London Macabre

by Savile, Steve

  Mercy be damned, he had to silence her.

  He had no choice.

  She met his gaze with icy resolve, her hateful gaze chilling him to the bone.

  ”I am no traitor, damn you!” he bellowed, but the storm stole his words. He knew what he had to do. It was the only thing that would save the girl, and that meant it was the only thing that would save them all … ”Oh Lord, keep safe our Queen Victoria! You are not our Victoria! I don’t serve you, lady. I serve London herself, and this is my London!”

  Gritting his teeth, Mason raised Mercy to swing, knowing that there was enough of the broken blade to cleave the Ice Queen’s head from her stolen shoulders—for all that the Confessor’s blade had been shattered to show the quality of mercy was compassion, Mason had no choice, she had to be struck down. She wouldn’t die, she was like an icy phoenix, born again from the melt. She would find new flesh to carry her if she needed it. And if she didn’t, she would live in the water itself, like some vile Lorelie, a Thames Maiden.

  Mason knew full well the consequences of what he was about to do.

  He knew that the only new flesh near enough to save her was his.

  But he had no choice but to do it anyway.

  He had to break the link. He had to shatter the ice, or whatever it was within its crystalline structure that allowed the Ice Queen to exert her influence upon it. It didn’t have to be forever, in fact it only needed to be for a few precious seconds, just long enough for the girl to finish the invocation and raise the coal-dust elemental. He would willingly sacrifice himself for that. For his city.

  He didn’t even know if it would work, but what choice did he have?

  In that moment of doubt the sword sang to him. He heard its melancholy voice urge him to spare the woman, to turn away from violence. The sword’s song was powerful. It thrilled through his veins, firing his blood. And a lesser man—or a greater man—would have heeded it, but not Mason.

  He surged forward, shrieking like a banshee as he swung the broken sword two-handed, cleaving it into the crusted nape of her neck and driving it through. The bone didn’t cleave in a single, smooth swing. He stood over her, over whatever Eugene Napier had become, and hacked and hacked with the broken blade until her head rolled across the ground.

  There was no blood.

  And, as he stared at the two horrified faces, one superimposed atop of the other, looking up at him from where the head had fallen, he heard the girl’s voice cry out triumphantly: ”Domine Salvam Fac Reginam Nostram Victoriam Primam,” for the fourth and final time, completing the invocation.

  He didn’t have time to savour his victory.

  The ice had already reached his feet.

  Chapter Eighty

  A second shadow fell across London as the storm raged on.

  The wind raged, gale force, battering the city.

  The eye of the storm was a small, placid area of calm in the Thames where the girl Emily finally surfaced, the last line of the invocation on her lips.

  Every grain and drachm of coal dust from the smog and the chimney soot and the dirty streets agglomerated into the giant shadow man of Emily’s imagination, giving it shape and form and density.

  This was her creation.

  It took her a moment to understand just how much it was hers, but as she saw the black dust form and reform familiar features, each one she knew better than her own reflection, she grasped just what she had done. And then the shadow man became a shadow woman, growing taller still, leaner, and taking on her own face.

  Father London lumbered toward the shadow woman.

  Instead of plunging through it and scattering the coal dust to the four winds, the iron Golem met a solid wall of resistance. The sheer rage of the vortex that bound the shadow woman together was an irresistible force. The surging winds battered the iron Golem back bodily. The grains of coal within the howling wind scoured the iron frame of the Golem, abrading it and degrading it. Father London reacted slowly to the threat, not understanding the attack and unsure. Whatever consciousness drove the iron giant wasn’t used to resistance, but after the first shock, the Golem retaliated. Like a punch-drunk pugilist, it came out of its corner swinging great thumping blows that hit nothing but air.

  But, as Father London came forward, huge feet crushing the bricks and mortar beneath it, those huge, lumbering haymakers started to connect, crashing against the thing that stood in its way. The two titanic forces clashed above the city streets. Father London clobbering the shadow woman again and again, battering her back across the city toward Petticoat Lane and Spitalfields.

