Time's Mistress (10 page)

“The way is open,” he rasped in a voice brittle as broken stones. “They come. They come.”

“What?” Millington said, mistaking the intensity of his companion’s words for the trailing threads of his blackout. “Speak plainly, man.”

“The Cross is broken, the door is open. No words could be plainer. I can feel it, no, not feel, feel is the wrong word. Hear, I can hear it. The world is screaming out against the wrongness of the door, and its screams are intensifying the longer the door remains open. London is hurting. We need to go there, now. Help me stand. I know where the door is. Just please God we can get there in time to close it. Mason, a cab, please.”

Millington reached down a hand for Stark, helping him to his feet. The smaller man swayed dangerously as he tried to remain upright. Millington lifted his arm and ducked under his shoulder, supporting him every step of the way as they moved to the curb.

“You aren’t strong enough, Fabian, let me summon the others.”

“No time. Mason can pass the word. We have to get there now.”

The chamberlain whistled once sharply and a black brougham drew up beside them, the driver doffing his cap as the sweat-slick horses pranced in place, their hooves sparking on the cobbles.

“St. Paul’s, driver,” Fabian Stark said, “and be quick about it. There’s a guinea in it if you can have us there before the sun is fully up.”

He opened the door and stumbled into the cab.

Millington followed him, pulling down the window as he slammed the door. “Carry word to McCreedy. He will know what to do.”

“Sir,” the chamberlain said, and this once Millington noticed the slight note of deference to his tone. It brought a smile to his lips. He banged on the side of the cab door and they were away, the driver cracked the whip and the cab lurched forward as the blinkered animals began to walk. The driver cracked the whip again and the horses broke into a brisk canter.

Millington sank back into the waxed leather banquette. Beside him Stark looked like Death himself.

“Tell me what to expect, Fabian.”

Stark closed his eyes and buried his head in his hands. The skin around his hairline paled as he massaged his temples. Millington could not tell if he was reliving his blackout or merely struggling to recover from it.

He didn’t say anything. The waking streets stretched out beyond the cab’s window. The whip cracked again and the brougham lurched once more as the horses began an easy gallop.

“I don’t know,” Stark said, eventually. “The way is open … anything could be waiting for us.”

With dawn no more than minutes away as they drew up before the Cathedral’s steps, Stark paid the man his full guinea and struggled out of the cab. Millington stood beside him. He noticed the birds first, cawing and circling. They drew his eyes toward the sky. Hundreds of starlings filled the sky, a writhing black cloud of feathers. It took him a moment more to see what had them so agitated: the gutted corpse of the boy crucified up against the Whispering Gallery. He grabbed Stark’s shoulder and pointed.

“I think that answers that,” he said, barely a whisper in the presence of death.

But Stark wasn’t looking at the boy. “No, this does,” Stark breathed, pointing beyond the boy to the ragged wound that appeared to open the great dome, and at the monstrosity emerging from it.

O O O

Nathaniel Seth was hurled against the leather restraints as the brass cage came to a jarring halt.

The world refused to cease spinning. Somewhere in the mad descent his body had given in to the extreme gravitational forces pulling on it and he had blacked out. When he came too he was upside down, the blood rushing to his head. Mercifully the cage had stopped falling. He rocked against the cage, bullying it into another half-rotation. The world swam sickeningly.

It was light here; bright. His ocular contraption had become dislodged somewhere during the descent. He had felt it slip and, arms effectively pinioned by the harness, bit down on the frame with his teeth, his jaw clenched for the miles of free-fall. He opened his mouth now, letting the odd little lenses fall the short distance to the ceiling of the brass cage. By rights he ought to have been blind, submerged in the perfect blackness, but instead there was daylight. Only it wasn’t daylight—it was more akin to a fire in the sky, the molten surface of the earth’s interior forming the blazing heavens. It was the most disconcerting of the many strange things that had happened to him since the night began.

If it is even the same night, he thought, realizing he had no sense of the time at all.

He reached up, trying to unfasten the buckle at his shoulder but his fingers refused to obey him as he fumbled away with the metal coupling. He struggled to focus on his fingertips, willing them to stop trembling.

