The Obsidian Dagger (Horatio Lyle) (34 page)

He moved without tiring, without looking or raising his head. He remembered the wind of his childhood and the endless dry steppes, and he ducked and whirled and
remembered . . . he remembered . . .

The city blocked out memories of other places, suppressed them beneath the fog and the darkness until all that was left was the city, filling him from top to toe as he danced through the night, weaving and punching and stabbing, and he hardly even noticed the cobbles under his feet or the ease with which Selene’s blade pierced stone. All that filled his mind was the dance and the rhythm, that rose up with the streets themselves.

And here, now, was the city, in Feng Darin’s head.

Because now, just for tonight, Feng Darin was beginning to understand.

 

And in the throng, for a moment, just a moment, Lyle saw
her
, and she saw him, and perhaps it was just the darkness and the illusions that fire and fog created, but something in his face made her start, and something in his eyes made her hesitate, and for a moment, the utter certainty of a mistress mastering the situation flickered, faltered.

Then she swept away again and a wall of gargoyles swept with her, forming a tight protective knot. But Lyle didn’t care, ran after her, raising in his hands a whole array of tubes and bottles and needles and glass baubles and hurling them blindly at anything that got in his way. He charged after Diane Lumire, knowing that she was the one who had made Sasso, made him stone, made him evil, brought him here, broken necks with a twist of her wrist and now she was going to destroy
his
city. He wasn’t operating on an intellectual level now; for almost the first time since the baby Lyle had opened his eyes, he was running on instinct, which felt the air move behind him and heard the ice crunch around him and felt the waters rise beneath his feet and kept him moving until he was suddenly ducking under a frantic horse that was trying to rear up from the cracks in the ice that were spreading under its hooves, and out on to the open, dark ice, in front of
her
.

He hurled the first tube of acid at her that came to hand: an angel stepped forward, without a moment’s hesitation, and the glass shattered off its front. Lyle thought he saw, behind its empty eyes, an altogether different intelligence, watching him with single-minded menace. He ignored the feeling and kept running, but now the ice underfoot was wobbling and bending, gargoyles leaping inelegantly from slab to slab as the cracks spread across it, worming their way from bank to bank. He half-heard the screams of horses and the clatter of steel as the soldiers struggled to stay either on their mounts or even on their feet. The world was suddenly a thousand little, toppling worlds, each one balancing slippery on the dark water of the Thames, which had decided that today it would like to breathe the air after all, thank you very much, and was trying to crawl its way back up over the ice, reclaiming its territory.

Lyle hopped from slab to slab, sometimes wrongly estimating the jump and landing on an edge, which wobbled and tried to tip him off. A gargoyle lunged at him, but the ice on which it stood simply tipped underneath it, toppling the gargoyle forward, so its claws sailed past Lyle’s head and its feet slid out on the ice, talons embedded and screeching like fingers across a blackboard as it slipped down into the cold water. The cavalry were retreating, climbing or swimming or running or riding away from the shattered ice and trying to control their terrified horses, in a confused circle towards Westminster, still firing at the gargoyles. These, rather than risk walking across the ice, were clinging to the walls of the Embankment, swarming across it like fleas to moisture, forming a long, tight circle round the straggling survivors, and then spreading out once more, scattering towards the shadows on Charing Cross Bridge.

Lyle looked and saw her again, Selene, Lumire, the One Who Did It All. She was heading towards the edge of the river, where the ice was thicker, as casually and daintily as if attending a ball. He ran after her, hurling chemical death at anything that got in his way.

Overhead in Icarus, Tess looked down and saw the black mass of stone figures swarming around the confused cavalry, forming a tighter and tighter circle, briefly illuminated by each new flash of rifle fire as the riders circled, confused, hemmed in on all sides. At their backs the ice was shattered and bobbing, mere white specks now on the rising black waters of the Thames.

Tess looked down, and saw, all along the Embankment, more men, desperately trying to work out how steel and lead are meant to break stone, swarming through the narrow streets between Westminster and Charing Cross Bridges, and thought, in a quiet little voice, the voice that she knew would be hers, when all the childish things were gone,
London’s burning, London’s burning
. . .

 

And, without warning, there was nothing but darkness and ice between Lyle and Selene. He looked in astonishment at the shattered stone around him, at the broken glass and thick, smelly smoke from a thousand unfortunate chemical combinations now regretting their acquaintance, even as, on Westminster Bridge, Lucan Sasso looked down and saw his love, the woman who made him, the only woman who’d ever rejected him, the woman who was his heart and soul and mind, standing alone, and tried to bend the stones round her, to protect her, dragging the stones across the ice, but Lucan Sasso sees . . . he
sees
. . . the cobbles of Hampstead, the walls of Hackney, the alleys of Shoreditch, the Thames bridges, the streets of Mayfair, the spires of Holborn, the chimneys of Finsbury, the courts of Westminster, and he sees London, stretching out through time and space, a thousand years of stones and lives, so many lives, so many stones, trying to drag him here or here, saying,
I was once walked on by Sir Christopher Wren
or
The blood of kings fell on my cobbles
or
Here we were bought
or
Here we were sold
or
Here died and here lived and here was born and here perished and here fought and here won and here lost
; and though his love needed him and stood alone on the ice, though the stones were his to command, Lucan Sasso
couldn’t get the city out of his head!

And here now is the city, in Lucan Sasso’s head.

