The Obsidian Dagger (Horatio Lyle) (24 page)

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

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 watching 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.

As the wing slid back to its natural shape, she felt the cradle shudder beneath her, and thought that she could feel the wood stretching, see it bend under the sudden pressure. She looked back and saw the stone dragon, wings tucked in to almost nothing, diving after them, snout forward, marble eyes unblinking. Her stomach lurched as, laboriously, Icarus twisted, wheels almost scraping the railway, and righted itself, the world a blur merely a few feet below. Fog and cold and fast-moving dark air stung her eyes as Icarus raced along just above the railway line. Behind her, one of the tubes gave a little whine and died, the flames slowly retreating at its back. But Icarus was moving so fast now it hardly mattered, with Thomas struggling to keep the nose level as the whole contraption hungered for higher air and space. Ahead, Tess saw lights, dim and yellow, rising high above the track. An almighty shudder shook Icarus; the dragon was there, its claws blackened by the flames bursting out from the back of Icarus; blackened but not even scratched.

‘Bigwig!’ she screamed, but he didn’t answer, or if he did, the answer was lost. She heard the whistle of the train again, and this time it was closer, and this time there were other sounds coming with it, the steady
cump-humph-cump-humph
of the engines and fat belchings of steam. She looked with a sort of inexorable certainty towards the lights ahead and saw one growing larger and larger, bringing with it a vague blackness that cut out the lights behind it. ‘
Tho-maaassss!’

Thomas let go of a lever and Icarus, its wings nearly flapping loose with the strain against them, exploded upwards almost vertically, catching the rush of air with open wings and accepting it like the release from the pressure of low flight that it was. Another tube was whining and giving out, and then Icarus began to slow, hesitating, drifting. Tess looked down. Below, the railways were lit up with orange light on either side of the rush of a train, and, running along its roof, stone claws digging through the frail wooden ceiling, was the stone dragon, eyes still fixed on them. Icarus slowed and, for a second, seemed to hang in the air. The dragon leapt, stretching to its full, incredible length, claws open, teeth ready. Tess stared at it in rapt horror, unaware of Thomas’s shout in her ears, just feeling the sudden stillness of Icarus and the hypnotic steadiness of the black eyes.

Something cold and wet struck her face as Tate brought her sharply back to the high-speed rush of the present. He bounced in her lap, ears flying out behind him like a flag, and Thomas’s words formed into a coherent exclamation in her mind. ‘Light it, light another or we’re dead, light it now!’

She spun round and struck a light to two more fuses, just as a third tube was dying. They began to spark. Below, the dragon rose up with an almost luxurious ease, turned towards Icarus, and, claws outstretched, charged for the heart of the ship. It stretched hard, immovable death towards the belly of Icarus, and the two tubes exploded in flame. Icarus lurched forward, twisting on to one side unevenly as, with a bang that shook the ship, the dragon missed by an inch, and scraped along underneath, sending splinters flying as it scored the hull. Icarus dived back towards the light, and Tess heard something go
clunk
. She looked up.

Two gears in the mass that controlled the wing were jammed, warping around the bolts that held them. She hammered at them with her fists, but they were wedged, trapped between each other. Icarus began to bend, one wing twisting down uncomfortably below the other, pulling the nose round with it in a spiral that brought them lower and lower. Tess half-stood up in the cradle and beat at the jammed gears with an elbow, but that just hurt her elbow. Below them, the slightly surprised dragon was rising again, tail writhing. Tess almost screamed in fury and frustration, grabbed the nearest dead tube, still sparking occasionally and, with utter disregard for the heat that seared her fingers, slammed it as hard as she could against the gear. It clunked, bent, wobbled for a second, and slid back into the whirling mass of cogs, which clattered happily on.

Icarus lurched to the right, nearly throwing Tess out and pitching Tate against the side. The tube fell away from her hands, spinning leisurely down into the blackness, still sparking, trailing its burnt fuse line. Below, she saw the dragon spin automatically and catch the tube in its claws, snapping it in two and throwing the jagged metal pieces away, in a shower of black dust from the clogged and burnt up chemical fuel. Tess began to frown. There was . . . a feeling. A sudden, calm stillness inside. Just for a second.

She found herself looking thoughtfully at the tubes.

And Icarus was diving again, twisting easily through the air towards the lights ahead, which became clearer through the fog and formed, in quick succession, a large arch across the darkness ahead, then an arch full of steaming black shapes, then a giant arch full of shapes and people and lamps and luggage racks, then an arch full of shapes and people and lamps and luggage racks and bridges and steel girders and clocks and whistles and noises and trains and then became, in an instant, the giant iron arch of King’s Cross Station, into which, with utter ease, Icarus flew.

 

Lyle was running. It was in many ways a liberating feeling. His legs had hit their stride and he was bounding blindly along, his direction given only by the slope and the gravity that pulled him towards its base. Thorns and brush and shrubs lashed at his ankles, snow spattered up around his shoes, ice slid under his heels, but he was moving so fast he hardly had time to register any of this. The noise of pursuit was all around, a constant rush of air and crunching of snow, no cries or thuds, but the unmistakable sound of heavy stone feet. And still Lyle kept running, face burning in the cold, breathing fast and shallow but keeping a steady rhythm. He’d passed the point of pain long ago; now there was just a throbbing in his legs that pushed him to run faster, if only to escape the burning of his own blood. He flew down the Heath, coat flapping, shoes soaked through, toes itching and burning from the melted snow and the weight of the run. The sounds of pursuit seemed further off, or maybe his own breathing was louder. Lyle hardly cared now, the run had turned into everything, his world, nothing else was important, all that mattered was the speed and the freedom and the darkness that stripped you of thought and fear and left behind a sudden, internal stillness, a perfection unutterable . . .

The Heath stopped so suddenly under Lyle’s feet that he tripped over the brush at its edge and landed on his hands and knees on the hard stone road, new and barely disturbed either by the passage of traffic or by the dirt of the city. A single lamp burnt at the corner, casting a dull light on the snow at its base. Lyle shuffled towards it, and pressed his burnt palm into the ice that clung to it, gasping for air, ears ringing with the effort of the run, and looked back into the fog. He could see nothing, hear nothing. He began cautiously to sidle down the edge of the road, following the tracks of carts in the snow, away from the light. The Heath dropped away, to be replaced by the high walls of new mansions for the rich and privileged, gleaming with ice. He kept walking, four hundred yards, five hundred. The streets were empty, but he followed his nose and instinct through the thinning fog, smelling the dirt of a more familiar, older city somewhere ahead, the smoke and sewage that, even out here in the rich suburbs, was faintly noticeable on the air, and in many ways all the sharper for its subtlety - enough to notice, but not enough to get used to as the smell drifted in and out of perception.

Lyle thought,
A priest pays a fortune to smuggle from a Vatican madhouse a man made of stone who controls stone, and who may or may not be utterly mad, messianic and murderous. In
my
city
. . .

Nearly a quarter mile, walls on all sides; and the faintest noise. It was the wet, hissing sound of snow falling. Lyle stopped and listened. The noise came again, just a little bit louder. He advanced another cautious pace. The sound grew, and underneath it was another, a hard, heavy clattering. With a sense of weary dread, he turned.