The Obsidian Dagger (Horatio Lyle)

by Webb, Catherine

  Tess had turned white. ‘We ain’t seriously usin’ that?’

  Thomas’s eyes when he looked at her could have illuminated Mars. ‘We’re going to fly, Teresa,’ he whispered breathlessly.

  ‘But . . . we ain’t never flied before.’ Tess sat down heavily on the ground as if not noticing it was there. ‘I thought how we was going to . . . not . . . fly?’

  ‘Well, now,’ came Lyle’s voice, ringing with forced joviality, ‘what would be the point of constructing a pressure-differential-velocity aeronautical device of quite such high calibre as this one, and not use it?’ His arms were full of long, narrow tubes which widened at each end to two sharp metal fans inside the container. As Tess watched in horror, he slid the tubes into slots on the back of Icarus, locking them into place with a precise click.

  Thomas sidled up to him. ‘Mister Lyle? Are you sure . . .’

  Lyle spun, grabbing the astonished boy by the shoulders and staring intently into his eyes. ‘Thomas? You did the maths, you know every bolt and every strut of this thing better than I do, the science is beautiful. Every number melding into every answer, every plus leading to every equals, every part honed to within a millimetre of accuracy, everything tried and tested and real. Real science, beautiful science, numbers that fit so neatly into reality it might have been a child’s puzzle designed for our exploration and delight. It can work. It will work.’ There was another howl in the night, closer, rippling through the trees. ‘And dammit, it’s probably safer than staying down here.’

  ‘But the lift . . .’

  Lyle gave him a shrewd look that lingered for a second. Then he smiled. ‘I know, lad,’ he muttered, patting him on the head. ‘I thought of that too.’ Before Thomas could answer, Lyle sprang away, strapping down the long tubes and kicking the stocks out from underneath the wheels. ‘Teresa!’ he barked.

  Tess, pale-faced, looked up from where she sat. ‘Yes, Mister Lyle?’ she quavered.

  ‘Your job is to look after Tate and make sure the tubes don’t stop burning, got it?’

  She nodded dully. Lyle picked her up easily and swung her into the cradle of wood and straps that made up one of the two seats in the complicated wooden plane. He strapped her in briskly while Thomas scurried to check every cranny, every gear and every joint.

  ‘Tess?’

  She stared into Lyle’s calm grey eyes.

  ‘It’s going to be all right, you understand?’ She nodded again, hands shaking with terror. A warm shape was deposited in her arms, stopping their trembling. She looked down at Tate, and Tate looked back up, tongue lolling. His tail wagged eagerly.

  ‘Hold on to him.’ Lyle held out the dynamo, the bulb pulled out. ‘Use the wires to make a spark. It’ll relight the tubes if they go out.’

  ‘These’d be the things what went bang?’ squeaked Tess.

  ‘That’s them.’ He patted her gently on the head. ‘It’ll be all right, understand?’

  She tried to speak, but her mouth was dry, so she just nodded once more, clinging on to Tate.

  Lyle turned to Thomas, who was already halfway into the front of the cradle, where ropes and pulleys ran together towards a series of stiff-looking cogs and gears. They ended in a tangle of levers and more ropes, the function of which almost any mere mortal wouldn’t have dared speculate on. ‘You think you can do this?’

  Thomas nodded. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Good.’

  Lyle hopped down from the side of Icarus, patting it gently on one long, curved wing with a sad expression, as if saying farewell to a friend. ‘Brakes!’

  Thomas kicked a lever. Something banged inside the machinery, and struts moved, visible from outside, like the workings of an exposed heart. Tess leant out. ‘Wait! Mister Lyle, you’ve got to . . .’

  Lyle was already running towards the door. ‘Not now, Teresa!’

  Icarus jerked forward, following the gentle incline of the land that dropped down towards the sleeping city, visible behind the settling fog. Matchbox in hand, Lyle knelt down at the top of the slope. There were three matches left. He swallowed as Icarus started to roll, nose beginning to pitch forward as it slid down over the snow and ice, wings bending slightly to catch the breeze of its passage. Inside, Thomas, Tess and Tate were just shadows. Lyle struck a match. It flickered in his hand, guttered for a second, then caught. He scrambled through the snow until he found a thin length of string, soggy and smelling of old oil, sticking up from the ground. He held the match to it. A faint blue flame began at the tip of the string, clinging, tantalizingly, to life, then went out.

