The Iscariot Sanction (27 page)

Lillian recovered quickly, taking up both blades and punching them into the monster’s back, ducking again beneath its flailing arms as it swung back at her, and finally delivering the
coup de grâce
—an uppercut with an eight-inch spike. The tip of the blade entered beneath the monster’s chin, and pierced its skull. It staggered and flailed, before falling to the floor.

This time, Lillian helped Arthur up.

‘We have to move,’ she said. ‘If we can make it to the barracks—’

Arthur’s eyes widened. ‘By God… they’re all over us.’

She followed his gaze, and saw dark shapes scurrying outside the windows, scrabbling along the train’s armoured exterior like great spiders. She sucked in a breath—there were too many. But where had they come from?

Stop running. Come to me.

The voice pierced her mind, and Arthur looked at her as though he had heard it too. A loud metallic clunk sounded behind them, and the door opened. Ewart was first through the door, struggling to hold back the harridan whose sole purpose now seemed to be vengeance for Valayar Shah.

Lillian pushed Arthur onwards, and, leaving one blade for lost in the head of the vampire, she took up her concealed revolver from her bustle as she hurried after him. She had a sense that there were more pursuers now, but she could not stop to take stock. Instead she pointed the gun behind her and fired indiscriminately, willing Arthur to move faster.

As he slammed the next door behind them and locked it, he pushed his back to it, panting for breath and clutching a hand to his chest. Blood oozed between his fingers.

‘Arthur…’

‘No time,’ he said. ‘We must keep moving.’

‘If you’re scratched, they’ll find us no matter what.’

He shook his head. ‘It’s not the scratch I’m worried about.’ He took his hand away from the wound. Blood flowed from a small hole four inches beneath his right arm.

‘You’re shot.’

He nodded. ‘Ewart,’ he said.

On cue, a pounding came at the door behind them.

‘Give it up; there’s naewhere for you tae go!’ Ewart bawled, barely audible through the thick door. As he shouted, the train lurched, metal panels creaking, and it began to pick up speed, slowly but surely.

‘He’s right,’ said Sir Arthur. ‘They’re crawling all over the train, and even if we reach the barracks car there’s no saying the soldiers won’t join Ewart.’

‘Arthur, will your injuries permit you further struggle?’

‘Why? What is your plan?’

‘I plan to get off this train, immediately.’

They ran from the door, along what they realised now was the kitchen car, where servants huddled behind cooking apparatus in fear and confusion, crying out in alarm when they realised two armed agents were amongst them. They cried out louder when they saw black-clad creatures scrambling over the outside of the moving train, peering inside with inhuman eyes, claws scraping thick windows. Lillian knew they would find no aid here; these poor servants were soon to be victims. She wished she could save them, but knew they would only slow her down.

So will Arthur.

Was that her own thought, or de Montfort’s? It was getting harder to tell.

As she reached the end of the kitchen car, Lillian paused. Through the glass panels set in the iron doors, she could see that the way was clear. Outside, the train was indeed moving faster, though still not up to full speed. If they were to jump clear, it would have to be now.

She pulled down the window of the external door, and poked her head out, half expecting to face a nightmarish creature riding on the outside of the carriage. There was none. Instead, she saw the train moving around a shallow bend. There was another engine in front of theirs; a red-painted, unliveried locomotive, which had been the cause of their sudden slowing. Now it led the way, picking up speed; an escort to an unknown destination. There was nothing but moors stretching out beside them. A few hundred yards ahead, on the inner curve of the track, the hard ballast began to give way to scrub, until it dropped into a heather-covered decline, leading to a stretch of boggy ground. It would be their best chance.

She pulled her head back inside. Arthur had just finished charging the Tesla pistol for another shot.

‘There’s a soft landing up ahead,’ she said. ‘We have to go now. But that gun could be dangerous—electricity and water don’t mix.’

There came a heavy thud above them, as of a clumsy footfall on the train’s roof.

‘Then I had better use this shot before we jump,’ Arthur replied. ‘You go first; I shall cover your escape.’

Lillian nodded and, her own pistol at the ready, swung open the outer door. She peered over the treadplate, at the dark ground that sped past faster than it had previously appeared to, and wondered if this were really such a good idea. As if to lend her urgency, she heard a loud bang behind her, which almost startled her into falling over the edge.

‘Lillian,’ Arthur shouted, ‘they’re almost through. Go now!’

With a deep breath, and hardly daring to keep her eyes open, Lillian stepped into thin air. But she did not fall.

A strong hand held her by the back of her jacket, and hoisted her upwards as her legs kicked at nothingness. She landed hard on the roof of the train, her arms and knees scraping metal, and then slipping, sickeningly, across the smooth, gently sloping roof. She did not know what scared her more: the three pairs of black-clad legs standing around her, or the fact that there was nothing to grab, nothing to grant her purchase as she started to drift sideways off the roof.

A hand grabbed her by the hair and yanked her head back. It was enough. Lillian leapt upwards against her assailant, trusting that he was trying to take her alive and thus had a firm grip upon her. She still had the revolver, which she had managed to hold on to, and at once unloaded five chambers into the other two creatures. One moved with alarming speed, only taking a flesh wound to the arm. The other flew backwards as it took a bullet to the chest, and another to the side of its face, shattering its ugly, jutting cheekbone. The vampire that gripped her now pulled her up to her feet, attempting to wrestle the gun from her grasp. With one last effort, Lillian twisted and turned, jabbing the heel of her boot into the creature’s foot, throwing both off them off the train in a deathly embrace.

* * *

Arthur’s stomach lurched as he saw Lillian fall through the air, wrapped in the arms of a black-coated attacker. They twirled in the air like wounded crows shot from the sky by a farmer’s gun.

