Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [39]
It had been a Saturday when this talented young man had received his final induction into the Service, which, given the Jewish cabbalistic trend in the Service, might explain the Confirmation Name he later chose for himself. Every initiation was different, in order to stop new recruits exchanging notes, but the basic principles were always the same. When testing a new ritualist, the Service would put the young man (because a ritualist was always male, while spies could be of any gender) in a situation of extreme peril and tell him that he had to survive by himself. If the initiate succeeded in escaping the trap, he would become part of the organisation. If not, he would very rarely survive and the integrity of the Service would remain intact.
The initiation of this particular agent had been especially spectacular, but the oracles of the Service had calculated that it best suited his own talents. That Saturday morning the initiate had been taken to a building on the banks of the Thames, in the shadow of St Paul’s Cathedral; escorted on to an elongated platform, specially erected on the roof; bound with ‘thirteen chains, thirteen locks and thirteen garters [?]’; covered by a hood of black sackcloth, which had covered his head and shoulders but left the eyes uncovered; hung with measures of lead weighing at least three hundred pounds; and – after the appropriate amount of ceremony – pushed off, into the river below.
At least, this is what the files claim. But this is all anyone really knows about the early career of the man who would later call himself Sabbath. Agents of the Service had their past identities removed with some precision, so apart from some inkling of his time as a student there’s no way of saying who he’d been or where he’d come from, but his entrance into the world of espionage had been made at the age of twenty-one when he’d sunk to the bottom of the Thames and somehow, somehow, survived. There was no ‘correct’ way out of any Service initiation, so whatever Sabbath had done had been improvisational. Perhaps he’d used the siddhis, the alleged supernatural skills stolen by the Service from the Eastern tantrists: or perhaps it was elaborate muscular techniques that had allowed him to shake his bonds, like those later popularised by escapologists (though this is unlikely, as in this case the chains would have been real and no trickery would have been involved). A romantic might suggest that he’d found a way to stop time before he’d drowned. All the records state is that Sabbath never came up from the river, and his initiators had assumed him to be lost until he’d casually appeared at Cambridge, bone-dry and unharmed, the following morning.
His survival might have seemed impressive at the time, but now the Service had reason to regret it. According to the testimony of the Marquis of M_____, Sabbath had become, if anything, more alarming than the intense young initiate of the 1760s. When a Service agent left the fold he generally used his secret knowledge to blackmail, swindle or otherwise get rich quick, and the rat-catchers were frequently called upon to storm some expensive well-defended fortress out in the African colonies or up in the Scottish highlands. Yet the Marquis stated that Sabbath wasn’t rich, as such. He simply knew how to use resources. He knew what levers to pull in order to get what he needed, and if money were required then it was no object. But the terrifying thing, said the Marquis, the terrifying thing wasn’t Sabbath’s great power or influence. The terrifying thing was the company he kept.
Thus began a story of inhuman creatures so bizarre that the Countess of Jersey later declared it to be the cuttings of a terrified, hallucinating idiot. The Marquis depicts Sabbath as some huge, all-pervading shadow, like one of the ogreish master-villains