  Lyle swore, struck another match and held it to the string. This time it caught, flickered, held, and with a sudden hiss started to burn with a bright orange flame. Lyle leapt back as Icarus drifted slowly by, the wheels squeaking under the weight of stretched wood and canvas, Thomas squinting into the darkness. Beneath Lyle’s feet, the flame raced along the string, divided, raced along two strings, three, four, down the slope and into the fog.

  Inside Icarus, Tess was shaking Thomas’s shoulder. ‘What you doin’? We got to stop for Mister Lyle!’

  ‘Icarus won’t build up enough lift to carry us and him,’ replied Thomas stiffly, eyes fixed on the darkness ahead.

  ‘What ’s that mean?’

  Ahead, without warning, something went whumph. The flame leapt from the lit string at Lyle ’s feet, to a series of half-buried candles, which hissed, spluttered and exploded into white fire, beacons of hot sparks leaping feet off the ground. Two parallel lines of flame raced downhill, burning through the fog, outlining a long, sharp drop towards the city below.

  And the shapes that filled it.

  They were . . . almost people. Some of them. The shapes were indistinct, even in the sudden white glow in which they basked. But Lyle saw the outline of angel’s wings, the flash of demon’s claws, the tilt of an immaculately triangular chin, the shuffle of a scrupulously folded robe. They were all around him, above, below, behind, a perfect stone circle. Some were the statues of angels who guarded the tombs of the dead, some the cruel gargoyles who clung to the churches, some the chubby cherubs who watched over the gardens of the rich. Lyle half-imagined he saw a garden gnome, squatting with a snotty expression on the edge of the ring, no higher than his knees, looking into the lines of flame.

  ‘Holy hell!’

  He looked down the path of fire defined by the candles, and saw shapes on that, too. And one shape, larger than the rest. As his eyes fell on the stone wall of living monstrosities, risen from their sleep in front of it, Icarus pitched forward, tail rising and nose dipping, and began to power downwards, straight towards Sasso.

  ‘Thomas!’ Lyle started running, oblivious of the shapes surrounding him on every side, fumbling in his pockets through glass and wires. At the back of Icarus, there was a crackle, and sparks began flying from two of the half-dozen tubes that lined the back, followed by the slow hiss of air being sucked in through the fans. ‘Thomas, get off the bloody ground!’

  Thomas was struggling with the controls, pulling back on everything with all his might, the wings stretching and snapping as they twisted to catch the wind. Lyle raced down towards Icarus, hands coming out of his pockets with a fistful of test tubes. He threw them without looking to see what they were, and somewhere ahead there was an ugly chemical bang as acids and ammonia smashed into each other, sending up dirt, snow and smoke around the feet of the nearest stone figures.

  The whine of the two sparking tubes turned to a screech as they ignited, flame spouting out behind them, fans screaming. Icarus lurched forward with a sudden new thrust, dropping almost vertically down the slope of the Heath, wings twisting to catch the air. The front wheel lifted for a second, a foot, two, above the ground, sagged again, and hung suspended gently in the air as Icarus wheeled downwards. Directly ahead, face lit dimly by the burning candles on either side, Lucan Sasso folded his arms, and looked unimpressed. Lyle felt in his pockets and pulled out another tube, an ugly brown-purple, and screamed, ‘I’
ll show you bloody oxidization!’

  Sasso looked up sharply at the sound, distracted momentarily from Icarus. Lyle threw the tube, a long overarm straight at him. Instinctively, Sasso threw himself to one side, rolling easily as the tube shattered in the snow, directly in front of the screaming shape of Icarus.

  A little puff of smoke went up, twinkling merrily, as Icarus, trailing fire and screaming with strain, rushed straight through and onwards, towards the city. Sasso stared in surprise as Lyle ran straight past him, following Icarus, coat flapping clumsily behind him, down the aisle of sparking roman candles.

  ‘We’ regoingtodiewe ‘regoingtodie!’ screamed Tess.

  ‘We ’renotgoingtodiewe ’renotgoingtodie!’ Thomas screamed back.

