Time's Mistress (11 page)

The sheer proximity of the great beast and the countless remembered stories of devils and daemons rooted Millington to the spot. Carruthers pushed up beside him and with a flourish threw some kind of snap-bang into the snake-man’s face. It was a children’s toy, a cheap sideshow prestidigitation, but it worked. For a split second the beast recoiled and in that moment Stark broke rank, lunging forward. Millington saw that he had some kind of salve on his fingers that he smeared down the snake-man’s torso. It didn’t seem to have any visible effect but that didn’t deter Stark from completing the cross on the beast’s chest. Even complete, the holy symbol had no effect on the snake-man.

Cackling, the creature stretched its wings and took flight.

“Hold, spawn of the pit!” Haddon McCreedy bellowed. Millington saw he clutched a battered leather bible in his trembling hands. “Questo esorcismo può essere recitato da tutti i cattolici, anche laici,” He began, the words of the exorcism torn from his lips by the sudden surge of the wind. “Per scacciare il demonio ed i suoi seguaci.”

The Meringias licked its lips with its flaccid tongue. “You amuse us, manling,” the creature said, grinning at McCreedy. “We will feed on you later. For now we will look for fat flesh to feast on. The city awakes, we smell the sweat and sex and gluttony of your kind. It is ripe in the air. It drives us wild.”

McCreedy roared the remaining words of the ritual but like the white cross they had little effect on the beast.

Up on the Whispering Gallery more abominations were emerging; a giant jackal-headed monstrosity, and behind it, an apish creature with a melted face and jewelled eyes lumbered into view, tearing the rent wider with its sheer bulk. More and more beasts broke through the veil between planes, defying death with their twisted visages and warped physiques.

The Meringias rose, flaunting its power. It turned its back on Stark and McCreedy as it ascended, until it was up around the heights of the dome itself. Then it turned, primal, powerful.

It sank its talons into the stone and crouched, sniffing the air theatrically before launching itself once more.

The Meringias streaked across the sky and disappeared behind the rooftops of Fleet Street.

A moment later the first screams came.

“Listen, all of you,” Stark said, turning to face the others. The lines of his face were taut, his lips white. “The way to the core has been opened; these things, daemons by our Christian mythology, were never meant to exist beneath our sky. This means we have but one chance here. The longer they remain on the Prime Material, the stronger they will become. Napier,” the brute nodded, stepping forward. “I need you to get to Greenwich, to the Prime Meridian. Take this,” he withdrew a Moleskine notebook from his inside pocket and scribbled something down. He tore the page out and handed it to Napier. “You must begin inscribing these words, exactly these words, in the brass line that marks the longitude, when you hear the first bell of the city chiming the seventh hour. You must be finished before the final bell sounds. Understood?”

“Aye,” Napier grunted. “Good man, there’s not a lot of time left. Take one of the cabs. Seven o’clock. It has to be Seven.” Napier lumbered away, half-running half-jumping down the long steps back to where the three hansom cabs still waited.

Stark wrote a second set of instructions for McCreedy. Haddon took them without a word.

“I need you to go back to the Reading Room, Haddon. When you hear the first bells of St. Giles tolling seven, do exactly what it says on the note. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“You can rely on it,” McCreedy said, turning on his heel and stalking back to the brougham Stark himself had arrived in moments before.

“Dorian, I need you to go to the bell tower of St. Clements—”

“I know, seven o’clock, exactly what it says on the note.”

“Exactly,” Stark agreed, handing the note over.

Carruthers pocketed it without so much as glancing at it.

“Locke, the same thing, but take the great bell of St. Martins in the Field.”

“Seven o’clock?”

“As soon as you hear the first notes sounding out from the Old Bailey Bell and Wren’s Tower here, and finished before the last.”

Locke nodded. “You can trust me, Fabian.”

“I know, now go.”

“What about me?” Millington said. He hadn’t been able to pull his gaze away from the nucleus of the black wound and the myriad devils of the deep places emerging through it.

“I need you here, Anthony. I won’t be able to do this alone.”

