Time's Mistress

by Steven Savile

  The boy wriggled all the more desperately, bracing his scuffed boots on the stone railing and arching his back as he fought with his bonds.

  “Suit yourself, child, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” With that, the man who called himself Seth took an ivory handled flick-knife from his pocket, pushing the edge of the still-concealed blade up against the young boy’s pulsing pulmonary. “One touch is all it will take,” he promised, applying the slightest pressure to the small silver stud. The four-inch blade lanced out, opening up the boy’s soft flesh. Thick, rich red blood pulsed out through the gash for as long as it took the boy’s heart to stop beating. Dead, he slumped back against his bonds.

  Seth stood over the child, hands and face smeared with innocent blood.

  He inhaled slowly, savouring the iron-tang and the ripeness of the wind blowing off the various markets of the city. The boy stank, but then, Nathaniel knew, violent death seldom bore the aroma of rosehip or lavender. It stank. He grabbed the boy’s corpse and hauled it up over the stone railing. It took all of his strength to hold it there, arms bent back, and fasten each wrist, making a mocking crucifixion out of the boy’s body.

  He knelt before the Homunculus Cross once more, sub-vocalizing the first rhythms of the incantation, and touching his bloody hand to the twisted face of the beast trapped within the crux of the cruciform. And with the first words off his lips, the sky broke, drops of rain coming down like Solomon’s tears.

  His lips moved, murmuring the words of summoning he had learned by rote. His fingers moved to the second and third engravings, sharing the child’s blood with them. He felt the stone respond to his touch—a sudden swell of warmth within its cold core. “Awake, guardian of the stair,” he whispered. “Awake, spirit of the stone. Awake, and come to me.” He touched his left cheek, his fingertips lingering in the blood. Slowly, he drew his fingers down his cheek to his chin, and across his lips. He tasted the boy’s blood and beneath it the mineral traces of the stone still on his fingers.

  He stood slowly, lifting the cross in both hands and raising it above his head.

  He walked to the edge of the Whispering Gallery, his leather soles in the smeared blood, and leaned out, letting the cross fall.

  It hit the ground, the butt cracking the funeral slab beneath it, the impact opening fissures within the cross itself. It shattered even as it fell back, shards of stone strewn all around the broken slab.

  “Show me the way, creature of flesh and stone. I set you free. I give you your life. I give the blood of life. Take that blood in return for your guidance. I would know your secrets,” there was madness in his voice as it crooned, “I bid thee, construct, open the hidden door, for I would walk the stair and free all of your kind, making a place for them here, above.”

  Lady Justice stared at him from the roof of the Old Bailey as he reached down over the gallery, pulling apart the dead boy’s grubby shirt and plunging the knife into his bare stomach. He broke from the chant’s cadence to whisper: “Be grateful for your blindfold, woman, because there’s nothing remotely just about what is going to happen now.” His words were carried away on the wind as the first drops of blood splashed down onto the funeral slabs below.

  Nathaniel Seth opened the wound wider, bleeding him out.

  “Come to me, guardian of the way. Rise. Rise!”

  From the fragments of dust and stone, the creature rose, a bestial figure with razor-like teeth and a feral grin as it shed the lethargy of its prison and climbed into the air.

  “Come to me!”

  The fat rain melted away from the creature as it rose, evaporating into steam long before they ever came into contact with its calcified skin.

  “I would have more blood,” the homunculus rasped, settling on the gallery’s stone rail. “Yours.”

  Seth took his knife and made a small incision, opening his wrist so that the creature might feed. It scurried forward, hungrily suckling at the wound. He winced against the savagery of its seventeen teeth as they sank deeper and deeper into him. “Open the door,” he commanded, but the certainty had slipped from his voice. All around him he was surrounded by the architecture of doubt, huge buildings raised within the spectre of reassurance, churches, cathedrals, law courts, and buildings devoted to the fear of the unknown future and sucking absence of the Lord, and the darkness of the here and now where His hand has failed His children.

  “Feed me,” the creature cackled, the gore of his flesh stuck between its jagged teeth.

