It was with a sense of relief that the group heard Cathaline’s announcement that she was ready. She handed out the remainder of the flash bombs, and showed Grindle the fuse that would ignite the first firework and thus begin the sequence. And so, leaving Grindle and Armand behind, the wych-hunters began to make their way into the dank throat of the wight’s stalking-ground.
“The moment you see it, throw a firework,” Cathaline advised. “Wights are slow, and your Wards will protect you for a few seconds, but it only takes a touch...
Thaniel ran his finger along the jingling array of small metal charms that hung beneath his shirt. They were the wych-hunters last line of defence; if everything else failed, you could only hope that one of the Warded charms about your person could fend off whatever wych-kin was coming at you. Sometimes they all worked, sometimes none. With the Cradlejack, because it was hosted in a flesh-and-blood body, they were ineffective. With a wight, who could say?
The spread of their lamplight seemed terribly small as they moved away from the small island of illumination in which Grindle and Armand waited. Soon, they had rounded a curve in the sewer, and then there was only the two of them, the shutters on their lanterns thrown open and their eyes darting about. The soft sliding of the water to their right seemed to increase in volume as the silence settled. They had only the width of the slippery path between the moist wall and the foetid sludge of the sewers, and the stink that surrounded them was enough to keep Thaniel on the verge of retching.
Minutes passed, marked only by the sound of the water and their near-silent footsteps. Thaniel felt his nerves tautening like the strings on a cello, twining up to the point of snapping.
“Ssh,” Cathaline hissed, and Thaniel froze.
For long moments, nothing. Then they heard it. A tiny rattling noise, as of teeth chattering very faintly. Cathaline held up her arm, pulling back her sleeve to reveal a bracelet of tiny coloured squares of bone threaded together by catgut. She pulled it off and held it up. Sure enough, the bones were jittering, clacking against each other.
“Have you ever seen that before?” she asked Thaniel.
“What Ward did you use on the bracelet?”
“Manderils Paradigm.”
“That is for detecting deildegasts,” Thaniel said.
“And apparently it works on wights, too,” she said with a grin. “Who would have thought it? Another piece of lore goes down in the name of Cathaline Bennett.”
“Congratulate yourself later,” Thaniel said, as the rattling got more pronounced. “It is on its way.”
The darkness was congealing around them, and the hairs on their necks were standing on end. All wych-hunters—or at least those who had survived long enough in the profession—cultivated a wych-sense, recognizing the telltale signs of a presence that were too subtle for most to notice. Now that sense was shrieking at each of them, telling them that something invisible was near, something that would only show itself as it passed into the range of their light.
“There! Thaniel, to your left!” Cathaline cried, and she thrust the fuse of her flash bomb into the flame of her lamp at the same moment.
Thaniel whirled to face the blank, stony curve of the sewer wall, his eyes catching the faintest movement, and in the merest fraction of a second he registered the shadow reaching down the wall towards him, five hideously long fingers of darkness on either side. With a cry, he dropped and rolled aside, his lantern smashing as he landed and sending a flaming slick of oil racing over the edge of the path and on to the water. A moment later, the flash bomb ignited, and the tunnel was blasted with blinding white. Thaniel was looking up at the wight as the bomb erupted, and the image of the thing was burned on to his already beleaguered retinas.
For long seconds, he was blind. Something shrieked a terrible howl, the cry of the wight as it was caught in the light, but all he could see was the shape of his attacker, descending with its long body, hands with spindly fingers half the length of the entire shadow, reaching towards him with a spidery grip of decay.
“Thaniel!” called Cathaline, and he felt her arms underneath him, pulling him to his feet.
“I am all right,” he insisted, blinking. The flash was receding to the edges of his vision now, and he could see again. “Which way did it go?”
“That way,” Cathaline said. “Back towards Grindle.”
“Grindle!” Thaniel cried, the volume of his voice making Cathaline flinch. “ It is coming your way!”
