Mason walked across to the dresser where the black chalice stood, took the phial from his pocket and emptied a few drops into the poisoned water, moving his wrist to swirl the two together.
Two things happened almost simultaneously: the viscous yellow liquid acted as a reagent as it hit the water, curls of smoke coiling up from the chalice as the liquid dissipated, while behind him the illusion masking the door failed and it opened with a soft snick. He set the chalice back down on the silver tray.
He couldn’t help but admire Arnos.
Mason crossed the room. The blue flame still clung to his fingers, lighting the escape passage. He paused at the threshold and looked back at the relics on the table. They were too precious—and too dangerous—to leave unguarded, Mason told himself as he moved back to the table to collect them. It wasn’t stealing, he was being practical. In the wrong hands, Mercy, Edward the Confessor’s blade, was beyond dangerous. He hefted the sword and slipped the fragment of the King’s Cross into his pocket. He thought about claiming the Devil’s cup as well, but realised in doing so he would effectively be murdering the Villain Kings as well as his own people. As much as it pained him, he left the chalice on the dresser. Armed with the sword and the cross, he stepped through the door.
It closed behind him soundlessly, sealing him in the dank dark passage. It curved downward, away from him. In the bluish glow of his hand he could see where the centre of the stone floor had been worn smooth by the shuffle of feet. He turned to examine the door behind him. It sat flush in the frame, without so much as a scar to betray its existence. It really was an admirable feat of engineering. And, as far as he could see, there was no release mechanism, meaning he had no choice but to plunge on into the dark passageway. Mason held his hand out in front him, fingers splayed wide. The blue light barely illuminated more than a dozen steps before his face. He walked, listening to the flat sound of his footsteps. There was barely any echo; whatever noise they made was dampened by the weight of stone and dirt pressing down all around him. He heard the steady drip, drip, drip of water in the distance. The ground angled away sharply. The Chamberlain closed his eyes, trying to rebuild an image of the world above him and find his place within it. He reached a narrow set of steps leading down, deep into the darkness and realised they would lead him beneath the river.
He had no choice but to follow them down.
The sliding seconds of silence between the drips shortened the deeper he went, until they began to run together.
The ground above and beneath him shivered.
The rumble followed a full three seconds later. It sounded as though the earth itself were waking, some great elemental giant coming around and shaking off the shackles of rock that bound it. Every stone and the dirt that spilled in to fill the gaps groaned and grated as they strained beneath the immense weight bearing down upon it. Mason had no way of knowing what was happening in the world above him, but something was happening, of that there could be no doubt. With every step he took he could feel its ramifications intensifying in the rumbling of the stones around him. He didn’t want to be down here any longer than he had to be. He held his hand out, peering into the blue light of the tunnel as it levelled out. Instead of brickwork the entire tunnel appeared to be clad with corrugated iron now. The water was trickling between the seams. In places he saw darker stains where rust had formed, weakening the integrity of the iron cladding. He really didn’t want to be caught down here if the tunnel collapsed—neither being buried alive nor drowning were on his agenda.
The iron groaned above him, the sudden surge of water twisting the metal seams far enough apart for half of the brackish river to come pouring down on him.
Mason started to run.
The sound of his footfalls swelled to fill the under-river tunnel, even as the groaning of the iron cladding became more desperate and the susurrus of the falling water deafening as more and more of the ceiling collapsed beneath the weight of gravity.
Mason didn’t slow down.
Mason didn’t look back.
He raced through the tunnel, desperately trying to outrun the river as it rushed in to fill the hollow earth. In moments the echoes of his footfalls turned to splashes as water caught up and overtook him.
And still there was no end to the tunnel in sight.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
McCreedy could feel the casket pitch and roll as the Brethren carried it through the dark city.
He was helpless.
He hated that more than anything.
He roared his frustration but he couldn’t so much as lash out at the silver sides of the casket. He could barely move more than a few inches at a time and everywhere his skin came into contact with the silver it burned. The casket reeked of charred flesh.
McCreedy gagged, hawking up a wad of phlegm he couldn’t spit out.
He was a brawler. He fought therefore he was. Caged like this, taken out of the fight, he was impotent. The big man cursed his stupidity. He had come barrelling out of the Conclave and straight into their trap. They knew their enemy. They knew he would be the first out, and they knew precisely how to neutralise him. McCreedy was predictable. He reacted first, repented later.
With air in the cramped casket already running thin and his head swimming from oxygen starvation he knew there wouldn’t be a lot of time for regret or repentance.
Each breath came sharp and shallow.
How long before he suffocated?
He had no way of knowing. All he could try and do was stifle the rising panic he felt and slow his breathing. There was a single certainty to his life now: the number of breaths left to him was finite. Like a drowning man, McCreedy pressed his lips up toward the corners of the casket, hoping to suck in a little extra air through the seams where the lid and walls joined. There wasn’t even so much as the slightest draught or chink of not-quite-so dark where the night stole in.
