This early chapter introduces Weyland Orr - Asterion.

Chapter Six

Idol Lane, London

He was a grown man now, thirty-three years old, and successful without being flamboyant or overly noticeable within the great bustling community that was London. Weyland Orr had risen from street boy to entrepreneur essentially by becoming a procurer. Whatever it was that a man or woman wanted, then Weyland Orr could discover and deliver it. Fine linens, dainties, jewels, horse and woman-flesh — none of it was beyond the remarkable skills of Weyland. Whatever a Londoner wanted, Weyland could deliver — so long as there was coin enough to pay at the end of the transaction.

Weyland was totally discrete. Not merely in the procuring of dreams, but in keeping himself as unnoticeable as possible. People requested, Weyland discovered and delivered, and after a day or so the customer tended to forget who precisely it was had procured the goods. There had been a man … but, oh, his face, it was too difficult to recall, and his name … no … that had gone, as well. Weyland drifted through London, discovering its secrets, indulging its whims, pandering to its excesses, and yet few ever noticed or remembered him. He was merely one of the city’s more spectral inhabitants, slipping silently and unobserved through back alleys and lanes.

Jane was far better known than Weyland. He’d come to regret prostituting her so early. He’d overused her during her early years, offering her without thought to sailor and labourer and clerk alike, until a year or so previously Weyland had noticed the early signs of the pox in her — the open sore on her forehead which would not heal, the ache in her long bones as the disease took hold. Weyland lamented the onset of this disease. Not because it made Jane suffer, and would eventually disfigure her, but Weyland did not want her to die before she managed that which he needed more than anything else in this life: to pass on the mysteries of the labyrinth to Cornelia-reborn.

Diseased and thus useless as an earning woman, Jane no longer prostituted for Weyland, but managed the homeless, friendless girls that Weyland took from the streets. These girls Jane fed and bathed, and taught some of the sexual skills that she had learned as a Mistress of the Labyrinth as well a woman who had managed great experience through her several lives. Once the girls were fed, cleaned, and trained, Weyland offered them to his clients, whether sailor or bishop, so long as the girls’ freshness and looks lasted.

All this activity took place in a single, discrete room Weyland leased from a tavern keeper just off Cheapside. Here Weyland ate and slept, kept Jane, and worked his girls. Weyland could have afforded quarters more commodious, but for years he had preferred discretion to comfort, anonymity to open brazenness.

He was, after all, a highly cautious man, and he didn’t want to bring himself to the attention of the Troy Game, which was more powerful in this life than ever before. Weyland would have vastly preferred the opulence of a palace, but that he did not dare.

But, oh, how difficult it was to live in such close confines with Jane. Not surprisingly, Jane loathed Weyland, and her tongue was becoming tarter with each passing year (even with the beatings Weyland dealt her). It had now got to the point where Weyland had decided that it was high time to find more commodious quarters. Somewhere discrete, somewhere dark, somewhere overlooked (Weyland still meant to keep himself as unnoticeable as possible), but somewhere larger where he could live separated by a wall or two from Jane.

Thus, in the autumn of 1646, Weyland set about discovering suitable accommodation for himself, Jane, whatever number of girls he had working for him at any given time, and for Cornelia-reborn, Noah, once he brought her to join them. Nothing ostentatious, nothing that might draw him to the attention of the Troy Game. Just something that had more than one room.

So as Weyland wandered the streets about his business, he also kept alert for some unassuming, darkened house that might serve both as a prison for Jane (as well, eventually, Noah) and as a sanctuary for himself. London afforded many narrow alleys and winding, tiny lanes into which were crowded a host of tenement dwellings. Given his now not inconsiderable resources, Weyland could have had his pick of fifty of them.

And yet none of them felt right.

Weyland had not thought he would be so fastidious. He found fault with this house, and then that, and then the one after. This was too gloomy, this too airy, this had too many doors. After all, what was a house? A shelter, only — yet why should he care so greatly about finding the right shelter? To his disgust, as his hunt for a house extended into the months, Weyland found himself dreaming of shelter; of finding the perfect and most unexpected shelter; of falling into a space of comforting and beloved that he could finally feel safe. Contented. Fulfilled.

These dreams worried Weyland. Yearning dreams of a comforting and safe shelter were so unlike him that Weyland wondered if he’d somehow managed to fall under the influence of some dark, malign planet. Damn it! All he needed was something vaguely upright, with at least two rooms, and secreted down some dark alleyway.

How difficult could that be in a city composed of almost nothing else?

Finally, just when Weyland thought he would drive himself insane with the looking, he wandered down Idol Lane.

