The Edinburgh Dead

by Brian Ruckley

  “They’d hardly let you carry such a thing into the Assembly Rooms. You’d have had trouble hiding it in that clown’s outfit, anyway.”

  Quire glanced down at his motley dress, and was struck by what an absurd, and obvious, figure he cut, hurrying along the New Town streets like a fugitive from some wandering theatre troupe. He had vaguely thought he would have the chance to shed the disguise before leaving, but that, in hindsight, had never been likely.

  They emerged on to the broad expanse of Princes Street with the soaring dark mass of the castle before them, like a vast umbrageous thundercloud detached from the night sky and settled down to rest atop the crags. It was dotted, though, with points of light: the windows of its huge barracks, and lanterns burning here and there along its meandering walls.

  There were no buildings along the south side of Princes Street—none save the Royal Institution, a short way further east—just a long run of black, spiked railings and beyond them the sweeping gardens that plunged down and across to the base of the castle’s huge rock. Those gardens were a black, blank void, obscured by the glare of the tall gaslights lining the street.

  Quire looked back. Blegg—he was almost certain it was him, though he could not make out his features at this distance—was coming down after them, walking quickly.

  “We need to shake him off,” Quire muttered.

  Directly ahead of them, opposite the foot of Frederick Street, a gate broke the line of the iron railings. It would be locked—the gardens were a private pleasure for the residents and shopkeepers of Princes Street—and was, like the railings themselves, head high. But it had no spikes atop it.

  “Into the gardens,” Quire said promptly. “No light there. We can lose him, or spring a little trap of our own.”

  “Right,” Dunbar said.

  He did not sound entirely convinced, but responded without hesitation to the taut urgency in Quire’s voice.

  Dunbar darted forward, set his strong hands on the top of the gate and swung his legs up and over with a great heave of his shoulders. Quire put his hands to Durand’s waist even as they drew near the gate, and lifted him from his feet. Dunbar reached over and hauled the Frenchman into the gardens. The two of them fell in a heap, crunching down on to the gravel path.

  Quire did not need to look around to know what Blegg was doing. He could hear running feet, pounding closer. He flung himself at the gate, hitting it hip high, folding himself over the top of it, landing on his back on the path beyond. He rolled and scrambled to his feet, glimpsing Blegg’s dark form rushing down the last of Frederick Street’s slope, coming into the pools of light cast by the chain of streetlights. The man was fast; unnervingly so.

  Quire ran after Dunbar and Durand, already disappearing into the profound darkness of the gardens. He could hear them clearly enough, though, for the gravel path was not made for silence.

  “Get off the path,” he called softly, and followed them as they veered off over the manicured lawns.

  They crouched into one of the big thickets of ornamental shrubs. Most of the bushes were foreigners; evergreens with thick, heavy concealing leaves. Durand was gasping for breath.

  “Be quiet,” Quire whispered.

  Blegg appeared, up there at the railings. Peering down into the gardens. Seeing, Quire hoped, not much more than they had: just the inky, lightless nothing. Blegg moved slightly to one side. His head was framed by the glowing lantern head of one of the gaslights, like a radiant halo.

  “There’s three of us,” Dunbar murmured. “We could sort him out easy enough, couldn’t we?”

  “Maybe,” said Quire. He was reluctant to trust any assumptions regarding Blegg’s capabilities. “In any case, there’s only two of us worth the counting, I’d guess.”

  “Quite true,” Durand whispered. “And he would kill both of you, most likely.”

  “I didn’t sign up for getting killed, any more than I did killing,” muttered Dunbar.

  Blegg carefully, deliberately, set both his hands atop the gate and vaulted it in a single leap, swinging his legs up high and clear. A manoeuvre that Quire could not have matched.

  “Shit,” Dunbar whispered, evidently reconsidering the advisability of confrontation.

  They eased themselves further back amongst the bushes. Quire had never been inside the gardens before, and could remember precious little of any use as far as their layout was concerned, even though he had often enough looked down over the railings and thought it a pleasant view. One thing he did remember, with something approaching certainty: the only other gates were further along to the west of them, down towards St. John’s and St. Cuthbert’s, the chapel and church that dominated the far end of Princes Street.

