Blaylock, James P - Langdon St Ives 02 (2 page)

 
          
 
''The coach!"
Kraken yelled, out of breath. He turned abruptly and grabbed for St. Ives's
arm. There was the rattling sound of another coach in the street and the clop
of horse's hooves. Out of the darkness plunged a teetering old cabriolet drawn
by its single horse, the driver exposed to the weather and the passenger half
hidden by the curtain fixed across the narrow coffm-shaped side chamber. The
cab slewed around into the flood, the horse throwing streamers of water from
its hooves, and the driver—Ignacio Narbondo—whipping the reins furiously, his
feet jammed against the apron to keep himself from flying out.

 
          
 
St. Ives leaped into the street, lunging for
the horse's neck and shouting futilely into the rain. The fingers of his right
hand closed over a tangle of streaming mane, and he held on as he was yanked
off his feet, waving the pistol in his left hand, his heels dragging on the wet
road as the horse and cab brushed past him and tore away, slamming him backward
into the water. He fired the already-cocked pistol straight into the air,
rolled onto his side as he cocked it again, and fired once more at the hurtling
shadow of the cab.

 
          
 
A hand clutched his arm.
"The
coach!"
Kraken yelled again, and St. Ives hauled himself heavily
out of the water-filled gutter and lunged after him.

 
          
 
Hasbro tossed at the reins even as St. Ives
and Kraken clambered in, and the pair of horses lurched off down the narrow
street, following the diminishing cab, which swayed and pitched and flung its
way toward Holborn. As soon as St. Ives was in and had caught his balance, he
threw the coach door open again and leaned out, squinting through the ribbons
of water that flew up from the wheels and from the horses' hooves. The coach
clattered along, tossing him from side to side, and he aimed his pistol in a
thousand directions, never fixing it on his target long enough for him to be
able to squeeze the trigger.

 
          
 
They had Narbondo, though. The man was
desperate.
Too desperate, maybe.
Their haste was
forcing him into recklessness. And yet if they didn't pursue him closely they
would lose him again. An awful sense of destiny swarmed over St. Ives. He held
on and gritted his teeth as the dark houses flew past. Soon, he thought. Soon
it'll be over, come what will. And no sooner had he thought this than the
cabriolet, charging along a hundred yards ahead now, banged down into a
water-filled hole in the street.

 
          
 
Its horse stumbled and fell forward, its knees
buckling. The tiny cab spun like a slowly revolving top as Narbondo threw up
the reins and held on to the apron, sliding half out, his legs kicking the air.
The cab tore itself nearly in two, and the sodden curtain across the passenger
chamber flew out as if in a heavy wind. A woman—
Alice
—tumbled helplessly into the street, her
hands bound, and the cabriolet crashed down atop her, pinning her underneath.
Narbondo was up almost at once, scrambling for a footing in the mire and
staggering toward where
Alice
lay unmoving.

 
          
 
St. Ives screamed into the night, weighed down
by the heavy dreamlike horror of what he saw, of Alice coming to herself,
suddenly struggling, trapped beneath the overturned cabriolet. Hasbro reined in
the horses, but for St. Ives, even a moment's waiting was too much waiting, and
he threw himself through the open door of the moving coach and into the road,
rolling up onto his feet and pushing himself forward into the onslaught of rain.
Twenty yards in front of him, Narbondo crawled across the wreckage of the cab
as the fallen horse twitched in the street, trying and failing to stand up, its
leg twisted back at a nearly impossible angle.

 
          
 
St. Ives pointed the pistol and fired at Narbondo,
but the bullet flew wide, and it was the horse that whinnied and bucked.
Desperately, St. Ives smeared rainwater out of his face with his coat sleeve,
staggering forward, shooting wildly again when he saw suddenly that Narbondo
also had a pistol in his hand and that he now crouched over the trapped woman.
He supported
Alice
's shoulders with his left arm, the pistol aimed at her temple.

 
          
 
Horrified, St. Ives fired instantly, but he
heard the crack of the other man's pistol before he was deafened by his own,
and through the haze of rain he saw its awful result just as Nar-bondo was
flung around sideways with the force of St. Ives's bullet slamming into his
shoulder. Narbondo managed to stagger to his feet, laughing a hoarse seal's
laugh, before he collapsed across the ruined cab that still trapped
Alice
's body.

 
          
 
St. Ives dropped the pistol into the flood and
fefl to his knees. Finishing Narbondo meant nothing to him anymore.

 
          
 
LANGDON ST. IVES, scicntist and explorer,
clutched a heavy alpaca blanket about his shoulders and stared out over
countless miles of rocky plateaus and jagged volcanic peaks. The tight weave of
ivory-colored wool clipped off a dry, chill wind that blew across the fifty
miles of Antarctic-spawned Peruvian Current, up from the
Gulf
of
Guayaquil
and across the Pacific slope of the
Peruvian Andes. A wide and sluggish river, gray-green beneath the lowering sky,
crept through broad grasslands behind and below him.
Moored
like an alien vessel amid the bunch grasses and tola bush was a tiny dirigible,
silver in the afternoon sun and flying the Union Jack from a jury-rigged mast.

