Broken Homes

will be consistent every time.
    So imagine my surprise when I flicked open my palm and got a werelight the size of a football and the colour of a yellow party balloon. I closed down the spell and tried again, this time adding impello so I could move the light about. Nightingale says that spells become more stable with each increase in complexity, so I was hoping the second forma would calm things down.
    It still came out so bright I expected lens flare, and as it rose up I suddenly understood why Bruno Taut’s sketches has been on Stromberg’s wall. Inside the concrete cylinder was a scaled-down version of Taut’s glass pavilion, like a giant acorn made of interlocking panes of glass. In the brilliance of my werelight the panes reflected back in greens, blues, purples and indigos. I tried to imagine what it would be like without the concealing concrete cylinder. You’d barely see it from ground level. But from a distance, or if it were lit from within . . .
    There was even a central plinth where, if it had been a lighthouse, the lamp would have stood. A metre across, it was raised to waist height and covered in a thick layer of dust. I wiped at it with my hand and got a static electric shock. Which was a surprise, because I could have sworn the surface was plastic. I used the sleeve of my jacket to clean the top. It was plastic, smooth black PVC with a pattern incised into the surface – a complicated series of interlocking circles and intersecting lines I didn’t recognise from anything I’d read.
    It was a lighthouse, I realised, or more precisely a Stadtkrone , a city crown. But it had always been assumed that the ‘spirit’ of the city was a metaphorical concept at best and a bit of metaphysical bollocks at worst.
    Is this what Erik Stromberg had been watching for with his telescope from his roof top garden on Highgate Hill? Gazing over the city and waiting to see – what exactly? A magic lighthouse? The mystical energy of the metropolis?
    I glanced up at my unnaturally bright werelight bobbing a metre above my head.
    Magic, vestigia . . . Whatever it is that powers what we do.
    Watching for a burst of magic like the burn-off at the top of a refinery flare tower?
    Making Skygarden what? A magic refinery, a drilling rig, magic mine? And extracting the magic from where? The ground? The people? Sky’s garden?
    Now I knew what it was, I was sensing I could identify it as the greasy, static-charged sense of power in the air. If Toby had been in there with me he would have barked himself right off the yap scale.
    Wege der Industriellen Nutzung von Magié , I thought. Towards the Industrial Use of Magic – oh yeah.
    Now I knew what the Faceless Man was interested in.

14
Something Missing
    T here have been developments. Please see me at your earliest convenience. Nightingale.
    ‘Still hasn’t really got the hang of texting yet has he?’ said Lesley.
    She’d been in the kitchen making coffee when I woke up the next morning. I asked her what her evening had been like.
    ‘We ended up at Shepherd Market,’ she said. ‘In one of those pubs that are tucked into a side street.’
    ‘Do you want to know why that is?’
    Lesley handed me a coffee. ‘If I said “no” would there be any chance you wouldn’t tell me?’
    ‘Yes. But then it would just niggle away at you until it became unbearable,’ I said.
    ‘That’s the way you are,’ she said. ‘I’m a little bit more focused on the practical things in life.’
    ‘Like fairies?’
    ‘Do you want to know what happened or not?’
    I tasted the coffee. It was vile. It always is when Lesley makes instant.
    ‘Thanks,’ I said.
    She sat down at the other end of the sofa-bed.
    ‘It was an ordinary pub,’ she said. ‘A bit traditional looking, Australian barman, but no TV though and no music. There was a stage area, so maybe they prefer it live. But you can feel it, like at the Spring Court – that something.’
    There was a man there so beautiful that he would have stopped a hen party in its tracks, and a woman dressed in strips of fur.
    ‘You don’t know what it’s like to take your mask off in front of people,’ she said. ‘And know they don’t care.’ She must have caught something in my expression, because she hastily added, ‘People that aren’t you and Nightingale. These people don’t care, in fact they don’t even notice – that includes Beverley you know. So whatever she sees in you, it ain’t your face. Lucky escape for you