He ran up the path, Cathaline following. There was no time to waste on recovery; Thaniel was not even quite clear on what had happened, but he guessed that the flash had made the wight flee. He stayed close to Cathaline, for she held the lamp that was all between them and complete darkness—and perversely, safety from the wych-kin that they chased.
“ Grindle! Light the fuses!” he shouted, but as they rounded the corner the answer came back as a strangled wail, a howl of utter horror as the wight fell on the elderly beggar. Thaniel felt his blood turn to ice in his veins as they came into sight of Grindle and Armand, and saw for the first time the wight in full.
It was a terrible, shifting, amorphous thing, stretching thin and breaking and reforming like liquid as it moved, a clot of darkness that bled along the walls and path of the sewer, darkening the lantern light. Each hand was fully the size of its narrow body, impossibly out of proportion, and it had no head to speak of, only a pair of smouldering dots that approximated eyes and were buried in what might be called its chest. Great long legs with sharp knees completed the mockery of a shape that it possessed, such as those stick-figures cast by humans at the end of the day, when the sun is low and the shadows lengthy.
The wych-kin was on Grindle, holding him, enwrapping him, seeming to go through him with its blade-like fingers. Thaniel averted his eyes to preserve his sanity, but the single second that his eyes had lingered on the unfortunate beggar was enough to shake him to his heart. Flesh crinkling and blackening, teeth coming loose and falling, Grindle rotting before them...
“Armand!” Cathaline cried, as the simple-minded giant got up from where he had tripped and fallen in fright some distance away, intending to throw off the horror that held his friend. “No, you idiot!”
Thaniel was fumbling with a flash bomb. He pulled Cathaline to a halt so that he could light the fuse on her lamp, and flung it down the path as far as he could, hoping to reach the dark thing that now dropped the husk of Grindle and turned on the giant. Cathaline raced past him, heading for the master fuse that would ignite the network of flash bombs. Thaniel’s bomb skittered towards them, hit a kink in the stone path, and bounced into the sludgy sewer water, extinguished.
Cathaline had reached Grindle’s body now, and she touched her lamp to the fuse of the flash-bomb chain that Grindle had been too slow to initiate. The wight, occupied with Armand’s approach, ignored her as the short fuse began to fizz, and a second later the fireworks went off.
Thaniel and Cathaline had averted their eyes this time, but the light was so bright that they could see the traceries of red capillaries in their lids. The wight shrieked, a noise that sawed through the marrow of the wych-hunters and made them shudder, but it was caught in an illumination too intense to escape this time. With a fading wail, it was annihilated and as the flash faded, so did the wight.
Two lamps still burned; Cathaline’s, and one that Armand had left on the floor when he went to aid his companion. As the dazzle faded to the gentle glow of the lamplight, casting its moist sheen across the rank sewer, a sound could be heard, a quiet sobbing.
Armand was kneeling next to the necrotic remains of Grindle, pressing his cheek next to the shrivelled skull of his dead friend and hitching up great sobs from his chest.
PERRIS THE BOAR
ELISANDER AND SANFORTH
MAYCRAFT GETS A CALL 13
Crott’s chambers nestled at the centre of the labyrinth that comprised the Beggar Lord’s territory. The route to them was under dripping stone arches, up throug
h basements and down through trapdoors, through tunnels and gates guarded by burly, unkempt sentries, and without a guide they would have been impossible to find. Here was the heart of his small empire, and the seat of his power, hidden where no other Beggar Lord might find it. There was scarcely the need to blindfold the wych-hunters as they were led into Crott’s presence; they could not have found their way back if they had tried.
The chambers themselves were plush treasure troves, the stone walls draped in furs and finery, a monument to overdecoration. Crott seemed to have a fully fledged magpie instinct that led him to collect anything shiny and gaudy, and the four interlinked rooms that formed his home were so cluttered with cheap vases and ornaments that there was scarcely space to walk through them. The room where he sat now was lit by gas lamps, and contained an assortment of odd furniture sat around a low table, with a stuffed leopard snarling out from behind one arm of the settee and rugs tangling the feet and hanging along the walls. It was quite unlike any place Thaniel had ever seen, with the possible exception of Cathaline’s attic.
