And she scared him to the bone.
In Chains
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Haddon McCreedy was assailed on all sides by the stench of The Liberty of Norton Folgate. It was like nowhere else in London. It harboured criminality. It flaunted itself in the face of justice. It had its own rules, its own why’s and wherefores. It was a place like no other within or without the Square Mile of the city proper. It was home to the Villain Kings and the Brethren both. It was a nest of scum and villainy. But it was proud. It looked after itself and its own and it didn’t take kindly to trespassers.
Haddon McCreedy didn’t belong there.
Neither did Eugene Napier.
But his scent was all over the damned place.
The great red wolf prowled the streets, nostrils flared, breathing in the stench of corruption that permeated everything, including the bricks and mortar and the ground itself. Napier was here. McCreedy needed to find him and get out before either the Brethren or the Villain Kings knew of his intrusion. There were wards, of course, etched into the red-brick and triggered by anyone walking by without the right counter-ward tattooed onto their skin. It was crude but effective and kept unwanted eyes out. The Peelers didn’t so much as peek down the piss-stinking alleys of Norton Folgate, as though crime somehow ceased to be as they reached the limits of the Liberty. And it did, in a way. The Villain Kings policed their own and had no need for Sir Robert’s boys in blue. The Liberty’s justice was swift and hard. Anyone caught stealing from their own lost a hand, a foot or an eye, anyone caught stealing from outsiders was beaten for their carelessness and told to make a better fist of it next time or risk being kicked out of the Liberty for giving good, honest thieves a bad name.
The wolf slunk low, its belly dragging against the cobbles, and prowled to the next corner, following Napier’s trail.
He knew where it was going—and had known from the first sniff when he started following it—but hadn’t wanted to believe, even as every possible alternative was past and the Brethren’s lair, the Sanctuary as they called it, was all that remained.
But that was where Napier was. There was no denying it.
The road sloped down, and every step the wolf took on it carried McCreedy further away from the light.
The red wolf slunk along the side of the wall. There were so many smells in this place, and so many of them so strong it was all he could do to press on. The wolf McCreedy didn’t merely smell the thick clot of humanity that took refuge in the Liberty, he smelled the sickness of them, too. The cholera, tuberculosis, the scurvy and malnutrition, the black stuff of illness. Even death. Death had its own smell and it was no stranger to the city. All of them had their own smells and they clung to the Liberty. And then there was that other smell, the one that led him through the warren of streets to the one door in all the city he did not want to open. It was the smell of corruption, like the sulphur of the pit, blazing, strong and irresistible. The wolf tossed back his head and howled, baying at the sliver moon visible through the thick cloud.
Up above a window opened and an angry voice yelled, ”Someone put a leash on that damned mutt!”
A moment later a chamber pot was emptied into the street. And for that long second the stink of urine drowned out every other smell in his nose.
Gaslight glow flickered in the lampposts. The play of light twisted the brickwork of the nearest buildings. Knots and flaws in the fired clay contorted, becoming screaming mouths. The wolf tossed back his great head. These weren’t the lies of shadow, on the contrary they were the truths. The screaming faces trapped within the stone were travellers caught between this London and the oblique city hidden within it. He could almost hear their cries, if he looked away and didn’t try and focus on them. The wind carried their voices down the narrow slum streets. It wasn’t one or ten or even a hundred mouths pressing out through the red bricks, every inch of the street seemed to be alive with them.
Why so many?
Why here?
It wasn’t uncommon to catch a glimpse of a lost traveller in the white marble of Regent’s Street or Bond Street. But that was one traveller, one mouth, one scream, perhaps a hand that had almost pushed through straining up against the unforgiving stone, but not hundreds.
It had to be the Sanctuary. Or something within the Sanctuary. After all, the Brethren must have chosen it for a reason. What better reason than because it was a locus between the two worlds of London? It made a disturbing sort of sense to the wolf.
