The Feast of Ravens

by Andrew Beasley

  “We saw you,” said Mickelwhite, his words laden with meaning.

  “You saw me?” Ben wasn’t following.

  “We saw you,” Mickelwhite repeated. His lips formed a twisted smile. “This morning.”

  This morning.

  Bedlam was grinning too, an ugly sneer.

  They saw me, this morning. Ben’s heart filled with dread.

  “On St Paul’s,” Mickelwhite continued, milking every moment, “with the Hag.”

  Ben wanted to say something, to deny it, but his tongue was as dry as old leather in his mouth. They know, he thought with despair. They know the secret that I would have given my soul to keep hidden.

  “We saw it all, through our telescopes,” said Mickelwhite, his cruel grin growing wider. “We don’t stay in the Under all the time, you know. We go up onto the high places as well, to watch the Watchers.” His tongue touched the tips of his teeth, savouring the words. “We saw the mighty anger rising up inside you, we saw the violence erupt. We saw your fist smashing the stonework – that withered old witch was terrified… You were magnificent!”

  “We saw the whole thing,” Bedlam chimed in, “brilliant, it was. You were shouting in her face and you went so red we thought you were going to bust a blood vessel.”

  “And then you killed her,” Mickelwhite finished.

  Ben examined the faces around him. He’d thought that they had been glaring at him when he arrived, but now he realized that he had read their emotions all wrong. They were staring at him with admiration – and maybe a tinge of fear.

  Mickelwhite began to clap and the others followed until Ben’s ears were echoing with their applause. They gathered round him and embraced him like a brother, like a hero.

  “So you were pretending all along,” said Bedlam. “You made us believe that you had gone over to the Watchers, but it was a lie!”

  Ben felt his heart sink down into his boots.

  Perhaps it was, he thought.

  Perhaps this gutter is where I belong?

  Ben could think of nothing to say as Mickelwhite and his brigade bundled him through the corridors of the Under, cheering and telling everyone they met about Ben’s act of murder.

  “He killed ’er!” Bedlam yelled at the top of his voice. “The Hag is dead and Ben Kingdom done it!”

  The triumphant chant was taken up, echoing down the tunnels. “Kingdom! Kingdom! Kingdom!”

  It was a mistake! Ben wanted to shout. I never meant to hurt her. And yet he couldn’t make the words form on his tongue. Only Ruby Johnson didn’t seem to share the Legion’s excitement. When Ben stole a glance in her direction, there was a sense of deadness in her eyes too, as if she, like him, was removed from what was going on around her. But she wouldn’t return his gaze and when his fingers sought the reassurance of her grasp she pulled away. Ben couldn’t say he blamed her.

  It was impossible for Ben to guess how long that journey took. The whole time he had the sense that he was trapped in a nightmare. He wanted to scream but his lips were sealed; he wanted to act but he was powerless. At some point, Mickelwhite and the others hoisted Ben up onto their shoulders and they carried him like some sort of champion, only setting his feet back on the ground when they were in Carter’s rooms beneath the British Museum.

  Professor Carter rose from his desk, came over to Ben…and embraced him, as warmly as Mother Shepherd once had. There was no mention of the battle they had fought for possession of the missing Coin. Or of the uncomfortable fact that Ben hadn’t seen Carter’s claw since it had slit his father’s throat. Mother Shepherd’s death, it would seem, had wiped the slate clean.

  Claw Carter welcomed him like a hero.

  “Ben, my boy!” said Carter, beaming. “I always knew you belonged with me.”

  It was meant as a compliment, Ben supposed, yet Carter had given voice to his deepest fear…

  So I really am going to be the Hand of Hell, after all.

  It was the darkest thought Ben had ever known.

  “You have nothing to be ashamed of, Ben, I hope you realize that.”

  Claw Carter had been talking with Ben like that for over an hour. Saying all the things that Ben’s troubled heart so desperately needed to hear.

  It had been obvious to Carter that Ben was overwhelmed with emotion and he had quickly ushered all the others away until the two of them were alone in the privacy of his room. For his part, Ben had hardly breathed a word. He let his eyes wander over the professor’s collection of treasures: skulls of every shape and size, their empty sockets gazing back at him.

