He was in the Lime House.
Down by the River Where the Dead Men Play
Chapter Sixty-Five
Inside the Conclave, time seeped slowly forward.
The grimace rippled across Anthony Millington’s face as he fought through the molasses of slow-time, trying desperately to run and run and run. He threw himself into it body and soul. He gave everything to the simple act of running, and felt as though, like time itself, he were standing dead still. His arms did move, an eighth of an inch, a sixteenth, but it was barely perceptible to the naked eye. His heart slowed, each beat dragged out desperately. Even the light filtering into his eyes crawled, changing the way he saw the antechamber. The slow light bent reality around him.
But his mind raced.
It was the one thing not bound by the treacle effect of whatever trap, incantation or glyph they had stumbled into.
He could see Napier out of the corner of his eye; the slowdown transformed his friend into a lifeless zombie shambling forward. It was eerie. There was no life behind his eyes. No sign of his fierce intelligence. No hint that he was even in there. And then, suddenly, Napier’s outline appeared to shimmer. The shimmer became a blur. And then he was gone. Disappeared. It was as though the man had been lifted out of time. But that was Napier’s gift in action—the man could manipulate the way light refracted, reflected and on occasion bent around his body, making him virtually invisible. The slowdown of time had just made the disappearing act more noticeable.
Millington shivered.
It took an age for the convulsion to work its way through his flesh. By the time it had he could have run a mile or more under normal circumstances. As it was his body had barely moved an inch across the antechamber’s marbled floor.
It was as though he were trapped in some dreadful dream. A dream in which he had to run for his life through the streets of London, chased by the tolling bells of the Ward and Borough churches, and if they caught him his soul would shrivel … and to handicap him the soles of his shoes had been coated with knackers glue so they stuck to the cobbles.
And then, when it seemed that they would be trapped within the Conclave for an eternity, time snapped and they were flying out through the door into the street one after the other. The Villain Kings piled out of the door behind him and stopped dead in the street. The effect was every bit as eerie as the slow-time that had encased them only moments before. Above them the last tattered remnants of fire burned out in the sky. The shadow of the Lime House Golem loomed, bathing the streets below it in a darkness as absolute as death itself. The night was uncomfortably warm. The fire, Millington realised, had thawed the streets and threatened to bake them. To the right, he saw the black line of the river and the gaslights along the embankment, to the left the white stone façades of the Anglo-Palladian style townhouses of the city’s new rich, and in front of him, leaning against the iron railings of the enclosed garden, Dorian Carruthers.
His friend wasn’t moving.
Millington moved cautiously across the street toward him. Around him the others shouted and gesticulated. No one seemed to know what the hell had happened to them, nor what was happening all around them now. Millington didn’t care. He only had eyes for Carruthers. As he drew nearer, Millington could see that not only wasn’t he moving, he wasn’t breathing, either. He reached out, feeling his friend’s neck for a pulse. The skin was icy to the touch. Carruthers’s head lolled forward, his entire body slumping against Millington. Millington caught him, and not knowing what else to do, lay him down in the street. He had seen dead people before, and there was no denying the fact that Dorian was dead. His eyes, rolled back so only the whites showed, stared blindly up at him. Rigor had already begun to set into his muscles, meaning he must have died shortly after they entered the Conclave. Millington checked again for a pulse, this time at the wrist. He willed Dorian to cough or shiver or something, anything, just to show that he’d returned to his body from wherever his consciousness had gone, but this was different. He wasn’t travelling. He wasn’t looking out through someone else’s eyes. Atropos, the Moirae, had cut the thread.
The last thing he had seen, the blazing sky, was burned into his eyes. Now, for eternity, all Dorian Carruthers would see was fire.
He closed his friend’s eyes and looked up to see Arnos standing over him. The Villain King looked stricken, close to panic. ”Is he … ?” He let the sentence trail off, as though he couldn’t bring himself to say the word ”dead.”
Millington nodded.
”We are under attack!” another of the Kings shouted from across the street.
”A trap!”
And another voice cried: ”We have been betrayed!”
