A gate lodge just outside the towers was in an awful state. The roof had collapsed and a fire had taken most of the timbers, leaving a skeleton of stone. Some of the outbuildings showed signs of recent habitation, with rubbish piles and rough cooking places.
The fortress still commanded a superb view over the surroundings – including a view of the inferno the city had become. Kingsley and Evadne stood for a time, helpless. In a trick of perspective, it was almost as if the angry black clouds above were reaching down to the city to smite it, so thick was the smoke.
People were gathered about the lower reaches of the hill, looking towards the city. Kingsley had been puzzled as to why they weren’t seeking the better outlook of the summit – or even from the tower itself, but when Evadne and he had pushed through their ranks, their expressions had plainly told him that they were afraid of the hill.
Three heavy, iron-bound doors in what must have been the cellar of one of the towers all promised access to the lower reaches. Each of them yielded to Kingsley’s lock-picking skills while Evadne kept watch. When the areas under the cellars surrendered nothing promising, mostly having collapsed, Kingsley drummed the stone wall with a fist in frustration.
He looked for Evadne and found her brooding. She was using her sabre to scratch the ground in an aimless but deadly looking manner.
The passion she’d shown when talking to the Retrievers had diminished and Kingsley was concerned that her crusade was oppressing her. He started towards her, aiming to cheer her out of her brown study, but he pulled himself up short. He had a notion that good-natured jollying wasn’t the sort of thing to work on Evadne Stephens. Anything that smacked of condescension could result in physical harm – something he was prepared to risk, as long as whatever provoked it had a chance of success, which he doubted condescension did.
However . . .
‘When is a door not a door?’ Kingsley asked aloud after he’d relocked the third of the doors. The walled courtyard had only two of the walls remaining. It was open to the sky that, directly above, was remarkably blue and innocent.
Evadne looked over the top of her spectacles. ‘Are you saying we should be looking for a jar?’
Kingsley was pleased to hear some lightness in Evadne’s voice. ‘Not exactly a jar, but something that doesn’t look like a door.’
She found a convenient block of stone and sat on it cross-legged, instantly resembling a classical monument as she put elbow on knee and chin in hand. ‘Many things don’t look like a door. Most things don’t, if you think about it.’
‘True, but many things function like a door, in principle. They allow access.’
‘You mean like windows?’
Kingsley wanted to cheer. As he’d hoped, the puzzle had brought Evadne to herself. An intellectual challenge was her cup of tea. ‘Yes, and chimneys, and hatches and all sorts of things like that. But what doesn’t function in that way?’
‘We’ve reduced the possibilities from millions to slightly fewer millions.’
‘True.’ Kingsley looked up at the sky. ‘Do you know the very first Basic Principle of Escapology?’
‘Please excuse my rudeness, but sometimes I feel as if you’re making these up as you go along.’
‘I won’t deign to dignify that remark with a denial.’
‘Ah, I see.’
He ploughed on. ‘The First and Fundamental Principle of Escapology states: There exists a universal key to all traps and escapes.’
‘I sense that I’m meant to ask what it is.’
‘Thinking. Thinking is the key to every trap. And I’ve just had a thought.’
She pursed her lips. ‘While I’m trying to articulate an adequate expression of my derision, why don’t you tell me what your thought is?’
‘I’m wondering how long those Spawn are going to watch before they report.’
Evadne raised an eyebrow. ‘That is brilliant.’
‘I’m just doing my best to keep up with you.’
She looked at him oddly. ‘And that’s the sort of remark that wouldn’t be out of place at court. I’m sure you’d have the ladies swooning at your feet after such neat phrasing, if they weren’t already.’
‘The prospect of bundles of swooned ladies around my feet sounds positively alarming.’
‘And now Normal Kingsley has returned.’
‘I should hope so.’
‘Never mind.’ She tilted her head a little, studying him with that disconcerting, spectacled gaze. ‘Doesn’t it worry you to be seen with a female who’s smarter than you?’
