replaced them with raw, formless spirits whose nature he did not understand.
Except Blegg, of course. What Ruthven had instilled in Blegg’s corpse was of different substance. It was a soul, indisputably. An old, immutable presence that brought with it appetites and insights and whispered memories and promises. Now, though, Ruthven began to doubt whether he had even called forth what resided in Blegg’s form in the first place. It may be that it had come of its own accord.
He had killed Blegg with his own hands. Strangled him. His submissive, obedient thrall, aghast at the wonders Carlyle’s machines and Ruthven’s magical knowledge performed upon the corpses of dogs, had discovered an unwonted courage. Threatened all manner of scandal. And thus became the first human subject for Ruthven’s experiments. It had seemed a triumph of sorts at the time. Perhaps that had been illusion, Ruthven dully thought.
Down to the entrance hallway he went. Still there was no further sound other than that which he made himself. The ornate mirror standing on the side table caught the light of his lamp. Shadows spun around the walls as he turned. Perhaps it was imagination, but he thought he felt the slightest drift of cold air, easing its way through from the rear of the house. He made to go that way, back towards the kitchen, but stopped. He heard a single, muted scrape, the movement of one thing against another. Brief, almost inaudible.
He went to the top of the dark stairway that led down into the cellars. It had come from down there, that whisper. The door to the store room in which all his secrets were stowed was locked. The walking corpse within should not have been able to escape it; yet they were strong, those things, and unpredictable.
Heart sinking at what he might find, Ruthven went down. The darkness fled before him, swirling away into the corners and edges. He stepped out from the stair, and found himself looking down the muzzle of the pistol Adam Quire was pointing at his chest.
Three weeks, Quire had waited, until his ankle was strong again. All of it under Cath’s attentive care.
He had come to loathe the Holy Land: the stink of it, and the noise, and the secret delinquencies practised behind its every door. But he had few choices, and Cath was there. Emma Slight had grown ever less happy at her extended eviction to make room, and peace, for Quire, but the Widow made sure her frustrations went no further than bitter looks, should she and Quire happen to pass on the stair. Mary Coulter gave Quire her protection, and that did not sit well with him, but he needed it and took it. She found it amusing, he suspected, to have him there, dependent upon her goodwill.
He and Cath had barely a penny between them, for he had no wage and she, to his unbounded relief, would not work while he was sharing her rooms. They ate sparsely, and drank hardly at all, which was for neither of them an entirely easy abstinence.
Yet it was a strangely happy time. Quire found a certain contentment within him, that was invulnerable to the vicissitudes of each day. It was a still, quiet thing settled into his breast founded upon the sense that he could not choose how this fragment of his life would end, and thus simply let it carry him along and took from it what comfort it offered. He was upon an island, having come out of the stormy sea, and would shortly descend once more into the chaos of rough waters, but for now he was ashore, and not alone.
He could have brought in a decent bit of funds by selling his French pistol and sabre, but those he would not part with, for he knew he would likely have a use for them yet.
“I’ve not treated you well,” Quire murmured, laying a soft kiss on Cath’s brow one night in the bed. “You’d no need to take me in here. I’ve not earned it.”
“No, but I’m a saint,” Cath whispered.
She stroked his neck.
“You’re a rare breed, then.” Quire smiled.
“We all are, aren’t we? There’s not a one of us so alike to another to be called the same. Not when you look proper close.”
“Maybe that’s true.”
Quire rolled, and stretched out an arm to snuff the candle by the bed. The flame vanished between his blunt fingertips, and he felt only the faintest sting of its heat as it departed. The room fell into darkness, so that he could not see her eyes or her hair any more, only feel her skin against his.
“One more thing I’ve got to do,” he said quietly, “and then, with luck, I’m a free man.”
“You’re a free man now.”
“Not quite. I’ve not settled with all those need the settling, not yet. And I’ll have no peace until that’s done. Not from them, not from myself. Once a thing like this is begun, you have to see it through to the finish, or someone else will, and that’s when a man dies. When he lets someone else do the finishing.”
“Hush,” Cath whispered. “Hush.”
And she dispelled the future with just that word, and made it unreal. She chose the present, for both of them, and tied him into it. She closed his lips with a kiss.
So Quire went to Melville Street, to finish it. He had come without knowing precisely what would happen, and that did not trouble him greatly. War had taught him that the world, and whatever fates governed it, did not treat lightly those who thought they knew what was to come. He went because he knew that if he did not, someone would come for him, or no one would; and that latter chance was little better than the first, for if nothing changed he would live for ever in the company of fearful expectation.
He went in through the back of the house, from the dingy lane there. He had looked down the length of Melville Street first, and seen no light in the windows of Ruthven’s house. There were works on the pavements, holes dug for the setting up of gas lamps down the whole length of the street. Some of them stood there already, an abbreviated row of black iron columns, not yet ready to throw out their fierce illumination, but waiting patiently for the new age they were inheriting and fostering to call them into life. The workers had gone home, or gone to their drinking dens. A solitary watchman remained, sitting far down the road on a pile of lifted paving stones. The columns of gas lamps lay in the roadway beside him, like felled trees, roped off and watched over by this one guardian. He wore a thick coat, its collar turned up against the cold night, and had his hat pulled down hard over his head. His lantern put a yellowish tinge over him.
There was little other activity on the street. One or two couples going quietly home. A single drunken gentleman, veering this way and that in his intermittent progress down the pavement, his top hat tilted at an unpromising angle on his head, his walking cane tucked under his arm. Little activity, but still entirely too much for what Quire had in mind, so he went down the dark lane on stealthy feet, and stood listening at the door to Ruthven’s kitchens.
Not a sound. The whole house, rising up above him in its skin of great sandstone blocks, was quite still and silent. Quire knocked in a pane of glass in the nearest window, doing it as gently as he could with the handle of his pistol wrapped in a scarf. It still sounded loud, the thud of the blow and the brittle shatter and spill of glass splinters, but he waited a while longer in the shadows, and no answer came from within. He reached through the broken pane, turned the latch on the window and pushed up its lower half. He pulled himself through, and down on to the stone floor of the kitchen. Glass that had fallen there cut his hand, but he paid it no heed.
The cellar, Durand had said. That was where the truth lay. Perhaps, if he still lived, it was where Blegg lay. Quire went quickly, on the balls of his feet through into the main hallway. The stretch of carpet running down its centre muffled his footsteps. He passed the drawing room where he had first met Ruthven and the others. A hint of light fell from the skylight far above, just a pale blush of the moon. Quire was interested in the narrow stairs leading down into darkness, not the broad, noble flights that rose towards the stars.
The silence of the house, though welcome, was unnerving. It felt heavy, cavernous, as if the place had stood empty and unloved for years. The building had a cold indifference to it. Quire went down into its underbelly with a tightening unease in his breast.
There was only the barest thread of light there, following him down the stairway. He stood still, letting his eyes educate themselves in the gloom, and saw the curve of the ceiling, the rough brickwork of the walls. The emptiness, for there was nothing here. He went cautiously along a narrow, low passageway, looking into one bare room after another, each darker than the last, until he could see almost nothing, and tell only by the still, cold air and the sound of his own breathing that the place was abandoned. Until he came to a heavy door, locked.
Before he could test it, he heard footsteps, coming down to him out of the body of the house. Light was suddenly spilling out of the stairwell. He took a couple of quick paces closer, and levelled his pistol just in time to
