The Providence Rider (36 page)

“What’s wrong with you?” Aria sat up, rubbing a bloodied lip bitten by a tooth. “Are you
insane
?” Then she caught sight of the knife.

“No, not insane. Just determined. Madam Chillany,” Minx said, “I’m going to kill you.”

“What?”

“Kill you,” Minx repeated. “For murdering my Nathan.”

There was a harsh inrush of breath.

“Yes,” came the reply to that statement. “Nathan was my lover. My
love
,” she clarified. “You killed him. Matthew told me so.”

“
Matthew?
What…”

“No more time for lies. Stand up and take this in your black heart.”

Aria Chillany came up off the floor. Her eyes were wild. With a sweeping motion she grasped the leather handle of the bag on the bed and swung it at Minx, who stepped back out of its way. Then Aria’s hand went into the bag and came out with a short but deadly blade of her own, and flinging the bag at Minx she followed it with her body and the knife flailing at the other woman’s face.

Kk

“Come on, boyo,” Mack Thacker taunted, as the broken glass sliced Fancy’s cheek. Matthew strode toward him with the sword upraised, and suddenly Jack Thacker threw his bottle at Matthew’s head and instead hit his left shoulder as Matthew dodged aside. Then Jack gave a strangled cry of rage and, his face swollen with blood, rushed across the room at Matthew.

Fancy—the pretty girl who had sat alone for so very long—came to life. She grasped Mack’s arm and sank her teeth into his hand, and he shouted in pain and grabbed a handful of her hair. The broken glass lodged against her throat. She kicked into his shin and tore loose from him, as brother Jack collided with Matthew and fought him for both the sword and the torch. A knee rose to smash into Matthew’s groin and the orange-haired head thrust forward to bust against Matthew’s skull, but Matthew avoided the blows he’d known were coming and swung Jack away from him with the strength of desperation.

“Kill him! Kill him!” Mack hollered, as the Indian girl leaped upon his back and locked an arm around his throat from behind. He flung her off and came at Matthew with the broken bottle.

But before Mack could reach him Pendulum Island, in its agonized throes, shifted once more. This time the library’s planked floor shook beneath their feet like—as Toy had said—the end of the world. There was a cracking noise like the bones of a behemoth being broken to pieces. Something deep in the guts of the castle made a hollow ringing noise like an exotic gong. The balcony windows shattered. The faces of the cherubs in the ceiling’s clouds fell away, exposing ugly gray plaster. Matthew was knocked to his knees and both brothers skittered to the floor. The torch rolled away from his fingers, setting fire to the scattered volumes.

And then the truly horrific happened, for in this quaking of tormented earth the very foundation of Fell’s castle was loosened, the seams of broken stone could not hold, and suddenly the entire library room pitched at a twenty-degree angle toward the cliff’s edge and the sea below and the books flew off the shelves like the flapping of paper bats.

Matthew, the Thacker brothers and the fallen Fancy slid along the crooked floor through the battlefield of burning books. The balcony itself began to split away from its stone bindings with the noise of small cannon fire and plummet piece by piece into the ocean. The window curtains were whirled away and downward as if into a vortex, but they snagged in the hanging balustrade. Fell’s castle had become a construction of torn parchment and forgeries, for all its strength against the earthquake. The gray morning became an open mouth ready to swallow Matthew, the Thackers and Fancy. Matthew saw the remaining stone seahorse topple down on its last ride. The library’s furniture and burning books tumbled around the sliding figures, and the problem-solver from New York reached for the bloodied Fancy as she scrabbled for a grip on the splintered planks. He caught her right arm with his left hand, but together they were going over the edge.

Kk

When the worst of the earthquake hit, Minx Cutter and Aria Chillany were locked in combat. They staggered around the room, grasping at each other’s knife hands and trying to get their own blades free. As the floor heaved and the walls cracked, their battle did not falter for death had entered the room and must be satisfied.

Madam Chillany spat into Minx’s eyes and tried to trip her but Minx was too nimble for that. They kicked at each other as the deadly blades were checked in stalemate. Then Minx drove her enemy backward against the dresser so hard the breath burst from Aria’s lungs and pain stitched her face. Aria pushed back with frantic strength and tried to wrench her knife hand free, but Minx had it gripped. With a scream of rage Madam Chillany took the risk of releasing Minx’s wrist to scratch at the gold-hued eyes and drew blood across the cheekbone. The knife came at her, a wild and unaimed blow, and grazed Aria’s shoulder.

Then the two women separated and, as Fell’s castle groaned and shrieked in its agonies, they searched for an opening the better to stab the other to death.

