London Macabre

by Savile, Steve

McCreedy’s howls were as shocking as they were desperate, his back arching as the lightning coursed through his bones in search of the earth. For all their agony they quickly turned from pain to rage as the red wolf clawed the ground and launched himself at the sorcerer, teeth and fur and fury.

  In that instant it came down to two simple choices, charge or stealth, there was no way Mason could simply wait. Not if he was going to be forced to listen to McCreedy’s screams. It would take a stronger man than him to stand by and listen to the big man commit suicide even if it was to save the rest of them.

  As though sensing him, the woman, Thoth, turned to look directly at him. Her face was unmistakable in the sliver of moonlight. Without all of that hatred pent up inside her she might have been beautiful, as it was she was a thing of ugliness personified. There was no way she could see him, but there was no denying the fact that her eyes were locked upon his. And for just a moment he found himself imagining she could see not only his flesh but all the way down into his soul. He shuddered and backed off another step, his back scraping against the brick wall.

  He made his choice: there was no way he would make it across the killing ground between his hiding place and where McCreedy was fighting for his life, not with Niamh Thoth waiting, watching, aware… . A single misstep was suicide.

  He was going to have to find another way around if he was going to have a hope in hell of saving McCreedy’s hide.

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Brannigan Locke braced himself against a low tumbledown wall to catch his breath. Head down, he swallowed hard. The fight with the vampire was finally taking its toll. He was hurting, and not just physically. Gritting his teeth, he looked up to see Millington’s concern. He nodded that he was fit enough to go on, though in truth he was anything but.

  But this night of all nights he knew that there would be no respite.

  The fire up above had long since burned out. Despite that, the occasional streamer of flame would flicker over their heads every now and again like some warning flare.

  For the most part, though, the air was back to the familiar end-of-year cold that had stung his lungs every December since he was born. There was an uncanny comfort in the return of that familiar bite. It was as though the world was rejecting the Ice Queen, the iron Golem, and everything else that didn’t belong.

  The deadweight of Dorian’s body was heavier than he had imagined possible. Indeed, the term deadweight suddenly made sense to Locke in a way that it hadn’t before. Grunting, he shouldered his burden again. While they could conceivably cart Carruthers all over Christendom it rather negated any impact they might have in the scrap. Locke wasn’t a fool. He knew full well they would be called upon to fight, and fight for their lives, being weighed down babysitting Carruthers’s mortal form wasn’t exactly conducive to ducking, diving, bobbing or weaving.

  ”Come on,” he muttered.

  They were close to the old factory district. The shadow of the workhouse loomed almost as oppressively as the colossus of Father London’s cast iron frame. Locke’s mind raced. Close by the howls of McCreedy’s wolf turned to whimpers. The sudden shift spurred him into action. He had no intention of being a spectator in this fight. Not when they were already a man down. He might not be Fabian Stark, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t capable of pulling a rabbit out of his arse and making a difference. Not when it really mattered.

  ”Cry God for Harry, England and Saint George!” Mason’s rallying cry was more like a prayer when it finally reached them. Even so, it galvanised Locke.

  He looked Millington square in the eye.

  It was impossible to ignore the fear in his friend’s eyes.

  He might have been an actor by trade, at home treading the boards and telling lies night after night, but he wasn’t fooling anyone. Millington wasn’t a brawler, not like Locke or, for that matter, Haddon McCreedy. They were the brawn. They battered down problems while Millington and Stark preferred finesse. They were at opposite ends of the spectrum. Napier on the other hand was a sneaky bastard quite capable of mixing it up with his fists, making him half a dozen of one and six of the other. Which, of course, was just another way of saying they each had their own gifts. Millington’s didn’t stretch to the pugilistic arts, nor were they anything like the arcane thud and blunder that Stark could draw upon to cause a scene. It was the middle of the night in the heart of the city. Millington’s way with animals was hardly the ace up their sleeve they needed right now, unless he could somehow charm the birds out of the … the thought died stillborn. That was exactly what he had done, wasn’t it? Not out of the trees though, but from the Tower.