  The fight raged on one-sidedly; the shadow woman didn’t defend herself. Rather, the coal-dust elemental simply stood in Father London’s way, the howling winds that held her form together doing all the damage to the iron Golem’s thundering fists as blow after wild blow forced its way into her dusty core.

  Emily was a victim. She had been all of her life. But the coal-dust shadow woman wasn’t. She wasn’t Emily Sheridan. She wasn’t a Bedlamite. She had never been a tallow girl. She was bound together by the wind and conjured from the black stuff of the earth. She was giant. Elemental. She was anything but a victim.

  And that meant she could fight.

  The knowledge empowered both Emily and the shadow woman she controlled, changing the nature of the fight raging above the city. It quickly became less about survival and more about winning.

  And like the gale, the shadow woman was unceasing. Every blow she took only served to strengthen her just as it diminished the Golem, the balance of the battle transferring with the grains of iron as they sheered away to join the vortex of coal dust in the gyre of the shadow woman’s core.

  The shadow woman grew taller still, her shadowy bulk stretching up until she blocked out the moon itself and cast the entire city in her shade. And as she grew, the coal-dust giantess seemed to draw strength from the darkness itself, using it to fuel her growth until she became so vast her swirling shadow devoured the moon.

  And as she grew, the storm worsened, its reach matching its rage.

  With the next wild swing from Father London the shadow woman allowed the storm to lessen momentarily, and as the wind dropped, so too did the centrifugal forces binding her together. The Golem’s iron first sank deep into the shadow woman’s face—Emily’s face—and as the force driving the gyre lessened so too did the substance of the shadow, allowing the fist to sink deeper and deeper into the coal dust only for Emily to slam the trap shut—or more literally, let all of the anger, the years of hurt and doubt, the madness of Bedlam, all of it, vent from her soul and fuel the maelstrom, trapping Father London’s iron fist within the shadow woman.

  The Golem teetered, unbalanced.

  With so much of herself driving the elemental, it became harder and harder for her to exert any kind of control over it. She felt it beginning to come undone even as it drew Father London forward another lurching stumbling step, dragging the Golem off balance. She panicked, drawing the shadow woman back and back away from the iron Golem as she struggled to maintain her hold on its coal dust form.

  She couldn’t.

  But she didn’t need to.

  Not any longer.

  Unable to wrench its massive fist free of the shadow woman’s face as it retreated step by frightened step, Father London lurched, past the tipping point, and came crashing down, destroying a vast tract of the city’s slums in the fall. The shockwaves triggered by Father London’s fall tore through the belly of the earth, shaking the city to its subterranean core and reverberated long after the coal dust had settled and the shadow woman had come undone.

  The raging winds scattered her across the rooftops of London like thick, black snow.

  Chapter Eighty-One

  The cemeteries of London emptied to Sataniel’s siren call. The ground shivered and moaned and split open and their residents crawled and crept and shuffled in his wake. He delighted in leading them like some perverse version of the Hamelin piper. Decay and cal
cification and decomposition made a mess of old bones and rotten clothes, only adding to the horror of the danse macabre as it wound its way through the city.

  Long before the ungodly procession reached the river they met the frightened Londoner’s fleeing from the Golem. ”Caught between the Devil,” he grinned, ”and the deep blue river.”

  The parallels between the expressions of the living and the dead were somehow both comical and harrowing; slack jaws and hungry eyes, emaciated to the point of slack skin and jutting bones draped in rags.

  And for a moment Sataniel allowed his guise to slip, that perfect beauty replaced by the puckish hindquarters of a long-haired goat, cloven hooves scuffing and sparking on the cobbles, long thick cock rampant as it hung between the beast’s legs, chest bared and horns curling out from his temples. It was as much a charade as any other skin the First Son of Angelkind chose to wear, but it was so much more effective than a beatific smile and serene blue eyes when it came to scaring the hell out of the natives. He capered at the front of the column of dead, clattering his hooves off the ground and laughing as he rushed up into the frightened faces of the mothers and fathers of London, braying and bleating and cursing them, and then, as they screamed and panicked, slipping back into the beautiful skin he so preferred. He was enjoying himself.

