The Spider Dance

by Nick Setchfield

  ‘Really, so sorry. Complete idiot. But we’ll sort this out.’

  The chauffeur turned to inspect the damage. The chrome grille was shredded, the silver-winged hood ornament knocked out of kilter. With a pained sigh he lifted the bonnet, wrenching the length of crumpled metal away from the engine. Steam hissed from the radiator in a scalding cloud.

  As he leaned in to fix what he could Winter cold-cocked him with the gun he had slipped from his suit. The weapon fell in a brisk, slanting blow. Concussed, the man hit the ground, his face twisting against the asphalt.

  Winter spun the weapon so that the handle sat in his palm. He stepped past the driver’s unconscious body, past the gleaming olive bodywork of the Bentley. When he reached the rear door he rapped his knuckles on the window.

  ‘Get out,’ he instructed, with a curt wave of the gun.

  At first there was no response from the car’s remaining occupant. And then Winter heard the thump of the door’s security bolt being unlocked. It was just audible over the incessant horn that still filled the road.

  He reached out and opened the Bentley’s door.

  Lord Auberon Gallard sat among the expanse of wood and leather, his austere features given extra keenness by the half-light. He regarded Winter with cool, grey-eyed detachment.

  ‘You know, you could have just asked my secretary to put this in the diary.’

  ‘I told you to get out.’

  Gallard swung his lean legs from the vehicle, his smartly cut camel coat sweeping over the dimpled leather. There was a black attaché case in his hand, embossed with the letters S and E in gold leaf. He held it close to his body.

  The man carried the scent of sandalwood. But there was another note, too, beneath the cologne. Something sweetly bitter as old flowers.

  Exiting the car he drew himself to his full height. He was bony but imposing, with more presence than his thin frame might have suggested. Gallard took a moment to inhale the drowsy evening air, the hollows of his cheeks sharpening beneath the skin.

  ‘To die in an English field, in late summer…’ He turned to face Winter directly, acknowledging the gun. ‘I take it you are here to kill me?’

  ‘I’m here to get answers.’

  ‘Of course you are. A lifetime’s worth.’ There was a provocation in his eyes as he said that.

  Winter found the man unexpectedly familiar. Just the faintest ghost of recognition in those aquiline features, in the crisp, supercilious manner, so poisonously polite. They had met before, he felt sure of it. This was one of Hart’s memories, rising inside him but not quite breaking the surface. He had a history with this man.

  The horn ceased.

  ‘I’m impressed you found me,’ Gallard continued, lowering his voice to match the sudden hush of the road. ‘Good work. Most diligent. You’re a credit to Sir Crispin.’

  ‘Everyone has a pattern. Even you.’

  ‘Yes, but even so. You retrieved this intelligence from the girl, I take it?’

  Winter said nothing.

  Gallard gave a pursed smile. ‘She went silent on us weeks ago. I rather imagined you’d killed her in Naples.’

  ‘I did. Always a mistake to leave a potential assassin alive. Key rule in this game.’

  ‘Pity. She had promise.’

  Winter glanced at the empty road. It was time to move. Another car would be along any minute, discovering its route blocked by the conjoined heap of the Rover and the Bentley. There was no telling how long Gallard’s chauffeur would remain unconscious, either.

  He waved his gun, indicating the rusted gate that waited at the edge of the field, its iron bars askew, slanting into the earth.

  ‘Start walking.’

  With a louche show of obeying Winter’s instruction, Gallard turned and led the way. Beyond the gate the field sprawled into fast-falling darkness. The two men stayed close to the cover of the tree-lined perimeter, walking through parched grass and crumbled earth, the shadows of branches spidering over the back of Gallard’s coat. The gnat-busy air had the queasy scent of hops, drifting from the kilns that rose like castle turrets against the first stars. Rooks cawed in the oaks, the birds beginning to roost as the autumn equinox approached.

  Winter kept the gun fixed on Gallard’s spine.

  The path took them to a solitary outbuilding. It was centuries old to judge by the ragged state of its crude slab walls. Across another field lay a farmhouse, its distant windows as bright as the building’s crude, empty apertures were black.

