The Remnant
Page 38
“A favour for a favour, boy, just as you said.”
The brothers formed a rough line across the cut and walked towards the narrow end, guns raised.
When their eyes adjusted and they were close enough to see the knot of Sluagh bunched against the iron gate, they stopped and raised their weapons.
“Christ,” said one. “These are ugly bastards and no mistake.”
“They’re on our side,” said Vintry. “Dark allies of the Day Father. ’E ain’t after them. ’E just wants The Oversight done.”
“Them on the ground is Oversight,” said one of his brothers excitedly.
“True,” said Vintry.
He raised his gun and pointed it at Badger Skull.
“You step aside, matey, and let us have a crack at them two,” he said. “We got no argument with you; we’re on the same side. Oversight no friends of yours, are they?”
Badger Skull rocked his head from side to side as if unkinking a particularly persistent knot in his neck.
“No,” he said. “No, they aren’t.”
“So step away, and keep them blades at your sides, and we’ll just take over from here,” said Vintry.
“Or … what?” said Badger Skull.
Poultry Templebane had a hair trigger on the blunderbuss he favoured as a weapon. He waved it towards the Sluagh.
“I’d kill me own mum for ’arf a gold guinea if I ’ad one,” he snarled. “So you just fuck off out the way right now, you nasty-looking buggers, or I’ll pulp you to fucking mincemeat, you see if I don’t, you just see if—”
He did. By mistake. Jerk the trigger.
And blasted the nearest Sluagh off his feet, dead before his shoulderblades hit the ground.
There was a stunned silence.
Then the Sluagh looked up from the dead body and growled as one.
“Fuck it,” said Vintry. “Now we got to kill them all.”
Charlie saw that no matter how fast the Sluagh attacked, the bullets would be faster.
“Suits me,” said another brother, cocking his gun and aiming it at Woodcock Crown. “Fifty guineas is fifty guineas, even if we ’as to split it. Night-night, ugly boys.”
NO.
The voice in their heads was so loud and so powerful that they all winced.
NO MORE BLOOD.
Vintry turned and saw who was roaring in his head.
Amos walked towards them, stumbling as he came. The metal plate he wore around his neck was no longer flat, but dished in by the lead bullet that had hit it. He winced as he walked, the force of the impact having broken his sternum so that each step felt like a hot knife jagging into his chest, but despite that his progress had an unstoppable momentum to it.
NO MORE KILLING.
“How’s he doing that?” said the brother who had just spoken.
“Dunno,” said Vintry. “Don’t care none neither.”
He aimed his gun at Amos.
Vintry. Please. Please don’t make me stop you.
“Fuck off, you black bastard.”
Or what?
The brothers laughed.
“Just shoot him and let’s get on with—”
No.
“I warned you,” said Vintry. And he spun on his heels and squeezed the trigger.
All the brothers jerked at the same time, brother suddenly facing brother as if they were marionettes unable to control their own movements as they fired their own weapons into one another, even one who had not yet reloaded his blunderbuss, impotently squeezing the trigger at the very instant Vintry’s bullet blew the back of his head off.
Charlie blinked reflexively at the noise and then his eyes went wide at the sight of the brothers falling to the ground while Amos continued to walk towards them, through the blood mist, past their jerking bodies.
“How did you do that?” he breathed. “Howd’you make ’em shoot each other?!”
Badger Skull exhaled, face stuck somewhere between shocked and impressed.
“What are you?” he said.
Amos stopped and looked around at the fallen bodies.
I don’t know.
He looked up at Charlie. This time his eyes were dry.
But I did warn them.
“He’s one of us,” said Sharp weakly, looking up from the gravel. “Now give me my candles, for I must cauterise these wounds before I bleed away, and so must you … Amos, please go and help those dogs …”
“No,” said Charlie, looking down at the hand clamped over the bullet wound in his side. “No. You don’t need flame for the wound …”
Sharp followed his eyes, then coughed in surprise before looking down at his own hands staunching the flow of blood from his chest. He tried to take his hand away but found he couldn’t.
On both of their wrists, the triple-wood bracelets had sprouted, green tendrils twining over their hands and around their bodies as strands and threads of vegetation wound themselves into patches which began to look like bark scars over their wounds.
“What is this?” said Charlie, his voice a half-sob of pain and wonderment.
“I don’t know,” grimaced Sharp, allowing himself to lie back as a thick tendril of ash probed into a bullet hole and thickened, blocking the flow of blood. “It hurts like blazes …”
He pushed himself up on his elbow and looked at the river, eyes searching for a small head in the water.
“I recognise the pain though,” he said.
“Me too,” said Charlie, sitting up with a grimace as he tried to drag himself towards the fallen gravel bank and join the dogs’ excavation with his one free hand.
“It’s life.”
CHAPTER 53
THE WILDFIRE UNBOUND
Issachar gaped at the window under the eaves, staring down in shock at the carnage his murderous sons had inexplicably unleashed on each other. He gaped, but not for long. He paused only to snatch the fallen rifle from Garlickhythe and a handful of bullets from the open box on the window ledge, and then he ran.
