The Crippled Angel. Sara Douglass

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      Armed men had stopped them halfway across at the drawbridge, but had let them through the instant they recognised Mary. When the party gained the intersection of New Fish Street and Thames Street on the city end of the bridge, they all stood still, slowly coming to terms with the horror that had enveloped London.

      Evening had fallen, but it did little to hide the hellish streetscape. Red, noxious smoke billowed everywhere. Fires sparked and roared in the intersections ahead. People, little more than huddled humps, scuttled from doorway to doorway. A cart, overloaded with corpses and drawn by an emaciated limping horse, emerged momentarily from the roiling smoke, rattling slowly down the cobbled surface of New Fish Street. A grotesquely cloaked and masked shadowed figure tugged at the horse by its bridle, and, even after the cart had vanished back within the smoke, Mary and her escort could hear the man cursing at the poor beast, trying to make it hobble faster.