The Obsidian Dagger (Horatio Lyle) (27 page)

Ahead of Feng and Lyle, the shadows moved, and behind them too. Lyle could hear something on the street: hard, ponderous sounds thudding through the snow, which only slightly muffled them.

‘What’s behind us?’ yelled Feng as the horse twisted its way through the streets.

‘I don’t know!’

‘You’re the detective!’

‘I hear . . . four legs, moving . . . very heavy, at a gallop!’ Lyle saw a shadow getting bigger, rising out of the fog, growing from small to horse-sized to a towering shape that filled the street, its shoulders pressing against the walls of the houses, which seemed to make space for it to pass, leaning away from its giant form. ‘Get us somewhere narrow!’ he yelled. ‘Do it now!’

Feng made no answer, but pulled on the reins. The horse twisted round a corner and dived down a dark alley, just as the lion, one of four usually swarmed over by children and pigeons, that guarded Nelson’s Column, slammed its shoulders against the old, crooked timbers of the alley, sending splinters and shards flying after them, its shadow cutting off the light from the lanterns in the street beyond. The horse galloped down the alley and out the other side. Lyle looked back the way they had come, and saw the lantern light again, unobscured by any shape. He looked ahead, and there were no lights burning, except for the occasional glimmer from under a rotting door.

‘This is the rookery!’ he yelled.

‘I know!’

‘You really want to go in there?’ Above, something roared. The lion looked down at them from the roof of a house, claws unsheathed, and snarled.

‘Never mind!’

Feng kicked the horse into action again as the lion drew back ready to spring, tons of rippling stone poised to kill. It didn’t need to get at them with its claws or teeth, thought Lyle. It just needed to sit down and that would be the end of them. The lion reared up, but the roof it stood on, buckling with age and rot, couldn’t take so much weight on such a small area. With a roar, the old timbers parted, sucking the stone lion down. Lyle saw the frames of the glassless windows shatter and explode outwards, flying after the retreating horse and riders, saw the walls of the house, already bent and crippled like the narrow winding streets, bulge with the passage of the beast through its floors, and give out, flying in every direction, and emerging from it all, the lion shook itself free, spitting stone dust.

The horse lurched, pitching Lyle forward. Ahead he saw a cellar door, tall and open, and ducked as Feng urged the horse down into it. In the rookery, you didn’t use streets to move from place to place; every house was an open road, every cellar a sewer, every rooftop a public tavern, every room a hovel for ten, every shadow a thief. They rode through the stultifying darkness of the cellar, mud and dirt and old straw flying up from the horse’s hooves, and then up on to a winding street closed off at both ends by houses that had grown like cancers out of their limits, shattered walls and piles of refuse combining into something almost solid and sentient.

Behind them, the end of the road exploded as the lion walked straight through the shoddy, crooked house that blocked it, shaking itself free of dust and shattered timbers, and fixed its eyes on the horse as it swerved into another house, tore through a room of ten, twenty sleeping shapes huddled on the floor head to toe, and out of the door at the end, into another alley.

‘Lyle?’

‘Yes?’

‘Can you do anything about our pursuer?’

‘Do I look as if I carry
that
much nitroglycerine?’

‘Can you do anything else?’

‘Do you know the St Martin’s brewery?’

‘Yes?’

‘You know it has a crane? And a vat in the basement.’

‘Yes?’ Feng thought about it. ‘Heaven have mercy - you can do that?’

‘Are you asking about the legality or the scientific practicality?’

Behind, the lion exploded over the next house, and landed in the street with a shudder that sent snow pouring off the rooftops and the horse’s hooves sliding on the unstable cobbles. ‘Neither!’ snapped Feng. He pulled the horse round in a new direction and they thundered on.

 

A pause, a moment, another place, another sight.

A stillness. A stillness so certain and so constant, it is almost hollow and empty, for there is no sign of movement or life in it to give it character.

A man stands, eyes closed, a statue, on Hampstead Heath, and lives through the stones of London Town. And though Lucan Sasso’s mind is cast through the streets and the stones, though it hums with power as it warps the streets themselves to its will, though the cobbles twitch when his finger does, though he remains still, is in control, aware of all the feet that trample all the stones below him, he is not aware that he sings a little song as he bends the city of London to his will.

And he sings, in a sad, strangely human voice, from his inhuman throat,

And still, though they twist and live anew to the mind of one man, the stones of London sing their songs, whisper of their past and their people, of the future, and maybe, in just a little way, they bend back against the will that bends them.

Perhaps the city was always alive.

It just never showed it until now.

And somewhere off St Martin’s Lane, a pair of huge double doors, barred on the inside, shook, rocked, thundered. Then opened. The giant stone lion sprang inside the St Martin’s brewery, finest distiller of deadly alcohols, gin for the ladies who clustered round Covent Garden and clawed at the coats that passed them by, deadly spirits so heavy in alcohol they were only drunk by those who had burnt away their taste buds, and trained for weeks in advance to repress the gag reflex. The floor was in darkness, a few sheltered, very secure lanterns burning in the corners. The building was long and high, cranes reaching from floor to ceiling, a stairway snaking round the wall to the top floor, barrels stacked against every wall.

The lion edged forward, and looked down at the giant central hole in the floor. Below, a full vat sat, not a ripple disturbing its dark surface, ready to be turned into a true mind-melter. A taut rope led from the ceiling up through an open trapdoor, beyond which something orange glowed and a crane waited to take delivery, then down to the vat. This was the crane that lifted the barrels out through the roof and swung them down into the courtyard, dozens at a time, gently swaying.