  “Open the door.”

  “Feed me,” it repeated as he wrenched his wrist away from its suckling mouth.

  “Not until you open the way.”

  “It has been so long, so long since I have tasted life. Who are you to command me? Are you the sovereign king of stone and shadow? Are you the master of granite and fog? Or are you all wind?”

  “I am the one who brought you back, imp. That is all you need to know. The boy is yours, feed to your heart’s content. When you have had your fill, you will open the door.”

  The homunculus scurried back and dropped from the railing, burying itself in the dead boy’s open ribs. Nathaniel Seth heard its feeding but did not listen. He leaned on the stone rail, looking out across the city. It would be the last morning that the sun would rise on these oblivious streets. The innocence of the city would be shorn from its alleys and byways. Tomorrow it would rise on a knowing city, stripped of illusion, stripped of safety, stripped of humanity.

  Tomorrow the sun would rise on a new Hell.

  O O O

  The homunculus opened the way.

  At first Nathaniel Seth thought the wall behind him was collapsing. The brickwork set in place for the best part of two centuries appeared to buckle, the huge white stones shifting, rearranging themselves until the mortar flaked away and the wounds in the wall opened wider and wider still, a wound in time and space.

  As the rain came down harder, the first burst of the yellow morning light seeped through the dark clouds. It bathed the huge cupola of St. Paul’s in the glory of a shifting rainbow, the violet of its inner rim so intense it bled into the buildings around it, suffusing them with incredibly vivid colour.

  More and more of the stones broke away until a huge gaping blackness beckoned where moments before there had been bricks and mortar.

  He stepped closer, hesitantly.

  “This is what you asked for, master of wind,” the homunculus mocked. “The great stair. Descend. Set the dwellers in the dirt free. Bring the denizens of the muck up to see the light of day. Let them revel in the filth of the earth no more. Set them abroad, let the folk of the surface learn humility when their new masters walk their precious streets. Down you go.”

  Seth peered deep into the darkness, trying to discern the curves and lines of the descent. For a moment he was sure there was nothing except for a dizzying drop, ninety-nine feet down, but slowly the ripples in the air began to solidify, hinting at the steps they were. Even so there was no substance to them. It was a vertiginous sight, down through the dome of the great Cathedral, through the nave and down into the quire vault and deeper still, past Wren and Nelson’s tombs and into the crypt with its famous dead and still deeper, losing itself in the belly of the black earth.

  “This is the stair?” He said doubtfully.

  “The Catamine Stair lies beyond. This is the doorway, nothing more. It is deeply rooted in the earth. Walk with faith, through the holiest of holies as you descend into what the frightened children call Hell.”

  “A sweet irony,” Seth said, repelled and yet still drawn to the seemingly endless drop.

  “Indeed. Now go, it will not remain open long without more blood, and I have a hankering for more of yours, truth be told.”

  “Be grateful I still have need of you, construct. But I warn you now, and just this once: continue to vex me and I will put an end to your miserable existence once and forever, as simply as this,” he snapped his fingers to emphasise his point. The homunculus sneered but lapsed int
o silence.

  A hangman’s wind was blowing down from Tyburn, though of course it wasn’t Tyburn anymore; the gallows tree was gone and in its place the glorious Marble Arch stood, but old deaths still clung to that wind. No amount of pretty buildings and new names could cleanse the spirit of the place or expunge the blood from the soil. It would always be a hangman’s wind that blew in from the west of the city.

  Smiling to himself, he stepped out into nothing.

  O O O

  The Catamine Stair lanced all the way down into the very heart of the earth.

  He walked, at first tentatively, each step felt out with care, and then with more and more surety as each new footfall was met by resistance from the air, and then by the clay steps of the stair itself as he disappeared beneath the surface, through the vault and lower.

  It was a long walk; but then he was walking through the realm of the dead to the hollow core of the earth, beneath the crust and the mantle and down, down, deeper and still down. It was dark but he had no need of light; he adjusted a simple ocular device which was to all intents and purposes identical to a run of the mill pair of glasses, though through a series of filters these altered the perception of his eyes, denying them the gift that was colour. Behind the lenses his world reduced to black and shades of grey. Beyond the glass frame fragments of colour still burned; they came to him as hallucinatory flashes, sparking and blazing at random.

