Seven for a Secret by Elizabeth Bear

lightning—the hand of God demolishing one of the tallest spires in Europe at the height of the English Renaissance—a bizarrely classical western facade added by Inigo Jones, the Sorcerer’s Fire, Christopher Wren’s Baroque additions, 18th century restoration of the central tower to a wedding-cake standard, and the bombs rained from Prussian zeppelins and flying dreadnaughts.
    If the cathedral had been built to the glory of God, well. God had not made the building of it easy.
    The wampyr had years on this eight-hundred-and-fifty-one-year-old church, but only a century or two. Of all the products of artifice in Europe, he felt most kinship to cathedrals.
    They grew and crumbled and endured through fat times and lean. They fell prey to fashion, to famine, and also to the whims of kings. Architects restored—or defaced—them. Conquerors appropriated them.
    They endured war and revolution and the rare idylls between—but the essential outline never changed. The nave and choir and transept and crossing. The tower at the heart. The crypts beneath. The flying buttresses, transferring the thrust of the fan vaults to the foundations.
    They were not living things, but they mocked living things. And in outlasting them, were changed by them, and became the rememberers of history.
    St Paul’s Cathedral housed the tombs of Aethelred the Unready, John of Gaunt, and John Donne. It seemed only fitting that the Prussians, with their fascination for appropriating myths and histories—and offspring—should consecrate their wolf-children there.
    The wampyr came to St Paul’s before even an ecclesiastical rising-time, traveling along in darkness and the cold continuing rain. Whatever legendry made of his kind, he had no allergy to holy ground. Though a church was the house of God, God did not see fit to demand the wampyr respect it as a dwelling. And so he made his way within.
    Truly, the gates of heaven stood wide to any who would enter.
    Paul’s Walk, they called the mighty nave, for its length and the height of the vaulting. Now it clung with shadows, only the rainy light of the city beyond casting shimmers across the clerestory windows that could not penetrate them to illuminate the space within. That did not matter to the wampyr; the darkness was transparent to him. For a moment he paused to consider the echoing belly of the cathedral, said by some to have no rival for beauty among the medieval churches of Europe.
    The wampyr, who had seen the cathedrals of Santiago de Compostela and Notre-Dame de Reims both in their youth and in their age, found the comparison overstated. Still, he wished he could have observed the windows in sunlight. Another sight he had never witnessed in all his long existence, and one of the ones he most regretted. He was of an age with the art of the stained glass window, and he had not seen its first incarnations when he was a mortal man.
    This cathedral bore more resemblance to Reims or
Canterbury than the famous Galician cathedral, which was of an older, barrel- and groin-vaulted design. Here in London, rib-vaults bore the weight of stone, overhead. The original lead-sheathed wooden roof was long since replaced, which had helped the great structure survive the fires of London and Prussian incendiaries as well.
    A medieval cathedral had a different sense to it than a Renaissance—the wampyr stopped himself before he could think modern —one. Fan-vaults, the Renaissance standard, gave a sense that the stone was levitating, as if its weight had somehow been placed in abeyance for a time. Or as if it had, by some magic, been made weightless. As if granite and slate could fly.
    In a nave such as this, however… all one felt was the heft of the rock suspended overhead, the thrust through the vaults and into the buttresses and walls, the stress and mass and pressure. The sheer massy bulk of it, and the muscle and wit it had taken to engineer those walls, that roof, those vaults and pillars. For the glory