The Obsidian Dagger (Horatio Lyle) (21 page)

‘Well, as I was saying, I was sent by the Pope to make sure you weren’t doing anything evil, like bringing killers or suchlike to London ’cos of dark and mysterious forces and . . . you ain’t heard of
them
, have you?’

‘I don’t know. Who are “them”?’

‘See,’ said Tess, wagging a finger, ‘if you have to ask, you don’t know. That’s ’cos they’re all evil and mysterious.’

‘I’m not. I have a vision.’

Tess scowled. He was a few paces away, so that her back was pressed against the wall. ‘Mister . . . my friend says how you should never trust visions. They cloud your judgement, he says.’

A hand reached out for her. ‘Would this be a certain Mister Lyle?’

Tess didn’t hesitate. In a single movement she turned, grabbed the Bible, spun, inelegantly dragged down by the weight of the book, and threw it at the window. It wasn’t a very strong throw, and the Bible more flopped than flew, but it was a heavy book, and the glass was thin. The window shattered in a storm of frost and silver shards. As Ignatius lashed out for Tess, she ducked under his arm, ran for the window, and threw herself out.

A little later there was a soft
thump
from the snow below, and the sound of frightened pigeons making for the sky.

Ignatius looked out of the window. A long way down, small against the snow and barely illuminated by the candlelight seeping out of the windows, was the Bible, and a lot of broken glass.

Some way above that, dangling by her fingertips from a gutter, was Tess.

‘You’ll fall, little lady. Your kind do,’ called Ignatius.

‘Thank you,’ she snapped back, ‘professional at work here.’ Tess began to swing her legs, pushing against the icy stone.

‘Assuming you make it down, I’ll have already summoned servants.’

‘Ah, but that means you’re going to go an’ have to stop lookin’ while you do the summ’nin’.’ Tess’s voice was both weak and smug. ‘That means you’ll ’ave to go away and when you come back, for all you know I might have dropped through an open window and got back into the house, or done somethin’ all clever and got out, an’ then won’t you feel stupid?’

Silence from the window above. Tess peered up and saw the black shadow still watching her. She gritted her teeth and tried to pull herself up into the gutter, the sharp metal, made sharper by the cold, digging into her fingers. Her arms buckled and nearly jerked free of her shoulder blades. She dangled over a long drop, and wondered how deep the snow was below.

From above, Ignatius’s voice drifted down. ‘I can offer absolution, if you wish.’

‘Is that like a very long rope?’

‘It’s so you will not burn through all eternity for your sins.’

‘Can I let you know?’

Tess looked down and saw, dimly, a window ledge, just wide enough for a few toes and nothing more, somewhere below. She looked up, looked down again, reached a decision, took a deep breath and let go.

 

Lyle picked himself up from the rubble, and groaned. Above him, a voice rumbled, ‘
See your own weakness, little man. Once I was weak, but I learnt through cold and patience how to be great, and will be greater still.’

Lyle crawled up on to his hands and knees. He still clung to the match and the glass sphere. He staggered a few paces - even the darkness seemed to be spinning - and leaned against the nearest wall. He tried to breathe, tried to ignore the pain of a dozen bruises. ‘Sasso?’ he rasped into the darkness. ‘You still alive?’

The voice was just a few paces away. In the darkness, he half-imagined he could reach out and touch it.
‘Yes.’

Lyle scrambled backwards, leaning his shoulders into the wall to stop himself from falling. His ears were filled with a high-pitched whine, from somewhere uncomfortable behind the eardrums, and his hands shook as he struck the match and held it up to the sphere. ‘Keep back!’ he barked. ‘Or I’ll oxidize!’

There was a sudden and prolonged silence. In the dull yellow light, he saw the black shadow, a few paces away. Finally,
‘Is that what threats are in this time?’

‘Oxidize,’ explained Lyle, feeling he was losing a certain control over things. ‘As in expose to oxygen. Combustion in an oxygen source, i.e. air. As in changing the charge on a metal, by the process of a reaction which bonds the metal to . . . to oxygen.’ Lyle ’s voice faded away. Somewhere, there was the clicking of light pieces of falling masonry. ‘The technological revolution just passed you by, didn’t it?’