There were five of them here now. Crott in his favourite chair of polished wood and dark green cushions; Cathaline and Thaniel on a settee together; Alaizabel sitting in another chair of mismatched green; and Devil-boy Jack, standing. They were arranged in a loose circle around the table, on which sat decanters of wine and spirits. All of them held a glass full of rich red Chianti, and as Crott raised his glass in a toast, they followed.
“To Grindle,” he said. “A sad loss.” With that, they all drank, and when the toast was over, they waited expectantly. Crott had summoned them all, directly after they had emerged from the sewers.
“Business, then,” he said. “I believe it is time we had a meeting of the minds, my good friends. It seems that all of us are up against something. Indeed I don’t wonder if London has not been up against something ever since the Vernichtung, and there’s a sight too many secrets being kept around here. So I have brought us together to talk, to discuss... to plan.” He drank from his glass, and then leaned forward to his listeners. “Even I can see that something dark is afoot in London. The signs are all around us. And what is bad for London is bad for me and my men. I would like you to share with me what you know, and after that... I have arranged a meeting with a friend of mine who will be able to tell you all you need to know about Miss Cray’s past and the whereabouts of her parents.”
Alaizabel looked up.
“He will meet you at five o’clock tomorrow, in the Green Angel Inn, south of the river. In the meantime, you are my guests. Thaniel, you may accompany her. That is all. He’s very nervous when it comes to meeting new people. That’s why he’s still alive.”
And so it was that Thaniel and Alaizabel came to be crossing the great sullen gush of the Thames, its waters a putrid green-brown murk as it flowed beneath the great old bridge that spanned it. The day was bright and almost warm, and sailors rolled up the sleeves of their shirts and stood on the decks of their steamers as they laboured upriver towards the docks. The gates of Battersea Bridge stood open, as they always did during the day, the Peelers at guard on either side, in their taut black uniforms.
Thaniel cast a critical eye over the defences, examining the double row of spiked railings that ran across the midriff of the bridge. The last line of resistance between north London and the Old Quarter, there was one on every span crossing the Thames. The Peelers stood here every night with their swords and pistols, minding the gates, but it was really a pointless task now. The wolves were canny enough not to try and cross the bridges, and wych-kin had other ways. Thaniel suspected they were using the Underground, travelling the tunnels beneath the river. Ironic, really; everybody hailed the subterranean trains as a masterpiece of city planning. Then the wych-kin came. Nobody with any sense went down into the Underground after sunset now. For anyone but a wych-hunter it was literally suicide.
They passed over Battersea Bridge and into Battersea. It was odd how the Old Quarter was still a teeming bustle of life during the day, yet deserted at night. The residents of London refused to cede their territory completely, and the preposterously cheap rent in the infested streets south of the Thames meant that people swarmed there. Goods were cheaper, because the shopkeepers and market sellers had lower overheads to pay. There were less police; the Peelers—so named after their founder, Sir Robert Peel—staying mainly on the north side. The Old Quarter had become a haven for those who tiptoed on the thin end of the law. It was not a respectable area of London, and considerably more dangerous than the streets across the river—for muggers and cut-throats did not stick to the night hours like wych-kin did—but for those willing to take the risk, it was a place brimming with opportunity.
“Where did the wych-kin come from?” Alaizabel asked, as they headed towards Lambeth.
“What do you mean?” Thaniel replied, only half-listening as he jostled his way past an aggressive apple-seller.
“Well, they have always been here as long as I remember. But there must have been a time that they weren’t. I’m sure I read about it somewhere.”
They turned on to a quieter thoroughfare, between two high terraces of crumbling buildings, where only a few people hurried about and the odd juggler or muffin-man plied their trade.
“Nobody knows for sure,” he said. “It was not long ago. Twenty years, maybe.”
“That is all?”