McCreedy-wolf moved on, nose to the cobbles now, unsure what to do. He could wait for Napier to emerge from the Sanctuary and challenge him, he could transform back into his brute form and batter down the doors, assuming Napier needed rescuing, or he could try stealth, somehow infiltrating the Sanctuary undetected. Somehow was the part of the problem that troubled McCreedy. It wasn’t a house, it was a fortress. He couldn’t very well burrow his way under … or could he? The Liberty was plumbed, just like every other part of the city. Plumbing meant pipes, pipes fed into sewers. He dismissed the idea. There was no way he was wading about in other peoples’ faeces naked. If not under then over? The red wolf looked up, scanning the rooftops with his keen eye. Transformed, McCreedy did not see like a man. His vision was much sharper, acute to the point of being dizzying at times, but without the distinction of colour. This meant at night his sight was particularly good. He followed the line of the gutters looking for a weakness in the façade. There was a distinct lack of ornamentation save for a single stone watcher carved into the upper right corner. The watcher wore the jackal face of Anubis, guardian of the dead, which given its service was not inappropriate. It saw him with its cold stone eyes but did not move. He was not even sure that it could, unless he took to the tiles and triggered the ward that animated it. It was an interesting line of defence though, the jackal-headed keeper of the door. There was an element of symbolism at work, the red wolf thought, baring its teeth in what might have passed for a smile.
Before he could make up his mind the door opened, and out of the shadows Eugene Napier emerged. He shook hands warmly with the doorman, exchanged a laugh, and bounded down the short flight of steps into the street.
Only it wasn’t Eugene Napier, the wolf McCreedy realised. It might look like Napier, sound like Napier and move like Napier, but it did not smell like Napier.
The wrong man checked his watch, a silver fob on a chain identical to the real Napier’s, looked up at the moon as though checking its position in the sky against the hands of time on his watch, and set off at a brisk walk toward the clubhouse on Grays Inn Road.
McCreedy followed, keeping to the shadows. It did not take him long to realise where the man who was Napier but wasn’t, was heading. He would have followed him all the way back, but for the fact that something—it could not have been a man, a daemon perhaps, or devil, wearing a top hat and leaning on a silver-tipped cane—crossed his path.
Torn between following the daemon and continuing to follow Napier home, the red wolf did the only thing he realistically could. He followed the devil in the top hat.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The real Napier hung from bloody wrists in the basement of the Sanctuary. The rusted metal of the manacles cut into the soft skin beneath the heel of his hands, digging deeper each and every time his legs buckled and he fell against them. He was beyond pain. His eyes filmed over with an emptiness that craved an ending, and what ending didn’t matter in the slightest, life or pain. Head down, chin resting on the bones of his chest, Napier’s lank hair fell across his eyes. He was barely sensate.
The teeth of Hathor’s whip lashed into his back, flaying away at the skin. Napier’s head came up and he cried out. There was next to no strength left in his screams. He was dying little by little, lash by lash. Hathor knew it. They all did. The Brethren gathered around the torture watching with curiosity as Vincent Hathor delivered blow after scathing blow. Every third or fourth stroke of the whip opened the skin a little deeper and caused N
apier to bleed a little more freely. The iron tang of blood in the confines of the basement was enough to drive the others to the brink of frenzy. They stood still, rooted to the gold-lined sigils inlaid into the floor that marked their places in the ritual, nostrils flaring in and out, in and out, until the only sound above and beyond the weakening screams and the crack of the whip was the inhalation and exhalation of seven creatures—because they weren’t all men—in the grip of bloodlust.
Seen from above the gold inlay formed an arcane rendition of the sun in ascension. The significance of the symbol went beyond worship. The sun ascendant marked the rising power of its worshippers, yes, but in the last few hours Eugene had come to understand that it meant so much more. It was no mere battle between the light and dark side he had found himself in the midst of, on the contrary it was the core of all things magic. The earth had its dwindling powers, already cleaved in four between the dirt, the air, the sea and the flame, and diluted anew by industry and pollutants as the canker of cities spread. The moon had its magic that waxed and waned with its cycles, but that was bestial, raw, and lacked the elemental might of the earth. The ever present, the greatest power, and the Egyptians had understood even back then, was the sun in all of its fiery glory.
