He twisted on the chains, trying to see, but for all that he could manipulate the way others saw the light around him he had never learned to see around corners. So instead he strained his ears. He heard the grate of metal on stone followed by splashes of water. It took Napier a moment to piece together the sounds. Some of the old houses, he knew, delved deep enough their cellars fed into the sewer systems and the other tunnels of the hidden city. Judging by the slosh of water whatever door separated the Sanctuary from the sewers had just been opened. A moment later he heard the unmistakable chittering of rats lured up out of the water. Thoth and Osiris smiled at him then. Thoth reached out a hand and caressed it down the length of his ruined back. His skin faded out behind her touch. She turned her back and left him, saying to her sister, ”I have no desire to watch the rats feed.”
”I think I will stay, if it is all the same to you?” Hermione Osiris said. ”It isn’t often you get the chance to watch the invisible man truly disappear,” her chuckle echoed eerily back up through the dank cell toward the city above.
Thoth broke the pattern, but it didn’t matter. There was no magic left to be done. It all came down to nature now and the rats’ imperative to feed. They were starving and he was helpless. They might take some encouraging, hence Hathor’s relentless whipping to get the blood flowing, but eventually the stench of the blood and the temptation of the meat would prove too much.
Time did not mean much within the cellar prison, it stretched into agonies, but too quickly the floor became a writhing black mass of fat-bodied, bloated and slick rats scurrying over one another to get close to the blood. Napier willed himself to fade then, but it didn’t matter, the rats could smell the blood and it drove them into a frenzy. They swarmed up Napier’s legs, tiny claws scratching out more blood. Time and again his flesh began to dim and fade only for fresh trails of blood to bring it back.
Hermione Osiris got down onto her hands and knees, whispering to the rats and she crawled around his legs, urging them to eat, eat, eat, and Eugene Napier screamed then …
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Ka, the false Napier brought forth from his blood and sweat, strode toward the lions guarding the door. It could not find the stone guardians in its stolen memories. It blinked curiously, tilting its head, then shrugged its shoulders. If it did not know about them they could not be important, the Ka reasoned. It was, at best, spurious logic, but the Ka was learning all the time. Every new moment brought a new experience for it to digest. The first thing that it had learned was that it was hungry for life.
Thoughts and reasons raced madly through its mind. Before any one thought was completed it surged off into three more, and then three more. Its final thought as it walked up to the door of number 111 was that it must be more powerful than the Son of God. Its reasoning ran wild: like the Messiah it had not been born of man. There had been no seed of life. No copulation. No heat. But then neither had it been born of woman. There had been no kicking and crying. No blood-slick passage into the world. So then if two parents made one normal, and one parent made a man divine, what did no parents mean?
The Ka hammered on the door.
A moment later the chamberlain appeared. The Ka reached into its memory for the man’s name: Mason. ”Good evening, Mason,” the Ka said. They were the first words it had ever spoken. Its voice was raw and untested. It wondered if the man would notice but then decided he would not.
The chamberlain bowed slightly and stepped back allowing it to enter. ”Master Napier, it is good to see you. Is the old wolf with you?”
The old wolf? It did not know any wolf. What would the man he was supposed to be say? Was he funny? Was he charming? Brusque? A man of few words? Did he like this man? All of these thoughts raced like blind runners through its brain. It knew all the answers, or remembered them through the filter of Napier’s memories. Napier thought of himself as charming, but not like Carruthers, not a knave nor a womaniser, but what was the word Napier used? It came to him then, in a flurry of smiles: a bon vivant. It curled up a lip in an approximation of a smile and shook its head. ”All on my own.”
The chamberlain looked at him appraisingly, then nodded. It was almost as though the man were judging him, the Ka realised. It had obviously passed its first test. Its smile spread. Why wouldn’t it? It was to all intents and purposes Eugene Napier. It would take more than a glorified doorman to see through his disguise. It would take a true Maester of The Art, and in this London it could not feel the presence of any … though there was an aftertaste of one recently gone. It looked around as though trying to sniff out the departed but already the little of the man that lingered was too weak to properly taste. But his taint was all over this place. The Ka counted its blessings and walked inside.
It knew the layout of the club as well as if it had lived there all of its life. Of course, in one respect it had. Or an aspect of it had. Its memories of this place were potent. It was more than just a house, it realised. Like the Sanctuary it was special. It was a place that bridged the gap between worlds, or rather existed where the barriers were stretched thin. It could not have been a coincidence that the enemy had made their home on a schism.
It climbed the stairs slowly, inhaling the magic of the place.
”Ah, but it is good to be home,” the Ka said over its shoulder to the chamberlain.
”Indeed, sir. If you will forgive me saying, the gentlemen were rather concerned about you. There has been a lot of peculiar activity tonight, and the loss of Master Stark has affected the Masters more than any of them will admit.”