There was no denying the truth of it; they had been betrayed. Someone had set the glyphs that bound them to the Conclave, just as someone had set them to keep Dorian out, isolating him so they could pick the Gentlemen Knights off one by one. Alone we are weak, together we are strong. It was a simple truth. Together they were strong but it felt like an age since they had been together, even if it had only been a day and a night since they had fought the daemon Meringias outside Saint Paul’s. He looked from face to face, searching for signs of complicity, but the Villain Kings were either innocent or incredibly accomplished liars. He could not read the seven gatekeepers, but neither could he discount them. The simple fact of their presence at the Conclave meant Arnos had expected trouble—was this the trouble he had expected? Could he have anticipated—or known about—the betrayal? Or, deeper, darker, could he have been behind it? Was it possible? There was no honour amongst the Villain Kings, that much was apparent, but just how low could they go to gain control? Wipe out the Conclave, control the city. Sure, there would be turf wars, but the surviving Villain King would have the might to win them. Not only win, but crush any resistance. Soon, done right, the thirteen would be reduced to one. One king to rule the entire city. Could the promise of that kind of power be enough to cause one of the Villain Kings to turn on his brothers? Millington knew the answer without even voicing the question. Of course they would: all things were fair in love and war.
But any traitor would have known about the Gentlemen Knights and their peculiar gifts, and about the Gatekeepers of the London Wall and all of the others sworn to protect the great city, meaning they would have known they needed help, and not just in the form of muscle. Millington knew what that meant, and the thought chilled him to the bone despite the residual heat of the burning sky. Whoever it was had aligned with the Brethren. There could be no other explanation for the events of the last few hours. The game afoot was more dangerous than any he could have anticipated.
Millington watched them as they took up defensive positions around the Villain Kings. They were ready—hungry even—to fight.
He looked around for Eugene Napier, but the man was nowhere to be seen. That didn’t mean he wasn’t there, of course, merely that he could not be seen by the naked eye. He scanned the shadows, looking for the tell-tale blur where the light was being manipulated, but the gaslight and moonlight shadow made it impossible. Napier was either there or he wasn’t. He couldn’t worry about it. There was something else that demanded his attention: birds had gathered across the face of the moon, forming a face of their own.
”What are you trying to tell me?” Millington asked, barely a whisper. He didn’t need to shout. Animals heard him. That was his gift. He could talk to the animals. They loved him. The scientific term was animist, but what it all came down to was his ability to communicate with other species. Compared to the others it could easily be argued that his talent was little more than a party trick, and indeed, he had used it more than once to amuse children, including his friend John Lofting’s brood. But there was a more serious side to it. Animals saw the world in a different way to humans. They saw things most people ignored or simply missed, and they were fiercely loyal to the pack, or the flock in this case. It was a mentality Anthony Millington shared. Loyalty to the pack ran in his b
lood; though his pack walked on two legs, not four. It gave him a bond to McCreedy unlike anything the others shared, because even after the big man unleashed his Anafanta and slipped into wolf form Millington knew him better than he knew himself.
The face formed by the flock of ravens shifted, formed and reformed until it became recognizably Dorian Carruthers’s.
It was a message, all right. He strained to hear their caws but they were too distant to make out any real meaning behind them. He had to rely upon his eyes. The ravens had no reason to mourn Dorian, he thought, and then the realization hit him. Of all the creatures in the city, the ravens had come together to form his face—ravens, soul guardians. He knew Dorian’s gift, the man could talk to the dead as easily as he could talk to animals. It stood to reason he would have a connection with the ravens. Just as McCreedy and Millington were bonded, so too was Carruthers. It was a different kind of bond, but it was a bond just the same. And now the birds were telling him that his friend was still alive. He didn’t question the message, nor how they might know. Now wasn’t the time.
In the distance, beyond the shouting, Millington heard the feral growl of McCreedy’s wolf, and knew the big man was in trouble. He had been the first out of the Conclave, quicker even than the traps laid to snare them, but that didn’t mean he had been quick enough to avoid danger. No. It meant he had had to face it alone.