  A curious lichen limned the steps themselves, giving off a faintly phosphorus glow. It was enough for him to see by.

  The Stair itself began as a cramped spiral, coiling around and around on itself dizzyingly, every twenty feet gained taking him through three complete rotations. With every turn and turnabout he felt all sense of his own place within the universe begin to drift.

  He noticed markings on the walls. Many were reminiscent of those on the Homunculus Cross, though the deeper he travelled the more deviant they became. The iconography was elemental at first, but it mutated, displaying perverse sexual deprivations, animalistic couplings, wild bestial rutting, horned figures presiding over the ritualistic rape and slaughter. It was almost as though he were descending into the murkier aspects of the human psyche, those dark whims rendered in images daubed on rough walls. Other shadowy renditions showed vaguely angelic creations, the offspring of the bacchanalia. In others still, women gave birth to giants too vast to be contained within their bodies, their flesh torn open. Cave paintings, animals, fire, the hunt, death, sex and life, all caricatures of those primitive essences. They were compelling, hypnotic, they craved the eye, filling the mind with the base memories of their artists. They were a connection with the creatures of this place and in studying them the images made a frightening pact with his imagination. It was possible, looking at them, to believe that the first men never crawled out of the primordial soup at all, that there was no Darwinian evolution, but that they emerged, erect, from this subterranean hell.

  By the wizardry of sheer willpower alone Nathaniel Seth broke their damned covenant and moved on, deeper.

  The air was different the deeper he descended; it went from stale to choked to dead.

  Even the quality of his footsteps changed, the stir of echoes thickening and muffling as the peculiar acoustics of the Stair took hold. They shifted from the reassuring solidity of stone to a hollow clang as the stair levelled out and he found himself walking along a vast metal embarkation platform.

  The left side of the platform was exposed. Brass rails ran the length of the platform, disappearing into the mouth of a tunnel at the far end. What might have been a brass egg rested on the tracks. As he moved closer he could see it looked more like a cage than an egg. It was easily large enough to confine a man. Seven thick bands of metal formed a mesh that came together to make the sphere. He walked slowly down the platform, marvelling at the construction of the place; it was akin to a subterranean railway station, the arched walls curving around the sphere, cradling it.

  It was like nothing on earth.

  Nathaniel Seth wasn’t alone.

  A woman—he knew it was a woman by the pendulous tears of her sleekly furred breasts—stood beside the brass sphere. She craned her head slowly, turning to face him. Her face, he saw in the flickering luminescence, was almost lupine in nature, with an elongated snout and deep-set eyes. He could feel her eyes on him as he moved along the platform—and so many more eyes as the infernal beasts watched him invade their realm.

  She held a brass spear, which she lowered as he neared, gesturing toward the cage.

  Close to, he appreciated her sheer size; the jackal-headed guardian towered over him, easily half his height again. Her muscles bunched and flexed, tense. There was nothing feminine about her.

  He bowed his head.

  “I come to offer your freedom,” he said.

  She had no answer for him.

  Instead, she reached forward with her sinister hand, resting it upon the brass casing of the sphere. It responded to her touch with the sound of clockwork mechanisms stirring. Cogs and gears ratcheted in the otherwise silent tunnel, and a moment later the hiss of a steaming piston was followed by a single sharp click as the coupling holding the lid of the sphere was released. The bands of brass folded back on each other one at a time. There was a leather harness on the floor of the sphere. She gestured with her spear again. He did not need prompting twice. Nathaniel Seth boarded the sphere. He stepped into the harness, pulling it up so that it rested on his hips, synched the straps and forced the buckles tight across his chest and arms. The harness was anchored at his feet to the brass casing. The pistons hissed again as the sphere closed around him. There were similar anchor points above him.

