Why was this happening to her?
For the next few minutes, she was focused only on escape, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, feeling nothing but that single desire. Twice more she fell, but she felt only numbness where bruises and scrapes should be. Her whimpering threw a rabid syncopation over the pounding pulse of her heart and the torrent of blood around her skull. She ran until her chest ached and her muscles seemed leaden, once stopping to hammer on a door and again receiving no answer. The city did not involve itself in the affairs of the doomed. The folk of the Charity Street area sat by their fires and stoves, their doors and windows a barrier to what was going on outside, and listened with hardened hearts to Pris’s barely coherent screams. To open their doors was to invite trouble, they said to themselves. And besides, who knew what kind of wych-kin made such awful sounds?
Finally, exhausted, she slowed her run to a stagger, and leaned against a lamp-post while she fought for breath, her stomach cramping. Tears streaking her face, she looked behind her into the foggy maw of the alleyway, and with a soft moan she saw that he was there, Stitch-face, still walking as if he had never even had to run to catch her.
You can’t escape me, his stride said. Come and meet my knife.
“Help me,” she whispered, and this time it was addressed to no-one, for she knew she was beyond help now.
But at those words, a surge of new energy seemed to flow into her, enough for her to get up and stumble away again, not knowing where she was going or why, only that she could not give up.
She turned the corner into a narrow alley, one that ran into the back yard of a shop. A trellis gate hung open there, separating the end of the alley from the yard. So tired was she that she failed to see the pair of shadows that slunk after her, detaching themselves from the darkness of a hole in the wall and following. Deaf, she did not hear the low growl that they made. In fact, the first she knew of the wolves was when she felt herself shoved from behind by a great weight, and she toppled forward with a cry, cracking her head on the metal jamb of the gate and finding nothing but blackness thereafter.
A new morning, and Detective Ezrael Carver found himself adding another pin to the great map of London that hung on the wall of the office he shared with Inspector Maycraft at the Cheapside Police Headquarters. A small paper flag with the number seventy-six carefully inked on it was speared by the same pin, which he plunged into a spot just south-east of Charity Street in Holborn.
He sat down at his teak desk and rested his cheek on his fist, looking at the map. The slatted windows let in the bright sunlight, turning drifting motes of dust into miniature suns as they meandered through the air. The office was neither tidy nor cluttered but a point in-between. Made predominantly of wood panelling, it had the feel of a University professors study or a librarians hideaway rather than a place for police work. A stout door separated Carver from the rest of the building, where the endless in-and-out of criminals, bereaved citizens, alarms and reports and emergencies went on. Here, in his office, it was peaceful, and he got up and walked over to the window, where he peered out of the slats at the crowded skyline of London, basking lazily in the brightness—if not the heat—of the day His eye roamed over the spires and domes of the tall churches, the grim brows of the factories and the tumbledown workhouses, the narrow chimneys that thrust up towards the sky, and he was struck by a sudden feeling of affection for this city and its people. It was a warm glow, a strange love for the place that had cradled him his whole life. Standing there, looking out, he felt that he was on the verge of something profound, a new inner revelation that might change his character, make him a wiser man.
The moment, if ever it would have come, was destroyed by Maycraft as he twisted the doorknob noisily and strode in, his eyes on a sheaf of reports in his hand.
“Morning, Carver,” he said, without looking up.
“Inspector Maycraft,” he replied politely, smothering his annoyance at being interrupted before this moment of insight.
Maycraft put down the papers and looked over at him. Carver was nearing the end of his twenties, neither tall nor short, with broader shoulders than was average. His black hair was slicked back, and a thick black moustache covered his upper lip. He wore a double-breasted black waistcoat over a brown shirt, and his neatly pressed trousers were a darker brown still. As always, he was turned out well. He was a stickler for tidiness. The mess of their shared office was almost entirely Maycraft’s fault, but Carver was too well-mannered to reproach him about it.
“Number seventy-six,” Maycraft said. “It’s about time we did something about this Stitch-face fellow.”