Well, not anymore.
Millington pushed himself to his feet. ”You,” he yelled at the nearest man. The keeper of the Lud gate, turned, his vampiric face as empty of emotion as it was blood. ”Come here,” Millington commanded, finding a strength he didn’t know he had. His friends needed him. He wasn’t about to let them down. ”Do not allow anyone close to his body. Do you understand me, Gatekeeper? It is imperative you protect him. Should anything happen to his body he won’t be able to return to it. Do you understand?” He pressed.
The vampire nodded wordlessly.
Brannigan Locke came running towards him across the cobbled street. He was cut above the eye. The wound bled freely, running down the side of his face. He looked as though he had gone ten rounds with a ham-hock fisted pugilist, bare knuckle. He was bruised and seemed dizzy and disorientated. He saw Millington, and then Dorian’s body laid out at his feet and seemed, momentarily, to come back to himself. Then, lastly, he saw the Lud Gate vampire. He dragged Millington aside.
”Locke? What happened to you?” Millington didn’t understand.
”No time,” Locke said, shaking his head. He staggered, catching himself against the railing. He leaned in close, his lips barely an inch from Millington’s ear. ”We can’t trust the Seven, they’ve shown their hands. Cripple Gate’s keeper is dead.” He looked down at his long coat and then back, looking Millington in the eye. Millington saw the dust and his imagination filled in the gaps. ”We can’t leave Dor alone with it, not like this. Not now. We can’t trust that this one hasn’t been turned, or that it wasn’t always lying in wait for the time to reveal itself. Are you with me, Anthony?” Millington nodded tightly. ”Good man. All right, we have got to get to McCreedy …” Locke’s voice trailed off as he looked over Millington at something. ”The Brethren are behind everything, I swear it. They know our gifts. They’ve made contingencies. None of this is random. Chance. We are undone, Anthony. We cannot win here. We must get out of this place, regroup. We need to think then act, but we can’t risk tipping our hand. This one doesn’t seem to know its kin is dead. That means they don’t share a mind, they can’t sense when one of their bloodsucking kin is slain. We can pick them off one at a bloody time if we have to. But whatever we do, we’ll have to carry Dor between us. We can’t leave him here, not when he’s like this.”
Millington wasn’t about to argue. He helped his friend lift the lifeless body of Dorian Carruthers, slipping Dor’s limp arm around his neck and his own arm around Dor’s back to hold him beneath his armpit. Brannigan Locke did likewise. With McCreedy’s snarls to guide them, they started to run toward the embankment.
The Lud Gate vampire watched them leave put didn’t move to stop them. It opened its jaw wide, incisors descending slick with spittle, and seemed to mouth the words ”Burn with me.”
Across the street the remaining five of the Seven ancient vampires threw back their heads and roared ”Burn!” in unison.
Chapter Sixty-Six
The Ka was untouched by the slow-time trap.
It watched the others, Millington, the Villain Kings, and the vampiric protectors as they were snared by it, but didn’t wonder why it was immune. It knew. Its body had been fashioned for a purpose, and this was a part of it. Their bodies blurred around the edges, as though losing definition. It moved between them, studying their faces as they froze in place, even going so far as to touch the area over Millington’s heart to feel out his heartbeat. For a moment it believed the man’s heart had simply stopped along with the rest of him, but that wasn’t true. The beats came, but the spaces between them stretched on and on. His first thought was that he could simply slit the Gentleman Knight’s throat then and there and no one would be any the wiser. His hand went instinctively toward the silver dagger he wore sheathed in his high leather boot. It would be easy. Simply touch the blade to the side of his throat and draw it around in a smooth arc. Given the almost-frozen beat of his heart, the Ka could even time the fatal cut so that none of the arterial spray betrayed it. More, it could work its way around the entire chamber killing them one by one. Who would stop it? Not Millington, nor the interfering chamberlain, Mason.
