Kites
Durand shook. Not from cold, that was certain; which left fear or fever. Quire suspected it was both.
The Frenchman had a sheen of sweat across his brow, and his eyes were red-rimmed, looking sore. Sick, then. It had come on quickly and without warning, within an hour or two of his arrival in Agnes McLaine’s house. Now, as the morning advanced, it had a firm grip of him. The fear had preceded it, and persisted still. Durand might be reconciled to his change of allegiance, but he was still quite clearly most fearful of its consequences. Neither the sickness nor his terror had yet silenced him, though.
“When I went into exile from my homeland,” he said, “I was forced to abandon most of my private collections. Too heavy, you see. Too difficult to transport. What I did bring with me to your country was only the best, the most significant.
“Clay tablets, in particular. Ancient texts. Magical texts, from Babylonia, Ur, Akkad. Mesopotamia. The oldest of old times, you understand, when Man lived in a wholly magical world?”
He looked questioningly from Quire to Agnes. Quire offered no response. He was standing by the window, holding the blanket just far enough away from the glass to give him a view out on to the narrow, crowded street. He was listening intently to what Durand said, but his eyes were mostly on the good people of Leith. He absently scratched at the cuff of the overly tight shirt he wore. Agnes had found him some clothes to replace the harlequin costume, but they did not fit him well.
Agnes, though, smiled and nodded encouragingly to the Frenchman. He sat on the bed, cocooned in her blankets, hugging them to him as if desperate for protection against the iciest of blasts.
“Tablets that were gathered together in Egypt,” Durand continued, “long before the days of Alexander, long before the rise of Rome. Two thousand years they lay buried in the dust of empire, until it was my privilege to uncover them, following in the wake of Napoleon’s armies. To become their… I do not know the word. Keeper? No, not quite. Custodian, perhaps. I took them from Egypt to France, and from France, when the time came, to England, and then here.”
“Are you following all this?” Quire asked Agnes, without looking away from the bustling scene outside the window.
“Close enough,” she said.
Her pipe had been lit for several minutes now, and had filled the room with floating strata of fine smoke, undulating slowly.
“I fell in with John Ruthven,” Durand said, suppressing a cough and pulling his blankets tighter about him. “By chance, or by fate. He was the magister. The chief of our quartet: me, Ruthven, Carlyle, Blegg.”
Quire turned aside from the window then, irresistibly summoned by those names, which between them held all the answers he so desired. Durand, Ruthven, Carlyle, Blegg. There was the skein in need of untangling.
“Carlyle made the equipment,” Durand said. “The electrical equipment. I did not entirely understand it, then or now, but there is galvanic stimulation of nerves. The heart is made to beat once more, do you see?”
Durand’s bleary eyes were weeping, though whether it was from sickness, or sorrow, or fear, Quire did not know. Agnes gestured with her pipe for Durand to continue, and he obediently did so. He was a husk of a man, much reduced in stature and will. Resigned, Quire suspected, to death. Or worse.
“Others in Italy and Germany, and my own homeland, showed it long ago: the movement of a corpse when electrical force is passed through it. Ruthven found a way to harness it, though. To make use of it. That was the greatest of his insights.
“So. Carlyle to make the equipment. Ruthven to apply it. They began with dogs, before ever I became a party to their enterprise. Ruthven had crude magics, then. He was… fumbling, you would say; fumbling in the dark. But he is a Prometheus, make no mistake. He found light, out there in that dark, and brought it forth. He learned to do things that surpass the wildest dreams of the ancients, and the most unlikely hopes of the present.”
Quire returned his attention to the street. The life of Leith continued outside, oblivious and indifferent to the madness being described in the little room. He was envious of the mundane concerns he knew ran through the men and women going up and down the narrow street: the simple desires and hungers, the vague hopes and small sadnesses. He would much rather have himself filled up with such things than with the memories and the furies and the fears that occupied him now.
“A great man,” Durand was saying, “but one who succumbed to temptation. He had to reach further, deeper. He began to work upon human corpses. He wanted to restore life. No; more than that. He wanted to restore souls. It was a noble ambition. So I thought, when I became privy to it. But he had not succeeded. His experiments… well, let us say no more than that they did not succeed. Except Blegg. Blegg is different.”
“What about Blegg?” Quire asked sharply.
“A moment, please.” Durand coughed, a loose rattle in his chest. “I will come to the matter of Blegg in a moment. I allied myself with Ruthven, and I brought my own secrets. Recipes for preservative elixirs, something for the hearts that Carlyle’s machines revived to pump around the body. Invocations and bindings, recorded on tablets older even than Egypt; transcribed on to the hands of the corpses, they bind an animating force to the flesh.”
“Not a soul, though,” Agnes said quietly, and Durand hung his head. Shivered.
“No, not a soul. Never a soul. In that, we all fell short of our ambitions. Formless, mindless things that we brought forth and incarnated in the dead. Animating force, nothing more. Fierce. Savage, without the dominating will of a mind to guide it. And never lasting. Always, the bindings failed in time; the body failed. Then it was burned, and the next was begun.”
“You dug up graves to get the bodies,” Quire said.
“
“Aye.”
“It became too much for Carlyle. He took to drinking, then tried to remove himself from the affair entirely. The dogs did it for him. Anyway, after your exploits at Duddingston, the grave robbing stopped. Of late they have been buying bodies, letting others do the digging—or the killing, I know not which—on their behalf. They’ve abandoned the farm, brought the apparatus to Ruthven’s house, in the cellar. Blegg pays a man called Hare, and the corpses… well, they appear in Melville Street.”
“You say Blegg is something different, though?” rasped Quire, his impatience rising like bile. “Not like these other… creatures Ruthven has made?”
“Blegg.
“You understand: it is not Blegg, not his mind or his spirit, that occupies his form. Whoever Blegg was, he died before I ever met him. I never knew quite how, though I always had the feeling that he was somehow the first real victim in all of this. Anyway, Ruthven, in his careless explorations, woke something else in Blegg’s corpse. Invited something in. Something that is much more than the dull animal spirits of the others.”
“Do you believe all of this?” Quire asked Agnes softly.
She had sat quite still all through Durand’s speech, save for the flex in her cheeks and lips as she drew smoke down into her chest and let it leak out again. She blinked, very slowly, very heavily, and looked up.
“Maybe,” she said.
She pointed at the morose Frenchman with the stem of her pipe.
“Look at him. Sick to the very root of him, and it’s no natural sickness, I can tell you that.”
“No,” Durand grunted. “It is Blegg, telling me to come home. Like a man calling out for his straying dog. He and Ruthven think—wrongly, as it happens, but no matter—they think there are further secrets I can yet uncover for them. If I do not heed his call, I will be dead long before I could offer testimony at any trial of your foes, Monsieur Quire. They are not careless in such matters.”
“Not that any’d give much credence to such testimony in these times, eh?” Agnes said to Quire. “Not talk of dead men rising, and spells dug up out of deserts.”
“No. There’ll be no trial, I think.”
He absently let the blanket fall back across the window.
“I have to go,” he muttered. “I have to find Dunbar. You’re sure you’re willing to watch over Durand?”
“Aye.” Agnes nodded. “They’ll not find him here, and it might be I can do something for his fever.”