Carver smiled, as he was expected to do. It was a long-running joke between them; as if they hadn’t spent the last two years trying to do something about it. The joke had long worn stale, but Maycraft still cranked it out for the sake of tradition on the appropriate occasions.
“How is she?” he asked.
“She’s damned lucky to be alive,” Maycraft replied, slumping down in his chair. “She keeps on blathering about how God saved her.”
“God saved her by having her savaged by wolves?” Carver asked, raising an eyebrow as he himself sat down.
Maycraft had drawn a fat cigar from his pocket and was clipping the end off with a silver cutter. The conversation paused while he lit it and breathed out a cloud of aromatic smoke. “She’s still alive, though. You can see her point. She’s only the fifth woman to get away from him in fifteen years, as far as we know.”
“I’d hardly call being mauled by wild animals an acceptable mode of escape,” Carver said dryly.
Maycraft tipped the nub of his cigar at the younger man. “The Lord moves in mysterious ways,” he replied.
“Yes, well, evidently not as mysterious as our good Mister Stitch-face,” Carver said, tapping his knuckle on the desk.
“She’s going to be well soon enough,” Maycraft said. “A few scratches, a good scar here and there. I’ve questioned the man who scared off the wolves. He’s a trapper, you know; travels out to the Yukon to shoot bears for their pelts. Runs that furriers’ shop when he’s back in London. His family look after it the rest of the time.” There was a pause, during which time Maycraft sucked on his cigar and looked at Carver with narrow, suspicious eyes. “Odd that of all the people she should stumble into, it happened to be a man who is an expert in shooting wild animals.”
Carver put his hands behind his head and leaned back. “You sound as if you’re beginning to believe that she was saved by the divine,” he said, with a wry twist to his voice.
“Hmmph,” Maycraft rumbled, not committing himself either way.
“Well, metaphysics aside, we do at least have one advantage now, thanks to Miss Weston,” Carver continued, getting up and walking to the map on the wall. “ Stitch-face always attacks in the same area again, if he fails the first time. Or, at least he has on the previous four occasions that he’s missed a kill.” He pointed at where a few odd pins nuzzled together in pairs. “If he follows the pattern he has set, his next attack should be soon, and within half a mile or so of the original site.”
Carver studied the map, his eyes intent. In amid the little pins and their flags were seven green tacks, each one bearing a number like the others. These were scattered all over London, instead of staying clustered around one area like the pins.
“Detective?” Maycraft prompted. “You’re not still trying to work it out, are you?”
Carver wrinkled his nose. “I can’t help it. There’s a pattern there, I know it. Especially those damnable Green Tack murders.”
The Green Tack murders were the biggest and most recent development in the hunt for Stitch-face. Carver himself had come up with the name, after he had started marking them on the map with green tacks to show that they were different from the others. It was a curiously innocuous name for something so grave, but then a little gallows humour was necessary these days if you wanted to keep your sanity.
They had begun a year ago now. Mu
rders being committed far outside Stitch-face’s territory—and he was very territorial in his killings—as far west as Hammersmith and as far east as Poplar, even one in the Old Quarter. They seemed to be Stitch-face’s handiwork, all right; and he had something of a monopoly on serial killing in London at the moment, since the execution of Catfoot Joe. The bodies of the victims were found with their eyes, tongues and hearts removed, cut out with the precision of a surgeon; and they were arranged with their arms crossed over their bloodied chests and facing downward, their eyeless faces staring into the road. But they were not right, because Stitch-face never killed outside his territory. Carver was convinced of that.
There was the popular theory that Stitch-face was a member of one of London’s many underground cults, lent weight by the ceremonial manner in which he killed and laid out his victims. Carver didn’t believe that. What passed for your average “cult” in London was just a few rich hee-haws getting their jollies with some black candles and a thrupenny book of wychcraft. Unless you believed all that rot about the Fraternity, of course. Well, he was sure no faceless organization pulled his strings.
