I fade in and out for a bit. When I'm back again, I find I'm sitting in one of the chairs. There's a tight bandage on my right arm, with something that isn't a rugby sock under it. My hands are lying on the armrests, un-cuffed, although I've got sore red bands where the metal cut into my wrists. I can feel my fingers, mostly—I can even make them flex. And for the first time in hours, my arm isn't killing me. I'm aware of the pain, but it feels as if it's on the other side of a thick woolen blanket.

Iris is sitting in the other chair, holding an oddly shaped cup made of what looks like yellow plastic, watching me. She's put her hair up and changed from her usual office casual into what my finely-tuned fashion sense suggests is either a late-Victorian mourning gown or a cultist priestess's robes. Or maybe she's just come from a goth nightclub with a really strict dress code.

I stare past her. We're in a cellar, sure enough—one designed by an architect from the C of E school of baroque cathedral design. It's all vaulted arches and flying buttresses, carved stone and heavy wooden partitions cutting us off from darkened naves and tunnels. Just like being in church, except for the lack of windows. Putti and angels flutter towards the shadowy ceiling. There are rows of oak pews, blackened with age. "Where are we?" I ask.

"We're in the underground chapel of the Ancient and Honourable Order of Wheelwrights," she says. "They had an overground chapel, too, but this one is more private."

"More p—" I stop. "Were the ancient whatevers a cover organization by any chance? For a brotherhood of a different hue?"

Iris seems amused by the idea. "Hardly! They were purged in the 1890s, but nobody found the way down to this cellar. We had rather a lot of cleaning up to do, interminable reconsecrations and exorcisms before we could dedicate the chapel to its true calling." She pulls a face. "Skull worshipers."

Skull worshipers? Does she mean . . . ? Oh dear. There are as many species of cultists as there are dark entities for them to wank over. If this place has a history of uncanny worship going back a century and a half, then it's a place of power indeed—and that's before you take into account its location inside a huge graveyard, at one end of a ley line leading into the heart of London that was traversed by tens of thousands of dead over a period of nearly a hundred years. The whole thing has got to be a gigantic necromantic capacitor. "So it was vacant and your people moved in?"

"More or less, yes."

"You people being, hmm. Officially, the Free Church of the Universal Kingdom? Or unofficially . . . ?"