by Dan Abnett
Dragon-shapes and bat-silhouettes swung around through the storm in the sky above the Battersea Powerdrome. On the flagstone apron in front of the drome's great entrance, hooded figures scurried out of the doorway's shelter into the wind, and formed a wide ring with their flaming torches.
The dragons came down.
Gull landed first, and then the six huscarls, slowing the wing-beats of their great wooden-framed Vincis with expertise. The torch-bearers hurried forward, taking the weight of each Vinci as the riders unbuckled their harnesses. The huge canvas wings flapped in the estuary wind.
"Stow them somewhere, out of the wind. We want them serviceable for the flight back," instructed Gull. The seven flying machines were carried away into the hallway of the drome. Gull and his huscarls marched along behind, pulling off gloves, goggles and scarves, and wiping water from their brows. The robed figures held up the torches to guide their way.
"Where's Natterjack?" asked Gull.
"Here, milord," answered the eldest of the robed figures. Natterjack was a weary, anxious-looking man with salt-andpepper hair. "Vivat Regina. The Union bids our guests welcome and ho-"
"Save the formal guff, old man. We came as soon as the lights failed. What's the story?"
"We don't know," admitted the Union rep. "The doors to the Cantrip Chamber are barred from within, and there's no reply to our knocking."
"When did you discover this?" asked Gull.
"When the lights failed, milord. The shift had changed but an hour before. There are five Union members on station in there. It shouldn't be possible for this to happen. There are back-ups fail-safes"
They stopped outside a pair of massive oak doors, dotted with iron studs, and engraved with ancient scripts that it was a good idea not to read.
"Break them down," said Gull to his huscarls.
"Milord!" interceded Natterjack. "We have sent for the cardinals. Surely we should wait until they-"
"Every footpad, cut-throat and opportunist in the City is going to think it's Christmas. We can't maintain security anywhere including at the Palace. Break it down," Gull insisted.
Natterjack nodded, and then stood aside with his comrades.
Two of the largest huscarls approached the doors, sized them up, mentally shook hands with them and popped in gum-shields, and then laid into the solid oak with shoulders that had room on them for mantle clocks and souvenirs from Skegness. After twenty seconds of tooth-rattling impact, there was a splintering noise. Another few shoulder-barges, and the doors reached the end of their three-hundred-yearlong working life.
A smell like that which permeated Wllm Beaver's garret, only a thousand times worse, welled out of the Cantrip Chamber like a fog. Huscarl and Union-man alike coughed and gagged. The two beefy huscarls, whose shoulders had beaten the doors by two falls and a submission, bore the brunt of it. Their stomachs tried to exit via their throats, but they staunchly fought back the nausea. They were tough, they were veterans, they had brawled and bashed their ways through the world's trouble spots and come out laughing. It took an awful lot to better them.
There was an awful lot in the Chamber beyond.
The two huscarls entered, looked around, looked up, saw what was making the smell, and threw up involuntarily in the doorway.
Gull drew his rapier and covered his nose and mouth with his kerchief.
"Stay back here," he instructed his men and the Union team. Absolutely none of them had even thought of doing anything else.
Gull stepped between his heaving, retching bruisers, and entered the room.
Somehow, he kept his dinner internalised.
The thirteen crystal balls, each the size of a man's head, that usually stood on the gilt frame in a careful pyramid, and focusing the pure energies of the Cantrips, had been smashed, as if by some furious hammering. Crystal shards were scattered in a constellation across the intricate mosaic floor. Shorting, unfocused Magickal energy sparked and spattered across the room, like loose, torn ribbons fluttering in the wind. There was a stench of sulphur, and ozone, and something else something fried and burnt and blistered.
Gull looked up.
The five Union men who had been on duty looked down at him from the rafters, staring out of scorched sockets, their white teeth smiling out of blackened gums.
They had each been crisped and seared by some unimaginable heat. Then, something had put them forty feet up in the rafters to cool, like burnt gingerbread men from an oven.
Gull swallowed hard.
He forced himself to look away, and swept his gaze around the room. Someone something had done this, yet it was no longer here. There was nowhere to hide, and no exit save the barred and bolted door. Gull tried not to think of invisible spirits. He tightened his grip on his rapier.
Then he saw the daubed writing on the back wall: tall, ugly, childish letters marked out in
Gull's grip on his sword tightened. Something had removed gallons of blood from the five dead men before frazzling them into dried shells.
He read the slogans, shaking with both fear and anger. Somehow, the childish writing, the misspelling and the malformed letters made them all the worse.
They said:
CANTRIPS DOWN
TO HELLE WITH THE UNITTY
ELISABETH IS AN HORE
THIS FOR YOU AND YOR FAMILY TO
THIS BE MY FIRST TRIUMF
Natterjack caught at Gull's sleeve as the guard captain strode from the room.
