It knew instinctively that neither Locke nor the woman could smell a thing. Not the magic, not the fire.
So their senses were inferior. That was worth remembering.
It looked up toward the ceiling, wondering when they would be able to hear the screams. It ran toward the door. They followed a fraction of a second behind it. The Ka met Mason on the foot of the stairs and chased him up toward whatever was burning. The chamberlain’s senses were not so dull. Another fact worth remembering. It was learning all the time. This Mason was a threat.
It took the rickety old stairs three and four at a time, the risers groaning under its weight. Halfway up the stairs the smell of burning was unmistakable. Even the humans behind it could not miss it. Locke coughed, gagging on the thickening smoke as it curled around them.
”Dor!” he cried. ”Dor! We’re coming! Stay where you are! We’ll find you!”
The Ka could hear the blind man stumbling about frantically in his room. The noise of the flames was utterly mesmerizing. It threw itself at the door and was battered back by the heat. The flames seared at its skin. The pain was a new sensation. It pushed through the smoke and the fire, fighting its way into the chamber.
All around it, furniture and soft furnishings burned. It was impossible to tell where the blaze originated from, but the Ka knew. It could feel the life of the fire flowing back into the tapestry on the wall. It was more than just fire, it realised. It was The Art. Somehow the weave brushed up against both there and here, and where it touched both realms it worked as a conduit. And now The Art was greedily strengthening its foothold in this world, burning up the residual magic of this place like the oxygen feeding its flames. In a few minutes the entire house would be gone, in its place smouldering ash.
All it had to do was let nature take its course.
But …
Even as the Ka began to turn away from the tapestry a hand reached out and grabbed it blindly. The shock of contact brought the here and now crashing in on all sides. The smoke cloyed at the back of its throat. It did not need to breathe but found itself mirroring the coughing of the others in the room. Very quickly the creature covered its mouth. The smoke thickened. The heat of the fire rose. It heard voices. No screams. No panic. These men were methodical in their defence against the flames. But it was a battle they could not hope to win because the fire would burn as long as there was magic in the air. They could throw all the water at it they could muster; it wouldn’t make a lick of difference to the outcome. The house would burn.
Chapter Thirty-Six
Emily felt the heat through the ceiling but it wasn’t until the white paint around the cornice began to blister and peel that she realised what was happening. And even then she didn’t grasp the full implications, only that something was happening up in Dorian’s room. She didn’t think, she pushed herself out of the chair and rushed up the stairs, skirts hitched up around her knees. The heat hit her like a sledgehammer to the gut. She staggered back, gritted her teeth and then pushed herself on, feeling the intense heat fusing her clothes to her body as she plunged closer to the flame.
They were shouting.
She couldn’t make out what, but rather than panic or fear there was only certainty behind the raised voices. They knew what they were doing. Then she reached the room. The men were moving as a single entity, a gestalt, but she knew that they were fighting an impossible fight. They couldn’t hope to get enough water from the cistern and throwing chamber pot after chamber pot onto the flames was even less efficient than spit and urine. She rushed through to the bathroom, looking about desperately for something that might shower water over the fire but there was nothing remotely useful in the room. The heat started to get to her. She felt herself shivering despite herself, sweat peppering her brow and running down the ladder of her spine to pool in that shallow declivity before the curve of her arse began. Without thinking she snatched up one of the rug beaters and raced back through to the burning room.
She burst into Dorian Carruthers’s room, and the first thing she thought—fiercely and with absolute surety—was that the blind man was staring at her. He was on the bed on his knees clutching at Eugene Napier’s arm. Oddly, the other man seemed utterly blind to Dorian. He only had eyes for the tapestry. Emily realised then that the wall hanging was the source of the flame, but like Napier something in it drew her and she found herself walking step after helpless step toward the source of the conflagration. She reached out, touching the cloth. It was cold. That was wrong. But then everything about this fire was wrong. No matter how much water the men threw on it, it refused to diminish. It was unquenchable. That frightened her. Not that she feared burning, but with the words ”Burn with me” echoing in her head she found her grip on the here and now slipping. She couldn’t feel the flames. She couldn’t feel the savage heat. She could feel their effects on her skin in the sweat that streamed down her face and chest and back, but she couldn’t feel the heat.
As the flames licked around her Emily felt herself being drawn closer and closer to the tapestry until she was close enough for her breath to crackle as the moisture burned out of it.
She felt herself falling …
Into …
The burning map, not physically, not her body, but her … what? Her soul? Her mind? Her consciousness?
Emily felt her breath tearing in her throat.
Before she could pull back she felt something tear. She didn’t know what it was, only that it was something fundamental to her existence, and then someone grabbed her and pulled her back. She looked around frantically. The flames were everywhere now, but still she felt no heat from them. Neither did the others, she realised. She tried to rationalise it. They had been struggling against the flames as she entered the room and now they formed a ring around her. She heard that voice again, urging her to ”Burn with me” but for all the smoke and all the flames there was no burning fire. Inside of the cackle of flames she heard chanting. The Greyfriars joined hands protectively around her. Dorian was shouting, the others echoed his words a mere second after he’d yelled them at the fire. She felt Napier’s hand in hers. It felt … waxy … like it was melting. She looked at the man but he had this blissfully rapt ”somewhere else” expression on his face. His lips were moving in time with the others but the words they formed were quite unlike any of those being spoken by the rest of the circle. He was weaving his own spell she realised. She could feel The Art bristling around him, sparking off his hand and as she looked at him she saw veins of electric blue arc from the tapestry to the thick pulsing vein of Napier’s throat. None of the others had seen it. She didn’t know what it meant.