  He looked everywhere except at Carter, but his ears took in everything the man said.

  “You can’t blame a dog for barking, Ben. You might not like the noise it makes, but dogs bark; it’s their nature and they have no control over it. You are the Hand of Hell, Benjamin, you have to stop fighting that fact and just accept it. You will destroy the Watchers, that’s your nature, and you are wrong to resist following it. I hope,” said Carter, resting his good hand on Ben’s shoulder, “that you will allow me the honour of being your guide. You must embrace your destiny, Ben; take pleasure in the power you wield.”

  Ben thought for a moment. “And if I do that, you’ll take me to Nathaniel? Release him?”

  “Your brother isn’t my prisoner, Ben, but, of course, that will be our very first aim…providing you join with me.”

  Ben still hesitated, not ready to utter the words aloud. “But…” he began.

  “Go on,” Carter urged gently. “I’ve sat in your position, I’ve wrestled with the same questions you are battling now.”

  “But if I am…”

  “The Hand of Hell…” Carter filled in the gaps.

  “If I am…that…doesn’t that make me evil?”

  Carter laughed out loud. “Who says?”

  Well, thought Ben, Cowpat Cowper, for one. And Pa, and Nathaniel, and Mr. Moon, and Lucy Lambert… And me.

  “Just about everyone,” Ben replied.

  “Everyone is wrong,” said Carter. “There is no such thing as good or evil.”

  “Of course there is,” Ben spluttered.

  Carter shook his head. “Good and evil, right and wrong, are all merely man-made concepts. Artificial rules invented to control the masses.”

  Ben couldn’t agree. What Carter was saying went against everything he had ever understood about the world. “That’s not true,” he said.

  “Give me an example then, Ben,” said Carter. “Tell me something which you think is evil.”

  “Killing,” Ben replied instantly. “It’s wrong to kill.”

  “Is it?” said Carter. “What about if you are defending yourself, if you are fighting for your own life?”

  “Well, in that case, no, but—”

  “Give me another example then.”

  “Stealing.”

  “If you are starving? Are you telling me that it’s evil to steal bread if you have nothing to eat?”

  “No,” Ben conceded again.

  “So killing and stealing aren’t always wrong, are they?” Carter sounded very persuasive.

  “Not if you put it like that.”

  “And you must put it like that too, Ben. Forget all about good and evil. Life is about survival, and the sooner you start seeing it like that, the sooner you will be free to live exactly the way you want to. Without guilt, without remorse, and without any petty rules to hold you back. Like me.”

  Ben’s head was spinning. He could see the logic in Carter’s argument and yet it still felt twisted.

  “Do we consider lions to be evil when they kill gazelles? Do we call a raven a thief when it takes food to feed itself? No, we call this the survival of the fittest. Why should different rules apply to us?”

  “Because we aren’t animals, Professor Carter.”

  “Aren’t we? What makes us so special?” He swung his claw towards his shelves of bones. “Strip away our flesh and you’ll find we are all the same on the inside. Kill or be killed
is the only law which applies to us all.”

  “So if what we call ‘good’ or ‘evil’ just depends which side we’re looking from, then how come the Watchers have got an angel fighting with them?”

  “So have the Legion,” Carter retorted. “Or have you forgotten the Feathered Men?”

  Ben thought of their angry unblinking eyes, their snapping beaks, their fetid breath, the talons that he had seen rip a man in two.

  “Oh,” said Carter, reading the expression on Ben’s face, “I see. Just because the Weeping Man is more handsome and eloquent, that makes him better, does it? His wings are white are so that means he must be the good guy?”

  “At least his wings aren’t stained with blood.”

  “Aren’t they? I seem to remember him being rather handy with that sword of his. The Watchers really have got their claws deeply into you, haven’t they?” Carter added with a sudden flash of anger. “I have a very easy relationship with their precious Uncreated One. He hates me and I hate Him.” Slowly, Claw Carter reached over to his desk and opened a drawer. “Let me show you why.”

