The Obsidian Dagger (Horatio Lyle) (32 page)

And then there was the voice, like marble warmed in the sun, and the hand was like marble, the left hand that had a grip no mere mortal should have possessed, the
left hand
. . .

And Lyle felt just a bit foolish for not working it out sooner.

‘Lucan,’ hummed the voice. ‘Do not do that.’

Lucan Sasso froze, and stared in horror and surprise at whatever stood behind Lyle, the hand that held the knife dropping slowly to his side. His mouth moved as he tried to form words, although none came.

‘The knife is not real,’ continued the warm-marble voice in Lyle’s ear. No breath, he noticed, no warm air touching his ear, though the lips that moved were right beside him, and seemed to have a coldness all of their own. ‘Lyle had it made during the day, out of plaster. I am disappointed that you cannot tell. The real blade hums with
power
.’

The hunger in that word made Lyle sick, made his stomach churn. The grip tightened on his neck, became painful, dragged his head back so that for a moment, out of the corner of his eyes, he saw marble-white skin, basalt-black hair, granite-grey eyes and a smile that could have conquered the world. ‘What did you do with the real blade, Lyle?’ whispered the voice in his ear.

He didn’t answer. The grip became more insistent, with a sudden rushing in Lyle’s ears and a hammering in his head which suggested that if it was any more insistent, it would be terminal.

‘Hidden!’ he gasped.

‘And this false blade? I imagine you’ve done something cunning with it.’

‘Hollow!’

‘And what’s in the centre?’

Lyle saw Sasso looming over him, face still set with wonder and surprise. He hissed, ‘I think, Lady Lumire, we’re about to find out.’

And Lady Diane Lumire, her marble hand clamped round Lyle’s neck, looked past him and down at the blade in Sasso’s hand and he, rapt, followed her gaze and noticed the little drip that seeped through the very top of the blade, the tiny shimmer of clear liquid that fell in a steady, silent splash on to the snow. And, because Lucan Sasso hadn’t had a chance to catch up with the modern technological revolution and didn’t really understand these things, he stood back in surprise, and dropped the blade.

If he’d bothered to ask Lyle, he would have known that dropping anything containing nitroglycerin was the last thing a sensible man would do.

CHAPTER 25

The explosion shakes Westminster Bridge. It sends the pigeons starting for the air, rattles snow off buildings, hums through the ice of the river and, for just a brief second, burns away the fog that shrouds the centre of the empty bridge.

Somewhere, not too far away, Feng Darin looks up from loading his revolver, sees the flash, looks down at the ice of the river, and hears something stomp very quietly in the night. He feels for the weight of Selene’s blade, at his side.

 

It is said that fortune favours the brave. Horatio Lyle, as the world filled with fireworks, smoke, noise and confusion, was of the increasing opinion that not only was this statement wrong, it was possibly spread by malignant people hoping to prove by elimination that cowardice was the more favourable Darwinian characteristic.

As the blade hit the ground, Lyle threw himself back, which worked fine, for Lady Diane Lumire clearly had a stronger grasp of science than Sasso, and was also diving for cover, Lyle utterly forgotten. He hit the cobbles and curled up, head tucked in deep below his shoulders as, behind him, the world filled with fire and flying stone. He felt the heat of the blast singe the back of his neck, turn the soles of his shoes slightly soft, scorch his coat, and instantaneously vaporize several gallons of snow so that it hissed and stung his eyes as it rushed out from the centre of the blast. He felt his ears go
pop
.

He opened his eyes. Loose bits of stone fell around him. He touched one. It was almost searing to the touch. He staggered upright. Sound was odd, out of place. He felt as if he was hearing the world through water. Light seemed a little bit too bright. Something was ringing in his head. He looked down at the ground. There was no sign of Sasso. He looked towards Diane. Where she had fallen, the stones were bent oddly, rising up above the normal level of the bridge to form a cocoon shape, large and long. They appeared to have blended, forming a smooth, almost uninterrupted slab. Lyle edged towards it. He prodded it with the tip of his toe; it felt solid enough. He bent down and touched it. The stones were warm to the touch. He moved away again, trying to work things out. Perhaps if . . .

