A couple weeks ago, I ended up on an unexpected last-minute trip to Dublin, Ireland (my client literally emailed me on Thursday evening to say “hey, can you be at the airport on Sunday?”). On the way back from Dublin, I spent a week or so in London visiting Eunice, my lovely co-author.
Our novel London Under Veil, about a young British infosec worker in Shoreditch who ends up drawn into a secret underground war between an ancient guild of spellcasting sex workers and a society of Tory rage mages, is (rather unexpectedly) turning out to be the most popular thing we’ve written so far.
Whilst I was in London, we spent a couple of days visiting some of the important places in the novel. All of the locations in the novel except the headquarters of the Guild are real; we wanted the novel to be as grounded as we possibly could.
We had a blast touring and taking photos of the key places in London where the story unfolds.
The first key location, where May takes refuge from the people trying to kidnap her, learns that magic is real, and finds herself drawn into the Guild of the Women of Saint Thais Under Royal Charter of Her Majesty Catherine Parr, Queen Consort of England and Ireland, founded in anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi 1544, is the Lalit, a tiny luxury hotel and restaurant:
We had high tea in the dining room, the very place where May meets Serene, the leader of the Guild and a powerful spellcaster.
The table on the right hand side of the photo, on the balcony, is where May has her first introduction to Serene.
“So, okay, just so we’re clear.” May folded her arms. “You’re telling me you can cast magic spells. Something like that.”
Serene smiled benevolently. “Something like that.”
“And the people who were after me? Can they…cast magic too?”
“They can, though they use a different system. A different way of seeing the world. A different programming language, if you like.”
“And you expect me to believe this, just by a sleight of hand trick with ID badges and some tea.” Even as she said it, May thought of the metal badge, hard and smooth beneath her fingers, a visceral memory that still lingered in her fingertips.
“What do you think?”
“I think you’re crazy. I think you’re trying to manipulate me. I think you’re trying to trick me for—for—for reasons of your own. I think you’ve arranged to drag me here so you can mess with my mind. You…you put something in the tea.”
“You haven’t had any of your tea.”
“Even so, this can’t be real!”
“All of those are sane, rational, and reasonable responses,” Serene said. “Offered a choice between accepting that which is by its very nature impossible, and accepting that someone is trying to fool you, the smart money is on someone trying to fool you every time. Normally I would suggest you go home and sleep on it, get adjusted to it a little, then come back with your questions, but this situation is not normal.”
“Because people are trying to grab me.”
“Because people are trying to grab you.” Serene sipped daintily at her tea.
“You seem quite blasé about all this.”
“Would you like to finish your tea before we go?”
“I’m fine.”
“I expect you’re not, but you are doing well considering. And you have a healthy degree of suspicion that will serve you in what is to come, I think. Still, time for us to be going.”
The Lalit is gorgeous, and we ended up staying there until well into the night.
Next up, the Barbican, that sprawling marvel of Brutalist architecture. Not many people know this, but the pools in the Barbican are part of a sophisticated magical warding system.
Toward the end of the novel, the Guild seeks shelter at the Barbican:
May finally broke the silence as they neared their destination, the sprawling Brutalist retro-dystopian complex of the Barbican, with its pools and gardens giving rise to slablike concrete buildings like strange plants. “I keep thinking nothing else can surprise me, and I keep being wrong. I suppose you’re going to tell me the Guild owns a flat here?”
“Several,” Janet said.
“Of course you do. We do. Whatever.”
“Why wouldn’t we? On hindsight, perhaps we shouldn’t have abandoned it for our new headquarters. It seemed a sound decision at the time, but this is a far more defensible position, magically and practically speaking. The pools—”
“Forget I asked,” May said.
She helped Janet slide the stretcher from the back of the van. Spencer’s tail whipped back and forth, back and forth. Serene’s expression didn’t change as the wheels hit the pavement. “Where are we taking her?”
“The flat to the left,” Janet said.
May guided the stretcher through the door into a posh, beautifully-furnished flat with large windows overlooking the reflecting pool in the plaza. “Nice digs,” she said.
“It’s maintained by a small corporation owned by a holding company that’s a subsidiary of a concern operated by the Crown,” Janet said.
“Seriously? I kinda thought, with the Tories being all Them—”
“The Adversary’s takeover of the Tories is a recent development, historically speaking. Our special relationship with the Crown has endured for longer than any of us have been alive. I see no reason that won’t continue for as long as the Guild exists.” She looked down at Serene’s placid face. “Which I fear might not be much longer. We need to prepare a response.”
The Shard doesn’t occur in the story directly, but there is a version of the Shard in the weird surreal magical alternate London, and it tears a hole in the sky.
Which, honestly, it kinda looks like it’s trying to do anyway.
When her stomach quit spinning, May walked to the edge of the roof and looked around. London spread out below her…not her London, but a bizarre, fantasy London, a storybook London from one of those stories spun of equal parts wonder and dread.
The buildings sprawled in classic London chaos, dark and forbidding, an urban canyon of twisting passages, all alike. A bit south of her, along the Thames, the grand clock tower rose hundreds of metres from the Tower of Westminster, its glossy obsidian sides black and brooding, tipped by a yellow crystalline spire that blazed with incandescence. Beyond it, the Shard thrust upward from the ground, transparent as glass, its peak piercing the heavens, creating a jagged rip in the bowl of the sky through which the stars gleamed like hard pinholes in the black velvet of night. She turned her gaze across the bridge, to where the London Eye spun madly, a glowing blur of red atop a tall monolith of grey steel and white concrete. What she had taken as boats floating along the river were actually scribbles, charcoal impressions of boats hastily sketched by the hand of an impatient artist, each identical, each with a gleaming lantern in its prow. Static fuzz rippled just beneath the water, as if the river itself were a television signal badly degraded.
The story’s climactic showdown takes place in the Guildhall, which is a stronghold of magic if ever there was one. The door they enter through is on the right, behind the group of people standing there.
“Ah. Right. Just so I’m clear, it’s us, the people in this room right now, breaking into the Guildhall, which is also not coincidentally the stronghold of a fantastically powerful band of, and I say this with some reservation, evil spellcasting wizards, without any idea what we’re walking into.”
“That’s about the long and short of it, yeah,” Claire said. “I might feel better if I knew exactly how you plan to keep the Adversary’s prying eyes off us.”
“No way,” Claire said. “That’s a terrible idea, from an opsec perspective. Compartmentalization of information. If you’re caught, you can’t compromise the rest of us.”
“You don’t know, do you?”
“There is a certain…improvisational element to the plan, I will grant.” She turned to Zoe. “All-Girl Nude Beach 2014?”
“Got it in my pocket,” Zoe said.
“I’m sorry, what?” Lillian said. Zoe pulled a small thumb drive from her pocket and handed it to Lillian. The thing, badly scuffed and scratched, had a strip of masking tape stuck to it with “All-Girl Nude Beach 2014” scribbled on it in felt-tip pen.
“I don’t get it,” Lillian said.
“Loaded with all the best malware money can buy,” Zoe said. “When it falls out of my pocket in front of some mark, I guarantee he’ll race to his office just as fast as he can to plug it into his computer.”
“And then?”
Claire grinned. “And then we root his system. Hasn’t failed yet.”
We also spent quite a lot of time at the British Library, in the member’s room since Eunice is a member (because of course she is).
Some libraries have rare books rooms. The British Library has four immense walls of rare books, visible through the charming round porthole by these cozy chairs.
