”Dear God,” Locke said. He couldn’t help himself.
McCreedy took another deep swallow of brandy then forced himself to go on.
”It used her blood to open a gateway. I … I think … it was Eden’s Gate. But everything beyond it was dead. Not just dead. Rotten. Then the Garden’s guardian came through the gate,” he shivered at the memory. ”The archangel was black—not just of skin, but of soul. Everything about it radiated corruption. It knew the killer. Called it Cain, I am sure of it, but it spoke in a tongue I have never in my life heard, but I am sure it named the murderer. They fought … I ran … I was damned if I was going to face the last man standing. A daemon or a demented angel,” McCreedy sucked on the final embers of the cigar, savouring the last of the heady smoke as it lingered in his lungs. ”That’s all of it.”
”Is anyone going to introduce me,” the woman, Emily, said from the doorway. McCreedy turned to look up at her. He saw both faces, the ice laid over the flesh, but that wasn’t what chilled the big man to the marrow. It was her voice. Or rather it wasn’t. You could age, change, the voice was the one thing that remained the same. Whoever’s it was, this new voice wasn’t the young woman’s. His nostrils flared instinctively, but with his Anafanta shackled once more within him, his senses were no more acute than the next mans. ”Don’t stare, it is most unbecoming,” the young woman said, walking across the room to meet him. She held out her hand. Everything about her suggested poise, and there was a regality to her movement that went beyond confidence or decorum. McCreedy was struck by the notion that she were so much older than either of her faces appeared. He took her hand. It was ice cold as he touched his lips to her fingers. That he was kissing ice was undeniable. But this was living ice. Like the daemon Cain, like himself McCreedy realised, the woman had two essences, the mask and the monster, though in her case the she wore the monster on the outside. The chill wormed its way from his lips all the way down into his heart.
”Haddon McCreedy,” he said. ”And you must be?”
”Must I be anyone?” the woman chided lightly, though her words, like her second skin, were cold. The air in the room seemed to have dropped toward freezing in the few moments she had been in the room.
”Yes, I think you must,” McCreedy said.
”Perhaps I am the Queen of Hearts.”
”Perhaps,” the big man said. ”Perhaps not.”
”This dance of words is tiresome,” she said, the ice thickening around her brows. Curious, McCreedy studied her, realizing quickly that the second skin of ice possessed a life all of its own. It crusted as she grew impatient, and thawed as her mood lightened.
”And there I was thinking it was just growing interesting,” his nostrils flared, his aspect turning decidedly wolfish as he allowed the beast to rise toward the surface. ”Who are you, woman? Because you are not the girl you were, and you do not smell as though you are of this place. What are you?”
The Ice Queen didn’t answer him, and that evasion was all the answer he needed.
He turned to the others. ”We have a cuckoo in the nest.”
It was Napier who answered him. ”Whoever she is, she saved us all, so I for one trust her.”
”Did she now?”
”There was a fire, Cranleigh’s tapestry burned, but it was no natural fire. Water couldn’t quench it.”
”But she could?”
”The girl sacrificed herself,” said Dorian. ”The fire was fuelled by The Art, or more precisely, whatever burned was akin to a vent where The Art poured through. It used the tapestry as a conduit. It was more powerful than anything I have encountered before,” he admitted. His eyes roved about wildly, unseeing, but McCreedy had the distinct impression the blind man could see everything just as well as he himself could. ”It was going to consume everything, not only the tapestry. The room. The house. Nothing else could have slaked it once it got a hold. Emily was a casualty.”
”So you know this thing,” McCreedy stared at the Ice Queen, ”isn’t the girl we gave refuge to last night?”
Carruthers nodded. ”But that doesn’t mean we don’t owe her our lives, Haddon. She has a part to play in this. I am sure of it.”
”I wish I could trust your hunches, Dor.”
”It isn’t a hunch,” the young man said, weighing his words carefully. ”I saw her there when I touched the angel’s mind. She is a part of this.”
”Of course I am, dear boy,” the woman said, ”so please stop talking about me as though I am not here. It is most impolite.”
”So she has a part to play,” McCreedy conceded, ”that doesn’t mean we should trust her. Judas had a part to play in Gethsemane and the snake had a part to play in Eden.”
”My, my, you apportion considerable strength to these weak and feeble hands,” the woman smiled, ice over the warm pink glow of her lips. ”I am but a woman.”
McCreedy shook his head, ”No, I think you are anything but.”