  He looked up at the Golem, and in relation to it, the ravens that flocked around its huge iron jaws, wings beating frantically at the unflinching metal. That was Millington’s doing, conscious or not. It had to be. It was completely unnatural. More than that, Locke realised. It meant that Millington didn’t have to be in the thick of it to use his talents. His gift could be deployed from range, like artillery.

  Use your mind, Locke railed against himself. He wasn’t thinking straight. He wasn’t thinking like a commander, he wasn’t seeing the big picture. It was all too focussed on him, on his place in all of it. To carry the analogy to its rather ungracious conclusion, his thoughts were chasing around like hapless grunts on the battlefield waiting, gun smoke, blood and mud in their eyes while the bullets were flying.

  They needed to find somewhere safe to hide Dorian. That was the first thing. It needed to be somewhere away from the front. In other words, somewhere Millington’s fear wouldn’t unman him.

  He looked about him, scanning the length of the wall and the buildings on either side of the street. He was looking for something that would hide Millington from sight but give him a clear field of vision down to the embankment. There were a few lodging houses but most of the buildings around here and going down to the docks were all factories. That didn’t mean they wouldn’t suit their purpose, but it did mean that there would almost certainly be night watchmen they needed to worry about. They were an unknown: a potential fly in the ointment, so to speak, but he’d rather have to worry about an unsuspecting night watchman stumbling upon the pair of them than he would a bloodthirsty vampire every night of the week.

  ”Come on,” he said again, but this time the urgency transferred to Millington, who seemed instinctively to grasp that Locke’s mind was racing. It was part of the bond between them. It went beyond trust. Beyond kin. They were aspects of the same whole; Napier, Millington, Dor, McCreedy, there weren’t so many of them left now. They had already lost Stark, and there was no knowing whether Simon Labauve was even alive or if he had already sailed into a watery hell all on his own. They hadn’t had any form of contact in over two months. The lack of word was unnerving. And now this, a full-frontal assault on them … Locke’s instinctive reaction was to rage, but anger only clouded his judgment. He needed a clear head. He needed to think. And not only think, but think differently. He needed to be deliberately unpredictable. The enemy thought they knew how the Gentleman Knights of London would act and react, and on the evidence he had seen so far, they had good reason to think they were right. Alone they were lessened, weaker, but together they were strong enough to save the world’s greatest city from any threat.

  And it was working.

  They had already lost one of their number, he was damned if he was going to lose another. It really was as simple as that.

  Part of Brannigan Locke, the dark, suspicious corner of his mind, suspected that the Brethren were even behind Labauve’s wild goose chase. Was it possible that they were playing such a long game? He shook his head. Of course it was. Of course it was.

  He motioned with two fingers, like a pistol. Understanding, Millington nodded, once, sharply, and together, they broke away from the shadows. With Carruthers’s shoes dragging on the cobblestones between them, they went in search of a vantage point, somewhere safe.

  For a full minute the soft slap of their shoes on
the cobbled stones of the street was the only sound they heard. An animalistic whimper changed that. Hearing it, Locke looked up, using the long arms of dockyard cranes as landmarks to get his bearings. They were close to the river. Close enough to smell the bilge and the backwash and all of those astringent reeks that bit at the back of the throat, meaning they were as close as was really comfortable.

  They weren’t alone for long.

  More and more people were roused from their beds by the tremors and, dressed in threadbare nightgowns, came stumbling into the streets to see what the hell was going on. Every head turned toward the lumbering Golem, staring in horror and fascination as its enormous foot came crushing down upon the red brick buildings that seconds before had been someone’s home and grinding it to dust and death beneath it.

  It wasn’t long before the entire city was screaming—or at least that was how it sounded to Locke. He half-ran, half-walked through the streets, pushing through the people as they stumbled out of their homes. The cries were impossible to ignore, but that was exactly what he needed to do. He knew, logically, that for what he had in mind, this kind of panic was exactly what he needed. Like it or not, confusion was his friend. There were a million places to hide within it, and a million more paths that wound through it, paths that couldn’t be followed.