It stopped dead still, sniffing the air. The perfume of old death clung to the air. It saw the dust on the staircase and the word written into it. Shards of glass lay in pieces at the foot of the stairs. The Ka glanced up at the denuded chandelier. All that remained of it were a few iron chains and the coronets where the crystal had hung. It read the scene as well as any forest tracker might. There had been a fight and one of the ancient vampires had fallen. There was a single footstep in the dust. Slowly, face by face, it looked around the room. They were three men short. McCreedy had been the first out of the Conclave. He had hared out of the room as though his tail were on fire—and no doubt that had saved him even as he had triggered the glyph that had been laid specifically to snare him. The Ka could smell the residual tang of The Art still thick in the air. The man was preternaturally fleet of foot, not merely fast, but of course he was part wolf. Mason had no such gift, and yet he was not among their number either. Somehow he had evaded the snare. The Ka looked back towards the Conclave’s chamber and through the shimmering portal saw the room beyond. Mason remained in his seat beside the auto-icon and seemed to be looking for whatever trick automated it. Typical that just this once curiosity saved the cat, it thought.
Brannigan Locke was the other one missing from the standing statues.
Curious.
It could not recall seeing the man leave the chamber, but when it thought back now it seemed that his seat had been empty for a very long time. It reeked of trickery.
The Ka would not have expected such resourcefulness from the man. To slip away unnoticed was one thing, but to fight one of the ancients and live was unusual. To do so without an arsenal was almost unheard of.
As though sensing its scrutiny, Mason looked up and locked eyes with the Ka. It did not move. Did not breathe. It needed the chamberlain to believe it was trapped, anything else would tip its hand too soon. It was a fragile illusion. The man was already suspicious. It had seen the way he looked at it, always sidelong glances, doubt, suspicion. And the man was devious. The way he moved, furtively sneaking around in the background all of the time carrying his silver service platters, polishing the brass fixtures and fittings with what smelled like catgut wax. Suspicion and constant lurking made dangerous bedfellows as far as it was concerned.
Finally Mason broke eye contact and looked away.
The Ka breathed out a slow sigh of relief but didn’t risk moving again until the chamberlain was out of sight.
It waited.
And then it moved. Quickly. The Ka rushed across the marble floor, soft shoes barely scuffing the surface. Still, the slow-time meant that its footfalls were to all intents and purposes silent.
It slipped out into the street.
It could sense her out there, its queen, and knew he had to stand by her side. That was its purpose here. There would be a battle. It could taste death on the air. It would fight at its queen’s side. It would protect her. That was why it had been sent through.
It tossed back its head and breathed in the scents of coal dust, brimstone and ice, sniffing out her scent.
It would find her.
She needed it.
It would not fail her.
With the shadows of flame writhing across the cobbles, it raced off after her, coattails lapping around its legs like angry dogs as it ran. It sniffed left and right at every corner, following the odour of wrongness that clung to his queen. She wasn’t of this place. It could smell the difference, even from a mile away. It paused beneath a stuttering gas lamp. The flame spat and crackled above its head, burning blue. Somewhere in the distance a forlorn foghorn sounded. Life was beginning to return to the river. It wouldn’t be too long until the hawkers and tallymen were out with the market traders. This was London. This was life. It was the same in every London. Above the Ka’s head, the blue flame popped once, loudly, and then went out. A blockage in the pipe. The Ka heard the hiss as the nozzle continued to leak gas into the street. This time there was no flame to burn it off.
Left to spill gas into the street all night, this one lamp was a tragedy waiting to happen. It looked up at the side of the house and the leaded windows and their thick velvet curtains. It was the same across the street. New money. Well, the inhabitants of these few flats were about to learn a valuable lesson: all the money in the world couldn’t protect you from the reaper when it was your time. The Ka did not smile. It did not feel any satisfaction in their plight. It did not feed on inevitability. It was a creature of entropy. From the moment of its creation its flesh was failing. From its first step it was walking toward its last. It did not pity them, either. It identified with them. The only difference between the people lying in their beds in the rooms up there and the Ka was that they were unaware. It wasn’t. Death was ever present in its mind. Not so much a ticking clock as it was a decaying one.
London Macabre Page 26