Chapter Forty-Nine
A scruffy mudlark waited for them at the wherryman’s seat. The boy was covered top to toe with the filth of the river and a grin that was almost as infectious as the stuff that clung to him. There were no water taxies, or wherries, anywhere along this stretch of the river and hadn’t been since the new toll-free bridge opened a few years back, making the seat a safe place to meet. He bobbed his head and jumped up off the narrow stone plinth, and with a quick wave of the dirty hand gestured for the gentlemen to follow him. The boy was whippet lean and every bit as nippy as he led them on a merry dance through the ”stews” on the way to the Conclave’s meeting place. The stews were steam bath houses that doubled as brothels along the south bank, or more precisely brothels that doubled as bathhouses. No one was fooled, least of all the Peeler’s but the Bobbies they kept their distance, letting the Villain Kings police their own. It was a sound arrangement. Only an idiot crossed one of the Villain Kings and seldom did said idiot live to brag about it for more than a night or two at best.
The boy seemingly disappeared before their very eyes, but in truth he had ducked down an ”invisible” alleyway. The stews were rife with them, false fronts in what appeared to be very ordinary terraced houses. Only the closest inspection would give away the fact that the houses weren’t houses at all. The truth was in the windows, or rather the lie was. There was no glass and the brickwork within the frames had been painted black. It was obvious to anyone who saw them, but hundreds of other houses across the city had the same bricked up windows, a relic from the days of the Window Tax where the miserly rich would rather lose light and air inside their homes than cough up a few extra shillings to fill the war chest. No inhabitant of the stews could ever have been accused of being rich, it was one of the poorest parts of the city. Two centuries before it had been home to theatres like the Globe and the Rose, full of life and entertainment, bear-baiting, gambling and whoring. Now all that remained of the ”culture” was the gambling and the whoring.
Carruthers, seeing the trick through the mudlark’s borrowed eyes, didn’t miss a step and led the others through the terrace’s false front. What looked from the front to be a solid wall was actually two walls, one set back a foot from the other to create a hidden passage whilst maintaining the illusion of being a solid wall. It was an ingenious use of the same principles of deception a musical hall magician might have employed to deceive his gullible audience.
The passage was barely wide enough for the barrel-chested McCreedy to squeeze through.
Beyond it, instead of the front room or parlour the narrow alleyway continued deeper into the stews.
They could almost hear the ghosts crying out in the grip of their lusts as they revelled in each and every one of the deadly sins that made this place their chosen haunt.
The mudlark led them into a square. It wasn’t like the wealthy squares of Holborn and the north, this one was hidden away behind the houses and was filled with hanging laundry, making it impossible to see from one side of the square to the other.
The boy glanced back over his shoulder and grinned, then started to run even faster, ducking beneath the sheets.
The gentlemen followed him in, pushing aside the hanging laundry as they did.
The sheets were not only dry, they were dirty, Dorian Carruthers realised with something akin to admiration. He watched through Millington’s eyes as he brushed another low-hanging one aside. ’Its trailing edge dragged against the cobbled ground. He glanced down and saw the filth that had started to work its way up through the bed linen, being drawn up by a process not dissimilar to osmosis. He couldn’t help but smile. The laundry square was nothing more than another defence, another layer to the subterfuge. He had no way of knowing how long these same sheets had hung out to dry like this but guessed it was weeks as opposed to hours.
There were five exits off the square.
They didn’t use any of them.
Instead the boy pushed aside another sheet revealing a backyard gate and disappeared inside. If Dorian hadn’t been riding along behind his eyes they would have lost him, which made him wonder just how much the Villain Kings wanted them at this parlay? And extrapolating that thought: what did they stand to gain from their absence? Part of the Peace of the London Stone demanded that they be there as Protectors of the Walled City—though the term Cranleigh had actually used when fashioning the Peace was The Gentleman Knights of Old London Town—but it had been a long time since the Villain Kings had kept any such promises that weren’t in their interests.
The boy didn’t enter the house as Dorian had expected. Instead, he shinnied up the lead drainpipe and hooked a hand up over the guttering on the roof, hauling himself up onto the shingle. He made it look easy, but given his life it didn’t demand so much as a second thought. The same couldn’t be said for the men following him. Shinnying up a drainpipe was not something they were used to—nor equipped for. Dorian himself was wearing soft leather-soled boots. They were more dandified than practical. The others were no better prepared, save for Mason. The chamberlain, as ever, seemed equipped for every eventuality.
He slipped on a pair of white gloves and said, ”Master Dorian, I suggest you follow though my eyes while I chase the boy. Lead the others at ground level as best you can. I suspect this is nothing more than another ruse to make our journey as unpleasant as possible.”
Dorian nodded, not for a moment wondering how Mason knew the truth about his returned sight. The man was endlessly enterprising and seemed to know a little about everything, making him an invaluable bat man. Carruthers couldn’t help but think there was more to him than that, though.
Without further ado, Mason took off after the mudlark like a grease monkey going up a pole. Dorian was surprised by the ease with which the older man negotiated the rooftop, running along the shingle and leaping across the firebreaks between the terraces with something close to ease. He had been right, the boy dropped down to street level again half a dozen buildings over, doubling back slightly on the way he had come. Dorian grinned and set off at a dash, leading the Gentleman Knights of Old London Town into the very heart of the territory they were sworn to protect.
