”About as far as I can throw you,” said Locke.
”Quite. I heard of Stark’s demise. A loss to all of us, believe me,” and for a moment the Villain King seemed genuinely remorseful. ”If there is anything I can do, it goes without saying,” he offered, inclining his head slightly. The effect was that Mason could no longer see his eyes. It was as though the Villain King deliberately did not want them to trust him. The chamberlain could not help but wonder why. There was a scheme going on here. A hustle. He had no idea what the Villain King stood to gain from their distrust, nor why he had engineered the situation to keep Master Dorian outside of the Wolf Hall. ”Still, as the Peace demands, let us put our differences aside as we enter the conclave. Shall we?” he swept his arm out, motioning them through in front of him. Mason inclined his head, deferring to the Villain King. In truth there was a strategic advantage to being the last to enter the Wolf Hall two steps behind Arnos. If they were met by betrayal the Blondel Distillator would ensure that the Villain King paid far more than thirty pieces of silver for it. Mason was not above shooting a man in the back.
That the Wolf Hall was so called was something of a joke. Cranleigh himself had dubbed it so during that first parlay, claiming that the wolves had finally sat down with the lambs. The name had stuck through each subsequent conclave, no matter that the meeting place changed every time.
They were the last to arrive. Thirteen of the seats at the table were already occupied, eight of them by men like Arnos dressed in the pearl-jewelled coats that marked them as Villain Kings. Their queens stood behind them, similarly dressed. Two more seats were taken by men Mason had never seen before, not in the flesh: the Baron and the Earl of Under London. Another was taken by the Keeper of the Tower. In his raven armour he looked like a relic of the First House of Anjou’s years spent ruling this Sceptred Isle. He looked up as the Gentlemen Knights entered the chamber but he had no smile for them. The Keeper guarded more than the Tower, he was custodian of both the Crown Jewels and the Queen’s Armoury, including the five swords of the realm: the Sword of Offering, the Sword of State, the Sword of Temporal Justice, the Sword of Spiritual Justice and the Sword of Mercy.
The Keeper himself wielded the sword of Temporal Justice. It was the blade that had been pulled from the London stone, giving rise to the legend of Excalibur, or at least one of the two Excalibur’s. The other, the Sword of Spiritual Justice, had been delivered from the depths of the shadowy waters of the Lyndon to King Lud whilst the city was still called Kaerlud. The sword itself had then been consigned to the earth with his remains, buried beneath the Ludgate by the Roman conquerors. It only came to the surface again during the demolition of the city gate in 1760 when the miraculously preserved corpse of the dead King was exhumed and it was found clutched in his mummified hands.
Mercy, Edward the Confessor’s blade, lay on the table between them. The sword’s tip had been broken off by an angel to prevent a wrongful killing, or so the legend went. Oliver Cromwell, the King Slayer himself, had failed to melt Mercy down even as he destroyed so many other treasures from the Kingdom’s history. Mason was disinclined to dismiss the legend as merely another story made to make Britain look great. Having a murdered angel brought to your door had a way of shifting your perspective.
On the table beside Mercy was the King’s Cross, a splinter of the true cross of Jesus smuggled out of the holy land by Joseph of Aremethea and presented as an offering to the Britannorum Rex, Cunobelinus, the Hound of God.
These treasures went beyond priceless. They were the foundation of the Kingdom itself—and of the Queen’s role as Defender of the Faith—and here they were gathered together outside of any State function. It proved beyond the shadow of any doubt the true power of the assembly.
The final seat at the table was taken up by a man he did not recognise.
That, Mason realised quickly, was because he was no man at all. He was actually an auto-icon; a statue of wax and straw built around the bones of a dead man. He had heard the story of the philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham offering his bones and head to the University College London to be preserved in this manner, but this was not Bentham. On closer inspection, Mason realised, the head of the thirteenth guest was not wax but actually the well-preserved leather of cured skin. He studied the bald head and face more closely. He did know the man, but had never thought to meet him, given that he had been dead some two hundred years: John Dee. What residual magic clung to the dead man’s bones?
He took up the vacant seat beside Dee’s auto-icon.
