by Dan Abnett
"He could be anywhere," said the cardinal, wiping his brow. "Thousands of people are fleeing Richmond at this very moment. A creature as gifted as Jaspers could lose himself among them. Where would we begin to search?"
"The river," said a small voice from behind him.
As you will have realised by now, gentle reader, my part in this Night of Infamy is nowhere near as heroic as Sir Rupert's, Doll's, Mr de Quincey's or Lord Gull's, but this was my moment of greatness. I urge you to savour it. I certainly do.
"When the panic began," said I, Wllm Beaver, "and the mob was fleeing hither and yon, I saw the Divine. He was racing for the Richmond Royal Stairs. There were boats at the quay there, I believe-"
"You old goat, you, Beaver!" cried Triumff, interrupting me to be sure, but nonetheless clapping me on the shoulder. I had hoped for "William, you Achilles, you!" but I can't complain. Well, I can. "You old goat, you!" won't look that great on a headstone in Poets' Corner.
"If he's already on the river, we won't catch him now," the cardinal began. "I'll-"
"We will, sir," said de Quincey, approaching them. "Mother Grundy knows how. If she'd er do it again. Ma'am?"
Mother Grundy nodded. "Of course, Neville. Make haste now, make merry come supper."
Cardinal Woolly frowned, working that through.
"I'll go with you pair," said Triumff. "I have unfinished business with Jaspers."
"Weren't you tending to Lord Gull, Police Surgeon de Quincey?" Woolly began.
"I can do that," said Doll. "I've been with Rupert long enough to know how to tend a sword cut." She crossed to Lord Gull, who looked up at her with a faint smile.
"Can I trust my life to Triumff's girl?" he muttered.
She glared down at him.
"You're in no position to be choosy, Gull," she replied.
With a chuckle, Gull got to his feet, leaning on her for support. He threw his bloody rapier across the arena to Triumff, who caught it neatly.
"That might help," he called.
Triumff nodded.
"It might indeed," he called back. "Ready?" he asked of de Quincey and Mother Grundy.
The three of them hurried away towards the Royal Steps as Woolly watched them go. His shoulders, which seemed to have been holding up the burden of the entire Earth, sagged.
He looked around and saw me, Wllm Beaver, pulling out his notepad and pencil.
"Not now, Master Beaver," he said, "not now."
"Don't flinch! Be a man!" Doll told Lord Gull.
He looked up at her, an eyebrow arched.
"Let me see," she murmured, and managed to move his arm aside.
The wound to Gull's stomach was deep and bloody.
"He didn't let you off easily, did he?" she asked as she dressed it.
"No," sighed Gull.
"Then why do you smile, Lord Gull?" asked Doll.
"Because the Queen is alive. Because I won. Such things make it worthwhile for a soldier to smile."
"And my name's Callum, Miss Taresheet," he added.
"Is that so?" She sniped at him. "I'm Doll."
He smiled again. "Rupert Triumff is a fortunate man," he remarked obliquely.
A shadow fell across them.
"Miss Taresheet? Where might I find Master Rupert?"
"Agnew! What are you doing here?" asked Doll.
"My best, lady. And Master Rupert?" he asked again.
"Gone to the river," said Doll, "chasing that vile Jaspers. Agnew?"
She called his name, but he had already gone.
The elms were swaying and singing in the wind, and the Palace walls were dark cliffs beyond them. Agnew hurried over to the figures huddled in the lea of the wall.
"So where's Rupert?" Uptil asked anxiously.
"Gone after Jaspers, on the river." Agnew said, glancing around.
"Then we have to get after him," said Uptil. The figure behind them growled softly.
"Where's Master Bluett gone?" asked Agnew.
"He said that he had his own business to attend to," said Uptil. "We can't afford to wait for him. Let's go."
Bonville de Tongfort limped silently down the damp stone steps of the Maze Approach. The swell of noise from the Palace grounds and the Shene outside was fading.
He felt sick. His leg hurt like a bastard from the stab-wound Triumff had given him, and his face and stomach ached.
He felt alone, but he wasn't.
"De Tongfort?" a voice called from the dark undergrowth by his side.
De Tongfort spun around, his rapier up and glinting in the starlight.
The storta swung out of nowhere, whistling in the still air.
Bonville de Tongfort felt his toes clench. This was remarkable, because his head was currently detached, and heading for the ground.
There was a thump, followed by a slower impact.