  The woman in the photograph was incredibly beautiful, Ben thought. What he liked best about her was her smile. Ben could imagine her bursting into laughter the second the photograph had been taken, filling the room with her joy.

  “She’s lovely,” said Ben.

  “Thank you,” said Carter softly, “I think so. That’s why I married her. Her name is Charlotte…was Charlotte, I should say. She’s dead now.” Ben saw the tears that welled in Carter’s eyes and felt a sudden compassion. Ben knew all too well what it felt like to miss the most important woman in your world. He thought of his mother every single day and the echoing hole that her death had left inside him had never healed.

  “It was a mosquito,” Carter explained. “That was what stole her life away. Can you imagine it? Something as small and trivial as an insect resting on my wife’s cheek for a second was enough to ruin the rest of my life.” Carter grew distant as he continued his story and Ben sat and listened in silence.

  “More than a decade ago, we were in India,” said Carter, “in Gujarat, one of the western states. Charlotte and I were embarking on an expedition together. I had a young man’s dream of trekking up the Indus Valley and finding the lost golden calf of Harappa. We were going to be rich!” He gave a hollow laugh. “The risk of malaria was well-documented but I was a seasoned explorer and thought that mosquito nets would be enough to protect us. I was wrong, Ben. One tiny malaria-ridden fly got through Charlotte’s net while she was sleeping and killed her.

  “She didn’t die instantly, of course. First she had to endure a week of shaking, misery and sweat while the disease had its way with her. I could do nothing except watch helplessly and pray for her recovery. But my prayers went unanswered. One pinprick from the mosquito, Ben, and my wife was gone…and the baby she carried inside her was lost to me before it even took its first breath.”

  A tear rolled down Carter’s lined and rutted cheek and he did nothing to hide it. “I buried my wife and unborn child at the Sun Temple at Modhera and then I walked away. I took nothing with me – no supplies, no maps, not even a water flask. My only possession was my anger and it drove me blindly onwards. I think that in my grief I went slightly mad, Ben. I kept walking north until I came to the Thar Desert, the great plain of sands in Rajasthan, which the locals called the Lavansagara, the ocean of salt. I had no plans to ever return.

  “The heat was blistering. I made no effort to stop it sucking the last of the moisture from my body, but even the sun didn’t burn as fiercely as my rage. I was delirious by that stage, probably only an hour or two from death by dehydration. When I saw the figure walking towards me over the dunes, I thought that he was a mirage at first, the last imaginations of my fevered brain.

  “He had the physique of a warrior, Ben, as if he was a Greek statue come to life. His pace was unhurried and he carried himself with the arrogance of a king. I knew how my own skin was suffering in the blazing heat, my lips were cracked and bleeding, but this man… He was on fire.”

  Ben gasped.

  “I didn’t know whether I could trust my own eyes,” Carter said. “I had seen fakirs walking on hot coals without wincing, but this was entirely different. I remember that I stood there, mesmerized, as fire caressed his entire body but apparently left him unharmed. It was beautiful, Ben. I watched the flames dance on his muscled arms and blossom around his head like a halo. They even flickered along the length of the enormous wings that sprouted from his shoulders. You can see why I thought I was hallucinating.

  “The angel spoke to me, Ben. He knew my name and said that my anger had called out to him across the miles. I was furious! If this being had been sent down to comfort me, then I didn’t want to hear anything it had to say!”

  Carter paused to compose himself. Even though the story was more than a decade old, it was clear to Ben that the professor’s wounds were still raw.

  “Then the Burning Man smiled at me. I saw the perfect pointed teeth that filled his mouth like a piranha’s and I knew that wherever he came from, it wasn’t Heaven. We talked for hours in that desert. And all the while I could see vultures circling above our heads, waiting for the moment that I became another carcass for them to dine on. As my life ebbed away, the Burning Man shared his secrets with me. He told me that he knew what it was like to be angry with the Uncreated One, because he was the angriest of all.

