If RakeHell Lizzie saw it, it made no difference to her. Or perhaps it made all the difference, and that was why she flung herself at Krakowski with a warped sense of joyful abandon and Albion’s blade went up and down like a piston in the meat of his face, neck and chest.
Matthew grabbed hold of Krakowski’s legs. The man staggered but stayed upright, dragging Matthew with him. Matthew could feel him swinging back and forth with the deadly duster. RakeHell Lizzie clung to him like a deadly vine, and Krakowski was bellowing like a dumb injured brute who was staying on his feet by sheer willpower, and there was nothing Matthew could do to bring the man down.
Then suddenly Krakowski fell like a huge thick tree that had at last received its final axeblow. His body lay quivering as Matthew sat up and saw that Elizabeth too had slid down against the wall, and she was staring blankly at the dagger in her hand as the life streamed from the wounds that had torn her throat open.
Someone else was in the hallway. Greta Autrey, holding the musket. Matthew got up as if in a slow-motion dream, and he saw through his own haze of pain Greta’s eyes tick toward the back door and her face tighten, and when he turned from her he saw Lioness Sauvage in her lion-skin coat coming through the open door with a pistol in each hand.
At that instant he gave himself up to Fate.
With death and blood all around him, with his ears half-deafened by the pistol blasts and the red haze pulsing in his eyes, everything seemed to him to have become eerily calm, even his own breathing and the labor of his heart…calm, as if chaos itself had reached its limit and collapsed, and what was behind that tattered veil was the glimpse of another world where life and death had become a strange and stately dance.
Matthew took the musket from Greta.
He walked—or rather, drifted in his dream—toward Lioness Sauvage, who also in slow-motion lifted one of the pistols into his face and pulled the trigger.
Fizzzzzzz…The snow-damp gun shot out from its flint three sparks and a ghost of smoke, but no bullet.
Matthew saw her face contort. Saw her teeth clench. Saw the other pistol coming up.
He pulled the musket’s trigger, though he had no memory of aiming it. His thought was that if Greta had not yet reloaded the weapon, the hammer was falling on his grave.
Greta’s powder was dry.
The musket was loaded.
In the burst of blue smoke that followed, Lioness Sauvage simply fell away out the door and was gone as if she had never been there at all. When Matthew pulled his reluctant legs after himself and peered out, he couldn’t see her anywhere but there were dark streaks on the snow. He closed the door softly, as if not wishing to disturb the dead, and he lamented the fact that there was no latch on this door, as the country thereabouts was a trustful land.
He found himself standing over Elizabeth. He looked into Greta’s blood-blanched face. He handed her back the musket. “Thank you,” he said. And then: “I’d like a cup of tea,” but why he said this he had no idea because he didn’t really want any tea, he wanted to find a place on earth where human beings did not murder each other for profit or for entertainment, and as Greta backed away from him obviously realizing he was on the brink of madness he sank down beside Elizabeth with a weary sigh and put a brotherly hand on his sister’s arm.
She had been cut badly in other places and those wounds might have healed, but she would not recover from the throat wound. Matthew saw it was a matter of time, and time was short. He just sat with her, in the mess of the hallway, and he put his arm around her shoulders as she leaned her head against him and bled out.
She angled her face up toward his ear and whispered something. A garbled sound. He couldn’t make it out.
She tried again, and this time he caught the first word.
“Save,” she said.
He nodded dumbly. Yes. Save.
“Save her,” she said.
He knew what she meant.
She was speaking about Berry. The woman I love and plan to marry, if I can bring her back, he’d said to Elizabeth in the room near the pit. I am here to retrieve the book and to take Firebaugh with it.
Perhaps at the last Elizabeth respected that effort, more than she respected Lash’s auction of the book; perhaps even RakeHell Lizzie thought it was a noble thing, because what man had ever held her in such high esteem? What man, indeed, would have died to save her?
Lash’s figurehead, deciding which way to steer her own ship.
