Chapter Sixteen
Down below, in that other place, beneath the molten sky, the homunculus crept forward.
The others had left, gone to the world above.
It was curious; that curiosity burned within it.
They had left behind the doorway, the skin and bone they had needed to move between the worlds.
It knelt beside the ruined corpse of Nathaniel Seth, looking at it with something between fascination and desire.
It licked its lips, looking furtively left and right.
It was alone.
Alone to do whatever it wished.
Whatever …
It scampered forward and climbed quickly inside the dead man’s skin, trying it on, stretching out into it, to fill it. It felt good. Right. It concentrated on the wounds, spreading its essence out into them. They would heal, in time. And it had time. All the time in the world. An endless hour.
And so the man who called himself Nathaniel Seth rose up again to stand on his own two feet.
The daemon of the hour.
The Little Matchstick Girl
Chapter Seventeen
That hour changed everything.
As the bells of London chimed thirteen the bronze lions of Trafalgar Square roared. The sight of Landseer’s huge lions rearing up stopped Emily Sheridan dead in her tracks. The rain sheeted down, drumming angrily on the empty street. She held her hands up, palms bared as though showing the lion that she was defenceless would save her. She edged back a step and then another. The beast tossed back its head and roared again. The sound came from deep in its throat and climbed violently into the night. The rain ran in red tears down her hands. Rust, she realised. The rain was full of rust.
She was trembling.
She was alone in the square with Landseer’s lions.
Emily had learned the legend of the lions at her mother’s knee, when she was still young enough to bury her face in the folds of her skirts and think that kind of invisibility made her safe. It wouldn’t help her now. The lion could see her and burying her face wouldn’t change that. There was nothing unique about the legend: at the time of the city’s greatest need the lions would wake and come to its aid. Emily had always thought it was a children’s tale, like The Once and Future King, a sort of warping of the holy resurrection and the second coming. People were simple and sought comfort in simple things, even if those simple things were impossible.
Now one of those impossible things bounded down from its pedestal while rust rained out of the sky. The sheer amount of strength trapped within its bronze body was daunting. She felt it as the lion prowled toward her, sniffing. She didn’t dare move. Not even so much as an inch. Another of the lions came down from its plinth to sniff her, pressing its bronze nose up against her legs, then went down on its forepaws and lowered its head to the ground. Emily didn’t know what to do. Things like this, like bronze lions coming to life and prostrating themselves before her, didn’t happen in Emily’s world. She was … what was she? It was hard to remember anything now. Her head rang with the voices of the city’s dead. She listened to them, trying to decipher them. Before the voices she had been a tallow girl. She had made candles and soaps from the butcher’s leftovers. Impossible things didn’t bow down to her as though she were their queen.
The three remaining lions presented themselves.
They were waiting for her to do something.
She had no idea what.
Above her a murder of crows circled the monument. They cawed, their voices raucous enough to raise the dead. She had never seen birds flying in the rain. She didn’t know what it meant. She stood for a moment, frozen in indecision, then the birds banked and veered off toward the north of the city.
One by one, from left to right, the four lions rose and set off after the crows.
Without thinking, she followed them.
Within one hundred yards she was running trying to keep up.
They made an unlikely entourage, the birds, the bronze lions and the former tallow girl. The lines from the nursery rhyme ran through her mind in her own singsong voice. For the life of her she couldn’t imagine how she was supposed to save London. She couldn’t even save herself. She looked over her shoulder. Someone was back there. They had been all the way from Southwark, shadowing her. Walking in her footsteps. She could feel their rancid breath on the nape of her neck. She glanced nervously over her shoulder, not knowing who to expect, but there was no one there.
The warders wouldn’t miss her ’til morning and by then she’d be long gone. Not that they would care; that was the one thing they never did, care. Not the sisters and brethren of the Order of the Star of Bethlehem locked away from the world behind the iron gates and high walls.
