by Mike Wild
As successful as Hannah was being defending her cardinal at Lambeth, Lawrence Verse was having problems at Tower Bridge. Problems that had nothing to do with either his build or his aim, but rather the gun itself. He had so far managed to take down four golems as they attempted to reach the crystal embedded in the bridge's south bascule, but the weapon he wielded was, not to be too impolite about it, seriously on the fritz. It wasn't Brand's fault. God knew, the man had worked wonders getting these things up and running, but he could only imagine that his had been the first on which the academic had worked, because something wasn't quite right. The trigger was unresponsive most of the time, for one thing, but worse, the compressed energy tubes seemed to be draining at a rate far faster than they should. In other words the damn contraption was leaking badly, and he estimated he had enough reserves for one, perhaps two more shots. That wasn't enough - the golems had already forced him back onto the bridge, and with the bascule raised as it was - perhaps as an attempt to stop the golems crossing the river at this point - he had nowhere to go. Backing up and up until his back physically rested against the concrete of the bridge's sometime road surface, Verse aimed carefully and fired. Two more golems collapsed, but that was that, and he dropped the useless weapon to the ground.
It wouldn't have reassured him to know that he wasn't alone in doing so. At the Victoria Memorial, at Cleopatra's Needle, and at Lambeth Palace, Ness, Simmons and Chapter did the same, their own guns' charges, though they had operated correctly, eventually exhausted by the sheer number of targets they faced.
Maybe if the behemoths had not been enhanced by their Samedi's Skin and the influence of the Formless One, more golems might have fallen, but as it was the golem guns had eliminated perhaps only one third of their army.
At each cardinal, its protector watched as the remaining golems neared. There was no choice, but to fight on physically, even if without any effective weaponry that very likely meant that they were going to die.
Ness, Verse and Chapter thought much the same thought that Jenny Simmons had earlier. Whatever the crystals were going to do to stop them, they were going to have to do it soon.
Then as the golems moved in the grey pall of the Unformed touched the four cardinals.
The crystals suddenly flared bright.
And nothing happened.
Absolutely nothing at all.
Chapter Twenty
The half burning, half demolished capital was so enveloped in the grey pall of the Unformed that from above, it looked like hell, shot on monochrome film.
Great God, Brand thought. Just look at it.
The helicopter in which he rode passed through low and heavy clouds that hung undisturbed by its passing, because they were not truly clouds at all. Perhaps twenty minutes after the cardinals had flared brightly and uselessly, London lay fully under the influence of the Formless One. And as the machine, its rotors sounding like flapping sheets in a storm, dropped beneath a formation that funnelled down from the heavens like some giant snout, it seemed they flew directly under the maw of a looming Lord of Chaos.
Perhaps that was exactly what it was.
The effect had spread upwards, the academic realised. Coalescing into a canopy of chaos that completely covered the conurba-
He stopped himself. If Hannah Chapter were with him she'd be asking, did you really just say that? He had to be more nervous than he thought if he was alliterating again.
His nervousness, though, was caused not by the remapping of the city below, but a desperate hope that he would be in time. In time to stop this destruction in one fell swoop. In time to save the lives of his friends, to stop them dying needlessly.
The urgent radio calls from Ness, Simmons and the others had reached him as he sat pouring over aged documents in the Department Q bunker, trying desperately to find some reference to Konterman's original golem activation - and by extension his deactivation - word, so that the third part of their combat strategy might be employed, as was looking increasingly necessary.
He was having no luck.
Then had come the calls, a frantic barrage of curses and questions that was best encapsulated by Ness. "Yer bleedin' cardinal is aboot as much use as a streetlamp, Boney-cock... so d'ya wanna tell us wha' the fook is goin' on?"
The news had not been what he had expected, and of course it had not sounded good. If the cardinals were, indeed, useless then why had the Dark Parliament placed so much store in them, and even more importantly, why the hell had Konterman embedded them in the first place?
There had to be a reason for their existence.
The problem triggered something that had been nagging at the back of his mind for a while. Ever since the golem army had emerged from the Capek Construction site, he had been feeling that strange dizzying vibration, that thrum of raw power, that had accompanied the presence of the Unformed since he had first encountered it, and as the golems had begun to mobilise on the surface - even though he had remained deep underground - the feeling had continued, the malign influence of the new Lord of Chaos transmitted down through the very foundations of the city. Where he had expected the feeling to become stronger as the Unformed spread, he had realised after a while that the opposite seemed in fact to be true.
The dizzying vibration was becoming weaker with every ground-shaking step the golems took.
Okay, he had thought, he supposed that could be partly explained by the loss of those golems that Ness and the others had - presumably - managed to destroy with the golem guns, but pound for pound those that they could have felled in the time they'd had struck him as greatly disproportionate to the lessening field strength he was feeling.
Now why, exactly, was that?
Think, Brand. Think.
The cardinals were positioned approximately north, south, east and west of the golem origin point, yes? According to what the others had relayed to him, their embedded crystals had at first glowed dully and then more brightly when there had been actual physical contact with the spread of the Unformed. The crystals had glowed with four different colours - white, blue, orange and a golden brown. Now why did that particular combination of colours seem familiar to him? Why?
