Instead, he looked down at the lion, and for just a moment imagined the impossible beast nodded. It was the subtlest of gestures, if it even existed, but the sensation that the lion was somehow party to his thoughts was undeniable. And by extension, that the subtle nod was the beast’s way of giving permission. The moonlight reflected off its bronze eyes, the glint betraying a fierce intelligence hidden within the living metal. Mason didn’t know what this creature was, really, but in that look he felt a kinship with the beast that he couldn’t explain. And inherent in that kinship was trust.
Mason let the broken sword slip through his fingers.
It clattered to the cobblestones.
He had no need of its reminder. Sometimes death could be merciful. Sometimes it was the only mercy.
He pulled the trigger, praying the Distillator would work.
There was no recoil, but a lever within the Distillator shunted forward and the entire glass compartment within the brass cage vibrated weakly. He kept it aimed at the Ice Queen’s face as the valves clicked open and the pulse of electricity sizzled through the fine brass wires Hittorf-Crookes glass inner tube. The metal gears ratcheted around first one then a second revolution, channelling the electric charge to the Ruhmcorff coil and loosing the electrostatic pulse in place of the bullet.
The Ice Queen threw her head back and screamed as the ribbon effect of the pulse hit her full in the face and fastened onto the water molecules that made up her stolen ”flesh.” In less than a second it had begun to pull her away from the girl beneath, elongating her features until they stretched beyond anything even remotely recognizable as human, and still the Distillator drew them out greedily.
The Distillator began to buck in his grasp, but Mason’s aim was true. He held it steady even as the brass fittings around the barrel began to heat up—so much so that he felt the sting of the metal searing his skin, and in less than a minute could smell the unmistakable sickly sweet stench of burning flesh.
Still his aim did not waver.
”You do not belong here, lady. Whatever you are, you are no queen of mine.” Mason spat the words out, the pain from his raw hand all but unbearable as his skin charred.
He pumped the trigger again, ratcheting the gears and levers round another turn, intensifying the electromagnetic pulse and wrenching the Ice Queen further away from the girl she had possessed. And the further away she became, the less recognizably human her substance was. Even her screams distorted, becoming less than human as she was torn away from the girl. It was as though Emily Sheridan leant the Ice Queen those lingering aspects of humanity, and suddenly wrenched free of their bond, this twisted Victoria was reduced to her elemental, animalistic, core.
And then he felt the Distillator shudder in his hand.
One of the brass cogs in the gear mechanism had buckled out of true, causing the electrical pulse feeding the Ruhmcorff coil to stutter.
Frantically, Mason pumped the trigger again.
The cog slipped, almost biting on the next gear in the mechanism before twisting free, and the pulse failed.
Chapter Seventy-Three
Sensing that something was wrong, the Ka hurled itself toward its queen.
There was no time for thought. It was instinct. Pure instinct.
It reached out to catch her as she toppled forward, throwing itself into the shivering blue electromagnetic pulse of the Blondel Distillator as the glass jar inside the brass cage shattered and the weapon failed.
The Ka only had eyes for its queen.
It caught and held her even as the fading pulse plucked at the fabric of its being. And because of its unique manmade physiognomy it could survive where anyone else on the riverside would have perished. It wasn’t like them. It was flesh, yes, but it had no blood. Even as it felt the sharp agony of the pulse tear at its flesh on a molecular level, it endured.
But its queen could not.
She had been wrenched away from the body of the girl, her being entirely ice, and the Distillator had begun the process of transforming her back to her base element. She was melting in its hands. Her unnatural life trickled through its fingers even as it tried to hold her together. Her features lost their sharp edges and definition as her cheekbones sagged, opening gaping cavities where her icy eyes had been, only for her brow to slip down over them and leave a featureless plain in its wake. Her mouth had frozen open, but there was no scream, no sound at all save the drip, drip, drip of dissolution.
Its hands sank into the Ice Queen even as it tried to protect her from the weapon, even as the pulse finally died, still she continued to melt.
