The chamberlain didn’t know, but he suspected the Villain King was as innocent as he made out—of this level of the subterfuge at least—which fascinated him. Strange things were afoot. And, more disturbingly, they were not confined to the players sat around the table. Or not within their control, at least. Arnos might well have put these things into motion, but once started he had no control over how they played themselves out.
Mason had come expecting an ambush of some sorts, physical or metaphysical, hence the Distillator in his pocket, but nothing so subtle or insidious as this … but if he were the enemy wouldn’t he in turn employ the same tactics? Sow dissent and doubt amongst the ranks of his foes? Point an accusatory finger at one of the Gentleman Knights? What more effective ploy than casting a shadow of doubt over the men supposed to stand against him?
Mason needed to think …
In turn the gathered Kings studied the gatekeepers of London Wall, Bishopsgate, Aldersgate, Aldgate, Ludgate, Moorgate, Cripplegate and Newgate. Their watches dated all the way back to the Roman occupation of London—not the founding, because even the Italian arrogance wasn’t enough to wash away the truth of the settlements that preceded Londinium, as did the immortal gatekeepers themselves. There was nothing glamorous about these immortals though; no thin-faced elegiac beauty, no ethereal grace or dark brooding good looks that went along with the gothic movement that had turned the nature of the Seven into something almost romantic. These Seven, the gatekeepers, were the original blood drinkers, vampiric in nature, sustained by the rich red liquid they stole from delicate necks and fragile veins. The poets and writers might look to turn them into mysterious strangers who clung to the shadows but they couldn’t have misunderstood the nature of the Seven more had they deliberately set out to. They weren’t princes of darkness, rather, in darkness lay their weakness. They drew their strength from the sun. It fuelled them. The heat of daylight caressed their skin, renewing them for another night. Night was when they fought, oh yes, there was no denying that, but only because it was the creatures of the night who sought to assail the city they protected. And when ”creatures” fight at night they become monsters. Nightwalkers. The Seven were no different. They had become daemonised for the fact that they needed fresh blood to sustain them. Stories of horror quickly twisted the truth into lies and they became killers where in truth they were defenders just like the Gentleman Knights, and never ever had there been a case of them draining some unsuspecting maiden and leaving her dead on a plush divan. Stories. Stories. Stories. If they did not feed they slumped into unconsciousness, from that into a coma-like state that could see them ”sleep” for centuries, only to be woken by that first drip of blood to touch their tongue.
The German brothers, Grimm, had encountered one of the Seven and transformed their plight into one of their stories, ”Dornröschen,” the tale of the sleeping Briar Rose. Of course, it was blood that put her to sleep, not the lack of, and a kiss that woke her, not the taste of blood on the tongue, but even at their darkest Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm shied away from the truth in their stories. Of course, Jacob, very much a conduit for The Art, had hidden away all manner of daemons and devils that his brother Wilhelm had tracked down. Jacob chronicled the fey creatures they fought in both volumes of Kinder-und Hausmärchen, he published in the early nineteenth century. The word choice in these original volumes was different, and deliberately un-Germanic, unlike the volumes that had since followed, and notably, from the brothers collections of legends. The truth was the storyteller had used his gift to imprison the fey within the framework of both stories, consolidating the ”magic” in the grimoire where he laid out the grammatical structure of the modern Germanic language. Those unexpected words were of course part of the spell of binding he had woven into the texts. Unlike Mercy and the other treasures on display in the Conclave, that original tome did lie safely in the al kimia beneath 111, Grays Inn Road. It was more dangerous than any mythical Pandora’s Box, for trapped within its pages were one hundred and fifty-six fey essences, daemons and malevolent fairies. Their escape would be nothing short of catastrophic.