  Gallard waited for Winter to unlatch a wooden door that had been warped and scoured by the elements. And then he stepped inside, still pressing the attaché case to his chest. Winter followed him in, watchfully.

  The interior was stark and stone-cool. The only light in the structure came from the high, ripe moon outside. Agricultural implements hung from hooks hammered into raw stone and there was an astringent smell of oil from the rags draped over pots and buckets.

  ‘Stand against the wall.’

  Gallard did so, placing himself halfway into a chalky arc of moonlight. His storm-grey eyes moved across Winter’s face.

  ‘I seem to recall you were rather boyish. Bit of a cherub, in fact. What happened? Was it that knife you took in Namibia? A near-death experience must be terribly aging.’

  Winter knew this show of insouciance was a psychological ploy. A counter-move, designed to get under his skin. He was intrigued nonetheless.

  ‘I knew you?’

  Gallard marvelled. ‘You really have no recollection, Tobias?’

  ‘My name is Christopher Winter.’

  ‘That was never your name. An identity the Crown assigned to a shell of a man. Not the man I knew in the war.’

  ‘It’s the name I’ve taken. It’s who I am.’

  For a moment Gallard’s tongue idled against his lips. He had sensed a faultline. ‘It frightens you, doesn’t it? He frightens you. All that you were, all that you did. The man you could be again. You were so easily seduced by magic. But you were never quite sated, were you? Part of you still craves the black gift in your veins. Just like he did.’

  Winter shook his head. ‘He’s gone,’ he said, unequivocally. ‘I’m not Tobias Hart.’

  Gallard indicated the gun in Winter’s hand. ‘I knew you’d come for me. All these years I’ve kept a watch on you. Intercepted your briefings, your psychological assessments. When Malcolm Hands disappeared at the same time you did I imagined you must have killed him. Reclaimed your memories. You became an active risk to me at that point.’

  ‘So you sent the girl to kill me. She took her time.’

  ‘Oh, first we had to find you. And then we observed you. I needed to know just how much of your past you remembered. The contacts you might renew.’

  ‘You overplayed your hand. I don’t remember you at all. You’ve stepped into daylight for nothing.’

  ‘This is hardly daylight. And it’s brought us together, at least. I’ll be the one who kills you this evening. There’s a rather lovely symmetry to that.’

  Another provocation. Winter ignored it, keeping the gun steady. He nodded to the gold-stamped initials on Gallard’s attaché case. ‘Sovereign Executive. Just how long have you been hidden away in Chancery Lane?’

  ‘Where else would I be?’ parried Gallard. ‘Those tunnels have always concealed us. Back when we operated under so many shadow names. The Joint Technical Board. The Inter-Services Research Bureau. All those bogus branches of the Admiralty or the Air Ministry. We were wrapped in dead ends and cul-de-sacs and blind alleys. Infinite loops of misdirection. We’ve always known how to hide among the filing.’

  Winter realised what Gallard was saying. ‘You’re telling me you’re the remnants of the SOE…?’

  Special Operations Executive. Hart had worked for it, Judit Majoras had told him, back in Budapest. It had been the covert intelligence network created to back the resistance in Axis-occupied Europe. Churchill’s Secret Army, they had called it, not entirely favourably. And ther
e had been another, altogether more damning name: The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

  ‘You were dissolved in ’46,’ said Winter, disbelievingly. ‘Attlee himself shut you down. That was a prime minister’s direct order.’

  ‘Oh, we’d overrule God in the name of country, believe me. The Joint Intelligence Committee was always queasy about our methods but they knew we were more effective than the SIS. Peace is fragile, war is inescapable. We were a bespoke weapon. They’d need us again. So we retreated even deeper into the labyrinth. And we’ve sat at the heart of it all ever since.’

  Winter processed the words. ‘I was part of this, wasn’t I? The SOE? Back in the war?’

  Gallard tapped a nail against the golden initials. ‘For a while. When we could pry you from the SIS. Given we never employed gentlemen you were our supreme asset. And then you betrayed me. In the end you had all the loyalty of a switchblade. It was only ever the hand that twisted you that counted.’

  Winter needed these answers more than he dared admit to himself. ‘Go on.’