Kk

Matthew used the cutlass.

He got his boots turned to give himself some friction on the floor, and with the strength of the damned he chopped the sharp edge into one of the floor planks. With the other hand he held onto Fancy, stopping their slide toward the hanging ruins of the balcony and the sea below.

Then a weight grasped his ankles and nearly broke his arm from its socket as he held onto the sword’s leather grip. Matthew looked backward to see the sweating red visage of Jack Thacker as the thug crawled up over his legs. Mack had caught himself on an edge of broken plank and had hold of one of Jack’s ankles. For a moment Matthew thought his spine would break as the weight pulled on him, and he was near losing his grip on the cutlass. The sweat had burst out like a mist around his face. He was close to letting go…he feared he couldn’t take the weight an instant more, his shoulder was about to be pulled from its socket and the cutlass was starting to work free.

Fancy kicked Mack in the face with a sturdy shoe. She did it a second time and then a third and a fourth, into the nose and mouth. Mack’s features became rearranged. He spat out a mouthful of blood and a couple of broken teeth and reached with one arm for Fancy’s legs to pin them. She squirmed away from him and kicked him once more, in the throat, as he flailed at her. He made a garbled, hideous noise that sounded like
Brother
spoken from the depths of despair, and then he blinked heavily and wearily as he lost his grip on Jack’s legs and slid away, through the fiery pages of torn books, through the glitter of broken glass from the windows, and out upon the tilted balcony.

“Brother!”
Jack screamed in response, the voice of human agony.

Mack Thacker gripped hold of one of the curtains that hung from the balustrade. He swung back and forth for a moment, as much a pendulum as Fell’s island. Then he was betrayed by the bitch called Fate, perhaps a female he had alternately wooed and scorned during the course of his dissolute life. She had the last laugh, for the curtain tore and with his fingers still locked in the fabric Mack fell toward the sea trailing a piercing cry. Upon his head followed several pieces of stone balusters, a nasty conking to be had while broken-toothed, bloody-mouthed and throat-mangled.

“Brother!”
Jack called again, and Matthew saw tears burst from the dazed green eyes.

But then the elder Thacker righted his senses and refound his rage, and he began to crawl up Matthew’s back as the cutlass quivered on the edge of breaking loose.

Kk

Aria Chillany grasped a handful of Minx’s hair and flung her back against a fissured wall. This time the breath burst from Minx’s lungs, and then Aria came at her with the knife. Minx had forgotten that Aria’s usefulness to Professor Fell also involved murder, and perhaps she too had been trained in the bloody arts by Lyra Sutch. The knife flashed out and caught Minx’s waistcoat as she twisted aside, but she could feel the blade kiss her ribs. Then Minx struck out but Aria had already retreated. When the women came together again it was a blurred and confused battle of life and death, all artistry of knives forgotten and nothing in its place but the savagery of survival.

Aria’s blade rose up and slashed. A cut streaked across Minx’s forehead. She countered with a strike into Madam Chillany’s left shoulder that brought forth a shrill cry of pain. Then they were flailing and staggering, striking at each other as best they could. Aria’s teeth snapped at Minx’s left ear and then sought the flesh of her cheek. Minx hit the other woman in the jaw with her free hand and as Aria fell back she stepped forward into another swing of Madam Chillany’s blade that missed opening her throat by a half-inch.

The chill madam’s eyes flashed with murder, as blood stained her mouth. She feinted once, twice and then drove in again when Minx tried to counter the second move. Instead of retreating, Minx measured Aria’s stride and also stepped forward, bringing her knife up for the blow. They crashed together, Aria’s blade seeking an eye but instead slicing a cut across Minx’s left cheek and into the hairline, and they spun around in a mad circle for a few seconds like dancers at a bedlam ball.

Minx knew.

She felt her adversary falter. Felt her legs start to give way. And then the circle of the death dance ceased, and Aria stared at Minx with a yellowed face, her mouth opening in a gasp of shock. The sapphire eyes moved to look down upon the knife that had found her heart, and the blood that was streaming out upon the gray gown.

Minx twisted it.

Just because she could.

Aria’s knife rose up in a trembling hand, to thrust itself into the hollow of Minx’s throat.

Before it could find its target Minx reached up and grasped the wrist, and she said in a rasping voice, “You are done.”

Aria smiled thinly. She spat bloody foam into Minx’s face.