More men filed into the chamber. The gatekeepers of London Wall. The seven men took up positions around the room. These were the bruisers meant to keep the others in line. The seven men had an almost mythical position as protectors of the city limits. Few crossed them and lived to tell the tale. Their presence in the Conclave only added to the air of expectation. The threat, Mason realised, was bigger than he had suspected. How big, only time would tell.
The others took up their allotted places. The round table itself had its place in the British history, having served other notable knights of the realm more than once. There were no empty seats at the great table, meaning Arnos had known full well that Master Dorian could not—or would not—enter the Conclave. Which in turn meant he had to be aware of his blinding. The chamberlain had no idea how the Villain King could have come by such knowledge, but the mere fact that he had sent a shiver down the ridges of his spine. With knowledge comes power, and never was that truism more apt than when applied to Arnos. The man was not to be trusted.
Arnos took up the Sword of Mercy and rapped its hilt three times on the wooden table like a gavel, calling the Conclave to order. Beside Mason the auto-icon straightened, brought to life by the knocking. The air in front of the chamberlain chilled, the temperature in the room dropping noticeably. The chill caused his breath to form a mist even as it dissipated before his eyes.
The Villain King motioned for his woman to come forward. A plain-faced woman with voluptuous curves, she clutched a black chalice in her hands. Her hands trembled, Mason noticed, and there were beads of sweat in the fine hairs lining her upper lip. She was nervous. Unreasonably so, it seemed to him. He turned his attention to the cup. It was devoid of any ornamentation, but obviously old. Older than any of the artefacts at the table. Its most recent use, Mason knew, had been to decant the blood of Mary I, Bloody Mary as she was known, and drunk by her privy counsellor, Francis Englefield. The man, exiled to Spain in his latter years, driven both mad and blind by overpowering conduit his flesh had somehow—and uncontrollably—opened to The Art, snuck back to Westminster where his queen was interred, and like a thief in the night opened the sarcophagus she would later share with her sister Elisabeth, and drained her blood so that he might drink like some vampire come a tap tap tapping. But the stories of where the blood-drinking Englefield had found the chalice varied, some chasing back to the Poor Knights Convento de Cristo, the round church in Tomar, Portugal, claiming it was actually the black grail, the cup of Judas from the fabled ”last supper,” brought back from the Holy Land during the last crusade. Others thought that the Devil’s Cup had actually been fashioned by Wayland the Smith as an offering to that shrewd and knavish sprite Robin Goodfellow. Take a sip from the chalice, say the ’Devil’s name and he shall appear, Mason thought, remembering his mythology. That would be enough to make any cupbearer’s hand tremble, wouldn’t it? Knowing that any one at the table could call forth an evil that bore no resemblance to the mischievous creation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Whatever the truth, there was no doubting the ominous aura surrounding the black chalice. The wench set it down on the table between Mercy and the King’s Cross, causing the chamberlain to suspect that the objects themselves were representing some sort of uneasy balance, the cross of Jesus, the sword of the angels the fulcrum, and the cup of either Judas or the Devil on the other side. There was no doubting the significance of it, nor that it was added last to the tab
le.
Any one of these treasures ought to have been hidden away in the al kimia beneath 111, Grays Inn Road. They were both priceless and irreplaceable. But more importantly, they were almost certainly dangerous. Artefacts like these were the preserve of the Greyfriars, they were not meant to just be out there where the wrong people could find them.
Arnos took up the chalice and sipped from it. ”Drink with me,” he said, ”we are all equals here, brothers at the feast, and by drinking pledge that no harm shall come to any of our brothers whilst we are sat.” It was a variant on the ritual of breaking bread. No man would harm a guest at his table. Arnos passed it on to the man at his right, who supped from it, and so it went around the table, each of them taking a single swallow. By the time everyone had drunk from the chalice it was empty. Arnos set it back down beside the sword and settled back into his chair, a smug smile settling on his lips. ”There,” he said. ”Now, we have each drunk once from water drawn fresh from the Well of Shadows this morning,” the Villain King said. One of the other Kings, Coram, pushed himself up from the table rage on his pock-marked face. ”Sit down, Coram, unless you want to accelerate the poison’s effects? Getting excited will just get you killed all the quicker. Your heart is working overtime pumping the poison out to every inch of your wretched carcass right now.”
