The Burning Altar

by Sarah Rayne

  But it’s the brotherhood of the streets, he thought; the community spirit that some politicians and most newspapers would have you believe no longer exists. Whatever it is, thank God for it! As the search began again, he thought with sudden irrepressible irony: I wish de Migli could see me now, scouring London’s East End with a gang of thieves and forgers and rent boys!

  He never quite sorted out the component parts of the motley collection called up by Baz that day. He thought that several people donated an hour and then went off on various and probably nefarious ploys of their own, but that others took over from them – the twilight shift. Fagin’s pickpockets swarming London Town, or the raucous colourful felons of Scott’s Alsatia – the seventeenth-century Whitechapel sanctuary for miscreants. Alsatia had long since gone – Raffael thought the area was mostly occupied by publishing houses and printers now – but its descendants were still here: they looted TVs and video recorders instead of gentlemen’s fobs and guinea-purses, and they stole microchips out of computers to order, but beneath the skin they were not so very different.

  It was almost five o’clock before he began to search the quayside proper, and darkness was closing in. His eyes were aching with peering through the fog, but he turned up the collar of his greatcoat and went cautiously down the steps. Behind him reared deserted-looking buildings with tiny mean windows set near to their roofs and directly ahead of him was the river: he could not see it for the mist, but he could hear the muffled hoots of river craft – probably barges – and he could smell the dank wet river smell. His own steps conjured up phantom ones – ghost footfalls coming after him. Someone following him? Someone really following him, not just his tired brain and disordered imagination creating sounds? He tripped over a stone mooring and swore, and then paused, trying to get his bearings. The phantom footsteps had vanished and he had the sense of being entirely alone now. At his feet were wet slippery stones and scatterings of debris: odd lengths of rope and sodden bits of unidentifiable rubbish. There was the occasional sound of a barge still, and blurred discs of smeary lights from moored crafts.

  To his left was a second stair that probably went down into the river and was probably used for maintenance of the river wall and access to sluice gates. He looked back at the empty buildings. Were they really empty? Supposing he had missed one, and supposing that was the very one holding Ginevra and Elinor and Georgie? There’re too many questions altogether, thought Raffael, and began to descend the steps.

  It was then that he saw the leather jacket Baz had lent to Ginevra, lying sodden and rather forlorn halfway down.

  ‘It might be a false trail, of course,’ said Raffael, as he and Baz retraced his steps. ‘Because it’s pretty unlikely that Ginevra’s captors didn’t know she’d thrown it down. But it might be a real clue, and anyway—’

  ‘It’s the only clue we’ve got.’

  ‘Precisely. Be careful where you step – that’s the quayside wall on our left, and I think this is one of the really old river stairs – probably Henry VIII came down here on his way to Greenwich.’

  Partway down the steps a narrow ledge branched off into a jutting shelf that appeared to extend along the quayside wall, about halfway down. Raffael caught the glint of dull green water below, and stepped back at once.

  Between the swirling fog and the encroaching darkness it was difficult to see if there were hiding places large enough for two men carrying an inert body, but there might be any number. He began to walk along the brick shelf, keeping his back against the wall, praying not to miss his step. The ledge was wider than it had looked from the stair, but it was still perilously narrow. He had gone about ten feet along when he stopped, and in a low voice said, ‘Baz. Come and look at this.’

  ‘What? Where?’

  ‘A circular hole with a brick surround. It’s cut into the quay wall itself.’ He moved closer until he could see the opening more clearly: it was eight or ten feet across and it yawned blackly.

  ‘It looks like the opening to a tunnel,’ said Raffael, as Baz came along the ledge. ‘At a guess it’s the overflow outlet of a disused sewer. About a hundred years ago the effluence of most of London’s East End probably discharged into sewer pits inside there. When it reached a certain level it simply overflowed and gushed out into the Thames.’

  ‘Through that outlet?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I always said the Thames was a shit-hole.’

  Raffael grinned, and Baz said, ‘That’s the way we’ve got to go, isn’t it?’