And perhaps also, Matthew thought as Elizabeth took her final breaths, she was weary—so very weary—of being two people, and being burdened by all she’d told him in the coach.
Matthew realized she was setting him free of her own affection for Samson Lash—who had likely rescued Elizabeth Mulloy from the madhouse because he purely and simply desired a companion—for while she was living she could not have allowed violence to be done to Lash by Matthew or Julian, and thus she was not only torn into two people but torn by two purposes.
Her ship was sailing.
“Rest,” he told her, but she was already gone.
He tried to take from her hand the dagger but he found he was unable to open her fingers. He decided to leave it with her, because in her own way she had been an Albion of sorts, fighting a battle she could never win, but doing enough to make a difference for someone, somewhere, and they would probably never know it.
When Matthew staggered back into the front room with the pistol he had retrieved in his hand, Julian looked at his bloodied form—the polar bear coat soaked on the front with it—and the bullet gash across his cheek and brief expressions of both sickness and relief passed across his face.
“I couldn’t leave here to help you,” he said, “but she said she would.”
Matthew just nodded. He saw the Autreys huddled on the floor together, and he wondered how they could ever see the world again in the same light as before.
Julian peered out the window and quickly drew his head back. He asked, “Is she—”
“Dead,” Matthew said.
At once Firebaugh rushed toward the broken glass and screamed, “Lash! They’ve killed Elizabeth! Do you hear? They’ve—”
Julian put him down again with a kick to the groin, after which the doctor crawled off to a corner sobbing in pain.
“Who was it?” Julian asked.
“Krakowski. And Lioness. I shot her. She’s out in the back somewhere.”
Julian grunted. He brought up a wry smile that his eyes did not share. “Well, that just leaves us with—”
Something on fire came flying through the spiderwebbed window and shattered the rest of it to pieces. A wine bottle with a flaming cotton wick broke on the stones of the floor; there was no explosion, but the whale oil spilled in a small brown wave rippling with blue fire. Almost immediately following that one came another bottle through the other window, breaking on the floor and throwing the burning oil in all directions.
Julian had seen a figure darting in through the barn’s heavy smoke to throw the second bottle—a large figure, Lash it looked to be—but there was no time to aim and no use in wasting a shot. When the third bottle came in through the window it broke on the sill and the flaming oil splattered a curtain, burning shilling-sized holes into it.
Smoke began blowing in from the barn. A fourth bottle came out of the murk and passed Julian’s face by a few inches. As it came in, shattered on the floor and spilled its sizzling oil a shot rang out and fragments of stone from the sill whined about the room.
Matthew found a place to sit away from the oil and went about reloading his pistol. His fingers fumbled. He couldn’t get his thinking straight. Another shot was fired and the bullet thunked into the wall above his head.
“You do know you’ve loaded that gun with three charges, don’t you?” Julian asked him.
Even in his dazed condition and with a dozen plac
es of pain in his body, Matthew realized it was pointless to stay here. He stood up in a crouch.
“We’ve got to go,” he said, his eyes watering from the smoke. “We’ve got to circle through the woods and get that second coach.”
“Agreed,” Julian said with hardly a pause. “Pull your balls in and stand up,” he told Firebaugh.
“Come out!” It was Cardinal Black’s voice from the whirling curtains of smoke. “Devane, you and Corbett have no chance! Make it easier on yourselves!”
“Easier, he says. Fuck him. Stand up, I said, or I’ll haul you up by the nuts.” Julian looked down upon the Autreys. “You two need to get out of here.”
“And go where?” Oliver asked, his face still pinched with pain and his eyes now gray-rimmed with the same shock that affected his wife and Matthew.
“Anywhere but here,” Julian answered.
“Wouldn’t get very far with a broken leg, would I?”
“You might hobble as if your life depends on it, which it does.” Julian advanced upon the doctor, who shrank back in fear. “One word from you, and by God your teeth will be down your gullet. Matthew, don’t put another charge in that damned gun. Get yourself under control.”