  Icarus pitched and wheeled clumsily as it fell. Thomas could feel the pressure against the wings, pushing it back up, dragging it away from the dropping ground. He saw the nose rise, hanging on the air, but the back wheels remained firmly attached to the ground. Ahead, he could see the trail of candles down the Heath getting shorter and shorter, a heavy, somehow very solid-seeming blackness ahead. ‘Tess?’ he screamed. ‘Light another tube!’

  Tess peered over her shoulder. The air being dragged past her face tugged at her skin and hair, sucking with a hungry pressure, and she could feel the heat coming off the tubes, even though they were set back further than she could reach. ‘You having a bloody joke?’ she screamed back.

  ‘Light it, Tess, we need to go faster!’

  Tess peered past Thomas. In her lap, Tate was leaping gleefully, trying to raise his head enough to see, tail wagging like grass in a gale. She cursed under her breath with all the colour that ten years in the East End thieving business could teach a girl, turned, wrapped the two wires of the dynamo round one of the fuse lines that ran from the tube to the cradle, and twiddled the magnet quickly. A spark jumped between the wire ends, almost lost in the wind, and fizzled across the fuse, which hissed and exploded in orange fire. She watched it crawl down the fuse and disappear into another tube, which puttered weakly, and started sparking. She saw the fans begin to turn, then explode into a blur of motion as the tube lit, the inside bursting with sudden fire that trailed out of the back of the tube. Icarus lurched forward, the world blurring on either side. ‘It’s working!’ she yelled, almost bouncing with excitement. ‘It ’s working!’

  Thomas felt Icarus lurch under him, the nose suddenly rising up, pointing straight towards the moon. ‘Fly, dammit!’

  Behind him, he heard Tess shrilling, ‘Why ain’t it working, why ain’t it working?’

  The line of candles ran out. For a second Icarus rattled through perfect, unstoppable darkness. Thomas closed his eyes, and felt something small and vital go clunk under him. He clung to the controls until they cut into his hands and made his arms shake. Death didn’t come. He could hear a hissing roar in his ears and feel a sickening pressure in the pit of his stomach.

  There was something missing.

  It took a few seconds to realize what, in the rush of wind and pressure of the air and bite of the cold, was incredibly absent.

  Tess’s high-pitched squeak had fallen suddenly, inexplicably, silent.

  Thomas opened his eyes.

  Below, the lights of London spread out smaller and smaller across the moonlit, fog-stained, snow-stroked landscape. He half-turned, and saw the narrow path of the candlelit runway dropping away, already just a small arrow of fire on the ground, and saw Tess too, leaning out of the cradle and peering at the stretching black and white landscape with an expression of surprise and something else: a strange and thoughtful look he’d never seen there before, something alert and intelligent that had begun to understand what no one had ever understood before.

  Inside, an odd feeling, unfamiliar and strange. It wasn’t a spectacular firework, a burning revelation. It was still and quiet and looked out at all that was below, and he saw himself above it all, and said, simply, yes.

  He pulled at a control lever, and at the end of the wing, a flap dipped, and Icarus responded, leaning into the wing, turning gently, like a swimmer dancing under the sea, circling round over the blackness of the Heath. Below, the small parts that composed the life of the heath seemed to be moving slowly, dragging their limbs with a weight that Thomas no longer felt. The candles were guttering, the fog crawling sullenly back into the black space burnt clear by the fire, and the dark too was a stillness, and a quiet contentment and quiet certainty that Thomas found, for the first time in his life, he could accept, and almost begin to understand. A perfection unutterable.

  Below, something new was happening. The crowd of monstrous stone shapes was parting, lumbering uneasily aside to let something else through. It was long, spindly and, at the best of times, aerodynamically unsound. It looked up at the sky with black marble eyes, opened a jaw the length of Thomas’s arm, licked dry sharp teeth with a dry sharp tongue that flicked hungrily at the air, stretched ancient, solid, slow joints and, with an inexorability equal to the setting of the sun, fixed its gaze on Icarus.

  Tess began to turn white. ‘Bigwig?’

  Thomas didn’t answer. ‘Bigwig, it’s . . . startin’ to run. Bigwig! It’s got wings!’

  ‘Don’t be absurd, Teresa! The probabilities of something weighing that much with such a small wing surface area ratio ever accumulating enough lift to get off the ground is so small it ’s practically negligib—’

  ‘Bigwig! It’s not runnin’ on the ground no more!’