Master Stark. It remembered him. Fabian Stark. The Maester, not the Master. It found the memory of Stark’s sacrifice against the Meringias. That was impressive magic. More, that was forgotten magic. The kind of magic that belonged in that other city, not here among the smog of small minds. And that was what they were, the Ka realised suddenly. They were small minds cut off from the magic of the universe. It almost made it sad. Or it would have if it hadn’t served its purpose that the city had forgotten everything that made it magical.
”Would you be requiring anything, sir?”
The Ka shook its head. It hesitated at the top of the stairs. What would the real Napier do? Drink, it realised. Smoke. It went through to the Reading Room and sank down into one of the well-worn leather armchairs.
A few minutes later the second test of its new life walked into the Reading Room. It recognised the man as Brannigan Locke. Locke stopped and frowned. ”Tired of your own chair, Eugene?” His eyes flicked across to one of the other high backed Chesterfield armchairs, this one over by the fire.
”A change is as good as a rest,” the Ka said with a smile. It wasn’t quite Napier’s smile but it did not care. It was a sloppy mistake. It ought to have known these men were sticklers for ritual. It had given this one, Brannigan Locke, reason to be suspicious. That was careless. It was not a careless creature by nature. Everything it did was calculated, measured, planned out to the finest detail. This new life was challenging. The slightest mistake necessitated a dozen readjustments to prevent suspicions being raised. It would learn.
”You’re an odd ball, Eugene, and that, my friend, is putting it mildly.”
Locke slumped into the chair beside him and stared at his hands. He cracked a small smile. ”What a day.”
The Ka nodded its agreement. ”Quite a day,” it agreed. ”And one hell of a night.” Locke had no idea what it meant. How could he? Playing with the man amused the Ka. This man was the enemy. This man needed to be taken in. There was more than one form of deceit. The Ka leaned forward. Now was the time to share the message it had been given. Now was the time to whisper the first lie. ”And it is only going to get worse tomorrow. The Villain Kings are calling a Conclave at Lime House. They’re offering the flag of parlay. The Pearly Kings and Queens have been summoned to police it.” The Ka shook its head in mock-disbelief as Locke’s head came up.
For a split second the man looked terrified, then the mask
of calm slipped over his features.
The Ka was impressed with his self-control. It would have taken a lesser man considerably longer to gather control of his wits after hearing such a message. It had been more than a year since the Villain Kings last gathered, a decade since the last Conclave. This was how the crooks divided the city. They sat down and divided the wards according to strength of arms and spheres of influence. Certain territories befit a certain kind of criminal and each Villain King had his own trademark flair. That they were gathering now could only mean that they had a sense of what was happening on their streets and were either instigators or were keen to become players as the game unfolded. It was all about opportunity. Chaos bred wealth if you knew how to take advantage of it.
Before it could press the point, a woman walked into the room. Far from beautiful she looked like an urchin dragged up from the gutters. She stared at it. Through it. Then, as she broke eye contact, it could have sworn it saw the flicker of recognition in her eyes. That wasn’t what stunned the Ka. It was her smell. The filth of the streets masked it but not enough. She reeked of that other place. She was as much a stranger here as it was. How had she got here? How had she stumbled through? And, more tellingly, how had its masters not known? This changed everything.
The God Particle I
Chapter Thirty-Three
He was not dead. Not in the dearly departed and gone to Heaven sense, nor in the not-so dearly departed and gone to Hell sense either. Fabian Stark existed as a divine spark inside a cage of stone. Dead to this world but painfully aware all the same. That awareness hurt him in ways he had never imagined possible when he was alive. In becoming stone something had happened to him—something beyond the transmogrification. He understood now. It was a revelation. He knew he could never leave this stone prison. It was his own personal hell. But as he reached out with his consciousness he realised that this hell was not infinite. The universe around him, the dimensions of the Prime Material and beyond were infinite. The oblique worlds went on and on and on thousands upon thousands of them feeding into one another just as this world brushed up against Other London, so Other London brushed up against Another London and Another brushed up against Yet Another, all of these points of contact, all of these weaknesses in the veil offering him a hope of escape. He might never find his way back to this place, but that did not mean he had to stay trapped here forever.
He could leave his body of stone and dissipate. He pushed with his mind, and even as he did felt his sense of self change. He felt his consciousness slip and suddenly it—he—existed beyond the stone. He felt himself bleeding into the air; into the earth beneath his feet; the grass; into the bark of the weeping willow; into the kerbstone and the cobbles of the street; into the metal of the lamp post and the flickering flame that burned there; into the wind as it rustled through the leaves; into the moisture particles in the gathering smog; into the flesh of the scullery maids and the footmen up with the lark, into the rats in the sewers and the starlings and pigeons lining the window ledges and guttering, and inside them grasped another secret of time. Their hearts beat so much faster, racing against their frail breasts, pounding out exactly the same number of beats that a man would over the course of his much longer life; into the scraps of food festering and the steel rims of the carriage wheels; into the minutiae of life. And he understood. Like God he was becoming a part of everything. His soul was dividing and dividing and dividing again until it bled out to feed every atom, every cell, of existence and became one with it. He felt the magic draining out of the earth itself, out of the air and the water. His soul was thinning beyond the point where it snapped, offering him like a sacrifice to every stone, every leaf and tree, and as he felt himself simply ceasing to be words screamed through his consciousness: ”Burn with me!”