She followed the lions up St. Mary’s Place. The rain transformed the cobbled street into a tributary of the Thames, running all the way down to the banks where the mudlarks were already out looking for the night’s spoils. She splashed through the puddles, picking up the trailing hem of her skirts as she ran. The red-brick of Theatreland beckoned but at this time of night only old ghosts trod the boards. At Eros, the lions bounded toward Covent Garden while above them the crows banked away, their black wings carrying them toward Holborn and Grays Inn Road.
Emily ran with her head up, staring at the birds. She didn’t know why she had to follow them, only that the lions were, and that somehow she had become part of whatever was happening to London. So she ran because she had to.
Chapter Eighteen
In the shadows, the homunculus that had clothed itself in Nathaniel Seth’s skin watched the woman hitch up her skirts. It wanted her but couldn’t risk going up against the lions. Not yet, at least. It was not strong enough. It needed more blood before it could even consider taking on the guardians. It was no fool, this daemon. It knew its place in the pantheon of the city. It was a skinwalker, nothing more. It could taste the richness of her blood in the air. It went beyond temptation. She was a rare and precious delicacy in this coming together of the lost and the damned. She was an innocent. The thing that was Seth tossed back its head and shrieked its frustration at the sky. Its howls were picked up by the wind and scattered across the rooftops.
Save for a baby, fresh from the womb, there was no more potent a feast than a virgin.
It wanted the woman.
It was not used to its new clothes. It didn’t walk upright like a man, it crabbed and scurried and scraped, dragging its fingers along the walls and the ground, always keeping as much of its physical being in contact with the earth itself as it could, as though somehow that contact grounded it to the hell it had crawled out of.
Sniffing the air, it scuttled forward.
It was hungry.
The woman looked back over her shoulder, and for a moment the homunculus thought for sure she saw it because she made the sign of the cross over her breast, but then she turned and ran away through the midnight streets.
Chapter Nineteen
Mason, the chamberlain of the Greyfriar’s Gentleman’s Club, balanced a silver tray of finely cut Baccarat crystal tumblers and a decanter filled to the brim with a Cardhu single malt, one handed. He moved around the room silently offering a glass, then filling it, to each of the gentlemen. When the last of the glasses were filled, Haddon McCreedy raised his glass and said simply, ”To Fabian, may the grand old bugger rest in peace.”
”To Fabian,” the others echoed, raising their glasses.
The big man downed his scotch in one swallow and slammed the tumbler down on the table. ”Christ, this is a miserable business,” he said.
”You’ll get no argument from me,” Dorian Carruthers said. He slouched back in his chair. He put his glass down and didn’t touch it again for a full five minutes. Instead he reached into his pocket for the copper thruppenny bit he had been playing with all evening and walked it from knuckle to knuckle before making it disappear. He was performing for an audience of one. There was no flourish of fingers this time. Anyone looking clo
sely enough would have seen him palm it. His mind wasn’t on the trick. It was obviously somewhere else, and where wasn’t hard to guess.
Beside him Millington unfolded the evening’s broadsheet then a few minutes later refolded it loudly and said, ”This is ridiculous. We’re can’t sit around and make like nothing happened. Fabian’s gone. We all saw it. He turned to stone!”
”And what do you propose we do, young Mister Millington?” It was Brannigan Locke. He tamped the tobacco down in his pipe and bit on the stem. He puffed four times vigorously to get the smoke flowing into his lungs. ”Call in a sculptor?”
”That’s not funny, Locke.”
”No, it’s not,” Locke agreed, ”but right now humour is the last thing on my mind. We’ve just lost a friend, but he was always more than that, wasn’t he? None of us are saying it, but we’re all thinking it: we just lost our protection. We few, more than anyone else in the Godforsaken city, know the truth of what is out there and now we are supposed to face it alone? I’m as much a gambling man as anyone here, but I wouldn’t put Carruthers’s bloody thruppenny bit on us right now, let alone my own money.”
”So what do you propose?” Millington turned the question back on Locke.