O O O

As the hammers rang out the first note of the seven o’clock chimes across the city the six men of the Greyfriar’s Gentleman’s Club went to work with grim purpose.

Eugene Napier knelt before the white door of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, his knees straddling the lead line that marked the Prime Meridian, the zero point of the world’s time and the division between the east and west hemispheres.

He smoothed out the crumpled paper, reading Stark’s instructions one last time even though he knew exactly what they entailed having committed them to memory on the long drive over to the Observatory.

Using the blade of his pocket knife he carved the seven symbols into the lead line, each one seven inches long precisely. Four he recognised as the elemental signs, three he did not. He had no time to labour over it, and no second chances. The chimes would last for only a minute. He made each stroke with precision, finishing the final flourish exactly as the final note faded to silence.

O O O

In the Reading Room of the Greyfriar’s Gentleman’s Club, Haddon McCreedy lifted down the huge mantle clock that sat above the doorway. The face was exposed, the different cogs all laid bare. The smaller second hand, off-set to the upper right of the clock’s face ticked quickly. The hours were marked in Roman numerals.

McCreedy placed the clock on the windowsill, as Stark’s instructions demanded.

He listened to the fourth, fifth and six chimes before he removed the seventh hour, scoring in another line beside the VII so it appeared VIII.

As the final note resonated in the air, McCreedy stole the seventh hour, leaving the old timepiece with two eight o’clocks.

O O O

In the bell tower of St. Clement’s Dorian Carruthers finished inscribing the great brass bell with the sigils Stark had drawn and counted out the fifth, sixth and seventh chimes before grabbing the rope high up and forcing another chime out of the bell, so seven became eight, the hour lost.

O O O

Brannigan Locke listened to the deafening chorus of the bells, his mind ringing with the old nursery rhyme.

“Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clements,” he said.

I’ll give you five farthings, the bells answered him over and over. I’ll give you five farthings. I’ll give you five farthings.

He waited and waited, the full minute of the chimes stretching out into the longest minute he had ever lived through.

Between the sixth and seventh chime he intoned the words Stark had written down for him, sealing the symmetry of the incantation, demarking the boundaries of effect where this moment of time would be excised from.

Then he grasped the rope and forced the great bell to toll an eighth time.

O O O

The sky above Fabian Stark bled.

The rain was tinged with rust, as though the Meringias’ presence on the Prime Material acted as a conduit for the infernal machinery of the hollow earth to bleed into reality. Stark was weak, already he could feel the draw of the Art reducing him. He knew what he had to do, but knowing made the task no simpler.

As the first hammer struck the city’s bells, he sank to his knees. As the first note blended into the second he tore open his shirt, yanking aside his cravat. He was skin and bones, dark shadows filling the clefts between his ribs and the hollow of his gut. Between the second and third peel of noise he smeared more of the white petroleum jelly across his bare chest, a circle within a square, a triangle within the circle, the most basic element of all conjurations, opening himself up to The Art.

He felt those first familiar stirrings within his flesh, the frisson of the elements coming to life inside his body, the air filling his lungs, the rain on his face, sinking into his skin, the hard-packed earth against his knees, and the fire in his heart, all of them coming together.

The flesh beneath the salve began to sting, the heat rising from beneath his skin.

“Millington,” he said, not looking around. “Do not let me fall. That is your job. Do not let me fall. More importantly, no matter what transpires, no matter how much I might beg, do not let me run, I beseech you.”

“I am here,” the actor said, resting a hand on Stark’s shoulder.

The fifth bell chimed, a symphony of sound reverberating out across the rooftops of London, from the Old Bailey Bell, down to the river, west to St. Martin’s in the Field, north to St. Giles, and back to St. Clement’s. His skin thrilled to the music of the city.

“I summon thee, Meringias!” Stark cried, throwing his head back. The blood red rain streamed down his face, into his eyes and mouth. “I summon thee, dweller of the deep!”

The sixth harmonic rang out, and counter-point to it came the slow thump-thump-thump of the beast’s heavy wings.

“COME TO ME!”

O O O

Anthony Millington stared in mute horror as the beast descended from the blood-red sky.

The seventh bell rang out the coming of the hour.