He had spent hours staring at the green tacks on the map, trying to draw a shape from them. They seemed so deliberate, so even. The distance between the Kensington and Battersea murders was almost exactly half the distance between Kensington and Poplar, where another Green Tack murder had taken place. The four other murders were similarly mathematically planned. A shape was there, he could sense it; but it was no shape he’d ever seen, with no apparent symmetry, and so it was impossible to predict where the next murder might occur.
Maycraft stoutly insisted that the Green Tack murders were the work of Stitch-face. Though they were outside his usual pattern, Maycraft refused to believe that someone else was doing them. It was simply inconceivable that someone could get away with seven murders in less than twelve months without leaving a trace of evidence; even Stitch-face had been seen on several occasions, and that was in the early days when he averaged only three or four murders a year. Maycraft would not accept the possibility of another serial killer in London, and one more clever than Stitch-face.
Carver knew Maycraft was wrong. It was plain and obvious to him that the Green Tack murders were not the work of Stitch-face. Which left two questions: why was Maycraft so eager to deny the evidence in front of him, and who was perpetrating the Green Tack murders?
THE CROOKED LANES
GRINDLE
CARVER MAKES A DISCOVERY 9
The city of London has a secret heart. It is a clotted thing of crumbling stone and dripping gutters, and it appears on no map or guide. Through its diseased alleys the vermin run, knowing that in this one place they are no better or worse than the people they live alongside. Here, no law exists, no Peelers walk, no cabs come. Even the airships that plough back and forth from the Finsbury Park airstrip seem to avoid flying too close. And it was here, to the Crooked Lanes, that Thaniel, Cathaline and Alaizabel went; for whatever the dangers it held within itself, once you were inside the Crooked Lanes, you had as good as vanished off the face of the planet.
It was midday as they approached Camden, the streets twining under the harsh, dazzling November sun, whose light relentlessly revealed every imperfection in the skin of this part of the city, until it was almost too ugly to look at. They were still at the edges of the Crooked Lanes here; there was evidence of recent bill posters stuck to ragged stone walls by an intrepid urchin, advertising a great Russian circus’s arrival in London or a new play opened on Piccadilly. Brown paper grocery bags shuffled around in the faint breeze, bumping against rat corpses that had floated into the storm gutters and jammed there, stiff and lifeless. Smoke-blackened windows gazed grimily down at them, a mute reminder of the factories not far away that choked out soot and carbon all day long. It was possible to see the dark pollution drifting up from the chimneys in the near distance, feathering into the clear sky; when the wind was right, it was possible to breathe it, too.
A change had come over Alaizabel since the events of last night. Somehow, the realization that there was something inside her, sharing her mind, had renewed her natural strength of will. She came to see that it was the not knowing that was the true reason for her distress. The presence of Thatch in her mind, curiously, was not half so threatening now that she had identified her enemy. She remembered that Thatch had been afraid of her during that trance-like sleepwalk. Given time to think, she had worked out what had happened last night, and explained it to Thaniel as they made ready to leave Crofter’s Gate at dawn.
“Things are becoming clearer now, Thaniel,” she said, as they sat cross-legged on the floor together in amid the debris of his efforts to take only the barest essentials. “I think I am starting to understand.”
“Do you remember anything yet?” Thaniel had prompted, and the genuine concern on his face had sent a warm runnel of happiness through her chest.
“Just... odd images,” she said. “But I know things... if you see what I mean. I do not know how; I mean, I do not remember why I know them. But... I think I am realizing not remembering. You understand?”
“I think so,” said Thaniel, his pale eyes searching hers. “Then what do you think is happening?”
“The night before last,” she said. “Cathaline put those things... those Wards on my room.” She put her hand on his arm with a guilty smile. “On your room, I mean.”
Thaniel was aware of little else but the contact between them; however, he managed to reply with something gentlemanly which he could not later remember. She removed her hand, breaking the touch, and continued.
