The centre of a city, a large city like London, is the scratching of nails down a blackboard to a mariner. Brendan had walked the streets of many of the world’s capitals, but he found London to be the worst. It was a heaving grey monster belching from a million orifices and screaming without ever stopping to take a breath. The two soldiers he had rescued before they could wage war on Shooter’s Hill and the nearby environs were lucky; they would face some sort of punishment for stealing the weapons and attacking their senior officer, but that sentence was going to be far shorter than the one they would have faced if they had succeeded with their attack.
The tattoos on their bodies were sharper, more detailed and much more potent than the boy"s initial clumsy efforts. Something was guiding