And then Madam Chillany’s eyes began to recede into their sockets, and in another few seconds she was just a dead woman who had not yet given up her soul to that which waited on the other side of the partition. Minx let her wrist go. The knife fell free to the floor. Minx placed her hand underneath Madam Chillany’s chin and pushed her backward off the cliff of life. But she left the blade in her heart for good measure.

Kk

Jack was a nimble climber. He came up over Matthew’s back and hooked an arm around the throat, at the same time clawing at Matthew’s eyes.

“You bastard,” said Fancy, and some certainty in her voice made Jack look at her. In time to see the torch she had stretched for and retrieved from the floor smash itself into his face. “Lick this,” she told him.

Sparks flew around Matthew’s head and bit his scalp. He heard some of his own hair crisp. Heard also Jack Thacker’s scream as the torch flamed his eyes out and seared his lips like pieces of grilled beef. Then Jack’s arm was off Matthew’s neck and his fingers were tending to his own blinded orbs, and with a shrug of his shoulders Matthew pushed the remaining Thacker brother off his body and away. Matthew looked back as the Irish rowdy slid down onto the sagging balcony, Jack’s face scorched red under the orange hair with the sprig of gray in it and the swollen eyes sealed shut. With a cry that might have been both pain and defiance Jack went over the edge, and as he went the rest of the balcony crumbled after him with a similar noise. As a last comment upon the life and death of Jack Thacker, Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone flung the torch toward his watery grave.

Hold on,” Matthew said. He could smell his own sweat and burned hair. He felt a hundred years old, but now was not the time to give in nor give up. He had said this because he felt, also, the hand of Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone trying to open the fingers that had seized her arm.

“Matthew,” she said quietly, tasting the name for the first time.

He tightened his grip both on her and the cutlass. Above them the ceiling of clouds and cherubs had begun to resemble a ravaged Hell rather than the repose of Heaven. Around them the burning books flamed and at any other moment Matthew might have wept for them.

“I can’t go home,” she said, quieter still.

“We can get up there.” Matthew saw places in the splintered planks that might serve as hand and foot-holds to climb up to the door. The ceiling was beginning to fall in. The clouds were heavier than they looked. Time was quickly running out, for tremors still disturbed the cracked walls and tilted floor. “Come on,” he said. “We have to go.”

“No,” she said. “That way is for you, not for me.”

He peered into her face. The blood crawled along her cheek, but she seemed neither to notice nor care; her soul had already turned away from the flesh that contained it.

“We’re both going up,” he vowed, aware that it was only a matter of seconds before either the ceiling collapsed upon them or the cutlass’s blade pulled loose.

“I came to your room,” said the girl, “to give you the only gift I could. Now I need you to give me a gift. Let me go, Matthew.”

“I won’t. No.”

“You must. I want to go dreaming now. I want to wash myself clean. Don’t you understand?”

“You’re
alive
!” he said.

But she shook her head, sadly still.

“No,” she answered, “I am not.”

And he did understand. He hated the understanding of it, but he did. She was part of nature, had been defiled and debased, and she wished to return to what she had been. Perhaps her feeling about death was completely contrary to his…or perhaps she just believed in a better afterlife than he. Whatever, he knew she wanted this gift…and yet…how could he open his fingers and give it to her?

“There’s a ship waiting.” He prayed to God it was still waiting, for the gray light was strengthening and the first ruddy glow had appeared to paint the waves. The sweat was on his face, his shoulders and back were cramping, and he couldn’t hold this position much longer. To emphasize the danger and lack of time, a piece of the ceiling as big as a kettle crashed down upon the tilted floor a few feet beyond the girl.

“It waits for you,” she answered, her face calm, her eyes soft and yearning for peace.

“No,” he said. “No, we’re both going.”

“Matthew…whoever you are, and whatever you are…you must know that being free means…I make my own choice.”

“The wrong choice.”

“Mine,”
she said.

Her fingers began to work again, at his. Hers were strong. She stared into his face as she worked, and he resisted. Yet as his fingers were pushed away, he began not to try so very hard.

“I will find him,” she said. “I will tell him about you. He will be very glad to hear.”

“Who?” Matthew asked.

“You know,” she told him, and then Pretty Girl Who Sits Alone smiled.

And slid away.

As she went toward the edge she turned her body, and Matthew saw her go into the air as if diving into a new life, one he could not possibly understand. She went silently and beautifully, even as he cried out as if struck to the heart. Which he was.

She disappeared in a billow of dark green, like an arrow returning to a forest unknown. And perhaps her forest did lie beyond the blue silence of the deep, and in that awesome place beyond the comprehension of Matthew Corbett she would return to who she had been, proud and innocent and clean.