”Fight,” Locke said, simply.
”That’s easy to say,” Haddon McCreedy said. ”If you are partial to shadow boxing.” The big man cracked his knuckles and shook his head. ”Just give me something to hit and I’ll hit it.” And true to his word, he looked ready to break something with his bare hands. ”Of course it would help if we had the vaguest notion of what we are facing. I would hate to clobber the wrong daemon, after all.”
”Yes, that would be rather poor form, wouldn’t it, old boy?” Carruthers said with a slight smile.
”Speaking of poor form, where the devil has Napier got to?” Millington asked.
”Haven’t seen hide nor hair of him since we left St Paul’s,” Locke said. ”Didn’t he travel back with you, Dorian?”
Carruthers shook his head. ”He wanted to make his own way back. I assumed he wanted to clear his head. You know how Eugene is. I don’t think we should worry.”
”You don’t? I can’t say I agree with you, Dor. I think we absolutely should worry, given what has happened tonight already. I’d say worrying was a fine thing for us to be doing.”
”You’re overreacting, Anthony,” Carruthers disagreed, shaking his head. ”Eugene is hardly helpless.”
”I never said he was, and normally I wouldn’t bat an eye if the old bugger wanted to take himself off on some midnight stroll. But the rules changed tonight, Dor. These aren’t the same streets they were. They’re dangerous in ways we can’t even begin to understand yet. Right now we should all be exercising a bit of caution.”
At the window, Haddon McCreedy grunted. ”Sorry to interrupt you ladies, but I think you might want to come and have a look at this,” he pressed his finger against the glass, pointing at something in the sky.
Carruthers pushed himself out of the comfort of the winged Chesterfield armchair and joined the big man at the window. ”What the hell … ?”
”What is it?”
”Damned if I know,” Carruthers muttered. He pressed his face up against the glass, his breath making a curious ’O’ on the pane as warm met cold.
”Looks like a giant bird, and I mean giant,” Locke said, peering over Carruthers’s shoulder.
”That’s what I thought at first, but it isn’t one bird. Look closer, it’s a flock, I think, pigeons, maybe, or ravens.” McCreedy said, ”But damn me, I’ve never seen birds flock like that. It’s unnatural.”
He was right. In the sky, cutting out half of the moon, the pigeons had abandoned their usual flocking patterns and seemed to have come together in the shape of a giant bird, a hundred, a thousand times the sum of its parts.
”Is that an Anafanta?” Carruthers asked, staring at the flock of birds. ”Christ, I wish Fabian was here,” he said, shaking his head. It was what they were all thinking. Something had to be binding the spirits of the pigeons into a single cohesive entity, and whatever was capable of that was out of their philosophy, as the Great Bard was wont to say. Stark would have known what it was, and what to do. But Stark was dead. The enormity of his sacrifice was beginning to hit home. It was all well and good to toast the dead man off on his voyage across the Styx with the ferryman, but this, this was different. This was real. They were alone.
Millington watched the birds. They banked and wheeled, circling around something he couldn’t see for the rooftops. He thought for a moment that he could see shapes within the spaces formed between the hundreds of wings, but before he could focus on one it was gone, blurring into the next and the next and the one after as though the flock was desperately trying to convey a message that he was too stupid to understand. And all he could think was that Stark would have been able to interpret the wing patterns and grasp exactly what the birds were trying to tell him.
”Down there! Look!” Locke gasped, stabbing a fat finger at the glass.
Millington followed the direction of his finger and saw a slip of a girl huddling against the side of the Cornucopia store across the way. It took him a moment to see beyond the filth and the grime of street life to see the girl beneath and realise that she could not have been more than sixteen, if that. She was shivering in the doorway, her arms folded beneath her breasts. Her hair fell across her face, but it couldn’t hide her eyes. She was staring up at him. She was beautiful but in an unconventional way, like Andersen’s Little Match Girl.
She mouthed something but he couldn’t read her lips.