The Seven brutes, contrary to the dark brooding characters of story, looked braced for a fight. To a man, their physiognomy was atavistic: thick brows, thicker muscular ridges of shoulder and neck, pulsing veins, flat noses and plain wide cheekbones that shadowed deep-set eyes. It was a curiosity how these creatures could give birth to such a legend; they dressed more like dock workers than dandies and had none of the social graces that might be expected to accompany seduction. But then, they never had to worry about seducing their victims; Arnos kept them in blood, letting them feed upon the whores and doxies in his care. Not that the women ever knew, of course. The Kiss of one of the Seven would leave a chemical inside the victim’s blood that dulled the senses and left the memory foggy. It was a convenient arrangement.
No one knew where they came from, only that they had always been there to protect the Square Mile.
The Seven had been forewarned, the chamberlain realised. And why wouldn’t Arnos warn his muscle if he expected trouble? And of course he was expecting trouble, that was the price of the Peace. It made strange bedfellows of them all. But, as fragile as it was, the Peace demanded they cooperated.
The only one who didn’t seem preoccupied with the intentions of the rest was Arnos, almost certainly because, like a chess player, he was thinking more than one move ahead. To Mason, the Villain King seemed almost content with how the situation was playing out. There was a twitch in his cheek, a visual tell if ever Mason had seen one, that betrayed the fact that Arnos was neither innocent nor completely in control now but left him in no doubt that the Villain King considered himself the playwright here, the manipulator. His stage directions were far from subtle, which of course was part of their genius; their telegraphed nature only served to make them all the more effective. It was all about suspicion. No one trusted anyone else in the room. He felt something tickle his mind, a silky touch that momentarily dampened his concentration.
Mason turned his attention back to his Masters. Of all of them only Napier, the subject of the peculiar stanza, seemed nonplussed. Indeed he didn’t seem to understand the implication at all. The others, though, appeared to have reached their own conclusions, and judging by the slight nods he received from McCreedy and Millington, those conclusions were in line with his own. Strange things were most certainly afoot. Strange, strange things. Now was not the time to doubt friends. Now was the time to guard them. Alone they were weak. Together they were strong.
Mason started to rise. He was ready. Then he saw that Master Locke’s seat was empty. He hadn’t seen him leave the chamber.
”They come!” the auto-icon rasped suddenly, its voice shocking in the silence that had settled over the room. Dee’s bones shuddered in their seat, the convulsions becoming more violent and showing no signs of abating. Indeed, as Mason dragged his chair back, they only intensified to the point that whatever wires or gewgaws held them together began to come apart. The auto-icon looked for all the world as though it were melting. Again, one last time before its head lolled limply against the stuffing that padded out its chest cavity, the voice boomed out: ”They come!” And then fell silent.
The Soul Cage
Chapter Fifty-One
Outside, Dorian Carruthers watched the heavens break through the eyes of a starling. The tiny black-winged bird flitted from thermal to thermal, riding the layers of the wind toward the eye of the storm.
It wasn’t rain.
In the distance, beyond the river, behind the tower, the sky crumbled.
On the ground he never would have seen it, not in anything approaching its glory. And as the questing fingers of the dead trapped within the Golem tore through the ether it was glorious, but it was horrific too. The eyes of the bird roved from rooftop to rooftop, across the old bridges and gutters toward Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square, over blind lady justice atop the old bailey and her borrowed bell from St Sepulchre-withou
t-Newgate, the old death-knell bell from the old debtors prison, unable to settle on any place for more than a few of its rapid heartbeats. The starling banked, and with it the lie of the land shifted and Dorian saw so much more of the great city from his vantage point, but he didn’t want to see architecture. He didn’t want to see familiar buildings from peculiar angles. He wanted to see the sky above the Lime House down by the river. As the wind carried the starling around in another tight turn, he caught another glimpse of it. He could have sworn the heavens themselves were on fire. He heard the echo of that distant voice begging him to: Burn with me. The clouds in the sky above the Tower physically writhed as though the last dregs of the rain were being wrung out of them, and through the crackling firmament he saw the huge fingers tearing away at the veil between this place and some other London.