It was all he could to do deny the pull of … what? The divine? The Godhead? And draw what remained of Fabian Stark back into the stone statue outside St Paul’s Cathedral in this waking London.
He had been wrong all this time. It wasn’t the buildings and the machines that were sapping the earth’s magic. It was them. It wasn’t about this burgeoning technology at all, nor even a failing to believe and a loss of the old ways. The Art was simple, it drew on the innate essence of being, and if that essence ran dry, that was it, it was gone forever. The mistake was in believing that it was industrialization that damned them. It wasn’t. It was actions. Those same actions that spoke louder than the proverbial words. Where were the heroes? Where were the good men? Selfishness, he realised, depleted that core of power every bit as much as a new factory down on the riverside. The difference was that all the machinery in the world only withered this one spot. The change in people, the cult of me as he began to think of it, robbed everywhere. Without the good deeds of men to feed the earth nothing was replenishing the magic. And a world without magic wasn’t worth contemplating.
It wasn’t just the huge acts of selflessness, the man staring down drunken dockers as they played too rough with a street girl, or having the courage to stop a drunken brawl before it started, taking in an orphan or teaching a father to read so he could tell stories to his son come lights out, it was all the little acts of kindness every day that were slipping. Without them there could be no magic.
He couldn’t be party to that.
But did that mean he had to surrender himself, become God, feeding his soul to every ounce of creation?
There had to be another way.
Had to be.
He had to find a way out of this stone cage, and that meant trying to open a path to one of the oblique cities that existed in the same place and time, so close but just out of reach. He gathered his will, drawing it in to him, strengthening it with the fortitude of stone, then shaped it. He could try to bludgeon his way through, tease open a crack, or tear the veil apart, each would have its own consequences, he knew, and each would carry its own problems. He touched the veil with his will, feeling it out, looking for any natural weakness he could exploit, but there were none, not here, not close enough. The only escape this way was through the same rent the Meringias had torn, and that way lay Hell. Testing the veil he knew he could shred it, but through his new perspective gleaned from those moments of oneness with all and everything, he knew that the damage of such a violation would be akin to raping nature Herself. He didn’t want that kind of stain on his conscience or his hands.
He did not want to be a god, either.
Or God.
But what choice did he have?
The Ice Queen
Chapter Thirty-Four
Dorian lay back against the feather pillows, spent. It went beyond exhaustion. Pulling the woman out of her past so soon after walking the thoughts of the dead was too much. He was weak. His hair matted flat against his scalp and his skin had that washed out wax complexion of a man on his deathbed.
He had asked Locke and the girl to leave him be, but truth be told now he was alone he was frightened.
A world without sight was an uncompromising place and try though he might he just could not accept that he would never see again. But the woman, the woman was worse than the blindness by far. Just the simple fact of her nearness was repellent. He had not realised it at first, but as he held her hand and talked her through her memories all of her wrongness seeped into his skin and now that she was gone he could not cleanse himself of it.
He couldn’t move. It was as though invisible shackles bound him to the soft mattress.
Dorian heard something: a movement. A shuffling sound.
”Is there anybody there?” he called out into the darkness like some charlatan spiritualist trying to commune with the dead. It didn’t work like that. It never had. Séances did not open the door to the other side but desperate people wanted soothing and there were enough opportunists in the world to take advantage of every last one of them.
There was no answer.
But that did not mean there was no one there.
He slowed his breathin
g, concentrating on controlling the shallow rise and fall of his chest, and then concentrating on filtering those slow breathes out so that he could hear every other sound in the cold bedroom.
It took him a moment to realise it was no longer cold. In point of fact it felt unnaturally warm. Warmth wasn’t something he associated with the dead, which discounted ghosts shuffling about in his blindness. ”Who’s there?” he asked again.
But again there was no answer.
Then, when he thought he must have been hearing things, he heard it again, only it wasn’t a shuffle, it was a crackle.
The sound by itself wasn’t enough, but when the smell of burning reached him he realised he was in trouble. Struggling to rise, he called out: ”Fire!” and louder, desperation creeping into his voice: ”Fire! Help me! Mason! Locke! Somebody!”
And in the silences where he breathed and the fire cackled he heard another voice taunting him.
”Burn with me,” it said.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Downstairs it was the Ka who heard his screams first.
It pushed itself out of the chair, nostrils flaring. It could smell the smoke, but beneath it, considerably more pungent, the astringent reek of magic. ”Something’s burning,” it said. That second smell, The Art blazing, was what interested it though. The blind man could burn in his bed for all it cared. And then, almost as an afterthought, it wondered how it could be sure there was a blind man in the bed up there?
The Ka reached out with its mind, trying to force its consciousness ahead of it on the stairs but it could no longer touch the panic of the blind man.
It knew it was right though.
Its words rattled them.
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