“This is a unique chamber, Jack, because the soil here is hallowed.” He crouched and stared down at the dirt floor. “It harbors the memories of those who’ve defended the Iron Horse and all its permutations across the millennia. Those permutations are all musical in some way, too, and all fortify its original intent.”
“Which is what?”
“To be a safe haven, a bulwark against tyranny, consecrated by the suffering of innocents on this very spot.”
That about matched the feeling I was getting. “What am I supposed to do?”
“For the first part, simply put your hands into the soil. Feel it. Let it feel you. The Iron Horse needs to accept you before you’ll be permitted to renew the ward.”
“What if it rejects me?” I asked.
“Honestly, we have no contingency. So, best foot forward, as they say.” None of this was in the books. “Is there something I should know first?” “Concentrate so that you may perceive its voice.”
“In dirt?”
“I suspect you’ve seen any number of things in entirely new ways of late.” Church started backing away. “Let your thoughts run out. They’ll find a home.”
I knelt down and slowly pushed my fingers into the loam. Almost immediately, my vision exploded. In a rush of sights and sounds I stood in more than a hundred different moments on this very ground.
The scent of oak bark and wet straw, the brush of wind and hiss of rain, the crimson sunset and hard yellow midday. I saw refugees marching down from forest hills, crying, with rough sacks on their backs; old men praying at stone monuments; soldiers resting by a stream, swords in their hands; children in nightgowns reading books with curled yellow pages; families huddled by cook fires against the icy wind. I wanted to help them. I felt that Henrywantedme to help them.
When I pulled my hands from the dirt, it began to roil and shift. A moment later it surged up into human form, churning, remaking itself into one figure after another—woman, child, man. Some smiled, some cried, others looked frightened, still others defiant. Deep tones of shifting earth rose up from their throats. Some tried to reach out, their arms spiraling into dirt and sand, grainy and ephemeral.
A moment later, all the faces and forms resolved into a woman fashioned of swirling soil and dust. She stood hunched over and emaciated. Even through the shifting soil of her face, she looked tired and weak. The woman turned her focus on me, though she had no eyes.
“Who are you?” I asked.
I am the ward of these grounds, she said inside my mind. “How can you?—”
The walls and ceiling of the grotto seemed to disappear, and I was suddenly kneeling on a mud path under a rainy grey sky. Around me, several hovels were burning despite the rain. Dozens of people lay wounded and bleeding. Some moaning. Some silent. Thundering hooves faded in echoes. Then, the woman, her hair muddy, her face covered in blood, began to sing. The world around me transformed with the ebb and flow of her melody and became the Asphodel Meadows. Souls stood up to be taken by the
winds to the mountain of fire . . . until her song invited them back.
But they didn’t return to their effigies the way I had. Instead, one by one, their souls joined hers, each one brightening her shine. When all
had come, her song modulated, the Meadows faded, and she stood again in the mud and rain. There, a plain-looking man in a long coat gently wrapped a vibrant crimson twine around her. When he’d finished, its ends plummeted into the ground like anchor chains and she ceased to sing.
The images and sounds faded, and I was kneeling back in the grotto, looking into the shifting-earth visage of the woman.
Their sacrifice hallowed this parcel of ancient London’s bloodied soil against any future claim that might be made upon it or its people. That is who we are. And that is how we protect our home.
My mind raced, drawing connections between what I’d been shown and what little I’d learned about spiritual wards from Father Kincaid.
I have shown you our past. Now I will show you yours.
Suddenly, I felt like I was looking into a mirror at my ten-year-old self. It was actually my reflection in the front windowof my childhood home on 107th Street. I saw little me, leaning on the back of the couch. Mama was backing down the driveway. She was crying at the wheel of the old Dodge. She reached into the back seat for a tissue, and I caught sight of the wine-splash birthmark on the back of her neck. I grabbed my neck where I have the same mark and screamed against the window for her to come back. I started to cry as she drove away.
Then the memory shifted to another place.
I clutched my wrist and screamed at the dirt woman. “No!”
There is more.
“I can’t . . .” I leaned forward and pressed my forehead into the cool soil to ease the pounding behind my eyes.
You are too much a prisoner of yourownhistory to be steward over ours.
I looked back up at her. “There’s a war coming, and I have to strengthen you against it. People are counting on me.” People had died because of me. “Please, tell me how I can help.”