  Raffael frowned. ‘Supposing the jacket was a red herring,’ he said. ‘Supposing they’ve gone farther along this ledge? Or even left the jacket there guessing we’d find it and walk into a trap? No, I’m seeing too many sides to the situation. If you start counting up “supposings” you never stop.’ He bent down and peered into the dimness. ‘Shall we just take a brief look in here to see if there’re any more clues? If not, we can explore the ledge a bit farther.’

  ‘How much time have we got?’

  ‘It’s half-past six.’

  ‘Five hours, then.’

  ‘Less. If they’ve set their hellish ritual for midnight, they’ll probably start preparing at least an hour beforehand.’ He paused, and then said, ‘I think we should assume we’ve only got three hours left.’

  Baz said, ‘Do you think they’re both still alive?’

  ‘I’m praying so.’

  Ginevra was not dead, but she was unconscious for so long that Elinor’s mind swung between black helpless despair and sheer mindless panic at least a dozen times.

  Iwane had chained her at the far side of the warehouse from Elinor, which had made communication almost impossible. Elinor had not dared call out to Ginevra because Grendel would be listening, and she still had no idea of how far Grendel could be trusted, and also because Timur and Iwane’s people were constantly in and out of the warehouse now, preparing for tonight’s ritual.

  Grendel kept to the shadows. He managed to convey the impression that he was attending to some vital part of the ritual in his own corner of the warehouse, and if anyone approached him, he spoke off-handedly over his shoulder, but each time this happened Elinor was dreadfully aware of how perilously near to discovery he was. She was appallingly aware of Grendel’s own fragile sanity.

  She was increasingly weak with hunger and thirst, and the dizziness was worse, and from time to time she lost track of what was happening. But as the hours crawled by, the preparations for the evening built up and a sense of anticipation began to sizzle on the air. She forced herself to remain alert. She watched Timur’s people bringing in food and wine, and tried to count them. They were all similar in appearance, but she thought there were no more than twelve or fourteen, and roughly half were women.

  Ginevra was not dead. She looked pale and dishevelled, but she was unquestionably alive, and Elinor was so hugely relieved that for a time she nearly forgot what was ahead. If she had been hit over the head she probably had a headache, but knowing Ginevra she would manage to shrug this off.

  As night approached, the hours that had been crawling suddenly began to race. We’re almost there! thought Elinor, and as if on cue, Grendel moved out of his shadowy corner.

  The main doors of the warehouse were flung open and from out of the night, arriving in silent orderly procession, came the cat-headed people.

  They wore plain dark clothes, and they were supple and sinuous and lithe. Elinor saw that her estimate of their numbers had been right, but as they moved into place she had to remind herself that the cat heads were false. It would be very easy indeed to imagine that she had tumbled into a mad surreal nightmare, where half-human things walked upright like men and donned a thin veneer of civilisation, but beneath it slavered hungrily for human flesh— Stop it, Elinor!

  But the blood was drumming inside her head because this was it, this was the moment when Grendel’s macabre disguise would be put to the test; in the next few seconds he would have to come out of the concealing shado
ws. She remembered with silent anguish that he was still chained.

  But as he stood half in, half out of the shadows, a cursory glance would show him to be Timur: build, hair, stance even, were all Timur’s. The face was most dreadfully Timur’s. But the instant he stepped into the flickering light they would see the distortion: they would see that Timur’s face looked as if it had slipped, as if it had been held over a furious heat and had melted and run, and then had hardened into a faintly warped cast.

  Iwane said, ‘We are ready to start, Timur,’ and from the shadows Grendel said, ‘Then start! Bring in the Burning Altar!’

  He stepped out of the darkness.

  Raffael and Baz had returned to Raffael’s rooms to get torches and a coil of rope, which Raffael thought might be useful if there were any descents to be made into drains.

  ‘And chalk,’ said Baz, foraging for the pieces he and Georgie used when it was darts night at the Anchor. It always raised a bit of a laugh because Georgie insisted on using coloured chalks for the scoring, and always took his own along.

  ‘Why chalk?’ began Raffael, and then: ‘Oh, to keep track of where we’ve been and where we haven’t. You’re right – it’ll probably be a maze in there.’