He saw something move. The stones seemed to ripple. He backed away faster, until he bumped against the parapet. The stones bent, twisting, then rising up abruptly and melting together, until they formed the irate shape of Lucan Sasso, standing tall as ever. At his feet, where she had been covered by the cocoon of masonry, Diane Lumire sat up, looking only slightly flummoxed. The pair of them turned to Lyle with an ice-hard stare.

‘Ah,’ muttered Lyle. ‘Well . . . it seemed a good idea at the time.’

Diane was back on her feet. Sasso half-turned to her, looking for guidance. She smiled at him, then smiled a wider but no less cruel smile in the direction of the baffled scientist. ‘Mister Lyle,’ she murmured, ‘you die faster than we do.’

Lyle thought about this. He considered all the possibilities at his disposal, all the ideas and plans that might yet save him, and settled on the most rational one. He turned, and ran. It was something he was getting quite good at.

 

Feng Darin remembered a different time. It was vague, the colours dimmed and the sounds muffled, details fading as time and experience plastered different, fresher memories over the walls of his mind. He remembered cold winters and cold summers, riding across endless steppes in search of water and food, of smoky yurts made of goat skins and twigs, of cowering away from the snow in giant, smelly furs sewn crudely together by the old lady of the tribe, who felt her way from stitch to stitch with hands so worn you could almost see each individual bone in the hand as the skin moved across it.

The memory was distant now. He remembered the Emperor’s men coming, remembered first seeing the steel ships being built in the docks, first seeing the sea, first seeing the smoke of London. He had an image of hell in his mind, but no imagination acquired in the mountains could have prepared him for the hell that he saw in reality, as he stepped into the wharves of London. He remembered the looks he would get, a strange man in a strange country, as the people of London looked at his dark skin and scurried away nervously, not used to seeing a Chinese man, and whispering to their children not to speak to him.

He remembered the day Tess had turned to him and said, ‘Oi. You a chink, ain’t you?’ And she hadn’t cared. Just shrugged it off, and gone about her larcenous business. He’d been afraid of daylight, until that moment. He’d feared that it showed him for who he was.

Feng Darin looked at the darkness and the fog, smelt the smoke and tasted the ice on the air. Under his feet, Charing Cross Bridge shuddered ever so slightly. He heard the hiss of a train, the burp of a machine, the click of metal on metal, the stamp of a horse’s hoof. And just behind it, very quietly, someone muttering,
‘Shush
.’

For a moment, just a moment, Feng Darin smiled, which was a rare thing indeed, and drew his blade. He knew what would have to be done and that, too, was cold.

 

Lyle swung round the corner of the bridge just as something heavy and dark swept over his head, and threw himself down the icy steps at the end, towards the frozen river below. The stones of the Embankment seemed to be coming alive, faces leering up and out of the masonry along the side of the river, bending like a liquid to watch him pass, rippling under his feet. He heard the beat of very,
very
heavy wings on the air and didn’t even bother to duck, but threw himself headlong off the stairs, feet slipping on the ice, to land heavily in a snowdrift built up in the hull of a trapped fishing boat. The wharves which lined the river were covered over with inches of ice and snow. Through the fog Lyle saw the phantasmal shapes of ships rising out of the ice, locked in place, forming a small city of streets and alleys. He looked up and saw on the bridge, staring down at him impassively, Sasso, arms raised as if trying to hold the air itself in his palms, on his face an expression which could only be called stony. Around him, gargoyles and griffins and the cherubs off the churches, some large and some no longer than Lyle’s arm, swarmed with the biting, hissing sound of aerodynamic practicalities being recklessly suspended. He looked back at the stairs leading down to the ice and saw Lady Diane at the top, a stone cat prowling round her feet. Turning, he saw behind him a pair of stone angels, stone swords raised, and felt sick.