The cage had come to rest alongside another embarkation platform; through this one was less a railway tunnel and more of a rickety bridge over an infinite gorge. Thick mists prevented him from seeing the bottom. Seth succeeded in releasing himself from the harness, and as the last buckle fell free it was greeted with the piston-hiss of the cage opening. He stepped out onto the platform, his balance immediately betraying him. He went sprawling, barely catching himself before the fall took him over the edge. He lay there, clutching the wooden slats as they swayed from brace to brace. The platform ran as far as the eye could see in both directions. Mist clung to the edges of the wood, licking up in white tongues from far below. He didn’t dare move until the rhythm of the swaying within his skull had subsided, which was long after the platform had come to rest.

When he finally did look up he saw a draconian creature lolloping toward him, each ungainly step sending ripples through the length of the platform. It wore the face of a serpent, scaled, a forked tongue licking out across bloodless lips as it neared. It was, he surmised, tasting him on the air. Its eyes burned with the fire of the false sky.

Behind it more creatures came, abominations each and every one. Leathery wings beat against the hot air as greater beasts rose through the mist, their powerful wings dispersing the thick clouds of white enough for him to catch a glimpse of the red-iron world of the infernal machines below him. The construction was vast, stretching mile upon mile, spars and struts, beams and cross-braces pitted with rust, vats of water steaming, pistons driving, wheels and cogs turning as their iron teeth bit and locked. Rusty towers rose hundreds of feet and still didn’t come close to reaching the precarious platform. They were crusted with spikes and spears, jagged teeth of metal and huge cogs, each forming part of this incredible living machine. And it was alive, every inch of the ferrous surface teemed with movement, millions of specks seething and sighing over the iron monstrosity.

It was an industrial wasteland, clockwork and steam and rust driving the world around.

The tears in the mists healed and the infernal machine was swallowed.

The platform bucked and swayed beneath Seth as he struggled to stand. Sweat clung to his skin.

He looked up at the snake-man, his enormous reptilian wings beating a slow, languid rhythm, as he strode along the rocking platform. Bulbous black carapaces swarmed around his clawed feet; mottled fur and beady glass eyes stared at Seth. There were hundreds of them, hairy black pedipalps twitching eagerly as the fanged spiders surged toward him.

And as they neared they swelled, their wiry black hairs stiffening as they grew to the size of rabid hounds.

Nathaniel Seth scrambled backwards, his heels scuffing off the wooden beams as he flung himself out of the way of their swarming advance.

The spiders skittered and scratched over the wooden platform, so vast in number the wood itself disappeared beneath the swell of their carapaces, over Seth’s legs and across his chest and up into his face. They reeked of corruption, the acrid tang of sulphur clinging to their underbellies as they crawled over him. Their fangs dripped venom. He didn’t dare move for fear just one of the creatures would sink its fangs into him.

“What is it we have found, my lovelies?” The snake-man’s sibilant voice licked and twisted in the hot air, “A little manling? Does it have a tongue?” The creature mocked him. Seth said nothing, watching the horrendous rise and fall of the slick armoured scale plates across the snake-man’s huge chest. “It seems not. But it smells good, doesn’t it? Fresh meat. It has been so long since we tasted fresh meat. We think we will gorge on this one ourselves. Yes we do.”

Seth shook his head, “No.”

It was barely a word but it was defiance enough.

“It speaks, my lovelies. But why has it come? What does it want? We should just eat it now. We are hungry.”

“No,” Seth said again, prone, smothered by the sleek black carapaces of the venomous spiders. Fine black hairs tickled along his lips as he spoke, forcing him to twist his head sharply to prevent the creature from crawling into his mouth.

Beneath him, steam vented and hissed from huge pot-boilers, searing his back through the gaps in the wood.

The snake-man loomed over him, forked tongue licking out to taste the heat from the steam, and savouring it. “What brings you down to us, manling?”

“I have come …” what could he say? “I have come to set you free of this hell.” The words caught in his throat. “I opened the way, I bested the riddles, pieced together the puzzles of the mad Arab, found the guardian cross and opened the way so that you might return to the world above.”

“You did no such thing, fool, you are the way. There is no door but your flesh. We open the doors into you.”

