The Obsidian Dagger (Horatio Lyle) (31 page)

The stone dust, picked up from a dozen masons’ yards and crumbling walls, and forming a mass so thick and seething it was practically solid and alive again, made a noise like bluebottles as it flew round the room in a grey cloud too dense to see through, stinging the eyes and choking the throat, drying up every drop of moisture in the air and stinging against the skin like a million needles.

Lyle screamed out, ‘Thomas!’ and half-imagined through the horrific, deafening roar that he heard someone answer back, faintly, calling out his name in a dry, terrified voice that immediately disappeared into a suffocated cough. Feng tried to hold Lyle back, but was shaken off as Lyle threw his arms up in front of his face and dived blindly into the cloud. He navigated by guesswork and memory, eyes shut, until he stumbled into the bed, tripping over it.

Thomas was curled up into a tiny ball, head buried against his knees, hands over his head. The skin of his hands and the back of his neck was red and raw, as if sandpaper had been dragged across them, and his clothes were torn from the abrasive dust. Lyle threw himself over the boy, cradling him in his arms as the storm knocked them this way and that, tearing at him with a million tiny nails. Dust filled his mouth even as he screamed, ‘I’ll do it! I’ll do whatever you want! Let him alone!’

Still the storm raged, if anything harder, forming a veritable tornado that tried to pull Lyle’s hair out by the roots. ‘I’ll give you what you want!’ he screamed, almost unable to speak for the dust that burnt his throat. ‘Do you hear me? I’ll give you Selene’s blade!’

And abruptly, the storm was over. Dust fell to the ground in a thick grey drift, with a little patter like the lightest drizzle when it first bounces on a roof. It fell on Thomas and Lyle, turning them both grey from top to toe. Lyle sat back slowly, stunned and shaken. At the door, Tess and Feng stood and watched in silence.

Thomas looked up into Lyle’s face, the picture of his own - grey with dust and too numb to assume any expression other than dumb shock. Thomas’s lips shook, as did his hands, but he tried to stand anyway, feet crunching in the dust as he put each one carefully down on the floor. He took a few uncertain steps; then his knees buckled and he twisted, grabbing at the bed. Lyle caught him under the arms and held him up, half-carried him to the door. Thomas buried his head in Lyle’s shoulder and - not because he must, not because he was going to all along, but because for the moment he was safe and unseen, and it was expected, and it was all right and not weak, as he had always been taught - he cried, in silence, and without moving, except for where the salt water tickled as it passed through the dust clinging to the end of his nose.

Feng stared at Lyle as he emerged from the room. When he spoke, it was quickly, as if not sure that he should. ‘Horatio . . .’

‘Not a word.’

‘If you give him the blade . . .’

‘Not a word!’

‘You
cannot
give him Selene’s blade! If he gets power over that element, over the first element, the one the Tseiqin revered, then . . .’

‘Feng Darin,’ snapped Lyle, ‘If you have any respect and faith in me, then you’ll stop talking right now.’

Feng hesitated, then closed his mouth and slowly folded his arms.

‘Thank you,’ said Lyle. ‘Now, we have maybe twelve hours. Tess, Thomas, get your clothes. I’m putting you on the first train out of the city.’

Tess folded her arms. ‘You ain’t.’

Lyle glared at her. ‘Teresa, do you see this expression of firm-eyed will and determination?’

Tess peered up at him. ‘You mean the kinda slitty-eyed one?’

‘That’s the one.’

‘The one what has the kinda wrinkle at the end of your nose and makes your ears seem funny?’

‘That sounds very likely.’

‘I’m seein’ it.’

‘It means you’re on the first train out of this city.’

‘Ain’t.’

‘Are.’

‘Ain’t.’

‘
Are
.’

‘Ain’t.’

‘Ain . . .
Are
, dammit, Teresa!’

Thomas’s voice, dry and dusty, cut in. ‘Mister Lyle?’ he croaked. ‘We can help you.’

Lyle scowled. ‘I’m not having children’s blood on my hands!’ he snapped. ‘Dust and nitroglycerin, but not children’s blood!’

‘Mister Lyle,’ said Tess, ‘you ain’t got enough hands to stop us. You need us.’

For a second, fury leapt up behind Lyle’s eyes, and he flushed an angry red. He looked from Tess to Thomas to Feng and back again. Several times he opened his mouth to speak, saw their expressions, and changed his mind again. Finally he let out a furious hiss and, turning to Feng, snapped, ‘
You
.’

Feng raised his eyebrows politely.

‘Get me all the ammonia you can find. And Tess?’

‘Yes, Mister Lyle?’

‘Get me the spare wheel from the basement, and get up to Greenwich Hill. If you stay, you stay above the stones, all right?’

‘Yes, Mister Lyle.’

CHAPTER 24

To Tate, who watched from the security of his basket in the kitchen, the day went quickly.

He was woken early by an unusual buzzing sound from upstairs and a lot of shouting, but decided it wasn’t worth investigation. He opened another torpid eye a little later when Lyle, covered in dust and looking very, very angry, exploded into the kitchen. A little strategic whining distracted Lyle long enough for food to be provided, before he stormed out again, carrying an armful of saucepans and some very thick gloves.

A little later, Thomas, also covered head to toe in dust, entered the kitchen, carrying a bundle of foul-smelling rags which he began to soak in lamp oil. Tate whined at Thomas, and was promptly fed.

Tess was the next to come in, wearing an alarmed expression and carrying one of the saucepans that Lyle had earlier taken away, only now it smelt sickly, a mixture of alcohol and the kind of chemicals Tate associated with large scorch marks and dirty smoke. Tess washed it in the sink, with frozen water and the care of someone who’s just been given a grenade instead of a cricket ball and told to ‘go play’. Tate turned his attentions to Tess, who in leaving, fed him.