“Yes,” Matthew said. Had he said that? “Yes,” he said, loudly to make sure.
“If you decide to stay here,” Julian said to the Autreys, “reload that musket and shoot the first man who rushes through that door…which will happen anytime now.” He sighed heavily. It turned into a series of coughs for smoke was filling the room through the broken windows.
“Get out while you can,” he told Oliver and Greta, and then he motioned with his gun at Firebaugh. “You first. Out the back door. Matthew, you’re behind me. Be watchful. Ready?”
“Yes.”
“Thank you for the hospitality,” Julian said to the innkeeper and his wife. There was nothing else to say, and with a solemn glance to see that several of the paper roses on the Christmas tree had begun to crisp and burn from the splatters of whale oil he put the four barrels of his gun against Firebaugh’s back and shoved the doctor toward the blood-soaked hallway.
twenty-nine.
“Gone,” said Cardinal Black.
Lash did not answer. Black gave the old man and woman who clung together on the floor a look of disdain. He wiped his watering eyes with the back of a long-fingered hand, coughed a few times to clear his lungs and then picked up the musket he had his boot on. He walked into the hallway the vice admiral had just entered, and there he saw the picture.
Lash had knelt down beside her body. He had one hand in her hair, supporting her head, and the other against her cheek.
“This is a damnable mess,” said Black.
Lash was silent. His huge body gave what might have been a shiver of either anguish or rage.
“They’re going for the other coach,” said Black. “Whatever happened here cannot be changed.” When Lash still did not respond, Black prodded a bit harder. “Lioness and Merda may be able to stop them in the woods but if they slip past, Hodder will be no match for Devane.”
Lash gently laid her head to the floor. He picked up the gun he’d set aside, stood up and stared at the open back door. Smoke was whirling through the hallway, drawn from both the burning barn and one of the window curtains that had caught fire. When he turned his gaze upon Cardinal Black again his face was a blank mask but Black recognized in the vice admiral’s piercing blue eyes the writhing flames of Hell.
He strode into the front room. The Autreys clung to each other on the floor, surrounded by little blue oil fires that shimmered on the stones. When Lash had thrown the last oil bottle in and followed it by breaking the door off its hinges with a tremendous kick, he’d found a musket pointed at him. He’d stopped dead still and bellowed I am a vice admiral in the Royal Navy, madam! The statement had so unnerved Greta that before she could compose herself Cardinal Black was in the room, and had driven the musket to the floor with his boot.
The flame-bearded Lash, a towering and terrifying presence, stood over the couple with his pistol at the ready.
“Please, sir,” said Oliver, “we want none of this.” His voice broke. “Please, sir.”
“Allow me,” Cardinal Black requested.
Lash’s voice was like a doom bell. “Make haste.”
Black drew from his raven’s-wing coat his ceremonial knife, its hooked blade marked with the symbols and lettering that to him spoke of absolute freedom in the name of Satan, which to the mind of the normal person would mean all forms of the darkest, most brutal evil without regard for consequence or conscience.
Black was on Oliver Autrey even as the man put his arms up in an effort to protect his wife. The blade slashed across Autrey’s throat, a target upon which Black had had much practise.
When the bloody knife was turned in the woman’s direction, Greta Autrey got up on her knees and spat at him with the tears running down her cheeks, and she said fiercely, “Rot in der Holle, du Schwein.”
After the work was done—quickly and efficiently, as was Black’s method—the cardinal cut the sign of the Devil’s Cross on the forehead of both bodies and said, “I commend your souls to the Master.” Then, to Lash, “I’m ready now, sir. The Master will speed our cause.”
“Fine,” Lash rumbled, with a grim glance toward the horror that lay in the hall. “Just keep your damn master out of my way.”