Lyle grabbed the side of the fishing boat and pulled himself up, his feet sliding in the snow that covered the frozen river, as he looked towards Charing Cross Bridge, a vague burning shadow in the distance. He began to run, darting between trapped fishing boats and long barges and crooked steamers. The ice was a blessing; it was something that Sasso couldn’t control, and Lyle moved across it as silently as possible, squeezing himself into every shadow he could find, not looking back,
never
looking back, terrified of what he might see. He’d only just begun to realize how big the river was: it seemed to stretch on every side, made bigger yet by the thick ice that had pushed it almost to the very top of the Embankment walls.

Something dark passed overhead, and landed in the shadows in front of Lyle. He didn’t stop running but ducked round the side of a boat, feet slapping dully in the snow, and heard the thing move to follow even as he dug in his pockets, pulling out a random handful of test tubes. He swung round another corner, and the giant stone angel was there, serene face staring straight down at him. Lyle threw a test tube at it and ran. The hiss of acid burning through the old stone melded with an unnatural, deep howl that made the stones around the Embankment resonate.

Then the tremor started, not in the ice itself, but either side of the river, shaking the ice free of the Embankment walls in little showers, rocking it unevenly and sending tiny cracks running through it where it was near any stone. Lyle slipped and fell uncomfortably on to his hands and knees, tried to get up, and slipped again. The tremor grew; he heard the sound of icicles crashing, snow falling off roofs, blackened trees shaking, felt the vibration rise up through his stomach, looked round and saw the houses of the Embankment
swaying
, as if they were made of cloth, saw stones cracking, splitting, felt the anger behind the tremors and knew that a very large part of that anger was blindly directed at
him
. He saw the clock tower of the Houses of Parliament crack, little lines spreading through it, cutting through the iron that bound it all together, he saw the glass lamps on the bridge flicker and fade, and thought how odd it was that no one in the area was screaming, shouting, calling out that this was the end of the world, the destruction of the city that Sasso had promised and was now delivering, the end of everything, the shattering of a thousand years of history. Earthquakes, after all, were hardly common in London, let alone earthquakes that made the old churches creak and the stones crack and the past slip away into the heart of the earth in slides of mud, trickles of snow, clouds of dust, centuries of living and dying erased in a single heave of the earth, the end of the city . . .

Lyle crawled, almost on his belly, clinging to the ice as the snow rippled across it in little disturbed eddies and the gutters of the Houses of Parliament creaked and dropped their load of icicles and the iron of the distant railway lines creaked and bent and sung out in metallic distress, until he reached what he judged in the dark and the fog to be the centre of the river, between Westminster and Charing Cross Bridge. He staggered upright and pulled from his pocket a little magnesium sphere, struck a match and watched the sphere blaze into burning white light.

‘Sasso!’ he screamed out through the roar of the stones. And then, because he couldn’t think of an appropriately defiant challenge, added, ‘Look over here! Coo-eee!’

The tremors died down, stopped, the last hum echoing away. Lyle held up the sphere, burning through the fog like a light-house.

On the bridge, Feng Darin looked up and saw, between him and Westminster Bridge, the small grey shape of Lyle, outlined beneath the blazing sphere of fire. And just beyond it, he saw the too-thick shadows, bunching, moving in, and knew that the darkness tonight was denser than the normal absence-of-light.

On the ice, a shape stepped forward from the crowded blackness as the light in Lyle’s hand began to flicker and die.

‘It will not save your city, you know,’ said Diane Lumire. Lyle didn’t say anything, fingers tightening around the light in the sphere, as if trying to trap some of it inside. She stepped forward, moving with surprising ease across the ice. ‘I made Sasso, Lyle. I made him; made him love, made him worship me, made him lose everything he had, made him
want
to die, made him stone. He is mine. And he will do what I say.’