FROM THE O LD S WAN, where they bated to warm themselves with pints, they could have walked half a mile along Thames Street and then applied themselves to the lengthy and complicated work of burrowing through the Tower’s gates, bastions, causeways, and the micro-neighborhoods that had grown up around, and occluded, the same, as vegetation on infected heart-valves. But Roger was of a mind to see a thing on the river side, and so they walked only far enough to get round the end of the Bridge, then descended the terraced rectilinear cove of Lion Stairs, below the barnlike mass of the Church of St. Magnus Martyr, which Wren had rebuilt, but not got round to putting a tower or a steeple on yet. Another waterman consented to take them downriver from there. Swinging wide round the riotous congestion of Billingsgate and the broad Key before the Customs House, they pounced upon Tower Wharf. For the most part this presented itself to them as a quarter-mile-long wall jumping straight out of the river. But it was adorned here and there with cranes, guns, a wee crenellated castle, and other curios. Two stairs and one arched tunnel were cut into it, and the waterman kept guessing Roger would go to one of those; but the Marquis of Ravenscar kept exhorting him on, on to the downstream end, where two brigs and a ship had been made fast to the wharf. Daniel instinctively looked at the smaller and meaner vessels, until he recollected that he was in the company of Roger; then he had eyes only for what was high and gaudy. They were looking up at the bows of the three-master. Its figurehead was extraordinary. Not only because it was covered in many square yards of gold leaf—that was common enough—but because of its sculpture. It was a face carved into the front of a bulbous golden sphere that seemed to be hurtling forth with utmost impetuosity, drawing behind it a vast swirling wake of golden, silver, and copper flames. It was, Daniel realized, an anthropomorphic phant’sy of a Comet or a great fiery—