He reached into himself, trying to grasp the beast within, to channel the Anafanta into completing the transformation, but it kept slipping away from him. And it became progressively more difficult to grasp the more frustrated and desperate he became. McCreedy had no way of knowing whether it was their incantation or the silver or the poison in his system but something prevented him from changing.
And then the world lurched away from beneath him.
He was falling.
Fast.
Not just falling. Tumbling. He felt the world tip head over heels and then right itself for a crazy second before he heard the splash of impact.
The silver casket hit the River Thames. For a moment it seemed as though it was going to float, bobbing on the surface, but then, agonizingly slowly, his weight began to take it under.
McCreedy summoned all of his strength and surged up against the lid, trying desperately to break the clasps that sealed him in but trapped in this limbo of half-wolf half-man he was too weak. He howled in frustration, panting. He dug his claws into the silver floor of the casket, his howls becoming screams as the silver seared his fingers. He focussed on the pain, embracing it. He arched his back, pressing up against the casket’s lid as he straightened his arms.
McCreedy felt the first dribbles of water on his face as it leaked in through the sides. He welcomed it. Not because with it came the inevitable cold kiss of death but rather because it proved there was no sorcery binding the seals. If water could get in, he could get out.
He desperately needed to believe that.
He kicked at the walls ever more desperately, driving his heels into the silver and trying to force the gap in the seals wider. More water stole in. Not a rush, but enough for him to know that it would only take a minute or two for the casket to flood completely. If he didn’t break the clasps he would be dead no more than a minute or so after that. But breaking the clasp meant he had to force the gap wider still, and the wider the breach the faster the casket would flood.
He was damned if he did, damned if he didn’t.
McCreedy’s heart raced, h
ammering against his breastbone. He almost believed he could feel Arnos’s poison pumping through his veins as he quickly became light-headed.
His breathing turned frantic, fast and shallow, using up the goodness in the air. It didn’t matter anymore. There wasn’t time for the poison to kill him and he would drown long before he suffocated.
He howled again, and pushed with all of his might. It was a more animalistic sound than any that had escaped his mouth since his entrapment. It took him another heartbeat to realise that the transformation was overtaking him. Whether the water dampened the incantation or the Brethren, over-confident in their triumph had ceased their chanting and turned the back on the drowning man-wolf didn’t matter.
The water poured into the casket. It was up around his paws now.
Driven by a desperate mixture of fear and rage McCreedy reached in deep, summoning the wolf.
And this time the Anafanta responded to his need.
The transformation thrilled through every muscle and tendon, going bone-deep. Each and every vertebra in his spine cracked and stretched, his haunches bunched, head dropped, tongue lolled between slack jowls and Haddon McCreedy died as fully and finally as though the water had drowned him, the poison stilled his heart and the coffin suffocated him.
He was reborn as the wolf.
And the silver cage could not hold him.
Chapter Sixty
Trapped within the consciousness of the Golem, Dorian Carruthers felt his hold on his own soul slipping. The lament of the dead was relentless. Overwhelming. The lost souls wailed and moaned and cried out, some refusing to believe they had passed on, others desperate to be heard by those they had left behind, or swearing vengeance, offering bargains for salvation, grieving, beaten. And somewhere within the cacophony Dorian struggled to hold on to his sense of self. With the voices of the dead swelling like an unholy choir all around him it was almost impossible.
Worse, though, by far, was his increasing desperation.
It was a death by one thousand cuts.
Every cry, every shriek, sliced into him, eroding his grip on the boundaries that made him him. Dorian wasn’t merely lessened, he was fractured. Each soul was a fresh cut that bit deep, stinging the thing that had been Dorian Carruthers … and as though the mere act of thinking his name was enough to agitate the dead into a frenzy of excitement, Dorian’s own screams rose and rose, spiralling desperately until they drowned out the dead. ”I AM DORIAN CARRUTHERS!” he bellowed, his name echoing through every inch of the Golem’s enchanted body. ”DO YOU HEAR ME? I AM DORIAN CARRUTHERS,” and beyond that, as the last syllables of his name echoed back to him, the dead souls howled in response. They knew him. Of course they did. He was their conduit to this world. He was the one who heard their lonely cries and their desperation. He was the one who walked through the cemeteries of Highgate and old London and listened to their bones lying there festering away beneath the dirt. He was their mouthpiece. They made themselves heard in this new world above them, the one that had left them behind. Of course they knew him. He was the master of the dead. And yet, for all his supposed mastery, his flesh and blood still stood leaning against a railing in the streets below while his consciousness was locked inside this thing, helpless. The irony of it burned. ”HEAR ME!” he shouted then, though he had no lips to shout with, no teeth to scream through. ”I AM THE MASTER OF THE DEAD!”
