Julian pushed Firebaugh to the right, in a direction that would curve them through the forest back to the road. As Matthew’s head cleared—and the bitter cold had a great deal to do with that—he reasoned that the second coach had come upon the Autreys’ cottage and its driver had seen the first coach situated in front, thus had pulled the horses to a halt and backed them up around the road’s bend so as to be out of sight. Montague had likely started the fire either to drive the team away or burn them, if they weren’t set loose. The others had probably either elected their own plan of attack or been directed by the vice admiral. In any case, now there was the unholy three to deal with, and maybe the worst of the lot though Krakowski had come within a gasp of finishing Matthew off.
“Stop,” Julian said quietly.
Through the trees could be seen the yellow glow of the coach’s lanterns, one on either side of the driver’s seat. The driver himself was not perched up top. “Driver’s inside keeping warm, if he’s got any sense,” Julian told Matthew. He withdrew from his cloak his gun, which he’d been trying to keep dry during their trek from the cottage. “If you have any thoughts of shouting out,” he said to Firebaugh, who appeared utterly exhausted and in no shape to protest, “I can still pour you a cup of suffering.”
“No, please,” the doctor murmured listlessly. “Please…I won’t shout out.”
“Go.” Julian shoved Firebaugh forward.
They crossed from the woods onto the road, which itself was thick with snow. The orange glow of the barn’s fire lit the clouds. Matthew looked back to see the spectacle of thousands of sparks blowing with the wind. The coach’s team grumbled nervously and shifted in their traces, smelling the smoke. Then they were upon the coach, and Julian threw open the doors on the side facing them.
The man inside was bundled up in a heavy brown coat and a brown woolen cap with a white tassel atop it. He gave a start and instantly lifted his hands at the sight of the four barrels looking him in his sharp-nosed face.
“Take off your coat and cap, get out the other side and run,” Julian said.
It was done at once and without protest. As soon as the driver was gone, Julian put on the coat and the cap and said to Matthew, “Both of you get in. I’ll get us the hell out of here.” When they were inside, Matthew put the useless gun on the seat beside him and Firebaugh collapsed into a heap on the other side. Julian closed the doors and climbed up to the driver’s seat. A movement to his right caught his attention: a small figure, crouched down and running as fast as possible across the road behind the coach. Julian had no time to dwell on Miles Merda; he flicked the reins and shouted “Giddap!” but the horses would not move.
Julian saw the whip upright in its stand. He put his gun aside to pull it out and crack it across the reluctant rumps. “Giddap, damn you!” he shouted, and with this added incentive the team lurched forward, the traces jingled, and the coach’s wheels began to roll.
A shot rang out and the lantern to Julian’s right exploded. He saw Samson Lash coming like a destructive force of nature across the road in front of the team, followed at a short distance by Cardinal Black. Before the team could pick up any kind of speed, Lash had thrown himself at the horses and grabbed hold of any leather strap he could find to stop their progress. Julian reached for his gun but Lash was too close to the team and shooting a horse was not productive; as the coach rattled to a stop, Julian struck out with the whip at Samson Lash, who took two strikes until he grasped hold of the whip’s bitter end. Before Julian could let go of the whip’s handle he was yanked off the driver’s seat, cast into space, and down upon the crust of the road.
The breath bellowed from Julian’s lungs. Lash gave him a kick to the side that Julian instantly knew through the searing pain had staved his ribs in. Julian desperately gripped the gun; he rolled away from the next kick, which grazed across his shoulder, and heard Lash shout, “Finish him, Black!” as the vice admiral tore away toward the coach. With two more strides Lash reached up, grasped one of the door handles and ripped the entire door from its hinges, exposing within Firebaugh and a terrified Matthew whose first impulse was to kick out at Lash’s face.
Black’s gun was drawn. As he reached Julian and took aim, Julian twisted his body and pulled one of the pistol’s triggers. Sparks flew, a small flame gouted, there was an instant of a sizzling sound during which Julian feared the first chamber had misfired…and then the pistol went off with a blinding flash, ear-cracking blast and a whirling dervish of blue smoke.