“Anyway, that night, the thing that came after me—”
“The Draug,” Thaniel interrupted automatically.
“Is that what it was?” She shivered. “I think I should rather not know anything else about it. But it was turned away by Cathaline’s Wards. I often wondered why Thatch did not just make me get up and walk out to the corridor, where that thing was. After all, she did it the next night. Then it struck me.”
“You were not sedated the first time,” Thaniel said, catching on.
“Yes,” she replied, clapping her hands. “And that was why Thatch could do what she did. You see, what you said about the ceremony... well, if the spirit and the host are battling, one has to be stronger.”
“And you believe you are stronger? She could only exert her power when you were sedated?”
“Yes!” she said again.
“I wonder if the presence of Thatch accounts for your... for the state you were in when I met you in the Old Quarter,” Thaniel mused. “It seems to make sense.” He looked up at Alaizabel. “But I should be interested to know how you deduced all that.”
“So would I,” Alaizabel admitted.
There was a pause for a time. “We will find your parents, you know,” Thaniel said finally. “We will get to the bottom of this.”
Alaizabel had not replied.
Now they had passed further into the Crooked Lanes, and Alaizabel began to see why the name had stuck to them. The houses crowded in closer, and the alleys began to jink left and right in an apparently random fashion. Tiny jetties ran between empty warehouses. Occasionally, a heap of rubble that had still not been cleared up from the Vernichtung would block their path and they had to backtrack. It seemed that there were very few people on the streets here; they saw only a few crippled beggars, who did not even ask them for a coin but shuffled on by. Distantly, they could hear urchins laughing and fighting, but other than that it seemed eerily deserted.
“What are we looking for?” Alaizabel asked.
“We would not find it if we tried,” said Thaniel in reply. “We are waiting for them to notice us.”
“Why is it so quiet here?” Alaizabel pitched the question to nobody in particular.
“The beggars go into the city during the day,” Thaniel answered her, rubbing one bloodshot eye with a knuckle. They were healing fast, thankfully, and did not pain him any more. “T
hose who are left behind are good at not being seen. Wait till nightfall; then you will see what the Crooked Lanes are all about.”
“You do know what you’re doing, don’t you?” Cathaline asked cheerily.
Thaniel shot her a bearish look, then spoke to Alaizabel. “I have a friend here. His name is Crott; he is one of the four Beggar Lords that run this place. He can help us. We need to hide, and we need to get to the bottom of this mystery. Something dark is going on here. The Fraternity are up to something. They managed to summon the spirit that you carry inside you, and they also managed to raise a Draug and something else—only the Almighty knows what—in an attempt to either kill you or get you back.”
Alaizabel blinked, not really knowing how to respond. “What are the Beggar Lords?” she asked instead.
“To be a beggar in London is as much a trade as being a thief or a carpenter,” he said. “The carpenters have their union, the thieves have their guild; the beggars have the Beggar Lords. I think that there used to be only one Beggar Lord in the past, but now the beggars have split into four gangs, each under a different leader. The gangs help out their members in return for a percentage of the profits, and they see that anyone begging who is not a member of a gang is quickly seen off.” He shrugged after a moment. “I really don’t know all that much about it.”
“And what about Crott? Who’s he?” she asked.
“He and my father knew each other,” Thaniel replied. “Crott’s wife was afflicted with an Incubus. It is a wych-kin that hangs on to a person’s back. You cannot see it or touch it, but it is there, weighing you down, making your heart sick and your soul heavy and your body tired. Slowly, you lose the will to live, and one day you sink to your knees and never get up again.” Alaizabel’s eyes were sad as she looked back at him. “That’s horrible,” she said quietly “Fortunately, they are easily removed; the trouble is, nobody knows they are there. Crott’s wife had seen every kind of doctor before he took her to my father in desperation. He removed it, but it was too late. She died, but Crott was always grateful to my father for making her last days happy ones. They had remained friends until my father died. I am hoping Crott remembers me fondly.”