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down the street, some man was retching.
    ‘Jack—’
    ‘Ah, how can we ever know?’
    ‘What did Elias see in the crystal?’
    ‘Wasn’t a ring, that’s for sure. Look, he wouldn’t talk about it and I didn’t want to come over too pushy. He says it don’t matter what he sees, he never
questions it. He’s only the middleman.’
    ‘And
you
saw…?
    ‘Me? I dunno… bones? Hazy grey man-shape, wiv bones. I didn’t like it.’
    ‘Marked?’ I said urgently, before I could stop myself. ‘Marked here?’ Snatching up the lantern, holding it to my face and raising fingers to my cheeks. ‘And
here?’
    ‘Keep your bleedin’ voice down. Marked how?’
    ‘Black lumps. As seen in places where sheep are farmed, wool gathered…’
    Hell, I knew this was a far cry from scientific inquiry, that the last thing I should do was prompt him. But I was tired and overwound.
    ‘Who you got in mind, Dr John?’
    ‘There
was
a man I met in Glastonbury. A trader in what he claimed were holy relics. But they were just old bones. He had hundreds of bones. If they were digging up a graveyard for
more burials he’d be there with his bag. In the end, he was able to give me the intelligence I needed about the bones of Arthur. This was just before he died. Of… of
wool-sorters’ disease. Face full of foul black spots.’
    Benlow the boneman. I recalled, with a sick tremor, how this man, an obvious buck-hunter, had tried to attach himself to me.
Never thought I’d meet a man as famous as you, my
lord.
    ‘He wanted to come to London. Wanted me to bring him back with me. I… may have… implied that this would be possible.’
    ‘You made a bargain wiv him?’
    ‘I suppose I was in his debt. But if he thought we had a bargain… it was one I couldn’t keep.’
    Benlow crouching amid the smashed shelves of his grisly warehouse, having attempted, in his agony, to take his own life by cutting his wrists and his throat, but too weak. Dying eventually
surrounded by the detritus of death, the bones he’d offered for sale as relics of the saints. A rooker in every sense, but in the end I’d felt pity for him and some measure of
guilt.
    And now he haunted me? Wanting me to know he was there, even though I could not see him – worse, it seemed to me, than if I could. The injustice mocked me daily – the learned
bookman, heaven’s interpreter, cursed by a poverty of the spirit. I knew more about the engines of the Hidden than any man in England, but I could not
see
except, on occasion, in
dreams.
    And maybe in a scryer’s crystal?
    I looked up at the night sky, in search of familiar geometry, but it had clouded over and there were neither stars nor moon.
    ‘Jack… erm… did you, by chance, ask him…?’
    ‘Where one might be obtained? A shewstone? Course I asked him.’
    ‘But?’
    ‘It ain’t simple, Dr John. And it ain’t cheap.’

    Brother Elias had said there was always a few around, but most of them were of little value to a scryer, full of flaws and impurity. The more perfect of them were hard to come
by and cost more than a court banquet.
    ‘And might be dangerous,’ Jack Simm said.
    ‘How?’
    ‘For a novice, he meant. The more perfect ones have been used by men of power. A man what’s never scryed might find himself driven into madness. It would take a man of knowledge and
instinct to… deal wiv what it might… bring into the world.’
    ‘Hmm.’
    ‘A responsibility. Laden wiv obligation –
his
words.’
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘Like to a wife,’ Jack said. ‘You must take it to your bed.’
    ‘Go to!’
    ‘I’m telling you what he
said.
There must needs be a close bond ’twixt the crystal and the scryer, so you might sleep wiv it under your bolster. Bit bleedin’
lumpy, if you ask me, but monks is fond of discomfort.’
    There was logic here. Crystal possesses strangely organic qualities; crystal spheres change, grow, in response to unseen influences. The stone in the Faldos’ hall this