Lash gripped one of Matthew’s legs and started pulling him out. “Get him! Get him!” Firebaugh screamed, his voice as shrill as a woman’s. Matthew kicked out with his other boot and caught Lash on the side of the head, but it was as a slap against the brow of an enraged bull.
Matthew reached to the seat beside him for his pistol to use as a club, but before he could get it the huge man had nearly climbed into the coach and the vice admiral’s hand closed on the weapon.
“Now!” Lash shouted, a shout of triumph to go with the fierce red gleam of near madness in his eyes, and he lifted the gun and pulled the trigger.
When the blast came, Matthew Corbett had known what was coming. He had thrown both his gloved hands up to protect his face and tried in the instant of recognition to twist his body to one side, but even so the flash was like a sun exploding and his ears rang with the shriek of a thousand of Cardinal Black’s demons. When he dropped his hands and uncoiled, through the roiling smoke he first saw that Samson Lash’s gun hand had been reduced to a red mass of two twitching fingers around a twisted thing that had once been a pistol.
Lash stared at his own misshapen hand. His right eye was a red, sunken hole. Around it the bones of the skull had caved in from the concussion. In his right cheek and forehead above the ruin of the eye had been driven pieces of metal from the gun that had exploded with its three packed charges of lead balls and gunpowder. Blue flames rippled in his beard. Some of the metal bits of the gun had blown out sideways and were imbedded in the walls of the coach, and they too glowed as if on a blacksmith’s forge. Sparks flared and flickered in the air, which smelled not of a winter’s snow but of summer’s hot lightning.
It also smelled of blood, scorched flesh and burning hair.
In another instant the vice admiral’s face had become a distorted bloodmask. He fell back out of the coach, but he did not go down nor did he make any sound. He began to stagger back and forth beside the landship, shaking his destroyed hand to which the mangled bomb of a pistol had melded. Matthew watched him as he took one arm with the other and seemed to want to tear it off, so fiercely did he wrench at it. Then he did fall to his knees, and his gory face turned to behold the man who was coming toward him, the specter of approaching death.
Julian Devane stood over him.
Lash’s mouth worked but no sound emerged. The remaining eye still held its red fire of both hatred and a refusal to plead for life. He puffed his chest out, and Julian caught the shine of his medals in the leaping firelight.
He brought up his pistol, cocked it, and put it against Lash’s head.
Lash pushed the gun away with his good hand. The vice admiral grinned, as blood ran from his nose and down into his beard, and his eyelid in the gruesome face began to fall to half-mast.
Julian put the gun against Lash’s head once more.
Lash spat blood at Julian and made a noise that might have been a laugh.
Matthew saw Julian hesitate…still hesitate…and then the bad man stepped back. Clutching his left side as if to hold his entrails in place, he hobbled to the coach. Julian croaked, “You’re driving. Get us out of here.”
“What happened to Black?”
“Gone. I think I hit him. But when the smoke cleared…gone. Get up there, Matthew. Firebaugh, I can still hurt you. Hear me?” Julian kept his grip on the fearsome pistol, and though his face was dead white and sweating even in the cold and
his voice was a harsh whisper, he was yet enough threat to keep the doctor at bay.
As Matthew shook off his own pains and weariness in the cold and got the team moving, he looked back to see Samson Lash still on his knees in the snow. Did the vice admiral fall at last, as Matthew took the coach around the curve to pass the burning barn and the house where the Autreys lay dead?
He wasn’t sure, but he did not look back again.
thirty.
Night and the wind. The horses, exhausted, had slowed to a walk and would not be urged to go any faster. The driver too was exhausted, and he clung to the reins as if fearful of falling asleep and toppling from his perch, which was true.
Two hours had passed since Matthew had guided the team past the Autreys’ cottage. He could see stars between the clouds as they moved like gray wraiths across the heavens. His body seemed to be one pulsing pain. Any broken bones? He didn’t think so. The pain of his shoulder where Krakowski had clouted him with the pistol was bad, but the worst pain was in his heart.