****
They struggled on through the woods and eight inches of snow. The wind was still blowing hard, sweeping snow from the tree branches, but the snowfall itself had ceased. Behind them the low clouded sky was smeared with orange from the burning barn, and before them was the dark of the unknown.
When they had come out of the cottage, they’d found Lioness Sauvage lying next to the woodpile. Blood had seeped through her lion’s-skin coat on the left side of her body up near the collarbone. When she made out who was there, she made a gasping noise and tried to lift one of the pistols she held—the one that Matthew realized had not misfired—but she was unable to do so. In any case, snow had already blighted that weapon as well, and also lay in an icy gleaming upon her face and the mane of her hair.
Matthew paused to look down upon her and was struck with a feeling of pity, his senses still stunned. As he was doing so the axe that Julian had picked up beside the woodpile came down into her head with a definitive finality, and Julian said, “Don’t waste our time. Move.” He pushed the doctor ahead of him, and Matthew followed as they trudged away from the cottage.
After another moment Matthew asked, “Do you think the Autreys will be all right?”
There was no reply from Julian.
“The Autreys,” said Matthew. “Do you think they’ll be all right?”
“They’re already dead,” Julian said. “Now be silent.”
Of course they were. Matthew knew it. Lash and Black would not let them live to tell any tales. Of course they were dead, their throats likely cut and that Devil’s Cross sliced into their—
Matthew nearly fell. The night and the woods and the world spun around him. He had to grab hold around a slim pine tree to keep from being flung off into infinity, and he realized he deserved to be flung off. He should be, because he had killed Oliver and Greta Autrey. He had killed Elizabeth too, and for what? Because he’d thought Dippen Nack should be saved? And even when he’d done the foolish thing and spoken out, it hadn’t spared Nack’s life. He realized that if he’d remained silent in his role as Baron Brux, he and the false Count Pellegar might very well have gotten out of that house with the book of potions and the doctor and not a drop of blood had to be shed for it. Lash would have his bars of gold and the plans for the airship he was obsessed to build, and that would’ve been the end of it until Julian and Matthew had told Firebaugh where he was going.
No one had had to die, least of all the Autreys. Matthew thought tha
t good and bad were mixed up in his mind; he no longer could tell one from the other. Had it been a good thing to try to save Nack? But that deed had led to bad consequences. Had it been a bad thing to kill Brux and Pellegar in their inn suite? But that deed had led to getting into the house, which would be a good deed in favor of saving Berry.
And just now…the axe to the head of a defenseless woman lying in the snow. Good or bad? A cruel murder? Or a defense against her regaining her feet and her senses and—
A hand gripped the front of the bloodied polar bear coat.
“Listen to me,” said Julian, his face up close to Matthew’s. “I don’t know exactly what’s in your mind but I don’t think I like it. You’re no stranger to bloodshed. Oh, I see…the Autreys, and you can’t stomach that, can you? Well, neither can I but it’s not going to get me killed. Our task was to get the book and the doctor…however we could. We have done that. Now the trick is to get both of them back to where they’ll do some good for your lady. You go to pieces now and everything—everything—was for nothing. Say you understand.” Matthew was slow in responding and Julian shook him. “Say it.”
“I understand,” Matthew answered, and whether he truly did fathom this deadly chess game of good and bad played by the hand of Fate, it did not matter. Julian was right. All the deaths, all the violence…it would be for nothing if they didn’t get the book and Firebaugh back to save Berry, and that was the very most important thing.
“Keep moving,” Julian said. Matthew let go of the tree that was holding him onto the earth. He did not spin away. He followed Julian and Firebaugh through the snowy woods, remembering that in his state of delirium in the house he had loaded his pistol with three charges, one ball and one pour of gunpowder on top of the other, and he thought that without a bullet extractor tool the gun was now useless except as a bomb to blow his hand off, so Julian’s four-barrelled pistol would have to see them through the next encounter. Lash, Black and Miles Merda were still out there, and they were not going to let that coach go without a fight.
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