Stark padded toward the door, scraping at it with his great claws.
The air bristled with The Art. It was everywhere. All around him. He felt it, every bit as raw and dangerous as Hertz’s barely harnessed electricity, thrill through his hide.
Strange things were happening, of that there was no denying.
It was as though he stood at some sort of locus. The Art surged all around him, pushing and pulling at his soul. It was as though he prowled on the edge of a sinkhole and all of the forces of gravity and kinetic energy and so much more he didn’t understand were being exerted on his flesh, relentlessly seeking to draw him towards its dark heart and swallow him. Not a sinkhole. A void. Something that fed … devoured … The Art. It was all he could do to retain his grip on the lion’s bronze form and not be scattered to the winds, pulled apart by The Art, such was the raw power of it. Stark threw his head back and roared again.
This time he was answered by the door opening.
The Ice Queen and her host stood silhouetted in the doorway. Both the girl and the mask of ice sheathing her body stared at Stark’s lion. He could feel the incredible vibrancy of the magic encapsulating her body. The simple scrutiny of it alone was almost unbearable. The Queen’s mastery of magic was more than a match for his own. Indeed, the sheer skill it took to maintain the mask and those recognizable features rather than simply dissipate into a cascade of sparks and be pulled away into whatever sought to consume him. Even so, he felt The Art surging around her like some elemental vortex. Looking at her standing in the doorway, the wind tearing at her hair, the ice caking it, crackling as it moved, Stark saw neither woman nor ice daemon, he saw The Art and The Art alone, and it was blinding.
The Ice Queen’s eyes narrowed. She lowered herself down to one knee and held out her hand toward Stark’s bronze muzzle. ”What are you?” She asked, as though seeing clean through the cast bronze shell to the trapped soul within. And then she sucked in a breath. He saw recognition in her eyes. ”I know you!” she gasped. ”You were there … you were the ghost in my room. You saw …” he words trailed off.
He opened his mouth to speak, thinking the words, ”Follow me,” but all that came out was another deep-throated roar.
He turned, tensed, and bounded out into the night city.
She followed him into the fire.
A Tisket, a Tasket, Dead Wolves in a Casket
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Haddon McCreedy was the first to react.
He was running for the door before the auto-icon’s head had even hit the table. He had one advantage over everyone else in the room: his heightened sense of smell. It wasn’t just that the air around them was suddenly wrong, it went beyond that. It was as though every ounce of oxygen had been sucked out of the air suddenly. And in accord with nature’s abhorrence of a vacuum, something else rushed in to fill that emptiness. McCreedy knew the smell. It had many names—rot, decay, blight, corrosion, decomposition, putrescence, mortification, but ultimately it always amounted to the same thing: death.
He did not notice the ash staining the marble staircase. And neither did he see the warning Locke had left for him. In fact as far as McCreedy could tell there was no hint of Brannigan Locke’s struggle with the Cripple Gate vampire. Locke wasn’t the only one adept at interfering with a man’s perceptions. He was as good as blind to his surroundings as he burst out of the Conclave. That one sense, smell, rose up to drown all of the others. It was overwhelming. Locke himself could have been lying bloody and battered in the antechamber and McCreedy wouldn’t have seen him. As his olfactory senses swelled, so his visual ones dimmed to the point of blindness. But he didn’t need to see. The odours of the city conjured a landscape every bit as vibrant as any he might have seen.
The street was warm.
That was the first thing he noticed as the air hit him.
It had been a cold night when he entered the Conclave.
The change was disorientating.
His vision began to clear, the demands of sight reasserting themselves upon him. But still the fragrances of the city were feverishly intense.
He pitched glances left and right, looking for something—anything—out of place. His entire body was alive with the wrongness of the night. Shadows flitted across his vision. Birds. But it was night—and no matter how full the moon they shouldn’t have been casting such deep shadows. He looked to the sky and saw the first ripples of flame igniting and felt the weight of pressure in his bones. His heightened senses raced; he heard screams from half-a-city away; he smelled the fear of whores and punters alike as the scent of sexes mingling were overwhelmed by the stink of terror; he tasted the cloying tang of burned flesh at the back of his throat, but it wasn’t just burned … there was something else, a deeper taste beyond the char. It took him a moment to recognise it because it was so wrong and yet disturbingly right, natural. The flesh he smelled, tasted, was dead. Not dying. Dead. A long time dead.
