Sovereigns of the Collapse Book 2

of tortuous back alleys. What was more, he could do it at night, from long practice as a miscreant teenager, provided he could locate the entrance to the right alley. This proved to be frustrating in the dark streets. After a certain amount of retracing his steps up and down the main boulevard near his parents’ house, a lone limousine emerged from a side lane and shone its headlights across a water trough and peculiar-shaped tree he recognised. This gave him an exact fix to the alley he was trying to find. From there, his memory proved accurate. So many paces, feel for a corner with a brick missing at waist level, follow the wall to the smell of cess tank, cross and take the passage, running hands along both walls until the end. Here he had to push his way through a thick hedge with an iron fence in it. Evidently, no one had used the secret route since he last had as a teenager, for it proved to be a tough squeeze, even after leaving the bow outside. He stood up inside the garden of his upbringing. In silence, he removed his boots, tied them by the laces and hung them around his neck.

Not a glimmer showed from the main house just twenty yards in front of him. From the summer house nearby came a smell of coal fire, which he thought peculiar. Who would use a summer house in November? After several minutes of gathering the scene, he advanced with toes out to test the surface ahead. Stooped, his hands out sweeping ahead, he edged up the lawn until he came to flag stones and then a brick wall. This was wall of the Annex, a bungalow built on to the rear of the sandstone main house for his grandmother, who had died when he was eight. It might now be used for servants’ quarters, so he crept to the right, towards the front of the house.

The total silence and darkness of the house unnerved him. Even late in the evening, there ought to have been some clangs from the boiler house, the smell of cigarettes, perhaps a banjo in the servants’ quarters in the basement. The windows of the ground floor were not shuttered, nor were curtains drawn, the rooms were simply dead dark within. What truly shook him was on moving around to the front porch, his probing fingers discovered that the front door was ajar and inside was as dark as outside. It seemed the house had been completely abandoned.

Lawrence crouched in the porch, trying to think this through. With the gates of the Grande Enceinte and the internal district frontiers all open, decent society had no safety features at all to keep the slummies out. Perhaps everyone had evacuated. Where might they have gone? A breach of the Grande Enceinte left few places to run to. Possibly some would have achieved asylum in the Mayfair estates of their sovereign benefactors. Every sovereign kept a force of marines as an ultimate safety feature.

This still did not explain why the house had been left with the front door open.

He edged inside on hands and knees, deciding within a few moments there could be no danger here. The air was cold and lacked any smell of cooking or coal fires. He found the kitchen range dead and the house batteries so run down that the one cupboard light he tried achieved only a feeble orange glow. The dining table was clear. The library informed him of nothing, except its freshness had not been sullied by pipe smoke in a long time. The emptiness of the garage was no surprise, as his parents would not have departed their house on foot like common slummies. Father must have sent the household staff home, leaving the basement was silent. That would explain all the people out in the streets—many houses must have dismissed their staff once the trouble started. Up on the first floor, Lawrence walked into a new mystery. The master’s bedroom carried a slight hint of lemons and cinnamon. That was the smell of Sarah-Kelly. He frowned and shook his head in the dark. It was proving to be a bizarre night!

He sat on his parent’s bed amid the smell of Sarah-Kelly and considered a dilemma. His father would not return until the Grande Enceinte was secured by glory troops again, however to wait that long meant being trapped inside the Central Enclave. His combat instincts railed against being cut off from retreat. He could—

He fell back on the bed laughing at the ceiling. It was such a fabulous idea, charismatic in its insolence. He would get over to Bermondsey asylum and hunt rodents. The particular rodent he had in mind was about six foot three and the meanest bastard that ever scuttled from a sewer: Captain Prentice Nightminster. Should he commit himself to an old rumour from the Value System? Well who would have made up the name Prentice for a villain like The Captain? It was too absurd not to be true. Did The Captain sip tea with his old mum in a twee little terraced house? How would that scathing bigot’s face react when Big Stak came at him with a carving knife?

His levity dissipated, to leave the hard truth that his decision now determined the rest of his life. In fact, the decision extended far beyond his own life. He sensed the hopeless miseries of Spiderman and Mirror-Face still trapped in the Value System and the hundreds of others like them. Lawrence’s escape brought its own responsibilities. The most basic one was to remain true to his purpose to expose the Value System to the world and free its population. His own father was far and away the best chance. It galled him to have to come back home at the age of twenty-seven and fall on his father’s charity. He would never have done it but for the poor bastards still