Time's Mistress

by Steven Savile

  “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.

&nbs
p; 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?”

  The sheer proximity of the great beast and the countless remembered stories of devils and daemons rooted Millington to the spot. Carruthers pushed up beside him and with a flourish threw some kind of snap-bang into the snake-man’s face. It was a children’s toy, a cheap sideshow prestidigitation, but it worked. For a split second the beast recoiled and in that moment Stark broke rank, lunging forward. Millington saw that he had some kind of salve on his fingers that he smeared down the snake-man’s torso. It didn’t seem to have any visible effect but that didn’t deter Stark from completing the cross on the beast’s chest. Even complete, the holy symbol had no effect on the snake-man.

  Cackling, the creature stretched its wings and took flight.

  “Hold, spawn of the pit!” Haddon McCreedy bellowed. Millington saw he clutched a battered leather bible in his trembling hands. “Questo esorcismo può essere recitato da tutti i cattolici, anche laici,” He began, the words of the exorcism torn from his lips by the sudden surge of the wind. “Per scacciare il demonio ed i suoi seguaci.”

  The Meringias licked its lips with its flaccid tongue. “You amuse us, manling,” the creature said, grinning at McCreedy. “We will feed on you later. For now we will look for fat flesh to feast on. The city awakes, we smell the sweat and sex and gluttony of your kind. It is ripe in the air. It drives us wild.”

  McCreedy roared the remaining words of the ritual but like the white cross they had little effect on the beast.

  Up on the Whispering Gallery more abominations were emerging; a giant jackal-headed monstrosity, and behind it, an apish creature with a melted face and jewelled eyes lumbered into view, tearing the rent wider with its sheer bulk. More and more beasts broke through the veil between planes, defying death with their twisted visages and warped physiques.

  The Meringias rose, flaunting its power. It turned its back on Stark and McCreedy as it ascended, until it was up around the heights of the dome itself. Then it turned, primal, powerful.

  It sank its talons into the stone and crouched, sniffing the air theatrically before launching itself once more.

  The Meringias streaked across the sky and disappeared behind the rooftops of Fleet Street.

  A moment later the first screams came.

  “Listen, all of you,” Stark said, turning to face the others. The lines of his face were taut, his lips white. “The way to the core has been opened; these things, daemons by our Christian mythology, were never meant to exist beneath our sky. This means we have but one chance here. The longer they remain on the Prime Material, the stronger they will become. Napier,” the brute nodded, stepping forward. “I need you to get to Greenwich, to the Prime Meridian. Take this,” he withdrew a Moleskine notebook from his inside pocket and scribbled something down. He tore the page out and handed it to Napier. “You must begin inscribing these words, exactly these words, in the brass line that marks the longitude, when you hear the first bell of the city chiming the seventh hour. You must be finished before the final bell sounds. Understood?”

  “Aye,” Napier grunted. “Good man, there’s not a lot of time left. Take one of the cabs. Seven o’clock. It has to be Seven.” Napier lumbered away, half-running half-jumping down the long steps back to where the three hansom cabs still waited.

  Stark wrote a second set of instructions for McCreedy. Haddon took them without a word.

  “I need you to go back to the Reading Room, Haddon. When you hear the first bells of St. Giles tolling seven, do exactly what it says on the note. Nothing more, nothing less.”

  “You can rely on it,” McCreedy said, turning on his heel and stalking back to the brougham Stark himself had arrived in moments before.

  “Dorian, I need you to go to the bell tower of St. Clements—”

  “I know, seven o’clock, exactly what it says on the note.”

  “Exactly,” Stark agreed, handing the note over.

  Carruthers pocketed it without so much as glancing at it.

  “Locke, the same thing, but take the great bell of St. Martins in the Field.”

  “Seven o’clock?”

  “As soon as you hear the first notes sounding out from the Old Bailey Bell and Wren’s Tower here, and finished before the last.”

  Locke nodded. “You can trust me, Fabian.”

  “I know, now go.”

  “What about me?” Millington said. He hadn’t been able to pull his gaze away from the nucleus of the black wound and the myriad devils of the deep places emerging through it.

  “I need you here, Anthony. I won’t be able to do this alone.”

  O O O

  As the hammers rang out the first note of the seven o’clock chimes across the city the six men of the Greyfriar’s Gentleman’s Club w
ent to work with grim purpose.

  Eugene Napier knelt before the white door of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, his knees straddling the lead line that marked the Prime Meridian, the zero point of the world’s time and the division between the east and west hemispheres.

  He smoothed out the crumpled paper, reading Stark’s instructions one last time even though he knew exactly what they entailed having committed them to memory on the long drive over to the Observatory.

  Using the blade of his pocket knife he carved the seven symbols into the lead line, each one seven inches long precisely. Four he recognised as the elemental signs, three he did not. He had no time to labour over it, and no second chances. The chimes would last for only a minute. He made each stroke with precision, finishing the final flourish exactly as the final note faded to silence.

  O O O

  In the Reading Room of the Greyfriar’s Gentleman’s Club, Haddon McCreedy lifted down the huge mantle clock that sat above the doorway. The face was exposed, the different cogs all laid bare. The smaller second hand, off-set to the upper right of the clock’s face ticked quickly. The hours were marked in Roman numerals.

  McCreedy placed the clock on the windowsill, as Stark’s instructions demanded.

  He listened to the fourth, fifth and six chimes before he removed the seventh hour, scoring in another line beside the VII so it appeared VIII.

  As the final note resonated in the air, McCreedy stole the seventh hour, leaving the old timepiece with two eight o’clocks.

  O O O

  In the bell tower of St. Clement’s Dorian Carruthers finished inscribing the great brass bell with the sigils Stark had drawn and counted out the fifth, sixth and seventh chimes before grabbing the rope high up and forcing another chime out of the bell, so seven became eight, the hour lost.