‘Why should it?’
‘It worries most males. Something about the natural order of things, they say.’
‘What a load of rubbish.’
‘I’m glad you agree. We’ll make you into a suffragist next.’ She took his hand. ‘Come on. Let’s play Spot a Spawn.’
The prophet of doom was still on the dock when Kingsley and Evadne made their way back there. He greeted Evadne with a wave of a finger, as if they were clerks who regularly met at a station before going to the office. He wasn’t fazed by Evadne’s appearance, and Kingsley wondered if the man saw equally extraordinary sights every day in his visions.
An hour later, Kingsley touched Evadne on the shoulder. A Spawn, almost identical to the one that hadn’t moved from its position at the rear of the mob, was striding down the hill. Its long, black wool robes swirled about its bare feet. When it reached its colleague, not a word was spoken. For a moment they stood shoulder to shoulder, eyes on the distance, then the first spun on its heel and marched away.
The Spawn showed no uneasiness, no indication that it even contemplated being followed. It trudged across the grass, ignoring the paths and the steps, making a straight line towards the hilltop fortress. Kingsley’s uneasiness at the dreadful creature increased as it went. He had trouble putting his finger on the source of this until he realised that the Spawn’s arms and legs were not moving in time. Instead of its right leg and left arm swinging together, with left leg working with the right arm, its limbs moved independently, jerkily, with no rhythm or connection.
Kingsley shuddered, but despite its lack of coordination, the Spawn’s progress was powerful. It had the crude unstoppability of a sledge hammer on its way down.
A few people were still in the park at the base of the hill. An old woman stared at Evadne, averted her eyes and made rough, stabbing gestures. She muttered either prayers or older, guarded chants of protection.
When the Spawn reached the forlorn gardens around the tower, Kingsley was surprised when it showed some awareness of its surroundings. Instead of marching straight through the flower beds it took the path to the rear. To keep it in sight, Kingsley and Evadne were forced to run until they were able to throw themselves behind a mound of large stones, the remains of a stable or barn. They watched as it slipped through one of the gaps in the rear wall and into a courtyard. There, it stood a moment then it took a dozen ragged steps and leaped feet first into the well.
Evadne gasped, but Kingsley was already running. When he reached the well he leaned over the low wall and smiled. ‘Misdirection,’ he said softly. ‘Nicely, nicely done.’
The handholds began a few yards down the stone wall of the well. They were well spaced, obviously suiting the spider-like Spawn. Kingsley had had some trouble before his foot found the first of them, but once he had, he was easily able to clamber down to the platform he’d spotted some twenty or thirty feet down.
He was begrudgingly admiring the nerveless way in which the Spawn had eschewed the handholds and simply dropped to the platform when Evadne joined him. She’d had no difficulty with the climbing, simply finding crannies among the stones when the handholds were inconvenient.
The platform was tiny. They were forced to stand close together. Kingsley hardly had to tilt his head
to meet Evadne’s gaze, so tall was she. Above, the oval of light that was the outside world was distant and forgettable, a mere decoration in the heavens.
The arched tunnel that was punched into the wall of the well was dark. ‘You lead,’ Kingsley whispered.
He kept a hand on her shoulder as they crept deeper into the heart of the hill, crouched, her sabre occasionally knocking against his hip. His wild self hunched even more, unhappy at the closeness of the passage, fretful in the darkness. The tunnel sloped downward severely, and kinked from side to side, seemingly at random, but the further they went the more sound came from ahead.
When the tunnel ended in an elaborate stone arch, they stopped dead.
The light made it hard to judge distances. Small fires and lanterns punctuated the darkness, as though the stars had come down from the sky for a bit of a hobnob. The impression of vastness came more from the way the sounds of construction echoed, convincing Kingsley that this was indeed a cavernous space being carved out of the hill.