He stumbled.
Across the wide street, leaning against iron railings, he saw Dorian. His friend’s face, devoid of expression, was lifted toward the sky. He was travelling, McCreedy realised. But like everything else around him, this was wrong. McCreedy rushed toward him, reaching out to shake Dorian awake again. He had no idea whether physical contact could bring Dorian back. It didn’t matter. He needed him here. He had to wake him.
McCreedy’s nostrils flared suddenly.
Dorian’s body reeked.
There was no mistaking the smell.
Death.
He reached out, touching cold, clammy skin.
There was no heartbeat.
Dorian was dead.
McCreedy didn’t understand. There wasn’t a mark on his body. No blood. But his heart wasn’t beating. There was nothing driving the life through his veins.
He wasn’t alone in the street. They couldn’t hide from him. He smelled their excitement on the wind; it was almost sexual with its intensity. Five of them emerged from the shadows, cowled and chanting. He couldn’t see their faces. He didn’t need to, not to recognise them. Their scents were unique. Every man, woman and child’s scents were, like fingerprints and faces. He knew them as well as he knew himself: Lucius Amun, Charles Ra, Vincent Hathor and the sisters, Niamh Thoth and Hermione Osiris. The enemy. The Brethren. It wasn’t just that they reeked of corruption; their scents all bore the same signature that marked them as wrong. They didn’t belong here. He didn’t know what it meant and didn’t have time to worry over it.
They came toward him. Two of them bore a silver casket between them.
The others carried crucibles. Incense burned within them. Wolfsbane, he realised, as the scent reached his mind. By then it was too late.
They had come prepared.
They knew exactly what he was, and they knew how to use it against him.
Silver daggers flashed in their free hands.
And for a moment he feared they were going to butcher him—but what they had in mind for Haddon McCreedy was far worse.
He felt himself beginning to change. His legs buckled beneath him and he fell forward, barely managing to catch himself before his face cannoned off the cobblestones. The wolfsbane worked its magic quickly, suffusing his senses and overwhelming him. There was nothing he could do to prevent it once he had inhaled the herb. It was anathema to his very unique physiognomy. It wasn’t deadly; far from it. What it did was draw the beast within to the surface, and no amount of fighting would hold it back. His grip on the world around him slipped as the transformation came over him. Even knowing it was futile, he struggled desperately to hold the Anafanta back, because that too was his nature. McCreedy threw his head back, feeling every bone in his spine stretch and break as the change gripped him.
His entire world consisted of the black leather of their shoes as they circled him.
He cried out.
It wasn’t a scream.
It was a howl.
A wolf baying at the moon.
And th
en the silver blades cut into him.
His howls then could have curdled blood.
The cuts were shallow. They weren’t meant to kill him. They were meant to disable him. He felt the blades slice deeper, the force behind them increasing as his hide thickened. He reached out, trying desperately to sink his claws into their flesh as the world around him turned to blood and he felt himself losing his grip on consciousness. Again and again the silver blades cut into him, bleeding McCreedy.
They could easily have killed him then and there had that been their intention.
It wasn’t.
He was barely aware of what happened around him. He heard them, and knew enough to know their chants were in no language he had ever heard. The transmogrification failed. He was neither man nor wolf but trapped somewhere hideously between. He willed himself desperately to fight back, to lash out, but he didn’t have the strength to so much as lift his head. Somehow their incantation held him trapped between both of his existences and there was nothing he could do to save himself. All he could do was pray that someone would emerge from the Conclave in time to save him.
They didn’t.
He knew, somehow, bone-deep, that the Brethren’s incantations were holding them back. He remembered the glyphs on the door, and knew they had been played for fools. At least one of the Villain Kings was in league with the Brethren. They had to be. The entire Conclave had been nothing but a ruse to separate them, enabling the enemy to pick them off one by one. They had already taken Carruthers and now they had him. With the very last of his strength, McCreedy roared and lashed out, cutting one of the sisters with his half-formed claws. Even as she screamed, his head went down and the fight left him.