Drew Bluett leaned on his sword and sighed, his weariness and the pain of his bruises overwhelming him like a tide.
"Got you at last," he breathed.
THE TWENTY-FIFTH CHAPTER.
At Battersea.
The sky above the City was lit volcanically, and gunpowder scented the down-river wind. News of the calamity at Richmond had not yet reached the City, and the festivities were continuing unabated.
Ferocious fireworks of every conceivable colour and magnitude fractured the night sky, supplemented by cannonades from the troops and retainers along the riverside. The London sky glowed with the warmth of a thousand bonfires and a million tapers, not to mention one or two burning buildings.
From the prow of the speeding wherry, Triumff watched the vast display, smiling as dying firerockets hooted and wailed down out of the multi-coloured, smoky night. The bright waters of the Thames mirrored every flash and star, and surge and detonation above. It reminded Rupert of the heart of a naval engagement.
It also took his mind off the fact that they were moving, oarless, down the river at something close to ten knots.
Triumff moved back from the prow. Mother Grundy was sitting, arms folded, in the stern chair, watching the passing banks. De Quincey was sitting in an oarsman's place, trying in vain to stoke and light his pipe. The wherry's slipstream kept extinguishing his tinder strikes.
"No sign," reported Triumff, sitting by de Quincey. "He could have put ashore already, anywhere. We might have passed him."
"To keep this far ahead of us," said Mother Grundy, "he must be using a similar means of propulsion."
Triumff began to ask her about that, and then thought better of it. There were some things he felt he didn't need to know.
Mother Grundy held out a skinny hand. In the open palm lay a small gemstone. It twitched slightly, with a life of its own.
"This lodestone is responding to the Goety he has left in his wake. He's still ahead of us, have no doubt."
"But this far down-river," de Quincey began, giving up on his pipe altogether. "We'll be under the Great Bridge in a minute or so. Is he heading for the sea, do you think? A waiting ship to speed him away?"
Triumff shook his head.
"I doubt that," he replied. "Jaspers was so confident of success, I'd wager he made no contingency for escape. No, my guess is, he's set upon one last mission an act of malice, of spite in revenge for his scuppered plan."
De Quincey frowned at Triumff.
"You've got an idea, haven't you?" he asked.
"There's a place he has struck at before," said Triumff, "somewhere rich in arcane power, somewhere his particular talents can do the most harm."
"The Powerdrome," said Mother Grundy.
Triumff nodded, and said, "It has to be."
"Lord save us all," murmured de Quincey.
Above them, coloured fire continued to split the sky, as if the heavens themselves were at war.
Dominating the great curve of the Thames at Battersea, the Powerdrome had been designed by Sir Christopher Wren in
1671. It was as famous a landmark of London as the White Tower or Hardy's Column. The three g
reat smoke-stacks, provided to vent off the exhaust of the Cantriptic reaction, made it look for all the world like a giant, upturned milking stool.
It loomed over them, impassive and silent, its stonework flickering in the sidelight of the firework bombardment.
The wherry bumped gently against the low quay, and Triumff sprang nimbly over the rail to tie up the rope that de Quincey handed out. Mother Grundy leaned over the stern, and fluttered a handful of dried petals into the dark water.
"What is she doi-" Triumff began, but shut up when he caught de Quincey's look.
Together, they helped Mother Grundy onto the landing, and made haste towards the drome's entrance yard.
A full ten yards from the edge of the quay, they passed another wherry. It was leaning on the stones, its belly raked and broken from its passage across the landingway, a passage evidenced by long gouges across the quay.
"He was in a hurry," mused Triumff with an unconvincing grin. "He didn't even stop when the water ran out."
De Quincey scratched the back of his scalp nervously, and swallowed hard. "He's er not going to be easy to tackle, is he?"
"Nope," said Triumff, unsheathing Gull's beautiful rapier, "but then neither am I." The naked weapon didn't make de Quincey feel very much better.
"A word of caution, Sir Rupert," said Mother Grundy quietly. "Over-confidence is the handmaid of disaster."
"Really?" asked Triumff.
"I mean it, sir," she insisted, and there was a quality to her voice that left neither man in any doubt that she did. "A man with a sword, even a brave man, is no match for that creature Jaspers. Please, attempt nothing rash. Be advised by me as we go. I may be a frail old dam from Suffolk, but I know my Arte. My knowledge may be the only weapon we have."