The lion looked at what hung from the bottom of the rope, a few inches above the vat of alcohol. Lyle, the rope tied round his middle, pale-faced, clung to the side of the vat by the tips of his fingers to stop himself from being dragged up by the tension in the rope. He smiled wanly at the lion. ‘I hate heights, you know.’

Above, something went
whumph
. The lion raised its head as Lyle let go of the side of the vat and was dragged, lurching, spinning, up through the centre of the giant building in a blur, all flailing limbs and coat. Heading the other way, the weight that dragged him up by its falling, a barrel plummeted down from the skylight. And it was on fire.

The lion, or at the very least the mind which controlled the lion, clearly wasn’t familiar with the basics of combustion. Lyle, passing the downward barrel as he shot upward, already had his hands in front of his eyes and was waiting for the blaze. The flaming barrel struck the vat of alcohol just as Lyle spun through the open skylight and slammed into the crane that overhung it, nearly falling free of the rope that held him, as the flame crawled cautiously from the barrel into the still pool of liquid, discovered that it was alcohol, and duly exploded.

Feng, standing by the crane, had snatched at the helplessly hanging Lyle, dragged him to the edge of the roof, grabbed hold of the rope that supported him, and thrown himself and Lyle off the side of the roof before the blue-orange flame had even reached the lion’s knees. As Lyle and Feng dropped down, swinging by the crane rope, falling together towards the street a long way below, the fire and the tattered remnants of the barrel raced each other for the ceiling.

The blue flame ruptured out of the barrel in a thousand flying spatters of boiling alcohol, pushed every window out of its frame, gobbled through every strut and bolt, melted glass in a second, boiled leather and metal, crawled up the walls and into every corner and then, finding that there was nothing there but wood and darkness, reached into the middle of the building and crawled up the air itself, as if it were a ladder to the moon, pillowing up in a flame so bright and so hot, every inch of snow around turned to slush and steam rose up from the street outside, burning away the fog in an angry hiss. The flame reached the skylight and exploded through it, found the crane, found the rope, ate through both in a second, gobbling them up in a hungry explosion of heat and pressure that shattered icicles and made the sky shimmer.

When the flame consumed the rope they clung to, Lyle and Feng were only a few feet above the ground. Feng sprang up in an instant, hurrying away from the fire that already lashed through the windows, roaring for more to fuel it. Lyle lay where he’d fallen, blackened and bruised. Feng cursed, ran to where he lay, and dragged him further from the fire. ‘Lyle! Lyle, dammit! Get up!’

Lyle groaned and tried to cover his blackened face with a blackened hand.

‘Horatio!’ hissed Feng. ‘We can’t stay here!’

Lyle tried to say something, but the words dissolved into a fit of coughing. He rolled over, hacking black spittle on to the snow. Feng swore, and dragged him up by the armpits. Lyle’s eyes opened on to the inferno, whose heat was almost unbearable, even from across the street. People were grouped at windows, bells were starting to ring out through the night, footsteps sounded through the dark. ‘My God,’ he muttered. ‘Did we just do that?’

‘Yes, come
on
.’

Lyle looked past Feng, and his eyes widened. He didn’t have time to call out, but pushed Feng to one side without a word, and ducked. The lion, blackened almost beyond recognition, missing its back legs and tail, dragging itself forward on one half-shattered paw, roared painfully in the night, dust and pieces of stone crumbling off it, and lashed out again with its one paw. Even as it did, cracks were spreading through the stone. It caught Lyle, lifting him off the ground and spinning him through the air.

Feng pulled himself on to his feet in time to see the lion heave itself painfully another inch forward, the cracks in it growing, running up its forelegs towards its head as it raised its paw above the still shape of Lyle. Feng leapt forward, reaching into his coat as the lion brought its paw round. His hand came out holding something long and black that gleamed dully in the night. He scrambled up on to the lion’s ruined shoulder even as its dust slipped away beneath his feet, clung on to the still-smoking, hot stone mane and brought the blade down as hard as he could into the lion’s skull.

It slid in like a knife through treacle. The cracks rippled across the lion, reached their very limit, and split. The lion collapsed gently into dust, which spilt across the street in a little storm that billowed into nothing before it reached the corner.

Feng lifted the half-conscious Lyle on to the horse’s back, swung up behind, and kicked the horse into a gallop, heading towards Hyde Park.

 

And in the darkness of the Heath, Lucan Sasso’s eyes fly open in surprise and horror. For a long while he just stands, frozen, mute with amazement. His mouth soundlessly moves, trying to speak, trying to find an emotion to match what he thinks he should feel. He remembers how to be surprised, remembers how to be hurt, worried, pained, angered, and he clings to these memories, gives them a face, gives them a name, feels the shock of the lion crumbling into dust, sees the face of Lyle swept away into darkness, and thinks, a roar of thought louder than any speech, making the city’s bells sway in their towers and the pigeons start up in surprise,
The blade! Selene’s blade!

CHAPTER 20

‘
What the hell do you think you’re doing to my ship?’

Tess recognized the voice instantly. Half-supported by another man, a dark shape in a burgundy scarf, Lyle was staggering away from an exhausted black horse. She gave an irrepressible cry of delight, ran towards him, reached out to hug him, saw that he was covered in soot, thought better of it, stood back and bounced with joy on the spot.

‘
WeflewMisterLylean’therewerethisbigdragonthingwhatcameafter usan’IsaidhowIhadthisplanan’howwecouldjustuseoneoftheexplosivetubethingstostopitan’thebigwigdidallthesteerin’althoughIwerethe realbrainsbehindtheplanan’
. . .
’

‘What the hell happened here?’ demanded Lyle, limping towards the stricken shape of Icarus.