  The sewer had obviously long since been abandoned. It smelled very nasty indeed and after the fog it was close and hot. They spoke in whispers but their voices were picked up by a dank dull echo. A faint light trickled in from somewhere.

  They were about a dozen yards along when they came to an abrupt halt. In front of them, stretching from the floor of the tunnel to its ceiling, was a pair of ancient sluice gates, the centre sections solid age-blackened oak, the top and bottom thick spiked iron.

  Raffael stared at it, his mind grappling with this new obstacle, but Baz was less daunted. He shone the torch, and after a moment said, ‘There’s a mechanism at the side for opening them – a kind of pivot arrangement. See it?’

  ‘I see it, but it doesn’t mean a thing to me. Can we operate it?’ Raffael stared rather helplessly at the machinery.

  ‘Well, not without the key.’ Funny to think such a poshly educated person could look at a piece of machinery and not have a clue how it worked. ‘You need the key,’ said Baz.

  ‘Yes, you said that. But I still don’t—’

  ‘The key turns that wheel,’ explained Baz patiently, because it was apparent that Raffael hadn’t a clue what they were talking about. He pointed to the immense wheel, set horizontally at the base of the mechanism. ‘It works like –’ he sought for examples – ‘like opening a giant tin of corned beef or sardines.’ This was probably not the most elegant of comparisons, but at least it was one that could be understood. Everybody in the world had opened a tin of sardines at some point in their lives for heaven’s sake, hadn’t they? ‘You slot the spline of the key down here – it’d be a couple of feet long – and then you can rotate the wheel.’

  ‘And that would open the tin, I mean the gates?’

  ‘Yes, they’d roll back, or maybe they’d roll up. At least,’ said Baz, ‘they would if we had the key.’

  ‘Can we force it to – rotate?’

  ‘Not without a lot of noise. And it’d take time and maybe equipment.’

  ‘What kind of equipment?’

  ‘Plumbers’ stuff. Those massive pliers that plumbers use. Monkey wrenches and maybe a jack. But I might be able to get the lend of some stuff.’

  It was probably better not to ask where Baz would get this at short notice late on Sunday afternoon. Raffael did not much care by this time, anyway. ‘The trouble is,’ he said slowly, ‘that we still don’t know if we’re following a false trail.’

  ‘No.’

  Raffael studied the immense gates, his mind working. They could waste time breaking through this forbidding Victorian portcullis arrangement, only to find nothing on the other side save a few sewer rats. On the other hand, if Ginevra and the others were there—

  ‘How long would it take to get the equipment?’ he said at last.

  ‘Say an hour, an hour and a half at most.’

  ‘As quickly as that?’ The brotherhood of Alsatia and Whitechapel again, but working at top speed this time.

  Baz grinned briefly. ‘I put the word out,’ he said, ‘and one person will tell two, and those two will tell three each. They’ll all know inside an hour, and the tools’ll be here.’

  ‘And – you could open the gates?’

  Baz, kneeling down to inspect the mechanism in more detail, thought he could. It wouldn’t be easy, on account of not knowing how long it was since it had been used, but he reckoned he could work it. They’d pour some freeing oil on it, like you did for seized-up car brakes and such.

  ‘You may not need it,’ said Raffael, pointing to a thin trickle on the ground. ‘These gates have been oiled recently. I think we’re on the right track, after all.’ He straightened up. ‘But we’ve got less than three hours to get through.’

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  When Grendel finally began to walk out of the shadows, every head turned, and ice and fire chased down Elinor’s spine.

  Even with the terrible skinned face it was easy to see that Grendel’s eyes were glowing with fervour, and he stared at the Burning Altar like a man finally looking on a consummation longed for over many years. Despite the danger Elinor felt an unexpected pang. Lewis’s son, walking towards what might be his own death. Did he know that? Did he sense it with that curious mad intuitive mind? Whatever was ahead, he was certainly going into the hands of people who would use him without compunction.

  The Altar had been set up by several of the men, who had dragged it from a dim corner and arranged what looked like clay bricks across the top. They had fired it from beneath – Elinor thought it worked on roughly the same principle as an ordinary garden barbecue – and it was already glowing with heat. Sentinels had been dispatched: two to guard the main outer doors, two more below the trap door into the tunnels, and inside the warehouse a sense of immense expectancy was building, as if the cat-headed people were saying: Nearly there! Nearly time!