  The air was beyond cold, unnaturally so. His breath frosted before his face as he slipped into another visage, preferring this time the red blistered skin of a denizen of the Inferno, and shifted his stride from the choppy canter of the goat boy to the more elegant and sinister slope of wildfire spreading. And even as he smouldered, Sataniel allowed his wings to unfurl, stretching them wide so that the membranous, leathery flesh was pulled taut, blanketing the processing with his shadow, only to furl them again, then seemingly lose them as his face shifted once more, this time into the visage of a wizened old man with gnarled bones and cemetery teeth behind his smile. As the blistered skin faded, shoots and leaves grew out of his skin, the foliage budding, ripening then browning and curling, living and dying through four seasons in as many heartbeats. As leaves withered and died and fell away they exposed a great black nothingness where his face ought to have been. He savoured the awe and fear on the faces of the Londoners, teasing them with aspect after devilish aspect until he settled upon the appearance of a wispily bearded youth with piercing blue eyes, blue as the morning sky, bright as the morning sun, and a lean musculature, each muscle honed, defined, and ripe with raw sexuality. This was who he was: enchanting, seductive, beautiful, compelling, worthy of adoration and awe. He made no pretence at modesty and no effort to hide his erection. His was alive. Vital. Potent.

  He was free.

  ”Bow down to me,” he said, his voice low, whispering through the crowds, and yet everyone heard the command as clearly as if it had been whispered right into their ear by the Devil himself.

  The living and dead fell at his feet; worshipping, begging, grovelling, fawning, there was little difference to him. It didn’t matter who they were, how wealthy or how poor, landed, muck dwellers and the dead, on their knees they were all levelled.

  And out of dark the vampires came; his first children, his chosen, ever loyal, eternally patient, the guardians of the old gates, and in his imprisonment, his protectors, not as is brothers might have hoped, his guards.

  His smile widened. ”Danse! Danse!” Sataniel ordered, and as his voice spiralled the dead, lifted their skulls and began to shuffle on, dragging their old bones toward the river. ”I am the lord of the danse,” he told those still on their knees, lapping up the tides of emotion, anxiety, fear and, beneath them, the lust, the avarice, all of the wanton vices of their species, that washed over him.

  And even as they dared raise their eyes toward him, toward the heavens, the city quaked.

  Sataniel breathed deeply of the icy air. It was too cold, even for the heart of winter. Rime and frost coated every window that hadn’t shattered beneath the force of the tremors, whilst the air itself had thickened to the point of choking as the filth of the smog coalesced and the dust and dirt kicked up from the ground to join the winds howling through the narrow streets out into the wider spaces of the city.

  Sataniel followed the direction of their stares to the duel raging above them. The shadow woman and the Soul Golem toe-to-toe, iron fists throwing ragged punches while the coal-dust shadow deflected them one after the other before finally absorbing one of them and snaring Father London and pulling him crashing down.

  The fallout covered vast tracts of the city, putting out the moon and the stars. There would be no dawn for London, the detritus from the demolished homes would take hours to settle. The wind played with the clouds of dust, bullying them up higher into the sky and then dispersing them to the furthest corners of the borough.

  And as the dust spread, so too did Sataniel’s smile. ”As it should be,” he crooned to Cain beside him. ”All things prostrate themselves at my feet, even the giants. This pleases me.”

  ”Not all things,” the homunculus said, watching with grim fascination as a huge, bronze lion came bounding out of the dust clouds, fangs bared.

  The beast’s muscular shoulders rippled as its huge gait devoured the distance between them. Sataniel watched as it came, his beautiful façade flickering and failing for just a moment, revealing his true self to the assembled dead, to the blind eyes of the fallen Soul Golem and the scattered dust of the shadow woman, to the Landseer lion, and to Cain at his side, but that was all it was, a singular moment of weakness, a lapse, because in that moment it revealed doubt. And doubt had no place here, not in his moment of glory.

  The lion’s mane streamed back flat against its bronze pelt as its mouth opened wide. Each of its bronze incisors were eight inches long and wickedly sharp, and its roar, when it emerged from the pit of the great beast’s stomach, was deep and savage and rancid as it hit Sataniel’s face.

