Broken Homes

careful. By the time we’d finished, the forge was good and hot – two thousand degrees Fahrenheit according to Nightingale, which was just over a grand in real temperature.
    ‘You need to learn to read the colour of the flame,’ he said.
    He bundled the seven rods together with wire and pushed one end into the glowing centre of the forge.
    ‘Now, this is where you need to watch carefully,’ he said, and stretched his hand over the forge. He said the spell quietly and I caught that weird echo you get when someone does some serious magic in your presence. Heat bloomed off the forge, real heat not vestigia , that crisped the hairs on my forearm and made me and Lesley step smartly backwards. Nightingale pulled back his hand equally sharply and, using a pair of tongs, rotated the bundle of rods a couple of times before withdrawing them from the forge.
    For a moment the heated end shone like a magnesium flare and I added an arc welding mask to my list of things to acquire before the next lesson. The light faded to merely bright as Nightingale swung around and placed the bundle on the anvil.
    ‘What now?’ asked Lesley.
    ‘Now?’ said Nightingale. ‘Now, we hit it with a hammer.’
    At breakfast the next morning Lesley pitched her plan for using the weird way of the Sons of Weyland and the staffs they made to lure out the Faceless Man.
    ‘Because he’s bound to want to know how it’s done,’ she said.
    Nightingale finished a mouthful of scrambled egg before speaking.
    ‘I understand the principle,’ he said. ‘I’m just not sure of the practicalities.’
    ‘Such as?’ asked Lesley.
    ‘Where do we cast our lure?’
    ‘I thought we’d start at the Goblin Fair,’ she said.
    Nightingale nodded.
    ‘We should be looking to maintain a presence at the fairs anyway,’ I said. ‘We need to get that whole community used to seeing us out and about.’
    ‘The community?’ asked Nightingale.
    ‘The,’ I groped for a word, but I couldn’t find any other term that fit, ‘magical community. We need to open up channels of communication.’ It was your basic policing by consent , currently referred to as stakeholder engagement , and we’d done at least one lecture on it at Hendon – although judging by Lesley’s amused snort I might have been the only one who stayed awake.
    She exchanged looks with Nightingale, who shrugged.
    ‘Perhaps we could do with a bit of dredging in that direction,’ he said. But before I could ask what that meant, he asked Lesley for specifics.
    ‘We go in as if we’re looking to scoop up any staffs floating around on the open market,’ she said, and explained that having established our interest we’d then imply that we were looking for the materials to construct new ones. ‘We want to make,’ she tilted her head at me, ‘ the community link our presence with the staffs. That might be enough to draw the Faceless Man out – although I think it might be a bit of a long-term strategy.’
    Nightingale sipped his coffee and gave it some thought.
    ‘It’s worth a try,’ he said. ‘And who knows? We might recover some genuine staffs into the bargain. Do we know when the next fair is?’
    ‘We know a man who does,’ I said.
    ‘I presume that would be our Mr Zach Taylor?’ asked Nightingale.
    ‘Well if you want to know where the goblins are . . .’ said Lesley.
    The Goblin Fair was, as far as we could tell, a combination mobile social club, shabeen and car boot sale for London’s supernatural community. I’d actually gone digging in the mundane library and found references to a Goblin Fayre and to a hidden market that was tucked into great St Bartholomew’s feast as a flea hides upon a dog . The earliest reference was recorded in 1534, which meant that the institution predated Isaac Newton and the establishment of the Folly.
    Nightingale had said that there’d always been a supernatural demi-monde at the fringes of the great horse fairs and the traditional markets, but he’d never had anything to do with them.
    ‘Not my department,’ he’d said.
    Not that the Folly had departments, you understand, it being the child of an era when a gentleman might serve his country in any number of ways regardless of previous experience, probity or talent. And if at the same time he might accrue some influence, some status and a huge estate in Warwickshire – then so much the better. Still, Nightingale had worked abroad at the behest of the Foreign and Colonial Offices while