And then she felt the cold.
It was so wrong and so strong.
It took her a moment to realise that it emanated from her. She felt it inside her blood, pulsing out through her flesh.
The chanting intensified, and with it the sheer chill in her heart until it swelled out of her and rime crept across the floor, up the legs of the bed and the cherry wood dresser. The frost reached the wallpaper. It spread in ice-white roses up the wall, rime spikes like thorns as the frost claimed more and more of the room. Still the tapestry burned. But it was different now. Desperate.
Emily heard a noise then.
Something behind the walls.
It came through faintly at first, like the scratching of rats in the walls, but changed rapidly into something more forceful, the scrabbling transformed into drumming as the water pipes rattled violently against the plaster, and finally hammering as the cold ate through the metal one way while the pressure built up from the ice forming inside them ruptured the pipes. The rime ate through the walls, weakening them so that the sheer force of the water built up behind them broke through, drowning the burning room in seconds. Water sprayed up out of the cracks in the plaster and wallpaper, arcing out over the bed, reaching the ceiling and soaking down the walls into the carpet.
The water turned to ice even as the flame tried to evaporate it.
She
felt the world spinning around her. She was the only fixed point in the room. Everything else shifted, moving faster and faster as it threatened to fall away from her. She felt herself buckling but didn’t—couldn’t—fall.
The water in the carpet thickened, a solid film of ice forming around the threads giving the fire nowhere to hold. It cracked and solidified over her shoes, fusing her to the floor. Like the flame, the water was no natural water, frosted as it was with the taint of The Art. She felt it. It was akin to the most potent opiate coursing through her system.
In less than a minute the fire had burned out and they all turned to look at her.
Emily saw the horror reflected in their eyes.
She didn’t know what they were staring at.
They had doused the fire.
She hadn’t had anything to do with it.
The circle broke.
Napier came towards her, reaching out with one of his waxy hands.
Instinctively, Emily tried to back up a step but her feet were fused to the carpet by the crust of ice. She couldn’t feel Napier’s touch when his hand lingered on her cheek. There was no heat in his fingers. Then she stared down at herself and saw the coating of ice that encased her and began to scream.
It was as though she had no mouth.
It wasn’t silent. The sound of her fear resonated through the thickening ice, the harmonic building in intensity as the ice served to amplify it, turning it into a solid substantial thing. And then, a single sharp crack resounded through the bedroom as a breach opened up in the film of ice. It ran from the ceiling through the top of the tapestry, splitting part of the city neatly into two, like the Thames, though the cleft ran north to south through the city as opposed to east west. She stared at the map while they stared at her.
The breach ended in the middle of Grays Inn Road, she realised.
And why the word breach? Why did she think of it that way? Why not a crack or a fissure?
She felt the Ka’s waxy hand take hers.
She looked down at it. The ice refused to melt. She wore it like a second skin now. Like the wolf, McCreedy, she had been transformed, but into no beast she had ever imagined. She was flesh and ice. No blood pulsed through her veins. She was elemental.
”What have you done?” she pleaded with them.
She had no way of knowing if they could hear her.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The Ka stared at the woman as she underwent the transmogrification. It heard her question, and of all of them it knew the answer. But how? How was it possible? A trick of the light? Wishful thinking? No. No. It was more than that.
It stared at the vessel, because that was what she was.
They were not so different that way; only she was no mere facsimile of the flesh.
It stared at her. Through the ice he saw the other woman’s face trapped beneath. It ignored her fear. It was the ice that told the truth. It saw it in the minute fissures and ridges that came together to form the mask of ice she wore. It was more than a likeness, so much more than a mask; it could see the sentience in the ice. It could see the face forming as it owned the woman beneath. The ice wrote itself over her. And in it, it saw one of the few faces it had known all of its life, through all of its incarnations.
She was one of the few constants on the other side.
But that was because she was its queen.
It recognised her.
Impossibly.
Somehow the ice queen’s spirit had forced its way through the breach from the other London and it had claimed this slip of a girl …
How could she be here? How could she have found her way across from the sundown side of the city?
And then it understood the nature of the crack in the ice and the tidal swell of The Art that had drawn it up here in the first place. And why the Greyfriars themselves had chosen this place of all the places in the city to settle. 111, Grays Inn Road stood on a weakness in the veil between this and the other London. But that weakness wasn’t beneath the ground as it was in the Brethren’s den, it was high above street level here, wrapped up somehow with the tapestry draped upon the wall.
It reached out to take her hand, to hold her, wanting to bend its knee, to worship …
It started to say her name: Victoria. But caught itself. They did not know. They could not know. They stared at her with horror. They had no idea who the ghostly face in the ice was, or what threat she posed, but the Ka did.
