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CHAPTER FIVE

Caged Heat

Deep in the City something had been woken, something so old and so ordinary that people had been walking past it for centuries without giving it a second look.

It was so commonplace and undistinguished that anyone who came looking for it couldn’t fail to be disappointed with what they found, not that anyone had come looking for a very long time. Nothing about it gave a hint as to its purpose or its power. It looked like a roughly hewn lump of old masonry: whitish rock, about the size and shape of an old milestone. The only clue that it was more than the nothing it seemed was its setting.

It was caged.

It sat in the side of a building that was younger than it by at least two thousand years, and it looked out on the street through a thick lattice of iron bars.

Given its antiquity, people who noticed this usually thought that the bars were to protect it from the public.

Only a very few—and a very strange few at that—knew that it was precisely the other way around.

The grille of iron had become a wind trap for the rubbish that swirled around the building on the eddies from the looming high-rise opposite. A gutted packet of crisps was stuck on top of the thing, glinting silver and brown. A fragment of label proclaimed “Barbecued Be—” to anyone who chose to peer in and see what flavor its long-gone contents had been.

If the person peering in had been a connoisseur of coincidences, they would no doubt have smiled at what happened next, given that the label turned out to be a prophecy as well.

There was a low-frequency hum, the kind that old refrigerators make in the dead hours of the night when they think no one is listening. And then the crisp packet slowly shriveled and shrunk and finally burst into a bright and short-lived flame, before disappearing completely.

And it may have been nothing, or it may have been the two narrow blood grooves on the rounded top of the stone; but cleared of the debris, it now suddenly looked vacant and ready as a mortician’s slab.