He felt himself being manhandled, lifted and bundled into the confines of the silver casket, and then the tattered shreds of night disappeared as the lid was closed.
He was alone in the dark. Alone in the utter claustrophobic silence. His breathing turned sharp and shallow. His panting swelled to fill every inch of the casket. It was all he could hear. His mind raced. They had known about him—and had known precisely what the effect of the wolfsbane would be—but how could they? How could they? The realization hit him: outside of the confines of the Greyfriar’s Gentleman’s Club no one knew his true nature.
Which could mean only one thing: he had been betrayed by one of his closest friends.
Again, he saw Napier leaving the Brethren’s territory. He didn’t want to believe it, but what other explanation could there be?
Napier had betrayed them all.
McCreedy felt his pulse quicken, rage firing his blood, but the Brethren’s chanting kept the transformation at bay. He was trapped not once but twice.
The casket lurched suddenly as it was hoisted up.
And then they were moving.
The rolling motion of their march pitched him up against the casket’s sides.
His skin burned everywhere it touched the silver.
McCreedy welcomed the pain. It meant he was still alive.
But with precious little air in the casket he wouldn’t be for much longer.
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Panic exploded within the Conclave. Several of the Villain Kings were on their feet and yelling. McCreedy wasn’t at his seat, Mason realised. Millington dragged back his chair and, shouting, ”We are betrayed!” ran for the door. Mason didn’t move. He wasn’t interested in the sudden hysteria. Let the others rush off in search of whatever, he wanted a proper look at Dee’s auto-icon. Of course he couldn’t just sit in his seat, so he added his own voice to the furore and pushed back his chair, scraping the wooden legs on the stone floor. He joined the back of the line of Villain Kings filing out of the door, made sure Arnos saw him, face set, brow furrowed, his anger at the Conclave being broken plain to see, but at the last moment slipped out of the line and drew a thick velvet drape around him, disappearing into the shadows. He held his breath, expecting the curtain to be drawn back, but no one had noticed him leave the line.
When the room was silent he slipped out from behind the curtain and moved quickly to the auto-icon slumped face down on the table. He checked the body for wires and any other kind of manipulative mechanism, but aside from the frame the stuffing was packed around, like some sort of perverse Guy Fawkes waiting to be burned atop a pyre, there was nothing. And it was undoubtedly the alchemist’s head, he realised, handling the rough leathery skin for the first time. The preservation was incredible. It wasn’t mummified and neither was it frozen, and yet somehow it hadn’t decayed down to bone. He couldn’t waste too much time pondering how it had been done. He just had to accept that someone in the Conclave’s history had been every bit as gifted with The Art as Dee himself had been.
Mason knelt, looking beneath the table and chair for some sort of wireless telegraphy device capable of providing the auto-icon’s voice, but again there was nothing. He ran his hands along the inside of the auto-icon’s legs, up to the knees and higher. Nothing.
The voice had come from the auto-icon’s mouth, or had appeared to, which discounted the idea of wireless telegraphy being hidden anywhere else in the chamber. The voice wouldn’t have carried correctly; it would have obviously been fakery. Which left only one alternative he could see: John Dee’s auto-icon had talked to them. In turn, that meant its message ”They come! They come!” was not some charlatan sideshow but rather a genuine warning. Pushing himself up to his feet, the Chamberlain moved toward the door, intending to follow the others outside.
He stopped on the threshold.
Something was wrong.
He could feel it in the air. He reached out cautiously with his fingertips, trailing them across the air in front of him. It rippled before his eyes. He pushed slightly harder, feeling his fingers sink into … it felt akin to syrup but he could see through it as though it weren’t there … meaning that he could see the others trapped within it. He thought for a moment that they were frozen in place, but that wasn’t true. They were moving. But so, so slowly. He stood in mute horror, watching the barely perceptible rise and fall of Millington’s chest, one breath taking the time of one hundred. Mason backed away from the doorway, for fear that whatever it was would leak through to snare him. It was as though the thickened air somehow slowed down time itself, he realised. One breath in one hundred wasn’t enough; it was barely one every three minutes.
