The Obsidian Dagger (Horatio Lyle)

by Webb, Catherine

  Frozen with fascination and horror, Lyle turned and looked at the doorway. With a final heave, the stones around the hinges shattered, flew outwards, taking with them a large part of the wall and the door itself, and flung themselves down the corridor, before exploding into splinters just beyond Lyle’s head.

  The rumble died. Then the cracking of tortured masonry, a slow, drawn-out sound. Lyle stared up at the ceiling by the dying light of the globe in his hand. A tiny crack snaked a few cautious inches from the main river of destruction through the ceiling, stopped, snaked another inch, stopped again to creak luxuriously in an agony of indecision, and stayed, giving off a shower of dust that rained down on Lyle, turning his sandy hair grey. The light in his hand went out. In the darkness something moved laboriously. Lyle froze. He heard another long, slow creaking, and the trickle of falling masonry. He forced himself to take gentle breaths, utterly silent, utterly still, as if his heart weren’t racing in his chest and every nerve didn’t scream for air and relief.

  He felt something move just to his right, and knew it wasn’t Tate; felt something huge and heard a hard footstep, as if the owner wore shoes made of steel or stone. Long, slow footsteps. He counted them, tried to calculate the stride by how long it took, relatively, for each step to get closer proportional to the sound increasing and how, if the sound increased at a rate of so many micro-decibels per step and the distance was, say, ten metres between here and there, divided by steps taken and . . .

  There was a movement right by him. He glanced up in the darkness, and imagined he saw a shape looming above him. He looked into the darkness, and felt that it was looking back. As quietly as possible, pretending not to move, he slid his hand into his pocket.

  Where there hadn’t been anything, there was suddenly a hand round his throat. The shock was, if anything, worse than the sudden pressure, as he gasped, letting out what little air was in his lungs anyway, and grabbed at the arm which dragged him up as if he were a shuttlecock. With just one hand. He had never felt a grip like it, and hoped he never would again, if there was to be an ‘again’. He thought, About six foot three and horrendously strong, kills without qualms, what a stupid way to die . . .

  Still in his pocket, he loosened a match from the box, moving the tips of his fingers only and very, very determinedly not looking down, not that there was anything to be seen in the dark. He found to his surprise that he could still breathe: tight, shallow breaths that came in gasps through a wall of fire. He slid the match out of the box, turning it this way and that until he felt the phosphorus end, dusty under his nails.

  When the voice finally came, it sounded like a deep rumble right in Lyle’s ear, although he felt no breath. ‘What. Are. You.’ Whoever owned the voice clearly wasn’t impressed.

  ‘No one!’ squeaked Lyle. ‘Lost! Misguided! But essentially well-meaning!’ And then, because in all circumstances his natural sense of curiosity had an unhealthy power over other instincts, he added faintly, ‘Who are you?’

  The grip tightened, and Lyle realized that what little air he’d had before had been luxury.

  ‘I am someone. And you are not.’

  Lyle felt another hand move near by, and thought of twisted necks. ‘Can I just . . . ask a question?’ he croaked as the hand moved towards his head.

  ‘Ask.’

  ‘Are you Lucan Sasso?’

  The question seemed to take the man by surprise. The grip lightened for a second, then tightened. Lyle heard a slow, uneasy shuffling in the dark, and felt the sudden confusion, almost fear, rolling out of the gloom. Then, quieter, but no less menacing for it, ‘I was.’

  ‘You murdered Captain Fabrio and Mr Stanlaw?’

  ‘Punishment.’ Then, almost uneasily, ‘How do you know . . . that name?’

  ‘Little birdy. Will you come peacefully?’

  Silence, followed by an incredulous, ‘Would you die so?’

  ‘Thought not. One last question.’ Lyle’s eyes were watering, his face bulging, turning blue in places. ‘Are you right-handed?’

  The hand closed against the side of his head, fingers tightening, pushing against bone.

  ‘Thought so.’