He fought against sleep. How many hours had it been since he’d slept? Many. The wind in his face was a double-edged sword; it was helping him win the fight, but his eyes were so narrowed against the blow that they kept wanting to close altogether.
He heard the sound of the viewslit sliding open.
“Stop the coach,” Julian said, his voice now even more ragged and pain-wracked than before.
“What is it?”
“Just stop. Right here, right now.”
Matthew pulled back on the reins. “Whoa, whoa,” he said. The team needed no coaxing. When the wheels had stopped rolling Matthew saw that they were on what appeared to be a desolate road with flat, snow-covered moors on either side. There were no lights but the single remaining lantern to his left, the lanterns within the coach, and the stars.
“Come down here,” Julian said, and then he slid the viewslit closed.
Matthew climbed down. His back protested. He dreaded what a mirror would tell him; the only demon in it would be himself, because in his sorry state he was sure he resembled the very Devil, if that creature were covered in black and blue bruises. Before he went to the place where there had been two doors, reduced now to one door and an opening that allowed the passengers to freeze to death, he stopped to scoop up a handful of snow and press it against the bullet crease on his cheek because that too was stinging like Satan’s most favored scorpion.
Julian was already climbing out, but with the pained slowness of an elderly man. Again he clutched at his left side. “Here.” He gave Matthew his pistol. “Hold this beast for me, and watch that bastard.” He motioned toward Firebaugh, who sat shivering in his banyan robe. “I’m going to see if there are any blankets in the back. Hoping a horse blanket, at least. A rope to tie him up with would be good, too, because I’m about to pass out. Watch him,” Julian repeated, and then he went to the landship’s stern where the two doors were closed over the baggage compartment.
When Julian got around to the back, he noted that one of the doors had been jarred a crack open, likely from the motion of the coach. He grasped both handles and pulled, and as the doors came fully open starlight glinted on the snout of a pistol that was thrust into his face.
“Jack in the box!” said Miles Merda with a toothy, lopsided grin. The man who resembled a twelve-year-old boy was wrapped up in a heavy coat with a blanket draped around him. His grin widened. “It appears to me I have won the—”
Three things happened almost at once.
Julian slammed the doors upon Merda’s wrist and the gun went off, but Julian had already jerked his head aside and the ball hissed past his left ear. With a move that sent excruciating pain through his injured side he reached into the baggage compartment where the small killer had lodged himself during the fight with Samson Lash and waited patiently for the moment when the guns were silent and the defenses down.
Merda was already reaching for a second prepared pistol, but Julian got hold of Merda’s coat and threw him out of the compartment into the snow before small hand could latch onto large gun. The little man nimbly scrambled up. A knife that a butcher would envy glinted in the wash of the coach’s lantern light. Merda rushed in jabbing the blade at Julian, who dodged one strike and then another but felt the third tear through his cloak. The blade snagged in the cloth. Julian chopped Merda’s hand away from it. He hit Merda full in the mouth but Merda delivered a fist that got Julian in his damaged ribs, and as Julian fell with the breath knocked out of him and pain sawing at his side he saw Merda reach into his mouth and pop out the false front teeth that turned into a pair of deadly blades.
At once Merda was sitting astride Julian’s chest, one hand up against his chin and the other pressing the blades into his throat, about to pierce the flesh.
“No,” said Matthew. He cocked the second chamber of Julian’s gun, which had seemed of its own accord to have taken aim at Merda’s forehead under the mass of curly, oiled hair.
Merda looked up at him. At that moment the doors on the other side of the coach banged open. Firebaugh was out and running.
The blades remained pressed against Julian’s throat. The slashing of arteries was an ounce of pressure away.
The grin was fixed on Merda’s mouth but his eyes were dark and dead: the remorseless, conscienceless eyes of a painted doll. It was clear he meant to kill Julian and take his chances with the Herrald Agency’s problem-solver, whose sympathetic nature—weakness would be the correct word—could be easily used against him.