She was cold.
So cold.
It wasn’t death, not in the mundane sense of the word, because it she had never truly been alive. She was a parasite. She fed on the girl beneath the ice. She fashioned herself on the body and seeped deep into the mind of the girl. But she was still its queen. She still demanded its loyalty even as she soaked into its fine clothes and spilled her essence across the cobbled street.
”Take me,” it urged its queen, leaning forward as it cradled her ruination. It whispered urgently into the ever-widening cavity where her ear had been only moments before. Her dissolution was accelerating. The hollow between her breasts had become a pit, and the pit had melted all the way back to where her spine ought to have been, while the breasts themselves dripped down over the entire length of her body, puddling on the cobbles. ”Take my flesh. I am strong enough to carry you. I am a vessel. This is my purpose. This is why I was created. Let my body be your body. Let me serve you, my queen.”
The water of her being soaked into its clothes, clammy and cold against its skin. It held her closer to it, pressing its face against the smooth plane of her cheek, shaping the melting ice around the contours of its own cheek and nose. The cold seeped into its pores. The cold infiltrated its empty veins and pumped through its system, spreading to every inch of its manmade flesh.
It wanted to believe it could feel her inside the cold.
But it couldn’t.
There was no underlying sentience within the water. There was no intelligence driving its invasion. It was simply cold.
The Ka looked up, the agony of abandonment in its eyes as it stared hatefully at Mason.
The change stole upon it. It felt its fingertips numb, then as it flexed them, felt the skin crack. Inch by inch, rime frosted up the length of its forearms, fusing flesh and cloth as it rose up to its throat like a blush. As the rime crystallised it crusted, and that crust spread like creeping death across the Ka’s body until it was a thing of ice. The Ka smiled triumphantly as its eyes became glassy.
And then it felt her touch its mind and it rejoiced.
”My queen,” it said, in a voice not entirely its own.
The ice crept inside its mouth, melting luxuriously down its throat before it began to solidify again, claiming the Ka’s vocal chords for its own.
When it next spoke, the Ka had no control over the words that emerged frosted and brittle from its mouth. Nor did it have any control over its body as its head turned slightly, looking away from the chamberlain waving his two broken weapons impotently and down at the fallen girl who lay sprawled out across the ground, coughing and retching, soaked to the skin with the Ice Queen’s melt. She shivered uncontrollably. Those shivers quickly mutated into convulsions as her body went into hypothermic shock. The Ka turned back to the meddling chamberlain and sneered. ”We are not amused.”
And again, the ground beneath their feet shivered as the Golem’s massive foot came crashing down.
Chapter Seventy-Four
Brannigan Locke ran through the streets without looking back.
No matter how fast he ran, no matter how desperately he pumped his arms and legs, the long shadow of Father London outran him, stretching on in front of him as he raced the length of Minories and through the grounds of Trinity Church. The old tombstones sank a little deeper into the earth with the aftershock of each of Father London’s footsteps, ca
nting and crumbling. Plots of earth had caved in where the coffin beneath had obviously been split open by the tremors. As he navigated a safe path through the graveyard, Locke fancied he saw the occasional glimpse of bone as though the dead were trying to claw their way out of their graves. It was more likely chalk or flint, the rational part of his brain insisted, but that didn’t lessen the eeriness of the situation in the slightest.
He left the graveyard via the gate onto Aldgate High Street.
All around him Londoners pushed and screamed and fought with each other trying to flee the Golem’s shadow. It was panic on the streets, pure and simple. And in that panic these people who insisted they were ”the salt of the earth” trod on one and other in their panic, happy to sacrifice someone else to the Golem just so long as it wasn’t them. It made Locke sick to the stomach. He pushed his way into the crowd, fighting against it all the way to Whitechapel. More than once he thought he caught a glimpse of one of the Villain Kings pushing in the opposite direction, trying to get closer to the danger. Locke ducked, trying to keep bodies between him and them. Whether he liked it or not, he couldn’t trust them. The panic on the streets bought him some confusion in which to hide, so, for that, at least, he was grateful to the selfish, venal, frightened denizens of the East End.
