The Naming of the Beasts

She scowled into her drink, her hand gripping the stem of the glass tightly enough for the knuckles to show white. ‘I walked into the aftermath of a battle. They’d turned the dormitory into a field hospital. Every bed was occupied, and there were people running around with bandages, tourniquets, buckets. Doctors stitching up wounds. Members of the order - people I knew - screaming or sobbing or shrieking out swear-words. Some of the bodies on the beds weren’t moving. They were dead. And the wounds . . .’ She stared at me. ‘They looked as though they’d been clawed by wild animals or . . . or been dragged along behind a truck, or something.

‘I just stood there in the doorway, staring. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t move. The . . . the smell was worse than anything. Blood, and shit, and sweat, all mixed together.

‘Then someone shoved a bucket and a sponge into my hands, and at least I had something to do. Mopping up the blood, so nobody would slip in it and break their neck. I got stuck in. It was a way of shutting my mind down, so I didn’t have to think about it.

‘I worked for hours. Not just with the bucket. I stitched up a wound too, which is the first time I’ve used a needle and thread since I left seminary school. It was Speight. I think you met him. Something had gashed his arm really badly, from the shoulder down to the elbow. I stitched it up the best way I knew how, while someone else - a man I didn’t know - held his arm still and stopped him from struggling.’

‘Why do this there?’ I demanded. ‘Why not take them to a proper hospital?’

Trudie had a hard time focusing on the question. She was back in that room, in her own vivid memories, breathing in the stink of other people’s pain and terror. ‘I think . . . operational secrecy, mainly,’ she said at last. ‘We’re legal in some ways, but we’re vulnerable in others. It’s a difficult balance to keep, and if . . . if our people had left other people dead . . .’ I nodded and waved her on. I got it. When you’re an excommunicated secret sect fighting an undeclared guerrilla war, sometimes it’s best not to invite too much scrutiny. At the Salisbury the Anathemata had moved openly, but then at the Salisbury there were tower blocks burning and dead people falling out of the sky. The cops had been grateful for all the help they could get. Evidently this operation was different. More like the Abbie Torrington business, in fact, when Gwillam’s lunatics were shooting it out with another secret army in a west London church. That was an unwelcome memory. A prickle of presentiment made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

‘Speight was raving,’ Trudie went on. ‘Feverish. I think his wound was poisoned in some way. They’d shot him full of antibiotics but he was burning up. I wasn’t listening; I was too busy trying to sew up all these loose shreds of flesh into the shape of an arm. But I heard him anyway. Enough to put it together. There’s a group called the Satanist Church of the Americas . . .’

‘I’ve met them,’ I said. ‘Twice.’

Trudie nodded. She knew that, of course. The Anathemata had a file somewhere with Rafi’s name on it, and she’d presumably read it from cover to cover before she ever met me in the flesh. Most of the last three years of my life would be in there.

‘We thought they were defunct,’ she said, sombrely. ‘The man in charge - Anton Fanke - died, and after that there was a schism. They spent a lot of last year fighting among themselves. But from what Speight said, there was a clear winner in that contest. And then the order got word that SCA people were filtering into the UK, in ones and twos. Some of them were travelling on false passports, but we had people in place, watching them. We were able to track them as they started to come together.’

My throat was dry by this time. It wasn’t just the vividness of Trudie’s description, it was the growing certainty that I knew where she was going. ‘How long ago was this?’ I asked tersely.

‘Last weekend. Six days ago. But Father Gwillam was tracking these arrivals for two weeks before that, so the Satanists started to gather in London about a week after Asmodeus broke free.

‘They didn’t come here to see the sights, Castor. They came to perform an invocation of some kind. They’d brought a girl with them: a sacrifice-child, like Abbie Torrington, born and bred to be ritually murdered. But the order was right on top of them, every step of the way. Father Gwillam called down an attack before they could finish the ritual.’

‘The girl,’ I said. ‘Did you—?’

‘Not me,’ Trudie corrected, deadpan. ‘I wasn’t there, remember? But yeah, the order got her out in one piece.’

Remembering Abbie, I bared my teeth. ‘How long is that likely to last?’ I demanded. ‘Gwillam is all about the greater good, isn’t he? He’d kill this kid in a heartbeat if he thought there was any risk the satanists would try again.’