Chapter One. 
The Whispering Shroud

10 p.m. Tower Bridge: under construction, London, 1888.

I perch on a wrought-iron beam overlooking the Thames, where the fog sits low. The view is decent if you like your air chewable. From this vantage point, the city appears choked and swollen, a body running a fever it refuses to name.

   I have always read cities the way other people read faces. These are familiar signs: strain before fracture, pressure before failure. Bodies and cities share a common pattern of collapse.

   I settle my bum against the ironwork and look down as evening deepens; the embankment’s throng disperses—shopkeepers, labourers, women carrying woven baskets heading home, their faces turned down against the moist air. The river catches what light remains and holds it like a mother clutches a dying child.

   Up here, the construction is mine. The scaffolding, the bare girders, the smell of tar and cut metal. My hand trails along the beams surface. My fingertip catches on a rounded rivet head, and I pull my gloves off to press bare skin. Solid enough by human measure. I look down at the peerie chap.

   ‘A bit foggy up here, eh, pal?’ I ask.

   The rivet says nothing, which is fair.

   ‘Damp, too. Must get a wee bit lonely, stuck out here on your own.’ I glance along the row of rivet heads stretching into the murk. ‘Well, not alone, but your companions don’t present themselves as exceptional talkers, though you might be.’

   I circle the head with my finger. Already rusting; the river doesn’t wait.

   ‘Been here long? I mean—obviously not. They’re still building this bit, aren’t they.    Have you held the role of rivet for an extended period? After you were ripped from the ground, and your family…Tough times I bet.’

   I tap the head. A dull clink.

   ‘Still, I bet you were a wee bit longer before they bashed you with the hammer, eh?’

   A pause, and I wince.

   ‘Sorry. Nasty memory, I expect.’

   I sit back on my heels and rest my hands on my knees as the fog thickens. Below, a lamplighter works his way along the embankment, each flame a smudge of gold the murk swallows.

    Out on the water, a steam tug pushes upriver, its engine ticking, and coughing against the current. Smoke trails from the stack and the fog takes it, the way the fog takes everything. I watch it for a while. The pinnacle of human engineering, that thing. Gears and pistons and a boiler the size of a wardrobe, all of it labouring to shift a few barges of coal from one stretch of river to another.

   I saw them build the pyramids. Two million blocks of limestone hauled across sand by rope and sweat and the absolute bloody-mindedness of a species that refuses to accept its own limitations. And now this: a tin kettle, unaware of the ghosts it leaves in its wake.

   The rivets say nothing. I lean in and drop my voice.

   ‘You’re not overly talkative, which is fine; many a fine mind keeps its counsel. The Stoics, for instance.’

   I stand up.

   ‘I met one once—Marcus Aurelius, no less. Nice chap.’ I nod. That sits where it should.    ‘We were in the Germanic north together, mud up to the ankles. Everyone shouting like volume wins wars, and Marcus just…stood.’

   ‘There I am, out of the tent for a moment and the smell hits first—horse sweat, iron, and the particular rot of churned mud in the cold forest. Firelight on exhausted faces, men who’d been shouting all day now gone quiet, eating, eyes down. Beyond the camp, the Germanic trees, black and enormous and entirely indifferent to Rome.’

   I’m on a roll. The rivet is still saying nothing.

   ‘Marcus at my side. He turns, looks at me the way he always did—as if he’d been thinking since morning.’ I take a breath. ‘The man who masters himself needs no enemy to defeat him,” he says quietly. And then goes back to watching the tree line.’

   I forgive him the man metaphor. Nice chap.

   ‘So, you. Essentially.’ I listen for wisdom from a piece of metal. Silence. ‘Aye, there we go.’ I say.

   Near me, the air constricts—the pause before the world tears open. I’ve felt it ten thousand times and it still makes the back of my neck prickle, still pulls the ancient in my chest toward the older. The purple presents first. A light bleeding up through a void. The crackle arrives the way your teeth feel before a storm breaks and the temperature drops two degrees. The rivets along the beams hum.

   Then she arrives. Scrabs. My spirit dog, the Cù-Sìth.

   She can be enormous or small—half wolf, half fox. Broad through the chest and shoulders, sharp at the jaw and ear, two ancient bloodlines wearing one black skin. The purple burns beneath her fur in slow pulses. Her eyes find mine. Yellow and still. White-tipped ear pointing her way.

   She circles me. Slow. Deliberate. The way a predator takes its time when there is no hurry.

   ‘Glad to see you made it here.’ I crouch to the rivet. ‘We were having a wee blether about Marcus.’

   ‘I heard.’

   ‘Anything to add?’

   Scrabs’ ears lift. ‘I never liked the Romans.’

   I squat, bring my hand to my chin, and whisper in her ear. ‘Following a period of this length, one might wonder if any lingering resentments could possibly exist.’

   ‘They do—and as you remember fine well Miss Koribella Moulach, they insisted on trying to put me in the arena.’ She turns and says over her shoulder, ‘I don’t do performing arts.’

   I smirk. ‘Fair point.’

   She turns to the river., and paces along the beam, sniffing. ‘You weren’t wrong about the smell.’

   ‘Yeah. Dead fish, waste, neglect, and ambition—the odd torso bobbing past.’ I clamp my mouth shut. ‘London hates untidy truths.’ I pause. ‘Alright. Let’s get back to work.  You got anything?’

   ‘Not much, the scent is too weak. Shall we get higher, above this stink?’

   She looks north. Up. A flick of her tail, and she’s gone — burnt hair, violet haze.

   I see a flash of purple, high on the viaduct, eighty feet away.

   ‘Right then. My turn.’

   I crouch, legs coiling, and drive forward. The beam groans; the wind howls. My boots slam into the gravel, the viaduct shudders, my knees take it, and then my teeth rattle. Dust lifts around my boots.

   Scrabs looks back into the gloom. Two lanterns.

   ‘Nice landing,’ she says.

   ‘I thought so.’

   Scrabs’ ears twitch, listening past the wind.

   ‘Your mum didn’t.’

   I breathe out through my nose. ‘Don’t.’

   ‘She says you’re favouring your left knee again.’

   ‘Scrabster—I understand you traverse both sides of the viel,’ I say, with more edge than I want. ‘But replaying my mother’s commentary doesn’t help. You know that.’

    ‘She’s persistent, Highland vampires always are. Comes with being dead, I suppose.'

    She flicks her tail again and disappears with a smirk growing. A snap of lightning and she’s on the warehouse opposite. I follow. Boots pounding across the gap, I jump. I land hard enough to send tiles skittering down the slope.

    Then Scrabs goes still. Crouched low on all fours. Her head tilts, eyes narrow. ‘Can you feel that?’ she says.

    ‘Yes.’ I say. It hits me—like jumping into a winter loch, felt through my feet to the back of my eyes.

    Scrabs give a wee shudder.

    ‘What is it?’ I ask.

    ‘Claws,’ she says, ears flattening. ‘Searching for a way through.’

    Scrabs draws a long breath through her nose and holds it. Her ears lift and settle. ‘It feels old, like the one on Arran. The one Natona felt it first, at Machrie.’

    ‘I remember. I’ve never seen her face like that before.’ I pause. ‘And now it wants a way in.’

    ‘Aye.’ She keeps her gaze forward. ‘Scratching at the door.’

    ‘Then we find the breach before it becomes a doorway.’

    The hum shifts—thin and taut—pulling across the Thames.

    ‘It’s moving,’ Scrabs says.

    I follow her east over the sleeping roofs. Below, the city sleeps. Above, something stirs. Between the two, the pressure thins.