He did weep. Not for the burning books and the ideas of men that flew away on their wings of ash, but for the Indian girl who had just taken flight from this world to the next.

“Climb up!
Hurry!
”

Matthew looked up toward the door. Minx Cutter stood there, with a bloodied piece of bedsheet pressed to her forehead. Another cut on her left cheek leaked red. She wavered on her feet, her strength nearly gone. Matthew reasoned that Aria Chillany had gone to a reunion with Jonathan Gentry, which would be her small and nasty room in the diseased mansion of Hell. It appeared to him that Minx was holding herself up with willpower alone, and on that account she was a formidable figure.

“Climb
up
!” she repeated, urgency in her voice, as various sounds of cracking stone came from the walls and ceiling. Another large chunk fell, to Matthew’s right. White dust powdered the air. It was time to get out of here, and quickly.

The first reach was the most dangerous. He had to let go of the cutlass and grip the edge of a splintered plank. Then he started up using similar hand-and-foot holds that were precarious at best. When he got near enough to Minx she leaned down and grasped his outstretched hand, and pulled him up into the warped corridor.

“The bag of gold,” Matthew told her. She already had gone to her room to get the forged orders for the release of the
Nightflyer
, complete with the professor’s octopus stamp, but it was doubtful such a paper would be needed today. The staircase was still intact, though the ceiling was falling to pieces, and on the second floor Matthew took a moment to enter his room—its floor crooked and the left wall partially collapsed—and retrieve the moneybag, which he shoved into his shirt. He realized then that the room to the left of his, though it had a balcony the same as his own, was not really a room and had been empty, according to the map he’d been given. The collapsed wall revealed another staircase curving down. It had to be, he realized, the stairway to Professor Fell’s domain. Not by happenstance had Matthew been given the quarters next to it.

He entered the corridor again, where Minx waited. Without hesitation he kicked the next door in. It swung open easily, for the quake had already sprung its lock.

“What is this?” she asked.

“You should go out to the wagon,” he told her. “Keep anyone else from taking it. I’m going down this way.”

“Why? What’s down there?”

“Him,” he said, and she understood.

“I’ll wait only for a short while. Falco might have taken the ship out already.”

“If he has, he has. We’ll find another way off.”

She nodded and peered into the dark staircase. “Good fortune,” she said, and then she turned and went her own path.

Matthew couldn’t blame her. He didn’t want to go down those steps either, into that darkness, but it had to be done.

He descended. A few torches had been set into the walls, but they were all extinguished. The staircase shook beneath his feet and stone dust rained from above. The castle was dying, perhaps to join the rest of Somers Town in its underwater sleep. Fate, it seemed, had caught up with Fell’s uneasy paradise. Still Matthew descended, past the first floor and into the castle’s guts. Or bowels, as might be more proper. The staircase curved to the left, the risers cut from rough stone. He came upon two torches still burning, and he paused to take one of them from its socket. Then, his confidence made more solid by the light, he continued on his downward trek.

A gate of black iron was set at the bottom of the stairs, but it was unlocked. Matthew pushed through and winced as the hinges squealed. Another torch burned from a wall in the narrow corridor ahead, and Matthew followed its illumination. Above his head there were nearly human groans as stone shifted against stone; even here, at this depth, the castle had been mortally wounded. Deep cracks grooved the walls and floor. Matthew walked on, pace after careful pace. He came to a branch in the corridor and decided to follow the straighter route. It led him to the wooden slab of a door that hung crooked on its hinges. He pulled it open and found a spacious white-walled sitting room and a candelabra with three tapers still burning atop a writing desk. The ceiling, riddled with cracks, was painted pale blue in emulation of the island’s sky. The furniture was tasteful, expensive, and also painted white with gold trim. Matthew went through another doorway and found a bedroom with a large, canopied white bed. His attention was drawn to what hung on a number of pegs on the wall next to that bed: the tricorn hats Professor Fell had worn on his visits to Matthew’s room, a white wig the same as worn by the castle’s servants, and a battered straw hat that might have been the topper for any of the island’s farmers.

He felt time was short, but he had to open and search a chest of drawers in the bedroom. He discovered in the drawers not only the elegant suits Fell had worn as well as the opaque cowl and the flesh-colored cloth gloves, but the sea-blue uniform of a servant. Also there were regular breeches with patched knees and white shirts that appeared worn and in need of stitching. All would have fit a slender man a few inches taller than Matthew. In addition, there were the shoes: two pair polished and gentlemanly, one pair scuffed and dirt-crusted.