  And below, although getting closer with each moment, the coiled stone dragon that had guarded a tomb or maybe a spire while it slept unstretched, spread its unimpressive wings, and leapt for the sky. Incredibly, improbably, the sky let it stay as, twisting like a snake caught in a trap, it rose above the fog, catching the moonlight on its shiny, polished stone surface, and turned, jaws agape, straight for Icarus.

  CHAPTER 17

  Chase

  And, without warning, Lyle was running blind, in fog and darkness.

  He slowed, stopped, looking around, searching for a sign of life this way or that, his only sense of geography given by the slope of the Heath and an instinct that somewhere, that way, a long way off, was the river. It was at times like these that Lyle almost wanted something to pray to.

  He felt in his pockets. They bulged less than before. The dynamo was in Tess’s hands, somewhere overhead, and the little glass spheres that burnt so brightly were almost gone: two left out of the handful he always carried. In the darkness, he ran his hands over the tubes that filled his pockets, feeling the shapes and sizes of their corks, the tiny indentations in each one suggesting what might be inside. His fingers brushed the matchbox, slid it open, felt inside. One match left. He closed the matchbox and shuffled onward through the dark, hands held out clumsily, feet feeling the way, like a blind man.

  There were things around, in the darkness. He couldn’t see them, but he could hear through the fog the definite crunch of hard snow underfoot, faint but close, and was aware of the shadows keeping him company. He stopped again, listening for the sounds, and they stopped, all around. He moved a step, and so did something else. He peered into the dark. The hint of a shadow too deep off to the left, the tiny suggestion of a flash too bright off to the right, the sense of an exposed back and an unknown front. Lyle swallowed and once again ran his hands through his pockets, feeling the limited remains of his arsenal of chemicals and tools. ‘Come on,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘Come on.’

  As if in answer to his prayer, the shadows deepened all around. Lyle turned white. ‘I didn’t mean it!’ he hissed, feeling slightly embarrassed and extremely resentful that for once in his life he hadn’t followed his basic principles, which had always suggested that loose talk really did cost lives.

  And ahead, far away, muffled by the fog, there was a new sound, a sudden familiar clatter: horses’ hooves and iron-bound wooden wheels, fading into darkness. Lyle thanked whichever theologically unsound and scientifically impractical non-entity was wat
ching over him that night, bent his burnt hand into a fist, took a deep breath, and ran faster with the blind speed of a man who had nothing left to lose.

  Around him, on every side, the gargoyles of London Town also started to run.

  Tess lit another fuse and another tube started to spark. Five were burning already, propelling Icarus forward with an unsteady jerkiness that made it buck like a ship in a storm, and still the stone dragon was following, still it rose behind them, teeth snapping ready for the kill. ‘It ’s gaining!’ she shrieked.

  ‘How close is it?’

  ‘About.. . some . . . maybe a few . . .’ Tess wished she’d paid more attention to measurements when Lyle tried to explain them. ‘Close!’

  Thomas looked down. Below, half-obscured in the fog, were the uneven chimney stacks of London. The moonlight gleamed on a host of railway lines, converging into a single silver arrow racing towards the city. He banked the plane and shouted, ‘Hold on!’

  ‘What?’ screamed Tess over the roar of the wind.

  ‘Hold on to something! Cling! Grab!’

  ‘What?’

  He shook his head and muttered under his breath, ‘Just don’t let go.’ He kicked a lever and felt, behind him, flaps in the wings turn and rise as, writhing round the guttering flame of the burning tubes, the stone dragon twisted, reaching out a claw for their tail, which snapped up past its grey snout as the head of the ship tipped forward and plummeted down towards the silver of the railway lines. Icarus dropped like a stone, describing almost a straight line as it fell, the wings screaming and creaking, trying to grab at the air. The railway lines grew and grew, until they seemed to fill the world, the fog over the track half-broken by the passage of the trains and their burning engines. Tess heard the angry whistle of a steam train somewhere through the wind and the darkness, saw the railway lines so close she half-imagined she could jump now and land easily on her feet, heard the clunk as Thomas punched a lever and a gear slid into place somewhere in the mass of cogs and levers that held together the wings in all their parts.