It ran on.
It found the Ice Queen on the banks of the river, the great bronze lion at her side. She looked like a warrior queen of old, Boudicca rampant, as she stood there staring down toward the mouth of the river and the distant sea. The Ka followed the direction of her gaze. The river was teeming with coal barges and iron-hulled keel-haulers belching thick black coal dust into the sky. The moonlight rippled on the water, stretching the shadows, but the longest shadow by far belonged not to a barge nor a building but rather to the towering figure of Father London. Seeing the Golem astride the great river, betwixt and between with one huge foot on either bank, the Ka felt a stab of recognition, regret, kinship … it too was one of Madam Blavatsky’s creations. It owed its existence to her tormented genius. That made them … brothers … the thought disturbed it. It had never imagined it would have any sort of kin, not beyond the unborn raw carcasses waiting for the imprints of the other Gentleman Knights that hung on meat hooks in the room where it was born, down in the basement of the Brethren’s chambers in heart of the Liberty of Norton Folgate. Brothers, all of them, without a single soul between them.
Father London turned laboriously, as though sensing their scrutiny.
Ravens flew around it, black feathers beating frantically at the sky and uselessly at the iron shell of the huge Golem.
The Ka turned back towards its queen and the lion, and saw the Ice Queen’s gaze had moved on from Father London to the shadowy figures locked in a scuffle further along the embankment.
It wasn’t a fair fight.
The growls and snarls of McCreedy’s red wolf tore at the shadowy figures as they desperately tried to defend themselves. Their carefully laid plans were coming undone. The werewolf had escaped his silver prison and instead of suffocating or drowning at the bottom of the Thames it was rending them with tooth and claw.
Their screams were pitiful to behold.
All thoughts of brotherhood were gone. Its masters, its makers, were dying. It could not stand by and leave them to the wolf’s not-so tender mercies. The creature’s attack was beyond savage; it was rabid.
The Ice Queen saw the Ka staring at the slaughter and cried out: ”To me!”
The Ka began to run, promising, ”I will not fail you. I will not fail you.”
It could have been talking to the queen, its creators, itself, Father London, or even the city itself. All of them or none of them. All it knew was that it had been created with a purpose, and this was it: to fight.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Sataniel was drawn to the river.
The fallen angel could sense its followers. He was not alone.
”I am the light of morning,” he said, a beautiful smile spreading slowly across his face. It was true. It always had been. He was the light, he was the morning star. ”I bring life!”
At his side, Cain’s skin tightened, shrivelling beneath the furnace heat radiating off Sataniel. The heat came in pulses, each pulse more brutally hot than the last. The Morning Star was incandescent. Fire coruscated beneath his skin, lighting him up as he walked through the waking city. So fierce was his internal flame that it lit the way despite the lingering smog. The fire in the sky might have shredded the thick choking smog, scorching the rooftops of the city below, but Sataniel’s fire was so much more precise, and more intense for it. It cut through the coal dust and pollutants like a hot knife sliding through a pat of butter.
He was a beacon in the night city.
He was the light.
Cain felt the first shiver from the earth as they walked beside the high walls of Bow Cemetery. The shiver ran all the way from Kensal Green to Norwood, Nunhead, Brompton and Abney Road, encompassing Tower Hamlets and Highgate to the north, the seven great cemeteries of the city. It was no accident that the tremors were bounded by the walls of those magnificent necropolises. The dead of London were stirring, responding to Sataniel’s nearness. The weeping angels and the granite-faced cherubim watching over the interred moved, following their passage. The movement was barely perceptible, but there was no denying it. Every statue in the old cemetery turned to watch them walk by.
”Rise up!” Sataniel commanded, throwing his arms high in a vee. ”Rise up! I am the light of the morning, I bring life!”
He did not look around, nor did he linger to see the result of his command, but rather like some perverse Pied Piper of the Dead and Damned, danced on toward the docklands. The angel’s corona blazed, venting evermore heat as the fires inside Sataniel raged. And, for just a moment, as licks of flame spilled from the angel’s eyes, Cain could not help but wonder what he had done …
Still, Cain followed in Sataniel’s wake, but unlike the angel, could not resist the temptation to look back: a deep shadow-fissure ran through the heart of the graveyard. It wove between the headstones and the sarcophagi like some black serpent. It might have been a wound in the earth, it might have been the play of light and a suggestible mind, but for a moment he could have sworn he saw the dirt-smeared bones of a skeletal hand clutching at the crumbling edge of dirt, scrabbling for purchase while it tried to haul itself from the grave … but whose madness was that?
Cain turned his back on the wounded earth.
The dead did not rise.
Sataniel was not … was not … the wanderer could barely bring himself to think God’s name.
The dead did not rise.
Sataniel was not God.
He did not have the power to drag the dead from their graves and lead them in some puppet dance.
Did he?