Above the almost comforting sounds of sawing and hammering was a constant, indistinct susurration, like wind whispering in a thousand trees, or a gentle shuffling on a dance floor, backward and forward, backward and forward. It was aural wool, muffling every other sound, wrapping them in blurriness.
A million monks in robes, Kingsley thought wildly, scuffling along in socks.
Evadne took his hand and led him to the left. They followed a flight of iron stairs down slowly, testing their weight with each footfall, fearful of drawing attention to themselves. Kingsley strove to remember the pentagon-based chamber of the Immortals, the one he’d seen two hundred and fifty years from now, but the light and the shadows defeated him. He relied on Evadne and her light-gathering spectacles.
She put a hand on his shoulder and made him crouch behind what he took in the dim light to be a pile of handmade bricks.
Kingsley waited, impatiently, while Evadne unslung her satchel full of phlogiston and gazed into the shadows. She touched the side of her spectacles once, then again, muttering. ‘They’re too far away,’ she whispered to herself and then a long silence stretched. He was beginning to worry – What if her temper broke loose again? – then once again he had the uncomfortable and exciting experience of Evadne’s putting her lips to his ear. ‘The Immortals are out there, in the middle. Sitting on their throne. Hovering in midair. The Spawn we followed has stopped on the edge of an abyss.’
‘Abyss?’
‘The floor isn’t finished. A large section is uncovered. Underneath is a huge space with walkways and rooms around the rim, arranged in levels.’
‘How far down do they go?’
She touched her spectacles. ‘At least ten storeys. Maybe more.’
‘What’s the Spawn doing?’
‘Nothing. It’s just waiting to deliver its report, I’d say.’
At that moment, Kingsley hissed and flung a hand up to shield his eyes. Evadne gasped and ducked her head behind the pile of bricks.
Light bloomed, filling the space and revealing the colossal construction site. Kingsley gasped at what had been making the eerie whispering noise.
Scores of Spawn clung to surfaces by their supernaturally strong fingers and toes. They moved slowly, lovingly polishing walls, floor and ceiling. The shuffling noise was the sound of hundreds of cloths and papers, smoothing, smoothing, smoothing.
Kingsley managed to look away from the unsettling sight – it was too much like a swarm of insects for his liking – to take in the rest of the gigantic chamber. The dodecahedron shape had already been carved out. Scaffolding, saw benches and metalworking lathes were scattered about in something approaching chaos. The pentagonal alcoves were already in place, but only two of them were occupied. One was a large cube. The other was the mysterious rotating solid that Kingsley had seen two hundred and fifty years from now, the tetrahedron that was the Temporal Manipulator.
Through the sliver of floor that was unfinished, it was almost as if he were looking down on an amphitheatre. He counted ten rings – vast rings – that descended into the heart of the earth, connected by stairways spaced around the perimeter. He even spied a stairway that led to a door in the wall opposite, right next to the Temporal Manipulator.
‘Look at the bottom,’ Evadne breathed.
The lowest level was a dead black disc, clearly visible against the grey stone that made up the walkways. It was impossible to tell how large it was with nothing nearby, and as he tried to make sense of it, his hackles rose; it was loathsome.
Kingsley hadn’t thought much about black, assuming that black was black. As he tried to make out this slab of nothingness, he understood that he’d been labouring under a misapprehension. Not all blacks were the same. The black of a midnight sky wasn’t the same as the black of a friendly cat. The black he saw when he closed his eyes wasn’t the same as the black of the ink in his favourite books.
This black disc was different from all of them. It made all the other blacks look half-hearted. It had taken all other blacks, intensifying them, extracting and distilling them, doubling them and then doubling them again until it was the perfect, irrefutable, all-consuming black. This was the acme of blacks.
‘It’s throbbing,’ Evadne whispered.
Kingsley went to deny this, for the continuous polishing noise tended to swallow any subtle sounds, but then he paused. He couldn’t hear it, but he perceived a single pulse.