  “‘An eye for an eye’, Ben, have you heard that expression? That was what the Burning Man was offering me: revenge on the Uncreated One who had ignored my cries.” Small flecks of spit escaped Carter’s lips as he grew more animated. “The Burning Man told me of an ancient alliance between fallen angels and man…”

  “The Legion,” said Ben.

  “Exactly,” said Carter, “the most diverse army in the world, whose stories are as varied as the grains of sand in that desert. But we all share one thing in common, Ben, a tie that binds us together – our shared desire to overthrow the Uncreated One.”

  Claw Carter looked straight at Ben and for the first time Ben could see the vulnerability that lurked behind the man’s steel-grey eyes.

  “I was on the verge of death when the Burning Man gave a signal and the vultures began to drop. But as they flew closer I saw that they weren’t vultures at all; they were men with the wings and heads of eagles… I don’t know how long the Feathered Men tended to me in that desert, but I know that when I returned to civilization and the company of men, I was ready to pledge my life to the Legion.

  “I loved Charlotte,” Carter said, “but the Uncreated One took her from me. So now I choose not to live by His rules. Your mother was stolen from you, wasn’t she? You understand how I feel, don’t you, Ben?”

  “Yes,” said Ben quietly. “I do.”

  Find Ben. That was the thought in all of their minds as the three Watchers groped their way through the rolling sea of vapour.

  Jago Moon could feel the fog all around him. Its gossamer fingers clung to his skin like a spider’s web. The mist quivered and trembled as he passed through it, as though it contained a life of its own. It did little to improve his mood.

  Mother Shepherd is dead. The words rang continuously inside his head. Moon felt as if huge chunks of his own life had crumbled into dust along with her. He couldn’t allow himself the luxury of mourning though; he had responsibilities, he reminded himself – there were others who still depended on him. Not least of whom was Ben Kingdom.

  The streets were virtually deserted. Part of the explanation for this, Moon had no doubt, were the soldiers patrolling the city in an attempt to restore order. An uneasy quiet had fallen across the city, and the sense of fear was as suffocating as the fog.

  He led Lucy and Ghost onwards through the eerie silence. Looking for one boy in London was like looking for a needle in a haystack, which was why Moon had called in a few favours.

  I may be the ears of London, he thought to himself, but eyes c
ome in handy now and then too.

  Moon had his own network of contacts whom he could call upon in situations such as this. Men and women from all walks of life who kept their eyes open and their wits sharp. Some of them were fully fledged Watchers, others were merely sympathetic to the cause, but they were all well placed and well informed. There was Sherrinford Morley, the celebrated actor, who knew every coming and going in the West End, and Lady Persephone Peters, who kept Moon up to date with all the gossip from society circles. Then there were his associates who moved amongst far less exalted company: Harry Gore, the Sea Wolf, who controlled every villain in the London docks, and Vladimir Kiskov of the infamous Red Hands, a gang leader and conman, who went some way to cleansing his conscience by spying for the Watchers. And then he had other informers who swam in darker waters still…

  Moon heard the soldiers first.

  Above the soft leather squeaks made by the Watcher coats worn by Lucy and Ghost, he could make out the soft rhythmic chiming of medals on a broad chest and the unmistakable crunch of army-issue “ammunition boots”, with their iron heel and toe plates and studded leather soles. Moon counted the footsteps; three soldiers were approaching them from behind. Armed soldiers, he realized, as he heard the deafening click of a Mark IV Martini-Henry rifle being cocked.

  “Halt!” shouted one of the soldiers. “Who goes there?”

  “Let me handle this,” Moon hissed, pausing in his tracks and spreading his arms wide as he turned to face the soldiers. “There’s no trouble here, sir,” he called to them.

  “Step forward where we can see you,” the soldier barked.

  “We’re not looters,” said Moon, keeping his tone very level so as not to cause undue alarm. “I’m only a blind man and these two kind souls are helping me find my way home…”

  Two more rifles cocked. “This doesn’t look good,” Lucy whispered.

  “You don’t keep very good company, old man,” said the soldier. “I can see from the uniforms that your young associates are anarchists… My orders are to shoot Watcher revolutionaries on sight. The only question I have left is whether I have to shoot you too, just to be on the safe side.”