  “Right, well I’ll draw him off, and you get your little French package here away,” Dunbar said suddenly.

  “No,” hissed Quire.

  Dunbar was already shifting his weight, settling himself on the balls of his feet.

  “Hush. It’ll be easy enough. I’ll just take him off into a corner somewhere and slip out over the railings. Once he sees it’s just me, he’ll leave off pretty sharp. It’s you two he’s after, you poor buggers.”

  “No, you don’t…” Quire said desperately, but he was saying it to Dunbar’s heels.

  Dunbar went crashing away, thrashing through the shrubs with abandon, and pounding his feet on the turf as he plunged into the darkness.

  “Christ,” groaned Quire.

  They heard Blegg ghosting past over the grass; a much lighter tread. Quire’s heart hammered away, and his legs trembled with the desire to throw himself out and after Blegg. He struggled with the instinct, and stifled it.

  Dunbar was quick on his feet, and nobody’s fool. He could take care of himself if he had to. That was all Quire could hope as he dragged Durand hurriedly but quietly away in the opposite direction.

  XXV

  Kites

  Durand shook. Not from cold, that was certain; which left fear or fever. Quire suspected it was both.

  The Frenchman had a sheen of sweat across his brow, and his eyes were red-rimmed, looking sore. Sick, then. It had come on quickly and without warning, within an hour or two of his arrival in Agnes McLaine’s house. Now, as the morning advanced, it had a firm grip of him. The fear had preceded it, and persisted still. Durand might be reconciled to his change of allegiance, but he was still quite clearly most fearful of its consequences. Neither the sickness nor his terror had yet silenced him, though.

  “When I went into exile from my homeland,” he said, “I was forced to abandon most of my private collections. Too heavy, you see. Too difficult to transport. What I did bring with me to your country was only the best, the most significant.

  “Clay tablets, in particular. Ancient texts. Magical texts, from Babylonia, Ur, Akkad. Mesopotamia. The oldest of old times, you understand, when Man lived in a wholly magical world?”

  He looked questioningly from Quire to Agnes. Quire offered no response. He was standing by the window, holding the blanket just far enough away from the glass to give him a view out on to the narrow, crowded street. He was listening intently to what Durand said, but his eyes were mostly on the good people of Leith. He absently scratched at the cuff of the overly tight shirt he wore. Agnes had found him some clothes to replace the harlequin costume, but they did not fit him well.

  Agnes, though, smiled and nodded encouragingly to the Frenchman. He sat on the bed, cocooned in her blankets, hugging them to him as if desperate for protection against the iciest of blasts.

  “Tablets that were gathered together in Egypt,” Durand continued, “long before the days of Alexander, long before the rise of Rome. Two thousand years they lay buried in the dust of empire, until it was my privilege to uncover them, following in the wake of Napoleon’s armies. To become their… I do not know the word. Keeper? No, not quite. Custodian, perhaps. I took them from Egypt to France, and from France, when the time came, to England, and then here.”

  “Are you following a
ll this?” Quire asked Agnes, without looking away from the bustling scene outside the window.

  “Close enough,” she said.

  Her pipe had been lit for several minutes now, and had filled the room with floating strata of fine smoke, undulating slowly.

  “I fell in with John Ruthven,” Durand said, suppressing a cough and pulling his blankets tighter about him. “By chance, or by fate. He was the magister. The chief of our quartet: me, Ruthven, Carlyle, Blegg.”

  Quire turned aside from the window then, irresistibly summoned by those names, which between them held all the answers he so desired. Durand, Ruthven, Carlyle, Blegg. There was the skein in need of untangling.

  “Carlyle made the equipment,” Durand said. “The electrical equipment. I did not entirely understand it, then or now, but there is galvanic stimulation of nerves. The heart is made to beat once more, do you see?”