”You poisoned us?” Crayford said in disbelief. His fat fingers went instinctively to his lips as though he could somehow feel the residue there. He looked down at his fingertips.
”And myself,” Arnos said, reasonably.
”Why?” Penge asked, equally reasonably. In fact, Mason noticed, the man seemed the least disturbed by this turn of events. It was as though he had expected it. Perhaps that was what they meant when they talked about honour amongst thieves—expect murder, expect treachery, expect betrayal, for those are just as much a code of honour as any so-called chivalry.
”Put this way, my good lady here has a second goblet, this one filled with a tincture that effectively neutralises the effects of Shadow Well’s poisonous water. All you have to do is listen without prejudice, and then when we have reached an accord she will distribute it amongst us all.”
”And if we don’t reach an accord?” Penge asked.
”Let us just say that now we have an added incentive,” the Villain King said.
”There was absolutely no need to resort to poison, man, it’s a dirty beggar’s trick. We’re above that.”
”Clearly we are not,” Locke said, ”or at least some of us aren’t.” He steepled his fingers and leaned forward in his seat. Like Mason, he must have recognised the chalice’s origins. ”So, perhaps you would care to share the contents of this message before those less hardy amongst us start to convulse?”
Crayford growled. He still hadn’t sat himself back down in his seat. A red blush crept up his throat, giving him a deathly cast. Blood pulsed through his temples.
”Oh, do sit down, Crayford. You’ll burst a blood vessel if you keep fuming like that. I’d hate to have to explain to your good lady that you died under the protection of the Peace,” Arnos said. ”And you are quite right, Master Locke, time is wasting, and given that time is the one thing no one at this table has a surfeit of,” the notion seemed to please Arnos no end, ”I bid you to listen to the words of the dead and urge you to remember that the dead have no vested interest in this life and as such tell no lies.” He turned his attention to the auto-icon of Dee. ”Share with us the gravity of your latest vision, Maester,” the Villain King commanded.
All eyes turned to the auto-icon. In response to Arnos’s voice, or some trigger word hidden in his words, the auto-icon’s leathery head lurched up and its back straightened. John Dee’s bones didn’t speak for the longest time. The silence grew uncomfortable. Crayford was obviously on the verge of another outburst and seemed ready to knock the stuffing out of the auto-icon. And then it spoke:
”I have seen,” it said in a voice brittle with disuse, ”and as I have seen so it shall come to pass.” Mason turned in his chair, looking for wires or any sign that they were being huckstered by the Villain King, but there were no obvious levers or pulleys, and no guide wires that he could see. Of course that didn’t mean it wasn’t some elaborate scam being pulled by Arnos at their expense, after all he had just poisoned everyone at the table … or had he? They only had his word that the water had been drawn from the Well of Shadows, and convincing your enemies they were poisoned was almost as good as actually poisoning them. They’d be just as pliable; after all, they wanted the antidote. The chamberlain couldn’t help but admire Arnos. The man was something of a twisted genius—exactly the kind of man you didn’t want to make an enemy of. ”The Old Gate breached, the tree withered and black. The Garden filled with corruption,” John’s Dee’s voice cracked and broke then, the auto-icon’s jaw moving with no words emerging from his mouth. Mason wondered if the dupe had somehow failed, but even as he was about to voice his doubts Dee’s eyes rolled up inside his leathery face, showing only the whites to those gathered around the table. Those were the same glass eyes the man had supposedly had fashioned a decade before his death and carried around in his pocket for years. The auto-icon found its voice again, though the words were even more fragmented than before. ”Twofold returned … In each a darker truth burns … Out of lime the dead rise … The veil breached … Giants lay waste to Lud’s domain … Heaven is on fire …” and then the last, an order, barked out, ”Burn with me …” The auto-icon’s head fell forward, the bones once more silent.
Arnos looked around the table, his gaze going from face to face.