Finally,
‘Tell me: has this revolution changed hearts as well as minds? Should I have . . . felt fear, little man?’

‘Well, something would have been nice,’ mumbled Lyle.

‘That’s just terrific.’

He heard the movement, rather than saw it, and instinctively ducked, dropping the match. At the same second, the sphere, burnt almost carbon black underneath, exploded in white light.

Later, Lyle wondered if he hadn’t half-imagined everything; would play back what he saw, image by image, as if flicking through a book of drawings and watching them change, picture melding into picture as the story progressed, pausing here or there to take one image out and turn it every which way, see if from any other angle it could tell the same story, but from a different perspective. Later, he’d say there was too much magnesium in the sphere to be entirely safe. Later, he ’d probably think of a logical explanation.

The white light, too bright and too white to look at directly, burning brighter than any winter sun, exploded in his hand like the opening eye of some demi-god, looking out on the world for the first time. It burnt through the darkness like a sword through cobwebs and lit up, bright and white, the face of Lucan Sasso.

The Marquis screamed, an unnatural, high-pitched wail that seemed to be resounding at three pitches at once, hiding his face from the light with his hands, twisting away. Lyle staggered back, the sphere of hot fire and magnesium burning his hand, but he clung on to it for dear life and squinted past the light at the Marquis.

Where Lucan’s hands were in front of his face, the light fell full on them, and the skin changed colour. It seemed to drain of all life, to become hard and flaky, with the texture of sandblasted stone. Joints froze up stiffly, each movement seeming to be a fight against some great weight, and as he watched, the hands and all areas exposed to the brightest of the light turned, inch by inch, to stone.

‘Oh,
bugger
,’ muttered Lyle, as Lucan laboriously dragged his hands away from his face, the skin underneath also darkening, the mouth set now in a fixed grimace of anger and hatred; and Lyle turned and ran.

Behind him, Lucan Sasso roared.
‘I am stone, my heart is stone, the stones hear my heart as no other mortal ever shall, and they answer to
me
!’

And the stones of Old London Town roared with him.

 

Thomas, wineglass in hand, felt the sound start beneath his feet. It rose up in a hum that twisted candle flames in odd directions and made the curtains brush nervously against each other. It was a long, deep, howled whisper that reminded him of an animal in pain, heard far off: the injured wolf, its cry muffled by the forest.

‘Good grief,’ said someone at first. ‘I do declare this weather is simply awful.’

When the sound went on, a furious, pained howl that seemed to be most audible through the toes, the room began to fall silent. Lady Diane Lumire giggled. Suddenly Thomas found this previously charming habit very, very irritating.

Someone else said, ‘Do you think it’s getting louder?’

With a start, Thomas put his head on one side, and heard now a sound underneath the pained hum of the stones, the thrumming that came up through his feet and bounced off the eardrums in a low, agonized howl; it was the sound of a human voice, but a human voice distorted beyond recognition, that seemed to be sounding three deep notes at once, rather than the standard one, screaming in expressionless hatred and rage. And just beyond it, getting nearer and louder, the sound of running footsteps.

All eyes, as if sensing an imminent spectacle, turned towards the sound of the running feet, and the door. Accompanying the feet, but half-drowned by the general racket, came a voice, shrill and frightened, rising from an incoherent babble to a loud exclamation as it drew nearer: ‘ . . . whatthehellareyoupeopledoing here don’t you realize HE’S UTTERLY MAD HE’S GOING TO KILL YOU STUPID IDIOTS!’ The voice and the footsteps passed by the door, stopped for a second as if the owner was hesitating, then began again, briefly, right outside. The door was thrown open, and a bedraggled, wild-eyed figure stared in, covered in mortar dust, blood and bruises, clinging to a dying sphere of light in one hand as if his fingers had fused to it. There was a general gasp of high dignities in the face of the unwashed.

‘Well, don’t just stand there, you bloody fools!’ Lyle snapped. ‘He ’s utterly mad and
you’re
not helping!’

With this, Lyle turned and started running again. Thomas hesitated for a second, then began pushing his way towards the door. Seeing this, other people, perhaps with a greater pragmatism than their breeding implied, started pushing and shoving in Thomas’s wake. Thomas exploded out of the crush, the floor still humming under him, and looked towards the centre of the roar.