They caught up with the chamberlain beside an old Cholera drinking well. He was barely out of breath while the rest of them were breathing hard. He pointed toward the door of what appeared to be a disused Masonic Lodge. The setsquare in the lintel had been chipped away to leave the compass marooned in the stone. There is no doubt some sort of symbolism behind the vandalism, Dorian thought.
The mudlark strode up to the door and rapped out a staccato rhythm with his clenched fist. A moment later the door eased open a crack. The boy said something he couldn’t hear—his new gift only granted him sight, all of his other senses remained trapped within his blind body—and it opened wider. Dorian glimpsed the splendour of the chamber beyond, the gilded ceiling rose, the ornamental columns and the curious pearl-encrusted costume of the doorman as the boy stepped inside, and then his world was plunged into darkness as he was kicked out of the boy’s head.
He didn’t know how it had happened, but there was no denying the fact that as the boy passed beneath the vandalised archway Dorian had been evicted from his mind. It took him a moment to orientate himself and latch on to a new pair of eyes to look through—Mason’s, he realised quickly—and a moment more to realise the implications of what had just happened.
”I can’t enter the Conclave,” he told the man beside him. Millington nodded wordlessly. He didn’t question Dorian’s assertion. If Dorian said he couldn’t cross the threshold, he couldn’t cross the threshold. It was as simple as that. The bond of trust between them was that strong. ”I will have to wait out here.” What he didn’t say was ”in the darkness” but that was precisely what he was thinking. While they were inside, the others were unreachable.
The doorman gazed down at the gathered gentlemen, his face unreadable. He didn’t say a word as one by one they filed inside.
Mason was the last to cross the threshold, and before he did he looked back to where Dorian stood alone. He nodded once then turned and went inside, consigning Dorian to the darkness once again.
Chapter Fifty
Mason didn’t like this place, not least because the wardings isolated it from The Art. He couldn’t help but notice the sigils freshly carved into the soft wood of the door’s frame, though he didn’t recognise them all he knew the purpose of at least four of them. One shielded the building from scrying, keeping out prying eyes. Another muffled any sound so that no noise could cross the threshold in either direction. The third one that he was familiar with served an all-together more sinister purpose—if triggered it would congeal the blood in the veins of the first person to cross it after it was broken. No doubt the many sigils the chamberlain did not recognise were equally heinous in nature. It was understandable, if extreme. The fourth though was the most curious as it went beyond rational precaution and suggested the Villain Kings were at least in part aware of the war playing out upon their streets. The warding barred the way to the Bene Elohim, one of the tiers of angels.
So much for the Peace, he thought, bringing up the rear.
The foyer of the old Masonic Hall had lost none of its splendour. Indeed, if anything, the Villain Kings had added to it with a gaudy flash of gold here and a jewel encrustation there. No one had ever been able to accuse them of either taste or propriety. They notoriously lavished their wealth upon the more public rooms of their dens, making them a rival for the great houses of Cavendish, Buckingham, Heywood, Wellington and the old families of the city. The ostentation hid a more practical if no less pernicious purpose: displays of wealth in the underworld were akin to tallies, a way showing who was who in this den of thieves and ingrates that quickly shifted from the trappings of wealth, the stolen works of art and the crystal chandeliers, to the Villain Kings and their queens themselves in the forms of their pearl-encrusted coats.
Each of the Villain Kings had their own livery, the coat of arms fashioned across their broad backs picked out in brocade and finely sliced slivers of opalescent pearl, each wafer thin slice a different opacity to the one beside it. The effect was stunning in broad daylight, the coats seemingly alive, but it was utterly haunting in the flickering gaslight glow of the lanterns that filled each of the thirteen sconces in the room as Arnos, first of the Villain Kings, strode across the room to greet them.
He held out his hand as though it were a serpent.
”Hail and well met, Gentleman Knights. I trust you are prepared for battle?”
”We are bound by the Peace just as you yourself are,” Locke said, speaking for all of them. He took the Villain King’s hand and shook it vigorously.
”Yes, yes, of course,” Arnos offered a wry smile, ”but peace by its very definition cannot last. By the time you leave these chambers I am sure you will be in no doubt as to the threat we face, and why it must concern us all.”
”I am sure your advocates will present your case to the Conclave with passion, Arnos,” Locke said, ”but w
e are not yours to command. Until we hear the reason for the parlay I will not commit the Gentlemen Knights to any course of action the Peace might regret.”
”Quite so. But given the … ah … thinness of your ranks you will forgive me for assuming the fight has already reached your door. I see neither Stark nor Carruthers, though my man tells me the fop is lurking outside. What is the matter, Brannigan? Don’t you trust us?”
London Macabre Page 17