I'm acting more on intuition than intellect. Many would think it madness to place so much faith in a dream and I might be completely wrong in my reading of the situation. Do you at least understand my reasoning?”
The brass man nodded his canister-shaped head.
Cloud enveloped them.
Burton sent Pox back to Swinburne.
He checked his harness. He was tightly strapped in.
“I hope your calculations are accurate,” he said.
Another lever was pulled. All along the back edges of the wings, wide but thin metal feathers emerged. The machine's nose rose and its silent, powerless descent slowed dramatically.
The king's agent was shaken by a thrill of fear. He could see nothing but thick vapour. For all he knew, they were seconds away from smashing into the ground.
He reached down and released four grappling hooks from the fuselage. They were attached to it by means of long, thin chains. He held two hooks in each hand and waited.
In front of him, a mechanical arm rose. At its end, three fingers and a thumb were extended.
The thumb curled in.
Four.
A finger folded.
Three.
Another.
Two.
The last.
One.
The roof of a large edifice rose up out of the miasma. With bone-jarring suddenness, the ornithopter thumped onto it and skidded across its surface, metal squealing, sparks showering outward.
Feeling as if he was being shaken half to death, Burton threw a grapple; then the second; then the third.
The right wing collided with a chimney stack, sending the machine slewing sideways as bricks exploded and bounced around it.
He flung the last grapple overboard, hung on tight, and called upon Allah.
The vehicle grated across the roof, hit the parapet, went straight through it, and plummeted over the edge.
There was a moment of weightless terror, a shriek of stressed metal, and a tremendous jolt that caused Burton's face to slap into the back of his valet's head.
He blacked out.
Disorientation.
Eyes coming back into focus.
The harness was digging into his chest. He sucked in a shuddering breath, shook his head to clear it, and looked to his left and right. The ornithopter was hanging against the side of the building, between the big, flat, white letters “A” and “R” of the sign, VENETIA ROYAL HOTEL. The machine's wings were buckled, and the left one had broken through a window.
Screams and shouts echoed up through the fog. There was obviously a battle occurring in the Strand below.
“Good show!” the king's agent muttered.
He braced his feet against moldings in the fuselage, gripped the lip of the saddle, checked that his cane was still securely thrust through a loop in the waistband of his trousers, and unbuckled his harness.
“Are you all right?” he asked the man of brass.
He received a nodded response.
“I'm going up. Follow.”
Transferring his grasp to one of the taut chains from which the flying machine hung, he swung free and pulled himself up hand-over-hand until he reached the roof. With a sense of relief, he hauled himself onto its flat surface.
Moments later, the clockwork man joined him.
Burton saw that three of the four grapples had caught fast amid brickwork. The fourth had crashed through a skylight and jammed against its frame.
“That's our means of entry,” he said, pacing over and looking down through the broken glass into an unlit room. “It's some sort of presentation hall. Slightly too long a drop for me, but you'll make it. Get down there and drag over a table for me to land on.”
This was done, and from the large room, Burton and his clockwork companion passed through a door into a hallway.
The Venetia Royal Hotel was dark and silent, and the top floor, which consisted entirely of offices, meeting rooms, and storerooms, was entirely abandoned.
They came to a wide staircase and descended to the next floor. Burton looked up at the ceiling. There was something clinging to it. It reminded him of the thick jungle vines he'd seen in Africa, except that it was pulsing and writhing and, somehow, no matter how hard he peered at it, it evaded proper focus, as if it wasn't entirely a substance of this world.
It was ectoplasm. It exuded through the top of the double doors leading to the corridors and rooms, snaked across the ceiling, and disappeared into the stairwell.
“Is it coming up the stairs or going down, I wonder?” he murmured.
He stepped over to the doors and pushed them open. Gas lamps, in brackets on the walls, illuminated the hallway beyond.
There were eight residential rooms on each side of this particular passage. Their doors were open. Ectoplasm twisted out of each one and joined the thick limb of stuff on the ceiling.
Burton clenched his jaw nervously, crept up to the first chamber, and peered in. Its furniture had been pushed aside but for a large table. Seven chairs stood around it. Only one was occupied. The remains of a man sat in it. He was mummified, his skin shrunken and desiccated, his sharp cheekbones poking through. His head was thrown back and ectoplasm was issuing from his mouth and rising up to the ceiling.
“Bismillah!” Burton whispered, entering. “There was a seance, and it doesn't look like this fellow survived it!”
He bent and looked at the man's face, then jerked back with a cry of shock, bumping into his companion, as the mummy's eyes flicked open and rolled sightlessly.
“Alive, by God! How long has the poor devil been here?”
He turned to his valet. “I have a horrible feeling it's going to be the same story in the other rooms.”
It was. On the seventh floor of the Venetia, in every room, there was a table at which a seance had been performed, and at every table there sat one shrunken, dried-out man, with head back and ectoplasm streaming out of him up to the ceiling and out into the corridor.
When they descended to the sixth floor, they found the same, though the ectoplasm was more abundant.
On the fifth, it was even thicker and glowed slightly with a greenish-hued light. It had crawled down the walls, forming strange organic shapes reminiscent of ribs and veins and quivering organs.
The fourth floor was worse: walls, ceilings, fixtures, and fittings were so completely buried beneath the pulsating substance that it seemed to Burton as if he and his valet were making their way through the arteries of a living organism.
Cautiously, the king's agent led the way to the stairwell. The route down to the third floor resembled the gullet of a mythical beast.
“Stepping into the dragon's maw,” Burton muttered.
He took the step.
Something touched his mind.
“ You should be dead! ” a voice hissed inside his skull.
He felt the devastating force of Madam Blavatsky's presence.