A second and more violent tremor caused the earth to undulate beneath his feet. All he could think was that the earth itself was rebelling against their unnatural presence. A third and a fourth hit, followed by a hellish low moan that sounded like all of creation tearing apart, slowly.
And again, despite himself, Cain looked back over his shoulder for the source of the moan.
But it wasn’t what was behind them that caused the earth to cry out in despair, it was what lay in front of them. Father London, the great Golem, strode across the river and toward Sataniel and his companion, and through its mouth every one of the dead souls trapped within the iron construct wailed.
Down in the river itself, the water began to chop, white waves churning up as the spume lapped against the rust riddled hulls of the coal barges. The water heads crashed and broke against the bulkheads of the tramp steamers, spilling back dirty and black with the scum of the river clinging to them. It almost looked as though the river was slowly coming to the boil, but the froth being churned up had nothing to do with heat and everything to do with the undercurrents of its elemental memory as the river remembered its dead.
There were no corpses to rise at Sataniel’s command, but the water did not forget.
It yielded up its victims one by one, giving momentary shape to them as they clawed toward the surface, only to break apart and splash back down to become part of the river once more, gone but not forgotten. Never forgotten. At first it was only one or two of the recently dead, those unlucky ones fallen drunkenly from the ships moored along the embankment, and the victims of saps to the skull, dumped in the drink with empty pockets to drown and then more and more ethereal bodies clawed up out of the water, older ghosts from when the city burned and from when plague tore it apart and bells rang out to cries of ”Bring out your dead! Bring out your dead!” The Thames was alive with the watery dead. Hundreds upon hundreds of faces pressed through the churning waters, looking for one last time upon the world they had left behind, answering Sataniel’s call.
”And the graves and waters are opened, the veil torn asunder and the dead remembered, for this is the first resurrection,” Sataniel said.
Cain looked on and trembled.
Not with fear.
With anticipation.
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Mason stumbled into the Lime House as the old bones of the dead rattled against the sides of their coffins.
It was like not
hing he had ever heard before, nor like anything he ever wanted to hear again.
It wasn’t that it was inhuman.
It was too human.
Mason shivered and gripped the hilt of Mercy all the more fiercely, as though the old blade could protect him from the reavers and ravening spirits trapped down here with him. ”Move on,” he said, barely above a whisper. He didn’t know whether he was urging himself into motion or the dead to cross over to the other side.
The building trembled on its shallow foundations, stone grating on stone as the dried up mortar towelled thinly between the red bricks crumbled.
Again and again the entire house shook violently, dislodging the slates from its angled roof and twisting its subterranean walls. Each fresh tremor dislodged more and more mortar and whitewashed flakes of brickwork where the walls were weakest. The weeping stone filled the room with choking dust.
With one particularly violent shudder, the tiny light in the wall sconce was snuffed out, leaving him alone in the dark with the dead.
Mason pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and fashioned a facemask out of it, tying it off in a knot behind his head. The starched white cotton quickly blackened as his breathing came faster and evermore shallow. His eyes watered as he fumbled around for the next door, the next staircase, to lead him back up to the light. He felt like Dante making the climb back from the ninth circle to the light of whatever passed for day in the world he had left behind, though he had neither Virgil nor the beautiful Beatrice to guide him, only bodies lined up in rows and columns in their boxes. There was nothing remotely divine nor comic about his situation.
Mason forced himself to breathe deeply, drawing the air in through the cotton weave of his handkerchief.
He would escape this ”basso loco” and see the stars again.
Despite himself, he smiled, pleased that even under such duress he did not lose his breeding nor forget his letters: basso loco was Dante’s literalisation of Hell, simply calling it the deep place, while every cantica closed on the same word, stelle, or stars. His father would have been proud, and that was all any son could ask of himself, wasn’t it?
He cast about in the darkness, fumbling his way across the room fingers first. He didn’t want to think about the nature of the things he felt beneath his fingers. To do so would be to invite panic into his mind. No. Gritting his teeth, Mason forced himself to work his way around the walls until he felt the textures change beneath his questing fingers, from the occasional brush of cloth to the cold of sarcophagi stone to the rough wood and iron straps of the door. He found the ring of the handle and twisted it abruptly, pushing it inwards. For one heart-stopping moment he thought it was locked, then instead of pushing he pulled.
Light streamed into the room in bright beams.
It might as well have been the dizzying brightness of Heaven; it stung his eyes every bit as much as any divine light would have. But there was nothing godly about it. The light owed its existence to the last blazing remnants of the fire in the sky Father London’s violent passage into this realm had caused. Mason couldn’t have known that. To him it was as though he had emerged from one kind of hell into another. In this one the skies burned and the dead stirred, clawing against the walls of their coffins as they tried to escape their confines.
He found the stairs, then the waiting room, which was nothing more than a big, empty chamber with bare floorboards where the dead were piled up while they waited to be taken below. There were windows here. They had been boarded up and taped over, but they were still windows. Chinks of nightlight filtered in through the cracks.
