The Obsidian Dagger (Horatio Lyle) (25 page)

Snow was pouring down the street, a tidal wave of it, being pushed ahead of a moving wall of cobblestones that grew higher and higher as he watched, the cobbles building on top of each other, pressing against the walls on every side, rushing down towards him, the hardest tidal wave he’d ever imagined. Lyle turned and ran. He reached for the nearest wall and was leaping for the top with an agility lent by terror, slipping on snow and ice as he scrambled at it. He clawed his way over the top, bracing his legs against the side and leaning his weight into the cracks between the bricks, as the wall rushed down, showering snow and dirt around, the street behind just a muddy mess of torn soil.

Lyle threw himself off the top of the wall and down on to the other side as the wave passed by, snapping at his coat tail and sending cobbles showering this way and that. He landed badly, on one side, crooked, legs flailing and arm going under him. Beyond the wall, the wave of cobbles collapsed, useless, a deafening roar of stone crashing down. Lyle scrambled away from the wall, limping slightly, across the darkness of a lawn. The grounds seemed endless, trees neatly laid out, the glow of a house somewhere in the distance. A stone house; Lyle didn’t dare approach. He felt his way to the darkness of the wrought-iron gate and struggled to pull it open.

Something brushed against his shoulder. He jumped, pressing his back against the iron gate, clinging on to it. His eyes now fell on two empty stone pedestals on either side of the gate, then moved slowly to the two figures standing before him. They were shorter than normal men, wore tunics in a classical Greek style and each had a laurel wreath in its hair. They were, in brief, the kind of ornamental statues Lyle told himself he should really have expected. They looked at him quizzically, a boy and girl, with tranquil faces. Lyle’s fingers tightened in useless fear round the iron of the gate; he didn’t move, didn’t breathe.

Slowly, thoughtfully, one of the statues reached out and ran its hand down the side of his face, starting at his hair, leaving a trail in the blood, sweat and dirt that stained his face, running its cold stone fingers under his chin, down his neck, stopping, two fingers lightly resting on the side of his neck, so that he could feel his own pulse against its cold touch. He swallowed, tried to speak, couldn’t think of anything to say, fell silent once more. More cold fingers slid down to touch his throat. He thought,
What a waste,
and closed his eyes.

And something exploded through the gate.

CHAPTER 18

People scattered as Icarus exploded into the arched metal tube of King’s Cross Station, screaming and running for cover as the wooden ship passed overhead, trailing fire and sparks on the waiting trains. Those who had stayed and watched, the intrepid who gaped and pointed and clapped and frowned as the machine rattled overhead, joined their neighbours in wild flight when, with as much confidence as Hannibal faced with a mountain, the stone dragon dipped easily down under the iron rafters of the station. Tess was struggling with an unlit tube at the back of Icarus - not trying to light it, but pulling it out of the clamps that held it down, freeing it and the fuse wire that ran to it, oblivious to the screams of people below and the rapid shrinking of the platform’s length. She dragged it free just as the stone dragon roared and dived, tearing at a train below with its claws before lashing up and towards Icarus. Looking up, for the first time she registered where they were. ‘Bigwig!’

‘Miss Teresa?’

‘What the hell are you doin’?’

‘We can fly out through the entrance!’

‘You ain’t never been ’ere before, ’ave you?’

‘How can you tell?’

‘I mightn’t know about distances, but I know if summat’s bigger than summat else and we’re
big
!’

A slight hesitation. For a second there was just the rush of wind. ‘The entrance . . . isn’t small, is it?’

‘What d’you think?’

Thomas’s eyes flew round the iron-arched prison, flickered up to the giant yellow brick wall at the end which was getting closer faster, and faster, and
faster
and . . .

‘Tess, get down, hide your head!’

Tess looked up too and saw the wall, the two huge windows set in it. ‘You gotta be havin’ a laugh!’

‘Too late now!’

Tess threw herself forward, pushing Tate underneath her legs and covering her head with her hands as, with a jerk, Thomas pulled on the controls. The wings dipped and rose, pitching the shell of the ship over on to one side, so that it arced through the air in a long curve that dragged it towards the wall. Thomas grabbed another lever, the gears slamming into reverse. One wing rose, the other dropped, lurching the ship on to its other side, into another curve away from the far wall and straight towards the window. Tess closed her eyes and, an instant before impact, so did Thomas, diving forward, hands over his head. The nose of Icarus ploughed straight into one of the huge, semicircular windows in the front of King’s Cross, smashing it into a million pieces which flooded down like snow in an avalanche, shattering into smaller and smaller parts off the hull of the ship. For a second Icarus travelled along in a cocoon of falling glass, small shards snagged in the wood or sliding along the wings, showering all around before it was free and spinning out towards the wall of a machine shop. Thomas opened his eyes, saw giant, friendly letters painted on the wall - ‘Machines, Weights and Scales, Gray’s Inn Road’ - and kicked at the nearest lever. The nose of Icarus swung upwards, arrowing for the moon. Behind, the great stone dragon slithered out of the shattered window, hesitating as it tried to find its prey again, then leaping forward with silent determination, claws stretched for Icarus.

 

Lyle threw himself on to the ground out of instinct, covering his head with his hands, as something fast exploded through the gate. He heard two loud, sharp bangs and felt snow shower around him, then heard the whinny of horses and the stamp of hooves. He felt something a few inches away skidding in the snow and coming to an eventual stop. He slowly raised his head.

A man, dressed all in black, face hidden in a burgundy-red scarf, looked down at Lyle. Lyle raised his head and peered past him, at the cab that had been driven through the gate behind a pair of wild-eyed horses, then beyond, to where one of the statues was already back on its feet. Cracks showed around its neck and arms where the stone was thinnest, but it was struggling inexorably towards them nonetheless.