  ‘It was an alliance of convenience,’ shared Gallard. ‘All of us. British. The Russians. The Shadowless. We established contact with Zerbinati in ’41. He was a key player for us, and just as keen as we were to undermine fascist rule in Italy. At war’s end he realised our true agenda. The necropolis beneath Naples. He severed the alliance. Sealed the bones away.’

  Again Gallard rapped the attaché case, a single nail striking the metal box-frame. The sound echoed in the stone-cool air.

  ‘I knew the Cold War was coming. Soon the Russians would be a liability. We had already shared too much research with them. I instructed you to kill every Soviet scientist that was part of Operation Paragon. You were ordered to savage their necks, bleed their bodies dry. Naturally the SIS would blame the Shadowless. But the SIS gave you a counter-order. You were to kill one man. And one man only.’

  Gallard continued to tap the case as he talked. The rhythm seemed random at first, no more than an anxious tic.

  ‘One of our own,’ said Winter, ignoring the skittering nail as he focused on the man’s words. ‘I killed one of our own, so I’ve been told.’

  Gallard’s finger found a steady, insistent pulse.

  Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

  ‘You killed me,’ he stated, dispassionately.

  Now the nail had the rhythm of a heartbeat.

  It had locked itself to Winter’s own, matching it precisely.

  Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

  The man’s skin tightened as he smiled, his eyes acknowledging Winter’s instant of realisation.

  Sir Auberon Gallard was undead.

  Winter held the gun level; for all that he knew it was useless now, just so much scrap in his hand. He heard the nail quicken against the case, keeping pace with his heart rate.

  ‘It was an ugly death,’ Gallard continued. ‘Not really worthy of your talents. A wire to the throat, for God’s sake. You had no inkling of what I was and I let you believe you’d succeeded. Convenient for me, in the long run. The SIS wanted me out of the way. They thought they could preserve our relations with the Soviets. Of course they didn’t have the means to kill me. Not a high-born vampire. Not a king.’

  ‘The house in Venice,’ said Winter, putting it together. ‘Il Portone. I put an enchantment upon it. Your orders?’

  ‘Zerbinati believed we were sweetening the alliance, ensuring no one would find the map to the thorns. He thought we were protecting him. But I was securing my survival. I always knew the thorns of Christ could be used against me. And then you went and broke the hex…’

  Gallard took a step away from the wall. He stood directly in the moonlight, his skin silver-pale, his irises almost translucent, like coils of water. It was as if he had been bled of all colour. A true revenant, clinging to the world like an after-image.

  ‘What did you need with the bones?’ asked Winter, buying time as he calculated whatever options he had left to defend himself. ‘You’re not exactly short of vampire DNA…’

  He glanced at Gallard’s hands as they gripped the case. They had altered shape, thinning to inhuman proportions. The fingers tapered like reeds, preternaturally long. As Winter watched, the nails slid from the quick.

  ‘A proprietorial interest,’ said Gallard. ‘I had no intention of letting the Russians be part of the final experimentation. They were useful scavengers, nothing more. The bones would be held by Britain. And I would guard their secrets. Bury them, if need be.’

  Gallard took another step, defying the gun aimed at his body. There was the sound of bone grinding beneath muscle. His face was shifting, elongating, the skin plucked tight against the planes of the skull. As Winter stared the hollows of the cheeks deepened into troughs while the jawline sharpened. The effect was lean and peculiarly jackal-like.

  ‘The parasitic wasp lays its eggs in a living host. These tiny eggs become larvae, and once they have injected that protective womb with all manner of toxins and pathogens they consume their host from within. It’s a cruel process. Darwin considered it proof that there could never be a beneficent God. Imagine how he would have shuddered at the existence of my kind.’

  Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

  ‘I am proof of God,’ Gallard declared, the scent of brittle flowers filling the old stone building. ‘At the dawn of creation he exiled a tribe of blood demons from the world. They so offended the Almighty that he banished even their reflections, cast them out of glass and mirrors, stamped out their shadows. They were his children but he wanted no reminders of his mistake.’

