh enough that people booked in under mononyms all the time. Like Lorde, only less from New Zealand.
The reception desk was manned by a respectable-looking bespectacled man with slightly greying hair. “Yes?” I was probably imagining thewhat’s the likes of you doing heretone, but then to be fair to the guy I had just wandered in off the street and obviously had zero clue what was going on.
“I’m looking for a woman you might have here long-term?” I tried. “Comatose? Would have come in from somewhere in Bromley a couple of years back—might be missing an eye.”