‘Erm . . .’ began Lyle, pointing a trembling, burnt, filthy finger in the direction of the statue. Without looking up at it, the man in black bent down, grabbed Lyle by the back of his collar, and dragged him on to his feet and out of the gate at a brisk pace that left Lyle scampering feebly through the snow, slipping and sliding, half concussed and extremely confused. The cab was waiting under a lamp post, with the driver dismounted and holding the horses. Both were well-fed, sleek black stallions, not the average beast of burden that shuffled round the streets of London all the days of the year.

Lyle found himself pushed up next to the driver’s seat and squeezed in beside the man in black, who grabbed the reins, nodded once at the driver holding the horses and murmured softly, ‘
Xiexie
.’

The driver nodded back, turned and ran off into the darkness. The man in black snapped at the reins, in a few seconds urging the horses into a trot and then a gallop. Lyle clung desperately to the side of the seat with the last ounce of strength and willpower he had left. He felt in terrible need of a comfortable chair by a good fire, of answers and explanations and maybe a decent curve of direct proportionality squared with which he could feel at home.

Instead, as they clattered through the streets, the man in the burgundy scarf demanded, ‘How many chemicals do you have left in your pocket?’

Lyle patted them, in a daze. ‘Some,’ he muttered.

‘How many of them are acids or explosives?’

‘A few. Why?’

‘You’ll need them before this night is out.’

‘I thought you’d say that, Feng Darin.’

The man in black hesitated, then smiled behind the scarf. ‘How long have you known, Horatio Lyle?’

‘Ever since you fed Tate one of those damn ginger biscuits. You’re the only spy I know with such a weakness for them. What piqued your interest this time? The mad priest with an intellectual deficiency? Or the madder man who turns to stone in bright light?’

‘A bit of both.’

‘And are you here out of personal attachment to the noble cause of self-preservation, or were you sent again by your employers?’

Another smile, slightly wider. Amusement in his voice, though his eyes never left the road. ‘A little bit of both.’

With one hand Feng Darin swept the scarf away from his face, and in the dull light that burned on the cab, Lyle saw the familiar worn features, dark walnut brown from both his origin and his occupation. Lyle said quietly, ‘You disappeared without a word after St Paul’s.’

‘No. I visited you in hospital, while you were still asleep, after your fall.’

Lyle nodded, then frowned once more. ‘We’re in the poop this time.’

‘Tell me everything when we ’re safe.’

‘There seems to be no safety.’

‘I know a place.’

‘And you’d know what’s happening, too?’

‘Some of it. But if I knew everything, Horatio Lyle, I wouldn’t need you. What explosives are you carrying?’

‘Ammonia compounds, and reactants, one or two things that can oxidize very rapidly when exposed to heat, but nothing that does severe damage.’

‘I always wondered why you carried them.’

‘You never know when you’ll need to blow something up. Why do you ask?’

‘Because we need to survive long enough to have a private conversation.’ They spun round a corner, rattling down towards the lights of the city, following the railway lines towards Euston and Marylebone. Lyle watched the cobbles racing by beneath them, saw the lights getting brighter and the squalid little houses that clung to the side of the railway lines growing thicker as the real city began to intrude on the false city of the suburban mansions. In the shadows, he saw something moving among the roadside slums, keeping level, and felt a shudder down his spine, and imagined a cold touch at his throat. Feng lashed at the reins again, eyes flickering this way and that, and Lyle knew he wasn’t the only one watching the shadows. And with that realization came the sudden awareness of a tune, hummed almost inaudibly under Feng’s breath. ‘
London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down. London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady
. . .
’

Lyle clung tighter to the side of the cab.

 

‘What are you doing?’

‘You don’t just try an’ hit nothin’, bigwig!’ Tess was leaning over the side of Icarus, almost on her feet, holding a loose tube in one hand. Icarus raced over the roofs of Gray’s Inn Road, over yellow-brick houses selling weights and measures and old clothes and broken furniture, sending the ladies who haunted the area, and the men who pretended they didn’t, scattering below. Seven of the tubes were now blazing at the back of Icarus, and still the stone dragon was keeping behind, twisting its way through the air with a snake-like movement. Gravity clearly had decided to look the other way, rather than deal with those claws.

‘Can you get higher?’ Tess yelled.

‘Why do we want to go higher?’

‘Who’s givin’ the orders round here, bigwig?’

Thomas tugged at a lever. Icarus jerked, flaps moving in the wings, the area facing the wind of their passage growing larger, pushing Icarus bodily upwards. Tess had the outer casing of the tube stripped away, revealing the packed, staged chemicals compressed around the central fan, like a second casing to the tube. She grabbed at the fuse, which ran from the end of the tube into the heart of the fan, passing through one chemical and one only, which was to burn at a constant rate, heating the air that passed through the small inner fans to provide thrust, and started wrapping the fuse tightly not only round that chemical, but round every other weird, compressed chemical pack that surrounded the tube, so that only a small part of the wire was left free as she slid the tube back into its casing. She turned and screamed, ‘Bigwig?’

‘Yes, Miss Teresa?’ Thomas’s teeth chattered and his voice wheezed with effort. Icarus was still climbing, the air growing thinner and colder as they rushed for the moon, trailing sparks and fire.

‘You need to let the dragon get close!’

‘I need to
what
?’

‘
Who’s in charge here?’
snapped Tess. ‘I want you to let him get real close, so close he can touch us, and then, when he’s close, an’ I give the word, I want you to dive, go right back down the way we was, and don’t stop for nothin’ ’cos we need to be a real long way away very quick!’

‘Why?’

Tess looked down at the tube in her hands, the tiny nose of the twisted fuse peering out from the end. ‘’Cos there ’s goin’ to be a real big bang.’