“There’s an Eiffel Dam – I haven’t heard of any tower.”
Once again, this new information raised more questions than it answered. “You ever seen it?”
“When would I have seen it, pray tell? In one of the months when the Changelings haven’t needed a militia force, perhaps?”
“Looks to me like the Changeling’s militia force don’t need you no more,” Ilsa teased.
To Eliot’s credit, he looked like he tried to resist glowering in response. “I hold out hope that this reprieve will be too short for a tour of the continent.” His words made the claim, but his tone told another story. Eliot would see the continent, and probably beyond, on both sides of the portal if he could.
He slowed, something snagging his attention, and he smirked. “Look.”
Ilsa followed his line of sight to a building under construction across the street. “That where we’re going?”
“That’s a building site, Ilsa. Just look at it.”
Ilsa did. The building had been partly raised, its frame climbing five of six storeys and shrouded on all sides by scaffolding. The walls of the first floor were complete, and those of the second were under way. Above them, beams were being hoisted – albeit with impressive speed – but there was nothing else to see.
Except for the builders. The mechanisms of manual labour were nowhere to be seen: no lifting, no motion, not a trowel or shovel or hammer in sight. Instead, ten or fifteen men stood, sat, and lounged on the frame and walls of the building – doing nothing. And yet the work continued around them. Ilsa almost stepped into traffic to get closer to the ropeless beams floating upwards, and the self-assembling bricks as they piled on top of one another. The building was making itself.
“Is this sorcery?” she said, entranced.
Eliot laughed softly. “The Sorcerers can only dream of psychokinetic power like this. In their centuries of study, they have never been able to replicate what the Psi can do.” The Psi. The dwellers of the Underground. “The work of these Psi builders is cerebral. Watch them. Watch their faces.”
The nearest man was perched between a vertical beam and a diagonal one like a child in a tree. His leg swung casually, and his head rested on the wood behind him, but his eyes were focused. They followed a succession of bricks as they floated from a barrow and rested in the mortar of the wall he was building. Ilsa’s eyes widened and her heart rate spiked, the wonder of it almost too much to bear.
The builder angled his head towards the sun, and a flash of white light reflected off his brow like sunlight on the ripples of the Thames. Ilsa got closer, and as the Psi man worked, a pattern of silver swirls pulsed across his brow, his temples, his cheekbones. It appeared inlaid, as if an artist had carved his skin and poured molten metal into the grooves. She turned her attention to another of the builders. He had similar markings, but his appeared as scars; he was not using his psychokinetic power.
“The markings exist from birth,” said Eliot. “They say no two are identical.”
Ilsa was barely listening any more. Something she had always wished to understand was falling into place. Bill Blume’s wife had needed to cover her face when she performed.
Because she had been Psi.
A nostalgic grief wrapped itself around her, but there was comfort too. She suddenly knew her magician better than ever before, even though he was gone. She wondered what Blume would think if he could see where she was now, and that she had found the answers she’d been looking for.
Her parents had left plenty of things to learn about them too, and one of them was Gedeon. No, it didn’t matter if they couldn’t find this chemist in Camden. Ilsa would find a way. She had to.
“Ilsa?”
Her head snapped to Eliot, who was watching her with grim concern. She had almost forgotten he was there.
“It’s nothing.” She shook her head. “Let’s go.”
Their next destination was a shop called McCormick & Castor. In a coincidence she couldn’t fathom, Ilsa knew it well, due to there being a duplicate in the Otherworld – a shop by the name of McConnell & Castor.
“It’s called a weak spot,” said Eliot when Ilsa voiced her astonishment. “The thinner the fabric between the two worlds, the stronger the similarities. London sits on a weak spot, and patches of it” – he gestured to the shop – “are weaker still. Then there are the portals, where the fabric breaks entirely.”
“Portals? There’s more than one?”
“There are five. Only the Psi don’t have one in their quarter.”
They were about to cross the street and enter the chemist’s when an Oracle rounded the corner, and Ilsa tugged Eliot to a halt.
Ilsa recognised her; it was the girl she and Captain Fowler had passed on the street the day she arrived. Her fuzzy, violently orange hair formed a halo underneath her bonnet, and her sunken cheeks gave her the appearance of a ventriloquist’s puppet; the clunky jaw too pronounced beneath the hollows. She was shrouded beneath a threadbare shawl, but still she trembled with cold. Ilsa knew enough working girls with a weakness for the pipe to recognise this as a symptom.
If the girl noticed Ilsa and Eliot, she thought nothing of them. Her gaze was on her hands, wringing at her breast, her chin tucked tightly to her neck. She stepped into the chemist’s, and the door swung closed behind her, bell tinkling.
“Let’s wait until she leaves,” said Eliot, leaning back against the wall. “It’s better if you don’t get too close.”
“Why?”
“An Oracle’s visions of someone or something are stronger when that person or thing is close. Places, too.”
Did that explain the way the girl had noticed her on the street the day she arrived in the Witherward? “But she’s a vemanta user, ain’t she? Don’t that mean she’s… living in the Glare or