Idol Lane was a narrow, crooked, dark, malodorous passageway that ran from Thames Street north uphill to the junction of Tower and Little Tower Streets in Tower Street Ward. It was relatively insignificant, save that halfway up the lane bordered the jumbled buildings and churchyard of St Dunstan’s-in-the-East; everything else in the lane was either dank warehouse or tumbledown tenement. Barely nine feet wide, the land was cobbled with slippery, slime-covered stones and existed in a permanent state of semi-darkness as both the church buildings and warehouses reared so high into the sky that all sunlight was effectively blocked out.

As it was, the lane was much the same as hundreds of other malodorous, narrow lanes in the city, and as he stepped into it Weyland did not give it much thought. He was due to meet with a wealthy wool merchant in the church nave who required a small item that no one but Weyland could procure for him.

That the small item had needed to be stolen from the bed chamber of one of the great nobles in the realm had vastly increased its already not inconsiderable value, and Weyland was looking forward to a payment that would - should he ever find the right house — furnish his new home quite nicely.

Weyland slipped into the churchyard and then through a small door in the northern face of the church into the nave. St Dunstan’s-in-the-East had once been a quite magnificent church but now was greatly decayed. Its once beautiful floor of luminous green tiles was marred with a myriad of cracks. The banners hanging from the ceiling were moth-eaten and so faded their armorial shields were impossible to read. Two of the stained glass windows were broken. Most of the golden plate from the altar been pawned, and the majority of the stone memorials and tombs in the church (of which there were close to a hundred) were water stained and crumbled.

Weyland hated it the instant he stepped inside. The church was unbearably dismal, and he resolved to have done with his business as quickly as he might.

The wool merchant was waiting as planned in a side chapel.

“You have it?” the merchant asked as Weyland joined him.

“Aye,” Weyland said. “You have the coin?”

The merchant grimaced, as if he found the subject of money repellent. That annoyed Weyland, for how else had this merchant managed to scrabble together enough for his stolen bauble if not by money-dealing?

“Aye,” the merchant mumbled.

“Give it to me,” said Weyland.

“Show it to me,” said the merchant.

Weyland sighed, but drew from a pocket a small leather wrapped bundle. Glancing about to make sure they were unobserved, Weyland unfolded the leather, and showed the merchant that which he craved — a stunning ruby ring that the merchant wanted to give to his nubile young lover.

His eyes unable to remove themselves from the ring with which he would purchase a few short nights in his lover’s bed, the merchant unclipped his purse and tipped a pile of gold coins into Weyland’s outstretched hand.

“Don’t spend it all at once,” the merchant said, snatching the ring from Weyland’s other hand.

“I need to purchase a house,” said Weyland. “No doubt this shall prove more than useful for the purpose.”

That comment finally drew the merchant’s eyes from ring to Weyland’s face. “You? A house?” The merchant gave a small mirthless chuckle. “What do your sort need with houses? All you need is a rat hole, surely.”

Weyland’s mouth thinned, but before he could retort the merchant continued.

“Use the money to buy the godforsaken ruin attached to the bone house of this church. It’s no idyll, to be sure, but it has enough damp spots and shadowy corners within which to hide your deceitfulness.”

And then he was gone, and Weyland was left standing, looking at the spot where he’d been, his mouth open in astonishment.

It’s no idyll, to be sure, but it has enough damp spots and shadowy corners within which to hide your deceitfulness.

Weyland did not know what it was about those words, but something about them called to him. He stood a moment longer, then he strode out the church and turned right up Idol Lane to the jumble of buildings that had once housed the medieval monks of St Dunstan’s.

They were all solidly built enough — made of stone, which in a city of timbered houses was unusual enough — if showing evidence of the same decay that beset the church. At the extreme northern boundary of the church buildings stood the bone house where the clergy of St Dunstan’s stored the bones they dug up from their increasingly full churchyard.

The northern wall of the bone house abutted on to a four storied house made of the same stone as the rest of the church and outbuildings. A small alleyway ran down the northern side of the house. Weyland had no idea to what purpose the house had once been put, but now it had an air of neglect and loneliness that bespoke its emptiness.

No doubt the clergy of St Dunstan’s wished to sell it to raise enough money for repairs to the church itself.

Weyland walked slowly to the front door and turned the handle.

It opened, and he walked inside.

The door opened directly into a large, unfurnished and dusty parlour which Weyland could see then led into a kitchen. Three paces away from the door rose a staircase, and it was to this that Weyland walked. Hesitating a moment at its base — briefly laying a hand against the shared wall with the bone house to feel the souls lost and moaning on its other side — Weyland climbed the stairs.

He did not come down for over five hours, and when he did, it was to walk directly out the door and back down Idol Lane to the church to open negotiations with the vicar.