“No …”

“You say that word a lot, do you draw comfort from it? Is it a word of power for you? Or is it just a denial of your own stupidity? Open him up, my lovelies, we would see this wondrous place the manling has promised us. Let us make doors out of his flesh and go explore.”

The spiders bit; at first a single fang sank into the soft flesh of his neck, then a second and a third and then the teeth came as they opened him up.

His screams were punctuated by the sharp hiss of the pot-boilers and the ratcheting of the infernal cogs down below.

They mocked his pleas for mercy as they tore him apart.

They jeered as they opened doors into his flesh.

They taunted as they pulled back his skin, stretching it and pinning it back with the jagged splinters of his broken ribcage.

And the light was still in his eyes as they streamed away from his ragged corpse, making way for the snake-man to get closer.

“Are we not dead yet, manling?” The snake-man preened, a curved talon tracing the open lines of Nathaniel Seth’s parted flesh. “Pity, it will hurt more like this.” The creature teased his bones apart and buried its face in the open wound, pushing through the rent in time and space to the other side.

O O O

The creature emerged, victorious, ichor dripping from its grotesque reptilian fangs as it tasted the air of London.

“Lord have mercy on our souls,” Anthony Millington breathed, unable to take his eyes off the monstrosity as it clawed its way into existence.

In front of him, Fabian Stark seemed to buckle, shrinking in on himself as though the beast was drawing its substance from him. Hundreds, thousands of tiny black mites swarmed out of the tear behind the snake-man, gaining shape and form as they skittered across the Whispering Gallery. Spiders. Thousands upon thousands of bulbous black spiders, their spindly legs snicking and chittering as they scuttled all across the great dome of St. Paul’s, blanketing it in a writhing black mass.

Millington rushed up to his side and caught him, lending his weight to stop the younger man from falling.

“What are they?”

“Harbingers,” Stark said. His breathing was laboured, coming in deep, ragged gasps.

“How do we fight them? Squash them under our heels?”

Up on the gallery, the snake-man drew himself to its full daunting height, and threw his head back so that all Millington could see was its long forked tongue licking out at the sky over and over.

Behind him, he heard the jarring clatter of metal-framed wheels and horseshoes sparking off the cobbled street. Millington turned to see two hansom cabs drawing up at the Cathedral’s steps. Haddon McCreedy and Dorian Carruthers emerged from one, Brannigan Locke and Eugene Napier from the other. The springs groaned their relief as the brute, Napier, heaved himself out of the cab. Locke held a service revolver in his hand. He took three brisk steps forward and levelled weapon, aiming up at the huge beast on the gallery. Millington’s warning stuck in his throat as Locke’s single shot rang out. The bullet struck the snake-man squarely in its armoured chest and ricocheted away harmlessly, burying itself into the stone.

Locke fired a second time, aiming for the snake-man’s glassy eyes, but the bullet cracked off the creature’s brow-ridge.

The snake-man did not so much as flinch. It came to the edge of the gallery, unfurling huge leathery wings that beat the air once, twice, and on the third, the snake-man launched himself into the air. Behind him the black spiders swarmed down the sides of the Cathedral and out across the grass and paving, across the cobbles and through the doorjambs and beneath the cracks into every house and office along the street, down through the drains into the sewers and up over the rooftops.

“What do we do, Stark?” Millington said, urgently.

Fabian Stark shook his head, tearing himself out of the stupor that had gripped him since the beast was born into the world above. “I need to think.” His eyes were bright, alive, feverish. When he spoke, it wasn’t to the actor, nor any of the others. “I know you, beast. I know what you are. I know who you are, Meringias, and there is power within a name, the things I can do with it, the pain I can impart with my art … This is not your place. I make this offer once, return to the world below. If you do not take it you will die.” Stark said this with such conviction Millington did not doubt him for a moment. The power in his otherwise frail companion’s voice was immense.

The winged beast sneered, its long tongue lashing against its jagged row of fangs. The beating of its wings intensified, as though the creature was agitated. It came lower, eye-to-eye with Stark. “You are weak, manling. You will die like the other one, and then all of these other timorous fools will follow in your wake. We shall walk this plane of yours and we shall feast. We are hungry, aren’t we, my lovelies?”