The repetition of that demand, burn with me, wasn’t lost on Mason, nor, by the looks of it, did it slip by Millington, McCreedy or Locke. The chamberlain didn’t like it. It went beyond coincidence. The fact that no one else seemed to share their discomfort didn’t make it any less worrying. Mason wondered if any of them had heard the demand before? Did Arnos know what it meant? As it was the fragmented rambling of the auto-icon was hardly worth calling a Conclave and risking the Peace, was it?
McCreedy spoke first. The big man planted his knuckles on the table and raised himself slowly to his feet. He looked Arnos squarely in the eye. ”Am I supposed to know what that cryptic nonsense actually means?”
An easy smile spread across the Villain King’s face. ”I am quite sure you know what it means, Wolf, but you mask your understanding well. A little more bluster next time, like old Crayford, perhaps, to better sell it? There is a war being fought on the streets of London.”
”When isn’t there?” McCreedy said, struggling to hold his composure. Mason recognised the signs. The Anafanta was rising up to the surface. It was only the supreme strength of the big man’s will that held the beast in check.
Before anyone could offer up an answer, the auto-icon’s head came up and its clawed hand shot out, levelling a finger at Napier, who had been sat silent all this while, simply studying the goings on. ”Ere Babylon was dust, the Magus Zoroaster, my dear child, met his own image walking in the Garden. That apparition, sole of men, he saw. For know there are two worlds of life and death: One that which thou beholdest; but the other is underneath the grave, where do inhabit the shadows of all forms that think and live till death unite them and they part no more… .”
Mason knew the passage, but there was no way John Dee could, given Shelley had penned them some hundred and fifty odd years after his death. They were from Prometheus Unbound. What he didn’t know was why the auto-icon had spouted them, nor how they fit into the dupe Arnos was obviously working. Met his own image walking in the Garden? It fit unerringly with the reference to the Old Gate in the vision it had recounted. Where the Kruptos Door sealed the stairway down to Pandemonium, the Ald Gate sealed the entrance to the Garden. Angels, daemons, Eden, Pandemonium, the dead rising from the lime. It was all the chamberlain could do to suppress a shiver. Two worlds of life and death? The apparition of man? It was all too neat. It had that oh-so-insincere ring of a sting about
it, but that didn’t mean it was a dupe.
There are stranger things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy, the chamberlain thought, knowing full well the truth of that Shakespearean couplet. His entire life was dedicated to those stranger things. Hadn’t he just the night before witnessed a woman possessed by … by what? An entity channelling The Art from one of the oblique cities? Hadn’t an angel turned up dead in his ward? Hadn’t McCreedy himself come back with tales of the Ald Gate having opened and the daemon Cain fighting the archangel Uriel on the steps of Eden? Of everyone at the table he was the least likely to discount the auto-icon’s prophecy. But that didn’t mean he believed it.
He looked around the table once again. This time he was looking for tells, visual clues that would betray what was going on inside the minds of the men he shared the round table with. If it was all an elaborate hoax one of them knew what was happening. The body spoke its own language, one that—if you were unaware of it—was almost impossible to silence. Mason had spent his life in the service of others. Reading the language of the body was merely another skill he had honed. A good chamberlain learned to read his Masters. The Villain Kings, Penge, Crayford, Kilburn, Acton, Blackwell, Hockley, Mortlake, Coram, Lancaster, Goodman, Whitehall, Devil’s Acre and Arnos met his gaze. They seemed confused by the sudden twist thrown out there by the auto-icon’s accusation, even Arnos. That was interesting. Had Arnos not expected the poetry? What did his surprise mean? Or was he pretending surprise? Surely if he had fed the vision into the auto-icon for recital he had to have provided it with Shelley? Which meant the look on his face was nothing more than another level to the ruse, surely? Was he that devious? The answer to the second part of that thought was yes, of course he was that devious. You didn’t rise to the top of the criminal fraternity without being untrustworthy scum. Why should you be expected to change just because you mastered your chosen profession of deceit? There was no such thing as an honest criminal. So, did his surprise add veracity to the rest of the auto-icon’s prophecy? Or did it only serve to prove that the rest of it was nothing more than an elaborate sham?
London Macabre Page 18
