something dreadful afoot.
The Rider cut through one corner of Hidepark, and for months afterward there was a black scar in the lush greenery near the Cumber Gate, one the quality affected not to see as they drove past on their daily promenades.
Then she turned, sharply, to the north, wheeling as a giant bird will. None but the tide of half- seen crystalline shades following her witnessed the helmed head lift, as if she studied the heavens, searching for … what? What could such a being be chasing, on such a night?
Whatever it was, she found it. For sudden tension bloomed in the Rider’s figure, and her scaled gauntlets tightened on the reins. The Khloros’s massive head rose, too, as if it could taste the spectral traces of a traitor’s passage against the velvet-yellow clouds reflecting Londinium’s nightly glow. The pale horse champed, and its hoofbeats took on new urgency.
A final Word broke free of the Rider’s throat. It was feathered with diamond ice, a weightless sound, and the dead flowed forward, streaming around the Khloros. The Rider shimmered as if under cold heavy oil, fog flash-freezing and scattering sparks of foxfire sorcery. The Pale Horse’s hooves hit a billowing cushion of vapour, and its bulk heaved up with a gasping-fish leap.
Khloros and Rider flew, on a white-billowing cloud of the dead. Their melting shadow touched the earth below, terribly black and crisp though there was precious little light to cast it. A withering stole through the dark hole of that shadow, and as they flew, the living in houses underneath cowered without knowing quite why.
It was over two hundred miles to Dinas Emrys, and the Rider had to reach it by dawn. As long as the strength holding the ætheric conduit open held, the Khloros would bear her.
Following a gryphon-borne traitor, Death flew from Londinium.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Man Only Dies Once
Ears ringing, blood slicking his face, Clare staggered upright. That is precisely the problem with cannon. Difficult to aim, especially when firing from a suspended carriage. He shook his head, and Valentinelli was suddenly before him, crouching and bloody. The man’s thin-lipped mouth moved, his dark hair half singed and wildly disarranged. Clare blinked, realising he was deaf.
Temporarily, or …
As if in response, the world poured into his ears once more. A sudden overwhelming welter of noise scored through his tender skull, threatening to turn his brain into thin gargling soup. His knees hit the smoking dirt, and Sigmund appeared, a thread of bright blood sliding down his filthy, soot-stained face.
Clare strained to deduce, but his faculties would not obey. The coja, false friend, had turned on him. Whatever bolt the immense arachnid mecha had fired at them was no help either.
The bolt. Electrical in some fashion? The mecha was swimming in electrical force; the capacitors are maintaining at a high rate. The core! Masters’s core!
The thought was driftwood to a drowning man. He clung to it, his mental grasp tightening with the strength of desperation.
A shifting stream of values! That’s it!
For a blinding moment he saw it all – the Blackwerks, where every difference was a range, not an orderly single value. The trouble was not irrationality. Rather, it was rationality not wide enough to contain what it saw.
The world is wider, Horatio, than is dreamed of in your philosophy.
The pressure in his skull eased all at once. Marvellous relief, sensory information behaving as it should now, and he opened his eyes to find the Neapolitan’s pox-scarred face above his. He had fallen; the assassin had caught him, and even now held him. The ground was charred, soot rising in fine dancing black flakes, the hedges blackened and crisped, peeled back in a perfect circle that had just missed them. Had Valentinelli not knocked them aside and held Sigmund down, all three of them might have been caught in the blast, instead of on its smoke-crisped margin.
The earth was quiet now, settling itself after a violation. The only hint of thunder was far in the distance, and one could not be sure it was not merely one’s nerves echoing after a sustained assault.
Calculate the stride length. The arachnid will have to pace slowly for the smaller mecha, but they will not grow tired. Sub-equations in the core will take care of that – how is it speaking to the receivers? An invisible signal, bringing it into range – pure electricity? No, and not magnetism either. Perhaps some blend of the two? How? Is it sorcery? No, the logic engine will not allow for that; the brains in the casks atop it must not be Altered then. I must have more data.
Valentinelli’s mouth was still moving. Sigmund nodded, leaned down –
– and slapped Clare. Not lightly, either, his work-hardened palm cracking against Clare’s cheek.
The shock snapped Clare’s head aside, and he thudded back into his body with a sound akin to a carriage wheel jolting through a pothole. “Thank you,” he gasped. “Dear heavens, that was uncomfortable.”
The Neapolitan relaxed slightly. He swore in Italian, more as a means of expressing his happiness than anything else. Clare blinked and found his body would obey him, gained his feet with Valentinelli’s help, and spotted his hat among some smoking shrubbery.
“Spinne!” Sigmund crowed. “Did you see that, Archie? Bastards built a Spinne! And what a beautiful beast. We hunt them down, ja? Hunt them and see how they made the fräulein Spinne!”
Bending over to retrieve his hat was problematic, but Clare managed it, and turned to survey the smoking pile of rubbish that had once been a reasonably nice, if somewhat decrepit, manor house. “Indubitably.”
“La strega do not pay enough for this,” the assassin muttered darkly. “That thing. Diavolo.” And, of all things, the assassin crossed himself in the manner of the Papists.
“Twenty guineas,” Clare reminded him, a trifle more jollily than he felt. “And you said you’d take on the Devil himself, my princely friend.”
“Twenty guinea is not enough.” The man’s accent had settled into what Clare suspected might be his true voice – clipped and cultured, but with the song of his native tongue rubbing under unmusical Queen’s Britannic. “That was not a cannonball, signor.”
“Nor was it a kiss on the cheek.” Clare jammed his hat atop his head. The reek of singed hair, singed greenery, boiled rock, and dust was immense. If Valentinelli knew he was missing his eyebrows, he gave no sign of it – and Clare wondered if he might be missing his own. “Come, gentlemen. We must find the horses, if they have not bolted. We have work to do.”
“Wait. That – that thing.” Valentinelli’s hands were tense and his clothing still steamed. His coat was sadly the worse for wear, and his dark hair was scorched as well. All in all, they were a rather sorry and raffish bunch by now. “How you plan on stopping it? What it doing, eh, signor? And what you propose we do?”
Sig stared in the direction the vast mecha had gone, his broad rough hands working on empty air as if he had the builder of such a contraption by the throat.
Clare took stock of himself, patting his pockets. His pistol had not discharged, thank goodness. His watch was still in its accustomed place, and he drew it forth, noted the time, and wound it, a soothingly habitual set of motions. “First we find the horses.” He replaced the watch and pulled his cuffs down, brushed at his frock coat. He stamped, doing what he could to rid his boots of dust and char. Miss Bannon’s money was still secure. “Then we visit the quarry three miles from here. If luck is on our side, there will be a mecha there we can steal, for the range of values will no doubt have excluded some of those built.” He paused. “If not, we shall think of something. Then we hie ourselves to Londinium and do our best to nip a rebellion in the bud.”
