“What happened?” Alaizabel said, after her jaw had stopped shuddering. “To Crott and Armand, I mean? What happened to them?” She directed the question at Jack, who was, ironically, the only one among them who had not been blinded by the darkness.
“They are gone,” the Devil-boy said.
“We know that? Cathaline snapped.
Jack did not react. “Armand became frightened. He ran out of the circle, and he took Crott with him. Perhaps he hoped to save them both. Instead, they saved us. The Draug got their victims.”
“Two men we knew just died,” Cathaline said in amazement. “Do any of you realize that? You discuss their deaths like they were strangers.”
“Lord Crott is gone now,” said the Devil-boy. “None of us but Armand had any special affection for him, and he is gone, too. Save any grieving you feel you must do until this is over. It will do us no good here.”
There was a silence.
“You knew they were to die,” Carver said.
“Yes,” Jack replied.
“How many more of us are to go?” he asked.
“That I will not tell you,” came the reply. “It would influence the outcome.”
The door to the room opened at that moment, and in strode a tall, stout man with a thick white beard and small, piggy blue eyes. He was dressed in an immaculately pressed uniform; a single medal hung at his breast.
“By George!” he bellowed good-naturedly. “Welcome to the lions den!”
General Montpelier was a foghorn of a man, brash and loud and impossible to ignore. He swept around those assembled, shaking hands and introducing himself, seemingly blithely oblivious to the fact that London was being swamped by wych-kin outside the walls of his airstrip. The General was only truly alive when at war, and he was never in a better mood than when the odds were against him.
“Well, well!” he declared. “Came all the way through the tunnels, did you? I wouldn’t have believed it if I couldn’t see you with my own eyes. Which of you is Detective Carver?”
Carver replied that it was he.
“Well, Carver, let’s not waste time. We’re both busy men. Lets talk.”
“In your office,” said Carver. “If you please. I need your signature on the forms to authorize the use of one of your airships.”
“Of course, of course,” he said. “We’ll be back directly.”
The two of them left the room, heading down the corridor to Montpelier’s office. On the way, he enthused about how the wych-kin were laying siege to the place, cursed dog-things that just kept on coming no matter how many you shot down.
“I have to say, Carver, I bloody hope that your letter is the real thing. I’d hate to have you come all this way for nothing.”
“We need that airship, General. The Palace thinks so, too. My letter comes straight from the highest office.”
“I should say it would have to!” the General declared. “These things are the pride of the royal fleet! Can’t sign them out to just anyone, not even you. Where’s old Maycraft, any-way:
“Oh, he’s about,” Carver replied.
“Not had this much fun since the Boers,” Montpelier declared as they stepped into his office and shut the door.
“I’m afraid it gets a lot less fun from here on in,” said Carver, and the tone of his voice made the General turn around. He found himself staring down the barrel of a pistol, held centimetres from his nose.
“What’s the bloody meaning of this?” Montpelier cried.
“I’m sorry, General. I’m here under false pretences. There is no letter from the Palace. The Palace has better things to do, and I didn’t have time to wait and see if they would give me permission to take an airship. So I brought my own permission.”
“You’re stealing an airship? Don’t be a fool, man. You shoot that thing and twenty officers will be in here in a moment.”
“What do you care? You’ll be dead,” Carver replied levelly. “I’m sorry, General, but this is too important to let bureaucracy get in the way. Now I believe you have some papers to sign for me?”
The rain drove itself against the huge grey flanks of the airship, battering the thick fabric before pouring off its sides to fall down to the tarmacadam in curtains. Gregor was there, standing by the door to the great gondola, stamping his boots and rubbing his gloved hands against the cold, his flight coat zipped up to his nose and his flat cap pulled down. He looked small in comparison to the vast craft that he sheltered beneath, a tiny figure against the massive marrow-shaped balloon that sat overhead or the gondola that hung below. And this was only one of the smallest airships in the fleet, and nothing to the sizes that the Prussians were coming up with.
Gregor stuck a cigarette in his hard-lipped mouth and lit it, puffing away as he watched the group hurrying from the western side of the airstrip to get to him. There were distant cracks of gunfire as the soldiers held at bay the dark things that crept across the fields, attracted by the lights.
Interesting, how it had come round to this. Six years ago he had stowed away on a tramp steamer from Siberia, slipping away from a prison colony where he had been sent for desertion from the Russian armed forces. He was not a fighter; he was a coward. Even he admitted that, if only to himself. It was only unfortunate that his nerve had broken in the midst of his term of service.
Some forged papers got him by in London for a time, but for a Russian émigré in England there was only the docks, and he had little talent for fishing. After a year of hauling crates, he heard that the airstrip at Finsbury Park needed airship pilots, and signed up. He had flown the more cumbersome Russian airships for six months back home, and he knew what he was about. The Army were prepared to overlook his heritage in exchange for his skills.
And so Gregor had slipped from one army to another, although he did not altogether mind. The weather was better here, for one. His money was good, his belly was never empty, and he could get American cigarettes whenever he wanted.