He stopped on the corner, beneath the chapel steps, letting the crowds push past him.
He stared.
Six steps above him the doors of the white chapel hung open. Beyond it, fire burned without so much as even a wisp of escaping through the doors. Even as he stared at the impossible fire raging inside the church, Locke realised that it wasn’t inside the church at all. It was somewhere entirely else. Blood slicked the steps and a huge iron gate lay twisted and buckled off to the side. Locke knelt, touching the blood, raising it to his lips as though he could somehow taste that it was angel’s blood. He knew full well it was. McCreedy had told them what had happened here.
The death of an angel.
And the ruined gate? That had to be the Ald Gate itself. He looked up at the fire, wondering what secret it consumed. Whatever it was, it was something that had been worth guarding for millennia. But now the Ald Gate had not only been opened, it had been destroyed, the vampiric gatekeepers turned, and this great secret they protected was burning.
To Locke it felt like the entire world was crumbling like the stone arch that barely supported the chapel’s roof.
But this wasn’t what he had come here for.
Time and tide and all of that, he thought, seeing the shadow of Father London swallow another stretch of street. Somewhere along the way the tremors had lost their power to scare him, now they were nuisances to be negotiated. It was the way his mind worked, they were known quantities, and what was known was not worthy of fear, respect yes, but not fear. He wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and ran on, towards Spitalfields and the warren of streets known as the Liberty of Norton Folgate.
The house he was looking for was halfway down White Lion Street. He had never seen it before, this was not a place for him or his kind, but he recognised it immediately when he saw it. There was a watcher set into the brickwork on the corner, its all-seeing eyes turned to the doorway protectively.
And now, standing in front of the Sanctuary’s door, Brannigan Locke felt the first stab of doubt. Was it really conceivable that sorcerers capable of turning time to sludge and turning the vampires would leave their lair unprotected? He knew the answer to that question and wished he hadn’t asked it. But now that he had, what he was about to do stopped being reckless and became merely stupid.
Locke looked up at the blind windows, then at the sills and the wooden sashes and frames, but for the life of him couldn’t see so much as a knot in the timber. Not that the near-dark and the thick shadows helped, but lighting a taper and examining the windows was out of the question. He had to look as though he belonged in White Lion Street, and more importantly, had every right to walk into the Brethren’s Sanctuary. Anything else marked him as a stranger. Away from the panicked crowds he was vulnerable and exposed.
He put his head down and walked toward the door purposefully. One step away, he reached out and placed his hand against the lock. Not against the handle but the brass lock plate. To any unwanted eyes it would have looked as though he were reaching out to open the door, which he was, in a manner of speaking.
He scuffed his feet at the threshold; it was an excuse to give the stoop a cursory examination, but he could not see any of the tell-tale markings of a glyph or ward.
”Here goes nothing,” he said to himself, and channelled his thoughts toward his fingertips. It wasn’t magic. It was sound scientific principle, but it might as well have been magic. As with the crystal chandelier in the Conclave, Locke tapped his gift. It was mind over matter. He drew on The Art to agitate the brass on a molecular level, though instead of accelerating their motion and generating heat to warp and stretch the metal he used psionics to slow the random motion of the molecules to a standstill, effectively freezing them. And frozen, they became brittle. With one sharp rap of his knuckles on the brass plate it cracked open with a spider-web of fissures. The cracks ran deep, into the crude tumblers of the lock itself. Locke’s heart raced. He took a moment to gather himself, letting the chill of the metal sting his fingertips. He closed his eyes. Somewhere in the distance the crowd shouted in panic. A heartbeat later the aftershocks reached him and were greeted by the sounds of breaking glass. With a sharp twist of the doorknob, the lock’s teeth grated against the tumblers, one breaking off against the other. Two more sharp twists and the door swung inwards.