  Lyle dragged the match out of his pocket; and even that was a movement too much. He’d always meant to take other exercise than the obligatory five hundred metres legging it, and now he realized why. He twisted the match round and slashed it against the wall behind him. Dull yellow phosphorus light erupted, singeing his fingers. For a second, taken by surprise, the hand around his throat relaxed. Lyle kicked out at whatever was there, and nearly broke his toes. In the dull light he saw, just for a second, a pale face, grey eyes and steel-grey hair. He stabbed upwards at the cold eyes with the flaming match and the man reeled back. Lyle slid out of his grip, threw the match towards his face, turned and ran, following Tate’s furious howling at the end of the corridor.

  From the first step, something was wrong. He kept stumbling, tripping over rubble, and in the darkness something seemed to be moving: not footsteps, but a prolonged drag. Something bumped against his ankle and he tripped, catching himself on the wall. The stones were warm to the touch despite the bitter cold, and almost hummed under his fingers, a little rhythm that reminded him of a nursery rhyme long forgotten . . .

  He kept running, fingers trailing the wall to feel the way. Overhead, there was a hideous creaking noise that grew louder and louder and seemed to be racing him, until something long, dark and deep passed him by above, showering dust as it went.

  Lyle was already pulling out a match and a little glass sphere, swinging round into the turn at the end of the corridor, before the whole ceiling collapsed on top of him.

  CHAPTER 15

  Priest

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  Tess, caught halfway between the desk and the window, froze in the candlelight, her jacket bulging with stolen papers. For a second she stayed that way, face twisted and pensive, eyes on the door. Then she straightened up, folded her arms and said, ‘Ah, yes, well, you may ask that.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the American voice like maple syrup, ‘I may, this being my room.’

  ‘Ah. Well . . . since you’re clearly ignorant, I’ll tell you.’

  The shadow in the door was blacker than the gloom outside, and outlined a tall, well-built man standing with utter confidence. Tess began to move cautiously, putting the bed between her and him.

  ‘Yes. Do tell me,’ said the American voice.

  ‘Well I . . . I . . . am Lady Teresa de . . . Stepney! And I have been sent by the Pope! To see if you’re doing your priesting proper.’

  The shadow drifted into the room. She saw a man with burning auburn eyes set in a dark face of a consistency achieved only by practising the same fervoured look for hours in front of an eager audience. He was wearing black. Quietly and carefully he shut the door behind him. Tess backed away until she was standing at the head of the bed, the huge Bible on the pillow beside her.

  ‘You’d . . . be Ignatius, right?’

  ‘I am Ignatius Caryway,’ said the auburn voice as the man advanced, ‘but I don’t see how a little lady like you should know that.’

  ‘Well, as I was saying, I was sent by the Pope to make sure you weren’t doing anything evil, like bringing killers or suchlike to London ’cos of dark and mysterious forces and . . . you ain’t heard of them, have you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Who are “them”?’

  ‘See,’ said Tess, wagging a finger, ‘if you have to ask, you don’t know. That’s ’cos they’re all evil and mysterious.’

  ‘I’m not. I have a vision.’

  Tess scowled. He was a few paces away, so that her back was pressed against the wall. ‘Mister . . . my friend says how you should never trust visions. They cloud your judgement, he says.’

  A hand reached out for her. ‘Would this be a certain Mister Lyle?’

  Tess didn’t hesitate. In a single movement she turned, grabbed the Bible, spun, inelegantly dragged down by the weig
ht of the book, and threw it at the window. It wasn’t a very strong throw, and the Bible more flopped than flew, but it was a heavy book, and the glass was thin. The window shattered in a storm of frost and silver shards. As Ignatius lashed out for Tess, she ducked under his arm, ran for the window, and threw herself out.

  A little later there was a soft thump from the snow below, and the sound of frightened pigeons making for the sky.

  Ignatius looked out of the window. A long way down, small against the snow and barely illuminated by the candlelight seeping out of the windows, was the Bible, and a lot of broken glass.

  Some way above that, dangling by her fingertips from a gutter, was Tess.

  ‘You’ll fall, little lady. Your kind do,’ called Ignatius.