He had to admit he was puzzled now, however. A detective called Carver, in the midst of all this calamity, had telegrammed the General saying that he was commandeering an airship, that he had the approval of the Palace and that it was his mission to save all of London.
“I’ll be bloody surprised if they turn up at all, let alone bringing a letter with royal authority,” Montpelier had declared, but apparently he had been wrong on both counts, for here they were, with documents signed by the General allowing the use of Gregor and his airship for the period of twenty-four hours.
Gregor shrugged to himself. He would rather be in the sky where those filthy wych-kin couldn’t get at him than down here on the ground.
The airship lifted itself from the tarmacadam with a deafening drone of engines, hauling its bulk slowly into the turbulent sky Lightning flickered to the south; the storm, at least, was beginning to peter out. Alaizabel watched through the windows of the gondola as the airstrip receded beneath them, turning as they turned. The ground seemed to be dropping away, as if they were static and the Earth was shrinking.
She raised her eyes to the whirlpool of red that swirled slowly over the Old Quarter. That was their destination, for whatever good it would do them. Could they survive in the heart of the Old Quarter, where no-one had ventured for years, even before the wych-kin invaded the capital? Only airships had flown over it since it became too dangerous to travel into on foot, dropping bombs in a futile effort to keep the demons down. What went on beneath the tangle of streets and ruins there?
The tone of the engines changed as the airship pushed forward, propelling them towards Camberwell, the first district to be infested with wych-kin twenty years ago, and above which the pupil of the evil red eye hung in the clouds.
Alaizabel looked over the streets below. The rain had slackened, and the fog was pushing its way back in, materializing in the deserted lanes and thoroughfares. Gaslights burned atop the black iron lamp-posts, oblivious to the slaughter. The city was a net of stars, a thousand thousand light
ed windows spreading out in all directions. It was as if they were flying upside down, with the clear sky beneath them and a roiling sea above.
London is being eaten alive, Alaizabel thought. Yet it looks so peaceful from up here.
She knew what the darkness masked. The beauty was false; the lights were all lit because nobody dared turn them off for fear of what might come. In the houses, people were dying. The wych-kin were rampant, and they were too diverse to be kept out. Lock and bolt might keep away some types of wych-kin, but others would come down the chimney, or glide through the ceiling, or materialize from candle smoke. The wych-kin were unstoppable in number, and endless in variation. Tallowcats, Cradlejacks, ju-jus, angel stones, stormwardens, will-o’-the-wisps, dust witches, a million of them and more.
Where do they come from? What do they want?
The questions had been asked too many times to count. The wych-kin never answered.
“Alaizabel,” said Thaniel, by her shoulder.
She looked back to see him standing there, wet and bedraggled but still strong, still iron with the fortitude that bore them all up. Returning her gaze to the window, she said, “I am scared, Thaniel.”
“That was what I was about to say to you,” he replied quietly.
“Really?” she asked, surprised.
“I feel that... everything has gone beyond my control,” he said quietly. “The way things were... I was not happy. But I was safe, and secure. Since you came, everything has changed. I have seen my life crumbling around me, I have abandoned my home, touched madness, I have... changed. I feel it. Since you came.”
“Do you regret it?” she asked, unconsciously tensing as she waited for his reply.
“Not for a moment,” he replied.
She felt a smile of relief touch her lips, and her heart began to beat a little harder.
“I do not know what will happen now,” he said. “We are heading into somewhere none of us has ever been. Some of us may not return. I wanted to say, in case I never have the opportunity again... what you have given me, Alaizabel, is a gift beyond measure... and I...”
“Master Fox,” she said, turning round from the window to face him, “ssh.” And she kissed him then, and he her, long and passionately. The others in the gondola melted away; their presence was unimportant now.
They had been over the lightless and seething Old Quarter for a half-hour. The airship cruised over the killing ground, up above the wych-kins reach, sliding past the barrier of the Thames and beyond. The rain had choked to fine mist, dewing the windows of the gondola. They looked out across the city, watching the ominous red maelstrom grow and slide towards them. All around was the thick drone of the engines, driving them through the sky.
Only imagination could decide what kinds of things were down there, what stalked in the night amid the shattered, bomb-torn streets. Terraces slumped across each other, their bricks splintered where they met; ancient roofs gaped like mouths with timber-beam teeth; blast patterns of flattened shops described sloping circles of rubble. It was a sea of dereliction, as if several armies of buildings had smashed into each other from different directions and wiped each other out, leaving their dead to soak and bleach and fade in the rain and sun.
But they were slipping beneath the unholy eye now, and the streets below were painted a ghastly vermilion hue. By its light, they could see movement here; things scampering, things drifting and lumbering. The fog was settling back in, but only enough to make it hard to see the shapes of the wych-kin that darted and lunged and thundered and slithered. And there ahead was the centre of the maelstrom, the pivot around which the foul clouds spun.
“Can you see? Can you see what is there?” Cathaline asked, pressing herself against the windows of the gondola.
“By God,” Thaniel breathed.