The pain in his side was overwhelming; he’d lost a lot of blood. The handle of the door behind him squealed as de Montfort’s minions forced it open. The barrage of psychic attack that Arthur had fought against had lulled as the train began to move faster, but the physical threat was all too real.

Arthur looked down. Lillian and the monster were almost out of sight, a tumbling mass of black cloth rolling into the thick heather. If he didn’t jump now, he wouldn’t make it at all. But he wanted a parting shot.

The door behind Arthur burst open, and the she-creature barged through, almost falling over in her haste to spring at him. It was all the encouragement he needed. Before de Montfort or the others could reach him, Arthur pushed himself backwards from the train step as hard as he could, pulling the trigger of the Tesla pistol as he went.

There was the smell of burning air and copper, and a blinding light that arced in his descent into thin air. He was sure he had hit his mark—the freezing wind was filled with high-pitched screams. Time seemed to slow. Motes of ghost-light drifted about him like dust, clinging to him as his proximity to the realm of the dead drew nearer.

Arthur smiled. How strange a thing, he thought, to be flying. To be buffeted on the cold winter air, not knowing whether life or death awaited him upon landing.
Morte d’Arthur
, he thought.

My wound hath taken cold; and I shall die.

‘Lillian! Lily!’

She remembered her father shouting her name over the roar of the storm, over the biting wind and hammering rain.

She remembered clear as day the taste of river-water filling her lungs, and the knowledge, even at that tender young age, that she would probably die. She had wondered what death would feel like. She was already so cold that she was numb, and so scared that she could not be any more afraid. She thought she was thrashing in the water, trying to swim to shore, but she could not feel her arms and legs, so she could not be certain.

She did not really know why she had wandered off. She had always believed that, beyond the garden gate, there was a secret land of fairies and gingerbread cottages. Her brother had teased her, and said that if there was anything out in the woods, it was evil goblins and prowling wolves. When the storm came, John had remarked that the fairy castles would be swallowed up and the wolves would devour all within. And so Lillian had stolen away in the night, with her father’s iron key, unlocking the garden gate and running across the field to the forest. She had perhaps hoped to prove her brother wrong; or to save the fairy-folk. Or perhaps she just wanted to show that she was not scared of goblins or wolves or storms or anything else.

When her father had scooped her up in his arms and held her close to his chest, she had thought he was a giant. He had never seemed so big or enfolding. Her father cried, ‘Lily! Oh, my girl!’ He had thought her dead, and she was too weak to tell him otherwise.

She remembered being bundled into her father’s overcoat, and carried through the woods and across the field, staring up at the clouds as she went, the rain falling on her face. They returned to the cottage that they called home, on the edge of a large tract of farmland near Faversham in Kent, where the smell of smoke rising from oast-houses always hung in the air.

On this night, there was no warm welcome, only the cries of Lillian’s mother, and a house that felt as though it were mourning a little girl on the edge of death.

Lillian remembered dreaming of a great dragon that set the house alight and carried her off far away, and dropped her into a fathomless ocean. Between fits and nightmares, she woke to see faces, some familiar, some strange, peering at her. Her mother, with eyes reddened and sore; John, asleep at her side; Dr. Harthouse, who always smelled of cigars; the nanny; some strangers. She heard talk of ‘pneumonia’, and how something was very ‘grave’, and remembered Dr. Harthouse telling her mother that she ought to ‘prepare for the worst’. She did not remember where her father was during that time.

When Lillian finally woke, and asked for a drink of water, her mother had cried and kissed and hugged her until she thought it might never end. The doctor had been called. Nanny went away to fetch water and food. Lillian’s mother went to find her father. Only John had been left behind in the little bedroom. Her brother had looked much older than his twelve years; wise almost. Something had changed in him. He had squeezed her hand and leaned close. ‘You should have asked me to come with you, Lily. I would have come. You could have died.’

‘I wasn’t afraid,’ she had said, defiant even then.

‘I know,’ John had replied, gravely. ‘But the day will come when you cannot stand alone. And on that day, I shall stand with you.’

* * *

Lillian dragged herself from the boggy water, detaching her skirts as she went so that she could better climb free of the embankment in her breeches. Her heart pounded so hard she thought it might burst from her chest; she coughed and spluttered stagnant, freezing water from her lungs. She was hurt; her legs and stomach gouged and slashed, ribs aching as though she’d been kicked by a horse. The taste of her own blood rose in her mouth, salty and warm. She spat out a tooth.

Another lecture from Mama. I shall no doubt deserve it this time.

She reached the crest of the bank. The trains had not stopped, and now they were a distant collection of dancing carriage-lights, their twin plumes of steam barely visible against the glowing night sky. Lillian glanced back to the pool of water from which she’d barely emerged with her life. She could just make out the creature’s bald head, luminescent in the darkness, bobbing upon the black water, the corpse floating face down. She had saved one bullet in the chamber, and was glad of it, but it had still been a desperate fight. She made a mental note that the Knights Iscariot did not need to breathe underwater, if at all. Unfortunately, she did, otherwise she would have gone looking for the pistol that she had dropped in the deep, murky pool.

Another thought, more pressing, hit her at once. Lillian had no idea if Arthur had made the jump. She had been dimly aware of a flash of light as she had rolled into the water in what she had thought was a deathly embrace. It had to have been Arthur, but what had befallen him afterwards was anyone’s guess. The thought that he could have been captured, or killed, was the final straw. The pain from her wounds, the cold, the tiredness in her bones, the abject failure to protect the prince, and the possible—no, probable—loss of Sir Arthur Furnival, was too much. Lillian fell to her knees in the damp heather, and sobbed. How dare de Montfort take everything from her?