He pounded down the creaking wooden warehouse stairs like an unstoppable avalanche of wobbling flesh, his breath coming in short, panicked barks which turned to a higher-pitched wheezing as he reached ground level and hurled himself towards the door beyond which his carriage waited.
He wrenched the door open and burst into the street, smashing into a passing pedestrian with such velocity that they both sprawled into the road beyond. The rifle went flying one way and the bullets another, and he scrambled to his feet with so little concern for the old woman he had steamrollered that he put his knee on her stomach and launched himself upright with his flabby crablike hand pushing straight down on her heaving chest. He spared her not a look, let alone an apology as he ran towards his waiting carriage.
And then he stutter-stepped to a halt as he saw the young girl who rolled herself over the low wall at the lip of the cut. It was not her trousers that shocked him into stasis: it was the ease with which she swung the crossbow from her back and aimed it at him.
“No,” he said. “No. You can’t. You can’t. I can make a deal. I can give you money. You can’t.”
“I know,” she said.
Father?
The voice inside his head was the final straw. Issachar felt his bladder empty down his shaking leg.
She can.
Issachar screamed at Ida, spittle flying from his mouth as he did so.
“No! You can’t.”
“I know,” she repeated.
And shot him.
“But I did.”
She jogged over to him and put her foot on his chest, pulling the quarrel free with a workmanlike tug. She stared at his dimming eyes.
“You kill my friends; I kill you. That’s my deal.”
And she slung the crossbow and turned back to the wall over the edge of the cut. She paused a moment to take in the dogs digging furiously at the slump of gravel on the other side, and then she scrambled over the wall and began climbing down as fast as she could, to help them.
She was gone by the time the Ghost had got her breath back, wincing at the pain the fat man’s knee had left as he knelt on her stomach. She did not see her pick up the rifle and a bullet and stumble to the edge of the parapet closest to the river.
The Ghost had no interest in the furious activity below her. Her eyes were only for the unmistakable figure of Mountfellon on the tilting deck of the chain-snared steam tug beyond.
“Francis,” she said, and her eyes were bright with an inner sunlight. “Francis. There you are. And here I am. And I am not as I was, and you are Mountfellon. And now I must act, and everyone knows what you must do, Francis …”
She giggled a little as she loaded the rifle with an efficiency that would have surprised any onlooker had the backstreet behind the warehouse been peopled by anyone other than herself and the still-twitching body of Issachar Templebane.
She rested the gun on the wall top, and squinted down the sights.
“ … everyone knows, Mountfellon must die.”
Emmet’s head broke the surface and stared around. He saw the tug. He saw the casket disappearing over the rail. And then he was hit in the back by the taut chain that had swept across the width of the river as the current took the tug on the end of it. He gripped it and looked around.
His hollow eyes fell on the figure at the end of the chain.
It was Sara, and she was hauling herself hand over hand towards him, her face a mask of pure determination, eyes locked on Mountfellon’s back.
“The Wildfire,” she shouted, waving at Emmet. He nodded and turned back to the boat, wrenching himself through the water.
The boatmen didn’t see him come over the rail, and he had two in the air, cartwheeling overboard as he flung them clear, before the others noticed. He threw two more and then the steersman just jumped without a second thought, terrified by the drenched man-monster that appeared to have just risen from the deep river like a nightmare made flesh.
The engineer had a cooler head and, as Emmet stepped towards him, he kicked the brake-lever on the chain-box, which was on the higher port side of the sloping deck. Emmet lunged for him, but just as his fingertips brushed his collar the golem was slammed brutally sideways by more than a ton and a half of fast-sliding wagon that pounded him into the starboard buffer and pinned him there.
Sara hauled herself over the railing and pointed a dripping finger at the engineer.
“You, over the side, now,” she said, and the force behind her look was enough to turn his mind and his body as he ran for the river and leapt for his life.
Sara shook water from her eyes and turned her attention to Mountfellon.
“The Wildfire,” she said. “Give it to me.”
She moved towards him, her eyes locked on the candle in the box and the wreath around it. Even without knowing what it was, she would have recognised the flame anywhere, having spent a lifetime guarding it: it was just a tiny lick of fire held by the thin wick of a candle, but seen with the right eyes it was also huge, a peephole into a whole other dimension of roiling conflagration, a perpetual hunger bursting to escape and consume all that fell before it. The pure power and destructive danger of the thing was all the stronger for being pent up in the tiniest of candle flames.
As she moved towards it she worked the Green Man’s bracelet off her wrist and held it at her side.
Mountfellon scrabbled in his jacket and fumbled a pair of smoked-lens spectacles over his eyes.
“You cannot make me,” he said. “You’re just a woman without a weapon. You can do nothing. Stay where you are.”
“I am alone, that’s true,” she said, continuing to step towards him. “But I can do something. I can save London. Now be very careful and hand that candlestick to me.”
He jerked back, away from her. The triple-wood wreath bobbled alarmingly. She stopped.
“Be careful, Mountfellon,” she said. “You don’t know what you have there.”
