The Golem's Eye

tumbled from the sky, breaking upon the pavements with a roar louder than cannon fire. A strong wind buffeted the rain this way and that, blowing it under porches and eaves, cornices and capstones, drowning each possible refuge with a freezing spray. There was water everywhere, bouncing off the tarmac, swilling along the gutters, congregating in basement corners and above the drains. It overflowed the city's cisterns. It cascaded horizontally through pipes, diagonally across roof slates, vertically down walls, staining the brickwork like sweeping washes of blood. It dripped between joists and through cracks in ceilings. It hung in the air in the form of a chill white mist, and above, invisibly, in the black reaches of the sky. It seeped into the fabric of buildings and the bones of their cowering inhabitants.
    In dark places underground, rats huddled in their lairs, listening to the echoes of the drumming overhead. In humble houses, ordinary men and women closed the shutters, turned lights on and clustered about their hearth fires with steaming cups of tea. Even in their lonely villas, the magicians fled the endless rain. They skulked to their workrooms, bolted fast the iron doors and, conjuring clouds of warming incense, lost themselves in dreams of distant lands.
    Rats, commoners, magicians: all safely undercover. And who could blame them? The streets were deserted, all London was shut down. It was close to midnight and the storm was getting worse.
    No one in their right mind would be out on a night like this.
    Ho hum.
    Somewhere amid the driving rain was a place where seven roads met. In the center of the crossroads stood a granite plinth, topped by a statue of a large man on a horse. The man waved a sword, his face frozen in the midst of a heroic cry. The horse was rearing up, back legs splayed, front legs out. Perhaps it was signaling dramatic defiance, perhaps it was preparing to hurl itself into battle. Perhaps it was simply trying to dislodge the fat bloke on its back. We'll never know. But see: under the belly of the horse, sitting right at the center of the plinth, its tail tucked elegantly against its paws—a large gray cat.
    The cat affected not to notice the bitter wind that rippled its sodden fur. Its handsome yellow eyes gazed out steadily into the murk, as if piercing the rain. Only the slight downward tilt of its tufted ears signaled dissatisfaction with its circumstances. One ear flicked occasionally; otherwise, the cat might have been carved from stone.
    The night darkened. The rain intensified. I tucked my tail in grimly and watched the roads.
    Time trickled on.
     
    Four nights is not a particularly long time even for humans, let alone for us higher beings from the Other Place. [1]  Yet the last four nights had really dragged. For each one of them I had been patrolling the central regions of London, hunting for the unknown marauder. I'd not been alone, admittedly; I had the company of a few other unlucky djinn and a barrel-load of foliots. The foliots in particular had caused incessant trouble, forever trying to bunk off by hiding under bridges or slipping down chimneys, or getting startled out of their skins [2]  by thunderclaps or one another's shadows. It was all one could do to keep them in line. And all the while it had rained continually, hard enough to cause a canker in one's essence.
     
    [1] Where time, strictly speaking, doesn't exist. Or, if it does, only in a circuitous, nonlinear sort of way.... Look, it's a complicated concept and I'd love to discuss it with you, but perhaps now's not quite the best moment. Remind me about it later.
     
    [2] Literally so, I'm afraid. All rather messy and inconvenient.
     
    Nathaniel, needless to say, had not been sympathetic. He was under pressure himself, he said, and he needed results soon. In his turn he was having difficulty marshaling the small group of magicians from his department who were providing the other djinn for the patrols. Reading between the lines, they were openly mutinous, disliking being ordered around by an upstart of a youth. And let's face it, who could blame them? Nevertheless, each night djinn and foliots alike assembled glumly on the gray slate roofs of Whitehall and were directed out on our patrols.
    Our aim was to protect certain prominent tourist regions of the city, which Nathaniel and his immediate superior, a certain Mr. Tallow, considered under threat. A list of possible sites was given to us: museums, galleries,