The Iscariot Sanction

by Mark Latham

  ‘Pull yourself together!’ Lillian snapped. ‘Where are the weapons? What can I arm myself with? I must fight.’

  ‘I suppose you must, not that it will do any good. We are all going to die, my dear; even the immortals amongst us.’ He fished in his pocket for a set of keys, and picked through them to find one in particular, which he detached from the ring. ‘Take this. Follow the corridor to the end, turn right, then right again, and go up the stairs ahead of you. You will find an unmarked door, and in it is a weapons locker, where we store our latest acquisitions. Take the Tesla pistols, and whatever else you need. There is etherium ammunition for the Riftborn, but there are too many to fight. Far, far too many…’

  ‘I am going to the club. I am going to find my brother. Will you come?’

  ‘I…’ Cherleten looked down at the floor, and then said, quietly, ‘There is no point, Agent Hardwick.’

  Lillian considered him for a moment in silence. What had he seen that had changed this cock-sure, near-immortal old blatherskite into a broken and wretched figure? She guessed she would soon find out.

  ‘Very well, Lord Cherleten. Stay here, and lock the doors behind me. Perhaps I shall see you in the next life.’

  She stepped back into the dark ward, littered with the bodies of the vampires, and made her way out along the dark corridor beyond. If Lord Cherleten spoke again, she did not hear him.

  * * *

  John staggered to his feet with no small effort, dust and broken glass falling from him as he steadied himself. He barely comprehended at first why there was a gale blowing into the club’s normally cosy smoking room, but as he blinked brick-dust from his eyes and shook his head to clear it of the muzzy sensation, he understood all too well.

  He faced out towards the window that overlooked Pall Mall, only there was no window any longer, and no wall either. With the explosion, a great rent had been opened up in the side of the building, exposing crumbling brick and burning timbers. An unnaturally fierce wind swept into the building, almost knocking John from his feet, and he braced himself against it, shielding his eyes with his hand. All he could see was fire and smoke; the venerable old clubhouses across the road were ablaze, mirroring the burning sky above them. He heard screams.

  Father.

  Lord Hardwick had left only moments earlier as part of the Queen’s escort, taking the road from St. James’s Palace. He could not have avoided the blast. John turned to flee the room, pausing as he noticed for the first time the bodies lying about him, the bodies of friends and colleagues. The sight made him check his progress for a moment, to ensure he was armed. Feeling his pistol still at his breast, he swore a silent oath to avenge those who had fallen to a coward’s bomb—after he had found his father.

  John stumbled along a corridor littered with rubble, portraits by English masters lying in tatters on the floor, crystal chandeliers reduced to a million glittering fragments. At the end of the corridor John saw over the balcony to the great hall, now half-buried beneath rubble. Agents, clubmen and servants groaned in pain, or helped the fallen, or lay dead.

  ‘John!’

  John turned to see Beauchamp Smythe emerging from the library, with Sir Toby leaning heavily upon him. John quickly took up a position on the other side of the old judge, and helped him to a nearby chair.

  ‘Do not worry about me, agents,’ groaned Sir Toby. ‘There are far more important matters.’

  ‘My father…’ John said.

  ‘Yes, and the Queen. And Nikola Tesla… and your sister.’

  ‘Lillian?’ John’s head swam; he still did not understand what was happening.

  ‘John,’ said Sir Toby gravely, ‘listen to me very carefully. The Knights Iscariot seek to unleash anarchy upon us. They have detonated an etheric bomb, the effects of which are entirely unpredictable. Our responsibility first and foremost is to the Crown—we must protect the Queen. But your father’s work with Tesla… that is of near-equal import. Without Tesla, there may be no way back from this catastrophe.’

  ‘What… I do not understand.’

  ‘An etheric bomb, Agent Hardwick. It has the power to tear the fabric of reality, as well as destroy half of London. What it could do to the Majestics in this city…’

  ‘And Lillian?’ John was trying hard to remain focused.

  ‘She is the very reason for the attack,’ said Sir Toby. ‘They will weaken us, and then use your sister to show the world what they can do. She cannot fall into their hands.’

  ‘Where is Tesla?’ John asked.