Of course, he had realised after a short while. The colours were universal codes in a good many alchemical and sorcerous schools of practice, relating in both cases to the prime materials required for any number of transmogrification rituals, wardings, summonings and banishments. The brown colour represented earth, the white was air, blue was, of course, water, and the orange, fire. They were the four elements fundamentally necessary to any ritualistic act of creation or - far more importantly - un-creation.
God, was that what the cardinals were meant to do, he had realised suddenly - un-create the Unformed? If that was the case, had something gone wrong? Had the cardinal crystals somehow become damaged or flawed in the years since they had been embedded? What else could explain their apparent failure to do anything but glow.
Glow, Brand had thought, and Ness's words had echoed in his mind. Aboot as much use as a streetlamp, the Scotsman had said, had he not? And as he had heard his words, he had pictured Konterman embedding the four crystals all those years ago, in a wartime London whose inhabitants had no suspicion of the evil that had been created beneath their feet. He had pictured the inhabitants strolling by the Victoria Memorial and Cleopatra's Needle, through Lambeth Palace and across Tower Bridge. As he had pictured them strolling along, he had also pictured night beginning to fall.
He had watched the streetlamps of London come on, many of which had still been gaslit in those days.
And he had seen it all of a sudden: the flickering flame, and the moths that danced about it.
The moths drawn to a flame.
Oh, Emmanuel Konterman. You crafty bastard.
A second after the realisation had struck him, he had been back on the walkie-talkie, trying desperately to contact Ness and the others. In the minutes of his deliberation something must have happened because through the
oversized box all he received in reply was static. Either the other walkie-talkies had all been destroyed in the fighting that must have continued, or, more likely, their components had, in the intervening time, been remapped.
Whichever of the two it was, he knew he had to find another way to contact the four of them, and fast, and there was no way he could do that alone.
Racing through the underground tunnels, Brand had returned to the chamber where Ravne and the reanimates had remained, intending to enlist the help of some of them by despatching them to three cardinal points while he handled the other, but as he had entered the chamber, it had become clear that something was wrong. He, it seemed, had not been the only one to make a discovery, and the news that Ravne had was bad.
The cause of the diminishing seeing abilities of the Dead of London, their need to work as a gestalt and their exhaustion after it, the arcane consultant had identified. Their presence underground for so long, in such proximity to the origin point of the Unformed, had compromised the reanimation process that had returned them to life, and their revitalised tissue - their flesh, their muscles, their brains - was returning to an original state of necrosis. Farrow, Mary, Meg, Rose and the others were not simply exhausted, they were dying.
There was, however, one hope. Though he would not be specific about what it was, Ravne believed that there was a way they could be saved. The ritual involved, however, was long and complex, and it required that he and the reanimates remained where they were for the time being. As a rather mysterious codicil, he added that the ritual might even help with the overall problem.
None of which, of course, made sense to or helped Brand. With the reanimates and the arcane consultant unable to assist him in reaching the others, he had to find another way.
Feeling helpless and guilty at having to leave - but at the same time knowing he had no choice - he had passed Mary on his way to the door and told her how sorry he was.
Mary had smiled weakly, squeezing his hand. "We none of us should be here, doctor, and you should not be sorry should we be gone. I only wish that I could help more."
"We wouldn't know what we did without you," the academic said. "Thank you."
"It's a long time since I heard those words, but you're welcome," Mary laughed, and coughed. "Now go save your world, Jonathan Brand," she added. "That is what you do, isn't it?"
Brand smiled. "Actually, what I mostly do is try to ignore it."
"But not this time, eh?"
"No," he replied. "Not this time."
Leaving Mary behind, Brand had returned to the surface, exiting through the same entrance near Stable Mews that had first led him down into her subterranean world. His mind had been whirling as he had tried to work out how he could possibly reach the four points of the compass in time when he had encountered the first piece of good fortune since his realisation had made the matter of some urgency: Ness's helicopter pilot friend, hovering ahead, and engaged in what - from what he could see of the cockpit contents - appeared to be some disaster zone looting.
He hadn't cared what the man had been up to and had waved him down.
Now here they both were, descending towards the first of the cardinals at Lambeth Palace, the golems leaving there now, and the academic hoping against hope that Hannah Chapter was still alive.
The American was. Though lying on the ground, bruised, battered and nursing a broken arm from what he guessed had been a noisy and determined effort to halt the golems with feet and fists alone, she was alive. And having been up against such odds, she didn't know why.
As Brand helped her limping frame into the helicopter, he told her. He told her also why the fact that she had been unable to protect the cardinal crystal - lying shattered in the equally shattered arch of the palace gatehouse - was not the disaster that it seemed.
At Tower Bridge, finding the ex-priest slumped beneath his broken crystal in the south bascule, nursing reopened stomach wounds, he told Lawrence Verse the same.
And at Cleopatra's Needle - when he had finally managed to calm the raging and flaring form of an infrequently defeated and therefore thoroughly pissed off Baarish-Shammon - he told her exactly the same again.