“Corbett,” Merda said quietly and soothingly, as if the child were speaking to another over the matter of sharing sugar candies. “You and I both know you’re not a killer. You’re a man of the law.” He spoke it like a curse. “Of justice. You wouldn’t stain yourself by—”
Matthew pulled the trigger.
The blast of the double shot took most of Merda’s skull away. The small man seemed to fold up as if made of flimsy paper and blow before the wind, the staring eyes beneath the cratered skull now truly dark and dead.
Julian sat up. He coughed up blood.
Matthew offered him the smoking pistol. “Here,” he said tonelessly, and when Julian took the weapon he began walking away.
Julian wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and regarded the result. “Where are you going?” he asked, his own senses stunned and sluggish.
“To fetch a doctor,” Matthew answered.
Firebaugh didn’t get far, maybe only a hundred yards before his borrowed boots cracked through the crust into boggy earth that stopped his progress as surely as a pair of leg-irons.
“On your feet,” Matthew commanded when he reached the man by easily following his tracks. He could hear in his voice—as the doctor could—that something had changed about him. Something was different, and this difference had perhaps become complete in just the last few minutes. Was this change for good or for bad? At the moment, it was difficult to say.
“Oh yes,” Matthew added, as he stood over the doctor and found himself wishing Firebaugh to try to run a bit more so he could take the man down like a sack of dirty laundry. “They don’t call me the Monster of Plymouth for no reason.”
****
The rope that wound up tying Firebaugh’s arms behind his back in the most uncomfortable position possible was the cord that had previously held up his breeches. With Firebaugh trussed and the yellow cravat of the formerly living Miles Merda stuffed into his mouth, the doctor was secured enough so that Julian could sleep under the blanket that Merda had used to stay warm in the baggage compartment, and thus Matthew got his balls under himself—as either Julian or Hudson Greathouse might say—and continued on as driver.
When two more hours had passed and the road seemed to go on forever across the moors, Matthew knew he was near passing out. So it was with great relief that within the following half hour he steered the team toward the
lamps of a coaching inn made of white stone and at least twice the size of the Autreys’ cottage, which would hopefully mean featherbeds and a chance to bathe. They had stopped here briefly with the Turlentorts on the way in to London, but the stop had hardly seen them out of their coach.
How to explain the situation to the innkeeper Edmond Varney and his wife Ann, when they as loyal helpers to the riders of the roads came out wearing coats over their nightclothing and shone their lanterns upon the battered faces of their newest visitors?
How indeed?
The first item of business before Matthew stopped the coach before the inn was to shrug off the polar bear coat that was freighted by so much blood. It would not do to scare the wits out of the Varneys before a word could be spoken. He threw the coat over the side of the coach into the snow on the right, still perhaps thirty yards from the inn, and hoped it was far enough not to be discovered, at least for tonight.
When he reined the team in, he climbed down and rang the small bell that hung beside the front door. Above the door was a sign he’d noted before, but now seemed more poignant: the name of the inn, The Flying Dragon.
“We are constables escorting this violent criminal to stand trial in Bristol,” Matthew decided to say when the pair emerged as predicted, with coats over nightclothes and lanterns ashine. “Yes, we did pass this way just lately, and we were coming from Bristol, as you know. Well, this one gave my associate and me quite a run and we’ve suffered some injuries but at last we brought him to ground. He’s tied up now, and it’s best he remain tied up and stoppered up because I can tell you, sir and madam, he is one cunning sonofabitch. Might we have a room for the night and some food? Also, the horses are very much in need of attention.”
“Of course!” said Varney, who stated that they had three rooms vacant and food aplenty, since it being so near Christmas all were at home with their families, and no one was travelling the roads except the express post coach.
Varney’s quick and hospitable acceptance of the guests changed noticeably when a gray-faced and wheezing Julian brought Firebaugh out of the coach like a bound-up beast. Both the innkeeper and his portly wife retreated from the doctor as if from a carrier of plague, and at the inn’s door Varney caught Matthew’s sleeve and asked nervously, “Sir? My wife and I are not to be in danger, are we?”
Cardinal Black Page 35