  They reached the huge iron gates of Saint Katherine’s Dock. The sign was barely legible for the layer of soot that it had collected. Behind the gates high chimneys belched grey smoke into the night sky. The dockyards never slept. It was too expensive to keep quenching the foundry fires and stoking them again come dawn so they kept them tended all night. It would be an hour or more before the dockers arrived for the day’s labour. An hour, now, with what they faced, was as good as a lifetime.

  The dockyard opened up onto the Thames. It was a wet dock. It was also a veritable labyrinth filled with places to hide, everywhere from the foreman’s office to skeletal ships themselves, to the bonded warehouses stacked to the ceilings with crates of cargo waiting to be loaded. The crates offered the protection of a labyrinth within the greater labyrinth.

  The cranes cast elongated shadows across the docks.

  ”You will be all right here,” he told Millington.

  ”What are you going to do?”

  ”I’m going to use my head, for once,” Locke said.

  ”And you expect me to just hide here like some coward?”

  ”You’re not a coward, Ant. You’ve got the heart of a lion. You don’t need to prove it to me. But we can’t leave Dorian alone. Not like this. The Gatekeepers have revealed themselves, and the Brethren have shown their hand. The game’s afoot, Ant. This is it. This is the moment we’ve been waiting for,” he almost said dreading. That would have been just as apt. ”It all comes down to this.”

  ”What are you going to do?” Millington pressed.

  And suddenly he didn’t want to say it, as though by giving voice to his plan, word might filter back to the Brethren, preparing them for his strike. He looked first left, then right, scanning the street almost comically. There were five hundred people crowding around the centre of the street, drawn together by the idea of safety in numbers. Not that numbers offered protection this time. It wasn’t as though the five hundred of them could scale Father London with spanners and welding tools and strip him girder by girder, though the notion appealed to him. He could almost see them, black flies swarming over the rusted frame. Let the Brethren see Londoners united. Let them see the true nature of city, the ”one for all and all for one” spirit.

  But then a darker thought crept in to undermine his utopian uprising: any one of them could have been a Brethren spy. He looked from face to frightened face quickly, not sure what it was, exactly, he needed to see to prove their innocence. But, of course, they were all innocent. He knew that logically. They were frightened because their world was being turned upside down. They lived in city where giant golems didn’t crush terraces underfoot, where vampires didn’t guard the old gates. They were at home with poverty and smog, with cutpurses and mudlarks and whores and drunks. They were at ease with the haves and the have-nots. They knew their place in the grand scheme of things and how the world divided into those who lived upstairs and those who laboured downstairs. In other words they lived in London. And this, here, wasn’t the London they knew or felt safe in.

  He was going to change that, even if it was the last thing he did.

  ”I’m going to make a difference, Ant. For once I am going to use the old noggin and be deliberately unpredictable. Think about it; they are all out there trying to round us up. Their agents are in the field. Somehow they are controlling that iron giant. They trapped Dorian out of his body. I don’t know how they did it, but they did. I know they did. And they’re behind Stark’s death, you can bet your life on it. They let the Meringias free. They opened the door to the Catamine Stair and set this entire nightmare into motion. They’re the puppet masters. But they’re not going to leave anything to chance, not now, not this late in the game. Are you with me?” Millington nodded, looking anything but convinced. ”They are out on the streets, now, en masse. Think about it. And follow that thought to its natural conclusion. If they are in the field that means their homestead is unguarded.”

  ”There will be wardings,” Millington objected, but Locke headed him off with a brusque nod and a wry grin.

  ”Of course there will, I mean, they’ve raised this thing,” he gestured up vaguely towards the Golem, ”and somehow they’ve turned the vampires. There’s no way they’d leave their lair unprotected. I’ll just have to be careful, won’t I?”