Napier had been a fool and now he was trapped.
No one was going to come and save him because in less than an hour they wouldn’t think he needed saving. He had seen the creature that called itself Luther Bast step out of the shadows to take up the final place on the floor. The names were affectation, Luther was no more an Egyptian deity than Vincent was, but as was the fashion amongst certain tiers of society, they wore these new names to make themselves seem more mysterious. Mercifully they still dressed according to the London fashions. Being whipped by a topless man in a golden headdress would have been too close to ludicrous to be frightening. There was something much more unsettling about punishment being dished out by a man wearing a butcher’s apron over his Oxford brogues and Savile Row suit. Lucius Amun and Charles Ra watched from their places in the pattern, while Niamh Thoth and Hermione Osiris, the sisters, licked dry tongues across drier lips. At first Napier thought it was a trick of the flickering torchlight, and then he hoped it was brought on by the pain, but it was neither. Napier watched as Bast’s face melted. And that was precisely what it looked like. The ridges of brow and forehead and nose lost their shape, the skin stretched taut over them melted like beeswax beneath the heat of tallow and flame.
Hathor delivered another punishing blow. With it, Napier’s vision blurred. His head dropped. Hathor didn’t make a sound. He didn’t need to. The leather parted the meat to reveal a momentary white of bone before the blood hid it. Napier’s screams were terrible. That only seemed to excite the watchers all the more.
Then, in the deepest haze of the pain, he had seen the impossible: the shifting meat of Bast’s face began to writhe, the muscles beneath the skin seething in the constant agitated motion of maggots, and the melted bones began to re-knit, the cheekbones hollowing, the eyes taking on the haunted cast of Napier’s own stare, and within a few minutes the beaten man was staring at his own face being worn by another man.
It was ungodly.
And worse, he would not have been able to tell himself from his double if his life depended upon it. Nor would any of the others. The thing they had made, his Ka, as they called it, was not only a perfect physical duplicate, it was a perfect mental one as well. That was the second ritual or the third or the fourth, he had begun to lose count as one hell bled into another. First they had taken his body, then his face, and later they had filled it with his life. Napier had felt them teasing precious memories out of his skull like ectoplasmic ribbons that they had then fed to the empty Ka. Piece by piece, memory by memory, he began to forget himself. He couldn’t remember his mother’s smell or the comfort of her embrace. He couldn’t remember the firmness of the back of his father’s hand nor the pride in his voice. Places went, the old grammar school building, the house on Theobolds Road where he had grown up, the church of St Martin’s in the Field where, dressed in his childhood Sunday Best he had been dragged along to worship, all of them gone. And more. He forgot the Latin conjugations and the Greek roots. He forgot the crack of leather on willow. He forgot the fish-stink of Billingsgate and the sweet flowers of … of where was it? The name had been in his mind, in the front of it, and now it was gone. But the Ka remembered. It was to all intents and purposes him, built around the same soul. The Ka remembered. Soon enough he would not even know himself.
That was how they broke him.
Chapter Thirty
That they tortured Napier in the basement where they could control the light meant they knew their enemy. He could not have been further removed from his gift. That meant a knowledge not only of Eugene Napier but of his Art, and if they knew Napier, they must also know McCreedy, Carruthers, Locke, and Millington. It stood to reason. And knowledge meant the opportunity for preparation. Each of the rooms along the corridor that had once been the servants’ quarters had been prepared as a unique torture chamber for the Greyfriar’s Gentlemen. A padded cell for Dorian the necromancer, a silver-lined cage for McCreedy the beast, a hall of mirrors for Locke the psionic, a crypt for Millington the animist, and the pit for Napier, where light could truly be controlled, denying him the chance to use his gift to fade. There was no such thing as true invisibility, but Napier had a rare understanding of light and how to manipulate it—or people’s perceptions of it—and his ability to fade or grow dim was as close to true invisibility as either science or magic would ever allow.