"What does it-" he began.
"Get your men in there. The place must be cleaned," Gull told him. "Try to rig up a temporary repair if you can. The cardinals will know. I'll get on the ouija and summon guards to reinforce and support you. Be doubly vigilant" He tailed off, realising how much he was shaking.
"What does it mean?" asked the elderly Union man in a small, frightened voice.
Gull looked at him, and said, "It means treason. It means diabolic perversion. It means Triumff is dead."
"Why?" asked Natterjack.
Gull weighed his rapier carefully in his gloved fist. "Because I'm going to kill the bastard myself," he said.
THE NEXT CHAPTER.
Bedevilment has a unique odour, something like burnt molasses, but less inviting, and by dawn the next day hints of it had spread out far across the glittering expanse of the Unity. People woke up and smelt it on the air, like they smelled stale wood-smoke the morning after the Midsummer Revels. They smelt it, and then they got up, afraid without knowing why.
From the beating heart of the City outwards, down the Valley, through the Boroughs, across the Shires and the Wealds and the Wolds and the Ridings, over fenland, farmland, woodland and heath, up scarps, over rivers, past coasts and ports and shorelines and beyond, the citizens of the Unity went about their lives and trades with little additions that morning: here a knotted brow, here a patter of rosary beads, there an anxious sigh, there a nervous prayer.
In the Suffolk village of Ormsvile Nesbit, where the geese outnumber the human residents, the smell seemed to have got in the air and the stones, and the milk.
Mother Grundy looked down at the curdy contents of the pail, and wrinkled a forehead that already needed a hem and a good iron. She extended a finger that was as true and unknobbly as a cudgel wasn't, and inserted it into the milk like a dipstick. Withdrawing it, she sucked it thoughtfully, and more wrinkles over-wrinkled themselves on top of wrinkles.
"Hmph," she murmured.
She patted Nettie the heifer on the rump to reassure her, took the offending bucket out of the dairy, and tipped the contents unceremoniously down the drain-midden.
It hissed alchemically as it gurgled away.
"Hmph," murmured Mother Grundy again, and headed for the house.
Mother Grundy was a well-worn woman of incalculable years. It was said she could remember half a dozen coronations. She didn't look old, as such, just hard and angular and lean. Her clothes hung from her rangy frame like curtaining nailed to a gibbet. Her hair was raked back over
her skull in layers that looked like they had been beaten out of old pewter, and was held in place by iron pins that seemed stapled to her scalp. The structure of her face was not so much bone as a lifetime of concerns: worries over family weddings, wayward sons, idle daughters, awkward neighbours, fractious grandchildren and sick livestock. She had raised and scrimped, toiled and spun, cared and midwifed, tutored and advised. She was autumnal. She was stoic. The community clacked around her skirts like milling geese, waiting for help and counsel and titbits. She braved long winters, suffered summer heat, and abhorred both the passage of time and any wastage thereof.
Without her, most reckoned, the village of Ormsvile Nesbit would have vanished, bewildered, into the soil, a generation since.
There were a few occasions on which she was known to smile, but that morning after St Dunstan's Day was not one of them.
In the numb chill of the farmhouse scullery, she hung her shawl on the door-peg (where it draped more fulsomely than it had around her shoulders) and began to fill a hopsack with various sprigs of dried herbs, a jar or two of preserved produce, a batch of Bath Olivers wrapped in grease-proof paper, an elderly book, a ram's-horn-shanked knife and a flask of tea.
There was something ill abroad, as the saying went. The signs positively yelled of it. And they weren't the usual calf with two heads or non-laying hens or red sky type signs (as in the country proverb: "Red sky at night, swineherd's delight; red sky in the bedroom, thatch is on fire"). They were neither as crude nor as sensational as that. They were real signs, bad signs, signs in the weave of the grass, the dew on webs, the call of birds from the woods and the tang of burnt molasses in the milk.
Mother Grundy was uneasy, and that was a bad sign in itself.
Just after eight in the morning, a crust-maker's apprentice named Gavin met Mother Grundy on the lane out of the village. Gavin, like many pie-men, was simple. He suffered a mild mental infirmity that meant he was blessed with several personalities, but he was good people.
Gavin shifted his pie-tray to his left shoulder, and tipped his cap to the woman as she strode past.
"Fine morning, Mother Grundy," he suggested as she strode past.
"Not in the least," she answered.
"Where are you off to, then?" he added.
She paused for a moment, and fixed him with a lancing stare.
"The City," she told him, and then continued to march away down the misty lane between the spinneys of ash and lime.