Then she collapsed, slumping against the red brick and curling up.
Millington didn’t hesitate. He ran out of the Smoking Room, across the landing and down the stairs three and four at a time and out into the street. The cold hit him like a sledgehammer as he opened the door. Wraiths of breath materialised in front of him. He didn’t so much as balk. He raced across the street to where the girl lay. She was unconscious, her eyes rolled up into her head. She was both more beautiful and more fragile than he had first thought. He reached down to gather her into his arms and froze as a deep-throated growl rumbled across the cold road. It was an utterly animalistic sound. Not a dog. Something much bigger. He turned slowly, not knowing what the hell he expected to see …
But hell was appropriate because this thing could have prowled straight out of any one of the Dantean Hells.
Thoughts raced blinding through his head. What would be worse, back up and abandon the girl or try to help her? Which would set the thing off? He tried to think it through. Surely if the creature meant to harm her it would have struck while she lay there helpless and alone, not waited for him to come between them. So then if it wasn’t trying to harm her it had to be protecting her. In which case he needed to convince it he was no threat to the girl. Swallowing his fear, Anthony Millington tried to will himself smaller as he knelt beside the unconscious girl. He moved very, very slowly. The last thing he wanted to do was startle the overprotective beast—whatever it was.
Cautiously, he reached out, slipping his arms under and around the girl and lifting her. The beast’s growl returned, low and menacing.
”It’s all right, it’s all right,” he soothed, having no idea if the creature could understand the Queen’s English. He didn’t know what else he could do other than talk to it, try to reassure it. ”I’m going to look after her. It’s all right.” Millington turned every bit as slowly as he had stood. No sudden moves. He saw the creature properly for the first time. He could scarcely believe his eyes: crouched between him and the door of number 111, Grays Inn Road was a massive lion. The creature was easily twice the size of any natural lion. The mix of moonlight and gas lamp leant the creature a stony cast, almost as though it could have been carved from granite. But that was impossible. Granite wasn’t a living stone. It did not breathe. He could see the steady rise and fall of the great lion’s ribcage.
He edged toward
the open door, half-expecting the lion to pounce. It didn’t. It watched him cautiously every step of the way back to the open door.
”Bring her in here,” Haddon McCreedy rumbled, his deep baritone enough to cause the granite lion’s hackles to rise. ”Nice and easy does it, laddy. Nice and easy.”
The bronze lion didn’t move.
”With all due respect,” Millington rasped through clenched teeth, ”do you think you could shut up until the door’s closed?”
McCreedy nodded and backed away inside to let Millington through. ”Not that a wooden door’s going to keep that bastard out if it decides it wants to come in, eh?” McCreedy said as Brannigan Locke dragged the door closed behind Millington.
Millington let out an audible sigh of relief. He hadn’t realised he was holding his breath.
They took the girl through to the Smoking Room and lay her down on the one chaise lounge in the room. Millington only grasped how small she was as he set her down. The girl fit comfortably head to toe on the velvet chaise. ”Give her some air,” he said as the others crowded in to see her.
”Will the master be needing smelling salts to revive the poor girl?” Mason, the chamberlain, asked.
Millington shook his head. ”I think she needs the rest, let’s let her sleep a while.”
”As you wish, sir.”
He touched a finger to her neck, feeling out the strength of her pulse. Satisfied that it was strong he pushed himself to his feet.
Dorian Carruthers was still at the window. He hadn’t moved throughout the whole excitement. His face was a study in concentration. Finally he grunted and moved away from the window. He didn’t return to his seat. Instead he went through to the Reading Room.
Millington took his place at the window, standing vigil. The birds were still flying but they weren’t what interested him. He looked down into the street. A second bronze lion had joined the first to take up sentry duty at the door of the Club, and down the street toward Holborn he could see the bulk of a third granite lion. He knew if he looked the other way he would almost certainly see a forth lion guarding the entrance onto Kings Cross.
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