But Laura was a Marshal. Marshals were not normal and everyday. The Order of Marshals was even older than Chetwood, another mediaeval survival dressed up in a twenty-first-century org chart. It had endured down the centuries since its inception by changing, and changing, and changing. There were Knights Mareschal in Robin Hood stories, or projected backwards in time into legends about King Arthur. They had hunted demons first as mendicant monastics, then as organised thugs. They had been enforcers for the Church in the days when demonic exorcism was the job of the village priest and God help him if he wasn’t up to it. They had been a crusading knightly order in the Middle Ages, and witch-hunters in the Protestant Reformation. They had dwindled in the Enlightenment, when gentleman-wizardry was on the rise, and grown again with the Industrial Revolution, as demons discovered the joys of technology. Marshals had fought in the First World War, the first and last modern conflict where both sides had openly summoned demons onto the battlefield, pouring monsters into machine-gun emplacements and early tanks and the very first aeroplanes. There was a long strip of no-man’s-land, near the site of the Battle of the Somme, where even now the boundaries between the mundane world and the demonic plane were thin, and it was a very bad idea to switch on your mobile phone.

Marshals—including the first Marshals-Distaff, female recruits—had stood with silver swords drawn on the rooftops of London during the frightening stage of the Blitz when everyone had been convinced the Nazis would crack demonic bombings any day. There’d been quite a good BBC miniseries about it a few years ago.

These days, of course, the Order of Marshals was essentially a specialist branch of the police, funded by council tax, plagued with all the usual problems of a modern UK police force: understaffing, bureaucratic complexity, organisational inertia. But Laura Kenning was a Chief Marshal. Though hardly anyone actually paid attention to the Order’s traditional internal ranks, Walden guessed she could probably tack something like KMC—Knight Mareschal Capus—onto her name, if she wanted to. She was slightly too young to get KMCD, for ‘Distaff.’ The Order had taken an amazingly long time to admit that having a separate set of ranks for female Marshals made no sense, but they’d caved at last in about 2006.