The fingers—and they were unmistakably fingers—belonged to some Gulliver-like giant tearing its way into his Lilliputian city. Even barely through the veil each finger was fatter than a city street was wide, and bleached white like bone. The night filled with the sound of screaming as the veil shredded and a vast arm reached through. Behind it came a shoulder, and then ducking down to peer through a broad flat brow and a skeletal face. It looked like no man Dorian had ever seen, rather, the giant had a doughy sort of featurelessness, as though a blind child had fashioned its likeness in dehydrated clay. There was a cavity where the nose ought to have been, as though the child’s thumbs had pressed down too hard, and the thick brow beetled over dark hollows lacking eyes. There wasn’t a hair on the Golem’s hide. It wasn’t flawless though. Every inch of the Golem’s flesh was covered with markings carved in deeply into its pallid skin. The markings weren’t random, neither were they arcane—at least not any kind of sigil or glyph that Dorian had ever encountered. The brief glimpse the starling’s wild flight afforded actually helped him understand precisely what the nature of the markings was—because he saw them twice, once on the creature’s skin and then again laid out beneath him. Someone had carved an absolutely perfect rendition of the streets of London into the Golem’s flesh, down to the smallest alley way and footpath. They had recreated this London, not merely copied it, he realised, catching a glimpse of the buildings along The Strand so lovingly carved into the Golem’s long arm. It was a work of art. Hideous, yes, but no less beautiful for its undeniable grotesqueness.
The sky burned around the breach, iridescent and incandescent as the veil between worlds ignited. And just like the tapestry fire that had cost him his sight, The Art streaming through this tear was far too fierce to be contained. More of the Golem forced its way through and in turn more of the sky burned, the fire reaching out across the horizon as the air, thick with pollutants, burst into flames. With the fire came the sound, like an unending crackle of thunder, a deep basso profundo that rumbled across the rooftops the city. Dorian felt the physical punch of the sound as it surged through the bird’s delicate bones, buffeting it off course. The bird fell uncontrollably toward the slate rooftops below. It beat frantically at the air with panicked wings, trying to claw its way out of the down draught that had it trapped, and then burst free of the funnel of wind and rose up higher and higher. Each wingbeat propelled it toward the moon.
Silhouetted against the moon, more of the Golem stepped through into this London. Its huge, broad torso was every bit as illustrated as the rest of it. The detailed work was incredible. Even with shadow thrown across it Dorian could recognise more and more of the streets of London as the Golem emerged from the tear in the sky.
The red sky blazed bright enough to delight any shepherd; flame crackled and spat as The Art fuelled the fire. The flames spread out across the rooftops in a sheet of fire. They weren’t angry, they were all-consuming. Dorian’s mind was driven to the last time the great city had burned, a simple baker’s fire so the story went. He saw Pudding Lane near the Golem’s belly. Unlike the tapestry in Cranleigh’s chamber there was no sense of perpetual motion, of life, to the city carved into the Golem. He had read John Evelyn’s confession, the pages excised from his diary, bound in the French style, and stowed within the Club’s library. Evelyn was one of the earliest recorded examples of a gifted one, like Stark. The man had a rare talent. He could command flame. In a time when they feared witchcraft almost as much as the wrath of God, John Evelyn was a pyromancer. He could steer fire, make it dance to his whim. He could conjure fire from the core of anything, drawing it out until it smouldered, and then erupted into flame. As the Plague gripped his city and killed rich and poor indiscriminately Evelyn conceived of a desperate plan. He opened a conduit to another London—how he knew of this other place wasn’t mentioned in the stolen pages of his diary—and harnessed the wild surge in The Art that accompanied his invasion to usher in the greatest fire he could imagine. Unfettered, the conflagration quickly became so great it raged beyond his control, and more than merely cleansing the last traces of the Plague from his city, the hungry flames devoured it body and soul.
And now another equally unnatural fire raged.