“The key. The key to all the hidden clockwork,” he grinned. “Pure power.”
“You don’t know how to control it, or why you must not ever try,” she said, easing towards him again, her eyes locked on the protective wreath.
“I will find out. I am a man of science. I will experiment. I will master it,” he said, stepping back until the chain-box dug into his shoulder-blades and stopped him. “This is my destiny. And if you come an inch closer to me, you pale-faced bitch, I will start by seeing if you burn.”
“Emmet,” she said calmly. “Gently now.”
Mountfellon had no time to register what she had said before a shovel-sized hand had closed around the back of his neck and tightened like an immoveable vice.
“Emmet will snap your neck if I tell him to,” said Sara. “Now you will hand me the candle very, very carefully, taking extreme care not to dislodge the small wreath. If you do let it fall clear of the flame, we will all die. If you hand it to me, we will all live. You have my word on both of those certainties.”
Mountfellon tried to pull free. The wreath slipped alarmingly. The Wildfire flared with a hungry roar then died back to a small candle flame as the triple-wood band settled back into place.
Mountfellon’s eyes went wide at the sight of it. Then he licked his lips as his mind began to sort through the options still open to him.
Sara’s eyes bored into his, unwavering.
“Part of me would like you to do what you are considering. Part of me would welcome the oblivion you are thinking of bringing down on both of us. But you will give us the flame, and you will not be harmed if you do so.”
“And why would I trust you?” he sneered.
“Because Lore and Law command me,” she said. “I am the—”
And here she paused, her voice suddenly ragged as she looked at Emmet, who had pushed the wagon back with one hand while holding onto Mountfellon with the other. Or rather she looked towards him but she saw instead Cook’s body lying on the gravel, unmoving. She saw Hodge’s dogs digging desperately at the riverbank. She saw Charlie being swamped by a tide of angry Sluagh. She saw Sharp falling. Again and again she saw Sharp falling, as he would now be for ever falling. She shook her head and nodded at Emmet in a kind of mute acknowledgement that said more than words might have.
“ … We, Emmet and I, are The Oversight now. And we have given our word.”
“And I should take the word of a monster and a Jew?” he said.
“Yes,” said Sara. “You should.”
Emmet stepped forward and let the chain-box thud back onto the buffers.
“I am going to give Emmet this bracelet,” she said. “You will give him the candle. He will place the bracelet around it to make doubly sure of the Wildfire. And then we will think about how we are to get ashore.”
“You are very certain I will agree,” said Mountfellon.
“I am only certain you are not a fool,” she said, reaching the bracelet to Emmet’s outstretched hand. “And only a fool and a little man would do what you were thinking of a moment ago.”
“And you can read my mind?”
“No. But you believe you are worthy of greatness. You want power; you want knowledge; you do not want to take the coward’s way out because in the moment before we both died, I would know it was the vengeful act of a vain and petty man, and you would know I knew it, and that is not how you would want to be seen at the end.”
The boat tremored under their feet. He shook his head.
“I want more,” he said. “If I give this back, I want your word on something.”
Sara relaxed. She took no real pleasure in it. This was just duty now, but she could see the Wildfire would now be safe again. Whatever followed that was sure. This was just a negotiation.
“Tell me,” she said.
He licked his lips and bared teeth that were, she thought, much more like yel
lowing fangs as he leant towards her.
“I want your word that—”
The Ghost’s bullet missed Mountfellon by a good two yards.
The superheated jet of steam from the boiler which the bullet did hit did not miss him. It hit him foursquare in the side of the head. If Emmet had not got such a tight grip on him he would have been blown overboard, his face a flayed, hideous mess, but maybe still alive. Instead, the steam jet punched into his face, lifting the skin, flensing the smile from his teeth as his neck snapped back and mercifully killed the scream in his throat as it broke and bought him more mercy than he deserved.
But his hands dropped the Wildfire.
Fast as she was, Sara couldn’t catch it.
Obstructed by Mountfellon’s body as he was, neither could Emmet.
The candle hit the deck and fell out of the protective ring of oak, ash and thorn.
And as simple as that, the fire was free. Free and wild and hungry. And of all the things the Wildfire hungered for, the first among them was more fire, because fire breeds fire, and the Wildfire has a world to burn.
The candle hit the planking and shot towards the steam engine and the glowing firebox beneath it.
Sara didn’t think. She just leapt for it, even as it flared, even as she knew she was too late, too far, too hopeless—
Emmet flung Mountfellon’s corpse aside like a rag and grabbed her, stopping her dead in the air.
“No, Emm—!” was all she had time to gasp before he hurled her clear, high into the air, as far from the tug as he could manage. As she flew helplessly away, in the few seconds she was airborne she saw him turn and step into the obliterating fireball that belched out of the exploding steam engine. And then she hit the cold hard surface of the Thames and all the breath was knocked out of her and she was kicking and sinking and trying to tear herself back to the surface, and when she did so she saw the tall black funnel of the tug toppling lazily end over end as it fell out of the sky in an accompanying shower of flaming debris, and she ducked under as it hailed down all around her, and when she surfaced again,