It reared over the surrounding buildings like a claw, a vast Gothic monolith, a cathedral of spite that loomed jagged and malicious and evil. Towers and spires scratched the belly of the sky, leering gargoyles swarming over its surface, frozen in stone. Portions of it seemed to have melted into others, while some sections were sharply defined by rows of twisted blades and balconies. High, arched windows soared above massive round blossoms of dark glass; steeples jumbled with buttresses and bell towers. It was part castle, part church, part temple; a thing beyond the power of all but the world’s most insane architects to conceive. Bathing in the red glow of the clouds above, it exhaled infernal wickedness, standing blasphemously proud like a twisted, bloodied crown.
“The womb of the darkness,” Jack intoned from behind them. He had not needed to look. “That is where we must go.”
“How did it get there?” Cathaline said. “Why could we not see it before?”
“It has been cloaked from our eyes for many years now,” the Devil-boy said. “Wards of a power I have never felt before. But the Wards are down now. The cathedral must be open to receive the Fraternity’s gods. The Glau Meska are on their way. Our time is short.”
“But... how is it here?” Cathaline asked, unsatisfied.
“The same way the wych-kin are here,” Jack replied. “Now, make ready. It is almost over; the rest is up to you.”
The airship segued closer to the foul edifice, and the companions prepared themselves as best they could, each wondering who was to die within the walls of the Fraternity’s demonic cathedral.
The airstrip at Finsbury Park was under siege, and ammunition was running desperately low. The creatures kept coming, and no matter how many fell, another three were there to take their place. The once-flat fields were now lumped with corpses, but the wych-kin stepped over their dead without pause, driven by a hunger beyond hunger, drawn by the lights and the lives within the perimeter wall.
Jerob Whately was in command of the defence effort. He had waited in frustration for the order to despatch the bombladen airships, to send them for help or to have them use their bombs to defend the base. No such order had come. The two airships had sat idle. He had watched as one was commandeered and taken by a stranger, flying off towards the Old Quarter. He had fought until things had become hopeless, and now he was going to see the General, to demand that they use the last airship to evacuate the base. His men were tired, trapped, and losing. The base would have to be forfeited. If he could not make Montpelier see sense, there might be a mutiny on his hands.
Retreat. Fall back. He thought of how he would phrase his request... no, his demand, as he knocked on the door to the General’s office. There was no reply. He frowned. The General had not been seen for the better part of an hour now. He knocked again. As before, only silence.
He tried the door anyway. It was locked.
“General?” he called, but no reply came to him. He drew his pistol. Now was the time for action, not dallying. Court martial be damned. Stepping back, he fired into the door and blew the lock apart.
The door swung open into a neat office. A thick desk by a shuttered window, books and documents. And there, tied to his chair, trussed up and gagged, was the General, red-faced with anger and making muffled noises through the sock in his mouth.
“Ah,” said Jerob, as if that explained it all.
THE CATHEDRAL
GUARDIANS 25
The cathedral courtyard was empty. The great walls that separated it from the rest of the Old Quarter held back the wych-kin with Wards and charms and forces beyond the senses of humankind. In the broken streets of Camberwell they howled and gibbered, desperate to reach the great airship that lowered itself down to hang five metres above the stone tiles. But the cathedral was cut off from the Old Quarter, quarantined so as not to be infested with the chaotic things that infested London. The people of the Fraternity knew how to deal with wych-kin, but they were still human and still vulnerable. If anything crawled and slid within these walls, it did so at the Fraternity’s behest.
The cathedral loomed massively above them, a crimson mountain of curves and pillars and arches. It seemed to hum and pulse, making Thaniel’s head
and ears throb as he climbed down the rope ladder that hung from the gondola to the floor of the courtyard. Despite the cacophony on the far side of the wall, the sound of the airship’s engines and the incessant bass grumble of the cathedral, the courtyard was eerily still and quiet. The rain had not seemed to fall on this place as it had on the rest of London; perhaps because it stood in the eye of the storm.
Thaniel’s boots touched the floor and he looked out across the vast emptiness. To his right was the main door of the cathedral, a huge pair of lacquered black doors laden with all manner of shapes and symbols picked out in gold. Nearby, Carver and Cathaline were tethering an anchor rope to the great bar that held shut the courtyard gate. Gregor was to wait for their return. He scarcely had any choice, for untethering the airship required two people: one to hold the airship steady and another to untie the ropes. He could not leave the airship to untie the anchor ropes on his own, for it would float off without him. This was evidently not something he had bargained for, judging by the heated exchanges coming from the cockpit during the descent, but finally, everything went very quiet, and when next they saw him, he was white-faced and shaken. Thaniel wondered what Carver had said to him to make him cooperate.
Rain misted down upon them as Alaizabel, the last, came down the ladder.
“It is so empty,” she said, echoing his thoughts. “Thaniel, why are there no guards?”
“Because they know you cannot get in,” said the Devil-boy at their sides. “The Wards on the entrances are more powerful than even the greatest wych-hunter could overcome. Thatch has laid them herself. Only she can undo them.”
Thaniel did not waste his breath on Jacks bait. He knew they would not have been brought here if there was not a way in.