The Ka knew, because like the girl it was a vessel.
And the Ka lived to serve.
It was the Ice Queen’s creature.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
On the bed Dorian Carruthers froze.
The ice did not reach him. It was the sight of the ice encasing the girl that did it. For the shortest moment, the silence between heartbeats, Dorian had been able to see. It was a single pulse of vision. And in that single fractured image he had seen himself on his hands and knees on the bed reaching out. The images came again and again with stroboscopic irregularity, flashing on the drama playing out in his room, and every time, although the angle was different what he saw remained the same. It took him a moment to realise he was witnessing things from two perspectives. He had thought it was more, but in truth what was happening was apart from him no one else in the room was standing still. The clarity of the image changed, the sharpness of the colours different depending upon whose eyes he saw it through …
That was what was happening, he realised. He was seeing the room through the eyes of the other people in it, somehow piggybacking Mason and Locke’s sight. Not Napier’s though, nor the girl’s. Something kept him out. He tried to push, to force his way inside, probing at either one of them, trying to shift his perspective of the room, to see whether he had any control at all over what was happening, but he didn’t.
Something was different about them.
With the girl it was obvious: the ice that encased her was alive with The Art, the stuff chased and sparked through every crystal.
But what made Napier any different from Mason or Locke? What kept him out? Were the others just more receptive or … no. No, that wasn’t it. It wasn’t something they had that Napier lacked. If anything it was reversed. He caught the expression on Eugene Napier’s hollowed out face as he gazed at the woman in the ice. He saw the way the man took her hand. There was a word for it all, a word for the look, for the tenderness of the gesture, a word for the intimacy of it. It was love. Not a healthy love. Something else entirely. Adoration.
Dorian shivered, and saw the shiver mirrored in his own body as it knelt on the bed. The ice had reached him, crusting around his shins.
And then, as he realised this, the link—however it was fashioned—failed, and his stolen sight with it.
He was alone in the dark.
In the blindness he heard the echo of a woman’s voice urging him to burn with her. It was more chilling than the creeping ice.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
The chamberlain ushered the masters out of the frozen chamber.
The room was not safe.
If it had ever been, he thought, casting a look over his shoulder at Cranleigh’s tapestry. The thing was damned. He had always suspected as much, but now he knew it to be true. A rime of frost clung to the tapestry but beneath it he could still see the constant swirling motion of life as people moved like ants marching.
He reached out for the woman’s hand and flinched at the cold.
Napier, Mason noticed, seemed unaffected by it as he took the woman’s hand. The master seemed out of sorts. Distant. Now was not the time to question him about what had happened out there, not with the Villain Kings calling a conclave and Landseer’s lions still guarding their door, the dead angel in the Smoking Room and all of the other atrocities that were playing out across the city. They were all linked, the chamberlain knew. They had to be. There was no such thing as coincidence in his philosophy. Master Stark had worked a terrible magic to hide away that hour and trap the Me
ringias within it, now they were left to pay the price for his brilliance.
And there was always a price. The chamberlain knew that.
God willing, they would have what it took to pay it.
Then they could worry about questions.
Though hopefully by then they would be unnecessary. After all, the most reasonable explanation was a combination of fatigue and grief. It had been a long—draining—day, and despite everything that had happened it was only a few hours since Master Stark’s sacrifice. Mason found it hard to reconcile everything that had happened, why should it be any different for the others? The world was running away from them. Of course Napier was acting differently. The simple truth of the matter was that they all were.
Mason closed and locked the door behind them. He would clean the room properly tomorrow. For now it was enough to quarantine it. He followed the others down the stairs a few steps behind them, but as they adjourned to the Smoking Room he carried on down into the Below Stairs part of the great house.
Below Stairs consisted of three main areas: the kitchens, his quarters, and the al kimia. The hidden chamber was much like its mirror chamber in the British Museum, and indeed was linked by a subterranean passage, but where the museum’s chamber hid treasures not meant for the modern world, including everything from the badly burned ties that bound the last Templar, Jacques de Molay, to the stake, to Lucifer’s testament, the book illuminated by an insane Babylonian scholar and unearthed centuries later by another mad man, this one the poet Milton, a lock of Lucretia Borges’s hair, withered and blackened where her blood had corrupted The Art that flowed through her veins, Charlemagne’s sword lay beside Cortez’s and the ashes of the witch Jean d’Arc, the al kimia beneath 111, Grays Inn Road hid more dangerous secrets. Things too dangerous for the world to be trusted with. Things that, if they fell into the Brethren’s hands, could lead to slaughter on an unparalleled scale.
The bronze door was sealed with a contraption of Mason’s father’s invention. He placed his hand against a bronze plate beside the door, and even as he pressed his palm flat against the contours of the plate a small needle darted out, pricking through his skin and drawing blood. As the blood trickled into the plate an alchemical compound broke down its components and released the bolt. The mechanism recognised his blood just as it had recognised his father’s blood before him, and if he had had a son, would recognise his boy’s blood. He didn’t know how his father had done it, but the door mechanism could only be released by someone of his lineage. It was something in the blood.
London Macabre Page 13