  ‘Underground, in the armoury,’ said Sir Toby. ‘If the bomb has not compromised the basements, then he should be safe.’

  ‘But if it has…’

  Sir Toby only nodded. Blood ran down his forehead. His hands shook, but the steel in his eyes remained.

  John took heart from that, and turned to Smythe. ‘There are not very many of us active, Smythe. Are you hurt?’

  ‘No, though lord knows how or why,’ Smythe replied.

  ‘Then may I ask you to find Tesla while I look for my father?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And when you find our Serbian friend, ask him where he keeps those fancy pistols of his. I have a feeling we may need them.’

  NINETEEN

  The air itself screamed hot and angry.

  The Riftborn tore through the streets outside St. Katharine Docks, bestial and monstrous, their keening howls sending terrified citizens into fits of madness. Incorporeal claws ripped through human flesh; honeyed whispers from a realm beyond the real echoed in the heads of simple folk, driving them to acts of cowardice, or rage, or barbarism against themselves and others of a kind undreamt of for a thousand years.

  Lillian had only ever half-seen the creatures before, as well as any man or woman could, and only after careful and taxing training. The Riftborn were not real—they were denizens of another universe, tearing violently through the veil, only truly existing when they shattered the sanity of the beholder, and revealed themselves through madness. These days, everyone was a little mad, or else touched by strange phenomena, and so the demons ran riot. Sometimes they appeared as man-sized, gangrel creatures, with a form that rippled as though made of quicksilver, reflecting the fire in the sky. Yet, in viewing them from another angle one might suddenly behold them as towering, many-limbed beasts of pulsating flesh, standing taller than St. Paul’s and at the same time occupying no more space than a mouse. Other times they were hollow, little more than holes in reality that fluttered like flags in a breeze, and through which the very pits of hell could be seen. When confronted by the multitudinous complexity of the Riftborns’ existence, most men went mad.

  Lillian was not, of course, a man. And no more was she human.

  Through violet eyes—dead eyes—she saw the Riftborn for what they were. No, not what they were, but what they should be. Gibbering beasts, fairytale horrors with bodies made in the mockery of men, long-limbed, filthily rutting in streets that blazed with liquid fire wherever they trod. Their flesh was translucent, and the blood in their veins coursed red and purple, glittering like a million stars pushed into an arterial space. Great yellow eyes flashed with fiery brilliance; horned heads turned upwards as the monsters called to the skies, where dark, flapping beasts spiralled like ragged gulls in the flaming air.

  Above them a high-pitched whining sound intensified, screaming fever-pitch in Lillian’s ears. And it emanated from the shadow; great tendrils, taller and fatter than any structure ever seen on any skyline in the world writhed and clawed from beyond the veil. The sound was maddening. Lillian could see it all around—men and women tearing at their own eyes and ears, their faces bloodied masks, their fingernails echoing the scratching inside their heads as the tendrils plucked at the edge of the atmosphere.

  Lillian saw the shadowy tendrils pulsate with energy. She knew at once that the humans around her could not see the thing as she could. Her vampire eyes brought focus; she saw it as it was meant to be seen, and yet she did not go mad
. Or perhaps, she reasoned, she had merely persuaded herself that she was sane, as all lunatics must be wont to do.

  As she gazed upon the chaos, she felt her skin tingle as if with a static charge, and looked about herself at once, her newly enhanced senses thrown into focus. The Riftborn had seen her; truly seen her. The demon stood stock-still as its warped brethren continued their wave of murder. It stared at her with blazing, saucer-like eyes, and she stared back at it and, despite herself, smiled her most wicked, barbed smile.

  ‘What is the matter, demon? Have you never seen a dead woman with a gun before?’

  The beast roared, drawing itself to a dizzying height and a miniscule bullet of fire all at the same time, igniting the ground beneath its floating, ever-changing form. Its flesh blazed hot, transforming into a skin of lava, and then it swept towards Lillian, its rage so powerful, so all-encompassing, that even Lillian felt it inhabiting her, rising within her to such heights that it became elation.

  ‘Thank you for that,’ she whispered, giving herself over to the feeling entirely for just a moment, before raising the pistol with preternatural speed, and pulling the trigger.

