Horatio Lyle (30 page)

Lacebark was smiling at him. Dew was grinning. Mercy’s face was expressionless, her arms limp at her sides.

‘Give us the Plate, Horatio.’

Lyle looked from Feng to Mercy to Lacebark, then to the Plate. He slowly moved it from where it hung over the wire, and held it up ponderously, staring at the plain stone surface. He looked up, and stared straight into Mercy’s vacant eyes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered, and closed his bloody left hand over the Plate, pressing the skewer of wood deep into his palm. Lacebark started forward, shouting, ‘Shoot him!’ - too late. Blood flowed from his hand, slipping into the Plate, turning the stone deep black-red.

The stone erupted in red sparks, leaping up from the blood-soaked plate and around the room. The magnet on the furnace screamed. Lyle couldn’t hold on to the Plate as it leapt from his fingers, trailing blood and blood-red sparks. Metal shattered, bent, flew across the room towards the Plate, which spun wildly as a whirlwind of metal formed a thick, deadly tornado in the centre of the room, focused on the Plate. The Tseiqin were screaming, clutching at their ears. Some were bleeding, white blood running down from their noses and ears, the metal slicing through the air with a scream. The fat coils of wire leapt up, dragging anything they were attached to with them, and snaked in the air like a waking dragon. Lyle heard the creak of the metal furnace behind him and half-turned. The furnace doors burst open, spurting fire, the wire around the magnet contorted and lashed, breaking into pieces and flying towards the centre of the room, the magnet buckling and twisting, the furnace warping and bending. Lyle ran for a corner, diving for cover as, with a twisted scream, the furnace ruptured, spewing hot fire across the room. He hit the floor and curled up, hands over his head, knees tucked in. With a final groan, the giant metal furnace exploded, tortured beyond all extremes by forces pushing every which way, red sparks pouring off it in a bloody flood.

Tess felt the explosion rise up through her feet all the way to the tips of her hair, and thought that perhaps the world had ended. The noise went on so long that she began to think it wasn’t noise at all, but perfect silence, and she was deaf. The shock wave pushed her and made bile rise in her throat, made Tate curl up at her foot and whimper. When it was over, she wasn’t even sure it was over, because the after-ring in her mind went on and on, a deafening roar of shattered worlds. Over the burning sound left in her ears, she heard the clink of falling masonry, the hiss of dying flames, the clicking of cooling tortured metal, the thud of debris falling to the earth, and ultimately, a very final silence.

She crouched on her hands and knees and peered out through the narrow gap under the wardrobe. A hand was right in front of her, bloody and still, the fingers bent loosely in the middle to form a shallow arch, the blood pooling gently around it. She saw a torn sleeve attached to an arm and, just behind it, the top of a head of sandy hair, turned away from her, so that all she could make out was a small halo of hair beyond the arm, utterly motionless. She held her breath and kept as still as a stone while the silence dragged. Finally there was a voice, so faint and far off, she could barely hear it. Then footsteps. Then a voice.

‘Mr Dew’s assistant is dead,’ said a voice like black leather.

‘Unfortunate,’ said a silken voice, slightly shaken. ‘Feng? Take the Plate.’

There was a click. A foot appeared in front of the bloody hand, shod in black leather. The point of a crossbow appeared in Tess’s line of view. Thomas’s breathing behind her was deafeningly loud. A voice said, ‘Wait.’ A different shoe appeared, a woman’s. ‘He can still be of use to us.’

The crossbow tip wavered. The tip of the shoe prodded the limp arm. Tess heard the click of metal cooling, like the heartbeat of time. A black-leather-gloved hand reached down and picked up the arm, dragging the head with it. As it went up, Tess saw that blood was trickling with slow thickness down one side of Lyle’s still face, and that his eyes were closed, his face relaxed, like one in sleep. Then it disappeared out of her line of sight. Behind her, she could hear Thomas’s frantically fast breathing, and thought,
Don’t give us away. Oh God I don’t want to die, please, please don’t hear . . .

She heard footsteps across the floor, and a slow dragging sound behind them. Somewhere, thunder was rolling, rain falling. The little sounds behind the silence started to slip back in. She held her breath, and kept on holding. Hot metal cooled.

She tried to count seconds in her mind, but couldn’t tell whether they were heartbeats, seconds or the
tick tick tick
of the metal.

Thomas’s hand rested on the wood of the door in front of her, ready to push. She grabbed it. His pulse underneath the shirt was racing desperately fast. She swallowed.

She counted a hundred ticks, never once letting go of Thomas’s sleeve, and gently pushed open the door. The room beyond was black apart from the red-hot slivers of shattered metal and a few, feeble fires still clinging to the contorted skeleton of the furnace, most of which was now embedded in various parts of the wall. The floor was littered with twisted metal and wood. There were dead Tseiqin lying still, some trapped under the debris of the explosion, some just lying with their eyes open in shock. Tess’s hands and knees shook as she picked her way across the floor. Near the wardrobe there was a bloodstain that was human, deep red. And there was a lot of it. Tate started barking, and suddenly ran ahead, bounding into the corridor. Tess and Thomas followed as fast as their shaking legs allowed them.

Mercy Chaste was curled up, knees to her chin, in the corridor, quaking in wordless terror. Thomas knelt down next to her. ‘Miss?’ he murmured.