  Elinor dared not take her eyes from Grendel. He was standing at the Altar’s head, but he was treading a line so appallingly fragile that it might snap at any second and precipitate them all into disaster. The heat burned up suddenly, lighting the macabre distorted face, and a murmur of shock went through the watchers. This is it, thought Elinor in panic. They’ve seen that something’s wrong. They’re realising. Oh God, what will Grendel do?

  As if he had caught the thought, Grendel lifted his hands and deliberately and slowly peeled back the grisly mask. It came away stickily, like tearing a bandage off a wound still wet, and beneath it his face was caked and smeary with dried blood. Elinor caught a movement from Ginevra and saw her put both hands over her mouth as if forcing back a cry of horror. There was a moment of appalled silence, and then Grendel seemed to take a huge breath and plunge straight into the centre of it.

  ‘Behold your ruler!’ he cried, and his voice echoed and spun around the lofty-roofed warehouse. ‘I am the one brought to preside over the Burning Altar of Touaris!’ He paused, his breathing harsh and ragged with emotion, and there was a low murmur of hostility.

  ‘Grendel . . .’ The single word growled through the echoes.

  ‘Yes, I am Grendel.’ He spun round to face Iwane, his eyes showing the red light. Remember that he’s mad, thought Elinor, staring at him. Only a madman would have deliberately walked straight into their midst, so don’t depend on him to get you out of here. But he’s got this far; he fooled Timur and killed him, and although these people are hostile they’re listening to him. They’re not pouncing on him. She sent a quick look to Ginevra and saw that Ginevra was half-kneeling, her eyes fixed on Grendel.

  Iwane said, ‘Where is Timur? Grendel, where is Timur?’

  ‘Dead.’

  ‘At your hands?’

  ‘Yes. But he was expendable and I am not. I am your ruler.’ Grendel’s voice was logical and calm, as
if he was explaining facts to a witless child.

  ‘Touaris is our ruler!’ cried Iwane, and behind him, someone murmured, ‘Imposter!’ and a snarl of assent went through the others.

  ‘You are our creature,’ said Iwane. ‘Nothing more. If Timur is dead, I take his place. But you are ours to use as we please!’

  ‘A cipher!’ cried one of the women.

  ‘A puppet!’ shouted another.

  ‘An imposter,’ said Iwane again. He swung round to face the Tashkarans. ‘And imposters,’ he said, ‘should share the fate of all false prophets!’

  ‘Burn him!’ shouted the Tashkarans at once. ‘Burn the false one! Feed him to the Altar!’

  There was a soaring note of blood lust in their voices and Elinor shivered. On the other side of the warehouse, Ginevra was dragging fruitlessly at her chains. It would be like Ginevra to somehow break free and go helter-skelter into battle, heedless of the consequences, and have to be rescued, upsetting a lot of plans in the process. Blast you, Ginevra, stay where you are! thought Elinor in silent anguish.

  The Tashkarans who had stared at Grendel with that cautious respect, were staring no longer. They were circling about him, like monstrous feral cats, and the warehouse was echoing with their shouts.

  ‘Bring him to the gods’ table!’

  ‘Let him burn!’

  ‘Feed the Altar! Feed the Altar . . . the Altar . . . the Altar . . .’

  They began to close in, and the fierce heat of the Altar showered them with glowering crimson.

  ‘Bring forward the prisoners!’ cried one, and at once the others took up the words, a dreadful rhythmic chant that beat painfully against Elinor’s senses.

  ‘Bring the prisoners! Bring the prisoners!’

  Four of the men stepped forward to snap open the padlocks holding the chains, and Elinor and Ginevra and the young man with her were dragged forward to the searing heat of the Burning Altar.

  The brotherhood of the streets had worked with the efficient swiftness that Raffael was coming to recognise, and in just over an hour they had an assortment of tools that Baz said should be enough to knacker the Aswan Dam for ever, never mind break through a half-rusted sluice gate.