He began to believe that Professor Fell at times dressed as a servant to move about the house and as a regular native to move about the island. Which begged the question…was Fell a native himself? A man of color? And perhaps Templeton…his son…had been harrassed and beaten to death on a London street partly because his skin was cream-colored, and darker than that of the average English boy? There was a reason, Matthew realized, why Temple’s portrait had been done in colored glass.

But the real question was…where was Professor Fell
now
?

The deep noise of grinding stones told Matthew he had to find a way out of here, or retrace his path to the staircase. He went through the doorway out into the corridor again, his torch held before him, and started back the way he’d come. He was not very far along when he caught sight of another torch coming toward him, and a giant figure in white robes and a white turban illuminated in the yellow light.

Sirki stopped. They faced each other at a distance of about thirty feet.

“Hello, young sir,” said the East Indian giant, and the light he held made the diamonds in his front teeth sparkle.

“Hello,” Matthew said, his voice echoing back and forth between the walls.

“We have suffered quite a mishap here. Quite an explosion, up at the far point of the island. Do you know anything about that?”

“I felt it, of course.”

“Of course. I see your stockings are very dirty. Muddy, perhaps? Did you get through that swamp all by yourself, Matthew?” Sirki waved a hand in his direction. “No, I don’t believe you did. Who helped you? It’s not only me asking. The professor would like to know. When that blast happened, his first thought was of you. And of course you were not in your room. Neither was Miss Cutter in hers. Now…why would
she
have helped you?”

“She likes me,” Matthew said.

“Oh. Yes. Well, then.” Sirki withdrew the sawtoothed blade from its sheath in his robes and walked forward a few steps. Matthew retreated the same number. “The professor,” said Sirki, “has left this place. He instructed me to find you, and when I went to your room I found that the stairway was revealed. You
had
to come down here, didn’t you? I am also instructed to tell you…that your services are no longer needed, and unfortunately Professor Fell will be unable to pay you your three thousand pounds.”

“I
thought
he might wind up withdrawing that offer.”

“Hm. He asked me to tell you that he will not be very much damaged by this little incident. Certainly he would not have wished this, but he has many irons in the fire.” Sirki inspected the brutal edge of his blade. “He is sorrowful for you, though. That you chose to hurt him out of your…how did he put it?…your blind stupidity. Ah, Matthew!” He advanced a few steps nearer, and again Matthew retreated. The hideous weapon gleamed with reflected torchlight. “To have come so far and be on the verge of such
greatness
…and then to fall back again, as dirty as the swamp.”

“The swamp,” Matthew said, “is cleaner than the professor’s soul.”

“He wishes me to cut off some part of you and bring it to him to demonstrate that you are dead,” said the giant. “What would you suggest, young sir?” To the silence that followed, Sirki smiled and said, “Let me decide.”

He strode forward, demonic in the torchlight. The sawtoothed blade was upraised, capable of horrendous injury with one swing. Matthew backed away, his heart hammering. He thrust the torch forward to keep the beast at bay.

“No use in that,” Sirki said almost gently. “I shall put that down your throat if I please.”

And Matthew knew he could. Therefore Matthew chose the better part of valor. He turned and ran for his life.

Sirki came after him, taking tremendous strides. The branch in the corridor was ahead. Matthew took the untrodden way, running as fast as he could. Sirki was right behind him, the white robes billowing like the wings of a deadly angel.

The corridor suddenly widened into a space where there sat two simple chairs with dark stains of what might have been blood upon and beneath them. Gory chains still lay about the chairs, but there were no bodies. Smythe and Wilson had already gone to the tearing beak and eight arms of Agonistes. Matthew’s light displayed three cells. He was in the dungeon under the dining hall, probably used to confine pirates and other criminals of note. In the center cell stood Zed, bald and bearded and wearing his ragged clothing. Zed had his hands gripped around the bars, and when he saw Matthew the mouth in the tribal-tattooed face gave a mangled roar of recognition.

Matthew heard Sirki coming. He saw a ring bearing three keys hanging on the wall. Sirki was almost into the chamber. Matthew dropped the torch to the floor and picked up one of the chairs. He threw it at Sirki’s legs as the giant came through the corridor, and Sirki crashed down upon the stones.

Matthew plucked the keys off the wall and ran to Zed’s cell. The first key did not fit. He looked back and saw Sirki up on his feet, lumbering toward him. The wicked blade flashed at Matthew’s head, but he had already ducked. Sparks flew up from the meeting of sawteeth and iron bars. Matthew threw the ring of keys between the bars into Zed’s cage, and then he got hold of the fallen torch and backed warily away as Sirki advanced upon him.