Gavin hurried on into Ormsvile Nesbit to spread the news. Mother Grundy was going to the City. Not only was that unheard of, even a simple pie-man knew it was possibly the worst sign there ever could be.
The signs spread across the turning globe, as fast as the line of daylight crept around. An hour before Mother Grundy had even plonked down her pail under Nettie's rotund udder, the signs were already reaching more distant regions of the Unity.
In the cypress-groved hills above La Spezia, where everything looked like it had been done in egg-tempera on stuccoed wooden panels, the first light of dawn grazed against the pumice-pink walls of a lone tower that stood at the crest of a wooded slope like a finger of Battenberg cake topped off with an icing of chunky red tiles.
One strand of light entered the tower through the single slit window near the top, and found itself slalomed and bent unexpectedly by a configuration of polished lenses and mirrors, finely set in a skeletal frame of stripped yew. The light twisted, refracted, reflected, sidestepped, dropped, levelled out, cornered sharply, gasped in alarm, and finally shot vertically down onto a horizontal plate of oil-buffed glass.
Giuseppe Giuseppo leaned forward in the chair he had set by the plate an hour before dawn, and watched the column of light, slowed by its tortuous path through the apparatus, drip like neon honey onto the smooth surface. It twinkled into intangible ingots of photonic gold, and then settled gently into a fanned-out specimen of the captured spectrum.
Giuseppe Giuseppo blinked his sleepy eyes for a moment or two, and then looked more closely.
At least two members of the spectrum were missing, and three others were in the wrong order.
He rose from the high-backed chair, and reached out to adjust the setting of the device, but withdrew his fingers from the brass handles at the last moment, and sat down again for a closer look. Giuseppe knew he had adjusted and re-adjusted the settings to the point of obsession the sunset before. Nothing had disturbed his apparatus in the night, the lenses were all clean and the wood unwarped.
It was the light that was wrong.
Giuseppe swallowed hard, and hurried across to his study desk. He lit a lamp, and leafed through his book of tables and notes, throwing aside blueprints for wide-bodied gliders, bathyscaphs, retractable quills, airbags and roll-bars for racing landaus, methods of refrigerated food preservation and golfball embossers. After a few minutes' scrambling, during which the genius outpourings of over a decade spilled onto the floor in a thick drift of parchment, he found what he was looking for, stuffed between an essay on "The Potentialities of Telephony" and a treatise he had composed on the "Elektrifikation and Harmonisation of Gauges" for a system of railed omnibus that hadn't even been built.
It was a book, quarto in size, bound in dark and patchy kid-skin, and held shut by a loop of black ribbon. With reverential fingers, Giuseppe slipped off the ribbon, turned open the cover, and began to skim through the vellum pages of tight, precise ink-script, cursing as he always did in such moments; that clever-clever mirror writing was so difficult to speed read.
There were, perhaps, two dozen copies of Leonardo's Principia De Tenebrae extant in the known Unity, and no reason to suppose any existed outside its territories. All, except this one, were in the possession of cardinals and senior divines of the Church, and all, except this one, were incomplete, printed editions. This manuscript draft, in the Master's own hand, had been in Giuseppe's family since the Re-Awakening. The story went that the old Master had given it to Giuseppe's forebear Niccolo for safekeeping when Niccolo had been apprenticed to him as a paint-mixer. The Church, Giuseppe was sure, would rack him, spit him, draw him, eighth him, burn him as a heretic, demolish his tower, torch his vineyards, and contract out plagues of locusts on all his friends and relations if they knew he had a copy. Much had been surmised over the years about what the Father of the Arte had "edited out" of his manuscript before committing it to print. Many were the rumours of an unexpurgated manuscript somewhere on a dusty shelf in a gloomy corner of a forgotten library in the back end of the Unity. After all this time, few believed those rumours could be true.
After a few moments struggling and squinting, Giuseppe called the Most Important Book in the World a very rude name, and stormed downstairs to fetch his shaving mirror.
When his housekeeper, Maria, arrived an hour later, she found Giuseppe in the tower room, under the distracting swing of the pendulums, packing such items as a scroll-butt snaphaunce revolver into an open valise.
He barely looked up as she entered, but gestured to a drawstring purse of coins on the desk beside him.
"Go to the port quickly, please," he told her. "Find me a berth on the next merchantman bound for England."
She began to object, but cut it short as he turned to look at her. She didn't like the look of the look.
"How long will you be gone?" she asked instead.
"If I don't come back," he replied, "I doubt you'll notice."
So the ripples spread.
Five hours after Mother Grundy had set the pail beneath Nettie, the dawn finally arrived, out of breath, through the evergreens of the Senenoyak forests and twinkled off the shore-waters of Lake Tenantochook.