He stood on the threshold, not daring to simply walk in.
But what choice did he have?
He ran his eyes around the doorframe, but again there were no obvious traps.
That, of course, was the problem. No obvious glyphs or wardings or defences didn’t negate the possibility of there being not so obvious ones. On the contrary, it rather guaranteed them.
Locke closed his eyes and crossed the threshold.
The world didn’t end.
His heart didn’t seize up in his chest.
Nothing happened.
No fireball roared down the hallway to consume him.
No viper-filled pit opened up beneath his feet.
Time did not stop.
Hell did not freeze over.
Nothing happened.
And that, in its own way, was far, far worse.
Because it meant they did not need any of these things to protect the Sanctuary … so what the hell was protecting it?
It took Locke a moment to realise what he was seeing. The reception room was the mirror image of the lodging house on Grays Inn Road, identical but reversed. It sent a chill crawling down into his gut to see the familiar mosaic inverted, white tiles where the black should have been laid, black where the white ought to have been. He let his gaze roam around the room before committing himself fully to the crime and adding entering to the charge of breaking. He felt as though he had stepped through a looking glass. Everything was so familiar, down to the pokers beside the fireplace, the leather Chesterfields, the cut-glass decanters, even the arrangement of the ashtrays on the side table. Portraits hung above the mantle. Locke was about to dismiss it as narcissism, when he saw that the oils of all but one of the portraits were actually featureless, the sharp ridges of paint where the palate knives had been scraped across the canvas gave the illusion of an actual face but the closer he looked the more readily apparent it was that these were blanks waiting for the faces to be applied. The only actual face was hauntingly familiar, as well it should have been for he knew it better than he knew his own reflection.
He touched the oil, staring into the eyes of his friend.
Eugene Napier.
He didn’t know what it meant that Napier hung among this gallery of blanks but there was no way it could be a good thing.
He crossed himself and backed away from the mantle.
> He thought of their own house, where would they hide their secrets? The Reading Room was the obvious first place, so he took the stairs two and three at a time, but at the top turned the wrong way, not allowing for the turn and turnabout of the mirror world he had just stepped into. He reoriented himself and twisted the brass handle that opened the Reading Room’s heavy door. Inside, like everywhere else in the Sanctuary, was a bizarre reflection of the familiar, but where their own chamber was immaculately ordered, this room was a study in chaos and clutter. Spread across the conference table were stacks of yellowed papers and leather-bound books. The place reeked of old paper and older still arcana.
Locke quickly scanned the papers, shuffling through them. Some made no sense, others made far too much sense. Fabian had been the historian; he had known the symbology and the craft. With Locke it was all instinctive. He heard the song of creation inside his head, or at least that was how he liked to describe it. He did, however, know enough to recognise several alchemical formulae, though what they did, he couldn’t say with any great certainty. There were also several philosophical tracts on the soul and abstract concepts that really shouldn’t have sat side-by-side with scientific papers. He skimmed the words, listening all the while for sounds of movement on the landing. The last thing he wanted to do was be caught in the Reading Room with no means of escape.
The Sanctuary was silent.
The silence did little to settle his nerves.
He riffled a few more of the pages, but they all seemed to be variants on the same theme. On the bottom of one he saw a scrawled signature he recognised: Blavatsky. On Blavatsky’s papers the words Father London had been underlined with deep scratches of blue ink. The witch is dead, long live the witch, he thought as he flicked through more of the sheets. And there, buried in the mass of formulae and treatise, he found a blueprint for an automaton. It was all very precise; the annotations marked out the scale, angles, materials, stresses and other necessaries for its construction. It took him a moment to appreciate the scale of it, and realise that he was looking at the blueprint for the giant construct striding across the East End, but that wasn’t what caught Locke’s attention. Two words did: Soul Golem.
London Macabre Page 30