‘Mnnmnn!’ she chattered, trying to eat her fingers.

‘Miss, are you all right?’

‘
Mnnnmnnn!
’

Tess put a hand on Thomas’s shoulder. ‘We’ ve got to get to Lord Lincoln. Thomas!’

He looked up weakly at her. ‘Tess?’

‘We’ ve got to get to the Palace. Come
on
! It’s still not finished! ’

She dragged him away.

CHAPTER 22

Lyle thought he heard a carriage, felt it bumping over stones.
Odd. I wonder if I’m dead?
He pondered this.
Well, I’m breathing, and I think that’s a pulse going on somewhere down there, which is always a good sign
.

And as awareness slowly came back, it brought with it memory and pain.

He opened his eyes. Mr Dew stared at him and grinned. He gently patted Lyle on the cheek, before leaning against the back of the carriage, smile still fixed.

‘Damn,’ muttered Lyle, then turned his face away and closed his eyes again. There were some things he just didn’t want to see.

*

‘Come on!’

‘I’m coming!’

‘Come
on
!’

‘I’m
coming
! Cabby! Cabby!’

‘What in Gawd’s name are you?’

‘This is Lady Teresa de le Hatch. I am the Honourable Thomas Edward Elwick. Take us to the Palace!’

‘You tryin’ to be funny, laddie?’

‘Oi! Don’t talk to him like that. My uncle’s king of
. . .
China
. . .
you know?!’

‘Children, get to bed. Go on, be off with you.’

‘You don’t understand! It’s
urgent
! The fate of the Empire depends on it!’

‘Be off with you.’ A clattering sound. ‘Oi, what the hell do you think you’re doing?’

‘Bigwig, what
are
you doing?’

‘If you won’t drive us, I’ll take us there
myself
!’

‘You what?’

‘You
what
?’

‘Get in, Teresa!’

‘Lad, a joke is a joke, but this is
. . .
’

In the sound there was a dull
thwack
, followed by a reverential silence. Finally, ‘Christ.’

‘Come on, Teresa.’

‘Can you drive this thing?’

‘I am familiar with all arts of horsemanship, including the long rein
. . .
’

‘That means you can drive it, or not?’

‘I’m sure I can.’

‘But you just
hit . . .
’

‘No time to think about that now!
Come on!
’

‘
All right!
’

 

And across London the church bells are proclaiming the hour anew, and the clouds are gathering and the pigeons are cooing in the gutters of old roofs and the drains are burbling with the rivers of rainwater that run down Ludgate Hill and slosh over the sides of Blackfriars Bridge into the sluggish river, which rises higher against the stone of the banks as the tide changes. And the factories yawn and the rigging creaks and the fires burn and the rain falls, always the rain falls, cutting through the night and making the streets shine silver. And the rain falls on Horatio Lyle as he is dragged out of a carriage that is just one in a convoy of carriages, and looks up slowly at the towering round dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, half-covered in scaffold that runs right up one side of the dome. And overhead, lighting stabs the sky, and thunder trails after it, a loyal shadow in the broken night.

Horatio Lyle, filthy, bloody Horatio Lyle, shirt torn and blackened, wrapping his bloody arms around himself as the rain falls, watches while the sleepwalking Feng climbs out of another carriage, carrying reverentially in both hands the Fuyun Plate.

A fist grabs Lyle by the hair and pulls his head back until he can see the golden cross on the top of the cathedral, half-lost behind the rain that stings his eyes. In his ear Mr Dew whispers, ‘You make gods of gold and iron, Mister Lyle. But we are the lords of flesh and blood.’

And Moncorvo is hammering on the iron doors of the cathedral, and while Lyle thinks
No!
the door is opened by a priest who peers out from the candlelit interior and says, ‘Yes?’

 

The priest is now crumpled in a corner as Lyle is dragged up the central aisle of the cathedral, across the marble floor, towards the altar beneath the towering dome. Shaking with cold, he looks up at the lightning flashing behind the windows in the nave. Moncorvo walks unhurriedly up to him.

‘Why aren’t I dead or sleepwalking?’ snaps Lyle, fear giving him confidence. He meets Moncorvo’s green eyes without flinching.

Moncorvo doesn’t answer. His eyes move past Lyle to a pair of struggling, sweating Tseiqin. Lyle turns slowly and stares. The two drag large sacks behind them. They drop them on to the ground. Moncorvo nods briskly at Lyle. ‘Open it.’ His voice leaves no room for disagreement. Lyle kneels and, thinking of snakes and venom, reaches into the bag. His fingers close around something cold. He pulls it out. It is a cable of thick copper wire, almost as fat as his arm. He looks back up at Moncorvo, who wordlessly tosses something down on to the floor by Lyle. He picks it up uncertainly. It is a diagram, neatly drawn on a piece of battered paper. He looks back up at Moncorvo. ‘A Faraday wheel?’

Wordlessly, Moncorvo points up into the dome. Lyle looks, and sees, running round the inside of the dome, a long, long way up, the iron railing of the Whispering Gallery. Lightning flashes again in the windows. He glances down at the diagram and thinks,
Lightning strikes the highest point it can find, taking the path of least resistance. St Paul’s is the tallest building in London . . . run the wire from the cross to the Whispering Gallery, wrap it round the
railing as a core, run the secondary coil down to earth, wait for lightning to strike . . .