The Brethren knew their enemies.
Had studied them.
Knew their weaknesses as well as their strengths.
And had planned for them.
They were not so different, these gentlemen and those others, save that the others, the Brethren, had slipped through from that other place, that other London glimpsed occasionally out of the corner of the eye. They were, to all intents and purposes, a reflection of the Greyfriar’s Gentlemen in the same way that a daemon stepped through from the backwards land of the mirror might be a reflection of an angel: a reversal, a counterpart, a negative. They were not the same. Even clothed in the same smiling faces they could never be the same. It wasn’t in their nature.
Chapter Thirty-One
Eugene Napier had one gift. He had discovered it when he was young, fed up with taking beatings from the Master’s cane for cheek—”insubordination” as the walrus-moustached Macawber of a man with heavy-hanging jowls used to rumble—he had learned how to fade. The gift had been honed in Newgate Gaol where being seen was as good as begging for a beating. That was where Lester Cranleigh had found him. It was the last memory they stole from him because they didn’t understand the potency of it. Napier clung to it as though it were the most precious thing he owned. Down there, reduced to nothing, it was. All of the money, the country house, the town house, the trinkets and objects d’art were worthless to him now.
Cranleigh had rescued him and in doing so had offered some form of salvation from himself. Napier had never been a dandy, and hadn’t taken naturally to the world above stairs. He had been born and raised on the north side of the city, not in the wealth of Russell Square and the gentrification around the new museum, but rather the poverty of below stairs Holborn. Before the day Cranleigh and the screw walked into the cell where Napier had faded, Napier had been nothing more than a thief—a good one, but a thief just the same.
Lester Cranleigh changed that.
Or rather refined it.
Cranleigh took Eugene Napier and polished him like a diamond, creating a gentleman thief where before there had just been the thief. The jobs were different. Cranleigh taught Napier how to use his charm to win hungry hearts, and how a smile opened more windows than a pick possibly could. He schooled Napier in the art of being dashing—and it was an art, make no mistake. It wasn’t just about seduction. Every flourish and every gesture was practiced and pr
acticed until it was honed to perfection. There was as much magic in the flash of his dangerous grin as there was when he bent the light and seemingly faded from sight.
Napier was good at it, as well.
Better than good.
He was raffish, charming and handsome, and lacked the kind heart it that would have protected the fair maidens from him.
He took his crimes to the second story.
Like a vampire he made sure he was invited inside, winning the desperate widow’s (and sometimes the wanton wife’s) heart before helping himself to her less intimate treasures. After all, what were a few diamonds and pearls after he’d helped himself to her body? More often than not he was intimately familiar with the soft pillows of the bedroom and the contents of the jewellery boxes before he ever came in through window, unless of course the seduction called for him to play Romeo beneath her balcony or Cyrano with his borrowed words of love. The women of London liked to be charmed, and, he came to believe, couldn’t bring themselves to hate him even after he had had his way with both body and jewels. It was all part of the game. Of course, as with so much in his life, he could just as easily have been lying to himself about that to assuage whatever passed for his conscience as he left a trail of broken hearts from Highgate to Lancaster Gate, Billingsgate to Bishopsgate, to Aldgate and every other gate in between. It was a large city—even bigger if you went beyond the gates of the original square mile but rewards were always richer if you stayed within the original city wall. That was just the way of it, money gravitated to the old city.
Only now there were no windows and his smile wouldn’t melt even the softest heart. He twisted on the chains, trying to see what was coming for him. He tried to concentrate on the flickering torches and match the beating of his heart to the whicker of the flame, but there was too much pain for him to focus and his heart raced away arrhythmically.
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