The creature Stark called Meringias landed beside him, wicked claws digging into the stone of the funeral slabs as it did. The air stank of brimstone and was haunted by the incessant skittering of the black spiders drawn back to the steps of St. Paul’s by Stark’s summons. His skin crawled at the sight of them.

He stood behind Stark, determined not to let him down, just as he knew the others had taken up their stations around the city, all sharing the same grim determination. Alone they were less than the sum of their parts; together they were strong.

Stark gasped—a sound that could only be described as agony—and swayed. Millington steadied him. Stark was burning up. His skin was hotter than Hell.

“The little manling is begging us, my lovelies. See him on his knees? We are amused by his contrition. We shall eat his sweetmeats with pleasure and remember his cowardice before our might.”

The spiders cried out in appreciation, thousands upon thousands of the hairy black pedipalps parting to allow the chittering its full voice; it was a distressingly human sound. The spiders were excited by the prospect of the feast.

They swarmed up the steps, wave after wave of bulbous black carapaces surging forward.

Millington did not move.

Stark shivered; no mere tremor, it was a violent convulsion that tore through the entirety of his body. He buckled beneath Millington’s steadying grasp. Millington did not allow him to fall.

“Shall we eat it now, my lovelies? Shall we? Yes, we shall.”

Stark leaned forward, head and shoulders sagging. He began to chant, vicious sharp words that Millington couldn’t fasten on, words that cut at the edges of his concentration as he tried to understand them. The intensity of his voice heightened, taking on greater and greater urgency as the beast neared, until he was screaming and the Meringias’s barbed claw was scratching through the squared circle on his chest, drawing a thick ribbon of blood to the surface.

“Open my flesh, Meringias. Cut me down, it will be your doom,” Fabian Stark promised.

The creature’s laughter was harsh.

“You doubt me?”

“You are weak, manling. Nothing. This place is ours now, we have arisen from the deep places, we are home. Your time here is done.”

“Time,” Stark said, thoughtfully. He actually smiled as he dwelt upon the word. The way he said it scared Millington, more so even than way the Meringias stared, naked hunger in its blazing eyes. Beyond that one word Millington heard the echoes of an eighth hour tolling. “Just ran out … do you feel it, beast? Do you feel its pull on your corporeal form? This is not your sky. This is not your rain, not your air, not your earth. This is not your time.”

Millington had no idea what his companion’s words meant, but he could feel the truth of them. It was as though the air itself was rebelling against the creature’s unnatural presence. It crackled with energy.

“We claim it for our own, manling. That is enough. The feeding will be grand. We scent millions of souls ripe for the taking … and we are hungry.”

“Begin with me,” Stark said, offering himself.

“No,” Millington said, instinctively stepping forward to protect the young magician.

But the beast ignored his protestations, lunging forward to pierce Stark’s bare chest with a razor-like claw, opening him up from throat to belly with a single savage motion. Stark screamed, a sound unlike any Millington had ever heard before. It emerged from three mouths, Stark’s, Millington’s and the beast itself. It took him the space between heartbeats to realise it was not merely one of pain but one of triumph as well. The triumph was Stark’s, the anguish, the beast’s.

Millington stepped back, forgetting his promise for a moment, but Stark did not fall. He could not, Millington realised with horror. The Meringias threw itself forward, burying its face in the young mage’s guts and feasting ravenously. So fierce was the daemon’s hunger that it crawled within Stark’s skin to better devour the marrow of his life, sucking his bones clean. And in that moment the final part of the trap was sprung, the elements coming together to bind the two. Even as he died, Stark’s screams took on a new, haunting quality. For a moment they rang out like joyous laughter and then he was dead and the bells of London were ringing out all around them, their chimes growing more and more frenzied.

Millington saw Stark’s legs: they had calcified, the blood inside him merging with the stone of the funeral slabs, flesh fusing with the stone, becoming stone. The blood ceased spilling, hardening to the same granite as the Cathedral steps.

The rain burned against Millington’s scalp. It sizzled off the stone creeping up Stark’s flesh, even as the fire in the young man’s eyes burned out.