  He had barely secured them when the jackal-headed guardian rapped on the side of the sphere. It responded by rocking violently. The brass began to thrum as the rocking intensified, and then it began to roll, gathering momentum as it did. The rails set into the floor guided the sphere as it accelerated. The cage rattled and swayed as it went into free-fall. Strapped in, Seth twisted and jerked, spun head over feet with ever increasing ferocity as the sphere descended.

  Subterranean winds whistled through the brass casing, the sounds of sorrow amplified by the same acoustics that had toyed with his footsteps.

  His screams echoed all the way to the hollow heart of the world.

  O O O

  Millington found it hard to laugh off the implications of the corpse strung up across the Whispering Gallery of St. Paul’s for all to see. The boy’s premature death subdued the actor’s familiar jocular nature.

  They had been leaving the Greyfriar’s when Stark had collapsed. There had been no warning to it. Mid-word Stark’s eyes rolled up into his head and his legs buckled. He went down hard, as though pole-axed by a bullet. Millington had caught him in time to prevent his skull cracking open on the cobblestones. He had been frightened to move him. For five full minutes Stark lay unmoving in the street, his pulse was strong, and there were no other outward signs of distress that Millington could see, but there was no sign of him coming around, either.

  The Club’s chamberlain, Mason, appeared with a wet towel, ice and revivification salts. He uncorked the salts and past them beneath Stark’s nose three times. On the fourth pass his eyes opened. They were shot through with blood and unfocussed. The young man looked haggard as they helped him to sit.

  “The way is open,” he rasped in a voice brittle as broken stones. “They come. They come.”

  “What?” Millington said, mistaking the intensity of his companion’s words for the trailing threads of his blackout. “Speak plainly, man.”

  “The Cross is broken, the door is open. No words could be plainer. I can feel it, no, not feel, feel is the wrong word. Hear, I can hear it. The world is screaming out against the wrongness of the door, and its screams are intensifying the longer the door remains open. London is hurting. We need to go there, now. Help me stand. I know where the door is. Just please God we can get there in time to close it. Mason, a c
ab, please.”

  Millington reached down a hand for Stark, helping him to his feet. The smaller man swayed dangerously as he tried to remain upright. Millington lifted his arm and ducked under his shoulder, supporting him every step of the way as they moved to the curb.

  “You aren’t strong enough, Fabian, let me summon the others.”

  “No time. Mason can pass the word. We have to get there now.”

  The chamberlain whistled once sharply and a black brougham drew up beside them, the driver doffing his cap as the sweat-slick horses pranced in place, their hooves sparking on the cobbles.

  “St. Paul’s, driver,” Fabian Stark said, “and be quick about it. There’s a guinea in it if you can have us there before the sun is fully up.”

  He opened the door and stumbled into the cab.

  Millington followed him, pulling down the window as he slammed the door. “Carry word to McCreedy. He will know what to do.”

  “Sir,” the chamberlain said, and this once Millington noticed the slight note of deference to his tone. It brought a smile to his lips. He banged on the side of the cab door and they were away, the driver cracked the whip and the cab lurched forward as the blinkered animals began to walk. The driver cracked the whip again and the horses broke into a brisk canter.

  Millington sank back into the waxed leather banquette. Beside him Stark looked like Death himself.

  “Tell me what to expect, Fabian.”

  Stark closed his eyes and buried his head in his hands. The skin around his hairline paled as he massaged his temples. Millington could not tell if he was reliving his blackout or merely struggling to recover from it.

  He didn’t say anything. The waking streets stretched out beyond the cab’s window. The whip cracked again and the brougham lurched once more as the horses began an easy gallop.

  “I don’t know,” Stark said, eventually. “The way is open … anything could be waiting for us.”

  With dawn no more than minutes away as they drew up before the Cathedral’s steps, Stark paid the man his full guinea and struggled out of the cab. Millington stood beside him. He noticed the birds first, cawing and circling. They drew his eyes toward the sky. Hundreds of starlings filled the sky, a writhing black cloud of feathers. It took him a moment more to see what had them so agitated: the gutted corpse of the boy crucified up against the Whispering Gallery. He grabbed Stark’s shoulder and pointed.