He looked around the room for the poisoned chalice. He wasn’t about to leave the chamber without sipping the antidote to the Shadwell waters. He was many things, but he wasn’t rash. There was nothing to say he’d be able to get back into the Conclave after he set foot outside of it. He wasn’t about to risk his life for the sake of a few seconds. Mason found the black chalice and, beside it, a small phial. He held to phial to the light, examining the consistency of its liquid contents. It was viscous, tinged slightly yellow, and translucent. He uncapped the phial and took a swig from it, then recapped it and slipped it into his pocket. He would make sure Masters McCreedy, Locke, Millington and Napier were taken care of. The Villain Kings could fend for themselves. He knew, situations reversed, Arnos and the others wouldn’t give a second thought for the welfare of his people. Contrary to the truism there was rarely honour amongst thieves. There was no musketeer ethos.
He knew Arnos’s kind well enough to know that despite all appearances they wouldn’t gather in a room without an alternative means of escape. These people didn’t trust each other; that was how they had stayed alive for so long. Ambitions were kept in check by respect and fear, and when necessary, violence. One door in, one door out, was too easy to sabotage; a glyph, a booby-trap, or in this case the sludge-air that held them in virtual suspended animation as they tried to force their way clear to the other side. Without alternative egress, they would be like cattle penned in, ripe for the slaughter. No, they were arrogant but they weren’t stupid. There was no way on God’s Green Earth that Arnos would risk everything on the misguided belief that his fellow villains could be trusted, esp
ecially as the Conclave was the one time they all gathered in the same place. What better time was there to make a play for control? What better place to humble Arnos than here, in the heart of his territory, where he was undisputed king?
Moving quickly, Mason checked the walls, pulling aside the thick velvet drapes and pushing against the brickwork. He worked his way around the chamber methodically. More haste, less speed. He felt along the bricks for raised edges and smooth stones, looking for any sort of anomaly that might signify a hidden lock mechanism. When he had exhausted the bare stones, he tried the antique bookcase, this time looking at the spines of the books and the edges of the pages for dust and fingerprints. It was futile. Arnos was cunning. He wouldn’t employ such crude devices. Mason needed to think, to stretch his mind. If not a hidden door, what? A trap in the floor? He dropped to his hands and knees, looking along the line of the stones for any sort of raised edge or seam. The flickering light in the embrasures made it virtually impossible to see where the stone had been worn down by the shuffling feet let alone any shadow-line that might indicate a flaw in the floor. So, if not a trap door, what? He discounted the ceiling, it needed to be easy. Something Arnos could make a bolt for if the need arose. Magic, then. Some sort of obfuscation. It made sense, but it also meant his chances of finding it were less than nil.
He whispered the word of illumination, holding his hand in the guttering flame of one of the gaslights. He expected the room to have been dampened like the rest of the building, it wasn’t. The flame gathered around his upturned palm. He withdrew his hand from the gaslight. The flame burned on, flickering across his outstretched fingers. He blew gently on it, fanning the flames. Quickly the flame turned blue. He raised his hand to his face, looking at the chamber through the filter of flame. He saw the door directly behind the slumped auto-icon.
Try as he might, Mason could not open the door.
He looked through the open doorway to the men trapped on the other side. They were more than halfway across the room. They appeared to be moving marginally quicker, as though the incantation binding them was weakening, time fighting to reassert itself. He needed to think like the Villain King. The man was devious enough to poison them all to hold the peace, and yet confident enough to risk betrayal at the very heart of his territory, leaving the chamber open to magic—meaning surely the key had to be magical in nature? Another warding or glyph? Unlikely. The last thing the Villain King would have wanted to risk was someone accidentally triggering the lock, so it had to be something quite specific. Again he came back to the fact that Arnos had poisoned them all. What had he said? They would be given the antidote at the end of the Conclave. Could it be as simple as that? The mixing of the antidote signified the end of the Conclave, which in turn meant it had served its purpose and they were free to leave.
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