  ‘Thank you,’ she snapped back, ‘professional at work here.’ Tess began to swing her legs, pushing against the icy stone.

  ‘Assuming you make it down, I’ll have already summoned servants.’

  ‘Ah, but that means you’re going to go an’ have to stop lookin’ while you do the summ’nin’.’ Tess’s voice was both weak and smug. ‘That means you’ll ’ave to go away and when you come back, for all you know I might have dropped through an open window and got back into the house, or done somethin’ all clever and got out, an’ then won’t you feel stupid?’

  Silence from the window above. Tess peered up and saw the black shadow still watching her. She gritted her teeth and tried to pull herself up into the gutter, the sharp metal, made sharper by the cold, digging into her fingers. Her arms buckled and nearly jerked free of her shoulder blades. She dangled over a long drop, and wondered how deep the snow was below.

  From above, Ignatius’s voice drifted down. ‘I can offer absolution, if you wish.’

  ‘Is that like a very long rope?’

  ‘It’s so you will not burn through all eternity for your sins.’

  ‘Can I let you know?’

  Tess looked down and saw, dimly, a window ledge, just wide enough for a few toes and nothing more, somewhere below. She looked up, looked down again, reached a decision, took a deep breath and let go.

  Lyle picked himself up from the rubble, and groaned. Above him, a voice rumbled, ‘See your own weakness, little man. Once I was weak, but I learnt through cold and patience how to be great, and will be greater still.’

  Lyle crawled up on to his hands and knees. He still clung to the match and the glass sphere. He staggered a few paces - even the darkness seemed to be spinning - and leaned against the nearest wall. He tried to breathe, tried to ignore the pain of a dozen bruises. ‘Sasso?’ he rasped into the darkness. ‘You still alive?’

  The voice was just a few paces away. In the darkness, he half-imagined he could reach out and touch it. ‘Yes.’

  Lyle scrambled backwards, leaning his shoulders into the wall to stop himself from falling. His ears were filled with a high-pitched whine, from somewhere uncomfortable behind the eardrums, and his hands shook as he struck the match and held it up to the sphere. ‘Keep back!’ he barked. ‘Or I’ll oxidize!’

  There was a sudden and prolonged silence. In the dull yellow light, he saw the black shadow, a few paces away. Finally, ‘Is that what threats are in this time?’

  ‘Oxidize,’ explained Lyle, feeling he was losing a certain control over things. ‘As in expose to oxygen. Combustion in an oxygen source, i.e. air. As in changing the charge on a metal, by the process of a reaction which bonds the metal to . . . to oxygen.’ Lyle ’s voice faded away. Somewhere, there was the clicking of light pieces of falling masonry. ‘The technological revolution just passed you by, didn’t it?’

  Finally, ‘Tell me: has this revolution changed hearts as well as minds? Should I have . . . felt fear, little man?’

  ‘Well, something would have been nice,’ mumbled Lyle.

  ‘I feel nothing.’

  ‘That’s just terrific.’

  He heard the movement, rather than saw it, and instinctively ducked, dropping the match. At the same second, the sphere, burnt almost carbon black underneath, exploded in white light.

  Later, Lyle wondered if he hadn’t half-imagined everything; would play back what he saw, image by image, as if flicking through a book of drawings and watching them change, picture melding into picture as the story progressed, pausing here or there to take one image out and turn it every which way, see if from any other angle it could tell the same story, but from a different perspective. Later, he’d say there was too much magnesium in the sphere to be entirely safe. Later, he ’d probably think of a logical explanation.

  The white light, too bright and too white to look at directly, burning brighter than any winter sun, exploded in his hand like the opening eye of some demi-god, looking out on the world for the first time. It burnt through the darkness like a sword through cobwebs and lit up, bright and white, the face of Lucan Sasso.

  The Marquis screamed, an unnatural, high-pitched wail that seemed to be resounding at three pitches at once, hiding his face from the light with his hands, twisting away. Lyle staggered back, the sphere of hot fire and magnesium burning his hand, but he clung on to it for dear life and squinted past the light at the Marquis.