A man, his skin changing slowly from hard grey to more natural off-brown in the dim light, was marching down the corridor towards him. As he walked, the stones around him seemed to ripple, bending before and behind his feet, cracks spreading all around through the screaming masonry, candles and lamps toppling as the fabric of the building tried to twist in on itself. From his mouth came a low, furious roar, and the stones themselves seemed to grow mouths to share in it. Thomas felt he knew against whom that anger was directed.

He stood frozen with fear, staring into the eyes of the oncoming man. He was
huge
. His unstoppable bulk made Thomas feel like an unfortunate earthworm in the path of a rampaging ox. The man didn’t seem to have seen Thomas, so focused was he in his hate, but he saw the crowd of people racing from the room, and his face twisted into a cruel smile. He lifted his hands up to the ceiling, and Thomas followed the curve of those raised fingers with horrified fascination. A crack started above the man’s head, began to spread, racing along the high ceiling like a hungry, feeding, growing snake. Thomas saw the ceiling sag.

A hand snaked out of the air behind Thomas, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and nearly lifted him off his feet. He saw Lyle’s filthy face behind him, almost unrecognizable for the dust, and heard Lyle say through gritted teeth as he dragged him bodily out of the front door, ‘Time and place for everything, lad, but not now.’

Behind him, Thomas heard the slow, inexorable grind of the roof hesitating, sagging and giving in, just as Lyle threw him out of the door and on to the gravel beyond. He fell heavily into a heap of terrified aristocracy. Dust and darkness rolled out of the door behind him, along with a low rumble.

Dust settled. The rumble died. Thomas pulled himself carefully up on to his feet on the hard gravel, and listened. There was a sound, so tiny it was hard to tell whether it was real or imagined. A little crunching noise, like the sound of gravel underfoot, but he hadn’t moved to crunch it. It grew louder, rose to a roar. He glanced at his feet. All the fragments of gravel were bouncing furiously, like sand on a tambourine. He turned round and saw that Lyle too was staring down in horror. As they watched, the gravel bounced higher and higher, until it was rattling against Thomas’s knees. He looked round for Lyle, and saw him already on the grass. ‘What the hell are you waiting for?’ snapped Lyle.

There was already an exodus of people off the gravel, screaming ladies and white-faced men. Thomas scrambled clear, almost falling on to Lyle and the safety of the lawn as, with a roar, the gravel seemed to coalesce, dragging the stones from its edges into a thick central pillar, then rear up and form a mouth, which opened.

This time, Thomas didn’t need to be told. Running by Lyle’s side, he threatened to overtake him as the giant head of stone wheeled around, snapping at anything within its reach, stretching out long and thin to snap at the ankles of fleeing women. And still the gravel bounced and chittered in a thin storm, its sound like the laugh of a rattlesnake, lingering after the two retreating figures.

 

Tess had landed on the edge of the sill when she fell. For a second she teetered, arms wheeling like a windmill as she struggled for balance. With a mighty push she toppled forward, and pressed her palms into the side of the window to hold herself there, gasping for breath. Under her fingers, the walls felt odd: warm, almost humming. The glass seemed to be vibrating before her eyes, tiny cracks spreading in it from the edges, as if it was being compressed between the walls that held it.

From above, she heard a slow clapping.

‘Well done, little lady! Lyle really does pay for professionals, doesn’t he? Now what are you planning on doing?’

‘Busy here!’ sang out Tess, scrambling for another hold. The humming noise was now loud enough to make her nervous, inching its way into her skull, to bounce around, doing damage inside. She quickly swivelled and sat down on the edge of the sill. There was another, a storey below. Clinging on, she eased herself out on to the edge of the sill, turned and lowered herself. Even when dangling by the length of her arms, it was a long drop. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes and let go. This time, her feet slipped on the ice of the sill, and dropped out under her. She flailed wildly and her fingers closed round something large protruding from the wall.

It was a cherub, small and ornamental, hiding a gutter spill. She almost sobbed with relief, her aching hands scrabbling for better purchase around its chubby neck.