  As Tesla had described, the electrical charge within the weapon coursed through the little etheric cartridge, evaporating the brownish liquid in a heartbeat, and projecting a bolt of blue lightning outwards from the barrel with incredible force. Lillian felt the exhilaration wash over her as the demon was enveloped in tendrils of arcing electricity. She felt its pain; she felt its utter joy at feeling such pain, elation that it was dying. She was sure her human self could never have understood such conflicting emotions, but her vampire self drank it in as hungrily as blood. The creature lashed out in its death throes, and Lillian danced away from its flailing tendrils. In the creature’s final second it was reduced to a pile of blackened slag and steaming rock, which in turn popped out of existence in a fizzing bubble of heat, leaving nothing but shimmering air and the smell of brimstone. A wave of emptiness and despair exploded from the point of its banishment, followed by an absolute joy as, somewhere in some other time and place, the creature was reborn. Lillian felt these things—knowledge and energy and raw emotion from the Rift—crash against her like a cold wave crashing against a yacht.

  Even as she shuddered with the pleasure of the kill, she felt other eyes upon her. Hungry, demonic eyes. She felt tears on her cheek. She heard herself laughing giddily as the creatures advanced. She realised she had already reloaded the Tesla pistol, ready for the next attack.

  If Lillian were truly dead, then why did she feel so alive?

  * * *

  John put his hands to his ears to stop the scratching sound that almost deafened him, but it did not cease. The sound—the sensation—was inside his head, like long fingernails scraping across a writing-slate. Madness was all around him; people wailed and screamed, from injuries sustained in the blast, and from those they had inflicted upon themselves. Venerable old clubmen frolicked naked in the streets, running through flames and setting upon each other with knives and bare hands, or disfiguring themselves while screeching in unintelligible languages. Starry rifts hung shimmering in the air, denizens of another world seeping through, invisible beyond the mind’s eye, but horrifying to those who dared concentrate upon them. The fire in the sky burned brighter and hotter than ever before, great streaks of lavender cloud roiling beneath a blast-furnace of liquid fire.

  Ahead, John glimpsed the royal carriage half-buried beneath debris, burning with unnatural flame. It shifted in and out of focus; sometimes he could see his father’s body, broken and burned, lying amongst the corpses of liveried footmen. In another instant, the scene of death and destruction was obscured by a dark shadow, as swaddling as a London particular. The shadow projected into the sky, to dizzying heights, sometimes invisible, at other times taking the form of a cyclopean, many-tentacled beast, redolent with insanity and malevolence. Like a rainbow, the phenomenon was at once near and far; John thought he was within the belly of the beast, and then in the next instant it seemed very far away.

  Somehow, through the deafening noise that was, in part, created by his own involuntary screams, he knew the source of the shadowy thing. It had come from the carriage.

  John did not know how he had reached the upended royal coach, or when, but he found himself digging through the rubble. His father was dead, his face already ashen, lips blue. Beside him was Kate Fox, the noted medium, the progenitor of the Awakening and all the terrors that had followed it. Her face was contorted in such an expression of horror that it was terrible to behold. Her head was spun right around, facing backwards—facing the sky. Shadows leaked from her, drifting upwards like smoke. The shadow on the sky had come from her. John knew, though he could not explain how he knew, that the Fox woman had been holding back this terrible thing alone since her sister had died. John had been too young to be aware of it at the time, but the story of the famous Fox sisters was taught to every new recruit at the academy. Margaret Fox had been assassinated in New York by a group of conspirators claiming affiliation with the Latter Day Saints. Her death had unleashed psychic devastation across America, causing half of Manhattan to fall into the sea. Kate Fox had fled to England, becoming a political exile. With her as a bargaining tool, the government had restored British interests in the recently formed Confederate States. The Knights Iscariot, in slaying Kate Fox, had unleashed something more terrible upon the world than they could have dreamt of. If ever Lord Hardwick had needed to succeed in his great plan, the escape plan John had once heard him speaking of, it was now. But Lord Hardwick was dead.

  John fell to his knees and wept. His father—tyrant, and would-be saviour—was gone. A few yards from Marcus Hardwick’s body, protruding from a mound of bricks and ashes like a sapling from dirt, was a hand, festooned with jewelled rings.