 
          
 
At St. Ives's feet the scree-strewn rim of a
volcanic cone,
Mount
Cotopaxi
, fell two thousand feet toward steamy open
fissures, the crater glowing like the bowl of an enormous pipe. St. Ives waved
ponderously to his companion Hasbro, who crouched some hundred yards down the
slope on the interior of the cone, working the compression mechanism of a
Rawls-Hib-bing Mechanical Bladder. Coils of India-rubber hose snaked away from
the pulsating device, disappearing into cracks in the igneous skin of the
mountainside.

 
          
 
A cloud of fierce sulphur-laced steam whirled
suddenly up and out of the crater in a wild sighing rush, and the red glow of
the twisted fissures dwindled and winked, here and there dying away into cold
and misty darkness. St. Ives nodded and consulted a pocket watch. His left
shoulder, recently grazed by a bullet, throbbed tiredly. It was late afternoon.
The shadows cast by distant peaks obscured the hillsides around him. On the
heels of the shadows would come
nightfall.

 
          
 
The man below ceased his furious manipulations
of the contrivance and signaled to St. Ives, whereupon the scientist turned and
repeated the signal—a broad windmill gesture, visible to the several thousand
Indians massed on the plain below. "Sharp's the word, Jacky,"
muttered St. Ives under his breath. And straightaway, thin and sailing on the
knife-edged wind, came a half-dozen faint syllables, first in English, then
repeated in Quechua, then giving way to the resonant cadence of almost five
thousand people marching in step. He could feel the rhythmic reverberations
beneath his feet. He turned, bent over, and, mouthing a quick silent prayer,
depressed the plunger of a tubular detonator.

 
          
 
He threw himself flat and pressed an ear to
the cold ground. The rumble of marching feet rolled through the hillsides like
the rushing cataract of a subterranean river. Then, abruptly, a deep and vast
explosion, muffled by the crust of the earth itself, heaved at the ground in a
tumultuous wave, and it appeared to St. Ives from his aerie atop the volcano as
if the grassland below were a giant carpet and that the gods were shaking the
dust from it. The marching horde pitched higgledy-piggledy into one another,
strewn over the ground like dominoes. The stars in the eastern sky seemed to
dance briefly, as if the earth had been jiggled from her course. Then, slowly,
the ground ceased to shake.

 
          
 
St. Ives smiled for the first time in nearly a
week, although it was the bitter smile of a man who had won a war, perhaps, but
had lost far too many battles. It was over for the moment, though, and he could
rest. He very nearly thought of Alice, 14 LORD Kelvin's machine who had been
gone these twelve months now, but he screamed any such thoughts out of his mind
before he became lost among them and couldn't find his way back. He couldn't
let that happen to him again, ever—not if he valued his sanity.

 
          
 
Hasbro labored up the hillside toward him
carrying the Rawls-Hibbing apparatus, and together they watched the sky deepen
from blue to purple, cut by the pale radiance of the Milky Way. On the horizon
glowed
a misty semicircle of light, like a lantern hooded
with muslin—the first faint glimmer of an ascending comet.

Dover
,
Long Weeks Earlier

 
          
 
THE TUMBLED ROCKS of Castlc Jetty loomed black
and wet in the fog. Below, where the gray tide of the
North Sea
fell inch by inch away, green tufts of
waterweed danced and then collapsed across barnacled stone, where brown
penny-crabs scuttled through dark crevices as if their sidewise scramble would
render them invisible to the men who stood above. Langdon St. Ives, wrapped in
a greatcoat and shod in hip boots, cocked a spyglass to his eye and squinted
north toward the Eastern Docks.

 
          
 
Heavy mist swirled and flew in the wind off
the ocean, nearly obscuring the sea and sky like a gray muslin curtain. Just
visible through the murk some hundred-fifty yards distant, the steamer H.M.S.
Ramsgate heaved on the ground swell, its handful of paying passengers having
hours since wended their way shoreward toward one of the inns along Castle Hill
Road —all the passengers, that is, but one. St. Ives felt as if he'd stood atop
the rocks for a lifetime, watching nothing at d\ but an empty ship.

 
          
 
He lowered the glass and gazed into the sea.
It took an act of will to believe that beyond the Strait lay
Belgium
and that behind him, a bowshot distant, lay
the city of
Dover
. He was overcome suddenly with the uncanny
certainty that the jetty was moving, that he stood on the bow of a sailing
vessel plying the waters of a phantom sea. The rushing tide below him bent and
swirled around the edges of thrusting rocks, and for a perilous second he felt
himself falling forward.

 
          
 
A firm hand grasped his shoulder. He caught
himself, straightened, and wiped beaded moisture from his forehead with the
sleeve of his coat.
' 'Thank
you.'' He shook his head
to clear it. "I'm tired out."

 
          
 
"Certainly, sir.
Steady on, sir."