And for a moment, as the world runs out of control, Lucan Sasso finally understands.

CHAPTER 27

Diane stood by the walls of the Embankment, head tilted on one side as Lyle approached out of the fog. He stopped a few paces away, looking suspiciously around, eyes narrowed, while from everywhere the cacophony of battle was oddly distant, muffled in the fog, directions lost. Seeing his face, she smiled faintly.

‘You think you can really harm
me
? Do you know me, Horatio Lyle? Do you know my reputation? What I am?’

‘God help us, I do. This - is all you?’

‘Flattery, but I accept it. I am Selene. I make the world what I want it to be. I am very patient.’

‘You’re a mad bagcase, pardon the technical jargon.’

Lyle looked up at Westminster Bridge, and saw the shadow of Lucan Sasso, standing utterly still, eyes closed, hands over his ears, as if trying to drown out a furious voice that was raging
inside
his head. He shrugged. ‘At the moment . . . I’m cautiously optimistic, Lady Selene.’

She smiled. ‘But you don’t have a weapon.’

Lyle looked down at his hands. He held one hypodermic, just a few drops of acid clinging to the needle, like ice crystals to a cold window. He didn’t need to feel his pockets to know they were empty. He looked up again, a half-hearted smile on his face, and risked another lopsided shrug. ‘I might have . . . a plan.’

Selene began walking towards him, picking her way carefully across the ice, steering her way without bothering to glance down. ‘I have lived many, many years, Horatio Lyle, if you can regard this existence as living. I have felt nothing, tasted nothing, heard no music that pleased me nor felt anything but lingering cold, even in the sun. The technological revolution seems to be . . . rather dull. It certainly doesn’t offer the
power
that is all I crave. In fact, it seems to me to be rather typical of the men who made it, that they will fight their way through ice and death to reach an end, and when they get there . . .’ She stopped, within arm’s reach of Lyle. He had never realized how intimidating fog made people. ‘. . . they never seem to find what they’re looking for. I was Tseiqin. I ruled the hearts of men. Now I am stone. I rule the heart of stone. It is a death perpetual, and a gift you will not understand.’

Lyle slashed out at her with the needle. She flung her arm up, and to his surprise, the needle drew a line through her sleeve and across the marble-white skin underneath. She grabbed his wrist with her other arm, wrenching it back on itself until his fingers turned blue, her face suddenly made ugly with hatred and pain. Lyle clung desperately on to the needle as the only thing left in his possession. As Selene twisted with a strength he hadn’t realized could be created outside a hydraulic system, he saw something staining her arm, where the needle had slashed it. It wasn’t dark enough in this light to be blood, nor did it run like water, but rather rose up in the cut across her arm in a slow pool, that clung to the cut like an old scab, and began to dry and change colour almost immediately.

Selene saw his eyes widen in horror and hissed in his ear, ‘My blood is clay, the clay of this city, Lyle, that made this city. My heart is stone, my blood is clay, but my mind . . . my
mind
is very much my own.’

Lyle heard his knees creak and felt them bend, then fell on to the ice while she still clung to his wrist. He looked down, saw a hole in the ice and black water lapping hungrily inside it, and felt anger rise up, overwhelming fear. Somewhere, on the edge of instinct, where the mind couldn’t function for fear of getting entangled in less practical matters, he felt the air move overhead.

‘You killed an old woman and a beggar,’ he gasped.

Selene shrugged. ‘Life’s a short business anyway. They’d already lived theirs.’

She pushed him face-down towards the water, one hand on the back of his neck, until his nose touched the shockingly cold, black surface. A shudder raced down his spine. He tried to breathe deeply, take as much air as he could, but the more he concentrated on breathing, the faster and shallower it became.

Somewhere, on the edge of instinct, where science was always a little bit too practical to venture, he heard the air move, and a voice shout: ‘Oi! That’s my gov’nor you’re drownin’!’

And as Selene looked up in a moment of surprise and horror, Lyle drew one breath that pushed at his lungs and made him feel he was about to explode, and threw himself, head first, into the black waters below.

 

Tess saw Lyle slip under the waters even as Selene raised her head in astonishment to look at Icarus. She screamed in fury and threw one of the still-hot tubes at Selene. But a gargoyle leapt out of the darkness below and knocked Selene aside, taking the full force of the hissing contraption in her place. As Thomas pulled at the levers, Icarus began sailing upwards again, the world below slowing to a luxurious spin as the machine fought for height. Tess saw the black pool where Lyle had vanished, the water lying still in the firelight, and screamed at Thomas, ‘We’ve gotta go down!’

‘What?’ Thomas’s voice was snatched away by the wind, the faintest shrill cry on the air.

‘We’ve gotta go down! We’ve gotta help Mister Lyle!’

Tess leant over the side, leaning out until her fingertips barely clung to the edge, eyes fixed on the black waters, and saw that Selene too was looking at the black pool, standing with hands folded neatly in front of her, almost as if at prayer, studying the depths. Tess tried to count the seconds, but seconds were breaths, and then heartbeats, and then the pounding of her head, and then the rhythm of another tube as it burnt out in a gentle
phutphut
, and still she saw nothing, just a blackness below that wouldn’t break. She knew that somewhere the soldiers were pushing back at the stone army along the Embankment, that somewhere a cannon had fired, that somewhere below, the world was burning, that it was all ending, the city, the battle, the flight, the night, the dark, the fog, the ice, and still the darkness didn’t break.