That last word, dead, reverberated through the struts that passed for bones inside the huge construct.
The souls fell silent.
This was his own personal hell, he realised sickly. Trapped, alone with the dead, the only man on earth who could hear them. No wonder they shrieked and babbled incessantly, desperate to be heard.
But the knowledge didn’t help him out of his predicament.
He was still trapped within the Golem and all of the rationalizations in the world couldn’t help him.
All he could do was look down through the eyes of the construct at creation, at the streets and the black river cutting through them, every bit as helpless as the dead trapped in here with him. And for once he understood, truly understood, how they felt.
But they had him to listen to their cries. They had him to pin their hopes on. They had him to carry their messages back to the living. Who did he have? Who listened to the listener? No one. And that was why he believed he was in his own unique slice of hell.
He needed to find a way out. That much was obvious. Even without knowing which glyphs the Golem’s creator had used to bind him, Dorian understood that the chances of him finding a weakness worth exploiting were less than none. Instinctively, he could tell that the wardings were perfect. They would hold for forever and a day.
He had to think.
He had to use his mind before it was completely overwhelmed by the dead and rational thought was buried beneath his own tragic lament. It wasn’t his time. He clung to that thought. He wasn’t dead. He had a body waiting for him to return to—though for how much longer? How long would the machinery of his heart keep the blood pumping and his kidneys and liver process of the toxins and purify it? How long until his system started shutting down one process at a time without his consciousness—his soul—to drive it? Whatever the answer was, it was too soon.
He needed to find a bridge between the living and the dead.
He needed to find himself.
That was the irony of the situation.
If it had been any of the others trapped inside the Golem with the dead souls he would have been able to find them. Who listens to the listener? he thought again as he gazed out over the city below. He wanted to scream out his frustration.
To call Dorian Carruthers a necromancer was to do him a grave disservice. He was more than that, or less. His gift meant he could communicate with dead souls, yes, but it was no dark Art that fuelled his gift, rather he was akin to a midwife helping ease their passage into death. The Greek philosophers had a name for it, psychopompos. Escorts for the dead came in many a form depending upon the faith in question, including horses, sparrows, whippoorwills, dogs, crows, cuckoos, harts and ravens. Sometimes guardians, sometimes protectors, always gatekeepers between two states of existence.
Ravens.
Dorian’s focus wandered to the Tower standing sentinel over the black river.
Hundreds of the black-winged birds speckled the rooftop of the Tower of London.
I am Dorian Carruthers, he thought, shouting it out into aether. Hear me! I am Dorian Carruthers, he repeated, come to me! Over and over again he sent the thought out, more desperately each time, willing the birds to rise up and take flight.
And even as the first bird left the Tower the dead around him wailed.
It was as though they knew …
The day the ravens left the Tower would be the day London fell …
Chapter Sixty-One
The tunnel flooded faster than Mason could have anticipated—and much faster than he had hoped—as part of the ceiling collapsed behind him in a rush of rubble. The susurrus of dirt and stone slipping was replaced quickly by the cacophony of splashing water that echoed up and down the confines of the tunnel. Suddenly the freezing water was up around his knees and rising to soak his thighs. The shock of the cold hit him hard. Mason clenched his teeth and splashed on, flailing and kicking up water as he waded toward the black distance at the end of the tunnel.
His world was reduced to icy water and black earth.
Without the blue luminescence clinging to his hand he would have been completely and utterly blind. As it was a bluish film shimmered away toward the black hole waiting to swallow him before he made it back to the surface. If he made it back to the surface. He held Mercy up like a beacon, his free hand slapping against the cold iron-cladding of the tunnel, then suddenly he felt stone beneath his palm. He couldn’t tell if the gradient of the tunnel’s floor changed. It almost didn’t matter. The sheer fact that the tunnel was no longer clad had to mean he had passed beneath the river and was moving tow
ard safety. It was not only impossible to run, it was counter-productive to try. He had to force himself to wade slowly and assuredly forward, letting the water eddy around his thighs as he plunged on.
But there was no light at the end of the tunnel.
The splashes of his shuffling steps were amplified by the weird acoustics of the tunnel.
And still the water rose.
It was up over his belly, the icy grasp freezing him to the marrow.
He felt all the heat flee his body.
He shivered as he splashed on, fighting against the relentless weight of the water.
Despite the irresistible cold gnawing away at his skin, the muscles in his upper arms burned from keeping them raised aloft for so long. He shivered uncontrollably. It was only sheer stubbornness that drove him on. With the water up around his chest Mason was forced to draw the Blondel Distillator from his pocket with his free hand to keep it from getting soaked. There was no way of knowing whether the weapon would work or not if water leaked into its mechanisms. It certainly wasn’t a risk worth taking. Struggling to keep the panic out of his breathing, Mason let the swell of water bully him on deeper into the tunnel.
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