  Sataniel didn’t flinch.

  There was more to this beast than metal and caged strength, he could feel it. It was alive, but not with the life of creation, with the life of magic the essence of that other stuff that bound the universe together, stuff more ancient than time itself. He didn’t have time to wonder, the great beast hit him full in the chest, driving him back off his feet.

  The crowd fell silent. The dead lowered their old bones to the dirt, as though craving the familiar stuff of their final resting places. The vampires watched silently, spreading out to form a circle around their master and the lion. Neither the living nor the dead fled, though sense should have impelled them Sataniel’s mere presence was like some irresistible magnet that held them captivated. Every single soul in the gathering crowd was in his thrall.

  Sataniel pushed himself up onto his elbows, grin wider than ever. The lion loomed over him, teeth bared. ”Kill me then,” Sataniel mocked, meeting the lion’s metallic glare. He offered his throat, inclining his head slightly to expose the thick vein pulsing there. Every inch of the lion’s bronzed musculature tensed, but resisted the temptation to pounce, to lash out.

  He let his face shift, taking on the iconic bloody tears of the crown of thorns worn by the martyr, ”You can’t, can you?” Sataniel sat up slowly, the blood dripping into his eyes, and dusted his hands off. He offered the lion the goat boy’s shaggy features, horns slowly pushing through the skin and curling at his temples. ”Does this make it easier?”

  The lion’s growl percolated low in its throat.

  But still it didn’t strike.

  ”How about this, then?” Sataniel offered the blistered and burned red skinned devil to the lion. ”Choose your favourite iconography, whatever look gives you what you need to strike me down. I won’t hold it against you if you like the prettier me, I must confess, I do. I have a weakness for great beauty, it is so much more appealing than ugliness,” and with that Sataniel’s face and form returned to the Adonis-like sculpted angles and lines of the beautiful youth. ”But then, that’s the sweetest deceit of all, isn’t it? Beauty. So flee
ting and it always fades into ugliness. And even that is misunderstood in this new world of steam and iron and machines. Uggligr, from the root ugga, means to be dreaded. Ugliness means quite literally to be dreaded.” Sataniel marvelled at the perfection of his own skin, turning his hand left and right so that he might better admire its beauty. ”All beauty is, at its heart, a lie. That is why I have always been drawn to it.”

  The lion struck, slashing across Sataniel’s bare chest with its claws. The impact from the blow was heavy enough to break a mortal man’s spine, leaving the fallen angel sprawled awkwardly on the ground, four deep wounds from its claws running from Sataniel’s glistening pectoral diagonally down to his abdomen. He clutched at his stomach, blood bubbling up and oozing between his fingers.

  The wounds didn’t heal immediately.

  ”What are you?” Sataniel gasped, forcing his skin to knit together beneath the not-so tender ministrations of his fingers. The edges of the wounds burned furiously.

  The lion roared, but there was no understanding its words.

  Sataniel let the lion come again, breathing slowly, deeply, implacably. As the bronze lion lashed out for his throat, the angel moved with preternatural speed, ducking under the savage strike and countering with a massive open-palmed slap to the lion’s ear. The lion’s entire body rang out like a bell, the chime reverberating into the dusty air. The layers of the city—the coal dust, the red-brick of the slums, the white marble and granite of the statues in the parks and palace gardens, the bark of the denuded trees, the iron lamp posts, the timber-frames of the hovels and glass windows of the outfitters and the perfumeries, the brass fittings of the churches and sepulchres, the hanging chains and meat hooks of the meat market , and the clay and the hard-packed earth—all seemed to take up the chime, the sound resonating through all of them, until it became a single sonorous note in the song of the city.

  And still it did not stop folding in layers and textures of sound.

  As one, the six surviving vampires clutched their pallid hands over their ears. Something inside them ruptured and thick, black, viscous blood trickled out between their fingers. Again as one, the creatures threw back their heads and screamed, a single shrill, long-sliding note that blended with the song of the city to create an undercurrent of agony that was anything but harmonic.