  Queen Victoria was dead.

  Kate Fox, Lord Marcus Hardwick and the Queen. All claimed by the vampires’ bomb. And with their deaths, John felt a desolation such that he had never felt in all the years since the Riftborn had first made ingress into the world. He felt the death of hope.

  He knelt within that terrible shadow, with that wailing in his ears, in his head, for how long he could not say. Someone, far away, was shouting his name, and he could not answer, so complete was his numbness.

  ‘John! For heaven’s sake get away from there!’

  A hand grabbed John’s shoulder, and eventually he felt himself being dragged away from the body of his father. John realised he was kicking and screaming in resistance, until at last a hand slapped him hard across the face. He saw Smythe standing over him, and he stared at the surgeon dumbly.

  John watched, childlike and passive, as Smythe rolled up the sleeve of his jacket and administered an injection into the vein at the crook of his left elbow. John was puzzled at first, and then felt a cold tingling sensation sweep over him, travelling up his arm and through his body with remarkable speed, until his brain felt it might freeze in his head. He gasped for air, and then came to his senses at last, though his head swam.

  ‘What…’ he stuttered.

  ‘Had to think on my feet, old fellow, with a bit of help from the Serbian. Morphine, mundane etherium—a few other things it’s best not to think about. You’ll feel wretched in the morning; we all shall. If we see the morning.’

  Smythe helped John up. The voices in his head became whispers of unfulfilled promises. The scratching in his skull lessened to a distant itch.

  ‘Mundane etherium?’ John asked. It had never had any effect on a normal human, as far as he knew. Its source was a closely guarded secret, although the rumours of its origins were ghastly to say the least. Ghastly enough to make him baulk at the thought of having it inside him.

  Smythe shrugged. ‘Worth a try. It seems to work, too.’

  John looked about, and his heart sank. The streets were in chaos. Now that he was able to focus, John saw… things… slip in and out of reality, occupying spaces that they should not. The Riftborn c
avorted through the streets, creatures of shadow and fire, driving men to commit foul atrocities in their name, or flaying the weak themselves with scissor-like claws. The shadow was present too, though now it came only sometimes into view, when John looked upon it askance. It avoided his scrutiny, but it was always there, in his mind’s eye. John shuddered. His eyes alighted once more upon the sundered carriage, and he stepped backwards, stumbling weakly as Smythe helped to steady him.

  ‘We have to get out of here,’ Smythe said. ‘The drug will protect us, but I don’t know for how long. They feed off fear and madness. Look to your training, John. Don’t let your grief make you weak. Close your mind, and hold on to something stronger.’

  ‘Hold on to what?’ John said. He was consumed by grief, and felt very weak indeed.

  ‘Anger,’ Smythe said. ‘Here, take this.’ He handed John a Tesla pistol, and a brown leather belt stuffed with etherium capsules. ‘There’s not much of this stuff, so use it wisely. Now, are you ready?’

  ‘I am,’ John said, surprising himself with the determination in his voice, although he had never felt more timid.

  ‘St. Katharine Docks?’

  John only nodded, and climbed down the mound of debris that had become his father’s grave.

  * * *

  The ground beneath Lillian’s feet began to tremble. Great chunks of masonry fell to earth, smashing into the pavements of Smithfield, crushing many who had been driven to inhuman revelry in the streets by the madness of the cyclopean shadow. A sound like thunder came from the south, accompanied by the crash of waves as though the ocean itself were lapping at London’s door. Lillian wondered if things could get any worse.

  The Riftborn turned from her, flowed around her like water, as though she were anathema to them. It was human souls they craved. She moved quickly through the ruins of her city, jumping over chasms as they opened in the earth. The sky was redder, brighter than ever before. She looked ahead, to the west, to her destination. She had to shield her eyes from the roiling elements; those same senses that allowed her to tell human from vampire, and to see the Riftborn for what they were, now pained her as she tried to get her bearings. The sky was both dark and bright to her inhuman eyes, dazzling in its horror. Squawking, flapping night-terrors danced amidst the flames above the Tower of London on leathery wings, paying balletic tribute to the clawed shadow that seemed to tear upwards from the heart of the City like a kraken, leaving desolation in its wake.