"And," she added, completely unnecessarily in de Quincey's opinion, "even that might be far from enough."
They passed under the arch of the river gatehouse. The drome's great yard opened before them, and beyond it, the massive entranceway yawned like a mouth.
The curtain walls shielded them from the worst of the tumult down-river. It was unnervingly quiet in the yard, and there was a smell, one that even the inexperienced nostrils of de Quincey and Triumff could recognise. It was the smell of rank sugar, molten and burnt, of caramelised syrup.
There were two lumpy shapes in the yard in front of the entrance steps. De Quincey took them to be piles of rubbish, until he stooped to check.
He started back, a resilience, conditioned by twenty years of gruesome forensic examinations, overwhelmed in one unguarded moment.
The lumps were men. Or they had been men. They had been guild men, drome workers of the Old Union.
Something had melted them, and the remains of their robes were flecking away from the distorted bodies in the night breeze, dry as charred paper.
"They tried to stop him," de Quincey mumbled, bracing himself to act as professionally as possible, even though he knew his voice had a quake in it. "Those metal lumps in their hands were weapons. They were protecting the doorway. From the position of the bodies you can see-"
"We can see," Triumff said, gripping de Quincey's arm and pulling him away. "Look, maybe you should go back to the river. Cross to Chelsea, alert the Militia. They should know what's going on, in case we don't make it."
De Quincey shook his head.
"If we don't make it, sir," he said, "there'll be nothing anyone can do. Anyway, you might need me."
Triumff nodded, understanding completely, and moved on.
"God knows what for," added de Quincey under his breath.
They went up the steps and in under the entrance arch. The tapers in the hall wall-brackets had burned out, but there was light, a pallid, lambent glow that filtered through the stones all around them. It was a good ten degrees colder inside than outside. White, sulphurous mist foamed the floor around their ankles.
"Has he staged these creepy effects to put the wind up us?" Triumff asked.
Mother Grundy glared at him.
"He's at work in the Cantrip Chamber," she said. "He's boiling up the power spheres far beyond their operational capacity. This phlogestonic mist is just a by-product of the process: a symptom, and a mild one at that. If he goes on, we'll see worse sights than this."
"Best guess, my lady, what's he trying?" de Quincey wanted to know.
"A meltdown of the Cantrip spheres, Neville? If he Goetically spurs them to melting point, the resultant implosion could leave a vast and smoking crater where the City used to be."
"Oh," said de Quincey, as if this was an interesting thing to know.
"It's called the Ind Syndrome," she continued. "The hypothesis is that if a Cantrip plant like this were to reach overload, it would melt down through the Earth, and eventually explode out of the other side, in India, one presumes."
"Hypothesis, eh? Has it ever, I mean, happened?" de Quincey ventured.
"No, but there was an accident in Wiltshire, recently. It was kept hush-hush, but I learned of it from a local witchlock there. It seems the Church tried to awaken and harness the old power rooted in the stones of the great Henge. Foolish, of course. The Henge power is raw, Druidic energy. It is not compatible with modern processes. It was a disaster, and many died. It could have been worse if they hadn't contained it."
"I heard the rumours," de Quincey nodded. "So it's true? Glory, I knew the Church was desperate for new Magick, but I never thought-"
"It wasn't the Church," said a voice from the shadows.
Triumff whirled, sword ready.
"Step out! Show yourself!" he commanded.
An elderly man in Union robes shuffled into the light. "Put up your sword, sir," he said. "I am Natterjack, of the Drome Union. Vivat Regina. I was hiding in the canteen. I heard your voices."
They stared at him for a moment.
"I've got credentials. Union papers. Hold on, then," he said, and began to rummage in his robes.
"Enough!" said Triumff. "I believe you, fellow. Quickly now, bring us up to speed. What's happening here?"
"Damned if I know," said Natterjack. "I was on a break, waiting for me tea to mash. Next thing, I hear screaming, and smell the smell. You know, the Smell. I came out here and found some of my best men dead as kippers, and the doors to the main chamber shut as tight as a duck's chuff.
"Begging-your-pardons-no-offence, madam," he added for Mother Grundy's benefit.
"Mister Natterjack," she replied, "be assured that I am more than passing conversant with the watertight nature of a duck's fundament. Please go on."
"Well, I tried to get in, and found no joy. Not that I really wanted to get in there, as it was. Then I tried to signal the proper authorities, but no one saw my flare," said Natterjack.