  Durand’s bleary eyes were weeping, though whether it was from sickness, or sorrow, or fear, Quire did not know. Agnes gestured with her pipe for Durand to continue, and he obediently did so. He was a husk of a man, much reduced in stature and will. Resigned, Quire suspected, to death. Or worse.

  “Others in Italy and Germany, and my own homeland, showed it long ago: the movement of a corpse when electrical force is passed through it. Ruthven found a way to harness it, though. To make use of it. That was the greatest of his insights.

  “So. Carlyle to make the equipment. Ruthven to apply it. They began with dogs, before ever I became a party to their enterprise. Ruthven had crude magics, then. He was… fumbling, you would say; fumbling in the dark. But he is a Prometheus, make no mistake. He found light, out there in that dark, and brought it forth. He learned to do things that surpass the wildest dreams of the ancients, and the most unlikely hopes of the present.”

  Quire returned his attention to the street. The life of Leith continued outside, oblivious and indifferent to the madness being described in the little room. He was envious of the mundane concerns he knew ran through the men and women going up and down the narrow street: the simple desires and hungers, the vague hopes and small sadnesses. He would much rather have himself filled up with such things than with the memories and the furies and the fears that occupied him now.

  “A great man,” Durand was saying, “but one who succumbed to temptation. He had to reach further, deeper. He began to work upon human corpses. He wanted to restore life. No; more than that. He wanted to restore souls. It was a noble ambition. So I thought, when I became privy to it. But he had not succeeded. His experiments… well, let us say no more than that they did not succeed. Except Blegg. Blegg is different.”

  “What about Blegg?” Quire asked sharply.

  “A moment, please.” Durand coughed, a loose rattle in his chest. “I will come to the matter of Blegg in a moment. I allied myself with Ruthven, and I brought my own secrets. Recipes for preservative elixirs, something for the hearts that Carlyle’s machines revived to pump around the body. Invocations and bindings, recorded on tablets older even than Egypt; transcribed on to the hands of the corpses, they bind an animating force to the flesh.”

  “Not a soul, though,” Agnes said quietly, and Durand hung his head. Shivered.

  “No, not a soul. Never a soul. In that, we all fell short of our ambitions. Formless, mindless things that we brought forth and incarnated in the dead. Animating force, nothing more. Fierce. Savage, without the dominating will of a mind to guide it. And never lasting. Always, the bindings failed in time; the body failed. Then it was burned, and the next was begun.”

  “You dug up graves to get the bodies,” Quire said.

  “Oui. Blegg did. The invention of that foul habit at least is not amongst our sins. You had body snatchers aplenty before ever the dead began to flow through Ruthven’s door.”

  “Aye.”

  “It became too much for Carlyle. He took to drinking, then tried to remove himself from the affair entirely. The dogs did it for him. Anyway, after your exploits at Duddingston, the grave robbing stopped. Of late they have been buying bodies, letting others do the digging—or the killing, I know not which—on their behalf. They’ve abandoned the farm, brought the apparatus to Ruthven’s house, in the cellar. Blegg pays a man called Hare, and the corpses… well, they appear in Melville Street.”

  “You say Blegg is something different, though?” rasped Quire, his impatience rising like bile. “Not like these other… creatures Ruthven has made?”

  “Blegg. Oui. He is something different, something very old. I think the madness that is in that house—it came with him, I think. The worst of it.

  “You understand: it is not Blegg, not his mind or his spirit, that occupies his form. Whoever Blegg was, he died before I ever met him. I never knew quite how, though I always had the feeling that he was somehow the first real victim in all of this. Anyway, Ruthven, in his careless explorations, woke something else in Blegg’s corpse. Invited something in. Something that is much more than the dull animal spirits of the others.”

  “Do you believe all of this?” Quire asked Agnes softly.

  She had sat quite still all through Durand’s speech, save for the flex in her cheeks and lips as she drew smoke down into her chest and let it leak out again. She blinked, very slowly, very heavily, and looked up.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  She pointed at the morose Frenchman with the stem of her pipe.

