streets had all changed. Trees gone; rows demolished; austerity in place of elegance, function in place of beauty; the new for old, however poor the exchange rate. It was a decade and more since he’d come here last. Had Gamut Street fallen, and a steel phallus risen in its place?
‘Where are we?’ he asked the driver.
‘Clerkenwell. That’s where you wanted, isn’t it?
‘I mean the precise place.
The driver looked for a sign, and found:
‘Flaxen Street. Does it ring a bell?
Chant peered out of the window.
‘Yes! Yes! Go down to the end, and turn right.
‘Used to live around here, did you?
‘A long time ago.’
‘It’s seen better days.’ He turned right. ‘Now where?
‘First on the left.’
‘Here it is,’ the man said. ‘Gamut Street. What number was it?’
‘Twenty-eight.’
The cab drew up at the kerb. Chant fumbled for the handle, opened the door, and all but fell out on to the pavement. Staggering, he put his weight against the door to close it, and for the first time he and the driver came face to face. Whatever the flea was doing to his system it must have been horribly apparent, to judge by the look of repugnance on the man’s face.
‘You will deliver the letter?’ Chant said.
‘You can trust me, mate.’
‘When you’ve done it, you should go home,’ Chant said. Tell your wife you love her. Give a prayer of thanks.’
‘What for?’
‘That you’re human,’ Chant said.
The cabbie didn’t question this little lunacy.
‘Whatever you say, mate,’ he replied. ‘I’ll give the missus one and give thanks at the same time, how’s that? Now don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, eh?’
This advice given, he drove off, leaving his passenger to the silence of the street.
With failing eyes, Chant scanned the gloom. The houses, built in the middle of Sartori’s century, looked to be mostly deserted; primed for demolition perhaps. But then Chant knew that sacred places - and Gamut Street was sacred in its way - survived on occasion because they went unseen, even in plain sight. Burnished by magic, they deflected the threatening eye and found unwitting allies in men and women who, all unknowing, knew holiness; became sanctuaries for a secret few.
He climbed the three steps to the door, and pushed at it, but it was securely locked, so he went to the nearest window. There was a filthy shroud of cobweb across it, but no curtain beyond. He pressed his face to the glass. Though his eyes were weakening by the moment, his gaze was still more acute than that of the blossoming ape. The room he was looking into was stripped of all furniture and decoration; if anybody had occupied this house since Sartori’s time - and it surely hadn’t stood empty for two hundred years - they had gone, taking every trace of their presence. He raised his good arm and struck the glass with his elbow, a single jab which shattered the window. Then, careless of the damage he did himself, he hoisted his bulk on to the sill, beat out the rest of the pieces of glass with his hand, and dropped down into the room on the other side.
The layout of the house was still clear in his mind. In dreams he’d drifted through these rooms, and heard the Maestro’s voice summoning him up the stairs, up! up!, to the room at the top where Sartori had worked his work. It was there Chant wanted to go now, but there were new signs of atrophy in his body with every heartbeat. The hand first invaded by the flea was withered, its nails dropped from their place, its bone showing at the knuckles and wrist. Beneath his jacket he knew his torso to the hip was similarly unmade; he felt pieces of his flesh falling inside his shirt as he moved. He would not be moving for much longer. His legs were increasingly unwilling to bear him up, and his senses were close to flickering out. Like a man whose children were leaving him he begged as he climbed the stairs:
‘Stay with me. Just a little longer. Please …’
His cajoling got him as far as the first landing, but then his legs all but gave out, and thereafter he had to climb using his one good arm to haul him onwards.
He was halfway up the final flight when he heard the voiders’ whistle in the street outside, its piercing din unmistakable. They had found him quicker than he’d anticipated, sniffing him out through the darkened streets. The fear that he’d be denied sight of the sanctum at the top of the stairs spurred him on, his body doing its ragged best to accommodate his ambition.
From below, he heard the door being forced open. Then the whistle again, harder than before, as his pursuers stepped into the house. He began to berate his limbs, his tongue barely able to shape the words.
‘Don’t let me down! Work, will you? Work!’
And they obliged. He scaled the last few stairs in a spastic fashion, but reached the top flight as he heard the voiders’ soles at the bottom. It was dark up here, though how much of that was blindness and how much night he didn’t know. It scarcely mattered. The route to the door of the sanctum was as familiar to him as the limbs he’d lost. He crawled on hand and knees across the landing, the ancient boards creaking beneath him. A sudden fear seized him: that the door would be locked, and he’d beat his weakness against it, and fail to gain access. He reached up for the handle, grasped it, tried to turn it once, failed, tried again and this time dropped face down over the threshold as the door swung open.
There was food for his enfeebled eyes. Shafts of moonlight spilled from the windows in the roof. Though he’d dimly thought it was sentiment that had driven him back here, he saw now it was not. In returning here he came full circle, back to the room which had been his first glimpse of the Fifth Dominion. This was his cradle, and his tutoring room. Here he’d smelt the air of England for the first time, the crisp October air; here he’d fed first, drunk first; first had cause for laughter, and later, for tears. Unlike the lower rooms, whose emptiness was a sign of desertion, this space had always been sparsely furnished, and sometimes completely empty. He’d danced here on the same legs that now lay dead beneath him, while Sartori had told him how he planned to take this wretched Dominion, and build in its midst a city that would shame Babylon; danced for sheer exuberance, knowing his Maestro was a great man, and had it in his power to change the world.
Lost ambition; all lost. Before that October had become November Sartori had gone, flitted in the night, or murdered by his enemies. Gone, and left his servant stranded in a city he barely knew. How Chant had longed then to return to the ether from where he’d been summoned; to shrug off the body which Sartori had congealed around him, and be gone out of this Dominion. But the only voice capable of ordering such a release was that which had conjured him, and with Sartori gone he was exiled on earth forever. He hadn’t hated his summoner for that. Sartori had been indulgent for the weeks they’d been together. Were he to appear now, in the moonlit room, Chant would not have accused him of negligence, but made proper obeisances and been glad that his inspiration had returned.
… Maestro …’ he murmured, face to the musty boards.
‘Not