It was turning into a good day.

The afternoon brought new and interesting odours from outside the kitchen, but they were that class of smell which Tate knew well enough to avoid, and which put him in mind of a hairless mouse with a scorched tail. He had a brief bout of exercise chasing his own tail, before Feng Darin walked in carrying a handful of test tubes, into which he poured a lot of sugar. Tate tried whining at him, saw Feng’s expression, and quickly went to hide under his blanket. When Feng was gone, Tate climbed up on to the table and helped himself to some of the food Lyle had forgotten to tidy away. Though it was technically against Tate’s policy to go out of his way to feed himself, desperate times did call for desperate measures.

Evening brought all four of them back. Tate whined at Tess, who gave him a biscuit. Dissatisfied with his prize, he whined again at Lyle, who muttered guiltily, ‘We have been neglecting you, haven’t we? You can’t have eaten since breakfast . . .’ and promptly fed him.

After dinner, Tate watched Tess and Thomas get into one hansom cab, Feng get into another and Lyle linger in the hall, uneasily waving goodbye. He was surprised at the way Thomas and Tess ran back and hugged Lyle in a rare show of affection. In Tate’s mind this suggested either deep concern on their part, or a mind-controlling experiment on the two hapless children, which would, Tate reasoned, go some way to explaining the smells that had been drifting out of the basement all day.

He regarded his master carefully, as Lyle waved goodbye. The odours coming off Lyle’s battered overalls were almost too thick and noxious to separate one from another, but Tate smelt evidence of ammonia, salt, sugar, carbon, soot, ammonium, various magnesium compounds, clay for some reason, maybe a dab of silver nitrate, a few iron oxides here or there, some of the foul electrolytes Lyle liked using when extracting elements from compounds in order to acquire certain otherwise unobtainable products, and, through it all, something that combined in many ways the worst of the smells and might, indeed, explain why Lyle was moving so cautiously, with one hand firmly over his left coat pocket, to stop its contents from moving about too much.

Tate reached the obvious conclusion.

It was terrifying.

 

Later. The kind of later that might be the last later ever recorded, or might just be the first of many, many laters yet to come.

Midnight in winter. No traffic crosses Westminster Bridge tonight, which is hardly unusual, considering the lateness of the hour, the depth of snow, the steadily falling white flakes which drive even the toughest horses back to the stable, their metal bits too cold to bite on. The gas lights burn dully on the freshly painted bridge, trying in vain to force their beams just that little bit further into the darkness.

Alone on Westminster Bridge, pacing under a lamp, and flapping his arms against the cold, Horatio Lyle thinks:
It is said that there are forces beyond any mere man’s control. Some call it magic, some call it God, some call it luck, some call it fate. They give the random empty things names, and then fear them. How silly.

And Horatio Lyle looks down across the silver of the frozen river, snaking west past the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben, past the wharves and docks and barges and ships trapped upright or at odd angles in the ice, out towards the edges of the city, burning gaseous yellow and snowy silver. And Horatio Lyle looks down across the silver of the frozen river, winding east past Charing Cross and the giant mansions of the Embankment, great government buildings and huge terraces for the wealthy and the indulged, past the piers and frozen walls of the river, past the burning chimneys belching their smoke into the sky, past the moving lights of the bridges where men carrying lanterns wind their way through the fog, towards the torches that burn among the stones of the Tower and around the city wall, as it runs rings through the heart of the city: here a Roman piece of masonry, here medieval, here Tudor, sometimes forming parts of buildings incorporating the ancient wall into themselves, sometimes snaking through the buildings or stopping on a street corner, to resume on the other side where the old gates had stood on the bridges or at the edge of the city, now sprawling beyond the old limits; torches burning with a million lives and a million fires that over the centuries have tried to eat up the fog and drive back the darkness . . .

 

Horatio Lyle looked across at London, and smiled. Just now, just for this instant, so inexpressible, everything was . . . perfect.

Lyle jumped, the voice right behind him, and instantly remembered the feel of a hand round his throat and the sensation that the earth was trying to swallow him whole. He backed away hastily a few steps from the shape of Sasso, half-visible in the fog. ‘I brought the blade,’ he stammered, trying to get control of his heart, which had suddenly decided it wanted to be somewhere else, quickly.

Sasso looked different. The mad gleam was gone; now there was just steely determination. In many ways, that was worse.
‘Then give it to me
.
’

Lyle hesitated. Instantly Sasso advanced a step, and the bridge seemed to lurch with him.

‘You’ll leave us alone?’ Lyle’s voice was barely above a whisper. ‘You’ll not hurt anyone?’

Lyle heard a little clinking sound behind him, and half-turned to see the two gargoyles, clinging to the rail of the bridge with long claws, leering brightly at him.

‘Well, yes . . . right,’ he muttered, reaching into his coat. He pulled out a long object, wrapped in cloth and, handling it as if it might explode at any second, held it out to Sasso.

Eagerness flaring on his face, he grabbed the blade from Lyle’s hands, dragged the cloth away and held it up, turning it this way and that, his face twisting into a smile.
‘Selene’s blade,’
he murmured.
‘Her gift, her power, to
me
.’

Lyle backed away, hoping no one would notice, as Lucan Sasso held the blade up to the light.

‘Well, I . . .’ Something cold and hard closed over the back of Lyle’s neck, holding with an unshakeable grip, dragging his head back so that all he could see was the fog where stars should be, and the gently falling snow stung his eyes. The hand was cold as the night air, but was definitely a human hand, four fingers pressing deep into the left side of his neck, a thumb forming a tight loop that dug into his vein. He thought,
Someone with a left hand?