The only one who did not yet know was Ness.
The helicopter, its passenger compartment three-quarters full, thrummed across the London skyline towards Buckingham Palace and its Queen Victoria Memorial, heading for its final rendezvous and the hopeful culmination of Brand's theory. Below them, London continued to suffer the assault of the golems, who, finished with the three destroyed cardinals, were extending their obliteration into areas such as The Strand, Saint Thomas's and the borders of Southwark. Fighting against them now, could also be made out the forms of Inspector Absolam's Lads, the uberclones no doubt deployed by the Accord operative in response to a situation that by no stretch of the imagination could be kept hidden from him any more. As well as the Lads, Brand smiled as he made out the bazooka and rocket-launcher bearing figures of various units of soldiers, by the looks of their professionalism in the face of the unknown, no doubt their old friends from Hereford Barracks, under the command of the man he knew only by the name of the Brigadier. Right now he could imagine the moustached officer commenting on the situation in his own inimitable way whilst he bellowed out orders to his men to fire any number of rounds rapid - big buggers, what? Remind me of those other overgrown blighters from where was it now - Mars? At any rate, damned inconvenient, if you ask me. Bloody damned inconvenient.
You can say that again, Brigadier, Brand thought, but for the time being just keep those big buggers exactly where I want them.
Brand stared ahead through the glass of the helicopter cockpit. The Victoria Memorial wasn't quite in sight yet and, it being the last of the four cardinals, he found himself hoping once more that they were in time. Out of desperation, he tried the walkie-talkie again. No good. Static still.
"Try his cellphone," Hannah said from the rear. "Not sure why, but he hasn't let that stray from his side these past few days."
The suggestion seemed to Brand so incongruous that he wasn't surprised he hadn't thought of it before, but, if any local mast was still intact, it might work.
He snatched his own mobile from his pocket and hastily punched in the Scotsman's number.
The phone was answered to the sounds of frantic scuffling and an unmistakable repeated thwack of a truncheon on things hard and unyielding, which moaned as a result. Evidently Ness was alive and even Hannah was impressed enough to give him points for staying power. Then the Scotsman shouted into the phone for all to hear. "If youse the lass from Dick-van-Dyke, then trust me, darlin', now is no' a good time ta drive o'er..."
"No, it isn't Dic-" Brand began.
"But ah haveta say ah'd welcome the inspiration reet now - so d'yer look like 'er?" His question was followed by another crack of wood and a golem roar. "Yer know, four-eyed Yank, thinnish like, wi' a way o' snarlin' even when ya smile - bu' withou' that bleedin' whinin' voice?" Another crack, another moan. "An' o' course withou' any objection to tekkin' i' up-"
"Gimme that thing!" Hannah said, snatching the phone from Brand. "Listen up, you degenerate asshole, in about five seconds I'm gonna be right on top of you and then I'm gonna help those golems stick your truncheon where the sun don't shi-"
"Tell him to let the golems destroy the cardinal!" Brand interrupted, shouting.
"Do you miiiind, Brainiac?" Hannah flared. Then - "Aw shit, right. Ness, listen to me - let the golems destroy the cardinal."
"Ah said withou' the whinin'-" Ness began and then paused, realising who it was he was talking to, and what she was saying. "Ooh aye, sure, yer bent bitch. Now ye're thinkin' ah'm a bleedin' loony tune, is tha' it?"
"Yes, as it happens, but I'm serious. These are Brand's instructions - let them destroy it."
"Christ, ah was wonderin' how long it'd tek Boney-cock to lose it."
"He hasn't lost it, you moron. He's-"
"Tell the bookworm from me that he can foo-"
The line went suddenly dead, the call ended by what sounded like the impact of a golem fist.
"Gone," Hannah declared.
"No matter, we're here anyway," Verse said, and pointed down to where Ness was engaged in a furious one-man slugfest with the western arm of the golem army. The Scotsman's tactics seemed to be strike and move, wearing the golems down and at the same time keeping them distracted, and to give him his due his tactics had worked - the cardinal crystal, though now exposed at the heart of the white marble statue known as the wedding cake, was still intact.
Exactly what they didn't want.
Looking at its sweat dripping, snarling and wild-eyed protector, the problem was still going to be convincing Ness of that.
"He's too pumped up," Brand said. "We try to stop him in that mood and he'll probably go for us as well."
"I'll handle that," Verse said.
Hannah stared at the seeping wounds on her partner's torso and shook her head. "Not in that state, bucko. There's an easier way." She took a gun from her pocket and aimed out of the side of the helicopter.
Everybody presumed at the cardinal crystal but, in fact, right between Ness's eyes.
This was it, she thought, her chance to drop the bastard at last. Kill two birds with one stone. With Ness gone, not only would the golems be able to destroy the crystal, but the Scotsman would have paid the price for abandoning Verse at Exham Priory, and she could get rid of the poison that was rotting her guts.
She bit her lip. "You sure this is gonna work, Brainiac?"
"Do it, Miss Chapter," the academic said.