  Where Lucan’s hands were in front of his face, the light fell full on them, and the skin changed colour. It seemed to drain of all life, to become hard and flaky, with the texture of sandblasted stone. Joints froze up stiffly, each movement seeming to be a fight against some great weight, and as he watched, the hands and all areas exposed to the brightest of the light turned, inch by inch, to stone.

  ‘Oh, bugger,’ muttered Lyle, as Lucan laboriously dragged his hands away from his face, the skin underneath also darkening, the mouth set now in a fixed grimace of anger and hatred; and Lyle turned and ran.

  Behind him, Lucan Sasso roared. ‘I am stone, my heart is stone, the stones hear my heart as no other mortal ever shall, and they answer to me!’

  And the stones of Old London Town roared with him.

  Thomas, wineglass in hand, felt the sound start beneath his feet. It rose up in a hum that twisted candle flames in odd directions and made the curtains brush nervously against each other. It was a long, deep, howled whisper that reminded him of an animal in pain, heard far off: the injured wolf, its cry muffled by the forest.

  ‘Good grief,’ said someone at first. ‘I do declare this weather is simply awful.’

  When the sound went on, a furious, pained howl that seemed to be most audible through the toes, the room began to fall silent. Lady Diane Lumire giggled. Suddenly Thomas found this previously charming habit very, very irritating.

  Someone else said, ‘Do you think it’s getting louder?’

  With a start, Thomas put his head on one side, and heard now a sound underneath the pained hum of the stones, the thrumming that came up through his feet and bounced off the eardrums in a low, agonized howl; it was the sound of a human voice, but a human voice distorted beyond recognition, that seemed to be sounding three deep notes at once, rather than the standard one, screaming in expressionless hatred and rage. And just beyond it, getting nearer and louder, the sound of running footsteps.

  All eyes, as if sensing an imminent spectacle, turned towards the sound of the running feet, and the door. Accompanying the feet, but half-drowned by the general racket, came a voice, shrill and frightened, rising from an incoherent babble to a loud exclamation as it drew nearer: ‘ . . . whatthehellareyoupeopledoing here don’t you realize HE’S UTTERLY MAD HE’S GOING TO KILL YOU STUPID IDIOTS!’ The voice and the footsteps passed by the door, stopped for a second as if the owner was hesitating, then began again, briefly, right outside. The door was thrown open, and a bedraggled, wild-eyed figure stared in, covered in mortar dust, blood and bruises, clinging to a dying sphere of light in one hand as if his fingers had fused to it. There was a general gasp of high dignities in the face of the unwashed.

  ‘Well, don’t just stand there, you bloody fools!’ Lyle snapped. ‘He ’s utterly mad and you’re not helping!’
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  With this, Lyle turned and started running again. Thomas hesitated for a second, then began pushing his way towards the door. Seeing this, other people, perhaps with a greater pragmatism than their breeding implied, started pushing and shoving in Thomas’s wake. Thomas exploded out of the crush, the floor still humming under him, and looked towards the centre of the roar.

  A man, his skin changing slowly from hard grey to more natural off-brown in the dim light, was marching down the corridor towards him. As he walked, the stones around him seemed to ripple, bending before and behind his feet, cracks spreading all around through the screaming masonry, candles and lamps toppling as the fabric of the building tried to twist in on itself. From his mouth came a low, furious roar, and the stones themselves seemed to grow mouths to share in it. Thomas felt he knew against whom that anger was directed.

  He stood frozen with fear, staring into the eyes of the oncoming man. He was huge. His unstoppable bulk made Thomas feel like an unfortunate earthworm in the path of a rampaging ox. The man didn’t seem to have seen Thomas, so focused was he in his hate, but he saw the crowd of people racing from the room, and his face twisted into a cruel smile. He lifted his hands up to the ceiling, and Thomas followed the curve of those raised fingers with horrified fascination. A crack started above the man’s head, began to spread, racing along the high ceiling like a hungry, feeding, growing snake. Thomas saw the ceiling sag.