  “Look at him. Sick to the very root of him, and it’s no natural sickness, I can tell you that.”

  “No,” Durand grunted. “It is Blegg, telling me to come home. Like a man calling out for his straying dog. He and Ruthven think—wrongly, as it happens, but no matter—they think there are further secrets I can yet uncover for them. If I do not heed his call, I will be dead long before I could offer testimony at any trial of your foes, Monsieur Quire. They are not careless in such matters.”

  “Not that any’d give much credence to such testimony in these times, eh?” Agnes said to Quire. “Not talk of dead men rising, and spells dug up out of deserts.”

  “No. There’ll be no trial, I think.”

  He absently let the blanket fall back across the window.

  “I have to go,” he muttered. “I have to find Dunbar. You’re sure you’re willing to watch over Durand?”

  “Aye.” Agnes nodded. “They’ll not find him here, and it might be I can do something for his fever.”

  “They will mean to kill you, assuredly,” Durand said in a matter-of-fact tone to Quire.

  “They will try, I know. Perhaps I will kill them.”

  The Frenchman grunted, and wiped a weary hand across his damp brow.

  “You will not find it easy to kill what is in Blegg. Not easy at all. Still the heart, remove the binding spells from the skin of his hands. Destroy the body, utterly, to its last scrap. And even then…”

  Durand shrugged, which made him cough and tremble once more. It took a moment or two for him to recover, before he could speak again.

  “He is an old thing. Not like we poor mortals. It takes no more than a fever to put an end to us.” He smiled bitterly. “Should you see Mr. Blegg in your travels, perhaps you could enquire whether he has some little figure of me—made of clay or wood, most likely—about his person.

  “He is a great one for making such things. Each of the dead we have raised had one of its own, as part of the binding of flesh and spirit. He hides them away somewhere up on that great hill of yours—Arthur’s Seat. It is a place of old power, evidently. One might be used just as well, I suspect, in the right hands, to separate flesh and spirit. It would need some part of me—hair, perhaps—but he might easily have obtained such a thing while I slept.”

  “I’ll bear it in mind,” Quire said.

  “Thank you. He will not part with it, of course, but you could ask. This is not how I would choose to die. Ha. How many of us choose how we die, though?”

  A flock of kites swept and swirled across the wind. Half a dozen of them, each tethe
red to the earth, to the hand of a child, by a long, taut string. Each straining against that tether, trying to tear itself free and escape into the sky’s embrace; go dancing off with the wind into the distance.

  They floated close by Holyrood Palace, rising up from the fields just to the east of it. There was little by way of flat ground in the King’s Park, and what there was drew families. The parents brought their children, and the children brought paper kites, painted with faces and trailing sinuous tails of ribbon bows. The grass was grazed low by sheep and cattle, and for the younger children in particular it must have felt like a limitless, soft expanse, fit for running and falling and tumbling.

  Quire knew, for his friend had told him often enough, that Wilson Dunbar’s was one of those families to be found here, on any Sunday suited to the flying of kites. He walked across the turf towards them with a feeling of sick dread in the pit of his stomach.

  He could hear the kite strings thrumming in the wind, and the crack and snap of their long tails. If he had closed his eyes, it could have been the rigging on a fleet of little boats, stirring. The laughter of children fluttered around and through it, light and joyous. Dunbar should be here, a part of it. This, Quire thought miserably, was what he had taken the man away from.

  Ellen Dunbar was standing with her back to him, watching her sons happily wrestle with the straining kites, dragging them across the breezes, shouting encouragement up to them. Quire did not know the boys well, for he had never intruded much upon the privacy of Dunbar’s familial life, but he knew how precious that life was. He envied it, though the envy had never troubled their friendship.

  “Hello, Ellen,” he said as he drew near.

  She half-turned to him, not wanting to lose sight of the boys. The wind that buoyed the kites above them lifted her hair.

  “Adam,” she said quietly. “Where is my husband?”

  “I thought perhaps he might be here.”

  “And I thought he might still be with you, sleeping off drink on a floor somewhere.”