  He could see that Millington was still far from convinced, and usually he would have made light of the other man’s concerns, but not this time. That wouldn’t be fair on him. Instead he let his grin fade and admitted: ”I’m not a fool, Ant. I know I might not get out of there alive. All I do know is that standing around arguing about what to do isn’t helping anyone. So, I’ve got to listen to my gut, which is telling me to get the hell down to the water and help McCreedy and the others, and do the damned opposite. Be deliberately unpredictable. It’s the only way I can really help McCreedy. I’ve already sprung one trap with my name on it. If I am lucky they’ll think I am already out of the game. But if I wade in there in my size elevens, they’ll not only know I’m not, they’ll come down on me like a ton of bricks and I’ll be no good to anyone. So, I’m using my head, and this is what my head is telling me: they’re expecting us to duke it out face to face, with honour, because that’s our way. That’s the way we’ve always been, and what they are banking on us always being. We are the Gentleman Knights. We aren’t the Poor Knights or the Lionhearted, we are the Gentlemen. Well, my friend, I say it’s time to take the white gloves off and get our hands dirty. They expect us to act a certain way, react a certain way, we need to become deliberately unpredictable, Anthony. Deliberately unpredictable. That’s the ticket.”

  ”Good speech, old man. You almost convinced me.”

  Locke grinned dangerously.

  ”It’s a beginning. Look after yourself, Ant.”

  ”You too, old man. You too.”

  Brannigan Locke turned his back on his friend, leaving Millington to find a hiding place within the crates and boxes. Locke had done all that he could. The rest was up to him.

  He walked away, taking that first literal as well as metaphorical step. He closed his eyes, letting the echoes of the dockyard guide him. He had told Millington it was a beginning, which was true, but what he hadn’t had the heart to tell him was that he just so happened to think it was the beginning of the end.

  Chapter Seventy

  The wolf’s fangs tore into the helpless man’s throat. Momentum and weight bore him backwards, sending Lucius Amun sprawling across the ground. Shock and fear were the last expressions to reach his face; shock at the speed and ferocity of the red wolf’s attack, fear at the realization he was a dead man. And he was. Even as Amun flailed desperately at the side of the
wolf’s head his jugular pulsed out a great gout of blood that arced almost to the banks of the black water. Lucius Amun was dead before he hit the cobbles. But the wolf didn’t stop tearing at his corpse. Blood-frenzy gripped the beast, any lingering trace of the big man overwhelmed by the unmistakable taste of blood. There was no room for conscious thought, only base instinct.

  Animal instinct.

  The air was thick with the pheromones of fear and rage, powerful conflicting stimuli. It’s nostrils flared wide as it breathed them in, letting them fill it and fuel it.

  Its world came down to blood. The wolf’s nostrils flared, scenting fresh danger. Its hackles rose.

  It must protect the pack.

  The instincts were ingrained now more than ever.

  Every last trace of the man, McCreedy, was subsumed.

  Had any trace of the man remained, it was gone now.

  A low growl percolated in the wolf’s throat.

  It tossed its head back, and claiming the victory, loosed a feral howl up at the moon. It was a baleful sound, so utterly out of place in the city the cut across every other sound, rising higher and higher. The wolf frothed at the mouth, blood and spittle spraying from its jowls. Then, teeth slick with blood and gristle, the red wolf ducked down again, forcing its muzzle up under the dead man’s chin to get at his vocal chords and the soft meat there tearing him apart.

  The kill was anything but clean.

  Even as the wolf bit down again, rough hands seized it from behind. It howled abrasively as fingers sank into its spine either side of its haunches.

  A voice cried out.

  Heat suffused its entire body, a sudden unquenchable fire igniting muscle deep. It spread through every nerve and fibre. It swelled through the tissue and seeped into the bone.

  It heard the command, ”Burn with me!” so close it might have been whispered in its ear, and then blinding black agony tore through its hide as it began to cook from the inside out. In seconds the air stank of scorched fur.