The door to the street hung on twisted hinges.
Mason pulled away the handkerchief and threw it to the ground as he dragged the door open. He savoured the feel of fresh air on his face before he walked out into the night, and like Dante, his reward was stars. They peppered the night sky, and for just a moment he was able to imagine they were shining just for him.
The moment didn’t last.
His first glimpse of Father London striding across the city, crushing houses that had stood for a hundred and more years beneath its careless feet, dispelled any illusions he might have harboured. This night wasn’t about him, but that didn’t mean he did not have a part to play in it. A lesser man might have turned his back and fled, but not Mason. He gripped Mercy all the more fiercely and ran toward the towering iron Golem, one tiny man against the might of the iron giant.
He raced toward the embankment, no real thought about what he was going to do or how he expected to stop the towering monstrosity. All he knew was that someone had to, so it might as well be him. As he reached the waterfront, he slowed, the sheer enormity of the Golem stopping him dead in his tracks. Looking up from the street he could barely make out its huge barrel chest never mind its head.
And for just a moment he felt utterly insignificant and helpless, but the moment passed and all he felt was angry. This was his city. This was where he had been born, where his father and his father before him and been born. This was his London. He hawked and spat a wad of coal-laced phlegm onto the hard-packed dirt of the road and looked up at the towering iron Golem. No misbegotten fiend, no matter how big, was going to destroy it.
”Cry God for Harry, England and Saint George!” Mason raged, brandishing the Confessor’s blade high in challenge to the Golem, as though the silver blade and a dead king’s fictitious rallying cry could strike fear into the heart of this enemy.
It couldn’t.
He knew that.
Iron giants had no hearts.
It didn’t matter.
The words weren’t for the giant.
They were for him.
And as far as he was concerned it wasn’t some pitiful gesture of defiance, it was everything that made his country great encapsulated in a single sentence. That was the brilliance of the Bard.
Along the waterfront Mason saw the Ice Queen, and prowling at her feet, the huge, bronze Landseer lion. Beyond them he saw a man running, the tails of his great coat swirling around him. It was hard to be sure who it was, but for all the world it looked as though it was Master Napier.
Mason started to run toward him, and for the second time in as many minutes stopped dead in his tracks as five figures emerged from the shadows to stand between them. He couldn’t see their faces but he didn’t need to. He knew exactly who they were. This entire thing reeked of their handiwork: Lucius Amun, Charles Ra, Vincent Hathor and the sisters, Niamh Thoth and Hermione Osiris.
The enemy.
The Brethren.
And they were between him and where he needed to be.
They hadn’t seen him yet.
Mason retreated a step then two more, drawing the cloak of shadows cast by the high factory wall around his shoulders. He was freezing from the icy water. It was a battle to keep some semblance of control over his shivering muscles.
A fool rushed in.
He forced himself to wait, assess the situation and use logic and reason over emotion. Something was happening. They weren’t merely springing a trap, he realised, they were under attack. A slow smile spread across his face as he heard the growls of McCreedy’s red wolf. A moment later he saw the shadow spring. The sounds of snapping teeth and tearing skin carried all the way to his hiding place. The shadow-shapes blended into one as the werewolf tore into Lucius Amun’s throat.
Mason had three choices: one, rush in to the wolf’s aid, changing the odds from four against one to four against two. As it was, Amun was as good as dead. The man fell away, sprawling across the road as the wolf bore down on him with its full weight. Amun clutched at his throat, blood gouting through his sticky fingers; two wait, do nothing because this wasn’t his fight, Napier ought to reach the wolf before one of the others straddled its back and slit its throat, meaning he need only have eyes for the iron giant; or three, find another way around, join Napier and the Ice Queen as they threw themselves into the fray and trust that his arrival would be enough to tilt the balance
.
Hiding went against every grain of his existence.
Sneaking was no better.
But it made sense.
Running headlong into a pack of sorcerers was nothing short of suicide. Waiting for them to turn their backs was little better. He reached for the Distillator. Drained of water, no one would survive.
And that was what stayed his hand.
McCreedy was in the midst of those writhing shadows fighting for his life. There was no way to reliably aim the Blondel Distillator, not like a gun. The effect rippled out from the muzzle in an ever increasing cone until it fizzled out into nothing. Pull the trigger now and McCreedy would be caught in the middle of it. Werewolves were just as much water as any other kind of man.
For the Distillator to be any use—if it even worked—he would need to drive the wolf from the fight, and that wasn’t going to happen now the blood was flowing.
He had the sword, Mercy, but even as he began to contemplate wading in to the fight swinging, he felt the subtlest of disturbances in the aether: one of the Brethren had begun to draw upon The Art. The sensation was unmistakable. It was unlike any other sensation. A single heartbeat later the odour of burning fur reached his nostrils and he saw an arc of lighting crackle from the sorcerer’s outstretched hand into the wolf’s spine.
London Macabre Page 27