He peered at the almost void. He couldn’t see anything, and was about to convince himself that he was imagining it when it happened again. A ripple as much as a drumbeat, he sensed it deep inside himself – a perturbation of the soul. He squinted, but saw nothing. He listened, but no sound emanated from the blankness. It happened again; he turned sideways and listened for the next trump of doom; his adjusted position was enough to confirm that the stroke came from the disc below.
‘What is it?’ he whispered to Evadne.
‘It’s the biggest phlogiston extractor I’ve ever seen. Ever heard of.’
‘How can you tell?’
She touched her spectacles, then tweaked the bridge over her nose. ‘On this setting, I can see the lines of disturbance in the ether that mean that phlogiston is being drawn to it.’
‘Ether? You mean the anaesthetic?’
‘A different ether. It’s a name for the underlying substrate of reality, through which phlogiston and countless other exotic and no doubt magical elements permeate the universe.’
‘I think I may have to unlearn everything I ever knew.’
‘Not really,’ Evadne said absently and Kingsley was pleased to see her absorbed in the mystery of the Immortals’ device. ‘Simply add another layer of understanding rather than throw out the old. It may come in handy one day.’ Evadne tapped her teeth with a fingernail. ‘So the Immortals have a giant phlogiston extractor under their headquarters. I wonder what for?’
‘To power their whatsits. That cube and their Temporal Manipulator.’
‘We can’t use the Temporal Manipulator,’ Evadne said slowly.
‘I hope that’s not the case,’ Kingsley said. ‘Otherwise we’re in an appalling situation. Look, I’m sure you’ll be able to work it out.’
‘I meant that we can’t use it right now.’
‘You’re not thinking of trying to destroy the Immortals, are you? Wait until we get back to 1908. We’ll be able to equip ourselves properly, plan thoroughly –’
Evadne gripped his arm hard enough to leave bruises. ‘Wait a moment.’
The tri-partite throne swivelled on its own centre and faced the waiting Spawn. Then it drifted to the rim of the yawning pit, coming close enough for Kingsley to see that the figures sitting on the thrones were substantially larger than the children he’d seen in the twentieth century. These looked like ten- or twelve-year-olds.
He felt ill. These entities – he couldn’t think of them as people – thousands of years old, transferring their essence to a succession of young bodies? He now understood Evadne’s desire to expunge them, regardless of their actions. Any humanity they may once have had was gone, drained by centuries of treating others as items of convenience – necessary for their survival, but hardly important beyond that.
He also saw, with horror, that the Immortals were almost completely swaddled in bloody bandages, right up to thighs and armpits, and they all had bandages wrapped around their heads. Making their army of Spawn had been costly.
Costly. Kingsley clenched his fists. Was this the wearing out that Evadne had spoken of? If so, it meant that the sorcerers would be needing new bodies to inhabit, and soon, if their dreadful current state was any indication. His horror grew as he realised that the streets of a panicked seventeenth-century London might be a fertile place to gather children. The Immortals may well have bodies ready and waiting for them.
How could he broach this with Evadne? He didn’t want her rushing off precipitously, as she had in the tunnels near her refuge. He had to be careful.
He needn’t have bothered. One look at her face told him that she’d reached the same conclusion he had. ‘The cells down there,’ she said. Her voice was like tempered steel. ‘The Immortals could have children down there.’
‘We’re not in a good position to do anything,’ Kingsley pointed out. ‘We should fall back. Maybe we can find those Retrievers again, or get assistance from the Demimonde.’
‘You can stay here, if you like. I’m going.’
Kingsley decided that the Immortals had no truck with order and organisation. Their answer to a problem was to throw Spawn at it. The larger the problem, the more Spawn they lobbed its way. The giant size of their hiding place and the chaos of its building site was testimony to their approach. Kingsley was grateful, for it meant that his and Evadne’s passage to the levels beneath the main chamber, while circuitous, would simply be a matter of flitting from cover to cover.
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