It was all Dorian could to do to pray to whatever higher power watched over the immortal city to shield it from the flames as they licked down from the heavens.
But with the sky alight and tongues of fire lashing out, fear drove the bird; the starling banked away from the Golem, its tiny heart racing as its wings beat faster and faster in an attempt to escape whatever was coming.
Dorian reached out with his mind, trying to calm the terrified creature, but there was nothing he could do. It was beyond soothing.
He pulled out, choosing blindness over flight.
He pushed his consciousness out, trying to find another pair of eyes. He wanted to see what was happening. He didn’t realise what he had done until it was too late.
Dorian Carruthers opened his borrowed eyes and looked down upon creation. For the length of the silence between heartbeats he thought he had found another bird, but then he looked down and saw his colossal fist swat the panicked starling out of the sky. The bird went tumbling but the Golem had no interest in it. It looked down at its own fist, seemingly fascinated by warren of slums carved deep into its pallid skin. It turned its hand first left and then right. The shadows of the fire danced across its massive palm. And with the realization that he had found his way into the Golem’s head came the screams.
In a matter of seconds Dorian was overwhelmed by the sheer volume and desperation of the voices as they spiralled into an agonised crescendo—and they were voices, not a voice, not the one voice of the creature’s subconscious mind, but hundreds of distinct and frightened voices crying out, railing against everything felt and saw. The desperation trapped within their screams was horrific to hear. With an insight he could have lived without, Dorian knew precisely what he was hearing: the voices of Pandemonium. The dead and the damned crying out to be heard.
They knew he was in there with them. They could sense his presence. It was wrong. He wasn’t meant to be there. He felt them rising up, reaching out to claw at his consciousness with serrated hooks fashioned from their suffering, with talons twisted out of their despair, with claws carved out of their angst, with barbs and blades forged from their grief.
Dorian tried to separate himself from the Golem, to flee, to break contact and return to the darkness.
He couldn’t.
He was trapped.
He pushed at the thick brow, trying to force his consciousness out, through it, beyond it, but something held him fast. It was as though his soul were shackled to the construct’s bones. He screamed then, as the first hooks bit into his soul, his voice lost beneath the others. There were glyphs on the Golem’s skin, there had to be. And now, because of his curiosity he was bound to the Golem. But what kind of glyphs? What was it that held him?
He pushed frantically, trying to will himself back into his own body but there was no way out.
The voices moaned, and within them he head the infinite sadness of lives curtailed. Beneath him he saw the rooftop of
the Lime House, where the corpses were laid out to allow their passage to the other side, and he knew then that he was alone with the dead …
Chapter Fifty-Two
The homunculus Cain stood in the centre of the Garden drinking in Paradise.
Everything was just as he remembered it, and yet everything was different now. A sly smile touched his lips. This place was home, and there truly was no place like it. For the longest time he was content to simply stand there letting the memories wash over him. So little of his life had been spent in this place in comparison with the centuries of exile, and yet those few years were so fundamental in making him the daemon he had become. He could no longer think of himself as a man. But, for all that, it was funny how a place could imprint itself on the soul. Standing here now, looking at the blackened and twisted trunk of the One Tree he remembered how his father had beat him every time he approached it. It was almost impossible to imagine the tree as it had been, so full of lush life, its branches weighed down with fruit. Not that the fruit, no matter how ripe, had ever been a temptation to him. His belly had always been full and he had never felt a hunger pang whilst he lived in the Garden. Hunger, such a natural thing, hadn’t existed because there was no sense of entropy, no decline. There was no age in the Garden, and until his brother’s murder, no death. Without death there was no change. Seasons did not exist because there was no renewal. The leaves on the trees were never shed. The world within the Garden had always existed in a state of now, frozen in the moment, out of time. But Abel’s murder had changed that in the most basic and yet absolute of ways. It let death into the Garden, yes, but along with death came Time, and time was the greatest thief of all.
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