  Winter glimpsed another face, sharing the light with Gallard’s own. It seemed ancient, bestial, with the crude, dreadful blankness of an idol. The face was the colour of blood, blackened and decayed. It hung there, a fleeting death’s head beneath the flesh. A second later it was gone.

  ‘But parasites are the most resilient of God’s works. The blood demons endured, and so did their thirst, across eternity. They took humans as their hosts. We incubated them and they claimed us from within, like larvae. But they were generous. They let us live. Forever.’

  Tap-tap. Tap-tap.

  ‘That’s what we are, the high-born ones, the monarchs of the undead. Symbiotic vessels, preserving the first of our kind. Our gods are inside us. We thirst like they do, and they sip the blood we steal.’

  Gallard bared his teeth in a bright, feral smile. ‘It’s a very gratifying arrangement all round.’

  He threw the case aside, moving in.

  Winter emptied the gun. Bullet after bullet studded into Gallard, the successive impact of the shots driving him back against the wall. The barrage had no chance of wounding let alone killing him but it won Winter the seconds he needed to dive sideways.

  He rolled across hard stone, hurling the gun away. Scrambling to his feet he seized a pitchfork from the shadows. It was crowned with four brutally pointed prongs. Winter readied it as Gallard approached. The vampire was bloodied but barely winded by the bullets.

  The heart, he told himself. Aim for the heart.

  He thrust the steel through the air. Gallard weaved. The prongs missed their target, snagging only the bulletholes in the shirt, shredding the cotton as they tore free.

  Winter lunged again, ramming the pitchfork at Gallard’s ribs. This time it stabbed the flesh. He could feel the reach of the steel inside the body. It was embedded in tissue, scraping bone. Straining now he urged the implement deeper. It sunk another inch closer to the heart.

  The two men were locked together by the length of wood and metal. Leaning in, Gallard brought his teeth to Winter’s throat. The razored enamel came close enough to break the skin. Winter felt hot saliva spatter his neck. He twisted away, his veins bulging beneath the wet, distended jaws. He could hear the click of Gallard’s epiglottis, close to his ear. Sweat compromised his grip on the handle but he levered a fraction of space between them, enough to escape the grasp of the teeth.

  Gallard’s hands closed around the head of the pitchf
ork. Matching his strength against Winter’s he pushed down, determined to extricate the steel from his impaled flesh. Winter fought him, his mouth contorting with the effort.

  Gallard had the edge. The prongs slid free with a soft sucking sound. They were running with blood.

  Winter let go of the pitchfork. He backed away, stumbling into the pots behind him. There was a threshing flail on the ground. He seized it, whirling the chained sticks at Gallard’s head.

  Gallard caught the flail and tore it from Winter’s hand. He flung it away.

  Winter retreated again. He was out of options. Any moment now he’d be backed against the opposite wall.

  Flesh is memory. Bone is memory. Blood is memory.

  Alessandra’s words were all that he had.

  Winter closed his fists. He felt the touch of his own skin as he took a deep, steadying breath. Inside him, he knew, was an enchantment of bone and muscle, its secrets stitched in a bright maze of veins. Every part of him held the memory and truth of magic. Enough to shape the world.

  He shut his eyes as Gallard closed the space between them. Now his world was dense as ink. And that ink surged and seethed and spiralled with possibility. It moved like a storm across his eyelids, just as it had swirled on that Rorschach test in London. Tiny capillaries glittered in the darkness, the threads of his blood electric.

  He was Christopher Winter. He was a magician.

  The nerve above his eyes began an insistent beat. Winter reached inside himself and summoned a shadow scythe. And this time he shaped it, made it exactly what he needed. He was no longer afraid of it. This one he would sculpt and command.

  The heart, he told himself. Aim for the heart.

  The magic tore from his body, wrenching itself out of blood and bone.

  Winter opened his eyes as Gallard screamed. A solid, lightless shard had skewered the vampire’s chest, piercing the heart. It was a lance of pure shadow and Gallard reeled beneath its impact, fighting in vain to rip it free. His hands were burning at the touch of the black spear.

  The scream decayed, turning to a protracted, agonised hiss. Gallard staggered and fell, his skin splitting, fracturing, reclaimed by the centuries. He hit the stone floor as a cadaver.