CHAPTER THREE
Black Bird
Something was wrong. The Raven felt it in its bones and feathers as it flew over the green space of Regent’s Park. It looked down and caught sight of its shape, doubled in the reflection of a pond below.
For a moment it was distracted from the feeling of wrongness as it saw itself as others must see it. It made, it noted with grim satisfaction, an ominous sight—an elemental winged silhouette starkly outlined against the bruised cloud base above. In the past, it knew people would have looked up from their campfires or plow handles and shuddered at the black bird-shaped hole it cut across the sky, casting a baleful shadow over their lives. They would have seen it and thought it was an omen, and not a good one at that. Not that the Raven put much store in what people thought. Against the scale of time that it had to measure things against, most people were scarcely here before they died and were forgotten.
It flew on and returned to the wrong feeling, which was this: it didn’t know where the Walker was. Most of the time the Walker’s presence exerted a magnetic pull on the ancient bird, which had spent the last four centuries or so in his control.
It circled over the sharp-edged hump of the British Museum, slowing its flight as it came in to hover over the front courtyard, where the white-and-pink brick grid design on the ground was broken by a perfectly circular sunken area. It was here that the Raven felt it had the best chance of finding the Walker. But the circle was empty.
It needed to find the Walker, and it needed to find the children the Walker had sent it to hunt. And because the Raven had an infinitely retentive brain, but only one pair of eyes, it decided it needed help looking. And with that in mind, it flew south into the tree-crammed space of Tavistock Square. At the center of the square was a statue of an emaciated man, half naked and cross-legged, sitting on top of a plinth that had a small arched shrine cut into it. The shrine held a couple of crumpled beer cans and a jam jar full of bright marigolds. The cross-legged statue had his lap filled with cut flowers in varying stages between fresh-cut and compost. Opposite him, on one of the park benches, sat a tramp with plastic bags over his shoes and a hank of dreadlock hair hanging off the back of his head like a dead badger. He leaned back to upend a beer can, blue alcohol-washed eyes staring at the sky.
As he satisfied himself that he’d shaken the last drop from the can, he belched and adjusted himself more comfortably on the bench, deep within a parka so greasy it looked as if it’d been dipped in engine oil at some time in the distant past.
The Raven dropped onto the back of the bench where the tramp sat, and waited as the dreadlocks were racked by a complicated spasm of coughing that resulted in a small green gob of phlegm splatting onto the ground between the shopping-bagged feet.
The Raven hopped onto the tramp’s shoulder and gripped hard. The tramp stiffened but showed no surprise. His voice slurred and rumbled in a deep, partially gargled bass.
“What would you be wanting, bird? What would you be wanting with the Tallyman?”
The bird ducked in closer to the side of his head and began a disjointed clacking. The tramp started to judder imperceptibly. His eyes closed and his lower lip disappeared under his upper teeth as he bit down, like a child concentrating. He nodded slowly.
“We’ll see what we can see.”
The tramp opened his eyes and stood up abruptly, tossing the empty beer can to join its mates in the shallow arch beneath the statue of the cross-legged man.
The Raven hopped into the air and hung there, watching. The tramp still juddered, but his eyes had changed. Where once they had been pale and booze-bleached, they were now black, black eyes with no whites, as black and sharp as the eyes of the Raven itself.
Which was exactly what they’d become.
And all over London, under bridges and on park benches, in back alleyways and in hostels that smelled of old soup and new disinfectant, eyes that had been rheumy and bloodshot, blurred with drink or just simple hopelessness, suddenly changed. Men who had closed normal eyes as they went to sleep in the shelter of vacant shop doors woke up with Raven eyes and walked out into the street, scanning the roadway. Lonely women shuffling flat-footed under the weight of a life boiled down to what could be carried in old carrier bags stopped avoiding people’s eyes and straightened their necks, scouring the streetscape.
The Raven had spoken, and all over the city, the eyes of the Tallyman had opened.