Thaniel nodded. “I do not even know how it began. Few people talk about it. Some dispute over naval territory with the Prussians, I believe. Things were looking like war, then...” Alaizabel frowned briefly. “The Vernichtung.”
It was a seldom-spoken word in Britain; nobody liked to be reminded of failure, and Thaniel was careful never to mention the Vernichtung around people he didn’t know in London. In fact, he was a little surprised that he had spoken of it to Alaizabel, and he was relieved that she chose not to take offence.
It meant destruction in the language of their aggressors. The Prussian Empire was particularly strong at the time, fresh from having crushed France; they were full of swagger and strength. A minor dispute with the British—the only nearby Empire of comparable muscle—was escalated to a major incident. Historians suspected that the Prussian Chancellor was merely looking for an excuse to test his new technology, the secret pride of the country. Airships.
The first that the British public knew about them was when a fleet of the dark, silver shapes arrived one night over London, coming in along the estuary and fanning out over the capital. It was too dark to see them, but people woke and looked fearfully to the sky, seeking the source of the dull, sinister drone that surrounded them.
The bombs came afterward, crude bundles of explosives that blasted the city and shattered buildings. The noise was terrifying, sending people screaming into the streets or huddling paralysed in their beds. Never before had anything so destructive been witnessed by the folk of London, and to have it turned on them was enough to make them quail.
The bombing went on for two weeks before Parliament capitulated and allowed the Prussians to win their dispute. British pride had been crushed; they did not even dare declare war for fear of the airships that hovered above them. The airships returned to their home, but the scars never healed.
“That was when the wych-kin came?”
Thaniel rubbed the back of his neck. “That is what they say. Some people think they were imprisoned deep underground, and an explosion set them loose. Some say they are God’s revenge for letting the Prussians bomb St Paul’s Cathedral into rubble.”
“But what do you think?”
“It does not matter where they came from,” said Thaniel. “All that matters is how to get rid of them.”
“I think it does matter,” said Alaizabel. “You need to know the nature of your opponent if you want to defeat it.”
“Be that as it may, you are correct; that was when the wych-kin came. At first, nobody believed they were there at all. Doctors said they were merely ghosts of the brain,
things witnessed by bomb-shocked survivors of the Vernichtung—it was especially savage around the area of Camberwell, where little was left standing.”
He talked to her as they followed the streets to the old inn where they were to meet Crott’s acquaintance, telling her of how the wych-kin thrived in the broken streets of bomb-torn Camberwell, how they benefitted from Parliament’s reluctance to believe they existed. The Prime Minister was more concerned with repairing bomb damage in the centre of the city; the less prosperous south side could wait. That was a mistake. In a year, Camberwell was called “the dead walk”. In two, it was uninhabitable. A plague of rats struck the city then, bringing with them a cruel disease called trench fever, characterized by a drying of the skin on the face and hands so that it split into little gullies, at the bottom of which was raw pink flesh. The epidemic rampaged through London for the next eighteen months, until a particularly vicious winter killed it off, and the rats with it.
Scholars of wychlore today argued whether the rats were somehow connected to the wych-kin, or whether it was merely an unfortunate coincidence that they arrived at the same time that the wych-kin did. Maybe, if there had not been a city-wide epidemic to deal with, the wych-kin could have been contained. But Parliament had their hands full, and so the wych-kin multiplied and spread, moving subtly, unnoticed. By the time the trench fever had been brought under control, the wych-kin had permeated the greater portion of south London, and there were now too many to shift.
But it was not only London that suffered under the attentions of the wych-kin, though London was the first and the worst of all the cities. Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and Glasgow were now burdened with the same yoke, although they had the problem adequately under control. New York, Philadelphia and New Orleans already had their own thriving population of wych-hunters. Almost every country’s capital had some kind of infestation. The Vernichtung might have marked the start of it, but the wych-kin had spread since then, growing where the population gathered thickest. The world’s best scholars of wychcraft couldn’t explain how it had happened. Why was it that they only appeared in the biggest cities? Were they being spread like a virus, or appearing spontaneously? Nobody could say.